been interrogations, a period of many Ksecs between the fighting and the resumption of Watches, but… Qiwi felt a numb horror spreading up from the pit of her stomach. She paged through the names. Kira Pen Lisolet. Mama. A bruised face, the eyes staring steadily back at her.Whatdid Ritser do to you? How could Tomas not know? She wasn’t really conscious of following the data links from that picture, but suddenly her huds were running an immersion video. The room was the same, but filled with the sights and sounds of long ago. As if from the other side of the rack, there came the sound of panting and moaning. Qiwi slid to the side and the vision tracked with near perfection. Around the corner of the rack, she came face-to-face with… Tomas Nau. A younger Tomas Nau. Out of sight, beyond the edge of the rack, he seemed to be thrusting from his hips. The look on his face was the sort of ecstatic pleasure that Qiwi had seen in his face so many times, the look he had when they could finally be alone and he could come in her. But this Tomas of years ago held a tiny, red-splattered knife. He leaned forward, out of sight, leaned down on someone whose moans changed to a shrill scream. Qiwi pulled herself over the edge of the rack and looked straight down at the true past, at the woman Nau was cutting.
“Mama!” The past didn’t notice her cry; Nau continued his business. Qiwi doubled up on herself, spewing vomit across the rack and beyond. She couldn’t see them anymore, but the sounds of the past continued, as if they were happening just on the other side of the rack. Even as her stomach emptied, she tore the huds from her face, threw them wildly away. She choked and gagged; gibbering horror was in charge of her reflexes.
The light changed as the room’s door opened. There were voices. Voices in the present. “Yeah, she’s in here, Marli.”
“Phew. What a mess.” Sounds of the two men quartering the room, coming closer to Qiwi’s hiding place. Mindlessly she retreated, floated down beneath the nightmare equipment, and braced herself against the floor.
A face coasted across her position.
“Got h—”
Qiwi exploded upward, the blade of her hand just missing the other’s neck. She slammed into the wall partition behind him. Pain lanced back along her arm.
She felt the prick of stunner darts. She turned, tried to bounce toward her attacker, but her legs were already dead. The two waited cautiously a second. Then the shooter, Marli, grinned and snagged her slowly-turning body. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe. But there was some sensation. She felt Marli draw her back to him, run his hand across her breasts. “She’s safed; don’t worry, Tung.” Marli laughed. “Or maybe you should worry. Look at that hole she put in the wall. Another four centimeters and you’d be breathing out the back of your neck!”
“Pus.” Tung’s voice was sullen.
“You got her? Good.” It was Tomas’s voice, from the door. Marli abruptly released his hold on her breasts. He coasted her around the equipment, into the open.
Qiwi couldn’t turn her head. She saw whatever happened to be before her eyes. Tomas, calm as ever. Calm as ever. He glanced at her in passing, nodded to Marli. Qiwi tried to scream, but no sound came. Tomas will kill me, like all the others…. But if he doesn’t? If he doesn’t, then nothing in God’s universe can save him.
Tomas turned. Ritser Brughel was behind him, disheveled and half-naked. “Ritser, this is inexcusable. The whole point of giving her access codes is to make capture predictable and easy. You knew she was coming, and you left yourself wide open.”
Brughel’s voice was whiny. “Plague take it. She’s never twigged this soon after her last scrub. And I had less than three hundred seconds from your first warning till she arrived here. That’s never happened before.”
Tomas glared at his Vice-Podmaster. “The second was just bad luck—something you should count on. The first…” He looked back at Qiwi, and his anger turned to thoughtfulness. “Something unexpected triggered her this time. Have Kal review just who she’s been talking to.”
He gestured to Marli and Tung. “Put her in a box and take her down to Hammerfest. Tell Anne I want the usual.”
“What cutoff time on the memories, sir?”
“I’ll talk to Anne about that myself. We’ve got some records to look at.”
Qiwi got a glimpse of the corridor, of hands dragging her along.Howmany times has this happened before? No matter how hard she strained, she couldn’t move a muscle. Inside she was screaming.This time I will remember. I willremember!
TWENTY-TWO
Pham followed Trud Silipan up the central tower of Hammerfest, toward the Attic. In a sense, this was the moment he had been angling for through Msecs of casual shmoozing—an excuse to get inside the Focus system, to see more than the results. No doubt he could have gotten here earlier—in fact, Silipan had offered more than once to show him around. Over the Watches they had known each other, Pham had made enough silly assertions about Focus, had bet Silipan and Xin enough scrip about his opinions; a plausible visit was inevitable. But there was plenty of time and Pham had never had quite the cover he’d wanted.Don’t fool yourself. Popping thelocalizers on Tomas Nau has put you in more danger than anything so far.
“Now, finally, you’re going to see behind the scenes, Pham old boy. After this, I hope you’ll shut up about some of your crazy theories.” Silipan was grinning; clearly, he’d been looking forward to this moment himself.
They drifted upward, past narrow tunnels that forked and forked. The place was a warren.
Pham pulled himself even with the coasting Silipan. “What’s to know? So you Emergents can make people into automatic devices. So what? Even a ziphead can’t multiply numbers faster than once or twice a second. Machines can do it trillions of times faster. So with zipheads, you get the pleasure of bossing people around—and for what? The slowest, crappiest automation since Humankind learned to write.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’ve been saying that for years. But you’re still wrong.” He stuck out a foot, catching a stop with the toe of his shoe. “Keep your voice down inside the grouproom, okay?” They were facing a real door, not one of the little crawl hatches of lower down. Silipan waved it open and they drifted through. Pham’s first impression was of body odor and packed humanity.
“They do get pretty ripe, don’t they? They’re healthy, though. I see to that.” He spoke with a technician’s pride.
There was rack on rack of micro-gee seating, packed in a three-dimensional lattice that would have been impossible in any real gravity. Most of the seats were occupied. There were men and women of all ages, dressed in grays, most using what looked to be premium Qeng Ho head-up display devices. This wasn’t what he had been expecting. “I thought you kept them isolated,” in little cells such as Ezr Vinh had described in more than one tearful session in the booze parlor.
“Some we do. It depends on the application.” He waved at the room attendants, two men dressed like hospital orderlies. “This is a lot cheaper. Two guys can handle all the potty calls, and the usual fights.”
“Fights?”
“‘Professional disagreements.’” Silipan chuckled. “Snits, really. They’re only dangerous if they upset the mindrot’s balance.”
They floated diagonally upward between the close-packed rows. Some of the huds flickered transparently and he could see the zipheads’ eyes moving. But no one seemed to notice Pham and Trud; their vision was elsewhere.
There was low-pitched mumbling from all directions, the combined voices of all the zipheads in the room. There were a lot of people talking, all in short bursts of words—Nese, but still nonsense. The global effect was an almost hypnotic chant.
The zipheads typed ceaselessly on chording keyboards. Silipan pointed to their hands with special pride. “See, not one in five has any joint damage; we can’t afford to lose people. We have so few, and Reynolt can’t completely control the mindrot. But it’s been most of a year since we had a simple medical fatality—and that was almost unavoidable. Somehow the zip got a punctured colon rightafter a clean checkup. He was an isolated specialty. His performance fell off, but we didn’t know there was a problem till the smell got completely rank.” So the slave had died from the inside out, too dedicated to cry his pain, too neglected for anyone to notice. Trud Silipan was only caring in the mean.
