by Vernor Vinge
Reynolt had strapped down across from him. “The successfully Focused are all on Hammerfest. You can talk to almost anyone you please.”
Hammerfest looked like an elegant personal estate. It was the luxurious heart of the Emergent operation. That had been some comfort to Ezr. He’d told himself that Trixia and the others would be treated decently there. They might be held like the hostages of Qeng Ho history, like the One Hundred at Far Pyorya. But no sensible Trader would ever build a habitat rooted in a rubble pile. The taxi coasted over towers of eerie beauty, a fey castle spiring up from the crystal plane. In a short time, he would know what the castle hid…Reynolt’s phrasing finally took hold of his attention. “Successfully Focused?”
Reynolt shrugged. “Focus is mindrot on a leash. We lost thirty percent in the initial conversions; we may lose more in the coming years. We had moved the sickest ones over to the Far Treasure.”
“But what—”
“Be quiet and let me tell you.” Her attention flicked to something beyond Vinh’s shoulder, and she was quiet for several seconds. “You remember becoming sick at the time of the ambush. You’ve guessed that was a disease of our design; its incubation time was an important part of our planning. What you don’t know is that the microbe’s military use is of secondary importance.” The mindrot was viral. Its original, natural, form had killed millions in the Emergents’ home solar system, had crashed their civilization…and set the stage for the present era of expansion. For the original strains of the bug had a novel property: They were a treasure house of neurotoxins.
“In the centuries since the Plague Time, the Emergency has gentled the mindrot and turned it to the service of civilization. Its present form needs special help to break through the blood-brain barrier, and spreads throughout the brain in a nearly harmless way, infecting about ninety percent of the glial cells. And now we can control the release of neuroactives.”
The taxi slowed and turned precisely to match Hammerfest’s lock. Arachna slid across the sky, a full “moon” nearly a half-degree across. The planet gleamed white and featureless, cloud decks hiding its furious rebirth.
Ezr scarcely noticed. His imagination was trapped in the vision that lurked behind Anne Reynolt’s dry jargon: the Emergents’ pet virus, penetrating the brain, breeding by the tens of billions, dripping poison into a still-living brain. He remembered the killing pressure in his head as their lander had climbed up from Arachna. That had been the disease banging on the portals of his mind. Ezr Vinh and all the others on the Qeng Ho temp had fought off that assault—or maybe their brains were still infected, and the disease was quiescent. But Trixia Bonsol and the people with the “Focus” glyph by their names had been given special treatment. Instead of a cure, Reynolt’s people had grown the disease in the victims’ brains like mold in the flesh of a fruit. If there had been even the slightest gravity in the taxi, Ezr would have vomited. “But why?”
Reynolt ignored him. She opened the lock hatch and led him into Hammerfest. When she spoke again, there was something close to enthusiasm in her flat tones. “Focusing ennobles. It is the key to Emergent success, and a much more subtle thing than you imagine. It’s not just that we’ve created a pyschoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision—and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision.”
Vinh’s response was so blank that it penetrated even Reynolt’s attention. “Don’t you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines.” She spelled it out in wretched detail. On the Emergent worlds, the Focusing process was spread over the last years of a specialist’s schooling, intensifying the graduate-school experience to produce genius. For Trixia and the others, the process had been necessarily more abrupt. For many days, Reynolt and her technicians had tweaked the virus, triggering genetic expression that precisely released the chemicals of thought—all guided by Emergent medical computers that gathered feedback from conventional brain diagnostics…
“And now the training is complete. The survivors are ready to pursue their researches as they never could have before.”
Reynolt led him through rooms with plush furniture and carpeted walls. They followed corridors that became narrower and narrower until they were in tunnels barely one meter across. It was a capillary architecture he had seen in histories…pictures from the heart of an urban tyranny. And finally they stood before a simple door. Like the others behind them, it bore a number and speciality. This one said: F042 EXPLORATORY LINGUISTICS.
Reynolt paused. “One last thing. Podmaster Nau believes you may be upset by what you see here. I know outlanders behave in extreme ways when they first encounter Focus.” She cocked her head as though debating Ezr Vinh’s rationality. “So. The Podmaster has asked me to emphasize: Focus is normally reversible, at least to a great extent.” She shrugged, as though delivering a rote speech.
“Open the door.” Ezr’s voice cracked on the words.
The roomlet was tiny, lit dimly by the glow from a dozen active windows. The light formed a halo around the head of the person within: short hair, slender form in simple fatigues.
“Trixia?” he said softly. He reached across the room to touch her shoulder. She didn’t turn her head. Vinh swallowed his terror and pulled himself around to look into her face. “Trixia?”
For an instant she seemed to look directly into his eyes. Then she twisted away from his touch and tried to peer around him, at the windows. “You’re blocking my view. I can’t see!” Her tone was nervous, edging into panic.
Ezr ducked his head, turned to see what was so important in the windows. The walls around Trixia were filled with structure and generation diagrams. One whole section appeared to be vocabulary options. There were Nese words in n-to-one match with fragments of unpronounceable nonsense. It was a typical language-analysis environment, though with more active windows than a reasonable person would use. Trixia’s gaze flickered from point to point, her fingers tapping choices. Occasionally she would mutter a command. Her face was filled with a look of total concentration. It was not an alien look, and not by itself horrifying; he had seen it before, when she was totally fascinated by some language problem.
Once he moved out of her way, he was gone from her mind. She was more…focused…than he had ever seen her before.
And Ezr Vinh began to understand.
He watched her for some seconds, watched the patterns expand in the windows, watched choices made, structures change. Finally, he asked in a quiet, almost disinterested voice, “So how is it going, Trixia?”
“Fine.” The answer was immediate, the tone exactly that of the old Trixia in a distracted mood. “The books from the Spider library, they’re marvelous. I have a handle on their graphemics now. No one’s ever seen anything like this, ever done anything like this. The Spiders don’t see the way we do; visual fusion is entirely different with them. If it hadn’t been for the physics books, I’d never have imagined the notion of split graphemes.” Her voice was distant, a little excited. She didn’t turn to look at him as she spoke, and her fingers continued to tap. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he could see small, frightening things. Her fatigues were fresh but there were syrupy stains down the front. Her hair, even cut short, looked tangled and greasy. A fleck of something—food? snot?—clung to the curve of her face just above her lips.
Can she even bathe herself? Vinh glanced downward, at the doorway. The place wasn’t big enough for three, but Reynolt had stuck her head and shoulders through the opening. She floated easily on her elbows. She was staring up at Ezr and Trixia with intense interest. “Dr. Bonsol has done well, even better than our own linguists, and they’ve been Focused since graduate school. Because of her, we’ll have a reading knowledge of their language even before the Spiders come back to life.”
Ezr touched Trixia’s shoulder again. Again, she twitched away. It wasn’t a gestur
e of anger or fear; it was as if she were shrugging off a pesky fly. “Do you remember me, Trixia?” No answer, but he was sure she did—it simply wasn’t important enough to comment on. She was an ensorcelled princess, and only the evil witches might waken her. But this ensorcellment might never have happened if he had listened more to the princess’s fears, if he had agreed with Sum Dotran. “I’m so sorry, Trixia.”
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, the words 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 the Invisible 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 they can 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 the Far 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 so good to pulp that face. Instead, he settled a little deeper in the dark and let his breath steady. “Yeah. It happens.” And maybe 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 was accommodating. 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 things backwards…
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 a friend 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 th
e 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.
And just as suddenly, he realized how much Jimmy must have hated playing the game of high-stakes threats with Tomas Nau. He didn’t have the scheming talent for such things, and in the end he had simply miscalculated. All the guy really wanted to do was marry Tsufe Do and get into middle management. It doesn’t make sense. Vinh was suddenly aware of the darkness around him, the sounds of butterflies sleeping in the trees. The damp of the moss was chill through his shirt and pants. He tried to remember exactly what he’d heard over the auditorium speakers. The voice was Jimmy’s, no doubt. The accent was precisely his Diem-family Nese. But the tone, the choice of words, those had been so confident, so arrogant, so…almost joyful. Jimmy Diem could never have faked that enthusiasm. And Jimmy would never have felt such enthusiasm, either.
And that left only one conclusion. Faking Jimmy’s voice and accent would have been difficult, but somehow they had done it. And so what else had been a lie? Jimmy didn’t kill anyone. The senior Qeng Ho had been murdered before Jimmy and Tsufe and Pham Patil ever went aboard the Far Treasure. Tomas Nau had committed murders on top of murders to claim his moral high ground. Explain Focus to your people, and do it so they can accept it, so what is left of our missions can survive.
Vinh stared up into the last light in the sky. Stars glinted here and there between the branches, a fake heaven from a sky light-years away. He heard Pham Trinli shift. He patted Ezr awkwardly on the shoulder, and his lanky form floated off the ground. “Good, you’re not bawling anymore. I figured you just needed a little backbone. Just remember, you gotta go along to get along. Nau is basically a softy; we can handle him.”