Ezr found himself grinning. Just now Trixia came about the closest she could to normality, even if it was a kind of frenetic triumph... ."Look! Except for one case of pain overload, every use of ‘plaid' has involved low haze, low humidity, and a wide range of brightness. In those situations, the whole color...thevetmoot3..." She was using internal jargon now, the inscrutable stuff that flowed between the Focused translators. "The languagemood is changed. I needed a special word, and ‘plaid' is good enough."
He listened and watched. He could almost see the insight spreading within Trixia's mind, setting up new connections, no doubt improving all later translations. Yes, it looked real. The jackboots could not complain about the color "plaid."
It was altogether a good session. And then Trixia did something that was a wondrous surprise. With scarcely a break in her speech, one hand left her keyboard and snatched sideways at the delitesse. She broke the cakelet free of its anchor and stared into the froth and fragrence—as if suddenly recognizing what the cakelet was and the pleasure that came from eating such things. Then she jammed the thing into her mouth, and the light frosting splashed in colorful drops across her lips. He thought for a moment that she was choking, but the sound was just a happy laugh. She chewed, and swallowed...and after a moment she gave the most contented sigh. It was the first time in all these years that Ezr had seen her happy about something outside her Focus.
Even her hands stopped their constant motion for a few seconds. Then, "So. What else?"
It took a moment for the question to penetrate Ezr's daze. "Ah, um." In fact, that had been the last item on his list. Butjoy ! The delitesse had made a miracle. "J-just one thing more, Trixia. Something you should know."Maybe something you can finally understand. "You are not a machine. You're a human being."
But the words had no impact. Maybe she didn't even hear them. Her fingers were tapping at her keys again, and her gaze was somewhere in huds imagery he couldn't see. Ezr waited several seconds, but whatever attention there had been seemed to have vanished. He sighed, and moved back to the cell's doorway.
Then perhaps ten or fifteen seconds after he had spoken, Trixia abruptly looked up. There was expression on her face again, but this time it was surprise. "Really? I'm not a machine?"
"Yes. You are a real person."
"Oh." Disinterest again. She returned to her keyboards, muttering on the voice link to her invisible ziphead siblings. Ezr quietly slipped out. In the early years, he would have felt crushed, or at least set back, by the curt dismissal. But...this was just ziphead normality. And for a moment he had broken through it. Ezr crawled back through the capillary corridors. Usually these kinking, barely-shoulders-wide passages got on his nerves. Every two meters another cell doorway, right side, top, left side, bottom. What if there was ever a panic here? What if they ever needed to evacuate? But today...echoes came back to him, and suddenly he realized he was whistling.
Anne Reynolt intercepted him as he emerged into Hammerfest's main vertical corridor. She jabbed a finger at the carrier trailing behind him. "I'll take that."
Damn.He'd intended to leave the second delitesse with Trixia. He gave Reynolt the carrier. "Things went well. You'll see in my report—"
"Indeed. I think I'll have that report right now." Reynolt gestured down the hundred-meter drop. She grabbed a wall stop, flipped feet for head, and started downward. Ezr followed. Where they passed openings in the caisson, OnOff's light shone through a thin layer of diamond crystal. And then they were back in artificial light, deeper and deeper in the mass of Diamond One. The mosaic carving looked as fresh as the day it was done, but here and there the hand and foot traffic had laid patches of grime on the fretwork. There weren't many unskilled zipheads left, not enough to maintain Emergent perfection. They turned sideways at the bottom, still gently descending but coasting past busy offices and labs—all familiar to Ezr now. The ziphead clinic. There, Ezr had been only once. It was closely guarded, closely monitored, but not quite off-limits. Pham was a regular visitor there, Trud Silipan's great friend. But Ezr avoided the place; it was where souls were stolen.
Reynolt's office was where it had always been, at the end of the lab tunnel, behind a plain door. The "Director of Human Resources" settled in her chair and opened the carrier she had taken from Ezr.
Vinh pretended to be unperturbed. He looked around the office. Nothing new, the same rough walls, the storage crates and seemingly loose equipment that still—after decades on-Watch—were her principal furniture. Even if he had never been told, Ezr would have long since guessed that Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. A miraculous, people-oriented ziphead, but still a ziphead.
