Reynolt ignored him. She opened the lock hatch and led him into Hammerfest. When she spoke again, there was something close to enthusiasm in her flat tones. "Focusing ennobles. It is the key to Emergent success, and a much more subtle thing than you imagine. It's not just that we've created a pyschoactive microbe. This is one whose growth within the brain can be controlled with millimeter precision—and once in place, the ensemble can be guided in its actions with the same precision."
Vinh's response was so blank that it penetrated even Reynolt's attention. "Don't you see? We can improve the attention-focusing aspects of consciousness: we can take humans and turn them into analytical engines." She spelled it out in wretched detail. On the Emergent worlds, the Focusing process was spread over the last years of a specialist's schooling, intensifying the graduate-school experience to produce genius. For Trixia and the others, the process had been necessarily more abrupt. For many days, Reynolt and her technicians had tweaked the virus, triggering genetic expression that precisely released the chemicals of thought—all guided by Emergent medical computers that gathered feedback from conventional brain diagnostics... .
"And now the training is complete. The survivors are ready to pursue their researches as they never could have before."
Reynolt led him through rooms with plush furniture and carpeted walls. They followed corridors that became narrower and narrower until they were in tunnels barely one meter across. It was a capillary architecture he had seen in histories...pictures from the heart of an urban tyranny. And finally they stood before a simple door. Like the others behind them, it bore a number and speciality. This one said:F 042EXPLORATORY LINGUISTICS.
Reynolt paused. "One last thing. Podmaster Nau believes you may be upset by what you see here. I know outlanders behave in extreme ways when they first encounter Focus." She cocked her head as though debating Ezr Vinh's rationality. "So. The Podmaster has asked me to emphasize: Focus is normally reversible, at least to a great extent." She shrugged, as though delivering a rote speech.
"Open the door." Ezr's voice cracked on the words.
The roomlet was tiny, lit dimly by the glow from a dozen active windows. The light formed a halo around the head of the person within: short hair, slender form in simple fatigues.
"Trixia?" he said softly. He reached across the room to touch her shoulder. She didn't turn her head. Vinh swallowed his terror and pulled himself around to look into her face. "Trixia?"
For an instant she seemed to look directly into his eyes. Then she twisted away from his touch and tried to peer around him, at the windows. "You're blocking my view. I can't see!" Her tone was nervous, edging into panic.
Ezr ducked his head, turned to see what was so important in the windows. The walls around Trixia were filled with structure and generation diagrams. One whole section appeared to be vocabulary options. There were Nese words in n-to-one match with fragments of unpronounceable nonsense. It was a typical language-analysis environment, though with more active windows than a reasonable person would use. Trixia's gaze flickered from point to point, her fingers tapping choices. Occasionally she would mutter a command. Her face was filled with a look of total concentration. It was not an alien look, and not by itself horrifying; he had seen it before, when she was totally fascinated by some language problem.
Once he moved out of her way, he was gone from her mind. She was more...focused...than he had ever seen her before.
And Ezr Vinh began to understand.
He watched her for some seconds, watched the patterns expand in the windows, watched choices made, structures change. Finally, he asked in a quiet, almost disinterested voice, "So how is it going, Trixia?"
"Fine." The answer was immediate, the tone exactly that of the old Trixia in a distracted mood. "The books from the Spider library, they're marvelous. I have a handle on their graphemics now. No one's ever seen anything like this, ever done anything like this. The Spiders don't see the way we do; visual fusion is entirely different with them. If it hadn't been for the physics books, I'd never have imagined the notion of split graphemes." Her voice was distant, a little excited. She didn't turn to look at him as she spoke, and her fingers continued to tap. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he could see small, frightening things. Her fatigues were fresh but there were syrupy stains down the front. Her hair, even cut short, looked tangled and greasy. A fleck of something—food? snot?—clung to the curve of her face just above her lips.
