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Show swept Dr'Anya with a bright smile, and glided out of the room, long skirts swishing. The door clicked firmly shut behind her. Dr'Anya glanced at Janni. "Well, if thou art doing that well, we should be able to free ourselves soon from this thrice bedamned prison." She sat down again in the chair and frowned in thought. "How sayest thou? Free ourselves?" asked Janni, astonished. "Before hearing whether or no they will keep us for good?" For escaping in such a manner would assure that they could not go back in peace to their Hold. "Certes, daughter. Question not whether or no they will keep us for good-keep us they will, I have no doubt. But we will most assuredly find a way to escape them, on that I wager my very bones." She looked around the room, puzzled, not having lost that sense of something electronic. Then she looked up at the ceiling above her, craned her neck back, and swiveled half way around in her seat. She waved to Janni and jabbed a finger toward the ventilator she'd noticed in the ceiling. Janni looked up, then nodded her head and looked thoughtfully at her mother. Of course-the ventilator was masking a Snoop. There were Snoops planted everywhere in NewOxbridge. There were so many Snoops that the BauerNetwork had given up checking them. The information taken in went automatically where everything else went that was collected by the Network-into the governing computer's prodigious and glutted memory. There were alarms, of course, triggered by specially tagged "sensitive words," but it usually took many a Month-or rather TwelveMonth!-for memoes to start going out concerning them. As far as Janni and her mother were concerned, it could do little 84 |
