"That's not what I mean. We can't have a real lake, not in microgravity. Every little rockquake would send it crawling up the walls."

Qiwi let her smile grow broad. "That's the real surprise. I can do it, Tomas! We have thousands of servo valves from the wrecked starships, more than we can use for anything else. We put them at the bottom of the lake, and run them off a network of localizers. It would be easy to damp the water waves, keep the thing confined."

Tomas laughed. "You really like stabilizing the intrinsically unstable, don't you, Qiwi! Well...you did it for the rockpile, maybe you can do it here."

She shrugged. "Sure I can. With a restricted shoreline, I could even do it with Emergent localizers."

Tomas turned to look at her, and now she saw no visions before his eyes. He was back in the hard sterile world of the diamond cavern. But he had seen the wonder, and she knew she had pleased him. "It would be marvelous...a lot of resources, though, and a lot of work." Work by non-zipheads, he meant. Even Tomas didn't think of the Focused as real people.

"It won't get in the way of important things. The valves are scrap. The localizers are surplus. And people owe me lots of favors."

After a time, Nau led his woman and the ziphead back out of the cavern. Qiwi had surprised him once again, this time more spectacularly than usual. And damn. This was just another reason why they needed the localizers in Hammerfest. Reynolt's people still hadn't cleared the devices; just how complicated could that be?Leave it for later. Qiwi said they could get some kind of lake even with Emergent localizers.

They went back up through the lower levels, acknowledging the various salutes and waves of techs, both Emergent and former Qeng Ho. They dropped Ali Lin off in the garden park that was his workshop. Qiwi's father wasn't caged in the Attic honeycomb. In fact, his specialty demanded open spaces and living things. At least, that was how Tomas Nau presented the issue to Qiwi. It was plausible, and it meant the girl was not continually exposed to the usual face of Focused operations; that helped slow her inevitable slide toward understanding.

"You have to go over to the temp, Qiwi?"

"Yes, some errands. To see some friends." Qiwi had her trades to accomplish, her favors to collect.

"Okay." He swept her up in a kiss, visible the length of the office hall. No matter. "You did well, my love!"

"Thanks." Her smile was a dazzling thing. Over thirty years old, and Qiwi Lisolet still hung on his approval. "See you this evening."

She departed up the central shaft, pulling herself hand over hand faster and faster, all but rocketing past the other people in the shaft. Qiwi still practiced every day in a two-gee centrifuge, still practiced the martial killing arts. It was all that was left of her mother's influence, at least all that was visible. No doubt a lot of her driving energy was some sort of sublimated effort to please her mother.

Nau looked up, almost oblivious of the people coming down around him; they would stay out of his way. He watched her figure dwindle into the heights of the main shaft.

After Anne Reynolt, Qiwi was his most precious possession. But he had essentially inherited Reynolt; Qiwi Lin Lisolet was his personal triumph, a brilliant, unFocused person, working unstintingly for him for all these years. Owning her, manipulating her—it was a challenge that never got stale. And there was always an edge of danger. She had the strength and speed, at least, to kill with her hands. He hadn't understood that in the early years. But that was also before he had realized what a valuable thing she was.

Yes, she was his triumph, but Tomas Nau was realistic enough to know he'd been lucky, too. He had first possessed Qiwi at just the right age and context—when she was old enough to have absorbed a depth of Qeng Ho background, yet young enough to be molded by the Diem Massacre. In the first ten years of the Exile, she had seen through his lies only three times.

A little smile quirked his lips. Qiwi thought she was changinghim, that she had shown him how well the methods of freedom worked. Well, she was right. In the early years, allowing the underground economy had been part of the game he was playing with her, a temporary weakness. But the underground economy reallyworked. Even the Qeng Ho texts claimed that free markets should be meaningless in an environment as closed and limited as this. And yet, year by year, the Peddlers had made things better—even for operations that Nau would have required anyway. So now, when she assured him that people owed her favors, that they would work really hard to make the lake park—Pestilence, I really want that lake—Tomas Nau didn't laugh behind his hand at her. She was right: the people—even the Emergents—would do better on that park because they owed Qiwi than they would because Tomas Nau was Podmaster with the ultimate power to space them all.

Qiwi was a tiny figure at the very top of the shaft. She turned and waved. Nau waved back, and she disappeared to the side, down one of the taxi access tunnels.

Nau stood a moment longer, staring upward with a smile on his face. Qiwi had taught him the power of managed freedom. Uncle Alan and the Nauly clique had bequeathed him the power of Focused slaves. And the OnOff star...? The more they learned of the star and its planet, the more he had the awed conviction that there were miracles hiding here, maybe not the treasures they had expected, but much greater things. The biology, the physics, the star system's far galactic orbit...their combined implications were just beyond the analysts' comprehension, teasing at his intuition.

And in a few years, the Spiders would hand him an industrial ecology with which to exploit it all.

There had never been a place and a time in the histories of Humankind where so much opportunity had come to one man. Twenty-five years ago, a younger Tomas Nau had quailed before the uncertainties. But the years had passed, and step by step he had met the problems and mastered them. What came out of Arachna would be the power of a dynasty like none Humankind had ever seen. It would take time, perhaps another century or two, but he would scarcely be out of Qeng Ho middle age by the end of it. He could sweep the Emergent cliques aside. This end of Human Space would see the greatest empire in all the histories. The legend of Pham Nuwen would pale in the light that Tomas Nau would cast.

And Qiwi? He cast a final look upward. He hoped she would last through the end of the Exile. There were so many things she could help him with when they took the Spiders down. But the mask was fraying. Mindscrub was not perfect; Qiwi was catching on faster than in the early years. Without destroying large amounts of brain tissue, Anne could not eliminate what she called "residual neural weighting." And of course there were some contradictions that coldsleep amnesia could not plausibly cover. Eventually, even with the most skillful manipulation...How could he explain reneging on his promises of manumission? How could he explain the measures he would take against the Spiders, or the human breeding programs that would be necessary? No. Inevitably, but most regrettably, he would have to dispose of Qiwi. And yet, even then she could still serve him. Children by her would still be possible. Someday his reign would need heirs.

Qiwi pulled into Benny's parlor about two thousand seconds later. And it was Benny running things this Watch. Good. He was her favorite master of the parlor. They dickered for a moment over the new gear he wanted. "Lord, Benny! You need more wallpaper? There are other projects that could use some, you know." Like a certain park under Hammerfest.

Benny shrugged. "Get the Podmaster to allow consensual imaging, and I won't need wallpaper. But the stuff just wears out. See?" He waved at the floor, where the image of Arachna was a permanent fixture. She could see a storm system that would probably reach Princeton in a few Ksecs; certainly the display drivers were still alive. But she could also see the distortions and the colored smudges.