Reynolt said, "Enough for this visit, Fleet Manager." She gestured him out of the roomlet.

Vinh slid back. Trixia's eyes never left her work. Something like that intentness had originally attracted him to her. She was a Trilander, one of the few who had shipped on the Qeng Ho expedition without close friends or even a little family. Trixia had dreamed of learning the truly alien, learning things no human had ever known. She had held the dream as fiercely as the most daring Qeng Ho. And now she had what she had sacrificed for...and nothing else.

Halfway through the door, he stopped and looked across the room at the back of her head. "Are you happy?" he said in a small voice, not really expecting an answer.

She didn't turn, but her fingers ceased their tapping. Where his face and touch had made no impression, thewords of a silly question stopped her. Somewhere in that beloved head, the question filtered past layers of Focus, was considered briefly. "Yes, very." And the sound of her tapping resumed.

Vinh had no recollection of the trip back to the temp, and after that, little more than confused fragments of memory. He saw Benny Wen in the docking area.

Benny wanted to talk. "We're back earlier that I'd ever guessed. You can't imagine how slick Xin's pilots are." His voice dropped. "One of them was Ai Sun. You know, from theInvisible Hand. She was in Navigation.One of our own people, Ezr. But it's like she's dead inside, just like his other pilots and the Emergent programmers. Xin said she was Focused. He said you could explain. Ezr, you know my pop is over on Hammerfest. What—"

And that was all Ezr remembered. Maybe he screamed at Benny, maybe he just pushed past him.Explain Focus to your people, and do it so theycan accept it, so what is left of our missions can survive.

When reason returned...

Vinh was alone in the temp's central park, without any recollection of having wandered there. The park spread out around him, the leafy treetops reaching across to touch him from five sides. There was an old saying: Without a bactry, a habitat cannot support its tenants; without a park, the tenants lose their souls. Even on ramships deep between the stars, there was still the Captain's bonsai. In the larger temps, the thousand-year habitats at Canberra and Namqem, the park was the largest space within the structure, kilometer on kilometer of nature. But even the smallest park had all the millennia of Qeng Ho ingenuity behind its design. This one gave the impression of forest depth, of creatures great and small waiting just behind the nearest trees. Keeping the balance of life in a park this small was probably the most difficult project in the temp.

The park was in deepening twilight, darkest in the direction of down. To his right the last glimmer of skylike blue shone beyond the trees. Vinh reached out, pulled himself hand over hand to the ground. It was a short trip; all together, the park was less than twelve meters across. Vinh hugged himself into the deep moss by a tree trunk and listened to the sounds of the cooling forest evening. A bat flickered against the sky, and somewhere a nest of butterflies muttered musically to itself. The bat was likely fake. A park this small could not stock large animals or scamperers, but the butterflies would be real.

For a blessed space of time, all thought fled...

...and returned with knives resharpened. Jimmy was dead. And Tsufe, and Pham Patil. In dying, they had killed hundreds of others, including the people who might know what to do now.Yet I still live.

Even half a day ago, knowing what had happened to Trixia would have put him in a rage beyond reason. Now that rage choked on his shame. Ezr Vinh had had a hand in the deaths aboard theFar Treasure. If Jimmy had been a little more "successful," all those on Hammerfest might be dead too. Was being foolish, and supporting foolish, violent people—was that as evil as committing a treacherous ambush?No, no, no! And yet, in the end, Jimmy had killed a good fraction of those who had survived the ambush.And I must make amends. Now I must somehow explain Focus to my people,and do it so they can accept it, so what is left of our mission can survive.

Ezr choked on a sob. He was supposed to convince others to accept what he would have died to prevent. In all his schooling, all his reading, all his nineteen years of life, he had never imagined there could be anything so difficult.

A tiny light swung through the middle distance. Branches shuffled aside. Someone had entered the park, was bumbling nearer the central glade. The light flashed briefly in Vinh's face, then went out.

"Aha. I figured you might go to ground." It was Pham Trinli. The old man grabbed a low-growing branch and settled on the moss near Vinh. "Brace up, young fellow. Diem's heart was in the right place. I helped him out as best I could, but he was a careless hothead—remember how he sounded? I never thought he was that foolish, and now a lot of people got killed. Well, shit happens."

Vinh turned toward the sound of the words; the other's face was a grayish blob in the twilight. For a moment, Vinh teetered on the edge of violence. It would feel sogood to pulp that face. Instead, he settled a little deeper in the dark and let his breath steady. "Yeah. It happens."Andmaybe some will happen to you. Surely Nau had the park bugged.

"Courage. I like that." In the darkness, Vinh couldn't tell whether the other was smiling or if the fatuous compliment was meant seriously. Trinli slid a little closer and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Don't take it so hard. Sometimes you have to go along to get along. And I think I can manipulate that Nau fellow. The speech he gave—did you notice? After all the death Jimmy caused, Nau wasaccommodating. I swear, he cribbed his talk from something in our own history."

So even in hell, there are clowns. Pham Trinli, the aging martinet, whose idea of subtle conspiracy was a whispered chat in a temp's central park. Trinli was so totally clueless. Worse, he had so many thingsbackwards... .

They sat in the near-total darkness for some seconds, and Pham Trinli remained mercifully silent. The guy's stupidity was like a load of rock dumped into the pool of Vinh's despair. It stirred things up. The absurdities gave him something to hit on besides himself. Nau's speech...accommodating? In a sense. Nau was the injured party in this. But they were all injured parties. Cooperation was the only way out now. He thought back over Nau's words.Huh. Some of the phrases really were borrowed, from Pham Nuwen's speech at Brisgo Gap. Brisgo Gap was a shining high point in the history of the Qeng Ho, where the Traders had saved a high civilization and billions of lives. As much as something so large could be tied to a single point in space-time, Brisgo Gap was the origin of the modern Qeng Ho. The similarities with the present situation were about nil... except that there, too, people from all over had cooperated, had prevailed in the face of terrible treachery.

Pham Nuwen's speech had been 'cast across Human Space many times during the last two thousand years. It wasn't surprising Tomas Nau would know it. So he'd spliced in a phrase here and there, sought a common background...except that Tomas Nau's notion of "cooperation" meant accepting Focus and what had been done to Trixia Bonsol. Vinh realized that some part of his mind had felt the similarities, had been moved by them. But seeing the cribbing laid out cold made things different. It was all so pat, and it ended with Ezr Vinh having to accept...Focus.

Shame and guilt lay so heavily on the last two days. Now Ezr wondered. Jimmy Diem had never been afriend of Ezr's. The other had been a few years older, and since they first met, Diem had been his crewleader, his most constant disciplinarian. Ezr tried to think back on Jimmy, think of him from the outside. Ezr Vinh was no prize himself, but he had grown up near the pinnacle of Vinh.23. His aunts and uncles and cousins included some of the most successful Traders in this end of Human Space. Ezr had listened to them and played with them since his nursery days...and Jimmy Diem was just not in their league. Jimmy was hardworking, but he didn't have that much imagination. His goals had been modest, which was fortunate since even working as hard as he did, Jimmy was scarcely able to manage a single work crew.Huh. I never thought about him that way. It was a sad surprise that suddenly made Jimmy the hardnosed crewleader much more likable, someone who could have been a friend.