damn you!”
“I mean she’s smart, and brave, and—”
“Yes, yes, yes! Fact is, she’s a flaming genius in almost every department. I’ve only seen a couple like her in all my life.”
“I—”
“Ezr, I don’t believe you’re a moral idiot or I wouldn’t be talking to you now, and I certainly wouldn’t be telling you about Qiwi. Butwake up ! You should have seen it years ago—but you were too fixed on Trixia and your own guilt trips. And now Qiwi is waiting for you, but without much hope since she’s so honorable she respects what you want for Trixia. Think about what she has been like, since we got rid of Nau.”
“…She’s been into everything…. I guess I see her every day.” He took a deep breath. Thiswas like deFocus —seeing what you saw before, in a totally new way. It was true, he depended on Qiwi even more than he did Pham or Anne. But Qiwi had her own burdens. He remembered the look on her face when she greeted Floria Peres. He remembered her smile when she said she was happy for his happy ending. It was strange to feel shame for something you’d been totally unaware of a moment before. “I’m so sorry…. I just… never thought.”
Pham eased back. “That’s what I hoped, Ezr. You and I, we have this little problem: We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding. It’s something we have to work on. I praised you a second ago, and it wasn’t a lie. But, truly, Qiwi is the wonder.”
For a moment, Ezr couldn’t say anything. Someone was rearranging the furniture inside his soul. Trixia, the dream of half a lifetime, wasslippingaway…. “I’ve got to think.”
“Do so. But talk to Qiwi about it, okay? You’re both hiding behind walls. You’d be amazed what can come from just talking straight out.”
Another idea that was like a new sun.Just talk to Qiwi about it. “I will…. I will!”
SIXTY-SIX
Time passed, but Arachna still had a long way to cool. The last dry hurricanes still blew fitfully through the midlatitudes, edging ever nearer to the world’s equator.
Their flyer had no wings, no jets or rockets. It came down along a ballistic arc, and slowed to a gentle touchdown on the naked rock of the altiplano.
Two space-suited figures emerged, one tall and slim, the other low, with limbs spreading in all directions.
Major Victory Lighthill tapped at the ground with the tips of her hands. “Our bad luck that there is no snow cover here. No footprints to track.” She waved at the rocky hillside a few dozen yards away. There was snow there, caught in crevices, lying in the windshade of the moment. It glimmered ghostly reddish in the sunlight. “And where there is snow, the wind is always blowing it around. Can you feel wind?”
Trixia Bonsol leaned into the breeze. She could hear it singing beyond her hood. She laughed. “More than you. I’ve got to stand up in it with only two legs.”
They walked toward a hillside. Trixia had her net-link audio turned way down. This was a place and a time she wanted to experience firsthand, without interruptions. Yet the buzz of sound and the displays at the upper corners of her vision kept her in tenuous contact with what was going on in space, and at Princeton. In the real world beyond her hood display, the light was barely brighter than Trilander moonlight, and the only movement was the low scudding of the frost dust beneath the wind. “And this is our best guess where Sherkaner left the helicopter?”
“It was, but there’s no sign of him here. The log files are all jumbled. Daddy was controlling Rachner’s aircraft through the net. Maybe he was going someplace special. More likely he was heading for random nowhere.” Trixia was not hearing Little Victory’s true voice. Those sounds were down-shifted and processed in Trixia’s hood. The result was not a human speech and certainly not Spider sound, but Trixia could understand it as easily as Nese, and listening left her eyes and hands free for other things.
“But…” Trixia waved her arm at the tumbled land ahead of them. “Sherkaner sounded rational to me, even at the end when everything was coming apart.” She spoke in the same intermediate language she listened to. The suit processor took care of the routine shifting of sounds to what Viki could hear.
“Wanderdeep can be like that,” said Victory. “He had just lost Mom. Nizhnimor and Jaybert and the counterlurk center had just been blown out from under him.”
At the bottom of her view, Trixia saw the twitch in Viki’s forearms. That was the equivalent of pursed lips, of a person confronting pain. In her years of Focus, she had always imagined herself talking to them head to head, on the same level. In free fall, that was more or less how things worked. But on the ground… well, human bodies extended upward, and Spider bodies sideways. If she didn’t keep a downward view, she missed out on “facial” expressions—and even worse, she might walk into her best friends.
“Thanks for coming with me, Trixia.” The cues in the intermediate language showed that Viki’s voice was tremulous. “I’ve been here and at Southmost before, officially, and with my brothers and sister. We promised each other we’d leave it alone for a while, but… I can’t… and I can’t face it alone either.”
Trixia waggled her hand in a way that meant comfort, understanding. “I’ve wanted to come here ever since I came out of Focus. I feel like I’m a person finally, and being with you I feel I have a family.”
One of Viki’s free arms reached up to rub Trixia’s elbow. “You were always a person to me. I can remember when Gokna died, when the General told us about you. Daddy showed us the logs, all the way back to when you first contacted him. Back then, he still thought you translators were some kind of AI. But you seemed to be a person to me, and I could tell you liked Dad very much.”
Trixia gestured a smile. “Dear Sherk was so sure of impossible things like AI. For me, Focus was like a dream. My mission was to understand you Spiders perfectly, and the emotions just came along with it. It was the side effect Tomas Nau never expected.” Personhood as a Spider had come slowly, growing with each advance in language knowledge. The radio debate had been the turning point, where Trixia and Zinmin Broute and the others had actually transformed and taken sides in the perfection of their craft.I’m so sorry, Xopi. We were Focused and suddenly you were the enemy. Whenwe scrambled your MRI codes, we didn’t really know we’d murdered you.Any of us could have been the Pedure translator, any of us could have beenin your place. And that had been when Trixia first reached down across the comm links and revealed herself to Sherkaner Underhill.
The smooth rock was broken now, rising into the hillside. Here there were patches of snow, and clefts shadowed from sun-and starlight. Victory and Trixia scrambled over the lower rocks of the hill, and peered into the shadows. This wasn’t a serious search; it was more an act of reverence. Air and orbit surveys had been completed many days before.
“Do—do you think we’ll ever find him, Victory?” During most of her years of Focus, Sherkaner Underhill had been the center of Trixia Bonsol’s universe. She’d been scarcely aware of Anne Reynolt or Ezr’s hundreds of faithful visits, but Sherkaner Underhill had been real. She remembered the old cobber who needed a guide-bug to keep from walking in circles. How could he be gone?
Victory was silent for a moment. She was several meters up the hillside, poking around beneath an overhang. Like all of her race, she was more than humanly good at rock climbing. “Yes, eventually. We know he’s not on the surface. Maybe… I think Mobiy must have lucked out, found a hole more than a few yards deep. But even that wouldn’t be a viable deepness; Dad’s body would dry to death in a short time.” She pulled out from under the rock. “It’s funny. When the Plan was coming apart, I thought it was Mom we had lost and Dad we could save. But now… you know the humans just made new sonograms of the bottom of Southmost? The Kindred nukes crushed Parliament Hall and the upper layers. Below that there are millions of tons of fractured bedrock—but there is open space, what’s left of the Southlanders’ superdeepness. If Mother and Hrunk made it alive to one of those…”
Trixia frowned; she had seen the news. “But the report says it’s too dangerous to dig, that it would just crush the open spaces.” And when the New Sun came, those millions of tons of rock would surely collapse upon the deepness.
“Ah, but we have time to plan. We’ll improve on the humans’ digging technology. Maybe we can come in from miles out and tunnel really deep, maintaining the balance with cavorite. Someday before the next New Sun, we’ll know what’s in those superdeeps. And if Mother and Hrunk are down there, we’ll rescue them.”
