A Deepness in the Sky

The smooth rock was broken now, rising into the hillside. Here there were patches of snow, and clefts shadowed from sun-and starlight. Victory and Trixia scrambled over the lower rocks of the hill, and peered into the shadows. This wasn't a serious search; it was more an act of reverence. Air and orbit surveys had been completed many days before.

"Do—do you think we'll ever find him, Victory?" During most of her years of Focus, Sherkaner Underhill had been the center of Trixia Bonsol's universe. She'd been scarcely aware of A

Victory was silent for a moment. She was several meters up the hillside, poking around beneath an overhang. Like all of her race, she was more than humanly good at rock climbing. "Yes, eventually. We know he's not on the surface. Maybe...I think Mobiy must have lucked out, found a hole more than a few yards deep. But even that wouldn't be a viable deepness; Dad's body would dry to death in a short time." She pulled out from under the rock. "It's fu

Trixia frowned; she had seen the news. "But the report says it's too dangerous to dig, that it would just crush the open spaces." And when the New Sun came, those millions of tons of rock would surely collapse upon the deepness.

"Ah, but we have time to plan. We'll improve on the humans' digging technology. Maybe we can come in from miles out and tu

They walked northward, around the hillock. Even if this were the hill where Sherkaner left Thract, they were well away from where Rachner could have landed. Still, Victory peeped into every shadow.

Trixia couldn't keep up. She straightened and looked away from the hillside. The sky above the southern horizon glowed, as if over a city. And it almost was. The old missile fields were gone, but now the world had a better use for the altiplano. Cavorite mines. Companies from all over the waking world had descended on it. From orbit, you could see the open pit mines stretching from the original Kindred operation, a thousand miles across the wasteland. A million Spiders worked there now. Even if they never figured out how to synthesize the magic substance, cavorite would revolutionize local spaceflight, partly making up for the lack of other bodies in this solar system.

Victory seemed to notice that Trixia's pace had faltered. The Spider found a rounded knob of rock, shaded from the wind, and settled on it. Trixia sat down beside her, pleased that they could be on the same level. Across the plains to the south, they could see hundreds of hillocks, any one of which might mark Sherkaner's final rest. But in the sky glow beyond the horizon, tiny dots of light drifted slowly upward, antigrav freighters hauling mass into space. In all human histories, antigravity had been one of the Failed Dreams. And here it was.

Viki didn't speak for a time. A human who didn't know the Spiders might think she was asleep. But Trixia could see the telltale movements of eating hands, and she heard untranslated keening. Every so often Viki would be like this; every so often she had to shed the image that she projected to her team and Belga Underville and the aliens from space. Little Victory had done very well, at least as well as her mother could have done, Trixia was sure. She had managed the final triumph of her parents' Great Lurk. In her own huds, Trixia could see a dozen calls pending for Major Lighthill. An hour or two alone, that was all Victory could spare these days. Outside of Brent, Trixia was probably the only person who knew the doubts that lived inside Victory Lighthill.

OnOff climbed into the sky, turning the shadows across the tumbled lands. This was the warmest High Equatoria would be for the next two hundred years, yet the best that OnOff could do was raise a soft haze of sublimation.

"I hope for the best, Trixia. The General and Dad, they were so very clever. They can't both be dead. But they—and I—had to do so many hard things. People who trusted us died."

"It was a war, Victory. Against Pedure, against the Emergents." That was what Trixia told herself now, when she thought about Xopi Reung.

"Yeah. And the ones who survived are doing well. Even Rachner Thract. He's never coming back to the King's Service. He feels betrayed. Hewas betrayed. But he's up there with Jirlib and Didi now"—she jerked a hand in the direction of L1—"becoming a kind of Spiderish Qeng Ho." She was quiet, then abruptly slapped at the rock of her perch. Trixia could hear that her real voice was angry, defensive. "Damn it, Mother was a good general! I could never have done what she did; there's too much of Daddy in me. And in the early years it worked; his genius and hers multiplied together. But it got harder and harder to disguise the counterlurk. Videomancy was a great cover, it let us have independent hardware and a covert data stream right under the humans' snouts. But if there were evenone slip, if the humans ever guessed, they could kill us all. That corroded Mom's heart."

Her eating hands fluttered aimlessly and there was a choked hissing sound. Victory was weeping. "I just hope she told Hrunkner. He was the most loyal friend we ever had. He loved us even though he thought we were a perversion. But Mother just could not accept that. She wanted too much from Uncle Hrunk, and when he couldn't change she—"

Trixia slid her arm across the other's midback. It was the closest a human could come to giving a multi-arm hug.

"You know how much Daddy wanted to tell Hrunk about the counterlurk. That last time in Princeton, Daddy and I thought we could manage it, that Mother would go along. But no. The General was so...unforgiving. In the end...well, she wanted Hrunk along on her trip to Southmost. If she trusted him with that, surely she would tell him the rest. Wouldn't she? She'd tell him that it was not all in vain."

EPILOGUE

SEVEN YEARS LATER—

The Spiders' world had a moon; the L1 rockpile had been coaxed into a synchronous orbit on Princeton's longitude. By the standards of most habitable worlds, it was a pitiful moon, barely visible from the ground. Forty thousand kilometers out, the lump of diamonds and ice glinted dimly in the light of the stars and the sun. Yet it reminded half the world that the universe was not what they had thought.

Fore and aft of the rockpile stretched a string of tiny stars, beads that grew brighter year by year: the Spiders' temps and factories. In the early years, they were the most primitive structures ever to fly in space, cheap and overbuilt and overcrewed, hoisted on cavorite wings. But the Spiders learned fast and well... .

There had been state di