commercials. Finally, she turned away from the controls. There was something a little dazed about her aspect. “… You know, your dad has some really… weird… ideas.”
There was a sequence of chords that might have been music, and the words, “Sharpened hands are happy hands. Brim the tinfall with mirthly bands—”
Spider commercials were sometimes the high point of Princeton Radio programs. Molt refresh, eye polish, leggings—many of the products made some sense, even if the selling points did not. Other products were just nonsense words, especially if it was a previously unknown product, and second-string translators.
Today, it was the second-stringers. Reung, Broute, and Trixia sat fidgeting, cut off from the signal stream. Their handlers were already moving in to clear them from the stage. Today the crowd in Benny’s parlor pretty much ignored the commercials, too:
“Not as much fun as when the kids are on, but—”
“Did you get the angle on spaceflight? I wonder what this does to the Schedule? If—”
Ezr wasn’t paying attention. His gaze stayed on the wall, and all the chitchat was just distant buzzing. Trixia looked worse than usual. The flicker of her gaze seemed desperate to Ezr. He often thought that, and a dozen times Anne Reynolt had claimed the behavior was nothing but eagerness to get back to work.
“Ezr?” A hand brushed gently against his sleeve. It was Qiwi. Sometime during the program she had slipped into the parlor. She had done this before, sitting silently, watching the show. Now she had the gall to act like a friend. “Ezr, I—”
“Save it.” Ezr turned away from her.
And so he was looking directly at Trixia when it happened: The handlers had moved Broute out of the room. As they led Xopi Reung past her, Trixia shrieked and lunged from her chair, her fist smashing into the younger woman’s face. Xopi twisted away, jerking out of her handler’s grip. She stared dazedly at the blood streaming from her nose, then wiped her face with her hand. The other tech grabbed the screaming Trixia before she could do more damage. Somehow Trixia’s words made it onto the general audio channel: “Pedure bad! Die! Die!”
“Oh, boy.” Next to Ezr, Trud Silipan bounced off his seat and pushed his way toward the entrance to Benny’s parlor. “Reynolt is going to have a fit about this. I gotta get back to Hammerfest.”
“I’m coming, too.” Ezr brushed past Qiwi and dived for the door. Benny’s parlor was silent for a shocked moment, then everyone was talking—
—but by that time, Ezr was nearly out of earshot, and chasing Silipan. They moved quickly to the main corridor, heading for the taxi tubes. At the locks, Silipan tapped something on the scheduler, then turned. “What do you two want?”
Ezr looked over his shoulder, saw that Pham Trinli had followed them out of Benny’s. Ezr said, “I have to come, Trud. I have to see Trixia.”
Trinli sounded worried too. “Is this going to screw our deal, Silipan? We need to make sure that—”
“Oh, pus. Yeah, we gotta think how this may affect things. Okay. Come along.” He glanced at Ezr. “But you. There’s nothing you can do to help.”
“I’m coming, Trud.” Ezr found himself less than ten centimeters from the other, with his fists raised.
“Okay, okay! Just stay out of the way.” A moment later, the taxi lock blinked green and they were aboard and accelerating out from the temp. The rockpile was a sunlit jumble just to one side of Arachna’s blue disk. “Pest, this would happen when we were on the far side. Taxi!”
“Sir?”
“Best time to Hammerfest.” Normally, they had to baby the taxi hardware—but apparently the automation recognized Trud’s voice and tone.
“Yessir.” The taxi pushed off at nearly a tenth of a gee. Silipan and the others grabbed for restraints, and tied down. Ahead of them the rockpile grew and grew. “This really sucks, you know that? Reynolt is going to say I was absent from my post.”
“Well, weren’t you?” Trinli had settled down right beside Silipan.
“Of course, but it shouldn’t matter. Hell, one handler should have been enough for the whole pus-be-damned translator crew. But now,I’m going to be the one who looks bad.”
“But is Trixia all right?”
“Why did Bonsol blow up like that?” said Trinli.
“It beats me. You know they bicker and fight, especially some of the ones in the same specialty. But this came from nowhere.” Silipan abruptly stopped talking. For a long moment he stared into his huds. Then, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. I bet there was still some audio feed from the ground. You know, a live mike, a failure of their show management. Maybe Underhill took a swipe at the other Spider. That might make Bonsol’s action ‘valid translation.’ …Damn!”
Now the guy was really worried, grasping at random explanations. Trinli seemed too dense to notice. He grinned and slapped Silipan lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. You know Qiwi Lisolet is in on the deal. That means that Podmaster Nau wants the zips to be more widely used, too. We’ll just say you were aboard the temp to help me with the details.”
The taxi turned end for end, braking for its landing. The rockpile and Arachna tumbled across the sky.
TWENTY-FIVE
They didn’t see the Honored Pedure on the way out of the radio station. Daddy was a little subdued, but he smiled and laughed when the cobblies told him how much they liked his performance. He didn’t even scold Gokna for Giving Ten. Brent got to sit up front with Daddy on the way back to Hill House.
Gokna and Victory didn’t talk much in the car. They both knew that everybody was fooling everybody.
When they got home, it was still two hours until dinner. The kitchen staff claimed that General Smith had returned from Lands Command and that she would be at dinner. Gokna and Viki exchanged looks.I wonderwhat Mother will say to Daddy. The juiciest parts wouldn’t be at dinner.Hmm. So what to do with the rest of the afternoon? The sisters split up, separately recon’d the spiraled halls of Hill House. There were rooms—lots of rooms—that were always locked. Some of them were ones that they had never even been able to steal keys for. The General had her own offices here, even if the most important stuff was down at Lands Command.
Viki poked into Daddy’s ground-floor den and the tech-level cafeteria, but only briefly. She’d bet Gokna that Daddy would not be hiding, but now she realized that today “not hiding” did not preclude “difficult to find.” She roamed through the labs, found the typical signs of his passage, graduate students in various states of puzzlement and sudden, surprised enlightenment. (“Underhill Dazzle” was what the students called it: If you came away puzzled, chances were that Daddy had said something worthwhile. If you were instantly enlightened, it probably meant Daddy had fooled both himself and you with a facile misinsight.)
The new signals lab was near the top of the house, under a roof full of experimental antennas. She caught Jaybert Landers coming down the steps from there. The cobber wasn’t showing any symptoms of Underhill Dazzle. Too bad.
“Hello, Jaybert. Have you seen my—”
“Yeah, they’re both up in the lab.” He jerked a hand over his shoulder.
Aha! But Viki didn’t immediately sidle past him. If the General was already here, maybe she should get some far intelligence. “So what’s happening, Jaybert?”
Of course, Jaybert took the question to be about his work. “Damnedest thing. I put my new antenna on the Lands Command link just this morning. At first the alignment was fine, but then I started getting these fifteen- second patches where it looks like there are two stations on the line-of-sight. I wanted to ask your father—” Viki followed him a few steps down the stairs, making agreeable sounds to the other’s unintelligible talk about amplifier stages and transient alignment failures. No doubt Jaybert had been very pleased to get Daddy’s quick attention, and no doubt Daddy had been delighted for an excuse to hole up in the signals lab. And then Mother showed up….
Viki left Jaybert down by his office-cubby, and climbed back up the stairs, this time circling around to the lab’s utility entrance. There was a column of light at the end of the corridor. Ha! The door was partway open. She could hear the General’s voice. Viki slipped down the hallway to the door.
