A Deepness in the Sky (29 page)

"You could refuel, even if there were only gas giants at the destination. Even I could manage the programs for that."

"Yeah, and that's what we did at Canberra. But without an overhaul, we can't go far and we can't do zip once we get there." Sura paused, cursed under her breath. "Those damn fools. Why did they stay behind?" Sura seemed caught between her contempt for the shipmasters who had stayed to conquer Canberra, and her own guilt at having deserted them.

Bret Trinli broke the silence. "Don't feel so bad for them. They're taking a big chance, but if they win, they'll have the Customers we were all expecting there."

"I know—and we're guaranteed to arrive at Namqem with nothing. Bet we'll lose theReprise. " She shook herself, visibly pushing back the worries that always seemed to gnaw her. "Okay, in the meantime we're going to create one more trained crewmember." She nailed Pham with a mock-glare. "What specialty do we need the most, Bret?"

Trinli rolled his eyes. "You mean that can bring us the most income? Obviously: Programmer-Archeologist."

The question was, could a feral child like Pham Nuwen ever become one? By now, the boy could use almost all the standard interfaces. He even thought of himself as a programmer, and potentially a ship's master. With the standard interfaces, one could fly theReprise, execute planetary orbit insertion, monitor the coldsleep coffins—

"And if anything goes wrong, you're dead, dead, dead" was how Sura finished Pham's litany of prowess. "Boy, you have to learn something. It's something that children in civilization often are confused about, too. We've had computers and programs since the beginning of civilization, even before spaceflight. But there's only so much they can do; they can't think their way out of an unexpected jam or do anything really creative."

"But—I know that's not true. I play games with the machines. If I set the skill ratings high, I never win."

"That's just computers doing simple things, very fast. There is only one important way that computers are anything like wise. They contain thousands of years of programs, and can run most of them. In a sense, they remember every slick trick that Humankind has ever devised."

Bret Trinli sniffed. "Along with all the nonsense."

Sura shrugged. "Of course. Look. What's our crew size—when we're in-system and everybody is up?"

"One thousand and twenty-three," said Pham. He had long since learned every physical characteristic of theReprise and this voyage.

"Okay. Now, suppose you're light-years from nowhere—"

Trinli: "You don't have to suppose that, it's the pure truth."

"—and something goes wrong. It takes perhaps ten thousand human specialties to build a starship, and that's on top of an enormous capital industry base. There's no way a ship's crew can know everything it takes to analyze a star's spectrum, and make a vaccine against some wild change in the bactry, and understand every deficiency disease we may meet—"

"Yes!" said Pham. "That's why we have the programs and the computers."

"That's why we can't survive without them. Over thousands of years, the machine memories have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies, all of them are buggy, and only the top-level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs." She paused, looked at Pham significantly. "It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, and then to interpret the results properly."

Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn't always Pham's fault. The programs that tried to translate Canberran to Nese were crap. "So... you want me to learn to program something better."

Sura grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. "We'll be satisfied if you become a good programmer, and then learn to use the stuff that already exists."

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra's original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within theReprise 's local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely...the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.

"We should rewrite it all," said Pham.

"It's been done," said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.

"It's been tried," corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. "But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it." Trinli grinned evilly. "And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you'd have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn't be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then."

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need."

"Almostprecisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."

"Yes, which I've almost completed." She glanced at Pham, saw the look on his face. "Aha. I thought you'd rather die than use a coffin."

Pham smiled shyly, remembering the little boy of six years before. "No, I'll use it. Someday."

That day was another five years of Pham's lifetime away. They were busy years. Both Bret and Sura were off-Watch, and Pham never felt close to their replacements. The foursome played musical instruments—manually, just like minstrels at court! They'd do it for Ksecs on end; there seemed be some strange mental/social high they got from playing together. Pham was vaguely affected by music, but these people worked so hard for such ordinary results. Pham did not have the patience even to begin down that path. He drifted off. Being alone was something he was very good at. There was so much to learn.

The more he studied, the more he understood what Sura Vinh had meant about "mature programming environments." By comparison with the crew members he knew, Pham had become an excellent programmer. "Flaming genius" was how he'd heard Sura describe him when she hadn't known he was nearby. He could codeanything —but life is short, and most significant systems were terribly large. So Pham learned to hack about with the leviathans of the past. He could interface weapons code from Eldritch Faerie with patched conic planners from before the conquest of space. Just as important, he knew how and where to look for possibly appropriate applications hidden in the ship's network.

...And he learned something about mature programming environments that Sura had never quite said. When systems depended on underlying systems, and those depended on things still older...it became impossible to know all the systems could do. Deep in the interior of fleet automation there could be—there must be—a maze of trapdoors. Most of the authors were thousands of years dead, their hidden accesses probably lost forever. Other traps had been set by companies or governments that hoped to survive the passage of time. Sura and Bret and maybe a few of the others knew things about theReprise 's systems that gave them special powers.

The medieval prince in Pham Nuwen was entranced by this insight.If only one could be at the ground floor of some universally popularsystem.... If the new layer was used everywhere, then the owner of those trapdoors would be like a king forever after, throughout the entire universe of use.

• • •

Eleven years had passed since a certain frightened thirteen-year-old had been taken from Canberra.

Sura had just returned from coldsleep. It was a return that Pham had awaited with increasing desire...since just after she departed. There was so much he wanted to tell her, so much to ask her and show her. Yet when the time finally came, he couldn't bring himself to stay at the coldsleep hold and greet her.

She found him in an equipment bay on the aft hull, a tiny niche with a real window on the stars. It was a place that Pham had appropriated several years earlier.

There was tap on the light plastic cover. He slipped it aside.

"Hello, Pham." Sura had a strange smile on her face.She looked strange. So young. In fact, she simply hadn't aged. And now Pham Nuwen had lived twenty-four years. He waved her into the tiny room. She floated close past him, and turned. Her eyes were solemn above the smile. "You've grown up, friend."

Pham started to shake his head. "Yes. But I—you are still ahead of me."

"Maybe. In some ways. But you're twice the programmer I will ever be. I saw the solutions you worked out for Ceng this last Watch."

They sat, and she asked him about Ceng's problems and his solutions. All the glib speeches and bravado he'd spent the last year planning were swept from his mind, his conversation reduced to awkward starts and stops. Sura didn't seem to notice.Damn. How does a Qeng Ho man take a woman? On Canberra, he had grown up believing in chivalry and sacrifice...and had gradually learned that the true method was very different: a gentleman simply grabbed what he wanted, assuming a more powerful gentleman did not already own it. Pham's own personal experience was limited and surely untypical: poor Cindi had grabbedhim. At the beginning of the last Watch, he had tried the true Canberra method on one of the female crew. Xina Rao had broken his wrist and made a formal complaint. It was something Sura would surely hear about sooner or later.

The thought blew away Pham's tenuous hold on the conversation. He stared at Sura in embarrassed silence, then blurted out the announcement he had been holding secret for some special moment. "I...I'm going to go off-Watch, Sura. I'll finally start coldsleep."

She nodded solemnly, as if she had never guessed.

"You know what really did it for me, Sura? The dustmote that broke me? It was three years ago. You were off-Watch,"and I realized how longit would be until next I saw you. "I was trying to make that second-level celestial mech stuff work. You really have to understand some math to do that. For a while, I was stumped. For the hell of it, I moved up here, just started staring at the sky. I've done that before. Every year, my sun is dimmer; it's scary."

"I'll bet," said Sura, "but I didn't know you could see directly aft, even from here." She slid near the forty-centimeter port, and killed the lights.

"Yes you can," said Pham, "at least when your eyes adjust." The room was dark as pitch now. This was areal window, not some enhancing display device. He moved close behind her. "See, there's the four bright stars of the Pikeman. Now Canberra's star just makes his pole one tong longer."Silly. She doesn't know the Canberran sky. He babbled on, a mindless cover for what he was feeling. "But even that is not what got me; my sun is another star, so what? The thing is, the constellations: the Pikeman, the Wild Goose, the Plow. I can still recognize them, but even their shapes have changed. I know, I should have expected that. I'd been doing the math behind much harder things. But...it struck me. In eleven years, we have moved so far that the whole sky has changed. It gave me a gut feeling of how far we've come, how very far we still have to go."

He gestured in the dark, and his palm slapped lightly on the smooth swell of her rear. His voice died in a little squeak, and for a measurable instant his hand sat motionless on her pants, his fingers touching her bare flesh just above the hip line. Somehow he hadn't noticed before; her blouse wasn't even tucked in. His hand swept around her waist and upward across the smooth curve of her belly, kept moving till he touched the undersides of her breasts. The move was a grab, modified and tentative perhaps, but a definite grab.

Sura's reaction was almost as swift as Xina Rao's had been. She twisted beneath him, her breast centering in the palm of his other hand. Before Pham could get out of her way, her arm was behind his neck, levering him down...for a long, hard kiss. He felt multiple shocks where his lips touched hers, where his hand rested, where her leg slid up between his.

And now she was pulling his shirt from his pants, forcing their bodies into a single long touch. She leaned her head back from his lips and laughed softly. "Lord! I've been wanting to get my hands on you ever since you were fifteen years old."