Damn.Today had been a disaster just barely avoided...or just temporarily avoided. Pham floated in the darkened room, but his vision flitted across the gap of kilometers, to Diamond One and Hammerfest. The localizers were everywhere there now, and they were operational—though the MRI units in the Focus clinic fried any nearby localizers almost immediately. Getting live localizers onto Hammerfest was the breakthrough he had waited years for, but—If I hadn't meddled with the diagnostics coming offVinh, we could have lost everything.Pham had known how the Podmaster might use his new toys; similar, if less intense, things had been going on in the temp for years. What he hadn't guessed was that Nau would have such deadly good luck in his choice of words. For nearly ten seconds, the boy had been sure that Nau had figured out everything. Pham had damped the snoops' report on that reaction, and Vinh himself had covered for it pretty well, but...

I never thought that Tomas Nau would know so much about me.Over the years, the Podmaster had often claimed to be a great admirer of "the historical giants," and he always included Pham Nuwen on his list. It had always seemed a transparent attempt to establish a common ground with the Qeng Ho. But now, Pham wasn't sure. While Tomas Nau had been busy "reading" Ezr Vinh, Pham had run similar diagnostics on the Podmaster. Tomas Nau reallydid admire his notion of the historical Pham Nuwen! Somehow, the monster thought he and Pham Nuwen were alike.He calledme a "Bringer of Order." That rang a strange resonance. Though Pham had never thought to use the term, it was almost what he wished of himself.Butwe are nothing alike. Tomas Nau kills and kills and it is for himself. All Iever wanted was an end to killing, an end to barbarism. We are different! Pham stuffed the absurdity back in its bottle. The really amazing thing was that Nau had so much of the true story. For the last 10Ksec, Pham had watched over Vinh's shoulder as the boy read through much of it. Even now, he was trickling the whole database out of Vinh's domain and into the distributed memory of the localizer net. Over the next Msec, he would study the whole thing.

What he had seen so far was...interesting. Much of it was even true. But whether truth or lie, it was not the awed mythology that Sura Vinh had left in the Qeng Ho histories. It was not the lie that covered Sura's ultimate treachery.And how will Ezr Vinh take it? Pham had already been much too open with Vinh. Vinh was totally inflexible about Focus; he just wouldn't stop whining about the zipheads. It was strange. In his life, Pham had blithely lied to crazies and villains and Customers and even Qeng Ho... but playing up to Vinh's obsession left him exhausted. Vinh just didn't understand the miracle that Focus could make.

And there were things in Nau's archive that would make it very difficult for Pham to disguise his true goals from the boy.

Pham dipped back into Nau's version of history, followed one story and then another, swore at the lies that made him out to be a monster...winced when the story was the truth, even if his actions had been the best he could do. It was strange to see his real face again. Some of these videos had to be real. Pham could almost feel the words of those speeches flowing up his throat and out his lips. It brought back memories: the high years, when almost every destination had brought him into contact with Traders who understood what could be made of an interstellar trading culture. Radio had outpaced him and delivered his message with good effect. And less than a thousand years after Little Prince Pham had been given away to the traveling merchants, his life plan was close to success. The idea of a true Qeng Ho had spread across most of Human Space. From worlds on the Far Side that he might never know, to the tilled and retilled heart of Human Space—even on Old Earth—they had heard his message, they had seen his vision of an organization durable enough and powerful enough to stop the wheel of fate. Yes, many of them saw nothing more than Sura had. These were the "practical minds," only interested in making great wealth, insuring the benefit to themselves and their Families. But Pham had thought then—and Lord, I still want to believe now—that the majority believed in the greater goal that Pham himself preached.

Across a thousand years of real time, Pham had left the message, the plan for a Meeting more spectacular than any meeting before, a place and a time where the new Qeng Ho would declare the Peace of Human Space, would agree to serve that cause. It had been Sura Vinh who set the place:

Namqem.

True, Namqem was well on the coreward side of Human Space, but it was near the center of heavy Qeng Ho activity. The Traders who could most certainly participate were in relatively easy reach; they would need less than one thousand years of lead time. Those were the reasons that Sura said. And all the time she smiled her old disbelieving smile, as if humoring poor Pham. But Pham had believed he would be given his chance at Namqem.

In the end, there was another reason for agreeing to meet at Namqem. Sura had traveled so little; she had always been the planner at the center of Pham's schemes. Decades and centuries had passed. Even with occasional coldsleep and the best medical technology in all Human Space, Sura Vinh was now insupportably old, five hundred years of life? six hundred? In the last century before the Meeting, her messages made her seem so very old. If they didn't have the Meeting at Namqem, maybe Sura would never see the success of what Pham had worked for. Maybe Sura would never see how Pham was right.She was the only one I totally trusted. I setmyself up for her.

And Pham drowned in an old, old rage, remembering... .

The mother of all meetings. In a sense, the entire method and mythology that Pham and Sura had invented had been dedicated to this single moment. So it wasn't surprising that the arrivals were timed with unprecedented precision. Instead of trickling in over a decade or two, five thousand ramscoops from more than three hundred worlds were falling inward toward the Namqem system, all to arrive within an Msec of one another.

Some had left port less than a century earlier, coming in from Canberra and Torma. There were ships from Strentmann and Kielle, from worlds with ethnicities that by now were almost different species. Some had launched from so far away that they had only heard of the Meeting by radio. There were three ships from Old Earth. Not all the Attendees were true Traders; some were government missions hoping for the solutions in Pham's message. Perhaps a third of the visitors' departure worlds would have fallen from civilization in the time it took for voyage and return.

Such a meeting could not be moved or postponed. The opening of Hell itself could not successfully deflect it. Still, decades out from port, Pham had known that Hell was cracking open for the people of Namqem.

Pham's Flag Captain was only forty years old. He had seen a dozen worlds, and he should have known better. But he had been born on Namqem. "They've been civilized since before you first showed up out of the Dark, sir. They know how to make things work. How can this be?" He looked disbelievingly at the analysis that had arrived with Sura Vinh's latest transmission.

"Sit down, Sammy." Pham kicked a chair out from the wall, gestured for the other to settle himself. "I've read the reports, too. The symptoms are classic. The last decade, the rate of system deadlocks has steadily increased throughout Namqem. See here, thirty percent of business commuting between the outer moons is in locked state at any given time." All the hardware was in working order, but the system complexity was so great that vehicles could not get the go-ahead.

Sammy Park was one of Pham's best. He understood the reasons behind all the synthetic beliefs of the new Qeng Ho—and he still embraced them. He could make a worthy successor to Pham and Sura—maybe better than Pham's oldest children, who were often as cautious as their mother. But Sammy was seriously rattled: "Surely the governance of Namqem understands the danger? They know everything Humankind has ever learned about stability—and they have better automation than we! Surely, in another few dozen Msecs we'll hear that they've reoptimized."