Pham shrugged, not admitting to his own disbelief.Namqem was sogood, for so long. Aloud he said, "Maybe. But we know they've had thirty years to work a fix." He waved at Sura's report. "And still the problems get worse." He saw the look on Park's face, and softened his voice. "Sammy, Namqem has had peace and freedom for almost four thousand years. There's not another Customer civilization in all Human Space that can say that. But that's the point. Without help, even they can't go on forever."

Sammy's shoulders hunched down. "They've avoided the killing disasters. They haven't had war plagues or nuclear war. The governance is still flexible and responsive. There are just these Lord-be-damned technical problems."

"They are technicalsymptoms, Sammy, of problems I'm sure the governance understands very well."And can't do a thing about. He remembered back to the cynicism of Gunnar Larson. In a way this conversation was rumbling down the same dead-end street. But Pham Nuwen had had a lifetime to think of solutions. "The flexibility of the governance is its life and its death. They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point... ."

"But we knew—I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."

Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still—"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

"Okay, I know." Sammy looked away, and Pham synched his huds to follow what the younger man was seeing: Tarelsk and Marest, the two largest moons. Two billion people on each. They were gleaming disks of city lights as they slid across the face of their mother world—which itself was the largest park in Human Space. When the end finally came to Namqem, it would be a steep, swift collapse. Namqem solar system was not as naturally desolate as the pure asteroidal colonies of the early days of the Space Age...but the megalopolis moons required high technology to sustain their billions. Large failures there could easily spread into a system-wide war. It was the sort of debacle that had sterilized more than one of Humankind's homes. Sammy watched the scene, peaceful and wondrous—and now years out-of-date. And then he said, "I know. This is everything you've been telling people, all the years I've been with the Qeng Ho. And for centuries before. Sorry Pham. I always believed...I just never thought my own birthplace would die, so soon."

"I...wonder." Pham looked across the command deck of his flag vessel and, in smaller windows, the command decks of the other thirty ships in his fleet. Here in midvoyage, there were only three or four people on each bridge. It was the dullest work in the universe. But the Nuwen fleet was one of the largest coming to the Meeting. More than ten thousand Qeng Ho slept in the holds of his ships. They had departed Terneu just over a century ago, and flew in the closest formation that wouldn't interfere with their ramfields. The farthest command deck was less than four thousand light-seconds from Pham's flag. "We're still twenty years' travel time from Namqem. That's a lot of time if we choose to spend it on-Watch. Maybe...this is an opportunity to prove that what I've been talking about can actually work. Namqem will likely be chaos by the time we arrive. But we are help from outside their planetary trap, and we are arriving in enough numbers to make a difference."

They were sitting on the command deck of Sammy's ship, theFarRegard. This bridge was almost busy, with five of the thirty command posts occupied. Sammy looked from post to post, and finally back at Pham Nuwen. Something like hope was spreading across his face. "Yes...the whole reason for the Meeting can beillustrated. " On the side he was running scheduling programs, already caught up in the idea. "If we use contingency supplies, we can support almost a hundred on-Watch per ship, all the way to Namqem. That's enough to study the situation, come up with action plans. Hell, in twenty years, we should be able to coordinate with the other fleets, too."

Sammy Park was all Flag Captain now. He stared into his calculations, twiddling the possibilities. "Yes. The Old Earth fleet is less than a quarter light-year from us. Half of all the Attendees are less than six light-years from us now, and of course that distance is decreasing. What about Sura and the Qeng Ho already in-system?"

Sura had put down roots over the centuries, but "Sura and company have their own resources. She'll survive." Sura understood the wheel of fate, even if she didn't believe it could be broken. She had moved her headquarters off Tarelsk a century before; Sura's "temp" was a hoary palace in the asteroid belt. She would guess what Pham was about to try. The wave front of her analysis was probably headed in their direction even now. Maybe there really was a Lord of All Trade. There was certainly an Invisible Hand. The Meeting at Namqem would mean more than even he had imagined.

Year on year, the fleet of fleets converged upon Namqem. Five thousand threads of light, fire flies visible across light-years—thousands of light-years to decent telescopes. Year on year, the flares of their deceleration became tighter, a fine ball of thistledown in the windows of every arriving ship.

Five thousand ships; more than a million human beings. The ships held machines that could slag worlds. The ships held libraries and computer nets....And all together they were not a puff of thistledown compared to the power and resources of a civilization like Namqem. How could a puff of thistledown save a falling colossus? Pham had preached his answer to that question in person and across the Qeng Ho network. Local civilizations are all isolated traps. A simple disaster could kill them, but a little outside help might lead them to safety. And for the nonsimple cases—like Namqem—where generations of clever optimization finally crushed itself, even those disasters depended on the closed-system nature of sessile civilizations. A governance had too few choices, too many debts, and in the end it would be swept away by barbarism. An outside view, a new automation, that was something the Qeng Ho could supply. That was what Pham claimed would make the difference. Now he was going to get a chance to prove his point, not just argue it. Twenty years was not too much time to get ready.

In twenty years, Namqem's once gentle decline had gone beyond inconvenience, beyond economic recession. The governance had fallen three times now, each time replaced by a regime designed to be "more effective"—each time opening the way to more radical social and technical fixes, ideas that had failed on a hundred other worlds. And with each downward step, the plans of the approaching fleets became more precise.

People were dying now. A billion kilometers out from Namqem world, the fleets saw the beginnings of Namqem's first war. Literally saw it with their naked eyes: the explosions were in the gigatonne range, the destruction of a competing governance that had seceded with two-thirds of the outer planets' automated industry. After the detonations, only one-third of that industry remained, but it was firmly in control of the megalopolitan regimes.