A Deepness in the Sky (20 page)

He paused. "And now the most important thing. You heard my speech, the part about learning Emergent ways?"

"About...Focus?" About what had they had really done to Trixia.

Behind Nau, the sadistic smirk flickered once again across Ritser Brughel's face.

"That's the main thing," said Nau. "Perhaps we should have been open about it, but the training period wasn't complete. Focus can make the difference between life and death in the present circumstances. Ezr, I want Anne to take you over to Hammerfest and explain it all to you. You'll be the first. I want you to understand, to make your peace with it. When you have, I want you to explain Focus to your people, and do it so they can accept it, so what is left of our missions can survive."

And so the secret Vinh had pushed to know, the secret that had driven every dream for Msecs, was now to be revealed to him. Ezr followed Reynolt up the central corridor to the taxi lock. Every meter was a battle for him. Focus. The infection they could not cure. The mindrot. There had been rumors, nightmares, and now he would know.

Reynolt waved him into the taxi. "Sit over there, Vinh." In a paradoxical way, he preferred dealing with Anne Reynolt. She didn't disguise her contempt, and she had none of the sadistic triumph that oozed from Ritser Brughel.

The taxi sealed up and pushed off. The Qeng Ho temp was still tied down to the rockpile. The sunlight was still too bright to allow it to be released. The purple sky had faded back to black, but there were a half-dozen comet tails streaking the stars—sundry blocks of ice that now floated some kilometers away. Wen and Xin were out there somewhere.

Hammerfest was less than five hundred meters from the temp, an easy free jump if Reynolt had wished it. Instead they floated across the space in shirtsleeve comfort. If you hadn't seen it all before the Relight, you might not guess the disaster that had happened. The monster rocks had long since stopped moving. Loose ice and snow had been redistributed across the shadow, larger chunks and smaller and smaller and smaller, a fractal pile. Only now there was less ice, and much less airsnow. Now the shadowed side of the jumble was lit as by a bright moon—the light reflected from Arachna. The taxi passed fifty meters above crews working to reemplace the electric jets. Last time he had checked, Qiwi Lisolet was down there, more or less running the operation.

Reynolt had strapped down across from him. "The successfully Focused are all on Hammerfest. You can talk to almost anyone you please."

Hammerfest looked like an elegant personal estate. It was the luxurious heart of the Emergent operation. That had been some comfort to Ezr. He'd told himself that Trixia and the others would be treated decently there. They might be held like the hostages of Qeng Ho history, like the One Hundred at Far Pyorya. But no sensible Trader would ever build a habitat rooted in a rubble pile. The taxi coasted over towers of eerie beauty, a fey castle spiring up from the crystal plane. In a short time, he would know what the castle hid....Reynolt's phrasing finally took hold of his attention. "Successfully Focused?"

Reynolt shrugged. "Focus is mindrot on a leash. We lost thirty percent in the initial conversions; we may lose more in the coming years. We had moved the sickest ones over to theFar Treasure ."

"But what—"

"Be quiet and let me tell you." Her attention flicked to something beyond Vinh's shoulder, and she was quiet for several seconds. "You remember becoming sick at the time of the ambush. You've guessed that was a disease of our design; its incubation time was an important part of our planning. What you don't know is that the microbe's military use is of secondary importance." The mindrot was viral. Its original, natural, form had killed millions in the Emergents' home solar system, had crashed their civilization...and set the stage for the present era of expansion. For the original strains of the bug had a novel property: they were a treasure house of neurotoxins.

"In the centuries since the Plague Time, the Emergency has gentled the mindrot and turned it to the service of civilization. Its present form needs special help to break through the blood-brain barrier, and spreads throughout the brain in a nearly harmless way, infecting about ninety percent of the glial cells. And now we can control the release of neuroactives."

The taxi slowed and turned precisely to match Hammerfest's lock. Arachna slid across the sky, a full "moon" nearly a half-degree across. The planet gleamed white and featureless, cloud decks hiding its furious rebirth.

Ezr scarcely noticed. His imagination was trapped in the vision that lurked behind Anne Reynolt's dry jargon: the Emergents' pet virus, penetrating the brain, breeding by the tens of billions, dripping poison into a still-living brain. He remembered the killing pressure in his head as their lander had climbed up from Arachna. That had been the disease banging on the portals of his mind. Ezr Vinh and all the others on the Qeng Ho temp had fought off that assault—or maybe their brains were still infected, and the disease was quiescent. But Trixia Bonsol and the people with the "Focus" glyph by their names had been given special treatment. Instead of a cure, Reynolt's people had grown the disease in the victims' brains like mold in the flesh of a fruit. If there had been even the slightest gravity in the taxi, Ezr would have vomited. "Butwhy ?"

Reynolt ignored him. She opened the lock hatch and led him into Hammerfest. When she spoke again, there was something close to enthusiasm in her flat tones. "Focusing ennobles. It is the key to Emergent success, and a much more subtle thing than you imagine. It's not just that we've created a pyschoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision—and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision."

Vinh's response was so blank that it penetrated even Reynolt's attention. "Don't you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines." She spelled it out in wretched detail. On the Emergent worlds, the Focusing process was spread over the last years of a specialist's schooling, intensifying the graduate-school experience to produce genius. For Trixia and the others, the process had been necessarily more abrupt. For many days, Reynolt and her technicians had tweaked the virus, triggering genetic expression that precisely released the chemicals of thought—all guided by Emergent medical computers that gathered feedback from conventional brain diagnostics... .

"And now the training is complete. The survivors are ready to pursue their researches as they never could have before."

Reynolt led him through rooms with plush furniture and carpeted walls. They followed corridors that became narrower and narrower until they were in tunnels barely one meter across. It was a capillary architecture he had seen in histories...pictures from the heart of an urban tyranny. And finally they stood before a simple door. Like the others behind them, it bore a number and speciality. This one said:F 042EXPLORATORY LINGUISTICS.

Reynolt paused. "One last thing. Podmaster Nau believes you may be upset by what you see here. I know outlanders behave in extreme ways when they first encounter Focus." She cocked her head as though debating Ezr Vinh's rationality. "So. The Podmaster has asked me to emphasize: Focus is normally reversible, at least to a great extent." She shrugged, as though delivering a rote speech.

"Open the door." Ezr's voice cracked on the words.

The roomlet was tiny, lit dimly by the glow from a dozen active windows. The light formed a halo around the head of the person within: short hair, slender form in simple fatigues.

"Trixia?" he said softly. He reached across the room to touch her shoulder. She didn't turn her head. Vinh swallowed his terror and pulled himself around to look into her face. "Trixia?"

For an instant she seemed to look directly into his eyes. Then she twisted away from his touch and tried to peer around him, at the windows. "You're blocking my view. I can't see!" Her tone was nervous, edging into panic.

Ezr ducked his head, turned to see what was so important in the windows. The walls around Trixia were filled with structure and generation diagrams. One whole section appeared to be vocabulary options. There were Nese words in n-to-one match with fragments of unpronounceable nonsense. It was a typical language-analysis environment, though with more active windows than a reasonable person would use. Trixia's gaze flickered from point to point, her fingers tapping choices. Occasionally she would mutter a command. Her face was filled with a look of total concentration. It was not an alien look, and not by itself horrifying; he had seen it before, when she was totally fascinated by some language problem.

Once he moved out of her way, he was gone from her mind. She was more...focused...than he had ever seen her before.

And Ezr Vinh began to understand.

He watched her for some seconds, watched the patterns expand in the windows, watched choices made, structures change. Finally, he asked in a quiet, almost disinterested voice, "So how is it going, Trixia?"

"Fine." The answer was immediate, the tone exactly that of the old Trixia in a distracted mood. "The books from the Spider library, they're marvelous. I have a handle on their graphemics now. No one's ever seen anything like this, ever done anything like this. The Spiders don't see the way we do; visual fusion is entirely different with them. If it hadn't been for the physics books, I'd never have imagined the notion of split graphemes." Her voice was distant, a little excited. She didn't turn to look at him as she spoke, and her fingers continued to tap. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he could see small, frightening things. Her fatigues were fresh but there were syrupy stains down the front. Her hair, even cut short, looked tangled and greasy. A fleck of something—food? snot?—clung to the curve of her face just above her lips.

Can she even bathe herself?Vinh glanced downward, at the doorway. The place wasn't big enough for three, but Reynolt had stuck her head and shoulders through the opening. She floated easily on her elbows. She was staring up at Ezr and Trixia with intense interest. "Dr. Bonsol has done well, even better than our own linguists, and they've been Focused since graduate school. Because of her, we'll have a reading knowledge of their language even before the Spiders come back to life."

Ezr touched Trixia's shoulder again. Again, she twitched away. It wasn't a gesture of anger or fear; it was as if she were shrugging off a pesky fly. "Do you remember me, Trixia?" No answer, but he was sure she did—it simply wasn't important enough to comment on. She was an ensorcelled princess, and only the evil witches might waken her. But this ensorcellment might never have happened if he had listened more to the princess's fears, if he had agreed with Sum Dotran. "I'm so sorry, Trixia."

Reynolt said, "Enough for this visit, Fleet Manager." She gestured him out of the roomlet.

Vinh slid back. Trixia's eyes never left her work. Something like that intentness had originally attracted him to her. She was a Trilander, one of the few who had shipped on the Qeng Ho expedition without close friends or even a little family. Trixia had dreamed of learning the truly alien, learning things no human had ever known. She had held the dream as fiercely as the most daring Qeng Ho. And now she had what she had sacrificed for...and nothing else.

Halfway through the door, he stopped and looked across the room at the back of her head. "Are you happy?" he said in a small voice, not really expecting an answer.

She didn't turn, but her fingers ceased their tapping. Where his face and touch had made no impression, thewords of a silly question stopped her. Somewhere in that beloved head, the question filtered past layers of Focus, was considered briefly. "Yes, very." And the sound of her tapping resumed.

Vinh had no recollection of the trip back to the temp, and after that, little more than confused fragments of memory. He saw Benny Wen in the docking area.

Benny wanted to talk. "We're back earlier that I'd ever guessed. You can't imagine how slick Xin's pilots are." His voice dropped. "One of them was Ai Sun. You know, from theInvisible Hand. She was in Navigation.One of our own people, Ezr. But it's like she's dead inside, just like his other pilots and the Emergent programmers. Xin said she was Focused. He said you could explain. Ezr, you know my pop is over on Hammerfest. What—"

And that was all Ezr remembered. Maybe he screamed at Benny, maybe he just pushed past him.Explain Focus to your people, and do it so theycan accept it, so what is left of our missions can survive.

When reason returned...

Vinh was alone in the temp's central park, without any recollection of having wandered there. The park spread out around him, the leafy treetops reaching across to touch him from five sides. There was an old saying: Without a bactry, a habitat cannot support its tenants; without a park, the tenants lose their souls. Even on ramships deep between the stars, there was still the Captain's bonsai. In the larger temps, the thousand-year habitats at Canberra and Namqem, the park was the largest space within the structure, kilometer on kilometer of nature. But even the smallest park had all the millennia of Qeng Ho ingenuity behind its design. This one gave the impression of forest depth, of creatures great and small waiting just behind the nearest trees. Keeping the balance of life in a park this small was probably the most difficult project in the temp.

The park was in deepening twilight, darkest in the direction of down. To his right the last glimmer of skylike blue shone beyond the trees. Vinh reached out, pulled himself hand over hand to the ground. It was a short trip; all together, the park was less than twelve meters across. Vinh hugged himself into the deep moss by a tree trunk and listened to the sounds of the cooling forest evening. A bat flickered against the sky, and somewhere a nest of butterflies muttered musically to itself. The bat was likely fake. A park this small could not stock large animals or scamperers, but the butterflies would be real.

For a blessed space of time, all thought fled...