Notice how they almost make sense, some of them.”
“Yes, and that’s the worst of all. Some of this looks like bits of Ladille or Aminese. These Ladille units —‘hours,’ ‘inches,’ ‘minutes’—they just make for awkward reading.”
Ezr had his own problems with the crazy Ladille units, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Reynolt. “I’m sure Trixia sees things that relate to her central translation the way Aminese and Ladille relate to the Nese you and I speak.”
Reynolt was silent for a long moment, vacantly staring. Sometimes that meant that the discussion was over, and she had just not bothered to dismiss him. Other times it meant that she was trying very hard to understand. “So you’re saying that she’s achieving a higher level of translation, giving us insight by trading on our own self- awareness.”
It was a typical Reynolt analysis, awkward and precise. “Yes! That’s it. You still want the translations with all the pointers and exceptions and caveats, since our understanding is still evolving. But the heart of good trading is having a gut feel for the other side’s needs and expectations.”
Reynolt had bought the explanation. In any case, Nau liked the simplifications, even the Ladille quaintness. As time passed, the other translators adopted more and more of Trixia’s conventions. Ezr doubted if any of the unFocused Emergents were really competent to judge the translations. And despite his own confident talk, Ezr wondered more and more: Trixia’s meta-trans of the Spiders was too much like the Dawn Age history he had pushed at her just before the ambush. That might seem alien to Nau and Brughel and Reynolt, but it was Ezr’s specialty and he saw too many suspicious coincidences.
Trixia consistently ignored the physical nature of the Spiders. Maybe this was just as well, considering the loathing that some humans felt for spiders. But the creatureswere radically nonhuman in appearance, more alien in form and life cycle than any intelligence yet encountered by Humankind. Some of their limbs had the function of human jaws, and they had nothing exactly like hands and fingers, instead using their large number of legs to manipulate objects. These differences were all but invisible in Trixia’s translations. There was an occasional reference to “a pointed hand” (perhaps the stiletto shape that a foreleg could fold into) or to midhands and forehands—but that was all. In school, Ezr had seen translations that were this soft, but those had been done by experts with decades of face-to-face experience with the Customer culture.
Children’s radio programming—at least that’s what Trixia thought it was—had been invented on the Spider world. She translated the show’s title as “The Children’s Hour of Science,” and currently it was their best source of insight about the Spiders. The radio show was an ideal combination of science language—which the humans had made good progress on—and the colloquial language of everyday culture. No one knew if it was really aimed at schooling children or simply entertaining them. Conceivably, it was remedial education for military conscripts. Yet Trixia’s title caught on, and that colored everything that followed with innocence and cuteness. Trixia’s Arachna seemed like something from a Dawn Age fairy tale. Sometimes when Ezr had spent a long day with her, when she had not spoken a word to him, when her Focus was so narrow that it denied all humanity… sometimes he wondered if these translations might be the Trixia of old, trapped in the most effective slavery of all time, and still reaching out for hope. The Spider world was the only place her Focus allowed her to gaze upon. May be she was distorting what she heard, creating a dream of happiness in the only way that was left to her.
NINETEEN
It was in the midphase of the sun, and Princeton had recovered much of its beauty. In the cooler times ahead, there would be much more construction, the open theaters, the Palace of the Waning Years, the University’s arboreta. But by 60//19, the street plan of generations past was fully in place, the central business section was complete, and the University held classes all the year round.
In other ways, the year 60//19 was different from 59//19, and very different from the tenth year of all generations before that. The world had entered the Age of Science. An airfield covered the river lowlands that had been farm paddies in past eras. Radio masts grew from the city’s highest hills; at night, their far-red marker lights could be seen for miles.
By 60//19 most of the Accord’s cities were similarly changed, as were the great cities of Tiefstadt and the Kindred, and to a lesser degree the cities of poorer nations. But even by the standards of the new age, Princeton was a very special place. There were things happening here that didn’t show on the visible landscape, yet were the seeds of greater revolution.
Hrunkner Unnerby flew in to Princeton one rainy spring morning. An airport taxi drove him from the riverfront up through the center of town. Unnerby had grown up in Princeton and his old construction company had been here. He arrived before most shops’ opening time; street cleaners scuttled this way and that around his taxi. A cool drizzle left the shops and the trees with glints of a thousand colors. Hrunkner liked the old downtown, where many of the stone foundations had survived more than three or four generations. Even the new concrete and the brick upper stories followed designs from before the time of any living person.
Out of the downtown, they climbed through new housing. This was a former Royal property that the government had sold to finance the Great War—the conflict the new generation was already calling simply the War with the Tiefers. Some parts of the new district were instant slums; others—the higher viewpoints—were elegant estates. The taxi trundled back and forth along the switchbacks, rising slowly toward the highest spot in the new tract. The top was obscured by dripping ferns, but here and there he glimpsed outbuildings. Gates opened silently and without apparent attendants. Hunh. There was a bloody palace up ahead.
Sherkaner Underhill stood by the parking circle at the end, looking quite out of place beside the grand entrance. The rain was just a comfortable mist, but Underhill popped open an umbrella as he walked out to greet Unnerby.
“Welcome, Sergeant! Welcome! All the years I’ve been after you to visit my little hillhouse, and finally you’re here.”
Hrunkner shrugged.
“I have so much to show you… starting with two small but important items.” He tipped back the umbrella. After a moment, two tiny heads peeked up from the fur on his back. The two were babies, holding tight to their father. They could be no older than normal children in the early Bright, just old enough to be cute. “The little girl is Rhapsa and the boy is Hrunkner.”
Unnerby stepped forward, trying to seem casual.They probably namedthe child Hrunkner out of friendship. God in deepest earth. “Very pleased to meet you.” In the best of times, Unnerby had no way with children—training new hires was the closest he’d ever come to raising them. Hopefully, that would excuse his unease.
The babies seemed to sense his distaste, and retreated shyly from sight. “
Never mind,” said Sherkaner, in that oblivious way of his. “They’ll come out and play once we’re indoors.”
Sherkaner led him inside, talking all the way about how much he had to show him, how good it was that Hrunkner was finally visiting. The years had changed Underhill, physically at least. Gone was the painful leanness; he had been through several molts. The fur on his back was deep and paternal, strange to see on anyone in this phase of the sun. The tremor in his head and forebody was a little worse than Unnerby remembered.
They walked through a foyer big enough for a hotel, and down a wide spiral of steps that looked out upon wing after wing of Sherkaner’s “little hillhouse.” There were plenty of other people here, servants perhaps, though they didn’t wear the livery that the super-rich usually demanded. In fact, the place had the utilitarian feel of corporate or government property. Unnerby interrupted the other’s nonstop chatter with, “This is all a front, isn’t it, Underhill? The King never sold this hill at all, just transferred it.” To the Intelligence Service.
“No, really. I do own the ground; I bought it myself. But, um, I do a lot of consulting, and Victory—I mean Accord Intelligence—decided that security was best served by setting up the labs right here. I have some things to show you.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s the point of my visit, Sherk. I don’t think you’re working on the right things. You’ve pushed the Crown into going all out for—I assume we can talk freely here?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
