be played out with unswerving patience, never giving up the struggle to destroy Tomas Nau and win back what still survived. It was a time he had thought would stretch into endless torment.
Yes. He had played with unswerving patience. And there had been pain… and shame. Yet his fear was most times a distant thing. And though he still didn’t know the details, just knowing that he was working for Pham Nuwen gave Ezr the sure feeling that in the end they would triumph. But the biggest surprise was something that popped up again and again for uneasy introspection: In some ways, these years were more more satisfying than any time since early childhood. Why was that?
Podmaster Nau made thrifty use of the remaining medical automation, and he kept critical “functions” such as translators on-Watch much of the time. Trixia was in her forties now. Ezr saw her almost every day he was on- Watch, and the little changes in her face tore at him.
But there were other changes in Trixia, changes that made him think that his presence and the passing years were somehow bringing her back to him.
When he came early to her tiny cell in Hammerfest’s Attic, she would still ignore him. But then, once, he arrived one hundred seconds after the usual time. Trixia was sitting facing the door. “You’re late,” she said. Her tone was the same flat impatience that Anne Reynolt might use. All the Focused were notorious about punctilio. Still. Trixia had noticed his absence.
And he noticed that Trixia was beginning to do some of her own grooming. Her hair was brushed back, almost neatly, when he arrived for their sessions. Now, as often as not, their conversations were not completely one-sided… at least if he was careful about the topics.
This day, Ezr entered her cell on time, but with some smuggled cargo—two delitesse cakelets from Benny’s parlor. “For you.” He reached out, bringing one cakelet close to her. The fragrance filled the cell. Trixia stared at his hand, briefly, as if contemplating a rude gesture. Then she waved the distraction away. “You were going to bring the Cur-plus-One translation requests.”
Sigh.But he left the confection tacked to the workspace near her hand. “Yes, I have them.” Ezr settled in his usual spot by the door, facing her. Actually, the list wasn’t long today. Focus could work miracles, but without a glue of normal common sense, the different specialist groups wandered off into private navel inspection. Ezr and the other normals read summaries of the Focused work and tried to see where each group of specialists had found something that was of interest beyond the zipheads’ fixation. Those were reported upward, to Nau, and back downward, as requests for additional work.
Today, Trixia had no trouble accommodating the requests, though she muttered darkly at some of them, “Waste of time.”
“Also, I’ve been talking to Rita Liao. Her programmers are very enthusiastic about the stuff you’ve been giving them. They’ve designed a suite of financial applications and network software that should run great on the Spiders’ new microprocessors.”
Trixia was nodding. “Yes, yes. I talk to them everyday.” The translators got along famously with the low- code programmers and the financial/legal zipheads. Ezr suspected it was because the translators were ignorant of those fields, and vice versa.
“Rita wants to set up a groundside company to market the programs. They should beat anything local, and we want saturation.”
“Yes, yes. Prosperity Software Incorporated; I already invented a name. But it’s still too early.”
He chatted it back and forth with her, trying to get a realistic time estimate to pass on to Rita Liao. Trixia was on a co-thread with the zipheads who were doing the insertion strategy, so their combined opinion was probably pretty good. Doing everything across a computer network—even with perfect knowledge and planning— depended on the sophistication of that net. It would be at least five years before a big commercial market developed in software, and a little longer before the Spiders’ public networks took off. Until then, it would be next to impossible to be a major groundside player. Even now, the only manipulations they could do consistently were of the Accord’s military net.
Too soon, Ezr came to the last item on his list. It might seem a small thing, but from long experience he knew it was trouble. “New topic, Trixia—but it’s a real translation question: about the color ‘plaid.’ I notice you are still using that term in descriptions of visual scenes. The physiologist—”
“Kakto.” Trixia’s eyes narrowed slightly. Where the zipheads interacted, there was normally an almost telepathic closeness—or else they hated each other’s guts with the sort of freezing hostility usually seen only in academic romance novels. Norm Kakto and Trixia oscillated between these states.
“Yes. Um, anyway, Dr. Kakto gave me a long lecture about the nature of vision and the electromagnetic spectrum and assured me that talking about a color ‘plaid’ could not correspond to anything meaningful.”
Trixia’s features screwed into a frown, and for a moment she looked much older than Ezr liked to see. “It’s a real word. I chose it. The context had a feel—” The frown intensified. More often than not what seemed a translation mistake turned out to be—perhaps not a literal truth, but at least a clue to some unrecognized aspect of the Spiders’ reality. But the Focused translators, even Trixia, could be wrong. In her early translations, where she and the others were still feeling their way across an unknown racial landscape—there had been hundreds of facile word choices; a good portion of them had to be abandoned later.
The problem was that zipheads did not take easily to abandoning fixation.
Trixia was coming close to real upset. The signs were not extreme. She often frowned, though not this fiercely. And even when she was silent, she was endlessly active with her two-handed keyboard. But this time the analysis coming back at her spilled from her head-up display to paint across the walls. Her breath came faster as she turned the criticism back and forth in her mind and on the attached network. She didn’t have any counterexplanation.
Ezr reached out, touched her shoulder. “Follow-up question, Trixia. I talked with Kakto about this ‘plaid’ thing for some time.” In fact, Ezr had all but badgered the man. Often that was the only way that worked with a Focused specialist: Concentrate on the ziphead’s specialty and the problem at hand, and keep asking your question in different ways. Without some skill and reasonable luck, the technique would quickly bring communication to an end. Even after seven Watch years, Ezr wasn’t an expert, but in this case Norm Kakto had finally been provoked into generating alternatives: “We were wondering, perhaps the Spiders have such a surplus of visual methods that the Spider brain has to multiplex access—you know, a fraction of a second sensing in one spectral regime, a fraction of a second in another. They might sense—I don’t know, some kind of rippling effect.”
In fact, Kakto had dismissed the idea as absurd, saying that even if the Spider brain time-shared on its visual senses, the perception would still seem continuous at the conscious level.
As he spoke the words, Trixia became nearly motionless, only her fingers continuing to move. Her constantly shifting gaze fixed for a long second… directly on Ezr’s eyes. He was saying something that was nontrivial and near the center of her Focus. Then she looked away, began muttering to her voice input, and pounded even more furiously on the keys. A few seconds passed and her eyes began darting around the room, tracking phantoms that were only visible in her own head-up. Then, abruptly, “Yes! That is the explanation. I never really thought before… it was just the context that made me pick the word, but—” Dates and locations spread across the walls where they could both see. Ezr tried to keep up, but his own huds were still barred from the Hammerfest net; he had to depend on Trixia’s vague gestures to know the incidents she was citing.
Ezr found himself grinning. Just now Trixia came about the closest she could to normality, even if it was a kind of frenetic triumph…. “Look! Except for one case of pain overload, every use of ‘plaid’ has involved low haze, low humidity, and a wide range of brightness. In those situations, the whole color… the vetmoot3…” She was using internal jargon now, the inscrutable stuff that flowed between the Focused translators. “The language mood is changed. I needed a special word, and ‘plaid’ is good enough.”
He listened and watched. He could almost see the insight spreading within Trixia’s mind, setting up new connections, no doubt improving all later translations. Yes, it looked real. The jackboots could not complain about the color “plaid.”
It was altogether a good session. And then Trixia did something that was a wondrous surprise. With scarcely a break in her speech, one hand left her keyboard and snatched sideways at the delitesse. She broke the cakelet free of its anchor and stared into the froth and fragrence—as if suddenly recognizing what the cakelet was and the pleasure that came from eating such things. Then she jammed the thing into her mouth, and the light frosting splashed in colorful drops across her lips. He thought for a moment that she was choking, but the sound was just a
