by Vernor Vinge
“Kakto.” Trixia’s eyes narrowed slightly. Where the zipheads interacted, there was normally an almost telepathic closeness—or else they hated each other’s guts with the sort of freezing hostility usually seen only in academic romance novels. Norm Kakto and Trixia oscillated between these states.
“Yes. Um, anyway, Dr. Kakto gave me a long lecture about the nature of vision and the electromagnetic spectrum and assured me that talking about a color ‘plaid’ could not correspond to anything meaningful.”
Trixia’s features screwed into a frown, and for a moment she looked much older than Ezr liked to see. “It’s a real word. I chose it. The context had a feel—” The frown intensified. More often than not what seemed a translation mistake turned out to be—perhaps not a literal truth, but at least a clue to some unrecognized aspect of the Spiders’ reality. But the Focused translators, even Trixia, could be wrong. In her early translations, where she and the others were still feeling their way across an unknown racial landscape—there had been hundreds of facile word choices; a good portion of them had to be abandoned later.
The problem was that zipheads did not take easily to abandoning fixation.
Trixia was coming close to real upset. The signs were not extreme. She often frowned, though not this fiercely. And even when she was silent, she was endlessly active with her two-handed keyboard. But this time the analysis coming back at her spilled from her head-up display to paint across the walls. Her breath came faster as she turned the criticism back and forth in her mind and on the attached network. She didn’t have any counterexplanation.
Ezr reached out, touched her shoulder. “Follow-up question, Trixia. I talked with Kakto about this ‘plaid’ thing for some time.” In fact, Ezr had all but badgered the man. Often that was the only way that worked with a Focused specialist: Concentrate on the ziphead’s specialty and the problem at hand, and keep asking your question in different ways. Without some skill and reasonable luck, the technique would quickly bring communication to an end. Even after seven Watch years, Ezr wasn’t an expert, but in this case Norm Kakto had finally been provoked into generating alternatives: “We were wondering, perhaps the Spiders have such a surplus of visual methods that the Spider brain has to multiplex access—you know, a fraction of a second sensing in one spectral regime, a fraction of a second in another. They might sense—I don’t know, some kind of rippling effect.”
In fact, Kakto had dismissed the idea as absurd, saying that even if the Spider brain time-shared on its visual senses, the perception would still seem continuous at the conscious level.
As he spoke the words, Trixia became nearly motionless, only her fingers continuing to move. Her constantly shifting gaze fixed for a long second…directly on Ezr’s eyes. He was saying something that was nontrivial and near the center of her Focus. Then she looked away, began muttering to her voice input, and pounded even more furiously on the keys. A few seconds passed and her eyes began darting around the room, tracking phantoms that were only visible in her own head-up. Then, abruptly, “Yes! That is the explanation. I never really thought before…it was just the context that made me pick the word, but—” Dates and locations spread across the walls where they could both see. Ezr tried to keep up, but his own huds were still barred from the Hammerfest net; he had to depend on Trixia’s vague gestures to know the incidents she was citing.
Ezr found himself grinning. Just now Trixia came about the closest she could to normality, even if it was a kind of frenetic triumph…“Look! Except for one case of pain overload, every use of ‘plaid’ has involved clear air, low humidity, and a wide range of brightness. In those situations, the whole color…the vetmoot3…” She was using internal jargon now, the inscrutable stuff that flowed between the Focused translators. “The language mood is changed. I needed a special word, and ‘plaid’ is good enough.”
He listened and watched. He could almost see the insight spreading within Trixia’s mind, setting up new connections, no doubt improving all later translations. Yes, it looked real. The jackboots could not complain about the color “plaid.”
It was altogether a good session. And then Trixia did something that was a wondrous surprise. With scarcely a break in her speech, one hand left her keyboard and snatched sideways at the delitesse. She broke the cakelet free of its anchor and stared into the froth and fragrance—as if suddenly recognizing what the cakelet was and the pleasure that came from eating such things. Then she jammed the thing into her mouth, and the light frosting splashed in colorful drops across her lips. He thought for a moment that she was choking, but the sound was just a happy laugh. She chewed, and swallowed…and after a moment she gave the most contented sigh. It was the first time in all these years that Ezr had seen her happy about something outside her Focus.
Even her hands stopped their constant motion for a few seconds. Then, “So. What else?”
It took a moment for the question to penetrate Ezr’s daze. “Ah, um.” In fact, that had been the last item on his list. But joy! The delitesse had made a miracle. “J-just one thing more, Trixia. Something you should know.” Maybe something you can finally understand. “You are not a machine. You’re a human being.”
But the words had no impact. Maybe she didn’t even hear them. Her fingers were tapping at her keys again, and her gaze was somewhere in huds imagery he couldn’t see. Ezr waited several seconds, but whatever attention there had been seemed to have vanished. He sighed, and moved back to the cell’s doorway.
Then perhaps ten or fifteen seconds after he had spoken, Trixia abruptly looked up. There was expression on her face again, but this time it was surprise. “Really? I’m not a machine?”
“Yes. You are a real person.”
“Oh.” Disinterest again. She returned to her keyboards, muttering on the voice link to her invisible ziphead siblings. Ezr quietly slipped out. In the early years, he would have felt crushed, or at least set back, by the curt dismissal. But…this was just ziphead normality. And for a moment he had broken through it. Ezr crawled back through the capillary corridors. Usually these kinking, barely-shoulders-wide passages got on his nerves. Every two meters another cell doorway, right side, top, left side, bottom. What if there was ever a panic here? What if they ever needed to evacuate? But today…echoes came back to him, and suddenly he realized he was whistling.
Anne Reynolt intercepted him as he emerged into Hammerfest’s main vertical corridor. She jabbed a finger at the carrier trailing behind him. “I’ll take that.”
Damn. He’d intended to leave the second delitesse with Trixia. He gave Reynolt the carrier. “Things went well. You’ll see in my report—”
“Indeed. I think I’ll have that report right now.” Reynolt gestured down the hundred-meter drop. She grabbed a wall stop, flipped feet for head, and started downward. Ezr followed. Where they passed openings in the caisson, OnOff’s light shone through a thin layer of diamond crystal. And then they were back in artificial light, deeper and deeper in the mass of Diamond One. The mosaic carving looked as fresh as the day it was done, but here and there the hand and foot traffic had laid patches of grime on the fretwork. There weren’t many unskilled zipheads left, not enough to maintain Emergent perfection. They turned sideways at the bottom, still gently descending but coasting past busy offices and labs—all familiar to Ezr now. The ziphead clinic. There, Ezr had been only once. It was closely guarded, closely monitored, but not quite off-limits. Pham was a regular visitor there, Trud Silipan’s great friend. But Ezr avoided the place; it was where souls were stolen.
Reynolt’s office was where it had always been, at the end of the lab tunnel, behind a plain door. The “Director of Human Resources” settled in her chair and opened the carrier she had taken from Ezr.
Vinh pretended to be unperturbed. He looked around the office. Nothing new, the same rough walls, the storage crates and seemingly loose equipment that still—after decades on-Watch—were her principal furniture. Even if he had never been told, Ezr would have long sin
ce guessed that Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. A miraculous, people-oriented ziphead, but still a ziphead.
Reynolt was obviously not surprised by the contents of the carrier. She sniffed at the delitesse with the expression of a bactry technician assessing slime ferment. “Very aromatic. Candy and junk food are not on the allowed diet list, Mr. Vinh.”
“I’m sorry. I just meant it as a treat…a little reward. I don’t do it often.”
“True. In fact, you’ve never done it before.” Her gaze flickered around his face, then moved away. “It’s been thirty years, Mr. Vinh. Seven years of your own life-time on-Watch. You know that zipheads do not respond to such ‘rewards’; their motive system is primarily within their area of Focus and secondarily attached to their owners. No…I think you still have your secret plans to waken love in Dr. Bonsol.”
“With a dessert confection?”
Reynolt gave him a hard little smile. His sarcasm would have gone right past an ordinary ziphead. It didn’t deflect Reynolt, but she recognized it. “With the smell, perhaps. I imagine you’ve been into some Qeng Ho neurology courses—found something about olfactory pathways having independent access to the higher centers. Hmm?” For an instant her gaze skewered him like a bug in a collection.
That’s exactly what the neuro courses said. And the delitesse was something that Trixia would not have smelled since before she was Focused. For a moment, the walls around Trixia’s true self had thinned to barely more than a veil. For a moment, Ezr had touched her.
Ezr shrugged. Reynolt was so very sharp. If she ever thought to look, she was surely bright enough to see all the way through him. She was probably bright enough to see through even Pham Nuwen. The only thing that saved them was that Pham and Ezr were at the edge of her Focus. If Ritser Brughel had a snoop even half as good, Pham and I would be dead now.
Reynolt turned away from him, for a moment tracked phantoms in her huds. Then, “Your misbehavior has caused no harm. In some ways, Focus is a robust state. You may think you see changes in Dr. Bonsol, but consider: Over the last few years, all the best translators have begun to show synthetic affect. If it hurts performance, we’ll take them down to the clinic for some tuning…
“However, if you actively attempt manipulation again, I will keep you out of Dr. Bonsol’s way.”
It was a totally effective threat, but Ezr tried to laugh. “What, no death threats?”
“My assessment, Mr. Vinh: Your knowledge of Humankind’s Dawn Age civilization makes you extremely valuable. You’re an effective interface between at least four of my groups—and I know that the Podmaster uses your advice as well. But make no mistake: I can get along without you in the translation department. If you cross me again, you won’t see Dr. Bonsol till after the mission is complete.”
Fifteen years? Twenty?
Ezr stared at her, feeling the utter certainty in her words. What an implacable creature this woman was. Not for the first time, he wondered what she had been like before. He was not alone in that. Trud Silipan regaled the patrons at Benny’s with the speculations. The Xevalle clique had once been the second most powerful in the Emergency; Trud claimed she had been high in its ranks. At one time she might have been a greater monster than Tomas Nau. At least some of them got punished; crushed by their own kind. Anne Reynolt had fallen far, from being a knowing Satan to being a Satan’s tool.
…Whether that made her more or less than before, she was dangerous enough for Ezr Vinh.
That night, alone in the dark of his room, Ezr described the encounter to Pham Nuwen. “I get the feeling that if Reynolt ever transferred to Brughel’s operation, she’d figure out about you and me in a matter of Ksecs.”
Nuwen’s chuckle was a distorted buzzing sound deep in Ezr’s ear. “That’s a transfer that will never happen. She’s the only thing that’s holding the ziphead operation together. She had a staff of four hundred unFocused interface types before the Ambush—now she’s buzz zzzt.”
“Say the last again.”
“I said, ‘Now she’s depending for much of her support on untrained help.’”
The buzz that was not quite a voice faded in and out of intelligibility. There were still times when Ezr had to ask for three or four repetitions. But it was a big improvement over the blinkertalk they had used in the beginning. Now, when Ezr pretended to go to sleep, he had a single millimeter-long localizer pressed deep in his ear. The result was mostly buzzing and hissing, nearly inaudible, but with enough practice you could normally guess the speech behind it. The localizers were scattered all around the room—all around the Traders’ temp. They had become Brughel and Nau’s primary security tool here.
“Still, maybe I shouldn’t have tried the delitesse trick.”
“…Maybe. I wouldn’t have tried anything so overt.” But then Pham Nuwen wasn’t in love with Trixia Bonsol. “We’ve talked about this before. Brughel’s zipheads are more powerful than any security tool we Qeng Ho ever imagined. They’re sniffing all the time, and they can read”—Ezr couldn’t make out the word: “naive”? “innocent”?; he didn’t feel like asking for clarification—“people like you. Face it. They surely guess that you don’t believe their story about the Diem Massacre. They know you’re hostile. They know you’re scheming—or wishing to scheme—about something. Your feelings for Bonsol give you a cover, a lesser lie to hide the greater one. Like my Zamle Eng thing.”
“Yeah.” But I think I’ll cool it for a while. “So you don’t think Reynolt is that much of a threat?”
For a moment, all he heard was buzzing and hissing; maybe Pham wasn’t saying anything. Then: “Vinh, I think very much the opposite. In the long run, she’s the deadliest threat we face.”
“But she’s not in Security.”
“No, but she maintains Brughel’s snoops, tweaks up their poor brains when they begin to drift. Phuong and Hom can only do the simpler cases; Trud pretends he can do everything, but he just follows her directions. And she has eight ziphead programmers going through our fleet code. Three of them are still grinding away at the localizers. Eventually, she’s going to see how I’ve scammed them, bzzz mumble Lord! The power Nau has.” Pham’s voice cut out, and there was just the background noise.
Ezr reached out from his blankets and stuck a finger in his ear, pushing the tiny localizer deeper. “Say again? Are you still there?”
bzzt “I’m here. About Reynolt: She’s deadly. One way or another, she must be removed.”
“Kill her?” The words caught in Ezr’s throat. For all that he hated Nau and Brughel and the whole system of Focus, he didn’t hate Anne Reynolt. In her own limited way, she looked after the slaves. Whatever Anne Reynolt had been, now she was just a tool.
“I hope not! Maybe…if Nau would just take the bait on the localizers, if he would just start using them in Hammerfest. Then we’d be as safe over there as we are here. If that happens before her zips figure out that it’s a trap…”
“But the whole point of the delay was to give her time to study the localizers.”
“Yeah. Nau is no fool. Don’t worry. I’m tracking things. If she gets too close, I’ll…take care of her.”
For a moment, Ezr tried to imagine what Pham might do, then forced his mind from the imaginings. Even after two thousand years, the Vinh Family still had a special place in its affection for the memory of Pham Nuwen. Ezr remembered the pictures that had been in his father’s den. He remembered the stories his aunt had told him. Not all of them were in the Qeng Ho archives. That meant the stories weren’t true—or else they were truly private reminiscences, what G’mama Sura and her children had really thought of Pham Nuwen. They loved him for more than founding the modern Qeng Ho, for more than being g’papa to all the Vinh Families. But some of the stories showed a hard side to the man.
Ezr opened his eyes, looked quietly around the darkened room. Vague night-gleams lit his fatigues floating in the closet sack, showed the delitesse still sitting uneaten on his desk. Reality. “What can you really do wi
th the localizers, Pham?”
Silence. Faraway buzzing. “What can I do? Well, Vinh, I can’t kill with them…not directly. But they are good for more than this crummy audio link. It takes practice; there are tricks you have to see.” Long pause. “Hell, you need to learn ’em. There could be times when I’m out of link, and they’re the only things that can save your cover. We should get together in person—”
“Huh? Face-to-face? How?” Dozens, maybe hundreds of times he and Pham Nuwen had plotted as they did tonight, like prisoners tapping anonymously on dungeon walls. In public, they saw less of each other than in the early Watches. Nuwen had said that Ezr just wasn’t good enough at controlling his eyes and body language, that the snoops would guess too much. Now—
“Here in the temp, Brughel and his zipheads are depending on the localizers. There are places ’tween the balloon hulls where some of their old cameras have died. If we run into each other there, they’ll have nothing to contradict what I feed them through the localizers. The problem is, I’m sure the snoops rely on statistics as much as anything. Once upon a time I ran a fleet security department, like Ritser’s except a bit more mellow. I had programs that highlighted suspicious behavior—who was out of sight when, unusual conversations, equipment failures. It worked pretty well, even when I couldn’t catch the bad guys red-handed. Zipheads plus computers should be a thousand times better. I bet they have stat traces extending back to the beginning of L1. For them, innocuous behaviors add up and add up—and one fine day Ritser Brughel has circumstantial evidence. And we’re dead.”
Lord of Trade. “But we could get away with almost anything!” Wherever the Emergents depended on Qeng Ho localizers.
“Maybe. Once. Curb the impulse.” Even in the buzzing speech, Ezr could tell that Pham was chuckling.
“When can we meet?”
“Sometime that minimizes the effect on Ritser’s merry analysts. Let’s see…I’m going off-Watch in less than two hundred Ksec. I’ll be partway through a Watch the next time you are on. I’ll fix things so we can do it right after that.”