A Deepness in the Sky

"For now, your Podmaster wants you close by." In fact, that was the official story: only lower network functions were needed in close orbit of Arachna. Pham and Ezr knew a darker explanation. Nau wanted as few people as possible on theHand when it performed its real mission. "You'll go when it's safe, Trixia. I promise." He reached out toward her. Trixia didn't flinch away, but she held tight to a wall stop, resisting any effort to draw her back to her cell.

Ezr looked over his shoulder at Rita Liao. "What should we do?"

"Wait one." She touched her ear, listened. "Phuong and Silipan will be here to stuff 'em back in their holes, just as soon as they get the others settled down on theHand. "

Lord, that could take a while. In the meantime, twenty translators would be loose in the Attic maze. He gently patted Trixia's arm. "Let's go back to your room, Trixia. Uh, look, the longer you're out here, the more you're out of touch. I'll bet you left your huds in your room. You could use them to ask fleet net your questions." Trixia had probably left her huds behind because they were offline. But at this point, he was just trying to make reasonable noises.

Trixia bounced from wall stop to wall stop, full of indecision. Abruptly she pushed past him and flitted back to the downward fork that led to her little room. Ezr followed.

The cell reacted to Trixia's presence, the lights coming to their usual dim glow. Trixia grabbed her huds, and Ezr synched to them. Her links weren't completely down. Ezr saw the usual pictures and splashes of text; it wasn't quite live from groundside, but it was close. Trixia's eyes darted from display to display. Her fingers pounded on her old keyboard, but she seemed to have forgotten about contacting the fleet information service. Just the sight of her workspace had drawn her back to the center of her Focus. New text windows popped up. Glyphics nonsense shifted so fast across it that it must be a representation of spoken Spider talk, some radio show or—considering the current state of affairs—a military intercept. "I just can't stand the time lag. It's not fair." Again a long silence. She opened another text screen. The pictures beside it went through a flickering series of colors, one of the Spiders' video formats. It still didn't look like a real picture, but he recognized this pattern; he had seen it often enough in Trixia's little room. This was a Spider commercial newscast that Trixia translated daily. "They're wrong. General Smith will go to Southmost instead of the King." She was still tense, but now it was her usual, Focused absorption.

A few seconds later, Rita Liao stuck her head into the room. Ezr turned, saw a look of quiet amazement on her face. "You're a magician, Ezr. How'd you get everyone calmed down?"

"I...I guess Trixia just trusts me." That was an innermost hope phrased as diffident speculation.

Rita pulled her head out of the doorway to look up and down the corridor. "Yeah. But you know, after you got her back to work? All the others just quietly returned to their rooms. These translator types have more control functionality than military zips. All you have to do is convince the alpha member, and everyone falls into line." She grinned. "But I guess we've seen this before, the way the translators can control the rote-layer zips. They're the keystone components, all right."

"Trixia is a person!"All the Focused are people, you damn slaver!

"I know, Ezr. Sorry. Really, I understand....Trixia and the other translators do seem to be different. You have to be pretty special to translate natural languages. Of all—of all the Focused, the translators seem the closest to being real people....Look, I'll take care of buttoning things down and let Bil Phuong know things are under control."

"Okay," Ezr replied, his voice stiff.

Rita backed out of the room. The cell door slid shut. After a moment, he heard other doors thumping shut along the corridor.

Trixia sat hunched over her keyboard, oblivious of the opinions just rendered. Ezr watched her for some seconds, thinking about her future, thinking about how he would finally save her. Even after forty years of Lurk, the translators couldn't masquerade real-time voice comm with the Spiders. Tomas Nau would gain no advantage by having his translators down by Arachna...yet. Once the world was conquered, Trixia and the others would be the voice of the conqueror.