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For that departure, nearly ten thousand Spiders had come into space, the King on one of the first all-Arachnan ferries, and that "di
To Pham Nuwen, that was only fitting. Customer civilizations should dominate the territory around their planets. Hell, to the Qeng Ho, it was the locals' most important function—to be havens where ships could be rebuilt and refurnished, to be the markets that made trekking across interstellar distances a profitable thing.
For this second departure, the Grand Temp was almost as crowded as at the Triland Farewell, but the actual di
The ballroom of the Arachnan Grand Temp was something new in the universe. The Spiders had been in space only 200Msec now, scarcely seven of their years. The ballroom was their first attempt at grandeur in free fall. They weren't up to the bioengineering of Qeng Ho parks. In fact, most Spiders hadn't yet realized that for starfarers, a living park is the greatest symbol of power and ability in space. Instead, the King's designers had borrowed from Qeng Ho inorganic construction and tried to adapt their own architectural traditions to free fall. Doubtless, within another century they would regard the effort as laughable. Or maybe the mistakes would become part of tradition:
The outer wall was a tesselation of hundreds of transparent plates, held in a grid of titanium. Some were diamond, some were quartz, some were almost opaque to Pham's eyes. The Spiders still preferred direct views. Video wallpaper and human display technologies didn't come close to matching the range of their vision. The polyhedral surface swept outward to form a bubble fifty meters across. At its base the Spider designers had built a terraced mound, rising to the dining tables at the top. The slope was gentle by Arachna standards, with broad sweeping stairs. To human eyes, the mound was a cliff-walled pi
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After they were settled, Spider attendants came out from the base of the mound, carrying a mix of Spider and human dishes. The two races could actually eat together, even if each found the other's food mostly grotesque.
They ate the welcoming appetizers in the Spider-traditional silence. Then Trixia Bonsol rose from her place among the Spiders and made a set speech as stately as anything at Jirlib's Farewell. Pham groaned to himself. Except for Belga Underville, all here were close friends. He knew they were scarcely more formal than himself. Yet there was a sadness in this occasion and it seemed greater than even a normal leavetaking should be. He sneaked a look around the table. So solemn, the humans in freefall formal dress that went back at least a thousand years. But it was not like they had to follow diplomatic niceties here. Underville was probably the prickliest creature here, but even she wasn't big on formalities. Now if someone didn't speak up, they might go the whole di
So when Trixia finished and sat down, Pham gently dumped a half-liter of wine into the air above his place at the table. The dark red liquid wobbled back and forth upon itself, an embarrassing spill that would be even more embarrassing depending on who it splashed onto. Pham stuck his finger into the bobbling wetness, and wiggled it just so. The blob stretched out, braided itself with its own surface tension. He definitely had their attention now, the Spiders even more than the humans. Pham waved off an attendant who floated close with a vacuum napkin. He gri
Qiwi leaned forward, to look across at him. "It'll be a neater trick if you can land that thing clean." She was also gri
"Yes. Well, I'll keep it in one piece as long as I can." His hand formed the spi
He left the red bauble floating above his place, and waved for the attendants to bring the next course. "I'll show you some other tricks later; just watch me."
Victory Lighthill rose a little from her perch. Her mouth hands modulated her voice into a sad chirping. "Tricks...long sad gone... drexip." At least that's what Pham thought she said. Even after all this time—even with the downshifter gadget to make all the phonemes audible—Spidertalk was harder than any human language he knew of. Sitting next to Lighthill, Trixia smiled and gave her own translation. "We will miss your tricks, Magician." Her voice held the same sadness that he recognized in the Spider's sounds.Damn. They make this sound like awake.
So Pham smiled brightly and pretended to miss the point. "Yes. In less than a megasecond, A
Ezr Vinh was nodding. "Yes, there will be future times, even if we don't know quite how we will meet, or where. But for many of us this will be the last meeting." Ezr didn't quite meet his eye.At bottom, even Ezrdoubts. And Ezr had given half his mission bounty to help Pham and A
But Qiwi laid her hand on Ezr's shoulder. "I say we setup some meeting marks, just like the Great Families do." A time and a place, and a space of life span passed. She looked across at A