That voice, the odd accent, like his grandmother’s almost, and her childish moon face above the long stick body made him feel curiously adrift, as if reality had turned inside out and left him stranded in a dreamscape. "There is very little it cannot dissolve," she said as the movement of the patterns onscreen accelerated.
He realized she was happy to explain, that this odd, pitiful person was a born teacher.
Abruptly, the screen cleared to a maze of symbols and glyphs.
"What is that?" he asked, his finger drawn to a particularly complex ideograph.
She grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grasp; he noticed for the first time how large her knuckles and wrist were in proportion to her
fingers and arms. "It is something the varlet Flindyk would most straitly desire thee to touch," she said without heat.
She released him as he pulled his hand back. With an attenuated finger, she touched the screen gently. The pattern folded in on itself, swallowing ranks of data. Rip had the sense of something focusing and wondered how Nunku saw it.
"A twisted web indeed he spinneth," she said. "But I shall pluck out the treasure at its heart." She touched the screen again, this time with a complex pattern of several fingers. Again the evolution, the sense of something evolving from blur to image. Nunku was once more the eel-maiden, this time swimming in a sea of data, with its own predators and beauties.
The unreality of the scene was intensified when Rip heard someone sneeze a few times in the outer chamber, and moments later he smelled a sharp odor rather like cinnamon and burned straw. The maintenance people were flushing the supposed vampire flies—they’d be in soon.
Nunku had to realize it too, but her face was merely absorbed as with delicate touch she tried various patterns of pressure and rhythm, watching the screen ripple through simpler and simpler patterns of symbols.
Finally the screen flickered and Rip saw data ranked in the Kanddoyd language. Moving swiftly now, Nunku pressed a keytab and at once the status light for a download shone a steady green.
"It returneth, its appetites sated, and with it our data."
It took only a few seconds, then Nunku pulled the chip out and the screen flickered to the fractal display they’d first seen.
"It should have erased my tracks," she said, "at least on the surface. A direct probe would reveal what we have done, but I do make no doubt I left nary a trace to raise the suspicions of yon miscreants."
"Then we’d better go," Rip said.
Until now she’d moved slowly; now she placed one of those impossibly thin feet on a surface and shot through the door to the outer room.
Very swiftly they all exited, the scouts reversing their process of entry so the pitfalls would be intact. Rip knew that the interruption would show up on some computer somewhere, but it couldn’t be helped. They could only hope that if the room seemed to be untouched no one would check—at least until they were safely out of reach.
They shot into the service adit just moments before a vanguard of maintenance people moved slowly down the hall, ostensibly looking for pests. One of Tooe’s klinti left the hatch open a fraction, just enough for them to see that the maintenance people were followed by two fully armed Monitors.
Someone closed the hatch, and in the dim indirect light of the service tunnel they moved swiftly back through the building’s crazy angles and curves until they emerged once again behind the protective screen of huge ferns.
Again they progressed in twos and threes onto the concourse, the last of the klinti being the two who had meanwhile shed and stashed their maintenance clothing.
This time, however, they did not go to the maglev. Instead, Rip and his companions from the Queen followed the others in an evasive pattern that led to the Spin Axis.
Rip was fascinated by the increasing strangeness of their surroundings as they approached the Spinner. Their route became ever more crooked, compressed by the micrograv shifting of forgotten cargo and junk over the centuries. Several times he saw where automated buildbots had evidently just chewed through everything in their path, bracing abandoned machinery to the walls merely as support for the new pipelines or data paths that transfixed them. No wonder there were so many leaks. It was almost like the Kanddoyds expected their cylome to be no more permanent than the planet that had rejected them.
From out of the fog and shadows came a hooting call, another in the series that had followed them, as unseen but ever-present klinti monitored their progress and their intentions. Of course they were tense, he thought, perceiving now the fragile network of relationships that kept the various factions and territories from deadly strife.
We've fractured the peace here—everywhere on the cylome, he
thought. If this doesn't work, if we can't prove this conspiracy, we won't survive. Everyone on the habitat will have been turned against us. Watching Nunku, Rip realized that the klinti knew this, and knew they would not survive either. They had made their choice: an irrevocable one.
The klinti nest was so bizarre that it gave Rip the sense of being the source of all the weirdness of the Spinner, rather than its effect. Not only was there no sense of up and down in the vast chamber, it seemed to have been designed using these elements of the klinti habitations with ferocious intent. Spidery latticework tubes—the free-fall equivalent of catwalks—webbed the space at all angles, swollen here and there with homes like galls on an oak branch. Between the thinner strands of the web were cables, ropes, and even some vines, which the inhabitants used to change direction on their graceful flights between catwalks. But when he saw two klinti meet and pass, each upside down to the other like an old Terran print he’d seen once, Rip saw how much more space that gave them. For a moment he flashed on how the Queen must look to Tooe, its wasteful, almost pretentious insistence on nonexistent acceleration, with almost half her space sacrificed to a cramped up-down orientation.
Nunku seemed to have no objections as Rip followed her to the strangest console he had ever seen. At a glance he knew that it was completely self-designed and built, and as he scanned it more slowly, his fingers unconsciously flexed as if they wanted nothing more than to get at those keys.
Nunku settled in place and inserted her chip, and moments later the screen reflected the same data that Rip remembered seeing on Flindyk’s screen.
"What I have," Nunku said, "are the payroll records. All of them."
Rip whistled to himself. That would be uncountable gigs of data. "Search on the ship names?" he asked.
Nunku nodded. "I do not think we shall find any ship names here," she said. "But of course we must examine for them first."
"You mean rule it out first," Rip said with a grin. "It won’t be that easy."
A rare, sweet smile transformed Nunku’s face for a moment into
something. almost human. Rip felt a wrench of pity for this young woman who was, after all, human, and who had been forced into this nightmarish form and existence through no fault of her own.
Her fingers tapped softly over her screen, tabbed two keys, and she said, "Nothing."
"How about people?" That was Dane. Stotz—of course— was busy examining the vibration compensators rigged on the junction with one of the catwalks. "The ones we suspect: Koytatik, Flindyk himself, and anyone from Clan Golm, but especially the Jheel."
Nunku’s fingers danced rapidly across the screen.
After a time, she said, "Here is Koytatik. They are paid by the piece, so this will be difficult." She pointed at the screen. "Here is Trade Authority—these are all ship Companies. Here’s one for a starfaring Shver clan."