"Also, I've been talking to Rita Liao. Her programmers are very enthusiastic about the stuff you've been giving them. They've designed a suite of financial applications and network software that should run great on the Spiders' new microprocessors."

Trixia was nodding. "Yes, yes. I talk to them everyday." The translators got along famously with the low-code programmers and the financial/legal zipheads. Ezr suspected it was because the translators were ignorant of those fields, and vice versa.

"Rita wants to set up a groundside company to market the programs. They should beat anything local, and we want saturation."

"Yes, yes. Prosperity Software Incorporated; I already invented a name. But it's still too early."

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.

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.