happy laugh. She chewed, and swallowed… and after a moment she gave the most contented sigh. It was the first time in all these years that Ezr had seen her happy about something outside her Focus.
Even her hands stopped their constant motion for a few seconds. Then, “So. What else?”
It took a moment for the question to penetrate Ezr’s daze. “Ah, um.” In fact, that had been the last item on his list. Butjoy ! The delitesse had made a miracle. “J-just one thing more, Trixia. Something you should know.” Maybe something you can finally understand. “You are not a machine. You’re a human being.”
But the words had no impact. Maybe she didn’t even hear them. Her fingers were tapping at her keys again, and her gaze was somewhere in huds imagery he couldn’t see. Ezr waited several seconds, but whatever attention there had been seemed to have vanished. He sighed, and moved back to the cell’s doorway.
Then perhaps ten or fifteen seconds after he had spoken, Trixia abruptly looked up. There was expression on her face again, but this time it was surprise. “Really? I’m not a machine?”
“Yes. You are a real person.”
“Oh.” Disinterest again. She returned to her keyboards, muttering on the voice link to her invisible ziphead siblings. Ezr quietly slipped out. In the early years, he would have felt crushed, or at least set back, by the curt dismissal. But… this was just ziphead normality. And for a moment he had broken through it. Ezr crawled back through the capillary corridors. Usually these kinking, barely-shoulders-wide passages got on his nerves. Every two meters another cell doorway, right side, top, left side, bottom. What if there was ever a panic here? What if they ever needed to evacuate? But today… echoes came back to him, and suddenly he realized he was whistling.
Anne Reynolt intercepted him as he emerged into Hammerfest’s main vertical corridor. She jabbed a finger at the carrier trailing behind him. “I’ll take that.”
Damn.He’d intended to leave the second delitesse with Trixia. He gave Reynolt the carrier. “Things went well. You’ll see in my report—”
“Indeed. I think I’ll have that report right now.” Reynolt gestured down the hundred-meter drop. She grabbed a wall stop, flipped feet for head, and started downward. Ezr followed. Where they passed openings in the caisson, OnOff’s light shone through a thin layer of diamond crystal. And then they were back in artificial light, deeper and deeper in the mass of Diamond One. The mosaic carving looked as fresh as the day it was done, but here and there the hand and foot traffic had laid patches of grime on the fretwork. There weren’t many unskilled zipheads left, not enough to maintain Emergent perfection. They turned sideways at the bottom, still gently descending but coasting past busy offices and labs—all familiar to Ezr now. The ziphead clinic. There, Ezr had been only once. It was closely guarded, closely monitored, but not quite off-limits. Pham was a regular visitor there, Trud Silipan’s great friend. But Ezr avoided the place; it was where souls were stolen.
Reynolt’s office was where it had always been, at the end of the lab tunnel, behind a plain door. The “Director of Human Resources” settled in her chair and opened the carrier she had taken from Ezr.
Vinh pretended to be unperturbed. He looked around the office. Nothing new, the same rough walls, the storage crates and seemingly loose equipment that still—after decades on-Watch—were her principal furniture. Even if he had never been told, Ezr would have long since guessed that Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. A miraculous, people-oriented ziphead, but still a ziphead.
Reynolt was obviously not surprised by the contents of the carrier. She sniffed at the delitesse with the expression of a bactry technician assessing slime ferment. “Very aromatic. Candy and junk food are not on the allowed diet list, Mr. Vinh.”
“I’m sorry. I just meant it as a treat… a little reward. I don’t do it often.”
“True. In fact, you’ve never done it before.” Her gaze flickered around his face, then moved away. “It’s been thirty years, Mr. Vinh. Seven years of your own life-time on-Watch. You know that zipheads do not respond to such ‘rewards’; their motive system is primarily within their area of Focus and secondarily attached to their owners. No… I think you still have your secret plans to waken love in Dr. Bonsol.”
“With a dessert confection?”
Reynolt gave him a hard little smile. His sarcasm would have gone right past an ordinary ziphead. It didn’t deflect Reynolt, but she recognized it. “With the smell, perhaps. I imagine you’ve been into some Qeng Ho neurology courses—found something about olfactory pathways having independent access to the higher centers. Hmm?” For an instant her gaze skewered him like a bug in a collection.
That’s exactly what the neuro courses said.And the delitesse was something that Trixia would not have smelled since before she was Focused. For a moment, the walls around Trixia’s true self had thinned to barely more than a veil. For a moment, Ezr had touched her.
Ezr shrugged. Reynolt was so very sharp. If she ever thought to look, she was surely bright enough to see all the way through him. She was probably bright enough to see through even Pham Nuwen. The only thing that saved them was that Pham and Ezr were at the edge of her Focus.IfRitser Brughel had a snoop even half as good, Pham and I would be deadnow.
Reynolt turned away from him, for a moment tracked phantoms in her huds. Then, “Your misbehavior has caused no harm. In some ways, Focus is a robust state. You may think you see changes in Dr. Bonsol, but consider: Over the last few years, all the best translators have begun to show synthetic affect. If it hurts performance, we’ll take them down to the clinic for some tuning….
“However, if you actively attempt manipulation again, I will keep you out of Dr. Bonsol’s way.”
It was a totally effective threat, but Ezr tried to laugh. “What, no death threats?”
“My assessment, Mr. Vinh: Your knowledge of Humankind’s Dawn Age civilization makes you extremely valuable. You’re an effective interface between at least four of my groups—and I know that the Podmaster uses your advice as well. But make no mistake: I can get along without you in the translation department. If you cross me again, you won’t see Dr. Bonsol till after the mission is complete.”
Fifteen years? Twenty?
Ezr stared at her, feeling the utter certainty in her words. What an implacable creature this woman was. Not for the first time, he wondered what she had been like before. He was not alone in that. Trud Silipan regaled the patrons at Benny’s with the speculations. The Xevalle clique had once been the second most powerful in the Emergency; Trud claimed she had been high in its ranks. At one time she might have been a greater monster than Tomas Nau. At least some of them got punished; crushed by their own kind. Anne Reynolt had fallen far, from being a knowing Satan to being a Satan’s tool.
…Whether that made her more or less than before, she was dangerous enough for Ezr Vinh.
That night, alone in the dark of his room, Ezr described the encounter to Pham Nuwen. “I get the feeling that if Reynolt ever transferred to Brughel’s operation, she’d figure out about you and me in a matter of Ksecs.”
Nuwen’s chuckle was a distorted buzzing sound deep in Ezr’s ear. “That’s a transfer that will never happen. She’s the only thing that’s holding the ziphead operation together. She had a staff of four hundred unFocused interface types before the Ambush—now she’s
“Say the last again.”
“I said, ‘Now she’s depending for much of her support on untrained help. ’ “
The buzz that was not quite a voice faded in and out of intelligibility. There were still times when Ezr had to ask for three or four repetitions. But it was a big improvement over the blinkertalk they had used in the beginning. Now, when Ezr pretended to go to sleep, he had a single millimeter-long localizer pressed deep in his ear. The result was mostly buzzing and hissing, nearly inaudible, but with enough practice you could normally guess the speech behind it. The localizers were scattered all around the room—all around the Traders’ temp. They had become Brughel and Nau’s primary security tool here.
“Still, maybe I shouldn’t have tried the delitesse trick.”
“…Maybe. I wouldn’t have tried anything so overt.” But then PhamNuwen wasn’t in love with Trixia Bonsol. “We’ve talked about this before. Brughel’s zipheads are more powerful than any security tool we Qeng Ho ever imagined. They’re sniffing all the time, and they can read”—Ezr couldn’t make out the word: “naive”? “innocent”?; he didn’t feel like asking for clarification—“people like you. Face it. They surely guess that you don’t believe their story about the Diem Massacre. They know you’re hostile. They know you’re scheming—or wishing to scheme— about something. Your feelings for Bonsol give you a cover, a lesser lie to hide the greater one. Like my Zamle Eng thing.”
“Yeah.” But I think I’ll cool it for a while. “So you don’t think Reynolt is that much of a threat?”
