In some fundamental sense, Sura Vinh had been all those things. For much of her long life, Sura Vinh had seemed to be his friend. And even though she was ultimately his betrayer—still, there at the beginning, Sura Vinh had been a woman good and true.

Someone was shaking him gently, waving a hand in his face. "Hey, Trinli! Pham! Are you still with us?" It was Jau Xin, and he looked genuinely concerned.

"Ungh, yes, yes. I'm fine."

"You sure?" Xin watched him for several seconds, then drifted back to his seat. "I had an uncle who went all glassy-eyed like you just did. Tas a stroke, and he—"

"Yeah, well I'm fine. Never better." Pham put the bluster back in his voice. "I was just thinking, that's all."

The claim provoked diversionary laughter all round the table. "Thinking. A bad habit, Pham, old boy!" After a few moments, their concern faded. Pham listened attentively now, occasionally injecting loud opinions.

In fact, invasive daydreaming had been a feature of his personality since at least his leaving the Canberra. He'd get totally wrapped up in memories or planning, and lose himself the way some people did in immersion videos. He'd screwed up at least one deal because of it. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Qiwi was gone. Yes, the girl's childhood had been much like his, and maybe that accounted for her imagination and drive now. In fact, he had often wondered if the Strentmannians' crazy childrearing was based on stories of Pham's time on theReprise. At least when he had reached his destination, things got better. Poor Qiwi had found only death and deception here. But she still kept going... .

"We're getting good translations now." Trud Silipan was back on the Spiders. "I'm in charge of Reynolt's translator zipheads." Trud was more like an attendant than a manager, but no one pointed that out. "I tell you, any day now we'll start getting information about what the Spiders' original civilization was like."

"I don't know, Trud. Everyone says this must be a fallen colony. But if the Spiders are elsewhere in space, how come we don't hear their radio?"

Pham: "Look. We've been over this before. Arachna must be a colony world. This system is just too hostile for life to start naturally."

And someone else: "Maybe the creatures don't have a Qeng Ho." Chuckles went round the table.

"No, there'd still be plenty of radio noise. We'd hear them."

"Maybe the rest of them are really far away, like the Perseus Mumbling—"

"Or maybe they're so advanced they don't use radio. We only noticed these guys because they're starting over." It was an old, old argument, part of a mystery that extended back to the Age of Failed Dreams. More than anything else it was what had drawn the human expeditions to Arachna. It was certainly what had drawn Pham.

And indeed, Pham had already found Something New, something so powerful that the origin of the Spiders was now a peripheral issue for him. Pham had found Focus. With Focus, the Emergents could convert their brightest people into dedicated machines of thought. A dud like Trud Silipan could get effective translations at the touch of a key. A monster like Tomas Nau could have eyes unresting. Focus gave the Emergents a power that no one had ever had before, subtlety that surpassed any machine and patience that surpassed any human. That was one of the Failed Dreams—but they had achieved it.

Watching Silipan pontificate, Pham realized that the next stage in his plan had finally arrived. The low-level Emergents had accepted Pham Trinli. Nau tolerated, even humored him, thinking he might be an unknowing window on the Qeng Ho military mind. It was time to learn a lot more about Focus. Learn from Silipan, from Reynolt...someday learn the technical side of the thing.

Pham had tried to build a true civilization across all of Human Space. For a few brief centuries it had seemed he might succeed. In the end, he had been betrayed. But Pham had long ago realized that the betrayal had been just the overt failure. What Sura and the others did to him at Brisgo Gap had been inevitable. An interstellar empire covers so much space, so much time. The goodness and justice of such a thing is not enough. You need an edge.

Pham Nuwen raised his bulb of Diamonds and Ice and drank an unnoticed toast, to the lessons of the past and the promise of the future. This time he would do things right.

EIGHTEEN

Ezr Vinh's first two years after the ambush were spread across nearly eight years of objective time. Almost like a good Qeng Ho captain, Tomas Nau was pacing their duty time to match local developments. Qiwi and her crews were out of coldsleep more than any, but even they were slowing down.

Anne Reynolt kept her astrophysicists busy, too. OnOff continued to settle along the light curve that had been seen in previous centuries; to a lay observer, it looked like a normal, hydrogen-eating sun, complete with sunspots. At first, she held the other academics to a lower duty cycle, awaiting the resumption of Spider activity.

Military radio transmissions were heard from Arachna less than one day after the Relight, even while steam-storms churned the surface. Apparently, the Off phase of the sun had interrupted some local war. Within a year or two, there were dozens of transmission sites on two continents. Every two centuries these creatures had to rebuild their surface structures almost from the foundations up, but apparently they were very good at it. When gaps showed in the cloud cover, the spacers caught sight of new roads, towns.

By the fourth year there were two thousand transmission points, the classical fixed-station model. Now Trixia Bonsol and the other linguists went to a heavier duty cycle. For the first time they had continuous audio to study.

When their Watches matched—and they often did now—Ezr visited Trixia Bonsol every day. At first, Trixia was more remote than ever. She didn't seem to hear him; the Spider talk flooded her workroom. The sounds were a squeaking shrillness that changed from day to day as Trixia and the other Focused linguists determined where in the acoustic spectrum the sense of Spider talk was hidden, and devised convenient representations, both auditory and visual, for its study. Eventually, Trixia had a usable data representation.

And then the translations really began. Reynolt's Focused translators grabbed everything they could get, producing thousands of words of semi-intelligible text per day. Trixia was the best. That was obvious from the beginning. It was her work with the physics texts that had been the original breakthrough, and it was she who melded that written language with the language spoken in two-thirds of the radio broadcasts. Even compared to the Qeng Ho linguists, Trixia Bonsol excelled; how proud she would be if only she could know. "She's indispensable." Reynolt passed sentence with her typical flat affect, free of both praise and sadism, a statement of fact. Trixia Bonsol would get no early out, as Hunte Wen had.

Vinh tried to read everything the translators produced. At first it was typical of raw field linguistics, where each sentence consisted of dozens of pointers to alternative meanings, alternative parsings. After a few Msecs, the translations were almost readable. There were living beings down there on Arachna, and these were their words.

Some of the Focused linguists never got beyond the annotated-style translations. They were caught in the lower levels of meaning and fought any attempt to capture the spirit of the aliens. Maybe that was enough. For one thing, they learned that the Spiders had no knowledge of any previous civilization:

"We're seeing no mention of a golden age of technology."

Nau looked at Reynolt skeptically. "That's suspicious in itself. Even on Old Earth, there were at least myths of a lost past." And if ever there were an origin world, it was Old Earth.