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blindness had only sharpened Cardenas’s talent.
    He’d attended a few Intuit conferences, where the talk was all about new vorec circuits and semantics. Little was said. Little
     had to be, since there were no misunderstandings between speakers. Among the attendees had been other cops, translators for
     multinats and governments, and entertainers. He remembered with special pleasure his conversation with the famous Eskimo Billy
     Oomigmak, a lieutenant with the Northwest Territories Federales. An Inuit Intuit would be an obvious candidate for celebrity
     status and Billy Oo had taken full advantage of it. Cardenas had no desire to trade places with him.
    “Can you read my thoughts?”
    “No, no. That’s a common misconception. All I can do issense the real meaning of a statement, detect if what’s being said is what’s being meant. If somebody utilizes phraseology
     to conceal something either in person or through an artvoc, I can often spot it. That’s why there are so many Intuit judges.
     Why do you think…?”
    He stopped. She had a hand over her mouth, stifling a laugh. Obviously she knew Intuits weren’t mind readers. She’d been teasing
     him. He pouted without realizing how silly it made him look.
    “Why’d you take me out, anyway? Charliebo aside.”
    Her hand dropped. She wasn’t smiling now, he saw. “Because it’s been a long time since I was out with a real grown-up, Angel.
     I like children, but not as dates.”
    He eyed her sharply. “Is that what this is? A date?”
    “Fooled you, didn’t I? All this time you thought it was a continuation of business.-Tell me: how’d they let somebody as small
     as you on the force?”
    He almost snapped at her, until he realized she was still teasing him. Well, he could tease, too. But all he could think of
     to say was, “Because there’s nobody better at breaking into a box.”
    “Is that so? You haven’t proven that to my satisfaction. Listening and probing at triple verbal’s impressive, but you still
     didn’t find anything.”
    “We don’t know yet that there’s anything to find.”
    “If there isn’t?”
    He shrugged. “I go back to Nogales where I can’t hear GenDyne scream.”
    “Dinner,” she said as their main course arrived. Cardenas’s chicken was simply and elegantly presented. He hadn’t realized
     how hungry he was. Eight hours of sponging had left him drained. He hardly heard her as he reached for his silverware.
    “Maybe later we’ll see how efficient a prober you really are.”
    He intuited that easy, but didn’t let on that he had. Steam hissed from the chicken as he sliced into it.
    * * *
    Each day he went into the GenDyne box and each evening he left the corporate offices feeling more baffled and disturbed than
     when he’d gone in. Not that Mermaid wasn’t full of accessible, fascinating information: it was. It was just that none of it
     was of the slightest use.
    Hypatia was of inestimable help, explaining where he didn’t understand, patiently elaborating on concepts he thought he understood
     but actually did not. GenDyne assigned her to him for the duration of his investigation. It pleased him. He thought it might
     have pleased her. After a week even she couldn’t keep his spirits up. He could be patient, he was methodical, but he was used
     to progressing, even at a creep. They weren’t learning anything. It was worse than going nowhere; he felt like they were going
     backward. Nor could he escape the feeling that somebody somewhere was laughing at him. He didn’t like it. Cardenas had a wry,
     subtle sense of humor, but not where his work was concerned.
    Anything that smelled of potential he recorded for playback later at half speed, then quarter speed. His senses were taut
     as the high string on a viola. He listened for the slightest off pronunciation, the one quirky vowel that might suggest an
     amorphous anomaly in the data. He found nothing. Mermaid was clean, neat, tidy, and innocuous as baby