my soul. “If Trixia and I can ever do anything to help you…”
And she was back at arm’s length, and her smile seemed a little odd. “You’re welcome, Ezr. But… no thanks needed. I’m glad you have a happy ending.”
Ezr let go, and was already turning toward the guide ropes Ali had installed for his reconstruction work. “It’s more a happy beginning, Qiwi. All these years have been dead time, and now finally… Hey, I’ll talk to you later!” He waved and pulled himself faster and faster, back toward the cavern’s entrance.
Reynolt had converted the Attic grouproom into a recovery ward. Where zipheads had spent Watch after Watch Focused in Podmaster service, now they were being freed.
Anne stopped him in the corridor just outside the grouproom. “Before you go in, keep in mind—”
Vinh was already edging around her. He stopped. “You said she was coming out okay.”
“Yes. Total affect is normal. General cognition is as good as before; she has even retained her specialized knowledge. We’re doing almost three thousand deFocus operations, more manumissions than any team in Emergent history. We’re getting very good.” She frowned, but it was not the impatient gesture of her old Focus. This was a frown of pain. “I—I wish we could redo the first ones. I think I could do better now.”
Ezr could see the pain, and he felt shame for his sudden joy:So thedelay has been for the best. Trixia had had the benefit of all the earlier experience. Maybe she would have been okay anyway. After all, Reynolt had come through all right. But either way, things had worked out. And just beyond Reynolt, down the cool green corridor, was Trixia Bonsol, the princess now finally wakened. He slipped past Reynolt, flew down through the blueness.
Behind him Anne called, “But, Ezr… Look, Pham wants to talk to you when you get done.”
“Okay. Okay.” But he wasn’t really listening now. And then he was into the grouproom. Part of it was still open, and ten or fifteen of the chairs were even occupied, people sitting in little circles, talking. Heads turned in his direction, eyes filled with curiosity that would have been impossible before. Some of the faces were fearful. Many had the sad, lost look of Hunte Wen after he was deFocused. The Emergents among them had no one to go back to. They woke to freedom, but a lifetime and light-years from everything they had known.
Ezr smiled embarrassment and slipped past them.Things have turnedout right for Trixia and me, but these lost ones must be helped.
The far side of the room had been partitioned into cubicles. Ezr flitted past the opened doors, stopped at the closed ones just long enough to read the patient labels. And finally…
He brushed his hair down as best he could… and tapped on the light plastic of the privacy hatch.
“Come in.”
…“Hi, Trixia.”
She floated in a hammock not much different from an ordinary bed. Medical instrumentation was a fine haze around her head. It didn’t matter, Ezr had been expecting it. Anne had begun instrumenting the patients, using the data to guide the deFocusing, and afterward to monitor for stroke and infection.
It made it hard to hug someone as thoroughly as Ezr Vinh wanted. He floated near, looking into Trixia’s face, lost in it. Trixia looked back—not around him, not impatient that he was blocking her data—but directly into his eyes. A faint, tremulous smile hovered on her lips.
“Ezr.”
And then she was in his arms, her hands reaching up to him. Her lips were soft and warm. He held her for a moment, gently encircling her within her hammock. Then he backed his head away, angling carefully around the medical gear. “So many times I thought we’d never make it back. Do you remember all the times”—years of life time, literally—“that I sat with you in your damn little cell?”
“Yes. You suffered far more than I. For me, it was a kind of dream, and time was a slippery thing. Everything outside of Focus was a blur. I could hear your words but they never seemed to matter.” Her hand came up to the side of his neck, gently stroking, a gesture from their real time together.
Ezr smiled.We’re talking. Really. Finally. “And now you’re back, and we can live again. I have so many plans. I’ve had years to think on them, what we might do if Nau could be destroyed and you could be saved. After all the death, the mission is turning out to be a greater treasure than we ever imagined.” Great risks, great treasure. But the risks had been taken, the sacrifices made, and now— “With our share of the mission bounty we… we can do anything. We could set up our own Great Family!” Vinh.23.7, Vinh-Bonsol, Bonsol.1, it didn’t matter; it would be theirs.
Trixia was still smiling, but there was the beginning of tears in her eyes. She shook her head. “Ezr, I don’t —”
Vinh rushed on. “Trixia, I know what you’re going to say. If you don’t want a Family—that’s okay too.” In the years under Tomas Nau, there had been plenty of time to think things through, to see what sacrifices were really not sacrifices at all. He took a deep breath and said, “Trixia, even if you want to go back to Triland… I’m willing to go there, to leave the Qeng Ho.” The Family wouldn’t like it; he was no longer a junior heir. This expedition would make the Vinh.23 Family fabulously richer, but… he knew that Ezr Vinh had scarcely been responsible for that. “You can be whatever you want, and we can still be together.”
He leaned closer, but this time she pushed him gently back. “No, Ezr, that’s not it. You and I, we’re years older. I—it’s been a long, long time since we were together.”
Ezr’s voice came out high-pitched. “It’s been years for me! But for you? You said Focus is like a dream, where time didn’t matter.”
“Not exactly. For some things, for the things at the center of my Focus, I probably remember the time better than you.”
“But—” She raised her hand, and he was silent.
“I had it easier than you. I was Focused, and something more, though I never consciously realized it and— thank goodness—neither did Brughel or Tomas Nau. I had a world to escape to, a world that I could build out of my translations.”
Despite himself: “I wondered. There was so much that seemed to be Dawn Age fantasy. So… that was fiction, not the real Spiders?”
“No. It was as close as we could come to the Spider viewpoint in a human mind. And if you read carefully, you get hints of where it can’t be literally true…. I think you guessed, Ezr. Arachna was my escape. As a translator, everything about being a Spider was within my Focus. Knowing what it was to be a free Spider consumed us. And when dear Sherkaner understood, even at the beginning when he thought we were machines, it was suddenly a world that accepted us, too.”
That was what had undone Nau, and saved them all, but—“But now you are back, Trixia. This isn’t the nightmare anymore. We can be together, better than we ever thought!”
She was shaking her head again. “Don’t you see, Ezr? We both have changed, and I have changed even more than you, even though I was—” She thought a second. “—even though I spent the years ‘ensorcelled.’ See? I do remember what you used to say to me. But Ezr, it’s not the same anymore. I and the Spiders, we have a future—”
He tried to keep his voice in an even, persuasive tone, but what came out sounded half-panicked even to his own ears.Dear Lord of Trade, I can’t lose her now! “I know. You’re still identifying with the Spiders. We’re the aliens to you.”
She touched his shoulder. “A little. During the first stages of the deFocus, it was like wakinginto a nightmare. I know how humans look to Arachnans. Pale, soft, grublike. There are pests and food animals like that. But we aren’t as gruesome to them as the reverse.” She looked up at him and her smile was momentarily wider. “The way you have to turn your head to see is endearing. You don’t realize it, but any Arachnan with paternal fur on his back, and most females too, are enthralled when they talk to you close up.”
Like the dreams he had had groundside. In Trixia’s mind, she was still part Spider. “Trixia, look. I’ll come and see you every day. Things will change. You’ll get over this.”
“Oh, Ezr, Ezr.” Her tears floated into the air between them, but she was crying for him and not for herself or for the two of them. “Thisis what I want to be, a translator, a bridge between you all and my new Family.”
A bridge.She’s not out of Focus. Somehow Pham and Anne had frozen her partway between Focus and freedom. The realization was like a fist in the belly… nausea, followed by rage.
