There is the bit where the story of Pham’s youth is told. He was third son of a King on a medieval–tech world (one with ancient stories of flying machines and long–distance communication devices) when some traders from a distant world landed. To everyone’s surprise they were human, and had expected this world to have a much higher technology level when they arrived. Pham’s dad did some kind of deal where his son Pham was given to the traders as an apprentice; even Pham didn’t know the details. Pham spent the next 20 years or so living on the ship because he refused to use the suspended–animation system (too coffin–like). He learned use use the many layers of emulation to use older and older programs, and eventually learned even trivial details. For example, he learned that the epoch of the time system used by the traders wasn’t actually the date of the first moon landing, but was a couple of years after that. He even hypothesized that over the millennia, many ship’s captains would have installed back doors in the system that might now never be rediscovered (which turns out to be foreshadowing :).

One funny detail I remember is a throw–away line where someone rapidly keys in “a column of text”. If you’re paying attention you can combine that with names like Pham, Vinh, Nau, and Qung Ho, the rarity of the red–headed gene, and the descriptions of some traders from the far end of human space you can reconstruct how things went after Humanity reached the stars.