The light changed as the room's door opened. There were voices. Voices in the present. "Yeah, she's in here, Marli."

"Phew. What a mess." Sounds of the two men quartering the room, coming closer to Qiwi's hiding place. Mindlessly she retreated, floated down beneath the nightmare equipment, and braced herself against the floor.

A face coasted across her position.

"Got h—"

Qiwi exploded upward, the blade of her hand just missing the other's neck. She slammed into the wall partition behind him. Pain lanced back along her arm.

She felt the prick of stunner darts. She turned, tried to bounce toward her attacker, but her legs were already dead. The two waited cautiously a second. Then the shooter, Marli, grinned and snagged her slowly-turning body. She couldn't move. She could barely breathe. But there was some sensation. She felt Marli draw her back to him, run his hand across her breasts. "She's safed; don't worry, Tung." Marli laughed. "Or maybe you should worry. Look at that hole she put in the wall. Another four centimeters and you'd be breathing out the back of your neck!"

"Pus." Tung's voice was sullen.

"You got her? Good." It was Tomas's voice, from the door. Marli abruptly released his hold on her breasts. He coasted her around the equipment, into the open.

Qiwi couldn't turn her head. She saw whatever happened to be before her eyes. Tomas, calm as ever.Calm as ever. He glanced at her in passing, nodded to Marli. Qiwi tried to scream, but no sound came.Tomas will killme, like all the others....But if he doesn't? If he doesn't, then nothing inGod's universe can save him.

Tomas turned. Ritser Brughel was behind him, disheveled and half-naked. "Ritser, this is inexcusable. The whole point of giving her access codes is to make capture predictable and easy. You knew she was coming, and you left yourself wide open."

Brughel's voice was whiny. "Plague take it. She's never twigged this soon after her last scrub. And I had less than three hundred seconds from your first warning till she arrived here. That'snever happened before."

Tomas glared at his Vice-Podmaster. "The second was just bad luck—something you should count on. The first..." He looked back at Qiwi, and his anger turned to thoughtfulness. "Something unexpected triggered her this time. Have Kal review just who she's been talking to."

He gestured to Marli and Tung. "Put her in a box and take her down to Hammerfest. Tell Anne I want the usual."

"What cutoff time on the memories, sir?"

"I'll talk to Anne about that myself. We've got some records to look at."

Qiwi got a glimpse of the corridor, of hands dragging her along.Howmany times has this happened before? No matter how hard she strained, she couldn't move a muscle. Inside she was screaming.This time I will remember. I willremember!

TWENTY-TWO

Pham followed Trud Silipan up the central tower of Hammerfest, toward the Attic. In a sense, this was the moment he had been angling for through Msecs of casual shmoozing—an excuse to get inside the Focus system, to see more than the results. No doubt he could have gotten here earlier—in fact, Silipan had offered more than once to show him around. Over the Watches they had known each other, Pham had made enough silly assertions about Focus, had bet Silipan and Xin enough scrip about his opinions; a plausible visit was inevitable. But there was plenty of time and Pham had never had quite the cover he'd wanted.Don't fool yourself. Popping thelocalizers on Tomas Nau has put you in more danger than anything so far.

"Now, finally, you're going to see behind the scenes, Pham old boy. After this, I hope you'll shut up about some of your crazy theories." Silipan was grinning; clearly, he'd been looking forward to this moment himself.

They drifted upward, past narrow tunnels that forked and forked. The place was a warren.

Pham pulled himself even with the coasting Silipan. "What's to know? So you Emergents can make people into automatic devices. So what? Even a ziphead can't multiply numbers faster than once or twice a second. Machines can do it trillions of times faster. So with zipheads, you get the pleasure of bossing people around—and for what? The slowest, crappiest automation since Humankind learned to write."

"Yeah, yeah. You've been saying that for years. But you're still wrong." He stuck out a foot, catching a stop with the toe of his shoe. "Keep your voice down inside the grouproom, okay?" They were facing a real door, not one of the little crawl hatches of lower down. Silipan waved it open and they drifted through. Pham's first impression was of body odor and packed humanity.

"They do get pretty ripe, don't they? They're healthy, though. I see to that." He spoke with a technician's pride.

There was rack on rack of micro-gee seating, packed in a three-dimensional lattice that would have been impossible in any real gravity. Most of the seats were occupied. There were men and women of all ages, dressed in grays, most using what looked to be premium Qeng Ho head-up display devices. This wasn't what he had been expecting. "I thought you kept them isolated," in little cells such as Ezr Vinh had described in more than one tearful session in the booze parlor.

"Some we do. It depends on the application." He waved at the room attendants, two men dressed like hospital orderlies. "This is a lot cheaper. Two guys can handle all the potty calls, and the usual fights."

"Fights?"

"‘Professional disagreements.' "Silipan chuckled. "Snits, really. They're only dangerous if they upset the mindrot's balance."

They floated diagonally upward between the close-packed rows. Some of the huds flickered transparently and he could see the zipheads' eyes moving. But no one seemed to notice Pham and Trud; their vision was elsewhere.

There was low-pitched mumbling from all directions, the combined voices of all the zipheads in the room. There were a lot of people talking, all in short bursts of words—Nese, but still nonsense. The global effect was an almost hypnotic chant.

The zipheads typed ceaselessly on chording keyboards. Silipan pointed to their hands with special pride. "See, not one in five has any joint damage; we can't afford to lose people. We have so few, and Reynolt can't completely control the mindrot. But it's been most of a year since we had a simple medical fatality—and that was almost unavoidable. Somehow the zip got a punctured colon rightafter a clean checkup. He was an isolated specialty. His performance fell off, but we didn't know there was a problem till the smell got completely rank." So the slave had died from the inside out, too dedicated to cry his pain, too neglected for anyone to notice. Trud Silipan was only caring in the mean.

They reached the top, looked back down the lattice of mumbling humanity. "Now in one way you're right, Mr. Armsman Trinli. If these people were doing arithmetic or string sorting, this operation would be a joke. The smallest processor in a finger ring can do that sort of thing a billion times faster than any human. But you hear the zipheads talking?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense."

"It's internal jargon; they get into that pretty fast when we work them in teams. But the point is, they're not doing low-level machine functions. They'reusing our computer resources. See, for us Emergents, the zipheads are the next system layer above software. They can apply human intelligence, but with the persistence and patience of a machine. And that's also why unFocused specialists—especially techs like me—are important. Focus is useless unless there are normal people to direct it and to find the proper balance of hardware and software and Focus. Done right, the combination is totally beyond what you Qeng Ho ever achieved."

Pham had long ago understood that, but denying the point provoked steadily more detailed explanations from Emergents like Trud Silipan. "So what is this group actually doing?"