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there was just enough vision area in the tips to sense motion.... Two
seconds passed. Pham's last midge showed the other attacker floating
silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that
instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his
stupid hacking, he'd never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited
for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and
shoot.
There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham's midge
caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters
away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always
closer to Greenstalk's position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even
after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their
rattle-talk. Greenstalk -- the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one,
the compulsively honest one -- rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer
around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far
enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry
Blueshell where he stood -- except that the movement took him directly in
front of Pham Nuwen's gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only
chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with
Blueshell --
The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him
upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him
now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath
him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward
him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white
in the heat of Greenstalk's fire. His voice was loud in Pham's ear: "I beg,
don't kill her. Don't kill -- "
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing
Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the
ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with
a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped.
Blueshell's tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to
reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change
the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow 'cross its middle. A ship floating
close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho ...
where am I? ... and consciousness fled.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
There were dreams. He'd lost a captaincy once again, been busted down
to tending potted plants in the ship's greenhouse. Sigh. Pham's job was to
water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and
moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was
now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had
always admired them.
Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.
More than once in his life, Pham Nuwen had wakened inside medical
automation. He was almost used to coffin-close tanks, plain green walls,
wires and tubes. This was different, and it took him a while to realize just
where he was. Willowy trees bent close around him, swaying just a little in
the warm breeze. He seemed to be lying on the softest moss, in a tiny glade
above a pond. Summer haze hung in the air above the water. It was all very
nice, except that the leaves were furry, and not quite the green of anything
he had ever seen. This was someone else's notion of home. He reached up
toward the nearest branch, and his hand hit something unyielding just fifty
centimeters above his face. A curved wall. For all the trick pictures, this
was about the same size as the surgeons he remembered.
Something clicked behind his head; the idyll slid past him, taking its
warm breeze with it. Somebody -- Ravna -- floated just beyond the cylinder.
"Hi, Pham." She reached past the surgeon's hull to squeeze his hand. Her
kiss was tremulous, and she looked haunted, as if she'd been crying a lot.
"Hi, yourself," he said. Memory came back in jagged pieces. He tried to
push off the bed, and found another similarity between this surgeon and ones
of the Qeng Ho: he was securely plugged in.
Ravna laughed a little weakly. "Surgeon. Disconnect." After a moment,
Pham drifted free.
"It's still holding my arm."
"No, that's the sling. Your left arm is going to take a while to
regrow. It almost got burned off, Pham."
"Oh." He looked down at the white cocoon that meshed his arm against
his side. He remembered the gunfight now.... and realized that parts of his
dream were deadly real. "How long have I been out?" The anxiety spilled into
his voice.
"About thirty hours. We're more than sixty light-years out from
Harmonious Repose. We're doing okay, except that now everyone in creation
seems to be chasing us."
The dream. His free hand clamped hard on Ravna's arm. "The
Skroderiders, where are they?" Not on board, pray the Fleet.
"W-what's left of Greenstalk is in the other surgeon. Blueshell is -- "
Why has he let me live? Pham's eyes roved the room. They were in a
utility cabin. Any weapons were at least twenty meters away. Hm. More
important than guns: get command console privileges with the OOB ... if it
was not already too late. He pushed out of the surgeon and drifted out of
the room.
Ravna followed. "Take it easy, Pham. You just came out of a surgeon."
"What have they said about the shoot-out?"
"Poor Greenstalk's not in a position to say anything, Pham. Blueshell
says pretty much what you did: Greenstalk was grabbed by the rogue Riders,
forced to lure you two into a trap."
"Hmhm, hmhm," Pham strove for a noncommittal tone. So maybe there was a
chance; maybe Blueshell was not yet perverted. He continued his one-handed
progress up the ship's axis corridor. A minute later he was on the bridge,
Ravna tagging behind.
"Pham. What's the matter? There's a lot we have to decide, but -- "
How right you are. He dived onto the command deck, and made for the
command console. "Ship. Do you recognize my voice?"
Ravna began, "Pham, What's this -- "
"Yes, sir."
" -- all about?"
"Command privileges," he said. Capabilities granted while the Riders
were ashore. Would they still be in place?
"Granted."
The Skroderiders had had thirty hours to plan their defense. This was
all too easy, too easy. "Suspend command privileges for the Skroderiders.
Isolate them."
"Yes, sir," came the ship's reply. Liar! But what more could he do? The
sweep toward panic crested, and suddenly he felt very cool. He was Qeng Ho
... and he was also godshatter.
Both Riders were in the same cabin, Greenstalk in the other copy of the
ship's surgeon. Pham opened a window on the room. Blueshell sat on a wall
beside the surgeon. He looked wilted, as when they heard about Sjandra Kei.
He angled his fronds at the video pickup. "Sir Pham. The ship tells me
you've suspended our privileges?"
"What is going on, Pham?" Ravna had dug a foot into the floor, and
stood glaring at him.
Pham ignored both questions. "How is Greenstalk doing?" he said.
The fronds turned away, seemed to become even more limp. "She lives....
I thank you, Sir Pham. It took great skill to do what you did. Considering
everything, I could not have asked for more."
What did I do? He remembered firing on Greenstalk. Had he pulled his
aim? He looked inside the surgeon. This was quite different from the human
configuration: This one was mostly water-filled, with turbulent aeration
along the patient's fronds. Asleep (?), Greenstalk looked frailer than he
remembered, her fronds waving randomly in the water. Some were nicked, but
her body seemed whole. His eyes traveled downwards toward the base of the
stalk, where a Rider is normally attached to its skrode. The stump ended in
a cloud of surgical tubing. And Pham remembered the last instant of the
firefight, blasting the skrode out from under Greenstalk. What is a Rider
like without anything to ride?
He pulled his eyes away from the wreckage. "I've deleted your command
privileges because I don't trust you." My former friend, tool of my enemy.
Blueshell didn't answer. After a moment Ravna spoke. "Pham. Without
Blueshell, I'd never have gotten you out of that habitat. Even then -- we
were stuck in the middle of the RIP system. The shepherd satellite was
screaming for our blood; they had figured out we were human. The Aprahanti
were trying to break harbor and come down on us. Without Blueshell, we'd
never have convinced local security to let us go ultra -- we'd probably have
been blown away the second we cleared the ring plane. We'd all be dead now,
Pham."
"Don't you know what happened down there?"
Some of the indignation left Ravna's face. "Yes. But understand about
skrodes. They are a mechanical contrivance. It's easy enough to disconnect
the cyber part from the mechanical linkages. These guys were controlling the
wheels, and aiming the gun."
Hmm. On the window behind Ravna, he could see Blueshell standing with
his fronds motionless, not rushing to agree. Triumphant? "That doesn't
explain Greenstalk's sucking us in to the trap." He raised a hand. "Yeah, I
know, she was bludgeoned into doing it. Only problem, Ravna, she had no
hesitation. She was enthusiastic, bubbly." He stared over the woman's
shoulder. "She was under no compulsion, didn't you tell me that, Blueshell."
A long pause. Finally, "Yes, Sir Pham."
Ravna turned, drifting back so she could see both of them. "But, but
... it's still absurd. Greenstalk has been with us from the beginning. A
thousand times she could have destroyed the ship -- or gotten word to the
outside. Why chance this stupid ambush?"
"Yes. Why didn't they betray us before...." Up until she asked the
question, Pham had not known. He knew the facts, but had no coherent theory
to hang them on. Now it all came together: the ambush, his dreams in the
surgeon, even the paradoxes. "Maybe she wasn't a traitor, before. We really
did escape from Relay without pursuit, without anyone knowing of us, much
less our exact destination. Certainly no one expected humans to show up at
Harmonious Repose." He paused, trying to get it all together. The ambush,
"The ambush, it wasn't stupid -- but it was completely ad hoc. The enemy had
no back up. Their weapons were dumb, simple things -- " insight "-- why,
I'll bet if you look at the wreckage of Greenstalk's skrode you'll find her
beam gun was some sort of cutter tool. And the only sensor on the claymore
mine was a motion detector: it had some civil use. All the gadgets were
pulled together on very short notice by people who had not been expecting a
fight. No, our enemy was very surprised by our appearance."
"You think the Aprahanti could -- "
"Not the Aprahanti. From what you said, they didn't break moorage till
after the gunfight, when the Rider moon started screaming about us.
Whoever's behind this is independent of the Butterflies, and must be spread
in very small numbers across many star systems -- a vast set of tripwires,
listening for things of interest. They noticed us, and weak as their outpost
was they tried to grab our ship. Only when we were getting away did they
advertise us. One way or another, they didn't want us to get away." He
jerked a hand at the ultratrace window. "If I read that right, we've got
more than five hundred ships on our tail."
Ravna's eyes flicked to the display and back. Her voice was abstracted,
"Yes. That's part of the main Aprahanti fleet and ... "
"There will be lots more, only they won't all be Butterflies."
"... what are you saying then? Why would Skroderiders wish us ill? A
conspiracy is senseless. They've never had a nation state, much less an
interstellar empire."
Pham nodded. "Just peaceful settlements -- like that shepherd moon --
in polyspecific civilizations all across the Beyond." His voice softened.
"No, Rav, the Skroderiders are not the real enemy here ... it's the thing
behind them. The Straumli Perversion."
Incredulous silence, but he noticed how tightly Blueshell held his
fronds now. That one knew.
"It's the only explanation, Ravna. Greenstalk really was our friend,
and loyal. My guess is that only a small minority of the Riders are under
the Perversion's control. When Greenstalk fell in with them she was
converted too."
"T-that's impossible! This is the Middle of the Beyond, Pham.
Greenstalk had courage, stubbornness. No brainwashing could have changed her
so quickly." A frightened desperation had come into her eyes. One
explanation or another, some terrible thing must be true.
And I'm still here, alive and talking. A datum for godshatter; maybe
there was yet a chance! He spoke almost as the understanding hit him.
"Greenstalk was loyal, yet she was totally converted in seconds. It wasn't
just a perversion of her skrode, or some drug. It was as if both Rider and
skrode had been designed from the beginning to respond." He looked across at
Blueshell, trying to gauge his reaction to what he would say next. "The
Riders have awaited their creator a long time. Their race is very old, far
older than anyone except the senescent. They're everywhere, but in small
numbers, always practical and peaceful. And somewhere in the beginning -- a
few billion years ago -- their precursors were trapped in an evolutionary
cul-de-sac. Their creator built the first skrodes, and made the first
Riders. Now I think we know the who and the why.
"Yes, yes. I know there have been other upliftings. What's marvelous
about this one is how stable it turned out to be. The greater skrodes are
'tradition' Blueshell says, but that's a word I apply to cultures and to
much shorter time scales. The greater skrodes of today are identical to ones
a billion years ago. And they are devices that can be made anywhere in the
Beyond ... yet the design is clearly High Beyond or Transcendent." That had
been one of his earliest humiliations about the Beyond. He had looked at the
design diagram -- dissections really -- of skrodes. On the outside, the
thing was a mechanical device, with moving parts even. And the text claimed
that the whole thing would be made with the simplest of factories, scarcely
more than what existed in some places in the Slow Zone. And yet the
electronics was a seemingly random mass of components, without any trace of
hierarchical design or modularity. It worked, and far more efficiently than
something designed by human-equivalent minds, but repair and debugging -- of
the cyber component -- was out of the question. "No one in the Beyond
understands all the potentials of skrodes, much less the adaptations forced
on their Riders. Isn't that so, Blueshell?"
The Rider clapped his fronds hard against his central stalk. Again a
furious rattling. It was something Pham had never seen before. Rage? Terror?
Blueshell's voder voice was distorted with nonlinearities: "You ask? You
ask? It's monstrous to ask me to help you in this -- " the voice skeetered
into high frequencies and he stood mute, his body shivering.
Pham of the Qeng Ho felt a stab of shame. The other knew and understood
... and deserved better than this. The Riders must be destroyed, but they
should not have to listen to his judging. His hand swept toward the
communications cutoff, stopped. No. This is your last chance to observe the
Perversion's ... work.
Ravna's glance snapped back and forth between human and Skroderider,
and he could tell that she understood. Her face had the same stricken look
as when she learned about Sjandra Kei. "You're saying the Perversion made
the original skrodes."
"And modified the Riders too. It was long ago, and certainly not the
same instance of the Perversion that the Straumers created, but...."
The "Blight", that was the other common name for the Perversion, and
closer to Old One's view. For all the Perversion's transcendence, its life
style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had
helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces,
across extraordinary reaches of time. It hid in archives, waiting for ideal
conditions. And it had created helpers for its blooming....
He looked at Ravna, and suddenly realized a little more. "You've had
thirty hours to think about this, Rav. You saw the record from my suit.
Surely you must have guessed some of this."
Her gaze dropped from his. "A little," she finally said. At least she
was no longer denying.
"You know what we have to do," he said softly. Now that he understood
what must be done, the godshatter eased its grip. Its will would be done.
"What is that?" said Ravna, as if she didn't know.
"Two things: Post this to the Net."
"Who would believe?" The Net of a Million Lies.
"Enough would. Once they look, most folk will be able to see the truth
here ... and take the proper action."
Ravna shook her head. "No," barely audible.
"The Net must be told, Ravna. We've discovered something that could
save a thousand worlds. This is the Blight's hidden edge," at least in the
Middle and Low Beyond.
She just shook her head again. "But screaming this truth would itself
kill billions."
"In honest defense!" He bounced slowly toward the ceiling, pushed
himself back toward the deck.
There were tears in her eyes now. "These are exactly the arguments used
to kill m-my family, my worlds.... A-and I will not be part of it."
"But the claims are true this time!"
"I've had enough of pogroms, Pham."
Gentle toughness ... and almost unbelievable. "You would make this
decision yourself, Rav? We know something that others -- leaders wiser than
either of us -- should be free to decide upon. You would keep them from
making that choice?"
She hesitated, and for an instant Pham thought the civilized
rule-follower in her would bring her around. But then her chin came up,
"Yes, Pham. I would deny them the choice."
He made a noncommittal noise and drifted back toward the command
console. No point in talking to her about what else must be done.
"And Pham, we will not kill Blueshell and Greenstalk."
"There's no choice, Rav." His hands played with the touch controls.
"Greenstalk was perverted; we have no idea how much of that survived the
destruction of her skrode, or how long it will be before Blueshell goes bad.
We can't take them along, or let them go free."
Ravna drifted sideways, her eyes fixed on his hands. "B-Be careful who
you kill, Pham," she said softly. "As you say, I've had thirty hours to
think about my decisions, thirty hours to think about yours."
"So." Pham raised his hands from the controls. Rage (godshatter?)
chased briefly through this mind. Ravna, Ravna, Ravna, a voice saying
goodbye inside his head. Then all became very cold. He had been so afraid
that the Riders had perverted the ship. Instead, this stupid fool had acted
for them, voluntarily. He drifted slowly toward her. Almost unthinking, he
held his arm and hand at combat ready. "How do you intend to prevent me from
doing what has to be done?" But he already guessed.
She didn't back away, even when his hand was centimeters from her
throat. Her face held courage and tears. "W-what do you think, Pham? While
you were in the surgeon ... I rearranged things. Hurt me, and you will be
hurt worse." Her eyes swept the walls behind him. "Kill the Riders, and ...
and you will die."
They stared at each other for a long moment, measuring. Maybe there
weren't weapons buried in the walls. He probably could kill her before she
could defend. But then there were a thousand ways the ship could have been
programmed to kill him. And all that would be left would be the Riders ...
flying down to the Bottom, to their prize. "So what do we do, then?" He
finally said.
"As b-before, we go to rescue Jefri. We go to recover the
Countermeasure. I'm willing to put some restrictions on the Riders."
A truce with monsters, mediated by a fool.
He pushed off and sailed around her, back down the axis corridor.
Behind him, he heard a sob.
They stayed well clear of each other the next few days. Pham was
allowed shallow access to ship controls. He found suicide programs threaded
through the application layers. But a strange thing, and reason for chagrin
if he had been capable of it: The changes dated from hours after his
confrontation with Ravna. She'd had nothing when she stood against him.
Thank the Powers, I didn't know. The thought was forgotten almost before he
formed it.
So. The charade would proceed right to the end, a continuing game of
lie and subterfuge. Grimly, he set himself to winning that game. Fleets
behind them, traitors surrounding him. By the Qeng Ho and his own
godshatter, the Perversion would lose. The Skroderiders would lose. And for
all her courage and goodness, Ravna Bergsndot would lose.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Tyrathect was losing the battle within herself. Oh, it wasn't near
ended; better perhaps to say that the tide had turned. In the beginning
there had been little triumphs, as when she let Amdijefri play alone with
the commset without even the children guessing she was responsible. But such
were many tendays past, and now.... Some days she would be entirely in
control of herself. Others -- and these often seemed the happiest -- would
begin with her seeming in control.
It was not yet clear the sort of day today would be.
Tyrathect paced along the hoardings that topped the new castle's walls.
The place was certainly new, but hardly yet a castle. Steel had built in
panicky haste. The south and west walls were very thick, with embedded
tunnels. But there were spots on the north side that were simply palisades
backed by stony rubble. Nothing more could be done in the time that Steel
had been given. She stopped for a moment, smelling fresh-sawn timber. The
view down Starship Hill was as beautiful as she had ever seen it. The days
were getting longer. Now there was only twilight between the setting and the
rising of the sun. The local snow had retreated to its summer patches,
leaving heather to turn green in the warmth. From here she could see miles,
to where bluish sea haze clamped down on the offshore islands.
By the conventional wisdom, it would be suicide to attack the new
castle -- even in its present ramshackle state -- with less than a horde.
Tyrathect smiled bitterly to herself. Of course, Woodcarver would ignore
that wisdom. Old Woodcarver thought she had a secret weapon that would
breach these walls from hundreds of feet away. Even now Steel's spies were
reporting that the Woodcarvers had taken the bait, that their small army and
their crude cannon had begun the overland trek up the coast.
She descended the wall stairs to the yard. She heard faint thunder.
Somewhere north of Streamsdell, Steel's own cannoneers were beginning their
morning practice. When the air was just right, you could hear it. There was
to be no testing near the farmlands, and none but high Servants and isolated
workers knew of the weapons. But by now Steel had thirty of the devices and
gunpowder to match. The greatest lack was gunners. Up close the noise of
firing was hellish. Sustained firing could deafen. Ah, but the weapons
themselves: They had a range of almost eight miles, three times as great as
Woodcarver's. They could deliver gunpowder "bombs" that exploded on impact.
There were places beyond the northern hills where the forest was gouged bare
and slumping landslides showed naked rock -- all from sustained barrages of
gunfire.
And soon -- perhaps today -- the Flenserists would have radio, too.
God damn you, Woodcarver! Of course Tyrathect had never met the
Woodcarver, but Flenser had known that pack well: Flenser was mostly
Woodcarver's offspring. The "Gentle Woodcarver" had borne him and raised him
to power. It had been Woodcarver who taught him about freedom of thought and
experiment. Woodcarver should have known the pride that lived in Flenser,
should have known that he would go to extremes his parent never dared. And
when the new one's monstrous nature became clear, when his first
"experiments" were discovered, Woodcarver should have had him killed -- or
at the very least, fragmented. Instead, Flenser had been allowed to take
exile ... to create things like Steel, and they to create their own
monsters, ultimately to build this hierarchy of madness.
And now, a century overdue, Woodcarver was coming to correct her
mistake. She came with her toy guns, as overconfident and idealistic as
ever. She came into a trap of steel and fire that none of her people would
survive. If only there were some way to warn the Woodcarver. Tyrathect's
only reason for being here was the oath she had sworn herself to bring
Flenser's Movement down. If Woodcarver knew what awaited her here, if she
even knew of the traitors in her own camp ... there might be a chance. Last
fall, Tyrathect had come close to sending an anonymous message south. There
were traders who visited through both kingdoms. Her Flenser memories told
her which were likely independent. She almost passed one a note, a single
piece of silkpaper, reporting the starship's landing and Jefri's survival.
In that she had missed death by less than a day: Steel had shown her a
report from the South, about the other human and Woodcarver's progress with
the "dataset". There were things in the report that could only be known by
someone at the top at Woodcarver's. Who? She didn't ask, but she guessed it
was Vendacious; the Flenser in Tyrathect remembered that sibling pack well.
They'd had ... dealings. Vendacious had none of the raw genius of their
joint parent, but there was a broad streak of opportunism in him.
Steel had shown her the report only to puff himself up, to prove to
Tyrathect that he had succeeded in something that Flenser had never
attempted. And it was a coup. Tyrathect had complimented Steel with more
than usual sincerity ... and quietly shelved her plans of warning. With a
spy at the top at Woodcarver's, any message would be pointless suicide.
Now Tyrathect padded across the castle's outer yard. There was still
plenty of construction going on, but the teams were smaller. Steel was
building timber lodges all over the yard. Many were empty shells. Steel
hoped to persuade Ravna to land at a special spot near the inner keep.
The inner keep. That was the only thing about this castle built to the
standards of Hidden Island. It was a beautiful structure. It could really be
what Steel told Amdijefri: a shrine to honor Jefri's ship and protect it
from Woodcarver attack. The central dome was a smooth sweep of cantilevers
and fitted stone as wide as the main meeting hall on Hidden Island.
Tyrathect watched it with one pair of eyes as she trotted round it. Steel
intended to face the dome with the finest pink marble. It would be visible
for dozens of miles into the sky. The deadfalls built into its structure
were the centerpiece of Steel's plan, even if the rescuers didn't land in
his other trap.
Shreck and two other high Servants stood on the steps of the castle's
meeting hall. They came to attention as she approached. The three backed
quickly away, bellies scraping stone ... but not as quickly as last fall.
They knew that the other Flenser Fragments had been destroyed. As Tyrathect
swept past them, she almost smiled. For all her weakness and all her
problems, she knew she could best these ones.
Steel was already inside, alone. The most important meetings were all
like this, just Steel and herself. She understood the relationship. In the
beginning, Steel had been simply terrified of her -- the one person he
believed he could never kill. For tendays, he had teetered between
grovelling before her and dismembering her. It was amusing to see the bonds
Flenser had installed years before still having force. Then had come word of
the death of the other Fragments. Tyrathect was no longer
Flenser-in-Waiting. She had half expected death to come then. But in a way
this made her safer. Now Steel was less afraid, and his need for intimate
advice could be satisfied in ways he saw less threatening. She was his
bottled demon: Flenser wisdom without the Flenser threat.
This afternoon he seemed almost relaxed, nodding casually to Tyrathect
as she entered. She nodded back. In many ways Steel was her -- Flenser's --
finest creation. So much effort had been spent honing Steel. How many
packs-worth of members had been sacrificed to get just the combination that
was Steel. She -- Flenser -- had wanted brilliance, ruthlessness. As
Tyrathect she could see the truth. With all the flensing, Flenser had
created a poor, sad thing. It was strange, but ... sometimes Steel seemed
like Flenser's most pitiable victim.
"Ready for the big test?" Tyrathect said. At long last, the radios
seemed complete.
"In a moment. I wanted to ask you about timing. My sources tell me
Woodcarver's army is on its way. If they make reasonable progress, they
should be here in five tendays."
"That's at least three tendays before Ravna's ship arrives."
"Quite. We will have your old enemy disposed of long before we go for
the high stakes. But ... something is strange about the Two-Legs' recent
messages. How much do you think they suspect? Is it possible that Amdijefri
are telling them more than we know?"
It was an uncertainty Steel would have masked back when she had been
Flenser-in-Waiting. Tyrathect slid to a seated position before replying.
"You might know the answer if you had bothered to learn more of the
Two-Legs' language, dear Steel, or let me learn more." Through the winter,
Tyrathect had been desperate to talk to the children alone, to get warning
to the ship. She was of two minds about that now. Amdijefri were so
transparent, so innocent. If they glimpsed anything of Steel's treachery,
they couldn't hide it. And what might the rescuers do if they knew Steel's
villainy? Tyrathect had seen one starship in flight. Just its landing could
be a terrible weapon. Besides ... If Steel's plan succeeds, I won't need the
aliens' goodwill.
Aloud, Tyrathect continued, "As long as you can continue your
magnificent performance, you have nothing to fear from the child. Can't you
see that he loves you?"
For an instant, Steel seemed pleased, and then the suspicion returned.
"I don't know. Amdi seems always to taunt me, as though he sees through my
act."
Poor Steel. Amdiranifani was his greatest success, and he would never
understand it. In this one thing Steel had truly exceeded his Master, had
discovered and honed a technique that had once been Woodcarver's. The
Fragment eyed his former student almost hungrily. If only he could do him
all over again; there must be a way to combine the fear and the flensing
with love and affection. The resulting tool would truly merit the name
Steel. Tyrathect shrugged, "Take my word for it. If you can continue your
kindness act, both children will be faithful. As for the rest of your
question: I have noticed some change in Ravna's messages. She seems much
more confident of their arrival time, yet something has gone wrong for them.
I don't think they're any more suspicious than before; they seemed to accept
that Jefri was responsible for Amdi's idea about the radios. That lie was a
good move, by the way. It played to their sense of superiority. On a fair
battlefield, we are probably their betters -- and they must not guess that."
"But what are they suddenly so tense about?"
The Fragment shrugged. "Patience, dear Steel. Patience and observation.
Perhaps Amdijefri have noticed this too. You might subtly inspire them to
ask about it. My guess is the Two-Legs have their own politics to worry
about." He stopped and turned all his heads on Steel. "Could you have your
'source' down at Woodcarver's ferret about with the question?"
"Perhaps I will. That Dataset is Woodcarver's one great advantage."
Steel sat in silence for a moment, nervously chewing at his lips. Abruptly,
he shook himself all over, as if to drive off the manifold threats he saw
encroaching. "Shreck!"
There was the sound of paws. The hatch creaked open and Shreck stuck a
head inside. "Sir?"
"Bring the radio outfits in here. Then ask Amdijefri if he can come
down to talk to us."
The radios were beautiful things. Ravna claimed that the basic device
could be invented by civilizations scarcely more advanced than Flenser's.
That was hard to believe. There were so many steps in the making, so many
meaningless detours. The final results: eight one-yard squares of
night-darkness. Glints of gold and silver showed in the strange material.
That, at least, was no mystery: a part of Flenser's gold and silver had gone
into the construction.
Amdijefri arrived. They raced around the central floor, poked at the
radios, shouted to Steel and the Flenser Fragment. Sometimes it was hard to
believe they were not truly one pack, that the Two Legs was not another
member: They clung to each other as a single pack might. As often as not,
Amdi answered questions about Two-Legs before Jefri had a chance to speak,
using the "I-pack" pronoun to identify both of them.
Today, however, there seemed to be a disagreement. "Oh, please my lord,
let me be the one to try it!"
Jefri rattled off something in Samnorsk. When Amdi didn't translate, he
repeated the words more slowly, speaking directly to Steel. "No. It is
[something something] dangerous. Amdi is [something] small. And also, time
[something] narrow."
The Fragment strained for the meaning. Damn. Sooner or later their
ignorance of the Two Legs' language was going to cost them.
Steel listened to the human, then sighed the most marvelously patient
sigh. "Please. Amdi. Jefri. What is problem?" He spoke in Samnorsk, making
more sense to the Flenser Fragment than the human child had.
Amdi dithered for a moment. "Jefri thinks the radio jackets are too big
for me. But look, it doesn't fit so badly!" Amdi jumped all around one of
the night-dark squares, dragging it heedlessly off its velvet pallet onto
the floor. He pulled the fabric over the back and shoulders of his largest
member.
Now the radio was roughly the shape of a greatcloak; Steel's tailors
had added clasps at the shoulders and gut. But the thing was vastly outsized
for little Amdi. It stood like a tent around one of him. "See? See?" The
tiny head poked out, looking first at Steel and then at Tyrathect, willing
their belief.
Jefri said something. The Amdi pack squeaked back angrily. Then, "Jefri
worries about everything, but somebody has to test the radios. There's this
little problem with speed. Radio goes much faster than sound. Jefri's just
afraid it's so fast, it might confuse the pack using it. That's foolish. How
much faster could it be than heads-together thought?" He asked it as a
question. Tyrathect smiled. The pack of puppies couldn't quite lie, but he
guessed that Amdi knew the answer to his question -- and that it did not
support his argument.
On the other side of the hall, Steel listened with heads cocked -- the
picture of benign tolerance. "I'm sorry, Amdi. It's just too dangerous for
you to be the first."
"But I am brave! And I want to help."
"I'm sorry. After we know it's safe -- "
Amdi gave a shriek of outrage, much higher than normal interpack talk,
almost in the range of thought. He swarmed around Jefri, whacking at the
human's legs with his butt ends. "Hideous traitor!" he cried, and continued
the insults in Samnorsk.
It took about ten minutes to get him calmed down to a sulk. He and
Jefri sat on the floor, grumbling at each other in Samnorsk. Tyrathect
watched the two, and Steel on the other side of the room. If irony were
something that made sound, they would all be deaf by now. All their lives,
Flenser and Steel had experimented on others -- usually unto death. Now they
had a victim who literally begged to be victimized ... and he must be
rejected. There was no question about the rejection. Even if Jefri had not
raised objections, the Amdi pack was too valuable to be risked. Furthermore,
Amdi was an eightsome. It was a miracle that such a large pack could
function at all. Whatever dangers there were with radio would be much
greater for him.
So, a proper victim would be found. A proper wretch. Surely there were
plenty of those in the dungeons beneath Hidden Island. Tyrathect thought
back on all the packs she remembered killing. How she hated Flenser, his
calculating cruelty. I am so much worse than Steel. I made Steel. She
remembered where her thoughts had been the last hour. This was one of the
bad days, one of the days when Flenser sneaked out from the recesses of her
mind, when she rode the power of his reason higher and higher, till it
became rationalization and she became him. Still, for a few more seconds she
might be in control. What could she do with it? A soul that was strong
enough might deny itself, might become a different person ... might at the
very least end itself.
"I-I will try the radio." The words were spoken almost before he
thought them. Weak, silly frill.
"What?" said Steel.
But the words had been clear, and Steel had heard. The Flenser Fragment
smiled dryly. "I want to see what this radio can do. Let me try it, dear
Steel."
They took the radios out into the yard, on the side of the starship
that was hidden from general view. Here it would just be Amdijefri, Steel,
and whoever I am at the moment. The Flenser Fragment laughed at the
upwelling fear. Discipline, she had thought! Perhaps that was best. He stood
in the middle of the yard and let the human help him with the radio gear.
Strange to see another intelligent being so close, and towering over him.
Jefri's incredibly articulate paws arranged the jackets loosely on his
backs. The inside material was soft, deadening. And unlike normal clothing,
the radios covered the wearer's tympana. The boy tried to explain what he
was doing. "See? This thing," he pulled at the corner of the greatcloak,
"goes over your head. The inside has [something] that makes sound into
radio."
The Fragment shrugged away as the boy tried to pull the cover forward.
"No. I can't think." Only by standing just so, all members facing inward,
could the Fragment maintain full consciousness. Already the weaker parts of
him were edging toward isolation panic. The conscience that was Tyrathect
would learn something today.
"Oh. I'm sorry." Jefri turned and spoke to Amdi, something about using
the old design.
Amdi was heads-together, just thirty feet away. He had been all frowns,
sullen at being denied, nervous to be apart from the Two-Legs. But as the
preparations continued, the frowns eased. The puppies' eyes grew wide with
happy fascination. The Fragment felt a wave of affection for the puppies
that came and went almost too fast to be noticed.
Now Amdi edged nearer, taking advantage of the fact that the cloaks
muffled much of the Fragment's thought sounds. "Jefri says maybe we
shouldn't have tried to make the mind-size radio," he said. "But this will
be so much better. I know it! And," he said with transparent slyness, "you
could still let me test it instead."
"No, Amdi. This is the way it must be." Steel's voice was all soft
sympathy. Only the Flenser Fragment could see the broad grin on a couple of
the lord's members.
"Well, okay." The puppies crept a little nearer. "Don't be afraid, Lord
Tyrathect. We've had the radios in sunlight for some time. They should have
lots of power. To make them work you just pull all the belts tight, even the
ones at your neck."
"All of them at once?"
Amdi fidgeted. "That's probably best. Otherwise, there will be such a
mismatch of speeds that -- " He said something to the Two Legs.
Jefri leaned close. "This belt goes here, and this here." He pointed to
the braid-bone straps that drew the head covering close. "Then just pull
this with your mouth."
"The harder you pull, the louder the radio," Amdi added.
"Okay." The Fragment drew himself together. He shrugged the jackets
into place, tightening the shoulder and gut belts. Deadly muffling. The
jackets almost seemed to mold themselves to his tympana. He looked at
himself, and grasped desperately for what was left of consciousness. The
jackets were beautiful, magic darkness yet with a hint of the golden-silver
of a Flenserist Lord. Beautiful instruments of torture. Even Steel had not
imagined such twisted revenge. Had he?
The Fragment grabbed the head straps and pulled.
Twenty years ago, when Tyrathect was new, she had loved to hike with
her fission parent on the grassy dunes along Lake Kitcherri. That was before
their great falling out, before loneliness drove Tyrathect to the Republic's
Capital and her search for "meaning". Not all of the shore of Lake Kitcherri
was beaches and dunes. Farther south there was the Rockness, where streams
cut through stone to the water. Sometimes, especially when she and her
parent had fought, Tyrathect would walk up from the shore along streams
bordered by sheer, smooth cliffs. It was a sort of punishment: there were
places where the stone had a glassy haze and didn't absorb sound at all.
Everything was echoed, right up to the top of thought. It was if she were
surrounded by copies of herself, and copies beyond them, all thinking the
same sounds but out of step.
Of course echoes are often a problem with unquilted stone walls,
especially if the size and geometry are wrong. But these cliffs were perfect
reflectors, a quarrier's nightmare. And there were places where the shape of
the Rockness conspired with the sounds.... When Tyrathect walked there, she
couldn't tell her own thoughts from the echoes. Everything was garbled with
barely offset resonance. At first it had been a great pain that sent her
running. But she forced herself back again and again, and finally learned to
think even in the worst of the narrows.
Amdijefri's radio was just a little like the Kitcherri cliffs. Enough
to save me, maybe. Tyrathect came to consciousness all piled in a heap. At
most seconds had passed since she brought the radios to life; Amdi and Steel
were simply staring at her. The human was rocking one of her bodies, talking
to her. Tyrathect licked the boy's paw, then stood partly up. She heard only
her own thoughts ... but they had some of the jarring difference of the
stone echoes.
She was back on her bellies again. Part of her was vomiting in the
dirt. The world shimmered, out of tune. Thought is there. Grab it! Grab it!
All a matter of coordination, of timing. She remembered Amdijefri talking
about how fast the radio was. In a way, this was the reverse of the problem
of the screaming cliffs.
She shook her heads, mastering the weirdness. "Give me a moment," she
said, and her voice was almost calm. She looked around. Slowly. If she
concentrated and didn't move fast, she could think. Suddenly she was aware
of the greatcloaks, pressing in on all her tympana. She should have been
deafened, isolated. Yet her thoughts were no muzzier than after a bad sleep.
She got to her feet again and walked slowly around the open space
between Amdi and Steel. "Can you hear me?" she asked.
"Yes," said Steel. He edged nervously away from her.
Of course. The cloaks muffled sound like any heavy quilt: anything in
the range of thought would be totally absorbed. But interpack speech and
seconds passed. Pham's last midge showed the other attacker floating
silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that
instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his
stupid hacking, he'd never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited
for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and
shoot.
There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham's midge
caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters
away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always
closer to Greenstalk's position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even
after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their
rattle-talk. Greenstalk -- the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one,
the compulsively honest one -- rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer
around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far
enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry
Blueshell where he stood -- except that the movement took him directly in
front of Pham Nuwen's gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only
chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with
Blueshell --
The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him
upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him
now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath
him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward
him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white
in the heat of Greenstalk's fire. His voice was loud in Pham's ear: "I beg,
don't kill her. Don't kill -- "
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing
Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the
ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with
a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped.
Blueshell's tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to
reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change
the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow 'cross its middle. A ship floating
close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho ...
where am I? ... and consciousness fled.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
There were dreams. He'd lost a captaincy once again, been busted down
to tending potted plants in the ship's greenhouse. Sigh. Pham's job was to
water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and
moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was
now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had
always admired them.
Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.
More than once in his life, Pham Nuwen had wakened inside medical
automation. He was almost used to coffin-close tanks, plain green walls,
wires and tubes. This was different, and it took him a while to realize just
where he was. Willowy trees bent close around him, swaying just a little in
the warm breeze. He seemed to be lying on the softest moss, in a tiny glade
above a pond. Summer haze hung in the air above the water. It was all very
nice, except that the leaves were furry, and not quite the green of anything
he had ever seen. This was someone else's notion of home. He reached up
toward the nearest branch, and his hand hit something unyielding just fifty
centimeters above his face. A curved wall. For all the trick pictures, this
was about the same size as the surgeons he remembered.
Something clicked behind his head; the idyll slid past him, taking its
warm breeze with it. Somebody -- Ravna -- floated just beyond the cylinder.
"Hi, Pham." She reached past the surgeon's hull to squeeze his hand. Her
kiss was tremulous, and she looked haunted, as if she'd been crying a lot.
"Hi, yourself," he said. Memory came back in jagged pieces. He tried to
push off the bed, and found another similarity between this surgeon and ones
of the Qeng Ho: he was securely plugged in.
Ravna laughed a little weakly. "Surgeon. Disconnect." After a moment,
Pham drifted free.
"It's still holding my arm."
"No, that's the sling. Your left arm is going to take a while to
regrow. It almost got burned off, Pham."
"Oh." He looked down at the white cocoon that meshed his arm against
his side. He remembered the gunfight now.... and realized that parts of his
dream were deadly real. "How long have I been out?" The anxiety spilled into
his voice.
"About thirty hours. We're more than sixty light-years out from
Harmonious Repose. We're doing okay, except that now everyone in creation
seems to be chasing us."
The dream. His free hand clamped hard on Ravna's arm. "The
Skroderiders, where are they?" Not on board, pray the Fleet.
"W-what's left of Greenstalk is in the other surgeon. Blueshell is -- "
Why has he let me live? Pham's eyes roved the room. They were in a
utility cabin. Any weapons were at least twenty meters away. Hm. More
important than guns: get command console privileges with the OOB ... if it
was not already too late. He pushed out of the surgeon and drifted out of
the room.
Ravna followed. "Take it easy, Pham. You just came out of a surgeon."
"What have they said about the shoot-out?"
"Poor Greenstalk's not in a position to say anything, Pham. Blueshell
says pretty much what you did: Greenstalk was grabbed by the rogue Riders,
forced to lure you two into a trap."
"Hmhm, hmhm," Pham strove for a noncommittal tone. So maybe there was a
chance; maybe Blueshell was not yet perverted. He continued his one-handed
progress up the ship's axis corridor. A minute later he was on the bridge,
Ravna tagging behind.
"Pham. What's the matter? There's a lot we have to decide, but -- "
How right you are. He dived onto the command deck, and made for the
command console. "Ship. Do you recognize my voice?"
Ravna began, "Pham, What's this -- "
"Yes, sir."
" -- all about?"
"Command privileges," he said. Capabilities granted while the Riders
were ashore. Would they still be in place?
"Granted."
The Skroderiders had had thirty hours to plan their defense. This was
all too easy, too easy. "Suspend command privileges for the Skroderiders.
Isolate them."
"Yes, sir," came the ship's reply. Liar! But what more could he do? The
sweep toward panic crested, and suddenly he felt very cool. He was Qeng Ho
... and he was also godshatter.
Both Riders were in the same cabin, Greenstalk in the other copy of the
ship's surgeon. Pham opened a window on the room. Blueshell sat on a wall
beside the surgeon. He looked wilted, as when they heard about Sjandra Kei.
He angled his fronds at the video pickup. "Sir Pham. The ship tells me
you've suspended our privileges?"
"What is going on, Pham?" Ravna had dug a foot into the floor, and
stood glaring at him.
Pham ignored both questions. "How is Greenstalk doing?" he said.
The fronds turned away, seemed to become even more limp. "She lives....
I thank you, Sir Pham. It took great skill to do what you did. Considering
everything, I could not have asked for more."
What did I do? He remembered firing on Greenstalk. Had he pulled his
aim? He looked inside the surgeon. This was quite different from the human
configuration: This one was mostly water-filled, with turbulent aeration
along the patient's fronds. Asleep (?), Greenstalk looked frailer than he
remembered, her fronds waving randomly in the water. Some were nicked, but
her body seemed whole. His eyes traveled downwards toward the base of the
stalk, where a Rider is normally attached to its skrode. The stump ended in
a cloud of surgical tubing. And Pham remembered the last instant of the
firefight, blasting the skrode out from under Greenstalk. What is a Rider
like without anything to ride?
He pulled his eyes away from the wreckage. "I've deleted your command
privileges because I don't trust you." My former friend, tool of my enemy.
Blueshell didn't answer. After a moment Ravna spoke. "Pham. Without
Blueshell, I'd never have gotten you out of that habitat. Even then -- we
were stuck in the middle of the RIP system. The shepherd satellite was
screaming for our blood; they had figured out we were human. The Aprahanti
were trying to break harbor and come down on us. Without Blueshell, we'd
never have convinced local security to let us go ultra -- we'd probably have
been blown away the second we cleared the ring plane. We'd all be dead now,
Pham."
"Don't you know what happened down there?"
Some of the indignation left Ravna's face. "Yes. But understand about
skrodes. They are a mechanical contrivance. It's easy enough to disconnect
the cyber part from the mechanical linkages. These guys were controlling the
wheels, and aiming the gun."
Hmm. On the window behind Ravna, he could see Blueshell standing with
his fronds motionless, not rushing to agree. Triumphant? "That doesn't
explain Greenstalk's sucking us in to the trap." He raised a hand. "Yeah, I
know, she was bludgeoned into doing it. Only problem, Ravna, she had no
hesitation. She was enthusiastic, bubbly." He stared over the woman's
shoulder. "She was under no compulsion, didn't you tell me that, Blueshell."
A long pause. Finally, "Yes, Sir Pham."
Ravna turned, drifting back so she could see both of them. "But, but
... it's still absurd. Greenstalk has been with us from the beginning. A
thousand times she could have destroyed the ship -- or gotten word to the
outside. Why chance this stupid ambush?"
"Yes. Why didn't they betray us before...." Up until she asked the
question, Pham had not known. He knew the facts, but had no coherent theory
to hang them on. Now it all came together: the ambush, his dreams in the
surgeon, even the paradoxes. "Maybe she wasn't a traitor, before. We really
did escape from Relay without pursuit, without anyone knowing of us, much
less our exact destination. Certainly no one expected humans to show up at
Harmonious Repose." He paused, trying to get it all together. The ambush,
"The ambush, it wasn't stupid -- but it was completely ad hoc. The enemy had
no back up. Their weapons were dumb, simple things -- " insight "-- why,
I'll bet if you look at the wreckage of Greenstalk's skrode you'll find her
beam gun was some sort of cutter tool. And the only sensor on the claymore
mine was a motion detector: it had some civil use. All the gadgets were
pulled together on very short notice by people who had not been expecting a
fight. No, our enemy was very surprised by our appearance."
"You think the Aprahanti could -- "
"Not the Aprahanti. From what you said, they didn't break moorage till
after the gunfight, when the Rider moon started screaming about us.
Whoever's behind this is independent of the Butterflies, and must be spread
in very small numbers across many star systems -- a vast set of tripwires,
listening for things of interest. They noticed us, and weak as their outpost
was they tried to grab our ship. Only when we were getting away did they
advertise us. One way or another, they didn't want us to get away." He
jerked a hand at the ultratrace window. "If I read that right, we've got
more than five hundred ships on our tail."
Ravna's eyes flicked to the display and back. Her voice was abstracted,
"Yes. That's part of the main Aprahanti fleet and ... "
"There will be lots more, only they won't all be Butterflies."
"... what are you saying then? Why would Skroderiders wish us ill? A
conspiracy is senseless. They've never had a nation state, much less an
interstellar empire."
Pham nodded. "Just peaceful settlements -- like that shepherd moon --
in polyspecific civilizations all across the Beyond." His voice softened.
"No, Rav, the Skroderiders are not the real enemy here ... it's the thing
behind them. The Straumli Perversion."
Incredulous silence, but he noticed how tightly Blueshell held his
fronds now. That one knew.
"It's the only explanation, Ravna. Greenstalk really was our friend,
and loyal. My guess is that only a small minority of the Riders are under
the Perversion's control. When Greenstalk fell in with them she was
converted too."
"T-that's impossible! This is the Middle of the Beyond, Pham.
Greenstalk had courage, stubbornness. No brainwashing could have changed her
so quickly." A frightened desperation had come into her eyes. One
explanation or another, some terrible thing must be true.
And I'm still here, alive and talking. A datum for godshatter; maybe
there was yet a chance! He spoke almost as the understanding hit him.
"Greenstalk was loyal, yet she was totally converted in seconds. It wasn't
just a perversion of her skrode, or some drug. It was as if both Rider and
skrode had been designed from the beginning to respond." He looked across at
Blueshell, trying to gauge his reaction to what he would say next. "The
Riders have awaited their creator a long time. Their race is very old, far
older than anyone except the senescent. They're everywhere, but in small
numbers, always practical and peaceful. And somewhere in the beginning -- a
few billion years ago -- their precursors were trapped in an evolutionary
cul-de-sac. Their creator built the first skrodes, and made the first
Riders. Now I think we know the who and the why.
"Yes, yes. I know there have been other upliftings. What's marvelous
about this one is how stable it turned out to be. The greater skrodes are
'tradition' Blueshell says, but that's a word I apply to cultures and to
much shorter time scales. The greater skrodes of today are identical to ones
a billion years ago. And they are devices that can be made anywhere in the
Beyond ... yet the design is clearly High Beyond or Transcendent." That had
been one of his earliest humiliations about the Beyond. He had looked at the
design diagram -- dissections really -- of skrodes. On the outside, the
thing was a mechanical device, with moving parts even. And the text claimed
that the whole thing would be made with the simplest of factories, scarcely
more than what existed in some places in the Slow Zone. And yet the
electronics was a seemingly random mass of components, without any trace of
hierarchical design or modularity. It worked, and far more efficiently than
something designed by human-equivalent minds, but repair and debugging -- of
the cyber component -- was out of the question. "No one in the Beyond
understands all the potentials of skrodes, much less the adaptations forced
on their Riders. Isn't that so, Blueshell?"
The Rider clapped his fronds hard against his central stalk. Again a
furious rattling. It was something Pham had never seen before. Rage? Terror?
Blueshell's voder voice was distorted with nonlinearities: "You ask? You
ask? It's monstrous to ask me to help you in this -- " the voice skeetered
into high frequencies and he stood mute, his body shivering.
Pham of the Qeng Ho felt a stab of shame. The other knew and understood
... and deserved better than this. The Riders must be destroyed, but they
should not have to listen to his judging. His hand swept toward the
communications cutoff, stopped. No. This is your last chance to observe the
Perversion's ... work.
Ravna's glance snapped back and forth between human and Skroderider,
and he could tell that she understood. Her face had the same stricken look
as when she learned about Sjandra Kei. "You're saying the Perversion made
the original skrodes."
"And modified the Riders too. It was long ago, and certainly not the
same instance of the Perversion that the Straumers created, but...."
The "Blight", that was the other common name for the Perversion, and
closer to Old One's view. For all the Perversion's transcendence, its life
style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had
helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces,
across extraordinary reaches of time. It hid in archives, waiting for ideal
conditions. And it had created helpers for its blooming....
He looked at Ravna, and suddenly realized a little more. "You've had
thirty hours to think about this, Rav. You saw the record from my suit.
Surely you must have guessed some of this."
Her gaze dropped from his. "A little," she finally said. At least she
was no longer denying.
"You know what we have to do," he said softly. Now that he understood
what must be done, the godshatter eased its grip. Its will would be done.
"What is that?" said Ravna, as if she didn't know.
"Two things: Post this to the Net."
"Who would believe?" The Net of a Million Lies.
"Enough would. Once they look, most folk will be able to see the truth
here ... and take the proper action."
Ravna shook her head. "No," barely audible.
"The Net must be told, Ravna. We've discovered something that could
save a thousand worlds. This is the Blight's hidden edge," at least in the
Middle and Low Beyond.
She just shook her head again. "But screaming this truth would itself
kill billions."
"In honest defense!" He bounced slowly toward the ceiling, pushed
himself back toward the deck.
There were tears in her eyes now. "These are exactly the arguments used
to kill m-my family, my worlds.... A-and I will not be part of it."
"But the claims are true this time!"
"I've had enough of pogroms, Pham."
Gentle toughness ... and almost unbelievable. "You would make this
decision yourself, Rav? We know something that others -- leaders wiser than
either of us -- should be free to decide upon. You would keep them from
making that choice?"
She hesitated, and for an instant Pham thought the civilized
rule-follower in her would bring her around. But then her chin came up,
"Yes, Pham. I would deny them the choice."
He made a noncommittal noise and drifted back toward the command
console. No point in talking to her about what else must be done.
"And Pham, we will not kill Blueshell and Greenstalk."
"There's no choice, Rav." His hands played with the touch controls.
"Greenstalk was perverted; we have no idea how much of that survived the
destruction of her skrode, or how long it will be before Blueshell goes bad.
We can't take them along, or let them go free."
Ravna drifted sideways, her eyes fixed on his hands. "B-Be careful who
you kill, Pham," she said softly. "As you say, I've had thirty hours to
think about my decisions, thirty hours to think about yours."
"So." Pham raised his hands from the controls. Rage (godshatter?)
chased briefly through this mind. Ravna, Ravna, Ravna, a voice saying
goodbye inside his head. Then all became very cold. He had been so afraid
that the Riders had perverted the ship. Instead, this stupid fool had acted
for them, voluntarily. He drifted slowly toward her. Almost unthinking, he
held his arm and hand at combat ready. "How do you intend to prevent me from
doing what has to be done?" But he already guessed.
She didn't back away, even when his hand was centimeters from her
throat. Her face held courage and tears. "W-what do you think, Pham? While
you were in the surgeon ... I rearranged things. Hurt me, and you will be
hurt worse." Her eyes swept the walls behind him. "Kill the Riders, and ...
and you will die."
They stared at each other for a long moment, measuring. Maybe there
weren't weapons buried in the walls. He probably could kill her before she
could defend. But then there were a thousand ways the ship could have been
programmed to kill him. And all that would be left would be the Riders ...
flying down to the Bottom, to their prize. "So what do we do, then?" He
finally said.
"As b-before, we go to rescue Jefri. We go to recover the
Countermeasure. I'm willing to put some restrictions on the Riders."
A truce with monsters, mediated by a fool.
He pushed off and sailed around her, back down the axis corridor.
Behind him, he heard a sob.
They stayed well clear of each other the next few days. Pham was
allowed shallow access to ship controls. He found suicide programs threaded
through the application layers. But a strange thing, and reason for chagrin
if he had been capable of it: The changes dated from hours after his
confrontation with Ravna. She'd had nothing when she stood against him.
Thank the Powers, I didn't know. The thought was forgotten almost before he
formed it.
So. The charade would proceed right to the end, a continuing game of
lie and subterfuge. Grimly, he set himself to winning that game. Fleets
behind them, traitors surrounding him. By the Qeng Ho and his own
godshatter, the Perversion would lose. The Skroderiders would lose. And for
all her courage and goodness, Ravna Bergsndot would lose.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Tyrathect was losing the battle within herself. Oh, it wasn't near
ended; better perhaps to say that the tide had turned. In the beginning
there had been little triumphs, as when she let Amdijefri play alone with
the commset without even the children guessing she was responsible. But such
were many tendays past, and now.... Some days she would be entirely in
control of herself. Others -- and these often seemed the happiest -- would
begin with her seeming in control.
It was not yet clear the sort of day today would be.
Tyrathect paced along the hoardings that topped the new castle's walls.
The place was certainly new, but hardly yet a castle. Steel had built in
panicky haste. The south and west walls were very thick, with embedded
tunnels. But there were spots on the north side that were simply palisades
backed by stony rubble. Nothing more could be done in the time that Steel
had been given. She stopped for a moment, smelling fresh-sawn timber. The
view down Starship Hill was as beautiful as she had ever seen it. The days
were getting longer. Now there was only twilight between the setting and the
rising of the sun. The local snow had retreated to its summer patches,
leaving heather to turn green in the warmth. From here she could see miles,
to where bluish sea haze clamped down on the offshore islands.
By the conventional wisdom, it would be suicide to attack the new
castle -- even in its present ramshackle state -- with less than a horde.
Tyrathect smiled bitterly to herself. Of course, Woodcarver would ignore
that wisdom. Old Woodcarver thought she had a secret weapon that would
breach these walls from hundreds of feet away. Even now Steel's spies were
reporting that the Woodcarvers had taken the bait, that their small army and
their crude cannon had begun the overland trek up the coast.
She descended the wall stairs to the yard. She heard faint thunder.
Somewhere north of Streamsdell, Steel's own cannoneers were beginning their
morning practice. When the air was just right, you could hear it. There was
to be no testing near the farmlands, and none but high Servants and isolated
workers knew of the weapons. But by now Steel had thirty of the devices and
gunpowder to match. The greatest lack was gunners. Up close the noise of
firing was hellish. Sustained firing could deafen. Ah, but the weapons
themselves: They had a range of almost eight miles, three times as great as
Woodcarver's. They could deliver gunpowder "bombs" that exploded on impact.
There were places beyond the northern hills where the forest was gouged bare
and slumping landslides showed naked rock -- all from sustained barrages of
gunfire.
And soon -- perhaps today -- the Flenserists would have radio, too.
God damn you, Woodcarver! Of course Tyrathect had never met the
Woodcarver, but Flenser had known that pack well: Flenser was mostly
Woodcarver's offspring. The "Gentle Woodcarver" had borne him and raised him
to power. It had been Woodcarver who taught him about freedom of thought and
experiment. Woodcarver should have known the pride that lived in Flenser,
should have known that he would go to extremes his parent never dared. And
when the new one's monstrous nature became clear, when his first
"experiments" were discovered, Woodcarver should have had him killed -- or
at the very least, fragmented. Instead, Flenser had been allowed to take
exile ... to create things like Steel, and they to create their own
monsters, ultimately to build this hierarchy of madness.
And now, a century overdue, Woodcarver was coming to correct her
mistake. She came with her toy guns, as overconfident and idealistic as
ever. She came into a trap of steel and fire that none of her people would
survive. If only there were some way to warn the Woodcarver. Tyrathect's
only reason for being here was the oath she had sworn herself to bring
Flenser's Movement down. If Woodcarver knew what awaited her here, if she
even knew of the traitors in her own camp ... there might be a chance. Last
fall, Tyrathect had come close to sending an anonymous message south. There
were traders who visited through both kingdoms. Her Flenser memories told
her which were likely independent. She almost passed one a note, a single
piece of silkpaper, reporting the starship's landing and Jefri's survival.
In that she had missed death by less than a day: Steel had shown her a
report from the South, about the other human and Woodcarver's progress with
the "dataset". There were things in the report that could only be known by
someone at the top at Woodcarver's. Who? She didn't ask, but she guessed it
was Vendacious; the Flenser in Tyrathect remembered that sibling pack well.
They'd had ... dealings. Vendacious had none of the raw genius of their
joint parent, but there was a broad streak of opportunism in him.
Steel had shown her the report only to puff himself up, to prove to
Tyrathect that he had succeeded in something that Flenser had never
attempted. And it was a coup. Tyrathect had complimented Steel with more
than usual sincerity ... and quietly shelved her plans of warning. With a
spy at the top at Woodcarver's, any message would be pointless suicide.
Now Tyrathect padded across the castle's outer yard. There was still
plenty of construction going on, but the teams were smaller. Steel was
building timber lodges all over the yard. Many were empty shells. Steel
hoped to persuade Ravna to land at a special spot near the inner keep.
The inner keep. That was the only thing about this castle built to the
standards of Hidden Island. It was a beautiful structure. It could really be
what Steel told Amdijefri: a shrine to honor Jefri's ship and protect it
from Woodcarver attack. The central dome was a smooth sweep of cantilevers
and fitted stone as wide as the main meeting hall on Hidden Island.
Tyrathect watched it with one pair of eyes as she trotted round it. Steel
intended to face the dome with the finest pink marble. It would be visible
for dozens of miles into the sky. The deadfalls built into its structure
were the centerpiece of Steel's plan, even if the rescuers didn't land in
his other trap.
Shreck and two other high Servants stood on the steps of the castle's
meeting hall. They came to attention as she approached. The three backed
quickly away, bellies scraping stone ... but not as quickly as last fall.
They knew that the other Flenser Fragments had been destroyed. As Tyrathect
swept past them, she almost smiled. For all her weakness and all her
problems, she knew she could best these ones.
Steel was already inside, alone. The most important meetings were all
like this, just Steel and herself. She understood the relationship. In the
beginning, Steel had been simply terrified of her -- the one person he
believed he could never kill. For tendays, he had teetered between
grovelling before her and dismembering her. It was amusing to see the bonds
Flenser had installed years before still having force. Then had come word of
the death of the other Fragments. Tyrathect was no longer
Flenser-in-Waiting. She had half expected death to come then. But in a way
this made her safer. Now Steel was less afraid, and his need for intimate
advice could be satisfied in ways he saw less threatening. She was his
bottled demon: Flenser wisdom without the Flenser threat.
This afternoon he seemed almost relaxed, nodding casually to Tyrathect
as she entered. She nodded back. In many ways Steel was her -- Flenser's --
finest creation. So much effort had been spent honing Steel. How many
packs-worth of members had been sacrificed to get just the combination that
was Steel. She -- Flenser -- had wanted brilliance, ruthlessness. As
Tyrathect she could see the truth. With all the flensing, Flenser had
created a poor, sad thing. It was strange, but ... sometimes Steel seemed
like Flenser's most pitiable victim.
"Ready for the big test?" Tyrathect said. At long last, the radios
seemed complete.
"In a moment. I wanted to ask you about timing. My sources tell me
Woodcarver's army is on its way. If they make reasonable progress, they
should be here in five tendays."
"That's at least three tendays before Ravna's ship arrives."
"Quite. We will have your old enemy disposed of long before we go for
the high stakes. But ... something is strange about the Two-Legs' recent
messages. How much do you think they suspect? Is it possible that Amdijefri
are telling them more than we know?"
It was an uncertainty Steel would have masked back when she had been
Flenser-in-Waiting. Tyrathect slid to a seated position before replying.
"You might know the answer if you had bothered to learn more of the
Two-Legs' language, dear Steel, or let me learn more." Through the winter,
Tyrathect had been desperate to talk to the children alone, to get warning
to the ship. She was of two minds about that now. Amdijefri were so
transparent, so innocent. If they glimpsed anything of Steel's treachery,
they couldn't hide it. And what might the rescuers do if they knew Steel's
villainy? Tyrathect had seen one starship in flight. Just its landing could
be a terrible weapon. Besides ... If Steel's plan succeeds, I won't need the
aliens' goodwill.
Aloud, Tyrathect continued, "As long as you can continue your
magnificent performance, you have nothing to fear from the child. Can't you
see that he loves you?"
For an instant, Steel seemed pleased, and then the suspicion returned.
"I don't know. Amdi seems always to taunt me, as though he sees through my
act."
Poor Steel. Amdiranifani was his greatest success, and he would never
understand it. In this one thing Steel had truly exceeded his Master, had
discovered and honed a technique that had once been Woodcarver's. The
Fragment eyed his former student almost hungrily. If only he could do him
all over again; there must be a way to combine the fear and the flensing
with love and affection. The resulting tool would truly merit the name
Steel. Tyrathect shrugged, "Take my word for it. If you can continue your
kindness act, both children will be faithful. As for the rest of your
question: I have noticed some change in Ravna's messages. She seems much
more confident of their arrival time, yet something has gone wrong for them.
I don't think they're any more suspicious than before; they seemed to accept
that Jefri was responsible for Amdi's idea about the radios. That lie was a
good move, by the way. It played to their sense of superiority. On a fair
battlefield, we are probably their betters -- and they must not guess that."
"But what are they suddenly so tense about?"
The Fragment shrugged. "Patience, dear Steel. Patience and observation.
Perhaps Amdijefri have noticed this too. You might subtly inspire them to
ask about it. My guess is the Two-Legs have their own politics to worry
about." He stopped and turned all his heads on Steel. "Could you have your
'source' down at Woodcarver's ferret about with the question?"
"Perhaps I will. That Dataset is Woodcarver's one great advantage."
Steel sat in silence for a moment, nervously chewing at his lips. Abruptly,
he shook himself all over, as if to drive off the manifold threats he saw
encroaching. "Shreck!"
There was the sound of paws. The hatch creaked open and Shreck stuck a
head inside. "Sir?"
"Bring the radio outfits in here. Then ask Amdijefri if he can come
down to talk to us."
The radios were beautiful things. Ravna claimed that the basic device
could be invented by civilizations scarcely more advanced than Flenser's.
That was hard to believe. There were so many steps in the making, so many
meaningless detours. The final results: eight one-yard squares of
night-darkness. Glints of gold and silver showed in the strange material.
That, at least, was no mystery: a part of Flenser's gold and silver had gone
into the construction.
Amdijefri arrived. They raced around the central floor, poked at the
radios, shouted to Steel and the Flenser Fragment. Sometimes it was hard to
believe they were not truly one pack, that the Two Legs was not another
member: They clung to each other as a single pack might. As often as not,
Amdi answered questions about Two-Legs before Jefri had a chance to speak,
using the "I-pack" pronoun to identify both of them.
Today, however, there seemed to be a disagreement. "Oh, please my lord,
let me be the one to try it!"
Jefri rattled off something in Samnorsk. When Amdi didn't translate, he
repeated the words more slowly, speaking directly to Steel. "No. It is
[something something] dangerous. Amdi is [something] small. And also, time
[something] narrow."
The Fragment strained for the meaning. Damn. Sooner or later their
ignorance of the Two Legs' language was going to cost them.
Steel listened to the human, then sighed the most marvelously patient
sigh. "Please. Amdi. Jefri. What is problem?" He spoke in Samnorsk, making
more sense to the Flenser Fragment than the human child had.
Amdi dithered for a moment. "Jefri thinks the radio jackets are too big
for me. But look, it doesn't fit so badly!" Amdi jumped all around one of
the night-dark squares, dragging it heedlessly off its velvet pallet onto
the floor. He pulled the fabric over the back and shoulders of his largest
member.
Now the radio was roughly the shape of a greatcloak; Steel's tailors
had added clasps at the shoulders and gut. But the thing was vastly outsized
for little Amdi. It stood like a tent around one of him. "See? See?" The
tiny head poked out, looking first at Steel and then at Tyrathect, willing
their belief.
Jefri said something. The Amdi pack squeaked back angrily. Then, "Jefri
worries about everything, but somebody has to test the radios. There's this
little problem with speed. Radio goes much faster than sound. Jefri's just
afraid it's so fast, it might confuse the pack using it. That's foolish. How
much faster could it be than heads-together thought?" He asked it as a
question. Tyrathect smiled. The pack of puppies couldn't quite lie, but he
guessed that Amdi knew the answer to his question -- and that it did not
support his argument.
On the other side of the hall, Steel listened with heads cocked -- the
picture of benign tolerance. "I'm sorry, Amdi. It's just too dangerous for
you to be the first."
"But I am brave! And I want to help."
"I'm sorry. After we know it's safe -- "
Amdi gave a shriek of outrage, much higher than normal interpack talk,
almost in the range of thought. He swarmed around Jefri, whacking at the
human's legs with his butt ends. "Hideous traitor!" he cried, and continued
the insults in Samnorsk.
It took about ten minutes to get him calmed down to a sulk. He and
Jefri sat on the floor, grumbling at each other in Samnorsk. Tyrathect
watched the two, and Steel on the other side of the room. If irony were
something that made sound, they would all be deaf by now. All their lives,
Flenser and Steel had experimented on others -- usually unto death. Now they
had a victim who literally begged to be victimized ... and he must be
rejected. There was no question about the rejection. Even if Jefri had not
raised objections, the Amdi pack was too valuable to be risked. Furthermore,
Amdi was an eightsome. It was a miracle that such a large pack could
function at all. Whatever dangers there were with radio would be much
greater for him.
So, a proper victim would be found. A proper wretch. Surely there were
plenty of those in the dungeons beneath Hidden Island. Tyrathect thought
back on all the packs she remembered killing. How she hated Flenser, his
calculating cruelty. I am so much worse than Steel. I made Steel. She
remembered where her thoughts had been the last hour. This was one of the
bad days, one of the days when Flenser sneaked out from the recesses of her
mind, when she rode the power of his reason higher and higher, till it
became rationalization and she became him. Still, for a few more seconds she
might be in control. What could she do with it? A soul that was strong
enough might deny itself, might become a different person ... might at the
very least end itself.
"I-I will try the radio." The words were spoken almost before he
thought them. Weak, silly frill.
"What?" said Steel.
But the words had been clear, and Steel had heard. The Flenser Fragment
smiled dryly. "I want to see what this radio can do. Let me try it, dear
Steel."
They took the radios out into the yard, on the side of the starship
that was hidden from general view. Here it would just be Amdijefri, Steel,
and whoever I am at the moment. The Flenser Fragment laughed at the
upwelling fear. Discipline, she had thought! Perhaps that was best. He stood
in the middle of the yard and let the human help him with the radio gear.
Strange to see another intelligent being so close, and towering over him.
Jefri's incredibly articulate paws arranged the jackets loosely on his
backs. The inside material was soft, deadening. And unlike normal clothing,
the radios covered the wearer's tympana. The boy tried to explain what he
was doing. "See? This thing," he pulled at the corner of the greatcloak,
"goes over your head. The inside has [something] that makes sound into
radio."
The Fragment shrugged away as the boy tried to pull the cover forward.
"No. I can't think." Only by standing just so, all members facing inward,
could the Fragment maintain full consciousness. Already the weaker parts of
him were edging toward isolation panic. The conscience that was Tyrathect
would learn something today.
"Oh. I'm sorry." Jefri turned and spoke to Amdi, something about using
the old design.
Amdi was heads-together, just thirty feet away. He had been all frowns,
sullen at being denied, nervous to be apart from the Two-Legs. But as the
preparations continued, the frowns eased. The puppies' eyes grew wide with
happy fascination. The Fragment felt a wave of affection for the puppies
that came and went almost too fast to be noticed.
Now Amdi edged nearer, taking advantage of the fact that the cloaks
muffled much of the Fragment's thought sounds. "Jefri says maybe we
shouldn't have tried to make the mind-size radio," he said. "But this will
be so much better. I know it! And," he said with transparent slyness, "you
could still let me test it instead."
"No, Amdi. This is the way it must be." Steel's voice was all soft
sympathy. Only the Flenser Fragment could see the broad grin on a couple of
the lord's members.
"Well, okay." The puppies crept a little nearer. "Don't be afraid, Lord
Tyrathect. We've had the radios in sunlight for some time. They should have
lots of power. To make them work you just pull all the belts tight, even the
ones at your neck."
"All of them at once?"
Amdi fidgeted. "That's probably best. Otherwise, there will be such a
mismatch of speeds that -- " He said something to the Two Legs.
Jefri leaned close. "This belt goes here, and this here." He pointed to
the braid-bone straps that drew the head covering close. "Then just pull
this with your mouth."
"The harder you pull, the louder the radio," Amdi added.
"Okay." The Fragment drew himself together. He shrugged the jackets
into place, tightening the shoulder and gut belts. Deadly muffling. The
jackets almost seemed to mold themselves to his tympana. He looked at
himself, and grasped desperately for what was left of consciousness. The
jackets were beautiful, magic darkness yet with a hint of the golden-silver
of a Flenserist Lord. Beautiful instruments of torture. Even Steel had not
imagined such twisted revenge. Had he?
The Fragment grabbed the head straps and pulled.
Twenty years ago, when Tyrathect was new, she had loved to hike with
her fission parent on the grassy dunes along Lake Kitcherri. That was before
their great falling out, before loneliness drove Tyrathect to the Republic's
Capital and her search for "meaning". Not all of the shore of Lake Kitcherri
was beaches and dunes. Farther south there was the Rockness, where streams
cut through stone to the water. Sometimes, especially when she and her
parent had fought, Tyrathect would walk up from the shore along streams
bordered by sheer, smooth cliffs. It was a sort of punishment: there were
places where the stone had a glassy haze and didn't absorb sound at all.
Everything was echoed, right up to the top of thought. It was if she were
surrounded by copies of herself, and copies beyond them, all thinking the
same sounds but out of step.
Of course echoes are often a problem with unquilted stone walls,
especially if the size and geometry are wrong. But these cliffs were perfect
reflectors, a quarrier's nightmare. And there were places where the shape of
the Rockness conspired with the sounds.... When Tyrathect walked there, she
couldn't tell her own thoughts from the echoes. Everything was garbled with
barely offset resonance. At first it had been a great pain that sent her
running. But she forced herself back again and again, and finally learned to
think even in the worst of the narrows.
Amdijefri's radio was just a little like the Kitcherri cliffs. Enough
to save me, maybe. Tyrathect came to consciousness all piled in a heap. At
most seconds had passed since she brought the radios to life; Amdi and Steel
were simply staring at her. The human was rocking one of her bodies, talking
to her. Tyrathect licked the boy's paw, then stood partly up. She heard only
her own thoughts ... but they had some of the jarring difference of the
stone echoes.
She was back on her bellies again. Part of her was vomiting in the
dirt. The world shimmered, out of tune. Thought is there. Grab it! Grab it!
All a matter of coordination, of timing. She remembered Amdijefri talking
about how fast the radio was. In a way, this was the reverse of the problem
of the screaming cliffs.
She shook her heads, mastering the weirdness. "Give me a moment," she
said, and her voice was almost calm. She looked around. Slowly. If she
concentrated and didn't move fast, she could think. Suddenly she was aware
of the greatcloaks, pressing in on all her tympana. She should have been
deafened, isolated. Yet her thoughts were no muzzier than after a bad sleep.
She got to her feet again and walked slowly around the open space
between Amdi and Steel. "Can you hear me?" she asked.
"Yes," said Steel. He edged nervously away from her.
Of course. The cloaks muffled sound like any heavy quilt: anything in
the range of thought would be totally absorbed. But interpack speech and