A Deepness in the Sky

The silence dissolved, people shouting questions, inviting Trud to come up and talk to them. Trud climbed up through the vines toward Jau Xin's table. There was no room left, so they flipped another table over to make a double-decker. Now Ezr was almost eye to eye with Silipan, even though the other's face was inverted from his. The crowd from other tables swarmed in close, anchoring themselves among the vines.

"So when are you going to break that deadlock, Trud? I've got zipheads reserved, waiting for answers."

"Yeah, why are you over here when—"

"—There's only so much we can do with raw hardware, and—"

"Lord of Trade Almighty, give the fellow a chance!" Pham's voice boomed, loud and irritated. It was a typical Trinli turnabout, always the truculent cannon, but pointing in whatever direction might make him look good. It also, Ezr noticed, silenced the crowd.

Silipan sent Pham a grateful look. The technician's cockiness was a fragile thing today. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his hand shook slightly as he raised the drink Benny had set before him.

"How is she, Trud?" Jau asked the question in sympathetic, quiet tones. "We heard...we heard, she's brain-dead."

"No, no." Trud shook his head and smiled weakly. "Reynolt should make a full recovery, minus maybe a year of retrograde amnesia. Things will be a bit chaotic till we get her back online. I'm sorry about the deadlock. Why, I'd have it fixed by now"—some of the old confidence crept back into his voice—"but I was reassigned to something more important."

"What really happened to her?"

Benny showed up with a shrimp-tentacle dinner, his best entree. Silipan dug in hungrily, seeming to ignore the question. This was the most attentive audience Trud had ever had, literally breathless to hear his opinions. Ezr could tell the guy realized this, that he was enjoying his sudden and central importance. At the same time, Trud was almost too tired to see straight. His once perfect uniform actually stank. His fork took a wobbling course from food bucket to mouth. After a few moments, he turned a bleary-eyed look in the direction of his questioner. "What happened? We're not sure. The last year or so, Reynolt's been slipping—still in Focus, of course, but not well tuned. Tas a subtle thing, something that only a pro could notice. I almost missed it myself. She seemed to be caught up on some subproject—you know the way zipheads can obsess. Only thing is, Reynolt does her own calibration, so there was nothing I could do. I tell you, tas making me damn uneasy. I was about to report it to the Podmaster when—"

Trud hesitated, seemed to realize that this was a brag with consequences. "Anyway, it looks like she was trying to adjust some of the MRI control circuits. Maybe she knew that her tuning was adrift. I don't know. She had the safety hood off and was running diagnostics. It looks like there was some kind of situational flaw in the control software; we're still trying to reproduce that. Anyway, she got a control pulse right in the face. There was a little piece of her scalp in the cabinet behind the controls, where she spasmed. Fortunately, the stimulated drug production was alpha-retrox. She has a concussion and a retrox overdose....Like I say, it's all repairable. Another forty days and our old lovable Reynolt will be back." He laughed weakly.

"Minus some recent memories."

"Of course. Zipheads aren't hardware; I don't have backups."

There was some uncomfortable mumbling around the table, but it was Rita Liao who put the idea into words: "It's all too convenient. It's like someone wanted to shut her down." She hesitated. Earlier in the day, it had been Rita pushing the rumors about Ritser Brughel. It showed how far these Emergents had come that they would stick their noses into what might be a Podmaster conflict. "Has Podmaster Nau checked into the off-Watch status of the Vice-Podmaster?"

"And his agents?" That from a Qeng Ho behind Ezr.

Trud slapped his fork down on the table. His voice came out angry and squeaky. "What do you think! The Podmaster is looking into the possibilities...very carefully." He took a deep breath, and seemed to realize that the price of fame was too high. "You can be absolutely sure that the Podmaster is taking this seriously. But look—the retrox flood was simply a massive overdose, unlocalized, just what you'd expect in an accident. The amnesia will be a patchy thing. Any saboteur doing that would be a fool. She could be dead and it would've looked just as much like an accident."

For a moment, everyone was silent. Pham glared back and forth at all of them.

Silipan picked up his fork, set it down again. He stared into his half-finished bucket of shrimp tentacles. "Lord, I am so tired. I go back on duty in twenty—damn it, fifteen—Ksecs."

Rita reached out to pat his arm. "Well, I'm glad you came over and gave us the straight story." There was a murmur of agreement from the people all around.