He chatted it back and forth with her, trying to get a realistic time estimate to pass on to Rita Liao. Trixia was on a co-thread with the zipheads who were doing the insertion strategy, so their combined opinion was probably pretty good. Doing everything across a computer network—even with perfect knowledge and planning—depended on the sophistication of that net. It would be at least five years before a big commercial market developed in software, and a little longer before the Spiders' public networks took off. Until then, it would be next to impossible to be a major groundside player. Even now, the only manipulations they could do consistently were of the Accord's military net.
Too soon, Ezr came to the last item on his list. It might seem a small thing, but from long experience he knew it was trouble. "New topic, Trixia—but it's a real translation question: about the color ‘plaid.' I notice you are still using that term in descriptions of visual scenes. The physiologist—"
"Kakto." Trixia's eyes narrowed slightly. Where the zipheads interacted, there was normally an almost telepathic closeness—or else they hated each other's guts with the sort of freezing hostility usually seen only in academic romance novels. Norm Kakto and Trixia oscillated between these states.
"Yes. Um, anyway, Dr. Kakto gave me a long lecture about the nature of vision and the electromagnetic spectrum and assured me that talking about a color ‘plaid' could not correspond to anything meaningful."
Trixia's features screwed into a frown, and for a moment she looked much older than Ezr liked to see. "It's a real word. I chose it. The context had a feel—" The frown intensified. More often than not what seemed a translation mistake turned out to be—perhaps not a literal truth, but at least a clue to some unrecognized aspect of the Spiders' reality. But the Focused translators, even Trixia, could be wrong. In her early translations, where she and the others were still feeling their way across an unknown racial landscape—there had been hundreds of facile word choices; a good portion of them had to be abandoned later.
The problem was that zipheads did not take easily to abandoning fixation.
Trixia was coming close to real upset. The signs were not extreme. She often frowned, though not this fiercely. And even when she was silent, she was endlessly active with her two-handed keyboard. But this time the analysis coming back at her spilled from her head-up display to paint across the walls. Her breath came faster as she turned the criticism back and forth in her mind and on the attached network. She didn't have any counterexplanation.
Ezr reached out, touched her shoulder. "Follow-up question, Trixia. I talked with Kakto about this ‘plaid' thing for some time." In fact, Ezr had all but badgered the man. Often that was the only way that worked with a Focused specialist: Concentrate on the ziphead's specialty and the problem at hand, and keep asking your question in different ways. Without some skill and reasonable luck, the technique would quickly bring communication to an end. Even after seven Watch years, Ezr wasn't an expert, but in this case Norm Kakto had finally been provoked into generating alternatives: "We were wondering, perhaps the Spiders have such a surplus of visual methods that the Spider brain has to multiplex access—you know, a fraction of a second sensing in one spectral regime, a fraction of a second in another. They might sense—I don't know, some kind of rippling effect."
In fact, Kakto had dismissed the idea as absurd, saying that even if the Spider brain time-shared on its visual senses, the perception would still seem continuous at the conscious level.
As he spoke the words, Trixia became nearly motionless, only her fingers continuing to move. Her constantly shifting gaze fixed for a long second...directly on Ezr's eyes. He was saying something that was nontrivial and near the center of her Focus. Then she looked away, began muttering to her voice input, and pounded even more furiously on the keys. A few seconds passed and her eyes began darting around the room, tracking phantoms that were only visible in her own head-up. Then, abruptly, "Yes! That is the explanation. I never really thought before...it was just the context that made me pick the word, but—" Dates and locations spread across the walls where they could both see. Ezr tried to keep up, but his own huds were still barred from the Hammerfest net; he had to depend on Trixia's vague gestures to know the incidents she was citing.
