And so the secret Vinh had pushed to know, the secret that had driven every dream for Msecs, was now to be revealed to him. Ezr followed Reynolt up the central corridor to the taxi lock. Every meter was a battle for him. Focus. The infection they could not cure. The mindrot. There had been rumors, nightmares, and now he would know.
Reynolt waved him into the taxi. "Sit over there, Vinh." In a paradoxical way, he preferred dealing with Anne Reynolt. She didn't disguise her contempt, and she had none of the sadistic triumph that oozed from Ritser Brughel.
The taxi sealed up and pushed off. The Qeng Ho temp was still tied down to the rockpile. The sunlight was still too bright to allow it to be released. The purple sky had faded back to black, but there were a half-dozen comet tails streaking the stars—sundry blocks of ice that now floated some kilometers away. Wen and Xin were out there somewhere.
Hammerfest was less than five hundred meters from the temp, an easy free jump if Reynolt had wished it. Instead they floated across the space in shirtsleeve comfort. If you hadn't seen it all before the Relight, you might not guess the disaster that had happened. The monster rocks had long since stopped moving. Loose ice and snow had been redistributed across the shadow, larger chunks and smaller and smaller and smaller, a fractal pile. Only now there was less ice, and much less airsnow. Now the shadowed side of the jumble was lit as by a bright moon—the light reflected from Arachna. The taxi passed fifty meters above crews working to reemplace the electric jets. Last time he had checked, Qiwi Lisolet was down there, more or less running the operation.
Reynolt had strapped down across from him. "The successfully Focused are all on Hammerfest. You can talk to almost anyone you please."
Hammerfest looked like an elegant personal estate. It was the luxurious heart of the Emergent operation. That had been some comfort to Ezr. He'd told himself that Trixia and the others would be treated decently there. They might be held like the hostages of Qeng Ho history, like the One Hundred at Far Pyorya. But no sensible Trader would ever build a habitat rooted in a rubble pile. The taxi coasted over towers of eerie beauty, a fey castle spiring up from the crystal plane. In a short time, he would know what the castle hid....Reynolt's phrasing finally took hold of his attention. "Successfully Focused?"
Reynolt shrugged. "Focus is mindrot on a leash. We lost thirty percent in the initial conversions; we may lose more in the coming years. We had moved the sickest ones over to theFar Treasure ."
"But what—"
"Be quiet and let me tell you." Her attention flicked to something beyond Vinh's shoulder, and she was quiet for several seconds. "You remember becoming sick at the time of the ambush. You've guessed that was a disease of our design; its incubation time was an important part of our planning. What you don't know is that the microbe's military use is of secondary importance." The mindrot was viral. Its original, natural, form had killed millions in the Emergents' home solar system, had crashed their civilization...and set the stage for the present era of expansion. For the original strains of the bug had a novel property: they were a treasure house of neurotoxins.
"In the centuries since the Plague Time, the Emergency has gentled the mindrot and turned it to the service of civilization. Its present form needs special help to break through the blood-brain barrier, and spreads throughout the brain in a nearly harmless way, infecting about ninety percent of the glial cells. And now we can control the release of neuroactives."
The taxi slowed and turned precisely to match Hammerfest's lock. Arachna slid across the sky, a full "moon" nearly a half-degree across. The planet gleamed white and featureless, cloud decks hiding its furious rebirth.
Ezr scarcely noticed. His imagination was trapped in the vision that lurked behind Anne Reynolt's dry jargon: the Emergents' pet virus, penetrating the brain, breeding by the tens of billions, dripping poison into a still-living brain. He remembered the killing pressure in his head as their lander had climbed up from Arachna. That had been the disease banging on the portals of his mind. Ezr Vinh and all the others on the Qeng Ho temp had fought off that assault—or maybe their brains were still infected, and the disease was quiescent. But Trixia Bonsol and the people with the "Focus" glyph by their names had been given special treatment. Instead of a cure, Reynolt's people had grown the disease in the victims' brains like mold in the flesh of a fruit. If there had been even the slightest gravity in the taxi, Ezr would have vomited. "Butwhy ?"
