by Vernor Vinge
Of course, Jaybert took the question to be about his work. “Damnedest thing. I put my new antenna on the Lands Command link just this morning. At first the alignment was fine, but then I started getting these fifteen-second patches where it looks like there are two stations on the line-of-sight. I wanted to ask your father—” Viki followed him a few steps down the stairs, making agreeable sounds to the other’s unintelligible talk about amplifier stages and transient alignment failures. No doubt Jaybert had been very pleased to get Daddy’s quick attention, and no doubt Daddy had been delighted for an excuse to hole up in the signals lab. And then Mother showed up…
Viki left Jaybert down by his office-cubby, and climbed back up the stairs, this time circling around to the lab’s utility entrance. There was a column of light at the end of the corridor. Ha! The door was partway open. She could hear the General’s voice. Viki slipped down the hallway to the door.
“—just don’t understand, Sherkaner. You are a brilliant person. How can you behave like such an idiot?”
Victory Junior hesitated, almost backed out of the darkened hall. She had never heard Mom sound quite so angry. It…hurt. On the other hand, Gokna would give anything to hear Viki’s report-of-action. Viki moved silently forward, turned her head sideways to peek through the narrow gap. The lab was pretty much as she remembered it, full of oscilloscopes and high-speed recorders. The covers were off some of Jaybert’s gear, but apparently Mom had arrived before the two got into any serious electronic dismemberment. Mother was standing in front of Daddy, blocking his best eyes from seeing Viki. And I bet I’m near the center of Mom’s blind spot.
“…Was I really that bad?” Daddy was saying.
“Yes!”
Sherkaner Underhill seemed to wilt under the General’s glare. “I don’t know. The cobber got me off guard. The comment about little Brent. I knew that was coming. You and I had talked about that. Even Brent and I talked about it. And even so, it knocked my legs out. I got confused.”
Mom jerked her hand, dismissing the comment. “That was no problem, Sherk. You gave a good response. Your hurt came across in a caring, paternal way. And yet a few minutes later she sucked you in—”
“Except for the astronomy, I only said things we had planned for the show over the next year.”
“But you said them all at once!”
“…I know. Pedure started talking like a bright, curious person. Like Hrunk or people here at Hill House. She raised some interesting questions and I got carried away. And you know? Even now…this Pedure is smart and flexible. Given time, I think I could have won her over.”
The General’s laugh was sharp and unhappy. “God Below, you are a fool! Sherk, I…” Mom reached out to touch Daddy. “I’m sorry. Funny, I don’t chew out my own staffers the way I do you.”
Daddy made a kindly sound, like when he was talking to Rhapsa or Little Hrunk. “You know the reason for that, dear. You love me as much as yourself. And I know how much you chew on yourself.”
“Inside. Only silently, and inside.” They were quiet for a moment, and Little Victory wished that she had lost her recon game with Gokna. But when Mother spoke again, her voice was more normal. “We both screwed up on this.” She keyed open her travel case and picked out some papers. “Over the next year, ‘The Children’s Hour’ was to introduce the virtue and the possibility of life in the Dark, on schedule with the first construction contracts. Someday, we knew there would be military consequences, but we didn’t expect anything at this stage.”
“Military consequences now?”
“Deadly maneuvering, anyway. You know this Pedure cobber is from Tiefstadt.”
“Sure. Her accent is unmistakable.”
“Her cover is good, partly because it’s mainly true. Honored Pedure is Cleric Three in the Church of the Dark. But she’s also midlevel intelligence with Action of God.”
“The Kindred.”
“Indeed. We’ve had friendly relations with the Tiefers since the war, but the Kindred are beginning to change that. They already have several minor states in their effective control. They’re a legitimate sect of the Church, but—”
Far down the corridor behind Little Victory, someone turned on a hall light. Mom raised a hand and stood very still. Oops. Maybe she had noticed a faint silhouette, familiar grooves and armored fluting. Without turning, Smith extended a long arm in the direction of the eavesdropper. “Junior! Shut the door and get yourself back to your room.”
Little Victory’s voice was small and abashed. “Yes, Mother.”
As she slid the utility door closed, she heard one last comment: “Damn. I spend fifty million a year on signal security, and my own daughter is running intercepts on me—”
Just now, the clinic under Hammerfest was a crowded place. On Pham’s previous visits, there had been Trud, sometimes another technician, and one or two “patients.” Today—well, a hand grenade would have caused more turmoil among the Focused, but not by much. Both the MRI units were occupied. One of the handlers was prepping Xopi Reung for MRI; the woman moaned, thrashing against his efforts. Over in a corner, Dietr Li—the physicist?—was strapped down, mumbling to himself.
Reynolt had one foot hooked over a ceiling stay, so that she hung down close to the MRI without getting in the way of the techs. She didn’t look around as they came in. “Okay, induction complete. Keep the arms restrained.” The tech slid his patient out into the middle of the room. It was Trixia Bonsol; she looked around, obviously not recognizing anyone, and then her face collapsed into hopeless sobbing.
“You’ve deFocused her!” Vinh shouted, pushing past Trud and Trinli. Pham anchored and grabbed, all in one motion, and Vinh’s forward motion reversed, bouncing him lightly against the wall.
Reynolt looked in Vinh’s direction. “Be silent or get out,” she said. She jerked a hand at Bil Phuong. “Insert Dr. Reung. I want—” The rest was jargon. A normal bureaucrat would certainly have kicked them out. Anne Reynolt really didn’t care, as long as they didn’t get in her way.
Silipan drifted back to Pham and Vinh. He looked subdued and grim. “Yeah. Shut up, Vinh.” He glanced at the MRI’s display. “Bonsol’s still Focused. We’ve just detuned her linguistics ability. It’ll make her easier to…treat.” He glanced at Bonsol uncertainly. The woman had bent in on herself as far as the restraints would permit. Her weeping continued, hopeless and inconsolable.
Vinh struggled briefly in Pham’s grasp, and then he was still except for a tremor that only Pham could feel. For a second it looked like he might start bawling. Then the boy twisted, turned his face away from Bonsol, and screwed his eyes shut.
Tomas Nau’s voice came loud in the room. “Anne? I’ve lost three analysis threads since this outage began. Do you know—”
Reynolt’s tone was almost the same she had used with Vinh: “Give me a Ksec. I have at least five cases of runaway rot.”
“Lordy…keep me posted, Anne.”
Reynolt was already talking to someone else. “Hom! What’s the story on Dr. Li?”
“He’s rational, ma’am; I’ve been listening to him. Something happened during the radio show, and—”
Reynolt sailed across the room to Dieter Li, somehow missing techs, zipheads, and equipment. “That’s bizarre. There shouldn’t have been live crosstalk between physics and the radio show.”
The tech tapped a card attached to Li’s blouse. “His log says he heard the translation.”
Pham noticed Silipan swallow hard. Could this be one of his screwups? Damn. If the man was disgraced, Pham would lose his pipeline into the Focus operation.
But Reynolt still hadn’t noticed her AWOL technician. She leaned close to Dietr Li, listened for a moment to his mumbling. “You’re right. He’s stuck on what the Spider said about OnOff. I doubt he’s suffering from real runaway. Just keep watching him; let me know if he starts looping.”
More voices from the walls, and these sounded Focused: “…Attic lab twenty percent inchoate…probable c
ause: cross-specialty reactions to audio stream ID2738 ‘Children’s Hour’…Instabilities are undamped…”
“I hear you, Attic. Prep for fast shutdown.” Reynolt returned to Trixia Bonsol. She stared at the weeping woman, her look an eerie combination of intense interest and total detachment. Abruptly she turned, her gaze skewering Trud Silipan. “You! Get over here.”
Trud bounced across the room to his boss’s side. “Yes, ma’am! Yes, ma’am!” For once there was no hidden impudence. Vengeance might be unthinkable to Reynolt, but her judgments were ones that Nau and Brughel would enforce. “I was checking out the effectiveness of the translations, ma’am, how well laypersons”—namely the patrons of Benny’s booze parlor—“would understand her.”
The excuses were lost on Reynolt. “Get an offline team. I want Dr. Bonsol’s log checked out.” She leaned closer to Trixia, her gaze probing. The translator’s weeping had stopped. Her body was curled in a quivering tetany. “I’m not sure if we can save this one.”
Ezr Vinh twisted in Pham’s grip, and for a moment it seemed he might start shouting again. Then he gave Pham a strange look and remained silent. Pham loosened his grip and gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder.
The two of them stayed silent, watching. “Patients” came and went. Several more were detuned. Xopi Reung came out of the MRI much like Trixia Bonsol. Over the last few Watches, Pham had had plenty of opportunity to watch Silipan work, and pump him about procedures. He’d even got a look at a beginning textbook on Focus. This was the first time he’d had a solid look at how Reynolt and the other technicians worked.
But something really deadly had happened here. Mindrot runaway. In attacking the problem, Reynolt came as close to emotion as Pham had ever seen her. Some parts of the mystery were solved right away. Trud’s query right at the beginning of the debate had triggered a search across many specialities. That was the reason so many zipheads had been listening to the debate. Their analysis had proceeded very normally for several hundred seconds, but then as the results were posted, there was a surge in communication between the translators. Normally, that was consultative, tuning the words that they spoke aloud. This time, it was deadly nonsense. First Trixia and then most of the other translators began to drift, their brain chemistry indicating an uncontrolled excursion of the rot. Real damage had been done even before Trixia attacked Xopi Reung, but that had marked the beginning of the massive runaway. Whatever was being communicated within the ziphead net provoked a cascade of similar flareups. Before the emergency was fully appreciated, about twenty percent of all the zipheads were affected, the virus in their brains producing out of bounds, flooding them with psychoactives and frankly toxic chemicals.
The nav zipheads were not affected. Brughel’s snoops were moderately affected. Pham watched everything Reynolt did, trying to absorb every detail, every clue. If I can make something like this happen to the L1 support network, if Brughel’s people could be disabled…
Anne Reynolt seemed to be everywhere. Every technician deferred to her. It was she who saved most of Ritser’s zips; she who managed the reboot of limited Attic operations. And it came to Pham that without Anne Reynolt, there might not have been any recovery. Back in the Emergents’ home solar system, ziphead crashes might be occasional inconveniences. There were universities to generate replacements, hundreds of clinics for Focusing newly created specialists. Here, twenty light-years from the Emergent civilization, it was a different story. Here, little failures could grow unbounded…and without some supernally competent manager, without Anne Reynolt, Tomas Nau’s operation could collapse.
Xopi Reung flat-lined shortly after they brought her out of the MRI. Reynolt broke off from managing the Attic reboot, spent frantic moments with the translator. Here, she had no success. A hundred seconds later, the runaway infection had poisoned Reung’s brain stem…and the rest didn’t matter. Reynolt looked at the still body for a second more, frowning. Then she waved for the techs to float the body out.
Pham watched as Trixia Bonsol was moved out of the clinic. She was still alive; Reynolt herself was at the front of Bonsol’s carrier.
Trud Silipan followed her toward the door. Suddenly he seemed to remember the two visitors. He turned and made a come-along gesture. “Okay, Trinli. End of show.”
Silipan’s face was grim and pale. The exact cause of the runaway was still unknown; it was some obscure interaction between the zipheads. Trud’s use of the ziphead net—his query at the beginning of the debate—should have been an innocuous use of the resources. But Trud was at the pointy end of some very bad luck. Even if his query hadn’t triggered the debacle, it was connected to it. In a Qeng Ho operation, Silipan’s query would have just been another clue. Unfortunately, the Emergents had some very post hoc methods for defining sin.
“Are you going to be okay, Trud?”
Silipan gave a frightened little shrug and chivied them out of the clinic. “Get on back to the temp—and don’t let Vinh come after his ziphead.” Then he turned and followed Reynolt.
Pham and Vinh hiked up from the depths of Hammerfest, alone except for the certain presence of Brughel’s snoops. The Vinh boy was quiet. In a way, today had been the biggest kick in the face he had suffered in years, maybe since Jimmy Diem’s death. For an n-times-removed descendant, Ezr Vinh had a face that was entirely too familiar. He reminded Pham of Ratko Vinh when Ratko was young; he had a lot of Sura’s face. That was not a pleasant thought. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something…Yes. Not just in the clinic, but all this Watch. Every so often the kid would look at him…and the look was more of calculation than contempt. Pham thought back, trying to remember just how his Trinli character had behaved. Certainly it was a risk to be so interested in Focus. But he had Trud’s scams as a cover for that. No, even while they were standing in the clinic and Pham’s mind had been totally concentrated on Reynolt and the Bonsol mystery—even then he was sure he hadn’t looked anything but mildly dazed, an old charlatan worried that this debacle would mess up the deals he and Trud had planned. Yet somehow this Vinh had seen through him. How? And what to do about it?
They came out of the main vertical corridor, and started down the ramp to the taxi locks. The Focused murals were everywhere, ceilings, walls, floors. In places, the diamond walls had been planed thin. Blue light—the light of full Arachna—came softly through the crystal, darker or lighter depending on the depth of the carving. Because Arachna was always in full phase from L1 and the rockpile was kept in a fixed phase relative to the sun, the light had been steady for years. There might have been a time when Pham Nuwen would have fallen in love with that art, but now he knew how it had been made. Watch after Watch, he and Trud Silipan would come down this ramp and see workers, carving. Nau and Brughel had pissed away the lifetimes of nonacademic zipheads to make this art. Pham guessed that at least two had died of old age. The survivors were gone now, too, perhaps finishing the carvings on lesser corridors. After I take over, things will be different. Focus was such a terrible thing. It must never be used except for the most critical needs.
They passed a side corridor paneled in tank-grown wood. The grain swirled smoothly, following the curve of the corridor that led downward to Tomas Nau’s private quarters.
And there was Qiwi Lin Lisolet. Maybe she had heard them coming. More likely she had seen their departure from the clinic. Either way, she had been waiting long enough that she stood with feet on the floor, as if in normal planetary gravity.
“Ezr, please. Can we talk, just for a moment? I never meant these shows to hurt—”
Vinh had been drifting ahead of Pham, silently pulling himself along. His head snapped up when he saw Qiwi. For an instant it seemed he might float on by her. Then she spoke. Vinh pushed hard against the wall, diving fast and directly toward her. The action was as bluntly hostile as swinging a fist at another’s face.
“Here now!” Pham blustered, and forced himself to hang back in seeming impotence. He’d already waylaid the fellow onc
e today, and this time the scene would be quite clear to the snoops. Besides, Pham had watched Qiwi work outside. She was in better condition than anyone at L1, and a natural acrobat. Maybe it would do Vinh some good to learn he couldn’t off-load his anger on her.
But Qiwi didn’t defend, didn’t even flinch. Vinh twisted, delivering a powerful, openhanded slap that sent them spinning apart. “Yes, we’ll talk!” Vinh’s voice was ragged. He bounced after her and he slapped her again. And again Qiwi didn’t defend, didn’t even raise her hands to shield her face.
And Pham Nuwen pushed forward before he’d really thought. Something in the back of his mind was laughing at him for risking years of masquerade just to protect one innocent. But that same something also cheered.
Pham’s dive turned into an apparently uncontrolled spin, one that just accidentally slammed his shoulder into Vinh’s gut and smashed the younger man into the wall. Out of sight of any camera, Pham gave his opponent a piece of elbow. An instant after the impact, the back of Vinh’s head smacked against the wall. If they had still been down in the carved diamond corridors, that might have caused serious injury. As it was, when Vinh came off the wall, his arms were flailing weakly. Little droplets of blood sprouted up from the back of his head.
“Pick on someone your own size, Vinh! Cowardly, scummy piece of vermin. You Great Family Traders are all alike.” Pham’s rage was real—but it was also rage against himself, for risking his cover.
The wits slowly percolated back into Vinh’s eyes. He glanced at Qiwi, four meters down the hallway. The girl looked back, her expression a strange combination of shock and determination. And then Vinh looked at Pham, and the old man felt a chill. Maybe Brughel’s cameras hadn’t caught all the details of the fight, but the kid knew how calculated Pham’s assault had been. For an instant the two stared at each other, and then Vinh shrugged free of his grasp and scooted back down the ramp toward the taxi locks. It was the scuttling retreat of a shamed and beaten man. But Pham had seen the look in his eyes; something would have to be done about Ezr Vinh.