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occasional pricks of light. She slipped her arm across his back, and after a
moment felt his across her shoulders.
She'd guessed right: tonight, the Galaxy owned the sky. It was a sight
that Vrinimi old hands happily ignored. For Ravna, it was the most beautiful
thing about Relay. Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand
light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of
mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape,
curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and ... there
were knots in the mist ... there were streaks of utter black that separated
the curving arms ... complexity on complexity, twisting toward the pale hub
that was the Core. Maelstrom. Whirlpool. Frozen, still, across half the sky.
She heard Pham's breath catch in his throat. He said something,
sing-song syllables that could not have been Trisk, and certainly not
Samnorsk. "All my life I lived in a tiny clump of that. And I thought I was
a master of space. I never dreamed to stand and see the whole blessed thing
at once." His hand tightened on her shoulder, then gentled, stroking her
neck. "And no matter how long we watch, will we see any sign of the Zones?"
She shook her head slowly. "But they're easily imagined." She gestured
with her free hand. In the large, the Zones of Thought followed the mass
distribution of the Galaxy: The Mindless Depths extending down to the soft
glow of the galactic Core. Farther out, the Great Slowness, where humankind
had been born, where ultralight could not exist and civilizations lived and
died unknowing and unknown. And the Beyond, the stars about four-fifths out
from the center, extending well off-plane to include places like Relay. The
Known Net had existed in some form for billions of years in the Beyond. It
was not a civilization; few civilizations lasted longer than a million
years. But the records of the past were quite complete. Sometimes they were
intelligible. More often, reading them involved translations of translations
of translations, passed down from one defunct race to another with no one to
corroborate -- worse than any multihop net message could ever be. Yet some
things were quite clear: There had always been the Zones of Thought, though
perhaps they were slightly inward-moved now. There had always been wars and
peace, and races upwelling from the Great Slowness, and thousands of little
empires. There had always been races moving into the Transcend, to become
the Powers ... or their prey.
"And the Transcend?" Pham said. "Is that just the far dark?" The dark
between the galaxies.
Ravna laughed softly. "It includes all that but ... see the outer
reaches of the spirals. They're in the Transcend." Most everything farther
than forty thousand light-years from the galactic center was.
Pham Nuwen was silent for a long moment. She felt a tiny shiver pass
through him. "After talking to the wheelies, I -- I think I understand more
of what you were warning me about. There's a lot of things I don't know,
things that could kill me ... or worse."
Common sense triumphs at last. "True," she said quietly. "But it's not
just you, or the brief time you've been here. You could study your whole
life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human
motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like
dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different
things people do to animals -- ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal --
each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural
protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not
exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a
deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far
down that the beings on the surface -- superior though they are -- can't
effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper
levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a
relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just
as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There
are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient
factories -- but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of
those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices.
Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't
make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor."
Pham turned toward her, away from window and the stars. "So there are
always 'fish' edging close to the surface." For an instant she thought she
had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent
deathwish. "Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood ... and
not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it." She felt him shiver
and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips
waiting.
It had been two years since Ravna Bergsndot left Sjandra Kei. In some
ways the time had gone fast. Just now her body was telling her what a long,
long time it had really been. Every touch was so vivid, waking desires
carefully suppressed. Suddenly her skin was tingling all over. It took
marvelous restraint to undress without tearing anything.
Ravna was out of practice. And of course she had nothing recent to
compare to.... But Pham Nuwen was very, very good.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay01 at Relay
Language path: Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK:Relay units
From: Net Administrator for Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down
Subject: Complaints about Relay, a suggestion
Summary: It's getting worse; try us instead
Key phrases: communications problems, Relay unreliability, Transcend
Distribution:
Communication Costs Special Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group, Transceiver Relay01 at Relay, Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop,
Follow-ups to: Windsong Expansion Interest Group
Date: 07:21:21 Docks Time, 36/09 of Org year 52089
Text of message:
During the last five hundred hours, Comm Costs shows 9,834
transceiver-layer congestion complaints against the Vrinimi operation at
Relay. Each of these complaints involves services to tens of thousand of
planets. Vrinimi has promised again and again that the congestion is a
purely temporary increase of Transcendent usage.
As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have
benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it
inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.
The events of the last seven hours compel us to change this policy.
Those reading this item already know about the incident; most of you are the
victims of it. Beginning at [00:00:27 Docks Time], Vrinimi Org began taking
transceivers off-line, an unscheduled outage. R01 went out at 00:00:27, R02
at 02:50:32, R03 and R04 at 03:12:01. Vrinimi stated that a Transcendent
customer was urgently requesting bandwidth. (R00 had been previously
dedicated to that Power's use.) The customer required use of both up- and
down-link bandwidth. By the Org's own admission, the unscheduled usage
exceeded sixty percent of their entire capacity. Note that the excesses of
the preceding five hundred hours -- excesses which caused entirely justified
complaint -- were never more than five percent of Org capacity.
Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul communication business. We
know how difficult it is to maintain transceiver elements that mass as much
as a planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply cannot be made by
suppliers in our line of work. But at the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi
Org is unacceptable. It's true that in the last three hours the Org has
returned R01 through R04 to general service, and promised to pass on the
Power's surpayment to all those who were "inconvenienced". But only Vrinimi
knows how large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even Vrinimi!)
knows whether this is the end of the outages.
What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to the rest of
you an unaccountable disaster.
Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a major -- and
permanent -- expansion of our service: the construction of five additional
backbone transceivers. Obviously this will be immensely expensive.
Transceivers are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the
geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be amortized over many
decades of good business. We can't undertake it without clear customer
commitment. In order to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build
what is really needed, we are creating a temporary newsgroup, Windsong
Expansion Interest Group, moderated and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive
charges to transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only ten
percent our usual. We urge you, our transceiver-layer customers, to use this
service to talk to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from
Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our proposals.
We are waiting to hear from you.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when
she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously
insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened
her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly
around ... a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a
second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last
night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense
... what a strange thing.
The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked
unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive
nonsense. "Yes?"
It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but
-- are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.
Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange:
sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She
rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine."
Fine! "What's up?"
"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were
so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org
to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we
were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."
"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I -- who's paying
for it, anyway?"
"I don't know, but it is expensive. We were told they're dedicating a
backbone transceiver to the search. If there's anyone transmitting, we
should know in a matter of hours."
They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more
coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into
business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The
Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there -- and gave it
full credit. But just yesterday, he'd been wimping about transceiver
saturation. Either way, this was good news -- perhaps extraordinarily good.
If the Riders' wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less
than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring
it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.
After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting
herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her
actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a
lot of things she wanted to check into.
Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller.
Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair;
it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly
she noticed that Grondr didn't look so hot either. His facial chitin was
smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.
"Ah!" His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level.
"Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have
been very ... chaotic." Just where had his cool distance gone? "I just want
you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken
in until just a couple of hours ago." He launched into a disjointed
description of massive demand swamping the Org's resources.
As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By
the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She
scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as
ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just
the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.
"-- Old One just kept asking for more and more. When we finally figured
things out, and confronted him.... Well, we came close to threatening
violence. We have the resources to destroy his emissary vessel. No telling
what his revenge might be, but we told Old One his demands were already
destroying us. Thank the Powers, he just seemed amused; he backed off. He's
restricted to a single transceiver now, and that's on a signal search that
has nothing to do with us."
Hmm. One mystery solved. Old One must have been snooping around The
Wandering Company and overheard the Skroderiders' story. "Maybe things will
be okay, then. But it's important to be just as tough if Old One tries to
abuse us again." The words were already out of her mouth before she
considered who she was giving advice to.
Grondr didn't seem to notice. If anything, he was the one scrambling to
agree: "Yes, yes. I'll tell you, if Old One were any ordinary customer, we'd
blacklist him forever for this deception.... But then if he were ordinary,
he could never have fooled us."
Grondr wiped pudgy white fingers across his face. "No mere Beyonder
could have altered our record of the dredge expedition. Not even one from
the Top could have broken into the junkyard and manipulated the remains
without our even suspecting."
Dredge? Remains? Ravna began to see that she and Grondr were not
talking about the same thing. "Just what did Old One do?"
"The details? We're pretty sure of them now. Since the Fall of Straum,
Old One has been very interested in humans. Unfortunately, there were no
willing ones available here. It began manipulating us, rewriting our
junkyard records. We've recovered a clean backup from a branch office: The
dredge really did encounter the wreck of a human ship; there were human body
parts in it -- but nothing that we could have revived. Old One must have
mixed and matched what it found there. Perhaps it fabricated memories by
extrapolating from human cultural data in the archives. With hindsight, we
can match its early requests with the invasion of our junkyard."
Grondr rattled on, but Ravna wasn't listening. Her eyes stared blindly
through the phone's display. We are little fish in the abyss, protected by
the deep from the fishers above. But even if they can't live down here, the
clever fisherfolk still have their lures and deadly tricks. And so Pham --
"Pham Nuwen is just a robot, then," she said softly.
"Not precisely. He is human, and with his fake memories he can operate
autonomously. But when Old One buys full bandwidth, the creature is fully an
emissary device." The hand and eye of a Power.
Grondr's mouthparts clattered in abject embarrassment. "Ravna, we don't
know all that happened last night; there was no reason to have you under
close surveillance. But Old One assures us that its need for direct
investigation is over. In any case, we'll never give him the bandwidth to
try again."
Ravna barely nodded. Her face suddenly felt cold. She had never felt
such anger and such fright at the same time. She stood in a wave of
dizziness and walked away from the phone, ignoring Grondr's worried cries.
The stories from grad school came tumbling through her mind, and the myths
of a dozen human religions. Consequences, consequences. Some of them she
could defend against; others were past repair.
And from somewhere in the back of her mind, an incredibly silly thought
crawled out from under the horror and the rage. For eight hours she had been
face to face with a Power. It was the sort of experience that made a chapter
in textbooks, the sort of thing that was always far away and misreported.
And it was the sort of thing no one in all of Sjandra Kei could come near to
claiming. Until now.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Johanna was in the boat for a long time. The sun never set, though now
it was low behind her, now it was high in front, now all was cloudy and rain
plinked off the tarp covering her blankets. She spent the hours in an
agonized haze. Things happened that could only have been dreams. There were
creatures pulling at her clothes, blood sticking everywhere. Gentle hands
and rat snouts dressed her wounds, and forced chill water down her throat.
When she thrashed around, Mom rearranged her blankets and comforted her with
the strangest sounds. For hours, someone warm lay beside her. Sometimes it
was Jefri; more often it was a large dog, a dog that purred.
The rain passed. The sun was on the left side of the boat, but hidden
behind a cold, snapping shadow. More and more, the pain became divisible.
Part of it was in her chest and shoulder; that stabbed through her whenever
the boat wobbled. Part of it was in her gut, an emptiness that was not quite
nausea ... she was so hungry, so thirsty.
More and more, she was remembering, not dreaming. There were nightmares
that would never go away. They had really happened. They were happening now.
The sun peeked in and out of the tumble of clouds. It slid slowly lower
across the sky till it was almost behind the boat. She tried to remember
what Daddy had been saying just before ... everything went bad. They were in
this planet's arctic, in the summer. So the sun's low point must be north,
and their twin-hulled boat was sailing roughly southwards. Wherever they
were going, it was minute by minute farther from the spacecraft and any hope
of finding Jefri.
Sometimes the water was like open sea, the hills distant or hidden by
low clouds. Sometimes they passed through narrows, and swept close to walls
of naked rock. She'd had no idea a sailboat could move so fast or be so
dangerous. Four of the rat creatures worked desperately to keep them off the
rocks. They bounded nimbly from mast platform to railing, sometimes standing
on each other's shoulders to extend their reach. The twin-hulled boat tilted
and groaned in water that was suddenly rough. Then they'd be through and the
hills would be at a peaceful distance, sliding slowly past.
For a long while, she pretended delirium. She moaned, she twisted. She
watched. The boat hulls were long and narrow, almost like canoes. The sail
was mounted between them. The shadow in her dreams had been that sail,
snapping in the cold, clean wind. The sky was an avalanche of grays, light
and dark. There were birds up there. They dipped past the mast, circled
again and again. There was twittering and hissing all around her. But the
sound did not come from the birds.
It was the monsters. She watched them through lowered lashes. These
were the same kind that killed Mom and Dad. They even wore the same funny
clothes, gray-green jackets studded with stirrups and pockets. Dogs or
wolves she had thought before. That didn't really describe them. Sure, they
had four slender legs and pointy little ears. But with their long necks and
occasionally pinkish eyes, they might as well be huge rats.
And the longer she watched them, the more horrible they seemed. A still
image could never convey that horror; you had to see them in action. She
watched four of them -- the ones on her side of the boat -- play with her
dataset. The Pink Oliphaunt was tied in a net bag near the rear of the boat.
Now the beasts wanted to look it over. At first it looked like a circus act,
the creatures' heads darting this way and that. But every move was so
precise, so coordinated with all the others. They had no hands, but they
could untie knots, each holding a piece of twine in its mouth and
maneuvering its necks around others. At the same time, one's claws held the
loose netting tight against the railing. It was like watching puppets run
off the same control.
In seconds they had it out of the bag. Dogs would have let it slide to
the bottom of the hull, then pushed it around with their noses. Not these
things: two put it onto on a cross bench, while a third steadied it with its
paw. They poked around the edges, concentrating on the plush flanges and
floppy ears. They pushed and nuzzled, but with clear purpose. They were
trying to open it.
Two heads showed over the railing on the other hull. They made the
gobbling, hissing sounds that were a cross between a bird call and someone
throwing up. One of those on her side glanced back and made similar sounds.
The other three continued to play with the dataset's latches.
Finally they pulled the big, floppy ears simultaneously: the dataset
popped open, and the top window went into Johanna's startup routine -- an
anim of herself saying "Shame on you, Jefri. Stay out of my things!" The
four creatures went rigid, their eyes suddenly wide.
Johanna's four turned the set so the others could see. One held it down
while another peered at the top window, and a third fumbled with the key
window. The guys in the other hull went nuts, but none of them tried to get
any closer. The random prodding of the four abruptly cut off her startup
greeting. One of them glanced at the guys in the other hull; another two
watched Johanna. She continued to lie with her eyes almost closed.
"Shame on you, Jefri. Stay out my things!" Johanna's voice came again,
but from one of the animals. It was a perfect playback. Then a girl's voice
was moaning, crying, "Mom, Daddy". It was her own voice again, but more
frightened and childish than she ever wanted it to sound.
They seemed to be waiting for the dataset to respond. When nothing
happened, one of them went back to pushing its nose against the windows.
Everything valuable, and all the dangerous programs, were passworded.
Insults and squawking emerged from the box, all the little surprises she had
planted for her snooping little brother. Oh Jefri, will I ever see you
again?
The sounds and vids kept the monsters amused for several minutes.
Eventually their random fiddlings convinced the dataset that somebody really
young had opened up the box, and it shifted into kindermode.
The creatures knew she was watching. Of the four fooling with her
Oliphaunt, one -- not always the same one -- was always watching her. They
were playing games with her, pretending they didn't know she was pretending.
Johanna opened her eyes wide and glared at the creature. "Damn you!"
She looked in the other direction. And screamed. The mob in the other hull
were clumped together. Their heads rose on sinuous necks from the pile. In
the low sunlight, their eyes glinted red. A pack of rats or snakes, silently
staring at her, and for heaven knew how long.
The heads leaned forward at her cry, and she heard the scream again.
Behind her, her own voice shouted "Damn you!" Somewhere else, she was
calling for "Mom" and "Daddy". Johanna screamed again, and they just echoed
it back. She swallowed her terror and kept silent. The monsters kept it up
for a half minute, the mimicking, the mixing of things she must have said in
her sleep. When they saw they couldn't terrorize her that way any more, the
voices stopped being human. The gobbling went back and forth, as if the two
groups were negotiating or something. Finally the four on her side closed
her dataset and tied it into the net bag.
The six unwrapped themselves from each other. Three jumped to the
outboard side of the hull. They gripped the edge tight in their claws and
leaned into the wind. For once they almost did look like dogs -- big ones
sitting at a car window, sniffing at the airstream. The long necks swept
forward and back. Every few seconds, one of them would dip its head out of
sight, into the water. Drinking? Fishing?
Fishing. A head flipped up, tossing something small and green into the
boat. The other three animals nosed about, grabbing it. She had a glimpse of
tiny legs and a shiny carapace. One of the rats held it at the tip of its
mouth, while the other two pulled it apart. It was all done with their
uncanny precision. The pack seemed like a single creature, and each neck a
heavy tentacle that ended in a pair of jaws. Her gut twisted at the thought,
but there was nothing to barf up.
The fishing expedition went on another quarter hour. They got at least
seven of the green things. But they weren't eating them; not all of them,
anyway. The dismembered leavings collected in a small wood bowl.
More gobbling between the two sides. One of the six grabbed the bowl's
edge in its mouth and crawled across the mast platform. The four on
Johanna's side huddled together as if frightened of the visitor. Only after
the bowl was set down and the intruder had returned to its side, did the
four in Johanna's hull poke their heads up again.
One of the rats picked up the bowl. It and another walked toward her.
Johanna swallowed. What torture was this? Her stomach twisted again ... she
was so hungry. She looked at the bowl again and realized that they were
trying to feed her.
The sun had just come out from under northern clouds. The low light was
like some bright fall afternoon, just after rain: dark sky above, yet
everything close by bright and glistening. The creatures' fur was deep and
plush. One held the bowl towards her, while the other stuck its snout in and
withdrew ... something slick and green. It held the tidbit delicately, just
with the tips of its long mouth. It turned and thrust the green thing toward
her.
Johanna shrank back, "No!"
The creature paused. For a moment she thought it was going to echo her.
Then it dropped the lump back into the bowl. The first animal set it on the
bench beside her. It looked up at her for an instant, then released the
jaw-wide flange at the edge of the bowl. She had a glimpse of fine, pointy
teeth.
Johanna stared into the bowl, nausea fighting with hunger. Finally she
worked a hand out of her blanket and reached into it. Heads perked up around
her, and there was an exchange of gobble comments between the two sides of
the boat.
Her fingers closed on something soft and cold. She lifted it into the
sunlight. The body was gray green, its sides glistening in the light. The
guys in the other hull had torn off the little legs and chopped away the
head. What remained was only two or three centimeters long. It looked like
filleted shellfish. Once she had liked such food. But that had been cooked.
She almost dropped the thing when she felt it quiver in her hand.
She brought it close to her mouth, touched it with her tongue. Salty.
On Straum, most shellfish would make you very sick if you ate them raw. How
could she know, all alone without parents or a local commnet? She felt tears
coming. She said a bad word, stuffed the green thing into her mouth, and
tried to chew. Blandness, with the texture of suet and gristle. She gagged,
spat it out ... and tried to eat another. Altogether she got parts of two
down. Maybe that was for the best; she'd wait and see how much she barfed
up. She lay back and saw several pairs of eyes watching. The gobbling with
the other side of the boat picked up. Then one of them sidled toward her,
carrying a leather bag with a spigot. A canteen.
This creature was the biggest of all. The leader? It moved its head
close to hers, putting the spout of the canteen near her mouth. The big one
seemed sly, more cautious about approaching her than the others. Johanna's
eyes traveled back along its flanks. Beyond the edge of its jacket, the pelt
on its rear was mostly white ... and scored deep with a Y-shaped scar. This
is the one that killed Dad.
Johanna's attack was not planned; perhaps that's why it worked so well.
She lunged past the canteen and swung her free arm around the thing's neck.
She rolled over the animal, pinning it against the hull. By itself, it was
smaller than she, and not strong enough to push her off. She felt its claws
raking through the blankets but somehow never quite cutting her. She put all
her weight on the creature's spine, grabbed it where throat met jaw, and
began slamming its head against the wood.
Then the others were on her, muzzles poking under her, jaws grabbing at
her sleeve. She felt rows of needle teeth just poking through the fabric.
Their bodies buzzed with a sound from her dreams, a sound that went straight
through her clothes and rattled her bones.
They pulled her hand from the other's throat, twisting her; she felt
the arrowhead tearing her inside. But there was still one thing she could
do: Johanna push off with her feet, butting her head against the base of the
other's jaw, smashing the top of its head into the hull. The bodies around
her convulsed, and she was flipped onto her back. Pain was the only thing
she could feel now. Neither rage nor fear could move her.
Yet part of her was still aware of the four. She had hurt them. She had
hurt them all. Three wandered drunkenly, making whistling sounds that for
once seemed to come from their mouths. The one with the scarred butt lay on
its side, twitching. She had punched a star-shaped wound in the top of its
head. Blood dripped down past its eyes. Red tears.
Minutes passed and the whistling stopped. The four creatures huddled
together and the familiar hissing resumed. The bleeding from her chest had
started again.
They stared at each other for a while. She smiled at her enemies. They
could be hurt. She could hurt them. She felt better than she had since the
landing.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Before the Flenser Movement, Woodcarvers had been the most famous
city-state west of the Icefangs. Its founder went back six centuries. In
those days, things had been harder in the north; snow covered even the
lowlands through most of the year. The Woodcarver had started alone, a
single pack in a little cabin on an inland bay. The pack was a hunter and a
thinker as much as an artist. There had been no settlements for a hundred
miles around. Only a dozen of the carver's early statues ever left his
cabin, yet those statues had been his first fame. Three were still in
existence. There was a city by the Long Lakes named for the one in its
museum.
With fame had come apprentices. One cabin became ten, scattered across
Woodcarver's fjord. A century or two passed, and of course the Woodcarver
slowly changed. He feared the change, the feeling that his soul was slipping
away. He tried to keep hold of himself; almost everyone does to one extent
or another. In the worst case, the pack falls into perversion, perhaps
becomes soul-hollow. For Woodcarver, the quest was itself the change. He
studied how each member fits within the soul. He studied pups and their
raising, and how you might guess the contributions of a new one. He learned
to shape the soul by training the members.
Of course little of this was new. It was the base of most religions,
and every town had romance advisors and brood kenners. Such knowledge,
whether valid or not, is important to any culture. What Woodcarver did was
to look at it all again, without traditional bias. He gently experimented on
himself and on the other artists in his little colony. He watched the
results, using them to design new experiments. He was guided by what he saw
rather than by what he wanted to believe.
By the various standards of his age, what he did was heresy or
perversion or simple insanity. In the early years, King Woodcarver was hated
almost as much as Flenser was three centuries later. But the far north was
still going through its time of heavy winters. The nations of the south
could not easily send armies as far as Woodcarvers. Once when they did, they
were thoroughly defeated. And wisely, Woodcarver never attempted to subvert
the south. Not directly. But his settlement grew and grew, and its fame for
art and furniture was small beside its other reputations. Old of heart
traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and
happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and
windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It
wasn't the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and
the outlook he had created.
Wickwrackscar and Jaqueramaphan arrived at Woodcarvers late in the
afternoon. It had rained most of the day, but now the clouds had blown away
and the sky was that bright cloudless blue that was all the more beautiful
after a stretch of cloudy days.
Woodcarver's Domain was paradise to Peregrine's eyes. He was tired of
the packless wilderness. He was tired of worrying about the alien.
Twinhulls paced them suspiciously for the last few miles. The boats
were armed, and Peregrine and Scriber were coming from very much the wrong
direction. But they were all alone, clearly harmless. Long callers hooted,
relaying their story ahead. By the time they reached the harbor they were
heroes, two packs who had stolen (unspecified) treasure from the villains of
the north. They sailed around a breakwater that hadn't existed on
Peregrine's last trip, and tied in at the moorage.
The pier was crowded with soldiers and wagons. Townspeople were all
over the road leading up to the city walls. This was as close to a mob scene
as you could get and still have room for sober thought. Scriber bounced out
of the boat and pranced about in obvious delight at the cheers from the
hillside. "Quickly! We must speak with the Woodcarver."
Wickwrackscar picked up the canvas bag that held the alien's picture
box, and climbed carefully out of the boat. He was dizzy from the beating
the alien had given him. Scar's fore-tympanum had been cut in the attack.
For a moment he lost track of himself. The pier was very strange -- stone at
first glance, but walled with a spongy black material he hadn't seen since
the Southseas; it should be brittle here.... Where am I? I should be happy
about something, some victory. He paused to regroup. After a moment both the
pain and his thoughts sharpened; he would be like this for days yet, at
least. Get help for the alien. Get it ashore.
King Woodcarver's Lord Chamberlain was a mostly overweight dandy;
Peregrine had not expected to see such at Woodcarvers. But the fellow became
instantly cooperative when he saw the alien. He brought a doctor down to
look at the Two-Legs (and incidentally, at Peregrine). The alien had gained
strength in the last two days, but there had been no more violence. They got
it ashore without much trouble. It stared at Peregrine out of its flat face,
a look he knew was impotent rage. He touched Scar's head thoughtfully ...
the Two-Legs was just waiting for the best opportunity to do more damage.
Minutes later, the travelers were in kherhog-drawn carriages, rolling
up the cobblestone street toward the city walls. Soldiers cleared the way
through the crowd. Scriber Jaqueramaphan waved this way and that, the
handsome hero. By now Peregrine knew the shy insecurity that lurked within
Scriber. This might be the high point of his whole life till now.
Even if he wanted it, Wickwrackscar could not be so expansive. With one
of Scar's tympana hurt, wild gestures made him lose track of his thoughts.
He hunkered down on the carriage seats and looked out in all directions:
But for the shape of the outer harbor, the place was not at all what he
remembered from fifty years ago. In most parts of the world, not much
changed in fifty years. A pilgrim returning after such an interval might
even be bored by the sameness. But this ... it was almost scary.
The huge breakwater was new. There were twice as many piers, and
multiboats with flags he had never seen on this side of the world. The road
had been here before, but narrow, with only a third as many turnoffs.
Before, the town walls had been more to keep the kherhogs and froghens in
than any invaders out. Now they were ten feet high, the black stone
extending as far as Peregrine could see.... And there had been scarcely any
soldiers last time; now they were everywhere. That was not a good change. He
felt a sinking in the pit of Scar's stomach; soldiers and fighting were not
good.
They rode through the city gates and past a market maze that spread
across acres. The alleys were only fifty feet wide, narrow where bolts of
cloth, furniture displays, and crates of fresh fruit encroached. Smells of
fruit and spice and varnish hung in the air. The place was so crowded that
the haggling was almost an orgy, and dizzy Peregrine almost blacked out.
Then they were on a narrower street that zigzagged through ranks of
half-timbered buildings. Beyond the roofs loomed heavy fortifications. Ten
minutes later they were in the castle yard.
They dismounted and the Lord Chamberlain had the Two-Legs moved to a
litter.
"Woodcarver, he'll see us now?" said Scriber.
The bureaucrat laughed. "She. Woodcarver changed gender more than ten
years ago."
Peregrine's heads twisted about in surprise. Precisely what would that
mean? Most packs change with time, but he had never heard of Woodcarver
being anything but "he". He almost missed what the Lord Chamberlain said
next.
"Even better. Her whole council must see ... what you've brought. Come
inside." He waved the guards away.
They walked down a hall almost wide enough for two packs to pass
abreast. The chamberlain led, followed by the travelers and the doctor with
the alien's litter. The walls were high, padded with silver-crusted
quilting. It was far grander than before ... and again, unsettling. There
was scarcely any statuary, and what there was dated from centuries before.
But there were pictures. He stumbled when he saw the first, and behind
him he heard Scriber gasp. Peregrine had seen art all around the world: The
mobs of the tropics preferred abstract murals, smudges of psychotic color.
The Southseas islanders had never invented perspective; in their
watercolors, distant objects simply floated in the upper half of the
picture. In the Long Lakes Republic, representationism was currently
favored, especially multiptychs that gave a whole-pack view.
But Peregrine had never seen the likes of these. The pictures were
mosaics, each tile a ceramic square about a quarter inch on a side. There
was no color, just four shades of gray. From a few feet away, the graininess
was lost, and ... they were the most perfect landscapes Peregrine had ever
seen. All were views from hilltops around Woodcarvers. Except for the lack
of color, they might have been windows. The bottom of each picture was
bounded by a rectangular frame, but the tops were irregular; the mosaics
simply broke off at the horizon. The hall's quilted wall stood where the
pictures should have shown sky.
"Here now, fellow! I thought you wanted to see Woodcarver." The remark
was directed at Scriber. Jaqueramaphan was strung out along the landscapes,
one of him sitting in front of a different picture all down the hall. He
turned a head to look at the chamberlain. His voice sounded dazed. "Soul's
end! It's like being God, as if I have one member on each hilltop and can
see everything at once." But he scrambled to his feet and trotted to catch
up.
The hall opened on one of the largest indoor meeting rooms Peregrine
had ever seen.
"This is as big as anything in the Republic," Scriber said with
apparent admiration, looking up at the three levels of balconies. They stood
alone with the alien at the bottom.
"Hmf." Besides the chamberlain and the doctor, there were already five
other packs in the room. More showed up as they watched. Most were dressed
like nobles of the Republic, all jewels and furs. A few wore the plain
jackets he remembered from his last trip. Sigh. Woodcarver's little
settlement had grown into a city and now a nation-state. Peregrine wondered
if he -- she -- had any real power now. He trained one head precisely on
Scriber and Hightalked at him. "Don't say anything about the picture box
just yet."
Jaqueramaphan looked puzzled and conspiratorial all at once. He High
Talked back, "Yes ... yes. A bargaining card?"
"Something like that." Peregrine's eyes swept back and forth across the
balconies. Most packs entered with an air of harried self-importance. He
smiled to himself. One glance into the pit was enough to shatter their
smugness. The air above him was filled with buzzing talk. None of the packs
looked like Woodcarver. But then, she'd have few of her members from before;
he could only recognize her by manner and bearing. It shouldn't matter. He
had carried some friendships far longer than any member's lifespan. But with
others the friend had changed in a decade, its viewpoints altering,
affection turning to animosity. He'd been counting on Woodcarver being the
same. Now....
There was a brief sound of trumpets, almost like a call to order. The
pubic doors of a lower balcony slid open and a fivesome entered. Peregrine
felt a twitchy thrill of horror. This was Woodcarver, but so ...
misarranged. One member was so old it had to be helped by the rest. Two were
scarcely more than puppies, and one of those a constant drooler. The largest
member was white-eyed blind. It was the sort of thing you might see in a
waterfront slum, or in the last generation of incest.
She looked down at Peregrine, and smiled almost as if she recognized
him. When she spoke, it was with the blind one. The voice was clear and
firm. "Please carry on, Vendacious."
The chamberlain nodded. "As you wish, Your Majesty." He pointed into
the pit, at the alien. "That is the reason for this hasty meeting."
"We can see monsters at the circus, Vendacious." The voice came from an
overdressed pack on the top balcony. To judge from the shouting that came
from all sides, this was a minority view. One pack on a lower balcony jumped
over the railing and tried to shoo the doctor away from the alien's litter.
The chamberlain raised a head for silence, and glared down at the
fellow who had jumped into the pit. "If you please, Scrupilo, be patient.
Everyone will get a chance to look."
"Scrupilo" made some grumbling hisses, but backed off.
"Good." Vendacious turned all his attention on Peregrine and Scriber.
"Your boat has outrun any news from the north, my friends. No one but I
knows anything of your story -- and what I have is guard codes hooted across
the bay. You say this creature flew down from the sky?"
An invitation to speechify. Peregrine let Scriber Jaqueramaphan do the
talking. Scriber loved it. He told the story of the flying house, of the
ambush and the murders, and the rescue. He showed them his eye-tools and
announced himself as a secret agent of the Long Lakes Republic. Now what
real spy would do that? Every pack on the council had eyes on the alien,
some fearful, some -- like Scrupilo -- crazily curious. Woodcarver watched
with only a couple of heads. The rest might have been asleep. She looked as
tired as Peregrine felt. He rested his own heads on his paws. The pain in
Scar was a pulsing beat; it would be easy enough to set the member asleep,
but then he'd understand very little of what was being said. Hey! maybe that
wasn't such a bad idea. Scar drifted off and the pain receded.
The talk went on for some minutes more, not making a whole lot of sense
to the threesome that was Wickwrack. He understood the tones of voice
moment felt his across her shoulders.
She'd guessed right: tonight, the Galaxy owned the sky. It was a sight
that Vrinimi old hands happily ignored. For Ravna, it was the most beautiful
thing about Relay. Without enhancement, the light was faint. Twenty thousand
light-years is a long, long way. At first there was just a suggestion of
mist, and an occasional star. As her eyes adapted, the mist took shape,
curving arcs, some places brighter, some dimmer. A minute more and ... there
were knots in the mist ... there were streaks of utter black that separated
the curving arms ... complexity on complexity, twisting toward the pale hub
that was the Core. Maelstrom. Whirlpool. Frozen, still, across half the sky.
She heard Pham's breath catch in his throat. He said something,
sing-song syllables that could not have been Trisk, and certainly not
Samnorsk. "All my life I lived in a tiny clump of that. And I thought I was
a master of space. I never dreamed to stand and see the whole blessed thing
at once." His hand tightened on her shoulder, then gentled, stroking her
neck. "And no matter how long we watch, will we see any sign of the Zones?"
She shook her head slowly. "But they're easily imagined." She gestured
with her free hand. In the large, the Zones of Thought followed the mass
distribution of the Galaxy: The Mindless Depths extending down to the soft
glow of the galactic Core. Farther out, the Great Slowness, where humankind
had been born, where ultralight could not exist and civilizations lived and
died unknowing and unknown. And the Beyond, the stars about four-fifths out
from the center, extending well off-plane to include places like Relay. The
Known Net had existed in some form for billions of years in the Beyond. It
was not a civilization; few civilizations lasted longer than a million
years. But the records of the past were quite complete. Sometimes they were
intelligible. More often, reading them involved translations of translations
of translations, passed down from one defunct race to another with no one to
corroborate -- worse than any multihop net message could ever be. Yet some
things were quite clear: There had always been the Zones of Thought, though
perhaps they were slightly inward-moved now. There had always been wars and
peace, and races upwelling from the Great Slowness, and thousands of little
empires. There had always been races moving into the Transcend, to become
the Powers ... or their prey.
"And the Transcend?" Pham said. "Is that just the far dark?" The dark
between the galaxies.
Ravna laughed softly. "It includes all that but ... see the outer
reaches of the spirals. They're in the Transcend." Most everything farther
than forty thousand light-years from the galactic center was.
Pham Nuwen was silent for a long moment. She felt a tiny shiver pass
through him. "After talking to the wheelies, I -- I think I understand more
of what you were warning me about. There's a lot of things I don't know,
things that could kill me ... or worse."
Common sense triumphs at last. "True," she said quietly. "But it's not
just you, or the brief time you've been here. You could study your whole
life, and not know. How long must a fish study to understand human
motivation? It's not a good analogy, but it's the only safe one; we are like
dumb animals to the Powers of the Transcend. Think of all the different
things people do to animals -- ingenious, sadistic, charitable, genocidal --
each has a million elaborations in the Transcend. The Zones are a natural
protection; without them, human-equivalent intelligence would probably not
exist." She waved at the misty star swarms. "The Beyond and below are like a
deep of ocean, and we the creatures that swim in the abyss. We're so far
down that the beings on the surface -- superior though they are -- can't
effectively reach us. Oh, they fish, and they sometimes blight the upper
levels with poisons we don't even understand. But the abyss remains a
relatively safe place." She paused. There was more to the analogy. "And just
as with an ocean, there is a constant drift of flotsam from the top. There
are things that can only be made at the Top, that need close-to-sentient
factories -- but which can still work down here. Blueshell mentioned some of
those when he was talking to you: the agrav fabrics, the sapient devices.
Such things are the greatest physical wealth of the Beyond, since we can't
make them. And getting them is a deadly risky endeavor."
Pham turned toward her, away from window and the stars. "So there are
always 'fish' edging close to the surface." For an instant she thought she
had lost him, that he was caught by the romance of the Transcendent
deathwish. "Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood ... and
not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it." She felt him shiver
and then his arms were around her. She tilted her head up and found his lips
waiting.
It had been two years since Ravna Bergsndot left Sjandra Kei. In some
ways the time had gone fast. Just now her body was telling her what a long,
long time it had really been. Every touch was so vivid, waking desires
carefully suppressed. Suddenly her skin was tingling all over. It took
marvelous restraint to undress without tearing anything.
Ravna was out of practice. And of course she had nothing recent to
compare to.... But Pham Nuwen was very, very good.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay01 at Relay
Language path: Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK:Relay units
From: Net Administrator for Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down
Subject: Complaints about Relay, a suggestion
Summary: It's getting worse; try us instead
Key phrases: communications problems, Relay unreliability, Transcend
Distribution:
Communication Costs Special Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group, Transceiver Relay01 at Relay, Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop,
Follow-ups to: Windsong Expansion Interest Group
Date: 07:21:21 Docks Time, 36/09 of Org year 52089
Text of message:
During the last five hundred hours, Comm Costs shows 9,834
transceiver-layer congestion complaints against the Vrinimi operation at
Relay. Each of these complaints involves services to tens of thousand of
planets. Vrinimi has promised again and again that the congestion is a
purely temporary increase of Transcendent usage.
As Relay's chief competitor in this region, we of Windsong have
benefited modestly from the overflow; however, until now we thought it
inappropriate to propose a coordinated response to the problem.
The events of the last seven hours compel us to change this policy.
Those reading this item already know about the incident; most of you are the
victims of it. Beginning at [00:00:27 Docks Time], Vrinimi Org began taking
transceivers off-line, an unscheduled outage. R01 went out at 00:00:27, R02
at 02:50:32, R03 and R04 at 03:12:01. Vrinimi stated that a Transcendent
customer was urgently requesting bandwidth. (R00 had been previously
dedicated to that Power's use.) The customer required use of both up- and
down-link bandwidth. By the Org's own admission, the unscheduled usage
exceeded sixty percent of their entire capacity. Note that the excesses of
the preceding five hundred hours -- excesses which caused entirely justified
complaint -- were never more than five percent of Org capacity.
Friends, we of Windsong are in the long-haul communication business. We
know how difficult it is to maintain transceiver elements that mass as much
as a planet. We know that hard contract commitments simply cannot be made by
suppliers in our line of work. But at the same time, the behavior of Vrinimi
Org is unacceptable. It's true that in the last three hours the Org has
returned R01 through R04 to general service, and promised to pass on the
Power's surpayment to all those who were "inconvenienced". But only Vrinimi
knows how large these surpayments really are. And no one (not even Vrinimi!)
knows whether this is the end of the outages.
What is to Vrinimi a sudden, incredible cash glut, is to the rest of
you an unaccountable disaster.
Therefore Windsong at Debley Down is considering a major -- and
permanent -- expansion of our service: the construction of five additional
backbone transceivers. Obviously this will be immensely expensive.
Transceivers are never cheap, and Debley Down does not have quite the
geometry enjoyed by Relay. We expect the cost must be amortized over many
decades of good business. We can't undertake it without clear customer
commitment. In order to determine this demand, and to ensure that we build
what is really needed, we are creating a temporary newsgroup, Windsong
Expansion Interest Group, moderated and archived at Windsong. Send/Receive
charges to transceiver-layer customers on this group will be only ten
percent our usual. We urge you, our transceiver-layer customers, to use this
service to talk to each other, to decide what you can safely expect from
Vrinimi Org in the future and how you feel about our proposals.
We are waiting to hear from you.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Afterwards, Ravna slept well. It was halfway through the morning when
she drifted back toward wakefulness. The ring of her phone was monotonously
insistent, loud enough to reach through the most pleasant dreams. She opened
her eyes, disoriented and happy. She was lying with her arms wrapped tightly
around ... a large pillow. Damn. He'd already left. She lay back for a
second, remembering. These last two years she had been lonely; till last
night she hadn't realized how lonely. Happiness so unexpected, so intense
... what a strange thing.
The phone just kept ringing. Finally she rolled out of bed and walked
unsteadily across the room; there should be limits to this Techno Primitive
nonsense. "Yes?"
It was a Skroderider. Greenstalk? "I'm sorry to bother you, Ravna, but
-- are you all right?" The Rider interrupted herself.
Ravna suddenly realized that she might be looking a little strange:
sappy smile spread from ear to ear, hair sticking out in all directions. She
rubbed her hand across her mouth, cutting back laughter. "Yes, I'm fine."
Fine! "What's up?"
"We want to thank you for your help. We had never dreamed that you were
so highly placed. We'd been trying for hundreds of hours to persuade the Org
to listen for the refugees. But less than an hour after talking to you, we
were told the survey is being undertaken immediately."
"Um." Say what? "That's wonderful, but I'm not sure I -- who's paying
for it, anyway?"
"I don't know, but it is expensive. We were told they're dedicating a
backbone transceiver to the search. If there's anyone transmitting, we
should know in a matter of hours."
They chatted for a few more minutes, Ravna gradually becoming more
coherent as she parceled the various aspects of the last ten hours into
business and pleasure. She had half expected the Org to bug her at The
Wandering Company. Maybe Grondr just heard the story there -- and gave it
full credit. But just yesterday, he'd been wimping about transceiver
saturation. Either way, this was good news -- perhaps extraordinarily good.
If the Riders' wild story were true, the Straumli Perversion might be less
than Transcendent. And if the refugee ships had some clues on how to bring
it down, Straumli Realm might even be saved.
After Greenstalk rang off, Ravna wandered about the apartment, getting
herself in shape, playing the various possibilities against each other. Her
actions became more purposeful, almost up to their usual speed. There were a
lot of things she wanted to check into.
Then the phone was ringing again. This time she previewed the caller.
Oops! It was Grondr Vrinimikalir. She combed her hand back through her hair;
it still looked like crap, and this phone was not up to deception. Suddenly
she noticed that Grondr didn't look so hot either. His facial chitin was
smudged, even across some of his freckles. She accepted the call.
"Ah!" His voice actually squeaked, then returned to its normal level.
"Thank you for answering. I would have called earlier, except things have
been very ... chaotic." Just where had his cool distance gone? "I just want
you to know that the Org had nothing to do with this. We were totally taken
in until just a couple of hours ago." He launched into a disjointed
description of massive demand swamping the Org's resources.
As he rambled, Ravna punched up a summary of recent Relay business. By
the Powers that Be: Sixty percent diversion? Excerpts from Comm Costs: She
scanned quickly down the item from Windsong. The gasbags were as pompous as
ever, but their offer to replace Relay was probably for real. It was just
the sort of thing Grondr had been afraid might happen.
"-- Old One just kept asking for more and more. When we finally figured
things out, and confronted him.... Well, we came close to threatening
violence. We have the resources to destroy his emissary vessel. No telling
what his revenge might be, but we told Old One his demands were already
destroying us. Thank the Powers, he just seemed amused; he backed off. He's
restricted to a single transceiver now, and that's on a signal search that
has nothing to do with us."
Hmm. One mystery solved. Old One must have been snooping around The
Wandering Company and overheard the Skroderiders' story. "Maybe things will
be okay, then. But it's important to be just as tough if Old One tries to
abuse us again." The words were already out of her mouth before she
considered who she was giving advice to.
Grondr didn't seem to notice. If anything, he was the one scrambling to
agree: "Yes, yes. I'll tell you, if Old One were any ordinary customer, we'd
blacklist him forever for this deception.... But then if he were ordinary,
he could never have fooled us."
Grondr wiped pudgy white fingers across his face. "No mere Beyonder
could have altered our record of the dredge expedition. Not even one from
the Top could have broken into the junkyard and manipulated the remains
without our even suspecting."
Dredge? Remains? Ravna began to see that she and Grondr were not
talking about the same thing. "Just what did Old One do?"
"The details? We're pretty sure of them now. Since the Fall of Straum,
Old One has been very interested in humans. Unfortunately, there were no
willing ones available here. It began manipulating us, rewriting our
junkyard records. We've recovered a clean backup from a branch office: The
dredge really did encounter the wreck of a human ship; there were human body
parts in it -- but nothing that we could have revived. Old One must have
mixed and matched what it found there. Perhaps it fabricated memories by
extrapolating from human cultural data in the archives. With hindsight, we
can match its early requests with the invasion of our junkyard."
Grondr rattled on, but Ravna wasn't listening. Her eyes stared blindly
through the phone's display. We are little fish in the abyss, protected by
the deep from the fishers above. But even if they can't live down here, the
clever fisherfolk still have their lures and deadly tricks. And so Pham --
"Pham Nuwen is just a robot, then," she said softly.
"Not precisely. He is human, and with his fake memories he can operate
autonomously. But when Old One buys full bandwidth, the creature is fully an
emissary device." The hand and eye of a Power.
Grondr's mouthparts clattered in abject embarrassment. "Ravna, we don't
know all that happened last night; there was no reason to have you under
close surveillance. But Old One assures us that its need for direct
investigation is over. In any case, we'll never give him the bandwidth to
try again."
Ravna barely nodded. Her face suddenly felt cold. She had never felt
such anger and such fright at the same time. She stood in a wave of
dizziness and walked away from the phone, ignoring Grondr's worried cries.
The stories from grad school came tumbling through her mind, and the myths
of a dozen human religions. Consequences, consequences. Some of them she
could defend against; others were past repair.
And from somewhere in the back of her mind, an incredibly silly thought
crawled out from under the horror and the rage. For eight hours she had been
face to face with a Power. It was the sort of experience that made a chapter
in textbooks, the sort of thing that was always far away and misreported.
And it was the sort of thing no one in all of Sjandra Kei could come near to
claiming. Until now.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Johanna was in the boat for a long time. The sun never set, though now
it was low behind her, now it was high in front, now all was cloudy and rain
plinked off the tarp covering her blankets. She spent the hours in an
agonized haze. Things happened that could only have been dreams. There were
creatures pulling at her clothes, blood sticking everywhere. Gentle hands
and rat snouts dressed her wounds, and forced chill water down her throat.
When she thrashed around, Mom rearranged her blankets and comforted her with
the strangest sounds. For hours, someone warm lay beside her. Sometimes it
was Jefri; more often it was a large dog, a dog that purred.
The rain passed. The sun was on the left side of the boat, but hidden
behind a cold, snapping shadow. More and more, the pain became divisible.
Part of it was in her chest and shoulder; that stabbed through her whenever
the boat wobbled. Part of it was in her gut, an emptiness that was not quite
nausea ... she was so hungry, so thirsty.
More and more, she was remembering, not dreaming. There were nightmares
that would never go away. They had really happened. They were happening now.
The sun peeked in and out of the tumble of clouds. It slid slowly lower
across the sky till it was almost behind the boat. She tried to remember
what Daddy had been saying just before ... everything went bad. They were in
this planet's arctic, in the summer. So the sun's low point must be north,
and their twin-hulled boat was sailing roughly southwards. Wherever they
were going, it was minute by minute farther from the spacecraft and any hope
of finding Jefri.
Sometimes the water was like open sea, the hills distant or hidden by
low clouds. Sometimes they passed through narrows, and swept close to walls
of naked rock. She'd had no idea a sailboat could move so fast or be so
dangerous. Four of the rat creatures worked desperately to keep them off the
rocks. They bounded nimbly from mast platform to railing, sometimes standing
on each other's shoulders to extend their reach. The twin-hulled boat tilted
and groaned in water that was suddenly rough. Then they'd be through and the
hills would be at a peaceful distance, sliding slowly past.
For a long while, she pretended delirium. She moaned, she twisted. She
watched. The boat hulls were long and narrow, almost like canoes. The sail
was mounted between them. The shadow in her dreams had been that sail,
snapping in the cold, clean wind. The sky was an avalanche of grays, light
and dark. There were birds up there. They dipped past the mast, circled
again and again. There was twittering and hissing all around her. But the
sound did not come from the birds.
It was the monsters. She watched them through lowered lashes. These
were the same kind that killed Mom and Dad. They even wore the same funny
clothes, gray-green jackets studded with stirrups and pockets. Dogs or
wolves she had thought before. That didn't really describe them. Sure, they
had four slender legs and pointy little ears. But with their long necks and
occasionally pinkish eyes, they might as well be huge rats.
And the longer she watched them, the more horrible they seemed. A still
image could never convey that horror; you had to see them in action. She
watched four of them -- the ones on her side of the boat -- play with her
dataset. The Pink Oliphaunt was tied in a net bag near the rear of the boat.
Now the beasts wanted to look it over. At first it looked like a circus act,
the creatures' heads darting this way and that. But every move was so
precise, so coordinated with all the others. They had no hands, but they
could untie knots, each holding a piece of twine in its mouth and
maneuvering its necks around others. At the same time, one's claws held the
loose netting tight against the railing. It was like watching puppets run
off the same control.
In seconds they had it out of the bag. Dogs would have let it slide to
the bottom of the hull, then pushed it around with their noses. Not these
things: two put it onto on a cross bench, while a third steadied it with its
paw. They poked around the edges, concentrating on the plush flanges and
floppy ears. They pushed and nuzzled, but with clear purpose. They were
trying to open it.
Two heads showed over the railing on the other hull. They made the
gobbling, hissing sounds that were a cross between a bird call and someone
throwing up. One of those on her side glanced back and made similar sounds.
The other three continued to play with the dataset's latches.
Finally they pulled the big, floppy ears simultaneously: the dataset
popped open, and the top window went into Johanna's startup routine -- an
anim of herself saying "Shame on you, Jefri. Stay out of my things!" The
four creatures went rigid, their eyes suddenly wide.
Johanna's four turned the set so the others could see. One held it down
while another peered at the top window, and a third fumbled with the key
window. The guys in the other hull went nuts, but none of them tried to get
any closer. The random prodding of the four abruptly cut off her startup
greeting. One of them glanced at the guys in the other hull; another two
watched Johanna. She continued to lie with her eyes almost closed.
"Shame on you, Jefri. Stay out my things!" Johanna's voice came again,
but from one of the animals. It was a perfect playback. Then a girl's voice
was moaning, crying, "Mom, Daddy". It was her own voice again, but more
frightened and childish than she ever wanted it to sound.
They seemed to be waiting for the dataset to respond. When nothing
happened, one of them went back to pushing its nose against the windows.
Everything valuable, and all the dangerous programs, were passworded.
Insults and squawking emerged from the box, all the little surprises she had
planted for her snooping little brother. Oh Jefri, will I ever see you
again?
The sounds and vids kept the monsters amused for several minutes.
Eventually their random fiddlings convinced the dataset that somebody really
young had opened up the box, and it shifted into kindermode.
The creatures knew she was watching. Of the four fooling with her
Oliphaunt, one -- not always the same one -- was always watching her. They
were playing games with her, pretending they didn't know she was pretending.
Johanna opened her eyes wide and glared at the creature. "Damn you!"
She looked in the other direction. And screamed. The mob in the other hull
were clumped together. Their heads rose on sinuous necks from the pile. In
the low sunlight, their eyes glinted red. A pack of rats or snakes, silently
staring at her, and for heaven knew how long.
The heads leaned forward at her cry, and she heard the scream again.
Behind her, her own voice shouted "Damn you!" Somewhere else, she was
calling for "Mom" and "Daddy". Johanna screamed again, and they just echoed
it back. She swallowed her terror and kept silent. The monsters kept it up
for a half minute, the mimicking, the mixing of things she must have said in
her sleep. When they saw they couldn't terrorize her that way any more, the
voices stopped being human. The gobbling went back and forth, as if the two
groups were negotiating or something. Finally the four on her side closed
her dataset and tied it into the net bag.
The six unwrapped themselves from each other. Three jumped to the
outboard side of the hull. They gripped the edge tight in their claws and
leaned into the wind. For once they almost did look like dogs -- big ones
sitting at a car window, sniffing at the airstream. The long necks swept
forward and back. Every few seconds, one of them would dip its head out of
sight, into the water. Drinking? Fishing?
Fishing. A head flipped up, tossing something small and green into the
boat. The other three animals nosed about, grabbing it. She had a glimpse of
tiny legs and a shiny carapace. One of the rats held it at the tip of its
mouth, while the other two pulled it apart. It was all done with their
uncanny precision. The pack seemed like a single creature, and each neck a
heavy tentacle that ended in a pair of jaws. Her gut twisted at the thought,
but there was nothing to barf up.
The fishing expedition went on another quarter hour. They got at least
seven of the green things. But they weren't eating them; not all of them,
anyway. The dismembered leavings collected in a small wood bowl.
More gobbling between the two sides. One of the six grabbed the bowl's
edge in its mouth and crawled across the mast platform. The four on
Johanna's side huddled together as if frightened of the visitor. Only after
the bowl was set down and the intruder had returned to its side, did the
four in Johanna's hull poke their heads up again.
One of the rats picked up the bowl. It and another walked toward her.
Johanna swallowed. What torture was this? Her stomach twisted again ... she
was so hungry. She looked at the bowl again and realized that they were
trying to feed her.
The sun had just come out from under northern clouds. The low light was
like some bright fall afternoon, just after rain: dark sky above, yet
everything close by bright and glistening. The creatures' fur was deep and
plush. One held the bowl towards her, while the other stuck its snout in and
withdrew ... something slick and green. It held the tidbit delicately, just
with the tips of its long mouth. It turned and thrust the green thing toward
her.
Johanna shrank back, "No!"
The creature paused. For a moment she thought it was going to echo her.
Then it dropped the lump back into the bowl. The first animal set it on the
bench beside her. It looked up at her for an instant, then released the
jaw-wide flange at the edge of the bowl. She had a glimpse of fine, pointy
teeth.
Johanna stared into the bowl, nausea fighting with hunger. Finally she
worked a hand out of her blanket and reached into it. Heads perked up around
her, and there was an exchange of gobble comments between the two sides of
the boat.
Her fingers closed on something soft and cold. She lifted it into the
sunlight. The body was gray green, its sides glistening in the light. The
guys in the other hull had torn off the little legs and chopped away the
head. What remained was only two or three centimeters long. It looked like
filleted shellfish. Once she had liked such food. But that had been cooked.
She almost dropped the thing when she felt it quiver in her hand.
She brought it close to her mouth, touched it with her tongue. Salty.
On Straum, most shellfish would make you very sick if you ate them raw. How
could she know, all alone without parents or a local commnet? She felt tears
coming. She said a bad word, stuffed the green thing into her mouth, and
tried to chew. Blandness, with the texture of suet and gristle. She gagged,
spat it out ... and tried to eat another. Altogether she got parts of two
down. Maybe that was for the best; she'd wait and see how much she barfed
up. She lay back and saw several pairs of eyes watching. The gobbling with
the other side of the boat picked up. Then one of them sidled toward her,
carrying a leather bag with a spigot. A canteen.
This creature was the biggest of all. The leader? It moved its head
close to hers, putting the spout of the canteen near her mouth. The big one
seemed sly, more cautious about approaching her than the others. Johanna's
eyes traveled back along its flanks. Beyond the edge of its jacket, the pelt
on its rear was mostly white ... and scored deep with a Y-shaped scar. This
is the one that killed Dad.
Johanna's attack was not planned; perhaps that's why it worked so well.
She lunged past the canteen and swung her free arm around the thing's neck.
She rolled over the animal, pinning it against the hull. By itself, it was
smaller than she, and not strong enough to push her off. She felt its claws
raking through the blankets but somehow never quite cutting her. She put all
her weight on the creature's spine, grabbed it where throat met jaw, and
began slamming its head against the wood.
Then the others were on her, muzzles poking under her, jaws grabbing at
her sleeve. She felt rows of needle teeth just poking through the fabric.
Their bodies buzzed with a sound from her dreams, a sound that went straight
through her clothes and rattled her bones.
They pulled her hand from the other's throat, twisting her; she felt
the arrowhead tearing her inside. But there was still one thing she could
do: Johanna push off with her feet, butting her head against the base of the
other's jaw, smashing the top of its head into the hull. The bodies around
her convulsed, and she was flipped onto her back. Pain was the only thing
she could feel now. Neither rage nor fear could move her.
Yet part of her was still aware of the four. She had hurt them. She had
hurt them all. Three wandered drunkenly, making whistling sounds that for
once seemed to come from their mouths. The one with the scarred butt lay on
its side, twitching. She had punched a star-shaped wound in the top of its
head. Blood dripped down past its eyes. Red tears.
Minutes passed and the whistling stopped. The four creatures huddled
together and the familiar hissing resumed. The bleeding from her chest had
started again.
They stared at each other for a while. She smiled at her enemies. They
could be hurt. She could hurt them. She felt better than she had since the
landing.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Before the Flenser Movement, Woodcarvers had been the most famous
city-state west of the Icefangs. Its founder went back six centuries. In
those days, things had been harder in the north; snow covered even the
lowlands through most of the year. The Woodcarver had started alone, a
single pack in a little cabin on an inland bay. The pack was a hunter and a
thinker as much as an artist. There had been no settlements for a hundred
miles around. Only a dozen of the carver's early statues ever left his
cabin, yet those statues had been his first fame. Three were still in
existence. There was a city by the Long Lakes named for the one in its
museum.
With fame had come apprentices. One cabin became ten, scattered across
Woodcarver's fjord. A century or two passed, and of course the Woodcarver
slowly changed. He feared the change, the feeling that his soul was slipping
away. He tried to keep hold of himself; almost everyone does to one extent
or another. In the worst case, the pack falls into perversion, perhaps
becomes soul-hollow. For Woodcarver, the quest was itself the change. He
studied how each member fits within the soul. He studied pups and their
raising, and how you might guess the contributions of a new one. He learned
to shape the soul by training the members.
Of course little of this was new. It was the base of most religions,
and every town had romance advisors and brood kenners. Such knowledge,
whether valid or not, is important to any culture. What Woodcarver did was
to look at it all again, without traditional bias. He gently experimented on
himself and on the other artists in his little colony. He watched the
results, using them to design new experiments. He was guided by what he saw
rather than by what he wanted to believe.
By the various standards of his age, what he did was heresy or
perversion or simple insanity. In the early years, King Woodcarver was hated
almost as much as Flenser was three centuries later. But the far north was
still going through its time of heavy winters. The nations of the south
could not easily send armies as far as Woodcarvers. Once when they did, they
were thoroughly defeated. And wisely, Woodcarver never attempted to subvert
the south. Not directly. But his settlement grew and grew, and its fame for
art and furniture was small beside its other reputations. Old of heart
traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and
happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and
windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It
wasn't the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and
the outlook he had created.
Wickwrackscar and Jaqueramaphan arrived at Woodcarvers late in the
afternoon. It had rained most of the day, but now the clouds had blown away
and the sky was that bright cloudless blue that was all the more beautiful
after a stretch of cloudy days.
Woodcarver's Domain was paradise to Peregrine's eyes. He was tired of
the packless wilderness. He was tired of worrying about the alien.
Twinhulls paced them suspiciously for the last few miles. The boats
were armed, and Peregrine and Scriber were coming from very much the wrong
direction. But they were all alone, clearly harmless. Long callers hooted,
relaying their story ahead. By the time they reached the harbor they were
heroes, two packs who had stolen (unspecified) treasure from the villains of
the north. They sailed around a breakwater that hadn't existed on
Peregrine's last trip, and tied in at the moorage.
The pier was crowded with soldiers and wagons. Townspeople were all
over the road leading up to the city walls. This was as close to a mob scene
as you could get and still have room for sober thought. Scriber bounced out
of the boat and pranced about in obvious delight at the cheers from the
hillside. "Quickly! We must speak with the Woodcarver."
Wickwrackscar picked up the canvas bag that held the alien's picture
box, and climbed carefully out of the boat. He was dizzy from the beating
the alien had given him. Scar's fore-tympanum had been cut in the attack.
For a moment he lost track of himself. The pier was very strange -- stone at
first glance, but walled with a spongy black material he hadn't seen since
the Southseas; it should be brittle here.... Where am I? I should be happy
about something, some victory. He paused to regroup. After a moment both the
pain and his thoughts sharpened; he would be like this for days yet, at
least. Get help for the alien. Get it ashore.
King Woodcarver's Lord Chamberlain was a mostly overweight dandy;
Peregrine had not expected to see such at Woodcarvers. But the fellow became
instantly cooperative when he saw the alien. He brought a doctor down to
look at the Two-Legs (and incidentally, at Peregrine). The alien had gained
strength in the last two days, but there had been no more violence. They got
it ashore without much trouble. It stared at Peregrine out of its flat face,
a look he knew was impotent rage. He touched Scar's head thoughtfully ...
the Two-Legs was just waiting for the best opportunity to do more damage.
Minutes later, the travelers were in kherhog-drawn carriages, rolling
up the cobblestone street toward the city walls. Soldiers cleared the way
through the crowd. Scriber Jaqueramaphan waved this way and that, the
handsome hero. By now Peregrine knew the shy insecurity that lurked within
Scriber. This might be the high point of his whole life till now.
Even if he wanted it, Wickwrackscar could not be so expansive. With one
of Scar's tympana hurt, wild gestures made him lose track of his thoughts.
He hunkered down on the carriage seats and looked out in all directions:
But for the shape of the outer harbor, the place was not at all what he
remembered from fifty years ago. In most parts of the world, not much
changed in fifty years. A pilgrim returning after such an interval might
even be bored by the sameness. But this ... it was almost scary.
The huge breakwater was new. There were twice as many piers, and
multiboats with flags he had never seen on this side of the world. The road
had been here before, but narrow, with only a third as many turnoffs.
Before, the town walls had been more to keep the kherhogs and froghens in
than any invaders out. Now they were ten feet high, the black stone
extending as far as Peregrine could see.... And there had been scarcely any
soldiers last time; now they were everywhere. That was not a good change. He
felt a sinking in the pit of Scar's stomach; soldiers and fighting were not
good.
They rode through the city gates and past a market maze that spread
across acres. The alleys were only fifty feet wide, narrow where bolts of
cloth, furniture displays, and crates of fresh fruit encroached. Smells of
fruit and spice and varnish hung in the air. The place was so crowded that
the haggling was almost an orgy, and dizzy Peregrine almost blacked out.
Then they were on a narrower street that zigzagged through ranks of
half-timbered buildings. Beyond the roofs loomed heavy fortifications. Ten
minutes later they were in the castle yard.
They dismounted and the Lord Chamberlain had the Two-Legs moved to a
litter.
"Woodcarver, he'll see us now?" said Scriber.
The bureaucrat laughed. "She. Woodcarver changed gender more than ten
years ago."
Peregrine's heads twisted about in surprise. Precisely what would that
mean? Most packs change with time, but he had never heard of Woodcarver
being anything but "he". He almost missed what the Lord Chamberlain said
next.
"Even better. Her whole council must see ... what you've brought. Come
inside." He waved the guards away.
They walked down a hall almost wide enough for two packs to pass
abreast. The chamberlain led, followed by the travelers and the doctor with
the alien's litter. The walls were high, padded with silver-crusted
quilting. It was far grander than before ... and again, unsettling. There
was scarcely any statuary, and what there was dated from centuries before.
But there were pictures. He stumbled when he saw the first, and behind
him he heard Scriber gasp. Peregrine had seen art all around the world: The
mobs of the tropics preferred abstract murals, smudges of psychotic color.
The Southseas islanders had never invented perspective; in their
watercolors, distant objects simply floated in the upper half of the
picture. In the Long Lakes Republic, representationism was currently
favored, especially multiptychs that gave a whole-pack view.
But Peregrine had never seen the likes of these. The pictures were
mosaics, each tile a ceramic square about a quarter inch on a side. There
was no color, just four shades of gray. From a few feet away, the graininess
was lost, and ... they were the most perfect landscapes Peregrine had ever
seen. All were views from hilltops around Woodcarvers. Except for the lack
of color, they might have been windows. The bottom of each picture was
bounded by a rectangular frame, but the tops were irregular; the mosaics
simply broke off at the horizon. The hall's quilted wall stood where the
pictures should have shown sky.
"Here now, fellow! I thought you wanted to see Woodcarver." The remark
was directed at Scriber. Jaqueramaphan was strung out along the landscapes,
one of him sitting in front of a different picture all down the hall. He
turned a head to look at the chamberlain. His voice sounded dazed. "Soul's
end! It's like being God, as if I have one member on each hilltop and can
see everything at once." But he scrambled to his feet and trotted to catch
up.
The hall opened on one of the largest indoor meeting rooms Peregrine
had ever seen.
"This is as big as anything in the Republic," Scriber said with
apparent admiration, looking up at the three levels of balconies. They stood
alone with the alien at the bottom.
"Hmf." Besides the chamberlain and the doctor, there were already five
other packs in the room. More showed up as they watched. Most were dressed
like nobles of the Republic, all jewels and furs. A few wore the plain
jackets he remembered from his last trip. Sigh. Woodcarver's little
settlement had grown into a city and now a nation-state. Peregrine wondered
if he -- she -- had any real power now. He trained one head precisely on
Scriber and Hightalked at him. "Don't say anything about the picture box
just yet."
Jaqueramaphan looked puzzled and conspiratorial all at once. He High
Talked back, "Yes ... yes. A bargaining card?"
"Something like that." Peregrine's eyes swept back and forth across the
balconies. Most packs entered with an air of harried self-importance. He
smiled to himself. One glance into the pit was enough to shatter their
smugness. The air above him was filled with buzzing talk. None of the packs
looked like Woodcarver. But then, she'd have few of her members from before;
he could only recognize her by manner and bearing. It shouldn't matter. He
had carried some friendships far longer than any member's lifespan. But with
others the friend had changed in a decade, its viewpoints altering,
affection turning to animosity. He'd been counting on Woodcarver being the
same. Now....
There was a brief sound of trumpets, almost like a call to order. The
pubic doors of a lower balcony slid open and a fivesome entered. Peregrine
felt a twitchy thrill of horror. This was Woodcarver, but so ...
misarranged. One member was so old it had to be helped by the rest. Two were
scarcely more than puppies, and one of those a constant drooler. The largest
member was white-eyed blind. It was the sort of thing you might see in a
waterfront slum, or in the last generation of incest.
She looked down at Peregrine, and smiled almost as if she recognized
him. When she spoke, it was with the blind one. The voice was clear and
firm. "Please carry on, Vendacious."
The chamberlain nodded. "As you wish, Your Majesty." He pointed into
the pit, at the alien. "That is the reason for this hasty meeting."
"We can see monsters at the circus, Vendacious." The voice came from an
overdressed pack on the top balcony. To judge from the shouting that came
from all sides, this was a minority view. One pack on a lower balcony jumped
over the railing and tried to shoo the doctor away from the alien's litter.
The chamberlain raised a head for silence, and glared down at the
fellow who had jumped into the pit. "If you please, Scrupilo, be patient.
Everyone will get a chance to look."
"Scrupilo" made some grumbling hisses, but backed off.
"Good." Vendacious turned all his attention on Peregrine and Scriber.
"Your boat has outrun any news from the north, my friends. No one but I
knows anything of your story -- and what I have is guard codes hooted across
the bay. You say this creature flew down from the sky?"
An invitation to speechify. Peregrine let Scriber Jaqueramaphan do the
talking. Scriber loved it. He told the story of the flying house, of the
ambush and the murders, and the rescue. He showed them his eye-tools and
announced himself as a secret agent of the Long Lakes Republic. Now what
real spy would do that? Every pack on the council had eyes on the alien,
some fearful, some -- like Scrupilo -- crazily curious. Woodcarver watched
with only a couple of heads. The rest might have been asleep. She looked as
tired as Peregrine felt. He rested his own heads on his paws. The pain in
Scar was a pulsing beat; it would be easy enough to set the member asleep,
but then he'd understand very little of what was being said. Hey! maybe that
wasn't such a bad idea. Scar drifted off and the pain receded.
The talk went on for some minutes more, not making a whole lot of sense
to the threesome that was Wickwrack. He understood the tones of voice