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though. Scrupilo -- the pack on the floor -- complained several times,
impatiently. Vendacious said something, agreeing with him. The doctor
retreated, and Scrupilo advanced on Wickwrack's alien.
Peregrine pulled himself to full wakefulness. "Be careful. The creature
is not friendly."
Scrupilo snapped back, "Your friend has already warned me once." He
circled the litter, staring at the alien's brown, furless face. The alien
stared back, impassive. Scrupilo reached forward cautiously and drew back
the alien's quilt. Still no response. "See?" said Scrupilo. "It knows I mean
no harm." Peregrine said nothing to correct him.
"It really walks on those rear paws alone?" said one of the other
advisors. "Can you imagine it, towering over us? One little bump would knock
it down." Laughter. Peregrine remembered how mantis-like the alien had
seemed when upright. These fellows hadn't seen it move.
Scrupilo wrinkled a nose. "The thing is filthy." He was all around her,
a posture that Peregrine knew upset the Two-Legs. "That arrow shaft must be
removed, you know. Most of the bleeding has stopped, but if we expect the
creature to live for long, it needs medical attention." He looked
disdainfully at Scriber and Peregrine, as if they were to blame for not
performing surgery aboard the twinhull. Something caught his eye and his
tone abruptly changed: "By the Pack of Packs! Look at its forepaws." He
loosened the ropes about the creature's front legs. "Two paws like that
would be as good as five pairs of lips. Think what a pack of these creatures
could do!" He moved close to the five-tentacled paw.
"Be -- " careful, Peregrine started to say. The alien abruptly bunched
its tentacles into a club. Its foreleg flicked out at an impossible angle,
ramming its paw into Scrupilo's head. The blow couldn't have been too
strong, but it was precisely placed on the tympanum.
"Ow! Yow! Wow. Wow." Scrupilo danced back.
The alien was shouting, too. It was all mouth noise, thin and
low-pitched. The eldritch sound brought up every head, even Woodcarver's.
Peregrine had heard it many times by now. There was no doubt in his mind --
this was the aliens' interpack speech. After a few seconds, the sound
changed to a regular hacking that gradually faded.
For a long moment no one spoke. Then part of Woodcarver got to her
feet. She looked at Scrupilo. "Are you all right?" It was the first time she
had spoken since the beginning of the meeting.
Scrupilo was licking his forehead. "Yes. It smarts is all."
"Your curiosity will kill you some day."
The other huffed indignantly, but also seemed flattered by the
prediction.
Queen Woodcarver looked at her councillors. "I see an important
question here. Scrupilo thinks one alien member would be as agile as an
entire pack of us. Is that so?" She pointed the question at Peregrine rather
than Scriber.
"Yes, Your Majesty. If those ropes had been tied within its reach, it
could easily have unknotted them." He knew where this was going; he'd had
three days to get there himself. "And the noises it makes sound like
coordinated speech to me."
There was a swell of talk as the others caught on. An articulate member
can often make semi-sensible speech, but usually at the expense of
dexterity.
"Yes ... A creature like nothing on our world, whose boat flew down
from the top of heaven. I wonder at the mind of such a pack, if a single
member is almost as smart as all of one of us?" Her blind one looked around
as it made the words, almost as if it could see. Two others wiped at her
drooler's muzzle. She was not an inspiring sight.
Scrupilo poked a head up. "I hear not a hint of thought sound from this
one. There is no fore-tympanum." He pointed at the torn clothing around the
creature's wound. "And I see no sign of shoulder tympana. Perhaps it is pack
smart even as a singleton ... and perhaps that's all the aliens ever are."
Peregrine smiled to himself; this Scrupilo was a prickly twit, but not one
who held with tradition. For centuries, academics had debated the difference
between people and animals. Some animals had larger brains; some had paws or
lips more agile than a member's. In the savannahs of Easterlee, there were
creatures that even looked like people and ran in groups, but without much
depth of thought. Leaving aside wolf nests and whales, only people were
packs. It was the coordination of thought between members that made them
superior. Scrupilo's theory was a heresy.
Jaqueramaphan said, "But we did hear thought sounds, loud ones, during
the ambush. Perhaps this one is like our unweaned, unable to think -- "
"And yet still almost as smart as a pack," Woodcarver finished
somberly. "If these people are not smarter than we, then we might learn
their devices. No matter how magnificent they are, we could eventually be
their equals. But if this member is just one of a superpack ..." For a
moment there was no talk, just the muted underedge of her councillors'
thoughts. If the aliens were superpacks, and if their envoy had been
murdered -- then there might not be anything they could do to save
themselves.
"So. Our first priority should be to save this creature, to befriend it
and learn its true nature." Her heads lowered, and she seemed lost within
herself -- or perhaps just tired. Abruptly, she turned several heads toward
her chamberlain. "Move the creature to the lodge by mine."
Vendacious started with surprise. "Surely not, Your Majesty! We've seen
that it is hostile. And it needs medical attention."
Woodcarver smiled and her voice turned silky. Peregrine remembered that
tone from before. "Do you forget that I know surgery? Do you forget ... that
I am the Woodcarver?"
Vendacious licked his lips and looked at the other advisors. After a
second he said, "No, Your Majesty. It will be as you wish."
And Peregrine felt like cheering. Perhaps Woodcarver did still run
things.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Peregrine was sitting back to back on the steps of his quarters when
Woodcarver came to see him next day. She came alone, and wearing the simple
green jackets he remembered from his last visit.
He didn't bow or go out to meet her. She looked at him coolly for a
moment, and sat down just a few yards away.
"How is the Two-Legs?" he asked.
"I took out the arrow and sewed the wound shut. I think it will
survive. My advisors were pleased: the creature didn't act like a reasoning
being. It fought even after it was tied down, as though it had no concept of
surgery.... How is your head?"
"All right, as long as I don't move around." The rest of him -- Scar --
lay behind the doorway in the dark interior of the lodge. "The tympanum is
healing straight, I think. I'll be fine in a few days."
"Good." A wrecked tympanum could mean continuing mental problems, or
the need for a new member and the pain of finding a use for the singleton
that was sent into silence. "I remember you, pilgrim. All the members are
different, but you really are the Peregrine of before. You had some great
stories. I enjoyed your visit."
"And I enjoyed meeting the great Woodcarver. That is the reason I
returned."
She cocked a head wryly. "The great Woodcarver of before, not the wreck
of now?"
He shrugged. "What happened?"
She didn't answer immediately. For a moment, they sat and looked across
the city. It was cloudy this afternoon, with rain coming. The breeze off the
channel was a cool stinging on his lips and eyes. Woodcarver shivered, and
puffed her fur out a bit. Finally she said, "I held my soul six hundred
years -- and that's counting by foreclaws. I should think it's obvious what
has become of me."
"The perversion never hurt you before." Peregrine was not normally so
blunt. Something about her brought out the frankness in him.
"Yes, the average incest degrades to my state in a few centuries, and
is an idiot long before then. My methods were much cleverer. I knew who to
breed with whom, which puppies to keep and which to put on others. So it was
always my flesh bearing my memories, and my soul remained pure. But I didn't
understand enough -- or perhaps I tried the impossible. The choices got
harder and harder, till I was left with choosing between brains and physical
defect." She wiped away the drool, and all but the blind one looked out
across her city. "These are the best days of summer, you know. Life is a
green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the
season." And the green did seem to be everywhere it could be: featherleaf
down the hillside and in the town, ferns all over the near hillsides, and
heather struggling toward the gray crowns of the mountains across the
channel. "I love this place."
He never expected to be comforting the Woodcarver of Woodcarvers. "You
made a miracle here. I've heard of it all the way on the other side of the
world.... And I'll bet that half the packs around here are related to you."
"Y-yes, I've been successful beyond a rake's wildest dreams. I've had
no shortage of lovers, even if I couldn't use the pups myself. Sometimes I
think my get has been my greatest experiment. Scrupilo and Vendacious are
mostly my offspring ... but so is Flenser."
Huh! Peregrine hadn't known that last.
"The last few decades, I'd more or less accepted my fate. I couldn't
outwit eternity; sometime soon I would let my soul slip free. I let the
council take over more and more; how could I claim the domain after I was no
longer me? I went back to art -- you saw those monochrome mosaics."
"Yes! They're beautiful."
"I'll show you my picture loom sometime. The procedure is tedious but
almost automatic. It was a nice project for the last years of my soul. But
now -- you and your alien have changed everything. Damn it! If only this had
happened a hundred years ago. What I would have done with it! We've been
playing with your 'picture box', you know. The pictures are finer than any
in our world. They are a bit like my mosaics -- the way the sun is like a
glowbug. Millions of colored dots go to make each picture, the tiles so
small you can't see them without one of Scriber's eye-tools. I've worked for
years to make a few dozen mosaics. The picture box can make unnumbered
thousands, so fast they seem to move. Your aliens make my life less than an
unweaned pup's scratching in its cradle."
The queen of the Woodcarvers was softly crying, but her voice was
angry. "And now the whole world is going to change, but too late for such
wreckage as I!"
Almost without conscious thought, Peregrine extended one of his members
toward the Woodcarver. He walked unseemly close: eight yards, five. Their
thoughts were suddenly fuzzy with interference, but he could feel her
calming.
She laughed blearily. "Thank you.... Strange that you should be
sympathetic. The greatest problem of my life is nothing to a pilgrim.
"You were hurting." It was all he could think to say.
"But you pilgrims change and change and change -- " She eased one of
herself close to him; they were almost touching, and it was even harder to
think.
Peregrine spoke slowly, concentrating on every word, hoping he wouldn't
forget his point. "But I do keep something of a soul. The parts that remain
a pilgrim must have a certain outlook." Sometimes great insight comes in the
noise of battle or intimacy. This was such at time. "And -- and I think the
world itself is due for a change of soul now that we have Two-Legs dropping
from the sky. What better time for Woodcarver to give up the old?"
She smiled, and the confusion became louder, but a pleasant thing. "I
... hadn't ... thought of it that way. Now is the time to change...."
Peregrine walked into her midst. The two packs stood for a moment,
necking, thoughts blending into sweet chaos. Their last clear recollection
was of stumbling up the steps and into his lodge.
Late that afternoon, Woodcarver brought the picture box to Scrupilo's
laboratory. When she arrived Scrupilo and Vendacious were already present.
Scriber Jaqueramaphan was there too, but standing farther from the others
than courtesy might demand. She had interrupted some kind of argument. A few
days before, such squabbling would have just depressed her. Now -- she
dragged her limper into the room and looked at the others through her
drooler's eyes -- and smiled. Woodcarver felt the best she had in years. She
had made her decision and acted on it, and now there were new adventures to
be had.
Scriber brightened at her entrance. "Did you check on Peregrine? How is
he?"
"He is fine, fine, just fine." Oops, no need to show them how fine he
really is! "I mean, there'll be a full recovery."
"Your Majesty, I'm very grateful to you and your doctors. Wickwrackscar
is a good pack, and I ... I mean, even a pilgrim can't change members every
day, like suits of clothes."
Woodcarver waved an offhand acknowledgment. She walked to the middle of
the room, and set the alien's picture box on the table there. It looked like
nothing so much as a big pink pillow -- with floppy ears and a weird animal
design sewed in its cover. After playing with it for a day and a half, she
was getting pretty good ... at opening the thing up. As always, the
Two-Legs's face appeared, making mouth noises. As always, Woodcarver felt an
instant of awe at seeing the moving mosaic. A million colored "tiles" had to
flip and shift in absolute synchrony to create the illusion. Yet it happened
exactly the same each time. She turned the screen so Scrupilo and Vendacious
could see.
Jaqueramaphan edged toward the others, and craned a pair of heads to
look. "You still think the box is an animal?" he said to Vendacious.
"Perhaps you could feed it sweets and it would tell us its secrets, eh?"
Woodcarver smiled to herself. Scriber was no pilgrim; pilgrims depend on
goodwill too much to go around giving the needle to the powerful.
Vendacious just ignored him. All his eyes were on her. "Your Majesty,
please do not take offense. I -- we of the Council -- must ask you again.
This picture box is too important to be left in the mouths of a single pack,
even one so great as you. Please. Leave it to the rest of us, at least when
you sleep."
"No offense taken. If you insist, you may participate in my
investigations. Beyond that, I will not go." She gave him an innocent look.
Vendacious was a superb spymaster, a mediocre administrator, and an
incompetent scientist. A century ago she would have the likes of him out
tending the crops, if he chose to stay at all. A century ago there had been
no need for spymasters and one administrator had been enough. How things had
changed. She absentmindedly nuzzled the picture box; perhaps things would
change again.
Scrupilo took Scriber's question seriously. "I see three possibilities,
sir. First, that it is magic." Vendacious winced away from him. "Indeed, the
box may be so far beyond our understanding, that it is magic. But that is
the one heresy the Woodcarver has never accepted, and so I courteously omit
it." He flicked a sardonic smile at Woodcarver. "Second, that it is an
animal. A few on the Council thought so when Scriber first made it talk. But
it looks like a stuffed pillow, even down to the amusing figure stitched on
its side. More importantly, it responds to stimuli with perfect
repeatability. That is something I do recognize. That is the behavior of a
machine."
"That's your third possibility?" said Scriber. "But to be a machine
means to have moving parts, and except for -- "
Woodcarver shrugged a tail at them. Scrupilo could go on like this for
hours, and she saw that Scriber was the same type. "I say, let's learn more
and then speculate." She tapped the corner of the box, just as Scriber had
in his original demonstration. The alien's face vanished from the picture,
replaced by a dizzying pattern of color. There was a splatter of sound, then
nothing but the mid-pitch hum the box always made when the top was open.
They knew the box could hear low-pitched sounds, and it could feel through
the square pad on its base. But that pad was itself a kind of picture
screen: certain commands transformed the grid of touch spots into entirely
new shapes. The first time they did that, the box refused any further
commands. Vendacious had been sure they had "killed the little alien". But
they had closed the box and reopened it -- and it was back to its original
behavior. Woodcarver was almost certain that nothing they could do by
talking to it or touching it would hurt the thing.
Woodcarver retried the known signals in the usual order. The results
were spectacular, and identical to before. But change that order in any way
and the effects would be different. She wasn't sure if she agreed with
Scrupilo: The box behaved with the repeatability of a machine ... yet the
variety of its responses was much more like an animal's.
Behind her, Scriber and Scrupilo edged members across the floor. Their
heads were stuck high in the air as they strained for a clear look at the
screen. The buzz of their thoughts came louder and louder. Woodcarver tried
to remember what she'd been planning next. Finally, the noise was just too
much. "Will you two please back off! I can't hear myself think." This isn't
a choir, you know.
"Sorry ... this okay?" They moved back about fifteen feet. Woodcarver
nodded. The two members were less than twenty feet from each other. Scrupilo
and Scriber must be really eager to see the screen. Vendacious had kept a
proper distance, and a look of alert enthusiasm.
"I have a suggestion," said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the
effort of concentrating over Scrupilo's thoughts. "When you touch the
four/three square and say -- " he made the alien sounds; they were all very
easy to do "-- the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match
the squares. I think we ... we are being given choices."
Hm. "The box could end up training us." If this is a machine, we need
some new definitions. "... Very well, let's play with it."
Three hours passed. Toward the end, even Vendacious had moved a member
nearer the screen; the noise in the room verged on mindless chaos. And
everybody had suggestions; "say that", "press this", "last time it said
that, we did thus and so". There were intricate colored designs, sprinkled
with things that must have been written language. Tiny, two-legged figures
scampered across the screen, shifting the symbols, opening little
windows.... Scriber Jaqueramaphan's idea was quite right. The first pictures
were choices. But some of those led to further pictures of choices. The
options spread out -- tree-like, Scriber said. He wasn't quite right;
sometimes they came back to an earlier point; it was a metaphorical network
of streets. Four times they ended in cul de sacs, and had to shut the box
and begin again. Vendacious was madly drawing maps of the paths. That would
help; there were places they would want to see again. But even he realized
there were unnumbered other paths, places that blind exploration would never
find.
And Woodcarver would have given a good part of her soul for the
pictures she had already seen. There were starscapes. There were moons that
shone blue and green, or banded orange. There were moving pictures of alien
cities, of thousands of aliens so close that they were actually touching. If
they ran in packs, those packs were bigger than anything in the world, even
in the tropics.... And maybe the question was irrelevant; the cities were
beyond anything she ever imagined.
Finally Jaqueramaphan backed off. He huddled together. There was a
shiver in his voice. "T-there's a whole universe in there. We could follow
it forever, and never know...."
She looked at the other two. For once, Vendacious had lost his
smugness. There were ink stains on all his lips. The writing benches around
him were littered with dozens of sketches, some clearer than others. He
dropped the pen, and gasped. "I say we take what we have and study it." He
began gathering the sketches, piling them into a neat stack. "Tomorrow,
after a good sleep, our heads will be clear and -- "
Scrupilo dropped back and stretched. His eyes had excited red rims.
"Fine. But leave the sketches, friend Vendacious." He jabbed at the
drawings. "See that one and that? It's clear that our blundering gets us
plenty of empty results. Sometimes the picture box just locks us out, but
much more often we get that picture: No options, just a couple of aliens
dancing in a forest and making rhythm sounds. Then if we say -- " and he
repeated part of the sequence, "-- we get that picture of piles of sticks.
The first with one, the second with two, and so on."
Woodcarver saw it too. "Yes. And a figure comes out and points to each
of the piles and says a short noise by each." She and Scrupilo stared at
each other, seeing the same gleam in each others' eyes. The excitement of
learning, of finding order where there had seemed only chaos. It had been a
hundred years since she last felt this way. "Whatever this thing is ... it's
trying to teach us the Two-Legs' language."
In the days that followed, Johanna Olsndot had lots of time to think.
The pain in her chest and shoulder gradually eased; if she moved carefully,
it was only a pulsing soreness. They had taken the arrow out and sewed the
wound closed. She had feared the worst when they had tied her down, when she
saw the knives in their mouths and the steel on their claws. Then they began
cutting; she had not known there could be such pain.
She still shuddered with remembered agony. But she didn't have
nightmares about it, the way she did about....
Mother and Dad were dead; she had seen them die with her own eyes. And
Jefri? Jefri might still be alive. Sometimes Johanna could go a whole
afternoon full of hope. She had seen the coldsleepers burning on the ground
below the ship, but those inside might have survived. Then she would
remember the indiscriminate way the attackers had flamed and slashed,
killing everything around the ship.
She was a prisoner. But for now, the murderers wanted her well. The
guards were not armed -- beyond their teeth and tines. They kept well away
from her when they could. They knew she could hurt them.
They kept her inside a big dark cabin. When she was alone she paced the
floor. The dogthings were barbarians. The surgery without anesthetics was
probably not even intended as torture. She hadn't seen any aircraft, or any
sign of electricity. The toilet was a slot carved in a marble slab. The hole
went so deep you could scarcely hear the plop hit bottom. But it still
smelled bad. These creatures were as backward as people in the darkest ages
on Nyjora. They had never had technology, or they had thoroughly forgotten
it. Johanna almost smiled. Mom had liked novels about shipwrecks and
heroines marooned on lost colonies. The big deal was usually to reinvent
technology and repair the spacecraft. Mom was ... had been ... so into the
history of science; she loved the details of those stories.
Well, Johanna was living it now. But with important differences. She
wanted rescue, but she also wanted revenge. These creatures were nothing
like human. In fact, she couldn't remember reading of anything quite like
them. She'd have looked for them in her dataset, except they had taken that.
Ha. Let them play with it. They'd quickly run into her booby traps and find
themselves totally locked out.
At first there were only blankets to keep warm. Then they'd given her
clothes cut like her jump suit but made of puffy quilting. They were warm
and sturdy, the stitching neater than anything she imagined a nonmachine
could do. Now she could comfortably walk around outside. The garden beyond
her cabin was the best thing about the place. It was about a hundred meters
square, and followed the slope of a hillside. There were lots of flowers,
and trees with long, feathery leaves. Flagstoned walks curved back and forth
through mossy turf. It was a peaceful place if she let it be, a little like
their backyard on Straum.
There were walls, but from the high end of the garden, she could see
over them. The walls angled this way and that, and in places she could see
their other side. The windows slits were like something out of her history
lessons: they let you shoot arrows or bullets without making a target of
yourself.
When the sun was out, Johanna liked to sit where the smell of the
feather leaves was strongest, and look over the lower walls at the bay. She
still wasn't sure just what she was seeing. There was a harbor; the forest
of spars was almost like the marinas on Straum. The town had wide streets,
but they zigged and zagged and the buildings along them were all askew. In
places there were open-roofed mazes of stone; from up here, she could see
the pattern. And there was another wall, a rambling thing that ran for as
far as she could see. The hills beyond were crowned with gray rock and
patches of snow.
She could see the dogthings down in the town. Individually, you could
almost mistake them for dogs (snake-necked, rat-headed ones). But watch them
from a distance and you saw their true nature. They always moved in small
groups, never more than six. Within the pack they touched, cooperated with
clever grace. But she never saw one group come closer than about ten meters
to another. From her distant viewpoint, the members of a pack seemed to
merge ... and she could imagine she was seeing one multilimbed beast ambling
cautiously along, careful not to come too close to a similar monster. By
now, the conclusion was inescapable: one pack, one mind. Minds so evil they
could not bear to be close to one another.
Her fifth time in the garden was the prettiest yet, a coercion toward
joy. The flowers had sprayed downy seeds into the air. The lowering sunlight
sparkled off them as they floated by the thousands on the slow breeze, clots
in an invisible syrup. She imagined what Jefri would do here: first pretend
grownup dignity, then bounce from one foot to the other. Finally he would
race down the hillside, trying to capture as many of the flying tufts as he
could. Laughing and laughing --
"One, two, how do you do?" It was a child's voice, behind her.
Johanna jumped up so fast she almost tore her stitches. Sure enough,
there was a pack behind her. They -- it? -- was the one who had cut the
arrow out of her. A mangy lot. The five were crouched, ready to run away.
They looked almost as surprised as Johanna felt.
"One, two, how do you do?" The voice came again, exactly as before. It
might as well have been a recording, except that one of the animals was
somehow synthesizing the sound with the buzzing patches of skin on its
shoulders, haunches and head. The parrot act was nothing new to her. But
this time ... the words were almost appropriate. The voice was not hers, but
she had heard that chant before. She put hands on hips and stared at the
pack. Two of the animals stared back; the others seemed to be admiring the
scenery. One licked nervously at its paw.
The two rear ones were carrying her dataset! Suddenly she knew where
they'd gotten that singsong question. And she knew what they expected in
response. "I am fine and how do you do?" she said.
The pack's eyes widened almost comically. "I am fine, so then are we
all!" It completed the game, then emitted a burst of gobbling. Someone
replied from down the hill. There was another pack there, lurking in the
bushes. She knew that if she stayed near this one, the other wouldn't
approach.
So the Tines -- she always thought of them by those claws on their
front feet; those she would never forget -- had been playing with the Pink
Oliphaunt, and hadn't been stopped by the booby traps. That was better than
Jefri ever managed. It was clear they had fallen into the kindermode
language programs. She should have thought of that. When the dataset noted
sufficiently asinine responses it would adapt its behavior, first for young
children, and -- if that didn't work -- for youngsters who didn't even speak
Samnorsk. With just a little cooperation from Johanna, they could learn her
language. Did she want that?
The pack walked a little nearer, at least two of them watching her all
the time. They didn't seem quite so ready to bolt as before. The nearest one
dropped to its belly and looked up at her. Very cute and helpless, if you
didn't see the claws. "My name is -- " Johanna heard a short burst of gobble
with an overtone that seemed to buzz right through her head. "What is your
name?"
Johanna knew it was all part of the language script. There was no way
the creature could understand the individual words it was saying. That "my
name, your name" pair was repeated over and over again between the children
in the language program. A vegetable would get the point eventually. Still,
the Tines pronunciation was so perfect....
"My name is Johanna," she said.
"Zjohanna," said the pack, with Johanna's voice, and splitting the word
stream incorrectly.
"Johanna," corrected Johanna. She wasn't even going to try saying the
Tines name.
"Hello, Johanna. Let's play the naming game!" And that was from the
script too, complete with silly enthusiasm. Johanna sat down. Sure, learning
Samnorsk would give the Tines power over her ... but it was the only way she
could learn about them, the only way she could learn about Jefri. And if
they had murdered Jefri, too? Well then, she would learn to hurt them as
much as they deserved.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
At Woodcarvers and then -- a few days later -- at Flenser's Hidden
Island, the long daylight of arctic summer ended. At first there was a
little twilight just around midnight, when even the highest hill stood in
shadow. And then the hours of dark grew quickly. Day fought night, and night
was winning. The featherleaf in the low valleys changed to autumn colors.
Looking up a fjord in daylight was to see orange red on the lower hills,
then the green of heather merging imperceptibly to the grays of lichen and
the darker grays of naked rock. The snowpatches waited for their time; it
would come soon.
At every sunset, each day a few minutes earlier, Tyrathect toured the
ramparts of Flenser's outer wall. It was a three-mile walk. The lower levels
were guarded by linear packs, but up here there were only a few lookouts.
When she approached, they stepped aside with military precision. More than
military precision; she saw the fear in their look. It was hard to get used
to that. For almost as far back as she had clear memories -- twenty years --
Tyrathect had lived in fear of others, in shame and guilt, in search of
someone to follow. Now all that was turned on its head. It was not an
improvement. She knew now, from the inside, the evil she had given herself
to. She knew why the sentries feared her. To them, she was Flenser.
Of course, she never gave any hint of these thoughts. Her life was only
as safe as the success of her fraud. Tyrathect had worked hard to suppress
her natural, shy mannerisms. Not once since coming to Hidden Island had she
caught herself in the old bashful habit of heads lowering, eyes closing.
Instead, Tyrathect had the Flenser stare -- and she used it. Her
passage around the top wall was as stark and ominous as Flenser's had ever
been. She looked out over her -- his -- domain with the same hard gaze as
before, all heads front, as if seeing visions beyond the petty minds of the
disciples. They must never guess her real reason for these sunset sweeps:
for a time, the days and nights were like in the Republic. She could almost
imagine she was still back there, before the Movement and the massacre at
Parliament Bowl, before they cut her throats and wed pieces of Flenser to
the stumps of her soul.
In the gold and russet fields beyond the stone curtains, she could see
peasants trimming the fields and the herds. Flenser ruled lands far beyond
her view, but he had never imported food. The grain and meat that filled the
storehouses were all produced within a two-day march of the straits. The
strategic intent was clear; still, it made for a peaceful evening's view and
brought back memories of her home and school.
The sun slid sideways into the mountains; long shadows swept the farm
lands. Flenser's castle was left an island in a sea of shadow. Tyrathect
could smell the cold. There would be frost again tonight. Tomorrow the
fields would be covered with false snow that would last an hour past
sunrise. She pulled the long jackets close around her and walked to the
eastern lookout. Across the straits, one of the near hilltops was still in
the sun. The alien ship had landed there. It was still there, but now behind
wood and stone. Steel began building there right after the landing. The
quarries at the north end of Hidden Island were busier now than ever in
Flenser's time. The barges hauling stone to the mainland made a steady
traffic across the straits. Even now that the light was not dayround,
Steel's construction went on nonstop. His Incallings and lesser inspections
were harsher than Flenser's had used to be.
Lord Steel was a killer; worse, a manipulator. But since the alien
landing, Tyrathect knew that he was something else: deathly afraid. He had
good reason. And even though the folk he feared might ultimately kill them
all, in her secret soul she wished them well. Steel and his Flenserists had
attacked the star people without warning, more out of greed than fear. They
had killed dozens of beings. In a way the murders were worse than what the
Movement had done to her. Tyrathect had followed the Flenser of her own free
will. She had had friends who warned her about the Movement. There had been
dark stories about the Flenser, and not all had been government propaganda.
But she had so wanted to follow, to give herself to Something Greater....
They had used her, literally as their tool. Yet she could have avoided it.
The star people had had no such option; Steel simply butchered them.
So now Steel labored out of fear. In the first three days he had
covered the flying ship with a roof: a sudden, silly farmhouse had appeared
on the hilltop. Before long the alien craft would be hidden behind stone
walls. Ultimately, the new fortress might be bigger than the one on Hidden
Island. Steel knew that if his villainy did not destroy him, it would make
him the most powerful pack in the world.
And that was Tyrathect's reason for staying, for continuing her
masquerade. She couldn't go on forever. Sooner or later the other fragments
would reach Hidden Island; Tyrathect would be destroyed and all of Flenser
would live again. Perhaps she wouldn't survive even that long. Two of
Tyrathect were of Flenser. The Master had miscalculated in thinking they
could dominate the other three. Instead the conscience of the three had come
to own the brilliance of the two. She remembered almost everything the great
Flenser had known, all the tricks and all the betrayals. The two had given
her an intensity she had never had before. Tyrathect laughed to herself. In
a sense, she had gained what she had been so naively seeking in the
Movement; and the great Flenser had made exactly the mistake that in his
arrogance he thought impossible. As long as she could keep the two under
control, she had a chance. When she was all awake, there wasn't much
problem; she still felt herself a "she", still remembered her life in the
Republic more clearly than the Flenser memories. It was different when she
slept. There were nightmares. The memories of torment inflicted suddenly
seemed sweet. Sleep-time sex should soothe; with her it was a battle. She
awoke sore and cut, as if she had been fighting a rapist. If the two ever
broke free, if she ever awoke a "he".... It would take only a few seconds
for the two to denounce the masquerade, only a little longer to kill the
three and put the Flenser members aboard a more manageable pack.
Yet she stayed. Steel meant to use the aliens and their ship to spread
Flenser's nightmare worldwide. But his plan was fragile, with risks on every
side. If there was anything she could do to destroy it and the Flenser
Movement, she would.
Across the castle, only the western tower still hung in sunlight. No
faces showed at the window slits, but eyes looked out: Steel watched the
Flenser Fragment -- the Flenser-in-Waiting as it styled itself -- on the
ramparts below. The fragment was accepted by all the commanders. In fact,
they accorded it almost the awe they had given to the full Flenser. In a
sense, Flenser had made them all, so it wasn't surprising they felt a chill
in the Master's presence. Even Steel felt it. In his shaping, Flenser had
forced the aborning Steel to try to kill him; each time Steel had been
caught and his weakest members tortured. Steel knew the conditioning that
was there, and that helped him fight it. If anything, he told himself, the
Flenser Frag was in greater danger because of it: in trying to counter the
fear, Steel might just miscalculate, and act more violently than was
appropriate.
Sooner or later Steel had to decide. If he didn't kill it before the
other fragments reached Hidden Island, then all of Flenser would be here
again. If two members could dominate Steel's regime, then six would totally
erase it. Did he want the Master dead? And if he did, was there any surely
safe way...? Steel's mind flickered lightly all around the issue as he
watched the black-frocked pack.
Steel was used to playing for high stakes. He had been born playing for
them. Fear and death and winning were his whole life. But never had the
stakes been as high as now. Flenser had come close to subverting the largest
nation on the continent, and had had dreams of ruling the world.... Lord
Steel looked to the hillside across the straits, at the new castle he was
building. In his present game, world conquest would follow easily on
victory, and the destruction of the world was a conceivable consequence of
failure.
Steel had visited the flying ship shortly after the ambush. The ground
was still steaming. Every hour it seemed to grow hotter. The mainland
peasants talked of demons wakened in the earth; Steel's advisors could not
do much better. The whitejackets needed padded boots to get close. Steel had
ignored the steam, donned the boots, and walked beneath the curving hull.
The bottom was vaguely like a boat's hull, if you ignored the stilts. Near
the center was a teat-like projection; the ground directly underneath
burbled with molten rock. The burned-out coffins were on the uphill side of
the ship. Several of the corpses had been removed for dissection. In the
first hours his advisors had been full of fanciful theories: the mantis folk
were warriors fleeing a battle, come to bury their dead....
So far no one had been able to take a careful look inside the craft.
The gray stairs were made of something as strong as steel yet feather
light. But they were recognizably stairs, even if the risers were high for
the average member. Steel scrambled up the steps, leaving Shreck and his
other advisors outside.
He stuck a head through the hatch -- and winced back abruptly. The
acoustics were deadly. He understood what the whitejackets were complaining
about. How could the aliens bear it? One by one he forced himself through
the opening.
Echoes screamed at him -- worse than from unpadded quartz. He quieted
himself, as he had so often done in the Master's presence. The echoes
diminished, but they were still a horde raging in the walls all around. Not
even his best whitejackets could tolerate more than five minutes here. The
thought made Steel stand straighter. Discipline. Quiet does not always mean
submission; it can mean hunting. He looked around, ignoring the howling
murmurs.
Light came from bluish strips in the ceiling. As his eyes adjusted, he
could see what his people had described to him: the interior was just two
rooms. He was standing in the larger one -- a cargo hold? There was a hatch
in the far wall and then the second room. The walls were seamless. They met
in angles that did not match the outer hull; there would be dead spaces. A
breeze moved fitfully about the room, but the air was much warmer than
outside. He had never been in a place that felt more of power and evil.
Surely it was only a trick of acoustics. They would bring in some absorbent
quilts, some side reflectors, and the feeling would go away. Still....
The room was filled with coffins, these unburned. The place stank with
the aliens' body odor. Mold grew in the darker corners. In a way that was
comforting: the aliens breathed and sweated as other living things, and for
all their marvelous invention, they could not keep their own den clean.
Steel wandered among the coffins. The boxes were mounted on railed racks.
When the ones outside had been here, the room must have been crammed full.
Undamaged, the coffins were marvels of fine workmanship. Warm air exited
slots along the sides. He sniffed at it: complex, faintly nauseating, but
not the smell of death. And not the source of the overpowering stench of
mantis sweat that hung everywhere.
Each coffin had a window mounted on its top side. What effort to honor
the remains of single members! Steel hopped onto one and looked down. The
corpse was perfectly preserved; in fact, the blue light made everything look
frozen. He cocked a second head over the edge of the box, got a double view
on the creature within. It was far smaller than the two they had killed
under the ship. It was even smaller than the one they had captured. Some of
Steel's advisors thought the small ones were pups, perhaps unweaned. It made
sense; their prisoner never made thought sounds.
Partly as an act of discipline, he stared for a long while at the
alien's queer, flat face. The echo of his mind was a continuing pain, eating
at his attention, demanding that he leave. Let the pain continue. He had
withstood worse before, and the packs outside must know that Steel was
stronger than any of them. He could master the pain and have the greater
insight.... And then he would work their butts off, quilting these rooms and
studying the contents.
So Steel stared, almost thoughtless, into the face. The screaming in
the walls seemed to fade a little. The face was so ugly. How could the
creature eat? He had looked at the charred corpses outside, noticed their
small jaws and randomly misshapen teeth.
A few minutes passed; the noise and ugliness mixed together,
dream-like.... And out of his trance, Steel new a nightmare horror: The face
moved. The change was small, and it happened very, very slowly. But over a
period of minutes, the face had changed.
Steel's fell from the coffin; the walls screamed back terror. For a few
seconds, he thought the noise would kill him. Then he regained himself with
quiet thought. He crawled back onto the box. All his eyes stared through the
crystal, waiting like a pack on hunt.... The change was regular. The alien
in the box was breathing, but fifty times more slowly than any normal
member. He moved to another box, watched the creature in it. Somehow, they
were all alive. Inside those boxes, their lives were simply slowed.
He looked up from the boxes, almost in a daze. That the room reeked of
evil was an illusion of sound ... and also the absolute truth.
The mantis alien had landed far from the tropics, away from the
collectives; perhaps it thought the Arctic Northwest a backward wilderness.
It had come in a ship jammed with hundreds of mantis pups. These boxes were
like larval casings: the pack would land, raise the small ones to adulthood
-- out of sight of civilization. Steel felt his pelts puff up as he thought
impatiently. Vendacious said something, agreeing with him. The doctor
retreated, and Scrupilo advanced on Wickwrack's alien.
Peregrine pulled himself to full wakefulness. "Be careful. The creature
is not friendly."
Scrupilo snapped back, "Your friend has already warned me once." He
circled the litter, staring at the alien's brown, furless face. The alien
stared back, impassive. Scrupilo reached forward cautiously and drew back
the alien's quilt. Still no response. "See?" said Scrupilo. "It knows I mean
no harm." Peregrine said nothing to correct him.
"It really walks on those rear paws alone?" said one of the other
advisors. "Can you imagine it, towering over us? One little bump would knock
it down." Laughter. Peregrine remembered how mantis-like the alien had
seemed when upright. These fellows hadn't seen it move.
Scrupilo wrinkled a nose. "The thing is filthy." He was all around her,
a posture that Peregrine knew upset the Two-Legs. "That arrow shaft must be
removed, you know. Most of the bleeding has stopped, but if we expect the
creature to live for long, it needs medical attention." He looked
disdainfully at Scriber and Peregrine, as if they were to blame for not
performing surgery aboard the twinhull. Something caught his eye and his
tone abruptly changed: "By the Pack of Packs! Look at its forepaws." He
loosened the ropes about the creature's front legs. "Two paws like that
would be as good as five pairs of lips. Think what a pack of these creatures
could do!" He moved close to the five-tentacled paw.
"Be -- " careful, Peregrine started to say. The alien abruptly bunched
its tentacles into a club. Its foreleg flicked out at an impossible angle,
ramming its paw into Scrupilo's head. The blow couldn't have been too
strong, but it was precisely placed on the tympanum.
"Ow! Yow! Wow. Wow." Scrupilo danced back.
The alien was shouting, too. It was all mouth noise, thin and
low-pitched. The eldritch sound brought up every head, even Woodcarver's.
Peregrine had heard it many times by now. There was no doubt in his mind --
this was the aliens' interpack speech. After a few seconds, the sound
changed to a regular hacking that gradually faded.
For a long moment no one spoke. Then part of Woodcarver got to her
feet. She looked at Scrupilo. "Are you all right?" It was the first time she
had spoken since the beginning of the meeting.
Scrupilo was licking his forehead. "Yes. It smarts is all."
"Your curiosity will kill you some day."
The other huffed indignantly, but also seemed flattered by the
prediction.
Queen Woodcarver looked at her councillors. "I see an important
question here. Scrupilo thinks one alien member would be as agile as an
entire pack of us. Is that so?" She pointed the question at Peregrine rather
than Scriber.
"Yes, Your Majesty. If those ropes had been tied within its reach, it
could easily have unknotted them." He knew where this was going; he'd had
three days to get there himself. "And the noises it makes sound like
coordinated speech to me."
There was a swell of talk as the others caught on. An articulate member
can often make semi-sensible speech, but usually at the expense of
dexterity.
"Yes ... A creature like nothing on our world, whose boat flew down
from the top of heaven. I wonder at the mind of such a pack, if a single
member is almost as smart as all of one of us?" Her blind one looked around
as it made the words, almost as if it could see. Two others wiped at her
drooler's muzzle. She was not an inspiring sight.
Scrupilo poked a head up. "I hear not a hint of thought sound from this
one. There is no fore-tympanum." He pointed at the torn clothing around the
creature's wound. "And I see no sign of shoulder tympana. Perhaps it is pack
smart even as a singleton ... and perhaps that's all the aliens ever are."
Peregrine smiled to himself; this Scrupilo was a prickly twit, but not one
who held with tradition. For centuries, academics had debated the difference
between people and animals. Some animals had larger brains; some had paws or
lips more agile than a member's. In the savannahs of Easterlee, there were
creatures that even looked like people and ran in groups, but without much
depth of thought. Leaving aside wolf nests and whales, only people were
packs. It was the coordination of thought between members that made them
superior. Scrupilo's theory was a heresy.
Jaqueramaphan said, "But we did hear thought sounds, loud ones, during
the ambush. Perhaps this one is like our unweaned, unable to think -- "
"And yet still almost as smart as a pack," Woodcarver finished
somberly. "If these people are not smarter than we, then we might learn
their devices. No matter how magnificent they are, we could eventually be
their equals. But if this member is just one of a superpack ..." For a
moment there was no talk, just the muted underedge of her councillors'
thoughts. If the aliens were superpacks, and if their envoy had been
murdered -- then there might not be anything they could do to save
themselves.
"So. Our first priority should be to save this creature, to befriend it
and learn its true nature." Her heads lowered, and she seemed lost within
herself -- or perhaps just tired. Abruptly, she turned several heads toward
her chamberlain. "Move the creature to the lodge by mine."
Vendacious started with surprise. "Surely not, Your Majesty! We've seen
that it is hostile. And it needs medical attention."
Woodcarver smiled and her voice turned silky. Peregrine remembered that
tone from before. "Do you forget that I know surgery? Do you forget ... that
I am the Woodcarver?"
Vendacious licked his lips and looked at the other advisors. After a
second he said, "No, Your Majesty. It will be as you wish."
And Peregrine felt like cheering. Perhaps Woodcarver did still run
things.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Peregrine was sitting back to back on the steps of his quarters when
Woodcarver came to see him next day. She came alone, and wearing the simple
green jackets he remembered from his last visit.
He didn't bow or go out to meet her. She looked at him coolly for a
moment, and sat down just a few yards away.
"How is the Two-Legs?" he asked.
"I took out the arrow and sewed the wound shut. I think it will
survive. My advisors were pleased: the creature didn't act like a reasoning
being. It fought even after it was tied down, as though it had no concept of
surgery.... How is your head?"
"All right, as long as I don't move around." The rest of him -- Scar --
lay behind the doorway in the dark interior of the lodge. "The tympanum is
healing straight, I think. I'll be fine in a few days."
"Good." A wrecked tympanum could mean continuing mental problems, or
the need for a new member and the pain of finding a use for the singleton
that was sent into silence. "I remember you, pilgrim. All the members are
different, but you really are the Peregrine of before. You had some great
stories. I enjoyed your visit."
"And I enjoyed meeting the great Woodcarver. That is the reason I
returned."
She cocked a head wryly. "The great Woodcarver of before, not the wreck
of now?"
He shrugged. "What happened?"
She didn't answer immediately. For a moment, they sat and looked across
the city. It was cloudy this afternoon, with rain coming. The breeze off the
channel was a cool stinging on his lips and eyes. Woodcarver shivered, and
puffed her fur out a bit. Finally she said, "I held my soul six hundred
years -- and that's counting by foreclaws. I should think it's obvious what
has become of me."
"The perversion never hurt you before." Peregrine was not normally so
blunt. Something about her brought out the frankness in him.
"Yes, the average incest degrades to my state in a few centuries, and
is an idiot long before then. My methods were much cleverer. I knew who to
breed with whom, which puppies to keep and which to put on others. So it was
always my flesh bearing my memories, and my soul remained pure. But I didn't
understand enough -- or perhaps I tried the impossible. The choices got
harder and harder, till I was left with choosing between brains and physical
defect." She wiped away the drool, and all but the blind one looked out
across her city. "These are the best days of summer, you know. Life is a
green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the
season." And the green did seem to be everywhere it could be: featherleaf
down the hillside and in the town, ferns all over the near hillsides, and
heather struggling toward the gray crowns of the mountains across the
channel. "I love this place."
He never expected to be comforting the Woodcarver of Woodcarvers. "You
made a miracle here. I've heard of it all the way on the other side of the
world.... And I'll bet that half the packs around here are related to you."
"Y-yes, I've been successful beyond a rake's wildest dreams. I've had
no shortage of lovers, even if I couldn't use the pups myself. Sometimes I
think my get has been my greatest experiment. Scrupilo and Vendacious are
mostly my offspring ... but so is Flenser."
Huh! Peregrine hadn't known that last.
"The last few decades, I'd more or less accepted my fate. I couldn't
outwit eternity; sometime soon I would let my soul slip free. I let the
council take over more and more; how could I claim the domain after I was no
longer me? I went back to art -- you saw those monochrome mosaics."
"Yes! They're beautiful."
"I'll show you my picture loom sometime. The procedure is tedious but
almost automatic. It was a nice project for the last years of my soul. But
now -- you and your alien have changed everything. Damn it! If only this had
happened a hundred years ago. What I would have done with it! We've been
playing with your 'picture box', you know. The pictures are finer than any
in our world. They are a bit like my mosaics -- the way the sun is like a
glowbug. Millions of colored dots go to make each picture, the tiles so
small you can't see them without one of Scriber's eye-tools. I've worked for
years to make a few dozen mosaics. The picture box can make unnumbered
thousands, so fast they seem to move. Your aliens make my life less than an
unweaned pup's scratching in its cradle."
The queen of the Woodcarvers was softly crying, but her voice was
angry. "And now the whole world is going to change, but too late for such
wreckage as I!"
Almost without conscious thought, Peregrine extended one of his members
toward the Woodcarver. He walked unseemly close: eight yards, five. Their
thoughts were suddenly fuzzy with interference, but he could feel her
calming.
She laughed blearily. "Thank you.... Strange that you should be
sympathetic. The greatest problem of my life is nothing to a pilgrim.
"You were hurting." It was all he could think to say.
"But you pilgrims change and change and change -- " She eased one of
herself close to him; they were almost touching, and it was even harder to
think.
Peregrine spoke slowly, concentrating on every word, hoping he wouldn't
forget his point. "But I do keep something of a soul. The parts that remain
a pilgrim must have a certain outlook." Sometimes great insight comes in the
noise of battle or intimacy. This was such at time. "And -- and I think the
world itself is due for a change of soul now that we have Two-Legs dropping
from the sky. What better time for Woodcarver to give up the old?"
She smiled, and the confusion became louder, but a pleasant thing. "I
... hadn't ... thought of it that way. Now is the time to change...."
Peregrine walked into her midst. The two packs stood for a moment,
necking, thoughts blending into sweet chaos. Their last clear recollection
was of stumbling up the steps and into his lodge.
Late that afternoon, Woodcarver brought the picture box to Scrupilo's
laboratory. When she arrived Scrupilo and Vendacious were already present.
Scriber Jaqueramaphan was there too, but standing farther from the others
than courtesy might demand. She had interrupted some kind of argument. A few
days before, such squabbling would have just depressed her. Now -- she
dragged her limper into the room and looked at the others through her
drooler's eyes -- and smiled. Woodcarver felt the best she had in years. She
had made her decision and acted on it, and now there were new adventures to
be had.
Scriber brightened at her entrance. "Did you check on Peregrine? How is
he?"
"He is fine, fine, just fine." Oops, no need to show them how fine he
really is! "I mean, there'll be a full recovery."
"Your Majesty, I'm very grateful to you and your doctors. Wickwrackscar
is a good pack, and I ... I mean, even a pilgrim can't change members every
day, like suits of clothes."
Woodcarver waved an offhand acknowledgment. She walked to the middle of
the room, and set the alien's picture box on the table there. It looked like
nothing so much as a big pink pillow -- with floppy ears and a weird animal
design sewed in its cover. After playing with it for a day and a half, she
was getting pretty good ... at opening the thing up. As always, the
Two-Legs's face appeared, making mouth noises. As always, Woodcarver felt an
instant of awe at seeing the moving mosaic. A million colored "tiles" had to
flip and shift in absolute synchrony to create the illusion. Yet it happened
exactly the same each time. She turned the screen so Scrupilo and Vendacious
could see.
Jaqueramaphan edged toward the others, and craned a pair of heads to
look. "You still think the box is an animal?" he said to Vendacious.
"Perhaps you could feed it sweets and it would tell us its secrets, eh?"
Woodcarver smiled to herself. Scriber was no pilgrim; pilgrims depend on
goodwill too much to go around giving the needle to the powerful.
Vendacious just ignored him. All his eyes were on her. "Your Majesty,
please do not take offense. I -- we of the Council -- must ask you again.
This picture box is too important to be left in the mouths of a single pack,
even one so great as you. Please. Leave it to the rest of us, at least when
you sleep."
"No offense taken. If you insist, you may participate in my
investigations. Beyond that, I will not go." She gave him an innocent look.
Vendacious was a superb spymaster, a mediocre administrator, and an
incompetent scientist. A century ago she would have the likes of him out
tending the crops, if he chose to stay at all. A century ago there had been
no need for spymasters and one administrator had been enough. How things had
changed. She absentmindedly nuzzled the picture box; perhaps things would
change again.
Scrupilo took Scriber's question seriously. "I see three possibilities,
sir. First, that it is magic." Vendacious winced away from him. "Indeed, the
box may be so far beyond our understanding, that it is magic. But that is
the one heresy the Woodcarver has never accepted, and so I courteously omit
it." He flicked a sardonic smile at Woodcarver. "Second, that it is an
animal. A few on the Council thought so when Scriber first made it talk. But
it looks like a stuffed pillow, even down to the amusing figure stitched on
its side. More importantly, it responds to stimuli with perfect
repeatability. That is something I do recognize. That is the behavior of a
machine."
"That's your third possibility?" said Scriber. "But to be a machine
means to have moving parts, and except for -- "
Woodcarver shrugged a tail at them. Scrupilo could go on like this for
hours, and she saw that Scriber was the same type. "I say, let's learn more
and then speculate." She tapped the corner of the box, just as Scriber had
in his original demonstration. The alien's face vanished from the picture,
replaced by a dizzying pattern of color. There was a splatter of sound, then
nothing but the mid-pitch hum the box always made when the top was open.
They knew the box could hear low-pitched sounds, and it could feel through
the square pad on its base. But that pad was itself a kind of picture
screen: certain commands transformed the grid of touch spots into entirely
new shapes. The first time they did that, the box refused any further
commands. Vendacious had been sure they had "killed the little alien". But
they had closed the box and reopened it -- and it was back to its original
behavior. Woodcarver was almost certain that nothing they could do by
talking to it or touching it would hurt the thing.
Woodcarver retried the known signals in the usual order. The results
were spectacular, and identical to before. But change that order in any way
and the effects would be different. She wasn't sure if she agreed with
Scrupilo: The box behaved with the repeatability of a machine ... yet the
variety of its responses was much more like an animal's.
Behind her, Scriber and Scrupilo edged members across the floor. Their
heads were stuck high in the air as they strained for a clear look at the
screen. The buzz of their thoughts came louder and louder. Woodcarver tried
to remember what she'd been planning next. Finally, the noise was just too
much. "Will you two please back off! I can't hear myself think." This isn't
a choir, you know.
"Sorry ... this okay?" They moved back about fifteen feet. Woodcarver
nodded. The two members were less than twenty feet from each other. Scrupilo
and Scriber must be really eager to see the screen. Vendacious had kept a
proper distance, and a look of alert enthusiasm.
"I have a suggestion," said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the
effort of concentrating over Scrupilo's thoughts. "When you touch the
four/three square and say -- " he made the alien sounds; they were all very
easy to do "-- the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match
the squares. I think we ... we are being given choices."
Hm. "The box could end up training us." If this is a machine, we need
some new definitions. "... Very well, let's play with it."
Three hours passed. Toward the end, even Vendacious had moved a member
nearer the screen; the noise in the room verged on mindless chaos. And
everybody had suggestions; "say that", "press this", "last time it said
that, we did thus and so". There were intricate colored designs, sprinkled
with things that must have been written language. Tiny, two-legged figures
scampered across the screen, shifting the symbols, opening little
windows.... Scriber Jaqueramaphan's idea was quite right. The first pictures
were choices. But some of those led to further pictures of choices. The
options spread out -- tree-like, Scriber said. He wasn't quite right;
sometimes they came back to an earlier point; it was a metaphorical network
of streets. Four times they ended in cul de sacs, and had to shut the box
and begin again. Vendacious was madly drawing maps of the paths. That would
help; there were places they would want to see again. But even he realized
there were unnumbered other paths, places that blind exploration would never
find.
And Woodcarver would have given a good part of her soul for the
pictures she had already seen. There were starscapes. There were moons that
shone blue and green, or banded orange. There were moving pictures of alien
cities, of thousands of aliens so close that they were actually touching. If
they ran in packs, those packs were bigger than anything in the world, even
in the tropics.... And maybe the question was irrelevant; the cities were
beyond anything she ever imagined.
Finally Jaqueramaphan backed off. He huddled together. There was a
shiver in his voice. "T-there's a whole universe in there. We could follow
it forever, and never know...."
She looked at the other two. For once, Vendacious had lost his
smugness. There were ink stains on all his lips. The writing benches around
him were littered with dozens of sketches, some clearer than others. He
dropped the pen, and gasped. "I say we take what we have and study it." He
began gathering the sketches, piling them into a neat stack. "Tomorrow,
after a good sleep, our heads will be clear and -- "
Scrupilo dropped back and stretched. His eyes had excited red rims.
"Fine. But leave the sketches, friend Vendacious." He jabbed at the
drawings. "See that one and that? It's clear that our blundering gets us
plenty of empty results. Sometimes the picture box just locks us out, but
much more often we get that picture: No options, just a couple of aliens
dancing in a forest and making rhythm sounds. Then if we say -- " and he
repeated part of the sequence, "-- we get that picture of piles of sticks.
The first with one, the second with two, and so on."
Woodcarver saw it too. "Yes. And a figure comes out and points to each
of the piles and says a short noise by each." She and Scrupilo stared at
each other, seeing the same gleam in each others' eyes. The excitement of
learning, of finding order where there had seemed only chaos. It had been a
hundred years since she last felt this way. "Whatever this thing is ... it's
trying to teach us the Two-Legs' language."
In the days that followed, Johanna Olsndot had lots of time to think.
The pain in her chest and shoulder gradually eased; if she moved carefully,
it was only a pulsing soreness. They had taken the arrow out and sewed the
wound closed. She had feared the worst when they had tied her down, when she
saw the knives in their mouths and the steel on their claws. Then they began
cutting; she had not known there could be such pain.
She still shuddered with remembered agony. But she didn't have
nightmares about it, the way she did about....
Mother and Dad were dead; she had seen them die with her own eyes. And
Jefri? Jefri might still be alive. Sometimes Johanna could go a whole
afternoon full of hope. She had seen the coldsleepers burning on the ground
below the ship, but those inside might have survived. Then she would
remember the indiscriminate way the attackers had flamed and slashed,
killing everything around the ship.
She was a prisoner. But for now, the murderers wanted her well. The
guards were not armed -- beyond their teeth and tines. They kept well away
from her when they could. They knew she could hurt them.
They kept her inside a big dark cabin. When she was alone she paced the
floor. The dogthings were barbarians. The surgery without anesthetics was
probably not even intended as torture. She hadn't seen any aircraft, or any
sign of electricity. The toilet was a slot carved in a marble slab. The hole
went so deep you could scarcely hear the plop hit bottom. But it still
smelled bad. These creatures were as backward as people in the darkest ages
on Nyjora. They had never had technology, or they had thoroughly forgotten
it. Johanna almost smiled. Mom had liked novels about shipwrecks and
heroines marooned on lost colonies. The big deal was usually to reinvent
technology and repair the spacecraft. Mom was ... had been ... so into the
history of science; she loved the details of those stories.
Well, Johanna was living it now. But with important differences. She
wanted rescue, but she also wanted revenge. These creatures were nothing
like human. In fact, she couldn't remember reading of anything quite like
them. She'd have looked for them in her dataset, except they had taken that.
Ha. Let them play with it. They'd quickly run into her booby traps and find
themselves totally locked out.
At first there were only blankets to keep warm. Then they'd given her
clothes cut like her jump suit but made of puffy quilting. They were warm
and sturdy, the stitching neater than anything she imagined a nonmachine
could do. Now she could comfortably walk around outside. The garden beyond
her cabin was the best thing about the place. It was about a hundred meters
square, and followed the slope of a hillside. There were lots of flowers,
and trees with long, feathery leaves. Flagstoned walks curved back and forth
through mossy turf. It was a peaceful place if she let it be, a little like
their backyard on Straum.
There were walls, but from the high end of the garden, she could see
over them. The walls angled this way and that, and in places she could see
their other side. The windows slits were like something out of her history
lessons: they let you shoot arrows or bullets without making a target of
yourself.
When the sun was out, Johanna liked to sit where the smell of the
feather leaves was strongest, and look over the lower walls at the bay. She
still wasn't sure just what she was seeing. There was a harbor; the forest
of spars was almost like the marinas on Straum. The town had wide streets,
but they zigged and zagged and the buildings along them were all askew. In
places there were open-roofed mazes of stone; from up here, she could see
the pattern. And there was another wall, a rambling thing that ran for as
far as she could see. The hills beyond were crowned with gray rock and
patches of snow.
She could see the dogthings down in the town. Individually, you could
almost mistake them for dogs (snake-necked, rat-headed ones). But watch them
from a distance and you saw their true nature. They always moved in small
groups, never more than six. Within the pack they touched, cooperated with
clever grace. But she never saw one group come closer than about ten meters
to another. From her distant viewpoint, the members of a pack seemed to
merge ... and she could imagine she was seeing one multilimbed beast ambling
cautiously along, careful not to come too close to a similar monster. By
now, the conclusion was inescapable: one pack, one mind. Minds so evil they
could not bear to be close to one another.
Her fifth time in the garden was the prettiest yet, a coercion toward
joy. The flowers had sprayed downy seeds into the air. The lowering sunlight
sparkled off them as they floated by the thousands on the slow breeze, clots
in an invisible syrup. She imagined what Jefri would do here: first pretend
grownup dignity, then bounce from one foot to the other. Finally he would
race down the hillside, trying to capture as many of the flying tufts as he
could. Laughing and laughing --
"One, two, how do you do?" It was a child's voice, behind her.
Johanna jumped up so fast she almost tore her stitches. Sure enough,
there was a pack behind her. They -- it? -- was the one who had cut the
arrow out of her. A mangy lot. The five were crouched, ready to run away.
They looked almost as surprised as Johanna felt.
"One, two, how do you do?" The voice came again, exactly as before. It
might as well have been a recording, except that one of the animals was
somehow synthesizing the sound with the buzzing patches of skin on its
shoulders, haunches and head. The parrot act was nothing new to her. But
this time ... the words were almost appropriate. The voice was not hers, but
she had heard that chant before. She put hands on hips and stared at the
pack. Two of the animals stared back; the others seemed to be admiring the
scenery. One licked nervously at its paw.
The two rear ones were carrying her dataset! Suddenly she knew where
they'd gotten that singsong question. And she knew what they expected in
response. "I am fine and how do you do?" she said.
The pack's eyes widened almost comically. "I am fine, so then are we
all!" It completed the game, then emitted a burst of gobbling. Someone
replied from down the hill. There was another pack there, lurking in the
bushes. She knew that if she stayed near this one, the other wouldn't
approach.
So the Tines -- she always thought of them by those claws on their
front feet; those she would never forget -- had been playing with the Pink
Oliphaunt, and hadn't been stopped by the booby traps. That was better than
Jefri ever managed. It was clear they had fallen into the kindermode
language programs. She should have thought of that. When the dataset noted
sufficiently asinine responses it would adapt its behavior, first for young
children, and -- if that didn't work -- for youngsters who didn't even speak
Samnorsk. With just a little cooperation from Johanna, they could learn her
language. Did she want that?
The pack walked a little nearer, at least two of them watching her all
the time. They didn't seem quite so ready to bolt as before. The nearest one
dropped to its belly and looked up at her. Very cute and helpless, if you
didn't see the claws. "My name is -- " Johanna heard a short burst of gobble
with an overtone that seemed to buzz right through her head. "What is your
name?"
Johanna knew it was all part of the language script. There was no way
the creature could understand the individual words it was saying. That "my
name, your name" pair was repeated over and over again between the children
in the language program. A vegetable would get the point eventually. Still,
the Tines pronunciation was so perfect....
"My name is Johanna," she said.
"Zjohanna," said the pack, with Johanna's voice, and splitting the word
stream incorrectly.
"Johanna," corrected Johanna. She wasn't even going to try saying the
Tines name.
"Hello, Johanna. Let's play the naming game!" And that was from the
script too, complete with silly enthusiasm. Johanna sat down. Sure, learning
Samnorsk would give the Tines power over her ... but it was the only way she
could learn about them, the only way she could learn about Jefri. And if
they had murdered Jefri, too? Well then, she would learn to hurt them as
much as they deserved.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
At Woodcarvers and then -- a few days later -- at Flenser's Hidden
Island, the long daylight of arctic summer ended. At first there was a
little twilight just around midnight, when even the highest hill stood in
shadow. And then the hours of dark grew quickly. Day fought night, and night
was winning. The featherleaf in the low valleys changed to autumn colors.
Looking up a fjord in daylight was to see orange red on the lower hills,
then the green of heather merging imperceptibly to the grays of lichen and
the darker grays of naked rock. The snowpatches waited for their time; it
would come soon.
At every sunset, each day a few minutes earlier, Tyrathect toured the
ramparts of Flenser's outer wall. It was a three-mile walk. The lower levels
were guarded by linear packs, but up here there were only a few lookouts.
When she approached, they stepped aside with military precision. More than
military precision; she saw the fear in their look. It was hard to get used
to that. For almost as far back as she had clear memories -- twenty years --
Tyrathect had lived in fear of others, in shame and guilt, in search of
someone to follow. Now all that was turned on its head. It was not an
improvement. She knew now, from the inside, the evil she had given herself
to. She knew why the sentries feared her. To them, she was Flenser.
Of course, she never gave any hint of these thoughts. Her life was only
as safe as the success of her fraud. Tyrathect had worked hard to suppress
her natural, shy mannerisms. Not once since coming to Hidden Island had she
caught herself in the old bashful habit of heads lowering, eyes closing.
Instead, Tyrathect had the Flenser stare -- and she used it. Her
passage around the top wall was as stark and ominous as Flenser's had ever
been. She looked out over her -- his -- domain with the same hard gaze as
before, all heads front, as if seeing visions beyond the petty minds of the
disciples. They must never guess her real reason for these sunset sweeps:
for a time, the days and nights were like in the Republic. She could almost
imagine she was still back there, before the Movement and the massacre at
Parliament Bowl, before they cut her throats and wed pieces of Flenser to
the stumps of her soul.
In the gold and russet fields beyond the stone curtains, she could see
peasants trimming the fields and the herds. Flenser ruled lands far beyond
her view, but he had never imported food. The grain and meat that filled the
storehouses were all produced within a two-day march of the straits. The
strategic intent was clear; still, it made for a peaceful evening's view and
brought back memories of her home and school.
The sun slid sideways into the mountains; long shadows swept the farm
lands. Flenser's castle was left an island in a sea of shadow. Tyrathect
could smell the cold. There would be frost again tonight. Tomorrow the
fields would be covered with false snow that would last an hour past
sunrise. She pulled the long jackets close around her and walked to the
eastern lookout. Across the straits, one of the near hilltops was still in
the sun. The alien ship had landed there. It was still there, but now behind
wood and stone. Steel began building there right after the landing. The
quarries at the north end of Hidden Island were busier now than ever in
Flenser's time. The barges hauling stone to the mainland made a steady
traffic across the straits. Even now that the light was not dayround,
Steel's construction went on nonstop. His Incallings and lesser inspections
were harsher than Flenser's had used to be.
Lord Steel was a killer; worse, a manipulator. But since the alien
landing, Tyrathect knew that he was something else: deathly afraid. He had
good reason. And even though the folk he feared might ultimately kill them
all, in her secret soul she wished them well. Steel and his Flenserists had
attacked the star people without warning, more out of greed than fear. They
had killed dozens of beings. In a way the murders were worse than what the
Movement had done to her. Tyrathect had followed the Flenser of her own free
will. She had had friends who warned her about the Movement. There had been
dark stories about the Flenser, and not all had been government propaganda.
But she had so wanted to follow, to give herself to Something Greater....
They had used her, literally as their tool. Yet she could have avoided it.
The star people had had no such option; Steel simply butchered them.
So now Steel labored out of fear. In the first three days he had
covered the flying ship with a roof: a sudden, silly farmhouse had appeared
on the hilltop. Before long the alien craft would be hidden behind stone
walls. Ultimately, the new fortress might be bigger than the one on Hidden
Island. Steel knew that if his villainy did not destroy him, it would make
him the most powerful pack in the world.
And that was Tyrathect's reason for staying, for continuing her
masquerade. She couldn't go on forever. Sooner or later the other fragments
would reach Hidden Island; Tyrathect would be destroyed and all of Flenser
would live again. Perhaps she wouldn't survive even that long. Two of
Tyrathect were of Flenser. The Master had miscalculated in thinking they
could dominate the other three. Instead the conscience of the three had come
to own the brilliance of the two. She remembered almost everything the great
Flenser had known, all the tricks and all the betrayals. The two had given
her an intensity she had never had before. Tyrathect laughed to herself. In
a sense, she had gained what she had been so naively seeking in the
Movement; and the great Flenser had made exactly the mistake that in his
arrogance he thought impossible. As long as she could keep the two under
control, she had a chance. When she was all awake, there wasn't much
problem; she still felt herself a "she", still remembered her life in the
Republic more clearly than the Flenser memories. It was different when she
slept. There were nightmares. The memories of torment inflicted suddenly
seemed sweet. Sleep-time sex should soothe; with her it was a battle. She
awoke sore and cut, as if she had been fighting a rapist. If the two ever
broke free, if she ever awoke a "he".... It would take only a few seconds
for the two to denounce the masquerade, only a little longer to kill the
three and put the Flenser members aboard a more manageable pack.
Yet she stayed. Steel meant to use the aliens and their ship to spread
Flenser's nightmare worldwide. But his plan was fragile, with risks on every
side. If there was anything she could do to destroy it and the Flenser
Movement, she would.
Across the castle, only the western tower still hung in sunlight. No
faces showed at the window slits, but eyes looked out: Steel watched the
Flenser Fragment -- the Flenser-in-Waiting as it styled itself -- on the
ramparts below. The fragment was accepted by all the commanders. In fact,
they accorded it almost the awe they had given to the full Flenser. In a
sense, Flenser had made them all, so it wasn't surprising they felt a chill
in the Master's presence. Even Steel felt it. In his shaping, Flenser had
forced the aborning Steel to try to kill him; each time Steel had been
caught and his weakest members tortured. Steel knew the conditioning that
was there, and that helped him fight it. If anything, he told himself, the
Flenser Frag was in greater danger because of it: in trying to counter the
fear, Steel might just miscalculate, and act more violently than was
appropriate.
Sooner or later Steel had to decide. If he didn't kill it before the
other fragments reached Hidden Island, then all of Flenser would be here
again. If two members could dominate Steel's regime, then six would totally
erase it. Did he want the Master dead? And if he did, was there any surely
safe way...? Steel's mind flickered lightly all around the issue as he
watched the black-frocked pack.
Steel was used to playing for high stakes. He had been born playing for
them. Fear and death and winning were his whole life. But never had the
stakes been as high as now. Flenser had come close to subverting the largest
nation on the continent, and had had dreams of ruling the world.... Lord
Steel looked to the hillside across the straits, at the new castle he was
building. In his present game, world conquest would follow easily on
victory, and the destruction of the world was a conceivable consequence of
failure.
Steel had visited the flying ship shortly after the ambush. The ground
was still steaming. Every hour it seemed to grow hotter. The mainland
peasants talked of demons wakened in the earth; Steel's advisors could not
do much better. The whitejackets needed padded boots to get close. Steel had
ignored the steam, donned the boots, and walked beneath the curving hull.
The bottom was vaguely like a boat's hull, if you ignored the stilts. Near
the center was a teat-like projection; the ground directly underneath
burbled with molten rock. The burned-out coffins were on the uphill side of
the ship. Several of the corpses had been removed for dissection. In the
first hours his advisors had been full of fanciful theories: the mantis folk
were warriors fleeing a battle, come to bury their dead....
So far no one had been able to take a careful look inside the craft.
The gray stairs were made of something as strong as steel yet feather
light. But they were recognizably stairs, even if the risers were high for
the average member. Steel scrambled up the steps, leaving Shreck and his
other advisors outside.
He stuck a head through the hatch -- and winced back abruptly. The
acoustics were deadly. He understood what the whitejackets were complaining
about. How could the aliens bear it? One by one he forced himself through
the opening.
Echoes screamed at him -- worse than from unpadded quartz. He quieted
himself, as he had so often done in the Master's presence. The echoes
diminished, but they were still a horde raging in the walls all around. Not
even his best whitejackets could tolerate more than five minutes here. The
thought made Steel stand straighter. Discipline. Quiet does not always mean
submission; it can mean hunting. He looked around, ignoring the howling
murmurs.
Light came from bluish strips in the ceiling. As his eyes adjusted, he
could see what his people had described to him: the interior was just two
rooms. He was standing in the larger one -- a cargo hold? There was a hatch
in the far wall and then the second room. The walls were seamless. They met
in angles that did not match the outer hull; there would be dead spaces. A
breeze moved fitfully about the room, but the air was much warmer than
outside. He had never been in a place that felt more of power and evil.
Surely it was only a trick of acoustics. They would bring in some absorbent
quilts, some side reflectors, and the feeling would go away. Still....
The room was filled with coffins, these unburned. The place stank with
the aliens' body odor. Mold grew in the darker corners. In a way that was
comforting: the aliens breathed and sweated as other living things, and for
all their marvelous invention, they could not keep their own den clean.
Steel wandered among the coffins. The boxes were mounted on railed racks.
When the ones outside had been here, the room must have been crammed full.
Undamaged, the coffins were marvels of fine workmanship. Warm air exited
slots along the sides. He sniffed at it: complex, faintly nauseating, but
not the smell of death. And not the source of the overpowering stench of
mantis sweat that hung everywhere.
Each coffin had a window mounted on its top side. What effort to honor
the remains of single members! Steel hopped onto one and looked down. The
corpse was perfectly preserved; in fact, the blue light made everything look
frozen. He cocked a second head over the edge of the box, got a double view
on the creature within. It was far smaller than the two they had killed
under the ship. It was even smaller than the one they had captured. Some of
Steel's advisors thought the small ones were pups, perhaps unweaned. It made
sense; their prisoner never made thought sounds.
Partly as an act of discipline, he stared for a long while at the
alien's queer, flat face. The echo of his mind was a continuing pain, eating
at his attention, demanding that he leave. Let the pain continue. He had
withstood worse before, and the packs outside must know that Steel was
stronger than any of them. He could master the pain and have the greater
insight.... And then he would work their butts off, quilting these rooms and
studying the contents.
So Steel stared, almost thoughtless, into the face. The screaming in
the walls seemed to fade a little. The face was so ugly. How could the
creature eat? He had looked at the charred corpses outside, noticed their
small jaws and randomly misshapen teeth.
A few minutes passed; the noise and ugliness mixed together,
dream-like.... And out of his trance, Steel new a nightmare horror: The face
moved. The change was small, and it happened very, very slowly. But over a
period of minutes, the face had changed.
Steel's fell from the coffin; the walls screamed back terror. For a few
seconds, he thought the noise would kill him. Then he regained himself with
quiet thought. He crawled back onto the box. All his eyes stared through the
crystal, waiting like a pack on hunt.... The change was regular. The alien
in the box was breathing, but fifty times more slowly than any normal
member. He moved to another box, watched the creature in it. Somehow, they
were all alive. Inside those boxes, their lives were simply slowed.
He looked up from the boxes, almost in a daze. That the room reeked of
evil was an illusion of sound ... and also the absolute truth.
The mantis alien had landed far from the tropics, away from the
collectives; perhaps it thought the Arctic Northwest a backward wilderness.
It had come in a ship jammed with hundreds of mantis pups. These boxes were
like larval casings: the pack would land, raise the small ones to adulthood
-- out of sight of civilization. Steel felt his pelts puff up as he thought