A Deepness in the Sky Read Online Free PDF

local rocks to create a cover for our habitats, hopefully within a few light-seconds of the Spiders." Nau glanced again at Captain Park. So some things were still under discussion.
    Nau raised his glass. "So a toast. To an end of mistakes, and to our common undertaking. May there be a greater focus in the future."

    "Hey, my dear,I'm supposed to be the paranoid one, remember? I thought you'd be beating me up for my nasty Trader suspicions."
    Trixia smiled a little weakly but didn't answer right away. She'd been unusually quiet all the way back from the Emergent banquet. They were back in her quarters in the Traders' temp. Here she was normally her most outspoken and delightful self. "Their habitat was certainly nice," she finally said.
    "Compared to our temp it is." Ezr patted the plastic wall. "For something made from parts they shipped in, it was a great job." The Qeng Ho temp was scarcely more than a giant, partitioned balloon. The gym and meeting rooms were good-sized, but the place was not exactly elegant. The Traders saved elegance for larger structures they could make with local materials. Trixia had just two connected rooms, a bit over one hundred cubic meters total. The walls were plain, but Trixia had worked hard on the consensus imagery: her parents and sisters, a panorama from some great Triland forest. Much of her desk area was filled with historical flats from Old Earth before the Space Age. There were pictures from the first London and the first Berlin, pictures of horses and aeroplanes and commissars. In fact, those cultures were bland compared with the extremes played out in the histories of later worlds. But in the Dawn Age, everything was being discovered for the first time. There had never been a time of higher dreams or greater naïveté. That time was Ezr's specialty, to the horror of his parents and the puzzlement of most of his friends. And yet Trixia understood. The Dawn Age was only a hobby for her, maybe, but she loved to talk about the old, old first times. He knew he would never find another like her.
    "Look, Trixia, what's got you down? Surely there's nothing suspicious about the Emergents having nice quarters. Most of the evening you were your usual softheaded self"—she didn't rise to the insult—"but then something happened. What did you notice?" He pushed off the ceiling to float closer to where she was seated against a wall divan.
    "It...it was several little things, and—" She reached out to catch his hand. "You know I have an ear for languages." Another quick smile. "Their dialect of Nese is so close to your broadcast standard that it's clear they've bootstrapped off the Qeng Ho Net."
    "Sure. That all fits with their claims. They're a young culture, crawling back from a bad fall."Will I end up having to defend them? The Emergent offer had been reasonable, almost generous. It was the sort of thing that made any good Trader a little cautious. But Trixia had seen somethingelse to worry about.
    "Yes, but having a common language makes a lot of things difficult to disguise. I heard a dozen authoritarian turns of speech—and they didn't seem to be fossil usages. The Emergents are accustomed to owning people, Ezr."
    "You mean slaves? This is a high-tech civilization, Trixia. Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart."
    She squeezed his hand abruptly, not angry, not playful, but intense in a way he'd never seen with her before. "Yes, yes. But we don't know all their kinks. We do know they play rough. I had a whole evening of listening to that reddish-blond fellow sitting beside you, and the pair that were on my right. The word ‘trade' does not come easily to them. Exploitation is the only relationship they can imagine with the Spiders."
    "Hmm." Trixia was like this. Things that slipped past him could make such a difference to her. Sometimes they seemed trivial even after she explained them. But sometimes her explanation was like a