by Vernor Vinge
Silipan reached out, lightly touching the walls on both sides, slowing his descent. He dropped behind for a moment before Pham started braking too.
“How long till your appointment with Anne Reynolt?” Silipan asked.
“Just over a Ksec.”
“Okay, I’ll keep this short. Can’t keep the boss lady waiting.” He laughed. Silipan seemed to have an especially low regard for Anne Reynolt. If she were incompetent, a lot of things would be simpler for Pham…
They passed through a pressure door, into what might have been a sickbay. There were a few coldsleep coffins; they looked like medical temporaries. Visible behind the equipment was another door, this one bearing a Podmaster special seal. Trud gave a nervous glance in that direction, and did not look back again.
“So. Here’s where it all happens, Pham. The real magic of Focus.” He dragged Pham across the room, away from the half-hidden door. A technician was working by the limp form of a ziphead, maneuvering the “patient’s” head into one of the large toroids that dominated the room. Those might be diagnostic imagers, though they were even clunkier-looking than most Emergent hardware.
“You already know the basic principles, right, Pham?”
“Sure.” Those had been carefully explained in the first Watch after Jimmy’s murder. “You’ve got this special virus, the mindrot; you infected us all.”
“Right, right. But that was a military operation. In most cases the rot didn’t get past the blood/brain barrier. But when it does…You know about glial cells? You’ve got lots more of those in your brain than neurons, actually. Anyway, the rot uses the glials as a kind of broth, infects almost all of them. After four days or so—”
“—You have a ziphead?”
“No. You have the raw material for a ziphead; many of you Qeng Ho ended up in that state—unFocused, perfectly healthy, but with the infection permanently established. In such people, every neuron in the brain is adjacent to infection cells. And each rotted cell has a menu of neuro-actives it can secrete. Now, this guy—” He turned to the tech, who was still working on the comatose ziphead. “Bil, what is this one in for?”
Bil Phuong shrugged. “He’s been fighting. Al had to stun him. There’s no chance of mindrot runaway, but Reynolt wants his basal-five retrained on the sequence from…”
The two traded jargon. Pham glanced with careful disinterest at the ziphead. Egil Manrhi. Egil had been the punning-est armsman in pre-Flight. But now…now he was probably a better analyst than he had ever been before.
Trud was nodding at Phuong: “Huh. I don’t see why messing with basal-five will do any good. But then she is the boss, isn’t she?” He grinned at the other. “Hey, let me do this one, okay? I want to show Pham.”
“Just so you sign for it.” Phuong moved out of their way, looking faintly bored. Silipan slid down beside the gray-painted toroid. Pham noticed that the gadget had separate power cables, each a centimeter wide.
“Is this some kind of an imager, Trud? It looks like obsolete junk.”
“Ha. Not exactly. Help me get this guy’s head in the cradle. Don’t let him touch the sides…” An alarm tone sounded. “And for God’s sake, give Bil that ring you’re wearing. If you’re standing in the wrong place, the magnets in this baby would tear your finger off.”
Even in low gee, it was awkward to maneuver the comatose Egil Manrhi. It was a tight fit, and the rockpile’s gravity was just strong enough to drag Egil’s head onto the lower side of the hole.
Trud moved back from his handiwork, and smiled. “All set. Now you’re going to see what it’s all about, Pham, my boy.” He spoke commands and some kind of medical image floated in the air between them, presumably a view inside Egil’s head. Pham could recognize gross anatomical features, but this was far from anything he had studied. “You’re right about the imaging, Pham. This is standard MRI, as old as time. But it’s good enough. See, the basal-five harmony is generated here.” A pointer moved along a complex curve near the surface of the brain.
“Now here’s the cute thing, what makes mindrot more than a neuropathic curiosity.” A galaxy of tiny glowing dots appeared in the three-dimensional image. They glowed in every color, though most were pink. There were clusters and strands of tiny dots, many of them flickering in time with one another. “You’re seeing infected glial cells, at least the relevant groups.”
“The colors?”
“Those show current drug secretion by type…Now, what I want to do…” More commands, and Pham had his first look at the toroid’s user manual. “…is change the output and firing frequency along this path.” His little marker arrow swept along one of the threads of light. He grinned at Pham. “This is how our gear is more than an imager. See, the mindrot virus expresses certain para- and dia-magnetic proteins, and these respond variously to magnetic fields to trigger the production of specific neuroactives. So while you Qeng Ho and all the rest of humanity use MRI solely as an observing tool, we Emergents can use it actively, to make changes.” He tapped his keyboard; Pham heard a creaking sound as the superconducting cables spread apart from each other. Egil twitched a couple of times. Trud reached out to steady him. “Damn. Can’t get millimeter resolution with him thrashing.”
“I don’t see any change in the brain map.”
“You won’t till I turn off active mode. You can’t image and modify at the same time.” He paused, watching the step-by-step in the manual. “Almost done…There! Okay, let’s see the changes.” There was a new picture. And now the glowing thread of lights was mostly blue, and frantically blinking. “It’ll take a few seconds to settle in.” He continued to watch the model as he talked. “See, Pham. This is what I’m really good at. I don’t know what you could compare me to in your culture. I’m a little like a programmer, but I don’t code. I’m a little like a neurologist, except I get results. I guess I’m most like a hardware technician. I keep the gear going for all the higher-ups who take the credit.”
Trud frowned. “…Hunh? Pus.” He looked across the room at where the other Emergent was working. “Bil, this guy’s leptin-dop ratio is still low.”
“You turned off the field?”
“Of course. Basal-five should have retrained by now.”
Bil didn’t come over, but apparently he was looking at the patient’s brain model.
The line of blue glitter was still a jumble of random change. Trud continued, “It’s just a loose end, but I don’t know what’s causing it. Can you take care of it?” He hooked a thumb in Pham’s direction, indicating he had other, more important business.
Bil said, dubiously, “You did sign for it?”
“Yes, yes. Just take care of it, huh?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Thanks.” Silipan gestured Pham away from the MRI gear; the brain image vanished. “That Reynolt. Her jobs are the trickiest, not by the book. Then, when you do it the right way, you’re likely to end up in a heap of trouble.”
Pham followed him out the door and down a side tunnel that cut through the crystal of Diamond One. The walls were a chiseled mosaic, the same style of precise artwork that had mystified Pham long ago, at the “welcoming banquet.” Not all the zipheads were high-tech specialists: they passed a dozen slave artists clustered around the circumference of the tunnel, hunched close over magnifying glasses and needle-like tools. Pham had been along here before, several Watches earlier. Then, the frieze had been only roughly outlined, a mountain landscape with some sort of military force moving toward a nebulous goal. Even that had been a guess, based on the title: “The Defeat of the Frenkisch Orc.” Now the figures were mostly complete, sturdy heroic fighters that glittered rainbows. Their goal was some kind of monster. The creature wasn’t that novel, a typical Cthulhonic horror, tearing humans with its long claws and eating the pieces. Emergents made a big thing of their conquest of Frenk. Somehow, Pham doubted that the mutations they had warred against had been so spectacular. He slowed, and Silipan took his stare for admiration.
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��The carvers make only fifty centimeters’ progress every Msec. But the art brings some of the warmth of our past.”
Warmth? “Reynolt wants things pretty?” It was a random question.
“Ha. Reynolt couldn’t care less. Podmaster Brughel ordered this, per my recommendation.”
“But I thought Podmasters were sovereign in their domains.” Pham hadn’t seen much of Reynolt on prior Watches, but he had seen her humiliate Ritser Brughel in meetings with Nau.
Trud continued on for several meters, not speaking. His face quirked in a silly smile, a look he sometimes got during their bull sessions at Benny’s. This time though, the smile broke into laughter. “Podmaster? Anne Reynolt? Pham, watching you boggle has already made my day—but this tops all.” He coasted for several seconds more, still chuckling. Then he saw the glower on Pham Trinli’s face. “I’m sorry, Pham. You Peddlers are clever in so many ways, but you’re like children when it comes to the basics of culture…I got you cleared to see the Focus clinic; I guess it can’t hurt to spell some other things out. No, Anne Reynolt is not a Podmaster, though most likely she was a powerful one, once upon a time. Reynolt is just another ziphead.”
Pham let his glower fade to blank astonishment—which also happened to be his true reaction. “But…she’s running a big part of the show. She gives you orders.”
Silipan shrugged. His smile had changed to something sour. “Yeah. She gives me orders. It’s a rare thing, but it can happen. I’d almost rather work for Podmaster Brughel and Kal Omo except that they play so…rough.” His voice trailed off nervously.
Pham caught up. “I think I see,” he lied. “When a specialist gets Focused, he fixates on his specialty. So an artist becomes one of your mosaic carvers, a physicist becomes like Hunte Wen, and a manager becomes, uh, I don’t know, the manager from Hell.”
Trud shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. See, technical specialties Focus well. We got a seventy-percent success rate even with you Qeng Ho. But people skills—counseling, politics, personnel management—normally, those don’t survive Focusing at all. You’ve seen enough zipheads by now; the one thing they have in common is flat affect. They can no more imagine what’s going on in a normal person’s head than a rock can. We’re lucky to have as many good translators as we do; that’s never been tried on this scale before.
“No. Anne Reynolt is something very, very rare. Rumor is, she was a High Podmaster in the Xevalle clique. Most of those got killed or mindscrubbed, but the story is Reynolt had really pissed the Nauly clique. For laughs they Focused her; maybe they thought to use her as body comfort. But that’s not how it turned out. My guess is, she was already close to being a monomaniac. It was one chance in a billion, but Reynolt’s management abilities survived—even some of her people skills survived.”
Up ahead, Pham could see the end of the tunnel. Light shone on an unadorned hatch. Trud came to a stop and turned to face Pham. “She’s a freak, but she is also Podmaster Nau’s most valued property. In principle, she doubles his reach…” He grimaced. “It doesn’t make it any easier to take orders from her, I’ll tell you that. Personally, I think the Podmaster overrates her. She’s a miraculous freak, but so what? It’s like a dog that writes poetry—no one notices that it’s doggerel.”
“You don’t seem to care if she knows your opinion.”
Now Trud was smiling again. “Of course not. That’s the one plus of my situation. She’s almost impossible to fool on things directly related to my job—but outside of that she’s like any other ziphead. Why, I’ve played some pus-funny j—” He stopped. “Ah, never mind. Tell her what Podmaster Nau asked you to and you’ll be okay.” He winked, then started back up the corridor, away from Reynolt’s office.
“Watch her close. You’ll see what I mean.”
If Pham had known about Anne Reynolt, he might have postponed the whole localizer scam. But now he was sitting in her office, and there weren’t many options. In a way it felt good to be winging it. Ever since Jimmy died, every one of Pham’s moves had been so considered, so damned cautious.
At first, the woman didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Pham sat uninvited on the chair across from her desk and looked around the room. It was nothing like Nau’s office. These walls were naked, rough diamond. There were no pictures, not even the abominations that passed for Emergent art. Reynolt’s desk was an agglomeration of empty storage crates and network gear.
And Reynolt herself? Pham stared at her face more intently than he might have dared otherwise. He’d been in her presence maybe 20Ksec total and those encounters had been in meetings, with Reynolt generally at the far end of the table. She always dressed plainly, except for that silver necklace tucked down into her blouse. With her red hair and pale skin, the woman might have been Ritser Brughel’s sister. The physical type was rare in this end of Human Space, arising most often from local mutation. Anne might have been thirty years old—or a couple of centuries, with really good medical support. In a crazy, exotic way she was lovely. Physically lovely. So you were a Podmaster.
Reynolt’s gaze flickered up, and impaled him for an instant. “Okay. You’re here to tell me the details of these localizers.”
Pham nodded. Strange. After that momentary glance, her gaze shifted away from his eyes. She was watching his lips, his throat, only briefly his eyes. There was no sympathy, no communication, but Pham had the chill feeling that she was seeing through all his masks.
“Good. What is their standard sensorium?”
He grumbled through the answers, claiming ignorance of details.
Reynolt didn’t seem to take offense. Her questions were delivered in a uniformly calm, mildly contemptuous tone. Then: “This isn’t enough to work with. I need the manuals.”
“Sure. That’s what I’m here for. The full manuals are on the localizer chips, encrypted beneath what ordinary techs are allowed to see.”
Again that long, scattered stare: “We’ve looked. We don’t see them.”
This was the dangerous part. At best, Nau and Brughel would be taking a very close look at Trinli’s buffoon persona. At worst…if they realized he was giving away secrets that even top armsmen wouldn’t know, he’d be in serious trouble. Pham pointed to a head-up display on Reynolt’s desk. “Allow me,” he said.
Reynolt didn’t react to his flippancy, but she did put on the huds and accepted consensual imaging. Pham continued, “I remember the passcode. It’s long, though”—and the full version was keyed to his own body, but he didn’t say that. He tried several incorrect codes, and acted irritable and nervous when they failed. A normal human, even Tomas Nau, would have expressed impatience—or laughed.
Reynolt didn’t say anything. She just sat there. But then, suddenly, “I have no patience for this. Do not pretend incompetence.”
She knew. In all the time since Triland, no one had ever seen this far behind his cover. He’d hoped for more time; once they started using the localizers he could write some new cover for himself. Damn. Then he remembered what Silipan had said. Anne Reynolt knew something. Most likely, she had simply concluded that Trinli was a reluctant informant.
“Sorry,” Pham mumbled. He typed in the correct sequence.
A simple acknowledgment came back from the fleet library, chip doc subsection. The glyphs floated silver on the air between them. The secret inventory data, the component specifications.
“Good enough,” said Reynolt. She did something with her control, and her office seemed to vanish. The two of them floated through the inventory information, and then they were standing within the localizers’ specifications.
“As you said, temperature, sonics, light levels…multispectrum. But this is more elaborate than you described at the meeting.”
“I said it was good. These are just the details.”
Reynolt spoke quickly, reviewing capability after capability. Now she sounded almost excited. This was far beyond the corresponding Emergent products. “A naked localizer, with a good sensorium an
d independent operation.” And she was seeing only the part that Pham wanted her to see.
“You do have to pulse it power.”
“Just as well. That way we can limit its use till we thoroughly understand it.”
She flicked away the image, and they were sitting in her office again, the lights sparkling cool off the rough walls. Pham could feel himself beginning to sweat.
She wasn’t even looking at him anymore. “The inventory showed several million localizers in addition to those embedded in fleet hardware.”
“Sure. Inactive, they pack into just a few liters.”
Calm observation: “You were fools not to use them for security.”
Pham glowered at her. “We armsmen knew what they could do. In a military situation—”
But those were not the details in Anne Reynolt’s Focus. She waved him silent. “It looks like we have more than enough for our purposes.”
The beautiful janissary looked back into Pham’s face. For an instant, her gaze stabbed directly into his eyes.
“You’ve made possible a new era of control, Armsman.”
Pham looked into the clear blue eyes and nodded; he hoped she didn’t understand the full truth that she spoke. And now Pham realized how central she was to all his plans. Anne Reynolt managed almost all the zipheads. Anne Reynolt was Tomas Nau’s direct control over operations. Anne Reynolt understood the things about the Emergents that a successful revolutionary must understand. And Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. She might figure out what he was up to—or she might be the key to destroying Nau and Brughel.
Things never got completely quiet in an ad hoc habitat. The Traders’ temp was only a hundred meters across; the crew, bouncing around in it, created stresses that could not be completely damped. And thermal stress made an occasional loud snapping sound. But just now was in the middle of most of the crew’s sleep period; Pham Nuwen’s little cabin was about as quiet as it ever got. He floated in the darkened cabin, pretending to drowse. His secret life was about to become very busy. The Emergents didn’t know it, but they’d just been snared by a trap that went deeper than most any Qeng Ho Fleet Captain knew about. It was one of two or three scams that Pham Nuwen had set up long ago. Sura and a few others had known about them, but even after Brisgo Gap, the knowledge hadn’t seeped into the general Qeng Ho armamentarium. Pham had always wondered about that; Sura could be subtle.