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display; Jefri had almost panicked before he realized that the lower part of
the screen worked as a keyboard. It was a laborious job typing in every
letter of every word -- though Amdi had gotten pretty good at it, using four
noses to peck at the keys. And nowadays he could read Samnorsk even better
than Jefri.
Amdijefri spent many afternoons here. If there was a message waiting
from the previous day, they would bring it up page by page and Amdi would
copy and translate it. Then they would enter the questions and answers that
Mr. Steel had talked to them about. Then there was a lot of waiting. Even if
Ravna was watching at the other end, it could take several hours to get a
reply. But the link was so much better than during the winter; they could
almost feel Ravna getting closer. The unofficial conversations with her were
often the high point of their day.
So far, this day had been quite different. After the false workers
attacked, Amdijefri had the shakes for about half an hour. Mr. Steel had
been wounded trying to protect them. Maybe there was nowhere that was safe.
They messed with the outside displays, trying to peek through cracks in the
rough planking of the compound's walls.
"If we'd been able to see out, we could have warned Mr. Steel," said
Jefri.
"We should ask him to put some holes in the walls. We could be like
sentries."
They batted the idea around a bit. Then the latest message started
coming in from the rescue ship. Jefri jumped into the acc webbing by the
display. This was his dad's old spot, and there was plenty of room. Two of
Amdi slid in beside him. Another member hopped on the armrest and braced its
paws on Jefri's shoulders. Its slender neck extended toward the screen to
get a good view. The rest scrambled to arrange paper and pens. It was easy
to play back messages, but Amdijefri got a certain thrill out of seeing the
stuff coming down "live".
There was the initial header stuff -- that wasn't so interesting after
about the thousandth time you saw it -- then Ravna's actual words. Only this
time it was just tabular data, something to support the radio design.
"Nuts. It's numbers," said Jefri.
"Numbers!" said Amdi. He climbed a free member onto the boy's lap. It
stuck its nose close to the screen, cross-checking what the one by Jefri's
shoulder was seeing. The four on the floor were busy scratching away,
translating the decimal digits on the screen into the X's and O's and 1's
and deltas of Tines' base four notation. Almost from the beginning Jefri had
realized that Amdi was really good at math. Jefri wasn't envious. Amdi said
that hardly any of the Tines were that good, either; Amdi was a very special
pack. Jefri was proud that he had such a neat friend. Mom and Dad would have
liked Amdi. Still ... Jefri sighed, and relaxed in the webbing. This number
stuff was happening more and more often. Mom had read him a story once,
"Lost in the Slow Zone", about how some marooned explorers brought
civilization to a lost colony. In that, the heroes just collected the right
materials and built what they needed. There had been no talk of precision or
ratios or design.
He looked away from the screen, and petted the two of Amdi that were
sitting beside him. One of them wriggled under his hand. Their whole bodies
hummed back at him. Their eyes were closed. If Jefri didn't know better, he
would have assumed they were asleep. These were the parts of Amdi that
specialized in talking.
"Anything interesting?" Jefri said after a while. The one on his left
opened its eyes and looked at him.
"This is that bandwidth idea Ravna was talking about. If we don't make
things just right, we'll just get clicks and clacks."
"Oh, right." Jefri knew that the initial reinventions of radio were
usually not good for much more than Morse code. Ravna seemed to think they
could jump that stage. "What do you think Ravna is like?"
"What?" The scritching of pens on paper stopped for an instant; he had
all of Amdi's attention, even though they'd talked of this before. "Well,
like you ... only bigger and older?"
"Yeah, but -- " Jefri knew Ravna was from Sjandra Kei. She was a
grownup, somewhere older than Johanna and younger than Mom. What exactly
does she look like? "I mean, she's coming all this way just to rescue us and
finish what Mom and Dad were trying to do. She must really be a great
person."
The scritching stopped again, and the display scrolled heedless on.
They would have to replay it. "Yes," Amdi said after a moment. "She -- she
must be a lot like Mr. Steel. It will be nice to meet someone I can hug, the
way you do Mr. Steel."
Jefri was a little miffed by that. "Well wait, you can hug me!"
The parts of Amdi next to him purred loudly. "I know. But I mean
someone that's a grownup ... like a parent."
"Yeah."
They got the tables translated and checked in about an hour. Then it
was time to send up the latest things that Mr. Steel was asking about. There
were about four pages, all neatly printed in Samnorsk by Amdi. Usually he
liked to do the typing, too, all bunched up over the keyboard and display.
Today he wasn't interested. He lay all over Jefri, but didn't pay any
special attention to checking what was being keyed in. Every so often Jefri
felt a buzzing through his chest, or the screen mounting would make a
strange sound -- all in sympathy to the unhearable sounds that Amdi was
making between his members. Jefri recognized the signs of deep thought.
He finished typing in the latest message, adding a few small questions
of his own. Things like, "How old are you and Pham? Are you married? What
are Skroderiders like?"
Daylight had faded from the cracks in the walls. Soon the digger teams
would be turning in their hoes and marching off to the barracks over the
edge of the hill. Across the straits, the towers on Hidden Island would be
golden in the mist, like something in a fairy tale. Their whitejackets would
be calling Amdi and Jefri out for supper any minute now.
Two of Amdi jumped off the acc webbing, and began chasing each other
around the chair. "I've been thinking! I've been thinking! Ravna's radio
thing: why is it just for talking? She says all sound is just different
frequencies of the same thing. But sound is all that thought is. If we could
change some of the tables, and make the receivers and transmitters to cover
my tympana, why couldn't I think over the radio?"
"I don't know." Bandwidth was a familiar constraint on many everyday
activities, though Jefri had only a vague notion of exactly what it was. He
looked at the last of the tables, still displayed on the screen. He had a
sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never
attain. "I use these things all the time, but I don't know exactly how they
work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?"
Amdi was getting all excited now, the way he did when he'd thought of
some great prank. "No, no, no. We don't have to understand everything."
Three more of him jumped to the floor; he waved random sheets of paper up at
Jefri. "Ravna doesn't know for sure how we make sound. The directions
include options for making small changes. I've been thinking. I can see how
the changes relate." He paused and made a high-pitched squealing noise.
"Darn. I can't explain it exactly. But I think we can expand the tables, and
that will change the machine in ob-obvious ways. And then ..." Amdi was
beside himself for a moment, and speechless. "Oh Jefri, I wish you could be
a pack, too! Imagine putting one of yourself each on a different mountain
top, and then using radio to think. We could be as big as the world!"
Just then there was the sound of interpack gobbling from outside the
cabin, and then the Samnorsk: "Dinner time. We go now, Amdijefri. Okay?" It
was Mr. Shreck; he spoke a fair amount of Samnorsk, though not as well as
Mr. Steel. Amdijefri picked up the scattered sheets and carefully slipped
them into the pockets on the back of Amdi's jackets. They powered down the
display equipment and crawled into the main hold.
"Do you think Mr. Steel will let us make the changes?"
"Maybe we should also send them back to Ravna."
The whitejackets' member retreated from the hatch, and Amdijefri
descended. A minute later they were out in the slanting sunlight. The two
kids scarcely noticed; they were both caught up in Amdi's vision.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
For Johanna, lots of things changed in the weeks after Scriber
Jaqueramaphan died. Most were for the better, things that might never have
happened but for the murder ... and that made Johanna very sad.
She let Woodcarver live in her cabin, and take the place of the helper
pack. Apparently Woodcarver had wanted to do this from the beginning, but
had been afraid of the human's anger. Now they kept the dataset in the
cabin. There were never less than four packs of Vendacious' security
surrounding the place, and there was talk of building barracks around it.
She saw the others during the day at meetings, and individually when
they needed help with the dataset. Scrupilo, Vendacious, and Scarbutt -- the
"Pilgrim" -- all spoke fluent Samnorsk now, more than good enough so that
she could see the character behind their inhuman forms: Scrupilo, prissy and
very bright. Vendacious, as pompous as Scriber had ever seemed, but without
the playfulness and imagination. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar. She felt a chill
every time she saw his big, scarred one. It always sat in the back, hunched
down to look unthreatening. Pilgrim obviously knew how the sight affected
her and tried not to offend, but even after Scriber's death she couldn't do
more than tolerate that pack.... And after all, there could be traitors in
the Woodcarver castle. It was only Vendacious' theory that the murder had
been a raid from outside. She kept a suspicious eye on Pilgrim.
At night Woodcarver chased the other packs away. She huddled around the
firepit, and asked the dataset questions that had no conceivable connection
with fighting the Flenserists. Johanna sat with her and tried to explain
things that Woodcarver didn't understand. It was strange. Woodcarver was
something very like the Queen of these people. She had this enormous
(primitive, uncomfortable, ugly -- yet still enormous) castle. She had
dozens of servants. Yet she spent most of each night in this little wood
cabin with Johanna, and helped with the fire and the food at least as much
as the pack who had been here before.
So it was that Woodcarver became Johanna's second friend among the
Tines. (Scriber was the first, though she hadn't known it till after he was
dead.) Woodcarver was very smart and very strange. In some ways she was the
smartest person Johanna had ever known, though that conclusion came slowly.
She hadn't really been surprised when the Tines mastered Samnorsk quickly --
that's the way it was in most adventures, and more to the point, they had
the language learning programs in the dataset. But night after night Johanna
watched Woodcarver play with the set. The pack showed no interest in the
military tactics and chemistry that preoccupied them all during the day.
Instead she read about the Slow Zone and the Beyond and the history of
Straumli Realm. She had mastered nonlinear reading faster than any of the
others. Sometimes Johanna would just sit and stare over her shoulders. The
screen was split into windows, the main one scrolling much faster than
Johanna could follow. A dozen times a minute, Woodcarver might come upon
words she didn't recognize. Most were just unfamiliar Samnorsk: she'd tap a
nose on the offending word and the definition would flicker briefly in a
dictionary window. Other things were conceptual, and the new windows would
lead the pack off into other fields, sometimes for just a few seconds,
sometimes for many minutes -- and sometimes the detour would become her new
main path. In a way, she was everything that Scriber had wanted to be.
Many times she had questions the dataset couldn't really answer. She
and Johanna would talk late into the night. What was a human family like?
What had Straumli Realm thought to make at the High Lab? Johanna no longer
thought of most packs as gangs of snake-necked rats. Deep past midnight, the
dataset's screen was brighter than the gray light from the firepit. It
painted the backs of Woodcarver in cheerful colors. The pack gathered round
her, looking up, almost like small children listening to a teacher.
But Woodcarver was no child. Almost from the first, she had seemed old.
Those late night talks were beginning to teach Johanna about the Tines, too.
The pack said things she never did during the day. They were mostly things
that must be obvious to other Tines, but never talked about. The human girl
wondered if Woodcarver the Queen had anyone to confide in.
Only one of Woodcarver's members was physically old; two were scarcely
more than puppies. It was the pattern of the pack that was half a thousand
years old. And that showed. Woodcarver's soul was held together by little
more than willpower. The price of immortality had been inbreeding. The
original stock had been healthy, but after six hundred years.... One of her
youngest members couldn't stop drooling; it was constantly patting a
kerchief to its muzzle. Another had milky white in its eyes where there
should have been deep brown. Woodcarver said it was stone blind, but healthy
and her best talker. Her oldest member was visibly feeble; it was panting
all the time. Unfortunately, Woodcarver said it was the most alert and
creative of all. When it died....
Once she started looking for it, Johanna could see weakness in all of
Woodcarver. Even the two healthiest members, strong and with plush fur,
walked a little strangely compared to normal pack members. Was that due to
spinal deformities? The two were also gaining weight, which wasn't helping
the problem.
Johanna didn't learn this all at once. Woodcarver had told her about
various Tinish affairs, and gradually her own story came out, too. She
seemed glad to have someone to confide in, but Johanna saw little self-pity
in her. Woodcarver had chosen this path -- apparently it was perversion to
some -- and had beaten the odds for longer than any other pack in recorded
history. She was more wistful than anything else, that her luck had finally
run out.
Tines architecture tended to extremes -- grotesquely oversized, or too
cramped for human use. Woodcarvers council chamber was at the large extreme;
it was not a cozy place. You could get three hundred humans into the
bowl-shaped cavity with room to spare. The separated balconies that ran
around its upper circumference could have held another hundred more.
Johanna had been here often enough before; this was where most work was
done with the dataset. Usually there was herself and Woodcarver and whoever
else needed information. Today was different, not a day to consult the
dataset at all: This was Johanna's first council meeting. There were twelve
packs in the High Council, and they were all here. Every balcony contained a
pack, and there were three on the floor. Johanna knew enough about Tines now
to see that for all the empty space, the place was hideously crowded. There
was the mind noise of fifteen packs. Even with all the padded tapestries,
she felt an occasional buzzing in her head or through her hands from the
railing.
Johanna stood with Woodcarver on the largest balcony. When they
arrived, Vendacious was already down on the main floor, arranging diagrams.
As the packs of the council came to their feet, he looked up and said
something to Woodcarver. The Queen replied in Samnorsk: "I know it will slow
things down, but perhaps that's a good thing." She made a human laughing
sound.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing on the next balcony over, just
like some council pack. Strange. Johanna had not yet figured out why, but
Scarbutt seemed to be one of Woodcarver's favorites. "Pilgrim, would you
translate for Johanna?"
Pilgrim bobbed several heads. "Is, is that okay, Johanna?"
The girl hesitated an instant, then nodded back. It made sense. Next to
Woodcarver, Pilgrim spoke better Samnorsk than any of them. As Woodcarver
sat down, she took the dataset from Johanna and popped it open. Johanna
glanced at the figures on the screen. She's made notes. Her surprise didn't
have a chance to register, before the Queen was talking again -- this time
in the gobble sounds of interpack talk. After a second, Pilgrim began
translating:
"Everyone please sit. Hunker down. This meeting is crowded enough as it
is." Johanna almost smiled. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar was pretty good. He was
imitating Woodcarver's human voice perfectly. His translation even captured
the wry authority of her speech.
After some shuffling around, only one or two heads were visible
sticking up from each balcony. Most stray thought noise should now be caught
in the padding around the balcony or absorbed by the quilted canopy that
hung over the room. "Vendacious, you may proceed."
On the main floor, Vendacious stood and looked up in all directions. He
started talking. "Thank you," came the translation, now imitating the
security chief's tones. "The Woodcarver asked me to call this meeting
because of urgent developments in the North. Our sources there report that
Steel is fortifying the region around Johanna's starship."
Gobble gobble interruption. Scrupilo? "That's not news. That's what our
cannon and gunpowder are for."
Vendacious: "Yes, we've known of the plans for some time. Nevertheless
the completion date has been advanced, and the final version will have walls
a good deal thicker than we had figured. It also appears that once the
enclosure is complete, Steel intends to break apart the starship and
distribute its cargo through his various laboratories."
For Johanna the words came like a kick in the stomach. Before there had
been a chance: If they fought hard enough, they might recapture the ship.
She might finish her parents' mission, perhaps even get rescued.
Pilgrim said something on his own account, translating: "So what's the
new deadline?"
"They're confident of having the main walls complete in just under ten
tendays."
Woodcarver bent a pair of noses to the keyboard, tapped in a note. At
the same time she stuck a head over the railing and looked down at the
security chief. "I've noticed before that Steel tends to be a bit
over-optimistic. Do you have an objective estimate?"
"Yes. The walls will be complete between eight and eleven tendays from
now."
Woodcarver: "We had been counting on at least fifteen. Is this a
response to our plans?"
On the floor below, Vendacious drew himself together. "That was our
first suspicion, Your Majesty. But ... as you know, we have a number of very
special sources of information ... sources we shouldn't discuss even here."
"What a braggart. Sometimes I wonder if he knows anything. I've never
seen him stick his asses out in the field." Huh? It took Johanna a second to
realize that this was Pilgrim, editorializing. She glanced across the
railing. Three of Pilgrim's heads were visible, two looking her way. They
bore an expression she recognized as a silly smile. No one else seemed to
react to his comment; apparently he could focus his translation on Johanna
alone. She glared at him, and after a moment he resumed his businesslike
translation:
"Steel knows we plan to attack, but he does not know about our special
weapons. This change in schedule appears to be a matter of random suspicion.
Unfortunately we are the worse for it."
Three or four Councillors began talking at once. "Much loud
unhappiness," came Pilgrim's voice, summing up. "They're full of 'I knew
this plan would never work' and 'Why did we ever agree to attack the
Flenserists in the first place'."
Right next to Johanna, Woodcarver emitted a shrill whistle. The
recriminations dribbled to a halt. "Some of you forget your courage. We
agreed to attack Hidden Island because it has been a deadly threat, one we
thought we could destroy with Johanna's cannons -- and one that could surely
destroy us if Steel ever learns to use the starship." One of Woodcarver's
members, crouching on the floor, reached out to brush Johanna's knee.
Pilgrim's focused voice chuckled in her ear. "And there's also the
little matter of getting you home and making contact with the stars, but she
can't say that aloud to the 'pragmatic' types. In case you haven't guessed,
that's one reason you're here -- to remind the chuckleheads there's more in
heaven than they have dreamed." He paused, and switched back to translating
Woodcarver:
"No mistake was made in undertaking this campaign: avoiding it would be
as deadly as fighting and losing. So ... do we have any chance of getting an
effective army up the coast in time?" She jabbed a nose in the direction of
a balcony across the room. "Scrupilo. Please be brief."
"The last thing Scrupilo can be is brief -- oops, sorry," More
editorializing from Peregrine.
Scrupilo stuck a couple more heads into view. "I've already discussed
this with Vendacious, Your Majesty. Raising an army, traveling up the coast
-- those all could be done in well under ten tendays. It's the cannon, and
perhaps training packs to use cannon, that is the problem. That is my
special area of responsibility."
Woodcarver said something abrupt.
"Yes, Majesty. We have the gunpowder. It is every bit as powerful as
Dataset says. The gun tubes have been a much greater problem. Till very
recently, the metal cracked at the breech as it cooled. Now I think I have
that fixed. At least I have two unblemished guntubes. I had hoped for
several tendays of testing -- "
Woodcarver interrupted, "-- but that is something we can't afford now."
She came completely to her feet and looked all around the council room. "I
want full-size testing immediately. If it's successful, we'll start making
gun tubes as fast as we can." And if not...
Two days later...
The funniest thing was that Scrupilo expected her to inspect the gun
tube before he fired it. The pack walked excitedly around the rig,
explaining things in awkward Samnorsk. Johanna followed, frowning seriously.
Some meters off, mostly hidden behind a berm, Woodcarver and her High
Council were watching the exercise. Well, the thing looked real enough.
They'd mounted it on a small cart that could roll back into a pile of dirt
under the recoil force. The tube itself was a single cast piece of metal
about a meter long with a ten-centimeter bore. Gunpowder and shot went in
the front end. The powder was ignited through a tiny firehole at the rear.
Johanna ran her hand along the barrel. The leaden surface was bumpy,
and there seemed be pieces of dirt caught in the metal. Even the walls of
the bore were not completely smooth; would that make a difference? Scrupilo
was explaining how he had used straw in the molds to keep the metal from
cracking as it cooled. Yecco. "You should try it out with small amounts of
gunpowder first," she said.
Scrupilo's voice became a bit conspiratorial, more focused, "Just
between you me, I did that. It went very good. Now for big test."
Hmm. So you're not a complete flake. She smiled at the nearest of him,
a member with no black at all in his head fur. In a kooky way, Scrupilo
reminded her of some the scientists at the High Lab.
Scrupilo stepped back from the cannon and said loudly, "It is all okay
to go now?" Two of him were looking nervously at the High Councillors beyond
the berm.
"Um, yes, it looks fine to me." And of course it should. The design was
copied straight from Nyjoran models in Johanna's history files. "But be
careful -- if it doesn't work right, it could kill anybody nearby."
"Yes, yes." Having gotten her official endorsement, Scrupilo swept
around the piece and shooed Johanna toward the sidelines. As she walked back
to Woodcarver, he continued in Tinish, no doubt explaining the test.
"Do you think it will work?" Woodcarver asked her quietly. She seemed
even more feeble than usual. They had spread a woven mat for her, on the
mossy heather behind the berm. Most of her lay quietly, heads between paws.
The blind one looked asleep; the young drooler cuddled against it, twitching
nervously. As usual Peregrine Wickwrackscar was nearby, but he wasn't
translating now. All his attention was on Scrupilo.
Johanna thought of the straw that Scrupilo had used in the molds.
Woodcarver's people were really trying to help, but.... She shook her head,
"I -- who knows." She came to her knees and looked over the berm. The whole
thing looked like a circus act from a history file. There were the
performing animals, the cannon. There was even the circus tent: Vendacious
had insisted on hiding the operation from possible spies in the hills. The
enemy might see something, but the longer Steel lacked details the better.
The Scrupilo pack hustled around the cannon, talking all the time. Two
of him hauled up a keg of black powder and he began pushing the stuff down
the barrel. A wad of silkpaper followed the powder down the barrel. He
tamped it into place, then loaded the cannon ball. At the same time, the
rest of him pushed the cart around to point out of the tent.
They were on the forest side of the castle yard, between the old and
new walls. Johanna could see a patch of green hillside, drizzly clouds
hanging low. About a hundred meters away was the old wall. In fact this was
the same stretch of stone where Scriber had been killed. Even if the damn
cannon didn't blow up, no one had any idea how far the shot would go.
Johanna was betting it wouldn't even get to the wall.
Scrupilo was on this side of the gun now, trying to light a long wooden
firing wand. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Johanna knew this
couldn't work. They were all fools and amateurs, she as much as they. And
this poor guy is going to get killed for nothing.
Johanna came to her feet. Gotta stop it. Something grabbed her belt and
pulled her down. It was one of Woodcarver's members, one of the fat ones
that couldn't walk quite right. "We have to try," the pack said softly.
Scrupilo had the wand alight now. Suddenly he stopped talking. All of
him but the white-headed one ran for the protection of the berm. For an
instant it seemed like strange cowardice, and then Johanna understood: A
human playing with something explosive would also try to shield his body --
except for the hand that held the match. Scrupilo was risking a maiming, but
not death.
The white-headed one looked across the trampled heather to the rest of
Scrupilo. It didn't seem upset so much as attentively listening. At this
distance it couldn't be part of Scrupilo's mind, but the creature was
probably smarter than any dog -- and apparently it was getting some kind of
directions from the rest.
White-head turned and walked toward the cannon. It belly-crawled the
last meter, taking what cover there was in the dirt behind the gun cart. It
held the wand so the flame at its tip came slowly down on the fire hole.
Johanna ducked behind the berm....
The explosion was a sharp snapping sound. Woodcarver shuddered against
her, and whistles of pain came from all around the tent. Poor Scrupilo!
Johanna felt tears starting. I have to look; I'm partly responsible. Slowly
she stood and forced herself to look across the field to where a minute ago
the cannon had been -- and still is! Thick smoke floated from both ends, but
the tube was intact. And more, White-head was wobbling dazedly around the
cart, his white fur now covered with soot.
The rest of Scrupilo raced out to White-head. The five of him ran round
and round the cannon, bounding over each other in triumph. For a long
moment, the rest of the audience just stared. The gun was in one piece. The
gunner had survived. And, almost as a side effect ... Johanna looked over
the gun, up the hillside: There was a meter-wide notch in the top of the old
wall, where none had been before. Vendacious would have a hard time
disguising that from enemy inspection!
Dumb silence gave way to the noisiest affair Johanna had seen yet.
There was the usual gobbling, and other sounds -- hissing that hovered right
at the edge of sensibility. On the other side of the tent, two Tines she
didn't know ran into each other: for a moment of mindless jubilation, they
were an enormous pack of nine or ten members.
We'll get the ship back yet! Johanna turned to hug Woodcarver. But the
Queen was not shouting with the others. She huddled with her heads close
together, shivering. "Woodcarver?" She petted the neck of one of the big,
fat ones. It jerked away, its body spasming.
Stroke? Heart attack? The names of oldenday killers popped into her
mind. Just how would they apply to a pack? Something was terribly wrong, and
nobody else had noticed. Johanna bounced back to her feet. "Pilgrim!" she
screamed.
Five minutes later, they had Woodcarver out of the tent. The place was
still a madhouse, but gone deathly quiet to Johanna's ears. She'd helped the
Queen onto her carriage, but after that no one would let her near. Even
Pilgrim, so eager to translate everything the day before, brushed her aside.
"It will be okay," was all he said as he ran to the front of the carriage
and grabbed the reins of the shaggy Whatsits. The carriage pulled out,
surrounded by several packs of guards. For an instant, the weirdness of the
Tines world came crashing back on Johanna. This was a obviously a great
emergency. A person might be dying. People were rushing this way and that.
And yet.... The packs drew into themselves. No one crowded close. No one
could touch another.
The instant passed, and Johanna was running out of the tent after the
carriage. She tried to keep to the heather along the muddy path, and almost
caught up. Everything was wet and chill, gunmetal gray. Everyone had been so
intent on the test -- could this be more Flenser treachery? Johanna
stumbled, went down on her knees in the mud. The carriage turned a corner,
onto cobblestones. Now it was lost to sight. She got up and slogged on
through the wet, but a little slower now. There was nothing she could do,
nothing she could do. She had made friends with Scriber, and Scriber had
been killed. She had made friends with Woodcarver, and now....
She walked along the cobbled alley between the castle's storehouses.
The carriage was out of sight, but she could hear its clatter on ahead.
Vendacious' security packs ran in both directions past her, stopping briefly
in side niches to allow opposing traffic by. Nobody answered her questions
-- probably none of them even spoke Samnorsk.
Johanna almost got lost. She could hear the carriage, but it had turned
somewhere. She heard it again behind her. They were taking Woodcarver to
Johanna's place! She went back, and a few minutes later was climbing the
path to the two-storey cabin she had shared with Woodcarver these last
weeks. Johanna was too pooped to run anymore. She walked slowly up the
hillside, vaguely aware of her wet and muddy state. The carriage was stopped
about five meters short of the door. Guard packs were strung out along the
hill, but their bows weren't nocked.
The afternoon sunlight found a break in the western clouds and shone
for a moment on the damp heather and glistening timbers, lighting them
bright against dark sky above the hills. It was a combination of light and
dark that had always seemed especially beautiful to Johanna. Please let her
be okay.
The guards let her pass. Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing around
the entrance, three of him watching her approach. The fourth, Scarbutt, had
its long neck stuck through the doorway, watching whatever was inside. "She
wanted to be back here when it happened," he said.
"What h-happened?" said Johanna.
Pilgrim made the equivalent of a shrug. "It was the shock of that
cannon going off. But almost anything could have done it." There was
something odd about the way his heads were bobbing around. With a shock
Johanna realized the pack was smiling, full of glee.
"I want to see her!" Scarbutt backed hastily away as she started for
the door.
Inside there was only the light from the door and the high window
slits. It took a second for Johanna's eyes to adjust. Something smelled ...
wet. Woodcarver was lying in a circle on the quilted mattress she used every
evening. She crossed the room and went to her knees beside the pack. The
pack edged nervously away from her touch. There was blood, and what looked
like a pile of guts, in the middle of the mattress. Johanna felt vomit
rising in her. "W-Woodcarver?" she said very softly.
One of the Queen moved back toward Johanna and put its muzzle in the
girl's hand. "Hello, Johanna. It's ... so strange ... to have someone next
to me at a time like this."
"You're bleeding. What's the matter?"
Soft, human-sounding laughter. "I'm hurt, but it's good.... See." The
blind one was holding something small and wet in its jaws. One of the others
was licking it. Whatever it was, it was wiggling, alive. And Johanna
remembered how strangely plump and awkward parts of Woodcarver had become.
"A baby?"
"Yes. And I'm going to have another in a day or two."
Johanna sat back on the floor timbers, and covered her face with her
hands. She was going to start crying again. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Woodcarver didn't say anything for a moment. She licked the little one
all around, then set it against the tummy of the member that must be its
mother. The newborn snuggled close, nuzzling into the belly fur. It didn't
make any noise that Johanna could hear. Finally the Queen said, "I ... don't
know if I can make you understand. This has been very hard for me."
"Having babies?" Johanna's hands were sticky with the blood on the
quilt. Obviously this had been hard, but that's how all lives must start on
a world like this. It was pain that needed the support of friends, pain that
led to joy.
"No. Having the babies isn't it. I've borne more than a hundred in my
memory's time. But these two ... are the ending of me. How can you
understand? You humans don't even have the choice to keep on living; your
offspring can never be you. But for me, it's the end of a soul six hundred
years old. You see, I'm going to keep these two to be part of me ... and for
the first time in all the centuries, I am not both the mother and the
father. A newby I'll become."
Johanna looked at the blind one and the drooler. Six hundred years of
incest. How much longer could Woodcarver have continued before the mind
itself decayed? Not both the mother and the father. "But then who is
father?" she blurted out.
"Who do you think?" The voice came from just beyond the door. One of
Peregrine Wickwrackscar's heads peered around the corner just far enough to
show an eye. "When Woodcarver makes a decision, she goes for extremes. She's
been the most tightly held soul of all time. But now she has blood -- genes,
Dataset would say -- from packs all over the world, from one of the flakiest
pilgrims who ever cast his soul upon the wind."
"Also from one of the smartest," said Woodcarver, her voice wry and
wistful at the same time. "The new soul will be at least as intelligent as
before, and probably a lot more flexible."
"And I'm a little bit pregnant, myself," said Pilgrim. "But I'm not the
least bit sad. I've been a foursome for too long. Imagine, having pups by
Woodcarver herself! Maybe I'll turn all conservative and settle down."
"Hah! Even two from me is not enough to slow your pilgrim soul."
Johanna listened to the banter. The ideas were so alien, and yet the
overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. Somewhere ...
then she had it: When Johanna was just five years old, and Mom and Dad
brought little Jefri home. Johanna couldn't remember the words, or even the
sense of what they'd said -- but the tone was the same as what went between
Woodcarver and Pilgrim.
Johanna slid back to a sitting position, the tension of the day
evaporating. Scrupilo's artillery really worked; there was a chance of
getting the ship. And even if they failed ... she felt a little bit like she
was back home.
"C-can I pet your puppy?"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The voyage of the Out of Band II had begun in catastrophe, where life
and death were a difference of hours or minutes. In the first weeks there
had been terror and loneliness and the resurrection of Pham. The OOB had
fallen quickly toward the galactic plane, away from Relay. Day by day the
whorl of stars tilted up to meet them, till it was the single band of light,
the Milky Way as seen from the perspective of Nyjora and Old Earth -- and
from most all the habitable planets of the Galaxy.
Twenty thousand light-years in three weeks. But that had been on a path
through the Middle Beyond. Now in the galactic plane, they were still six
thousand light-years from their goal at the Bottom of the Beyond. The Zone
interfaces roughly followed surfaces of constant mean density; on a galactic
scale, the Bottom was a vaguely lens-shaped surface, surrounding much of the
galactic disk. The OOB was moving in the plane of the disk now, more or less
toward the galactic center. Every week took them deeper toward the Slowness.
Worse, their path, and all variants that made any progress, extended right
through a region of massive Zone shifting. The Net News had called it the
Great Zone Storm, though of course there was not the slightest physical
feeling of turbulence within the volume. But some days their progress was
less that eighty percent what they'd expected.
Early on they'd known that it was not only the storm that was slowing
them. Blueshell had gone outside, looking over the damage that still
remained from their escape.
"So it's the ship itself?" Ravna had glared out from the bridge,
watching the now imperceptible crawl of near stars across the heavens. The
confirmation was no revelation. But what to do?
Blueshell trundled back and forth across the ceiling. Every time he
reached the far wall, he'd query ship's management about the pressure seal
on the nose lock. Ravna glared at him, "Hey, that was the n'th time you've
checked status in the last three minutes. If you really think something is
wrong, then fix it."
The Skroderider's wheeled progress came to an abrupt halt. Fronds waved
uncertainly. "But I was just outside. I want to be sure I shut the port
correctly.... Oh, you mean I've already checked it?"
Ravna looked up at him, and tried to get the sting out of her voice.
Blueshell wasn't the proper target for her frustration. "Yup. At least five
times."
"I'm sorry." He paused, going into the stillness of complete
concentration. "I've committed the memory." Sometimes the habit was cute,
and sometimes just irritating: When the Riders tried to think on more than
one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain
short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior,
repeating an action and immediately forgetting the accomplishment.
Pham grinned, looking a lot cooler than Ravna felt. "What I don't see
is why you Riders put up with it."
"What?"
"Well, according to the ship's library, you've had these Skrode gadgets
since before there was a Net. So how come you haven't improved the design,
gotten rid of the silly wheels, upgraded the memory tracking? I bet that
even a Slow Zone combat programmer like me could come up with a better
design than the one you're riding."
"It's really a matter of tradition," Blueshell said primly, "We're
grateful to Whatever gave us wheels and memory in the first place."
"Hmm."
Ravna almost smiled. By now she knew Pham well enough to guess what he
was thinking -- namely that plenty of Riders might have gone on to better
things in the Transcend. Those remaining were likely to have self-imposed
limitations.
"Yes. Tradition. Many who once were Riders have changed -- even
Transcended. But we persist." Greenstalk paused, and when she continued
sounded even more shy than usual. "You've heard of the Rider Myth?"
"No," said Ravna, distracted in spite of herself. In the time ahead she
would know as much about these Riders as about any human friends, but for
now there were still surprises.
"Not many have. Not that it's a secret; it's just we don't make much of
it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don't proselytize. Four or
five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first
Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something
destroyed our Creator and all its works.... A catastrophe so great that from
this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind."
There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in
the distant past, in the time of the Ur-Partition. But the Net couldn't be
forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in
Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.
"So in a sense," Greenstalk said, "we Riders are the faithful ones,
waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the
traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience
possible."
"Quite so," said Blueshell. "And the design itself is very subtle, My
Lady, even if the function is simple." He rolled to the center of the
ceiling. "The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline -- concentration
on what's truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many
things...." Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: "Two of our drive
spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be
degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I've
studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm."
"... and it's still getting worse?"
"Unfortunately so."
"So how bad will it get?"
Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. "My Lady Ravna, we can't be
certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or --
You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final
consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than
anything. We don't know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the
Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives
very carefully ... and hope."
It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom
of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter
of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into
cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached
him, and the secret of his parents' ship buried in some medieval midden.
Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. "Still, this is
the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a
decade." He shrugged. "Surely there's some place we can get repairs?"
"Several."
So much for "a quick flight, all unobserved". Ravna sighed. The final
fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software.
All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. "Do you
have any ideas?"
"About what?" Greenstalk said.
Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of
comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.
Blueshell rattled at his mate.
"Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several
possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here,
but outside this storm. We -- "
"Too far," Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.
the screen worked as a keyboard. It was a laborious job typing in every
letter of every word -- though Amdi had gotten pretty good at it, using four
noses to peck at the keys. And nowadays he could read Samnorsk even better
than Jefri.
Amdijefri spent many afternoons here. If there was a message waiting
from the previous day, they would bring it up page by page and Amdi would
copy and translate it. Then they would enter the questions and answers that
Mr. Steel had talked to them about. Then there was a lot of waiting. Even if
Ravna was watching at the other end, it could take several hours to get a
reply. But the link was so much better than during the winter; they could
almost feel Ravna getting closer. The unofficial conversations with her were
often the high point of their day.
So far, this day had been quite different. After the false workers
attacked, Amdijefri had the shakes for about half an hour. Mr. Steel had
been wounded trying to protect them. Maybe there was nowhere that was safe.
They messed with the outside displays, trying to peek through cracks in the
rough planking of the compound's walls.
"If we'd been able to see out, we could have warned Mr. Steel," said
Jefri.
"We should ask him to put some holes in the walls. We could be like
sentries."
They batted the idea around a bit. Then the latest message started
coming in from the rescue ship. Jefri jumped into the acc webbing by the
display. This was his dad's old spot, and there was plenty of room. Two of
Amdi slid in beside him. Another member hopped on the armrest and braced its
paws on Jefri's shoulders. Its slender neck extended toward the screen to
get a good view. The rest scrambled to arrange paper and pens. It was easy
to play back messages, but Amdijefri got a certain thrill out of seeing the
stuff coming down "live".
There was the initial header stuff -- that wasn't so interesting after
about the thousandth time you saw it -- then Ravna's actual words. Only this
time it was just tabular data, something to support the radio design.
"Nuts. It's numbers," said Jefri.
"Numbers!" said Amdi. He climbed a free member onto the boy's lap. It
stuck its nose close to the screen, cross-checking what the one by Jefri's
shoulder was seeing. The four on the floor were busy scratching away,
translating the decimal digits on the screen into the X's and O's and 1's
and deltas of Tines' base four notation. Almost from the beginning Jefri had
realized that Amdi was really good at math. Jefri wasn't envious. Amdi said
that hardly any of the Tines were that good, either; Amdi was a very special
pack. Jefri was proud that he had such a neat friend. Mom and Dad would have
liked Amdi. Still ... Jefri sighed, and relaxed in the webbing. This number
stuff was happening more and more often. Mom had read him a story once,
"Lost in the Slow Zone", about how some marooned explorers brought
civilization to a lost colony. In that, the heroes just collected the right
materials and built what they needed. There had been no talk of precision or
ratios or design.
He looked away from the screen, and petted the two of Amdi that were
sitting beside him. One of them wriggled under his hand. Their whole bodies
hummed back at him. Their eyes were closed. If Jefri didn't know better, he
would have assumed they were asleep. These were the parts of Amdi that
specialized in talking.
"Anything interesting?" Jefri said after a while. The one on his left
opened its eyes and looked at him.
"This is that bandwidth idea Ravna was talking about. If we don't make
things just right, we'll just get clicks and clacks."
"Oh, right." Jefri knew that the initial reinventions of radio were
usually not good for much more than Morse code. Ravna seemed to think they
could jump that stage. "What do you think Ravna is like?"
"What?" The scritching of pens on paper stopped for an instant; he had
all of Amdi's attention, even though they'd talked of this before. "Well,
like you ... only bigger and older?"
"Yeah, but -- " Jefri knew Ravna was from Sjandra Kei. She was a
grownup, somewhere older than Johanna and younger than Mom. What exactly
does she look like? "I mean, she's coming all this way just to rescue us and
finish what Mom and Dad were trying to do. She must really be a great
person."
The scritching stopped again, and the display scrolled heedless on.
They would have to replay it. "Yes," Amdi said after a moment. "She -- she
must be a lot like Mr. Steel. It will be nice to meet someone I can hug, the
way you do Mr. Steel."
Jefri was a little miffed by that. "Well wait, you can hug me!"
The parts of Amdi next to him purred loudly. "I know. But I mean
someone that's a grownup ... like a parent."
"Yeah."
They got the tables translated and checked in about an hour. Then it
was time to send up the latest things that Mr. Steel was asking about. There
were about four pages, all neatly printed in Samnorsk by Amdi. Usually he
liked to do the typing, too, all bunched up over the keyboard and display.
Today he wasn't interested. He lay all over Jefri, but didn't pay any
special attention to checking what was being keyed in. Every so often Jefri
felt a buzzing through his chest, or the screen mounting would make a
strange sound -- all in sympathy to the unhearable sounds that Amdi was
making between his members. Jefri recognized the signs of deep thought.
He finished typing in the latest message, adding a few small questions
of his own. Things like, "How old are you and Pham? Are you married? What
are Skroderiders like?"
Daylight had faded from the cracks in the walls. Soon the digger teams
would be turning in their hoes and marching off to the barracks over the
edge of the hill. Across the straits, the towers on Hidden Island would be
golden in the mist, like something in a fairy tale. Their whitejackets would
be calling Amdi and Jefri out for supper any minute now.
Two of Amdi jumped off the acc webbing, and began chasing each other
around the chair. "I've been thinking! I've been thinking! Ravna's radio
thing: why is it just for talking? She says all sound is just different
frequencies of the same thing. But sound is all that thought is. If we could
change some of the tables, and make the receivers and transmitters to cover
my tympana, why couldn't I think over the radio?"
"I don't know." Bandwidth was a familiar constraint on many everyday
activities, though Jefri had only a vague notion of exactly what it was. He
looked at the last of the tables, still displayed on the screen. He had a
sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never
attain. "I use these things all the time, but I don't know exactly how they
work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?"
Amdi was getting all excited now, the way he did when he'd thought of
some great prank. "No, no, no. We don't have to understand everything."
Three more of him jumped to the floor; he waved random sheets of paper up at
Jefri. "Ravna doesn't know for sure how we make sound. The directions
include options for making small changes. I've been thinking. I can see how
the changes relate." He paused and made a high-pitched squealing noise.
"Darn. I can't explain it exactly. But I think we can expand the tables, and
that will change the machine in ob-obvious ways. And then ..." Amdi was
beside himself for a moment, and speechless. "Oh Jefri, I wish you could be
a pack, too! Imagine putting one of yourself each on a different mountain
top, and then using radio to think. We could be as big as the world!"
Just then there was the sound of interpack gobbling from outside the
cabin, and then the Samnorsk: "Dinner time. We go now, Amdijefri. Okay?" It
was Mr. Shreck; he spoke a fair amount of Samnorsk, though not as well as
Mr. Steel. Amdijefri picked up the scattered sheets and carefully slipped
them into the pockets on the back of Amdi's jackets. They powered down the
display equipment and crawled into the main hold.
"Do you think Mr. Steel will let us make the changes?"
"Maybe we should also send them back to Ravna."
The whitejackets' member retreated from the hatch, and Amdijefri
descended. A minute later they were out in the slanting sunlight. The two
kids scarcely noticed; they were both caught up in Amdi's vision.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
For Johanna, lots of things changed in the weeks after Scriber
Jaqueramaphan died. Most were for the better, things that might never have
happened but for the murder ... and that made Johanna very sad.
She let Woodcarver live in her cabin, and take the place of the helper
pack. Apparently Woodcarver had wanted to do this from the beginning, but
had been afraid of the human's anger. Now they kept the dataset in the
cabin. There were never less than four packs of Vendacious' security
surrounding the place, and there was talk of building barracks around it.
She saw the others during the day at meetings, and individually when
they needed help with the dataset. Scrupilo, Vendacious, and Scarbutt -- the
"Pilgrim" -- all spoke fluent Samnorsk now, more than good enough so that
she could see the character behind their inhuman forms: Scrupilo, prissy and
very bright. Vendacious, as pompous as Scriber had ever seemed, but without
the playfulness and imagination. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar. She felt a chill
every time she saw his big, scarred one. It always sat in the back, hunched
down to look unthreatening. Pilgrim obviously knew how the sight affected
her and tried not to offend, but even after Scriber's death she couldn't do
more than tolerate that pack.... And after all, there could be traitors in
the Woodcarver castle. It was only Vendacious' theory that the murder had
been a raid from outside. She kept a suspicious eye on Pilgrim.
At night Woodcarver chased the other packs away. She huddled around the
firepit, and asked the dataset questions that had no conceivable connection
with fighting the Flenserists. Johanna sat with her and tried to explain
things that Woodcarver didn't understand. It was strange. Woodcarver was
something very like the Queen of these people. She had this enormous
(primitive, uncomfortable, ugly -- yet still enormous) castle. She had
dozens of servants. Yet she spent most of each night in this little wood
cabin with Johanna, and helped with the fire and the food at least as much
as the pack who had been here before.
So it was that Woodcarver became Johanna's second friend among the
Tines. (Scriber was the first, though she hadn't known it till after he was
dead.) Woodcarver was very smart and very strange. In some ways she was the
smartest person Johanna had ever known, though that conclusion came slowly.
She hadn't really been surprised when the Tines mastered Samnorsk quickly --
that's the way it was in most adventures, and more to the point, they had
the language learning programs in the dataset. But night after night Johanna
watched Woodcarver play with the set. The pack showed no interest in the
military tactics and chemistry that preoccupied them all during the day.
Instead she read about the Slow Zone and the Beyond and the history of
Straumli Realm. She had mastered nonlinear reading faster than any of the
others. Sometimes Johanna would just sit and stare over her shoulders. The
screen was split into windows, the main one scrolling much faster than
Johanna could follow. A dozen times a minute, Woodcarver might come upon
words she didn't recognize. Most were just unfamiliar Samnorsk: she'd tap a
nose on the offending word and the definition would flicker briefly in a
dictionary window. Other things were conceptual, and the new windows would
lead the pack off into other fields, sometimes for just a few seconds,
sometimes for many minutes -- and sometimes the detour would become her new
main path. In a way, she was everything that Scriber had wanted to be.
Many times she had questions the dataset couldn't really answer. She
and Johanna would talk late into the night. What was a human family like?
What had Straumli Realm thought to make at the High Lab? Johanna no longer
thought of most packs as gangs of snake-necked rats. Deep past midnight, the
dataset's screen was brighter than the gray light from the firepit. It
painted the backs of Woodcarver in cheerful colors. The pack gathered round
her, looking up, almost like small children listening to a teacher.
But Woodcarver was no child. Almost from the first, she had seemed old.
Those late night talks were beginning to teach Johanna about the Tines, too.
The pack said things she never did during the day. They were mostly things
that must be obvious to other Tines, but never talked about. The human girl
wondered if Woodcarver the Queen had anyone to confide in.
Only one of Woodcarver's members was physically old; two were scarcely
more than puppies. It was the pattern of the pack that was half a thousand
years old. And that showed. Woodcarver's soul was held together by little
more than willpower. The price of immortality had been inbreeding. The
original stock had been healthy, but after six hundred years.... One of her
youngest members couldn't stop drooling; it was constantly patting a
kerchief to its muzzle. Another had milky white in its eyes where there
should have been deep brown. Woodcarver said it was stone blind, but healthy
and her best talker. Her oldest member was visibly feeble; it was panting
all the time. Unfortunately, Woodcarver said it was the most alert and
creative of all. When it died....
Once she started looking for it, Johanna could see weakness in all of
Woodcarver. Even the two healthiest members, strong and with plush fur,
walked a little strangely compared to normal pack members. Was that due to
spinal deformities? The two were also gaining weight, which wasn't helping
the problem.
Johanna didn't learn this all at once. Woodcarver had told her about
various Tinish affairs, and gradually her own story came out, too. She
seemed glad to have someone to confide in, but Johanna saw little self-pity
in her. Woodcarver had chosen this path -- apparently it was perversion to
some -- and had beaten the odds for longer than any other pack in recorded
history. She was more wistful than anything else, that her luck had finally
run out.
Tines architecture tended to extremes -- grotesquely oversized, or too
cramped for human use. Woodcarvers council chamber was at the large extreme;
it was not a cozy place. You could get three hundred humans into the
bowl-shaped cavity with room to spare. The separated balconies that ran
around its upper circumference could have held another hundred more.
Johanna had been here often enough before; this was where most work was
done with the dataset. Usually there was herself and Woodcarver and whoever
else needed information. Today was different, not a day to consult the
dataset at all: This was Johanna's first council meeting. There were twelve
packs in the High Council, and they were all here. Every balcony contained a
pack, and there were three on the floor. Johanna knew enough about Tines now
to see that for all the empty space, the place was hideously crowded. There
was the mind noise of fifteen packs. Even with all the padded tapestries,
she felt an occasional buzzing in her head or through her hands from the
railing.
Johanna stood with Woodcarver on the largest balcony. When they
arrived, Vendacious was already down on the main floor, arranging diagrams.
As the packs of the council came to their feet, he looked up and said
something to Woodcarver. The Queen replied in Samnorsk: "I know it will slow
things down, but perhaps that's a good thing." She made a human laughing
sound.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing on the next balcony over, just
like some council pack. Strange. Johanna had not yet figured out why, but
Scarbutt seemed to be one of Woodcarver's favorites. "Pilgrim, would you
translate for Johanna?"
Pilgrim bobbed several heads. "Is, is that okay, Johanna?"
The girl hesitated an instant, then nodded back. It made sense. Next to
Woodcarver, Pilgrim spoke better Samnorsk than any of them. As Woodcarver
sat down, she took the dataset from Johanna and popped it open. Johanna
glanced at the figures on the screen. She's made notes. Her surprise didn't
have a chance to register, before the Queen was talking again -- this time
in the gobble sounds of interpack talk. After a second, Pilgrim began
translating:
"Everyone please sit. Hunker down. This meeting is crowded enough as it
is." Johanna almost smiled. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar was pretty good. He was
imitating Woodcarver's human voice perfectly. His translation even captured
the wry authority of her speech.
After some shuffling around, only one or two heads were visible
sticking up from each balcony. Most stray thought noise should now be caught
in the padding around the balcony or absorbed by the quilted canopy that
hung over the room. "Vendacious, you may proceed."
On the main floor, Vendacious stood and looked up in all directions. He
started talking. "Thank you," came the translation, now imitating the
security chief's tones. "The Woodcarver asked me to call this meeting
because of urgent developments in the North. Our sources there report that
Steel is fortifying the region around Johanna's starship."
Gobble gobble interruption. Scrupilo? "That's not news. That's what our
cannon and gunpowder are for."
Vendacious: "Yes, we've known of the plans for some time. Nevertheless
the completion date has been advanced, and the final version will have walls
a good deal thicker than we had figured. It also appears that once the
enclosure is complete, Steel intends to break apart the starship and
distribute its cargo through his various laboratories."
For Johanna the words came like a kick in the stomach. Before there had
been a chance: If they fought hard enough, they might recapture the ship.
She might finish her parents' mission, perhaps even get rescued.
Pilgrim said something on his own account, translating: "So what's the
new deadline?"
"They're confident of having the main walls complete in just under ten
tendays."
Woodcarver bent a pair of noses to the keyboard, tapped in a note. At
the same time she stuck a head over the railing and looked down at the
security chief. "I've noticed before that Steel tends to be a bit
over-optimistic. Do you have an objective estimate?"
"Yes. The walls will be complete between eight and eleven tendays from
now."
Woodcarver: "We had been counting on at least fifteen. Is this a
response to our plans?"
On the floor below, Vendacious drew himself together. "That was our
first suspicion, Your Majesty. But ... as you know, we have a number of very
special sources of information ... sources we shouldn't discuss even here."
"What a braggart. Sometimes I wonder if he knows anything. I've never
seen him stick his asses out in the field." Huh? It took Johanna a second to
realize that this was Pilgrim, editorializing. She glanced across the
railing. Three of Pilgrim's heads were visible, two looking her way. They
bore an expression she recognized as a silly smile. No one else seemed to
react to his comment; apparently he could focus his translation on Johanna
alone. She glared at him, and after a moment he resumed his businesslike
translation:
"Steel knows we plan to attack, but he does not know about our special
weapons. This change in schedule appears to be a matter of random suspicion.
Unfortunately we are the worse for it."
Three or four Councillors began talking at once. "Much loud
unhappiness," came Pilgrim's voice, summing up. "They're full of 'I knew
this plan would never work' and 'Why did we ever agree to attack the
Flenserists in the first place'."
Right next to Johanna, Woodcarver emitted a shrill whistle. The
recriminations dribbled to a halt. "Some of you forget your courage. We
agreed to attack Hidden Island because it has been a deadly threat, one we
thought we could destroy with Johanna's cannons -- and one that could surely
destroy us if Steel ever learns to use the starship." One of Woodcarver's
members, crouching on the floor, reached out to brush Johanna's knee.
Pilgrim's focused voice chuckled in her ear. "And there's also the
little matter of getting you home and making contact with the stars, but she
can't say that aloud to the 'pragmatic' types. In case you haven't guessed,
that's one reason you're here -- to remind the chuckleheads there's more in
heaven than they have dreamed." He paused, and switched back to translating
Woodcarver:
"No mistake was made in undertaking this campaign: avoiding it would be
as deadly as fighting and losing. So ... do we have any chance of getting an
effective army up the coast in time?" She jabbed a nose in the direction of
a balcony across the room. "Scrupilo. Please be brief."
"The last thing Scrupilo can be is brief -- oops, sorry," More
editorializing from Peregrine.
Scrupilo stuck a couple more heads into view. "I've already discussed
this with Vendacious, Your Majesty. Raising an army, traveling up the coast
-- those all could be done in well under ten tendays. It's the cannon, and
perhaps training packs to use cannon, that is the problem. That is my
special area of responsibility."
Woodcarver said something abrupt.
"Yes, Majesty. We have the gunpowder. It is every bit as powerful as
Dataset says. The gun tubes have been a much greater problem. Till very
recently, the metal cracked at the breech as it cooled. Now I think I have
that fixed. At least I have two unblemished guntubes. I had hoped for
several tendays of testing -- "
Woodcarver interrupted, "-- but that is something we can't afford now."
She came completely to her feet and looked all around the council room. "I
want full-size testing immediately. If it's successful, we'll start making
gun tubes as fast as we can." And if not...
Two days later...
The funniest thing was that Scrupilo expected her to inspect the gun
tube before he fired it. The pack walked excitedly around the rig,
explaining things in awkward Samnorsk. Johanna followed, frowning seriously.
Some meters off, mostly hidden behind a berm, Woodcarver and her High
Council were watching the exercise. Well, the thing looked real enough.
They'd mounted it on a small cart that could roll back into a pile of dirt
under the recoil force. The tube itself was a single cast piece of metal
about a meter long with a ten-centimeter bore. Gunpowder and shot went in
the front end. The powder was ignited through a tiny firehole at the rear.
Johanna ran her hand along the barrel. The leaden surface was bumpy,
and there seemed be pieces of dirt caught in the metal. Even the walls of
the bore were not completely smooth; would that make a difference? Scrupilo
was explaining how he had used straw in the molds to keep the metal from
cracking as it cooled. Yecco. "You should try it out with small amounts of
gunpowder first," she said.
Scrupilo's voice became a bit conspiratorial, more focused, "Just
between you me, I did that. It went very good. Now for big test."
Hmm. So you're not a complete flake. She smiled at the nearest of him,
a member with no black at all in his head fur. In a kooky way, Scrupilo
reminded her of some the scientists at the High Lab.
Scrupilo stepped back from the cannon and said loudly, "It is all okay
to go now?" Two of him were looking nervously at the High Councillors beyond
the berm.
"Um, yes, it looks fine to me." And of course it should. The design was
copied straight from Nyjoran models in Johanna's history files. "But be
careful -- if it doesn't work right, it could kill anybody nearby."
"Yes, yes." Having gotten her official endorsement, Scrupilo swept
around the piece and shooed Johanna toward the sidelines. As she walked back
to Woodcarver, he continued in Tinish, no doubt explaining the test.
"Do you think it will work?" Woodcarver asked her quietly. She seemed
even more feeble than usual. They had spread a woven mat for her, on the
mossy heather behind the berm. Most of her lay quietly, heads between paws.
The blind one looked asleep; the young drooler cuddled against it, twitching
nervously. As usual Peregrine Wickwrackscar was nearby, but he wasn't
translating now. All his attention was on Scrupilo.
Johanna thought of the straw that Scrupilo had used in the molds.
Woodcarver's people were really trying to help, but.... She shook her head,
"I -- who knows." She came to her knees and looked over the berm. The whole
thing looked like a circus act from a history file. There were the
performing animals, the cannon. There was even the circus tent: Vendacious
had insisted on hiding the operation from possible spies in the hills. The
enemy might see something, but the longer Steel lacked details the better.
The Scrupilo pack hustled around the cannon, talking all the time. Two
of him hauled up a keg of black powder and he began pushing the stuff down
the barrel. A wad of silkpaper followed the powder down the barrel. He
tamped it into place, then loaded the cannon ball. At the same time, the
rest of him pushed the cart around to point out of the tent.
They were on the forest side of the castle yard, between the old and
new walls. Johanna could see a patch of green hillside, drizzly clouds
hanging low. About a hundred meters away was the old wall. In fact this was
the same stretch of stone where Scriber had been killed. Even if the damn
cannon didn't blow up, no one had any idea how far the shot would go.
Johanna was betting it wouldn't even get to the wall.
Scrupilo was on this side of the gun now, trying to light a long wooden
firing wand. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Johanna knew this
couldn't work. They were all fools and amateurs, she as much as they. And
this poor guy is going to get killed for nothing.
Johanna came to her feet. Gotta stop it. Something grabbed her belt and
pulled her down. It was one of Woodcarver's members, one of the fat ones
that couldn't walk quite right. "We have to try," the pack said softly.
Scrupilo had the wand alight now. Suddenly he stopped talking. All of
him but the white-headed one ran for the protection of the berm. For an
instant it seemed like strange cowardice, and then Johanna understood: A
human playing with something explosive would also try to shield his body --
except for the hand that held the match. Scrupilo was risking a maiming, but
not death.
The white-headed one looked across the trampled heather to the rest of
Scrupilo. It didn't seem upset so much as attentively listening. At this
distance it couldn't be part of Scrupilo's mind, but the creature was
probably smarter than any dog -- and apparently it was getting some kind of
directions from the rest.
White-head turned and walked toward the cannon. It belly-crawled the
last meter, taking what cover there was in the dirt behind the gun cart. It
held the wand so the flame at its tip came slowly down on the fire hole.
Johanna ducked behind the berm....
The explosion was a sharp snapping sound. Woodcarver shuddered against
her, and whistles of pain came from all around the tent. Poor Scrupilo!
Johanna felt tears starting. I have to look; I'm partly responsible. Slowly
she stood and forced herself to look across the field to where a minute ago
the cannon had been -- and still is! Thick smoke floated from both ends, but
the tube was intact. And more, White-head was wobbling dazedly around the
cart, his white fur now covered with soot.
The rest of Scrupilo raced out to White-head. The five of him ran round
and round the cannon, bounding over each other in triumph. For a long
moment, the rest of the audience just stared. The gun was in one piece. The
gunner had survived. And, almost as a side effect ... Johanna looked over
the gun, up the hillside: There was a meter-wide notch in the top of the old
wall, where none had been before. Vendacious would have a hard time
disguising that from enemy inspection!
Dumb silence gave way to the noisiest affair Johanna had seen yet.
There was the usual gobbling, and other sounds -- hissing that hovered right
at the edge of sensibility. On the other side of the tent, two Tines she
didn't know ran into each other: for a moment of mindless jubilation, they
were an enormous pack of nine or ten members.
We'll get the ship back yet! Johanna turned to hug Woodcarver. But the
Queen was not shouting with the others. She huddled with her heads close
together, shivering. "Woodcarver?" She petted the neck of one of the big,
fat ones. It jerked away, its body spasming.
Stroke? Heart attack? The names of oldenday killers popped into her
mind. Just how would they apply to a pack? Something was terribly wrong, and
nobody else had noticed. Johanna bounced back to her feet. "Pilgrim!" she
screamed.
Five minutes later, they had Woodcarver out of the tent. The place was
still a madhouse, but gone deathly quiet to Johanna's ears. She'd helped the
Queen onto her carriage, but after that no one would let her near. Even
Pilgrim, so eager to translate everything the day before, brushed her aside.
"It will be okay," was all he said as he ran to the front of the carriage
and grabbed the reins of the shaggy Whatsits. The carriage pulled out,
surrounded by several packs of guards. For an instant, the weirdness of the
Tines world came crashing back on Johanna. This was a obviously a great
emergency. A person might be dying. People were rushing this way and that.
And yet.... The packs drew into themselves. No one crowded close. No one
could touch another.
The instant passed, and Johanna was running out of the tent after the
carriage. She tried to keep to the heather along the muddy path, and almost
caught up. Everything was wet and chill, gunmetal gray. Everyone had been so
intent on the test -- could this be more Flenser treachery? Johanna
stumbled, went down on her knees in the mud. The carriage turned a corner,
onto cobblestones. Now it was lost to sight. She got up and slogged on
through the wet, but a little slower now. There was nothing she could do,
nothing she could do. She had made friends with Scriber, and Scriber had
been killed. She had made friends with Woodcarver, and now....
She walked along the cobbled alley between the castle's storehouses.
The carriage was out of sight, but she could hear its clatter on ahead.
Vendacious' security packs ran in both directions past her, stopping briefly
in side niches to allow opposing traffic by. Nobody answered her questions
-- probably none of them even spoke Samnorsk.
Johanna almost got lost. She could hear the carriage, but it had turned
somewhere. She heard it again behind her. They were taking Woodcarver to
Johanna's place! She went back, and a few minutes later was climbing the
path to the two-storey cabin she had shared with Woodcarver these last
weeks. Johanna was too pooped to run anymore. She walked slowly up the
hillside, vaguely aware of her wet and muddy state. The carriage was stopped
about five meters short of the door. Guard packs were strung out along the
hill, but their bows weren't nocked.
The afternoon sunlight found a break in the western clouds and shone
for a moment on the damp heather and glistening timbers, lighting them
bright against dark sky above the hills. It was a combination of light and
dark that had always seemed especially beautiful to Johanna. Please let her
be okay.
The guards let her pass. Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing around
the entrance, three of him watching her approach. The fourth, Scarbutt, had
its long neck stuck through the doorway, watching whatever was inside. "She
wanted to be back here when it happened," he said.
"What h-happened?" said Johanna.
Pilgrim made the equivalent of a shrug. "It was the shock of that
cannon going off. But almost anything could have done it." There was
something odd about the way his heads were bobbing around. With a shock
Johanna realized the pack was smiling, full of glee.
"I want to see her!" Scarbutt backed hastily away as she started for
the door.
Inside there was only the light from the door and the high window
slits. It took a second for Johanna's eyes to adjust. Something smelled ...
wet. Woodcarver was lying in a circle on the quilted mattress she used every
evening. She crossed the room and went to her knees beside the pack. The
pack edged nervously away from her touch. There was blood, and what looked
like a pile of guts, in the middle of the mattress. Johanna felt vomit
rising in her. "W-Woodcarver?" she said very softly.
One of the Queen moved back toward Johanna and put its muzzle in the
girl's hand. "Hello, Johanna. It's ... so strange ... to have someone next
to me at a time like this."
"You're bleeding. What's the matter?"
Soft, human-sounding laughter. "I'm hurt, but it's good.... See." The
blind one was holding something small and wet in its jaws. One of the others
was licking it. Whatever it was, it was wiggling, alive. And Johanna
remembered how strangely plump and awkward parts of Woodcarver had become.
"A baby?"
"Yes. And I'm going to have another in a day or two."
Johanna sat back on the floor timbers, and covered her face with her
hands. She was going to start crying again. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Woodcarver didn't say anything for a moment. She licked the little one
all around, then set it against the tummy of the member that must be its
mother. The newborn snuggled close, nuzzling into the belly fur. It didn't
make any noise that Johanna could hear. Finally the Queen said, "I ... don't
know if I can make you understand. This has been very hard for me."
"Having babies?" Johanna's hands were sticky with the blood on the
quilt. Obviously this had been hard, but that's how all lives must start on
a world like this. It was pain that needed the support of friends, pain that
led to joy.
"No. Having the babies isn't it. I've borne more than a hundred in my
memory's time. But these two ... are the ending of me. How can you
understand? You humans don't even have the choice to keep on living; your
offspring can never be you. But for me, it's the end of a soul six hundred
years old. You see, I'm going to keep these two to be part of me ... and for
the first time in all the centuries, I am not both the mother and the
father. A newby I'll become."
Johanna looked at the blind one and the drooler. Six hundred years of
incest. How much longer could Woodcarver have continued before the mind
itself decayed? Not both the mother and the father. "But then who is
father?" she blurted out.
"Who do you think?" The voice came from just beyond the door. One of
Peregrine Wickwrackscar's heads peered around the corner just far enough to
show an eye. "When Woodcarver makes a decision, she goes for extremes. She's
been the most tightly held soul of all time. But now she has blood -- genes,
Dataset would say -- from packs all over the world, from one of the flakiest
pilgrims who ever cast his soul upon the wind."
"Also from one of the smartest," said Woodcarver, her voice wry and
wistful at the same time. "The new soul will be at least as intelligent as
before, and probably a lot more flexible."
"And I'm a little bit pregnant, myself," said Pilgrim. "But I'm not the
least bit sad. I've been a foursome for too long. Imagine, having pups by
Woodcarver herself! Maybe I'll turn all conservative and settle down."
"Hah! Even two from me is not enough to slow your pilgrim soul."
Johanna listened to the banter. The ideas were so alien, and yet the
overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. Somewhere ...
then she had it: When Johanna was just five years old, and Mom and Dad
brought little Jefri home. Johanna couldn't remember the words, or even the
sense of what they'd said -- but the tone was the same as what went between
Woodcarver and Pilgrim.
Johanna slid back to a sitting position, the tension of the day
evaporating. Scrupilo's artillery really worked; there was a chance of
getting the ship. And even if they failed ... she felt a little bit like she
was back home.
"C-can I pet your puppy?"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The voyage of the Out of Band II had begun in catastrophe, where life
and death were a difference of hours or minutes. In the first weeks there
had been terror and loneliness and the resurrection of Pham. The OOB had
fallen quickly toward the galactic plane, away from Relay. Day by day the
whorl of stars tilted up to meet them, till it was the single band of light,
the Milky Way as seen from the perspective of Nyjora and Old Earth -- and
from most all the habitable planets of the Galaxy.
Twenty thousand light-years in three weeks. But that had been on a path
through the Middle Beyond. Now in the galactic plane, they were still six
thousand light-years from their goal at the Bottom of the Beyond. The Zone
interfaces roughly followed surfaces of constant mean density; on a galactic
scale, the Bottom was a vaguely lens-shaped surface, surrounding much of the
galactic disk. The OOB was moving in the plane of the disk now, more or less
toward the galactic center. Every week took them deeper toward the Slowness.
Worse, their path, and all variants that made any progress, extended right
through a region of massive Zone shifting. The Net News had called it the
Great Zone Storm, though of course there was not the slightest physical
feeling of turbulence within the volume. But some days their progress was
less that eighty percent what they'd expected.
Early on they'd known that it was not only the storm that was slowing
them. Blueshell had gone outside, looking over the damage that still
remained from their escape.
"So it's the ship itself?" Ravna had glared out from the bridge,
watching the now imperceptible crawl of near stars across the heavens. The
confirmation was no revelation. But what to do?
Blueshell trundled back and forth across the ceiling. Every time he
reached the far wall, he'd query ship's management about the pressure seal
on the nose lock. Ravna glared at him, "Hey, that was the n'th time you've
checked status in the last three minutes. If you really think something is
wrong, then fix it."
The Skroderider's wheeled progress came to an abrupt halt. Fronds waved
uncertainly. "But I was just outside. I want to be sure I shut the port
correctly.... Oh, you mean I've already checked it?"
Ravna looked up at him, and tried to get the sting out of her voice.
Blueshell wasn't the proper target for her frustration. "Yup. At least five
times."
"I'm sorry." He paused, going into the stillness of complete
concentration. "I've committed the memory." Sometimes the habit was cute,
and sometimes just irritating: When the Riders tried to think on more than
one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain
short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior,
repeating an action and immediately forgetting the accomplishment.
Pham grinned, looking a lot cooler than Ravna felt. "What I don't see
is why you Riders put up with it."
"What?"
"Well, according to the ship's library, you've had these Skrode gadgets
since before there was a Net. So how come you haven't improved the design,
gotten rid of the silly wheels, upgraded the memory tracking? I bet that
even a Slow Zone combat programmer like me could come up with a better
design than the one you're riding."
"It's really a matter of tradition," Blueshell said primly, "We're
grateful to Whatever gave us wheels and memory in the first place."
"Hmm."
Ravna almost smiled. By now she knew Pham well enough to guess what he
was thinking -- namely that plenty of Riders might have gone on to better
things in the Transcend. Those remaining were likely to have self-imposed
limitations.
"Yes. Tradition. Many who once were Riders have changed -- even
Transcended. But we persist." Greenstalk paused, and when she continued
sounded even more shy than usual. "You've heard of the Rider Myth?"
"No," said Ravna, distracted in spite of herself. In the time ahead she
would know as much about these Riders as about any human friends, but for
now there were still surprises.
"Not many have. Not that it's a secret; it's just we don't make much of
it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don't proselytize. Four or
five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first
Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something
destroyed our Creator and all its works.... A catastrophe so great that from
this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind."
There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in
the distant past, in the time of the Ur-Partition. But the Net couldn't be
forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in
Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.
"So in a sense," Greenstalk said, "we Riders are the faithful ones,
waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the
traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience
possible."
"Quite so," said Blueshell. "And the design itself is very subtle, My
Lady, even if the function is simple." He rolled to the center of the
ceiling. "The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline -- concentration
on what's truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many
things...." Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: "Two of our drive
spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be
degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I've
studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm."
"... and it's still getting worse?"
"Unfortunately so."
"So how bad will it get?"
Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. "My Lady Ravna, we can't be
certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or --
You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final
consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than
anything. We don't know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the
Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives
very carefully ... and hope."
It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom
of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter
of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into
cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached
him, and the secret of his parents' ship buried in some medieval midden.
Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. "Still, this is
the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a
decade." He shrugged. "Surely there's some place we can get repairs?"
"Several."
So much for "a quick flight, all unobserved". Ravna sighed. The final
fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software.
All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. "Do you
have any ideas?"
"About what?" Greenstalk said.
Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of
comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.
Blueshell rattled at his mate.
"Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several
possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here,
but outside this storm. We -- "
"Too far," Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.