A Deepness in the Sky

And today, Ezr Vinh and his little speech:"The price is too high!" EzrVinh !

Pham might have his dream...if he gave up the reason for it.

Once before, a Vinh had stepped between him and final success.Letthe Vinh snake die. Let them all die. Let me die.

Pham curled inward upon himself. He was suddenly conscious that he was weeping. Except as a deceit, he hadn't cried since...he didn't remember...perhaps since those days at the other end of his life when he first came aboard theReprise.

So what do you do when your dream dies?

When your dream dies, you give it up.

And then what is left? For a long time, Pham's mind dwelled in a nothingness. And then once more, he became aware of the images flickering around him from the localizer net: down on the rockpile, the Focused slaves crammed by the hundreds in the honeycombs of Hammerfest, A

They deserved better than what had happened to them. They deserved better than what Tomas Nau had pla

He reached out into the net, and gently touched Ezr Vinh, motioned him aside. He gathered the boy's efforts up and began building them out into an effective patch. There were details: the bruises on Vinh's neck, the need for ten thousand new localizers in the temp interspace. He could handle them, and in the longer run—

A

And somewhere before he finally fell asleep, he remembered Gu

That night he dreamed of Sura. And there was no pain.

PART THREE

FORTY-FOUR

There is always an angle. Gonle Fong had lived her whole life by that principle. The mission to the OnOff star had been a long shot, the sort of thing that appealed mainly to scientists. But Gonle had seen angles. Then had come the Emergent ambush, and the long shot had been turned into servitude and exile. A prison run by thugs. But even then there was an angle. For almost twenty years of her life she had played the angles and prospered—if only by the standards of this dump.

Now things were changing. Jau Xin had been gone for more than four days, at least since the begi

Gonle had run a betting pool on the speculations, but she was suffering from sucker fever herself. She wasn't one bit disappointed when the big bosses decided to let them all in on the secret.

Tomas Nau invited a handful of the peons down to his estate for the briefing. This was first time Gonle had been to Lake Park since the open house. Nau had made a big thing of his hospitality then. Afterward, the place had been locked tight—though to be honest, part of that might be because of what happened to A

As Gonle and the three other chosen peons shuffled down the footpath toward Nau's lodge, she passed her critical judgment on the scene. "So they figured out how to do rain." It was more a windblown mist, so fine it dewed her hair and eyelashes, so fine that the lack of real gravity didn't matter.

Pham Trinli gave a cynical chuckle. "I'll bet it's partly garbage collection. In my time, I've seen plenty of these faked gravity parks, usually built by some Customer with more money than sense. If you want to have a groundside and a skyside, the clutter starts piling up. Pretty soon you have a sky full of crap."

Walking beside him, Trud Silipan said, "Sky looks pretty clean to me."

Trinli looked up into the driven mist. The clouds were low and gray, moving quickly in from the lake's far shore. Some of this was real and some must be wallpaper, but the two were seamlessly meshed. Not a cheerful scene by Gonle Fong's standards, but one that was chill and clean. "Yeah," he said after a moment. "I gotta hand it to you, Trud. Your Ali Lin is a genius."

Silipan puffed up a little. "Not just him. It's the coordination that counts. I've got a team of zipheads on this. Every year it just gets better. Someday we'll even figure out how to make natural-looking sea waves."

Gonle looked across at Ezr Vinh and rolled her eyes. Neither of these buffoons liked to acknowledge how much everyone's cooperation—very profitable cooperation—was involved here. Even if the peons weren't welcome anymore, they still supplied a constant stream of food, finished woods, live plants, and program designs.

The mist made little swirls around the lodge, and the illusion of gravity was sorely tested as the visitors tilted this way and that on their grabber-soled shoes. Then they were in the lodge, warmed by very natural-looking burning logs in Tomas Nau's big fireplace. The Podmaster gestured them toward a conference table. There were Nau, Brughel, and Reynolt. Three other figures were silhouetted against the windows and the gray light beyond. One was Qiwi.

"Well hello, Jau," said Ezr. "Welcome...back."

Sure enough, it was Jau and Rita. Tomas Nau brightened the room lights. The warmth and brightness were nothing more than in any civilized habitation, but somehow the cold and gloom so expensively maintained outside made this i

The Podmaster waved them to seats, then sat down himself. As usual, Nau was a picture of generous and high-minded leadership.But he doesn'tfool me for a moment, thought Gonle. Before this mission, she had had a long career, dealing with a dozen Customer cultures, on three worlds. Customers came in all the sizes and colors of humanity. And their governments were even more varied—tyra

The Podmaster nodded to each of them. "Thanks for coming in person. You should know that this meeting is being shown live on the local net, but I hope you'll tell your friends what you've seen firsthand." He gri