In his usual place on the other side of the parlor, Trud Silipan seemed to ignore the suspense. He and Pham Trinli were talking in low tones. The two were constant drinking buddies, planning great deals that never seemed to go anywhere.Funny, I used to think Trinli was a loud buffoon. Pham's "magic localizer" claims had not been a bluff; Ezr had noticed the dustmotes. Nau and Brughel had begun using the gadgets. Somehow, Pham Trinli had known a secret about the localizers that had been missing from the innermost sections of the fleet library. Ezr Vinh might be the only one to realize it, but Pham Trinli was not totally a buffoon. More and more, Ezr guessed that the old man was in no part a fool. There were secrets hidden all through the fleet library; there had to be in anything that old and that large. But for a secret that important to be known by this man...Pham Trinli must go back along way.
"Hey, Trud!" shouted Rita, pointing at the clock. "Where are your zipheads?" The parlor's wallpaper still looked out on the forests of some Balacrean nature preserve.
Trud Silipan rose from his table and floated down before the crowd. "It's okay, folks. I just got word. Princeton Radio has started the ‘Children's Hour' intro. Director Reynolt will bring out the zipheads in a moment. They're still synching with the word stream."
Liao's irritation melted away. "Great! Good going, Trud."
Silipan gave a bow, accepting kudos for what was a zero contribution on his part. "So, in a few moments we should know what strange things this Underhill creature has been doing with his children...." He cocked his head, listening to his private data feed. "And here they are!"
The dripping, blue-green forest landscape disappeared. The bar side of the room suddenly seemed to extend into one of the meeting rooms down on Hammerfest. Anne Reynolt slid in from the right, her form distorted by the perspective angle; that part of the wallpaper just couldn't handle 3D. Behind Reynolt came a couple of technicians and five zipheads...Focused persons. One of those was Trixia.
This was where Ezr wanted to start screaming—or run off to some dark place and pretend the world didn't exist. Normally the Emergents hid their zipheads deep within their systems, as if they felt some remnant shame. Normally the Emergents liked to get results from computer and head-up displays, all graphics and hygienically filtered data. Benny had told him that in the beginning Qiwi's freak show had just been the zipheads' voices piped into the parlor. Then Trud told everyone about the translators' byplay, and the show went visual. Surely the zipheads couldn't intuit body language from a Spider audio. That didn't seem to matter; the byplay might be nonsense, but it was what the ghouls around him wanted.
Trixia was dressed in loose fatigues. Her hair floated out, partly tangled. Ezr had combed it sleek less than 40Ksec earlier. She shrugged off her handlers and grabbed the edge of a table. She was looking this way and that, and mumbling to herself. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her fatigue blouse and pulled herself down to a chair restraint. The others followed her, looking as abstracted as Trixia. Most were wearing huds. Ezr knew the sort of thing they were seeing and hearing, the midlevel transduction of the Spider language. That was Trixia's entire world.
"We're synched, Director," one of the techs said to Reynolt.
The Emergent Director for Human Resources floated down the rank of slaves, moving the fidgeting zipheads about for reasons that Ezr couldn't guess. After all this time, Ezr knew the woman had a special talent. She was a stone-eyed bitch, but she knew how to get results from zipheads.
"Okay, start 'em running—" She moved up, out of the way. Zinmin Broute had risen against his seat, and was already speaking in his ponderous announcer's voice. "My name is Rappaport Digby, and this is ‘The Children's Hour of Science.'..."
Daddy took them all to the radio station that day. Jirlib and Brent were up on the top deck of the car, acting very serious and grown-up—and they looked near enough to in-phase that they didn't attract attention. Rhapsa and Little Hrunk were still tiny enough to perch in Daddy's fur; it might be another year before they rejected being called the babies of the family.
Gokna and Victory Junior sat in the back, each on her separate perch. Victory stared out through the smoky glass at the streets of Princeton. This all made her feel a little like royalty. She tilted her head slyly in her sister's direction; maybe Gokna was her handmaiden.
Gokna sniffed imperiously. They were alike enough that she was certainly thinking the same thing—with herself as Great Ruler. "Daddy, if you're doing the show today, why are we even along?"
