A Deepness in the Sky

They walked toward a hillside. Trixia had her net-link audio turned way down. This was a place and a time she wanted to experience firsthand, without interruptions. Yet the buzz of sound and the displays at the upper corners of her vision kept her in tenuous contact with what was going on in space, and at Princeton. In the real world beyond her hood display, the light was barely brighter than Trilander moonlight, and the only movement was the low scudding of the frost dust beneath the wind. "And this is our best guess where Sherkaner left the helicopter?"

"It was, but there's no sign of him here. The log files are all jumbled. Daddy was controlling Rachner's aircraft through the net. Maybe he was going someplace special. More likely he was heading for random nowhere." Trixia was not hearing Little Victory's true voice. Those sounds were down-shifted and processed in Trixia's hood. The result was not a human speech and certainly not Spider sound, but Trixia could understand it as easily as Nese, and listening left her eyes and hands free for other things.

"But..." Trixia waved her arm at the tumbled land ahead of them. "Sherkaner sounded rational to me, even at the end when everything was coming apart." She spoke in the same intermediate language she listened to. The suit processor took care of the routine shifting of sounds to what Viki could hear.

"Wanderdeep can be like that," said Victory. "He had just lost Mom. Nizhnimor and Jaybert and the counterlurk center had just been blown out from under him."

At the bottom of her view, Trixia saw the twitch in Viki's forearms. That was the equivalent of pursed lips, of a person confronting pain. In her years of Focus, she had always imagined herself talking to them head to head, on the same level. In free fall, that was more or less how things worked. But on the ground...well, human bodies extended upward, and Spider bodies sideways. If she didn't keep a downward view, she missed out on "facial" expressions—and even worse, she might walk into her best friends.

"Thanks for coming with me, Trixia." The cues in the intermediate language showed that Viki's voice was tremulous. "I've been here and at Southmost before, officially, and with my brothers and sister. We promised each other we'd leave it alone for a while, but...I can't...and I can't face it alone either."

Trixia waggled her hand in a way that meant comfort, understanding. "I've wanted to come here ever since I came out of Focus. I feel like I'm a person finally, and being with you I feel I have a family."

One of Viki's free arms reached up to rub Trixia's elbow. "You were always a person to me. I can remember when Gokna died, when the General told us about you. Daddy showed us the logs, all the way back to when you first contacted him. Back then, he still thought you translators were some kind of AI. But you seemed to be a person to me, and I could tell you liked Dad very much."

Trixia gestured a smile. "Dear Sherk was so sure of impossible things like AI. For me, Focus was like a dream. My mission was to understand you Spiders perfectly, and the emotions just came along with it. It was the side effect Tomas Nau never expected." Personhood as a Spider had come slowly, growing with each advance in language knowledge. The radio debate had been the turning point, where Trixia and Zinmin Broute and the others had actually transformed and taken sides in the perfection of their craft.I'm so sorry, Xopi. We were Focused and suddenly you were the enemy. Whenwe scrambled your MRI codes, we didn't really know we'd murdered you.Any of us could have been the Pedure translator, any of us could have beenin your place. And that had been when Trixia first reached down across the comm links and revealed herself to Sherkaner Underhill.

The smooth rock was broken now, rising into the hillside. Here there were patches of snow, and clefts shadowed from sun-and starlight. Victory and Trixia scrambled over the lower rocks of the hill, and peered into the shadows. This wasn't a serious search; it was more an act of reverence. Air and orbit surveys had been completed many days before.

"Do—do you think we'll ever find him, Victory?" During most of her years of Focus, Sherkaner Underhill had been the center of Trixia Bonsol's universe. She'd been scarcely aware of Anne Reynolt or Ezr's hundreds of faithful visits, but Sherkaner Underhill had been real. She remembered the old cobber who needed a guide-bug to keep from walking in circles. How could he be gone?