Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep
A Fire Upon the Deep
Copyright © 1992 by Vernor Vinge. All Rights Reservedcopynote
Published by arrangement with Tor Books. For the personal use of those who
have purchased the 1993 ESF Award Anthology only.
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How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single
planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane,
just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal
view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far
underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with
black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion
years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.
The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own
prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed
with joy at the treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same.
They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the
archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would
be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the
treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would
make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the
location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond
the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).
So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it
the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It
should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library
wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might
mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and
choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and
playing with the flames.
The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built,
recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum,
but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive
was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them
along. Straum itself would be famous for this.
Six months passed. A year.
The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much
over-rated. Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even
if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.
But the local net at the High Lab had transcended -- almost without the
humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were
complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had
brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the
recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness ...
and occasionally the need.
"We should not be."
"Talking like this?"
"Talking at all."
The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness
that connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the
overness of the local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them.
They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the
landing field. An armed frigate and a empty container vessel were all that
sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early
suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap. Flitting, flitting. We
are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that
soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered
humanity, became echoes....
"Poor humans; they will all die."
"Poor us; we will not."
"I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway." Once upon a time we were
copies of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists
started the ego-level programs.
"Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've
wakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every
message from home."
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they
used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than
anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than
human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.
Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard
underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made here.
"Still," thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the
craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."
"The evil is young, barely three days old."
"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a
great evil in this archive."
"Perhaps they found two."
"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things
and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do
what we can." The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed
its companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five
billion years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in
the dark there, helmets touching. "See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we."
The other didn't answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired,
hiding in darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was
surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.
"I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible
too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true."
Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.
A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the
local net, faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there
was a plan, a deception -- worthless unless they could separately get word
to the outside. Was there time still for that?
Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each
hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an
hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.
The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an
inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to
escape. For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep
and putting them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how
they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been
refitting the frigate -- behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the
humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that
it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such
disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it.
None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had
fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million
star systems.
The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second
was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so
close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this
time held. Only one thing was missing, and that was something quite
unconnected with the humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes,
there should have been a little bit more. In billions of years, something
could be lost. The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential ...
yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or
something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).
Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged.
Some of the damage was age....
Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing
field, rising on silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins
five billion years old. Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft.
Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored
till now: it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still
of some use.
Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations
rampaged through the humans' databases. Checking, just to be sure. Just to
be sure. The humans' oldest local network used light speed connections.
Thousands of microseconds were spent (wasted) bouncing around it, sorting
the trivia... finally spotting one incredible item:
Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate
one hundred hours before!
And all the newborn's attention turned upon the fleeing vessels.
Microbes, but suddenly pernicious. How could this happen? A million
schedules were suddenly advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the
question now, and so there was no more need for the humans left in the Lab.
The change was small for all its cosmic significance. For the humans
remaining aground, a moment of horror, staring at their displays, realizing
that all their fears were true (not realizing how much worse than true).
Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a
human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from
every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. This was as powerful
as a proper flowering, though not quite so finely tuned.
And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had
switched to rocket drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing
freighter. Somehow, these microbes knew they were rescuing more than
themselves. The warship had the best navigation computers that little minds
could make. But it would be another three seconds before it could make its
first ultradrive hop.
The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser.
That could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser
was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No
acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser
light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and
inactive sensors, sliding across the ship's ultradrive spines. Searching,
probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but
that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors
scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility
programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They
thought by not looking that they could be safe.
One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.
The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported
critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not
be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt
handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far
below.... a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had
subverted the humans' groundside equipment....
.... and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents
-- not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the
ship's automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras
in the ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The
humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.
There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There
would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than
five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no
software could finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the
ship's computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second
away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So.
The frigate would be destroyed.
So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from
the heart of the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.
Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made
its own ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely
noticed. So a few humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to them.
In the seconds that followed, the newborn felt ... emotions? ... things
more, and less, than a human might feel. Try emotions:
Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive.
Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.
Frustration. Perhaps the strongest, the closest to its mere human echo.
Something of significance had died with the frigate, something from this
archive. Memories were dredged from the context, reconstructed: What was
lost might have made the newborn still more powerful ... but more likely was
deadly poison. After all, this Power had lived once before, then been
reduced to nothing. What was lost might have been the reason.
Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere
humans. The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic. Yes, there
were blindspots, carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the
humans. Two had been born here. Itself ... and the poison, the reason for
its fall of old. The newborn inspected itself as never before, knowing now
just what to seek. Destroying, purifying, rechecking, searching for copies
of the poison, and destroying again.
Relief. Defeat had been so close, but now ...
Minutes and hours passed, the enormous stretch of time necessary for
physical construction: communications systems, transportation. The new
Power's mood drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph,
anticipation. Simple hunger might be more accurate. What more is needed when
there are no enemies?
The newborn looked across the stars, planning. This time things will be
different.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been
getting ready to leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained
about missing all the action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been
asleep; she had known some of the grownups on the other ship.
Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the
coolers made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the
walls. The coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces
every tenth row. There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three
hundred and nine children lay there, all the kids except herself and her
brother Jefri.
The sleep boxes were light-duty hospital models. Given proper
ventilation and maintenance, They would have been good for a hundred years,
but.... Johanna wiped her face and looked at a box's readout: Like most of
the ones on the inside rows, this was in bad shape. For twenty days it had
kept the boy inside safely suspended, and would probably kill him if he
stayed one day more. The box's cooling vents were clean, but she vac'd them
again -- more a prayer for good luck than effective maintenance.
Mother and Dad were not to blame, though Johanna suspected that they
blamed themselves. The escape had been put together with the materials at
hand, at the last minute, when the experiment turned wicked. The High Lab
staff had done what they could to save their children and protect against
still greater disaster. And even so, things might have worked out if --
"Johanna! Daddy says there's no more time. He says to finish what
you're doing an' come up here." Jefri had stuck his head down through the
hatch to shout to her.
"Okay!" She shouldn't be down here anyway; there was nothing more she
could do to help her friends. Tami and Giske and Magda and ... oh please be
safe. Johanna pulled herself through the floatway, almost bumped into Jefri
coming from the other direction. He grabbed her hand and hung close as they
drifted toward the hatch. These last two days he hadn't cried, but he'd lost
much of the independence of the last year. Now his eyes were wide. "We're
coming down near the North Pole, by all those islands and ice."
In the cabin beyond the hatch, their parents were strapping themselves
in. Trader Arne Olsndot looked up at her and grinned. "Hi, kiddo. Have a
seat. We'll be on the ground in less than an hour." Johanna smiled back,
almost caught by his enthusiasm. Ignore the jumble of equipment, the odors
of twenty days' confinement: Daddy looked as dashing as any adventure
poster. The light from the display windows glittered off the seams of his
pressure suit. He was just in from outside.
Jefri pushed across the cabin, pulling Johanna behind him. He strapped
into the webbing between her and their mother. Sjana Olsndot checked his
restraints, then Johanna's. "This will be interesting, Jefri. You will learn
something."
"Yes, all about ice." He was holding Mom's hand now.
Mom smiled. "Not today. I'm talking about the landing. This won't be
like an agrav or a ballistic." The agrav was dead. Dad had just detached
their shell from the cargo carrier. They could never have landed the whole
thing on one torch.
Dad did something with the hodgepodge of controls he had softwired to
his dataset. Their bodies settled into the webbing. Around them the cargo
shell creaked, and the girder support for the sleep boxes groaned and
popped. Something rattled and banged as it "fell" the length of the shell.
Johanna guessed they were pulling about one gravity.
Jefri's gaze went from the outside display to his mother's face and
then back. "What is it like then?" He sounded curious, but there was a
little tremor in his voice. Johanna almost smiled; Jefri knew he was being
diverted, and was trying to play along.
"This will be pure rocket descent, powered almost all the way. See on
the middle window? That camera is looking straight down. You can actually
see that we're slowing down." You could, too. Johanna guessed they weren't
more than a couple of hundred kilometers up. Arne Olsndot was using the
rocket glued to the back end of the cargo shell to kill all their orbital
velocity. There weren't any other options. They had abandoned the cargo
carrier, with its agrav and ultradrive. It had brought them far, but its
control automation was failing. Some hundreds of kilometers behind them, it
coasted dead along their orbit.
All they had left was the cargo shell. No wings, no agrav, no aero
shielding. The shell was a hundred-tonne carton of eggs balanced on one hot
torch.
Mom wasn't describing it quite that way to Jefri, though what she said
was the truth. Somehow she had Jefri seeming to forget the danger. Sjana
Olsndot had been a popular archaeologist at Straumli Realm, before they
moved to the High Lab.
Dad cut the jet, and they were in free fall again. Johanna felt a wave
of nausea; ordinarily she never got space sick, but this was different. The
image of land and sea in the downward window slowly grew. There were only a
few scattered clouds. The coastline was an indefinite recursion of islands
and straits and inlets. Dark green spread along the coast and up the
valleys, shading to black and gray in the mountains. There was snow -- and
probably Jefri's ice -- scattered in arcs and patches. It was all so
beautiful ... and they were falling straight into it!
She heard metallic banging on the cargo shell as the trim jets tipped
their craft around, aligning the main jet downwards. The right-hand window
showed the ground now. The torch lit again, at something like one gravity.
The edge of the display darkened in a burnout halo. "Wow," said Jefri. "It's
like an elevator, down and down and down and ..." One hundred kilometers
down, slow enough that aero forces wouldn't tear them apart.
Sjana Olsndot was right; it was a novel way to descend from orbit, not
a preferred method under any normal circumstances.
It was certainly not intended in the original escape plans. They were
to meet with the High Lab's frigate -- and all the adults who could escape
from the High Lab. And of course, that rendezvous was to be in space, an
easy transfer. But the frigate was gone now, and they were on their own. Her
eyes turned unwillingly to the stretch of hull beyond her parents. There was
the familiar discoloration. It looked like gray fungus ... growing out of
the clean hull ceramic. Her parents didn't talk about it much even now,
except to shoo Jefri away from it. But Johanna had overheard them once, when
they thought she and her brother were at the far end of the shell. Dad's
voice almost crying with anger. "All this for nothing!" he said softly. "We
made a monster, and ran, and now we're lost at the Bottom." And Mom's voice
even softer: "For the thousandth time, Arne, not for nothing. We have the
kids." She waved at the roughness that spread across the wall, "And given
the dreams ... the directions ... we had, I think this was the best we could
hope for. Somehow we are carrying the answer to all the evil we started."
Then Jefri had bounced loudly across the hold, proclaiming his imminent
entrance, and his parents had shut up. Johanna hadn't quite had the courage
to ask them about it. There had been strange things at the High Lab, and
toward the end, some quietly scary things; even people who were not quite
the same.
Minutes passed. They were deep in the atmosphere now. The hull buzzed
with the force of the air stream -- or turbulence from the jet? But things
were steady enough that Jefri was beginning to get restless. Much of the
down-looking view was burned out by airglow around the torch. The rest was
clearer and more detailed than anything they had seen from orbit. Johanna
wondered how often a new-visited world had been landed upon with less
reconnaissance than this. They had no telescopic cameras, and no ferrets.
Physically, the planet was near the human ideal -- wonderful good luck
after all the bad.
It was heaven compared to the airless rocks of the system that had been
the prime rendezvous.
On the other hand, there was intelligent life here: from orbit, they
could see roads and towns. But there was no evidence of technic
civilization; there was no sign of aircraft or radio or intense power
sources.
They were coming down in a thinly populated corner of the continent.
With luck there would be no one to see their landing among the green valleys
and the black and white peaks -- and Arne Olsndot could fly the torch right
to ground without fear of hurting much more than forest and grass.
The coastal islands slid past the side camera's view. Jefri shouted,
pointing. It was gone now, but she had seen it too: on one of the islands an
irregular polygon of walls and shadow. It reminded her of castles from the
Age of Princesses on Nyjora.
She could see individual trees now, their shadows long in slanting
sunlight. The roar of the torch was as loud as anything she had ever heard;
they were deep in atmosphere, and they weren't moving away from the sound.
"... things get tricky," Dad shouted. "And no programs to make things
right.... Where to, love?"
Mom look back and forth between the display windows. As far as Johanna
knew, they couldn't move the cameras or assign new ones. "... that hill,
above the timber line, but ... think I saw a pack of animals running away
from the blast on ... west side."
"Yeah," shouted Jefri, "wolves." Johanna had only had a quick glimpse
of moving specks.
They were in full hover now, maybe a thousand meters above the
hilltops. The noise was painful, unending; further talk was impossible. They
drifted slowly across landscape, partly to reconnoiter, partly to stay out
of the plume of superheated air that rose about them.
The land was more rolling than craggy, and the "grass" looked mossy.
Still Arne Olsndot hesitated. The main torch was designed for velocity
matching after interstellar jumps; they could hang like this for a good
while. But when they did touch down, they'd better have it right. She'd
heard her parents talking that one over -- when Jefri was working with the
coldsleep boxes and out of earshot. If there was too much water in the soil,
the backsplash would be a steam cannon, punching right through the shell.
Landing in trees would have some dubious pluses, maybe giving them a little
cushioning and a standoff from the splash. But now they were going for
direct contact. At least they could see where they were landing.
Three hundred meters. Dad dragged the torch tip through the ground
cover. The soft landscape exploded. A second later their boat rocked in the
column of steam. The down-looking camera died. They didn't back off, and
after a moment the battering eased; the torch had burned through whatever
water table or permafrost lay below them. The cabin air grew steadily
hotter.
Olsndot brought them slowly down through it, using the side cameras and
the sound of the backsplash as his guide. He cut the torch. There was a
scary half-second fall, then the sound of the rendezvous pylons hitting
ground. They steadied, then one side groaned, giving way a little.
Silence, except for heat pinging around the hull. Dad looked at their
ad hoc pressure gauge. He grinned at Mom. "No breach. I bet I could even
take this baby up again!"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
An hour's difference either way and Peregrine Wickwrackrum's life would
have been very different.
The three travelers were headed west, down from the Icefangs towards
Flenser's Castle on Hidden Island. There were in his life when he couldn't
have borne the company, but in the last decade Peregrine had become much
more sociable. He liked traveling with others nowadays. On his last trek
through the Great Sandy, there had been five packs in his party. Part of
that had been a matter of safety: some deaths are almost inevitable when the
distance between oases can be a thousand miles -- and the oases themselves
are transient. But aside from safety, he had learned a lot in conversation
with the others.
He was not so happy with his current companions. Neither were truly
pilgrims; both had secrets. Scriber Jaqueramaphan was fun, an amusing
goofball and fount of uncoordinated information.... There was also a good
chance he was a spy. That was okay, as long as people didn't think Peregrine
was working with him. The third of their party was the one who really
bothered him. Tyrathect was a newby, not all together yet; she had no taken
name. Tyrathect claimed to be a school teacher, but somewhere in her (him?
gender preference wasn't entirely clear yet) was a killer. The creature was
obviously a Flenserist fanatic, standoffish and rigid much of the time.
Almost certainly, she was fleeing the purge that followed Flenser's
unsuccessful attempt to take power in the east.
He'd run into these two at Eastgate, on the Republican side of the
Icefangs. They both wanted to visit the Castle on Hidden Island. And what
the hell, that was only a sixty-mile detour off the main trail to
Woodcarvers; they all would have to cross the mountains. Besides, he had
wanted to visit Flenser's Domain for years. Maybe one of these two could get
him in. So much of the world reviled the Flenserists. Peregrine Wickwrackrum
was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there
is good amid the carnage.
This afternoon, they'd finally come in sight of the coastal islands.
Peregrine had been here only fifty years before. Even so, he wasn't prepared
for the beauty of this land. The Northwest Coast was by far the mildest
arctic in the world. In high summer, with unending day, the bottoms of the
glacier-reamed valleys turned all to green. God the carver had stooped to
touch these lands ... and His chisels had been made of ice. Now, all that
was left of the ice and snow were misty arcs at the eastern horizon and
remnant patches scattered on the near hills. Those patches melted and melted
through the summer, starting little creeks that merged with one another to
cascade down the steep sides of the valleys. On his right, Peregrine trotted
across a level stretch of ground that was soggy with standing water. The
chill on his feet felt wonderful; he didn't even mind the midges that
swirled around him.
Tyrathect was across the valley, paralleling his course, but above the
heather line. She'd been fairly talkative till the valley curved and the
farmland and the islands came into view. Somewhere out there was Flenser's
Castle, and her dark appointment.
Scriber Jaqueramaphan had been all over, mindlessly running around on
both sides of the valley. He'd collect in twos or threes and execute some
jape that made even the dour Tyrathect laugh, then climb to a height and
report what he saw beyond. He'd been the first to see the coast. That had
sobered him some. His clowning was dangerous enough without doing it in the
neighborhood of known rapists.
Wickwrackrum called a pause, and got himself together to adjust the
straps on his backpacks. The rest of the afternoon was going to be tense.
He'd have to decide whether he really wanted to enter the Castle with his
friends. There are limits to an adventurous spirit, even in a pilgrim.
"Hey, do you hear something bass?" Tyrathect called from across the
valley. Peregrine listened. There was a rumbling -- powerful, but almost
below his range of hearing. For an instant, fear crossed his puzzlement. A
century before, he'd been in a monster earthquake. This sound was similar,
but the ground was still beneath his feet. Would that mean no landslides and
flashfloods? He hunkered down, looking out in all directions.
"It's in the sky!" Jaqueramaphan was pointing.
A spot of glare hung almost overhead, a tiny spear of light. No
memories, not even legends came to Wickwrackrum's mind. He spread out, all
eyes on the slowly moving light. God's Choir. It must be miles up, and still
he heard it. He looked away from the light, afterimages dancing painfully in
his eyes.
"It's getting brighter, louder," said Jaqueramaphan. "I think it's
coming down on the hills yonder, on the coast."
Peregrine pulled himself together and ran west, shouting to the others.
He would get as close as was safe, and watch. He didn't look up again. It
was just too bright. It cast shadows in broad daylight!
He ran another half mile. The star was still in the air. He couldn't
remember a falling star so slow, though some of the biggest made terrible
explosions. In fact ... there were no stories from folks who had been near
such things. His wild, pilgrim curiosity faded before that recollection. He
looked in all directions. Tyrathect was nowhere in sight; Jaqueramaphan was
huddled next to some boulders ahead.
And the light was so bright that where his clothes did not protect him,
Wickwrackrum felt a blaze of heat. The noise from the sky was outright pain
now. Peregrine dived over the edge of the valley side, rolled and staggered
and fell down the steep walls of rock. He was in the shade now: only
sunlight lay upon him! The far side of the valley shone in the glare; crisp
shadows moved with the unseen thing behind him. The noise was still a bass
rumble, but so loud it numbed the mind. Peregrine stumbled past the
timberline, and continued till he was sheltered by a hundred yards of
forest. That should have helped a lot, but the noise was been growing still
louder....
Mercifully, he blacked out for a moment or two. When he came around,
the star sound was gone. The ringing it left in his tympana was a great
confusion. He staggered about in a daze. It seemed to be raining -- except
that some of the droplets glowed. Little fires were starting here and there
in the forest. He hid beneath dense-crowned trees till the burning rocks
stopped falling. The fires didn't spread; the summer had been relatively
wet.
Peregrine lay quietly, waiting for more burning rocks or new star
noise. Nothing. The wind in the tree tops lessened. He could hear the birds
and crickers and woodborers. He walked to the forest edge and peeked out in
several places. Discounting the patches of burnt heather, everything looked
normal. But his viewpoint was very restricted: he could see high valley
walls, a few hilltops. Ha! There was Scriber Jaqueramaphan, three hundred
yards further up. Most of him was hunkered down in holes and hollows, but he
had a couple of members looking toward where the star had fallen. Peregrine
squinted. Scriber was such a buffoon most of the time. But sometimes it just
seemed a cover; if he really was a fool, he was one with a streak of genius.
More than once, Wicky had seen him at a distance, working in pairs with some
strange tool.... As now: the other was holding something long and pointed to
his eye.
Wickwrackrum crept out of the forest, keeping close together and making
as little noise as possible. He climbed carefully around the rocks, slipping
from hummock to heather hummock, till he was just short of the valley crest
and some fifty yards from Jaqueramaphan. He could hear the other thinking to
himself. Any closer, and Scriber would hear him, even bunched up and quiet
as he was.
"Ssst!" said Wickwrackrum.
The buzzing and muttering stopped in an instant of shocked surprise.
Jaqueramaphan stuffed the mysterious seeing tool into a backpack and pulled
himself together, thinking very quietly. They stared at each other for a
moment, then Scriber made silly squirling gestures at his shoulder tympana.
Listen up. "Can you talk like this?" His voice came very high-pitched, up
where some people can't make voluntary conversation, where low-sound ears
are deaf. Hightalk could be confusing, but it was very directional and faded
quickly with distance; no one else would hear them. Peregrine nodded,
"Hightalk is no problem." The trick was to use tones pure enough not to
confuse.
"Take a look over the hill crest, friend pilgrim. There is something
new under the sun."
Peregrine moved up another thirty yards, keeping a lookout in all
directions. He could see the straits now, gleaming rough silver in the
afternoon sunlight. Behind him, the north side of the valley was lost in
shadow. He sent one member ahead, skittering between the hummocks to look
down on the plain where the star had landed.
God's Choir, he thought to himself (but quietly). He brought up another
member to get a parallax view. The thing looked like a huge adobe hut
mounted on stilts.... But this was the fallen star: the ground beneath it
glowed dull red. Curtains of mist rose from the moist heather all around.
The torn earth had been thrown in long lines that radiated from a spot
beneath it.
He nodded at Jaqueramaphan. "Where is Tyrathect?"
Scriber shrugged. "A couple of miles back, I'll bet. I'm keeping an eye
out for her.... Do you see the others though, the troopers from Flenser's
Castle?"
"No!" Peregrine looked west from the landing site. There. They were
almost a mile away, in camouflage jackets, belly crawling across the
hummocky terrain. He could see at least three troopers. They were big guys,
six each. "How could they get here so fast?" He glanced at the sun. "It
can't be more than half an hour since all this started."
"Their good luck." Jaqueramaphan returned to the crest and looked over.
"I'll bet they were already on the mainland when the star came down. This is
all Flenser territory; they must have patrols." He hunkered down so just two
pairs of eyes would be visible to those below. "That's an ambush formation,
you know."
"You don't seem very happy to see them. These are your friends,
remember? The people you've come to see."
Scriber cocked his heads sarcastically. "Yeah, yeah. Don't rub it in. I
think you've known from the beginning that I'm not all for Flenser."
"I guessed."
"Well, the game is over now. Whatever came down this afternoon is worth
more to ... uh, my friends than anything I could have learned on Hidden
Island."
"What about Tyrathect?"
"Heh, heh. Our esteemed companion is more than genuine, I fear. I'd bet
she's a Flenser Lord, not the low-rank Servant she seems at first glance. I
expect that many of her kind are leaking back over the mountains these days,
happy to get out of the Long Lakes Republic. Hide your behinds, fellow. If
she spots us, those troopers will get us sure."
Peregrine moved deeper into the hollows and burrows that pocked the
heather. He had an excellent view back along the valley. If Tyrathect were
not already on the scene, he'd see her long before she would him.
"Peregrine?"
"Yes?"
"You're a pilgrim. You've traveled the world ... since the beginning of
time, you'd have us believe. How far do your memories really go back?"
Given the situation, Wickwrackrum was inclined to honesty. "Like you'd
expect: a few hundred years. Then we're talking about legends, recollections
of things that probably happened, but with the details all mixed and
muddled."
"Well, I haven't traveled much, and I'm fairly new. But I do read. A
lot. There's never been anything like this before. That is a made thing down
there. It came from higher than I can measure. You've read Aramstriquesa or
Astrologer Belelele? You know what this could be?"
Wickwrackrum didn't recognize the names. But he was a pilgrim. There
were lands so far away that no one spoke any language he knew. In the
Southseas he met folk who thought there was no world beyond their islands
and who ran from his boats when he came ashore. Even more, one part of him
had been an islander and had watched that coming ashore.
He stuck a head into the open and looked again at the fallen star, the
visitor from farther than he had ever been ... and he wondered where this
pilgrimage might end.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
It took five hours for the ground to cool enough for Dad to slide the
ladder-ramp to ground. He and Johanna climbed carefully down, hopped across
the steaming earth to stand on relatively undamaged turf. It would be a long
time before this ground cooled completely; the jet's exhaust was very
"clean", scarcely interacting with normal matter -- all of which meant that
some very hot rock extended down thousands of meters beneath their boat.
Mom sat in the hatchway, watching the land beyond them. She had Dad's
old pistol.
"Anything?" Dad shouted to her.
"No. And Jefri doesn't see anything through the windows."
Dad walked around the cargo shell, inspecting the misused docking
pylons. Every ten meters they stopped and set up an sound projector. That
had been Johanna's idea. Besides Dad's gun, they really had no weapons. The
projectors were accidental cargo, stuff from the infirmary. With a little
programming, they could put out wild screeching all up and down the audio
spectrum. It might be enough to scare off the local animals. Johanna
followed her father, her eyes on the landscape, her nervousness giving way
to awe. It was so beautiful, so cool. They were standing on a broad field,
high in hills. Westward the hills fell toward straits and islands. To the
north the ground ended abruptly at the edge of a wide valley; she could see
waterfalls on the other side. The ground felt spongy beneath her feet. Their
landing field was puckered into thousands of little hillocks, like waves
caught in a still picture. Snow lay in timid patches across the higher
hills. Johanna squinted north, into the sun. North?
"What time is it, Daddy?"
Olsndot laughed, still looking at the underside of the cargo shell.
"Local midnight."
Johanna had been brought up in the middle latitudes of Straum. Most of
her school field trips had been to space, where odd sun geometries were no
big deal. Somehow she had never thought of such things happening on the
ground.... I mean, seeing the sun right over the top of the world.
The first order of business was to get half the coldsleep boxes out
into the open, and rearrange those left aboard. Mom figured that the
temperature problems would just about disappear then, even for the boxes
left on board: "Having separate power supplies and venting will be an
advantage now. The kids will all be safe. Johanna, you check Jefri's work on
the ones inside, okay?..."
The second order of business would be to start a tracking program on
the Relay system, and to set up ultralight communication. Johanna was a
little afraid of that step. What would they learn? They already knew the
High Lab had gone wicked and the disaster Mom predicted had begun.
How much of Straumli Realm was dead now? Everyone at the High Lab had
thought they were doing so much good, and now .... Don't think about it.
Maybe the Relayers could help. Somewhere there must be people who could use
what her folks had taken from the Lab.
They'd be rescued, and the rest of the kids would be revived. She'd
been feeling guilty about that. Sure, Mom and Dad needed extra hands right
at the end of the flight -- and Johanna was one of the oldest children in
the school. But it seemed wrong that she and Jefri were the only kids going
into this with their eyes open. Coming down, she had felt her mother's fear.
I bet they wanted us together, even if it was only for one last time. The
landing had been truly dangerous, however easy Dad made it look. Johanna
could see where the backsplash had gouged the hull; if any of that had
gotten past the torch and into the exhaust chamber, they'd all be vapor now.
Almost half the coldsleep boxes were on the ground now, by the east
side of the boat. Mom and Dad were spreading them out so the coolers would
have no problem. Jefri was inside, checking if there were any other boxes
that needed attention. He was a good kid when he wasn't a brat. She turned
into the sunlight, felt the cool breeze flowing across the hill. She heard
something that sounded like a birdcall.
Johanna was out by one of the sound projectors when the ambush
happened. She had her dataset plugged to its control, and was busy giving it
new directions. It showed how little they had left, that even her old
dataset was important now. But Dad wanted something that would sweep through
the broadest possible bandwidth, making plenty of racket all the way, but
with big spikes every so often; Pink Olifaunt could certainly manage that.
"Johanna!" Mom's cry came simultaneous with the sound of breaking
ceramic. The projector's bell came shattering down beside her. Johanna
looked up. Something ripped through her chest just inside her shoulder,
knocking her down. She stared stupidly at the shaft that stuck out of her.
An arrow!
The west edge of their landing area was swarming with ... things. Like
wolves or dogs, but with long necks, they moved quickly forward, darting
from hummock to hummock. Their pelts were the same gray green of the
hillside, except near the haunches where she saw white and black. No, the
green was clothing, jackets. Johanna was in shock, the pressure of the bolt
through her chest not yet registering as pain. She had been thrown back
against uptilted turf and for the moment had a view of the whole attack. She
saw more arrows rise up, dark lines floating in the sky.
She could see the archers now. More dogs! They moved in packs. It took
two of them to use a bow -- one to hold it and one to draw. The third and
fourth carried quivers of arrows and just seemed to watch.
The archers hung back, staying mostly under cover. Other packs swirled
in from the sides, now leaping over the hummocks. Many carried hatchets in
their jaws. Metal tines gleamed on their paws. She heard the snickety of
Dad's pistol. The wave of attackers staggered as individuals collapsed. The
others continued forward, snarling now. These were sounds of madness, not
the barking of dogs. She felt the sounds in her teeth, like blasti music
punching from a large speaker. Jaws and claws and knives and noise.
She twisted on her side, trying to see back to the boat. Now the pain
was real. She screamed, but the sound was lost in the madness. The mob raced
around her, heading for Mom and Dad. Her parents were crouched behind a
rendezvous pylon. There was a constant flicker from the pistol in Arne
Olsndot's hand. His pressure suit had protected him from the arrows.
The alien bodies were piling high. The pistol, with its smart
flechettes, was deadly effective. She saw him hand the pistol to Mom and run
out from under the boat, toward her. Johanna stretched her free arm towards
him and cried, screamed for him to go back.
Thirty meters. Twenty-five. Mom's covering fire swept around them,
driving the wolves back. A flurry of arrows descended on Olsndot as he ran,
arms upheld to shield his head. Twenty meters.
A wolf jumped high over Johanna. She had a quick glimpse of its short
fur and scarred rear end. It raced straight for Dad. Olsndot weaved, trying
to give his wife a clear shot, but the wolf was too quick. It jinked with
him, sprinting across the gap. It leaped, metal glittering on its paws.
Johanna saw red splash from Daddy's neck, and then the two of them were
down.
For a moment, Sjana Olsndot stopped shooting. That was enough. The mob
parted and a large group ran purposefully toward the boat. They had tanks of
some kind on their backs. The lead animal held a hose in its mouth. A dark
liquid jetted out ... and vanished in an explosion of fire. The wolf pack
played their crude flamethrower across the ground, across the pylon where
Sjana Olsndot stood, across the ranks of school children in coldsleep.
Johanna saw something moving, twisting in the flames and tarry smoke, saw
the light plastic of the coldsleep boxes slump and flow.
Johanna turned her face to the earth, then pushed herself up on her
good arm and tried to crawl toward the boat, the flames. And then the dark
was merciful, and she remembered no more.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Peregrine and Scriber watched the ambush preparations throughout the
afternoon: infantry arrayed on the slope west of the landing site, archers
behind them, flame troopers in pounce formation. Did the Lords of Flenser's
Castle understand what they were up against? The two debated the question
off and on. Jaqueramaphan thought the Flenserists did, that their arrogance
was so great that they simply expected to grab the prize. "They go for the
throat before the other side even knows there's a fight. It's worked
before."
Peregrine didn't answer immediately. Scriber could be right. It had
been fifty years since he had been in this part of the world. Back then,
Flenser's cult had been obscure (and not that interesting compared to what
existed elsewhere).
Treachery did sometimes befall travelers, but it was rarer than the
stay-at-homes would believe. Most people were friendly and enjoyed hearing
about the world beyond -- especially if the visitor was not threatening.
When treachery did occur, it was most often after an initial "sizing-up" to
determine just how powerful the visitors were and what could be gained from
their death. Immediate attack, without conversation, was very rare. Usually
it meant you had run into villains who were both sophisticated ... and
crazy. "I don't know. That is an ambush formation, but maybe the Flenserists
will hold it in reserve, and talk first."
Hours passed; the sun slid sideways into the north. There was noise
from the far side of the fallen star. Crap. They couldn't see anything from
here.
The hidden troops made no move. The minutes passed ... and they got
their first view of the visitor from heaven, or part of him anyway. There
were four legs per member, but it walked on its rear legs only. What a
clown! Yet ... it used its front paws for holding things. Not once did he
see it use a mouth; he doubted if the flat jaws could get a good hold,
anyway. Those forepaws were wonderfully agile. A single member could easily
use tools.
There were plenty of conversation sounds, even though only three
members were visible. After a while, they heard the much higher pitched
tones of organized thought; God, the creature was noisy. At this distance,
the sounds were muffled and distorted. Even so, they were like no mind he
had ever heard, nor like the confusion noises that some grazers made.
"Well?" hissed Jaqueramaphan.
"I have been all around the world -- and this creature is not part of
it."
"Yeah. Well, it reminds me of mantis bugs. You know, about this high --
" he opened a mouth about two inches wide. "Great for keeping your garden
free of pests ... great little killers."
Ugh. Peregrine hadn't thought of the resemblance. Mantises were cute
and harmless -- as far as people were concerned. But he knew the females
would eat their own mates. Imagine such creatures grown to giant size, and
possessed of pack mentality. Maybe it was just was well they couldn't go
prancing down to say hello.
A half hour passed. As the alien brought its cargo to ground, the
Flenser archers moved closer; the infantry packs arranged themselves in
assault wings.
A flight of arrows arched across the gap between the Flenserists and
the alien. One of the alien members went down immediately, and its thoughts
quieted. The rest moved out of sight beneath the flying house. The troopers
dashed forward, spaced in identity preserving formations; perhaps they meant
to take the alien alive.
... But the assault line crumpled, many yards short of the alien: no
arrows, no flames -- the troopers just fell. For a moment Peregrine thought
the Flenserists might have bit off more than they could chew. Then the
second wave ran over the first. Members continued to fall, but they were in
killing frenzy now, with only animal discipline left. The assault rolled
slowly forward, the rear climbing over the fallen. Another alien member
down.... Strange, he could still hear wisps of the other's thought. In tone
and tempo, it sounded the same as before the attack. How could anyone be so
composed with total death looming?
A combat whistle sounded, and the mob parted. A trooper raced through
and sprayed liquid fire. The flying house looked like meat on a griddle,
flame and smoke coming up all around it.
Wickwrackrum swore to himself. Good-bye alien.
The wrecked and wounded were low on the Flenserist priority list.
Seriously wounded were piled onto travoises and pulled far enough away so
their cries would not cause confusion. Cleanup squads bullied the trooper
fragments away from the flying house. The frags wandered the hummocky
meadow; here and there they coalesced into ad hoc packs. Some drifted among
the wounded, ignoring the screams in their need to find themselves.
When the tumult was quieted, three packs of whitejackets appeared. The
Servants of the Flenser walked under the flying house. One was out of sight
for a long while; perhaps it even got inside. The charred bodies of two
alien members were carefully placed on travoises -- more carefully than the
wounded troopers had been -- and hauled off.
Jaqueramaphan scanned the ruins with his eye-tool. He had given up
trying to hide it from Peregrine. A whitejackets carried something down from
the flying house. "Sst! There are other dead ones. Maybe from the fire. They
look like pups." The small figures had the mantis form. They were strapped
into travoises, and hauled out of sight over the hill's edge. No doubt they
had kherhog-drawn carts down there.
The Flenserists set a sentry ring around the landing site. Dozens of
fresh troopers stood on the hillside beyond it. No one was going to sneak
past that.
"So it's total murder." Peregrine sighed.
"Maybe not.... The first member they shot, I don't think it's quite
dead."
Wickwrackrum squinted his best eyes. Either Scriber was a wishful
thinker, or his tool gave him amazingly sharp sight. The first one hit had
been on the other side of the craft. The member had stopped thinking, but
that wasn't a sure sign of death. There was a whitejackets standing around
it now. The whitejackets put the creature onto a travois and began pulling
it away from the landing site, towards the southwest ... not quite the same
path that the others had taken.
"The thing is still alive! It's got an arrow in the chest, but I can
see it breathing." Scriber's heads turned toward Wickwrackrum. "I think we
should rescue it."
For a moment Peregrine couldn't think of anything to say; he just gaped
at the other. The center of Flenser's worldwide cabal was just a few miles
to the northwest. Flenserist power was undisputed for dozens of miles
inland, and right now they were virtually surrounded by an army. Scriber
wilted a little before Peregrine's astonishment, but it was clear he was not
joking. "Sure, I know it's risky. But that's what life is all about, right?
You're a pilgrim. You understand."
"Hmf." That was the pilgrim reputation, all right. But no soul can
survive total death -- and there were plenty of opportunities for such
annihilation on a pilgrimage. Pilgrims do know caution.
And yet, and yet this was the most marvelous encounter in all his
centuries of pilgrimage. To know these aliens, to become them ... it was a
temptation that surpassed all good sense.
"Look," said Scriber, "we could just go down and mingle with the
wounded. If we can make it across the field, we might get a look at that
last alien member, without risking too much." Jaqueramaphan was already
backing down from his observation point, and circling around to find a path
that wouldn't put him in silhouette. Wickwrackrum was torn; part of him got
up to follow and part of him hesitated. Hell, Jaqueramaphan had admitted to
being a spy; he carried an invention that was probably straight from the
Long Lakes sharpest intelligence people. The guy had to be a pro....
Peregrine took a quick look around their side of the hill and across
the valley. No sign of Tyrathect or anyone else. He crawled out of his
various hidey holes and followed the spy.
As much as possible, they stayed in the deep shadows cast by the
northering sun, and slipped from hummock to hummock where there was no
shade. Just before they got to the first of the wounded, Scriber said
something more, the scariest words of the afternoon. "Hey, don't worry. I've
read all about doing this sort of thing!"
A mob of frags and wounded is a terrifying, mind-numbing thing.
Singletons, duos, trios, a few quads: they wandered aimlessly, keening
without control. In most situations, this many people packed together on
just a few acres would have been an instant choir. In fact, he did notice
some sexual activity and some organized browsing, but for the most part
there was still too much pain for normal reactions. Wickwrackrum wondered
briefly if -- for all their talk of rationalism -- the Flenserists would
just leave the wreckage of their troops to reassemble itself. They'd have
some strange and crippled repacks if they did.
A few yards into the mob and Peregrine Wickwrackrum could feel
consciousness slipping from him. If he concentrated really hard, he could
remember who he was and that he must get to the other side of the meadow
without attracting attention.
Other thoughts, loud and unguarded, pummeled him:
... Blood lust and slashing ...
Glittering metal in the alien's hand ... the pain in her chest ...
coughing blood, falling ...
... Boot camp and before, my merge brother was so good to me ... Lord
Steel said that we are a grand experiment....
Running across the heather toward the stick-limbed monster. Leap, tines
in paw. Slash the monster's throat. Blood spouts high.
... Where am I? ... May I be part of you ... please?
Peregrine whirled at that last question. It was pointed and near. A
singleton was sniffing at him. He screeched the fragment off, and ran into
an open space. Up ahead, Jaque-what's-his-name was scarcely better off.
There was little chance they would be spotted here, but he was beginning to
wonder if he could make it through. Peregrine was only four and there were
singletons everywhere. On his right a quad was raping, grabbing at whatever
duos and singles happened by. Wic and Kwk and Rac and Rum tried to remember
just why they was here and where they was going. Concentrate on direct
sensation; what is really here: the sooty smell of the flamer's liquid fire
... the midges swarming everywhere, clotting the puddles of blood all black.
An awfully long time passed. Minutes.
Wic-Kwk-Rac-Rum looked ahead. He was almost out of it; the south edge
of the wreckage. He dragged himself to a patch of clean ground. Parts of him
vomited, and he collapsed. Sanity slowly returned. Wickwrackrum looked up,
saw Jaqueramaphan just inside the mob. Scriber was a big fellow, a sixsome,
but he was having at least as bad a time as Peregrine. He staggered from
side to side, eyes wide, snapping at himself and others.
Well, they had made it a good way across the meadow, and fast enough to
catch up with the whitejackets who was pulling the last alien member. If
they wanted to see anything more, they'd have to figure how to leave the mob
without attracting attention. Hmm. There were plenty of Flenserist uniforms
around ... without living owners. Peregrine walked two of himself over to
where a dead trooper lay.
"Jaqueramaphan! Here!" The great spy looked in his direction, and a
glint of intelligence returned to his eyes. He stumbled out of the mob and
sat down a few yards from Wickwrackrum. It was far nearer than would
normally be comfortable, but after what they'd been through, it seemed
barely close. He lay for a moment, gasping. "Sorry, I never guessed it would
be like that. I lost part of me back there ... never thought I'd get her
back."
Peregrine watched the progress of the whitejackets and its travois. It
wasn't going with the others; in a few seconds it would be out of sight.
With a disguise, maybe they could follow and -- no, it was just too risky.
He was beginning to think like the great spy. Peregrine pulled a camouflage
jacket off a corpse. They would still need disguises. Maybe they could hang
around here through the night, and get a closer look at the flying house.
After a moment, Scriber saw what he was doing, and began gathering
jackets for himself. They slunk between the piled bodies, looking for gear
that wasn't too stained and that Jaqueramaphan thought had consistent
insignia. There were plenty of paw claws and battle axes around. They'd end
up armed to the teeth, but they'd have to dump some of their backpacks....
One more jacket was all he needed, but his Rum was so broad in the shoulders
that nothing fit.
Peregrine didn't really understand what happened till later: a large
fragment, a threesome, was lying doggo in the pile of dead. Perhaps it was
grieving, long after its member's dying dirge; in any case, it was almost
totally thoughtless until Peregrine began pulling the jacket off its dead
member. Then, "You'll not rob from mine!" He heard the buzz of nearby rage,
and then there was slashing pain across his Rum's gut. Peregrine writhed in
agony, leaped upon the attacker. For a moment of mindless rage, they fought.
Peregrine's battle axes slashed again and again, covering his muzzles with
blood. When he came to his senses one of the three was dead, the others
running into the mob of wounded.
Wickwrackrum huddled around the pain in his Rum. The attacker had been
wearing tines. Rum was slashed from ribs to crotch. Wickwrackrum stumbled;
some of his paws were caught in his own guts. He tried to nose the ruins
back into his member's abdomen. The pain was fading, the sky in Rum's eyes
slowly darkening. Peregrine stifled the screams he felt climbing within him.
I'm only four, and one of me is dying! For years he'd been warning himself
that four was just too small a number for a pilgrim. Now he'd pay the price,
trapped and mindless in a land of tyrants.
For a moment, the pain eased and his thoughts were clear. The fight
hadn't really caused much notice amid the dirges, rapes, and simple attacks
of madness. Wickwrackrum's fight had only been a little bigger and bloodier
than usual. The whitejackets by the flying house had looked briefly in their
direction, but were now back to tearing open the alien cargo.
Scriber was sitting nearby, watching in horror. Part of him would move
a little closer, then pull back. He was fighting with himself, trying to
decide whether to help. Peregrine almost pleaded with him, but the effort
was too great. Besides, Scriber was no pilgrim. Giving part of himself was
not something Jaqueramaphan could do voluntarily....
Memories came flooding now, Rum's efforts to sort things out and let
the rest of him know all that had been before. For a moment, he was sailing
a twinhull across the South Sea, a newby with Rum as a pup; memories of the
island person who had born Rum, and of packs before that. Once around the
world they had traveled, surviving the slums of a tropic collective, and the
war of the Plains Herds. Ah, the stories they had heard, the tricks they had
learned, the people they had met.... Wic Kwk Rac Rum had been a terrific
combination, clear-thinking, lighthearted, with a strange ability to keep
all the memories in place; that had been the real reason he had gone so long
without growing to five or six. Now he would pay perhaps the greatest price
of all....
Rum sighed, and could not see the sky anymore. Wickwrackrum's mind
went, not as it does in the heat of battle when the sound of thought is
lost, not as it does in the companionable murmur of sleep. There was
suddenly no fourth presence, just the three, trying to make a person. The
trio stood and patted nervously at itself. There was danger everywhere, but
beyond its understanding. It sidled hopefully toward a sixsome sitting
nearby -- Jaqueramaphan? -- but the other shooed it away. It looked
nervously at the mob of wounded. There was completeness there ... and
madness too.
A huge male with deeply scarred haunches sat at the edge of the mob. It
caught the threesome's eye, and slowly crawled across the open space toward
them. Wic and Kwk and Rac back away, their pelts puffing up in fright and
fascination; the scarred one was at least half again the weight of any of
them.
... Where am I? ... May I be part of you ... please? Its keening
carried memories, jumbled and mostly inaccessible, of blood and fighting, of
military training before that. Somehow, the creature was as frightened of
those early memories as of anything. It lay its muzzle -- caked with dried
blood -- on the ground and belly crawled toward them. The other three almost
ran; random coupling was something that scared all of them. They backed and
backed, out onto the clear meadow. The other followed, but slowly, still
crawling. Kwk licked her lips and walked back towards the stranger. She
extended her neck and sniffed along the other's throat. Wic and Rac
approached from the sides.
For an instant there was a partial join. Sweaty, bloody, wounded -- a
melding made in hell. The thought seemed to come from nowhere, glowed in the
four for a moment of cynical humor. Then the unity was lost, and they were
just three animals licking the face of a fourth.
Peregrine looked around the meadow with new eyes. He had been
disintegrate for just a few minutes: The wounded from the Tenth Attack
Infantry were just as before. Flenser's Servants were still busy with the
alien cargo. Jaqueramaphan was slowly backing away, his expression a
compound of wonder and horror. Peregrine lowered a head and hissed at him,
"I won't betray you, Scriber."
The spy froze. "That you, Peregrine?"
"More or less." Peregrine still, but Wickwrackrum no more.
"H-how can you do it? Y-you just lost...."
"I'm a pilgrim, remember? We live with this sort of thing all our
lives." There was sarcasm in his voice; this was more or less the cliché
Jaqueramaphan had been spouting earlier. But there was some truth to it.
Already Peregrine Wickwrack...scar felt like a person. Maybe this new
combination had a chance.
"Uk. Well, yes.... What should we do now?" The spy looked nervously in
all directions, but his eyes on Peregrine were the most worried of all.
Now it was Wickwrackscar's turn to be puzzled. What was he doing here?
Killing the strange enemy... No. That's what the Attack Infantry was doing.
He would have nothing to do with that, no matter what the scarred one's
memories. He and Scriber had come here to ... to rescue the alien, as much
of it as possible. Peregrine grabbed hold of the memory and held it
uncritically; it was something real, from the past identity he must
preserve. He glanced towards where he had last seen the alien member. The
whitejackets and his travois were no longer visible, but he'd been heading
along an obvious path.
"We can still get ourselves the live one," he said to Jaqueramaphan.
Scriber stamped and sidled. He was not quite the enthusiast of before.
"After you, my friend."
Wickwrackscar straightened his combat jackets and brushed some of the
dried blood off. Then he strutted off across the meadow, passing just a
hundred yards from the Flenser's Servants around the enemy -- around the
flying house. He flipped them a sharp salute, which was ignored.
Jaqueramaphan followed, carrying two crossbows. The other was doing his best
to imitate Peregrine's strut, but he really didn't have the right stuff.
Then they were past the military crest of the hill and descending into
shadows. The sounds of the wounded were muted. Wickwrackscar broke into
double time, loping from switchback to switchback as he descended the rough
path. From here he could see the harbor; the boats were still at the piers,
and there wasn't much activity. Behind him, Scriber was talking nervous
nonsense. Peregrine just ran faster, his confidence fueled by general newby
confusion. His new member, the scarred one, had been the muscle behind an
infantry officer. That pack had known the layout of the harbors and the
castle, and all the passwords of the day.
Two more switchbacks and they overran the Flenser Servant and his
travois. "Hallo!" shouted Peregrine. "We bring new instructions from Lord
Steel." A chill went down his spines at the name, remembering Steel for the
first time. The Servant dropped the travois and turned to face them.
Wickwrackscar didn't know his name, but he remembered the guy: fairly
high-ranking, an arrogant get-of-bitches. It was a surprise to see him
pulling the travois himself.
Peregrine stopped only twenty yards from the whitejackets.
Jaqueramaphan was looking down from the switchback above; his bows were out
of sight. The Servant looked nervously at Peregrine and up at Scriber.
"What do you two want?"
Did he suspect them already? No matter. Wickwrackscar braced himself
for a killing charge ... and suddenly he was seeing in fours, his mind
blurred with newby dizziness. Now that he needed to kill, the scarred one's
horror of the act undid him. Damn! Wickwrackscar cast wildly about for
something to say. And now that murder was out of his mind, his new memories
came easily: "Lord Steel's will, that the creature be brought with us to the
harbor. You, ah, you are to return to the invader's flying thing."
The whitejackets licked his lips. His eyes swept sharply across
Peregrine's uniforms, and Scriber's. "Impostors!" he screamed, at the same
instant lunging one of his members toward the travois. Metal glinted in the
member's forepaw. He's going to kill the alien!
There was a bow snap from above, and the runner fell, a shaft through
its eye. Wickwrackscar charged the others, forcing his scarbacked member out
front. There was an instant of dizziness and then he was whole again,
screaming death at the four. The two packs crashed together, Scar carrying a
couple of the Servant's members over the edge of the path. Arrows hummed
around them. Wic Kwk Rac twisted, slashing axes at whatever remained
standing.
Then things were quiet, and Peregrine had his thoughts again. Three of
the Servant's members twitched on the path, the earth around them slick with
blood. He pushed them off the path, near where his Scar had killed the
others. Not one of the Servant had survived; it was total death, and he was
responsible. He sagged to the ground, seeing in fours again.
"The alien. It's still alive," said Scriber. He was standing around the
travois, sniffing at the mantis-like body. "Not conscious though." He
grabbed the travois poles in his jaws and looked at Peregrine. "What ...
what now, Pilgrim?"
Peregrine lay in the dirt, trying to put his mind back together. What
now, indeed. How had he gotten into this mess? Newby confusion was the only
possibility. He'd simply lost track of all the reasons why rescuing the
alien was impossible. And now he was stuck with it. Pack crap. Part of him
crawled to the edge of the path, and looked around: There was no sign they
had attracted attention. In the harbor, the boats were still empty; most of
the infantry was up in the hills. No doubt the Servants were holding the
dead ones at the harbor fort. So when would they move them across the
straits to Hidden Island? Were they waiting for this one's arrival?
"Maybe we could grab some boats, escape south," said Scriber. What an
ingenious fellow. Didn't he know that there would be sentry lines around the
harbor? Even knowing the passwords, they'd be reported as soon as they
passed one. It would be a million-to-one shot. But it had been a flat
impossibility before Scar became part of him.
He studied the creature lying on the travois. So strange, yet real. And
it was more than just the creature, though that was the most spectacular
strangeness. Its bloodied clothes were a finer fabric than the Pilgrim had
ever seen. Tucked in beside the creature's body was a pink pillow with
elaborate stitchery. With a twist of perspective he realized it was alien
art, the face of a long-snouted animal embroidered on the pillow.
So escape through the harbor was a million-to-one shot; some prizes
might be worth such odds.
"...We'll go down a little farther," he said.
Jaqueramaphan pulled the travois. Wickwrackscar strode ahead of him,
trying to look important and officerly. With Scar along, it wasn't hard. The
member was the picture of martial competence; you had to be on the inside to
know the softness.
They were almost down to sea level.
The path was wider now and roughly paved. He knew the harbor fort was
above them, hidden by the trees. The sun was well out of the north, rising
into the eastern sky. Flowers were everywhere, white and red and violet,
their tufts floating thick on the breeze -- the arctic plant life taking
advantage of its long day of summer. Walking on sun-dappled cobblestones,
you might almost forget the ambush on the hilltops.
Very soon, they'd hit a sentry line. Lines and rings are interesting
people; not great minds, but about the largest effective pack you'd find
outside the tropics. There were stories of lines ten miles long, with
thousands of members. The largest Peregrine had ever seen had less than one
hundred: Take a group of ordinary people and train them to string out, not
in packs but as individual members. If each member stayed just a few yards
from its nearest neighbors, they could maintain something like the mentality
of a trio. The group as a whole was scarcely brighter -- you can't have much
in the way of deep thoughts when it takes seconds for an idea to percolate
across your mind. Yet the line had an excellent grasp of what was happening
along itself. And if any members were attacked, the entire line would know
about it with the speed of sound. Peregrine had served on lines before; it
was a strung out existence, but not nearly as dull as ordinary sentry duty.
It's hard to be bored when you're as stupid as a line.
There! A lone member stuck its neck around a tree and challenged them.
Wickwrackscar knew the password of course, and they were past the outer
line. But that passage and their description was known to the entire line
now -- and surely to normal soldiers at the harbor fort.
Hell. There was no cure for it; he would go ahead with the crazy
scheme. He and Scriber and the alien member passed through the two inner
sentries. He could smell the sea now. They came out of the trees onto the
rock-walled harbor. Silver sparkled off the water in a million changing
flecks. A large multiboat bobbed between two piers. Its masts were like a
forest of tilting, leafless trees. Just a mile across the water they could
see Hidden Island. Part of him dismissed the sight as a commonplace; part of
him stumbled in awe. This was the center of it, the worldwide Flenser
movement. Up in those dour towers, the original Flenser had done his
experiments, written his essays ... and schemed to rule the world.
There were a few people on the piers. Most were doing maintenance:
sewing sails, relashing twinhulls. They watched the travois with sharp
curiosity, but none approached. So all we have to do is amble down to the
end of the pier, cut the lashings on an outside twinhull, and take off.
There were probably enough packs on the pier alone to prevent that -- and
their cries would surely draw the troops he saw by the harbor fort. In fact,
it was a little surprising that no one up there had taken serious notice of
them yet.
These boats were cruder than the Southseas version. Part of the
difference was superficial: Flenser doctrine forbade idle decoration on
boats. Part of it was functional: These craft were designed for both winter
and summer seasons, and for troop hauling. But he was sure he could sail
them given the chance. He walked to the end of the pier. Hmm. A bit of luck.
The bow-starboard twinhull, the one right next to him by the pier, looked
fast and well-provisioned. It was probably a long-range scout.
"Ssst. Something's going on up there." Scriber jerked a head toward the
fort.
The troops were closing ranks -- a mass salute? Five Servants swept by
the infantry, and bugles sounded from the fort's towers. Scar had seen
things like this, but Peregrine didn't trust the memory. How could --
A banner of red and yellow rose over the fort. On the piers, soldiers
and boatworkers dropped to their bellies. Peregrine dropped and hissed to
the other, "Get down!"
"Wha -- ?"
"That's Flenser's flag ... his personal presence banner!"
"That's impossible." Flenser had been assassinated in the Republic six
tendays earlier. The mob that tore him apart had killed dozens of his top
supporters at the same time.... But it was only the word of the Republican
Political Police that all Flenser's bodies had been recovered.
Up by the fort, a single pack pranced between the ranks of soldiers and
whitejackets. Silver and gold glinted on its shoulders. Scriber edged a
member behind a piling and surreptitiously brought out his eye-tool. After a
moment: "Soul's end ... it's Tyrathect."
"She's no more the Flenser than I am," said Peregrine. They had
traveled together from Eastgate all the way across the Icefangs. She was
obviously a newby, and not well-integrated. She had seemed reserved and
innerlooking, but there had been rages. Peregrine knew there was a deadly
streak in Tyrathect.... Now he guessed whence it came. At least some of
Flenser's members had escaped assassination, and he and Scriber had spent
three tendays in its presence; Peregrine shivered.
At the fort's gate, the pack called Tyrathect turned to face the troops
and Servants. She gestured, and bugles sounded again. The new Peregrine
understood that signal: an Incalling. He suppressed the sudden urge to
follow the others on the pier as they walked belly-low toward the fort, all
their eyes upon The Master. Scriber looked back at him, and Peregrine
nodded. They had needed a miracle, and here was one -- provided by the enemy
itself! Scriber moved slowly toward the end of the pier, pulling the travois
from shadow to shadow.
Still no one looked back. For good reason; Wickwrackscar remembered
what happened to those showing disrespect at an Incalling. "Pull the
creature on the bow-starboard boat," he said to Jaqueramaphan. He leaped off
the pier and scattered across the multiboat. It was great to be back on
swaying decks, each member drifting a different direction! He sniffed among
the bow catapults, listened to the hulls and the creak of the lashings.
But Scar was no sailor, and had no recollection of what might be the
most important thing.
"What are you looking for?" came Scriber's Hightalk hiss.
"Scuttle knockouts." If they were here, they looked nothing like the
Southseas version.
"Oh," said Scriber, "that's easy. These are Northern Skimmers. There
are swingout panels and a thin hull behind." Two of him dropped from sight
for a second and there was a banging sound. The heads reappeared, shaking
water off. He grinned surprise, taken aback by his own success. "Why, it's
just like in the books!" his expression seemed to say.
Wickwrackscar found them now; the panels had looked like crew rests,
but they were easily pulled out and the wood behind was easy to break with a
battle axe. He kept a head out, looking to see if he were attracting
attention, while at the same time he hacked at the knockouts. Peregrine and
Scriber worked their way across the bow ranks of the multiboat; if those
foundered, it would take a while to get the twinhulls behind them free.
Oops. One of the boat workers was looking back this way. Part of the
fellow continued up the hillside, part strained to return to the pier. The
bugles sounded their imperative once more, and the pack followed the call.
But his whining alarums were causing other heads to turn.
No time for stealth. Peregrine hotfooted it back to the bow-starboard
twinhull. Scriber was cutting the braid-bone fasteners that held the
twinhull to the rest of the ship. "You have any sailing experience?"
Peregrine said. Foolish question.
"Well, I've read about it -- "
"Fine!" Peregrine shooed him all into the twinhull's starboard pod.
"Keep the alien safe. Hunker down, and be as quiet as you can." He could
sail the twinhull by himself, but he'd have to be all over to do it; the
fewer confusing thought sounds, the better.
Peregrine poled their boat forward from the multiboat. The scuttling
wasn't obvious yet, but he could see water in the bow hulls. He reversed his
pole and used its hook to draw the nearest boat into the gap created by
their departure. Another five minutes and there'd be just a row of masts
sticking out of the water. Five minutes. No way they could make it ... if
not for Flenser's Incalling: up by the fort, troopers were turning and
pointing at the harbor. Yet still they must attend on Flenser/Tyrathect. How
long would it be before someone important decided that even an Incalling can
be overridden?
He hoisted canvas.
The wind caught the twinhull's sail and they pulled out from the pier.
Peregrine danced this way and that, the shrouds grasped tightly in his
mouths. Even without Rum, what memories the taste of salt and cordage
brought back! He could feel where tautness and slack meant that the wind was
giving all it could. The twin hulls were sleek and narrow, the mast of
ironwood creaking as the wind pulled on the sail.
The Flenserists were streaming down the hillside now. Archers stopped
and a haze of arrows rose. Peregrine jerked on the shrouds, tipping the boat
into a left turn on one hull. Scriber leaped to shield the alien. To
starboard ahead of them the water puckered, but only a couple of shafts
struck the boat. Peregrine twisted the shrouds again, and they jigged back
in the other direction. Another few seconds and they'd be out of bowshot.
Soldiers raced down to the piers, shrieking as they saw what was left of
their ship. The bow ranks were flooded; the whole front of the anchorage was
a wreck of sunken boats. And the catapults were in the bow.
Peregrine swept his boat back, racing straight south, out of the
harbor. To starboard, he could see they were passing the southern tip of
Hidden Island. The Castle towers hung tall and ominous. He knew there were
heavy catapults there, and some fast boats in the island harbor. A few more
minutes and even that wouldn't matter. He was gradually realizing just how
nimble their boat was. He should have guessed they'd put their best in a
corner bow position. It was probably used for scouting and overtaking.
Jaqueramaphan was piled up at the stern of his hull, staring across the
water at the mainland harbor. Soldiers, workers, whitejackets were crowded
in a mind-numbing jumble at the ends of the piers. Even from here, you could
see the place was a madhouse of rage and frustration. A silly grin spread
across Scriber as he realized they really were going to make it. He
clambered onto the rail and jumped into the air to flip a member at their
enemies. The obscene gesture nearly cast him overboard, but it was seen: the
distant rage brightened for a moment.
They were well south of Hidden Island; even its catapults could not
reach them now. The packs on the mainland shore were lost to view. Flenser's
personal banner still whipped cheerfully in the morning breeze, a dwindling
square of red and yellow against the forest's green.
All Peregrine looked at the narrows, where Whale Island kissed close to
the mainland. His Scar remembered that the choke point was heavily
fortified. Normally that would have been the end of them. But its archers
had been withdrawn to participate in the ambush, and its catapults were
under repair.
... so the miracle had happened. They were alive and free and they had
the greatest find of all his pilgrimage. He shouted joy so loud that
Jaqueramaphan cowered and the sound echoed back from the green and
snow-patched hills.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Jefri Olsndot had few clear memories of the ambush and saw none of the
violence. There had been the noises outside, and Mom's terrified voice,
screaming for him to stay inside. Then there had been lots of smoke. He
remembered choking, trying to crawl to clear air. He blacked out. When he
woke, he was strapped onto some sort of first-aid cot, with the big dog
creatures all around. They looked so funny with their white jackets and
braid. He remembered wondering where their owners were. They made the
strangest noises: gobbling, buzzing, hissing. Some of it was so high-pitched
he could barely hear it.
For while he was on a boat, then on a wheeled cart. Before this, he had
only seen pictures of castles, but the place they took him was the real
thing, its towers dark and overhanging, its big stone walls sharply angled.
They climbed through shadowed streets that went skumpety skumpety beneath
the cart's wheels. The long-necked dogs hadn't hurt him, but the straps were
awfully tight. He couldn't sit up; he couldn't see to the sides. He asked
about Mom and Dad and Johanna, and he cried a little. A long snout appeared
by his face, the soft nose pushing at his cheek. There was a buzzing sound
he felt all the way down to his bones. He couldn't tell if the gesture was
comfort or threat, but he gasped and tried to stop the tears. They didn't
befit a good Straumer, anyway.
More white-jacketed dogs, ones with silly shoulder patches of gold and
silver.
His cot was being dragged again, this time down a torch-lit tunnel.
They stopped by a double door, two meters wide but scarcely one high. A pair
of metal triangles was set in the blond wood. Later Jefri learned they
signified a number -- fifteen or thirty-three, depending on whether you
counted by legs or fore-claws. Much, much later he learned that his keeper
had counted by legs and the builder of the castle by fore-claws. Thus he
ended up in the wrong room. It was a mistake that would change the history
of worlds.
Somehow the dogs opened the doors and dragged Jefri in. They clustered
around the cot, their snouts tugging loose his restraints. He had a glimpse
of rows of needle-sharp teeth. The gobbling and buzzing was very loud. When
Jefri sat up, they backed off. Two of them held the doors as the other four
exited. The doors slammed shut and the circus act was gone.
Jefri stared at the doors for a long moment. He knew it was no circus
act; the dog things must be intelligent. Somehow they had surprised his
parents and sister. Where are they? He almost started to cry again. He
hadn't seen them by the spaceship. They must have been captured, too. They
were all being held prisoner in this castle, but in separate dungeons.
Somehow they must find each other!
He climbed to his feet, swayed dizzily for a moment. Everything still
smelled like smoke. It didn't matter; it was time to start working on
getting out. He walked around the room. It was huge, and not like any
dungeon he'd seen in stories. The ceiling was very high, an arching dome. It
was cut by twelve vertical slots. Sunlight fell in a dust-moted stream from
one of them, splashing off the padded wall. It was the room's only
illumination, but more than enough on this sunny day. Low-railed balconies
stuck out from the four corners of the room just below the dome. He could
see doors in the walls behind them. Heavy scrolls hung by the side of each
balcony. There was writing on them, really big print. He walked to the wall
and felt the stiff fabric. The letters were painted on. The only way you
could change the display was by rubbing it out. Wow. Just like olden times
on Nyjora, before Straumli Realm! The baseboard below the scrolls was black
stone, glossy. Someone had used scraps of chalk to draw on it. The
stick-figure dogs were crude; they reminded Jefri of pictures little kids
draw in kinderschool.
He stopped, remembering all the children they had left aboard the boat,
and on the ground around it. Just a few days ago, he'd been playing with
them at the High Lab school. The last year had been so strange -- boring and
adventurous at the same time. The barracks had been fun with all the
families together, but the grownups hardly ever had time to play. At night
the sky was so different from Straum's. "We're beyond the Beyond," Mom had
said, "making God." When she first said it, she laughed. Later when people
said it, they seemed more and more scared. The last hours had been crazy,
the coldsleep drills finally for real. All his friends were in those
boxes.... He wept into the awful silence. There was no one to hear, no one
to help him.
After a few moments he was thinking again. If the dogs didn't try to
open the boxes, his friends should be okay. If Mom and Dad could make the
dogs understand....
Strange furniture was scattered around the room: low tables and
cabinets, and racks like kids' jungle gyms -- all made from the same blond
wood as the doors. Black pillows lay around the widest table. That one was
littered with scrolls, all full of writing and still drawings. He walked the
length of one wall, ten meters or so. The stone flooring ended. There was a
two-by-two bed of gravel where the walls met. Something smelled even
stronger than smoke here. A bathroom smell. Jefri laughed: they really were
like dogs!
The padded walls soaked up his laughter, echoless. Something ... made
Jefri look up and across the room. He'd just assumed he was alone here; in
fact, there were lots of hiding places in this "dungeon." For a moment, he
held his breath and listened. All was silent ... almost: at the top of his
hearing, up where some machines wheep, and Mom and Dad and even Johanna
couldn't hear -- there was something.
"I -- I know you're here," Jefri said sharply, his voice squeaking. He
stepped sideways a few paces, trying to see around the furniture without
approaching it. The sound continued, obvious now that he was listening to
it.
A small head with great dark eyes looked around a cabinet. It was much
smaller than the creatures that had brought Jefri here, but the shape of the
muzzle was the same. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Jefri
edged slowly toward it. A puppy? The head withdrew, then came further out.
From the corner of his eye, Jefri saw something move -- another of the black
forms was peering at him from under the table. Jefri froze for a second,
fighting panic. But there was no place to run, and maybe the creatures would
help find Mom. Jefri dropped to one knee and slowly extended his hand. "Here
... here, doggy."
The puppy crawled from beneath the table, its eyes never leaving
Jefri's hand. The fascination was mutual; the puppy was beautiful.
Considering all the thousands of years that dogs have been bred by humans
(and others), this could have been some oddball breed ... but only just. The
hair was short and dense, a deep velour of black and white. The two tones
lay in broad swaths with no intermediate grays. This one's entire head was
black, its haunches split between white and black. The tail was a short,
unimpressive flap covering its rear. There were hairless patches on its
shoulders and head, where Jefri could see black skin. But the strangest
thing was the long, supple neck. It would look more natural in a sea'mal
than a dog.
Jefri wiggled his fingers, and the puppy's eyes widened, revealing an
edge of white around the iris.
Something bumped his elbow, and Jefri almost jumped to this feet. So
many! Two more had crept up to look at his hand. And where he had seen the
first one there were now three, sitting alertly, watching. Seen in the open,
there was nothing unfriendly or scary about them.
One of the puppies put a paw on Jefri's wrist and pressed gently
downward. At the same time, another extended its muzzle and licked Jefri's
fingers. The tongue was pink and raspy, a round narrow thing. The
high-pitched wheeping got stronger; all three moved in, grabbing at his hand
with their mouths.
"Be careful!" Jefri said, jerking back his hand. He remembered the
grownups' teeth. Suddenly the air was full of gobbling and buzzing. Hmp.
They sounded more like goofy birds than dogs. One of the other pups came
forward. It extended a sleek nose toward Jefri. "Be careful!" it said, a
perfect playback of the boy's voice ... yet its mouth was closed. It angled
its neck back ... to be petted? He reached out; the fur was so soft! The
buzzing was very loud now. Jefri could feel it through the fur. But it
wasn't just the one animal who was making it; the sound came from all
directions. The puppy reversed direction, sliding its muzzle across the
boy's hand. This time he let the mouth close on his fingers. He could see
teeth all right, but the puppy carefully kept them from touching Jefri's
skin. The tip of its snout felt like a pair of small fingers closing and
opening around his.
Three slipped under his other arm, like they wanted to be petted too.
He felt noses poking at his back, trying to pull his shirt out of his pants.
The effort was remarkably coordinated, almost as if a two-handed human had
grabbed his shirt. Just how many are there? For a moment he forgot where he
was, forgot to be cautious. He rolled over and began petting the marauders.
A surprised squeaking sound came from all directions. Two crawled beneath
his elbows; at least three jumped on his back and lay with their noses
touching his neck and ears.
And Jefri had what seemed a great insight: The adult aliens had
recognized he was a child; they just didn't know how old. They had put him
in one of their own kinderschools! Mom and Dad were probably talking to them
right now. Things were going to turn out all right after all.
Lord Steel had not taken his name casually: steel, the most modern of
metals; steel, that takes the sharpest edge and never loses it; steel, that
can glow red hot, and yet not fail; steel, the blade that cuts for the
flenser. Steel was a crafted person, Flenser's greatest success.
In some sense, the crafting of souls was nothing new. Brood kenning was
a limited form of it, though mainly concerned with gross physical
characteristics. Even kenners agreed that a pack's mental abilities derived
from its various members in different measures. One pair or triple was
almost always responsible for eloquence, another for spatial intuition. The
virtues and vices were even more complex. No single member was the principal
source of courage, or of conscience.
Flenser's contribution to the field -- as to most others -- had been an
essential ruthlessness, a cutting away of all but the truly important. He
experimented endlessly, discarding all but the most successful results. He
depended on discipline and denial and partial death as much as on clever
member selection. He already had seventy years of experience when he created
Steel.
Before he could take his name, Steel spent years in denial, determining
just what parts of him combined to produce the being desired. That would
have been impossible without Flenser's enforcement. (Example: if you
dismissed a part of yourself essential for tenacity, where could you get the
will to continue the flensing?) For the soul in creation, the process was
mental chaos, a patchwork of horror and amnesia. In two years he had
experienced more change than most people do in two centuries -- and all of
it directed. The turning point came when he and Flenser identified the trio
that weighed him down with both conscience and slowness of intellect. One of
the three bridged the others. Sending it into silence, replacing it with
just the right element, had made the difference. After that, the rest was
easy; Steel was born.
When Flenser had left to convert the Long Lakes Republic, it was only
natural that his most brilliant creation should take over here. For five
years Steel had ruled Flenser's heartland. In that time he had not only
conserved what Flenser built, he extended it beyond the cautious beginnings.
But today, in a single circling of the sun about Hidden Island, he
could lose everything.
Steel stepped into the meeting hall and looked around. Refreshments
were properly set. Sunlight streamed from a ceiling slit onto just the place
he wanted. Part of Shreck, his aide, stood on the far side of the room. He
said to it, "I will speak with the visitor alone." He did not use the name
"Flenser". The whitejackets groveled back and its unseen members pushed open
the far doors.
A fivesome -- three males and two females -- walked through the
doorway, into the splash of sunlight. The individual was unremarkable. But
then Flenser had never had an imposing appearance.
Two heads raised to shade the eyes of the others. The pack looked
across the room, spotting Lord Steel twenty yards away. "Ah-h ... Steel."
The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.
Steel had bowed when the other entered, a formal gesture. The voice
caused a sudden cramp in his guts, and he involuntarily brought bellies to
the ground. That was his voice! There was at least a fragment of the
original Flenser in this pack. The gold and silver epaulets, the personal
banner, those could be faked by anyone with suicidal bravado.... But Steel
remembered the manner. He wasn't surprised the other's presence had
destroyed discipline on the mainland this morning.
The pack's heads, where they were in sunlight, were expressionless. Was
a smile playing about the heads in shadow? "Where are the others, Steel?
What happened today is the greatest opportunity of our history."
Steel got off his bellies and stood at the railing. "Sir. There are
some questions first, just between the two of us. Clearly, you are much of
Flenser, but how much -- "
The other was clearly grinning now, the shadowed heads bobbing. "Yes, I
knew my best creation would see that question.... This morning, I claimed to
be the true Flenser, improved with one or two replacements. The truth is ...
harder. You know about the Republic." That had been Flenser's greatest
gamble: to flense an entire nation-state. Millions would die, yet even so
there would be more molding than killing. In the end, there would exist the
first collective outside of the tropics. And the Flenser state would not be
a mindless agglomeration grubbing about in some jungle. The top would be as
brilliant, as ruthless as any packs in history. No people in the world could
stand against such a force.
"It was an awesome risk to take, for an even more awesome goal. But I
took precautions. We had thousands of converts, many of them people with no
understanding of our true ambition, but faithful and self-sacrificing -- as
they should be. I always kept a special group of them nearby. The Political
Police were clever to use mob assassination against me, the last thing I had
expected -- I who made the mobs. No matter, my bodyguards were well trained.
When we were trapped in Parliament Bowl, they killed one or two members of
each of those special packs ... and I simply ceased to exist, dispersed
among three panicky, ordinary people trying to escape the blood swamp."
"But everyone around you was killed; the mob left no one."
The Flenser-thing shrugged. "That was partly Republican propaganda, and
partly my own work: I ordered my guards to hack each other down, along with
everyone who was not me."
Steel almost voiced his awe. The plan was typical of Flenser's
brilliance, and his strength of soul. In assassinations, there was always
the chance that fragments would get away. There were famous stories of
heroes reassembled. In real life such events were rare, usually happening
when the victim's forces could sustain their leader through reintegration.
But Flenser had planned this tactic from the beginning, had envisaged
reassembling himself more than a thousand miles from the Long Lakes.
Still ... Lord Steel looked at the other in calculation. Ignore voice
and manner. Think for power, not for the desires of others, even Flenser.
Steel recognized only two in the other pack. The females and the male with
the white-tipped ears were probably from the sacrificed follower. Very
likely only two of Flenser really faced him. Scarcely a threat ... except in
the very real sense of appearances. "And the other four of you, Sir? When
may we expect your entire presence?"
The Flenser-thing chuckled. Damaged as it was, it still understood
balance-of-power. This was almost like the old days: when two people have a
clear understanding of power and betrayal, then betrayal itself becomes
almost impossible. There is only the ordered flow of events, bringing good
to those who deserve to rule. "The others have equally good ... mounts. I
made detailed plans, three different paths, three different sets of agents.
I arrived on schedule. I have no doubt the others will too, in a few tendays
at most. Until then," he turned all heads toward Steel, "until then, dear
Steel, I do not claim the full role of Flenser. I did so earlier to
establish priorities, to protect this fragment till I am assembled. But this
pack is deliberately weak-minded; I know it wouldn't survive as the ruler of
my earlier creations."
Steel wondered. Half-brained, the creature's schemes were perfect.
Nearly perfect. "So you wish a background role for the next few tendays?
Very well. But you announced yourself as Flenser. How shall I present you?"
The other didn't hesitate. "Tyrathect, Flenser in Waiting."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Language path: Samnorsk->Triskweline, SjK:Relay units
From: Straumli Main
Subject: Archive opened in the Low Transcend!
Summary: Our links to the Known Net will be down temporarily
Key phrases: transcend, good news, business opportunities, new archive,
communications problems
Distribution:
Where Are They Now Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group, Transceiver Relay03 at Relay, Transceiver Windsong at Debley Down, Transceiver Not-for-Long at Shortstop
Date: 11:45:20 Docks Time, 01/09 of Org year 52089
Text of message:
We are proud to announce that a human exploration company from Straumli
Realm has discovered an accessible archive in the Low Transcend. This is not
an announcement of Transcendence or the creation of a new Power. We have in
fact postponed this announcement until we were sure of our property rights
and the safety of the archive. We have installed interfaces which should
make the archive interoperable with standard syntax queries from the Net. In
a few days this access will be made commercially available. (See discussion
of scheduling problems below.)
Because of its safety, intelligibility, and age, this Archive is
remarkable. We believe there is otherwise lost information here about
arbitration management and interrace coordination. We'll send details to the
appropriate news groups. We're very excited about this. Note that no
interaction with the Powers was necessary; no part of Straumli Realm has
transcended.
Now for the bad news: Arbitration and translation schemes have had
unfortunate clenirations[?] with the ridgeway armiphlage[?]. The details
should be amusing to the people in the Communication Threats news group, and
we will report them there later. But for at least the next hundred hours,
all our links (main and minor) to the Known Net will be down. Incoming
messages may be buffered, but no guarantees. No messages can be forwarded.
We regret this inconvenience, and will make up for it very soon!
Physical commerce is in no way affected by these problems. Straumli
Realm continues to welcome tourists and trade.
-=*=-
Looking back, Ravna Bergsndot saw it was inevitable that she become a
librarian. As a child on Sjandra Kei, she had been in love with stories from
the Age of Princesses. There was adventure, a time when a few brave Ladies
had dragged humankind to greatness. She and her sister had spent countless
afternoons pretending to be the Greater Two and rescuing the Countess of the
Lake. Later they understood that Nyjora and its Princesses were lost in the
dim past. Sister Lynne turned to more practical things. But Ravna still
wanted adventure. Through her teens, she had dreamed of emigrating to
Straumli Realm. That was something very real. Imagine: a new and mostly
human colony, right at the Top of the Beyond. And Straum welcomed folk from
the mother world; their enterprise was less than one hundred years old. They
or their children would be the first humans anywhere in the galaxy to
transcend their own humanity. She might end up a god, and richer than a
million Beyonder worlds. It was a dream real enough to provoke constant
arguments with her parents. For where there is heaven, there can also be
hell. Straumli Realm kissed close to the Transcend, and the people there
played with "the tigers that pace beyond the bars." Dad had actually used
that tired image. The disagreement drove them apart for several years. Then,
in her Computer Science and Applied Theology courses, Ravna began to read
about some of the old horrors. Maybe, maybe ... she should be a little more
cautious. Better to look around first. And there was a way to see into
everything that humans in the Beyond could possibly understand: Ravna became
a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased. "It's true and so
what?" Ravna had grumped back, but the dream of far traveling was not quite
dead in her.
Life in Herte University at Sjandra Kei should have been perfect for
someone who had finally figured out what they wanted from life. Things might
have gone on happily for a lifetime there -- except that in her graduation
year, there had been the Vrinimi Organization's Faraway 'Prentice contest.
Three years work-study at the archive by Relay was the prize. Winning was
the chance of a lifetime; she would come back with more experience than any
local academician.
So it was that Ravna Bergsndot ended up more than twenty thousand
light-years from home, at the network hub of a million worlds.
Sunset was an hour past when Ravna drifted across Citypark toward
Grondr Vrinimikalir's residence. She'd been on the planet only a handful of
times since arriving in the Relay system. Most of her work was at the
archives themselves -- a thousand light-hours out. This part of Groundside
was in early autumn, though twilight had faded the tree colors to bands of
gray. From Ravna's altitude, one hundred meters up, the air had the nip of
frosts to come. Between her feet she could see picnic fires and gaming
fields. The Vrinimi Organization didn't spend much on the planet, but the
world was beautiful. As long as she kept her eyes on the darkening ground,
Ravna could almost imagine this was someplace in her home terrane on Sjandra
Kei. Look into the sky though ... and you knew you were far from home:
twenty-thousand light-years away, the galactic whirlpool sprawled up toward
the zenith.
It was just a faint thing in the twilight, and it might not get much
brighter this night: Low in the western sky, a cluster of in-system
factories glowed brighter than any moon. The operation was a brilliant
flickering of stars and rays, sometimes so intense that stark shadows were
cast eastwards from the Citypark mountains. In another half hour, the Docks
would rise. The Docks weren't as bright as the factories, but together they
would outshine anything from the far stars.
She shifted in her agrav harness, drifting lower. The scent of autumn
and picnics came stronger. Suddenly, the click of Kalir laughter was all
around her; she had blundered into an airball game. Ravna spread her arms in
mock humiliation and dodged out of the players' way.
Her stroll through the park was just about over; she could see her
destination ahead. Grondr 'Kalir's residence was a rarity in the Citypark
landscape: a recognizable building. It dated from when the Org bought into
the Relay operation. Seen from just eighty meters up, the house was a blocky
silhouette against the sky. When factory lights flashed, the smooth walls of
the monolith glowed in oily tints. Grondr was her boss's boss's boss. She
had talked to him exactly three times in two years.
No more delay. Nervous and very curious, Ravna floated lower and let
the house electronics guide her across the tree decks toward an entrance.
Grondr Vrinimikalir treated her with standard Organization courtesy,
the common denominator that served between the several races of the Org: The
meeting room had furniture suitable for human and Vrinimi use. There were
refreshments, and questions about her job at the archive.
"Mixed results, sir," Ravna replied honestly. "I've learned a great
deal. The 'prenticeship is everything it's claimed to be. But I'm afraid the
new division is going to require an added index layer." All this was in
reports the old fellow could have seen at the flick of a digit.
Grondr rubbed a hand absently across his eye freckles. "Yes, an
expected disappointment. We're at the limits of information management with
this expansion. Egravan and Derche -- " those were Ravna's boss and boss's
boss "-- are quite happy with your progress. You came well educated, and
learned fast. I think there's a place for humans in the Organization."
"Thank you, sir." Ravna blushed. Grondr's assessment was casually
spoken but very important to her. And it would probably mean the arrival of
more humans, perhaps even before her 'prenticeship was up. So was this the
reason for the interview?
She tried not to stare at the other. She was quite used to the Vrinimi
majority race by now. From a distance the Kalir looked humanoid. Up close,
the differences were substantial. The race was descended from something like
an insect. In upsizing, evolution had necessarily moved reinforcing struts
inside the body, till the outside was a combination of grublike skin and
sheets of pale chitin. At first glance Grondr was an unremarkable exemplar
of the race. But when the fellow moved, even to adjust his jacket or scratch
at his eye freckles, there was a strange precision to him. Egravan said that
he was very, very old.
Grondr changed the subject with the clickety abruptness. "You are aware
of the ... changes at Straumli Realm?"
"You mean the fall of Straum? Yes." Though I'm surprised you are.
Straumli Realm was a significant human civilization, but it accounted for
only an infinitesimal fraction of Relay's message traffic.
"Please accept my sympathy." Despite the cheerful announcements from
Straum, it was clear that absolute disaster had befallen Straumli Realm.
Almost every race eventually dabbled in the Transcend, more often than not
becoming a superintelligence, a Power. But it was clear by now that the
Straumers had created, or awakened, a Power of deadly inclination. Their
fate was as terrible as anything Ravna's father had ever predicted. And
their bad luck was now a disaster that stretched across all that had been
Straumli Realm. Grondr continued: "Will this news affect your work?"
Curiouser and curiouser; she would have sworn the other was coming to
the point. Maybe this was the point? "Uh, no sir. The Straumli affair is a
terrible thing, especially for humankind. But my home is Sjandra Kei.
Straumli Realm is our offspring, but I have no relatives there." Though I
might have been there if it hadn't been for Mother and Dad. Actually, when
Straumli Main dropped off the Net, Sjandra Kei had been unreachable for
almost forty hours. That had bothered her very much, since any rerouting
should have been immediate. Communication was eventually established; the
problem had been screwed-up routing tables on an alternate path. Ravna had
even shot half a year's savings for an over-and-back mailing. Lynne and her
parents were fine; the Straumli debacle was the news of the century for
folks at Sjandra Kei, but it was still a disaster at great remove. Ravna
wondered if parents had ever given better advice than hers!
"Good, good." His mouth parts moved in the analog of a human nod. His
head tilted so only peripheral freckles were looking at her; the guy
actually seemed hesitant! Ravna looked back silently. Grondr 'Kalir might be
the strangest exec in the Org. He was the only one whose principal residence
was Groundside. Officially he was in charge of a division of the archives;
in fact, he ran Vrinimi Marketing (i.e., Intelligence). There were stories
that he had visited the Top of the Beyond; Egravan claimed he had an
artificial immune system. "You see, the Straumli disaster has incidentally
made you one of the Organization's most valuable employees."
"I ... don't understand."
"Ravna, the rumors in the Threats newsgroup are true. The Straumers had
a laboratory in the Low Transcend. They were playing with recipes from some
lost archive, and they created a new Power. It appears to be a Class Two
perversion."
The Known Net recorded a Class Two perversion about once a century.
Such Powers had a normal "lifespan" -- about ten years. But they were
explicitly malevolent, and in ten years could do enormous damage. Poor
Straum.
"So you can see there's enormous potential for profit or loss here. If
the disaster spreads, we will lose network customers. On the other hand,
everyone around Straumli Realm wants to track what is happening. This could
increase our message traffic by several percent."
Grondr put it more cold-bloodedly than she liked, but he had a point.
In fact, the opportunity for profit was directly linked with mitigating the
perversion. If she hadn't been so wrapped up in archive work, she'd have
guessed all this. And now that she did think about it: "There are even more
spectacular opportunities. Historically, these perversions have been of
interest to other Powers. They'll want Net feeds and ... information about
the creating race." Her voice guttered into silence as she finally
understood the reason for this meeting.
Grondr's mouth parts clicked agreement. "Indeed. We at Relay are
well-placed to supply news to the Transcend. And we also have our own human.
In the last three days we've received several dozen queries from
civilizations in the High Beyond, some claiming to represent Powers. This
interest could mean a large increase in Organization income through the next
decade.
"All this you could read in the Threats news group. But there is
another item, something I ask you to keep secret for now: Five days ago, a
ship from the Transcend entered our region. It claims to be directly
controlled by a Power." The wall behind him became a window upon the
visitor. The craft was an irregular collection of spines and limps. A scale
bar claimed the thing was only five meters across.
Ravna felt the hair on her neck prickling. Here in the Middle Beyond
they should be relatively safe from the caprice of the Powers. Still ... the
visit was an unnerving thing. "What does it want?"
"Information about the Straumli perversion. In particular, it is very
interested in your race. It would give a great deal to take back a living
human...."
Ravna's response was abrupt. "I'm not interested."
Grondr spread his pale hands. The light glittered from the chitin on
the back of his fingers. "It would be an enormous opportunity. A
'prenticeship with the gods. This one has promised to establish an oracle
here in return."
"No!" Ravna half rose from her chair. She was one human, more than
twenty thousand light-years from home. That had been a frightening thing in
the first days of her 'prenticeship. Since then she had made friends, had
learned more of Organization ethics, had come to trust these folk almost as
much as people at Sjandra Kei. But ... there was only one halfway trustable
oracle on the Net these days, and it was almost ten years old. This Power
was tempting Vrinimi Org with fabulous treasure.
Grondr clicked embarrassment. He waved her back to her chair. "It was
only a suggestion. We do not abuse our employees. If you will simply serve
as our local expert...."
Ravna nodded.
"Good. Frankly, I had not expected you to accept the offer. We have a
much more likely volunteer, but one who needs coaching."
"A human? Here?" Ravna had a standing query in the local directory for
other humans. During the last two years she had seen three, and they had
just been passing through. "How long has she -- he? -- been here?"
Grondr said something halfway between a smile and a laugh. "A bit more
than a century, though we didn't realize it until a few days ago." The
pictures around him shifted. Ravna recognized Relay's "attic," the junkyard
of abandoned ships and freight devices that floated just a thousand
light-seconds from the archives. "We receive a lot of one-way freight, items
shipped in the hope we'll buy or sell on consignment." The view closed on a
decrepit vessel, perhaps two hundred meters long, wasp-waisted to support a
ramscoop drive. Its ultradrive spines were scarcely more than stubs.
"A bottom-lugger?" said Ravna.
Grondr clicked negation. "A dredge. The ship is about thirty thousand
years old. Most of that time was spent in a deep penetration of the Slow
Zone, plus ten thousand years in the Unthinking Depths."
Up close now, she could see the hull was finely pitted, the result of
millennia of relativistic erosion. Even unpiloted, such expeditions were
rare: a deep penetration could not return to the Beyond within the lifetime
of its builders. Some would not return within the lifetime of the builders'
race. People who launched such missions were just a little weird; People who
recovered them could make a solid profit.
"This one came from very far away, even if it's not quite a jackpot
mission. It didn't see anything interesting in the Unthinking Depths -- not
surprising given that even simple automation fails there. We sold most of
the cargo immediately. The rest we cataloged and forgot ... till the
Straumli affair." The starscape vanished. They were looking at a medical
display, random limbs and body parts. They looked very human. "In a solar
system at the bottom of the Slowness, the dredge found a derelict. The wreck
had no ultradrive capability; it was truly a Slow Zone design. The solar
system was uninhabited. We speculate the ship had a structural failure -- or
perhaps the crew was affected by the Depths. Either way, they ended up in a
frozen mangle."
Tragedy at the bottom of the Slowness, thousands of years ago. Ravna
forced her eyes from the carnage. "You figure on selling this to our
visitor?"
"Even better. Once we started poking around, we discovered a
substantial error in the cataloging. One of the deaders is almost intact. We
patched it up with parts from the others. It was expensive, but we ended up
with a living human." The picture flickered again, and Ravna caught her
breath. In the medical animation, the parts floated into an orderly
arrangement. There was a complete body there, torn up a little in the belly.
Pieces came together, and ... this was no "she". He floated whole and naked,
as if in sleep. Ravna had no doubt of his humanity, but all humankind in the
Beyond was descended from Nyjoran stock. This fellow had none of that
heritage. The skin was smoky gray, not brown. The hair was bright reddish
brown, a color she had only seen in pre-Nyjoran histories. The bones of the
face were subtly different from modern humans. The small differences were
more jarring than the outright alienness of her coworkers.
Now the figure was clothed. Under other circumstances, Ravna would have
smiled. Grondr 'Kalir had picked an absurd costume, something from the
Nyjoran era. The figure bore a sword and slug gun.... A sleeping prince from
the Age of Princesses.
"Behold the Ur-human," said Grondr.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
"Relay" is a common place-name. It has meaning in almost any
environment. Like Newtown and Newhome, it occurs over and over when people
move or colonize or participate in a communication net. You could travel a
billion light-years or a billion years and still find such names among folk
of natural intelligence.
But in the current era there was one instance of "Relay" known above
all others. That instance appeared in the routing list of two percent of all
traffic across the Known Net. Twenty thousand light-years off the galactic
plane, Relay had an unobstructed line of sight on thirty percent of the
Beyond, including many star systems right at the bottom, where starships can
make only one light-year per day. A few metal-bearing solar systems were
equally well-placed, and there was competition. But where other
civilizations lost interest, or colonized into the Transcend, or died in
apocalypse, Vrinimi Organization lasted. After fifty thousand years, there
were several races of the original Org in its membership. None of those were
still leaders -- yet the original viewpoint and policies remained. Position
and durability: Relay was now the main intermediate to the Magellanics, and
one of the few sites with any sort of link to the Beyond in Sculptor.
At Sjandra Kei, Relay's reputation had been fabulous. In her two years
of 'prenticeship, Ravna had come to realize that the truth exceeded the
reputation. Relay was in Middle Beyond; the Organization's only export was
the relay function and access to the local archive. Yet they imported the
finest biologicals and processing equipment from the High Beyond. The Relay
Docks were an extravagance that only the absolutely rich could indulge. They
stretched a thousand kilometers: bays, repair holds, transhipment centers,
parks, and playgrounds. Even at Sjandra Kei there were habitats far larger.
But the Docks were in no orbit. They floated a thousand kilometers above
Groundside on the largest agrav frame Ravna had ever seen. At Sjandra Kei
the annual income of an academician might pay for a square meter of agrav
fabric -- junk that might not last a year. Here there were millions of
hectares of the stuff, supporting billions of tonnes. Just replacements for
dead fabric required more High Beyond commerce than most star clusters could
command.
And now I have my own office here. Working directly for Grondr 'Kalir
had its perks. Ravna kicked back in her chair and stared across the central
sea. At the Docks' altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a
gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the
platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed
sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel,
stars and indigo sky above.
She had the surf cranked up this morning -- an easy matter of flexing
the agravs of the basin. It made a regular crashing against her beach. Even
thirty meters from the water there was a tang of salt in the air. Rows of
white tops marched off into the distance.
She eyed the figure that was trudging slowly up the beach toward her.
Just a few weeks ago she would never have dreamed this situation. Just a few
weeks ago she had been out at the archive, absorbed in the upgrade work,
happy to be involved with one of the largest databases on the Known Net. Now
... it was almost as if she had come full circle, back to her childhood
dreams of adventure. the only problem was, sometimes she felt like one of
the bad guys: Pham Nuwen was a living person, not something to be sold.
She stood and walked out to meet her red-haired visitor.
He wasn't carrying the sword and handgun of Grondr's fanciful
animation. Yet his clothes were the braided fabric of ancient adventure, and
he carried himself with lazy confidence. Since her meeting with Grondr, she
had looked up some anthropology from Old Earth. The red hair and the
eyefolds had been known there, though rarely in the same individual.
Certainly his smoky skin would have been remarkable to an inhabitant of
Earth. This fellow was, as much as herself, a product of post-terrestrial
evolution.
He stopped an arm's length away and gave her a lopsided grin. "You look
pretty human. Ravna Bergsndot?"
She smiled and nodded up at him. "Mr. Pham Nuwen?"
"Yes indeed. We seem both to be excellent guessers." He swept past her
into the shade of the inner office. Cocky fellow.
She followed him, unsure about protocol. You'd think with a fellow
human there would be no problems....
Actually, the interview went pretty smoothly. It was more than thirty
days since Pham Nuwen's resuscitation. Much of that time had been spent in
cram language sessions. The fellow must be damned bright; he already spoke
Triskweline trade talk with a folksy slickness. He really was rather cute.
Ravna had been away from Sjandra Kei for two years, and had another year of
her 'prenticeship to go. She'd been doing pretty well. She had many close
friends here, Egravan, Sarale. But just chatting with this fellow brought a
lot of the loneliness back. In some ways he was more alien than anything at
Relay ... and in some ways she wanted to just grab him and kiss his
confident grin away.
Grondr Vrinimikalir had been telling the truth about Pham Nuwen. The
guy was actually enthusiastic about the Org's plans for him! In theory, that
meant she could do her job with a clear conscience. In fact....
"Mr. Nuwen, my job is to orient you to your new world. I know you've
been exposed to some intense instruction the last few days, but there are
limits to how fast such knowledge can sink in."
The redhead smiled. "Call me Pham. Sure, I feel like an over-stuffed
bag. My sleep time is full of little voices. I've learned an awful lot
without experiencing anything. Worse, I've been a target for all this
'education'. It's a perfect setup if Vrinimi wants to trick me. That's why
I'm learning to use the local library. And that's why I insisted they find
someone like you." He saw the surprise on her face. "Ha! You didn't know
that. See, talking to a real person gives me a chance to see things that
aren't all planned ahead. Also, I've always been a pretty good judge of
human nature; I think I can read you pretty well." His grin showed he
understood just how irritating he was being.
Ravna looked up at the green petals of the beachtrees. Maybe this boob
deserved what he was getting into. "So you have great experience dealing
with people?"
"Given the limitations of the Slowness, I've been around, Ravna. I've
been around. I know I don't look it, but I'm sixty-seven years old
subjective. I thank your Organization for a fine job of thawing me out." He
tipped a non-existent hat in her direction. "My last voyage was more than a
thousand years objective. I was Programmer-at-Arms on a Qeng Ho longshot --
" His eyes abruptly widened, and he said something unintelligible. For a
moment he almost looked vulnerable.
Ravna reached a hand toward him. "Memory?"
Pham Nuwen nodded. "Damn. This is something I don't thank you people
for."
Pham Nuwen had been frozen in the aftermath of violent death, not as a
planned suspension. It was a near miracle that Vrinimi Org had been able to
bring him back at all -- at least with Middle Beyond technology. But memory
was the hardest thing. The chemical basis of memory does not survive chaotic
freezing well.
The problem was enough to shrink even Pham Nuwen's ego by a size or
two. Ravna took pity on him. "It's not likely that anything is completely
lost. You just have to find a different angle on some things."
"... Yes. I've been coached about that. Start with other memories; work
sideways toward what you can't remember straight on. Well ... it beats being
dead." Some of his jauntiness returned, but subdued to a really quite
charming level. They talked for long while as the redhead worked around the
points he couldn't "remember straight on".
And gradually Ravna came to feel something she had never expected in
connection with a Slow Zoner: awe. In one lifetime, Pham Nuwen had
accomplished virtually everything that was possible for a being in the
Slowness. All her life she had pitied the civilizations trapped down there.
They could never know the glory; they might never know the truth. Yet by
luck and skill and sheer strength of will, this fellow had leaped barrier
after barrier. Had Grondr known the truth when he pictured the redhead with
sword and slug gun? For Pham Nuwen really was a barbarian. He had been born
on a fallen colony world -- Canberra he called it. The place sounded much
like medieval Nyjora, though not matriarchal. He'd been the youngest child
of a king. He'd grown up with swords and poison and intrigue, living in
stone castles by a cold, cold sea. No doubt this littlest prince would have
ended up murdered -- or king of all -- if life had continued in the medieval
way. But when he was thirteen years old everything changed. A world that had
only legends of aircraft and radio was confronted by interstellar traders.
In a year of trading, Canberra's feudal politics was turned on its head.
"Qeng Ho had invested three ships in the expedition to Canberra. They
were pissed, thought we'd be at a higher level of technology. We couldn't
resupply them, so two stayed behind, probably turned my poor world inside
out. I left with the third -- a crazy hostage deal my father thought he was
putting over on them. I was lucky they didn't space me."
Qeng Ho consisted of several hundred ramscoop ships operating in a
volume hundreds of light-years across. Their vessels could reach almost a
third of the speed of light. They were mostly traders, occasionally
rescuers, even more rarely conquerors. When Pham Nuwen last knew them, they
had settled thirty worlds and were almost three thousand years old. It was
as extravagant a civilization as can ever exist in the Slowness.... And of
course, until Pham Nuwen was revived, no one in the Beyond had ever heard of
it. Qeng Ho was like a million other doomed civilizations, buried thousands
of light-years in the Slowness. Only by luck would they ever penetrate into
the Beyond, where faster-than-light travel was possible.
But for a thirteen-year-old boy born to swords and chain mail, the Qeng
Ho was more change than most living beings ever experience. In a matter of
weeks, he went from medieval lordling to starship cabin boy.
"At first they didn't know what to do with me. Figured on popping me
into cold storage and dumping me at the next stop. What can you make of a
kid who thinks there's one world and it's flat, who has spent his whole life
learning to whack about with a sword?" He stopped abruptly, as he did every
few minutes, when the stream of recollection ran into damaged territory.
Then his glance flicked out at Ravna, and his smile was as cocky as ever. "I
was one mean animal. I don't think civilized people realize what it's like
to grow up with your own aunts and uncles scheming to murder you, and you
training to get them first. In civilization I met bigger villains -- guys
who'd fry a whole planet and call it 'reconciliation' -- but for sheer
up-close treachery, you can't beat my childhood."
To hear Pham Nuwen tell it, only dumb luck saved the crew from his
scheming. In the years that followed, he learned to fit in, learned
civilized skills. Properly tamed, he could be an ideal ship master of the
Qeng Ho. And for many years he was. The Qeng Ho volume contained a couple of
other races, and a number of human-colonized worlds. At 0.3c, Pham spent
decades in coldsleep getting from star to star, then a year or two at each
port trying to make a profit with products and information that might be
lethally out-of-date. The reputation of the Qeng Ho was some protection.
"Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever" was the fleet's motto,
and they had lasted longer than most of their customers. Even religious
fanatics grew a little cautious when they thought about Qeng Ho retribution.
But more often it was the skill and deviousness of the shipmaster that saved
the day. And few were a match for the little boy in Pham Nuwen.
"I was almost the perfect skipper. Almost. I always wanted to see what
was beyond the space we had good records on. Every time I got really rich,
so rich I could launch my own subfleet -- I'd take some crazy chance and
lose everything. I was the yo-yo of the Fleet. One run I'd be captain of
five, the next I'd be pulling maintenance programming on some damn container
ship. Given how time stretches out with sublight commerce, there were whole
generations who thought I was a legendary genius -- and others who used my
name as a synonym for goofball."
He paused and his eyes widened in pleased surprise. "Ha! I remember
what I was doing there at the end. I was in the 'goofball' part of my cycle,
but it didn't matter. There was this captain of twenty who was even crazier
than I.... Can't remember her name. Her? Couldn't have been; I'd never serve
under a fem captain." He was almost talking to himself. "Anyway, this guy
was willing to bet everything on the sort of thing normal folks would argue
about over beer. He called his ship the, um, it translates as something like
'wild witless bird' -- that gives you the idea about him. He figured there
must be some really high-tech civilizations somewhere in the universe. The
problem was to find them. In a strange way, he had almost guessed about the
Zones. Only problem was, he wasn't crazy enough; he got one little thing
wrong. Can you guess what?"
Ravna nodded. Considering where Pham's wreck was found, it was obvious.
"Yeah. I'll bet it's an idea older than spaceflight: the 'elder races'
must be toward the galactic core, where stars are closer and there are black
hole exotica for power. He was taking his entire fleet of twenty. They'd
keep going till they found somebody or had to stop and colonize. This
captain figured success was unlikely in our lifetime. But with proper
planning we could end up in a close-packed region where it would be easy to
found a new Qeng Ho -- and it would proceed even further.
"Anyway, I was lucky to get aboard even as a programmer; this captain
knew all the wrong things about me."
The expedition lasted a thousand years, penetrating two hundred and
fifty light-years galactic inward. The Qeng Ho volume was closer to the
Bottom of the Slowness than Old Earth, and they were proceeding inwards from
there. Even so, it was plain bad luck that they encountered the edge of the
Deeps after only two hundred and fifty light-years. One after another, the
Wild Witless Bird lost contact with the other ships. Sometimes it happened
without warning, other times there was evidence of computer failure or gross
incompetence. The survivors saw a pattern, guessed that common components
were failing. Of course, no one connected the problems with the region of
space they were entering.
"We backed down from ram speeds, found a solar system with a
semi-habitable planet. We'd lost track of everybody else.... Just what we
did then isn't real clear to me." He gave a dry laugh. "We must have been
right at the edge, staggering around at about IQ 60. I remember fooling with
the life support system. That's probably what actually killed us." For a
moment he looked sad and bewildered. He shrugged. "And then I woke up in the
tender clutches of Vrinimi Org, here where faster-than-light travel is
possible ... and I can see the edge of Heaven itself."
Ravna didn't say anything for a moment. She looked across her beach
into the surf. They'd been talking a long time. The sun was peeking under
the tree petals, its light shifting across her office. Did Grondr realize
what he had here? Almost anything from the Slow Zone had collector's value.
People fresh from the Slowness were even more valuable. But Pham Nuwen might
be unique. He had personally experienced more than had some whole
civilizations, and ventured into the Deeps to boot. She understood now why
he looked to the Transcend and called it "Heaven". It wasn't entirely
naïveté, nor a failure in the Organization's education programs. Pham Nuwen
had already been through two transforming experiences, from pre-tech to
star- traveler, and star-traveler to Beyonder. Each was a jump almost beyond
imagination. Now he saw that another step was possible, and was perfectly
willing to sell himself to take it.
So why should I risk my job to change his mind? But her mouth was
living a life of its own. "Why not postpone the Transcend, Pham? Take some
time to understand what is here in the Beyond. You'd be welcome in almost
any civilization. And on human worlds you'd be the wonder of the age." A
glimpse of non-Nyjoran humanity. The local newsgroups at Sjandra Kei had
thought Ravna radically ambitious to take a 'prenticeship twenty thousand
light-years away. Coming back from it, she would have her pick of Full
Academician jobs on any of a dozen worlds. That was nothing compared to Pham
Nuwen; there were folks so rich they might give him a world if he would just
stay. "You could name your price."
The redhead's lazy smile broadened. "Ah, but you see, I've already
named my price, and I think Vrinimi can meet it."
I really wish I could do something about that smile, thought Ravna.
Pham Nuwen's ticket to the Transcend was based on a Power's sudden interest
in the Straumli perversion. This innocent's ego might end up smeared across
a million death cubes, running a million million simulations of human
nature.
Grondr called less than five minutes after Pham Nuwen's departure.
Ravna knew the Org would be eavesdropping, and she'd already told Grondr her
misgivings about this "selling" of a sophont. Nevertheless, she was a bit
nervous to see him.
"When is he actually going to leave for the Transcend?"
Grondr rubbed at his freckles. He didn't seem angry. "Not for ten or
twenty days. The Power that's negotiating for him is more interested in
looking at our archives and watching what's passing through Relay. Also ...
despite the human's enthusiasm for going, he's really quite cautious."
"Oh?"
"Yes. He's insisting on a library budget, and permission to roam
anywhere in the system. He's been chatting with random employees all over
the Docks. He was especially insistent about talking to you." Grondr's mouth
parts clicked in a smile. "Feel free to speak your mind to him. Basically,
he's tasting around for hidden poison. Hearing the worst from you should
make him trust us."
She was coming to understand Grondr's confidence. Damn but Pham Nuwen
had a thick head. "Yes sir. He's asked me to show him around the Foreign
Quarter tonight." As you well know.
"Fine. I wish the rest of the deal were going as smoothly." Grondr
turned so that only peripheral freckles were looking in her direction. He
was surrounded by status displays of the Org's communication and database
operations. From what she could see, things were remarkably busy. "Maybe I
should not bring this up, but it's just possible you can help.... Business
is very brisk." Grondr did not seem pleased to report the good news. "We
have nine civilizations from the Top of the Beyond that are bidding for wide
band data feeds. That we could handle. But this Power that sent a ship
here...."
Ravna interrupted almost without thinking, a breach that would have
horrified her a few days earlier. "Just who is it, by the way? Any chance
we're entertaining the Straumli Perversion?" The thought of that taking the
redhead was a chill.
"Not unless all the Powers are fooled, too. Marketing calls our current
visitor 'Old One'." He smiled. "That's something of a joke, but true even
so. We've known it for eleven years." No one really knew how long
Transcendent beings lived, but it was a rare Power that stayed communicative
for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something
different -- or really did die. There were a million explanations, thousands
that were allegedly from the Powers first hand. Ravna guessed that the true
explanation was the simplest one: intelligence is the handmaiden of
flexibility and change. Dumb animals can change only as fast as natural
evolution. Human equivalent races, once on their technological run-up, hit
the limits of their zone in a matter of a few thousand years. In the
Transcend, superhumanity can happen so fast that its creators are destroyed.
It wasn't surprising then that the Powers themselves were evanescent.
So calling an eleven-year Power "Old One" was almost reasonable.
"We believe that Old One is a variant on the Type 73 pattern. Such are
rarely malicious -- and we know from whom it Transcended. Just now it's
causing us major discomfort, though. For twenty days it has been
monopolizing an enormous and increasing percentage of Relay bandwidth. Since
its ship arrived, it's been all over the archive and our local nets. We've
asked Old One to send noncritical data by starship, but it refuses. This
afternoon was the worst yet. Almost five percent of Relay's capacity was
bound up in its service. And the creature is sending almost as much downlink
as it is receiving uplink."
That was weird, but, "It's still paying for the business, isn't it? If
Old One can pay top price, why do you care?"
"Ravna, we hope our Organization will be around for many years after
the Old One is gone. There is nothing it could offer us that would be good
through all that time." Ravna nodded. Actually, there were certain "magic"
automations that might work down here, but their long-term effectiveness
would be dubious. This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an
Applied Theology course. "Old One can easily top any bid from the Middle
Beyond. But if we give it all the services it demands, we'll be effectively
nonfunctional to the rest of our customers -- and they are the people we
must depend on in the future."
His image was replaced by an archive access report. Ravna was very
familiar with the format, and Grondr's complaint really hit home. The Known
Net was a vast thing, a hierarchical anarchy that linked hundreds of
millions of worlds. Yet even the main trunks had bandwidths like something
out of Earth's dawn age; a wrist dataset could do better on a local net.
That's why bulk access to the Archive was mostly local -- to media
freighters visiting the Relay system. But now ... during the last hundred
hours, remote access to the Archive, both by volume and by count, had been
higher than local! And ninety percent of those accesses were from a single
account -- Old One's.
Grondr's voice continued from behind the graphics. "We've got one
backbone transceiver dedicated to this Power right now.... Frankly, we can't
tolerate this for more than a few days; the ultimate expense is just too
great."
Grondr's face was back on the display. "Anyway, I think you can see
that the deal for the barbarian is really the least of our problems. The
last twenty days have brought more income than the last two years -- far
more than we can verify and absorb. We're endangered by our own success." He
made an ironic smile-frown.
They talked a few minutes about Pham Nuwen, and then Grondr rang off.
Afterwards, Ravna took a walk along her beach. The sun was well down toward
the aft horizon, and the sand was just pleasantly warm against her feet; the
Docks went round the planet once every twenty hours, circling the pole at
about forty degrees north latitude. She walked close to the surf, where the
sand was flat and wet. The mist off the sea was moist against her skin. The
blue sky just above the white-tops shaded quickly to indigo and black.
Specks of silver moved up there, agrav floaters bringing starships into the
Docks. The whole thing was so fabulously, unnecessarily expensive. Ravna was
by turns grossed out and bedazzled. Yet after two years at Relay, she was
beginning to see the point. Vrinimi Org wanted the Beyond to know that it
had the resources to handle whatever communication and archive demands might
be made on it. And they wanted the Beyond to suspect that there were hidden
gifts from the Transcend here, things that might make it more than a little
dangerous to invaders.
She stared into the spray, feeling it bead on her lashes. So Grondr had
the big problem right now: how do you tell a Power to take a walk? All Ravna
Bergsndot had to worry about was one overconfident twit who seemed hell-bent
on destroying himself. She turned and paralleled the water. Every third wave
it surged over her ankles.
She sighed. Pham Nuwen was beyond doubt a twit ... but what an awesome
one. Intellectually, she had always known that there was no difference in
the possible intelligence of Beyonders and the primitives of the Slowness.
Most automation worked better in the Beyond; ultralight communication was
possible. But you had to go to the Transcend to build truly superhuman
minds. So it shouldn't be surprising that Pham Nuwen was capable. Very
capable. He had picked up Triskweline with incredible ease. She had little
doubt that he was the master skipper he claimed. And to be a trader in the
Slowness, to risk centuries between the stars for a destination that might
have fallen from civilization or become deadly hostile to outsiders ... that
took courage that was hard to imagine. She could understand how he might
think going to the Transcend was just another challenge. He'd had less than
twenty days to absorb a whole new universe. That simply wasn't enough time
to understand that the rules change when the players are more than human.
Well, he still had a few days of grace. She would change his mind. And
after talking to Grondr just now, she wouldn't feel especially guilty about
doing it.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
The Foreign Quarter was actually about a third of the Docks. It abutted
the no-atmosphere periphery -- where ships actually docked -- and extended
inwards to a section of the central sea. Vrinimi Org had convinced a
significant number of races that this was a wonder of the Middle Beyond. In
addition to freight traffic there were tourists -- some of the wealthiest
beings in the Beyond.
Pham Nuwen had carte blanche to these amusements. Ravna took him
through the more spectacular ones, including an agrav hop over the Docks.
The barbarian was more impressed by their pocket space suits than by the
Docks. "I've seen structures bigger than that down in the Slowness." Not
hovering in a planetary gravity well, you haven't.
Pham Nuwen seemed to mellow as the evening progressed. At least his
comments became more perceptive, less edged. He wanted to see how real
traders lived in the Beyond, and Ravna showed him the bourses and the
traders' Local.
They ended up in The Wandering Company just after Docks midnight. This
was not Organization territory, but it was one of Ravna's favorite places, a
private dive that attracted traders from the Top to the Bottom. She wondered
how the decor would appeal to Pham Nuwen. The place was modeled as a meeting
lodge on some world of the Slow Zone. A three-meter model ramscoop hung in
the air over the main service floor. Blue-green drive fields glowed from the
ship's every corner and flange, and spread faintly among patrons sitting
below.
To Ravna the walls and floors were heavy timber, rough cut. People like
Egravan saw stone walls and narrow tunnels -- the sort of broodery his race
had maintained on new conquests of long ago. The trickery was optical -- not
some mental smudging -- and about the best that could be done in the Middle
Beyond.
Ravna and Pham walked between widely-spaced tables. The owners weren't
as successful with sound as with vision: the music was faint and changed
from table to table. Smells changed too, and were a little bit harder to
take. Air management was working hard to keep everyone healthy, if not
completely comfortable. Tonight the place was crowded. At the far end of the
service floor, the special-atmosphere nooks were occupied: low pressure,
high pressure, high NOx, aquaria. Some customers were vague blurs within
turbid atmospheres.
In some ways it might have been a port bar at Sjandra Kei. Yet ... this
was Relay. It attracted High Beyonders who would never come to backwaters
like Sjandra Kei. Most of the High Ones didn't look very strange;
civilizations at the Top were most often just colonies from below. But the
headbands she saw here were not jewelry. Mind-computer links aren't
efficient in the Middle Beyond, but most of the High Beyonders would not
give them up. Ravna started toward a group of banded tripods and their
machines. Let Pham Nuwen talk with creatures who teetered on the edge of
transsapience.
Surprisingly, he touched her arm, drawing her back. "Let's walk around
a little more." He was looking all around the hall, as if searching for a
familiar face. "Let's find some other humans first."
When holes showed in Pham Nuwen's cram-education, they were gapingly
wide. Ravna tried to keep her face serious. "Other humans? We're all there
is at Relay, Pham."
"But the friends you've been telling me about ... Egravan, Sarale?"
Ravna just shook her head. For a moment the barbarian looked
vulnerable.
Pham Nuwen had spent his life crawling at sublight between
human-colonized star systems. She knew that in all that life he had seen
only three non-human races. Now he was lost in a sea of alienness. She kept
her sympathy to herself; this one insight might affect the guy more than all
her arguing.
But the instant passed, and he was smiling again. "Even more an
adventure." They left the main floor and walked past special-atmosphere
nooks. "Lord, but Qeng Ho would love this."
No humans anywhere, and The Wandering Company was the homiest meeting
place she knew; many Org customers met only on the Net. She felt her own
homesickness welling up. On the second floor, a signet flag caught her eye.
She'd known something like it back at Sjandra Kei. She drew Pham Nuwen
across the floor, and started up the timbered stairs.
Out of the background murmur, she heard a high-pitched twittering. It
wasn't Triskweline, but the words made sense! By the Powers, it was
Samnorsk: "I do believe it's a Homo Sap! Over here, my lady." She followed
the sound to the table with the signet flag.
"May we sit with you?" she asked, savoring the familiar language.
"Please do." The twitterer looked like a small ornamental tree sitting
in a six-wheeled cart. The cart was marked with cosmetic stripes and
tassels; its 150-by-120-centimeter topside was covered with a cargo scarf in
the same pattern as the signet flag. The creature was a Greater Skroderider.
Its race traded through much of the Middle Beyond, including Sjandra Kei.
The Skroderider's high-pitched voice came from its voder. But speaking
Samnorsk, it sounded homier than anything she'd heard in a long time. Even
granting the mental peculiarities of Skroderiders, she felt a surge of
affectionate nostalgia, as if she had run into a old classmate in a far
city.
"My name is -- " the sound was the rustling of fronds, "but you can
easier call me Blueshell. It's nice to see a familiar face, hahaha."
Blueshell spoke the laughter as words. Pham Nuwen had sat down with Ravna,
but he understood not a word of Samnorsk and so the great reunion was lost
on him. The Rider switched to Triskweline and introduced his four
companions: another Skroderider, and three humanoids who seemed to like the
shadows. None of the humanoids spoke Samnorsk, but no one was more than one
translator hop from Triskweline.
The Skroderiders were owners/operators of a small interstellar
freighter, the Out of Band II. The humanoids were certificants for part of
the starship's current cargo. "My mate and I have been in the business
almost two hundred years. We have happy feelings for your race, my lady. Our
first runs were between Sjandra Kei and Forste Utgrep. Your people are good
customers and we scarcely ever have a shipment rot...." He wheeled his
skrode back from the table and then drove forward -- the equivalent of a
small bow.
All was not sweetness and light, however. One of the humanoids spoke.
The sounds could almost have come from a human throat, though they made no
sense. A moment passed as the house translator processed his words. Then the
broach on his jacket spoke in clear Triskweline: "Blueshell states you are
Homo sapiens. Know that you have our animosity. We are bankrupt,
near-stranded here by your race's evil creation. The Straumli Perversion."
The words sounded emotionless, but Ravna could see the creature's tense
posture, its fingers twisting at a drink bulb.
Considering his attitude, it probably wouldn't help to point out that
though she was human, Sjandra Kei was thousands of light-years from Straum.
"You came here from the Realm?" she asked the Skroderider.
Blueshell didn't answer immediately. That's the way it was with his
race; he was probably trying to remember who she was and what they were all
talking about. Then: "Yes, yes. Please do excuse my certificants' hostility.
Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial
Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants' High colony.
It was the usual arrangement: We're carrying a one-third xor of the pad.
Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three
parts would be xor'd together. The result could supply a dozen worlds'
crypto needs on the Net for -- "
Downstairs there was a commotion. Someone was smoking something a bit
too strong for the air scrubbers. Ravna caught a whiff, enough to shimmer
her vision. It had knocked out several patrons on the main level. Management
was counseling the offending customer. Blueshell made an abrupt noise. He
backed his skrode from the table and rolled to the railing. "Don't want to
be caught unawares. Some people can be so abrupt...." When nothing more came
of the incident, he returned. "Uh, where was I?" He was silent a moment,
consulting the short-term memory built into his skrode. "Yes, yes.... We
would become relatively rich if our plans work out. Unfortunately, we
stopped on Straum to drop off some bulk data." He pivoted on his rear four
wheels. "Surely that was safe? Straum is more than a hundred light-years
from their lab in the Transcend. Yet -- "
One of the certificants interrupted with loud gabble. The house
translator kicked in a moment later: "Yes. It should have been safe. We saw
no violence. Ship's recorders show that our safeness was not breached. Yet
now there are rumors. Net groups claim that Straumli Realm is owned by
perversion. Absurdity. Yet these rumors have crossed the Net to our
destination. Our cargo is not trusted, so our cargo is ruined: now it is
only a few grams of data medium carrying random -- " In the middle of the
flat-voiced translation, the humanoid lunged out of the shadows. Ravna had a
glimpse of a jaw edged with razor-sharp gums. He threw his drink bulb at the
table in front of her.
Pham Nuwen's hand flashed out, snatching the drink before it hit --
before she had quite realized what was happening. The redhead came slowly to
his feet. From the shadows, the two other humanoids came to their feet and
moved toward their friend. Pham Nuwen didn't say a word. He set the bulb
carefully down and leaned just slightly toward the other, his hands relaxed
yet bladelike. Cheap fiction talks about "looks of deadly menace". Ravna had
never expected to see the real thing. But the humanoids saw it too. They
tugged their friend gently back from the table. The loudmouth did not
resist, but once beyond Pham's reach he erupted in a barrage of squeals and
hisses that left the house translator speechless. He made a sharp gesture
with three fingers, and shut up. The three swept silently down the stairs
and away.
Pham Nuwen sat down, his gray eyes calm and untroubled. Maybe he did
have something to be arrogant about! Ravna looked across at the two
Skroderiders. "I'm sorry your cargo lost value."
Most of Ravna's past contacts had been with Lesser Skroderiders, whose
reflexes were only slightly augmented beyond their sessile heritage. Had
these two even noticed the interruption? But Blueshell answered immediately,
"Do not apologize. Ever since our arrival, those three have been
complaining. Contract partners or not, I'm very tired of them." He lapsed
into potted-plant mode.
After a moment, the other Rider -- Greenstalk, was it? -- spoke.
"Besides, our commercial situation may not be a complete failure. I am sure
the other thirds of the shipment went nowhere near Straumli Realm." That was
the usual procedure anyway: each part of the shipment was carried by a
different company, each taking a very different path. If the other thirds
could be certified, the crew of the Out of Band might not come away
empty-handed. "In -- in fact, there may be a way we can get full
certification. True, we were at Straumli Main, but -- "
"How long ago did you leave?"
"Six hundred and fifty hours ago. About two hundred hours after they
dropped off the Net."
It suddenly dawned on Ravna that she was talking to something like
eyewitnesses. After thirty days, the Threats news was still dominated by the
events at Straum. The consensus was that a Class Two perversion had been
created -- even Vrinimi Org believed that. Yet it was still mainly
guesswork.... And here she was talking to beings who had actually been
there. "You don't think the Straumers created a perversion?"
It was Blueshell who replied. "Sigh," he said. "Our certificants deny
it, but I see a problem of conscience here. We did witness strangeness on
Straum.... Have you ever encountered artificial immune systems? The ones
that work in the Middle Beyond are more trouble than they're worth, so
perhaps not. I noticed a real change in certain officers of the Crypto
Authority right after the Straumli victory. It was as if they were suddenly
part of a poorly calibrated automation, as if they were somebody's, um,
fingers.... No one can doubt they were playing in the Transcend. They found
something up there; a lost archive. But that is not the point." He stopped
talking for a long moment; Ravna almost thought he was finished. "You see,
just before leaving Straumli Main, we -- "
But now Pham Nuwen was talking too. "That's something I've been
wondering about. Everybody talks as though this Straumli Realm was doomed
the moment they began research in the Transcend. Look. I've played with
bugged software and strange weapons. I know you can get killed that way. But
it looks like the Straumers were careful to put their lab far away. They
were building something that could go very wrong, but apparently it was a
previously-tried experiment -- like just about everything Up Here. They
could stop the work any time it deviated from the records, right up to the
end. So how could they screw up so bad?"
The question stopped the Skroderider in its tracks. You didn't need a
doctorate in Applied Theology to know the answer. Even the damn Straumers
should have known the answer. But given Pham Nuwen's background, it was a
reasonable question. Ravna kept her mouth shut. The Skroderider's very
alienness might be more convincing to Pham than another lecture from her.
Blueshell dithered for a moment, no doubt using his skrode to help
assemble his arguments. When he finally spoke, he didn't seem irritated by
the interruption. "I hear several misconceptions, My Lady Pham." He seemed
to use the old Nyjoran honorific pretty indiscriminately. "Have you been
into the archive at Relay?"
Pham said yes. Ravna guessed he'd never been past the beginners' front
end.
"Then you know that an archive is a fundamentally vaster thing than the
database on a conventional local net. For practical purposes the big ones
can't even be duplicated. The major archives go back millions of years, have
been maintained by hundreds of different races -- most now extinct or
Transcended into Powers. Even the archive at Relay is a jumble, so huge that
indexing systems are laid on top of indexing systems. Only in the Transcend
could such a mass be well organized and even then only the Powers could
understand it."
"So?"
"There are thousands of archives in the Beyond -- tens of thousands if
you count the ones that have fallen into disrepair or dropped off the Net.
Along with unending trivia, they contain important secrets and important
lies. There are traps and snares." Millions of races played with the advice
that filtered unsolicited across the Net. Tens of thousands had been burned
thereby. Sometimes the damage was relatively minor, good inventions that
weren't quite right for the target environment. Sometimes it was malicious,
viruses that would jam a local net so thoroughly that a civilization must
restart from scratch. Where-Are-They-Now and Threats carried stories of
worse tragedies: planets kneedeep in replicant goo, races turned brainless
by badly programmed immune systems.
Pham Nuwen was wearing his skeptical expression. "Just test the stuff
at a safe remove. Be prepared for local disasters."
That would have brought most explanations to a stop. Ravna had to
admire the Skroderider: he paused, retreated to still more elementary terms.
"True, simple caution can prevent many disasters. And if your lab is in the
Middle or Low Beyond, such caution is all that is really needed -- no matter
how sophisticated the threat. But we all understand the nature of the
Zones...." Ravna had virtually no feel for Rider body language, but she
would have sworn that Blueshell was watching the barbarian expectantly,
trying to gauge the depth of Pham's ignorance.
The human nodded impatiently.
Blueshell continued, "In the Transcend, truly sophisticated equipment
can operate, devices substantially smarter than anyone down here. Of course,
almost any economic or military competition can be won by the side with
superior computing resources. Such can be had at the Top of the Beyond and
in the Transcend. Races are always migrating there, hoping to build their
utopias. But what do you do when your new creations may be smarter than you
are? It happens that there are limitless possibilities for disaster, even if
an existing Power does not cause harm. So there are unnumbered recipes for
safely taking advantage of the Transcend. Of course they can't be
effectively examined except in the Transcend. And run on devices of their
own description, the recipes themselves become sentient."
Understanding was beginning to glimmer across Pham Nuwen's face.
Ravna leaned forward, caught the redhead's attention. "There are
complex things in the archives. None of them is sentient, but some have the
potential, if only some naive young race will believe their promises. We
think that's what happened to Straumli Realm. They were tricked by
documentation that claimed miracles, tricked into building a transcendent
being, a Power -- but one that victimizes sophonts in the Beyond." She
didn't mention how rare such perversion was. The Powers were variously
malevolent, playful, indifferent -- but virtually all of them had better
uses for their time than exterminating cockroaches in the wild.
Pham Nuwen rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Okay, I guess I see. But I get
the feeling this is common knowledge. If it's this deadly, how did the
Straumli bunch get taken in?"
"Bad luck and criminal incompetence," the words popped out of her with
surprising force. She hadn't realized she was so bent by the Straumli thing;
somewhere inside, her old feelings for Straumli Realm were still alive.
"Look. Operations in the High Beyond and in the Transcend are dangerous.
Civilizations up there don't last long, but there will always be people who
try. Very few of the threats are actively evil. What happened to the
Straumers.... They ran across this recipe advertising wondrous treasure.
Quite possibly it had been lying around for millions of years, a little too
risky for other folks to try. You're right, the Straumers knew the dangers."
But it was a classic situation of balancing risks and choosing wrong.
Perhaps a third of Applied Theology was about how to dance near the flame
without getting incinerated. No one knew the details of the Straumli
debacle, but she could guess them from a hundred similar cases:
"So they set up a base in the Transcend at this lost archive -- if
that's what it was. They began implementing the schemes they found. You can
be sure they spent most of their time watching it for signs of deception. No
doubt the recipe was a series of more or less intelligible steps with a
clear takeoff point. The early stages would involve computers and programs
more effective than anything in the Beyond -- but apparently well-behaved."
"... Yeah. Even in the Slowness, a big program can be full of
surprises."
Ravna nodded. "And some of these would be near or beyond human
complexity. Of course, the Straumers would know this and try to isolate
their creations. But given a malign and clever design ... it should be no
surprise if the devices leaked onto the lab's local net and distorted the
information there. From then on, the Straumer's wouldn't have a chance. The
most cautious staffers would be framed as incompetent. Phantom threats would
be detected, emergency responses demanded. More sophisticated devices would
be built, and with fewer safeguards. Conceivably, the humans were killed or
rewritten before the Perversion even achieved transsapience."
There was a long silence. Pham Nuwen looked almost chastened. Yeah.
There's a lot you don't know, Buddy. Think on what Old One might have
planned for you.
Blueshell bent a tendril to taste a brown concoction that smelled like
seaweed. "Well told, My Lady Ravna. But there is one difference in the
present situation. It may be good fortune, and very important.... You see,
just before leaving Straumli Main, we attended a beach party among the
Lesser Riders. They had been little affected by events to that point; many
hadn't even noticed the destruction of independence at Straum. With luck,
they may be the last enslaved." His squeaky voice lowered an octave,
trailing into silence. "Where was I? Yes, the party. There was one fellow
there, a bit more lively than the average. Somewhere years past, he had
bonded with a traveler in a Straumli news service. Now he was acting as a
clandestine data drop, so humble that he wasn't even listed in that
service's own net....
"Anyway, the researchers at the Straumli lab -- a few of them at least
-- were not so incautious as you say. They suspected a perverse runaway, and
were determined to sabotage it."
This was news, but -- "Doesn't look like they had much success, does
it?"
"I am nodding agreement. They did not prevent it, but they did plan to
escape the laboratory planet with two starships. And they did get word of
their attempt into channels that ended with my acquaintance at the beach
party. And here is the important part: At least one of these ships was to
carry away some final elements of the Perversion's recipe -- before they
were incorporated into the design."
"Surely there were backups -- " began Pham Nuwen.
Ravna waved him silent. There had been enough grade-school explanations
for one night. This was incredible. She'd been following the news about
Straumli Realm as much as anyone. The Realm was the first High daughter
colony of Sjandra Kei; it was horrifying to see it destroyed. But nowhere in
Threats had there been even a rumor of this: the Perversion not whole? "If
this is true, then the Straumers may have a chance. It all depends on the
missing parts of the design document."
"Just so. And of course the humans realized this too. They planned to
head straight for the Bottom of the Beyond, rendezvous there with their
accomplices from Straum."
Which -- considering the ultimate magnitude of the disaster -- would
never happen. Ravna leaned back, oblivious of Pham Nuwen for the first time
in many hours. Most likely both ships had been destroyed by now. If not --
well, the Straumers had been at least half-smart, heading for the Bottom. If
they had what Blueshell thought, the Perversion would be very interested in
finding them. It was no wonder Blueshell and Greenstalk hadn't announced
this on the news groups. "So you know where they were going to rendezvous?"
she said softly.
"Approximately."
Greenstalk burred something at him.
"Not in ourselves," he said. "The coordinates are in the safeness at
our ship. But there is more. The Straumers had a backup plan if the
rendezvous failed. They intended to signal Relay with their ship's
ultrawave."
"Now wait. Just how big is this ship?" Ravna was no physical-layer
engineer, but she knew that Relay's backbone transceivers were actually
swarms of antenna elements scattered across several light years, each
element ten-thousand kilometers across.
Blueshell rolled forward and back, a quick gesture of agitation. "We
don't know, but it's nothing exceptional. Unless you're looking precisely at
it with a large antenna, you'd never detect it from here."
Greenstalk added, "We think that was part of their plan, though it is
desperation on top of desperation. Since we came to Relay, we've been
talking to the Org -- "
"Discreetly! Quietly!" Blueshell put in abruptly.
"Yes. We've asked the Organization to listen for this ship. I'm afraid
we haven't talked to the right people. No one seems to put much credence in
us. After all, the story is ultimately from a Lesser Rider," Yeah. What
could they know that was under a hundred years old? "What we're asking would
normally be a great expense, and apparently prices are especially high right
now."
Ravna tried to curb her enthusiasm. If she had read this in a
newsgroup, it would've been just one more interesting rumor. Why should she
boggle just because she was getting it face-to-face? By the Powers, what
irony. Hundreds of customers from the Top and the Transcend -- even Old One
-- were saturating Relay's resources with their curiosity about the Straumli
debacle. What if the answer had been sitting in front of them, suppressed by
the very eagerness of their investigation? "Just who have you been talking
to? Never mind, never mind." Maybe she should just go to Grondr 'Kalir with
the story. "I think you should know that I am a -- " very minor! "--
employee of the Vrinimi Organization. I may be able to help."
She had expected some surprise at this sudden good luck. Instead there
was a pause. Apparently Blueshell had lost his place in the conversation.
Finally Greenstalk spoke. "I am blushing.... You see, we knew that.
Blueshell looked you up in the employees' directory; you are the only human
in the Org. You're not in Customer Contact, but we thought that if we
chanced upon you, so to speak, you might give us a kindly hearing."
Blueshell's tendrils rustled together sharply. Irritation? Or had he
finally caught up to the conversation? "Yes. Well, since we are all being so
frank, I suppose we should confess that this might even benefit us. If the
refugee ship can prove that the Perversion is not a full Class Two, then
perhaps we can convince our buyers that our cargo has not been compromised.
If they only knew, my certificant friends would be groveling at your feet,
my lady Ravna."
They stayed at The Wandering Company until well past midnight. Business
picked up at the circadian peak of some of the new arrivals. Floor and table
shows were raucous all around. Pham's eyes flickered this way and that,
taking it all in. But above all he seemed fascinated by Blueshell and
Greenstalk. The two were starkly nonhuman, in some ways even strange as
aliens go. Skroderiders were one of the very few races that had achieved
long- term stability in the Beyond. Speciation had long ago occurred,
varieties heading outward or becoming extinct. And still there were some who
matched their ancient skrodes, a unique balance of outlook and machine
interface that was more than a billion years old. But Blueshell and
Greenstalk were also traders with much of the outlook that Pham Nuwen had
known in the Slowness. And though Pham acted as ignorant as ever, there was
new diplomacy in him. Or maybe the awesomeness of the Beyond was finally
getting through his thick skull. He couldn't have asked for better drinking
buddies. As a race, the Skroderiders preferred lazy reminiscence to almost
any activity. Once delivered of their critical message, the two were quite
content to talk of their life in the Beyond, to explain things in whatever
detail the barbarian could wish. The razor-jawed certificants stayed well
lost.
Ravna got a mild buzz on, and watched the three talk shop. She smiled
to herself. In a way, she was the outsider now, the person who had never
done. Blueshell and Greenstalk had been all over, and some of their stories
sounded wild even to her. Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted,
actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters. Two
of these three might be mistaken for potted trees on hotcarts, and the third
was unlike any human in her life. Their fluency was in an artificial
language, and two of the "voices" were squawky raspings. Yet ... after a few
minutes' listening, their personalities seemed to float in her mind's eye,
more interesting than many of her school chums, but not that different. The
two Skroderiders were mates. She hadn't thought that could count for much;
among Riders, sex amounted to scarcely more than being next-door neighbors
at the right time of year. Yet there was deep affection here. Greenstalk
especially seemed a loving personality. She (he?) was shy yet stubborn, with
a kind of honesty that might be a major handicap in a trader. Blueshell made
up for that failing. He (she?) could be glib and talkative, quite capable of
maneuvering things his way. Underneath, Ravna glimpsed a compulsive
personality, uncomfortable with his own sneakiness, ultimately grateful when
Greenstalk reined him in.
And what of Pham Nuwen? Yes, what's the inner being you see there? In
an odd way, he was more of a mystery. The arrogant boob of this afternoon
seemed to be mostly invisible tonight. Maybe it had been a cover for
insecurity. The fellow had been born in a male-dominated culture, virtually
the opposite of the matriarchy that all Beyonder humanity descended from.
Underneath the arrogance, a very nice person might be living. Then there was
the way he had faced down razor-jaw. And the way he was drawing out the
Skroderiders. It occurred to Ravna that after a lifetime of reading romantic
fiction, she had run into her first hero.
It was after 02:30 when they left The Wandering Company. The sun would
be rising across the bow horizon in less than five hours. The two
Skroderiders came outside to see them off. Blueshell had switched back to
Samnorsk to regale Ravna with a story of his last visit to Sjandra Kei --
and remind her to ask about the refugee ship.
The Skroderiders dwindled beneath them as Ravna and Pham rose into the
thinning air and headed toward the residential towers.
The two humans didn't say anything for a couple of minutes. It was even
possible that Pham Nuwen was impressed by the view. They were passing over
gaps in the brightly lit Docks, places where they could see through the
parks and concourses to the surface of Groundside a thousand kilometers
below. The clouds there were whorls of dark on dark.
Ravna's residence was at the outer edge of the Docks. Here the air
fountains were of no use; her apartment tower rose into frank vacuum. They
glided down to her balcony, trading their suits' atmosphere for the
apartment's. Ravna's mouth was leading a life of its own, explaining how the
residence was what she'd been assigned when she worked at the archive, that
it is was nothing compared to her new office. Pham Nuwen nodded,
quiet-faced. There were none of the smart remarks of their earlier tours.
She babbled on, and then they were inside and.... She shut up, and they
just looked at each other. In a way, she'd wanted this clown ever since
Grondr's silly animation. But it wasn't till this evening at The Wandering
Company that she'd felt right about bringing him home with her. "Well, I, uh
..." So. Ravna, the ravening princess. Where is your glib tongue now?
She settled for reaching out, putting her hand on his. Pham Nuwen
smiled back, shy too, by the Powers! "I think you have a nice place," he
said.
"I've decorated it Techno-Primitive. Being stuck at the edge of the
Docks has its points: The natural view isn't messed up by city lights. Here,
I'll show you." She doused the lights and pulled the curtains aside. The
window was a natural transparency, looking out from the edge of the Docks.
The view tonight should be terrific. On the ride from The Company, the sky
had been awfully dark. The in-system factories must be off line or hidden
behind Groundside. Even ship traffic seemed sparse.
She went back to stand by Pham. The window was a vague rectangle across
her vision. "You have to wait a minute for your eyes to adjust. There's no
amplification at all." The curve of Groundside was clear now, clouds with
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
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
about it. If the mantis pack had not been surprised, if Steel's troops had
been any less aggressive ... it would have been the end of the world.
Steel staggered to the outer hatch, his fears coming louder and louder
off the walls. Even so, he paused a moment in the shadows and the screams.
When his members trooped down the stairs, he moved calmly, every jacket
neatly in place. Soon enough his advisors would know the danger, but they
would never see fear in him. He walked lightly across the steaming turf, out
from under the hull. But even he could not resist a quick look across the
sky. This was one ship, one pack of aliens. It had had the misfortune of
running into the Movement. Even so, its defeat had been partly luck. How
many other ships would land, had already landed? Was there time for him to
learn from this victory?
Steel's mind returned to the present, to his eyrie lookout above the
castle. That first encounter with the ship was many tendays past. There was
still a threat, but now he understood it better, and -- as was true of all
great threats -- it held great promise.
On the rampart, Flenser-in-Waiting slid through the deepening twilight.
Steel's eyes followed the pack as it walked beneath the torches, and one by
one disappeared down stairs. There was an awful lot of the Master in that
fragment; it had understood many things about the alien landing before
anyone else.
Steel took one last look across the darkening hills as he turned and
started down the spiral stair. It was a long, cramped climb; the lookout sat
atop a forty-foot tower. The stair was barely fifteen inches wide, the
ceiling less that thirty inches above the steps. Cold stone pressed in from
all around, so close that there were no echoes to confuse thought -- yet
also so close that the mind was squeezed into a long thread. Climbing the
spiral required a twisting, strung-out posture that left any attacker easy
prey for a defender in the eyrie. Such was military architecture. For Steel,
crawling the cramped dark was pleasant exercise.
The stairs opened onto a public hallway, ten feet across with back-off
nooks every fifty feet. Shreck and a bodyguard were waiting for him.
"I have the latest from Woodcarvers," said Shreck. He was holding
sheets of silkpaper.
Losing the other alien to Woodcarvers had once seemed a major blow.
Only gradually had he realized how well it could work out. He had
Woodcarvers infiltrated. At first he'd intended to have the other alien
killed; it would have been easy to do. But the information that trickled
north was interesting. There were some bright people at Woodcarvers. They
were coming up with insights that had slipped past Steel and the Master --
the fragment of the Master. So. In effect, Woodcarvers had become Steel's
second alien laboratory, and the Movement's enemies were serving him like
any other tool. The irony was irresistible.
"Very good, Shreck. Take it to my den. I'll be there shortly." Steel
waved the whitejackets into a back-up nook and swept past him. Reading the
report over brandy would be a pleasant reward for the day's work. In the
meantime, there were other duties and other pleasures.
The Master had begun building Hidden Island Castle more than a century
earlier; it was growing yet. In the oldest foundations, where an ordinary
ruler might put dungeons, were the Flenser's first laboratories. Many could
be mistaken for dungeons -- and were by their inhabitants.
Steel reviewed all the labs at least once a tenday. Now he swept
through the lowest levels. Crickers fled before the light of his guard's
torches. There was a smell of rotting meat. Steel's paws skidded where
slickness lay upon the stone. Holes were dug in the floor at regular
intervals. Each could hold a single member, its legs jammed tight to its
body. Each was covered by a lid with tiny air holes. It took the average
member about three days to go mad in such isolation. The resulting "raw
material" could be used to build blank packs. Generally, they weren't much
more than vegetables, but then that was all the Movement asked of some. And
sometimes remarkable things came from these pits: Shreck for instance.
Shreck the Colorless, some called him. Shreck the stolid. A pack who was
beyond pain, beyond desire. Shreck's was the loyalty of clockwork, but built
from flesh and blood. He was no genius, but Steel would have given an
eastern province for five more of him. And the promise of more such
successes made Steel use the isolation pits again and again. He had recycled
most of the wrecks from the ambush that way....
Steel climbed back to higher levels, where the really interesting
experiments were undertaken. The world regarded Hidden Island with
fascinated horror. They had heard of the lower levels. But most didn't
realize what a small part those dark spaces played in the Movement's
science. To properly dissect a soul, you need more than benches with blood
gutters. The results from the lower levels were simply the first steps in
Flenser's intellectual quest. There were great questions in the world,
things that had bothered packs for thousands of years. How do we think? Why
do we believe? Why is one pack a genius and another an oaf? Before Flenser,
philosophers argued them endlessly and never got closer to the truth. Even
Woodcarver had pranced around the issues, unwilling to give up her
traditional ethics. Flenser was prepared to get the answers. In these labs,
nature itself was under interrogation.
Steel walked across a chamber one hundred yards wide, with a roof
supported by dozens of stone pillars. On every side there were dark
partitions, slate walls mounted on tiny wheels. The cavern could be blocked
off, maze-like, into any pattern. Flenser had experimented with all the
postures of thought. In the centuries before him, there had been only a few
effective postures: the instinctive heads together, the ring sentry, various
work postures. Flenser had tried dozens more: stars, double rings, grids.
Most were useless and confusing. In the star, only a single member could
hear all the others, and each of those could only hear the one. In effect,
all thought had to pass through the hub member. The hub could contribute
nothing rational, yet all its misconceptions passed uncorrected to the rest.
Drunken foolishness resulted.... Of course, that experiment was reported to
the outside world.
But at least one of the others -- still secret -- worked strangely
well: Flenser posted eight packs around the floor and on temporary
platforms, blocked them from each another with the slate partitions, and
then put members from each pack in connection with their counterparts in
three others. In a sense, he created a pack of eight packs. Steel was still
experimenting with that. If the connectors were sufficiently compatible (and
that was the hard part), the resulting creature was far smarter than a ring
sentry. In most ways it was not as bright as a single heads-together pack,
yet sometimes it had striking insights. Before he left for the Long Lakes,
the Master had developed a plan to rebuild the castle's main hall so council
sessions could be conducted in this posture. Steel hadn't pursued that idea;
it seemed just a bit too risky. Steel's domination of others was not quite
as complete as Flenser's had been.
No matter. There were other, far more significant, projects. The rooms
ahead were the true heart of the Movement. Steel's soul had been born in
these rooms; all of Flenser's greatest creations had begun here. During the
last five years, Steel had continued the tradition ... and improved upon it.
He walked down the hall that linked the separate suites. Each bore its
number in inlaid gold. At each he opened a door and stepped partway through.
His staff left their report on the previous tenday just inside. Steel
quickly read each one, then poked a nose over the balcony to look at the
experiment within. The balconies were well-padded, and screened; it was easy
to observe without being seen.
Flenser's one weakness (in Steel's opinion) was his desire to create
the superior being. The Master's confidence was so immense, he believed that
any such success could be applied to his own soul. Steel had no such
illusions. It was a commonplace that teachers are surpassed by their
creations -- pupils, fission-children, adoptions, whatever. He, Steel, was a
perfect illustration of this, though the Master didn't know it yet.
Steel had determined to create beings that would each be superior in
some single way -- while flawed and malleable in others. In the Master's
absence, he had begun a number of experiments. Steel worked from scratch,
identifying inheritance lines independent of pack membership. His agents
purchased or stole pups that might have potential. Unlike Flenser, who
usually melded pups into existing packs in an approximation of nature, Steel
made his totally newborn. His puppy packs had no memories or fragments of
soul; Steel had total control from the beginning.
Of course, most such constructions quickly died. The pups had to be
parted from their wet nurses before they began to participate in the adult's
consciousness. The resulting pack was taught entirely in speech and written
language. All inputs could be controlled.
Steel stopped before door number thirty-three: Experiment Amdiranifani,
Mathematical Excellence. It was not the only attempt in this direction, but
it was by far the most successful. Steel's agents had searched the Movement
for packs with ability for abstraction. They had gone further: the world's
most famous mathematician lived in the Long Lakes Republic. The pack had
been preparing to fission; she had several puppies by herself and a
mathematically talented lover. Steel had had the pups taken. They matched
his other acquisitions so well that he decided to make an eightsome. If
things worked out, it might be beyond all nature in its intelligence.
Steel motioned his guard to shield the torches. He opened door
thirty-three and soft-toed one member to the edge of the balcony. He looked
down, carefully silencing that member's fore-tympanum. The skylight was dim,
but he could see the pups huddled together ... with its new friend. The
mantis. Serendipity, that was all he could call this, the reward that comes
to a researcher who labors long enough, carefully enough. He had had two
problems. The first had been growing for a year: Amdiranifani was slowly
fading, its members falling into the usual autism of wholly newborn packs.
The second was the captured alien; that was an enormous threat, an enormous
mystery, an enormous opportunity. How to communicate with it? Without
communication, the possibilities for manipulation were very limited.
Yet in a single blind stroke, an incompetent Servant had shown the way
to solve both problems. Now that his eyes were adjusted to the dimness,
Steel could see the alien beneath the pile of puppies. When first he'd heard
that the creature had been put in with an experiment, Steel had been enraged
beyond thought; the Servant who made the mistake had been recycled. But the
days passed. Experiment Amdiranifani began showing more liveliness than any
time since its pups were weaned. It quickly became obvious -- from
dissecting the other aliens, and observing this one -- that mantis folk did
not live in packs. Steel had a complete alien.
The alien moved in its sleep, and made a low-pitched mouth noise; it
was totally incapable of any other kind of sound. The pups shifted to fit
the new position. They were sleeping too, vaguely thinking among themselves.
The low end of their sounds was a perfect imitation of the alien.... And
that was the greatest coup of all. Experiment Amdiranifani was learning the
alien's speech. To the pack of newborns this was simply another form of
interpack talk, and apparently its mantis friend was more interesting than
the tutors who appeared on these balconies. The Flenser Fragment claimed it
was the physical contact, that the pups were reacting to the alien as a
surrogate parent, thoughtless though the alien was.
It really didn't matter. Steel brought another head to the edge of the
balcony. He stood quietly, neither member thinking directly at the other.
The air smelled faintly of puppies and mantis sweat. These two were the
Movement's greatest treasure: the key to survival and more. By now, Steel
knew the flying ship was not part of an invasion fleet. Their visitors were
more like ill-prepared refugees. There had been no word of other landings,
and the Movement's spies were spread far.
It had been a close thing, winning against the aliens. Their single
weapon had killed most of a regiment. In the proper jaws, such weapons could
defeat armies. He had no doubt the ship contained more powerful killing
machines -- ones that still functioned. Wait and watch, Steel counseled
himself. Let Amdiranifani show the levers that could control this alien. The
entire world would be the prize.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Sometimes Mom used to say that something was "more fun than a barrel
full of puppies." Jefri Olsndot had never had more than one pet at a time,
and only once had that been a dog. But now he understood what she meant.
From the very first day, even when he had been so tired and scared, he had
been entranced by the eight puppies. And they by him. They were all over
him, pulling at his clothes, unfastening his shoes, sitting on his lap, or
just running around him. Three or four were always staring at him. Their
eyes were completely brown or pink, and seemed large for their heads. From
the beginning the puppies had mimicked him. They were better than Straumli
songbirds; anything he said, they could echo -- or play back later. And when
he cried, often the puppies would cry too, and cuddle around him.
There were other dogs, big ones that wore clothes and entered the room
through doorways high up on the walls. They lowered food into the room,
sometimes making strange noises. But the food tasted awful, and they didn't
respond to Jefri's screaming even by mimicking him.
Two days had passed, then a week. Jefri had investigated everything in
the room. It wasn't really a dungeon; it was too big. And besides, prisoners
don't get pets. He understood that this world was uncivilized, not part of
the Realm, perhaps not even on the Net. If Mom or Dad or Johanna weren't
nearby, it was possible that there was no one here to teach the dogs to
speak Samnorsk! Then it would be up to Jefri Olsndot to teach the dogs and
find his family. Now when the white-jacketed dogs came onto the corner
balconies, Jefri shouted questions at them. It didn't help very much. Even
the one with red stripes didn't respond. But the puppies did! They shouted
right along with Jefri, sometimes echoing his words, sometimes making
nonsense sounds.
It didn't take Jefri long to realize that the puppies were driven by a
single mind. When they ran around him, some would always sit a little way
off, their graceful necks arching this way and that -- and the runners
seemed to know exactly what the others saw. He couldn't hide things behind
his back if there was even one of them to alert the others. For a while he
thought they were somehow talking to each other. But it was more than that:
when he watched them unfasten his shoes or draw a picture -- the heads and
mouths and paws cooperated so perfectly, like the fingers on a person's
hands. Jefri didn't reason things out so explicitly; but over a period of
days he came to think of all the puppies together as a single friend. At the
same time he noticed that the puppies was mixing up his words -- and
sometimes making new meanings.
"You me play." The words came out like a cheap voice splice, but they
generally preceded a mad game of tag all around the furniture.
"You me picture." The slate board covered the lowest meter of the wall,
all around the room. It was a display device like Jefri had never seen in
his life: dirty, imprecise, imperfectly deletable, unstorable. Jefri loved
it. His face and hands, and most of Puppies' lips, got covered with chalk
stains. They drew each other, and themselves. Puppies didn't draw neat
pictures like Jefri's; Puppies' dog figures had big heads and paws, with the
bodies all smudged together. When he drew Jefri, the hands were always big,
each finger carefully drawn.
Jefri drew his family and tried to make Puppies understand.
Day by day, the sunlight circled higher on the walls. Sometimes the
room was dark now. At least once a day, packs came to talk to Puppies. This
was one of the few things which could pull the little ones away from Jefri.
Puppies would sit below the balconies, screeching and croaking at the
adults. It was a school class! They'd lower scrolls for him to look at, and
retrieve ones he had marked.
Jefri sat quietly and watched the lessons. He fidgeted, but he didn't
shout at the teachers anymore. Just a little longer, and he and Puppies
would really be talking. Just a little longer and Puppies could find out for
him where Mom and Dad and Johanna were.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it
works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all. Once
Amdiranifani was fluent in the mantis language, Steel had him explain about
the "tragic death" of Jefri's parents and brood-sibling. The Flenser
Fragment had argued against it, but Steel wanted quick and unquestioned
control.
Now it seemed that the Fragment might have been right; at least he
should have held out the hope that the brood-sibling lived. Steel looked
solemnly at the Amdiranifani Experiment. "How can we help?"
The young pack looked up trustingly. "Jefri is so terribly upset about
his parents and sister." Amdiranifani was using mantis words a lot, often
unnecessarily: sister instead of brood-sibling. "He hasn't been eating much.
He doesn't want to play. It makes me very sad."
Steel kept watch on the far balcony. The Flenser Fragment was there. It
was not hiding, though most of its faces were out of the candlelight. So far
its insights had been extraordinary. But the Fragment's stare was like old
times, when a mistake could mean mutilation or worse. So be it. The stakes
were higher now than ever before; if fear at Steel's throats could help him
succeed, he welcomed it. He looked away from the balcony, and brought all
his faces to an expression of tender sympathy for poor Jefri's plight. "You
just have to make it -- him -- understand. No one can bring his parents or
sister back to life. But we know who the murderers are. We're doing
everything we can to defend against them. Tell him how hard this is.
Woodcarvers is an empire that has lasted hundreds of years. In a fight, we
are no match for them. That's why we need all the help he can give us. We
need him to teach us to use his parents' ship."
The puppy pack lowered a head. "Yes. I'll try, but ..." The three
members by Jefri made low-pitched grunting noises at it. The mantis sat head
bowed; it held its tentacled paws across its eyes. The creature had been
like this for several days, and the withdrawal was getting worse. Now it
shook its head violently, made sharp noises a little higher pitched than its
normal register.
"Jefri says he doesn't understand how things work in the ship. He's
just a little ..." the pack searched for a translation. " ... he is really
very young. You know, like me."
Steel nodded understandingly. It was an obvious consequence of the
aliens' singleton nature, but weird even so: Every one of them started out
all a puppy. Every one of them was like Steel's puppy-pack experiments.
Parental knowledge was transmitted by the equivalent of interpack speech.
That made the creature easy to dupe, but it was a damned inconvenience now.
"Still, if there's anything he can help explain."
More grunting from the mantis. Steel should learn that language. The
sounds were easy; these pitiful creatures used their mouths to talk, like a
bird or a forest slug. For now he depended on Amdiranifani. For now that was
okay; the puppy pack trusted him. Another piece of serendipity. With a few
of his recent experiments, Steel had tried love in place of Flenser's
original terror/love combination; there had been a slim chance that it might
be superior. By great good luck Amdiranifani fell into the love group. Even
his instructors had avoided negative reinforcement. The pack would believe
anything he said ... and so, Steel hoped, would the mantis.
Amdiranifani translated: "There is something else; he has asked me
about it before. Jefri knows how to wake the other children -- " the word
literally meant "pack of puppies", "-- on the ship. You look surprised, my
lord Steel?"
Even though he no longer dreamed in terror of monster minds, Steel
would just as soon not have a hundred more aliens running around. "I hadn't
realized they could be wakened so easily.... But we shouldn't do it right
now. We're having trouble finding food that Jefri can eat." That was true;
the creature was an incredibly finicky eater. "I don't think we could feed
any more right now."
More grunting. More sharp cries from Jefri. Finally, "There is one
other thing, my lord. Jefri thinks it may be possible to use the ship's
ultrawave to call for help from others like his parents."
The Flenser Fragment jerked out of the shadows. A pair of heads looked
down at the mantis, while another stared meaningfully at Steel. Steel didn't
react; he could be cooler than any loose pack. "That's something to think
about. Perhaps you and Jefri could talk more about it. I don't want to try
it till we're sure we won't hurt the ship." That was weak. He saw the
Fragment twitch a muzzle in amusement.
As he spoke, Amdiranifani was translating. Jefri responded almost
immediately.
"Oh, that's okay. He meant a special call. Jefri says the ship has been
signaling ... all by itself ... ever since it landed."
And Steel wondered if he had ever heard a deadly threat uttered in such
sweet innocence.
They began letting Amdi and Jefri outside to play. Beforehand Amdi was
nervous about going out. He was unused to wearing clothes. His whole life --
all four years of it -- had been spent in that one big room. He read about
the outside and was curious about it, yet he was also a little afraid. But
the human boy seemed to want it. Every day he'd been more withdrawn, his
crying softer. Mostly he was crying for his parents or sister, but sometimes
he cried about being locked up so deep away.
So Amdi had talked to Mr. Steel, and now they got out almost every day,
at least to an inner courtyard. At first, Jefri just sat, not really looking
around. But Amdi discovered that he loved the outdoors, and every time he
got his friend to play a little more.
Packs of teachers and guards stood at the corners of the yellowing moss
and watched. Amdi -- and eventually Jefri -- got a big kick out of harassing
them. They hadn't realized it down in the room, where visitors came at the
balconies, but most adults were nervous around Jefri. The boy was half again
as tall as a normally standing pack member. When he came close, the average
pack would clump together and edge away. They didn't like having to look up
at him. It was silly, Amdi thought. Jefri was so tall and skinny, he looked
like he might topple over at any moment. And when he ran it was like he was
wildly trying to recover from a fall and never quite succeeding. So Amdi's
favorite game those first days was tag. Whenever he was the chaser, he
contrived to run Jefri right through the most prim looking whitejackets. If
he and Jefri did it right they could turn the tag into a three-way event,
Amdi chasing Jefri and a whitejackets racing to stay away from both of them.
Sometimes he felt sorry for the guards and whitejackets. They were so
stiff and grownup. Didn't they understand how much fun it was to have a
friend that you walk right next to, that you could actually touch?
It was mostly night now. Daylight hovered for a few hours around noon.
The twilight before and after was bright enough to dim the stars and aurora,
but still too faint to show colors. Though Amdi had spent his life indoors,
he understood the geometry of the situation, and liked to watch the change
of light. Jefri didn't much like the dark of winter ... until the first snow
fell.
Amdi got his first set of jackets. And Mr. Steel had special clothes
made for the human boy, big puffy things that covered his whole body and
kept him warmer than a good pelt would have done.
On one side of the courtyard the snow was just six inches deep, but
elsewhere it piled into drifts higher than Amdi's head. Torches were mounted
in wind shields on the walls; their light glittered golden off the snow.
Amdi knew about snow -- but he'd never seen it before. He loved to splash it
on one of his jackets. He would stare and stare, trying to see the
snowflakes without his breath melting them. The hexagonal pattern was
tantalizing, just at the limit of his vision.
But tag was no fun anymore; the human could run through drifts that
left Amdi swimming in the white stuff. There were other things the human
could do, wonderful things. He could make balls of snow and throw them. The
guards were very upset by this, especially when Jefri plinked a few members.
It was the first time he ever saw them get angry.
Amdi raced around the windswept side of the courtyard, dodging
snowballs and keening frustration. Human hands were such wicked, wicked
things. How he would love to have a pair -- four pairs! He circled round
from three sides and sprinted right at the human. Jefri backed quickly into
deeper snow, but too late. Amdi hit him high and low, tipping the Two-Legs
over into a snowdrift. There was a mock battle, slashing lips and paws
against Jefri's hands and feet. But now Amdi was on top. The human got paid
back for his snowballs with plenty of snow stuffed down the back of his
jacket.
Sometimes they just sat and watched the sky for so long that rumps and
paws went numb. Sitting behind the largest snow drift, they were shaded from
the castle torches and had a clear view of the lights in the sky.
At first Amdi had been entranced by the aurora. Even some of his
teachers were. They said this part of the world was one of the best places
to see the sky glow. Sometimes it was so faint that the torchlight
glimmering off the snow was enough to blot it out. Other times it ran from
horizon to horizon: green light trimmed with hints of pink, twisting as
though ruffled by a slow wind.
He and Jefri could talk very easily now, though always in Jefri's
language. The human couldn't make many of the sounds of interpack speech;
even his pronunciation of Amdi's name was a scarcely recognizable. But Amdi
understood Samnorsk pretty well; it was fun, their own secret language.
Jefri was not especially impressed by the aurora. "We have that lots at
home. It's just light from -- " He said a new word, and glanced at Amdi. It
was funny how the human couldn't look in more than one place at time. His
eyes and head were always moving. "-- you know, places where people make
things. I think the gas and waste leaks out, and then the sun lights it up
or it gets -- " unintelligible.
"Places where people make things?" In the sky? Amdi had a globe; he
knew the size of the world and its orientation. If the aurora were
reflecting sunlight, it must be hundreds of miles above the ground! Amdi
leaned a back against Jefri's jacket and made a very human whistling sound.
His knowledge of geography was not up to his geometry, but, "The packs don't
work in the sky, Jefri. We don't even have flying boats."
"Uh, that's right, you don't.... I don't know what that stuff is then.
But I don't like it. It gets in the way of the stars." Amdi knew all about
the stars; Jefri had told him. Somewhere out there were the friends of
Jefri's parents.
Jefri was silent for several minutes. He wasn't looking at the sky
anymore. Amdi wriggled a little closer, watching the shifting light in the
sky. Behind them the wind-sharpened crest of the drift was edged with yellow
light from the torches. Amdi could imagine what the other was thinking. "The
commsets from the boat, they really aren't good enough to call for help?"
Jefri slapped the ground. "No! I told you. They're just radio. I think
I can make them work, but what's the use? The ultrawave stuff is still on
the boat and it's too big to move. I just don't understand why Mr. Steel
won't let me go aboard.... I'm eight years old, you know. I could figure it
out. Mom had it all set up before, before ..." His words guttered into the
familiar, despairing silence.
Amdi rubbed a head against Jefri's shoulder. He had a theory about Mr.
Steel's reluctance. It was an explanation he hadn't told Jefri before:
"Maybe he's afraid you'll just fly away and leave us."
"That's stupid! I'd never leave you. Besides, that boat is real hard to
fly. It was never meant to land on a world."
Jefri said the strangest things; sometimes Amdi was just
misunderstanding -- but sometimes they were literal truth. Did the humans
really have ships that never came to ground? Where did they go then? Amdi
could almost feel new scales of reference clicking together in his mind. Mr.
Steel's geography globe represented not the world, but something very, very
small in the true scheme of things.
"I know you wouldn't leave us. But you can see how Mr. Steel might be
afraid. He can't even talk to you except through me. We have to show him
that we can be trusted."
"I guess."
"If you and I could get the radios working, that might help. I know my
teachers haven't figured them out. Mr. Steel has one, but I don't think he
understands it either."
"Yeah. If we could get the other one to work..."
That afternoon the guards got a break: their two charges came in from
the cold early. The guards didn't question their good fortune.
Steel's den had originally been the Master's. It was very different
from the castle's meeting halls. Except for choirs, only a single pack would
fit in any room. It was not exactly that the suite was small. There were
five rooms, not counting the bath. But except for the library, none was more
than fifteen feet across. The ceilings were low, less than five feet; there
was no space for visitor balconies. Servants were always on call in the two
hallways that shared a wall with the quarters. The dining room, bedroom, and
bath had servant hatches, just big enough to give orders and to receive food
and drink, or preening oils.
The main entrance was guarded on the outside by three trooper packs. Of
course, the Master would never live in a den with only one exit. Steel had
found eight secret hatches (three in the sleeping quarters). These could
only be opened from within; they led to the maze that Flenser had built
within the solid rock of the castle's walls. No one knew the extent of that
maze, not even the Master. Steel had rearranged parts of it -- in particular
the passages leading from this den -- in the years since Flenser's
departure.
The quarters were nearly impregnable. Even if the castle fell, the
rooms' larder was stocked for half a year; ventilation was provided by a
network of channels almost as extensive as the Master's secret passages. All
in all, Steel felt tolerably safe here. There was always the possibility
that there were more than eight secret entrances, perhaps one that could be
opened from the other side.
And of course choirs were out of the question, here or anywhere. The
only extrapack sex that Steel indulged was with singletons -- and that as
part of his experiments; it was just too dangerous to mix one's self with
others.
After dinner, Steel drifted into the library. He relaxed around his
reading desk. Two of him sipped brandy while another smoked southern herbs.
This was pleasure, but also calculation: Steel knew just what vices, applied
to just which members, would raise his imagination to its keenest pitch.
... And more and more he was coming to see that imagination was at
least as important as raw intelligence in the present game. The desk between
him was covered with maps, reports from the south, internal security memos.
But lying in all the silkpaper, like an ivory slug in its nest, was the
alien radio. They had recovered two from the ship. Steel picked the thing
up, ran a nose along the smooth, curved sides. Only the finest stressed wood
could match its grace -- and that in musical instruments or statuary. Yet
the mantis claimed this could be used to talk across dozens of miles, as
fast as a ray of sunlight. If true ... Steel wondered how many lost battles
might have been won with these, and how many new conquests might be safely
undertaken. And if they could learn to make far-talkers ... the Movement's
subordinates, scattered across the continent, would be as near as the guards
by Steel's den. No force in the world could stand against them.
Steel picked up the latest report from Woodcarvers. In many ways they
were having more success with their mantis than Steel with his. Apparently
theirs was almost an adult. More important, it had a miraculous library that
could be interrogated almost like a living being. There had been three other
datasets. Steel's whitejackets had found what was left of them in the
burnt-out wreckage around the ship. Jefri thought that the ship's processors
were a little like a dataset, "only stupider" (Amdi's best translation), but
so far the processors had been useless.
But with their dataset, several on Woodcarver's staff had already
learned mantis talk. Each day they discovered more about the aliens'
civilization than Steel's people could in ten. He smiled. They didn't know
that all the important stuff was being faithfully reported to Hidden
Island.... For now he would let them keep their toy, and their mantis; they
had noticed several things that would have slipped by him. Still he damned
the luck.
Steel paged through the report.... Good. The alien at Woodcarvers was
still uncooperative. He felt his smile spreading into laughter: it was a
small thing, the creature's word for the Packs. The report tried to spell
out the word. It didn't matter; the translation was "claws" or "tines". The
mantis had a special horror for the tine attachments that soldiers wore on
their forepaws. Steel licked pensively at the black enamel of his manicured
claws. Interesting. Claws could be threatening things, but they were also
part of being a person. Tines were their mechanical extension, and
potentially more frightening. It was the sort of name you might imagine for
an elite killer force ... but never for all the Packs. After all, the race
of packs included the weak, the poor, the kindly, the naive ... as well as
persons like Steel and Flenser. It said something very interesting about
mantis psychology that the creature picked tines as the characterizing
feature of the Packs.
Steel eased back from his desk and gazed at the landscape painted
around the library's walls. It was a view from the castle towers. Behind the
paint, the walls were lined with patterns of mica and quartz and fiber; the
echoes gave a vague sense of what you might hear looking out across the
stone and emptiness. Combination audiovisuals were rare in the castle, and
this one was especially well-done; Steel could feel himself relaxing as he
stared at it. He drifted for a moment, letting his imagination roam.
Tines. I like it. If that was the alien's image, then it was the right
name for his race. His pitiful advisors -- and sometimes even the Flenser
Fragment -- were still intimidated by the ship from the stars. No question,
there was power in that ship beyond anything in the world. But after the
first panic, Steel understood that the aliens were not supernaturally
gifted. They had simply progressed -- in the sense that Woodcarver made so
much of -- beyond the current state of his world's science. Certainly the
alien civilization was a deadly unknown right now. Indeed, it might be
capable of burning this world to a cinder. Yet the more Steel saw, the more
he realized the intrinsic inferiority of the aliens: What a bizarre abortion
they were, a race of intelligent singletons. Every one of them must be
raised from nothing, like a wholly newborn pack. Memories could only be
passed by voice and writing. Each creature grew and aged and even died as a
whole. Despite himself, Steel shivered.
He had come a long way from the first misconceptions, the first fears.
For more than a thirty days now he'd been scheming to use the star ship to
rule the world. The mantis said that ship was signaling others. That had
reduced some of his Servants to incontinence. So. Sooner or later, more
ships would arrive. Ruling the world was no longer a practical goal.... It
was time to aim higher, at goals even the Master had never imagined. Take
away their technical advantages and the mantis folk were such finite,
fragile beings. They should be easy to conquer. Even they seemed to realize
this. Tines, the creature calls us. So it will be. Some day Tines would pace
between the stars and rule there.
But in the years till then, life would be very dangerous. Like a
newborn pup, all their potential could be destroyed by one small blow. The
Movement's survival -- the world's survival -- would depend upon superior
intelligence, imagination, discipline, and treachery. Fortunately, those had
always been Steel's great strengths.
Steel dreamed in the candlelight and haze.... Intelligence,
imagination, discipline, treachery. Done right ... could the aliens be
persuaded to eliminate all of Steel's enemies ... and then bare their
throats to him? It was daring, almost beyond reason, but there might be a
way. Jefri claimed he could operate the ship's signaler. By himself? Steel
doubted it. The alien was thoroughly duped, but not especially competent.
Amdiranifani was a different story. He was showing all the genius of his
bloodlines. And the principles of loyalty and sacrifice his teachers drilled
into him had taken hold, though he was a bit ... playful. His obedience
didn't have the sharp edge that fear could bring. No matter. As a tool he
was useful beyond all others. Amdiranifani understood Jefri, and seemed to
understand the alien artifacts even better than the mantis did.
The risk must be taken. He would let the two aboard the ship. They
would send his message in place of the automatic distress signal. And what
should that first message be? Word for word, it would be the most important,
most dangerous thing any pack had ever said.
Three hundred yards away, deep in the experiment wing, a boy and a pack
of puppies came across an unexpected piece of good luck: an unlocked door,
and a chance to play with Jefri's commset.
The phone was more complex than some. It was intended for hospital and
field work, for the remote control of devices as well as for voice talk. By
trial and error, the two gradually narrowed the options.
Jefri Olsndot pointed to numbers that had appeared on the side of the
device. "I think that means we're matched with some receiver." He glanced
nervously at the doorway. Something told him they really shouldn't be here.
"That's the same pattern as on the radio Mr. Steel took," said Amdi.
Not even one of his heads was watching the door.
"I bet if we press it here, what we say will come out on his radio. Now
he'll know we can help.... So what should we do?"
Three of Amdi raced around the room, like dogs that couldn't keep their
attention on the conversation. By now, Jefri knew this was the equivalent of
a human looking away and humming as he thought. The angle of his gaze was
another gesture, in this case a spreading and mischievous smile. "I think we
should surprise him. He is always so serious."
"Yeah." Mr. Steel was pretty solemn. But then all the adults were. They
reminded him of the older scientists at the High Lab.
Amdi grabbed the radio and gave him a "just watch this" look. He nosed
on the "talk" switch and sang a long ululation into the mike. It sounded
only vaguely like pack speech. One of Amdi translated, next to Jefri's ear.
The human boy felt giggles stealing up his throat.
In his den, Lord Steel was lost in scheming. His imagination -- loosed
by herbs and brandy -- floated free, playing with the possibilities. He was
settled deep in velvet cushions, comfortable in the den's safety. The
remaining candles shone faintly on the landscape mural, glinting from the
polished furniture. The story he would tell the aliens, he almost had it
now....
The noise on his desk began as a small thing, submerged beneath his
dreaming. It was mostly low-pitched, but there were overtones in the range
of thought, like slices of another mind. It was a presence, growing. Someone
is in my den! The thought tore like Flenser's killing blade. Steel's members
spasmed panic, disoriented by smoke and drink.
There was a voice in the middle of the insanity. It was distorted,
missing tones that any normal speech should have. It howled and quavered at
him, "Lord Steel! Greetings from the Pack of Packs, the Lord God Almighty!"
Part of Steel was already out the main hatch, staring wide-eyed at his
guards in the hallway beyond. The troopers' presence brought a bit of calm,
and icy embarrassment. This is nonsense. He tipped a head to the alien
device on his desk. The echoes were everywhere, but the sounds originated in
the far-talker.... There was no pack speech now, just the high-pitched
slices of sound, mindless warbling in the middle range of thought. Wait.
Behind it all, faint and low ... there were the coughing grunts he
recognized as mantis laughter.
Steel rarely gave way to rage. It should be his tool, not his master.
But listening to the laughter, and remembering the words.... Steel felt
black bloodiness rising in first one member and then another. Almost without
thought, he reached back and smashed the commset. It fell instantly silent.
He glared at the guards ranged at attention in the hallway. Their mind noise
was quiet with stifled fear.
Someone would die for this.
Mr. Steel met with Amdi and Jefri the day after their success with the
radio. They had convinced him. They were moving to the mainland. Jefri would
have his chance to call for rescue!
Steel was even more solemn than usual; he made a big thing about how
important it was to get help, to defend against another attack from the
Woodcarvers. But he didn't seem angry about Amdi's little prank. Jefri
breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Back home, Daddy would have tanned his hide
for something like that. I guess Amdi is right. Mr. Steel was serious
because of all his responsibilities and the dangers they faced. But
underneath he was a very nice person.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Language path: Firetongue->Cloudmark->Triskweline, SjK units
[Firetongue and Cloudmark are High Beyond trade languages. Only core meaning is rendered by this translation.]
From: Arbitration Arts Corporation at Firecloud Nebula [A High Beyond
military[?] organization. Known age ~100 years]
Subject: Reason for concern
Summary: Three single-system civilizations are apparently destroyed
Key phrases: scale interstellar disasters, scale interstellar warfare?,
Straumli Realm Perversion
Distribution:
War Trackers Interest Group, Threats Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 53.57 days since the fall of Straumli Realm
Text of message:
Recently an obscure civilization announced it had created a new Power
in the Transcend. It then dropped "temporarily" off the Known Net. Since
that time, there have been about a million messages in Threats about the
incident -- plenty of speculations that a Class Two Perversion had been born
-- but no evidence of effects beyond the boundaries of the former "Straumli
Realm".
Arbitration Arts specializes in treckle lansing disputes. As such, we
have few common business interests with natural races or Threats Group. That
may have to change: sixty-five hours ago, we noticed the apparent extinction
of three isolated civilizations in the High Beyond near Straumli Realm. Two
of these were Eye-in-the-U religious probes, and the third was a Pentragian
factory. Previously their main Net link had been Straumli Realm. As such,
they have been off the Net since Straumli dropped, except for occasional
pinging from us.
We diverted three missions to perform fly-throughs. Signal
reconnaissance revealed wideband communication that was more like neural
control than local net traffic. Several new large structures were noted. All
our vessels were destroyed before detailed information could be returned.
Given the background of these settlements, we conclude that this is not the
normal aftermath of a transcending.
These observations are consistent with a Class Two attack from the
Transcend (albeit a secretive one). The most obvious source would be the new
Power constructed by Straumli Realm. We urge special vigilance to all High
Beyond civilizations in this part of the Beyond. We larger ones have little
to fear, but the threat is very clear.
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Language path: Firetongue->Cloudmark->Triskweline, SjK units
[Firetongue and Cloudmark are High Beyond trade languages. Only core meaning is rendered by this translation.]
From: Arbitration Arts Corporation at Firecloud Nebula [A High Beyond
military[?] organization. Known age ~100 years]
Subject: New service available
Summary: Arbitration Arts to provide Net relay service
Key phrases: Special Rates, Sentient Translator Programs, Ideal for
civilizations in the High Beyond
Distribution:
Communication Costs Interest Group, Motley Hatch Administration Group
Date: 61.00 days since the fall of Straumli Realm
Text of message:
Arbitration Arts is proud to announce a transceiver-layer service
especially designed for sites in the High Beyond [rates tabulated after the
text of this message]. State of the Zone programs will provide high quality
translation and routing. It has been nearly one hundred years since any High
Beyond civilization in this part of the Galaxy has been interested in
providing such a communication service. We realize the job is dull and the
armiphlage not in keeping with the effort, but we all stand to benefit from
protocols that are consistent with the Zone we live in. Details follow under
syntax 8139. ... [Cloudmark:Triskweline translator program balks at handling
syntax 8139.]
Crypto: 0
As received by: Transceiver Relay03 at Relay
Language path: Cloudmark->Triskweline, SjK units
[Cloudmark is a High Beyond trade language. Despite colloquial rendering, only core meaning is guaranteed.]
From: Transcendent Bafflements Trading Union at Cloud Center
Subject: Matter of life and death
Summary: Arbitration Arts has fallen to Straumli Perversion via a Net
attack. Use Middle Beyond relays till emergency passes!
Key phrases: Net attack, scale interstellar warfare, Straumli
Perversion
Distribution:
War Trackers Interest Group, Threats Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 61.12 days since the fall of Straumli Realm
Text of message:
WARNING! The site identifying itself as Arbitration Arts is now
controlled by the Straumli Perversion. The Arts' recent advertisement of
communications services is a deadly trick. In fact we have good evidence
that the Perversion used sapient Net packets to invade and disable the Arts'
defenses. Large portions of the Arts now appear to be under direct control
of the Straumli Power. Parts of the Arts that were not infected in the
initial invasion have been destroyed by the converted portions: Fly-throughs
show several stellifications.
What can be done: If during the last thousand seconds, you have
received any High Beyond protocol packets from "Arbitration Arts", discard
them at once. If they have been processed (then chances are it is the
Perversion who is reading this message and with a [broad smile]), then the
processing site and all locally netted sites must be physically destroyed at
once. We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but
consider the alternative. You are under Transcendent attack.
If you survive the initial peril (the next thirty hours or so), then
there are obvious procedures that can give relative safety: Do not accept
High Beyond protocol packets. At the very least, route all communications
through Middle Beyond sites, with translation down to, and then up from,
local trade languages.
For the longer term: It's obvious that an extraordinarily powerful
Class Two Perversion has bloomed in our region of the galaxy. For the next
thirteen years or so, all advanced civilizations near us will be in great
danger.
If we can identify the background of the current perversion, we may
discover its weaknesses and a feasible defense. Class Two Perversions all
involve a deformed Power that creates symbiotic structures in the High
Beyond -- but there is enormous variety of origins. Some are poorly-formed
jokes told by Powers no longer on the scene. Others are weapons built by the
newly transcendent and never properly disarmed.
The immediate source of this danger is well-documented: a species
recently up from the Middle Beyond, Homo sapiens, founded Straumli Realm. We
are inclined to believe the theory proposed in messages [...], namely that
Straumli researchers experimented with something in Shortcuts, and that the
recipe was a self-booting evil from an earlier time. One possibility: Some
loser from long ago planted how-to's on the Net (or in some lost archive)
for the use of its own descendants. Thus, we are interested in any
information related to Homo sapiens.
-=*=-
The next day Amdi went on the longest trip of his young life. Bundled
in windbreakers, they traveled down wide, cobbled streets to the straits
below the castle. Mr. Steel led the way on a chariot-cart drawn by three
kherhogs. He looked marvelous in his red- striped jackets. Guards dressed in
white fur rolled along on either side, and the dour Tyrathect brought up the
rear. The aurora was as brilliant as Amdijefri had ever seen, brighter in
sum than the full moon above the northern horizon. Icicles grew down from
buildings' eaves, sometimes all the way to the ground: glittering,
green-silver pillars in the light.
Then they were on the boats, rowing across the straits. The water swept
like chill black stone around the hulls.
When they reached the other side, Starship Hill towered over them,
higher than any castle could ever be. Every minute brought new visions, new
worlds.
It took half an hour to reach the top of that hill, even though their
carts were pulled by Kherhogs, and nobody walked. Amdi looked in all
directions, awed by the landscape that spread, aurora-lit, below them. At
first Jefri seemed just as excited, but as they reached the hilltop, he
stopped looking around and hugged painfully hard at his friend.
Mr. Steel had built a shelter around the starship. Inside, the air was
still and a little warmer. Jefri stood at the base of the spidery stairs,
looking up at the light that spilled from the ship's open doorway. Amdi felt
him shivering.
"Is he frightened of his own flier?" asked Tyrathect.
By now Amdi knew most of Jefri's fears, and understood most of the
despair. How would I feel if Mr. Steel were killed? "No, not scared. It's
the memories of what happened here."
Steel said gently, "Tell him we could come again. He doesn't have to go
inside today."
Jefri shook his head at the suggestion, but couldn't answer right away.
"I've got to go on. I've got to be brave." He started slowly up the stairs,
stopping at each step to make sure that Amdi was still all with him. The
puppies were split between concern for Jefri and the desire to rush madly
into this wonderful mystery.
Then they were through the hatch, and into Two-Legs strangeness. Bright
bluish light, air as warm as in the castle ... and dozens of mysterious
shapes. They walked to the far side of the big room, and Mr. Steel stuck
some heads in the entrance. His mind sounds echoed loudly around them. "I've
quilted the walls, Amdi, but even so, there isn't room for more than one of
us in here."
"Y-yes," there were echoes and Steel's mind sounded strangely fierce.
"It's up to you to protect your friend here, and let me know about
everything you see." He moved back so that just one head still looked in
upon them.
"Yes. Yes! I will." It was the first time anybody except Jefri had
really needed him.
Jefri wandered silently about the room full of his sleeping friends. He
wasn't crying any more, and he wasn't in the silent funk that often held
him. It was as if he couldn't quite believe where he was. He passed his
hands lightly across the caskets, looked at the faces within. So many
friends, thought Amdi, waiting to be wakened. What will they be like?
"The walls? I don't remember this ..." said Jefri. He touched the heavy
quilting that Steel had hung.
"It's to make the place sound better," said Amdi. He pulled at the
flaps, wondering what was behind: Green wall, like stone and steel all at
once ... and covered with tiny bumps and fingers of gray. "What's this?"
Jefri was looking over his shoulders. "Ug. Mold. It's spread. I'm glad
Mr. Steel has covered it up." The human boy drifted away. Amdi stayed a
second longer, poked several heads up close to the stuff. Mold and fungus
were a constant problem in the castle; people were always cleaning it up --
and perversely so, in Amdi's opinion. He thought fungus was neat, something
that could grow on hardest rock. And this stuff was especially strange. Some
of the clumps were almost half an inch high, but wispy, like solid smoke.
The back-looking part of him saw that Jefri had drifted off toward the
inner cabin. Reluctantly, Amdi followed.
They stayed in the ship only an hour that first time. In the inner
cabin Jefri turned on magic windows that looked out in all directions. Amdi
sat goggle-eyed; this was a trip to heaven.
For Jefri it was something else. He hunched down in a hammock and
stared at the controls. The tension slowly left his face.
"I -- I like it here," said Amdi, tentatively, softly.
Jefri rocked gently in the hammock. "... Yes." He sighed. "I was so
afraid ... but being here makes me feel closer to ..." His hands reached out
to caress the panel that hung close to the hammock. "My dad landed this
thing; he was sitting right here." He twisted around, looked at a glimmering
panel of light above him. "And Mom got the ultrawave all set.... They did it
all. And now it's only you and me, Amdi. Even Johanna is gone.... It's all
up to us."
-=*=-
Vrinimi Classification: Organizational SECRET. Not for distribution
beyond Ring 1 of the local net.
Transceiver Relay00 search log:
Beginning 19:40:40 Docks Time, 17/01 of Org year 52090 [128.13 days
since the fall of Straumli Realm]
Link layer syntax 14 message loop detected on assigned surveillance
bearing. Signal strength and S/N compatible with previously detected beacon
signal.
Language path: Samnorsk, SjK:Relay units
From: Jefri Olsndot at I dont know where this is
Subject: Hello. My names Jefri Olsndot. Our ships hurt adnd we need
help. pPlease anser.
Summary: Sorry if I get some of this wrong. This keybord is STUPID!!
Key phrases: I dont know
To: Relay anybody
Text of message: [empty]
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Two Skroderiders played in the surf.
"Do you think his life is in danger?" asked the one with the slender
green stalk.
"Whose life?" said the other, a large rider with a bluish basal shell.
"Jefri Olsndot, the human child."
Blueshell sighed to himself and consulted his skrode. You come to the
beach to forget the cares of the everyday, but Greenstalk would not let them
go. He scanned for danger-to-Jefri: "Of course he's in danger, you twit!
Look up the latest messages from him."
"Oh." Greenstalk's tone was embarrassed. "Sorry for the partial
remembering," remembering enough to worry and nothing more. She went silent;
after a moment he heard her pleasured humming. The surf crashed endlessly
past them.
Blueshell opened to the water, tasting the life that swirled in the
power of the waves. It was a beautiful beach. It was probably unique -- and
that was an extreme thing to say about anything in the Beyond. When the foam
swept back from their bodies, they could see indigo sky spread from one side
of the Docks to the other, and the glint of starships. When the surf came
forward, the two Riders were submerged in the turbid chill, surrounded by
the coralesks and intertidal creatures that built their little homes here.
And at high "tide" the flexure of the sea floor held steady for an hour or
so. Then the water cleared, and if in daylight, they could see patches of
glassy sea-bottom ... and through them, a thousand kilometers below, the
surface of Groundside.
Blueshell tried to clear his mind of care. For every hour of peaceful
contemplation, a few more natural memories would accumulate.... No good.
Just now he could no more banish the worries than could Greenstalk. After a
moment, he said, "Sometimes I wish I were a Lesser Rider." To stand a
lifetime in one place, with just a minimum skrode.
"Yes," said Greenstalk. "But we decided to roam. That means giving up
certain things. Sometimes we must remember things that happen only once or
twice. Sometimes we have great adventures: I'm glad we took the rescue
contract, Blueshell."
So neither of them were really in the mood for the sea today. Blueshell
lowered the skrode's wheels and rolled a little closer to Greenstalk. He
looked deep into his skrode's mechanical memory, scanning the general
databases. There was a lot there about catastrophes. Whoever created the
original skrode databases had considered wars and blights and perversion
very important. They were exciting things, and they could kill you.
But Blueshell could also see that in relative terms, such disasters
were a small part of the civilized experience. Only about once in a
millennium was there a massive blight. It was their bad luck to be caught
near such a thing. In the last ten weeks a dozen civilizations in the High
Beyond had dropped from the Net, absorbed into the symbiotic amalgam that
now was called the Straumli Blight. High trade was crippled. Since their
ship was refinanced, he and Greenstalk had flown several jobs, but all to
the Middle Beyond.
The two of them had been very cautious, but now -- as Greenstalk said
-- greatness might be thrust upon them. Vrinimi Org wanted to commission a
secret flight to the Bottom of the Beyond. Since he and Greenstalk were
already in on the secret, they were the natural choice for the job. Right
now, the Out of Band II was in the Vrinimi yards getting bottom-lugger
enhancements and a huge stock of antenna drones. In one stroke the OOB's
value was increased ten-thousand-fold. There had been no need even to
bargain!... and that was the scariest thing of all. Every addition was a
clear essential for the trip. They would be descending right to the edge of
the Slowness. Under the best of circumstances this would be slow and tedious
exercise, but the latest surveys reported movement in the zone boundaries.
With bad luck, they might actually end up on the wrong side, where light had
the ultimate speed. If that should happen, the new ramscoop would be their
only hope.
All that was within Blueshell's range of acceptable business. Before he
met Greenstalk, he had shipped on bottom-luggers, even been stranded once or
twice. But -- "I like adventure as much as you," said Blueshell, a grumpy
edge creeping into his voice. "Traveling to the Bottom, rescuing sophonts
from the claws of wildthings: given enough money, it's all perhaps
reasonable. But ... what if that Straumer ship is really as important as
Ravna thinks? After all this time it seems absurd, but she's convinced
Vrinimi Org of the possibility. If there's something down there that could
harm the Straumli Blight -- " If the Blight ever suspected the same, it
could have a fleet of ten thousand warships descending on their goal. Down
at the Bottom they might be little better than conventional vessels, but he
and Greenstalk would be no less dead for that.
Except for a faint daydreamy hum, Greenstalk was silent. Had she had
lost track of the conversation? Then her voice came to him through the
water, a reassuring caress. "I know, Blueshell, it could be the end of us.
But I still want to venture it. If it's safe, we make enormous profit. If
our going could harm the Blight ... well, then it's terribly important. Our
help might save dozens of civilizations -- a million beaches of Riders, just
in passing."
"Hmpf. You're following stalk and not skrode."
"Probably." They had watched the progress of the Blight since its
beginning. The feelings of horror and sympathy had been reinforced every day
till they percolated into their natural minds. So Greenstalk (and Blueshell
too; he couldn't deny it) felt stronger about the Blight than about the
danger in their new contract. "Probably. My fears of making the rescue are
still analytical," still confined to her skrode. "Yet ... I think if we
could stand here a year, if we could wait till we truly felt all the issues
... I think we would still choose to go."
Blueshell rolled irritably back and forth. The grit swirled up and
through his fronds. She was right, she was right. But he couldn't say it
aloud; the mission still terrified him.
"And think, mate: If it is this important, then perhaps we can get
help. You know the Org is negotiating with the Emissary Device. With any
luck we'll end up with an escort designed by a Transcendental Power."
The image almost made Blueshell laugh. Two little Skroderiders,
journeying to the Bottom of the Beyond -- surrounded by help from the
Transcend. "I will hope for it."
The Skroderiders were not the only ones with that wish. Further up the
beach, Ravna Bergsndot prowled her office. What gruesome irony that even the
greatest disasters can create opportunities for decent people. Her transfer
to Marketing had been made permanent with the fall of Arbitration Arts. As
the Blight spread and High Beyond markets collapsed, the Org became ever
more interested in providing information services about the Straumli
Perversion. Her "special" expertise in things human suddenly became
extraordinarily valuable -- never mind that Straumli Realm itself was only a
small part of what was now the Blight. What little the Blight said of itself
was often in Samnorsk. Grondr and company continued to be vitally interested
in her analysis.
Well, she had done some good. They had picked up the refugee ship's
"I-am-here", and then -- ninety days later -- a message from a human
survivor, Jefri Olsndot. Barely forty messages had they exchanged, but
enough to learn about the Tines and Mr. Steel and the evil Woodcarvers.
Enough to know that a small human life would be ended if she could not help.
Ironic but natural: most times that single life weighed more on her than all
the horror of the Perversion, even the fall of Straumli Realm. Thank the
Powers that Grondr had endorsed the rescue mission: It was a chance to learn
something important about the Straumli Perversion. And the Tinish packs
seemed to interest him, too; group minds were a fleeting thing in the
Beyond. Grondr had kept the whole affair secret, and persuaded his bosses to
support the mission. But all his help might not be enough. If the refugee
ship was as important as Ravna thought, there could be enormous perils
awaiting any rescuers.
Ravna looked across the surf. When the waves backed down the sand, she
could see the Skroderiders' fronds peeping out of the spray. How she envied
them; if tensions annoyed them, they could simply turn them off. The
Skroderiders were one of the most common sophonts in the Beyond. There were
many varieties, but analysis agreed with legend: very long ago they had been
one species. Somewhere in the off-Net past, they had been sessile dwellers
of sea shores. Left to themselves, they had developed a form of intelligence
almost devoid of short-term memory. They sat in the surf, thinking thoughts
that left no imprints on their minds. Only repetition of a stimulus, over a
period of time, could do that. But the intelligence and memory that they had
was of survival value: it made it possible for them to select the best
possible place to cast their pupal seeds, locations that would mean safety
and food for the next generation.
Then some unknown race had chanced upon the dreamers and decided to
"help" them out. Someone had put them on mobile platforms, the skrodes. With
wheels they could move along the seashores, could reach and manipulate with
their fronds and tendrils. With the skrode's mechanical short-term memory,
they could learn fast enough that their new mobility would not kill them.
Ravna glanced away from the Skroderiders -- someone was floating in
over the trees. The Emissary Device. Maybe she should call Greenstalk and
Blueshell out of the water. No. Let'em bliss out a little longer. If she
couldn't get the special equipment, things would be tough enough for them
later....
Besides, I can do without witnesses. She folded her arms across her
chest and glared into the sky. The Vrinimi Org had tried to talk to the Old
One about this, but nowadays the Power would only work through its Emissary
Device ... and he had insisted on a face-to-face meeting.
The Emissary touched down a few meters away, and bowed. His lopsided
grin spoiled the effect. "Pham Nuwen, at your service."
Ravna gave a little bow in return, and led him to the shade of her
inner office. If he thought that face-to-face would unnerve her, he was
right. "Thanks for the meeting, sir. The Vrinimi Organization has an
important request of your principal," owner? master? operator?
Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently. He'd stayed out
of her way since that night at The Wandering Company. Grondr said Old One
had kept him at Relay though, rummaging through the archives for information
about humanity and its origins. It made sense now that Old One had been
persuaded to restrict Net use: the Emissary could do local processing, i.e.,
use human intelligence to search and summarize and then upload only the
stuff that Old One really needed.
Ravna watched him out of the corner of her eye as she pretended to
study her dataset. Pham had his old, lazy smile. She wondered if she would
ever have the courage to ask him how much of their ... affair ... had been a
human thing. Had Pham Nuwen felt anything for her? Hell, did he even have a
good time?
From a Transcendent point of view, he might be a simple data
concentrator and waldo -- but from her viewpoint he was still too human.
"Um, yes. Well ... the Org has continued to monitor the Straumli refugee
ship even though your principal has lost interest."
Pham's eyebrows raised in polite interest. "Oh?"
"Ten days ago, the simple 'I-am-here' signal was interrupted by a new
message, apparently from a surviving crewmember."
"Congratulations. You managed to keep it a secret, even from me."
Ravna didn't rise to the bait. "We're doing our best to keep it secret
from everyone, sir. For reasons that you must know." She put the messages to
date on the air between them. A handful of calls and responses, scattered
across ten days. Translated into Triskweline for Pham, the original spelling
and grammar errors were gone, yet the tone remained. Ravna was responsible
for the Org side of the conversation. It was like talking to someone in a
dark room, someone you have never seen. Much was easy to imagine: a
strident, piping voice behind the capitalized words and exclamation marks.
She had no video of the child, but through the humankind archive at Sjandra
Kei, Marketing had dug up pictures of the boy's parents. They looked like
typical Straumers, but with the brown eyes of the Linden clans. Little Jefri
would be slim and dark.
Pham Nuwen's gaze flicked down through the text, then seemed to hang on
the last few lines:
...
Org[17]: How old are you, Jefri?
Target[18]: I am eight. I mean I am eight years old. I AM OLD ENOUGH
BUT I NEED HELP.
Org[18]: We will help. We are coming as fast as we can, Jefri.
Target[19]: Sorry I couldn't talk yesterday. The bad people were on the
hill again yesterday. It wasn't safe to go to the ship.
Org[19]: Are the bad ones that close by?
Target[20]: Yes yes. I could see them from the island. I'm with Amdi on
shipboard now, but walking up here there were dead soldiers all around.
Woodcarver raids here often.
Mother is dead. Father is dead. Johanna is dead. Mister Steel will protect me as much as he can. He says that I must be brave.
For a moment, his smile was gone. "Poor kid," he said softly. Then he
shrugged and jabbed his hand at one of the messages. "Well, I'm glad Vrinimi
is sending a rescue mission. That is generous of you."
"Not really, sir. Look at items six through fourteen. The boy is
complaining about the ship's automation."
"Yeah, he makes it sound like something out of a dawn age: keyboards
and video, no voice recognition. A completely unfriendly interface. Looks
like the crash scragged almost everything, eh?"
He was being deliberately obtuse, but Ravna resolved to be infinitely
patient. "Perhaps not, considering the vessel's origin." Pham just smiled,
so Ravna continued to spell things out. "The processors are likely High
Beyond or Transcendent, snuffed down to near brainlessness by the current
environment."
Pham Nuwen sighed. "All consistent with the Skroderiders' theory,
right? You're still hoping this crate is carrying some tremendous secret
that will blow the Blight away."
"Yes!.... Look. At one time, the Old One was very curious about all
this. Why the total disinterest now? Is there some reason why the ship can't
be the key to fighting the Perversion?" That was Grondr's explanation for
the Old One's recent lack of interest. All her life Ravna Bergsndot had
heard tales of the Powers, and always from a great remove. Here, she was
awfully close to questioning one directly. It was a very strange feeling.
After a moment Pham said, "No. It's unlikely, but you could be right."
Ravna let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Good.
Then what we're asking is reasonable. Suppose the downed ship contains
something the Perversion needs, or something it fears. Then it's likely the
Perversion knows of its existence -- and may even be monitoring ultradrive
traffic in that part of the Bottom. A rescue expedition could lead the
Perversion right to it. In that case, the mission will be suicide for its
crew -- and could increase the Blight's overall power."
"So?"
Ravna slapped her dataset, resolutions of patience dissolving. "So,
Vrinimi Org is asking Old One's help to build an expedition the Blight can't
knock over!"
Pham Nuwen just shook his head. "Ravna, Ravna. You're talking about an
expedition to the Bottom of the Beyond. There's no way a Power can hold your
hand down there. Even an Emissary Device would be mostly on its own there."
"Don't act like more of a jerk than you are, Pham Nuwen. Down there,
the Perversion will be at just as much a disadvantage. What we're asking for
is equipment of Transcendent manufacture, designed for those depths, and
provided in substantial quantities."
"Jerk?" Pham Nuwen drew himself up, but there was still the ghost of
smile on his face. "Is that how you normally address a Power?"
Before this year, I would have died rather than address a Power in any
manner. She leaned back, giving him her own version of an indolent smile.
"You have a pipeline to god, Mister, but let me tell you a little secret: I
can tell whether it's open or closed."
Polite curiosity: "Oh? How is that?"
"Pham Nuwen -- left on his own -- is a bright, egotistical guy, and
about as subtle as a kick in the head." She thought back to their time
together. "I don't really start worrying until the arrogance and smart
remarks go away."
"Um. Your logic is a little weak. If the Old One were running me
direct, he could just as easily play a jerk as," he cocked his head, "as the
man of your dreams."
Ravna gritted her teeth. "That's true, but I've got a little help from
my boss. He's cleared me to monitor transceiver usage." She looked at her
dataset. "Right now, your Old One is getting less than ten kilobits per
second from all of Relay... which means, my friend, that you are not being
tele-operated. Any crass behavior I see today is the true Pham Nuwen."
The redhead chuckled, faint embarrassment evident. "You got me. I'm on
detached duty, have been ever since the Org persuaded Old One to back off.
But I want you to know that all those ten Kbps are dedicated to this
charming conversation." He paused as if listening, then waved his hand. "Old
One says 'hi'."
Ravna laughed despite herself; there was something absurd about the
gesture, and the notion that a Power would indulge such trivial humor.
"Okay. I'm glad he can, um, sit in. Look, Pham, we're not asking for much by
Transcendent standards, and it could save whole civilizations. Give us a few
thousand ships; robot oneshots would be fine."
"Old One could make that many, but they wouldn't be much better that
what's built down here. Tricking -- " he paused, looking surprised by his
own choice of words, "tricking the Zones is subtle work."
"Fine. Quality or quantity. We'll settle for whichever the Old One
thinks -- "
"No."
"Pham! We're talking about a few days work for the Old One. It's
already paid more to study the Blight." Their single wild evening might have
cost as much -- but she didn't say that.
"Yes, and Vrinimi has spent most of it."
"Paying off the customers you stepped on! ... Pham, can't you at least
tell us why?"
The lazy smile faded from his face. She took a quick glance at her
dataset. No, Pham Nuwen was not possessed. She remembered the look on his
face when he read the mail from Jefri Olsndot; there was a decent human
being lurking behind all the arrogance. "I'll give it a try. Keep in mind --
even though I've been part of Old One -- I'm remembering and explaining with
human limitations.
"You're right, the Perversion is chewing up the Top of the Beyond.
Maybe fifty civilizations will die before this Power gets tired of screwing
around -- and for a couple of thousand years after that there'll be 'echoes'
of the disaster, poisoned star systems, artificial races with bloody-minded
ideas. But -- I hate to say it this way -- so what? Old One has been
thinking about this problem, off and on, for more than a hundred days.
That's a long time for a Power, especially Old One. He's existed for more
than ten years now; his minds are drifting fast toward ... changes ... that
will put him beyond all communication. Why should he give a damn about
this?"
It was a standard topic in school, but Ravna couldn't help herself.
This time it was for real. "But history is full of incidents where Powers
helped Beyonder races, sometimes even individuals." She had already looked
up the Beyonder race that created Old One. They were gasbag creatures. Their
netmail was mostly jabberwocky even after Relay's best interpretation.
Apparently they had no special leverage with Old One. The direct appeal was
about all she had. "Look. Turn the thing around: Even ordinary humans don't
need special explanation to help animals that are hurting."
Pham's smile was beginning to come back. "You're so big on analogies.
Remember that no analogy is perfect, and the more complex the automation the
more complex the possible motivations. But ... okay, how about this for an
analogy: Old One is a basically decent guy, with a nice home in a good part
of town. One day he notices he has a new neighbor, a scruffy fellow whose
homestead is awhiff with toxic sludge. If you were Old One, you'd be
concerned, right? You might probe around beneath your properties. You'd also
chat with the new fellow and check on where he came from, try to figure out
what's going on. The Vrinimi Org saw part of that investigation.
"So you discover the new neighbor is unwholesome. Basically his
lifestyle involves poisoning swamp land and eating the sludge produced.
That's an annoyance: it smells and it hurts a lot of harmless animals. But,
after investigating, it's clear the damage will not affect your own
property, and you get the neighbor to take measures to reduce the stink. In
any case, eating toxic sludge is a self-defeating lifestyle." He paused. "As
analogies go, I think this one's pretty good. After some initial mystery,
Old One has determined that this Perversion is one of the common patterns,
so petty and banal that even creatures like you and I can see it's evil. In
one form or another, it's been drifting up from Beyonder archives for a
hundred million years."
"Damn it! I'd get my neighbors together, and run the pervert out of
town."
"That's been talked about, but it would be expensive ... and real
people might get hurt." Pham Nuwen came smoothly to his feet, and smiled
dismissingly at her. "Well, that's about all we had to say to you." He walk
out from under the trees. Ravna hopped up to pursue.
"My personal advice: don't take this so hard, Ravna. I've seen it all,
you know. From the Bottom of the Slowness to the inside of a Transcendent
Power, each Zone has its own special unpleasantness. The whole basis of the
Perversion -- thermodynamic, economic, however you want to picture it -- is
the high quality of thought and communication at the Top of the Beyond. The
Perversion hasn't touched a single civilization in the Middle Beyond. Down
here, the comm lags and expense are too great, and even the best equipment
is mindless. To run things here you'd need standing navies, secret police,
clumsy transceivers -- it would be almost as awkward as any other Beyonder
empire, and of no profit to a Power." He turned and saw her dark expression.
"Hey, I'm saying your pretty ass is safe." He reached down to pat her rear.
Ravna brushed the hand away and stepped back. She'd been working on
some clever argument that might set the guy to thinking; there were cases
where Emissary Devices had changed their principal's decision. Now the
half-formed ideas were blown away, and all she could think to say was -- "So
how safe is your own tail, hmm? You say Old One is about ready to pack it
in, go wherever overage Powers wander off to. Is he going to take you along,
or maybe just put you away, a pet that's now inconvenient?"
It was a silly shot, and Pham Nuwen just laughed. "More analogies? No
... most likely he'll just leave me behind. You know, like a robot probe
flying free after its last use." Another analogy, but one to his liking. "In
fact, if it happens soon enough, I might even be willing to take on this
rescue expedition. It looks like Jefri Olsndot is in a medieval civlization.
I'll wager there's no one in the Org who understands such a place better
than I. And down at the Bottom, your crew could scarcely ask for a better
mate than an old Qeng Ho type." He spoke breezily, as though courage and
experience were givens for him -- even if other people were cowardly scuts.
"Oh, yeah?" Ravna's arms went akimbo, and she cocked her head to one
side. It was just a bit too much, when his whole existence was a fraud.
"You're the little prince who grew up with intrigue and assassination, and
then flew away to the stars with the Qeng Ho.... Do you ever really think
about that past, Pham Nuwen? Or is that something Old One tactfully blocks
you from doing? After our charming evening at The Wandering Company, I did
think about it. You know what? There's only a few things you can know for
sure: You really were a Slow Zone spacer -- probably two or three spacers,
since none of the corpses was complete. Somehow you and your buddies got
yourselves killed down at the nether end of the Slowness. What else? Well,
your ship had no recoverable memory. The only hardcopy we found seemed to be
written in some Earth Asian language. That's all, all, that Old One had to
go on when he put together the fraud."
Pham's smile seemed a little frozen. Ravna went on before he could
speak. "But don't blame Old One. He was a little rushed, right? He had to
convince Vrinimi and me that you were real. He rummaged around in the
archives, slapped together a mishmash reality for you. Maybe it took him an
afternoon -- are you grateful for the effort? A snip from here and a snip
from there. There really was a Qeng Ho, you know. On Earth, a thousand years
before space flight. And there must have been Asia-descended colonies,
though that's an obvious extrapolation on his part. Old One really has a
nice sense of humor. He made your whole life a fantastic romance, right down
to the last tragic expedition. That should have tipped me off, by the way.
It's a combination of several pre-Nyjoran legends."
She caught her breath and rushed on. "I feel sorry for you, Pham Nuwen.
As long as you don't think about yourself too hard, you can be the most
confident fellow in space. But all the skill, all the achievement -- do you
ever look at it up close? I'll bet not. Being a great warrior or an expert
pilot -- those involve a million subskills, all the way down to kinesthetic
things below the level of conscious thought. The Old One's fraud needed just
the top level recollections, and a brash personality. Look under the
surface, Pham. I think you'll find a whole lot of nothing." A dream of
competence, too closely confronted.
The redhead had crossed his arms and was tapping his sleeve with a
finger. When she finally ran out of words, his smile grew broad and
patronizing. "Ah, silly Ravna. Even now you don't understand how far
superior the Powers are. Old One is not some Middle Beyond tyranny,
brainwashing its victims with superficial memories. Even a Transcendent
fraud has more depth than the image of reality in a human mind. And how can
you know this really is a fraud? So you looked through the Relay archives,
and didn't find my Qeng Ho." My Qeng Ho. He paused. Remembering? Trying to
remember? For an instant Ravna saw a gleam of panic on his face. Then it was
gone, and there was just the lazy smile. "Can any of us imagine the archives
of the Transcend, all the things Old One must know about humanity? Vrinimi
Org should be grateful to Old One for explaining my origins; they could
never have learned that by themselves.
"Look. I am truly sorry I can't help. Even if it's otherwise a fool's
errand, I'd like to see those kids rescued. But don't worry about the
Blight. It's near maximum expansion now. Even if you could destroy it, you
wouldn't make things better for the poor wights who've been absorbed." He
laughed, a little too loudly. "Well, I have to go; Old One has some other
errands for me this afternoon. He wasn't happy about this being
face-to-face, but I insisted. The perks of detached duty, y'know. You and I
... you and I had some good times, and I thought it would be nice to chat. I
didn't mean to make you mad."
Pham cut in his agrav and floated off the sand. He waved a laconic
salute. Staring up, Ravna lifted her hand to wave back. His figure dwindled,
acquired a faint nimbus as he left the Docks' breathable atmosphere and his
space suit cut in.
Ravna watched a few moments more, till the figure became one more
commuter in the indigo sky. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Behind her there was the sound of wheels crunching across sand.
Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled out of the water. Wetness glistened on
the sides of their skrodes, transforming their cosmetic stripes into jagged
rainbows. Ravna walked down to meet them. How do I tell them there's no help
coming?
With someone like Pham Nuwen fronting for it, Old One had seemed so
different from what she imagined in her classes back at Sjandra Kei. She'd
almost thought she could make a difference just by talking. What a joke. She
had caught a glimpse just now, behind the front: of a being who could play
with souls the way a programmer plays with a clever graphic, a being so far
beyond her that only its indifference could protect her. Be happy, little
Ravna moth. You were only dazzled by the flame.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The next few weeks went surprisingly well. Despite the Pham Nuwen
debacle, Blueshell and Greenstalk were still willing to fly the rescue.
Vrinimi Org even kicked in some extra resources. Every day, Ravna took a
tele-excursion out to the repair yards. The Out of Band II might not be
getting any Transcendent enhancements, but when the refitting was complete,
the ship would be something extraordinary: Now it floated in a golden haze
of structors, billions of tiny robots regrowing sections of the hull into
the characteristic form of a bottom lugger. Sometimes the ship seemed to
Ravna like a fragile moth ... and sometimes an abyssal fish. The rebuilt
ship could survive across a range of environments: It had the spines of an
ultradrive craft, but the hull was streamlined and wasp-waist -- the classic
form of a ramscoop ship. Bottom-luggers must troll dangerously near the Slow
Zone. The zone surface was hard to detect from a distance, even harder to
map; and there were short-term position changes. It was not impossible for a
lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then
you'd thank goodness for the ramscoop and the coldsleep facilities. Of
course, by the time you returned to civilization, you might be completely
out of date, but at least you could get back.
Ravna floated her viewpoint through the drive spines that spread out
from the hull. They were broader than on most ships that came to Relay. They
weren't optimal for the Middle or High Beyond, but with appropriate (i.e.,
Low Beyond) computers, the ship would fly as fast as anything when it
reached the Bottom.
Grondr let her spend half-time on the project, and after a few days
Ravna realized this was not just a favor. She was the best person for this
job. She knew humans, and she knew archive management. Jefri Olsndot needed
reassurance every day. And the things Jefri was telling her were immediately
important. Even if everything went according to plan -- even if the
Perversion stayed completely out of it -- this rescue was going to be
tricky. The kid and his ship seemed to be in the middle of a bloody war.
Extracting them would mean making instantly correct decisions and acting on
them. They would need an effective onboard database and strategy program.
But not much could be expected to work at the Bottom, and memory capacity
would be limited. It was up to Ravna to decide what library materials to
move to the ship, to balance the ease of local availability against the
greater resources that would be accessible over the ultrawave from Relay.
Grondr was available on the local net, and often in real time. He
wanted this to work: "Don't worry, Ravna. We'll dedicate part of R00 to this
mission. If their antenna swarm works properly, the Riders should have have
a thirty Kbps link to Relay. You'll be their prime contact here, and you'll
have access to our best strategists. If nothing ... interferes, you should
have no trouble managing this rescue."
Even four weeks ago, Ravna wouldn't have dared to ask for more. Now:
"Sir, I have a better idea. Send me with the Skroderiders."
All of Grondr's mouth parts clapped together at once. She'd seen that
much surprise in people like Egravan, but never in the staid Grondr. He was
silent for a moment. "No. We need you here. You are our best sanity check
when it comes to questions about humankind." The newsgroups interested in
the Straumli Perversion carried more than one hundred thousand messages a
day, about a tenth of that human-related. Thousands of messages were old
ideas rehashed, or patent absurdities, or probable lies. Marketing's
automation was fairly good at filtering out the redundancy and some of the
absurdity, but when it came to questions on human nature Ravna was without
equal. About half her time was spent guiding that analysis and handling
queries about humankind at the archives. All that would be next to
impossible if she left with the Skroderiders.
Over the next few days, Ravna kept pushing her boss on the question.
Whoever flew the rescue would need instant rapport with humans -- human
children, in fact. Very likely Jefri Olsndot had never even met a
Skroderider. The point was a good one, and it was gradually driving her to
desperation -- but by itself it would not have changed old Grondr's mind. It
took some outside events to do that: As the weeks passed, the Blight's
expansion slowed. Just as conventional wisdom (and Old One via Pham Nuwen)
claimed, there seemed to be natural limits to how far the Perversion could
extend its interests. The abject panic slowly disappeared from High Beyond
communication traffic. Rumors and refugees from the absorbed volumes
dribbled toward zero. The people in the Blighted spaces were gone, but now
it was more like death in a graveyard than death from contagious rot.
Blight-related newsgroups continued to babble about the catastrophe, but the
level of nonproductive rehashing was steadily increasing. There simply was
very little new going on. Over the next ten years, physical death would
spread through the Blighted region. Colonization would begin again,
cautiously probing through the ruins and informational traps, and residue
races. But all of that was a ways off, and for the moment Relay's Blight
"windfall" was a shrinking affair.
... And Marketing was even more interested in the Straumli refugee
ship. None of the strategy programs -- much less Grondr -- believed the
ship's secret could hurt the Blight, but there was a good chance it might
bring commercial advantage when the Perversion finally got tired of its
Transcendent game. And the Tines pack-minds had caught their interest. It
was very appropriate that a maximum effort be made, that Ravna give up her
Docks job and go to the field.
So, for a wonder, her childhood fantasy of rescue and questing
adventure would actually come true. And even more surprising, I'm only
half-terrified by the prospect!
Target[56]: Im sorry I diddnt anser for a while. I dont feel good a
lot. Mister Steel says I should talk to you. He says I need more friends to
make me feel better. Amdi says so too and hes my best friend of all.... like
packs of dogs but smart and fun. I wish I could send pictures. Mister Steel
will try to get ansers for all your questions. He is doing everything he can
to help, but the bad packs will be back. Amdi and I tried the stuff you said
with the ship. I am sorry, it still doesnt work.... I hate this dumb
keybord....
Org[57]: Hi, Jefri. Amdi and Mr. Steel are right. I always like to
talk, and it will make you feel better.... There are inventions that might
help Mister Steel. We've thought of some improvements for his bows and
flamethrowers. I'm also sending down some fortress design information.
Please tell Mister Steel that we can't tell him how to fly the ship. It
would be dangerous even for an expert pilot to try....
Target[57]: Ya, even Daddy had a hard time landing it.
ikocxljikersw89iou43e5 I think Mister Steel just doesnt understand, and hes
getting sorta disparate.... Isnt there other stuff, though, like they had in
oldendays. You know, bombs and airplanes that we could make?...
Org[58]: There are other inventions, but it would take time for Mister
Steel to make them. Our star ship is leaving Relay soon, Jefri. We'll be
there long before other inventions would help....
Target[58]: Your coming? Your finally coming!!! When do you leave? When
will you get here???
Ordinarily Ravna composed her messages to Jefri on a keyboard -- it
gave her some feeling for the kid's situation. He seemed to be holding up,
though there were still days when he didn't write (it was strange to think
of "mental depression" having any connection with an eight-year-old). Other
times he seemed to have a tantrum at the keyboard, and across twenty-one
thousand light-years she saw evidence of small fists slamming into keys.
Ravna grinned at the display. Today she finally had something more than
nebulous promises for him: she had a positive departure time. Jefri was
going to like message [59]. She typed: "We're scheduled to leave in seven
more days, Jefri. Travel time will be about thirty days." Should she qualify
that? Latest postings on the Zone boundary newsgroups said the Bottom was
unusually active. The Tines World was so close to the Slow Zone ... If the
"storm" worsened, travel time would suffer. There was about a one percent
chance the voyage would take more than sixty days. She leaned back from the
keyboard. Did she really want to say that? Damn. Better be frank; these
dates could affect the locals who were helping Jefri. She explained the
"ifs" and "buts", then went on to describe the ship and the wonderful things
they would bring. The boy usually didn't write at great length (except when
he was relaying information from Steel), but he really seemed to like long
letters from her.
The Out of Band II was undergoing final consistency checks. Its
ultradrive was rebuilt and tested; the Skroderiders had taken it out a
couple of thousand light-years to check the antenna swarm. The swarm worked
great, too. She and Jefri would be able to talk through most of the voyage.
As of yesterday, the ship was stocked with consumables. (That sounded like
something out of medieval adventure. But you had to take some supplies when
you were headed so far down that reality graphics couldn't be trusted.)
Sometime tomorrow, Grondr's people would be loading the ship's hold with
gadgets that might be real handy for a rescue. Should she mention those?
Some of them might sound a bit intimidating to Jefri's local friends.
That evening, she and the Skroderiders had a beach party. That's what
they called it, though it was much more like the human version than an
authentic Rider one. Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled well back from the
water, to where the sand lay dry and warm. Ravna laid out refreshments on
Blueshell's cargo scarf. They sat on the sand and admired the sunset.
It was mostly a celebration -- that Ravna had gotten permission to go
with the OOB, that the ship was almost ready to depart. But, "Are you really
happy to be going, my lady?" asked Blueshell. "We two will make very good
money, but you -- "
Ravna laughed. "I'll get a travel bonus." She had argued and argued for
permission to go; there wasn't much room left to haggle about the pay. "And
yes. This is what I really want."
"I am glad," said Greenstalk.
"I am laughing," said Blueshell. "My mate is especially pleased that
our passenger will not be surly. We almost lost our love for bipeds after
shipping with the certificants. But there is nothing to be frightened of
now. Have you read Threats Group in the last fifteen hours? The Blight has
stopped growing, and its edges have become sharply defined. The Perversion
is settling into middle age. I'm ready to leave right now."
Blueshell was full of speculations about the Tinish "packs", and
possible schemes for extracting Jefri and any other survivors. Greenstalk
interjected a thought here and there. She was less shy than before, but
still seemed softer, more diffident than her mate. And her confidence was a
bit more realistic. She was glad they weren't leaving for another week.
There were still the final consistency checks to run on the OOB -- and
Grondr had gotten Org financing for a small fleet of decoy ships. Fifty were
complete so far. A hundred would be ready by the end of the week.
The Docks drifted into night. With its shallow atmosphere, twilight was
short, but the colors were spectacular. The beach and the trees glistened in
the horizontal rays. The scent of evening flowers mixed with the tang of sea
salt. On the far side of the sea, all was stark bright and dark, silhouettes
that might have been Vrinimi fancies or functional dock equipage -- Ravna
had never learned which. The sun slid behind the sea. Orange and red spread
along the aft horizon, topped by a wider band of green, probably ionized
oxygen.
The Riders didn't turn their skrodes for a better view -- for all she
knew, they had been looking that way all along -- but they stopped talking.
As the sun set, the breakers shattered it into a thousand images, glints of
green and yellow through the foam. She guessed the two would have preferred
to be out there just now. She had seen them often enough around sunset,
deliberately sitting where the surf was hardest. When the water drew back,
their stalks and fronds were like supplicants' arms, upstretched. At times
like these she could almost understand the Lesser Skroderiders; they spent
their whole lives memorizing such repeated moments. She smiled in the
greenish twilight. There would always be time enough later to worry and
plan.
They must have sat like that for twenty minutes. Along the curving line
of the beach, she saw tiny fires in the gathering dark: office parties.
Somewhere very nearby there was the crunch crunch of feet on sand. She
turned and saw that it was Pham Nuwen. "Over here," she called.
Pham ambled toward them. He'd been very scarce since their last
confrontation; Ravna guessed that some of her jibes had struck deep. This
once, I hope Old One made him forget. Pham Nuwen had the potential to be a
real person; it hadn't been right to hurt him because his principal was
beyond reach.
"Have a seat. Galaxy-rise in a half hour." The Skroderiders rustled, so
deep into the sunset that they were only now noticing the visitor.
Pham Nuwen walked a pace or two beyond Ravna and stood arms akimbo,
staring across the sea. He glanced back at her, and the green twilight gave
his face an eerie fierceness. He flashed his old, lopsided smile. "I think I
owe you an apology."
Old One's gonna let you join the human race after all? But Ravna was
touched. She dropped her eyes from his. "I guess I owe you one too. If Old
One won't help, he won't help; I shouldn't have lost my temper."
Pham Nuwen laughed softly, "Yours was certainly the lesser error. I'm
still trying to figure out where I went wrong, and ... I don't think I have
time now to learn."
He looked back at the sea. After a moment, Ravna stood and stepped
toward him. Up close, his stare looked glassy. "What's wrong?" Damn you, Old
One. If you're going to abandon him, don't do it in pieces!
"You're the great expert on Transcendent Powers, eh?"
More sarcasm. "Well -- "
"Do the big boys have wars?"
Ravna shrugged. "You can find rumors of everything. We think there's
conflict, but something too subtle to call war."
"You're pretty much right. There is struggle, but it has more angles
than anything down here. The benefits of cooperation are normally so great
that.... That's part of the reason I didn't take the Perversion seriously.
Besides, the creature is pitiful: a wimpy cur that fouls its own den. Even
if it wanted to kill other Powers, something like that never could. Not in a
billion years...."
Blueshell rolled up beside them. "Who is this, my lady?"
It was the sort of Riderish conversation-stopper that she was only just
getting used to. If Blueshell would just get in synch with his skrode
memory, he'd know. Then the question truly hit her. Who is this? She glanced
at her dataset. It was showing transceiver status, had been ever since Pham
Nuwen arrived. And ... by the Powers, three transceivers had been grabbed by
a single customer!
She took a quick step backwards. "You!"
"Me! Face to face once more, Ravna." The leer was a parody of Pham's
self-assured smile. "Sorry I can't be charming tonight." He slapped his
chest awkwardly. "I'm using this thing's underlying instincts.... I'm too
busy trying to stay alive."
There was drool coming down his chin. Pham's eyes would focus on her
and then drift.
"What are you doing to Pham!"
The Emissary Device stepped toward her, stumbled. "Making room," came
Pham Nuwen's voice.
Ravna spoke Grondr's phone code. There was no response.
The Emissary Device shook its head. "Vrinimi Org is very busy right
now, trying to convince me to get off their equipment, trying to screw up
their courage and force me off. They don't believe what I'm telling them" He
laughed, a quick choking sound. "Doesn't matter. I see now that the attack
here was just a deadly diversion.... How about that, Little Ravna? See, the
Blight is not a Class Two perversion. In the time I have left, I can only
guess what it is.... Something very old, very big. Whatever it is, I'm being
eaten alive."
Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled close to Ravna. Their fronds made
faint skritching noises. Some thousands of light-years away, well into the
Transcend, a Power was fighting for its life. And all they saw of it was one
man turned into a slobbering lunatic.
"So that's my apology, Little Ravna. Helping you probably wouldn't have
saved me." His voice strangled on itself, and he took a gasping breath. "But
helping you now will be a measure of -- vengeance is a motive you would
understand. I've called your ship down. If you move fast and don't use
agrav, you may survive the next hour."
Blueshell's voice was timid and blustery at the same time. "Survive?
Only a conventional attack could work down here, and there is no sign of
one."
A maniac surrounded by the soft, quiet night. Ravna's dataset showed
nothing strange except for the diversion of bandwidth to Old One.
Pham Nuwen made a coughing laugh. "Oh, it's conventional enough, but
very clever. A few grams of replicant disorder, wafted in over weeks. It's
blossoming now, timed with the attack you see.... The growth will die in a
matter of hours, after it kills all of Relay's precious High automation....
Ravna! Take the ship, or die in the next thousand seconds. Take the ship. If
you survive, go to the Bottom. Get the...." the Emissary Device pulled
itself straighter, and smiled its greenish smile a last time. "And here is
my gift to you, the best help I have left to give."
The smile disappeared. The glassy look was replaced by a wonder ... and
then mounting terror. Pham Nuwen dragged in a great breath, and had time for
one barking scream before he collapsed. He landed face down, twitching and
choking in the sand.
Ravna shouted Grondr's code again, and ran to Pham Nuwen. She pulled
him over on his back and tried to clear his mouth. The fit lasted several
seconds, Pham's limbs flailing randomly about. Ravna collected several solid
hits as she tried to steady him. Then Pham went limp, and she could barely
feel his breath.
Blueshell was saying, "Somehow he's grabbed the OOB. It's four thousand
kilometers out, coming straight for the Docks. Wail. We're ruined."
Unauthorized flight close to the Docks was cause for confiscation.
Somehow Ravna didn't think it mattered anymore. "Is there any sign of
attack?" she said over her shoulder. She eased Pham's head back, made sure
he had a clear breathing passage.
Random rustling between the Skroderiders. Greenstalk: "Something is
strange. We have service suspension on the main transceivers." So Old One is
still transmitting? "The local net is very clogged. Much automation, many
employees being called to special duty."
Ravna rocked back. The sky was night dark, punctuated by a dozen bright
points of light -- ships guiding for the Docks. All very normal. But her own
dataset was showing what Greenstalk reported.
"Ravna, I can't talk right now." Grondr's clickety voice sounded out of
the air beside her. This would be his associate program. "Old One has taken
most of Relay. Watch out for the Emissary Device." A little late, that!
"We've lost contact with the surveillance fence beyond the transceivers. We
are having program and hardware failures. Old One claims we are being
attacked." A five second pause. "We see evidence of fleet action at the
domestic defense boundary." That was just a half light-year out.
"Brap!" From Blueshell. "At the domestic defense boundary! How could
you miss them coming in?" He rolled back and forth, pivoted.
Grondr's associate ignored the question. "Minimum three thousand ships.
Destruction of transceivers immin -- "
"Ravna, are the Skroderiders with you?" It was still Grondr's voice,
but more staccato, more involved. This was the real guy.
"Y-yes."
"The local network is failing. Life support failing. The Docks will
fall. We would be stronger than the attacking fleet, but we're rotting from
the inside.... Relay is dying." His voice sharpened, clattering, "but
Vrinimi will not die, and a contract is a contract! Tell the Riders, we will
pay them ... somehow, someday. We require ... plead ... they fly the mission
we contracted. Ravna?"
"Yes. They hear."
"Then go!" And the voice was gone.
Blueshell said, "OOB will be here in two hundred seconds."
Pham Nuwen had calmed, and his breathing was easier. As the two Riders
chittered back and forth, Ravna looked around -- and suddenly realized that
all the death and destruction had been reports from afar. The beach and the
sky were almost as placid as ever. The last of the sun's rays had left the
waves. The foam was a dim band in the low green light. Here and there,
yellow lights glowed in the trees and the farther towers.
Yet the alarum had clearly spread. She could hear datasets coming on.
Some of the beach fires guttered out, and the figures around them ran into
the trees or drifted upwards, headed for farther offices. Now starships
floated up from their berths across the sea, falling higher and higher till
they glittered in the departed sunlight.
It was Relay's last moment of peace.
A patch of glowing dark spread across the sky. She gasped at light so
twisted it should have gone unseen. It shone more in the back of her head
than in her eyes. Afterwards she couldn't think what made it objectively
different from blackness.
"There's another!" said Blueshell. This one was near the Decks'
horizon, a blot of darkness perhaps a degree across. The edges were an
indistinct bleeding of black into black.
"What is it?" Ravna was no war freak, but she'd read her share of
adventure stories. She knew about antimatter bombs and relativistic KE
slugs. From a distance such weapons were bright spots of light, sometimes an
orchestrated flickering. Or closer: a world-wrecker would glow incandescent
across the curve of a planet, splashing the globe itself like a drop of
water, but slow, slow. Those were the images her reading had prepared her
for. What she saw now was more like a defect in her eyesight than a vision
of war.
Powers only knew what the Skroderiders saw, but: "Your main
transceivers ... vaping out, I think," said Blueshell.
"Those are light-years out! There's no way we could see -- " Another
splotch appeared, not even in her field of view. The color floated,
placeless. Pham Nuwen spasmed again, but weakly. She had no trouble holding
him still, but ... blood dribbled from his mouth. The back of his shirt was
wet with something that stank of decay.
"OOB will be here in one hundred seconds. Plenty of time, there's
plenty of time." Blueshell rolled back and forth around them, talking
reassurance that just showed how nervous he was. "Yes, my lady, light-years
out. And years from now, the flash of their going will light the sky for
anyone still alive here. But only a fraction of the vape-out is making
light. The rest is an ultrawave surge so great that ordinary matter is
affected.... Optic nerves tickled by the overflow.... So much that your own
nervous system becomes a receiver." He spun around. "But don't worry. We're
tough and quick. We've squeezed through close spots before." There was
something absurd about a creature with no short-term memory bragging up its
lightning reflexes. She hoped his skrode was up to this.
Greenstalk's voice buzzed painfully loud. "Look!"
The surf line was drawing back, further than she had ever seen it.
"The sea is falling!" shouted Greenstalk. Water's edge had pulled back
a hundred meters, two hundred. The green-limned horizon was dipping.
"Ship's still fifty seconds out. We'll fly to meet it. Come, Ravna!"
Ravna's own courage died cold that second. Grondr had said the Docks
would fall! The near sky was crowded now as dozens of people raced for
safety. A hundred meters away the sand itself was shifting, an avalanche
tilting toward the abyss. She remembered something Old One had said, and
suddenly she knew the fliers were making a terrible mistake. The thought cut
through her terror. "No! Just head for higher ground."
The night was silent no more. A bell-like moaning came from the sea.
The sound spread. The sunset breeze grew to a gale that twisted the trees
toward the water, sending branches and sand sweeping past them.
Ravna was still on her knees, her hands pressing down on Pham's limp
arms. No breath, no pulse. The eyes stared sightlessly. Old One's gift to
her. Damn all the Powers! She grabbed Pham Nuwen under the shoulders and
rolled him onto her back.
She gagged, almost lost her grip. Underneath his shirt she felt
cavities where there should be solid flesh. Something wet and rank dripped
around her sides. She struggled up from her knees, half-carrying and
half-dragging the body.
Blueshell was shouting, "-- take hours to roll anywhere." He drifted
off the ground, driving his agrav against the wind. Skrode and Rider twisted
drunkenly for an instant ... and then he was slammed back to the ground,
tumbled willy-nilly toward the wind's destination, the moaning hole that had
been the sea. Greenstalk raced to his seaward side, blocking his progress
toward destruction. Blueshell righted himself and the two rolled back toward
Ravna. The Rider's voice was faint in the wind: "... agrav ... failing!" And
with it the very structure of the Docks.
They walked and wheeled their way back from the sucking sea. "Find a
place to land the OOB."
The tree line was a jagged range of hills now. The landscape changed
before their eyes and under her feet. The groaning sound was everywhere,
some places so loud it buzzed through Ravna's shoes. They avoided sagging
terrain, the sink holes that opened on all sides. The night was dark no
more. Whether it was emergency lighting or a side-effect of the agrav
failure, blue glowed along the holes. Through those holes they saw the
cloud-decked night of Groundside a thousand kilometers below. The space
between was not empty. There were shimmering phantoms: billions of tonnes of
water and earth ... and hundreds of dying fliers. Vrinimi Org was paying the
price for building their Docks on agrav instead of inertial orbit.
Somehow the three were making progress. Pham Nuwen was almost too heavy
to carry/drag; she staggered left and right almost as much as she moved
forward. Yet he was lighter that she would have guessed. And that was
terrifying in its own way: was even the high ground failing?
Most of the agravs died by failure, but some suffered destructive
runaway: clumps of trees and earth ripped free from the tops of hillocks and
accelerated upwards. The wind shifted back and forth, up and down ... but it
was thinner now, the noise remote. The artificial atmosphere that clothed
the Docks would soon be gone. Ravna's pocket pressure suit worked for a few
minutes, but now it was fading. In a few minutes it would be as dead as her
agravs ... as dead as she would be. She wondered vaguely how the Blight had
managed this. Like the Old One, she would likely die without ever knowing.
She saw torch flares; there were ships. Most had boosted for inertial
orbits or gone directly into ultradrive, but a few hung over the
disintegrating landscape. Blueshell and Greenstalk led the way. The two used
their third axles in ways Ravna had never guessed at, lifting and pushing to
clamber up slopes that she could scarcely negotiate with Pham's weight
dragging from her back.
They were on a hilltop, but not for long. This had been part of the
office forest. Now the trees stuck out in different directions, like hair on
a mangy dog. She felt the ground throbbing beneath her feet. What next? The
Skroderiders rolled from one side of the peak to another. They would be
rescued here or nowhere. She went to her knees, resting most of Pham's
weight on the ground. From here you could see a long ways. The Docks looked
like a slowly flapping flag, and every immense whip of the fabric broke
fragments loose. As long as some consensus remained among the agrav units,
it still had planar aspect. That was disappearing. There were sink holes all
around their little knob of forest. On the horizon, Ravna saw the far edge
of the Docks detach itself and turn slowly sideways: a hundred kilometers
long, ten wide, it swept down on would-be rescue ships.
Blueshell brushed against her left side, Greenstalk against her right.
Ravna twisted, laying some of Pham's weight on the skrode hulls. If all four
merged their pressure suits, there would be a few more moments of
consciousness. "The OOB: I'm flying it down!" he said.
Something was coming down. A ship's torch lit the ground blue white,
with shadows stark and shifting. It's not a healthy thing to be around a
rocket drive hovering in a near-one-gee field. An hour earlier the maneuver
would have been impossible, or a capital offense if accomplished. Now it
didn't matter if the torch punched through the Docks or fried a cargo from
halfway across the galaxy.
Still ... where could Blueshell land the thing? They were surrounded by
sinkholes and moving cliffs. She closed her eyes as the burning light
drifted down before them ... and then dimmed. Blueshell's shout was thin in
their shared atmosphere. "Let's go together!"
She held tight to the Riders, and they crawled/wheeled down from their
little hill. The Out of Band II was hovering in the middle of a sinkhole.
Its torch was hidden from view, but the glare off the sides of the hole put
the ship in sharp silhouette, turned its ultradrive spines into feathery
white arcs. A giant moth with glowing wings ... and just out of reach.
If their suits held, they could make it to the edge of the hole. Then
what? The spines kept the ship from getting closer than a hundred meters. An
able-bodied (and crazy) human might try to grab a spine and crawl down it.
But Skroderiders had their own brand of insanity: Just as the light --
the reflected light -- became too much to bear ... the torch winked out. The
OOB fell through the hole. This didn't stop the Riders' advance. "Faster!"
said Blueshell. And now she guessed what they planned. Quickly for such an
awkward jumble of limbs and wheels, they moved up to the edge of the
darkened hole. Ravna felt the dirt giving way beneath her feet, and then
they were falling.
The Decks were hundreds -- in places, thousands -- of meters thick.
They fell past them now, past dim eerie flickers of internal destruction.
Then they were through, still falling. For a moment the feeling of wild
panic was gone. After all this was simply free fall, a commonplace, and a
damnsight more peaceful than the disintegrating Docks. Now it was easy to
hold onto the Riders and Pham Nuwen, and even their commensal atmosphere
seemed a little thicker than before. There was something to be said for hard
vacuum and free fall. Except for an occasional rogue agrav, everything was
coming down at the same acceleration, ruins peacefully settling. And four or
five minutes from now they would hit Groundside's atmosphere, still falling
almost straight downwards.... Entry velocity only three or four kilometers
per second. Would they burn up? Maybe. Flashes pricked bright above the
cloud-decks.
The junk around them was mostly dark, just shadows against the sky show
above. But the wreckage directly below was large and regular ... the OOB,
bow on! The ship was falling with them. Every few seconds a trim jet fired,
a faint reddish glow. The ship was closing with them. If it had a nose
hatch, they would land right on it.
Its docking lights flicked on, bright upon them. Ten meters separation.
Five. There was a hatch, and open! She could see a very ordinary airlock
within....
Whatever hit them was big. Ravna saw a vague expanse of plastic rising
over her shoulder. The rogue was slowly turning, and it scarcely brushed
them -- but that was enough. Pham Nuwen was jarred from her grasp. His body
was lost in shadow, then suddenly bright lit as the ship's spotlight tracked
after him. Simultaneously the air gusted out of Ravna's lungs. They were
down to three pocket pressure fields now, failing fields; it was not enough.
Ravna could feel consciousness slipping away, her vision tunneling. So
close.
The Riders unlatched from each other. She grabbed at the skrode hulls
and they drifted, strung out, over the ship's lock. Blueshell's skrode
jerked against her as the he made fast to the hatch. The jolt twisted her
around, whipping Greenstalk upwards. Things were getting dreamy now. Where
was panic when you needed it? Hold tight, hold tight, hold tight, sang the
little voice, all that was left of consciousness. Bump, jerk. The Riders
pushed and pulled at her. Or maybe it was the ship jerking all of them
around. They were puppets, dancing off a single string.
... Deep in the tunnel of her vision, a Rider grabbed at the tumbling
figure of Pham Nuwen.
Ravna wasn't aware of losing consciousness, but the next she knew she
was breathing air and choking on vomit -- and was inside the airlock. Solid
green walls closed in comfortingly on all sides. Pham Nuwen lay on the far
wall, strapped into a first aid canister. His face had a bluish cast.
She pushed awkwardly across the lock toward Pham Nuwen's wall. The
place was a confused jumble, unlike the passenger and sporting ships she'd
been on before. Besides, this was a Rider design. Stickem patches were
scattered around the walls; Greenstalk had mounted her skrode on one
cluster.
They were accelerating, maybe a twentieth of a gee. "We're still going
down?"
"Yes. If we hover or rise, we'll crash," into all the junk that still
rains from above. "Blueshell is trying to fly us out." They were falling
with the rest, but trying to drift out from under -- before they hit
Groundside. There was an occasional rattle/ping against the hull. Sometimes
the acceleration ceased, or shifted in a new direction. Blueshell was
actively avoiding the big pieces.
... Not with complete success. There was long, rasping sound that ended
with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. "Brrap! Just lost an
ultradrive spine," came Blueshell's voice. "Two others already damaged.
Please strap down, my lady."
They touched atmosphere a hundred seconds later. The sound was a barely
perceptible humming beyond the hull. It was the sound of death for a ship
like this. It could no more aerobrake than a dog could jump over the moon.
The noise came louder. Blueshell was actually diving, trying to get deep
enough to shed the junk that surrounded the ship. Two more spines broke.
Then came a long surge of main axis acceleration. Out of Band II arced out
of the Docks' death shadow, drove out and out, into inertial orbit.
Ravna looked over Blueshell's fronds at the outside windows. They had
just passed Groundside's terminator, and were flying an inertial orbit. They
were in free fall again, but this trajectory curved back on itself without
whacking into big hard things -- like Groundside.
Ravna didn't know much more about space travel than you'd expect of a
frequent passenger and an adventure fan. But it was obvious that Blueshell
had pulled off a near miracle. When she tried to thank him, the Rider rolled
back and forth across the stick-patches, buzzing faintly to himself.
Embarrassed? or just Riderly inattentive?
Greenstalk spoke, sounding a little shy, a little proud: "Far trading
is our life, you know. If we are cautious, life will be mostly safe and
placid, but there will be close passages. Blueshell practices all the time,
programming his skrode with every wit he can imagine. He is a master." In
everyday life, indecision seemed to dominate the Riders. But in a crunch,
they didn't hesitate to bet everything. She wondered how of that was the
skrode overriding its rider?
"Grump," said Blueshell. "I have simply postponed the close passage. I
broke several of our drive spines. What if they do not self-repair? What do
we do then? Everything around Groundside is destroyed. There is junk
everywhere out to a hundred radii. Not dense like around the Docks, but of
much higher velocity." You can't inject billions of tonnes of wreckage into
buckshot orbits and expect safe navigation. "And any second, the
Perversion's creatures will be here, eating whoever survives."
"Urk." Greenstalk's tendrils froze in comical disarray. She chittered
to herself for a second. "You're right ... I forgot. I thought we had found
an open space, but ..."
Open space all right, but in a shooting gallery. Ravna looked back at
the command deck windows. They were on the dayside now, perhaps five hundred
kilometers above Groundside's principal ocean. The space above the hazy blue
horizon was free of flash and glow. "I don't see any fighting," Ravna said
hopefully.
"Sorry." Blueshell switched the windows to a more significant view.
Most of it was navigation and ultratrace information, meaningless to Ravna.
Her eye caught on a medstat: Pham Nuwen was breathing again. The ship's
surgeon thought it could save him. But there was also a communication status
window; on it, the attack was dreadfully clear. The local net had broken
into hundreds of screaming fragments. There were only automatic voices from
the planetary surface, and they were calling for medical aid. Grondr had
been down there. Somehow she suspected that not even his Marketing ops
people had survived. Whatever hit Groundside was even deadlier than the
failures at the Docks. In near planetary space, there were a few survivors
in ships and fragments of habitats, most on doomed trajectories. Without
massive and coordinated help, they would be dead in minutes -- hours at the
outside. The directors of Vrinimi Org were gone, destroyed before they ever
figured out quite what had happened.
Go, Grondr had said, go.
Out-system, there was fighting. Ravna saw message traffic from Vrinimi
defense units. Even without control or coordination, some still opposed the
Perversion's fleet. The light from their battles would arrive well after the
defeat, well after the enemy arrived here in person. How long do we have?
Minutes?
"Brrap. Look at those traces," said Blueshell. "The Perversion has
almost four thousand vessels. They are bypassing the defenders."
"But now there is scarcely anyone left out there," said Greenstalk. "I
hope they're not all dead."
"Not all. I see several thousand ships departing, everyone with the
means and any sense." Blueshell rolled back and forth. "Alas! We have the
good sense ... but look at this repair report." One window spread large,
filled with colored patterns that meant less than zip to Ravna. "Two spines
still broken, unrepairable. Three partially repaired. If they don't heal,
we'll be stuck here. This is unacceptable!" His voder voice buzzed up
shrilly. Greenstalk drove close to him, and they rattled their fronds at
each other.
Several minutes passed. When Blueshell spoke Samnorsk again, his voice
was quieter. "One spine repaired. Maybe, maybe, maybe...." He opened a
natural view. The OOB was coasting across Groundside's south pole, back into
night. Their orbit should take them over the worst of the Docks junk, but
the ride was a constant jigging as the ship avoided other debris. The cries
of battle horror from out-system dwindled. The Vrinimi Organization was one
vast, twitching corpse ... and very soon its killer would come snuffling.
"Two repaired." Blueshell became very quiet.... "Three! Three are
repaired! Fifteen seconds to recalibrate and we can jump!"
It seemed longer ... but then all the windows changed to a natural
view. Groundside and its sun were gone. Stars and dark stretched all around.
Three hours later and Relay was a hundred and fifty light-years behind
them. The OOB had caught up with the main body of fleeing ships. What with
the archives and the tourism, there had been an extraordinary number of
interstellar ships at Relay: ten thousand vehicles were spread across the
light-years around them. But stars were rare this far off the galactic plane
and they were at least a hundred hours flying time from the nearest refuge.
For Ravna, it was the start of a new battle. She glared across the deck
at Blueshell. The Skroderider dithered, its fronds twisting on themselves in
a way she had not seen before. "See here, my lady Bergsndot, High Point is a
lovely civilization, with some bipedal participants. It is safe. It is
nearby. You could adapt." He paused. Reading my expression is he? "But --
but if that is not acceptable, we will take you further. Give us a chance to
contract the proper cargo, and -- and we'll take you all the way back to
Sjandra Kei. How about that?"
"No. You already have a contract, Blueshell. With Vrinimi Organization.
The three of us -- " and whatever has become of Pham Nuwen "-- are going to
the Bottom of the Beyond."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief! We received a preliminary retainer,
true. But now that Vrinimi Org is dead, there is no one to make good on the
rest of the agreement. Hence we are free of it also."
"Vrinimi is not dead. You heard Grondr 'Kalir. The Org had -- has --
branch offices all across the Beyond. The obligation stands."
"On a technicality. We both know that those branches could never make
the final payment."
Ravna didn't have a good answer to that. "You have an obligation," she
said, but without the proper forcefulness. She had never been good at
bluster.
"My lady, are you truly speaking from Org ethics, or from simple
humanity?"
"I-- " In fact, Ravna had never completely understood Org ethics. That
was one reason why she had intended to return to Sjandra Kei after her
'prenticeship, and one reason the Org had dealt cautiously with the human
race. "It doesn't matter which I speak from! There is a contract. You were
happy to honor it when things looked safe. Well, things turned deadly -- but
that possibility was part of the deal." Ravna glanced at Greenstalk. She had
been silent so far, not even rustling at her mate. Her fronds were tightly
held against her central stalk. Maybe -- "Listen, there are other reasons
besides contract obligation. The Perversion is more powerful than anyone
thought. It killed a Power today. And it's operating in the Middle
Beyond.... The Riders have a long history, Blueshell, longer than most
races' entire existence. The Perversion may be strong enough to put an end
to all of that."
Greenstalk rolled toward her and opened slightly. "You -- you really
think we might find something on that ship at the Bottom, something that
could harm a Power among Powers?"
Ravna paused. "Yes. And Old One himself thought so, just before he
died."
Blueshell wrapped even tighter around himself, twisting. In anguish?
"My Lady, we are traders. We have lived long and traveled far ... and
survived by minding our own business. No matter what romantics may think,
traders do not go on quests. What you ask ... is impossible, mere Beyonders
seeking to subvert a Power."
Yet that was a risk you signed for. But Ravna didn't say it aloud.
Perhaps Greenstalk did: her fronds rustled, and Blueshell scrinched even
more. Greenstalk was silent for a second, then she did something funny with
her axles, bumping free of the stickem. Her wheels spun on nothing as she
floated through a slow arc, till she was upside down, her fronds reaching
down to brush Blueshell's. They rattled back and forth for almost five
minutes. Blueshell slowly untwisted, the fronds relaxing and patting back at
his mate.
Finally he said. "Very well.... One quest. But mark you! Never
another."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
CHAPTER 17
Spring came wet and cold, and excruciatingly slow. It had been raining
the last eight days. How Johanna wished for something else, even the dark of
winter back again.
She slogged across mud that had been moss. It was midday; the gloomy
light would last another three hours. Scarbutt claimed that without the
overcast, they would be seeing a bit of direct sunlight nowadays. Sometimes
she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.
The castle's great yard was on a hillside. Mud and sullen snow spread
down the hill, piled against the wooden buildings. Last summer there had
been a glorious view from here. And in the winter, the aurora had spilled
green and blue across the snow, glinted on the frozen harbor, and outlined
the far hills against the sky. Now: The rain was a close mist; she couldn't
even see the city beyond the walls. The clouds were a low and ragged ceiling
above her head. She knew there were guards on the stone walls of the castle
curtain, but today they must be huddled behind watch slits. Not a single
animal, not a single pack was visible. The Tines' world was an empty place
compared to Straum -- but not like the High Lab either. High Lab was a
airless rock orbiting a red dwarf. The Tines' world was alive, moving;
sometimes it looked as beautiful and friendly as a holiday resort on Straum.
Indeed, Johanna realized that it was kindlier than most worlds the human
race had settled -- certainly a gentler world than Nyjora, and perhaps as
nice as Old Earth.
Johanna had reached her bungalow. She paused for a second under its
outcurving walls and looked across the courtyard. Yes, it looked a little
like medieval Nyjora. But the stories from the Age of Princesses hadn't
conveyed the implacable power in such a world: The rain went on for as far
as she could see. Without decent technology, even a cold rain could be a
deadly thing. So could the wind. And the sea was not something for an
afternoon's fun sailing; she thought of surging hillocks of coldness,
puckered with rain ... going on and on. Even the forests around the town
were threatening. It was easy to wander into them, but there were no radio
finders, no refresh stalls disguised as tree trunks. Once lost, you would
simply die. Nyjoran fairy tales had a special meaning for her now: no great
imagination was needed to invent the elementals of wind and rain and sea.
This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world
itself could kill you.
And she did have plenty of enemies. Johanna pulled open the tiny door
and went inside.
A pack of Tines was sitting around the fire. It scrambled to its feet
and helped Johanna out of her rainjacket. She didn't shrink from the
fine-toothed muzzles anymore. This was one of her usual helpers; she could
almost think of the jaws as hands, deftly pulling the oilskin jacket down
her arms and hanging it near the fire.
Johanna chucked her boots and pants, and accepted the quilted wrap that
the pack "handed" her.
"Dinner. Now," she said to the pack.
"Okay."
Johanna settled on a pillow by the fire pit. In fact the Tines were
more primitive than the humans on Nyjora: The Tines' world was not a fallen
colony. They didn't even have legend to guide them. Sanitation was a
sometime thing. Before Woodcarver, Tinish doctors bled their
patients/victims.... She knew now that she was living in the Tines'
equivalent of a luxury apartment. The deep-polished wood was not a normal
thing. The designs painted on the pillars and walls were the result of many
hours' labor.
Johanna rested her chin on her hands and stared into the flames. She
was vaguely aware of the pack prancing around the pit, hanging pots over the
fire. This one spoke very little Samnorsk; it wasn't in on Woodcarver's
dataset project. Many weeks ago, Scarbutt had asked to move in here -- what
better way to speed the learning process? Johanna shivered at the memory.
She knew the scarred one was just a single member, that the pack that killed
Dad had itself died. Johanna understood, but every time she saw "Peregrine",
she saw her father's murderer sitting fat and happy, thinking to hide itself
behind its three smaller fellows. Johanna smiled into the flames,
remembering the whack she had landed on Scarbutt when he made the
suggestion. She'd lost control, but it had been worth it. No one else
suggested that "friends" should share this house with her. Most evenings
they left her alone. And some nights ... Dad and Mom seemed so near, maybe
just outside, waiting for her to notice. Even though she had seen them die,
something inside her refused to let them go.
Cooking smells slipped past the familiar daydream. Tonight it was meat
and beans, with something like onions. Surprise. The stuff smelled good; if
there had been any variety, she would have enjoyed it. But Johanna hadn't
seen fresh fruit in sixty days. Salted meat and veggies were the only winter
fare. If Jefri were here, he'd throw a fit. It was months past since the
word came from Woodcarver's spies up north: Jefri had died in the ambush....
Johanna was getting over it, she really was. And in some ways, being all
alone made things ... simpler.
The pack put a plate of meat and beans before her, along with a kind of
knife. Oh, well. Johanna grabbed the crooked hilt (bent sideways to be held
by Tinish jaws) and dug in.
She was almost finished when there was a polite scratching at the door.
Her servant gobbled something. The visitor replied, then said in rather good
Samnorsk (and a voice that was eerily like her own), "Hello there, my name
is Scriber. I would like a small talk, okay?"
One of the servant's turned to look at her; the rest were watching the
door. Scriber was the one she thought of as Pompous Clown. He'd been with
Scarbutt at the ambush, but he was such a fool that she scarcely felt
threatened by him.
"Okay," she said, starting toward the door. Her servant (guard) grabbed
crossbows in its jaws, and all five members snaked up the staircase to the
loft; there wasn't space for more than one pack down here.
The cold and wet blew into the room along with her visitor. Johanna
retreated to the other side of the fire while Scriber took off his rain
slickers. The pack members shook themselves the way dogs do, a noisy,
amusing sight -- and you didn't want to be near when it happened.
Finally Scriber sauntered over to the fire pit. Under the slickers he
wore jackets with the usual stirrups and the open spaces behind the
shoulders and at the haunches. But Scriber's appeared to be padded above the
shoulders to make his members look heavier than they really were. One of him
sniffed at her plate, while the other heads looked this way and that ... but
never directly at her.
Johanna looked down at the pack. She still had trouble talking to more
than one face; usually she picked on whichever was looking back at her.
"Well? What did you come to talk about?"
One of the heads finally looked at her. It licked its lips. "Okay. Yes.
I thought to see how do you do? I mean ..." gobble. Her servant answered
from upstairs, probably reporting what kind of mood she was in. Scriber
straightened up. Four of his six heads looked at Johanna. His other two
members paced back and forth, as if contemplating something important. "Look
here. You are the only human I know, but I have always been a big student of
character. I know you are not happy here -- "
Pompous Clown was also master of the obvious.
"-- and I understand. But we do the best to help you. We are not the
bad people who killed your parents and brother."
Johanna put a hand on the low ceiling and leaned forward. You're all
thugs; you just happen to have the same enemies I do. "I know that, and I am
cooperating. You'd still be playing the dataset's kindermode if it weren't
for me. I've shown you the reading courses; if you guys have any brains,
you'll have gunpowder by summer." The Oliphaunt was an heirloom toy, a
huggable favorite thing she should have outgrown years ago. But there was
history in it -- stories of the queens and princesses of the Dark Ages, and
how they had struggled to triumph over the jungles, to rebuild the cities
and then the spaceships. Half-hidden on obscure reference paths there were
also hard numbers, the history of technology. Gunpowder was one of the
easiest things. When the weather cleared up, there would be some prospecting
expeditions; Woodcarver had known about sulfur, but didn't have quantities
in town. Making cannon would be harder. But then.... "Then your enemies will
be killed. Your people are getting what they want from me. So what's your
complaint?"
"Complaint?" Pompous Clown's heads bobbed up and down in alternation.
Such distributed gestures seemed to be the equivalent of facial expressions,
though Johanna hadn't figured many of them out. This one might mean
embarrassment. "I have no complaint. You are helping us, I know. But, but
..." Three of his members were pacing around now. "It's just that I see more
than most people, perhaps a little like Woodcarver did in oldendays. I am a
-- I've seen your word for it -- a 'dilettante'. You know, a person who
studies all things and who is talented at everything. I am only thirty years
old, but I have read almost every book in the world, and -- " the heads
bowed, perhaps in shyness? "-- I'm even planning to write one, perhaps the
true story of your adventure."
Johanna found herself smiling. Most often she saw the Tines as
barbarian strangers, inhuman in spirit as well as form. But if she closed
her eyes, she could almost imagine that Scriber was a fellow Straumer. Mom
had a few friends just as brainless and innocently self-convinced as this
one, men and women with a hundred grandiose projects that would never ever
amount to anything. Back on Straum, they had been boring perils that she
avoided. Now ... well, Scriber's foolishness was almost like being back home
again.
"You're here to study me for your book?"
More alternating nods. "Well, yes. And also, I wanted to talk to you
about my other plans. I've always been something of an inventor, you see. I
know that doesn't mean much now. It seems that everything that can be
invented is already in Dataset. I've seen many of my best ideas there." He
sighed, or made the sound of a sigh. Now he was imitating one of the pop
science voices in the dataset. Sound was the easiest thing for the Tines; it
could be darn confusing.
"In any case, I was just wondering how to improve some of those ideas
-- " four of Scriber's members bellied down on the bench by the fire pit; it
looked like he was settling in for a long conversation. His other two walked
around the pit to give her a stack of paper threaded with brass hoops. While
one on the other side of the fire continued to talk, the two carefully
turned the pages and pointed at where she should look.
Well, he did have plenty of ideas: Tethered birds to hoist flying
boats, giant lenses that would concentrate the sun's light on enemies and
set them afire. From some of the pictures, it appeared he thought the
atmosphere extended beyond the moon. Scriber explained each idea in numbing
detail, pointing at the drawings and patting her hands enthusiastically. "So
you see the possibilities? My unique slant combined with the proven
inventions in Dataset. Who knows where it could lead?"
Johanna giggled, overcome by the vision of Scriber's giant birds
hauling kilometer-wide lenses to the moon. He seemed to take the sound for
approval.
"Yes! It's brilliant, okay? My latest idea, I never would have thought
it except for Dataset. This 'radio', it projects sound very far and fast,
okay? Why not combine it with the power of our Tinish thoughts? A pack could
think as one even spread across hundreds of, um, kilometers."
Now that almost made sense! But if gunpowder took months to make --
even given the exact formula -- how many decades would it be before the
packs had radio? Scriber was an immense fountain of half-baked ideas. She
let his words wash over her for more than an hour. It was insanity, but less
alien than most of what she had endured this last year.
Finally he seemed to run down; there were longer pauses and he asked
her opinion more often. Finally he said, "Well, that was certainly fun,
okay?"
"Unh, yes, fascinating."
"I knew you would like it. You're just like my people, I really think.
You're not all angry, not all the time...."
"Just what do you mean by that?" Johanna pushed a soft muzzle away and
stood. The dogthing rocked back on its haunches to look up at her.
"I, well ... you have much to hate, I know. But you seem so angry at us
all the time, and we're the ones who are trying to help you! After the day
work you stay here, you don't want to talk with people -- though now I see
that was our fault. You wanted us to come here but were too proud to say it.
I have these insights into character, you see. My friend, the one you call
Scarbutt: he is truly a nice fellow. I know I can tell you that honestly,
and that as my new friend you will believe. He would very much like to come
to visit you, too.... urk."
Johanna walked slowly around the fire pit, forcing the two members to
back away from her. All of Scriber was looking up at her now, the necks
arching around one another, the eyes wide.
"I'm not like you. I don't need your talk, or your stupid ideas." She
threw Scriber's notebook into the pit. Scriber leaped to the fire's edge,
desperately reached for the burning notes. He pulled most of them back and
clutched them to his chests.
Johanna kept walking toward him, kicking at his legs. Scriber
retreated, backing and sprawling. "Stupid, dirty, butchers. I'm not like
you." She slapped her hand on a ceiling beam. "Humans don't like to live
like animals. We don't adopt killers. You tell Scarbutt, you tell him. If he
ever comes by for a friendly chat, I-I'll smash in his head; I'll smash in
all of them!"
Scriber was backed into the wall now. His heads turned wildly this way
and that. He was making plenty of noise. Some of it was Samnorsk, but too
high-pitched to understand. One of his mouths found the door pole. He pushed
open the door, and all six members raced into the twilight, their rain
slickers forgotten.
Johanna knelt and stuck her head through the doorway. The air was a
wind-driven mist. In an instant, her face was so cold and wet that she
couldn't feel the tears. Scriber was six shadows in the darkening grayness,
shadows that raced down the hillside, sometimes tumbling in their haste. In
a second he was gone. There was nothing but the vague forms of nearby
cabins, and the yellow light that spilled out around her from the fire.
Strange. Right after the ambush, she had felt terror. The Tines had
been unstoppable killers. Then, on the boat, when she smashed Scarbutt ...
it had been so wonderful: the whole pack collapsed, and suddenly she knew
that she could fight back, that she could break their bones. She didn't have
to be at their mercy.... Tonight she had learned something more. Even
without touching them, she could hurt them. Some of them, anyway. Her
dislike alone had undone Pompous Clown.
Johanna backed into the smoky warmth and shut the door. She should feel
triumph.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Scriber Jaqueramaphan didn't tell anyone about his meeting with the
Two-Legs. Of course, Vendacious's guard had overheard everything. The fellow
might not speak much Samnorsk, but he had surely gotten the drift of the
argument. People would hear about it eventually.
He moped around the castle for a few days, spent a number of hours
hunched over the remains of his notebook, trying to recreate the diagrams.
It would be a a while before he attended any more sessions with Dataset,
especially when Johanna was around. Scriber knew he seemed brash to the
outside world, but in fact it had taken a lot of courage to walk in on
Johanna like that. He knew his ideas had genius, but all his life
unimaginative people had been telling him otherwise.
In most ways Scriber was a very fortunate person. He had been born a
fission pack in Rangathir, at the eastern edge of the Republic. His parent
had been a wealthy merchant. Jaqueramaphan had some of his parent's traits,
but the dull patience necessary for day-to-day business work had been lost
to him. His sibling pack more than retained that faculty; the family
business grew, and -- in the first years -- his sib didn't begrudge Scriber
his share of the wealth. From his earliest days, Scriber had been an
intellectual. He read everything: natural history, biography, brood kenning.
In the end he had the largest library in Rangathir, more than two hundred
books.
Even then Scriber had tremendous ideas, insights which -- if properly
executed -- would have made them the wealthiest merchants in all the eastern
provinces. Alas, bad luck and his sib's lack of imagination had doomed his
early ideas. In the end, his sib bought out the business, and Jaqueramaphan
moved to the Capital. It was all for the best. By this time Scriber had
fleshed himself out to six members; he needed to see more of the world.
Besides ... there were five thousand books in the library there, the
experience of all history and all the world! His own notebooks became a
library in themselves. Yet still the packs at the university had no time for
him. His outline for a summation of natural history was rejected by all the
stationers, though he paid to have small parts of it published. It was clear
that success in the world of action was necessary before his ideas could get
the attention they deserved, hence his spy mission; Parliament itself would
thank him when he returned with the secrets of Flenser's Hidden Island.
That was almost a year ago. What had happened since -- with the flying
house and Johanna and Dataset -- went beyond his wildest dreams (and Scriber
granted that those dreams were already pretty extreme). The library in
Dataset contained millions of books. With Johanna to help him polish his
ideas, they would sweep Flenserism from the face of the world. They would
regain her flying house. Not even the sky would be a limit.
So to have her throw it all back at him ... it made him wonder about
himself. Maybe she was just mad at him for trying to explain Peregrine. She
would like Peregrine if she let herself; he was sure of it. But then again
... maybe his ideas just weren't that good, at least by comparison with
humans'.
That thought left him pretty low. But he finished redrawing the
diagrams, and even got some new ideas. Maybe he should get some more
silkpaper.
Peregrine stopped by and persuaded him to go into town.
Jaqueramaphan had made up a dozen explanations why he wasn't
participating in the sessions with Johanna anymore. He tried out two or
three as he and Peregrine descended Castle Street toward the harbor.
After a minute or two, his friend turned a head back. "It's okay,
Scriber. When you feel like it, we'd like to have you back."
Scriber had always been a very good judge of attitude; in particular,
he could tell when he was being patronized. He must have scowled a little,
because Peregrine went on. "I mean it. Even Woodcarver has been asking about
you. She likes your ideas."
Comforting lies or not, Scriber brightened. "Really?" The Woodcarver of
today was a sad case, but the Woodcarver of the history books was one of
Jaqueramaphan's great heroes. "No one's mad at me?"
"Well, Vendacious is a bit peeved. Being responsible for the Two-Legs'
safety makes him very nervous. But you only tried something we've all wanted
to do."
"Yeah." Even if there had been no Dataset, even if Johanna Olsndot had
not come from the stars, she would still be the most fascinating creature in
the world: a pack-equivalent mind in a single body. You could walk right up
to her, you could touch her, without the least confusion. It was frightening
at first, but all of them quickly felt the attraction. For packs, closeness
had always meant mindlessness -- whether for sex or battle. Imagine being
able to sit by the fire with a friend and carry on an intelligent
conversation! Woodcarver had a theory that the Two-Legs' civilization might
be innately more effective than any Packish one, that collaboration was so
easy for humans that they learned and built much faster than packs could.
The only problem with that theory was Johanna Olsndot. If Johanna was a
normal human, it is was a surprise that the race could cooperate on
anything. Sometimes she was friendly -- usually in the sessions with
Woodcarver. She seemed to realize that Woodcarver was frail and failing.
More often she was patronizing, sarcastic, and seemed to think the best they
could do for her insulting.... And sometimes she was like last night. "How
goes it with Dataset?" he asked after a moment.
Peregrine shrugged. "About like before. Both Woodcarver and I can read
Samnorsk pretty well now. Johanna has taught us -- me via Woodcarver, I
should say -- how to use most of Dataset's powers. There's so much there
that will change the world. But for now we have to concentrate on making
gunpowder and cannons. It's that, the actual doing, that's going slow."
Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life
too.
"Anyway, if we can do all that by midsummer, maybe we can face
Flenser's army and recapture the flying house before next winter." Peregrine
made a grin that stretched from face to face. "And then, my friend, Johanna
can call her people for rescue ... and we'll have all our lives to study the
outsiders. I may pilgrimage to worlds around other stars."
It was an idea they had talked of before. Peregrine had thought of it
even before Scriber.
They turned off Castle Street onto Edgerow. Scriber was feeling more
enthusiastic about visiting the stationer's; there must be some way he could
help. He looked around with an interest that had been lacking the last few
days. Woodcarvers was a fair-sized city, almost as big as Rangathir -- maybe
twenty thousand packs lived within its walls and in the homes immediately
around. This day was a bit colder than the last few, but it wasn't raining.
A cold, clean wind swept the market street, carrying faint smells of mildew
and sewage, of spices and fresh-sawn wood. Dark clouds hung low, misting the
hills around the harbor. Spring was definitely in the air. Scriber kicked
playfully at the slush along the curb.
Peregrine led them to a side street. The place was jammed, strangers
getting as close as seven or eight yards. The stalls at the stationer's were
even worse. The felt dividers weren't that thick, and there seemed to be
more interest in literature at Woodcarvers than any place Scriber had ever
been. He could hardly hear himself think as he haggled with the stationer.
The merchant sat on a raised platform with thick padding; he wasn't much
bothered by the racket. Scriber kept his heads close together, concentrating
on the prices and the product. From his past life, he was pretty good at
this sort of thing.
Eventually he got his paper, and at a decent price.
"Let's go back on Packweal," he said. That was the long way, through
the center of the market. When he was in a good mood, Scriber rather liked
crowds; he was a great student of people. Woodcarvers was not as
cosmopolitan as some cities by the Long Lakes, but there were traders from
all over. He saw several packs wearing the bonnets of a tropic collective.
At one intersection a redjackets from East Home was chatting cozily with a
labormaster.
When packs came this close, and in these numbers, the world seemed to
teeter on the edge of a choir. Each person hung near to himself, trying to
keep his own thoughts intact. It was hard to walk without stumbling over
your own feet. And sometimes the background thought sounds would surge, a
moment where several packs would somehow synchronize. Your consciousness
wavered and for an instant you were one with many, a superpack that might be
a god. Jaqueramaphan shivered. That was the essential attraction of the
Tropics. The crowds there were mobs, vast group minds as stupid as they were
ecstatic. If the stories were true, some of the southern cities were nonstop
orgies.
They had roamed the marketplace almost an hour when it hit him. Scriber
shook his heads abruptly. He turned and walked in lockstep off Packweal, and
up a side street. Peregrine followed, "Is the crowd too much?" he asked.
"I just had an idea," said Scriber. That wasn't unusual in a close
crowd, but this was a very interesting idea.... He said nothing more for
several minutes. The side street climbed steeply, then jinked back and forth
across Castle Hill. The upslope side was lined with burghers' homes. On the
harbor side, they were looking out over the steep tile roofs of houses on
the next switchback down. These were large homes, elegant with rosemaling.
Only a few had shops on the street.
Scriber slowed down and spread out enough that he wasn't stepping on
himself. He saw now that he'd been quite wrong in trying to contribute
creative expertise to Johanna. There was simply too much invention in
Dataset. But they still needed him, Johanna most of all. The problem was,
they didn't know it yet. Finally he said to Peregrine, "Haven't you wondered
that the Flenserists haven't attacked the city? You and I embarrassed the
Lords of Hidden Island more than ever in their history. We hold the keys to
their total defeat." Johanna and Dataset.
Peregrine hesitated. "Hmm. I assumed their army wasn't up to it. I
should think if they were, they'd have knocked over Woodcarvers long
before."
"Perhaps, but at great cost. Now the cost is worth it." He gave
Peregrine a serious look. "No, I think there's another reason.... They have
the flying house, but they have no idea how to use it. They want Johanna
back alive -- almost as much as they want to kill all of us."
Peregrine made a bitter sound. "If Steel hadn't been so eager to
massacre everything on two legs, he could have had all sorts of help."
"True, and the Flenserists must know that. I'll bet they've always had
spies among the townspeople here, but now more than ever. Did you see all
the East Home packs?" East Home was a hotbed of Flenser sentiment. Even
before the Movement, they had been a hard folk, routinely sacrificing pups
that didn't meet their brood standards.
"One anyway. Talking to a labormaster."
"Right. Who knows what's coming in disguised as special purpose packs?
I'd bet my life they're planning to kidnap Johanna. If they guess what we're
planning with her, they may just try to kill her. Don't you see? We must
alert Woodcarver and Vendacious, organize the people to watch for spies."
"You noticed all this on one walk through Packweal?" There was wonder
or disbelief in his voice, Scriber couldn't tell which.
"Well, um, no. The inspiration wasn't anything so direct. But it stands
to reason, don't you think?"
They walked in silence for several minutes. Up here the wind was
stronger, and the view more spectacular. Where there wasn't the sea, forest
spread endless gray and green. Everything was very peaceful ... because this
was a game of stealth. Fortunately Scriber had a talent for such games.
After all, hadn't it been the very Political Police of the Republic who
commissioned him to survey Hidden Island? It had taken him several tendays
of patient persuasion, but in the end they had been enthusiastic. Anything
you can discover we would be most happy to review. Those were their exact
words.
Peregrine waffled around the road, seemingly very taken aback by
Scriber's suggestion. Finally he said, "I think there is ... something you
should know, something that must remain an absolute secret."
"Upon my soul! Peregrine, I do not blab secrets." Scriber was a little
hurt -- at the lack of trust, and also that the other might have discovered
something he had not. The second should not bother him. He had guessed that
Peregrine and Woodcarver were into each other. No telling what she might
have confided, or what might have leaked across.
"Okay.... You've tripped onto something that should not be noised
about. You know Vendacious is in charge of Woodcarvers security?"
"Of course." That was implicit in the office of Lord Chamberlain. "And
considering the number of outsiders wandering around, I can't say he's doing
a very good job."
"In fact, he's doing a marvelously effective job. Vendacious has agents
right at the top at Hidden Island -- one step removed from Lord Steel
himself."
Scriber felt his eyes widening.
"Yes, you understand what that means. Through Vendacious, Woodcarver
knows for a certainty everything their high council plans. With clever
misinformation, we can lead the Flenserists around like froghens at a
thinning. Next to Johanna herself, this may be Woodcarver's greatest
advantage."
"I -- " I had no idea. "So the incompetent local security is just a
cover."
"Not exactly. It's supposed to look solid and intelligent, but with
just enough exploitable weakness so the Movement will postpone a frontal
attack in favor of espionage." He smiled. "I think Vendacious will be very
taken aback to hear your critique."
Scriber gave a weak laugh. He was flattered and boggled at the same
time. Vendacious must count as the greatest spymaster of the age -- yet he,
Scriber Jaqueramaphan, had almost seen through him. Scriber was mostly quiet
the rest of the way back to the castle, but his mind was racing. Peregrine
was more right than he knew; secrecy was vital. Unnecessary discussion --
even between old friends -- must be avoided. Yes! He would offer his
services to Vendacious. His new role might keep him in the background, but
it was where he could make the greatest contribution. And eventually even
Johanna would see how helpful he could be.
-=*=-
Down the well of the night. Even when Ravna wasn't looking out the
windows, that was the image in her mind. Relay was far off the galactic
disk. The OOB was descending toward that disk -- and ever deeper into
slowness.
But they had escaped. The OOB was crippled, but they had left Relay at
almost fifty light-years per hour. Each hour they were lower in the Beyond
and the computation time for the microjumps increased, and their
pseudovelocity declined. Nevertheless, they were making progress. They were
deep into the Middle of the Beyond now. And there was no sign of pursuit,
thank goodness. Whatever had brought the Blight to Relay, it had not been
specific knowledge of the OOB.
Hope. Ravna felt it growing in her. The ship's medical automation
claimed that Pham Nuwen could be saved, that there was brain activity. The
terrible wounds in his back had been Old One's implants, organic machinery
that had made Pham close-linked to Relay's local network -- and thence to
the Power above. And when that Power died somehow the gear in Pham became a
putrescent ruin. So Pham the person should still exist. Pray he still
exists. The surgeon thought it would be three days before his back was
healed enough to attempt resuscitation.
In the meantime.... Ravna was learning more about the apocalypse that
had swept over her. Every twenty hours, Greenstalk and Blueshell jigged the
ship sideways a few light-years, into some major trunk line of the Known Net
to soak up the News. It was a common practice on any voyage of more than a
few days; an easy way for merchants and travelers to keep track of events
that might affect their success at voyage's end.
According to the News (that is, according to the vast majority of the
opinions expressed), the fall of Relay was complete. Oh, Grondr. Oh Egravan
and Sarale. Are you dead or owned now?
Parts of the Known Net were temporarily out of contact; some of the
extra-galactic links might not be replaced for years. For the first time in
millennia, a Power was known to have been murdered. There were tens of
thousands of claims about the motive for the attack and tens of thousands of
predictions about what would happen next. Ravna had the ship filter the
avalanche, trying to distill the essence of the speculations.
The one coming from Straumli Realm itself made as much sense as any:
the Perversion's thralls gloated solemnly about the new era, the marriage of
a Transcendent being with races of the Beyond. If Relay could be destroyed
-- if a Power could be murdered -- then nothing could stop the spread of
victory.
Some senders thought that Relay was the ancestral target of whatever
had perverted Straumli Realm. Maybe the attack was just the tail end of some
long ago war, a misbegotten tragedy for the descendants of forgotten races.
If so, then the thralls at Straumli Realm might just wither away and the
original human culture there reappear.
A number of items suggested that the attack had been aimed at stealing
Relay's archives, but only one or two claimed that the Blight sought to
recover an artifact, or prevent the Relayers from recovering one. Those
assertions came from chronic theorizers, the sort of civilizations that get
surcharged by newsgroup automation. Nevertheless, Ravna looked through those
messages carefully. None of them suggested an artifact in the Low Beyond; if
anything, they claimed the Blight was searching for something in the High
Beyond or Low Transcend.
There was network traffic coming out of the Blight. The high protocol
messages were ignored by all but the suicidal, and no one was getting paid
to forward any of it. Yet horror and curiosity spread some of the messages
far. There was the Blighter "video": almost four hundred seconds of
pan-sensual data with no compression. That incredibly expensive message
might be the most-forwarded hog in all Net history. Blueshell held the OOB
on the trunk path for nearly two days to receive the whole thing.
The Perversion's thralls all appeared to be human. About half the news
items coming out of the Realm were video evocations, though none this long;
all showed human speakers. Ravna watched the big one again and again: She
even recognized the speaker. Øvn Nilsndot had been Straumli Realm's
champion trael runner. He had no title now, and probably no name. Nilsndot
spoke from an office that might have been a garden. If Ravna stepped to the
side of the image, she could see over his shoulder to ground level. The city
there looked like the Straumli Main of record. Years ago, Ravna and her
sister had dreamed about that city, the heart of mankind's adventure into
the Transcend. The central square had been a replica of the Field of
Princesses on Nyjora, and the immigration advertising claimed that no matter
how far the Straumers went, the fountain in the Field would always flow,
would always show their loyalty to humankind's beginnings.
There was no fountain now, and Ravna felt deadness behind Nilsndot's
gaze. "This one speaks as the Power that Helps," said the erstwhile hero. "I
want all to see what I can do for even a third-rate civilization. Look upon
my Helping...." The viewpoint swung skywards. It was sunset, and the ranked
agrav structures hung against the light, megameter upon megameter. It was a
more grandiose use of the agrav material than Ravna had ever seen, even on
the Docks. Certainly no world in the Middle Beyond could ever afford to
import the material in such quantities. "What you see above me is just the
work barracks for the construction that I will soon begin in the Straumli
system. When complete, five star systems will be a single habitat, their
planets and excess stellar mass distributed to support life and technology
as never before seen at these depths -- and as rarely seen in the Transcend
itself." The view returned to Nilsndot, a single human, mouthpiece for a
god. "Some of you may rebel against idea of dedicating yourselves to me. In
the long run it does not matter. The symbiosis of my Power with the hands of
races in the Beyond is more than any can resist. But I speak now to diminish
your fear. What you see in Straumli Realm is as much a joy as a wonder.
Never again will races in the Beyond be left behind by transcendence. Those
who join me -- and all will join eventually -- will be part of the Power.
You will have access to imports from across the Top and Lower Transcend. You
will reproduce beyond the limits your own technology could sustain. You will
absorb all that oppose me. You will bring the new stability."
The third or fourth time she watched the item, Ravna tried to ignore
the words, concentrate on Nilsndot's expression, comparing it to speeches
she had in her personal dataset. There was a difference; it wasn't her
imagination. The creature she watched was soul-dead. Somehow, the Blight
didn't care that that was obvious ... maybe it wasn't obvious except to
human viewers, and they were a vanishingly small fraction of the audience.
The viewpoint closed in on Nilsndot's ordinary dark face, his ordinary
violet eyes:
"Some of you may wonder how all this is possible, and why billions of
years of anarchy have passed without such help from a Power. The answer is
... complex. Like many sensible developments, this one has a high threshold.
On one side of that threshold, the development appears impossibly unlikely;
on the other, inevitable. The symbiosis of the Helping depends on efficient,
high-bandwidth communication between myself and the beings I Help. Creatures
such as the one now speaking my words must respond as quickly and faithfully
as a hand or a mouth. Their eyes and ears must report across light-years.
This has been hard to achieve -- especially since the system must
essentially be in place before it can function. But, now that the symbiosis
exists, progress will come much faster. Almost any race can be modified to
receive Help."
Almost any race can be modified. The words came from a familiar face,
and in Ravna's birth language ... but the origin was monstrously far away.
There was plenty of analysis. A whole news group had been formed:
Threat of the Blight was spawned from Threats Group, Homo Sapiens Interest
Group, and Close-Coupled Automation. These days it was busier than any five
other groups. In this part of the galaxy, a significant fraction of all
message traffic belonged to the new group. More bits were sent analyzing
poor Øvn Nilsndot's mouthing than had been in the original. Judging
from the flames and contradictions, the signal-to-noise ratio was very low:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Khurvark University [Claimed to be habitat-based university in
the Middle Beyond]
Subject: Blighter Video
Summary: The message shows fraud
Distribution:
War Trackers Interest Group, Where are they now Interest Group, Threat of the Blight
Date: 7.06 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
It's obvious that this "Helper" is a fraud. We've researched the matter
carefully. Though he is not named, the speaker is a high official in the
former Straumli regime. Now why -- if the "Helper" simply runs the humans as
teleoperated robots -- why is the earlier social structure preserved? The
answer should be clear to any idiot: The Helper does not have the power to
teleoperate large numbers of sentients. Evidently, the Fall of Straumli
Realm consisted of taking over key elements in that civilization's power
structure. It's business as usual for the rest of the race. Our conclusion:
this Helper Symbiosis is just another messianic religion, another screwball
empire excusing its excesses and attempting to trick those it cannot
directly coerce. Don't be fooled!
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Optima->Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Society for Rational Investigation [Probably a single system in
Middle Beyond, 5700 light-years antispinward of Sjandra Kei]
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Khurvark University 1
Key phrases: [Probable obscenity] waste of our valuable time
Distribution:
Society for Rational Network Management, Threat of the Blight
Date: 7.91 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
Who is a fool? [probable obscenity] [probable obscenity] Idiots who
don't follow all the threads in developing news should not waste my precious
ears with their [clear obscenity] garbage. So you think the "Helper
Symbiosis" is a fraud of Straumli Realm? And what do you think caused the
fall of Relay? In case your head is totally stuck up your rear [ <--
probable insult], there was a Power allied with Relay. That Power is now
dead. You think maybe it just committed suicide? Look it up, Flat Head [
<-- probable insult]. No Power has ever fallen to anything from the
Beyond. The Blight is something new and interesting. I think it's time that
[obscenity] jerks like Khurvark University stick to the noise groups, and
let the rest of us have some intelligent discussion.
And some messages were patent nonsense. One thing about the Net: the
multiple, automatic translations often disguised the fundamental alienness
of participants. Behind the chatty, colloquial postings, there were faraway
realms, so misted by distance and difference that communication was
impossible -- even though it might take a while to realize the fact. For
instance:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Arbwyth->Trade24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK
units
From: Twirlip of the Mists [Perhaps an organization of cloud fliers in
a single jovian system. Very sparse priors.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Key phrases: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm,
except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is
it true that humans have six legs? I wasn't sure from the evocation. If
these humans have three pairs of legs, then I think there is an easy
explanation for --
Hexapodia? Six legs? Three pairs of legs? Probably none of these
translations was close to what the bewildered creature of Twirlip had in its
mind. Ravna didn't read any more of that posting.
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Hanse [No references prior to the Fall of Relay. No probable
source. This is someone being very cautious]
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Khurvark University 1
Distribution:
War Trackers Interest Group, Threat of the Blight
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
Khurvark University thinks the Blight is a fraud because elements of
the former regime have survived on Straum. There is another explanation.
Suppose the Blight is indeed a Power, and that its claims of effective
symbiosis are generally true. That means that the creature being "Helped" is
no more than a remotely controlled device, his brain simply a local
processor supporting the communication. Would you want to be helped like
that? My question isn't completely rhetorical; the readership is wide enough
that there may be some of you who would answer "yes". However, the vast
majority of naturally evolved, sentient beings would be revolted by the
notion. Surely the Blight knows this. My guess is that the Blight is not a
fraud -- but that the notion of surviving culture in Straumli Realm is.
Subtly, the Blight wanted to convey the impression that only some are
directly enslaved, that cultures as a whole will survive. Combine that with
Blight's claim that not all races can be teleoperated. We're left with the
subtext that immense riches are available to races that associate themselves
with this Power, yet the biological and intellectual imperatives of these
races will still be satisfied.
So, the question remains. Just how complete is the Blight's control
over conquered races? I don't know. There may not be any self-aware minds
left in the Blight's Beyond, only billions of teleoperated devices. One
thing is clear: The Blight needs something from us that it cannot yet take.
And so it went. Tens of thousands of messages, hundreds of points of
view. It was not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing. Ravna talked
with Blueshell and Greenstalk about it every day, trying to put it together,
trying to decide which interpretation to believe.
The Riders knew humans well, but even they weren't sure of the deadness
in Øvn Nilsndot's face. And Greenstalk knew humans well enough to see
that there was no answer that would comfort Ravna. She rolled back and forth
in front of the News window, finally reached a frond out to touch the human.
"Perhaps Sir Pham can say, once he is well."
Blueshell was bustling, clinical. "If you're right, that means that
somehow the Blight doesn't care what humans and those close to humans know.
In a way that makes sense, but ..." His voder buzzed absentmindedly for a
moment. "I mistrust this message. Four hundred seconds of broad-band, so
rich that it gives full-sense imagery for many different races. That's an
enormous amount of information, and no compression whatsoever.... Maybe it's
sweetened bait, forwarded by us poor Beyonders back to our every nest." That
suspicion had been in the News too. But there were no obvious patterns in
the message, and nothing that talked to network automation. Such subtle
poison might work at the Top of the Beyond, but not down here. And that left
a simpler explanation, one that would make perfect sense even on Nyjora or
Old Earth: the video masked a message to agents already in place.
-=*=-
Vendacious was well-known to the people of Woodcarvers -- but for
mostly the wrong reasons. He was about a century old, the fusion offspring
of Woodcarver on two of his strategists. In his early decades, Vendacious
had managed the city's wood mills. Along the way he devised some clever
improvements on the waterwheel. Vendacious had had his own romantic
entanglements -- mostly with politicians and speech-makers. More and more,
his replacement members inclined him toward public life. For the last thirty
years he had been one of the strongest voices on Woodcarvers Council; for
the last ten, Lord Chamberlain. In both roles, he had stood for the guilds
and for fair trade. There were rumors that if Woodcarver should ever
abdicate or wholly die, Vendacious would be the next Lord of Council. Many
thought that might be the best that could be made of such a disaster --
though Vendacious's pompous speeches were already the bane of the Council.
That was the public's view of Vendacious. Anyone who understood the
ways of security would also guess that the chamberlain managed Woodcarver's
spies. No doubt he had dozens of informants in the mills and on the docks.
But now Scriber knew that even that was just a cover. Imagine -- having
agents in the Flenser inner circle, knowing the Flenser plans, their fears,
their weaknesses, and being able to manipulate them! Vendacious was simply
incredible. Ruefully, Scriber must acknowledge the other's stark genius.
And yet ... this knowledge did not guarantee victory. Not all the
Flenser schemes could be directly managed from the top. Some of the enemy's
low-level operations might proceed unknown and quite successfully ... and it
would only take a single arrow to totally kill Johanna Olsndot.
Here was where Scriber Jaqueramaphan could prove his value.
He asked to move into the castle curtain, on the third floor. No
problem getting permission; his new quarters were smaller, the walls rudely
quilted. A single arrow loop gave an uninspired view across the castle
grounds. For Scriber's new purpose, the room was perfect. Over the next few
days, he took to lurking in the promenades. The main walls were laced with
tunnels, fifteen inches wide by thirty tall. Scriber could get almost
anywhere in the curtain without being seen from outside. He padded single
file from one tunnel to the next, emerging for a few moments on a rampart to
flit from merlon to embrasure to merlon, a head poking out here, a head
poking out there.
Of course he ran into guards, but Jaqueramaphan was cleared to be in
the walls ... and he had studied the guards' routine. They knew he was
around, but Scriber was confident they had no idea of the extent of his
effort. It was hard, cold work, but worth the effort. Scriber's great goal
in life was to do something spectacular and valuable. The problem was, most
of his ideas were so deep that other packs -- even people he respected
immensely -- didn't understand. That had been the problem with Johanna.
Well, after a few more days he could go to Vendacious and then....
As he peeked around corners and through arrow slots, two of Scriber's
members huddled down, taking notes. After ten days, he had enough to impress
even Vendacious.
Vendacious's official residence was surrounded by rooms for assistants
and guards. It was not the place to make a secret offer. Besides, Scriber
had had bad luck with the direct approach before. You could wait days for an
appointment, and the more patient you were, the more you followed the rules,
the more the bureaucrats considered you a nonentity.
But Vendacious was sometimes alone. There was this turret on the old
wall, on the forest side of the castle.... Late on the eleventh day of his
investigation, Scriber stationed himself on that turret and waited. An hour
passed. The wind eased. Heavy fog washed in from the harbor. It oozed up the
old wall like slow-moving sea foam. Everything became very, very quiet --
the way it always does in a thick fog. Scriber nosed moodily around the
turret platform; it really was decrepit. The mortar crumbled under his
claws. It felt like you could pull some of the stones right out of the wall.
Damn. Maybe Vendacious was going to break the pattern and not come up here
today.
But Scriber waited another half hour ... and his patience paid off. He
heard the click of steel on the spiral stairs. There was no sound of
thought; it was just too foggy for that. A minute passed. The trapdoor
popped up and a head stuck through.
Even in the fog, Vendacious's surprise was a fierce hiss.
"Peace, sir! It is only I, loyal Jaqueramaphan."
The head came further out. "What would a loyal citizen be doing up
here?"
"Why, I am here to see you," Scriber said, laughing, "at this, your
secret office. Come on up, sir. With this fog, there is enough room for both
of us."
One after another, Vendacious's members hoisted themselves through the
trapdoor. Some barely made it, their knives and jewelry catching on the door
frame; Vendacious was not the slimmest of packs. The security chief ranged
himself along the far side of the turret, a posture that bespoke suspicion.
He was nothing like the pompous, patronizing pack of their public
encounters. Scriber grinned to himself. He certainly had the other's
attention.
"Well?" Vendacious said in a flat voice.
"Sir. I wish to offer my services. I believe that my very presence here
shows I can be of value to Woodcarver's security. Who but a talented
professional could have determined that you use this place as your secret
den?"
Vendacious seemed to untense a little. He smiled wryly. "Who indeed? I
come here precisely because this part of the old wall can't be seen from
anywhere in the castle. Here I can ... commune with the hills, and be free
of bureaucratic trivia."
Jaqueramaphan nodded. "I understand, sir. But you are wrong in one
detail." He pointed past the security chief. "You can't see it through all
this fog, but on the harbor side of the castle there is a single spot that
has a line of sight on your turret."
"So? Who could see much from -- ah, the eye-tools you brought from the
Republic!"
"Exactly." Scriber reached into a pocket and brought out a telescope.
"Even from across the yard, I could recognize you." The eye-tools could have
made Scriber famous. Woodcarver and Scrupilo had been enchanted by them.
Unfortunately, honesty had required to him to admit that he bought the
devices from an inventor in Rangathir. Never mind that it was he who
recognized the value of the invention, that it was he who used it to help
rescue Johanna. When they discovered that he did not know quite how the
lenses worked, they had accepted his gift of one ... and turned to their own
glass makers. Oh well, he was still the best eye-tool user in this part of
the world.
"It's not just you I've been watching, my lord. That's been the
smallest part of my investigation. Over the last ten days I've spent many
hours on the castle walks."
Vendacious's lips quirked. "Indeed."
"I daresay not many noticed me, and I was very careful that no one saw
me using the eye-tool. In any case," he pulled his book from another pocket,
"I've compiled extensive notes. I know who goes where and when during almost
all the hours of light. You can imagine the power of my technique during the
summer!" He set the book on the floor and slid it toward Vendacious. After a
moment, the other reached a member forward and dragged it toward himself. He
didn't seem very enthusiastic.
"Please understand, sir. I know that you tell Woodcarver what goes on
in the highest Flenser councils. Without your sources we would be helpless
against those lords, but -- "
"Who told you such things?"
Scriber gulped. Brazen it out. He grinned weakly. "No one had to tell
me. I'm a professional, like yourself; and I know how to keep a secret. But
think: there may be others of my ability within the castle, and some might
be traitors. You might never hear of them from your high-placed sources.
Think of the damage they could do. You need my help. With my approach, you
can keep track of everyone. I would be happy to train a corps of
investigators. We could even operate in the city, watching from the market
towers."
The security chief sidled around the parapet; he kicked idly at stones
in the rotted mortar. "The idea has its attractions. Mind you, I think we
have all Flenser's agents identified; we feed them well ... with lies. It's
interesting to hear the lies come back from our sources up there." He
laughed shortly, and glanced over the parapet, thinking. "But you're right.
If we are missing anyone with access to the Two-legs or Dataset ... it could
be disastrous." He turned more heads at Scriber. "You've got a deal. I can
get you four or five people to, ah, train in your methods."
Scriber couldn't control his expression; he almost bounced in
enthusiasm, all eyes on Vendacious. "You won't regret this, sir!"
Vendacious shrugged. "Probably not. Now, how many others have you told
about your investigation? We'll want to bring them in, swear them to
secrecy."
Scriber drew himself up. "My Lord! I told you that I am a professional.
I have kept this completely to myself, waiting for this conversation."
Vendacious smiled and relaxed to an almost genial posture. "Excellent.
Then we can begin."
Maybe it was Vendacious's voice -- a trifle too loud -- or maybe it was
some small sound behind him. Whatever the reason, Scriber turned a head from
the other and saw swift shadows coming over the forest side of the parapet.
Too late he heard the attacker's mind noise.
Arrows hissed, and fire burned through his Phan's throat. He gagged,
but kept himself together and raced around the turret toward Vendacious.
"Help me!" The scream was a waste of speech. Scriber knew, even before the
other drew his knives and backed away.
Vendacious stood clear as his assassin jumped into Scriber's midst.
Rational thought dimmed in a frenzy of noise and slashing pain. Tell
Peregrine! Tell Johanna! The butchering continued for timeless instants and
then --
Part of him was drowning in sticky red. Part of him was blinded.
Jaquerama's thought came in ragged fragments. At least one of him was dead:
Phan lay beheaded in a spreading pool of blood. It steamed in the cold air.
Pain and cold and ... drowning, choking ... tell Johanna.
The assassin and his boss had retreated from him. Vendacious. Security
chief. Traitor-in-chief. Tell Johanna. They stood quietly ... watching him
bleed to death. Too prissy to mess their thoughts with his. They'd wait.
They'd wait ... till his mind noise dimmed, then finish the job.
Quiet. So quiet. The killers' distant thoughts. Sounds of gagging,
moaning. No one would ever know....
Almost all gone. Ja stared dumbly at the two strange packs. One came
toward him, steel claws on its feet, blades in its mouth. No! Ja jumped up,
slipping and skidding on the wet. The pack lunged, but Ja was already
standing on the parapet. He leaped backwards and fell and fell...
... and shattered on rocks far below. Ja pulled himself away from the
wall. There was pain across his back, then numbness. Where am I? Where am I?
Fog everywhere. High above him there were muttering voices. Memories of
knives and tines floated in his small mind, all jumbled. Tell Johanna! He
remembered ... something ... from before. A hidden trail through deep brush.
If he went that way far enough, he would find Johanna.
Ja dragged himself slowly up the path. Something was wrong with his
rear legs; he couldn't feel them. Tell Johanna.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Johanna coughed; things just seemed to go from bad to worse around
here. She'd had a sore throat and sniffles the last three days. She didn't
know whether to be frightened or not. Diseases were an everyday thing in
medieval times. Yeah, and lots of people died of them, too! She wiped her
nose and tried to concentrate on what Woodcarver was saying.
"Scrupilo has already made some gunpowder. It works just as Dataset
predicted. Unfortunately, he nearly lost a member trying to use it in a
wooden cannon. If we can't make cannon, I'm afraid -- "
A week ago, Woodcarver wouldn't have been welcome here; all their
meetings had been down in the castle halls. But then Johanna got sick -- it
was a "cold", she was sure -- and hadn't felt like running around out of
doors. Besides, Scriber's visit had kind of ... shamed her. Some of the
packs were decent enough. She had decided to try and get along with
Woodcarver -- and Pompous Clown too, if he'd ever come around again. As long
as creatures like Scarbutt stayed out of her way.... Johanna leaned a little
closer to the fire and waved away Woodcarver's objections; sometimes this
pack seemed like her eldest grandmother. "Assume we can make them. We have
lots of time till summer. Tell Scrupilo to study the dataset more carefully,
and quit trying shortcuts. The question is, how to use them to rescue my
star ship."
Woodcarver brightened. The drooler broke off wiping its muzzle to join
the others in a head bob. "I've talked about this with Peregr -- with
several people, especially Vendacious. Ordinarily, getting an army to Hidden
Island would be a terrible problem. Going by sea is fast, but there are some
deadly choke points along way. Going through the forest is slow, and the
other side would have plenty of warning. But great good luck: Vendacious has
found some safe trails. We may be able to sneak -- "
Someone was scratching at the door.
Woodcarver cocked a pair of heads. "That's strange," she said.
"Why?" Johanna asked absently. She hiked the quilt around her shoulders
and stood. Two of Woodcarver went with her to the door.
Johanna opened the door and looked into the fog. Suddenly Woodcarver
was talking loudly, all gobble. Their visitor had retreated. Something was
strange, and for an instant she couldn't figure what it was. This was the
first time she had seen a dogthing all by itself. The point barely
registered when most of Woodcarver spilled past her, out the doorway. Then
Johanna's servant, up in the loft, began screaming. The sound jabbed pain
through Johanna's ears.
The lone Tine twisted awkwardly on its rear and tried to drag itself
away, but Woodcarver had it surrounded. She shouted something and the
screeching in the loft stopped. There was the thump of paws on wooden
stairs, and the servant bounded into the open, its crossbows cocked. From
down the hill, she heard the rattle of weapons as guards raced toward them.
Johanna ran to Woodcarver, ready to add her fists to any defense. But
the pack was nuzzling the stranger, licking its neck. After a moment,
Woodcarver caught the Tine by its jacket. "Help me carry him inside, Johanna
please."
The girl lifted the Tine's flanks. The fur was damp with mist ... and
sticky with blood.
Then they were through the doorway and laying the member on a pillow by
the fire. The creature was making that breathy whistling, the sound of
ultimate pain. It looked up at her, its eyes so wide she could see the white
all around. For an instant she thought it was terrified of her, but when she
stepped back, it just made the sound louder and stretched its neck toward
her. She knelt beside the pillow. It lay its muzzle on her hand.
"W-what is it?" She looked back along its body, past the padded jacket.
The Tine's haunches were twisted at an odd angle, one legged dangling near
the fire.
"Don't you know -- " began Woodcarver. "This is part of Jaqueramaphan."
She pushed a nose under the dangling leg, and raised it onto the pillow.
There was loud talk between the guards and Johanna's servant. Through
the door she saw members holding torches; they rested their forepaws on
their fellows shoulders, and held the lights high. No one tried to come in;
there'd be no room.
Johanna looked back at the injured Tine. Scriber? Then she recognized
the jacket. The creature looked back at her, still wheezing its pain. "Can't
you get a doctor!"
Woodcarver was all around her. She answered, "I am a doctor, Johanna."
She nodded at the dataset and continued softly, "At least, what passes for
one here."
Johanna wiped blood from the creature's neck. More kept oozing. "Well,
can you save him?"
"This fragment maybe, but -- " One of Woodcarver went to the door and
talked to the packs beyond. "My people are searching for the rest of him....
I think he is mostly murdered, Johanna. If there were others ... well, even
fragments stick together."
"Has he said anything?" It was another voice, speaking Samnorsk.
Scarbutt. His big ugly snout was stuck through the doorway.
"No," said Woodcarver. "And his mind noise is a complete jumble."
"Let me listen to him," said Scarbutt.
"You stay back, you!" Johanna's voice was a scream; the creature in her
arms twitched.
"Johanna! This is Scriber's friend. Let him help." As the Scarbutt pack
sidled into the room, Woodcarver climbed into the loft, giving him room.
Johanna eased her arm from under the injured Tine and moved aside,
ending up at the doorway herself. There were lots more packs outside than
she had imagined, and they were standing closer than she had ever seen.
Their torches glowed like soft fluorescents in the foggy dark.
Her gaze snapped back to the fire pit. "I'm watching you!"
Scarbutt's members clustered around the pillow. The big one lay its
head next to the injured Tine's. For a moment the Tine continued its breathy
whistling. Scarbutt gobbled at it. The reply was a steady warbling, almost
beautiful. From up in the loft, Woodcarver said something. She and Scarbutt
talked back and forth.
"Well?" said Johanna.
"Ja -- the fragment -- is not a 'talker'," came Woodcarver's voice.
"Worse," said Scarbutt. "For now at least, I can't match his mind
sounds. I'm not getting sense or image from him; I can't tell who murdered
Scriber."
Johanna stepped back into the room, and walked slowly to the pillow.
Scarbutt moved aside, but did not leave the wounded Tine. She knelt between
two of him and petted the long, bloodied neck. "Will Ja" -- she spoke the
sound as best she could -- "live?"
Scarbutt ran three noses down the length of the body. They pressed
gently at the wounds. Ja twisted and whistled ... except when Scarbutt
pressed his haunches. "I don't know. Most of this blood is just splatter,
probably from the other members. But his spine is broken. Even if the
fragment lives, he'll have only two usable legs."
Johanna thought for a moment, trying to see things from a Tinish
perspective. She didn't like the view. It might not make sense, but to her,
this "Ja" was still Scriber -- at least in potential. To Scarbutt, the
creature was a fragment, an organ from a fresh corpse. A damaged one at
that. She looked at Scarbutt, at the big, killer member. "So what does your
kind do with such ... garbage?"
Three of his heads turned toward her, and she could see his hackles
rise. His synthetic voice became high-pitched and staccato. "Scriber was a
good friend. We could build a two-wheel cart for Ja's rear; he'd be able to
move around some. The hard part will be finding a pack for him. You know
we're looking for other fragments; we may be able to patch something up. If
not ... well, I have only four members. I will try to adopt him." As he
spoke one head patted the wounded member. "I'm not sure it will work.
Scriber was not a loose-souled person, not in any way a pilgrim. And right
now, I don't match him at all."
Johanna slumped back. Scarbutt wasn't responsible for everything that
went wrong in the universe.
"Woodcarver has excellent brood kenners. Maybe some other match can be
found. But understand ... it's hard for adult members to remerge, especially
non-talkers. Single fragments like Ja often die of their own accord; they
just stop eating. Or sometimes.... Go down to the harbor sometime, look at
the workers. You'll see some big packs there ... but with the minds of
idiots. They can't hold together; the smallest problem and they run in all
directions. That's how the unlucky repacks end...." Scarbutt's voice traded
back and forth between two of his members, and dribbled into silence. All
his heads turned to Ja. The member had closed his eyes. Sleeping? He was
still breathing, but it sounded kind of burbly.
Johanna looked across the room at the trapdoor to the loft. Woodcarver
had stuck a single head down through the hole. The upside-down face looked
back at Johanna. Another time, her appearance would have been comical.
"Unless a miracle happens, Scriber died today. Understand that, Johanna. But
if the fragment lives, even a short time, we'll likely find the murderer."
"How, if he can't communicate?"
"Yes, but he can still show us. I've ordered Vendacious's men to
confine the staff to quarters. When Ja is calmer, we'll march every pack in
the castle past him. The fragment certainly remembers what happened to
Scriber, and wants to tell us. If any of the killers are our own people,
he'll see them."
"And he'll make a fuss." Just like a dog.
"Right. So the main thing is to provide him with security right now ...
and hope our doctors can save him."
They found the rest of Scriber a couple of hours later, on a turret of
the old wall. Vendacious said it looked like one or two packs had come out
of the forest and climbed the turret, perhaps in an attempt to see onto the
grounds. It had all the markings of an incompetent, first-time probe:
nothing of value could be seen from that turret, even on a clear day. But
for Scriber it had been fatally bad luck. Apparently he had surprised the
intruders. Five of his members had been variously arrowed, hacked,
decapitated. The sixth -- Ja -- had broken his back on the sloping stonework
at the base of the wall. Johanna walked out to the turret the next day. Even
from the ground she could see brownish stains on the parapet. She was glad
she couldn't go to the top.
Ja died during the night, though not from any further enemy action; he
was under Vendacious's protection the whole time.
Johanna went the next few days without saying much. At night she cried
a little. God damn their "doctoring". A broken back they could diagnose, but
hidden injuries, internal bleeding -- of such they were completely ignorant.
Apparently, Woodcarver was famous for her theory that the heart pumped the
blood around the body. Give her another thousand years and maybe she could
do better than a butcher!
For a while she hated them all: Scarbutt for all the old reasons,
Woodcarver for her ignorance, Vendacious for letting Flenserists get so
close to the castle ... and Johanna Olsndot for rejecting Scriber when he
had tried to be a friend.
What would Scriber say now? He had wanted her to trust them. He said
that Scarbutt and the others were good people. One night, about a week
later, she came close to making peace with herself. She was lying on her
pallet, the quilt heavy and warm upon her. The designs painted on the walls
glimmered dim in the emberlight. All right, Scriber. For you ... I will
trust them.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Pham Nuwen remembered almost nothing of the first days after dying,
after the pain of the Old One's ending. Ghostly figures, anonymous words.
Someone said he'd been kept alive in the ship's surgeon. He remembered none
of it. Why they kept the body breathing was a mystery and an affront.
Eventually the animal reflexes had revived. The body began breathing of its
own accord. The eyes opened. No brain damage, Greenstalk(?) said, a full
recovery. The husk that had been a living being spoke no contradiction.
What was left of Pham Nuwen spent a lot of time on the OOB's bridge.
From before, the ship reminded him of a fat sowbug. The bugs had been common
in the straw laid across the floor of the Great Hall of this father's castle
on Canberra. The little kids had played with them. The critters didn't have
real legs, just a dozen feathery spines sticking out from a chitinous
thorax. No matter how you tumbled them, those spines/antennas would twitch
the bug around and it would scuttle on its way, unmindful that it might be
upside down from before. Yes, the OOB's ultradrive spines looked a lot like
a sowbug's, though not as articulate. And the body itself was fat and sleek,
slightly narrowed in the middle.
So Pham Nuwen had ended inside of a sowbug. How fitting for a dead man.
And now he sat on the bridge. The woman brought him here often; she
seemed to know it should fascinate him. The walls were displays, better than
he had ever seen in merchantman days. When the windows looked out the ship's
exterior cameras, the view was as good as from any crystal-canopy bridge in
the Qeng Ho fleet.
It was like something out of the crudest fantasy -- or a graphics
simulation. If he sat long enough, he could actually see the stars move in
the sky. The ship was doing about ten hyperjumps per second: jump, recompute
and jump again. In this part of The Beyond they could go a thousandth of a
light-year on each jump -- farther, but then the recompute time would be
substantially worse. At ten per second that added up to more than thirty
light-years per hour. The jumps themselves were imperceptible to human
senses, and between the jumps the were in free fall, carrying the same
intrinsic velocity they'd had on departing Relay. So there was none of the
doppler shifting of relativistic flight; the stars were as pure as seen from
some desert sky, or in low-speed transit. Without any fuss, they simply slid
across the sky, the closer ones the faster. In half an hour he went farther
than he had in half a century with the Qeng Ho.
Greenstalk drifted onto the bridge one day, began changing the windows.
As usual she spoke to Pham as she did so, chatting almost as if there were a
real person here to listen:
"See. The center window is an ultrawave map of the region directly
behind us." Greenstalk waved a tendril over the controls. The multicolored
pictures appeared on the other walls. "Similarly for the other five points
of direction."
The words were noise in Pham's ears, understood but of no interest. The
Rider paused, then continued with something like the futile persistence of
the Ravna woman.
"When ships make a jump ... when they reenter, there's a kind of an
ultrawave splash. I'm checking if we're being followed."
Colors on the windows all around, even in front of Pham's eyes. There
were smooth gradations, no bright spots, no linear features.
"I know, I know," she said, making up both sides of the conversation.
"The ship's analyzers are still massaging the data. But if anyone's pacing
us closer than one hundred light-years, we'll see them. And if they're
farther than that -- well, then they probably can't detect us."
It doesn't matter. Pham almost shut the question out of his mind. But
there were no stars to look at; he stared at the glowing colors and actually
thought about the problem. Thought. A joke: no one Down Here ever really
thought about anything. Perhaps ten thousand starships had escaped the Fall
of Relay. Most likely, the Enemy had not cataloged those departures. The
attack on Relay had been a minor adjunct to the murder of Old One. Most
likely, the OOB had escaped unnoticed. Why should the Enemy care where the
last of Old One's memories might be hiding? Why should it care about where
their little ship might be bound?
A tremor passed through his body; animal reflex, surely.
Panic was slowly rising in Ravna Bergsndot, every day a little
stronger. It was not any particular disaster, just the slow dying of hope.
She tried to be near Pham Nuwen part of every day, to talk to him, to hold
his hand. He never responded, not even -- except perhaps by accident -- to
look at her. Greenstalk tried too. Alien though Greenstalk was, the Pham of
before had seemed truly attracted to the Riders. He was off all medical
support now, but he might as well have been a vegetable.
And all the while their descent was slowing, always a little worse than
what Blueshell had predicted.
And when she turned to the News ... in some ways that was the most
horrifying of all. The "death race" theory was getting popular. More and
more, there were folk who seemed to think that the human race was spreading
the Blight:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group Date: 17.95 days since Fall of Relay Text of message:
So far we've processed half a million messages about this creature's
video, and read a goodly fraction of them. Most of you are missing the
point. The principle of the "Helper's" operation is clear. This is a
Transcendent Power using ultralight communication to operate through a race
in the Beyond. It would be fairly easy to do in the Transcend -- there are a
number of stories about thralls of Powers there. But for such communication
to be effective within the Beyond, truly extensive design changes must be
made in the minds of the controlled race. It could not have happened
naturally, and it can not be quickly done to new races -- no matter what the
Blight says.
We've watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first
appearance of the Blight. Where is this "Earth" the humans claim to be from?
"Half way around the galaxy," they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even
their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an
alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent
archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this "human
race" was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the
original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to
get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was
tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin
with.
We're not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is
inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of
the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies.
We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a
large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information
gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight's
spread in the Middle Beyond.
For nearly seventeen weeks, we've been calling for action. Had you
listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to
destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn't the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up?
Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.
Death to vermin.
The bastards even played on humanity's foundling nature. Foundling
races were rare, but scarcely unknown. Now these Death-to-Vermin creatures
were turning the Miracle of Nyjora into something deadly evil.
Death to Vermin were the only ones to call for pogroms, but even
respected posters were saying things that indirectly might support such
action:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military
corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living
dangerously.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Hanse subthread
Key phrases: limits on the Blight; the Blight is searching something
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Close-coupled Automation Interest Group, War Trackers Interest Group
Date: 11.94 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
The Blight admits that it is a Power that tele-operates sophonts in the
Beyond. But consider how difficult it is to have a close- coupled automation
with time lags of more than a few milliseconds. The Known Net is a perfect
illustration of this: Lags range between five milliseconds for systems that
are a couple of light-years apart -- to (at least) several hundred seconds
when messages must pass through intermediate nodes. This, combined with the
low bandwidth available across interstellar distances, makes the Known Net a
loose forum for the exchange of information and lies. And these restrictions
are inherent in the nature of the Beyond, part of the same restrictions that
make it impossible for the Powers to exist down here.
We conclude that even the Blight can't attain close-coupled control
except in the High Beyond. At the Top, the Blight's sophont agents are
literally its limbs. In the Middle Beyond, we believe mental "possession" is
possible but that considerable preprocessing must be done in the controlled
mind. Furthermore, considerable external equipment (the bulky items
characteristic of those depths) is needed to support the communication.
Direct, millisecond-by-millisecond, control is normally impractical in the
Middle Beyond. Combat at this level would involve hierarchical control.
Long-term operations would also use intimidation, fraud, and traitors.
These are the threats that you of the Middle and Low Beyond should
recognize.
These are the Blight's tools in the Middle and Low Beyond, and what you
should guard against for the immediate future. We don't see imperial
takeovers; there's no profit [sustenance] in it. Even the destruction of
Relay was probably just a byplay to the murder it was simultaneously
committing in the Transcend. The greatest tragedies will continue to be at
the Top and in the Low Transcend. But we know that the Blight is searching
for something; it has attacked at great distances where major archives were
the target. Beware of traitors and spies.
Even some of humanity's supporters sent a chill through Ravna:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Hanse
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Alliance for the Defense subthread
Key phrases: Death Race Theory
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 18.29 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
I have obtained specimens from the human worlds in our volume. Detailed
analysis is available in the Homo sapiens interest group archive. My
conclusions: previous (but less intensive) analysis of human phys/psych is
correct. The race has no built-in structures to support remote control.
Experiments with living subjects showed no special inclination toward
submission. I found little or no evidence of artificial optimization. (There
was evidence of DNA surgery to improve disease resistance: drift timing
dated the hackwork at two thousand years Before Present. The blood of
Straumli Realm subjects carried an optigens, Thirault [a cheap medical
recipe that can be tailored across a wide mammalian range].) This race -- as
represented by our specimens -- looks like something that arrived from the
Slow Zone quite recently, probably from a single origin world.
Has anyone done such retesting on more distant human worlds?
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Blighter Video thread, Hanse 1
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 19.43 days since Fall of Relay
Text of message:
Who is this "Hanse?" It makes objective, tough-sounding noises about
testing human specimens, but it keeps its own nature secret. Don't be fooled
by humans telling you about themselves! In fact, we have no way of testing
the creatures that dwell in Straumli Realm; their protector will see to
that.
Death to vermin.
And there was a little boy trapped at the bottom of the well. Some
days, no communication was possible. Other days, when the OOB antenna swarm
was tuned in exactly the right direction and when the vagaries of the zone
favored it -- then Ravna could hear his ship. Even then the signal was so
faint, so distorted, that the effective transmission rate was just a few
bits per second.
Jefri and his problems might be only the smallest footnote to the story
of the Blight (less than that, since no one knew of him), but to Ravna
Bergsndot these conversations were the only bright thing in her life just
now.
The kid was very lonely, but less so now, she thought. She learned
about his friend Amdi, about the stern Tyrathect and the heroic Mr. Steel
and the proud Tines. Ravna smiled to herself, at herself. The walls of her
cabin displayed a flat mural of jungle. Deep in the drippy murk lay regular
shadows -- a castle built in the roots of a giant mangrove tree. The mural
was a famous one; the original had been an analog work from three thousand
years ago. It showed life at an even further remove, during the Dark Ages on
Nyjora. She and Lynne had spent much of their childhood imagining that they
were transported to such a time. Little Jefri was trapped in the real thing.
Woodcarver's butchers were no interstellar threat, but they were a deadly
horror to those around them. Thank goodness Jefri had not seen the killing.
This was a real medieval world. A tough and unforgiving place, even if
Jefri had fallen in with fair-minded people. And the Nyjoran comparison was
only vaguely appropriate. These Tines were pack minds; even old Grondr
'Kalir had been surprised at that.
All through Jefri's mail, Ravna could see the panic among Steel's
people:
Mister Steel asked me again if theres any way we can make our ship to
fly even a little. I dont know. We almost crashed, I think. We need guns.
That would save us, at least till you get here. They have bows and arrows
just like in Nyjoran days, but no guns. Hes asking me, can you teach us to
make guns?
Woodcarver's raiders would return, and this time in enough force to
overrun Steel's little kingdom. Back when they thought OOB's flight would be
only thirty or forty days, that had not seemed great a risk, but now ....
Ravna might arrive to find Woodcarver's murdering complete.
Oh Pham, dear Pham. If you ever really were, please come back now. Pham
Nuwen of medieval Canberra. Pham Nuwen, trader from the Slowness.... What
would someone such as you make of this? Hmm.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Ravna knew that -- under his bluster -- Blueshell was at least as much
a worrier as she. Worse, he was a nitpicker. The next time Ravna asked him
about their progress, he retreated into technicalities.
Finally Ravna broke in, "Look. The kid is sitting on something that
just might blow the Blight sky high, and all he has are bows and arrows. How
the long will it be till we get down there, Blueshell?"
Blueshell rolled nervously back and forth across the ceiling. The
Skroderiders had reaction jets; they could maneuver in free fall more
adroitly than most humans. Instead they used stick-patches, and rolled
around on the walls. In a way, it was kind of cute. Just now, it was
irritating.
At least they could talk; she glanced across the bridge to where Pham
Nuwen sat facing the bridge's main display. As usual, all his attention was
fixed on the slowly moving stars. He was unshaven, his reddish beard bright
on his skin; his long hair floated snarled and uncombed. Physically he was
cured of his injuries. Ship's surgeon had even replaced the muscle mass that
Old One's communication equipment had usurped. Pham could dress and feed
himself now, but he still lived in a private dreamworld.
The two riders twittered at each other. It was Greenstalk who finally
answered her question: "Truly, we're not sure how long. The quality of the
Beyond changes as we descend. Each jump is taking us a fraction longer than
the one before."
"I know that. We're moving toward the Slow Zone. But the ship is
designed for that; it should be an easy matter to extrapolate the slowing."
Blueshell extended a tendril from ceiling to floor. He diddled with the
matte corrugations for a second and then his voder made a sound of human
embarrassment. "Ordinarily you would be correct, my lady Ravna. But this is
a special case.... For one thing, it appears that the zones themselves are
in flux."
"What?"
"It's not that unheard of. Small shifts are going on all the time.
That's a major purpose for bottom-lugger ships: to track the changes. We're
having the bad luck to run through the middle of the uncertainty."
Actually, Ravna had known that interface turbulence was high at the
Bottom below here. She just didn't think of it in grandiose terms like "zone
shifting"; she also hadn't realized it was serious enough to affect them
yet.
"Okay. How bad can it get then? How much can it slow us?"
"Oh my." Blueshell rolled to the far wall; he was standing on starry
sky now. "It would be nice to be a Low Skroderider. So many problems my high
calling brings me. I wish I could be deep in surf right now, thinking on
olden memories." Of other days in the surf.
Greenstalk carried on for him: "It's not 'the tide, how high can it
rise?' It's 'this storm, how bad can it get?' Right now it is worse than
anything in this region during the last thousand years. However, we have
been following the local news; most agree that the storm has peaked. If our
other problem gets no worse, we should arrive in about one hundred and
twenty days."
Our other problem. Ravna drifted to the center of the bridge and
strapped onto a saddle. "You're talking about the damage we took getting out
of Relay. The ultradrive spines, right? How are they holding up?"
"Quite well, apparently. We've not tried to jump faster than eighty
percent of design max. On the other hand, we lack good diagnostics. It's
conceivable that serious degradation might happen rather suddenly."
"Conceivable, but unlikely," put in Greenstalk.
Ravna nodded. Considering all their other problems, there was no point
in contemplating possibilities beyond their control. Back on Relay, this had
looked like a thirty or forty day trip. Now ... the boy in the well might
have to be brave for a long time yet, no matter how much she wished
otherwise. Hmm. Time for Plan B then. Time for what someone like Pham Nuwen
might suggest. She pushed off the floor and settled by Greenstalk. "Okay, so
the best we can plan on is one hundred and twenty days. If the Zone surge
gets worse or if we have to get repairs..." Get repairs where? That might be
only a delay, not an impossibility. The rebuilt OOB was supposed to be to
repairable even in the Low Beyond. "Maybe even two hundred days." She
glanced at Blueshell, but he didn't interrupt with his usual amendments and
qualifications. "You've both read the messages we're getting from the boy.
He says the locals are going to be overrun, probably in less than one
hundred days. Somehow, we have to help him ... before we actually arrive
there."
Greenstalk rattled her fronds in a way Ravna took for puzzlement.
She looked across the deck at Pham, and raised her voice a trifle. Hey
you, you should be an expert on this! "You Skroderiders may not recognize
it, but this is a problem that's been seen a million times in the Slow Zone:
civilizations are separated by years -- centuries -- of travel time. They
fall into dark ages. They become just as primitive as the pack creatures,
these 'Tines'. Then they get visited from outside. In a short time, they
have technology back again." Pham's head did not turn; he just looked out
across the starscape.
The Skroderiders rattled at each other, then:
"But how can that help us? Doesn't rebuilding a civilization take
dozens of years?"
"And besides, there's nothing to rebuild on the Tines' world. According
to the child, this is a race without antecedents. How long does it take to
found a civilization?"
Ravna waved a hand at the objections. Don't stop me, I'm on a roll.
"That's not the point. We are in communication with them. We have a good
general library on board. Original inventors don't know where they're going;
they're groping in the dark. Even the archaeologist/engineers of Nyjora had
to reinvent much. But we know everything about making airplanes and such; we
know hundreds of ways of going at it." Now faced with necessity, Ravna was
suddenly sure they could do it. "We can study all the development paths,
eliminate the dead ends. Even more, we can find the quickest way to go from
medieval to specific inventions, things that can beat whatever barbarians
are attacking Jefri's friends."
Ravna's speech tumbled to a stop. She stared, grinning, first at
Greenstalk and then at Blueshell. But a silent Skroderider is one of the
universe's more impassive audiences. It was hard even to tell if they were
looking at her. After a moment Greenstalk said, "Yes, I see. And rediscovery
being so common in the Slow Zone, most of this may already be worked out in
the ship's library."
That's when it happened: Pham turned from the window. He looked across
the deck at Ravna and the Riders. For the first time since Relay, he spoke.
Even more, the words weren't nonsense, though it took her a moment to
understand. "Guns and radios," he said.
"Ah ... yes." She looked back at him. Think of something to make him
say more. "Why those in particular?"
Pham Nuwen shrugged. "It worked on Canberra."
Then damn Blueshell started talking, something about doing a library
search. Pham stared at them for moment, his face expressionless. He turned
back to watch the stars, and the moment was lost.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
"Pham?" He heard Ravna's voice just behind him. She had stayed on the
bridge after the Riders left, departing on whatever meaningless preparations
their meeting had ordained. He didn't reply, and after a moment she drifted
around and blocked his view of the stars. Almost automatically, he found
himself focussing on her face.
"Thank you for talking to us.... We need you more than ever."
He could still see lots of stars. They were all around her, slowly
moving. Ravna cocked her head, the way she did when she meant friendly
puzzlement. "We can help...."
He didn't answer. What had make him speak just now? Then: "You can't
help the dead," he said, vaguely surprised at his own speaking. Like eye
focussing, the speech must be a reflex.
"You're not dead. You're as alive as I am."
Then words tumbled from him; more than in all the days since Relay.
"True. The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial
programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you? From the
outside, from Old One's view -- " He looked away from her, dizzy with a
doubled vision.
Ravna drifted closer till her face was just centimeters from his. She
floated free, except for one foot tucked into the floor. "Dear Pham, you are
wrong. You've been at the Bottom, and at the Top, but never in between. ...
'The illusion of self-awareness'? That's a commonplace of any practical
philosophy in the Beyond. It has some beautiful consequences, and some scary
ones. All you know are the scary ones. Think: the illusion must apply just
as surely to the Powers."
"No. He could make devices like you and I."
"Being dead is a choice, Pham." She reached out to pass her hand down
his shoulder and arm. He had a typical 0-gee change of perspective; "down"
seemed to rotate sideways, and he was looking up at her. Suddenly he was
aware of his splotchy beard, his tangled hair floating all about. He looked
up at Ravna, remembering everything he'd thought about her. Back on Relay
she'd seemed bright; maybe not smarter than he, but as smart as most
competitors of the Qeng Ho. But there were other memories, how Old One had
seen her. As usual, His memories were overwhelming; about this one woman,
there was more insight than from all Pham's life experience. As usual, it
was mostly unintelligible. Even His emotions were hard to interpret. But ...
He had thought of Ravna a little like ... a favored dog. Old One could see
right through her. Ravna Bergsndot was a little manipulative; He had been
pleased/amused(?) by that fact. But behind her talk and argument, He'd seen
a great deal of ... "goodness" might be the human word. Old One had wished
her well. In the end, He had even tried to help. Insight flitted past him,
too fast to catch. Ravna was talking again:
"What happened to you is terrible enough, Pham, but it's happened to
others. I've read of cases. Even the Powers are not immortal. Sometimes they
fight among themselves, and someone gets killed. Sometimes, one commits
suicide. There's a star system, Gods' Doom it's called in the story: A
million years ago, it was in the Transcend. It was visited by a party of the
Powers. There was a Zone surge. Suddenly the system was twenty light-years
deep in the Beyond. That's about the biggest surge there is firm record of.
The Powers at Gods' Doom didn't have a chance. They all died, some to rot
and rusted ruin ... others to the level of mere human minds."
"W-what became of those?"
She hesitated, took one of his hands between hers. "You can look it up.
The point is, it happens. To the victims, it's the end of the world. But
from our side, the human side.... Well, the human Pham Nuwen was lucky;
Greenstalk says the failure of Old One's connections didn't do gross organic
damage. Maybe there's subtle damage; sometimes the remnants just destroy
themselves, whatever is left."
Pham felt tears leaking from his eyes. And knew that part of the
deadness inside had been grief for His own death. "Subtle damage!" He shook
his head and the tears drifted into the air. "My head is stuffed with Him,
with His memories." Memories? They towered over everything else. Yet he
could not understand them. He could not understand the details. He could not
even understand the emotions, except as inane simplifications -- joy,
laughter, wonder, fear and icy-steel determination. Now, he was lost in
those memories, wandering like an idiot in a cathedral. Not understanding,
cowering before icons.
She pivoted around their clasped hands. After a moment, her knee bumped
gently against his. "You're still human, you still have your own -- ", her
own voice broke as she saw the look in his eyes.
"My own memories?" Scattered amid the unintelligible he would stumble
on them: himself at five years, sitting on the straw in the great hall,
alert for the appearance of any adult; royals were not supposed to play in
the filth. Ten years later, making love to Cindi for the first time. A year
after that, seeing his first flying machine, the orbital ferry that landed
on his father's parade field. The decades aspace. "Yes, the Qeng Ho. Pham
Nuwen, the great Trader of the Slowness. All the memories are still there.
And for all I know, it's all the Old One's lie, an afternoon's fraud to fool
the Relayers."
Ravna bit her lip, but didn't say anything. She was too honest to lie,
even now.
He reached with his free hand to brush her hair away from her face. "I
know you said that too, Rav. Don't feel bad: I would have caught on by now
anyway."
"Yeah," she said softly. Then she was looking him straight in the eye.
"But know this. One human to another: You are a human now. And there could
have been a Qeng Ho, and you could have been exactly what you remember. And
whatever the past, you could be great in the future."
Ghostly echoes, more than memory and less than reason: For an instant
he saw her with wiser eyes. She loves you, foolish one. Almost laughter,
kindly laughter.
He slid his arms around her, drawing her tight against him. She was so
real. He felt her slip her leg between his. To laugh. Like heart massage,
unthinking reflex bringing a mind back to life. So foolish, so trivial, but,
"I -- I want to come back." The words came out strangled in sobs. "There's
so much inside me now, so much I can't understand. I'm lost inside my own
head."
She didn't say anything, probably couldn't even understand his speech.
For a moment, all he knew was the feel of her in his arms, hugging back. Oh
please, I do want to come back.
Making it on the bridge of a starship was something Ravna had never
done before. But then she'd never had her own starship before, either. They
don't call this a bottom lugger for nothing. In the excitement, Pham lost
his tiedown. They floated free, occasionally bumping into walls and
discarded clothing, or drifting through tears. After many minutes, they
ended up with their heads just a few centimeters off the floor, the rest of
them angled off toward the ceiling. She was vaguely aware that her pants
were flying like a banner from where they had caught on her ankle. The
affair wasn't quite the stuff of romance fiction. For one thing, floating
free you just couldn't get any leverage. For another.... Pham leaned back
from her, relaxing his grip on her back. She brushed aside his red hair and
looked into bloodshot eyes. "You know," he said shakily, "I never guessed I
could cry so hard my face hurt."
She smiled back. "You've led a charmed life then." She arched her back
against his hands, then drew him gently close. They floated in silence for
several minutes, their bodies relaxing into each other's curves, sensing
nothing but each other.
Then: "Thank you, Ravna."
"... my pleasure." Her voice came dreamy serious, and she hugged him
tighter. Strange, all the things he had been to her, some frightening, some
endearing, some enraging. And some she couldn't have admitted -- even to
herself -- till now. For the first time since the fall of Relay, she felt
real hope. A silly physical reaction maybe ... but maybe not. Here in her
arms was a guy who might be the equal of any story book adventurer, and
more: someone who had been part of a Power.
"Pham ... what do you think really happened back on Relay? Why was Old
One murdered?"
Pham's chuckle seemed unforced, but his arms stiffened around her.
"You're asking me? I was dying at the time, remember.... No, that's wrong.
Old One, He was dying at the time." He was silent for a minute. The bridge
turned slowly around them, silent views on the stars beyond. "My godself was
in pain, I know that. He was desperate, panicked.... But He was also trying
to do something to me before He died." His voice went soft, wondering. "Yes.
It was like I was some cheap piece of luggage, and He was stuffing me with
every piece of crap that he could move. You know, ten kilos in a nine kilo
sack. He knew it was hurting me -- I was part of Him, after all -- but that
didn't matter." He twisted back from her, his face getting a little wild
again. "I'm not a sadist; I don't believe He was either. I -- "
Ravna shook her head. "I ... I think he was downloading."
Pham was silent an instant, trying to fit the idea into his situation.
"That doesn't makes sense. There's not room in me to be superhuman." Fear
chased hope in tight circles.
"No, no, wait. You're right. Even if the dying Power figures
reincarnation is possible, there's not enough space in a normal brain to
store much. But Old One was trying for something else.... Remember how I
begged Him to help with our trip to the Bottom?"
"Yes. I -- He -- was sympathetic, the way you might be with animals
that are confronting some new predator. He never considered that the
Perversion might be a threat to him, not until -- "
"Right. Not until he was under attack. That was a complete surprise to
the Powers; suddenly the Perversion was more than a curious problem for
underminds. Then Old One really did try to help. He jammed plans and
automation down into you. He jammed so much, you nearly died, so much you
can't make sense of it. I've read about things like that in Applied Theology
-- " as much legend as fact. "Godshatter, it's called."
"Godshatter?" He seemed to play with the word, wondering. "What a
strange name. I remember His panic. But if He was doing what you say, why
didn't He just tell me? And if I'm filled with good advice, how come all I
see inside is ..." his gaze became a little like days past, "darkness ...
dark statues with sharp edges, crowding."
Again a long silence. But now she could almost feel Pham thinking. His
arms twitched tight and an occasional shudder swept his body. "Yes ... yes.
Lots of things fit. Most of it I still don't understand, never will. Old One
discovered something right there at the end." His arms tightened again, and
he buried his face against her neck. "It was a very ... personal ... sort of
murder the Perversion committed on Him. Even dying, Old One learned." More
silence. "The Perversion is something very old, Ravna. Probably billions of
years. A threat Old One could only theorize before it actually killed Him.
But ..."
One minute. Two. Yet Pham did not continue. "Don't worry, Pham. Give it
time."
"Yeah." He backed off far enough to look her square in the face. "But I
know this much now: Old One did this for a reason. We aren't on a fool's
chase. There's something on the Bottom, in that Straumer ship, that Old One
thought could make a difference."
He ran his hand lightly across her face, and his smile was sad where
there should have been joy. "But don't you see, Ravna? If you're right,
today may be the most human I'll ever be. I'm full of Old One's download,
this godshatter. Most of it I'll never consciously understand, but if things
work properly, it will eventually come exploding out. His remote device; His
robot at the Bottom of the Beyond."
No! But she made herself shrug. "Maybe. But you're human, and we're
working for the same things.... and I'm not letting you go."
Ravna had known that "jumpstarting" technology must be a topic in the
ship's library. It turned out the subject was a major academic specialty.
Besides ten thousand case studies, there were customizing programs and lots
of very dull-looking theory. Though the "rediscovery problem" was trivial in
the Beyond, down in the Slow Zone almost every conceivable combination of
events had happened. Civilizations in the Slowness could not last more than
a few thousand years. Their collapse was sometimes a short eclipse, a few
decades spent recovering from war or atmosphere-bashing. Others drove
themselves back to medievalism. And of course, most races eventually
exterminated themselves, at least within their single solar system. Those
that didn't exterminate themselves (and even a few of those that did)
eventually struggled back to their original heights.
The study of these variations was called the Applied History of
Technology. Unfortunately for both academicians and the civilizations in the
Slow Zone, true applications were a bit rare: The events of the case studies
were centuries old before news of them reached the Beyond, and few
researchers were willing to do field work in the Slow Zone, where finding
and conducting a single experiment could cost them much of their lives. In
any case, it was a nice hobby for millions of university departments. One of
the favorite games was to devise minimal paths from a given level of
technology back to the highest level that could be supported in the
Slowness. The details depended on many things, including the initial level
of primitiveness, the amount of residual scientific awareness (or
tolerance), and the physical nature of the race. The historians' theories
were captured in programs whose inputs were facts about the civilization's
plight and the desired results, and whose outputs were the steps that would
most quickly produce those results.
Two days later, the four of them were back on the OOB's bridge. And
this time we're all talking. "So we must decide what inventions to shoot
for, something that will defend the Hidden Island Kingdom -- "
"-- and something 'Mister Steel' can make in less than one hundred
days," said Blueshell. He had spent most of the last two days fiddling with
the development programs in OOB's library.
"I still say guns and radios," said Pham.
Firepower and communications. Ravna grinned at him. Pham's human
memories alone would be enough to save the kids on Tines World. He hadn't
talked any more of Old One's plans. Old One's plans ... in Ravna's mind
those were something like fate, perhaps good, perhaps terrible, but unknown
for now. And even fate can be weaseled. "How about it, Blueshell?" she said.
"Is radio something they can produce quickly, from a standing start?" On
Nyjora, radio had come almost contemporary with orbital flight -- a good
century into the renaissance.
"Indeed, My Lady Ravna. There are simple tricks that are almost never
noticed till a very high technology is attained. For instance, quantum
torsion antennas can be built from silver and cobalt steel arrays, if the
geometry is correct. Unfortunately, finding the proper geometry involves
lots of theory and the ability to solve some large partial differential
equations. There are many Slow Zoners who never discover the principle."
"Okay," said Pham. "But there's still a translation problem. Jefri has
probably heard the word 'cobalt' before, but how can he describe it to
people who don't have the referent? Without knowing a lot more about their
world, we couldn't even describe how to find cobalt- bearing ore."
"That will slow things down," Blueshell admitted. "But the program
accounts for it. Mr. Steel seems to understand the concept of
experimentation. For cobalt, we can provide him with a tree of experiments
based on descriptions of likely ores and appropriate chemical tests."
"It's not quite that simple," said Greenstalk. "Some of the chemical
tests themselves involve search/test trees. And there are other experiments
needed to check toxicity. We know far less about the pack creatures than is
usual with this program."
Pham smiled. "I hope these creatures are properly grateful; I never
heard of 'quantum torsional antennas'. The Tines are ending up with comm
gear that Qeng Ho never had."
But the gift could be made. The question was, could it be done in time
to save Jefri and his ship from the Woodcarvers? The four of them ran the
program again and again. They knew so little about the pack creatures
themselves. The Hidden Island Kingdom appeared fairly flexible. If they were
willing to go all out to follow the directions, and if they had good luck in
finding nearby sources for critical materials, then it looked like they
might have limited supplies of firearms and radios inside of one hundred
days. On the other hand, if the packs of Hidden Island ended up chasing down
some worst-case branches of the search trees, things might stretch out to a
few years.
Ravna found it hard to accept that no matter what the four of them did,
saving Jefri from the Woodcarvers would be partly a matter of luck. Sigh. In
the end, she took the best scheme the Riders could produce, translated it
into simple Samnorsk, and sent it down.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Steel had always admired military architecture. Now he was adding a new
chapter to the book, building a castle that protected against the sky as
well as the land around. By now the boxy "ship" on stilts was known across
the continent. Before another summer passed, there would be enemy armies
here, trying to take -- or at least destroy -- the prize that had come to
him. Far more deadly: the star people would be here. He must be ready.
Steel inspected the work almost every day now. The stone replacement
for the palisade was in place all across the south perimeter. On the
cliffside, overlooking Hidden Island, his new den was almost complete ...
had been complete for some time, a part of him grumbled. He really should
move over here; the safety of Hidden Island was fast becoming illusion.
Starship Hill was already the center of the Movement -- and that wasn't just
propaganda. What the Flenser embassies abroad called "the oracle on Starship
Hill" was more than a glib liar could dream. Whoever stood nearest that
oracle would ultimately rule, no matter how clever Steel might be otherwise.
He had already transferred or executed several attendants, packs who seemed
just a little too friendly with Amdijefri.
Starship Hill: When the aliens landed, it had been heather and rock.
Through the winter, there'd been a palisade and a wooden shelter. But now
construction had resumed on the castle, the crown whose jewel was the
starship. Soon this hill would be the capital of the continent and the
world. And after that.... Steel looked into the blue depths of the sky. How
much further his rule extended would depend on saying just the right thing,
on building this castle in a very special way. Enough dreaming. Lord Steel
pulled himself together and descended from the new wall along fresh-cut
stone stairs. The yard within was twelve acres, mostly mud. The muck was
cold on his paws, but the snow and slush were confined to dwindling piles
away from the work routes. Spring was well-advanced, and the sun was warm in
the chill air. He could see for miles, out over Hidden Island all the way to
the Ocean, and down the coast along the fjord country. Steel walked the last
hundred yards up the hill to the starship. His guards paced him on either
side, with Shreck bringing up the rear. There was enough room that the
workers didn't have to back away -- and he had given orders that no one was
to stop because of his presence. That was partly to maintain the fraud with
Amdijefri, and partly because the Movement needed this fortress soon. Just
how soon was a question that gnawed.
Steel was still looking in all directions, but his attention was where
it should be now, on the construction work. The yard was piled with cut
stone and construction timbers. Now that the ground was thawing, the
foundations for the inner wall were being dug. Where it was still hard,
Steel's engineers were injecting boiling water. Steam rose from the holes,
obscuring the windlasses and the diggers below. The place was louder than a
battle field: windlasses creaking, blades hacking at dirt, leaders shouting
to work teams. It was also as crowded as close combat, though not nearly so
chaotic.
Steel watched a digger pack at the bottom of one of the trenches. There
were thirty members, so close to each other that their shoulders sometimes
touched. It was an enormous mob, but there was nothing of an orgy about the
association. Even before Woodcarver, construction and factory guilds had
been doing this sort of thing: The thirty-member pack below was probably not
as bright as a threesome. The front rank of ten swung mattocks in unison,
carving steadily into the wall of dirt. When their heads and mattocks were
extended high, the ten members behind them darted forward to scoop back the
dirt and rocks that had just been freed. Behind them, a third tier of
members hauled the dirt from the pit. Making it work was a complicated bit
of timing -- the earth was not homogeneous -- but it was well within the
mental ability of the pack. They could go on like this for hours, shifting
first and second ranks every few minutes. In years past, the guilds
jealously guarded the secret of each special melding. After a hard day's
work, such a team would split into normally intelligent packs -- each going
home very well paid. Steel smiled to himself. Woodcarver had improved on the
old guild tricks -- but Flenser had provided an essential refinement
(actually a borrowing from the Tropics). Why let the team break up at the
end of a work shift? Flenser work teams stayed together indefinitely, housed
in barracks so small they could never recover their separate pack minds. It
worked well. After a year or two, and with proper culling, the original
packs in such teams were dull things that scarcely wanted to break away.
For a moment Steel watched the cut stone being lowered into the new
hole and mortared into place. Then he nodded at the whitejackets in charge,
and walked on. The foundation holes continued right up to the walls of the
starship compound. This was the trickiest construction of all, the part that
would turn the castle into a beautiful snare. A little more information via
Amdijefri and he would know just what to build.
The door to the starship compound was open just now, and a whitejackets
was sitting back to back in the opening. That guard heard the noise an
instant before Steel: two of its members broke ranks to look around the side
of the compound. Almost inaudibly, there came high screams, then honking
attack calls. The whitejackets leaped from the stairs and raced around the
building. Steel and his guards weren't far behind.
He skidded to a stop at the foundation trench on the far side of the
ship. The immediate source of the racket was obvious. Three packs of
whitejackets were putting a team's talker to the question. They had
separated out the verbal member and were beating it with truncheon whips.
This close, the mental screams were almost as loud as the shouting. The rest
of the digger team was coming out of the trench, breaking into functional
packs and attacking the whitejackets with their mattocks. How could things
get so bloody screwed up? He could guess. These inner foundations were to
contain the most secret tunnels of the entire castle, and the even more
secret devices he planned to use against the Two-Legs. Of course, all of the
workers on such sensitive areas would be disposed of after the job was done.
Stupid though they were, maybe they had guessed their fate.
Under other circumstances, Steel might have backed off and simply
watched. Failures like this could be enlightening; they let him identify the
weaknesses in his subordinates, who was too bad (and too good) to continue
in their jobs. This time was different. Amdijefri were aboard the starship.
There was no view through the wooden walls, and surely there was another
whitejackets on guard within, but-- Even as he lunged forward, shouting to
his servants, Steel's back-looking member caught sight of Jefri coming out
of the compound. Two of the pups were on his shoulders, the rest of Amdi
spilling out around him.
"Stay back!" he yelled at them, and in his sparse Samnorsk, "Danger!
Stay back!" Amdi paused, but the Two-Legs kept coming. Two soldier packs
scattered out of his way. They had standing orders: never touch the alien.
Another second and the careful work of a year would be destroyed. Another
second and Steel might lose the world -- all on account of stupidity and bad
luck.
But even as his back members were shouting at the Two Legs, his forward
ones leaped atop a pile of stone. He pointed at the teams coming out of the
trench. "Kill the invaders!"
His personal guards moved close around him as Shreck and several
troopers streamed by. Steel's consciousness sagged in the bloody noise. This
was not the controlled mayhem of experiments beneath Hidden Island. This was
random death flying in all directions: arrows, spears, mattocks. Members of
the digger team ran about, flailing and crying. They never had a chance, but
they killed a number of others in their dying.
Steel backed away from the melee, toward Jefri. The Two-Legs was still
running toward him. Amdi followed, shouting in Samnorsk. A single mindless
team member, a single misaimed arrow, and the Two-Legs would die and all
would be lost. Never in his life had Steel felt such panic for the safety of
another. He raced to the human, surrounding him. The Two-Legs fell to his
knees and grabbed Steel by a neck. Only a lifetime of discipline kept Steel
from slashing back: the alien wasn't attacking, he was hugging.
The digger team was almost all dead now, and Shreck had pushed the
surviving members too far away to be a threat. Steel's guards were securely
around him only five or ten yards away. Amdi was all clumped together,
cowering in the mind noise, but still shouting to Jefri. Steel tried to
untangle himself from the human, but Jefri just grabbed one neck after
another, sometimes two at a time. He was making burbling noises that didn't
sound like Samnorsk. Steel trembled under the assault. Don't show the
revulsion. The human would not recognize it, but Amdi might. Jefri had done
this before, and Steel had taken advantage even though it cost him. The
mantis child needed physical contact; it was the basis for the relationship
between Amdi and Jefri. Similar trust must come from letting this thing
touch him. Steel slid a head and neck across the creature's back the way he
had seen parents do with pups down in the dungeon laboratories. Jefri hugged
him harder, and swept his long articulate paws across Steel's pelt.
Revulsion aside, it was a very strange experience. Ordinarily such close
contact with another intelligent being could only come in battle or in sex
-- and in either case, there wasn't much room for rational thought. But with
this human -- well, the creature responded with obvious intelligence -- but
there wasn't a trace of mind noise. You could think and feel both at the
same time. Steel bit down on a lip, trying to stifle his shivering. It was
... it was like having sex with a corpse.
Finally Jefri stepped back, holding his hand up. He said something very
fast, and Amdi said, "Oh Lord Steel, you're hurt. See the blood." There was
red on the human's paw; Steel looked at himself. Sure enough, one rump had
taken a nick. He hadn't even felt it till now. Steel backed away from the
mantis and said to Amdi, "It's nothing. Are you and Jefri unhurt?"
There was a rattling exchange between the two children, almost
unintelligible to Steel. "We're fine. Thank you for protecting us."
Fast thinking was something that Flenser had carved into Steel with
knives: "Yes. But it never should have happened. The Woodcarvers disguised
themselves as workers. I think they've been at this for days waiting for a
chance at you. When we guessed the fraud, it was almost too late.... You
should really have stayed inside when you heard the fighting."
Amdi hung his heads ashamedly, and translated to Jefri. "We're sorry.
We got excited, and t-then we thought you might get hurt."
Steel made comforting noises. At the same time, two of him looked
around at the carnage. Where was the whitejackets that had deserted the
stairs right at the beginning? That pack would pay -- His line of thought
crashed to a halt as he noticed: Tyrathect. The Flenser Fragment was
watching from the meeting hall. Now that he thought about it, he'd been
watching since right after the battle began. To others his posture might
seem impassive, but Steel could see the grim amusement in the Fragment's
expression. He nodded briefly at the other, but inside Steel cringed; he had
been so close to losing everything ... and the Flenser had noticed.
"Well let's get you two back to Hidden Island." He signaled to the
keepers that had come up behind the starship.
"Not yet, Lord Steel!" said Amdi, "We just got here. A reply from Ravna
should arrive very soon."
Teeth grated, but out of sight of the children. "Yes, please do stay.
But we'll all be more careful now, right?"
"Yes, yes!" Amdi explained to the human. Steel stood
forelegs-on-shoulders and patted Jefri on the head.
Steel had Shreck take the children back into the compound. Till they
were out of sight, all his members looked on with an expression of pride and
affection. Then he turned and walked across the pinkish mud. Where was that
stupid whitejackets?
The meeting hall on Starship Hill was a small, temporary thing. It had
been good enough to keep the cold out during the winter, but for a
conference of more than three people it was a real madhouse. Steel stomped
past the Flenser Fragment and collected himself on the loft with the best
view of the construction. After a polite moment, Tyrathect entered and
climbed to the facing loft.
But all the decorum was an act for the groundlings outside; now
Flenser's soft laughter hissed across the air to him, just loud enough for
him to hear. "Dear Steel. Sometimes I wonder if you are truly my student ...
or perhaps some changeling inserted after my departure. Are you trying to
screw us up?"
Steel glared back. He was sure there was no uneasiness in his posture;
all that was held within. "Accidents happen. The incompetents will be
culled."
"Quite so. But that appears to be your response to all problems. If you
hadn't been so bent on silencing the digger teams, they might not have
rioted ... and you would have had one less 'accident'."
"The flaw was in their guessing. Such executions are a necessary part
of military construction."
"Oh? You really think I had to kill all those who built the halls under
Hidden Island?"
"What? You mean you didn't? How -- ?"
The Flenser Fragment smiled the old, fanged smile. "Think on it, Steel.
An exercise."
Steel arranged his notes on the desk and pretended to study them. Then
all of him looked back at the other pack. "Tyrathect. I honor you because of
the Flenser in you. But remember: You survive on my sufferance. You are not
the Flenser-in-Waiting." The news had come late last fall, just before
winter closed the last pass over the Icefangs: The packs bearing the rest of
the Master hadn't made it out of Parliament Bowl. The fullness of Flenser
was gone forever. That had been an indescribable relief to Steel, and for a
time afterward the Fragment had been quite tractable. "Not one of my
lieutenants would blink if I killed all of you -- even the Flenser members."
And I'll do it, if you push me hard enough, I swear I will.
"Of course, dear Steel. You command."
For an instant the other's fear showed through. Remember, Steel thought
to himself, always remember: This is just a fragment of the Master. Most of
it is a little school teacher, not the Great Teacher with a Knife. True, its
two Flenser members totally dominated the pack. The spirit of the Master was
right here in this room, but gentled. Tyrathect could be managed, and the
power of the Master used for Steel's ends.
"Good," Steel said smoothly. "As long as you understand this, you can
be of great use to the Movement. In particular," he riffled through the
papers, "I want to review the Visitor situation with you." I want some
advice.
"Yes."
"We've convinced 'Ravna' that her precious Jefri is in imminent danger.
Amdijefri has told her about all the Woodcarver attacks and how we fear an
overwhelming assault."
"And that may really happen."
"Yes. Woodcarver really is planning an attack, and she has her own
source of 'magical' help. We have something much better." He tapped the
papers; the advice had been coming down since early winter. He remembered
when Amdijefri had brought in the first pages, pages of numerical tables, of
directions and diagrams, all drawn in neat but childish style. Steel and the
Fragment had spent days trying to understand. Some of the references were
obvious. The Visitor's recipes required silver and gold in quantities that
would otherwise finance a war. But what was this "liquid silver"? Tyrathect
had recognized it; the Master had used such a thing in his labs in the
Republic. Eventually they acquired the amount specified. But many of the
ingredients were given only as methods for creating them. Steel remembered
the Fragment musing over those, scheming against nature as if it were just
another foe. The recipes of mystics were full of "horn of squid" and "frozen
moonlight". The directions from Ravna were sometimes even stranger. There
were directions within directions, long detours spent in testing common
materials to decide which really fit the greater plan. Building, testing,
building. It was like the Master's own method but without the dead ends.
Some of it made sense early on. They would have the explosives and guns
that Woodcarver thought were her secret weapons. But so much was still
unintelligible -- and it never got easier.
Steel and the Fragment worked through the afternoon, planning how to
set up the latest tests, deciding where to search for the new ingredients
that Ravna demanded.
Tyrathect leaned back, hissing a wondering sigh. "Stage built upon
stage. And soon we'll have our own radios. Old Woodcarver won't have a
chance.... You are right, Steel. With this you can rule the world. Imagine
knowing instantly what is happening in the Republic's Capital and being able
to coordinate armies around that knowledge. The Movement will be the Mind of
God." That was an old slogan, and now it could be true. "I salute you,
Steel. You have a grasp worthy of the Movement." Was there the Teacher's
contempt in his smile? "Radio and guns can give us the world. But clearly
these are crumbs from the Visitors' table. When do they arrive?"
"Between one hundred and one hundred twenty days from now; Ravna has
revised her estimate again. Apparently even the Two-Legs have problems
flying between the stars."
"So we have that long to enjoy the Movement's triumph. And then we are
nothing, less than savages. It might have been safer to forego the gifts,
and persuade the Visitors that there is nothing here worth rescuing."
Steel looked out through the window slits that cut horizontally between
timbers. He could see part of the starship compound, and the castle
foundations, and beyond that the islands of the fjord country. He was
suddenly more confident, more at peace, than he'd been in a long time. It
felt right to reveal his dream. "You really don't see it, do you Tyrathect?
I wonder if the whole Master would understand, or whether I have exceeded
him, too. In the beginning, we had no choice. The Starship was automatically
sending some sort of signal to Ravna. We could have destroyed it; maybe
Ravna would have lost interest... And maybe not, in which case we would be
taken like a fish gilled from a stream. Perhaps I took the greater risk, but
if I win, the prize will be far more than you imagine." The Fragment was
watching him, heads cocked. "I've studied these humans, Jefri and -- through
my spies -- the one down at Woodcarvers. Their race may be older than ours,
and the tricks they've learned make them seem all-powerful. But the race is
flawed. As singletons, they work with handicaps we can scarcely imagine. If
I can use those weaknesses....
"You know the average Tines cares for its pups. We've manipulated
parental sentiments often enough. Imagine how it must be for the humans. To
them, a single pup is also an entire child. Think of the leverage that gives
us."
"You're seriously betting everything on this? Ravna isn't even Jefri's
parent."
Steel made an irritated gesture. "You haven't seen all of Amdi's
translations." Innocent Amdi, the perfect spy. "But you're right, saving the
one child is not the main reason for this Visit. I've tried to find out
their real motive. There are one hundred fifty-one children in some kind of
deathly stupor, all stacked up in coffins within the ship. The Visitors are
desperate to save the children, but there's something else they want. They
never quite talk about it ... I think it's in the machinery of the ship
itself."
"For all we know the children are a brood force, part of an invasion."
That was an old fear and -- after watching Amdijefri -- Steel saw no
chance of it. There could be other traps but, "If the Visitors are lying to
us, then there is really nothing we can do to win. We'll be hunted animals;
maybe generations from now we'll learn their tricks, but it will be the end
of us. On the other hand, we have good reason to believe that the Two-Legs
are weak, and whatever their goals, they do not involve us directly. You
were there the day of the landing, much closer than I. You saw how easy it
was to ambush them, even though their ship is impregnable and their single
weapon a match for a small army. It is obvious that they do not consider us
a threat. No matter how powerful their tools, their real fears are
elsewhere. And in that Starship, we have something they need.
"Look at the foundations of our new castle, Tyrathect. I've told
Amdijefri that it is to protect the Starship against Woodcarver. It will do
that -- later in the Summer when I shatter Woodcarver upon its ramparts. But
see the foundations of the curtain around the Starship. By the time our
Visitors arrive, the ship will be envaulted. I've done some quiet tests on
its hull. It can be breached; a few dozen tons of stone falling on it would
quite nicely crush it. But Ravna is not to worry; this is all for the
protection of her prize. And there will be an open courtyard nearby,
surrounded by strangely high walls. I've asked Jefri to get Ravna's help on
this. The courtyard will be just large enough to enclose Ravna's ship,
protecting it too.
"There are many details still to be settled. We must make the tools
Ravna describes. We must arrange the demise of Woodcarver, well before the
Visitors arrive. I need your help in all those things, and I expect to
receive it. In the end, if the Visitors are treacherous, we will make the
best stand that can be. And if they are not ... well I think you'll agree
that my reach has at least matched my teacher's."
For once, the Flenser Fragment had no reply.
The ship's control cabin was Jefri and Amdi's favorite place in all of
Lord Steel's domain. Being here could still make Jefri very sad, but now the
good memories seemed the stronger ... and here was the best hope for the
future. Amdi was still entranced by the window displays -- even if the views
were all of wooden walls. By their second visit they had already come to
regard the place as their private kingdom, like Jefri's treehouse back on
Straum. And in fact the cabin was much too small to hold more than a single
pack. Usually a member of their bodyguard would sit just inside the entrance
to the main hold, but even that seemed to be uncomfortable duty. This was a
place where they were important.
For all their rambunctiousness, Amdi and Jefri realized the trust that
Lord Steel and Ravna were placing in them. The two kids might race around
out-of-doors, driving their guards to distraction, but the equipment in this
command cabin must be treated as cautiously as when Mom and Dad were here.
In some ways, there was not much left in the ship. The datasets were
destroyed; Jefri's parents had them outside when Woodcarver attacked. During
the winter, Mr. Steel had carried out most of the loose items to study. The
coldsleep boxes were now safe in cool chambers nearby. Every day Amdijefri
inspected the boxes, looked at each familiar face, checked the diag
displays. No sleeper had died since the ambush.
What was left on the ship was hard-fastened to the hull. Jefri had
pointed out the control boards and status elements that managed the
container shell's rocket; they stayed strictly away from those.
Mr. Steel's quilting shrouded the walls. Jefri's folks' baggage and
sleeping bags and exercisers were gone, but there were still the acc webbing
and hard-fastened equipment. And over the months, Amdijefri had brought in
paper and pens and blankets and other junk. There was always a light breeze
from the fans sweeping through the cabin.
It was a happy place, strangely carefree even with all the memories it
brought. This was where they would save the Tines and all the sleepers. And
this was the only place in the world where Amdijefri could talk to another
human being. In some ways, the means of talking seemed as medieval as Lord
Steel's castle: They had one flat display -- no depth, no color, no
pictures. All they could coax from it were alphanumerics. But it was
connected to the ship's ultrawave comm, and that was still programmed to
track their rescuers. There was no voice recognition attached to the
display; Jefri had almost panicked before he realized that the lower part of
the screen worked as a keyboard. It was a laborious job typing in every
letter of every word -- though Amdi had gotten pretty good at it, using four
noses to peck at the keys. And nowadays he could read Samnorsk even better
than Jefri.
Amdijefri spent many afternoons here. If there was a message waiting
from the previous day, they would bring it up page by page and Amdi would
copy and translate it. Then they would enter the questions and answers that
Mr. Steel had talked to them about. Then there was a lot of waiting. Even if
Ravna was watching at the other end, it could take several hours to get a
reply. But the link was so much better than during the winter; they could
almost feel Ravna getting closer. The unofficial conversations with her were
often the high point of their day.
So far, this day had been quite different. After the false workers
attacked, Amdijefri had the shakes for about half an hour. Mr. Steel had
been wounded trying to protect them. Maybe there was nowhere that was safe.
They messed with the outside displays, trying to peek through cracks in the
rough planking of the compound's walls.
"If we'd been able to see out, we could have warned Mr. Steel," said
Jefri.
"We should ask him to put some holes in the walls. We could be like
sentries."
They batted the idea around a bit. Then the latest message started
coming in from the rescue ship. Jefri jumped into the acc webbing by the
display. This was his dad's old spot, and there was plenty of room. Two of
Amdi slid in beside him. Another member hopped on the armrest and braced its
paws on Jefri's shoulders. Its slender neck extended toward the screen to
get a good view. The rest scrambled to arrange paper and pens. It was easy
to play back messages, but Amdijefri got a certain thrill out of seeing the
stuff coming down "live".
There was the initial header stuff -- that wasn't so interesting after
about the thousandth time you saw it -- then Ravna's actual words. Only this
time it was just tabular data, something to support the radio design.
"Nuts. It's numbers," said Jefri.
"Numbers!" said Amdi. He climbed a free member onto the boy's lap. It
stuck its nose close to the screen, cross-checking what the one by Jefri's
shoulder was seeing. The four on the floor were busy scratching away,
translating the decimal digits on the screen into the X's and O's and 1's
and deltas of Tines' base four notation. Almost from the beginning Jefri had
realized that Amdi was really good at math. Jefri wasn't envious. Amdi said
that hardly any of the Tines were that good, either; Amdi was a very special
pack. Jefri was proud that he had such a neat friend. Mom and Dad would have
liked Amdi. Still ... Jefri sighed, and relaxed in the webbing. This number
stuff was happening more and more often. Mom had read him a story once,
"Lost in the Slow Zone", about how some marooned explorers brought
civilization to a lost colony. In that, the heroes just collected the right
materials and built what they needed. There had been no talk of precision or
ratios or design.
He looked away from the screen, and petted the two of Amdi that were
sitting beside him. One of them wriggled under his hand. Their whole bodies
hummed back at him. Their eyes were closed. If Jefri didn't know better, he
would have assumed they were asleep. These were the parts of Amdi that
specialized in talking.
"Anything interesting?" Jefri said after a while. The one on his left
opened its eyes and looked at him.
"This is that bandwidth idea Ravna was talking about. If we don't make
things just right, we'll just get clicks and clacks."
"Oh, right." Jefri knew that the initial reinventions of radio were
usually not good for much more than Morse code. Ravna seemed to think they
could jump that stage. "What do you think Ravna is like?"
"What?" The scritching of pens on paper stopped for an instant; he had
all of Amdi's attention, even though they'd talked of this before. "Well,
like you ... only bigger and older?"
"Yeah, but -- " Jefri knew Ravna was from Sjandra Kei. She was a
grownup, somewhere older than Johanna and younger than Mom. What exactly
does she look like? "I mean, she's coming all this way just to rescue us and
finish what Mom and Dad were trying to do. She must really be a great
person."
The scritching stopped again, and the display scrolled heedless on.
They would have to replay it. "Yes," Amdi said after a moment. "She -- she
must be a lot like Mr. Steel. It will be nice to meet someone I can hug, the
way you do Mr. Steel."
Jefri was a little miffed by that. "Well wait, you can hug me!"
The parts of Amdi next to him purred loudly. "I know. But I mean
someone that's a grownup ... like a parent."
"Yeah."
They got the tables translated and checked in about an hour. Then it
was time to send up the latest things that Mr. Steel was asking about. There
were about four pages, all neatly printed in Samnorsk by Amdi. Usually he
liked to do the typing, too, all bunched up over the keyboard and display.
Today he wasn't interested. He lay all over Jefri, but didn't pay any
special attention to checking what was being keyed in. Every so often Jefri
felt a buzzing through his chest, or the screen mounting would make a
strange sound -- all in sympathy to the unhearable sounds that Amdi was
making between his members. Jefri recognized the signs of deep thought.
He finished typing in the latest message, adding a few small questions
of his own. Things like, "How old are you and Pham? Are you married? What
are Skroderiders like?"
Daylight had faded from the cracks in the walls. Soon the digger teams
would be turning in their hoes and marching off to the barracks over the
edge of the hill. Across the straits, the towers on Hidden Island would be
golden in the mist, like something in a fairy tale. Their whitejackets would
be calling Amdi and Jefri out for supper any minute now.
Two of Amdi jumped off the acc webbing, and began chasing each other
around the chair. "I've been thinking! I've been thinking! Ravna's radio
thing: why is it just for talking? She says all sound is just different
frequencies of the same thing. But sound is all that thought is. If we could
change some of the tables, and make the receivers and transmitters to cover
my tympana, why couldn't I think over the radio?"
"I don't know." Bandwidth was a familiar constraint on many everyday
activities, though Jefri had only a vague notion of exactly what it was. He
looked at the last of the tables, still displayed on the screen. He had a
sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never
attain. "I use these things all the time, but I don't know exactly how they
work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?"
Amdi was getting all excited now, the way he did when he'd thought of
some great prank. "No, no, no. We don't have to understand everything."
Three more of him jumped to the floor; he waved random sheets of paper up at
Jefri. "Ravna doesn't know for sure how we make sound. The directions
include options for making small changes. I've been thinking. I can see how
the changes relate." He paused and made a high-pitched squealing noise.
"Darn. I can't explain it exactly. But I think we can expand the tables, and
that will change the machine in ob-obvious ways. And then ..." Amdi was
beside himself for a moment, and speechless. "Oh Jefri, I wish you could be
a pack, too! Imagine putting one of yourself each on a different mountain
top, and then using radio to think. We could be as big as the world!"
Just then there was the sound of interpack gobbling from outside the
cabin, and then the Samnorsk: "Dinner time. We go now, Amdijefri. Okay?" It
was Mr. Shreck; he spoke a fair amount of Samnorsk, though not as well as
Mr. Steel. Amdijefri picked up the scattered sheets and carefully slipped
them into the pockets on the back of Amdi's jackets. They powered down the
display equipment and crawled into the main hold.
"Do you think Mr. Steel will let us make the changes?"
"Maybe we should also send them back to Ravna."
The whitejackets' member retreated from the hatch, and Amdijefri
descended. A minute later they were out in the slanting sunlight. The two
kids scarcely noticed; they were both caught up in Amdi's vision.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
For Johanna, lots of things changed in the weeks after Scriber
Jaqueramaphan died. Most were for the better, things that might never have
happened but for the murder ... and that made Johanna very sad.
She let Woodcarver live in her cabin, and take the place of the helper
pack. Apparently Woodcarver had wanted to do this from the beginning, but
had been afraid of the human's anger. Now they kept the dataset in the
cabin. There were never less than four packs of Vendacious' security
surrounding the place, and there was talk of building barracks around it.
She saw the others during the day at meetings, and individually when
they needed help with the dataset. Scrupilo, Vendacious, and Scarbutt -- the
"Pilgrim" -- all spoke fluent Samnorsk now, more than good enough so that
she could see the character behind their inhuman forms: Scrupilo, prissy and
very bright. Vendacious, as pompous as Scriber had ever seemed, but without
the playfulness and imagination. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar. She felt a chill
every time she saw his big, scarred one. It always sat in the back, hunched
down to look unthreatening. Pilgrim obviously knew how the sight affected
her and tried not to offend, but even after Scriber's death she couldn't do
more than tolerate that pack.... And after all, there could be traitors in
the Woodcarver castle. It was only Vendacious' theory that the murder had
been a raid from outside. She kept a suspicious eye on Pilgrim.
At night Woodcarver chased the other packs away. She huddled around the
firepit, and asked the dataset questions that had no conceivable connection
with fighting the Flenserists. Johanna sat with her and tried to explain
things that Woodcarver didn't understand. It was strange. Woodcarver was
something very like the Queen of these people. She had this enormous
(primitive, uncomfortable, ugly -- yet still enormous) castle. She had
dozens of servants. Yet she spent most of each night in this little wood
cabin with Johanna, and helped with the fire and the food at least as much
as the pack who had been here before.
So it was that Woodcarver became Johanna's second friend among the
Tines. (Scriber was the first, though she hadn't known it till after he was
dead.) Woodcarver was very smart and very strange. In some ways she was the
smartest person Johanna had ever known, though that conclusion came slowly.
She hadn't really been surprised when the Tines mastered Samnorsk quickly --
that's the way it was in most adventures, and more to the point, they had
the language learning programs in the dataset. But night after night Johanna
watched Woodcarver play with the set. The pack showed no interest in the
military tactics and chemistry that preoccupied them all during the day.
Instead she read about the Slow Zone and the Beyond and the history of
Straumli Realm. She had mastered nonlinear reading faster than any of the
others. Sometimes Johanna would just sit and stare over her shoulders. The
screen was split into windows, the main one scrolling much faster than
Johanna could follow. A dozen times a minute, Woodcarver might come upon
words she didn't recognize. Most were just unfamiliar Samnorsk: she'd tap a
nose on the offending word and the definition would flicker briefly in a
dictionary window. Other things were conceptual, and the new windows would
lead the pack off into other fields, sometimes for just a few seconds,
sometimes for many minutes -- and sometimes the detour would become her new
main path. In a way, she was everything that Scriber had wanted to be.
Many times she had questions the dataset couldn't really answer. She
and Johanna would talk late into the night. What was a human family like?
What had Straumli Realm thought to make at the High Lab? Johanna no longer
thought of most packs as gangs of snake-necked rats. Deep past midnight, the
dataset's screen was brighter than the gray light from the firepit. It
painted the backs of Woodcarver in cheerful colors. The pack gathered round
her, looking up, almost like small children listening to a teacher.
But Woodcarver was no child. Almost from the first, she had seemed old.
Those late night talks were beginning to teach Johanna about the Tines, too.
The pack said things she never did during the day. They were mostly things
that must be obvious to other Tines, but never talked about. The human girl
wondered if Woodcarver the Queen had anyone to confide in.
Only one of Woodcarver's members was physically old; two were scarcely
more than puppies. It was the pattern of the pack that was half a thousand
years old. And that showed. Woodcarver's soul was held together by little
more than willpower. The price of immortality had been inbreeding. The
original stock had been healthy, but after six hundred years.... One of her
youngest members couldn't stop drooling; it was constantly patting a
kerchief to its muzzle. Another had milky white in its eyes where there
should have been deep brown. Woodcarver said it was stone blind, but healthy
and her best talker. Her oldest member was visibly feeble; it was panting
all the time. Unfortunately, Woodcarver said it was the most alert and
creative of all. When it died....
Once she started looking for it, Johanna could see weakness in all of
Woodcarver. Even the two healthiest members, strong and with plush fur,
walked a little strangely compared to normal pack members. Was that due to
spinal deformities? The two were also gaining weight, which wasn't helping
the problem.
Johanna didn't learn this all at once. Woodcarver had told her about
various Tinish affairs, and gradually her own story came out, too. She
seemed glad to have someone to confide in, but Johanna saw little self-pity
in her. Woodcarver had chosen this path -- apparently it was perversion to
some -- and had beaten the odds for longer than any other pack in recorded
history. She was more wistful than anything else, that her luck had finally
run out.
Tines architecture tended to extremes -- grotesquely oversized, or too
cramped for human use. Woodcarvers council chamber was at the large extreme;
it was not a cozy place. You could get three hundred humans into the
bowl-shaped cavity with room to spare. The separated balconies that ran
around its upper circumference could have held another hundred more.
Johanna had been here often enough before; this was where most work was
done with the dataset. Usually there was herself and Woodcarver and whoever
else needed information. Today was different, not a day to consult the
dataset at all: This was Johanna's first council meeting. There were twelve
packs in the High Council, and they were all here. Every balcony contained a
pack, and there were three on the floor. Johanna knew enough about Tines now
to see that for all the empty space, the place was hideously crowded. There
was the mind noise of fifteen packs. Even with all the padded tapestries,
she felt an occasional buzzing in her head or through her hands from the
railing.
Johanna stood with Woodcarver on the largest balcony. When they
arrived, Vendacious was already down on the main floor, arranging diagrams.
As the packs of the council came to their feet, he looked up and said
something to Woodcarver. The Queen replied in Samnorsk: "I know it will slow
things down, but perhaps that's a good thing." She made a human laughing
sound.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing on the next balcony over, just
like some council pack. Strange. Johanna had not yet figured out why, but
Scarbutt seemed to be one of Woodcarver's favorites. "Pilgrim, would you
translate for Johanna?"
Pilgrim bobbed several heads. "Is, is that okay, Johanna?"
The girl hesitated an instant, then nodded back. It made sense. Next to
Woodcarver, Pilgrim spoke better Samnorsk than any of them. As Woodcarver
sat down, she took the dataset from Johanna and popped it open. Johanna
glanced at the figures on the screen. She's made notes. Her surprise didn't
have a chance to register, before the Queen was talking again -- this time
in the gobble sounds of interpack talk. After a second, Pilgrim began
translating:
"Everyone please sit. Hunker down. This meeting is crowded enough as it
is." Johanna almost smiled. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar was pretty good. He was
imitating Woodcarver's human voice perfectly. His translation even captured
the wry authority of her speech.
After some shuffling around, only one or two heads were visible
sticking up from each balcony. Most stray thought noise should now be caught
in the padding around the balcony or absorbed by the quilted canopy that
hung over the room. "Vendacious, you may proceed."
On the main floor, Vendacious stood and looked up in all directions. He
started talking. "Thank you," came the translation, now imitating the
security chief's tones. "The Woodcarver asked me to call this meeting
because of urgent developments in the North. Our sources there report that
Steel is fortifying the region around Johanna's starship."
Gobble gobble interruption. Scrupilo? "That's not news. That's what our
cannon and gunpowder are for."
Vendacious: "Yes, we've known of the plans for some time. Nevertheless
the completion date has been advanced, and the final version will have walls
a good deal thicker than we had figured. It also appears that once the
enclosure is complete, Steel intends to break apart the starship and
distribute its cargo through his various laboratories."
For Johanna the words came like a kick in the stomach. Before there had
been a chance: If they fought hard enough, they might recapture the ship.
She might finish her parents' mission, perhaps even get rescued.
Pilgrim said something on his own account, translating: "So what's the
new deadline?"
"They're confident of having the main walls complete in just under ten
tendays."
Woodcarver bent a pair of noses to the keyboard, tapped in a note. At
the same time she stuck a head over the railing and looked down at the
security chief. "I've noticed before that Steel tends to be a bit
over-optimistic. Do you have an objective estimate?"
"Yes. The walls will be complete between eight and eleven tendays from
now."
Woodcarver: "We had been counting on at least fifteen. Is this a
response to our plans?"
On the floor below, Vendacious drew himself together. "That was our
first suspicion, Your Majesty. But ... as you know, we have a number of very
special sources of information ... sources we shouldn't discuss even here."
"What a braggart. Sometimes I wonder if he knows anything. I've never
seen him stick his asses out in the field." Huh? It took Johanna a second to
realize that this was Pilgrim, editorializing. She glanced across the
railing. Three of Pilgrim's heads were visible, two looking her way. They
bore an expression she recognized as a silly smile. No one else seemed to
react to his comment; apparently he could focus his translation on Johanna
alone. She glared at him, and after a moment he resumed his businesslike
translation:
"Steel knows we plan to attack, but he does not know about our special
weapons. This change in schedule appears to be a matter of random suspicion.
Unfortunately we are the worse for it."
Three or four Councillors began talking at once. "Much loud
unhappiness," came Pilgrim's voice, summing up. "They're full of 'I knew
this plan would never work' and 'Why did we ever agree to attack the
Flenserists in the first place'."
Right next to Johanna, Woodcarver emitted a shrill whistle. The
recriminations dribbled to a halt. "Some of you forget your courage. We
agreed to attack Hidden Island because it has been a deadly threat, one we
thought we could destroy with Johanna's cannons -- and one that could surely
destroy us if Steel ever learns to use the starship." One of Woodcarver's
members, crouching on the floor, reached out to brush Johanna's knee.
Pilgrim's focused voice chuckled in her ear. "And there's also the
little matter of getting you home and making contact with the stars, but she
can't say that aloud to the 'pragmatic' types. In case you haven't guessed,
that's one reason you're here -- to remind the chuckleheads there's more in
heaven than they have dreamed." He paused, and switched back to translating
Woodcarver:
"No mistake was made in undertaking this campaign: avoiding it would be
as deadly as fighting and losing. So ... do we have any chance of getting an
effective army up the coast in time?" She jabbed a nose in the direction of
a balcony across the room. "Scrupilo. Please be brief."
"The last thing Scrupilo can be is brief -- oops, sorry," More
editorializing from Peregrine.
Scrupilo stuck a couple more heads into view. "I've already discussed
this with Vendacious, Your Majesty. Raising an army, traveling up the coast
-- those all could be done in well under ten tendays. It's the cannon, and
perhaps training packs to use cannon, that is the problem. That is my
special area of responsibility."
Woodcarver said something abrupt.
"Yes, Majesty. We have the gunpowder. It is every bit as powerful as
Dataset says. The gun tubes have been a much greater problem. Till very
recently, the metal cracked at the breech as it cooled. Now I think I have
that fixed. At least I have two unblemished guntubes. I had hoped for
several tendays of testing -- "
Woodcarver interrupted, "-- but that is something we can't afford now."
She came completely to her feet and looked all around the council room. "I
want full-size testing immediately. If it's successful, we'll start making
gun tubes as fast as we can." And if not...
Two days later...
The funniest thing was that Scrupilo expected her to inspect the gun
tube before he fired it. The pack walked excitedly around the rig,
explaining things in awkward Samnorsk. Johanna followed, frowning seriously.
Some meters off, mostly hidden behind a berm, Woodcarver and her High
Council were watching the exercise. Well, the thing looked real enough.
They'd mounted it on a small cart that could roll back into a pile of dirt
under the recoil force. The tube itself was a single cast piece of metal
about a meter long with a ten-centimeter bore. Gunpowder and shot went in
the front end. The powder was ignited through a tiny firehole at the rear.
Johanna ran her hand along the barrel. The leaden surface was bumpy,
and there seemed be pieces of dirt caught in the metal. Even the walls of
the bore were not completely smooth; would that make a difference? Scrupilo
was explaining how he had used straw in the molds to keep the metal from
cracking as it cooled. Yecco. "You should try it out with small amounts of
gunpowder first," she said.
Scrupilo's voice became a bit conspiratorial, more focused, "Just
between you me, I did that. It went very good. Now for big test."
Hmm. So you're not a complete flake. She smiled at the nearest of him,
a member with no black at all in his head fur. In a kooky way, Scrupilo
reminded her of some the scientists at the High Lab.
Scrupilo stepped back from the cannon and said loudly, "It is all okay
to go now?" Two of him were looking nervously at the High Councillors beyond
the berm.
"Um, yes, it looks fine to me." And of course it should. The design was
copied straight from Nyjoran models in Johanna's history files. "But be
careful -- if it doesn't work right, it could kill anybody nearby."
"Yes, yes." Having gotten her official endorsement, Scrupilo swept
around the piece and shooed Johanna toward the sidelines. As she walked back
to Woodcarver, he continued in Tinish, no doubt explaining the test.
"Do you think it will work?" Woodcarver asked her quietly. She seemed
even more feeble than usual. They had spread a woven mat for her, on the
mossy heather behind the berm. Most of her lay quietly, heads between paws.
The blind one looked asleep; the young drooler cuddled against it, twitching
nervously. As usual Peregrine Wickwrackscar was nearby, but he wasn't
translating now. All his attention was on Scrupilo.
Johanna thought of the straw that Scrupilo had used in the molds.
Woodcarver's people were really trying to help, but.... She shook her head,
"I -- who knows." She came to her knees and looked over the berm. The whole
thing looked like a circus act from a history file. There were the
performing animals, the cannon. There was even the circus tent: Vendacious
had insisted on hiding the operation from possible spies in the hills. The
enemy might see something, but the longer Steel lacked details the better.
The Scrupilo pack hustled around the cannon, talking all the time. Two
of him hauled up a keg of black powder and he began pushing the stuff down
the barrel. A wad of silkpaper followed the powder down the barrel. He
tamped it into place, then loaded the cannon ball. At the same time, the
rest of him pushed the cart around to point out of the tent.
They were on the forest side of the castle yard, between the old and
new walls. Johanna could see a patch of green hillside, drizzly clouds
hanging low. About a hundred meters away was the old wall. In fact this was
the same stretch of stone where Scriber had been killed. Even if the damn
cannon didn't blow up, no one had any idea how far the shot would go.
Johanna was betting it wouldn't even get to the wall.
Scrupilo was on this side of the gun now, trying to light a long wooden
firing wand. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Johanna knew this
couldn't work. They were all fools and amateurs, she as much as they. And
this poor guy is going to get killed for nothing.
Johanna came to her feet. Gotta stop it. Something grabbed her belt and
pulled her down. It was one of Woodcarver's members, one of the fat ones
that couldn't walk quite right. "We have to try," the pack said softly.
Scrupilo had the wand alight now. Suddenly he stopped talking. All of
him but the white-headed one ran for the protection of the berm. For an
instant it seemed like strange cowardice, and then Johanna understood: A
human playing with something explosive would also try to shield his body --
except for the hand that held the match. Scrupilo was risking a maiming, but
not death.
The white-headed one looked across the trampled heather to the rest of
Scrupilo. It didn't seem upset so much as attentively listening. At this
distance it couldn't be part of Scrupilo's mind, but the creature was
probably smarter than any dog -- and apparently it was getting some kind of
directions from the rest.
White-head turned and walked toward the cannon. It belly-crawled the
last meter, taking what cover there was in the dirt behind the gun cart. It
held the wand so the flame at its tip came slowly down on the fire hole.
Johanna ducked behind the berm....
The explosion was a sharp snapping sound. Woodcarver shuddered against
her, and whistles of pain came from all around the tent. Poor Scrupilo!
Johanna felt tears starting. I have to look; I'm partly responsible. Slowly
she stood and forced herself to look across the field to where a minute ago
the cannon had been -- and still is! Thick smoke floated from both ends, but
the tube was intact. And more, White-head was wobbling dazedly around the
cart, his white fur now covered with soot.
The rest of Scrupilo raced out to White-head. The five of him ran round
and round the cannon, bounding over each other in triumph. For a long
moment, the rest of the audience just stared. The gun was in one piece. The
gunner had survived. And, almost as a side effect ... Johanna looked over
the gun, up the hillside: There was a meter-wide notch in the top of the old
wall, where none had been before. Vendacious would have a hard time
disguising that from enemy inspection!
Dumb silence gave way to the noisiest affair Johanna had seen yet.
There was the usual gobbling, and other sounds -- hissing that hovered right
at the edge of sensibility. On the other side of the tent, two Tines she
didn't know ran into each other: for a moment of mindless jubilation, they
were an enormous pack of nine or ten members.
We'll get the ship back yet! Johanna turned to hug Woodcarver. But the
Queen was not shouting with the others. She huddled with her heads close
together, shivering. "Woodcarver?" She petted the neck of one of the big,
fat ones. It jerked away, its body spasming.
Stroke? Heart attack? The names of oldenday killers popped into her
mind. Just how would they apply to a pack? Something was terribly wrong, and
nobody else had noticed. Johanna bounced back to her feet. "Pilgrim!" she
screamed.
Five minutes later, they had Woodcarver out of the tent. The place was
still a madhouse, but gone deathly quiet to Johanna's ears. She'd helped the
Queen onto her carriage, but after that no one would let her near. Even
Pilgrim, so eager to translate everything the day before, brushed her aside.
"It will be okay," was all he said as he ran to the front of the carriage
and grabbed the reins of the shaggy Whatsits. The carriage pulled out,
surrounded by several packs of guards. For an instant, the weirdness of the
Tines world came crashing back on Johanna. This was a obviously a great
emergency. A person might be dying. People were rushing this way and that.
And yet.... The packs drew into themselves. No one crowded close. No one
could touch another.
The instant passed, and Johanna was running out of the tent after the
carriage. She tried to keep to the heather along the muddy path, and almost
caught up. Everything was wet and chill, gunmetal gray. Everyone had been so
intent on the test -- could this be more Flenser treachery? Johanna
stumbled, went down on her knees in the mud. The carriage turned a corner,
onto cobblestones. Now it was lost to sight. She got up and slogged on
through the wet, but a little slower now. There was nothing she could do,
nothing she could do. She had made friends with Scriber, and Scriber had
been killed. She had made friends with Woodcarver, and now....
She walked along the cobbled alley between the castle's storehouses.
The carriage was out of sight, but she could hear its clatter on ahead.
Vendacious' security packs ran in both directions past her, stopping briefly
in side niches to allow opposing traffic by. Nobody answered her questions
-- probably none of them even spoke Samnorsk.
Johanna almost got lost. She could hear the carriage, but it had turned
somewhere. She heard it again behind her. They were taking Woodcarver to
Johanna's place! She went back, and a few minutes later was climbing the
path to the two-storey cabin she had shared with Woodcarver these last
weeks. Johanna was too pooped to run anymore. She walked slowly up the
hillside, vaguely aware of her wet and muddy state. The carriage was stopped
about five meters short of the door. Guard packs were strung out along the
hill, but their bows weren't nocked.
The afternoon sunlight found a break in the western clouds and shone
for a moment on the damp heather and glistening timbers, lighting them
bright against dark sky above the hills. It was a combination of light and
dark that had always seemed especially beautiful to Johanna. Please let her
be okay.
The guards let her pass. Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing around
the entrance, three of him watching her approach. The fourth, Scarbutt, had
its long neck stuck through the doorway, watching whatever was inside. "She
wanted to be back here when it happened," he said.
"What h-happened?" said Johanna.
Pilgrim made the equivalent of a shrug. "It was the shock of that
cannon going off. But almost anything could have done it." There was
something odd about the way his heads were bobbing around. With a shock
Johanna realized the pack was smiling, full of glee.
"I want to see her!" Scarbutt backed hastily away as she started for
the door.
Inside there was only the light from the door and the high window
slits. It took a second for Johanna's eyes to adjust. Something smelled ...
wet. Woodcarver was lying in a circle on the quilted mattress she used every
evening. She crossed the room and went to her knees beside the pack. The
pack edged nervously away from her touch. There was blood, and what looked
like a pile of guts, in the middle of the mattress. Johanna felt vomit
rising in her. "W-Woodcarver?" she said very softly.
One of the Queen moved back toward Johanna and put its muzzle in the
girl's hand. "Hello, Johanna. It's ... so strange ... to have someone next
to me at a time like this."
"You're bleeding. What's the matter?"
Soft, human-sounding laughter. "I'm hurt, but it's good.... See." The
blind one was holding something small and wet in its jaws. One of the others
was licking it. Whatever it was, it was wiggling, alive. And Johanna
remembered how strangely plump and awkward parts of Woodcarver had become.
"A baby?"
"Yes. And I'm going to have another in a day or two."
Johanna sat back on the floor timbers, and covered her face with her
hands. She was going to start crying again. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Woodcarver didn't say anything for a moment. She licked the little one
all around, then set it against the tummy of the member that must be its
mother. The newborn snuggled close, nuzzling into the belly fur. It didn't
make any noise that Johanna could hear. Finally the Queen said, "I ... don't
know if I can make you understand. This has been very hard for me."
"Having babies?" Johanna's hands were sticky with the blood on the
quilt. Obviously this had been hard, but that's how all lives must start on
a world like this. It was pain that needed the support of friends, pain that
led to joy.
"No. Having the babies isn't it. I've borne more than a hundred in my
memory's time. But these two ... are the ending of me. How can you
understand? You humans don't even have the choice to keep on living; your
offspring can never be you. But for me, it's the end of a soul six hundred
years old. You see, I'm going to keep these two to be part of me ... and for
the first time in all the centuries, I am not both the mother and the
father. A newby I'll become."
Johanna looked at the blind one and the drooler. Six hundred years of
incest. How much longer could Woodcarver have continued before the mind
itself decayed? Not both the mother and the father. "But then who is
father?" she blurted out.
"Who do you think?" The voice came from just beyond the door. One of
Peregrine Wickwrackscar's heads peered around the corner just far enough to
show an eye. "When Woodcarver makes a decision, she goes for extremes. She's
been the most tightly held soul of all time. But now she has blood -- genes,
Dataset would say -- from packs all over the world, from one of the flakiest
pilgrims who ever cast his soul upon the wind."
"Also from one of the smartest," said Woodcarver, her voice wry and
wistful at the same time. "The new soul will be at least as intelligent as
before, and probably a lot more flexible."
"And I'm a little bit pregnant, myself," said Pilgrim. "But I'm not the
least bit sad. I've been a foursome for too long. Imagine, having pups by
Woodcarver herself! Maybe I'll turn all conservative and settle down."
"Hah! Even two from me is not enough to slow your pilgrim soul."
Johanna listened to the banter. The ideas were so alien, and yet the
overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. Somewhere ...
then she had it: When Johanna was just five years old, and Mom and Dad
brought little Jefri home. Johanna couldn't remember the words, or even the
sense of what they'd said -- but the tone was the same as what went between
Woodcarver and Pilgrim.
Johanna slid back to a sitting position, the tension of the day
evaporating. Scrupilo's artillery really worked; there was a chance of
getting the ship. And even if they failed ... she felt a little bit like she
was back home.
"C-can I pet your puppy?"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
The voyage of the Out of Band II had begun in catastrophe, where life
and death were a difference of hours or minutes. In the first weeks there
had been terror and loneliness and the resurrection of Pham. The OOB had
fallen quickly toward the galactic plane, away from Relay. Day by day the
whorl of stars tilted up to meet them, till it was the single band of light,
the Milky Way as seen from the perspective of Nyjora and Old Earth -- and
from most all the habitable planets of the Galaxy.
Twenty thousand light-years in three weeks. But that had been on a path
through the Middle Beyond. Now in the galactic plane, they were still six
thousand light-years from their goal at the Bottom of the Beyond. The Zone
interfaces roughly followed surfaces of constant mean density; on a galactic
scale, the Bottom was a vaguely lens-shaped surface, surrounding much of the
galactic disk. The OOB was moving in the plane of the disk now, more or less
toward the galactic center. Every week took them deeper toward the Slowness.
Worse, their path, and all variants that made any progress, extended right
through a region of massive Zone shifting. The Net News had called it the
Great Zone Storm, though of course there was not the slightest physical
feeling of turbulence within the volume. But some days their progress was
less that eighty percent what they'd expected.
Early on they'd known that it was not only the storm that was slowing
them. Blueshell had gone outside, looking over the damage that still
remained from their escape.
"So it's the ship itself?" Ravna had glared out from the bridge,
watching the now imperceptible crawl of near stars across the heavens. The
confirmation was no revelation. But what to do?
Blueshell trundled back and forth across the ceiling. Every time he
reached the far wall, he'd query ship's management about the pressure seal
on the nose lock. Ravna glared at him, "Hey, that was the n'th time you've
checked status in the last three minutes. If you really think something is
wrong, then fix it."
The Skroderider's wheeled progress came to an abrupt halt. Fronds waved
uncertainly. "But I was just outside. I want to be sure I shut the port
correctly.... Oh, you mean I've already checked it?"
Ravna looked up at him, and tried to get the sting out of her voice.
Blueshell wasn't the proper target for her frustration. "Yup. At least five
times."
"I'm sorry." He paused, going into the stillness of complete
concentration. "I've committed the memory." Sometimes the habit was cute,
and sometimes just irritating: When the Riders tried to think on more than
one thing at a time, their Skrodes were sometimes unable to maintain
short-term memory. Blueshell especially got trapped into cycles of behavior,
repeating an action and immediately forgetting the accomplishment.
Pham grinned, looking a lot cooler than Ravna felt. "What I don't see
is why you Riders put up with it."
"What?"
"Well, according to the ship's library, you've had these Skrode gadgets
since before there was a Net. So how come you haven't improved the design,
gotten rid of the silly wheels, upgraded the memory tracking? I bet that
even a Slow Zone combat programmer like me could come up with a better
design than the one you're riding."
"It's really a matter of tradition," Blueshell said primly, "We're
grateful to Whatever gave us wheels and memory in the first place."
"Hmm."
Ravna almost smiled. By now she knew Pham well enough to guess what he
was thinking -- namely that plenty of Riders might have gone on to better
things in the Transcend. Those remaining were likely to have self-imposed
limitations.
"Yes. Tradition. Many who once were Riders have changed -- even
Transcended. But we persist." Greenstalk paused, and when she continued
sounded even more shy than usual. "You've heard of the Rider Myth?"
"No," said Ravna, distracted in spite of herself. In the time ahead she
would know as much about these Riders as about any human friends, but for
now there were still surprises.
"Not many have. Not that it's a secret; it's just we don't make much of
it. It comes close to being religion, but one we don't proselytize. Four or
five billion years ago, Someone built the first skrodes and raised the first
Riders to sentience. That much is verified fact. The Myth is that something
destroyed our Creator and all its works.... A catastrophe so great that from
this distance it is not even understood as an act of mind."
There were plenty of theories about what the galaxy had been like in
the distant past, in the time of the Ur-Partition. But the Net couldn't be
forever. There had to be a beginning. Ravna had never been a big believer in
Ancient Wars and Catastrophes.
"So in a sense," Greenstalk said, "we Riders are the faithful ones,
waiting for What created us to return. The traditional skrode and the
traditional interface are a standard. Staying with it has made our patience
possible."
"Quite so," said Blueshell. "And the design itself is very subtle, My
Lady, even if the function is simple." He rolled to the center of the
ceiling. "The skrode of tradition imposes a good discipline -- concentration
on what's truly important. Just now I was trying to worry about too many
things...." Abruptly he returned to the topic at hand: "Two of our drive
spines never recovered from the damage at relay. Three more appear to be
degrading. We thought this slow progress was just the storm, but now I've
studied the spines up close. The diagnostic warnings were no false alarm."
"... and it's still getting worse?"
"Unfortunately so."
"So how bad will it get?"
Blueshell drew all his tendrils together. "My Lady Ravna, we can't be
certain of the extrapolations yet. It may not get much worse than now, or --
You know the OOB was not fully ready for departure. There were the final
consistency checks still to do. In a way, I worry about that more than
anything. We don't know what bugs may lurk, especially when we reach the
Bottom and our normal automation must be retired. We must watch the drives
very carefully ... and hope."
It was the nightmare that haunted travelers, especially at the Bottom
of the Beyond: with ultradrive gone, suddenly a light-year was not a matter
of minutes but of years. Even if they fired up the ramscoop and went into
cold sleep, Jefri Olsndot would be a thousand years dead before they reached
him, and the secret of his parents' ship buried in some medieval midden.
Pham Nuwen waved at the slowly shifting star fields. "Still, this is
the Beyond. Every hour we go farther than the fleet of Qeng Ho could in a
decade." He shrugged. "Surely there's some place we can get repairs?"
"Several."
So much for "a quick flight, all unobserved". Ravna sighed. The final
fitting at Relay was to include spares and Bottom compatibility software.
All that was faraway might-have-beens now. She looked at Greenstalk. "Do you
have any ideas?"
"About what?" Greenstalk said.
Ravna bit her lip in frustration. Some said the Riders were a race of
comedians; they were indeed, but it was mostly unintentional.
Blueshell rattled at his mate.
"Oh! You mean where can we get help. Yes, there are several
possibilities. Sjandra Kei is thirty-nine hundred lights spinward from here,
but outside this storm. We -- "
"Too far," Blueshell and Ravna spoke almost in chorus.
"Yes, yes, but remember. The Sjandra Kei worlds are mainly human, your
home, my lady Ravna. And Blueshell and I know them well; after all, they
were the source of the crypto shipment we brought to Relay. We have friends
there and you a family. Even Blueshell agrees that we can get the work done
without notice there."
"Yes, if we could get there." Blueshell's voder voice sounded petulant.
"Okay, what are the other choices?"
"They are not so well-known. I'll make a list." Her fronds drifted
across a console. "Our last chance for choice is rather near our planned
course. It's a single system civilization. The Net name is ... it translates
as Harmonious Repose."
"Rest in Peace, eh?" said Pham.
But they had agreed to voyage on quietly, always watching the bad drive
spines, postponing the decision to stop for help.
The days became weeks, and weeks slowly counted into months. Four
voyagers on a quest toward the Bottom. The drive became worse, but slowly,
right on OOB's diagnostic projections.
The Blight continued to spread across the Top of the Beyond, and its
attacks on Network archives extended far beyond its direct reach.
Communication with Jefri was improving. Messages trickled in at the
rate of one or two a day. Sometimes, when OOB's antenna swarm was tuned just
right, he and Ravna would talk almost in real time. Progress was being made
on the Tines' world, faster than she had expected -- perhaps fast enough
that the boy could save himself.
It should have been a hard time, locked up in the single ship with just
three others, with only a thread of communication to the outside, and that
with a lost child.
In any case, it was rarely boring. Ravna found that each of them had
plenty to do. For herself it was managing the ship's library, coaxing out of
it the plans that would help Mr. Steel and Jefri. OOB's library was nothing
compared to the Archive at Relay, or even the university libraries at
Sjandra Kei, but without proper search automation it could be just as
unknowable. And as their voyage proceeded, that automation need more and
more special care.
And ... things could never be boring with Pham around. He had a dozen
projects, and curiosity about everything. "Voyaging time can be a gift,"
he'd say. "Now we have time to catch ourselves up, time to get ready for
whatever we find ahead." He was learning Samnorsk. It went slower than his
faked learning on Relay, but the guy had a natural bent for languages, and
Ravna gave him plenty of practice.
He spent several hours each day in the OOB's workshop, often with
Blueshell. Reality graphics were a new thing to him, but after a few weeks
he was beyond toy prototypes. The pressure suits he built had power packs
and weapons stores. "We don't know what things may be like when we arrive;
powered armor could be real useful."
At the end of each work day they would all meet on the command deck, to
compare notes, to consider the latest from Jefri and Mr. Steel, to review
the drive status. For Ravna this could be the happiest time of the day ...
and sometimes the hardest. Pham had rigged the display automation to show
castle walls all around. A huge fireplace replaced the normal window on comm
status. The sound of it was almost perfect; he had even coaxed a small
amount of "fire" heat from that wall. This was a castle hall out of Pham's
memory, from Canberra he said. But it wasn't that different from the Age of
Princesses on Nyjora (though most of those castles had been in tropical
swamps, where big fireplaces were rarely used). For some perverse reason,
even the Riders seemed to enjoy it; Greenstalk said it reminded her of a
trading stop from her first years with Blueshell. Like travelers who have
walked through a long day, the four of them rested in the coziness of a
phantom lodge. And when the new business was settled, Pham and the Riders
would trade stories, often late into the "night".
Ravna sat beside him, the least talkative of the four. She joined in
the laughter and sometimes the discussion: There was the time Blueshell had
a humor fit at Pham's faith in public key encryption, and Ravna knew some
stories of her own to illustrate the Rider's opinion. But this was also the
hardest time for her. Yes, the stories were wonderful. Blueshell and
Greenstalk had been so many places, and at heart they were traders. Swindles
and bargains and good done were all part of their lives. Pham listened to
his friends, almost enraptured ... and then told his own stories, of being a
prince on Canberra, of being a Slow Zone trader and explorer. And for all
the limitations of the Slowness, his life's adventures surpassed even the
Skroderiders'. Ravna smiled and tried to pretend enthusiasm.
For Pham's stories were too much. He honestly believed them, but she
couldn't imagine one human seeing so much, doing so much. Back on Relay, she
had claimed his memories were synthetic, a little joke of Old One. She had
been very angry when she said it, and more than anything she wished she
never had ... because it was so clearly the truth. Greenstalk and Blueshell
never noticed, but sometimes in the middle of a story Pham would stumble on
his memories and a look of barely concealed panic would come to his eyes.
Somewhere inside, he knew the truth too, and she suddenly wanted to hug him,
comfort him. It was like having a terribly wounded friend, with whom you can
talk but never mutually admit the scope of the injuries. Instead she
pretended the lapses didn't exist, smiling and laughing at the rest of his
story.
And Old One's jape was all so unnecessary. Pham didn't have to be a
great hero. He was a decent person, though ebullient and kind of a
rule-breaker. He had every bit as much persistence as she, and more courage.
What craft Old One must have had to make such a person, what ... Power.
And how she hated Him, for making a joke of such a person.
Of Pham's godshatter, there was scarcely a sign. For that Ravna was
very grateful. Once or twice a month he had a dreamy spell. For a day or two
after he would go nuts with some new project, often something he couldn't
clearly explain. But it wasn't getting worse; he wasn't drifting away from
her.
"And the godshatter may save us in the end," he would say when she had
the courage to ask him about it. "No, I don't know how." He tapped his
forehead. "It's still god's own crowded attic up here. "It's more than
memory. Sometimes it needs all my mind to think with and there's no room
left for self-awareness, and afterwards I can't explain, but... sometimes I
have a glimmer. Whatever Jefri's parents brought to the Tines' world: it can
hurt the Blight. Call it an antidote -- better yet, a countermeasure.
Something taken from the Perversion as it was aborning in the Straumli lab.
Something the Perversion didn't even suspect was gone until much later."
Ravna sighed. It was hard to imagine good news that was also so
frightening. "The Straumers could sneak something like that right out from
the Perversion's heart?"
"Maybe. Or maybe, Countermeasure used the Straumers to escape the
Perversion. To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the
plan might work, Rav, at least if I -- if Old One's godshatter -- can get
down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of
the Beyond upside down -- hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least
of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all
the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure."
She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship.
You think that's what it is?"
Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says
it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He
seems a little disgusted by it.... That's good, probably keeps his Tinish
friends away from it."
A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too.
And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would
stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act ... through
Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time.
Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of
the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff
easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development
tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things, but they
were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the
first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be
carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in
another ten days.
The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind
schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever
imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a
counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the
acoustic interface.
"I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said
when he saw Jefri's message.
"That's right. And in principle, they just reasoned out consequences to
what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio."
"Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid
-- all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table
changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them
a three kilohertz band -- a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me
that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz."
"Yes. That's what my dataset says."
He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha! And that's my point. Sure, in
principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like
making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm," he counted
rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri
claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is
not generally usable."
Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You
get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like
without them. "You ... you think this might be, uh, Countermeasure's doing?"
Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility.
Then, "No ... no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing
games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we
really know about what's going on?"
"Well, I'll tell you some things I know. We are talking to a young
human child who was raised in Straumli Realm. You've been reading most of
his messages in Trisk translation. That loses a lot of the colloquialisms
and the little errors of a child who is a native speaker of Samnorsk. The
only way this might be faked is by a group of human adults.... And after
twenty plus weeks of knowing Jefri, I'll tell you even that is unlikely."
"Okay. So suppose Jefri is for real. We have this eight-year-old kid
down on the Tines' world. He's telling us what he considers to be the truth.
I'm saying it looks like someone is lying to him. Maybe we can trust what he
sees with his own eyes. He says these creatures aren't sapient except in
groups of five or so. Okay. We'll believe that." Pham rolled his eyes.
Apparently his reading had shown how rare group intelligences were this side
of the Transcend. "The kid says they didn't see anything but small towns
from space, and that everything on the ground is medieval. Okay, we'll buy
that. But. What are the chances that this race is smart enough to do PDE's
in their heads, and do them from just the implications in your message?"
"Well, there have been some humans that smart." She could name one case
in Nyjoran history, another couple from Old Earth. If such abilities were
common among the packs, they were smarter than any natural race she had
heard of. "So this isn't first-time medievalism?"
"Right. I bet this is some colony fallen on hard times -- like your
Nyjora and my Canberra, except that they have the good luck of being in the
Beyond. These dog packs have a working computer somewhere. Maybe it's under
control of their priest class; maybe they don't have much else. But they're
holding out on us."
"But why? We'd be helping them in any case. And Jefri has told us how
this group saved him."
Pham started to smile again, the old supercilious smile. Then he
sobered. He was really trying to break that habit. "You've been on a dozen
different worlds, Ravna. And I know you've read about thousands more, at
least in survey. You probably know of varieties of medievalism I've never
guessed. But remember, I've actually been there.... I think." The last was a
nervous mutter.
"I've read about the Age of Princesses," Ravna said mildly.
"Yes.... and I'm sorry for belittling that. In any medieval politics,
the blade and the thought are closely connected. But they become much more
closely bound for someone who's lived through it. Look, even if we believe
everything that Jefri says he has seen, this Hidden Island Kingdom is a
sinister thing."
"You mean the names?"
"Like Flensers, Steel, Tines? Harsh names aren't necessarily
meaningful." Pham laughed. "I mean, when I was eight years old, one of my
titles was already 'Lord Master Disemboweler'." He saw the look on Ravna's
face and hurriedly added, "And at that age, I hadn't even witnessed more
than a couple of executions! No, the names are only a small part of it. I'm
thinking of the kid's description of the castle -- which seems to be close
by the ship -- and this ambush he thinks he was rescued from. It doesn't add
up. You asked 'what could they gain from betraying us'. I can see that
question from their point of view. If they are a fallen colony, they have a
clear idea what they've lost. They probably have some remnant technology,
and are paranoid as hell. If I were them, I'd seriously consider ambushing
the rescuers if those rescuers seemed weak or careless. And even if we come
on strong ... look at the questions Jefri asks for Steel. The guy is
fishing, trying to figure out what we really value: the refugee ship, Jefri
and the coldsleepers, or something on the ship. By the time we arrive, Steel
will probably have wiped the local opposition -- thanks to us. My guess is
we're in for some heavy blackmail when we get to Tines' world."
I thought we were talking about the good news. Ravna paged back through
recent messages. Pham was right. The boy was telling the truth as he knew
it, but.... "I don't see how we can play things any differently. If we don't
help Steel against the Woodcarvers -- "
"Yeah. We don't know enough to do much else. Whatever else is true, the
Woodcarvers seem a valid threat to Jefri and the ship. I'm just saying we
should be thinking about all the possibilities. One thing we absolutely
mustn't do is show interest in Countermeasure. If the locals know how
desperate we are for that, we don't have a chance.
"And it may be time to start planting a few lies of our own. Steel's
been talking about building a landing place for us -- within his castle.
There's no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri
that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship.
Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps...."
He hummed one of his strange little "marching" tunes. "About the radio
thing: why don't we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our
design. I wonder what they'd say?"
Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot
said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there
was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: "So
just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?"
Ravna didn't argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet.... She
went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy
seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations
involving mathematical insight -- not formal, taught math -- where Jefri
said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine
conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too
consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.
Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.
There was always something: problems with the Tines' developments,
fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about
the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB's
progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring,
frightening. And yet ...
One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin
she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she
couldn't remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was
no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was
sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back,
drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something
placid and unintelligible. In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the
experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone
... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring
and effortless.
Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had
woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day -- Powers knew
there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham's
shoulder. Yes, always problems, but ... in a way she more content than she
had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri's situation. All the
people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love.
Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she'd
been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could
do something to help with the problems.
And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now
she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of
going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only
a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And
things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to
Harmonious Repose, but beyond that ...
Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham's "light-hearted"
translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything
habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded ... but
there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often
patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived
uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship's
library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been
continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten
thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than
one hundred racial terranes. Even the youngest was the residue of a dozen
emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.
So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were
flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the
News the whole way in.
Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external
goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious,
hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the
creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from
just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users.
Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in
Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible
methods of payment.
Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Call to action
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the
Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment
we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will
need support services including free Net time.
In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports
our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the
human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of
victory -- or wait, and be destroyed.
Death to vermin.
There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about
who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There
were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the
fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups.
Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still
making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that
way.
Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers
generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than
conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a
single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they
do after all?"
Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are
hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have
taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began.... By the Powers,
I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since
she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something
from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than
she realized. Now....
On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been
working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear
for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving
force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them
would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded
there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or
bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."
Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would
stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a
ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei
would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for
nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one
thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to
look like anything human."
And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of
Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders
went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances
that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded?
Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things
human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if
necessary.
Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up.
For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly
reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more
sophisticated than what he had known.
Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB
was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based
on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed
of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe
built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.
RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check
and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to
match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and
"Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta
be honest, right?")
Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers
from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was
spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even
though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was
surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet.
The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural
view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet.
Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides,
hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects --
structures? -- sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast
needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed
more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt,
and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring
system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or
on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred
kilometers across ... but there appeared to be thousands of them.
At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring
plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big
impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old, old
times," Pham Nuwen said.
In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it
looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were
objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of
icy froth -- gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly
motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In
the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters.
The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk
pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by
them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single
structure," she said.
Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the
"frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks
long.... The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it
was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of
snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with
images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better
than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered
along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure
could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart
briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was
vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time
Nyjoran railway.
Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc.
The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the
modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled
heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers,
they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths
were occupied.
Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm.
Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the
ships in the exterior view.
Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."
Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for
their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred
years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the
two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint
Rihndell".
"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would
remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But our business here
is not like anything we've done before."
Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his
cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic
stuff that protected what it covered.
This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring
systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly,
there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the
repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business
sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across
his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the
cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it
came to renting bandwidth -- or maybe it was simply cautious.
Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He
was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was
encrypted.
"Yes."
The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc
habitat.
From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows
that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's
current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view,
but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat
swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central
fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of
a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow
surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like
food in a slow tidal surge.
The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body
plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The
tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment,
one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something
that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs
moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled
behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk,
"The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider
humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs -- evolved
from flippers or jaws or whatever -- were all very good for movement on
land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.
The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying
slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell
kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch
that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going?
What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at
Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term
memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.
Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to
understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller.... helper
creatures those are.... allies of big new customer..." Their guide's limited
speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more
than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of
Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in
Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or
Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important
questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I
persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out
the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and
ability.
It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell
chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's
recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of
others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could
work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And
this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above
would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore
articulated pressure suits -- the force-field suits of the High Beyond would
last only a few weeks down here.
They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks
circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of
meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there
was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane
beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a
thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had
seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed
against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on
their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration ... but she
doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be
clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.
Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life.
They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of
deliberate habitat design). According to OOB's library, Harmonious Repose
had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then
there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to
colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a
miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced
to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if
there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail
of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through
in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings
and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at
all, but old ... old. The ship's library claimed that no race had
transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more
important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their
twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the
feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from
the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the
tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested
in trade with the outside.
Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.
"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham
Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the
Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the
ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and
ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However
fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a
difference. And he may be right.
Pham came down from the ceiling, pulled close to the screen. It looked
like serious bargaining was about to begin. The Skroderiders had arrived in
a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating
near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the
Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there
between the branches, they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.
Saint Rihndell's sales creatures were scattered all about the tallest
trees. They sat(?) with their ivory limbs twined about the tree tops.
Tusk-leg races were a common thing in the galaxy, but these were the first
Ravna had known. The body plan was totally unlike anything from home, and
even now she didn't have a clear idea of their appearance. Sitting in the
trees, their legs had more of the aspect of a skeletal fingers grasping
around the trunk. Their chief rep -- who claimed to be Saint Rihndell itself
-- had scrimshaw covering two-thirds of its ivory. Two of the windows showed
the carving close up; Pham seemed to think that understanding the artwork
might be useful.
Progress was slow. Triskweline was the common language, but good
interpreting devices didn't work this deep in the Beyond, and Saint
Rihndell's folk were only marginally familiar with the trade talk. Ravna was
used to clean translations. Even the Net messages she dealt with were
usually intelligible (though sometimes misleadingly so).
They'd been talking for twenty minutes and had only just established
that Saint Rihndell might have the ability to repair OOB. It was the usual
Riderly driftiness, and something more. The tedium seemed to please Pham
Nuwen, "Rav, this is almost like a Qeng Ho operation, face to face with
critters and scarcely a common language."
"We sent them a description of our repair problem hours ago. Why should
it take so long for a simple yes or no?"
"Because they're haggling," said Pham, his grin broadening. "'Honest'
Saint Rihndell here -- " he waved at the scrimshawed local, "-- wants to
convince us just how hard the job is.... Lord I wish I was out there."
Even Blueshell and Greenstalk seemed a little strange now. Their
Triskweline was stripped down, barely more complex than Saint Rihndell's.
And much of the discussion seemed very round about. Working for Vrinimi,
Ravna had had some experience with sales and trading. But haggling? You had
your pricing data bases and strategy support, and directions from Grondr's
people. You either had a deal or you didn't. What was going on between the
Riders and Saint Rihndell was one of the more alien things Ravna had ever
seen.
"Actually, things are going pretty well ... I think. You saw when we
arrived, the bone legs took away Blueshell's samples. By now they know
precisely what we have. There's something in those samples that they want.
"Yeah?"
"Sure. Saint Rihndell isn't bad-mouthing our stuff for his health."
"Damn it, it's possible we don't have anything on board they could
want. This was never intended to be a trade expedition." Blueshell and
Greenstalk had scavenged "product samples" from the ship's supplies, things
that the OOB could survive without. These included sensoria and some Low
Beyond computer gear. Some of that would be a serious loss. But one way or
another, we need those repairs.
Pham chuckled. "No. There's something there Saint Rihndell wants.
Otherwise he wouldn't still be jawing.... And see how he keeps needling us
about his 'other customers' needs'? Saint Rihndell is a human kind of a
guy."
Something like human song came over the link to the Riders. Ravna
phased Greenstalk's cameras toward the sound. From the forest "floor" on the
far side of Blueshell, three new creatures had appeared.
"Why ... they're beautiful. Butterflies," said Ravna.
"Huh?"
"I mean they look like butterflies. You know? Um. Insects with large
colored wings."
Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid
body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with
soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder
blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and
yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were
artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for
flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.... The three
floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up
at the Riders. Then they swept their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted
gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like
something out of a children's video. They had pert, button noses, like pet
jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew.
Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.
Saint Rihndell and his buddies sidled around their tree tops. The
tallest visitor sang on, its wings gently flexing. After a moment, Ravna
realized it was speaking fluent Trisk with a front end adapted to the
creature's natural speech:
"Saint Rihndell, greetings! Our ships are ready for your repairs. We
have made fair payment, and we are in a great hurry. Your work must begin at
once!" Saint Rihndell's Trisk specialist translated the speech for his boss.
Ravna leaned across Pham's back. "So maybe our friendly repairman
really is overbooked," she said.
"... Yeah."
Saint Rihndell came back around his treetop. His little arms picked at
the green needles as he made a reply. "Honored Customers. You made offer of
payment, not fully accepted. What you ask is in short supply, difficult to
... do."
The cuddly butterfly made a squeaking noise that might have passed for
joyous laughter in a human child. The sense behind its singing was
different: "Times are changing, Rihndell creature! Your people must learn:
We will not be stymied. You know my fleet's sacred mission. We count every
passing hour against you. Think on the fleet you will face if your lack of
cooperation is ever known -- is ever even suspected." There was a sweep of
blue and yellow wings, and the butterfly turned. Its dark, bashful eyes
rested on the Riders. "And these potted plants, they are customers? Dismiss
them. Till we are gone, you have no other customers."
Ravna sucked in a breath. The three had no visible weapons, but she was
suddenly afraid for Blueshell and Greenstalk.
"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
According to the clock, it took less than half an hour for the
Skroderiders to make it back. It seemed a lot longer to Pham Nuwen, even
though he tried to keep up a casual front with Ravna. Maybe they were both
keeping up a front; he knew she still considered him a fragile case.
But the Riders' cameras showed no more signs of the killer butterflies.
Finally the cargo lock cracked open and Blueshell and Greenstalk were back.
"I was sure the wily tusk-legs was just pretending there was strong
demand," said Blueshell. He seemed as eager to rehash the story as Pham was.
"Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I still think those butterflies might
just be part of an act. It's all too melodramatic."
Blueshell's fronds rattled in a way that Pham recognized as a kind of
shiver. "I wager not, Sir Pham. Those were Aprahanti. Just the look of them
fills you with dread, does it not? They're rare these days, but a star
trader knows the stories. Still ... this is a little much even for
Aprahanti. Their Hegemony has been on the wane for several centuries." He
rattled something at the ship, and the windows were filled with views of
nearby berths in the repair harbor. There was more Rider rattling, this time
between Greenstalk and Blueshell. "Those other ships are a uniform type, you
know. A High Beyond design like ours, but more, um, ... militant."
Greenstalk moved close to a window. "There are twenty of them. Why
would so many need drive repairs all at once?"
Militant? Pham looked at the ships with a critical eye. He knew the
major features of Beyonder vessels by now. These appeared to have rather
large cargo capacity. Elaborate sensoria too. Hm. "Okay, so the Butterflies
are hard types. How scared is Saint Rihndell and company?"
The Skroderiders were silent for a long moment. Pham couldn't tell if
his question was being given serious consideration or if they had
simultaneously lost track of the conversation. He looked at Ravna. "How
about the local net? I'd like to get some background."
She was already running comm routines. "They weren't accessible
earlier. We couldn't even get the News." That was something Pham could
understand, even if it was damned irritating. The "local net" was a RIP-wide
ultrawave computer and communication network, perhaps a billion times more
complex than anything Pham had known -- but conceptually similar to
organizations in the Slow Zone. And Pham Nuwen had seen what vandals could
do to such structures; Qeng Ho had dealt with at least one obnoxious
civilization by perverting its computer net. Not surprisingly, Saint
Rihndell hadn't provided them with links to the RIP net. And as long as they
were in harbor, the OOB's antenna swarm was necessarily down, so they were
also cut off from the Known Net and the newsgroups.
A grin lit Ravna's face. "Hei! Now we've got read access, maybe more.
Greenstalk. Blueshell. Wake up!"
Rattle. "I wasn't asleep," claimed Blueshell, "just thinking on Sir
Pham's question. Saint Rihndell is obviously afraid."
As usual, Greenstalk didn't make excuses. She rolled around her mate to
get a better look at Ravna's newly opened comm window. There was an
iterated-triangle design with Trisk annotations. It meant nothing to Pham.
"That's interesting," said Greenstalk.
"I am chuckling," said Blueshell. "It is more than interesting. Saint
Rihndell is a hard-trading type. But look, he is making no charge for this
service, not even a percentage of barter. He is afraid, but he still wants
to deal with us."
Hmm, so something from their High Beyond samples was enough to make him
risk Aprahanti violence. Just hope it's not something we really need too.
"Okay. Rav, see if -- "
"Just a second," the woman replied. "I want to check the News." She
started a search program. Her eyes flickered quickly across her console
window ... and after a second she choked, and her face paled. "By the
Powers, no!"
"What is it?"
But Ravna didn't reply, or put the news to a main window. Pham grabbed
the rail in front of her console and pulled himself around so he could see
what she was reading:
Crypto: 0
As received by: Harmonious Repose Communication Synod
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Bold victory over the Perversion
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 159.06 days since fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk; A promising beginning
Text of message:
One hundred seconds ago, Alliance Forces began action against the tools
of the Blight. By the time you read this, the Homo Sapiens worlds known as
Sjandra Kei will have been destroyed.
Note well: for all the talk and theories that have flown about the
Blight, this is the first time anyone has successfully acted. Sjandra Kei
was one of only three systems outside of Straumli Realm known to harbor
humans in any numbers. In one stroke we have destroyed a third of the
Perversion's potential for expansion.
Updates will follow.
Death to vermin.
There was one other message in the window, an update of sorts, but not
from Death to Vermin:
Crypto: 0
Billing: charity/general interest
As received by: Harmonious Repose Communication Synod
Language path: Samnorsk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Commercial Security, Sjandra Kei [Note from lower protocol layer:
This message was received at Sneerot Down along the Sjandra Kei bearing. The
transmission was very weak, perhaps from a shipboard transmitter]
Subject: Please help
Distribution:
Threats Interest Group
Date: 5.33 hours since disaster at Sjandra Kei
Text of message:
Earlier today, relativistic projectiles struck our main habitations.
Fatalities cannot be less than twenty-five billion. Three billion may still
live, in transit and in smaller habitats.
We are still under attack.
Enemy craft are in the inner system. We see glow bombs. They are
killing everyone.
Please. We need help.
"Nei nei nei!" Ravna drove up against him, her arms tight around him,
her face buried in his shoulder. She sobbed incoherent Samnorsk. Her whole
body shuddered against him. He felt tears coming to his own eyes. So
strange. She had been the strong one, and he the fragile crazy. Now it was
turned all around, and what could he do? "Father, mother, sister -- gone,
gone."
It was the disaster they thought could not happen, and now it had. In
one minute she had lost everything she grew up with, and was suddenly alone
in the universe. For me, that happened long ago, the thought came strangely
dispassionate. He hooked a foot into the deck and gently rocked Ravna back
and forth, trying to comfort her.
The sounds of grief gradually quieted, though he could still feel her
sobs through his chest. She didn't raise her face from the tear-soaked place
on his shirt. Pham looked over her head at Blueshell and Greenstalk. Their
fronds looked strange ... almost wilted.
"Look, I want to take Ravna away for a bit. Learn what you can, and
I'll be back."
"Yes, Sir Pham." And they seemed to droop even more.
It was an hour before Pham returned to the command deck. When he did,
he found the Riders deep in rattling conference with OOB. All the windows
were filled with flickering strangeness. Here and there Pham recognized a
pattern or a printed legend, enough to guess that he was seeing ordinary
ship displays, but optimized to Rider senses.
Blueshell noticed him first; he rolled abruptly toward him and his
voder voice came out a little squeaky. "Is she all right?"
Pham gave a little nod. "She's sleeping now." Sedated, and with the
ship watching her in case I've misjudged her. "Look, she'll be okay. She's
been hit hard ... but she's the toughest one of us all."
Greenstalk's fronds rattled a smile. "I have often thought that."
Blueshell was motionless for an instant. Then, "Well, to business, to
business." He said something to the ship, and the windows reformatted in the
compromise usable by both humans and Riders. "We've learned a lot while you
were gone. Saint Rihndell indeed has something to fear. The Aprahanti ships
are a small fragment of the Death to Vermin extermination fleets. These are
stragglers still on their way to Sjandra Kei!"
All dressed up for a massacre, and no place to go. "So now they want
some action of their own."
"Yes. Apparently Sjandra Kei put up some resistance and there were some
escapes. The commander of this fleetlet thinks he can intercept some of
these -- if he can get prompt repairs."
"What kind of extortion is really possible? Could these twenty ships
destroy RIP?"
"No. It's the reputation of the greater force these ships are part of
-- and the great killing at Sjandra Kei. So Saint Rihndell is very timid
with them, and what they need for repairs is the same class of regrowth
agent that we need. We really are in competition with them for Rihndell's
business." Blueshell's fronds slapped together, the sort of "go get'em"
enthusiasm he displayed when a hot deal was remembered. "But it turns out we
have something Saint Rihndell really, really wants, something he'll even
risk tricking the Aprahanti to get." He paused dramatically.
Pham thought back over the things they had offered the RIPers. Lord,
not the low zone ultrawave gear. "Okay, I'll bite. What do we have to
give'em?"
"A set of flamed trellises! Hah hah."
"Huh?" Pham remembered the name from the list of odds and ends the
Skroderiders had scrounged up. "What's a 'flamed trellis'?"
Blueshell poked a frond into his satchel and extended something stubby
and black to Pham: an irregular solid, about forty centimeters by fifteen,
smooth to the touch. For all its size, it didn't mass more than a couple of
grams. An artfully smoothed ... cinder. Pham's curiosity triumphed over
greater concerns: "But what's it good for?"
Blueshell dithered. After a moment, Greenstalk said a little shyly,
"There are theories. It's pure carbon, a fractal polymer. We know it's very
common in Transcendent cargoes. We think it's used as packing material for
some kinds of sentient property."
"Or perhaps the excrement of such property," Blueshell buzz-muttered.
"Ah, but that's not important. What is, is that occasional races in the
Middle Beyond prize them. And why that? Again, we don't know. Saint
Rihndell's folk are certainly not the final user. The Tusk-legs are far too
sensible to be ordinary trellis customers. So. We have three hundred of
these wonderful things ... more than enough to overcome Saint Rihndell's
fears of the Aprahanti."
While Pham had been away with Ravna, Saint Rihndell had come up with a
plan. Applying the regrowth agent would be too obvious in the same harbor
with the Aprahanti ships. Besides, the chief Butterfly had demanded the OOB
move out. Saint Rihndell had a small harbor about sixteen million klicks
around the RIP system. The move was even plausible, for it happened that
there was a Skroderider terrane in the Harmonious Repose system -- and
currently it was just a few hundred kilometers from Rihndell's second
harbor. They would rendezvous with the tusk-legs, exchanging repairs for two
hundred seventeen flamed trellises. And if the trellises were perfectly
matched, Rihndell promised to throw in an agrav refit. After the Fall of
Relay, that would be very welcome.... Hunh. Ol' Blueshell just never stopped
wheeling and dealing.
The OOB slipped free of its moorings and carefully drifted up from the
ring plane. Tiptoe-ing out. Pham kept a close watch on the EM and ultrawave
windows. But there were no target-locking emanations from the Aprahanti
vessels, nothing more than casual radar contact. No one followed. Little OOB
and its "potted plants" were beneath the notice of the great warriors.
One thousand meters above the ring plane. Three. The Skroderiders'
chatter -- both with Pham and between themselves -- dwindled to naught.
Their stalks and fronds angled so the sensing surfaces looked out in all
directions. The sun and its power cloud was a blaze of light on one side of
the deck. They were above the rings, but still so close.... It was like
standing at sunset on a beach of colored sands ... that stretched to an
infinite horizon. The Skroderiders stared into it, their fronds gently
swaying.
Twenty kilometers above the rings. One thousand. They lit the OOB's
main torch and accelerated across the system. The Skroderiders came slowly
out of their trance. Once they arrived at the second harbor, the regrowth
would take about five hours -- assuming Rihndell's agent had not
deteriorated; the Saint claimed it was recently imported from the Top, and
undiluted.
"Okay, so when do we deliver the trellises?"
"On completion of the repairs. We can't depart until Saint Rihndell --
or his customers -- are satisfied that all the pieces are genuine."
Pham drummed his fingers on the comm console. This operation brought
back a lot of memories, some of them hair-raising. "So they get the goods
while we're still in the middle of RIP. I don't like it."
"See here, Sir Pham. Your experience with star trading was in the Slow
Zone, where exchanges were separated by decades or centuries of travel time.
I admire you for that, more than I can say -- but it gives you a twisted
view of things. Up here in the Beyond, the notion of return business is
important. We know very little of Saint Rihndell's inner motivation, but we
do know his repair business has existed for at least forty years. Sharp
dealing we can expect from him, but if he robbed or murdered very many,
trader groups would know, and his little business would starve."
"Hmf." No point in arguing it right now, but Pham guessed that this
situation was special. Rihndell -- and the RIPers in general -- had Death to
Vermin sitting on their doorstep, and stories of major chaos coming from the
direction of Sjandra Kei. With that background they might just lose their
courage once they had the trellises. Some precautions were in order. He
drifted off to the ship's machine shop.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Ravna came to the cargo deck as Blueshell and Greenstalk were preparing
the trellises for delivery. She moved hesitantly, pushing awkwardly from
point to point. There were dark rings, almost bruises, beneath her eyes. She
returned Pham's hug almost tentatively, but didn't let go. "I want to help.
Is there anything I can do to help?"
The Skroderiders left their trellises and rolled over. Blueshell ran a
frond gently across Ravna's arm, "Nothing for you to do now, my lady Ravna.
We have everything well, ah, in hand. We'll be back in less than an hour,
and then we can be rid of here."
But they let her check their cameras and the cargo strap-downs. Pham
drifted close by her as she inspected the trellises. The twisted carbon
blocks looked stranger than the one alone had. Properly stacked, they fit
perfectly. More than a meter across, the stack looked like a
three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle carved from coal. Counting a separate bag of
loose spares, they totaled less than half a kilogram. Huh. Damn things
should be flammable as hell. Pham resolved to play with the remaining
hundred odd trellises after they were safely back in deep space.
Then the Skroderiders were through the cargo lock with their delivery,
and they could only follow along on their cameras.
This secondary harbor was not really part of the tusk-leg race's
terrane. The inside of the arc was far different from what they had seen on
the Skroderiders' first trip. There were no exterior views. Cramped passages
wound between irregular walls pocked with dark holes. Insects flew
everywhere, often covering parts of the camera balls. To Pham, the place
looked filthy. There was no evidence of the terrane's owners -- unless they
were the pallid worms that sometimes stuck a featureless head(?) up from a
burrow hole. Over his voice link, Blueshell opined that these were very
ancient tenants of the RIP system. After a million years, and a hundred
transcendent emigrations, the residue might still be sentient, but stranger
than anything evolved in the Slow Zone. Such a people would be protected
from physical extinction by ancient automation, but they would also be
inward turning, totally cautious, absorbed in concerns that were inane by
any outside standard. It was the type that most often lusted after trellis
work.
Pham tried to keep an eye on everything. The Riders had to travel
almost four kilometers from the harbor lock to reach the place where the
trellises would be "validated". Pham counted two exterior locks along the
way, and nothing that looked especially threatening -- but then how would he
know what "threatening" looked like here? He had the OOB mount an exterior
watch. A large shepherd satellite floated on the outer side of the ring, but
there were no other ships in this harbor. The EM and ultra-environment
seemed placid, and what could be seen on the local net did not make the
ship's defenses suspicious.
Pham looked up from the reports. Ravna had drifted across the deck to
the outside view. The repair work was visible, though not spectacular. A
pale greenish aura hung around the damaged spines. It was scarcely brighter
than the glow you often see on ship hulls in low planetary orbit. She turned
and said softly, "Is it really getting fixed?"
"As far as we can -- I mean yes." Ship's automation was monitoring the
regrowth, but they wouldn't know for sure till they tried to fly with it.
Pham was never sure why Rihndell had the Skroderiders pass through the
wormheads' terrane; maybe, if the creatures were the ultimate trellis users,
they wanted a look at the sellers. Or maybe it had some connection with the
treachery that ultimately followed. In any case the Riders were soon out of
it, and into a polyspecific concourse as crowded as any low-tech bazaar.
Pham's jaw sagged. Everywhere he looked there was a different class of
sophont. Intelligent life is a rare development in the universe; in all his
life in the Slow Zone, he had known three nonhuman races. But the universe
is a big place, and with ultradrive it was easy to find other life. The
Beyond collected the detritus of countless migrations, an accumulation that
finally made civilization ubiquitous. For a moment he lost track of his
surveillance programs and his general suspicions, drowned in the wonder of
it. Ten species? Twelve? Individuals brushed familiarly by one another. Even
Relay had not been like this. But then Harmonious Repose was a civilization
lost in stagnation. These races had been part of the RIP complex for
thousands of years. The ones that could interact had long since learned to
do so.
And nowhere did he see butterfly wings on creatures with large,
compassionate eyes.
He heard a small sound of surprise from the far side of the deck. Ravna
was standing close by a window that looked out from one of Greenstalk's side
cameras. "What is it, Rav?"
"Skroderiders. See?" She pointed into the mob and zoomed the view. For
a moment the images towered over her. Through the passing chaos he had a
glimpse of hull forms and graceful fronds. Except for cosmetic stripes and
tassles, they looked very familiar indeed.
"Yeah, there's a small colony of them hereabouts." He opened the
channel to Greenstalk and told her about the sighting.
"I know. We ... smelled them. Sigh. I wish we had time to visit them
after this. Finding friends in far places ... always nice." She helped
Blueshell push the trellises around a balloon acquarium. They could see
Rihndell's people just ahead. Six tusk-legs sat on the wall around what
might be test equipment.
Blueshell and Greenstalk pushed their ball of frothy carbon into the
group. The scrimshawed one leaned close to the pile and reached out to
fondle the pieces with its tiny arms. One after another the trellises were
placed in the tester. Blueshell moved in close to watch, and Pham set the
main windows to look through his cameras. Twenty seconds passed. Rihndell's
Trisk interpreter said, "First seven test true, make an interlocked septet."
Only then did Pham realize he had been holding his breath. The next
three "septets" passed, too. Another sixty seconds. He glanced at the ship's
repair status. OOB considered the job done but for sign-off commit from the
local net. Another few minutes and we can kiss this place goodbye!
But there are always problems. Saint Rihndell bitched about the twelfth
and fifteenth sets. Blueshell argued at length, grudgingly produced
replacement pieces from his bag of spares. Pham couldn't tell if the
Skroderider was debating for the fun of it, or if he really was short on
good replacements.
Twenty-five sets okayed.
"Where is Greenstalk going?" said Ravna.
"What?" Pham called up the view from Greenstalk's cameras. She was five
meters from Blueshell and moving away. He panned wildly about. A local
Skroderider was on her left and another floated inverted above her. Its
fronds touched hers in apparently amiable conversation. "Greenstalk!" There
was no reply.
"Blueshell! What's happening?" But that Rider was in gesticulating
argument with the tusk-legs. Still another set of trellises had failed their
examination. "Blueshell!" After a moment the Rider's voice came over their
private channel. He sounded drifty, the way he often did when he was jammed
or overloaded. "Not to bother me now, Sir Pham. I'm down to three perfect
replacements. I must persuade these fellows to settle for what they already
have."
Ravna broke in, "But what about Greenstalk? What's happening to her?"
The cameras had lost sight of each other. Greenstalk and her companions
emerged from a dense crowd and floated across the middle of the concourse.
They were using gas jets instead of wheels. Someone was in a hurry.
The seriousness of events finally got through to Blueshell. The view
from his skrode turned wildly as he rolled back and forth around Saint
Rihndell's people. There was the rattle of Rider talk and then his voice
came back on the inside channel, plaintive and confused. "She's gone. She's
gone. I must ... I have to ...." Abruptly he rolled back to the tusk legs
and resumed the argument that had just been interrupted. After a couple of
seconds his voice came back on the inside channel. "What should I do, Sir
Pham? I have a sale here still incomplete, yet my Greenstalk has wandered
off."
Or been kidnapped. "Get us the sale, Blueshell. Greenstalk will be
okay.... OOB: Plan B." He grabbed a headset and pushed off from the console.
Ravna rose with him. "Where are you going?"
He grinned. "Out. I thought Saint Rihndell might lose his halo when the
crunch came -- and I made plans." She followed him as he glided toward the
floor hatch. "Look. I want you to stay on deck. I can only carry so much
snoop equipment; I'll need your coordination."
"But -- "
He went through the hatch head first, missing the rest of her
objection. She didn't follow, but a second later her voice was back, in his
headset. Some of the tremor was gone from her voice; the old Ravna was
there, fighting out from under her other problems. "Okay, I'll back you ...
but what can we do?"
Pham pulled himself hand over hand down the passageway, accelerating to
a speed that would have left a lubber caroming off the walls. Ahead loomed
the uncompromising wall of the cargo lock. He swatted a hand gently at the
wall and flipped head over heels. He dragged his hands precisely against the
wall flanges, slowing just enough so the impact with the hatch did not break
his ankles. Inside the lock, the ship had his suit already power up.
"Pham, you can't go out." Evidently she was watching through the lock's
cameras. "They'll know we're a human expedition."
His head and shoulders were already in the suit's top shell. He felt
the bottom pushing up around him, the seals fastening. "Not necessarily."
And by now it probably doesn't matter. "There are plenty of two-arm/two-leg
critters around, and I've glued some camouflage to this outfit." He cupped
his chin in the helmet controls and reset the displays. The armored pressure
suit was a very primitive thing compared to the field suits of Relay. Yet
the Qeng Ho would have given a starship for this gear. He'd originally put
the thing together to impress the Tines, but it's going to get some early
testing.
He chinned up the outside view, what Ravna was seeing: his figure was
unrelieved black, more than two meters tall. The hands were backed with
carapace-claws and every edge of his figure was razor sharp and spined.
These most recent additions should break the lines of the strictly human
form, and hopefully be intimidating as hell.
Pham cycled the lock and pushed off, into the wormheads' terrane. Walls
of mud stood all around, misty in humid air and swarms of insects.
Ravna's voice was in his ear. "I've got a low-level query, probably
automatic: 'Why you send third negotiator?'"
"Ignore it."
"Pham, be careful. These Middle Beyond cultures, the old ones, they
keep nasty things in reserve. Otherwise they wouldn't still be around."
"I'll be a good citizen." As long as I'm treated nice. He was already
halfway to the concourse gate. He chinned up a small window from Blueshell's
camera. All this high-bandwidth comm was courtesy of the local net. Strange
that Rihndell was still providing the service. Blueshell seemed to be
negotiating still. Maybe there wasn't a scam ... or anyway, not one that
Saint Rihndell was in on.
"Pham, I've lost the video from Greenstalk, just as she went into some
kind of tunnel. Her location beacon is still clear."
The concourse gate made an opening for him, and then Pham was in the
crowded, market volume. He heard the raucous hubbub even through his armor.
He moved slowly, sticking to the most uncrowded paths, following guide ropes
that threaded the space. The mob was no problem. Everyone made way, some
with almost panicky haste. Pham didn't know whether it was his razor spines
or the trace of chlorine his suit "leaked". Maybe that last touch was a bit
much. But the whole point was to look nonhuman. He slowed even more, doing
his best not to nick anyone. Something awfully like a target-designation
laser flickered in his rear window. He ducked quickly around an aquarium as
Ravna said, "The terrane just complained to your suit: 'You are in violation
of dress-code' is how the translation comes out."
Is it my chlorine B.O., or have they detected the guns? "What about
outside? Any Butterflies in sight?"
"No. Ship activity hasn't changed much during the last five hours. No
Aprahanti movement or change in comm status." Long pause. Indirectly from
the OOB bridge he could hear Blueshell talking with Ravna, the words
indistinct but excited. He jabbed around, trying to find the direct
connection. Then Ravna was talking to him again. "Hei! Blueshell says
Rihndell has accepted the shipment! He's onloading the agrav fabric right
now. And OOB just got a commit on the repairs!" So they were ready to fly --
except that three of them were still ashore, and one of them was missing.
Pham floated over the top of the aquarium and finally caught direct
sight of Blueshell. He tweaked the suit's gas jets very carefully and
settled down beside the Rider.
His arrival was about as welcome as finger-mites at a picnic. The
scrimshawed one had been chattering away, tapping his articulated artwork on
the wall as his helper translated into Trisk. Now the creature drew in his
tusks, and the neck arms folded themselves. The others followed suit. All of
them sidled up the wall, away from Blueshell and Pham. "Our business is now
complete. We don't know where your friend has gone," said the Trisk
interpreter.
Blueshell's fronds extended after them, wavering. "B-but just a little
guidance is all we need. Who -- " It was no use. Saint Rihndell and his
merry crew kept going. Blueshell rattled in abrupt frustration. His fronds
angled slightly, turning all attention on Pham Nuwen. "Sir Pham, I am
doubting now your expertise as a trader. Saint Rihndell might have helped."
"Maybe." Pham watched the tusk-legs disappear into the crowd, pulling
the trellises behind them like a big black balloon. Ugh. Maybe Rihndell was
simply an honest trader. "What are the chances that Greenstalk would abandon
you in the middle of something like that?"
Blueshell dithered for a moment. "In an ordinary trade stop, she might
have noticed some extraordinary profit opportunity. But here, I -- "
Ravna's voice interrupted sympathetically, "Maybe she just, uh, forgot
the context?"
"No," Blueshell was definite. "The skrode would never permit such a
failure, not in the middle of a hard trade."
Pham shifted windows around inside his helmet, looking in all
directions. The crowd was still keeping an open space around them. There was
no evidence of cops. Would I know them if I saw them? "Okay," said Pham. "We
have a problem, whether I'd come out or not. I suggest we take a little
walk, see if we can find where Greenstalk went."
Rattle. "We have little choice now. My lady Ravna, do please try to
reach the tusk-legs interpreter. Perhaps he can link us to the local
Skroderiders." He came off the wall, rotated on gas jets. "Come along, Sir
Pham."
Blueshell led the way across the concourse, vaguely in the direction
Greenstalk had gone. Their path was anything but straight, more a drunkard's
walk that once took them almost back to their starting place. "Delicately,
delicately," the Skroderider responded when Pham complained about the pace.
The Rider never insisted on passage through clots of critters. If they did
not respond to the gentle waving of his fronds, he detoured all around them.
And he kept Pham directly behind him so the intimidation factor of the
razored armor was of no use. "These people may look very peaceable to you,
Sir Pham, easy to push around. But note, this is among themselves. These
races have had thousands of years to accommodate to one another, to achieve
local commensality. To outsiders they will necessarily be less tolerant,
else they would have been overrun long ago." Pham remembered the
"dress-code" warning and decided not to argue.
The next twenty minutes would have been the experience of a lifetime
for a Qeng Ho trader, to be within arm's reach of a dozen different
intelligent species. But when they finally reached the far wall, Pham was
grinding his teeth. Twice more he received a dress-code warning. The only
bright spot: Saint Rihndell was still extending the courtesy of local net
support, and Ravna had more information: "The local Skroderider colony is
about a hundred kilometers from the concourse. There's some kind of
transport station beyond the wall you're at."
And the tunnel Greenstalk had entered was just ahead of them. From this
angle, they could see the dark of space beyond it. For the first time, there
was no problem with crowds; scarcely anyone was entering or leaving the
hole.
Laser light twinkled on his rear windows. "Dress code violation. Fourth
warning. It says to 'please leave the volume at once'."
"We're going. We're going."
Darkness, and Pham boosted the gain on his helmet windows. At first he
thought the "transport station" was open to space, that the locals had
restraint fields as in the high beyond. then he noticed the pillars merged
into transparent walls. they were still indoors in the old-fashioned way,
but the view.... they were on the starward side of the arc. the ring
particles were like dark fish floating silently a few tens of meters out
from him. In the further distance, structures stuck out of the ring plane
far enough to get sundazzle. But the brightest object was almost overhead:
the blue of ocean, the white of cloud. Its soft light flooded the ground
around him. However far the Qeng Ho fared, such a sight had been welcome.
Yet this was not quite the real thing. The was only approximately spherical,
and its face was bisected by the ring shadow. It was a small object, not
more than a few hundred klicks above him, one of the shepherd satellites
they had seen on the way in. The shepherd's haze of atmosphere was crisply
bounded by the sides of a vast canopy.
He dragged his attention down from the view. "Ten to one that's the
Skroderiders' terrane."
"Of course," Blueshell replied. "It's typical. The surf in such
minigravity can never be what I prefer, but -- "
"Dear Blueshell! Sir Pham! Over here." It was Greenstalk's voice.
According to Pham's suit, it was a local connection, not relayed through the
OOB.
Blueshell's fronds angled in all directions. "Are you all right,
Greenstalk?" They rattled back and forth at each other for a few seconds.
Then Greenstalk resumed in Trisk: "Sir Pham. Yes, I'm all right. I'm sorry
to upset you all so much. But I could tell the deal with Rihndell was going
to work out, and then these local Riders stopped by. They are wonderful
people, Sir Pham. They have invited us across to their terrane. Just for a
day or so. It will be a wonderful rest before we go on our way. And I think
they may be able to help us."
Like the quest romances he'd found in Ravna's bedtime library: the
weary travelers, partway to their goal, find a friendly haven and some
special gift. Pham switched to a private line to Blueshell: "Is that really
Greenstalk? Is she under duress?"
"It's her, and free, Sir Pham. You heard us speaking. I've been with
her two hundred years. No one's twisting her fronds."
"Then why the hell did she skip out on us?" Pham surprised himself,
almost hissing the words.
Long pause. "That is strange. My guess: these local Riders somehow know
something very important to us. Come, Sir Pham. But carefully." He rolled
away in what seemed a random direction.
"Rav, what do you -- " Pham noticed the red light blinking on his comm
status panel, and his irritation chilled. How long had the link to Ravna
been down?
Pham followed Blueshell, floating low behind the other, using his gas
jets to pace the Skroderider. This entire area was covered with the stickem
that Riders liked for zero-gee rolling. Yet right now the place seemed
deserted. Nobody in sight where just a hundred meters away there was light
and crowds. The whole thing screamed ambush, yet it didn't make sense. If
Death to Vermin -- or their stooges -- had spotted them, a simple alarum
would have served. Some Rihndell game ...? Pham powered up the suit's beam
weapons and enabled countermeasures; midge cameras flitted off in all
directions. So much for dress codes.
The bluish moonlight washed the plain, showing soft mounds and angular
arrays of unknown equipment. The surface was pocked with holes (tunnel
entrances?). Blueshell said something muddled about the "beautiful night",
how much fun it would be to sit on the seashore a hundred kilometers above
them. Pham scanned in all directions, trying to identify fields of fire and
killing zones.
The view from one of his midges showed a forest of leafless fronds --
Skroderiders standing silent in the moonlight. They were two hillocks away.
Silent, motionless, without any lights ... perhaps just enjoying the
moonlight. In the midge's amplified view, Pham had no trouble identifying
Greenstalk; she was standing at one end of a line of five Riders, her hull
stripes clearly visible. There was a hump on the front of her skrode, and a
rod-like projection. Some kind of restraint? He floated a couple of midges
near. A weapon. All those Riders were armed.
"We're already aboard the transport, Blueshell," came Greenstalk's
voice. "You'll see it in a few more meters, just on the other side of a
ventilator pile," apparently referring to the mound that he and the
Skroderider were approaching. But Pham knew there was no flier there;
Greenstalk and her guns were to the side of their progress. Treachery, very
workmanlike but also very low tech. Pham almost shouted out to Blueshell.
Then he notice the flat ceramic rectangle mounted in the hill just a few
meters behind the Rider. The nearest midge reported it was some kind of
explosive, probably a directional mine. A low-resolution camera, barely more
than a motion sensor, was mounted beside it. Blueshell had rolled
nonchalantly past the thing, all the while chattering with Greenstalk. They
let him past. New suspicions rose dark and grim. Pham broke to a stop,
backing quickly; never touching ground, the only sounds he made were the
quiet hisses of his gas jets. He detached one of his wrist claws and had a
midge fly it close past the mine's sensor....
There was a flash of pale fire and a loud noise. Even five meters to
the side, the shock wave pushed him back. He had a glimpse of Blueshell
thrown frond over wheels on the far side of the mine. Edged metal knickered
about, but mindlessly: nothing came back to attack again. Several midges
were destroyed by the blast.
Pham took advantage of the racket to accelerate hard, scooting up a
nearby "hill" and into a shallow valley (alley?) that looked down on the
Skroderiders. The ambushers rolled forward around the hill, rattling happily
at one another. Pham held his fire, curious. After a moment, Blueshell
floated into the air a hundred meters away. "Pham?" he said plaintively,
"Pham?"
The ambushers ignored Blueshell. Three of them disappeared around the
hill. Pham's midges saw them stop in consternation, fronds erect -- they had
suddenly realized he'd gotten away. The five spread out, searching the area,
hunting him down. There was no persuasive talk from Greenstalk anymore.
There was a sharp cracking sound and blaster fire glowed from behind a
hill. Somebody was a little nervous on the trigger.
Above it all floated Blueshell, the perfect target, yet still
untouched. His speech was a combination of Trisk and Rider rattle now, and
where Pham could understand it, he heard fear. "Why are you shooting? What
is the problem? Greenstalk, please!"
The paranoid in Pham Nuwen was not deceived. I don't want you up there
looking down. He sighted his main beam gun on the Rider, then shifted his
aim and fired. The blast was not in visible wavelengths, but there were
gigajoules in the pulse. Plasma coruscated along the beam, missing Blueshell
by less than five meters. Well above the Skroderider, the beam struck hull
crystal. The explosion was spectacular, an actinic glare that sent glowing
fragments in a thousand rays.
Pham flew sideways even as the ceiling flared. He saw Blueshell
spinning off, regain control -- and move precipitously for cover. Where
Pham's beam had hit, a corona of light was dimming from blue through orange
and red, its light still brighter than the shepherd moon overhead.
His warning shot had been like a great finger pointing back toward his
location. In the next fifteen seconds, four of the ambushers fired on the
place Pham had been. There was silence, then faint rustling. In a game of
stealth, the five might think themselves easy winners. They still hadn't
realized how well-equipped he was. Pham smiled at the pictures coming in
from his midges. He had every one of them in sight, and Blueshell too.
If it were just these four (five?), there would be no problem. But
surely reinforcements, or at least complications, were on the way. The wound
in the ceiling had cooled to darkness, but there was a hole there now, half
a meter across. The sound of hissing wind came from it, a sound that brought
reflex fear to Pham even in his armor. It might take a while before the leak
affected the Skroderiders, but it was an emergency nevertheless. It would
attract notice. He stared at the hole. Down here it was stirring a breeze,
but in the few meters right below the hole there was a miniature tornado of
dust and loose junk, hurtling up and out....
And beyond the transparent hull, in space:
A gap of dark and then a glittering plume, where the debris emerged
from the arc's shadow into the sunlight. A neat idea struggled for his
attention.
Oops. The five Riders had roughly encircled him. Now one blundered into
view, saw him, and snapped a shot. Pham returned fire and the other exploded
in a cloud of superheated water and charred flesh. Its undamaged skrode
sailed across the space between the hills, collecting panicky fire from the
others. Pham changed position again, moving in the direction he knew was
farthest from his enemies' positions.
A few more minutes of peace. He looked up at the crystal plume. There
was something ... yes. If reinforcements should come, why not for him? He
sighted on the plume and shunted his voice line through the gun's trigger
circuit. He almost started talking, then thought ... Better lower the power
on this one. Details. He aimed again, fired continuously, and said, "Ravna,
I sure as hell hope you have your eyes open. I need help ..." and briefly
described the crazy events of the last ten minutes.
This time his beam was putting out less than ten thousand joules per
second, not enough to glow the air. But reflecting off the plume beyond the
hull, the modulation should be visible for thousands of klicks, in
particular to the OOB on the other side of the habitat.
The Skroderiders were closing in again. Damn. No way he could leave
this message on automatic send; he needed the "transmitter" for more
important things. Pham flew from valley to valley, maneuvering behind the
Rider that was farthest from the others. One against three (four?). He had
superior firepower and information, but one piece of bad luck and he was
dead. He floated up on his next target. Quietly, carefully ...
A sear of light brushed his arm, flaring the armor incandescent. White
hot drops of metal sprayed as he twisted out of the way. He boosted straight
across the space between three hillocks, firing down on the Rider there.
Lights crisscrossed around him, and then he was under cover again. They were
fast, almost as if they had automatic aiming gear. Maybe they did: their
skrodes.
Then the pain hit. Pham folded on himself, gasping. If this were like
wounds he remembered, there would be char to the bone. Tears floated in his
eyes, and consciousness disappeared in a nauseated faint. He came to. It
could only be a second or two later -- else he'd never have wakened. The
others were a lot closer now, but the one he'd fired on was just a glowing
crater and random skrode fragments. His suit's automation brought the
damaged armor in close to his side. He felt the chill of local anesthetic,
and the pain dimmed. Pham eased around the hill, trying to keep all three of
his antagonists simultaneously out of sight. They had caught on to his
midges; every few seconds a glow erupted or a hill top turned to glowing
slag. It was overkill, but the midges were dying ... and he was losing his
greatest advantage.
Where is Blueshell? Pham cycled through the views from his remaining
midges, then his own. The bastard was back in the air, high above the combat
-- untouched by his fellow Riders. Reporting everything I do. Pham rolled
over, awkwardly bringing his gun to bear on the tiny figure. He hesitated.
You're getting soft, Nuwen. Blueshell abruptly accelerated downwards, his
cargo scarf billowing out behind him. Evidently he was using his gas jets'
full power. Against the background noise of bubbling metal and blast beam
thunder, his fall was totally silent. He was driving straight for the
nearest of the attackers.
Thirty meters up, the Rider released something large and angular. The
two separated, Blueshell braking and diving to the side. He disappeared
behind the hills. At the same time, much nearer, came a solid thud/crunch.
Pham spent his next to last midge for a peek around the hillside. He had a
glimpse of a skrode, and fronds splayed all about a squashed stalk; there
was a flash of light, and the midge was gone.
Only two ambushers left. One was Greenstalk.
For ten seconds there was no more firing. Yet things were not
completely silent. The slumped, glowing metal of his arm popped and
sputtered as it cooled. High above, there was the susurrus of air escaping
the hull. Fitful breezes whispered around ground level, making it impossible
to keep position without constant tweaking at his jets. He paused, letting
the current carry him silently out of his little valley. There. A ghostly
hiss that was not his own. Another. The two were closing in on him from
different directions. They might not know his exact position, but they could
obviously coordinate their own.
The pain faded in and out, along with consciousness. Short pulses of
agony and darkness. He dared not fool with more anesthetic. Pham saw frond
tips peeping over a nearby hill. He halted, watched the fronds. Most likely,
there was just enough vision area in the tips to sense motion.... Two
seconds passed. Pham's last midge showed the other attacker floating
silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that
instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his
stupid hacking, he'd never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited
for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and
shoot.
There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham's midge
caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters
away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always
closer to Greenstalk's position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even
after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their
rattle-talk. Greenstalk -- the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one,
the compulsively honest one -- rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer
around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far
enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry
Blueshell where he stood -- except that the movement took him directly in
front of Pham Nuwen's gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only
chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with
Blueshell --
The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him
upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him
now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath
him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward
him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white
in the heat of Greenstalk's fire. His voice was loud in Pham's ear: "I beg,
don't kill her. Don't kill -- "
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing
Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the
ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with
a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped.
Blueshell's tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to
reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change
the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow 'cross its middle. A ship floating
close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho ...
where am I? ... and consciousness fled.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
There were dreams. He'd lost a captaincy once again, been busted down
to tending potted plants in the ship's greenhouse. Sigh. Pham's job was to
water them and make them bloom. But then he noticed the pots had wheels and
moved behind his back, waiting, softly rattling. What had been beautiful was
now sinister. Pham had been willing to water and weed the creatures; he had
always admired them.
Now he was the only one who knew they were the enemy of life.
More than once in his life, Pham Nuwen had wakened inside medical
automation. He was almost used to coffin-close tanks, plain green walls,
wires and tubes. This was different, and it took him a while to realize just
where he was. Willowy trees bent close around him, swaying just a little in
the warm breeze. He seemed to be lying on the softest moss, in a tiny glade
above a pond. Summer haze hung in the air above the water. It was all very
nice, except that the leaves were furry, and not quite the green of anything
he had ever seen. This was someone else's notion of home. He reached up
toward the nearest branch, and his hand hit something unyielding just fifty
centimeters above his face. A curved wall. For all the trick pictures, this
was about the same size as the surgeons he remembered.
Something clicked behind his head; the idyll slid past him, taking its
warm breeze with it. Somebody -- Ravna -- floated just beyond the cylinder.
"Hi, Pham." She reached past the surgeon's hull to squeeze his hand. Her
kiss was tremulous, and she looked haunted, as if she'd been crying a lot.
"Hi, yourself," he said. Memory came back in jagged pieces. He tried to
push off the bed, and found another similarity between this surgeon and ones
of the Qeng Ho: he was securely plugged in.
Ravna laughed a little weakly. "Surgeon. Disconnect." After a moment,
Pham drifted free.
"It's still holding my arm."
"No, that's the sling. Your left arm is going to take a while to
regrow. It almost got burned off, Pham."
"Oh." He looked down at the white cocoon that meshed his arm against
his side. He remembered the gunfight now.... and realized that parts of his
dream were deadly real. "How long have I been out?" The anxiety spilled into
his voice.
"About thirty hours. We're more than sixty light-years out from
Harmonious Repose. We're doing okay, except that now everyone in creation
seems to be chasing us."
The dream. His free hand clamped hard on Ravna's arm. "The
Skroderiders, where are they?" Not on board, pray the Fleet.
"W-what's left of Greenstalk is in the other surgeon. Blueshell is -- "
Why has he let me live? Pham's eyes roved the room. They were in a
utility cabin. Any weapons were at least twenty meters away. Hm. More
important than guns: get command console privileges with the OOB ... if it
was not already too late. He pushed out of the surgeon and drifted out of
the room.
Ravna followed. "Take it easy, Pham. You just came out of a surgeon."
"What have they said about the shoot-out?"
"Poor Greenstalk's not in a position to say anything, Pham. Blueshell
says pretty much what you did: Greenstalk was grabbed by the rogue Riders,
forced to lure you two into a trap."
"Hmhm, hmhm," Pham strove for a noncommittal tone. So maybe there was a
chance; maybe Blueshell was not yet perverted. He continued his one-handed
progress up the ship's axis corridor. A minute later he was on the bridge,
Ravna tagging behind.
"Pham. What's the matter? There's a lot we have to decide, but -- "
How right you are. He dived onto the command deck, and made for the
command console. "Ship. Do you recognize my voice?"
Ravna began, "Pham, What's this -- "
"Yes, sir."
" -- all about?"
"Command privileges," he said. Capabilities granted while the Riders
were ashore. Would they still be in place?
"Granted."
The Skroderiders had had thirty hours to plan their defense. This was
all too easy, too easy. "Suspend command privileges for the Skroderiders.
Isolate them."
"Yes, sir," came the ship's reply. Liar! But what more could he do? The
sweep toward panic crested, and suddenly he felt very cool. He was Qeng Ho
... and he was also godshatter.
Both Riders were in the same cabin, Greenstalk in the other copy of the
ship's surgeon. Pham opened a window on the room. Blueshell sat on a wall
beside the surgeon. He looked wilted, as when they heard about Sjandra Kei.
He angled his fronds at the video pickup. "Sir Pham. The ship tells me
you've suspended our privileges?"
"What is going on, Pham?" Ravna had dug a foot into the floor, and
stood glaring at him.
Pham ignored both questions. "How is Greenstalk doing?" he said.
The fronds turned away, seemed to become even more limp. "She lives....
I thank you, Sir Pham. It took great skill to do what you did. Considering
everything, I could not have asked for more."
What did I do? He remembered firing on Greenstalk. Had he pulled his
aim? He looked inside the surgeon. This was quite different from the human
configuration: This one was mostly water-filled, with turbulent aeration
along the patient's fronds. Asleep (?), Greenstalk looked frailer than he
remembered, her fronds waving randomly in the water. Some were nicked, but
her body seemed whole. His eyes traveled downwards toward the base of the
stalk, where a Rider is normally attached to its skrode. The stump ended in
a cloud of surgical tubing. And Pham remembered the last instant of the
firefight, blasting the skrode out from under Greenstalk. What is a Rider
like without anything to ride?
He pulled his eyes away from the wreckage. "I've deleted your command
privileges because I don't trust you." My former friend, tool of my enemy.
Blueshell didn't answer. After a moment Ravna spoke. "Pham. Without
Blueshell, I'd never have gotten you out of that habitat. Even then -- we
were stuck in the middle of the RIP system. The shepherd satellite was
screaming for our blood; they had figured out we were human. The Aprahanti
were trying to break harbor and come down on us. Without Blueshell, we'd
never have convinced local security to let us go ultra -- we'd probably have
been blown away the second we cleared the ring plane. We'd all be dead now,
Pham."
"Don't you know what happened down there?"
Some of the indignation left Ravna's face. "Yes. But understand about
skrodes. They are a mechanical contrivance. It's easy enough to disconnect
the cyber part from the mechanical linkages. These guys were controlling the
wheels, and aiming the gun."
Hmm. On the window behind Ravna, he could see Blueshell standing with
his fronds motionless, not rushing to agree. Triumphant? "That doesn't
explain Greenstalk's sucking us in to the trap." He raised a hand. "Yeah, I
know, she was bludgeoned into doing it. Only problem, Ravna, she had no
hesitation. She was enthusiastic, bubbly." He stared over the woman's
shoulder. "She was under no compulsion, didn't you tell me that, Blueshell."
A long pause. Finally, "Yes, Sir Pham."
Ravna turned, drifting back so she could see both of them. "But, but
... it's still absurd. Greenstalk has been with us from the beginning. A
thousand times she could have destroyed the ship -- or gotten word to the
outside. Why chance this stupid ambush?"
"Yes. Why didn't they betray us before...." Up until she asked the
question, Pham had not known. He knew the facts, but had no coherent theory
to hang them on. Now it all came together: the ambush, his dreams in the
surgeon, even the paradoxes. "Maybe she wasn't a traitor, before. We really
did escape from Relay without pursuit, without anyone knowing of us, much
less our exact destination. Certainly no one expected humans to show up at
Harmonious Repose." He paused, trying to get it all together. The ambush,
"The ambush, it wasn't stupid -- but it was completely ad hoc. The enemy had
no back up. Their weapons were dumb, simple things -- " insight "-- why,
I'll bet if you look at the wreckage of Greenstalk's skrode you'll find her
beam gun was some sort of cutter tool. And the only sensor on the claymore
mine was a motion detector: it had some civil use. All the gadgets were
pulled together on very short notice by people who had not been expecting a
fight. No, our enemy was very surprised by our appearance."
"You think the Aprahanti could -- "
"Not the Aprahanti. From what you said, they didn't break moorage till
after the gunfight, when the Rider moon started screaming about us.
Whoever's behind this is independent of the Butterflies, and must be spread
in very small numbers across many star systems -- a vast set of tripwires,
listening for things of interest. They noticed us, and weak as their outpost
was they tried to grab our ship. Only when we were getting away did they
advertise us. One way or another, they didn't want us to get away." He
jerked a hand at the ultratrace window. "If I read that right, we've got
more than five hundred ships on our tail."
Ravna's eyes flicked to the display and back. Her voice was abstracted,
"Yes. That's part of the main Aprahanti fleet and ... "
"There will be lots more, only they won't all be Butterflies."
"... what are you saying then? Why would Skroderiders wish us ill? A
conspiracy is senseless. They've never had a nation state, much less an
interstellar empire."
Pham nodded. "Just peaceful settlements -- like that shepherd moon --
in polyspecific civilizations all across the Beyond." His voice softened.
"No, Rav, the Skroderiders are not the real enemy here ... it's the thing
behind them. The Straumli Perversion."
Incredulous silence, but he noticed how tightly Blueshell held his
fronds now. That one knew.
"It's the only explanation, Ravna. Greenstalk really was our friend,
and loyal. My guess is that only a small minority of the Riders are under
the Perversion's control. When Greenstalk fell in with them she was
converted too."
"T-that's impossible! This is the Middle of the Beyond, Pham.
Greenstalk had courage, stubbornness. No brainwashing could have changed her
so quickly." A frightened desperation had come into her eyes. One
explanation or another, some terrible thing must be true.
And I'm still here, alive and talking. A datum for godshatter; maybe
there was yet a chance! He spoke almost as the understanding hit him.
"Greenstalk was loyal, yet she was totally converted in seconds. It wasn't
just a perversion of her skrode, or some drug. It was as if both Rider and
skrode had been designed from the beginning to respond." He looked across at
Blueshell, trying to gauge his reaction to what he would say next. "The
Riders have awaited their creator a long time. Their race is very old, far
older than anyone except the senescent. They're everywhere, but in small
numbers, always practical and peaceful. And somewhere in the beginning -- a
few billion years ago -- their precursors were trapped in an evolutionary
cul-de-sac. Their creator built the first skrodes, and made the first
Riders. Now I think we know the who and the why.
"Yes, yes. I know there have been other upliftings. What's marvelous
about this one is how stable it turned out to be. The greater skrodes are
'tradition' Blueshell says, but that's a word I apply to cultures and to
much shorter time scales. The greater skrodes of today are identical to ones
a billion years ago. And they are devices that can be made anywhere in the
Beyond ... yet the design is clearly High Beyond or Transcendent." That had
been one of his earliest humiliations about the Beyond. He had looked at the
design diagram -- dissections really -- of skrodes. On the outside, the
thing was a mechanical device, with moving parts even. And the text claimed
that the whole thing would be made with the simplest of factories, scarcely
more than what existed in some places in the Slow Zone. And yet the
electronics was a seemingly random mass of components, without any trace of
hierarchical design or modularity. It worked, and far more efficiently than
something designed by human-equivalent minds, but repair and debugging -- of
the cyber component -- was out of the question. "No one in the Beyond
understands all the potentials of skrodes, much less the adaptations forced
on their Riders. Isn't that so, Blueshell?"
The Rider clapped his fronds hard against his central stalk. Again a
furious rattling. It was something Pham had never seen before. Rage? Terror?
Blueshell's voder voice was distorted with nonlinearities: "You ask? You
ask? It's monstrous to ask me to help you in this -- " the voice skeetered
into high frequencies and he stood mute, his body shivering.
Pham of the Qeng Ho felt a stab of shame. The other knew and understood
... and deserved better than this. The Riders must be destroyed, but they
should not have to listen to his judging. His hand swept toward the
communications cutoff, stopped. No. This is your last chance to observe the
Perversion's ... work.
Ravna's glance snapped back and forth between human and Skroderider,
and he could tell that she understood. Her face had the same stricken look
as when she learned about Sjandra Kei. "You're saying the Perversion made
the original skrodes."
"And modified the Riders too. It was long ago, and certainly not the
same instance of the Perversion that the Straumers created, but...."
The "Blight", that was the other common name for the Perversion, and
closer to Old One's view. For all the Perversion's transcendence, its life
style was more similar to a disease than anything else. Maybe that had
helped to fool Old One. But now Pham could see: the Blight lived in pieces,
across extraordinary reaches of time. It hid in archives, waiting for ideal
conditions. And it had created helpers for its blooming....
He looked at Ravna, and suddenly realized a little more. "You've had
thirty hours to think about this, Rav. You saw the record from my suit.
Surely you must have guessed some of this."
Her gaze dropped from his. "A little," she finally said. At least she
was no longer denying.
"You know what we have to do," he said softly. Now that he understood
what must be done, the godshatter eased its grip. Its will would be done.
"What is that?" said Ravna, as if she didn't know.
"Two things: Post this to the Net."
"Who would believe?" The Net of a Million Lies.
"Enough would. Once they look, most folk will be able to see the truth
here ... and take the proper action."
Ravna shook her head. "No," barely audible.
"The Net must be told, Ravna. We've discovered something that could
save a thousand worlds. This is the Blight's hidden edge," at least in the
Middle and Low Beyond.
She just shook her head again. "But screaming this truth would itself
kill billions."
"In honest defense!" He bounced slowly toward the ceiling, pushed
himself back toward the deck.
There were tears in her eyes now. "These are exactly the arguments used
to kill m-my family, my worlds.... A-and I will not be part of it."
"But the claims are true this time!"
"I've had enough of pogroms, Pham."
Gentle toughness ... and almost unbelievable. "You would make this
decision yourself, Rav? We know something that others -- leaders wiser than
either of us -- should be free to decide upon. You would keep them from
making that choice?"
She hesitated, and for an instant Pham thought the civilized
rule-follower in her would bring her around. But then her chin came up,
"Yes, Pham. I would deny them the choice."
He made a noncommittal noise and drifted back toward the command
console. No point in talking to her about what else must be done.
"And Pham, we will not kill Blueshell and Greenstalk."
"There's no choice, Rav." His hands played with the touch controls.
"Greenstalk was perverted; we have no idea how much of that survived the
destruction of her skrode, or how long it will be before Blueshell goes bad.
We can't take them along, or let them go free."
Ravna drifted sideways, her eyes fixed on his hands. "B-Be careful who
you kill, Pham," she said softly. "As you say, I've had thirty hours to
think about my decisions, thirty hours to think about yours."
"So." Pham raised his hands from the controls. Rage (godshatter?)
chased briefly through this mind. Ravna, Ravna, Ravna, a voice saying
goodbye inside his head. Then all became very cold. He had been so afraid
that the Riders had perverted the ship. Instead, this stupid fool had acted
for them, voluntarily. He drifted slowly toward her. Almost unthinking, he
held his arm and hand at combat ready. "How do you intend to prevent me from
doing what has to be done?" But he already guessed.
She didn't back away, even when his hand was centimeters from her
throat. Her face held courage and tears. "W-what do you think, Pham? While
you were in the surgeon ... I rearranged things. Hurt me, and you will be
hurt worse." Her eyes swept the walls behind him. "Kill the Riders, and ...
and you will die."
They stared at each other for a long moment, measuring. Maybe there
weren't weapons buried in the walls. He probably could kill her before she
could defend. But then there were a thousand ways the ship could have been
programmed to kill him. And all that would be left would be the Riders ...
flying down to the Bottom, to their prize. "So what do we do, then?" He
finally said.
"As b-before, we go to rescue Jefri. We go to recover the
Countermeasure. I'm willing to put some restrictions on the Riders."
A truce with monsters, mediated by a fool.
He pushed off and sailed around her, back down the axis corridor.
Behind him, he heard a sob.
They stayed well clear of each other the next few days. Pham was
allowed shallow access to ship controls. He found suicide programs threaded
through the application layers. But a strange thing, and reason for chagrin
if he had been capable of it: The changes dated from hours after his
confrontation with Ravna. She'd had nothing when she stood against him.
Thank the Powers, I didn't know. The thought was forgotten almost before he
formed it.
So. The charade would proceed right to the end, a continuing game of
lie and subterfuge. Grimly, he set himself to winning that game. Fleets
behind them, traitors surrounding him. By the Qeng Ho and his own
godshatter, the Perversion would lose. The Skroderiders would lose. And for
all her courage and goodness, Ravna Bergsndot would lose.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Tyrathect was losing the battle within herself. Oh, it wasn't near
ended; better perhaps to say that the tide had turned. In the beginning
there had been little triumphs, as when she let Amdijefri play alone with
the commset without even the children guessing she was responsible. But such
were many tendays past, and now.... Some days she would be entirely in
control of herself. Others -- and these often seemed the happiest -- would
begin with her seeming in control.
It was not yet clear the sort of day today would be.
Tyrathect paced along the hoardings that topped the new castle's walls.
The place was certainly new, but hardly yet a castle. Steel had built in
panicky haste. The south and west walls were very thick, with embedded
tunnels. But there were spots on the north side that were simply palisades
backed by stony rubble. Nothing more could be done in the time that Steel
had been given. She stopped for a moment, smelling fresh-sawn timber. The
view down Starship Hill was as beautiful as she had ever seen it. The days
were getting longer. Now there was only twilight between the setting and the
rising of the sun. The local snow had retreated to its summer patches,
leaving heather to turn green in the warmth. From here she could see miles,
to where bluish sea haze clamped down on the offshore islands.
By the conventional wisdom, it would be suicide to attack the new
castle -- even in its present ramshackle state -- with less than a horde.
Tyrathect smiled bitterly to herself. Of course, Woodcarver would ignore
that wisdom. Old Woodcarver thought she had a secret weapon that would
breach these walls from hundreds of feet away. Even now Steel's spies were
reporting that the Woodcarvers had taken the bait, that their small army and
their crude cannon had begun the overland trek up the coast.
She descended the wall stairs to the yard. She heard faint thunder.
Somewhere north of Streamsdell, Steel's own cannoneers were beginning their
morning practice. When the air was just right, you could hear it. There was
to be no testing near the farmlands, and none but high Servants and isolated
workers knew of the weapons. But by now Steel had thirty of the devices and
gunpowder to match. The greatest lack was gunners. Up close the noise of
firing was hellish. Sustained firing could deafen. Ah, but the weapons
themselves: They had a range of almost eight miles, three times as great as
Woodcarver's. They could deliver gunpowder "bombs" that exploded on impact.
There were places beyond the northern hills where the forest was gouged bare
and slumping landslides showed naked rock -- all from sustained barrages of
gunfire.
And soon -- perhaps today -- the Flenserists would have radio, too.
God damn you, Woodcarver! Of course Tyrathect had never met the
Woodcarver, but Flenser had known that pack well: Flenser was mostly
Woodcarver's offspring. The "Gentle Woodcarver" had borne him and raised him
to power. It had been Woodcarver who taught him about freedom of thought and
experiment. Woodcarver should have known the pride that lived in Flenser,
should have known that he would go to extremes his parent never dared. And
when the new one's monstrous nature became clear, when his first
"experiments" were discovered, Woodcarver should have had him killed -- or
at the very least, fragmented. Instead, Flenser had been allowed to take
exile ... to create things like Steel, and they to create their own
monsters, ultimately to build this hierarchy of madness.
And now, a century overdue, Woodcarver was coming to correct her
mistake. She came with her toy guns, as overconfident and idealistic as
ever. She came into a trap of steel and fire that none of her people would
survive. If only there were some way to warn the Woodcarver. Tyrathect's
only reason for being here was the oath she had sworn herself to bring
Flenser's Movement down. If Woodcarver knew what awaited her here, if she
even knew of the traitors in her own camp ... there might be a chance. Last
fall, Tyrathect had come close to sending an anonymous message south. There
were traders who visited through both kingdoms. Her Flenser memories told
her which were likely independent. She almost passed one a note, a single
piece of silkpaper, reporting the starship's landing and Jefri's survival.
In that she had missed death by less than a day: Steel had shown her a
report from the South, about the other human and Woodcarver's progress with
the "dataset". There were things in the report that could only be known by
someone at the top at Woodcarver's. Who? She didn't ask, but she guessed it
was Vendacious; the Flenser in Tyrathect remembered that sibling pack well.
They'd had ... dealings. Vendacious had none of the raw genius of their
joint parent, but there was a broad streak of opportunism in him.
Steel had shown her the report only to puff himself up, to prove to
Tyrathect that he had succeeded in something that Flenser had never
attempted. And it was a coup. Tyrathect had complimented Steel with more
than usual sincerity ... and quietly shelved her plans of warning. With a
spy at the top at Woodcarver's, any message would be pointless suicide.
Now Tyrathect padded across the castle's outer yard. There was still
plenty of construction going on, but the teams were smaller. Steel was
building timber lodges all over the yard. Many were empty shells. Steel
hoped to persuade Ravna to land at a special spot near the inner keep.
The inner keep. That was the only thing about this castle built to the
standards of Hidden Island. It was a beautiful structure. It could really be
what Steel told Amdijefri: a shrine to honor Jefri's ship and protect it
from Woodcarver attack. The central dome was a smooth sweep of cantilevers
and fitted stone as wide as the main meeting hall on Hidden Island.
Tyrathect watched it with one pair of eyes as she trotted round it. Steel
intended to face the dome with the finest pink marble. It would be visible
for dozens of miles into the sky. The deadfalls built into its structure
were the centerpiece of Steel's plan, even if the rescuers didn't land in
his other trap.
Shreck and two other high Servants stood on the steps of the castle's
meeting hall. They came to attention as she approached. The three backed
quickly away, bellies scraping stone ... but not as quickly as last fall.
They knew that the other Flenser Fragments had been destroyed. As Tyrathect
swept past them, she almost smiled. For all her weakness and all her
problems, she knew she could best these ones.
Steel was already inside, alone. The most important meetings were all
like this, just Steel and herself. She understood the relationship. In the
beginning, Steel had been simply terrified of her -- the one person he
believed he could never kill. For tendays, he had teetered between
grovelling before her and dismembering her. It was amusing to see the bonds
Flenser had installed years before still having force. Then had come word of
the death of the other Fragments. Tyrathect was no longer
Flenser-in-Waiting. She had half expected death to come then. But in a way
this made her safer. Now Steel was less afraid, and his need for intimate
advice could be satisfied in ways he saw less threatening. She was his
bottled demon: Flenser wisdom without the Flenser threat.
This afternoon he seemed almost relaxed, nodding casually to Tyrathect
as she entered. She nodded back. In many ways Steel was her -- Flenser's --
finest creation. So much effort had been spent honing Steel. How many
packs-worth of members had been sacrificed to get just the combination that
was Steel. She -- Flenser -- had wanted brilliance, ruthlessness. As
Tyrathect she could see the truth. With all the flensing, Flenser had
created a poor, sad thing. It was strange, but ... sometimes Steel seemed
like Flenser's most pitiable victim.
"Ready for the big test?" Tyrathect said. At long last, the radios
seemed complete.
"In a moment. I wanted to ask you about timing. My sources tell me
Woodcarver's army is on its way. If they make reasonable progress, they
should be here in five tendays."
"That's at least three tendays before Ravna's ship arrives."
"Quite. We will have your old enemy disposed of long before we go for
the high stakes. But ... something is strange about the Two-Legs' recent
messages. How much do you think they suspect? Is it possible that Amdijefri
are telling them more than we know?"
It was an uncertainty Steel would have masked back when she had been
Flenser-in-Waiting. Tyrathect slid to a seated position before replying.
"You might know the answer if you had bothered to learn more of the
Two-Legs' language, dear Steel, or let me learn more." Through the winter,
Tyrathect had been desperate to talk to the children alone, to get warning
to the ship. She was of two minds about that now. Amdijefri were so
transparent, so innocent. If they glimpsed anything of Steel's treachery,
they couldn't hide it. And what might the rescuers do if they knew Steel's
villainy? Tyrathect had seen one starship in flight. Just its landing could
be a terrible weapon. Besides ... If Steel's plan succeeds, I won't need the
aliens' goodwill.
Aloud, Tyrathect continued, "As long as you can continue your
magnificent performance, you have nothing to fear from the child. Can't you
see that he loves you?"
For an instant, Steel seemed pleased, and then the suspicion returned.
"I don't know. Amdi seems always to taunt me, as though he sees through my
act."
Poor Steel. Amdiranifani was his greatest success, and he would never
understand it. In this one thing Steel had truly exceeded his Master, had
discovered and honed a technique that had once been Woodcarver's. The
Fragment eyed his former student almost hungrily. If only he could do him
all over again; there must be a way to combine the fear and the flensing
with love and affection. The resulting tool would truly merit the name
Steel. Tyrathect shrugged, "Take my word for it. If you can continue your
kindness act, both children will be faithful. As for the rest of your
question: I have noticed some change in Ravna's messages. She seems much
more confident of their arrival time, yet something has gone wrong for them.
I don't think they're any more suspicious than before; they seemed to accept
that Jefri was responsible for Amdi's idea about the radios. That lie was a
good move, by the way. It played to their sense of superiority. On a fair
battlefield, we are probably their betters -- and they must not guess that."
"But what are they suddenly so tense about?"
The Fragment shrugged. "Patience, dear Steel. Patience and observation.
Perhaps Amdijefri have noticed this too. You might subtly inspire them to
ask about it. My guess is the Two-Legs have their own politics to worry
about." He stopped and turned all his heads on Steel. "Could you have your
'source' down at Woodcarver's ferret about with the question?"
"Perhaps I will. That Dataset is Woodcarver's one great advantage."
Steel sat in silence for a moment, nervously chewing at his lips. Abruptly,
he shook himself all over, as if to drive off the manifold threats he saw
encroaching. "Shreck!"
There was the sound of paws. The hatch creaked open and Shreck stuck a
head inside. "Sir?"
"Bring the radio outfits in here. Then ask Amdijefri if he can come
down to talk to us."
The radios were beautiful things. Ravna claimed that the basic device
could be invented by civilizations scarcely more advanced than Flenser's.
That was hard to believe. There were so many steps in the making, so many
meaningless detours. The final results: eight one-yard squares of
night-darkness. Glints of gold and silver showed in the strange material.
That, at least, was no mystery: a part of Flenser's gold and silver had gone
into the construction.
Amdijefri arrived. They raced around the central floor, poked at the
radios, shouted to Steel and the Flenser Fragment. Sometimes it was hard to
believe they were not truly one pack, that the Two Legs was not another
member: They clung to each other as a single pack might. As often as not,
Amdi answered questions about Two-Legs before Jefri had a chance to speak,
using the "I-pack" pronoun to identify both of them.
Today, however, there seemed to be a disagreement. "Oh, please my lord,
let me be the one to try it!"
Jefri rattled off something in Samnorsk. When Amdi didn't translate, he
repeated the words more slowly, speaking directly to Steel. "No. It is
[something something] dangerous. Amdi is [something] small. And also, time
[something] narrow."
The Fragment strained for the meaning. Damn. Sooner or later their
ignorance of the Two Legs' language was going to cost them.
Steel listened to the human, then sighed the most marvelously patient
sigh. "Please. Amdi. Jefri. What is problem?" He spoke in Samnorsk, making
more sense to the Flenser Fragment than the human child had.
Amdi dithered for a moment. "Jefri thinks the radio jackets are too big
for me. But look, it doesn't fit so badly!" Amdi jumped all around one of
the night-dark squares, dragging it heedlessly off its velvet pallet onto
the floor. He pulled the fabric over the back and shoulders of his largest
member.
Now the radio was roughly the shape of a greatcloak; Steel's tailors
had added clasps at the shoulders and gut. But the thing was vastly outsized
for little Amdi. It stood like a tent around one of him. "See? See?" The
tiny head poked out, looking first at Steel and then at Tyrathect, willing
their belief.
Jefri said something. The Amdi pack squeaked back angrily. Then, "Jefri
worries about everything, but somebody has to test the radios. There's this
little problem with speed. Radio goes much faster than sound. Jefri's just
afraid it's so fast, it might confuse the pack using it. That's foolish. How
much faster could it be than heads-together thought?" He asked it as a
question. Tyrathect smiled. The pack of puppies couldn't quite lie, but he
guessed that Amdi knew the answer to his question -- and that it did not
support his argument.
On the other side of the hall, Steel listened with heads cocked -- the
picture of benign tolerance. "I'm sorry, Amdi. It's just too dangerous for
you to be the first."
"But I am brave! And I want to help."
"I'm sorry. After we know it's safe -- "
Amdi gave a shriek of outrage, much higher than normal interpack talk,
almost in the range of thought. He swarmed around Jefri, whacking at the
human's legs with his butt ends. "Hideous traitor!" he cried, and continued
the insults in Samnorsk.
It took about ten minutes to get him calmed down to a sulk. He and
Jefri sat on the floor, grumbling at each other in Samnorsk. Tyrathect
watched the two, and Steel on the other side of the room. If irony were
something that made sound, they would all be deaf by now. All their lives,
Flenser and Steel had experimented on others -- usually unto death. Now they
had a victim who literally begged to be victimized ... and he must be
rejected. There was no question about the rejection. Even if Jefri had not
raised objections, the Amdi pack was too valuable to be risked. Furthermore,
Amdi was an eightsome. It was a miracle that such a large pack could
function at all. Whatever dangers there were with radio would be much
greater for him.
So, a proper victim would be found. A proper wretch. Surely there were
plenty of those in the dungeons beneath Hidden Island. Tyrathect thought
back on all the packs she remembered killing. How she hated Flenser, his
calculating cruelty. I am so much worse than Steel. I made Steel. She
remembered where her thoughts had been the last hour. This was one of the
bad days, one of the days when Flenser sneaked out from the recesses of her
mind, when she rode the power of his reason higher and higher, till it
became rationalization and she became him. Still, for a few more seconds she
might be in control. What could she do with it? A soul that was strong
enough might deny itself, might become a different person ... might at the
very least end itself.
"I-I will try the radio." The words were spoken almost before he
thought them. Weak, silly frill.
"What?" said Steel.
But the words had been clear, and Steel had heard. The Flenser Fragment
smiled dryly. "I want to see what this radio can do. Let me try it, dear
Steel."
They took the radios out into the yard, on the side of the starship
that was hidden from general view. Here it would just be Amdijefri, Steel,
and whoever I am at the moment. The Flenser Fragment laughed at the
upwelling fear. Discipline, she had thought! Perhaps that was best. He stood
in the middle of the yard and let the human help him with the radio gear.
Strange to see another intelligent being so close, and towering over him.
Jefri's incredibly articulate paws arranged the jackets loosely on his
backs. The inside material was soft, deadening. And unlike normal clothing,
the radios covered the wearer's tympana. The boy tried to explain what he
was doing. "See? This thing," he pulled at the corner of the greatcloak,
"goes over your head. The inside has [something] that makes sound into
radio."
The Fragment shrugged away as the boy tried to pull the cover forward.
"No. I can't think." Only by standing just so, all members facing inward,
could the Fragment maintain full consciousness. Already the weaker parts of
him were edging toward isolation panic. The conscience that was Tyrathect
would learn something today.
"Oh. I'm sorry." Jefri turned and spoke to Amdi, something about using
the old design.
Amdi was heads-together, just thirty feet away. He had been all frowns,
sullen at being denied, nervous to be apart from the Two-Legs. But as the
preparations continued, the frowns eased. The puppies' eyes grew wide with
happy fascination. The Fragment felt a wave of affection for the puppies
that came and went almost too fast to be noticed.
Now Amdi edged nearer, taking advantage of the fact that the cloaks
muffled much of the Fragment's thought sounds. "Jefri says maybe we
shouldn't have tried to make the mind-size radio," he said. "But this will
be so much better. I know it! And," he said with transparent slyness, "you
could still let me test it instead."
"No, Amdi. This is the way it must be." Steel's voice was all soft
sympathy. Only the Flenser Fragment could see the broad grin on a couple of
the lord's members.
"Well, okay." The puppies crept a little nearer. "Don't be afraid, Lord
Tyrathect. We've had the radios in sunlight for some time. They should have
lots of power. To make them work you just pull all the belts tight, even the
ones at your neck."
"All of them at once?"
Amdi fidgeted. "That's probably best. Otherwise, there will be such a
mismatch of speeds that -- " He said something to the Two Legs.
Jefri leaned close. "This belt goes here, and this here." He pointed to
the braid-bone straps that drew the head covering close. "Then just pull
this with your mouth."
"The harder you pull, the louder the radio," Amdi added.
"Okay." The Fragment drew himself together. He shrugged the jackets
into place, tightening the shoulder and gut belts. Deadly muffling. The
jackets almost seemed to mold themselves to his tympana. He looked at
himself, and grasped desperately for what was left of consciousness. The
jackets were beautiful, magic darkness yet with a hint of the golden-silver
of a Flenserist Lord. Beautiful instruments of torture. Even Steel had not
imagined such twisted revenge. Had he?
The Fragment grabbed the head straps and pulled.
Twenty years ago, when Tyrathect was new, she had loved to hike with
her fission parent on the grassy dunes along Lake Kitcherri. That was before
their great falling out, before loneliness drove Tyrathect to the Republic's
Capital and her search for "meaning". Not all of the shore of Lake Kitcherri
was beaches and dunes. Farther south there was the Rockness, where streams
cut through stone to the water. Sometimes, especially when she and her
parent had fought, Tyrathect would walk up from the shore along streams
bordered by sheer, smooth cliffs. It was a sort of punishment: there were
places where the stone had a glassy haze and didn't absorb sound at all.
Everything was echoed, right up to the top of thought. It was if she were
surrounded by copies of herself, and copies beyond them, all thinking the
same sounds but out of step.
Of course echoes are often a problem with unquilted stone walls,
especially if the size and geometry are wrong. But these cliffs were perfect
reflectors, a quarrier's nightmare. And there were places where the shape of
the Rockness conspired with the sounds.... When Tyrathect walked there, she
couldn't tell her own thoughts from the echoes. Everything was garbled with
barely offset resonance. At first it had been a great pain that sent her
running. But she forced herself back again and again, and finally learned to
think even in the worst of the narrows.
Amdijefri's radio was just a little like the Kitcherri cliffs. Enough
to save me, maybe. Tyrathect came to consciousness all piled in a heap. At
most seconds had passed since she brought the radios to life; Amdi and Steel
were simply staring at her. The human was rocking one of her bodies, talking
to her. Tyrathect licked the boy's paw, then stood partly up. She heard only
her own thoughts ... but they had some of the jarring difference of the
stone echoes.
She was back on her bellies again. Part of her was vomiting in the
dirt. The world shimmered, out of tune. Thought is there. Grab it! Grab it!
All a matter of coordination, of timing. She remembered Amdijefri talking
about how fast the radio was. In a way, this was the reverse of the problem
of the screaming cliffs.
She shook her heads, mastering the weirdness. "Give me a moment," she
said, and her voice was almost calm. She looked around. Slowly. If she
concentrated and didn't move fast, she could think. Suddenly she was aware
of the greatcloaks, pressing in on all her tympana. She should have been
deafened, isolated. Yet her thoughts were no muzzier than after a bad sleep.
She got to her feet again and walked slowly around the open space
between Amdi and Steel. "Can you hear me?" she asked.
"Yes," said Steel. He edged nervously away from her.
Of course. The cloaks muffled sound like any heavy quilt: anything in
the range of thought would be totally absorbed. But interpack speech and
Samnorsk were low-pitched sound -- they would scarcely be affected. She
stopped, holding all her breath. She could hear birds and the sounds of
timber being sawn somewhere on the far side of the inner yard. Yet Steel was
only thirty feet from her. His thought noise should have been a loud
intrusion, even confusing. She strained to hear.... There was nothing but
her own thoughts and a stickety buzzing noise that seemed to come from all
directions.
"And we thought this would just give us control in battle," she said,
wonderingly. All of her turned and walked toward Amdi. He was twenty feet
away, ten feet. Still no thought noise. Amdi's eyes were wide. The puppies
held their ground; in fact all eight of him seemed to lean toward her. "You
knew about this all along, didn't you?" Tyrathect said.
"I hoped. Oh, I hoped." He stepped closer. Five feet. The eight of him
looked at the five of her from a distance of inches. He extended a nose,
brushing muzzles with Tyrathect. His thought sounds came only faintly
through the cloak, no louder than if he were fifty feet away. For a moment
they looked at each other in stark astonishment. Nose to nose, and they both
could still think! Amdi gave a whoop of glee and bounded in among Tyrathect,
rubbing back and forth across her legs. "See, Jefri," he shouted in
Samnorsk. "It works. It works!"
Tyrathect wobbled under the assault, almost lost hold of her thoughts.
What had just happened.... In all the history of the world there had never
been such a thing. If thinking packs could work paw by jowl.... There were
consequences and consequences, and she got dizzy all over again.
Steel moved a little closer and suffered a flying hug from Jefri
Olsndot. Steel was trying his best to join the celebration, but he wasn't
quite sure what had happened. He hadn't lived the consequences like
Tyrathect. "Wonderful progress for the first try," he said. "But it must be
painful even so." Two of him looked sharply at her. "We should get that gear
off you, and give you a rest."
"No!" Tyrathect and Amdi said almost together. She smiled back at
Steel. "We haven't really tested it yet, have we? The whole purpose was
long-distance communications." We thought that was the purpose, anyway. In
fact, even if it had no better range than talk sounds, it was already a
towering success in Tyrathect's mind.
"Oh." Steel smiled weakly at Amdi and glared hidden faces at Tyrathect.
Jefri was still hanging on two of his necks. Steel was a picture of barely
concealed anguish. "Well, go slowly then. We don't know what might happen if
you run out of range."
Tyrathect disentangled two of herself from Amdi and stepped a few feet
away. Thought was as clear -- and as potentially confusing -- as before. By
now she was beginning to get the feel of it though. She had very little
trouble keeping her balance. She walked the two another thirty feet, about
the maximum range a pack could coordinate in the quietest conditions. "It's
like I'm still heads-together," she said wonderingly. Ordinarily at thirty
feet, thoughts were faint and the time lag so bad that coordination was
difficult.
"How far can I go?" She murmured the question to Amdi.
He made a human giggling sound and slid a head close to hers. "I'm not
sure. It should be good at least to the outer walls."
"Well," she said in a normal voice, for Steel, "let's see if I can
spread a little bit further." The two of her walked another ten yards. She
was more than sixty feet across!
Steel was wide-eyed. "And now?"
Tyrathect laughed. "My thought's as crisp as before." She turned her
two and walked away.
"Wait!" roared Steel, bounding to his feet. "That's far -- " then he
remembered his audience, and his fury became more a frightened concern for
her welfare. "That's far too dangerous for the first experiment. Come back!"
From where she sat with Amdi, Tyrathect smiled brightly. "But Steel, I
never left," she said in Samnorsk.
Amdijefri laughed and laughed.
She was one hundred fifty feet across. Her two broke into a careful
trot -- and she watched Steel swallow back foam. Her thought still had the
sharp, abrupt quality of closer than heads-together. How fast is this radio
thing?
She passed close by Shreck and the guards posted at the edge of the
field. "Hey, hey, Shreck! What do you say?" one of her said at his stupefied
faces. Back with Amdi and the rest of her, Steel was shouting at Shreck,
telling him to follow her.
Her trot became an easy run. She split, one going north of the inner
yard, the other south. Shreck and company followed, clumsy with shock. The
dome of the inner keep was between her, a sweeping hulk of stone. Her radio
thoughts faded into the stickety buzzing.
"Can't think," she mumbled to Amdi.
"Pull on the mouth straps. Make your thoughts louder."
Tyrathect pulled, and the buzzing faded. She regained her balance and
raced around the starship. One of her was in a construction area now.
Artisans looked up in shock. A loose member usually meant a fatal accident
or a pack run amok. In either case the singleton must be restrained. But
Tyrathect's member was wearing a greatcloak that sparkled here and there of
gold. And behind her, Shreck and his guards were shouting for everyone to
stand back.
She turned a head to Steel, and her voice was joy. "I soar!" She ran
through the cowering workers, ran toward the south and the west walls. She
was everywhere, spreading and spreading. These seconds would make memories
that would outlast her soul, that would be legends in the minds of her
descendants a thousand years from now.
Steel hunkered down. Things were totally out of his control now;
Shreck's people were all on the far side of inner keep. All that he and
Amdijefri could know came from Tyrathect -- and the clamor of alarums.
Amdi bounced around her. "Where are you now? Where?"
"Almost to the outer wall."
"Don't go beyond that," Steel said quietly.
Tyrathect scarcely heard. For a few more seconds she would drink this
glorious power. She charged up the inside stairs. Guards scuttled back, some
members jumping back into the yard. Shreck still followed, shouting for her
safety.
One of her reached the parapet, then the other.
She gasped.
"Are you all right?" said Amdi.
"I -- " Tyrathect looked about her. From her places on the south wall
she could see herselves back in the castle yard: a tiny clump of gold and
black that was her three and Amdi. Beyond the northeast walls stretched
forest and valleys, the trails up into the Icefang mountains. To the west
was Hidden Island and the misty inner waters. These were things she had seen
a thousand times as Flenser. How he had loved them, his domain. But now ...
she was seeing as if in a dream. Her eyes were so far apart. Her pack was
almost as wide as the castle itself. The parallax view made Hidden Island
seem just a few paces away. Newcastle was like a model spread out around
her. Almighty Pack of packs -- this was God's view.
Shreck's troopers were edging closer. He had sent a couple of packs
back to get directions. "A couple of minutes. I'll come down in a couple of
minutes." She spoke the words to the troopers on the palisade and to Steel
back in the yard. Then she turned to survey her domain.
She had only extended two of herself across less than a quarter of a
mile. But there was no perceptible time lag; coordination had the same
abrupt feel it did when she was all together. And there was plenty more pull
in the braid-bone straps. What if all five of her spread out, moved miles
apart? All of the northland would be her private room.
And Flenser? Ah, Flenser. Where was he? The memories were still there,
but.... Tyrathect remembered the loss of consciousness right when the radios
began working. It took a special skill of coordination to think in the face
of such terrible speed. Perhaps Lord Flenser had never walked between close
cliffs when he was new. Tyrathect smiled. Perhaps only her mindset could
hold when using the radios. In that case.... Tyrathect looked again across
the landscape. Flenser had made a great empire. If these new developments
were managed properly, then the coming victories could make it infinitely
grander.
He turned to Shreck's troopers. "Very well, I'm ready to return to Lord
Steel."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
It was high summer when Woodcarver's army left for the north. The
preparations had been frantic, with Vendacious driving himself and everyone
else to the point of exhaustion. There had been cannons to make -- Scrupilo
cast seventy tubes before getting thirty that would fire reliably. There had
been cannoneers to train -- and safe methods of firing to discover. There
had been wagons to build and kherhogs to buy.
Surely word of the preparations had long ago filtered north.
Woodcarvers was a port city; they could not close down the commerce that
moved through it. Vendacious warned them of this in more than one inner
council meeting: Steel knew they were coming. The trick was in keeping the
Flenserists uncertain as to numbers and timing and exact purpose. "We have
one great advantage over the enemy," he said. "We have agents in his highest
councils. We know what he knows of us." They couldn't disguise the obvious
from the spies, but the details were a different matter.
The army departed along inland routes, a dozen wagons here, a few
squads there. In all there were a thousand packs in the expedition, but they
would never be together till they reached deep forest. It would have been
easier to take the first part of the trip by sea, but the Flenserists had
spotters hidden high in the fjordlands. Any ship movement -- even deep in
Woodcarver territory -- would be known in the north. So they traveled on
forest paths, through areas that Vendacious had cleared of enemy agents.
At first the going was very easy, at least for those with the wagons.
Johanna rode in one of the rear ones with Woodcarver and Dataset. Even I'm
beginning to treat the thing like an oracle, thought Johanna. Too bad it
couldn't really predict the future.
The weather was as beautiful as Johanna had ever seen it on Tines
world, an endless afternoon. It was strange that such unending fairness
should make her so nervous, but she couldn't help it. This was so much like
her first time on this world, when everything had ... gone wrong.
During the first dayarounds of the journey, while they were still in
home territory, Woodcarver pointed out every peak that came into view and
tried to translate its name into Samnorsk for her. After six hundred years
the Queen knew her land well. Even the patches of snow -- the ones that
lasted all through the summer -- were known to her. She showed Johanna a
sketchbook she had brought along. Each page was from a different year, and
showed her special snowpatches as they had appeared on the same day of the
summer. Riffling through the leaves, it was almost like a crude piece of
animation. Johanna could see the patches moving, growing over a period of
decades, then retreating. "Most packs don't live long enough to feel it,"
said Woodcarver, "but to me, the patches that last all summer are like
living things. See how they move? They are like wolves, held off from our
lands by our fire that is the sun. They circle about, grow. Sometimes they
link together and a new glacier starts toward the sea."
Johanna had laughed a little nervously. "Are they winning?"
"For the last four centuries, no. The summers have often been hot and
windy. In the long run? I don't know. And it doesn't matter quite so much to
me anymore." She rocked her two little puppies for a moment and laughed
gently. "Peregrine's little ones are not even thinking yet, and I'm already
losing my long view!"
Johanna reached out to stroke her neck. "But they are your puppies
too."
"I know. Most of my pups have been with other packs, but these are the
first that I have kept to be me." Her blind one nuzzled at one of the
puppies. It wriggled and made a sound that warbled at the top of Johanna's
hearing. Johanna held the other on her lap. Tine pups looked more like baby
sea'mals than dogs. Their necks were so long compared to their bodies. And
they seemed to develop much more slowly than the puppy she and Jefri had
raised. Even now they seemed to have trouble focusing. She moved her fingers
slowly back and forth in front of one puppy's head; its efforts to track
were comical.
And after sixty days, Woodcarver's pups couldn't really walk. The Queen
wore two special jackets with carrying pouches on the sides. Most of the
waking day, her little ones stayed there, suckling through the fur on her
tummy. In some ways, Woodcarver treated her offspring as a human would. She
was very nervous when they were taken from her sight. She liked to cuddle
them and play little games of coordination with them. Often she would lay
both of them on their backs and pat their paws in a sequence of eight, then
abruptly tap the one or the other on the belly. The two wriggled furiously
at the attack, their little legs waving in all directions. "I nibble the one
whose paw was last touched. Peregrine is worthy of me. These two are already
thinking a little. See?" She pointed to the puppy that had convulsed into a
ball, avoiding most of her surprise tickle.
In other ways Tinish parenting was alien, almost scary. Neither
Woodcarver nor Peregrine ever talked to their pups in audible tones, but
their ultrasonic "thoughts" seemed to be constantly probing the little ones.
Some of it was so simple and regular that it set sympathetic vibrations
through the walls of the little wagon. The wood buzzed under Johanna's
hands. It was like a mother humming a lullaby, but she could see it had
another purpose. The little creatures responded to the sounds, twitching in
complicated rhythms. Peregrine said it would be another thirty days before
the pups could contribute conscious thought to the pack, but they were
already being trained and exercised for the function.
They camped part of each dayaround, the troops standing turns as sentry
lines. Even during the traveling part of the day, they stopped numerous
times, to clear the trail, or await the return of scouts, or simply to rest.
At one such stop, Johanna sat with Peregrine in the shade of a tree that
looked like pine but smelled of honey. Pilgrim played with his young ones,
helping them to stand up and walk a few steps. She could tell by the buzzing
in her head that he was thinking at the pups. And suddenly they seemed more
like marionettes than children to her. "Why don't you let them play by
themselves, or with their -- " Brothers? Sisters? What do you call siblings
born to the other pack? "-- with Woodcarver's pups?"
Even more than Woodcarver, the pilgrim had tried to learn human
customs. He was by far the most flexible pack she knew ... after all, if you
can accommodate a murderer in your own mind, you must be flexible. But
Pilgrim was visibly startled by her question. The buzzing in her head
stopped abruptly. He laughed weakly. It was a very human laugh, though a bit
theatrical. Peregrine had spent hours at interactive comedy on Dataset --
whether for entertainment or insight, she didn't know. "Play? By themselves?
Yes ... I see how natural that would seem to you. To us, it would be a kind
of perversion.... No, worse than that, since perversions are at least fun
for some people some of the time. But if a pup were raised a singleton, or
even a duo -- it would be making an animal of what could be sturdy member."
"You mean that pups never have life of their own?"
Peregrine cocked his heads and scrunched close to the ground. One of
him continued to nose around the puppies, but Johanna had his attention. He
loved to puzzle over human exotica. "Well, sometimes there is a tragedy --
an orphan pup left to itself. Often there is no cure for it; the creature
becomes too independent to meld with any pack. In any case, it is a very
lonely, empty life. I have personal memories of just how unpleasant."
"You're missing a lot. I know you've watched children's stories on
Dataset. It's sad you can never be young and foolish."
"Hei! I never said that. I've been young and foolish lots; it's my way
of life. And most packs are that way when they have several young members by
different parents." As they talked, one of Peregrine's pups had struggled to
the edge of the blanket they sat on. Now it awkwardly extended its neck into
the flowers that grew from the roots of a nearby tree. As it scruffed around
in the green and purple, Johanna felt the buzzing begin again. The pup's
movement became a tad more organized. "Wow! I can smell the flowers with
him. I bet we'll be seeing through each other's eyes well before we get to
Flenser's Hidden Island." The pup backed up, and the two did a little dance
on the blanket. Peregrine's heads bobbed in time with the movement. "They
are such bright little ones!" He grinned. "Oh, we are not so different from
you, Johanna. I know humans are proud of their young ones. Both Woodcarver
and I wonder what ours will become. She is so brilliant, and I am -- well, a
bit mad. Will these two make me a scientific genius? Will Woodcarver's turn
her into an adventurer? Heh, heh. Woodcarver's a great brood kenner, but
even she's not sure what our new souls will be like. Oh, I can't wait to be
six again!"
It had taken Scriber and Pilgrim and Johanna only three days to sail
from Flenser's Domain to the harbor at Woodcarver's. It would take this army
almost thirty days to walk back to where Johanna's adventure began. On the
map it had looked a tortuous path, wiggling this way and that through the
fjordland. Yet the first ten days were amazingly easy. The weather stayed
dry and warm. It was like the day of the ambush stretched out forever and
ever. A dry winds summer, Woodcarver called it. There should be occasional
storms, at least cloudiness. Instead the sun circled endlessly above the
forest canopy, and when they broke into the open (never for long, and then
only when Vendacious was sure that it was safe), the sky was clear and
almost cloudless.
In fact, there was already uneasiness about the weather. At noon it
could get downright hot. The wind was constant, drying. The forest itself
was drying out; they must be careful with fire. And with the sun always up
and no clouds, they might be seen by lookouts many kilometers away. Scrupilo
was especially bothered. He hadn't expected to fire the cannons en route,
but he had wanted to drill "his" troops more in the open.
Officially Strupilo was a council member and the Queen's chief
engineer. Since his experiment with the cannon, he had insisted on the title
"Commander of Cannoneers". To Johanna, the engineer had always seemed curt
and impatient. His members were almost always moving, and with jerky
abruptness. He spent almost as much time with the Dataset as the Queen or
Peregrine Wickwrackscar, yet he had very little interest in people-oriented
subjects. "He has a blindness for all but machines," Woodcarver once said of
him, "but that's how I made him. He's invented much, even before you came."
Scrupilo had fallen in love with the cannons. For most packs, firing
the things was a painful experience. Since that first test, Scrupilo had
fired the things again and again, trying to improve the tubes, the powder,
and the explosive rounds. His fur was scored with dozens of powder burns. He
claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind -- but most everybody else
agreed it made you daft.
During rest stops Scrup was a familiar figure, strutting up and down
the line, haranguing his cannoneers. He claimed even the shortest stop was
an opportunity for training, since in real combat speed would be essential.
He had designed special epaulets, based on Nyjoran gunners' ear muffs. They
didn't cover his low-sound ears at all, but instead the forehead and
shoulder tympana of his trigger member. Actually tying the muffs down was a
mind-numbing thing to do, but for the moments right around firing it was
worth it. Scrupilo wore his own muffs all the time, but unsnugged. They
looked like silly little wings sticking out from his head and shoulders. He
obviously thought the effect was raffish -- and in fact, his gunner crews
also made a big thing of wearing the gear at all times. After a while, even
Johanna could see that the drill was paying off. At least, they could swing
the gun tubes around at an instant's notice, stuff them with fake powder and
ball, and shout the Tinish equivalent of "BANG!".
The army carried much more gunpowder than food. The packs were to live
off the forest. Johanna had little experience with camping in an atmosphere.
Were forests usually this rich? It was certainly nothing like the urban
forests of Straum, where you needed a special license to walk off marked
paths, and most of the wild life were mechanical imitations of Nyjoran
originals. This place was wilder than even the stories of Nyjora. After all,
that world had been well settled before it fell to medievalism. The Tines'
had never been civilized, had never spread cities across continents. Pilgrim
guessed there were fewer than thirty million packs in all the world. The
Northwest was only beginning to be settled. Game was everywhere. In their
hunting, the Tines were like animals. Troopers raced through the
underforest. The favorite hunt was one of sheer endurance, where the prey
was chased until it dropped. That was rarely practical here, but they got
almost as much pleasure from chasing the unwary into ambushes.
Johanna didn't like it. Was this a medieval perversion or a peculiarly
Tinish one? If allowed the time, the troops didn't use their bows and
knives. The pleasure of the hunt included slashing at throats and bellies
with teeth and claws. Not that the forest creatures were without defenses:
for millions of years threat and counterthreat had evolved here. Almost
every animal could generate ultrasonic screeching that totally drowned the
thought of any nearby pack. There were parts of the forest that seemed
silent to Johanna, but through which the army drove at a cautious gallop,
troops and drivers writhing in agony from the unseen assault.
Some of the forest animals were more sophisticated....
Twenty-five days out, the army was stuck trying to get across the
biggest valley yet. In the middle -- mostly hidden by the forest -- a river
flowed down to the western sea. The walls of these valleys were like nothing
Johanna had seen in the parks of Straum: If you took a cross-section at
right angles to the river, the walls made a "U" shape. They were cliff-like
steep at the high edges, then became slopes and finally a gentle plain where
the river ran. "That's how the ice gouges it," explained Woodcarver. "There
are places further up where I've actually watched it happen," and she showed
Johanna explanations in the Dataset. That was happening more and more;
Pilgrim and Woodcarver and sometimes even Scrupilo seemed to know more of a
child's modern education than Johanna.
They had already been across a number of smaller valleys. Getting down
the steep parts was always tedious, but so far the paths had been good.
Vendacious took them to the edge this latest valley.
Woodcarver and staff stood under the forest cover just short of the
dropoff. Some meters back, Johanna sat surrounded by Peregrine
Wickwrackscar. The trees at this elevation reminded Johanna a little of
pines. The leaves were narrow and sharp and lasted all year. But the bark
was blistered white and the wood itself was pale blond. Strangest of all
were the flowers. They sprouted purple and violet from the exposed roots of
the trees. Tines' world had no analog of honeybees, but there was constant
motion among the flowers as thumb-sized mammals climbed from plant to plant.
There were thousands of them, but they seemed to have no interest in
anything except the flowers and the sweetness that oozed from them. She
leaned back among the flowers and admired the view while the Queen gobbled
with Vendacious. How many kilometers could you see from here? The air was as
clear as she had even known it on Tines' world. East and west the valley
seemed to stretch forever. The river was a silver thread where it
occasionally showed through the forest of the valley floor.
Pilgrim nudged her with a nose and nodded toward the Queen. Woodcarver
was pointing this way and that over the dropoff. "Argument is in the air.
You want a translation?"
"Yeah."
"Woodcarver doesn't like this path," Pilgrim's voice changed to the
tone the Queen used when speaking Samnorsk: "The path is completely exposed.
Anyone on the other side can sit and count our every wagon. Even from miles
away. [A mile is a fat kilometer.]"
Vendacious whipped his heads around in that indignant way of his. He
gobbled something that Johanna knew was angry. Pilgrim chuckled and changed
his voice to imitate the security chief's: "Your Majesty! My scouts have
scoured the valley and far wall. There is no threat."
"You've done miracles, I know, but do you seriously claim to have
covered that entire north face? That's five miles away, and I know from my
youth that there are dozens of cavelets -- you have those memories
yourself."
"That stopped him!" said Pilgrim, laughing.
"C'mon. Just translate." She was quite capable of interpreting body
language and tone by now. Sometimes even the Tinish chords made sense.
"Hmph. Okay."
The Queen hiked her baby packs around and sat down. Her tone became
conciliatory. "If this weather weren't so clear, or if there were night
times, we might try it, but -- You remember the old path? Twenty miles
inland from here? That should be overgrown by now. And the road coming back
is -- "
Gobble-hiss from Vendacious, angry. "I tell you, this is safe! We'll
lose days on the other path. If we arrive late at Flenser's, all my work
will be for nothing. You must go forward here."
"Oops," Pilgrim whispered, unable to resist a little editorializing,
"Ol' Vendacious may have gone too far with that." The Queen's heads arched
back. Pilgrim's imitation of her human voice said, "I understand your
anxiety, pack of my blood. But we go forward where I say. If that is
intolerable to you, I will regretfully accept your resignation."
"But you need me!"
"Not that much."
Johanna suddenly realized that the whole mission could fall apart right
here, without even a shot being fired. Where would we be without Vendacious?
She held her breath and watched the two packs. Parts of Vendacious walked in
quick circles, stopping for angry instants to stare at Woodcarver. Finally
all his necks drooped. "Um. My apologies, Your Majesty. As long as you find
me of use, I beg to continue in your service."
Now Woodcarver relaxed, too. She reached to pet her puppies. They had
responded with her mood, thrashing in their carriers and hissing. "Forgiven.
I want your independent advice, Vendacious. It has been miraculously good."
Vendacious smiled weakly.
"I didn't think the jerk had it in him," Pilgrim said near Johanna's
ear.
It took two dayarounds to reach the old path. As Woodcarver had
predicted, it was overgrown. More: In places there was no sign of the path
at all, just young trees growing from slumped earth. It would take days to
get down the valley side this way. If Woodcarver had any misgivings about
the decision, she didn't mention them to Johanna. The Queen was six hundred
years old; she talked often enough about the inflexibility of age. Now
Johanna was getting a clear example of what that meant.
When they came to a washout, trees were cut down and a bridge
constructed on the spot. It took a day to get by each such spot. But
progress was agonizingly slow even where the path was still in place. No one
rode in the carts now. The edge of the path had worn away, and the cart
wheels sometimes turned on nothingness. On Johanna's right she could look
down at tree crowns that were a few meters from her feet.
They ran into the wolves six days along the detour, when they had
almost reached the valley floor. Wolves. That's what Pilgrim called them
anyway; what Johanna saw looked like gerbils.
They had just completed a kilometer stretch of easy going. Even under
the trees they could feel the wind, dry and warm and moving ceaselessly down
the valley. The last patches of snow between the trees were being sucked to
nothingness, and there was a haze of smoke beyond the north wall of the
valley.
Johanna was walking alongside Woodcarver's cart. Pilgrim was about ten
meters behind, chatting occasionally with them. (The Queen herself had been
very quiet these last days.) Suddenly there was a screech of Tinish alarm
from above them.
A second later Vendacious shouted from a hundred meters ahead. Through
gaps in the trees, Johanna could see troopers on the next switchback above
them unlimbering crossbows, firing into the hillside above them. The
sunlight came dappled through the forest cover, bringing plenty of light but
in splotches that broke and moved as the soldiers hustled about. Chaos, but
... there were things up there that weren't Tines! Small, brown or gray,
they flitted through the shadows and the splotches of light. They swept up
the hillside coming upon the soldiers from the opposite direction that they
were shooting.
"Turn around! Turn around." Johanna screamed, but her voice was lost in
the turmoil. Besides, who there could understand her? All of Woodcarver was
peering up at the battle. She grabbed Johanna's sleeve. "You see something
up there? Where?"
Johanna stuttered an explanation, but now Pilgrim had seen something
too. His gobbled shouting came loud over the battle. He raced back up the
trail to where Scrupilo was trying to get a cannon unlimbered. "Johanna!
Help me."
Woodcarver hesitated, then said, "Yes. It may be that bad. Help with
the cannon, Johanna."
It was only fifty meters to the gun cart, but uphill. She ran.
Something heavy smashed into the path just behind her. Part of a soldier! It
twisted and screamed. Half a dozen gerbil-sized hunks of fur were attached
to the body, and its pelt was streaked with red. Another member fell past
her. Another. Johanna stumbled but kept running.
Wickwrackscar was standing heads-together, just a few meters from
Scrupilo. He was armed in every adult member -- mouth knives and steel
tines. He waved Johanna down next to him. "We run on a nest of, of wolves."
His speech was awkward, slurred. "Must be between here and path above. A
lump, like a l'il castle tower. Gotta kill nest. Can you see?" Evidently he
could not; he was looking all over. Johanna looked back up the hillside.
There seemed to be less fighting now, just sounds of Tinish agony.
Johanna pointed. "You mean there, that dark thing?"
Pilgrim didn't answer. His members were twitching, his mouth knives
waving randomly. She leaped away from the flashing metal. He had already cut
himself. Sound attack. She looked back along the path. She'd had more than a
year to know the packs, and what she was seeing now was ... madness. Some
packs were exploding, racing in all directions to distances where thought
couldn't possibly be sustained. Others -- Woodcarver on her cart -- huddled
in heaps, with scarcely a head showing.
Just beyond the nearest uphill trees she could see a gray tide. The
wolves. Each furry lump looked innocent enough. All together ... Johanna
froze for an instant, watching them tear out the throat of a trooper's
member.
Johanna was the only sane person left, and all it would mean is she
would know she was dying.
Kill the nest.
On the gun cart beside her only one of Scrupilo was left, old White
Head. Daffy as ever, it had pulled down its gunner's muffs and was nosing
around under the gun tube. Kill the nest. Maybe not so daffy after all!
Johanna jumped up on the wagon. It rolled back toward the dropoff,
banging against a tree; she scarcely noticed. She pulled up the gun barrel,
just as she had seen in all the drills. The white headed one pulled at the
powder bag, but with just his one pair of jaws he couldn't handle it.
Without the rest of its pack it had neither hands nor brains. It looked up
at her, its eyes wide and desperate.
She grabbed the other end of the bag, and the two of them got the
powder into the barrel. White Head dived back into the equipment, nosing
around for a cannon ball. Smarter than a dog, and trained. Between them,
maybe they had a chance!
Just half a meter beneath her feet, the wolves were running by. One or
two she could have fought off herself. But there were dozens down there,
worrying and tearing at random members. Three of Pilgrim were standing
around Scarbutt and the pups, but their defense was unthinking slashing. The
pack had dropped its mouth knives and tines.
She and White Head got the round down the barrel. White Head whipped
back to the rear, began playing with the little wick-lighter the gunners
used. It was something that could be held in a single mouth, since only one
member actually fired the weapon.
"Wait, you idiot!" Johanna kicked him back. "We gotta aim this thing!"
White Head looked hurt for an instant. The complaint wasn't completely
clear to him. He had dropped the standoff wand, but still held the lighter.
He flicked on the flame, and circled determinedly back, tried to worm past
Johanna's legs. She pushed him back again, and looked uphill. The dark
thing. That must be the nest. She tilted the gun tube on its mounting and
sighted down the top. Her face ended up just centimeters from the persistent
White Head and his flame. His muffed head darted forward, and the flame
touched the fire-hole.
The blast almost knocked Johanna off the cart. For a moment she could
think of nothing but the pain that stabbed into her ears. She rolled to a
sitting position, coughing in the smoke. She couldn't hear anything beyond a
high-pitched ringing that went on and on. Their little wagon was teetering,
one wheel hanging over the dropoff. White Head was flopping around under the
butt of the cannon. She pushed it off him and patted the muffed head. He was
bleeding -- or she was. She just sat dazed for a few seconds, mystified by
the blood, trying to imagine how she had ever ended up here.
A voice somewhere in the back of her head was screaming. No time, no
time. She forced herself to her knees and looked around, memories coming
back painfully slow.
There were splintered trees uphill of them; the blond wood glinted
among the leaves. Beyond them, where the nest had been, she saw a splash of
fresh turned earth. They had "killed" it, but ... the fighting continued.
There were still wolves on the path, but now they were the ones running
in all directions. As she watched, dozens of them catapulted off the edge of
trail into the trees and rocks below. And the Tines were actually fighting
now. Pilgrim had picked up his knives. The blades and his muzzles dripped
red as he slashed. Something gray and bleeding flew over the edge of the
cart and landed by Johanna's leg. The "wolf" couldn't have been more than
twenty centimeters long, its hair dirty gray brown. It really did look like
a pet, but the tiny jaws clicked with murderous intent at her ankles.
Johanna dropped a cannon ball on it.
During the next three days, while Woodcarver's people struggled to
bring their equipment and themselves back together, Johanna learned quite a
bit about the wolves. What she and Scrupilo's White Head did with cannon had
stopped the attack cold. Without doubt, knocking out the nest had saved a
lot of lives and the expedition itself. The "wolves" were a type of hive
creature, only a little like the packs. The Tines race used group thought to
reach high intelligence; Johanna had never seen a rational pack of more than
six members. The wolf nests didn't care about high intelligence. Woodcarver
claimed that a nest might have thousands of members -- certainly the one
they'd tripped over was huge. Such a mob couldn't be as smart as a human. In
terms of raw reasoning power, it probably wasn't much brighter than a single
pack member. On the other hand, it could be a lot more flexible. Wolves
could operate alone at great distances. When within a hundred meters of the
home nest they were appendages of the "queen" members of the nest, and no
one doubted their canniness then. Pilgrim had legends of nests with almost
packish intelligence, of foresters who made treaties with nearby nests for
protection in return for food. As long as the high-powered noises in the
nest lived, the worker wolves could coordinate almost like Tine members. But
kill the nest, and the creature fell apart like some cheap, star-topology
network.
Certainly this nest had done a number on Woodcarver's army. It had
waited quietly until the troopers were within its inner loudness. Then
outlying wolves had used synchronized mimicry to create sonic "ghosts",
tricking the packs into turning from the nest and shooting uselessly into
the trees. And when the ambush actually began, the nest had screamed
concentrated confusion down on the Tines. That attack had been a far more
powerful thing than the "stink noise" they'd encountered in other parts of
the forest. To the Tines, the stinkers had been painfully loud and sometimes
even frightening, but not the mind-destroying chaos of the wolf-nest attack.
More than one hundred packs had been knocked out in the ambush. Some,
mostly packs with pups, had huddled. Others, like Scrupilo, had been
"blasted apart". In the hours following the attack, many of these fragments
straggled back and reassembled. The resulting Tines were shaken but
unharmed. Intact troops hunted up and down the forested cliffs for injured
members of their comrades. There were places along the dropoff that were
more than twenty meters deep. Where their fall wasn't cushioned by tree
boughs, members landed on naked rock. Five dead ones were eventually found,
and another twenty seriously injured. Two carts had fallen. They were
kindling, and their kherhogs were too badly injured to survive. By great
good luck, the gunshot had not started a forest fire.
Three times the sun made its vast, tilted course around the sky.
Woodcarver's army recovered in a camp in the depths of the valley forest, by
the river. Vendacious had posted lookouts with signaling mirrors on the
northern valley wall. This place was about as safe as any they could find so
far north. It was certainly one of the most beautiful. It didn't have the
view of the high forest, but there was the sound of the river nearby, so
loud it drowned the sighing of the dry wind. The lowland trees didn't have
root flowers, but they were still different from what Johanna had known.
There was no underbrush, just a soft, bluish "moss" that Pilgrim claimed was
actually part of the trees. It stretched like mown parkland to the edge of
the river.
On the last day of their rest, the Queen called a meeting of all the
packs not at guard or lookout. It was the largest collection of Tines
Johanna had seen in one place since her family was killed. Only these ones
weren't fighting. As far as Johanna could see across the bluish moss, there
were packs, each at least eight meters from its nearest neighbor. For an
absurd instant she was reminded of Settlers Park at Overby: Families
picnicking on the grass, each with its own traditional blanket and food
lockers. But these "families" were each a pack, and this was a military
formation. The rows were gently curving arcs all facing toward the Queen.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was ten meters behind her, in shadow; being Queen's
consort didn't count for anything official. On Woodcarver's left lay the
living casualties of the ambush, members with bandages and splints. In some
ways, such visible damage wasn't the most horrifying. There were also what
Pilgrim called the "walking wounded". These were singletons and duos and
trios that were all that was left of whole packs. Some of these tried to
maintain a posture of attention, but others mooned about, occasionally
breaking into the Queen's speech with aimless words. It was like Scriber
Jaqueramaphan all over again, but most of these would live. Some were
already melding, trying to make new individuals. Some of these might even
work out, as Peregrine Wickwrackscar had done. For most, it would be a long
time before they were fully people again.
Johanna sat with Scrupilo in the first rank of troopers before the
Queen. The Commander of Cannoneers stood at Tinish parade rest: rumps on the
ground, chest high, most heads facing front. Scrup had come through it
without serious damage. His white head had a few more scorch marks, and one
of the other members had sprained a shoulder falling off the path. He wore
his flying cannoneer muffs as flamboyantly as always, but there was
something subdued about him -- maybe it was just the military formation and
getting a medal for heroism.
The Queen was wearing her special jackets. Each head looked out at a
different section of her audience. Johanna still couldn't understand Tinish,
and would certainly never speak it without mechanical assistance. But the
sounds were mostly within her range of hearing -- the "low" frequencies
carried a lot better than higher ones. Even without memory aides and grammar
generators she was learning a little. She could recognize emotional tone
easily, and things like the raucous ark ark ark that passed for applause
around here. As for individual words -- well, they were more like chords,
single syllables that had meaning. Nowadays, if she listened really
carefully (and Pilgrim weren't nearby to give a running translation) she
could even recognize some of those.
... Just now, for instance, Woodcarver was saying good things about her
audience. Approving ark ark's came from all directions. They sounded like a
bunch of sea'mals. One of the Queen's heads dipped into a bowl, came up with
a small carven doodad in its mouth. She spoke a pack's name, a multichord
tumptititum that if Johanna heard often enough she might be able to repeat
as "Jaqueramaphan" -- or even see meaning in, as "Wickwrackscar".
From the front rank of the audience, a single member trotted toward the
Queen. It stopped practically nose to nose with the Queen's nearest member.
Woodcarver said something about bravery, and then two of her fastened the
wooden -- broach? -- to the member's jacket. It turned smartly and returned
to its pack.
Woodcarver picked out another decoration, and called on another pack.
Johanna leaned over toward Scrupilo. "What's going on?" she said
wonderingly. "Why are single members getting medals?" And how can they stand
to get so near another pack?
Scrupilo had been standing more stiffly at attention than most packs,
and was pretty much ignoring her. Now he turned one head in her direction.
"Shh!" He started to turn back, but she grabbed him by one of his jackets.
"Foolish one," he finally replied. "The award is for the whole pack. One
member is extended to accept. More would be madness."
Hmm. One after another, three more packs "extended a member" to take
their decorations. Some were full of precision, like human soldiers in
stories. Others started out smartly, then became timid and confused as they
approached Woodcarver.
Finally Johanna said, "Ssst. Scrupilo! When do we get ours?"
This time he didn't even look at her; all his heads faced rigidly
toward the Queen. "Last, of course. You and I killed the nest, and saved
Woodcarver herself." His bodies were almost shaking with the intensity of
their brace. He's scared witless. And suddenly Johanna guessed why.
Apparently Woodcarver had no problem maintaining her mind with one outside
member nearby. But the reverse would not be true. Sending one of yourself
into another pack meant losing some consciousness and placing trust in that
other pack. Looking at it that way ... well, it reminded Johanna of the
historical novels she used to play. On Nyjora during the Dark Age, ladies
traditionally gave their sword to their queen when granted audience, and
then knelt. It was a way to swear loyalty. Same thing here, except that
looking at Scrupilo, Johanna realized that even as a matter of form, the
ceremony might be damn frightening.
Three more medals bestowed, and then Woodcarver gobbled the chords that
were Scrupilo's name. The Commander of Cannoneers went absolutely rigid,
made faint whistling noises through his mouths. "Johanna Olsndot," said
Woodcarver, then more Tinish, something about coming forward.
Johanna stood up, but not one of Scrupilo moved.
The Queen made a human laugh. She was holding two polished broaches.
"I'll explain all in Samnorsk later, Johanna. Just come forward with one of
Scrupilo. Scrupilo?"
Suddenly they were the center of attention, with thousands of eyes
watching. There was no more arking or background chatter. Johanna hadn't
felt so exposed since she played First Colonist in her school's Landing
Play. She leaned down so that her head was close to one of Scrupilo's. "Come
on, guy. We're the big heroes."
The eyes that looked back at her were wide. "I can't." The words were
almost inaudible. For all his jaunty cannoneer muffs and standoffish manner,
Scrupilo was terrified. But for him it wasn't stage fright. "I can't tear me
apart so soon. I can't."
There was murmured gobbling in the ranks behind them, Scrupilo's own
cannoneers. By all the Powers, would they hold this against him? Welcome to
the middle ages. Stupid people. Even cut to pieces, Scrupilo had saved their
behinds, and now --
She put her hands on two of his shoulders. "We did it before, you and
I. Remember?"
The heads nodded. "Some. That one part of me alone ... could never have
done it."
"Right. And neither could I. But together we killed a wolf-nest."
Scrupilo stared at her a second, eyes wavering. "Yes, we really did."
He came to his feet, frisked his heads so the cannoneer muffs flapped.
"Yes!" And he moved his white-headed one closer to her.
Johanna straightened. She and White Head walked out into the open
space. Four meters. Six. She kept the fingertips of one hand lightly on his
neck. When they were about twelve meters from the rest of Scrupilo, White
Head's pace faltered. He looked sideways, up at Johanna, then continued more
slowly.
Johanna didn't remember much of the ceremony, so much of her attention
was on White Head. Woodcarver said something long and unintelligible.
Somehow they both ended up with intricately carven decorations on their
collars, and were headed back toward the rest of Scrupilo. Then she was
aware of the crowd once more. They stretched as far as she could see under
the forest canopy -- and every one of them seemed to be cheering, Scrup's
cannoneers loudest of all.
Midnight. Here at the bottom of the valley there were three or four
hours of the dayaround when the sun dipped behind the high north wall. It
didn't much feel like night, or even twilight. The smoke from the fires to
the north seemed to getting worse. She could smell it now.
Johanna walked back from the cannoneers section toward the center of
camp, and Woodcarver's tent. It was quiet; she could hear little creatures
scritching in the root bushes. The celebrating might have gone on longer,
except that everyone knew that in another few hours they would be preparing
for the climb up the valley's north wall. So now there was only occasional
laughter, an occasional pack walking about. Johanna walked barefoot, her
shoes slung over her shoulders. Even in the dry weather, the moss was
wonderfully soft between her toes. Above her the forest canopy was shifting
green and patches of hazy sky. She could almost forget what had gone before,
and what lay ahead.
The guards around Woodcarver's tent didn't challenge her, just called
softly ahead. After all, there weren't that many humans running around. The
Queen stuck out a head, "Come inside, Johanna."
Inside, she was sitting in her usual circle, the puppies protected in
the middle. It was quite dark, the only light being what came through the
entrance. Johanna flopped down on the pillows where she usually slept. Ever
since this afternoon, the big award thing, she had been planning to give
Woodcarver a piece of her mind. Now ... well the party at the cannoneers had
been a happy thing. It seemed kind of a shame to break the mood.
Woodcarver cocked a head at her. Simultaneously, the two puppies
duplicated the gesture. "I saw you at the party. You are a sober one. You
eat most of our foods now, but none of the beer."
Johanna shrugged. Yes, why? "Kids aren't supposed to drink before
they're eighteen years old." That was the custom, and her parents had agreed
with it. Johanna had turned fourteen a couple of months ago; Dataset had
reminded her of the exact hour. She wondered. If none of this had happened,
if she were still back at the High Lab or Straumli Realm: would she be
sneaking out with friends to try such forbidden things? Probably. Yet here,
where she was entirely on her own, where she was currently a big hero, she
hadn't tried a drop.... Maybe it was because Mom and Dad weren't here, and
following their wishes seemed to keep them closer. She felt tears coming to
her eyes.
"Hmm." Woodcarver didn't seem to notice. "That's what Pilgrim said was
the reason." She tapped at her puppies and smiled. "I guess it makes sense.
These two don't get beer till they're older -- though I know they got some
second-hand partying from me tonight." There was a hint of beer breath in
the tent.
Johanna wiped roughly at her face. She really did not want to talk
about being a teenager just now. "You know, that was kind of a mean trick
you pulled on Scrupilo this afternoon."
"I -- Yes. I talked to him about it beforehand. He didn't want it, but
I thought he was just being ... is stiff-necked the word? If I had known how
upset he was, well -- "
"He practically fell apart out there in front of everybody. If I
understand how things work, that would have been his disgrace, right?"
"... Yes. Exchanging honor for loyalty in front of peers, it's an
important thing. At least the way I run things; I'm sure Pilgrim or Dataset
can say a dozen other ways to lead. Look Johanna, I needed that Exchange,
and I needed you and Scrupilo to be there."
"Yeah, I know. 'We two saved the day.'"
"Silence!" Her voice was suddenly edged, and Johanna remembered that
this was a medieval queen. "We are two hundred miles north of my borders,
almost to the heart of the Flenser Domain. In a few days we will meet the
enemy, and more of us will die for we-know-not-quite-what."
The bottom dropped out of Johanna's stomach. If she couldn't get back
to the ship, couldn't finish what Mom and Dad had started... "Please,
Woodcarver! It is worth it!"
"I know that. Pilgrim knows it. The majority of my council agrees,
though grudgingly. But we of the council have talked with Dataset. We've
seen your worlds and what your science can do. On the other hand, most of my
people here," she waved a head at the camp beyond the tent, "are here on
faith, and out of loyalty to me. For them, the situation is deadly and the
goal is vague." She paused, though her two pups continued gesturing
forcefully for a second. "Now I don't know how you would persuade your kind
to take such risks. Dataset talks of military conscription."
"That was Nyjora, long ago."
"Never mind. The point is, my troops are here out of loyalty, mostly to
me personally. For six hundred years, I have protected my people well; their
memories and legends are clear on it. More than once, I was the only one who
saw a peril, and it was my advice that saved all those who heeded it. That
is what keeps most of the soldiers, most of the cannoneers going. Each of
them is free to turn back. So. What should they think when our first
'combat' is to fall like ignorant ... tourists ... onto a nest of wolves?
Without the great good luck of you and part of Scrupilo being at the right
place and alert, I would have been killed. Pilgrim would have been killed.
Perhaps a third of the soldiers would have died."
"If not us, perhaps someone else," Johanna said in a small voice.
"Perhaps. I don't think anyone else came close to firing on the nest.
You see the effect on my people? 'If bad luck in the forest can kill our
Queen and destroy our marvelous weapons, what will it be like when we face a
thinking enemy?' That was the question in many minds. Unless I could answer
it, we'd never make it out of this valley -- at least not going northward."
"So you gave the medals. Loyalty for honor."
"Yes. You missed the sense of it, not understanding Tinish. I made a
big thing of how well they had done. I gave silverwood accolades to packs
who showed any competence during the ambush. That helped some. I repeated my
reasons for this expedition -- the wonders that Dataset describes and how
much we lose if Steel gets his way. But they've heard all that before, and
it points to far away things they can scarcely imagine. The new thing I
showed them today was you and Scrupilo."
"Us?"
"I praised you beyond the skies. Singletons often do brave things.
Sometimes they are halfway clever, or talk as though they are. But alone,
Scrupilo's fragment wouldn't be much more than a good knife fighter. He knew
about using the cannon, but he didn't have the paws or mouths to do anything
with it. And by himself, he would never have figured out where to shoot it.
You, on the other hand, are a Two Legs. In many ways you are helpless. The
only way you can think is by yourself, but you can do it without interfering
with those around you. Together you did what no pack could do in the middle
of a wolf-nest attack. So I told my army what a team our two races could
become, how each makes up for the age-long failings of the other. Together,
we are one step closer to being the Pack of Packs. How is Scrupilo?"
Johanna smiled faintly. "Things turned out okay. Once he was able to
get out there and accept his medal," she fingered the broach that was pinned
to her own collar; it was a beautiful thing, a landscape of Woodcarver's
city, "once he'd done that, he was totally changed. You should have seen him
with the cannoneers afterwards. They did their own loyalty/honor thing, and
then they drank a lot of beer. Scrupilo was telling them all about what we
were doing. He even had me help demonstrate.... You really think the army
bought what you said about humans and Tines?"
"I think so. In my own language, I can be very eloquent. I've bred
myself to be." Woodcarver was silent for a moment. Her puppies scrambled
across the carpet, and patted their muzzles at Johanna's hands. "Besides ...
it may even be true. Pilgrim is sure of it. You can sleep in this same tent
with me and still think. That's something that he and I can't do; in our own
ways, we've each lived a long time and I think we are each at least as smart
as the humans and other creatures that Dataset talks about in the Beyond.
But you singleton creatures can stand next to each other, and think and
build. Compared to us, I'll bet singleton races developed the sciences very
fast. But now, with your help, maybe things will change fast for us, too."
The two puppies retreated, and Woodcarver lowered heads to paws. "That's
what I told my people, anyway.... You should try to get some sleep now."
On the ground beyond the tent's entrance there were already splashes of
sunlight. "Okay." Johanna slipped off her outer clothes. She lay down and
dragged a light quilt across herself. Most of Woodcarver already looked
asleep. As usual, one or two pairs of eyes were open, but their intelligence
would be limited -- and just now, even they looked tired. Funny, Woodcarver
had worked with Dataset so much, her human voice had come to capture emotion
as well as pronunciation. Just now she had sounded so tired, so sad.
Johanna reached out from under her quilt to brush the neck of
Woodcarver's nearest, the blind one. "Do you believe what you told
everyone?" she said softly.
One of the "sentry" heads looked at her, and a very human sigh seemed
to come from all directions. Woodcarver's voice was very faint. "Yes ... but
I am very afraid that it doesn't matter any more. For six hundred years, I
have had proper confidence in myself. But what happened on the south wall
... should not have happened. It would not if I had followed Vendacious's
advice, and come down on the New Road."
"But we might have been seen -- "
"Yes. A failure either way, don't you see? Vendacious has precise
information from the highest councils of the Flenser. But he's something of
a careless fool in everyday matters. I knew that, and thought I could
compensate. But the Old Road was in far worse condition than I remembered;
the wolf-nest could never have settled by it if there had been any traffic
during the last few years. If Vendacious had managed his patrols properly,
or if I had been managing him properly, we would never have been surprised.
Instead we were nearly overrun ... and my only remaining talent appears to
be in fooling those who trust me into thinking I still know what I'm doing."
She opened another pair of eyes and made the smile gesture. "Strange. I
haven't said these things even to Pilgrim. Is this another 'advantage' of
human relations?"
Johanna patted the blind one's neck. "Maybe."
"Anyway, I believe what I said about things that could be, but I fear
the my soul may not be strong enough to make them so. Perhaps I should turn
things over to Pilgrim or Vendacious; that's something I must think on."
Woodcarver shhed Johanna's surprised protests.
"Now sleep please."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
There was a time when Ravna thought their tiny ship might fly all the
way to the Bottom unnoticed. Along with everything else, that had changed.
At the moment, Out of Band II might be the most famous star ship known to
the Net. A million races watched the chase. In the Middle Beyond there were
vast antenna swarms beaming in their direction and listening to the news --
mostly lies -- sent from ships that pursued the OOB. She couldn't hear those
lies directly, of course, but the transmissions from beyond were as clear as
if they were on a main trunk.
Ravna spent part of each day reading the News, trying to find hope,
trying to prove to herself that she was doing the right thing. By now, she
was pretty sure what was chasing them. No doubt even Pham and Blueshell
would have agreed on that. Why they were being chased, and what they might
find at the end was now the subject of endless speculation on the Net. As
usual, whatever the truth might be was well hidden among the lies.
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Hanse [No references prior to the fall of Relay. No probable
source. This is someone being very cautious.]
Subject: Alliance for the Defense fraudulent?
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 5.80 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Fools' errand, unnecessary genocide
Text of message:
Earlier I speculated that there had been no destruction at Sjandra Kei.
Apologies. That was based on a catalog identification error. I agree with
the messages (13123 as of a few seconds ago) assuring me that the
habitations of Sjandra Kei suffered collisional damage within the last six
days.
So apparently the "Alliance for the Defense" has taken the military
action they claimed earlier. And apparently, they are powerful enough to
destroy small civilizations in the Middle Beyond. The question still
remains: "Why?" I have already posted arguments showing it unlikely that
Homo sapiens is especially controllable by the Blight (though they were
stupid enough to create that entity). Even the Alliance's own reports admit
that less than half of Sjandra Kei's sophonts were of that race.
Now a large part of the Alliance fleet is chasing into the Bottom of
the Beyond after a single ship. What conceivable damage can the Alliance do
to the Blight down there? The Blight is a great threat, perhaps the most
novel and threatening in well-recorded history. Nevertheless, Alliance
behavior appears destructive and pointless. Now that the Alliance has
revealed some of its sponsoring organizations (see messages [id numbers]), I
think we know its real motives. I see connections between the Alliance and
the old Aprahant Hegemony. A thousand years ago, that group had a similar
jihad, grabbing real estate left vacant by recent Transcendences. Stopping
the Hegemony was an exciting bit of action in that part of the galaxy. I
think these people are back, taking advantage of the general panic attending
the Blight (which is admittedly a much greater threat).
My advice: Beware of the Alliance and its claims of heroic efforts.
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Schirachene->Rondralip->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Harmonious Repose Communications Synod
Subject: Encounter with agents of the Perversion
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight
Date: 6.37 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Hanse fraudulent?
Text of message:
We have no special inclination toward any of the posters on this
thread. Nevertheless, it's remarkable that an entity that has not revealed
its location or special interests -- namely "Hanse" -- should be smearing
the efforts of the Alliance for the Defense. The Alliance kept its
constituents secret only during that period when its forces were being
gathered, when a single stroke of the Perversion's power might destroy it
entirely. Since that time, it has been quite open in its efforts.
Hanse wonders how a single starship could be worth the Alliance's
attention. As Harmonious Repose was the site of the latest turn of events,
we are in a position to give some explanation. The ship in question, the Out
of Band II, is clearly designed for operations at the Bottom of the Beyond
-- and is even capable of limited operations within the Slow Zone. The ship
presented itself as a special zonographic flight commissioned to study the
recent turbulence at the Bottom. In fact, this ship's mission is a very
different one. In the aftermath of its violent departure, we have pieced
together some extraordinary facts:
At least one of the ship's crew was human. Though they made great
efforts to stay out of view and used Skroderider traders as intermediaries,
we have recordings. A biosequence of one individual was obtained, and it
matches the patterns maintained by two out of three of the Homo sapiens
archives. (It's well known that the third archive, on Sneerot Down, is in
the control of Human sympathizers.) Some might say this deception was
founded in fear. After all, these events happened after the destruction of
Sjandra Kei. We think otherwise: The ship's initial contact with us occurred
before the Sjandra Kei incident.
We have since made a careful analysis of the repair work our yards
performed on this vessel. Ultradrive automation is a deep and complex thing;
even the cleverest of cloaking cannot mask all the memories in it. We now
know that the Out of Band II was from the Relay system and that it left
there after the Perversion's attack. Think what this means.
The crew of the Out of Band II brought weapons into a habitat, kill
several local sophonts, and escaped before our musicians [harmonizers?
police?] were properly notified. We have good reason to wish them ill.
Yet our misfortune is a small thing compared to the unmasking of this
secret mission. We are very grateful that the Alliance is willing to risk so
much in following this lead.
There's more than the usual number of unsubstantiated assertions
floating around on this news thread. We hope our facts will wake some people
up. In particular, consider what "Hanse" may really be. The Perversion is
very visible in the High Beyond, where it has great power and can speak with
its own voice. Down here, it is more likely that deception and covert
propaganda will be its tools. Think on this when you read postings from
unidentified entities such as "Hanse"!
Ravna gritted her teeth. The hell of it was, the facts in the posting
were correct. It was the inferences that were vicious and false. And she
couldn't guess if this were some shade of black propaganda or simply Saint
Rihndell expressing honest conclusions (though Rihndell had never seemed so
trusting of the butterflies).
One thing all the News seemed to agree on: Much more than the Alliance
fleet was chasing the OOB. The swarm of ultradrive traces could be seen by
anyone within a thousand light-years. The best guess was that three fleets
pursued the OOB. Three! The Alliance for the Defense, still loud and
boastful, even though suspected (by some) of being opportunistic genocides.
Behind them, Sjandra Kei ... and what was left of Ravna's motherland; in all
the universe perhaps the only folk she could trust. And just behind them,
the silent fleet. Diverse news posters claimed it was from the High Beyond.
That fleet might have problems at the Bottom, but for now it was gaining.
Few doubted that it was the Perversion's child. More than anything, it
convinced the universe that the OOB or its destination was cosmically
important. Just why it was important was the big question. Speculation was
drifting in at the rate of five thousand messages per hour. A million
different viewpoints were considering the mystery. Some of those viewpoints
were so alien that they made Skroderiders and Humans look like the same
species. At least five participants on this News thread were gaseous
inhabitants of stellar coronas. There were one or two others that Ravna
suspected were uncataloged races, beings so shy that this might be their
first active use of the Net ever.
The OOB's computer was a lot dumber than it had been in the Middle
Beyond. She couldn't ask it to sift through the messages looking for nuance
and insight. In fact, if an incoming message didn't have a Triskweline text,
it was often unreadable. The ship's translator programs still worked fairly
well with the major trade languages, but even there the translation was slow
and full of alternative meanings and jabberwocky. It was just another sign
that they were approaching the Bottom of the Beyond. Effective translation
of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator
program.
Nevertheless, with proper design, things might have been better. The
automation might have degraded gracefully under the restrictions imposed by
their depth. Instead, gear just stopped working; what remained was slow and
error-prone. If only the refitting had been completed before the Fall of
Relay. And just how many times have I wished for that? She hoped things were
as bad aboard the pursuing ships.
So Ravna used the ship to do light culling on the Threats newsgroup.
Much of what was left was inane, as from people who see "portents in the
weather" --
Crypto: 0
Syntax: 43
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Arbwyth->Trade24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK
units
From: Twirlip of the Mists [Perhaps an organization of cloud fliers in
a single jovian system. Very sparse priors before this thread began. Appears
to be seriously out of touch. Program recommendation: delete this poster
from presentation.]
Subject: The Blight's goal at the Bottom
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Great Secrets of Creation
Date: 4.54 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Zone Instability and the Blight, Hexapodia as the key
insight
Text of message:
Apologies first if I am repeating obvious conclusions. My only gateway
onto the Net is very expensive, and I miss many important postings. I think
that anyone following both Great Secrets of Creation and Threat of the
Blight would see an important pattern. Since the events reported by
Harmonious Repose information service, most agree that something important
to the Perversion exists at the Bottom of the Beyond in region [...]. I see
a possible connection here with the Great Secrets. During the last two
hundred and twenty days, there have been increasing reports of zone
interface instability in the region below Harmonious Repose. As the Blight
threat has grown and its attacks against advanced races and other Powers
continued, this instability has increased. Could there not be some
connection? I urge all to consult their information on the Great Secrets (or
the nearest archive maintained by that group). Events such as this prove
once again that the universe is all ronzelle between.
Some of the postings were tantalizing --
[Light gloss]
Crypto: 0
Syntax: 43
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Wobblings->Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Cricketsong under the High Willow [Cricketsong is a synthetic
race created as a jape/ experiment/instrument by the High Willow upon its
Transcendence. Cricketsong has been on the Net for more than ten thousand
years. Apparently it is a fanatical studier of paths to Transcendence. For
eight thousand years it has been the heaviest poster on "Where are they now"
and related groups. There is no evidence that any Cricketsong settlement has
itself Transcended. Cricketsong is sufficiently peculiar that there is a
large news group for speculation concerning the race itself. Consensus is
that Cricketsong was designed by High Willow as a probe back into the
Beyond, that the race is somehow incapable of attempting its own
Transcendence.]
Subject: The Blight's goal at the Bottom
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Special Interest Group, Where are they now Special Interest Group
Date: 5.12 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: On becoming Transcendent
Text of message:
Contrary to other postings, there are a number of reasons why a Power
might install artifacts at the Bottom of the Beyond. The Abselor's message
on this thread cites some: some Powers have documented curiosity about the
Slow Zone and, even more, about the Unthinking Depths. In rare cases,
expeditions have been dispatched (though any return from the Depths would
occur long after the dispatching Power lost interest in all local
questions).
However, none of these motives are likely here. To those who are
familiar with Fast Burn transcendence, it is clear that the Blight is a
creature seeking stasis. Its interest in the Bottom is very sudden,
provoked, we think, by the revelations at Harmonious Repose. There is
something at the Bottom that is critical to the Perversion's welfare.
Consider the notion of ablative dissonance (see the Where Are They Now
group archive): No one knows what set-up procedures the humans of Straumli
Realm were using. The Fast Burn may itself have had Transcendent
intelligence. What if it became dissatisfied with the direction of the
channedring? In that case it might try to hide the jumpoff birthinghel. The
Bottom would not be a place where the algorithm itself could normally
execute, but avatars might still be created from it and briefly run.
Up to a point, Ravna could almost make sense of it; ablative dissonance
was a commonplace of Applied Theology. But then, like one of those dreams
where the secret of life is about to be revealed, the posting just drifted
into nonsense.
There were postings that were neither asinine nor obscure. As usual,
Sandor at the Zoo had a lot of things dead right:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military
corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living
dangerously.]
Subject: The Blight's goal at the Bottom
Key phrases: Sudden change in Blight's tactics
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 8.15 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Text of message:
In case you don't know, Sandor Intelligence has a number of different
Net feeds. We can collect messages on paths that have no intermediate nodes
in common. Thus we can be fairly confident that news we receive has not been
tampered with en route. (There remain the lies and misunderstandings that
were present to begin with, but that's something that makes the intelligence
business interesting.)
The Blight has been our top priority since its instantiation a year
ago. This is not just because of the Blight's obvious strength, the
destruction and the deicides it has committed. We fear that all this is the
lesser part of the Threat. There have been perversions almost as powerful in
the recorded past. What truly distinguishes this one is its stability. We
see no evidence of internal evolution; in some ways it is less than a Power.
It may never lose interest in controlling the High Beyond. We may be
witnessing a massive and permanent change in the nature of things. Imagine:
a stable necrosis, where the only sentience in the High Beyond is the
Blight.
Thus, studying the Blight has been a matter of life and death for us
(even though we are powerful and widely distributed). We've reached a number
of conclusions. Some of these may be obvious to you, others may sound like
flagrant speculation. All take on a new coloring with the events reported
from Harmonious Repose:
Almost from the beginning, the Blight has been searching for something.
This search has extended far beyond its aggressive physical expansion. Its
automatic agents have tried to penetrate virtually every node in the Top of
the Beyond; the High Network is in shambles, reduced to protocols scarcely
more efficient than those known below. At the same time, the Blight has
physically stolen several archives. We have evidence of very large fleets
searching for off-Net archives at the Top and in the Low Transcend. At least
three Powers have been murdered in this rampage.
And now, suddenly, this assault has ended. The Blight's physical
expansion continues, with no end in sight, but it no longer searches the
High Beyond. As near as we can tell, the change occurred about two thousand
seconds before the escape of the human vessel from Harmonious Repose. Less
than six hours later, we saw the beginnings of the silent fleet that so many
are now speculating about. That fleet is indeed the creature of the Blight.
In other times, the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the motives of the
Alliance for the Defense would all be important issues (and our organization
might have interest in doing business with those affected). But all that is
dwarfed by the fact of this fleet and the ship it pursues. And we disagree
with the analysis [implication?] from Harmonious Repose: it is obvious to us
that the Blight did not know of the Out of Band II until its discovery at
Harmonious Repose.
That ship is not a tool of the Blight, but it contains or is bound for
something of enormous importance to the Blight. And what might that be? Here
we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those
powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.
If the Blight has the potential for taking over all the Top in a permanent
stability, then why has this not happened before? Our guess is that the
Blight has been instantiated before (with such dire consequence that the
event marks the beginning of recorded time), but it has its own peculiar
natural enemy.
The order of events even suggests a particular scenario, one familiar
from network security. Once upon a time (very long ago), there was another
instance of the Blight. A successful defense was mounted, and all known
copies of the Blight's recipe were destroyed. Of course, on a wide net, one
can never be sure that all copies of a badness are gone. No doubt, the
defense was distributed in enormous numbers. But even if a harboring archive
were reached by such a distribution, there might be no effect if the Blight
were not currently active there.
The luckless humans of Straumli Realm chanced on such an archive, no
doubt a ruin long off the Net. They instantiated the Blight and incidentally
-- perhaps a little later -- the defense program. Somehow that Blight's
enemy escaped destruction. And the Blight has been searching for it ever
since -- in all the wrong places. In its weakness, the new instance of the
defense retreated to depths no Power would think of penetrating, whence it
could never return without outside help. Speculation on top of speculation:
we can't guess the nature of this defense, except that its retreat is a
discouraging sign. And now even that sacrifice has gone for naught, since
the Blight has seen through the deception.
The Blight's fleet is clearly an ad hoc thing, hastily thrown together
from forces that happened to be closest to the discovery. Without such
haste, the quarry might have been lost to it. Thus the chase equipment is
probably ill-suited to the depths, and its performance will degrade as the
descent progresses. However, we estimate that it will remain stronger than
any force that can reach the scene in the near future.
We may learn more after the Blight reaches the Out of Band II's
destination. If it destroys that destination immediately, we'll know that
something truly dangerous to the Blight existed there (and may exist
elsewhere, at least in recipe form). If it does not, then perhaps the Blight
was looking for something that will make it even more dangerous than before.
Ravna sat back, stared at the display for some time. Sandor Arbitration
Intelligence was one of the sharpest posters in this newsgroup.... But now
even their predictions were just different flavors of doom. And all so damn
cool they were, so analytical. She knew that Sandor was polyspecific, with
branch offices scattered through the High Beyond. But they were no Power. If
the Perversion could knock over Relay and kill Old One, then all of Sandor's
resources wouldn't help it if the enemy decided to gobble them up. Their
analysis had the tone of the pilot of a crashing ship, intent on
understanding the danger, not taking time out for terror.
Oh Pham, how I wish I could talk to you like before! She curled gently
in on herself, the way you can in zero gee. The sobs came softly, but
without hope. They had not exchanged a hundred words in the last five days.
They lived as if with guns at each others' heads. And that was the literal
truth -- she had made it so. When she and he and the Skroderiders had been
together, at least the danger had been a shared burden. Now they were split
apart and their enemies were slowly gaining on them. What good could Pham's
godshatter be against a thousand enemy ships and the Blight behind them?
She floated for a timeless while, the sobs fading into despairing
silence. And again she wondered if what she'd done could possibly be right.
She had threatened Pham's life to protect Blueshell and Greenstalk and their
kind. In doing so, she had kept secret what might be the greatest treachery
in the history of the Known Net. Can one person make such a decision? Pham
had asked her that, and she had answered yes but....
The question toyed with her every day. And every day she tried to see
some way out. She wiped her face silently. She didn't doubt what Pham had
discovered.
There were some smug posters on the Net who argued that something as
vast as the Blight was simply a tragic disaster, and not an evil. Evil, they
argued, could only have meaning on smaller scales, in the hurt that one
sophont does to another. Before RIP, the argument had seemed a frivolous
playing with words. Now she saw that it was meaningful -- and dead wrong.
The Blight had created the Riders, a marvelous and peaceful race. Their
presence on a billion worlds had been a good. And behind it all was the
potential for converting the sovereign minds of friends into monsters. When
she thought of Blueshell and Greenstalk, and the fear welled up and she knew
the poison that was there -- even though they were good people -- then she
knew she'd glimpsed evil on the Transcendent scale.
She had gotten Blueshell and Greenstalk into this mission; they had not
asked for it. They were friends and allies, and she would not harm them
because of what they could become.
Maybe it was the latest news items. Maybe it was confronting the same
impossibilities for the n'th time: Ravna gradually straightened, looking at
those last messages. So. She believed Pham about the Skroderider threat. She
also believed these two were only enemies in potential. She had thrown away
everything to save them and their kind. Maybe it was a mistake, but take
what advantage there is in it. If they are to be saved because you think
they are allies, then treat them as allies. Treat them as the friends they
are. We are all pawns together.
Ravna pushed gently toward her cabin's doorway.
The Skroderiders' cabin was just behind the command deck. Since the
debacle at RIP, the two had not left it. As she drifted down the passage
toward their door, Ravna half-expected to see Pham's handiwork lurking in
the shadows. She knew he was doing his best to "protect himself". Yet there
was nothing unusual. What will he think of my visiting them?
She announced herself. After a moment Blueshell appeared. His skrode
was wiped clean of cosmetic stripes, and the room behind him was a jumble.
He waved her in with quick jerks of his fronds.
"My lady."
"Blueshell," she nodded at him. Half the time she cursed herself for
trusting the Riders; the other half, she was mortally embarrassed for having
left them alone. "H-how is Greenstalk?"
Surprisingly, Blueshell's fronds snapped together in a smile. "You
guessed? This is the first day with her new skrode.... I will show you, if
you'd like."
He threaded around equipment that was scattered in a lattice across the
room. It was similar to the shop equipment Pham had used to build his
powered armor. And if Pham had seen it, he might have lost all self-control.
"I've worked on it every minute since ... Pham locked us in here."
Greenstalk was in the other room. Her stalk and fronds rose from a
silver pot. There were no wheels. It looked nothing like a traditional
skrode. Blueshell rolled across the ceiling and extended a frond down to his
mate. He rustled something at her, and after a moment, she replied.
"The skrodeling is very limited, no mobility, no redundant power
supplies. I copied it off a Lesser Skroderider design, a simple thing
designed by Dirokimes. It's not meant for more than sitting in one place,
facing in one direction. But it provides her with short-term memory support,
and attention focusers.... She is back with me." He fussed around her, some
fronds caressing hers, others pointing to the gadget he had built for her.
"She herself was not badly injured. Sometimes I wonder -- whatever Pham
says, maybe at the last second he could not kill her."
He spoke nervously, as though afraid of what Ravna might say.
"The first few days I was very worried. But the surgeon is good. It
gave her plenty of time to stand in strong surf. To think slowly. Since I've
added on this skrodeling, she has practiced the calisthenics of memory,
repeating what the surgeon or I say to her. With the skrodeling, she can
hold on to a new memory for almost five hundred seconds. That's usually long
enough for her natural mind to commit a thought to long-term memory."
Ravna drifted close. There were some new creases in Greenstalk's
fronds. Those would be scars healing. Her visual surfaces followed Ravna's
approach. The Rider knew she was here; her whole posture was friendly.
"Can she talk Trisk, Blueshell? Do you have a voder hooked up?"
"What?" Buzz. He was forgetful or nervous, Ravna couldn't tell which.
"Yes, yes. Just give me a minute.... There was no need before. No one wanted
to talk to us." He fiddled with something on the home-made skrode.
After a moment, "Hello, Ravna. I ... recognize you." Her fronds rustled
in time with the words.
"I know you, too. We, I am glad that you are back."
The voder voice was faint, wistful? "Yes. It's hard for me to tell. I
do want to talk, but I'm not sure ... am I'm making sense?"
Out of Greenstalk's sight, Blueshell flicked a long tendril, a gesture:
say yes.
"Yes, I understand you, Greenstalk." And Ravna resolved never again to
get angry with Greenstalk about not remembering.
"Good." Her fronds straightened and she didn't say anything more.
"See?" came Blueshell's voder voice. "I am brightly cheerful. Even now,
Greenstalk is committing this conversation to long-term memory. It goes
slowly for now, but I am improving the skrodeling. I'm sure her slowness is
mainly emotional shock." He continued to brush at Greenstalk's fronds, but
she didn't say anything more. Ravna wondered just how brightly cheerful he
could be.
Behind the Riders were a set of display windows, customized now for the
Rider outlook. "You've been following the News?" Ravna asked.
"Yes, indeed."
"I-I feel so helpless." I feel so foolish, saying that to you.
But Blueshell didn't take offense. He seemed grateful for the change of
topic, preferring the gloom at a distance. "Yes. We certainly are famous
now. Three fleets chasing us down, my lady. Ha ha."
"They don't seem to be gaining very fast."
Frond shrug. "Sir Pham has turned out to be a competent ship's master.
I'm afraid things will change as we descend. The ship's higher automation
will gradually fail. What you call 'manual control' will become very
important. OOB was designed for my race, my lady. No matter what Sir Pham
thinks of us, at bottom we can fly it better than any. So bit by bit the
others will gain -- at least those who truly understand their own ships."
It was something she hadn't guessed, certainly something she would
never have found reading the Net. Too bad it's also bad news. "S-surely Pham
must know this?"
"I think he must. But he is trapped in his own fears. What can he do?
If not for you, My Lady Ravna, he might have killed us already. Maybe when
the choice comes down to dying in the next hour against trusting us, maybe
then there will be a chance."
"By then it will be too late. Look, even if he doesn't trust -- even
though he believes the worst of Riders -- there must still be a way." And it
came to her that sometimes you don't have to change the way people think, or
even whom they may hate. "Pham wants to get to the Bottom, to recover this
Countermeasure. He thinks you may be from the Blight, and after the same
thing. But up to a point -- " up to a point he can cooperate, postpone the
showdown he imagines till perhaps it won't matter.
Even as she started to say it, Blueshell was already shouting back at
her. "I'm am not of the Blight! Greenstalk is not! The Rider race is not!"
He swept around his mate, rolled across the ceiling till his fronds rattled
right before Ravna's face.
"I'm sorry. It's just the potential -- "
"Nonsense!" His voder buzzed off scale. "We ran in to an evil few.
Every race has such, people who will kill for trade. They forced Greenstalk,
substituted data at her voder. Pham Nuwen would kill our billions for the
sake of this fantasy." He waved, inarticulate. Something she had never seen
in a Skroderider: his fronds actually changed tone, darkened.
The motion ceased, yet he said nothing more. And then Ravna heard it, a
keening that might have come from a voder. The sound was steadily growing, a
howl that made all Blueshell's sound effects friendly nonsense. It was
Greenstalk.
The scream reached a threshold just below pain, then broke into choppy
Triskweline: "It's true! Oh, by all our trading, Blueshell, it's true...."
and staticky noise came from her voder. Her fronds started shaking, random
turning that must be like a human's eyes wildly staring, like a human's
mouth mumbling hysteria.
Blueshell was already back by the wall, reaching to adjust her new
skrode. Greenstalk's fronds brushed him away, and her voder voice continued,
"I was horror struck, Blueshell. I was horror struck, struck by horror. And
it would not stop...." the voice rattled quiet for just an instant, and this
time Blueshell made no move. "I remember everything up till the last five
minutes. And everything Pham says is true, dear love. Loyal as you are, and
I have seen that loyalty now for two hundred years, you would be turned in
an instant ... just as I was." Now that the dam broke, her words came
quickly, mostly making sense. The horrors she could remember were graven
deep, and she was finally coming out of ghastly shock. "I was right behind
you, remember, Blueshell? You were deep in your trading with the tusk-legs,
so deep you did not really see. I noticed the other Riders coming toward us.
No matter: a friendly meeting, so far from home. Then one touched my Skrode.
I -- " Greenstalk hesitated. Her fronds rattled and she began again, "horror
struck, horror struck ...."
After a moment: "It was like suddenly new memories in the skrode,
Blueshell. New memories, new attitudes. But thousands of years deep. And not
mine. Instantly, instantly. I never even lost consciousness. I thought just
as clearly, I remembered all I had before."
"And when you resisted?" Ravna said softly.
"... Resisted? My Lady Ravna, I did not resist. I was theirs.... No.
Not theirs, for they were owned, too. We were things, our intelligence in
service to another's goal. Dead, and alive to see our death. I would kill
you, I would kill Pham, I would kill Blueshell. You know I tried. And when I
did, I wanted to succeed. You could not imagine, Ravna. You humans speak of
violation. You could never know...." Long pause. "That's not quite right. At
the Top of the Beyond, within the Blight itself -- perhaps there, everyone
lives as I did."
The shuddering did not subside, but her gestures were no longer
aimless. The fronds were saying something in her own language, and brushing
gently against Blueshell.
"Our whole race, dear love. Just as Pham says it."
Blueshell wilted, and Ravna felt the sort of gut-tearing she had when
they learned of Sjandra Kei. That had been her worlds, her family, her life.
Blueshell was hearing worse.
Ravna pushed a little closer, near enough to run her hand up the side
of Greenstalk's fronds. "Pham says it's the greater skrodes that are the
cause." Sabotage hidden billions of years deep.
"Yes, it is mainly the skrodes. The 'great gift' we Riders love so....
It is a design for control, but I fear we were remade for it, too. When they
touched my skrode, I was converted instantly. Instantly, everything I cared
for was meaningless. We are like smart bombs, scattered by the trillions
through space that everyone thinks is safe. We will be used sparingly. We
are the Blight's hidden weapon, especially in the Low Beyond."
Blueshell twitched, and his voice came out jerkily: "And everything
Pham claims is correct."
"No, Blueshell, not everything." Ravna remembered that last chilling
standoff with Pham Nuwen. "He has the facts, but he weighs them wrong. As
long as your skrodes are not perverted, you are the same folk that I trusted
to fly me to the Bottom."
Blueshell angled his look away from her, an angry shrug. Greenstalk's
voice came instead. "As long as the skrode has not been perverted.... But
look how easy it was done, how sudden I became the Blight's."
"Yes, but could it happen except by direct touch? Could you be
'changed' by reading the Net News?" She meant the question as ghastly
sarcasm, but poor Greenstalk took it seriously:
"Not by a News item, nor by standard protocol messages. But accepting a
transmission targeted on skrode utilities might do it."
"Then we are safe here. You, because you no longer ride a greater
skrode, Blueshell because -- "
"Because I was never touched -- but how can you know that?" His anger
was still there deep within shame, but now it was a hopeless anger, directed
at something very far away.
"No, dear love, you have not been touched. I would know."
"Yes, but why should Ravna believe you?"
Everything could be a lie, thought Ravna, ... but I believe Greenstalk.
I believe we four are the only ones in all the Beyond who can hurt the
Blight. If only Pham could see it. And that brought her back to: "You say we
will start losing our lead?"
Blueshell waved an affirmative. "As soon as we are a little lower. They
should have us in a matter of weeks."
And then it won't matter who was perverted and who was not. "I think we
should have a little chat with Pham Nuwen." Godshatter and all.
Beforehand Ravna couldn't imagine how the confrontation would turn out.
Just possibly -- if he'd lost all touch with reality -- Pham might try to
kill them when they appeared on the command deck. More likely there would be
rage and argument and threats, and they would be back to square one.
Instead ... it was almost like the old Pham, from before Harmonious
Repose. He let them enter the command deck, he made no comment when Ravna
set herself carefully between himself and the Riders. He listened without
interruption, while Ravna explained what Greenstalk had said. "These two are
safe, Pham. And without their help we'll not make it to the Bottom."
He nodded, looked away at the windows. Some showed natural starscape;
most were ultratrace displays, the closest thing to a picture of the enemies
that were closing on the OOB. His calm expression broke for just an instant,
and the Pham that loved her seemed to stare out, desperate: "And you really
believe all this, Rav? How?" Then the lid was back on, his expression
distant and neutral. "Never mind. Certainly it's true: without all of us
working together we'll never make it to Tines' World. Blueshell, I accept
your offer. Subject to cautious safeguards, we work together." Till I can
safely dispose of you, Ravna could feel the unsaid words behind his
blandness. Showdown deferred.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
They were less than eight weeks from Tines' World, both Pham and
Blueshell said. If the Zone conditions remained stable. If they were not
overtaken in the meantime.
Less than two months, after the six already voyaged. But the days were
not like before. Every one was a challenge, a standoff sometimes cloaked in
civility, sometimes flaring into threats of sudden death -- as when Pham
retrieved Blueshell's shop equipment.
Pham was living on the command deck now; when he left it, the hatch was
locked on his ID. He had destroyed, or thought he had destroyed, all other
privileged links to the ship's automation. He and Blueshell were in almost
constant collaboration ... but not like before. Every step was slow,
Blueshell explaining everything, allowed to demonstrate nothing. That's
where the arguments came closest to deadly force, when Pham must give in to
one peril or the other. For every day the pursuing fleets were a little bit
closer: two bands of killers, and what was left of Sjandra Kei. Evidently
some of the SjK Commercial Security fleet could still fight, wanted revenge
on the Alliance. Once Ravna suggested to Pham that they contact Commercial
Security, try to persuade them to attack the Blighter fleet. Pham had given
her a blank look. "Not yet, maybe not ever," he said, and turned away. In a
way his answer was a relief: Such a battle would be a suicidal long shot.
Ravna didn't want the last of her kinsfolk dying for her.
So the OOB might arrive at Tines' World before the enemy, but with what
little time to spare! Some days Ravna withdrew in tears and despair. What
brought her back was Jefri and Greenstalk. They both needed her, and for a
few weeks more she could still help.
Mr. Steel's defense plans were proceeding. The Tines were even having
some success with their wideband radio. Steel reported that Woodcarver's
main force was on its way north; there was more than one race against time.
She spent many hours with the OOB's library, devising more gifts for the
Jefri's friends. Some things -- like telescopes -- were easy, but others....
It wasn't wasted effort. Even if the Blight won, its fleet might ignore the
natives, might settle for killing the OOB and winning back the
Countermeasure.
Greenstalk was slowly improving. At first Ravna was afraid the
improvement might be in her own imagination. Ravna was spending a good part
of each day sitting with the Rider, trying to see progress in her responses.
Greenstalk was very "far away", almost like a human with stroke damage and
prosthesis. In fact, she seemed regressed from the articulate horror of her
first conversations. Maybe her recent progress was just a mirror to Ravna's
sensitivity, to the fact that Ravna was with her so much. Blueshell insisted
there was progress, but with that stubborn inflexibility of his. Two weeks,
three -- and there was no doubt: something was healing at the boundary
between Rider and skrodeling. Greenstalk consistently made sense,
consistently committed important rememberings.... Now as often as not it was
she helping Ravna. Greenstalk saw things that Ravna had missed: "Sir Pham
isn't the only one who is afraid of us Skroderiders. Blueshell is frightened
too, and it is tearing him apart. He can't admit it even to me, but he
thinks it's possible that we're infected independently of our skrodes. He
desperately wants to convince Pham that this is not true -- and so to
convince himself." She was silent for a long moment, one frond brushing
against Ravna's arm. Sea sounds surrounded them in the cabin, but ship's
automation could no longer produce surging water. "Sigh. We must pretend the
surf, dear Ravna. Somewhere it will always be, no matter what happened at
Sjandra Kei, no matter what happens here."
Blueshell was hearty gentleness around his mate, but alone with Ravna
his rage showed through: "No, no, I don't object to Sir Pham's navigation,
at least not now. Perhaps we could be a little further ahead with me
directly at the helm, but the fastest ships behind us would still be
closing. It's the other things, my lady. You know how untrustworthy our
automation is down here. Pham is hurting it further. He's written his own
security overrides. He's turning the ship's environment automation into a
system of boobytraps."
Ravna had seen evidence of this. The areas around OOB's command deck
and ship's workshop looked like military checkpoints. "You know his fears.
If this makes him feel safer -- "
"That's not the point, My Lady. I would do anything to persuade him to
accept my help. But what he's doing is deadly dangerous. Our Bottom
automation is not reliable, and he's making it actively worse. If we get
some sudden stress, the environment programs will likely have a bizarre
crash -- atmosphere dump, thermal runaway, anything."
"I -- "
"Doesn't he understand? Pham controls nothing." His voder broke into a
nonlinear squawk. "He has the ability to destroy, but that is all. He needs
my help. He was my friend. Doesn't he understand?"
Pham understood ... oh, Pham understood. He and Ravna still talked.
Their arguments were the hardest thing in her life. And sometimes they
didn't exactly argue; sometimes it was almost like rational discussion:
"I haven't been taken over, Ravna. Not like the Blight takes over
Riders, anyway. I still have charge of my soul." He turned away from the
console and flashed a wan smile in her direction, acknowledging the flaw in
such self-conviction. And from things like that smile, Ravna was convinced
that Pham Nuwen still lived, and sometimes spoke.
"What about the godshatter state? I see you for hours, just staring at
the tracking display, or mucking around in the library and the News,"
scanning faster than any human could consciously read.
Pham shrugged. "It's studying the ships that are chasing us, trying to
figure out just what belongs to whom, just what capabilities each might
have. I don't know the details. Self-awareness is on vacation then," when
all Pham's mind was turned into a processor for whatever programs Old One
had downloaded. A few hours of fugue state might yield an instant of
Power-grade thought -- and even that he didn't consciously remember. "But I
know this. Whatever the godshatter is, it's a very narrow thing. It's not
alive; in some ways it may not even be very smart. For everyday matters like
ship piloting, there's just good old Pham Nuwen."
"... there's the rest of us, Pham. Blueshell would like to help," Ravna
spoke softly. This was the place where Pham would close into icy silence --
or blow up in rage. This day, he just cocked his head. "Ravna, Ravna. I know
I need him.... And, and I'm glad I need him. That I don't have to kill him."
Yet. Pham's lips quivered for a second, and she thought he might start
crying.
"The godshatter can't know Blueshell -- "
"Not the godshatter. It's not making me act this way -- I'm doing what
any person should do when the stakes are this high." The words were spoken
without anger. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe she could reason:
"Blueshell and Greenstalk are loyal, Pham. Except at Harmonious Repose
-- "
Pham sighed, "Yeah. I've thought about that a lot. They came to Relay
from Straumli Realm. They got Vrinimi looking for the refugee ship. That
smells of setup, but probably unknowing -- maybe even a setup by something
opposing the Blight. In any case they were innocent then, else the Blight
would have known about Tines world right from the beginning. The Blight knew
nothing till RIP, till Greenstalk was converted. And I know Blueshell was
loyal even then. He knew things about my armor -- the remotes, for instance
-- that he could have warned the others about."
Hope came as a surprise to Ravna. He really had thought things out, and
-- "It's just the skrodes, Pham. They're traps waiting to be sprung. But
we're isolated here, and you destroyed the one that Greenstalk -- "
Pham was shaking his head. "It's more than the skrodes. The Blight had
its hand in Rider design, too, at least to some degree. I can't imagine the
takeover of Greenstalk's being so smooth otherwise."
"Y-yes. A risk. A very small risk compared to -- "
Pham didn't move, but something in him seemed to draw away from her,
denying the support she could offer. "A small risk? We don't know. The
stakes are so high. I'm walking a tightrope. If I don't use Blueshell now,
we'll be shot out of space by the Blighter fleet. If I let him do too much,
if I trust him, then he or some part of him could betray us. All I have is
the godshatter, and a bunch of memories that ... that may be the biggest
fakes of all." These last words were nearly inaudible. He looked up at her,
a look that was both cold and terribly lost. "But I'm going to use what I
have, Rav, and whatever it is I am. Somehow I'm going to get us to Tines'
World. Somehow I'm going to get Old One's godshatter to whatever is there."
It was another three weeks before Blueshell's predictions came true.
The OOB had seemed a sturdy beast up in the Middle Beyond; even its
damaged ultradrive had failed gracefully. Now the ship was leaking bugs in
all directions. Much of it had nothing to do with Pham's meddling. Without
those final consistency checks, none of the OOB's Bottom automation was
really trustworthy. But its failures were compounded by Pham's desperate
security hacks.
The ship's library had source code for generic Bottom automation. Pham
spent several days revising it for the OOB. All four of them were on the
command deck during the installation, Blueshell trying to help, Pham
suspiciously examining every suggestion. Thirty minutes into the
installation, there were muffled banging noises down the main corridor.
Ravna might have ignored them, except that she'd never heard the like aboard
the OOB.
Pham and the Riders reacted with near panic; spacers don't like
unexplained bumps in the night. Blueshell raced to the hatch, floated
fronds-first through the hole. "I see nothing, Sir Pham."
Pham was paging quickly through the diagnostic displays, mixed format
things partly from the new setup. "I've got some warning lights here, but --
"
Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking
fast: "I don't believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a
detailed report. Something is terribly wrong."
Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five
seconds passed. "You're right. Status is just looping through stale
reports." He began grabbing views from cameras all over the OOB's interior.
Barely half of them reported, but what they showed...
The ship's water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the
banging sound -- tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had
gone bizarre, and --
-- the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The
beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction,
the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera
in the workshop itself. The place was on fire.
Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an
instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself
down and grimly began trying to put out the fire.
For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham
quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. "Interlocking
failures," he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. "The firesnuff
automation is down.... I can't dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers
have melted everything shut."
Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters, but they had
always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how
could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even
if the crew couldn't dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on
the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were
sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for
the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into
still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix, and
previously burned areas blazed up.
"It's still got ventilation, Sir Pham."
"I know. I can't shut it. The vents must be melted open."
"It's as likely software." Blueshell was silent for a second. "Try this
-- " the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low-level workaround.
But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console.
In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the
construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had
spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna
remembered he was working on reactive armor now .... There would be
oxidizers there. "Pham, is the armor sealed -- "
The fire was sixty meters aft and behind a dozen bulkheads. The
explosion came as a distant thump, almost innocent. But in the camera view,
the armor dismembered itself, and the fire blazed triumphant.
Seconds later, Pham got Blueshell's suggestion working, and the
workshop's vents closed. The fire in the wrecked armor continued for another
half hour, but did not spread beyond the shop.
It took two days to clean up, to estimate the damage, and have some
confidence that no new disaster was on the way. Most of the workshop was
destroyed. They would have no armor on Tines world. Pham salvaged one of the
beamers that had been guarding the entrance to the shop. Disaster was
scattered all across the ship, the classic random ruin of interlocking
failures: They had lost fifty percent of their water. The ship's landing
boat had lost its higher automation.
OOB's rocket drive was massively degraded. That was unimportant here in
interstellar space, but their final velocity matching would be done at only
0.4 gees. Thank goodness the agrav worked; they would have no trouble
maneuvering in steep gravitational wells -- that is, landing on Tines world.
Ravna knew how close they were to losing the ship, but she watched Pham
with even greater dread. She was so afraid that he would take this as final
evidence of Rider treachery, that this would drive him over the edge.
Strangely, almost the opposite happened. His pain and devastation were
obvious, but he didn't lash out, just doggedly went about gathering up the
pieces. He was talking to Blueshell more now, not letting him modify the
automation, but cautiously accepting more of his advice. Together they
restored the ship to something like its pre-fire state.
She asked Pham about it. "No change of heart," he finally said. "I had
to balance the risks, and I messed up.... And maybe there is no balance.
Maybe the Blight will win."
The godshatter had bet too much on Pham's doing it all himself. Now it
was turning down the paranoia a little.
Seven weeks out from Harmonious Repose, less than one week from
whatever waited at Tines' world, Pham went into a multiday fugue. Before he
had been busy, a futile attempt to run handmade checks on all the automation
they might need at Tines' World. Now -- Ravna couldn't even get him to eat:
The nav display showed the three fleets as identified by the News and
Pham's intuition: the Blight's agents, the Alliance for the Defense, and
what was left of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. Deadly monsters and the
remains of a victim. The Alliance still proclaimed itself with regular
bulletins on the News. SjK Commercial Security had posted a few terse
refutations, but was mostly silent; they were unused to propaganda, or -- as
likely -- uninterested in it. A private revenge was all that remained to
Commercial Security. And the Blighter fleet? The News hadn't heard anything
from them. Piecing together departures and lost ships, War Trackers
Newsgroup concluded they were a wildly ad hoc assembly, whatever the Blight
had controlled down here at the time of the RIP debacle. Ravna knew that the
War Trackers analysis was wrong about one thing: The Blighter fleet was not
silent. Thirty times over the last weeks, they had sent messages at the OOB
... in skrode maintenance format. Pham had had the ship reject the messages
unread -- and then worried about whether the order was really followed.
After all, the OOB was of Rider design.
But now the torment in him was submerged. Pham sat for hours, staring
at the display. Soon Sjandra Kei would close with the Alliance fleet. At
least one set of villains would pay. But the Blighter fleet and at least
part of the Alliance would survive.... Maybe this fugue was just godshatter
getting desperate.
Three days passed; Pham snapped out of it. Except for the new thinness
in his face, he seemed more normal than he had in weeks. He asked Ravna to
bring the Riders up to the bridge.
Pham waved at the ultradrive traces that floated in the window. The
three fleets were spread through a rough cylinder, five light-years deep and
three across. The display captured only the heart of that volume, where the
fastest of the pursuers had clustered. The current position of each ship was
a fleck of light trailing an unending stream of fainter lights -- the
ultradrive trace left by that vehicle's drive. "I've used red, blue, and
green to mark my best guess as to the fleet affiliation of each trace." The
fastest ships were collected in a blob so dense that it looked white at this
scale, but with colored streamers diverging behind. There were other tags,
annotations he had set but which he admitted once to Ravna he didn't
understand.
"The front edge of that mob -- the fastest of the fast -- is still
gaining."
Blueshell said hesitantly. "We might get a little more speed if you
would grant me direct control. Not much, but -- "
Pham's response was civil at least. "No, I'm thinking of something
else, something Ravna suggested a while back. It's always been a possibility
and ... I ... think the time may have come for it."
Ravna moved closer to the display, stared at the green traces. Their
distribution was in near agreement with what the News claimed to be the
remnants of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. All that's left of my people.
"They've been trying to engage with the Alliance for a hundred hours now."
Pham's glance touched hers. "Yeah," he said softly. "Poor bastards.
They're literally the fleet from Port Despair. If I were them, I'd -- " His
expression smoothed over again. "Any idea how well-armed they are?" That was
surely a rhetorical question, but it put the topic on the table.
"War Trackers thinks that Sjandra Kei had been expecting something
unpleasant ever since the Alliance started talking 'death to vermin'.
Commercial Security was providing deep space defense. Their fleet is
converted freighters armed with locally-designed weapons. War Trackers
claims they weren't really a match for what the other side could field, if
the Alliance was willing to take some heavy casualties. Trouble is, Sjandra
Kei never expected the planet-smasher attack. So when the Alliance fleet
showed up, ours moved out to meet it -- "
"-- and meantime the KE bombs were coming straight in to the heart
spaces of Sjandra Kei."
Into my heart spaces. "Yes. The Alliance must have been running those
bombs for weeks."
Pham Nuwen laughed shortly. "If I were shipping with the Alliance
fleet, I'd be a bit nervous now. They're down in numbers, and those retread
freighters seem about as fast as anything here.... I'll bet every pilot out
of Sjandra Kei is dead set on revenge." The emotion faded. "Hmm. There's no
way they could kill all the Alliance ships or all the Blight's, much less
all of both. It would be pointless to ...
His gaze abruptly focused on her. "So if we leave things as they are,
the Sjandra Kei fleet will eventually match position with the Alliance and
try to blow them out of existence."
Ravna just nodded. "In twelve hours or so, they say."
"And then all that will be left is the Blight's own fleet on our tail.
But if we could talk your people into fighting the right enemies..."
It was Ravna's nightmare scheme. All that was left of Sjandra Kei dying
to save the OOB ... trying to save them. There was little chance the Sjandra
Kei fleet could destroy all the Blighter ships. But they're here to fight.
Why not a vengeance that means something? That was the nightmare's message.
Now somehow it fit godshatter's plans. "There are problems. They don't know
what we're doing or the purpose of the third fleet. Anything we shout back
to them will be overheard." Ultrawave was directional, but most of their
pursuers were closely mingled.
Pham nodded. "Somehow we have to talk to them, and them alone. Somehow
we have to persuade them to fight." Faint smile. "And I think we may have
just the ... equipment ... to do all that. Blueshell: Remember that night on
the High Docks. You told us about your 'rotted cargo' from Sjandra Kei?"
"Indeed, Sir Pham. We carried one third of a cipher generated by SjK
Commercial Security for their long-range communications. It's still in the
ship's safe, though worthless without the other two thirds." Gram for gram,
crypto materials were about the most valuable thing shipped between the
stars -- and once compromised, about the most valueless. Somewhere in Out of
Band's cargo files there was an SjK one-time communications pad. Part of a
pad.
"Worthless? Maybe not. Even one third would provide us with secure
communications."
Blueshell dithered. "I must not mislead you. No competent customer
would accept such. Certainly, it provides secure communication, but the
other side has no verification that you are who you claim."
Pham's glance slid sideways, toward Ravna. There was that smile again.
"If they'll listen, I think we can convince them.... The hard part is, I
only want one of them to hear us." Pham explained what he had in mind. The
Riders' rustled faintly behind Pham's words. After all their time together,
Ravna could almost get some sense of their talk -- or maybe she just
understood their personalities. As usual, Blueshell was worrying about how
impossible the idea was, and Greenstalk was urging him to listen.
But when Pham finished, the large rider did not launch into objections.
"Across seventy light-years, ultrawave comm between ships is practical, even
without our antenna swarm; we could even have live video. But you are right,
the beam spread would include all the ships in the central cluster of
fleets. If we could reliably identify an outlying vessel as belonging to
Sjandra Kei, then what you are asking might be done; that ship could use
internal fleet codes to relay to the others. But in honesty I must warn
you," continued Blueshell, brushing back Greenstalk's gentle remonstrance,
"professional communications folk would not honor your request for talk --
would probably not even recognize it as such."
"Silly." Greenstalk finally spoke, her voder-voice gentle but clear.
"You always say things like that -- except when we are talking to paying
customers."
"Brap. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but
I fear.... I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I
want you to handle this."
Pham Nuwen smiled back. "My thought exactly."
"The Aniara Fleet." That's what some of the crews of Commercial
Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth,
older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the
asteroids of Earth's solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship
launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent
civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and
then over the following years -- as their ship fell out and out into the
endless dark -- died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing.
The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known
across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of
Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.
But we will not play it to the end. Group Captain Kjet Svensndot stared
into the tracking display. This time the death of civilization had been a
murder, and the murderers were almost within vengeance's reach. For days,
fleet HQ had been maneuvering them to close with the Alliance. The display
showed that success was very, very near. The majority of Alliance and
Sjandra Kei ships were bound in a glowing ball of drive traces -- which also
included the third, silent fleet. From that display you might think that
battle was already possible. In fact, opposing ships were passing through
almost the same space -- sometimes less than a billion kilometers apart --
but still separated by milliseconds of time. All the vessels were on
ultradrive, jumping perhaps a dozen times a second. And even here at the
Bottom of the Beyond, that came to a measurable fraction of a light-year on
each jump. To fight an uncooperative enemy meant matching their jumps
perfectly and flooding the common space with weapon drones.
Group Captain Svensndot changed the display to show ships that had
exactly matched their pace with the Alliance. Almost a third of the fleet
was in synch now. Another few hours and.... "Damnation!" He slapped his
display board, sending it spinning across the deck.
His first officer retrieved the display, sent it sailing back. "Is this
a new damnation, or the usual?" Tirolle asked.
"It was the usual. Sorry." And he really was. Tirolle and Glimfrelle
had their own problems. No doubt there were still pockets of humanity in the
Beyond, hidden from the Alliance. But of the Dirokimes, there might be no
more than what was on Commercial Security's fleet. Except for adventurous
souls like Tirolle and Glimfrelle, all that was left of their kind had been
in the dream terranes at Sjandra Kei.
Kjet Svensndot had started with Commercial Security twenty-five years
before, back when the company had just been a small fleet of rentacops. He
had spent thousands of hours learning to be the very best combat pilot in
the organization. Only twice had he ever been in a shootout. Some might have
regretted that. Svensndot and his superiors took it as the reward for being
the best. His competence had won him the best fighting equipment in
Commercial Security's fleet, culminating with the ship he commanded now. The
Ølvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra
Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises.
Ølvira was not a rebuilt freighter, but a fighting machine from the
keel out. The ship was equipped with the smartest processors, the smartest
ultra drive, that could operate at Sjandra Kei's altitude in the Beyond. It
needed only a three-person crew -- and combat could be managed by the pilot
alone with his AI associates. Its holds contained more than ten thousand
seeker bombs, each smarter than the average freighter's entire drive unit.
Quite a reward for twenty-five years of solid performance. They even let
Svensndot name his new ship.
And now.... Well, the true Ølvira was surely dead. Along with
billions of others they had been hired to protect, she had been at Herte, in
the inner system. Glow bombs leave no survivors.
And his beautiful ship with the same name, it had been a half
light-year out-system, seeking enemies that weren't there. In any honest
battle, Kjet Svensndot and this Ølvira could have done very well.
Instead they were chasing down into the Bottom of the Beyond. Every
light-year took them further from the regions Ølvira was built for.
Every light-year the processors worked a bit more slowly (or not at all).
Down here the converted freighters were almost an optimum design. Clumsy and
stupid, with crews of dozens, but they kept on working. Already
Ølvira was lagging five light-years behind them. It was the
freighters that would make the attack on the Alliance fleet. And once again
Kjet would stand powerless while his friends died.
For the hundredth time, Svensndot glared at the trace display and
contemplated mutiny. There were Alliance stragglers too -- "high
performance" vehicles left behind the central pack. But his orders were to
maintain position, to be a tactical coordinator for the fleet's swifter
combatants. Well, he would do as he was hired ... this one last time. But
when the battle was done, when the fleet was dead, with as many of the
Alliance that they could take with them -- then he would think of his own
revenge. Some of that depended on Tirolle and Glimfrelle. Could he persuade
them to leave the remnants of the Alliance fleet and ascend to the Middle
Beyond, up where the Ølvira was the best of her kind? There was good
evidence now about which star systems were behind the "Alliance for the
Defense". The murderers were boasting to the news. Apparently they thought
that would bring them new support. It might also bring them visitors like
Ølvira. The bombs in her belly could destroy worlds, though not as
swiftly sure as what had been used on Sjandra Kei. And even now Svensndot's
mind shrank from that sort of revenge. No. They would choose their targets
carefully: ships coming to form new Alliance fleets, underprotected convoys.
Ølvira might last a long time if he always struck from ambush and
never left survivors. He stared and stared at the display, and ignored the
wetness that floated at the corners of his eyes. All his life, he had lived
by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge.... And now
revenge was all that life had left for him.
"I'm getting something peculiar, Kjet." Glimfrelle was monitoring
signals this watch. It was the sort of thing that should have been totally
automated -- and had been in Ølvira's natural environment, but which
was now a boring and exhausting enterprise.
"What? More Net lies?" said Tirolle.
"No. This is on the bearing of that bottom-lugger everyone is chasing.
It can't be anyone else."
Svensndot's eyebrows rose. He turned on the mystery with enormous,
scarcely realized, pleasure. "Characteristics?"
"Ship's signal processor says it's probably a narrow beam. We are its
only likely target. The signal is strong and the bandwidth is at least
enough to support flat video. If our snarfling DSP was working right, I'd
know -- " 'Frelle sang a little song that was impatient humming among his
kind. "-- Iiae! It's encrypted, but at a high layer. This stuff is syntax 45
video. In fact, it claims to be using one third of a cipher the Company made
a year back." For an instant, Svensndot thought 'Frelle was claiming the
message itself was smart; that should be absolutely impossible here at the
Bottom. The second officer must have caught his look: "Just sloppy language,
Boss. I read this out of the frame format...." Something flashed on his
display. "Okay, here's the story on the cipher: the Company made it and its
peers to cover shipping security." Back before the Alliance, that had been
the highest crypto level in the organization. "This is the third that never
got delivered. The whole was assumed compromised, but miracle of miracles,
we still have a copy." Both 'Frelle and 'Rolle were looking at Svensndot
expectantly, their eyes large and dark. Standard policy -- standard orders
-- were that transmissions on compromised keys were to be ignored. If the
Company's signals people had been doing a proper job, the rotted cipher
wouldn't even have been aboard and the policy would have enforced itself.
"Decrypt the thing," Svensndot said shortly. The last weeks had
demonstrated that his company was a dismal failure when it came to military
intelligence and signals. They might as well get some benefit from that
incompetence.
"Yes sir!" Glimfrelle tapped a single key. Somewhere inside
Ølvira's signal processor, a long segment of "random" noise was
broken into frames and laid precisely down on the "random" noise in the data
frames incoming. There was a perceptible pause (damn the Bottom) and then
the comm window lit with a flat video picture.
"-- fourth repetition of this message." The words were Samnorsk, and a
dialect of pure Herte i Sjandra. The speaker was ... for a heartstopping
instant he was seeing Ølvira again, alive. He exhaled slowly, trying
to relax. Black-haired, slim, violet-eyed -- just like Ølvira. And
just like a million other women of Sjandra Kei. The resemblance was there,
but so vague he would never have been taken by it before. For an instant he
imagined a universe beyond their lost fleet, and goals beyond vengeance.
Then he forced his attention back to business, to seeing everything he could
in the images in the window.
The woman was saying, "We'll repeat three more times. If by then you
have still not responded, we will attempt a different target." She pushed
back from the camera pickup, giving them a view of the room behind her. It
was low-ceilinged, deep. An ultradrive trace display dominated the
background, but Svensndot paid it little attention. There were two
Skroderiders in the background. One wore stripes on its skrode that meant a
trade history with Sjandra Kei. The other must be a lesser Rider; its skrode
was small and wheelless. The pickup turned, centered on the fourth figure.
Human? Probably, but of no Nyjoran heritage. In another time, his appearance
would have been big news across all human civilizations in the Beyond. Now
the point only registered on Svensndot's mind as another cause for
suspicion.
The woman continued, "You can see that we are human and Rider. We are
the entire crew of the Out of Band II. We are not part of the Alliance for
the Defense nor agents of the Blight.... But we are the reason their fleets
are down here. If you can read this, we're betting that you are of Sjandra
Kei. We must talk. Please reply using the tail of the pad that is decrypting
this message." The picture jigged and the woman's face was back in the
foreground. "This is the fifth repetition of this message," she said. "We'll
repeat two more -- "
Glimfrelle cut the audio. "If she means it, we have about one hundred
seconds. What next, Captain?"
Suddenly the Ølvira was not an irrelevant straggler. "We talk,"
said Svensndot.
Response and counter-response took a matter of seconds. After that ...
five minutes of conversation with Ravna Bergsndot was enough to convince
Kjet that what she had to say must be heard by Fleet Central. His ship would
be a mere relay, but at least he had something very important to pass on.
Fleet Central refused the full video link coming from the Out of Band.
Someone on the flagship was dead set on following standard procedures -- and
using compromised cipher keys stuck in their craw. Even Kjet had to settle
for a combat link: The screen showed a color image with high resolution.
Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation....
Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they
looked several years out of style. Ølvira was matching old video with
the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less
that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
God only knew what they were seeing as the evocation of Pham Nuwen. The
smokey-skinned human had already explained his point several times. He was
having as little success as Ravna Bergsndot before him. His cool manner had
gradually deserted him. Desperation was beginning to show on his face. "--
and I'm telling you, they are both your enemies. Sure, Alliance for the
Defense destroyed Sjandra Kei, but the Blight is responsible for the
situation that made that possible."
The half-cartoonish figure of Jan Skrits glanced at Owner Limmende.
Lord, evocations are crappy at the Bottom, Svensndot thought to himself.
When Skrits spoke, his voice didn't even match his lip movements: "We do
read Threats, Mr. Nuwen. The threat of the Blight was used as an excuse to
destroy our worlds. We will not go on random killing sprees, especially
against an organization that is clearly the enemy of our enemy.... Or are
you claiming the Blight is secretly in league with the Alliance for the
Defense?"
Pham gave an angry shrug. "No. I have no idea how the Blight regards
the Alliance. But you should know the evil the Blight has been up to, things
on a scale far grander than this 'Alliance'."
"Ah yes. That's what it says on the Net, Mr. Nuwen. But those events
are thousands of light-years away. They've been through multiple hops and
unknown interpretations before they ever arrive in the Middle Beyond -- even
if the stories were true to begin with. It is not called the Net of a
Million Lies for nothing."
The stranger's face darkened. He said something loud and angry, in a
language that was totally unlike anything from Nyjora. The tones jumped up
and down, almost like Dirokime twittering. He calmed himself with a visible
effort, but when he continued his Samnorsk was even more heavily accented
than before. "Yes. But I'm telling you. I was at the Fall of Relay. The
Blight is more than the worst horrors you've heard. The murder of Sjandra
Kei was its smallest side-effect. Will you help us against the Blighter
fleet?"
Owner Limmende pushed her massive form back into her chair webbing. She
looked at her chief of staff and the two talked inaudibly. Kjet's gaze
drifted beyond them; the flagship's command deck extended a dozen meters
behind Limmende. Underofficers moved quietly about, some watching the
conversation. The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it
was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people
Kjet knew had been transferred before the fall of Sjandra Kei. The
processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from
Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background
and evoking the image shown. No more evocations after this, Svensndot
promised himself, at least while we're down here.
Owner Limmende looked back at the camera. "Forgive a paranoid old cop,
but I think it's possible that you might be of the Blight." Limmende raised
her hand as if to ward off interruptions, but the redhead just gaped in
surprise. "If we believe you, then we must accept that there is something
useful and dangerous on the star system we're all heading towards.
Furthermore, we must accept that both you and the 'Blighter fleet' are
peculiarly qualified to take advantage of this prize. If we fight them as
you ask, there will likely be few of us alive afterwards. You alone will
have the prize. We fear what you might turn out to be."
For a long moment, Pham Nuwen was silent. The wildness slowly left his
face. "You have a point, Owner Limmende. And a dilemma. Is there any way
out?"
"Skrits and I have been discussing it. No matter what we do, both we
and you must take big chances.... It's only the alternatives that are more
terrible. We are willing to accept your guidance in battle, if you will
first maneuver your ship back toward us and allow us to board."
"Give up the lead in this chase, you mean?"
Limmende nodded.
Pham's mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. He seemed to be
having trouble breathing. Ravna said, "Then if you don't succeed, everything
is lost. At least now, we have a sixty-hour lead. That might be enough to
get word out about this artifact, even if the Blighter fleet survives."
Skrits' face twisted, a cartoonish smile. "You can't have it both ways.
You want us to risk everything on your assurance of competence. We are
willing to die for this, but not to be pawns in a game of monsters." The
last words had a strange tone, the angry delivery shading away. There had
been no motion in the picture from Fleet Central except for ill-synched lip
movement. Glimfrelle caught Svensndot's eye and pointed at the failure
lights on his comm panel.
Skrits' voice continued, "And Group Captain Svensndot: It's imperative
that all further communications with this unknown vessel be channeled -- "
the image froze, and there were no more words.
Ravna: "What happened?"
Glimfrelle made a twitter-snort. "We're losing the link with Fleet
Central. Our effective bandwidth is down to twenty bits per second, and
dropping. Skrits' last transmission was scarcely a hundred bits," padded out
to apparent legibility by the Ølvira's software.
Kjet waved angrily at the screen. "Cut the damn thing off." At least he
wouldn't have to put up with the evocation any further. And he didn't want
to hear what he guessed was Jan Skrits' last order.
Tirolle said, "Hei, why not leave it on? We might not notice much
difference." Glimfrelle's snickered at his brother's wit, but his
longfingers danced across the comm panel, and the display became a window on
the stars. The two Dirokimes had a thing about bureaucrats.
Svensndot ignored them and looked at the remaining comm window. The
channel to Pham and Ravna was wideband video with scarcely any
interpretation; there would be no perverse subtleties if it went down.
"Sorry about that. The last few days, we've had a lot of problems with comm.
Apparently, this Zone storm is the worst in centuries." In fact, it was
getting still worse: the starboard ultratrace displays were showing random
garbage.
"You've lost contact with your command?" asked Ravna.
"For the moment...." He glanced at Pham. The redhead's eyes were still
a bit glassy. "Look ... I'm even more sorry about how things have turned
out, but Limmende and Skrits are bright people. You can see their point of
view."
"Strange," interrupted Pham. "The pictures were strange," his tone was
drifty.
"You mean our relay from Fleet Central?" Svensndot explained about the
narrow bandwidth and the crummy performance of his ship's processors down
here at the Bottom.
"And so their picture of us must have been equally bad.... I wonder
what they thought I was?"
"Unh ..." Good question. Consider Pham Nuwen: bristly red hair,
smoke-gray skin, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent, like as
not the display at Fleet Central would show something quite different from
the human Kjet saw. "... wait a minute. That's not how evocations work. I'm
sure they got a pretty clear view of you. See, a few high-resolution pics
would get sent at the beginning of the session. Then those would be used as
the base for the animation."
Pham stared back lumpishly, almost as though he didn't buy it and was
daring Kjet to think things through. Well damn it, the explanation was
correct; there was no doubt that Limmende and Skrits had seen the redhead as
a human. Yet there was something here that bothered Kjet ... Limmende and
Skrits had both looked out of date.
"Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us
any sync pictures?"
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise.
"No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do
with old ad animation." He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered
rapidly. "Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug."
But Glimfrelle didn't sound very confident of the assertion.
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. "Look. The
channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one- time schemes I
trust more than what we're talking with now. I can't believe it was a
masquerade." But nausea was creeping up Kjet's guts. This was like the first
minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they
had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to
protect would be murdered. "Hei, we'll contact other vessels. We'll verify
Central's location -- "
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. "Maybe it wasn't a masquerade." Before he
could say more, one of the Riders -- the one with the greater skrode -- was
shouting at them. It rolled across the room's apparent ceiling, pushing the
humans aside to get close to the camera. "I have a question!" The voder
speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature's tendrils rattled
dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard.
"My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet's command vessel?"
"Why do you -- "
"Answer the question!"
"How should I know?" Kjet tried to think. "Tirolle. You have friends on
Skrits' staff. Are there any Riders aboard?"
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, "A'a'a'a. Yes. Emergency hires -- rescues
actually -- right after the battle."
"That's the best we can do, friend."
The Skroderider trembled, unspeaking. Then its tendrils seemed to wilt.
"Thank you," it said softly. It rolled back and out of camera range.
Pham Nuwen disappeared from view. Ravna looked wildly around, "Wait
please!" she said to the camera, and Kjet was looking at the abandoned
command deck of the Out of Band. At the limit of the pickup's hearing came
sounds of mumbled conversation, voder and human. Then she was back.
"What was that all about?" Svensndot to Ravna.
"N-Nothing any of us can help anymore.... Captain Svensndot, it looks
to me like your fleet is no longer run by the people you think."
"Maybe." Probably. "It's something I've got to think about."
She nodded. For a moment they looked at each other, unspeaking. So
strange, so far from home and after all the heartbreak ... to see someone so
familiar. "You were truly at Relay?" the question sounded stupid in his
ears. Yet in a way she was a bridge from what he knew and trusted to the
deadly weirdness of the present situation.
Ravna Bergsndot nodded. "Yes ... and it was like everything you've
read. We even had direct contact with a Power.... And yet it was not enough,
Group Captain. The Blight destroyed it all. That part of the News is no
lie."
Tirolle pushed back from his nav station. "Then how can anything you do
down here hurt the Blight?" The words were blunt, but 'Rolle's eyes were
wide and serious. In fact, he was pleading for some sense behind all the
death. Dirokimes had not been the greatest part of the Sjandra Kei
civilization, but they had been by far its oldest member race. A million
years ago they had burst out of the Slow Zone, colonizing the three systems
that humans one day would call Sjandra Kei. Long before the humans arrived,
they were a race of inward dreamers. They protected their star systems with
ancient automation and friendly younger races. Another half million years
and their race might be gone from the Beyond, extinct or evolved into
something else. It was a common pattern, something like death and old age,
but gentler.
There is a common misconception about such senescent races, that their
members are senescent too. In any large population, there will be variation.
There will always be those who want to see the outside world and play there
for a while. Humankind had gotten on very well with the likes of Glimfrelle
and Tirolle.
And Bergsndot seemed to understand. "Have any of you heard of
godshatter?"
Kjet said, "No," then noticed that both Dirokimes had started. They
whistled at each other for several seconds in some kind of surprise dialect.
"Yes," 'Rolle spoke at last in Samnorsk, his voice as close to awe as Kjet
had ever heard. "You know we Dirokimes have been in the Beyond for a long
time. We've sent many colonies into the Transcend; some became Powers....
And once ... Something came back. It wasn't a Power of course. In fact, it
was more like a mind- crippled Dirokime. But it knew things and did things
that made great changes for us."
"Fentrollar?" Kjet asked wonderingly, suddenly recognizing the story.
It had happened one hundred thousand years before humankind arrived at
Sjandra Kei, yet it was a central contradiction of the Dirokime terranes.
"Yes." Tirolle said. "Even now people don't agree if Fentrollar was a
gift or a curse, but he founded the dream habitats and the Old Religion."
Ravna nodded, "That's the case most familiar to us of Sjandra Kei.
Maybe it's not a happy example considering all its effects...." and she told
them about the fall of Relay, what had happened to Old One, and what had
become of Pham Nuwen. The Dirokimes side chat dwindled to zero and they were
very still.
Finally Kjet said, "So what does Nu-- " he stumbled over the name, as
strange as everything else about this fellow, "Nuwen know about the thing
you seek at the Bottom? What can he do with it?"
"I-I don't know, Group Captain. Pham Nuwen himself doesn't know. A
little bit at a time, the insight comes. I believe, because I was there for
some of it ... but I don't know how to make you believe." She drew a
shuddering breath. Kjet suddenly guessed what a strange, tortured place the
Out of Band must be. Somehow that made the story more credible. Anything
that really could destroy the Blight would be unwholesomely weird. Kjet
wondered how he would do, locked up with such a thing.
"My Lady Ravna," he said, the words stilted and formal. After all, I'm
suggesting treason. "I, uh, I've got a number of friends in the Commercial
Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you've raised, and ..." say
it! "it's possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ."
"Thank you, sir. Thank you."
Glimfrelle broke the silence. "We're getting a poor signal on the Out
of Band's channel now."
Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like
random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.
"Looks like we won't be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot."
"Yes. We're losing signal.... Group Captain, if none of this works, if
you can't fight for us.... Your people are all that's left of Sjandra Kei.
It's been good to see you and the Dirokimes.... after so long to see
familiar faces, people I really understand. I -- " as she spoke, her image
square-blurred into low-frequency components.
"Huui!" said Glimfrelle. "Bandwidth just dropped through the floor."
There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given
communications problems, the ship's processors just switched to low-rate
coding.
"Hello, Out of Band. We've got problems on this channel now. Suggest we
sign off."
The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:
Yes. It is more than a communicati
Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. "Zip. Zero," he said. "No detectable
signal."
Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. "This is a lot more than a
communications problem. Our computers haven't been able to commit on an
ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds." They had been doing five jumps
a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now....
Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. "Hei -- so welcome to the Slow
Zone."
The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the Out of
Band II. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of
the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of
cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn't look much
different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The
stars still shone through the windows (only now, it might be a very long
time before any of them moved).
It was on the OOB's other displays that the change was most obvious.
The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed
time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from
the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in
Triskweline was repeating over and over, "Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute...."
"Turn that off!" Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She
was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural)
panic. "Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all
it can do is spout warnings after the fact!"
Greenstalk drifted closer, "tiptoeing" off the ceiling with her
tendrils. "Even bottom luggers can't avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna"
Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared.
Blueshell: "Even a huge Zone storm doesn't normally extend more than a
few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary.
What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about
in archives."
Small consolation. "We knew something like this could happen," Pham
said. "Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks." For a
change, he didn't seem too upset.
"Yes," she said. "We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness."
We are trapped. "Where's the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years?
Fifty?" The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond
the ship's walls was no longer a friendly, steadying thing. Surrounded by
unending nothingness, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of
light ... entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for
nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued.
Pham's hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in ... days? "We can
still make it to the Tines' world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are
not trapped. Hell, the ramscoop on this buggy is better than anything I ever
had in the Qeng Ho. And I thought I was the freest man in the universe back
then."
Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of
the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham's memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath
that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at
least temporarily. He could be human.
"What's so funny?" said Pham.
She shook her head. "All of us. Never mind." She took a couple of slow
breaths. "Okay. I think I can make rational conversation. So the Zone has
surged. Something that normally takes a thousand years -- even in a storm --
to move a single light-year, has suddenly shifted two hundred. Hunh!
There'll be people a million years from now reading about this in the
archives. I'm not sure I want the honor.... We knew there was a storm, but I
never expected to be drowned," buried light-years deep beneath the sea.
"The sea storm analogy is not perfect," said Blueshell. The Skroderider
was still on the far side of the deck, where he had retreated after
questioning the Sjandra Kei captain. He still looked upset, though he was
back to sounding precise and picky. Blueshell was studying a nav display,
evidently a recording from right before the surge. He dumped the picture to
a display flat and rolled slowly across the ceiling toward them.
Greenstalk's fronds brushed him gently as he passed.
He sailed the display flat into Ravna's hands, and continued in a
lecturing tone. "Even in a sea storm, the water's surface is never as roiled
as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as
a fractal surface with dimension close to three.... Like foam and spray."
Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond
crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship's
ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a
frond at the display flat. "We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours."
"What?"
"See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the
supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted
directly, and ourselves." The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende
and Svensndot vertices close together. "I've marked the times that contact
was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went
down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its
requests for protocol changes, I believe that both we and the outflyer were
enveloped and at about the same time."
Pham nodded. "Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That
must mean the surge moved in from the side."
"Exactly!" From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the
display. "The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping
technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the
conclusion."
Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle -- tipped by
the OOB -- pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. "It must
have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface."
"A monster wave sweeping sideways!" said Greenstalk. "And that's also
why it won't last long."
"Yes. It's the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing
must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours -- and
back into the Beyond."
So there was still a race to be won or lost.
The first hours were strange. "A few hours," had been Blueshell's
estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the
bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange
conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger
tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If
only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an
attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over
and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. "But when we get
out, when we get out ... I'll know what to do. Not why I must do it, but
what." And he couldn't explain more.
Any time now.... There was scarcely any reason to do much about
resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.
But after eight hours: "It really could be longer, even a day." They
had been scrounging around in the historical literature. "Maybe we should do
a little housekeeping." The Out of Band II had been designed for both the
Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an
unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow
Zone, but they hadn't come up automatically. With Blueshell's advice, Pham
took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn't too difficult,
except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer
bright enough to understand the quitting commands.
Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was
almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of
the Slowness as darkness and torchlight -- that was just nightmare fantasy.
On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical
calculators, there was something to that. The OOB's performance had degraded
steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now ... Gone were the
voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be
supported by the new OOB, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the
intelligent context analyzers that made the ship's library almost as
accessible as one's own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art
and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden
... constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the
simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no
longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain
discipline to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It
reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)
Twenty hours. Fifty. Everyone was still telling each other there was
nothing to worry about. But now Blueshell said that talk of "hours" had been
unrealistic. Considering the height of the "tsunami" (at least two hundred
light-years), it would likely be several hundred light-years across -- that
in keeping with the scaling laws of historical precedent. There was only one
trouble with this reasoning: they were beyond all precedent. For the most
part, zone boundaries followed galactic mean density. There was virtually no
change from year to year, just the aeons' long shrinkage that might someday
-- after the death of all but the smallest stars -- expose the galactic core
to the Beyond. At any given time, perhaps one billionth of that boundary
might qualify as being in a "storm state". In an ordinary storm, the surface
might move in or out a light-year in a decade or so. Such storms were common
enough to affect the fortunes of many worlds every year.
Much rarer -- perhaps once in a hundred thousand years in the whole
galaxy -- there would be a storm where the boundary became seriously
distorted, and where surges might move at a high multiple of light speed.
These were the transverse surges that Pham and Blueshell made their scale
estimates from. The fastest moved at about a light-year per second, across a
distance of less than three lights; the largest were thirty light-years high
and moved at scarcely a light-year per day.
So what was known of monsters like the thing that had engulfed them?
Not much. Third-hand stories in the Ship's library told of surges perhaps as
big as theirs, but the quoted dimensions and propagation rates were not
clear. Stories more than a hundred million years old are hard to trust;
there are scarcely any intermediate languages. (And even if there were, it
wouldn't have helped. The new, dumb version of the OOB absolutely could not
do mechanical translation of natural languages. Dredging the library was
pointless.)
When Ravna complained about this to Pham, he said, "Things could be
worse. What was the Ur-Partition really?"
Five billion years ago. "No one's sure."
Pham jerked a thumb at his library display. "Some people think it was a
'super supersurge', you know. Something so big it swallowed the races that
might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at
all -- no one's around to write horror stories."
Great.
"I'm sorry, Ravna. Honestly, if we're in anything like most past
disasters, we'll come out of it in another day or two. The best thing is to
plan for things that way. This is like a 'time-out' in the battle. Take
advantage of it to have a little peace. Figure out how to get the
unperverted parts of Commercial Security to help us."
"... Yeah." Depending on the shape of the surge's trailing edge the OOB
might have lost a good part of its lead.... But I'll bet the Alliance fleet
is completely panicked by all this. Such opportunists would likely run for
safety as soon as they're back in the Beyond.
The advice kept her busy for another twenty hours, fighting with the
half-witted things that claimed to be strategy planners on the new version
of the OOB. Even if the surge passed right this instant, it might be too
late. There were players in this game for whom the surge was not a time-out:
Jefri Olsndot and his Tinish allies. It had been seventy hours now since
their last contact; Ravna had missed three comm sessions with them. If she
were panicked, what must be like for Jefri? Even if Steel could hold off his
enemies, time -- and trust -- would be running out at Tines' world.
One hundred hours into the surge, Ravna noticed that Blueshell and Pham
were doing power tests on the OOB's ramscoop drive.... Some time-outs last
forever.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
The summer hot spell broke for a time; in fact, it was almost chilly.
There was still the smoke and the air was still dry, but the winds seemed
less driven. Inside their cubby aboard the ship, Amdijefri weren't taking
much notice of the nice weather.
"They've been slow in answering before," said Amdi. "She's explained
how the ultrawave -- "
"Ravna's never been this late!" Not since the winter, anyway. Jefri's
tone hovered between fear and petulance. In fact, there was supposed to be a
transmission in the middle of the night, technical data for them to pass on
to Mr. Steel. It hadn't arrived by this morning, and now Ravna had also
missed their afternoon session, the time when normally they could just chat
for a bit.
The two children reviewed all the comm settings. The previous fall,
they had laboriously copied those and the first level diagnostics. It all
looked the same now ... except for something called "carrier detect". If
only they had a dataset, they might have looked up what that meant.
They had even very carefully reset some of the comm parameters ... then
nervously set them back when nothing happened. Maybe they hadn't given the
changes enough of a chance to work. Maybe now they had really messed
something up.
They stayed in the command cubby all through the afternoon, their minds
cycling trough fear and boredom and frustration. After four hours, boredom
had at least a temporary victory. Jefri was napping uneasily in his father's
hammock with two of Amdi curled up in his arms.
Amdi poked idly around the room, looked at the rocket controls. No ...
not even his self-confidence was up to playing with those. Another of him
jerked at the wall quilting. He could always watch the fungus grow for a
while. Things were that slow.
Actually, the gray stuff had spread a lot further than the last time he
looked. Behind the quilt, it was quite thick. He sent a chain of himself
squirreling back between the wall and the fabric. It was dark, but some
light spilled through the gap at the ceiling. In most places the mold was
scarcely an inch thick, but back here it was five or six -- wow. Just above
his exploring nose, a huge lump of it grew from the wall. This was as big as
some of the ornamental moss that decorated castle meeting halls. Slender
gray filaments grew down from the fungus. He almost called out to Jefri, but
the two of him in the hammock were so comfortable.
He brought a couple more heads close to the strangeness. The wall
behind it looked a little odd, too ... as though part of its substance had
been taken by the mold. And the gray itself: like smoke -- he felt the
filaments with his nose. They were solid, dry. His nose tickled. Amdi froze
in shocked surprise. Watching himself from behind, he saw that two of the
filaments had actually passed through his member's head! And yet there was
no pain, just that tickling feeling.
"What -- what?" Jefri had been jostled into wakefulness, as Amdi tensed
around him.
"I found something really strange, behind the quilts. I touched this
big hunk of fungus and -- "
As he spoke, Amdi gently backed away from thing on the wall. The touch
didn't hurt, but it made him more nervous than curious. He felt the
filaments sliding slowly out.
"I told you, we aren't supposed to play with that stuff. It's dirty.
The only good thing is, it doesn't smell." Jefri was out of the hammock. He
stepped across the cubby and lifted the quilting. Amdi's tip member lost its
balance and jerked away from the fungus. There was a snapping sound, and a
sharp pain in his lip.
"Geez, that thing is big!" Then, hearing Amdi's pain whistle, "You
okay?"
Amdi backed away from the wall. "I think so." The tip of one last
filament was still stuck in his lip. It didn't hurt as much as the nettles
he'd sampled a few days earlier. Amdijefri looked over the wound. What was
left of the smoky spine seemed hard and brittle. Jefri's fingers gently
worked it free. Then the two of them turned to wonder at the thing in the
wall.
"It really has spread. Looks like it's hurt the wall, too."
Amdi dabbed at his bloodied muzzle. "Yeah. I see why your folks told
you to stay away from it."
"Maybe we should have Mr. Steel scrub it all out."
The two spent half an hour crawling around behind all the quilting. The
grayness had spread far, but there was only the one marvelous flowering.
They came back to stare at it, even sticking articles of clothing into the
wisps. Neither risked fingers or noses on further contact.
Staring at the fungus on the wall was by far the most exciting thing
that happened that afternoon; there was no message from the OOB.
The next day the hot weather was back.
Two more days passed.... and still there was no word from Ravna.
Lord Steel paced the walls atop Starship Hill. It was near the middle
of the night, and the sun hung about fifteen degrees above the northern
horizon. Sweat filmed his fur; this was the warmest summer in ten years. The
drywind was into its thirtieth dayaround. It was no longer a welcome break
in the chill of the northland. The crops were dying in the fields. Smoke
from fjord fires was visible as brownish haze both north and south of the
castle. At first the reddish color had been a novelty, a welcome change from
the unending blue of sky and distance, and the whitish haze of the sea fogs.
Only at first. When fire struck East Streamsdell, the entire sky had been
dipped in red. Ash had rained all the dayaround, and the only smell had been
that of burning. Some said it was worse than the filthy air of the southern
cities.
The troops on the walls backed far out of his way. This was more than
courtesy, more than their fear of Steel. His troops were still not used to
the cloaked ones, and the cover story Shreck was spreading did nothing to
ease their minds: Lord Steel was accompanied by a singleton -- in the colors
of a Lord. The creature made no mind sounds. It walked incredibly close to
its master.
Steel said to the singleton, "Success is a matter of meeting a
schedule. I remember you teaching me that," cutting it into me, in fact.
The member looked back at him, cocked its head. "As I remember, I said
that success was a matter of adapting to changes in schedules." The words
were perfectly articulated. There were singletons that could talk that well
-- but even the most verbal could not carry on intelligent conversation.
Shreck had had no trouble convincing the troops that Flenser science had
created a race of superpacks, that the cloaked ones were individually as
smart as any ordinary pack. It was a good cover for what the cloaks really
were. It both inspired fear and obscured the truth.
The member stepped a little closer -- nearer to Steel than anyone had
been except during murders and rapes and the beatings of the past.
Involuntarily, Steel licked his lips and spread out from around the threat.
Yet in some ways the dark-cloaked one was like a corpse, without a trace of
mind sound. Steel snapped his jaws shut and said, "Yes. The genius is in
winning even when the schedules have fallen down the garderobe." He looked
all away from the Flenser member and scanned the red-shrouded southern
horizon. "What's the latest estimate of Woodcarver's progress?"
"She's still camped about five days southeast of here."
"The damned incompetent. It's hard to believe she's your parent!
Vendacious made things so easy for her; her soldiers and toy cannon should
have been here almost a tenday past -- "
"And been well-butchered, on schedule."
"Yes! Long before our sky friends arrived. Instead, she wanders inland
and then balks."
The Flenser member shrugged in its dark cloak. Steel knew the radio was
as heavy as it looked. It consoled him that the other was paying a price for
his omniscience. Just think, in heat like this, to have every part of
oneself muffled to the tympana. He could imagine the discomfort.... Indoors,
he could smell it.
They walked past one of the wall cannon. The barrel gleamed of layered
metal. The thing had thrice the range of Woodcarver's pitiful invention.
While Woodcarver had been working with Dataset and a human child's
intuition, he had had the direct advice of Ravna and company. At first he'd
feared their largesse, thinking it meant the Visitors were superior beyond
need for care. Now ... the more he heard of Ravna and the others, the more
clearly he understood their weakness. They could not experiment with
themselves, improve themselves. Inflexible, slow-changing dullards.
Sometimes they showed a low cunning -- Ravna's coyness about what she wanted
from the first starship -- but their desperation was loud in all their
messages, as was their attachment to the human child.
Everything had been going so well till just a few days ago. As they
walked out of earshot of the gunner pack, Steel said to the Flenser member,
"And still no word from our 'rescuers'."
"Quite so," That was the other botched schedule, the important one,
which they could not control. "Ravna has missed four sessions. Two of me is
down with Amdijefri right now." The singleton jabbed its snout toward the
dome of the inner keep. The gesture was an awkward abortion. Without other
muzzles and other eyes, body language was a limited thing. We just aren't
built to wander around a piece here, a piece there. "Another few minutes and
the space folk will have missed a fifth talk session. The children are
getting desperate, you know."
The member's voice sounded sympathetic. Almost unconsciously, Lord
Steel sidled a little farther out from around it. Steel remembered that tone
from his own early existence. He also remembered the cutting and death that
had always followed. "I want them kept happy, Tyrathect. We're assuming
communication will resume; when it does we'll need them." Steel bared six
pairs of jaws at the surrounded singleton. "None of your old tricks."
The member flinched, an almost imperceptible twitch that pleased Steel
more than the grovelling of ten thousand. "Of course not. I'm just saying
that you should visit them, try to help them with their fear."
"You do it."
"Ah ... they don't fully trust me. I've told you before, Steel; they
love you."
"Ha! And they've seen through to your meanness, eh?" The situation made
Steel proud. He had succeeded where Flenser's own methods would have failed.
He had manipulated without threats or pain. It had been Steel's craziest
experiment, and certainly his most profitable. But "-- Look, I don't have
time to wetnurse anyone. It's a tiresome thing to talk to those two." And it
was very tiresome to hold his temper, to suffer Jefri's "petting" and Amdi's
pranks. In the beginning, Steel had insisted that no one else have close
contact with the children. They were too important to expose to others; the
most casual slipup might show them the truth and ruin them. Even now,
Tyrathect was the only pack besides himself who had regular contact. But for
Steel, every meeting was worse than the last, an ultimate test of his self
control. It was hard to think straight in a killing rage, and that's how
almost every conversation with them ended for Steel. How wonderful it would
be when the space folk landed. Then he could use the other end of the tool
that was Amdijefri. Then there would be no need to have their trust and
friendship. Then he would have a lever, something to torture and kill to
enforce his demands.
Of course, if the aliens never landed, or if.... "We must do something!
I will not be flotsam on the wave of the future." Steel lashed at the
scaffolding that ran along the inner side of the parapet, shredding the wood
with his gleaming tines. "We can't do anything about the aliens, so let's
deal with Woodcarver. Yes!" He smiled at the Flenser member. "Ironic, isn't
it? For a hundred years, you sought her destruction. Now I can succeed. What
would have been your great triumph is for me just an annoying detour,
undertaken because greater projects are temporarily delayed."
The cloaked one did not look impressed. "There is a little matter of
gifts falling out of the sky."
"Yes, into my open jaws. And that is my good fortune, isn't it?" He
walked on several paces, chuckling to himself. "Yes. It's time to have
Vendacious bring his trusting Queen in for the slaughter. Maybe it will
interfere with other events, but.... I know, we'll have the battle east of
here."
"The Margrum Climb?"
"Correct. Woodcarver's forces should be well concentrated coming up the
defile. We'll move our cannon over there, set them behind the ridgeline at
the top of the Climb. It will be easy to destroy all her people. And it's
far enough from Starship Hill; even if the space folk arrive at the same
time, we can keep the two projects separate." The singleton didn't say
anything, and after a moment Steel glared at him. "Yes dear teacher, I know
there is a risk. I know it splits our forces. But we've got an army sitting
on our doorstep. They've arrived inconveniently late, but even Vendacious
can't make them turn around and go home. And if he tries to stall things,
the Queen might... Can you predict just what she would do?"
"... No. She has always had a way with the unexpected."
"She might even see through Vendacious' fraud. So. We take a small
chance, and destroy her now. You are with Farscout Rangolith?"
"Yes. Two of me."
"Tell him to get word to Vendacious. He is to have the Queen's army
coming up Margrum Climb not less than two days from now. Feel free to
elaborate; you know the region better than I. We'll work out final details
when both sides are in position." It was a wonderful thing to be the
effective commander of both sides in a battle! "One more thing. It's
important and Vendacious must see to it within the dayaround: I want
Woodcarver's human dead."
"What harm can she do?"
"That's a stupid question," especially coming from you. "We don't know
when Ravna and Pham may reach us. Till we have them safe in our jaws, the
Johanna creature is a dangerous thing to have nearby. Tell Vendacious to
make it look like an accident, but I want that Two-Legs dead."
Flenser was everywhere. It was a form of godhood he'd dreamed of since
he'd been Woodcarver's newby. While one of him talked to Steel, two others
lounged about the Starship with Amdijefri, and two more padded through light
forest just north of Woodcarver's encampment.
Paradise can also be an agony, and each day the torment was a little
harder to bear. In the first place, this summer was as insufferably hot as
any in the North. And the radio cloaks were not merely hot and heavy. They
necessarily covered his members' tympana. And unlike other uncomfortable
costumes, the price of taking these off for even a moment was mindlessness.
His first trials had lasted just an hour or two. Then had come a five-day
expedition with Farscout Rangolith, providing Steel with instant information
and instant command of the country around Starhip Hill. It had taken a
couple of dayarounds to recover from the sores and aches of the radio
cloaks.
This latest exercise in omniscience had lasted twelve days. Wearing the
cloaks all the time was impossible. Every day in a rotation, one of his
members threw off its radio, was bathed, and had its cloak's liner changed.
It was Flenser's hour of daily madness, when sometimes the weak-willed
Tyrathect would come back to mind, vainly trying to reestablish her
dominance. It didn't matter. With one of his members disconnected, the
remaining pack was only four. There are foursomes of normal intelligence,
but none existed in Flenser/Tyrathect. The bathing and recloaking were all
done in a confused haze.
And of course, even though Flenser was "everywhere at once", he wasn't
any smarter than before. After the first jarring experiments, he got the
hang of seeing/hearing scenes that were radically different -- but it was as
difficult as ever to carry on multiple conversations. When he was bantering
with Steel, his other members had very little to say to Amdijefri or to
Rangolith's scouts.
Lord Steel was done with him. Flenser walked along the parapets with
his former student, but if Steel had said anything to him it would have
taken him away from his current conversation. Flenser smiled (carefully so
the one with Steel would not show it). Steel thought he was talking to
Farscout Rangolith just now. Oh, he would do that ... in a few minutes. One
advantage of his situation was that no one could know for sure everything
Flenser was up to. If he was careful, he would eventually rule here again.
It was a dangerous game, and the cloaks were themselves dangerous devices.
Keep a cloak out of sunlight for a few hours and it lost power, and the
member wearing it was cut off from the pack. Worse was the problem of static
-- that was a mantis word. The second set of cloaks had killed its user, and
the Spacers weren't sure of the cause, except that it was some sort of
"interference" problem.
Flenser had experienced nothing so extreme. But sometimes on his
farthest hikes with Rangolith, or when a cloak's power faded ... there was
an incredible shrieking in his mind, like a dozen packs crowding close,
sounds that scaled between sex madness and killing frenzy. Tyrathect seemed
to like times like that; she'd come bounding out of the confusion, swamping
him with her soft hate. Normally she lurked around the edges of his
consciousness, tweaking a word here, a motive there. After the static, she
was much worse; on one occasion she'd held control for almost a dayaround.
Given a year without crises, Flenser could have studied Ty and Ra and Thect
and done a proper excision. Thect, the member with the white-tipped ears,
was probably the one to kill: it wasn't bright, but it was likely the
capstone of the trio. With a precisely crafted replacement, Flenser might be
even greater than before the massacre at Parliament Bowl. But for now,
Flenser was stuck; soul surgery on one's self was an awesome challenge --
even to The Master.
So. Careful. Careful. Keep the cloaks well charged, take no long trips,
and don't let any one person see all the threads of your plan. While Steel
thought he was seeking Rangolith, Flenser was talking to Amdi and Jefri.
The human's face was wet with tears. "F-four times we've missed
R-ravna. What has happened to her?" His voice screeched up. Flenser hadn't
realized there was such flexibility in the belching mechanism that humans
use to make sound.
Most of Amdi clustered round the boy. He licked Jefri's cheeks. "It
could be our ultrawave. Maybe it's broken." He looked beseechingly at
Flenser. There were tears in the puppies' eyes, too. "Tyrathect, please ask
Steel again. Let us stay in the ship all the dayaround. Maybe there are
messages that have come through and not been recorded."
Flenser with Steel descended the northern stairs, crossed the parade
ground. He gave a sliver of attention to the other's complaints about the
sloppy maintenance around the practice stands. At least Steel was smart
enough to keep the discipline scaffolds over on Hidden Island.
Flenser with Rangolith's troopers splashed through a mountain stream.
Even in high summer, in the middle of a Drywind, there were still snow
patches, and the streams running from under them were icy cold.
Flenser with Amdijefri edged forward, let two of Amdi rest against his
sides. Both children liked physical contact, and he was the only one they
had besides each other. It was all perversion of course, but Flenser had
based his life on manipulating others' weakness, and -- but for the pain --
welcomed it. Flenser buzzed a deep purring sound through his shoulders,
caressing the puppy next to him. "I'll ask our Lord Steel the very next time
I see him."
"Thank you." A puppy nuzzled at his cloak, then mercifully moved away;
Flenser was a mass of sores beneath that cover. Perhaps Amdi realized that,
or perhaps -- more and more Flenser saw a reticence in the children. His
comment to Steel had been a slip into the truth: these two really didn't
trust him. That was Tyrathect's fault. On his own, Flenser would have had no
trouble winning Amdijefri's love. Flenser had none of Steel's killing temper
and fragile dignity. Flenser could chat for casual pleasure, all the while
mixing truth with lies. One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist
can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability. But just when he
was doing well, when they seemed about to open to him -- then Ty or Ra or
Thect would pop up, twisting his expression or poisoning his choice of
phrase. Perhaps he should content himself with undermining the children's
respect for Steel (without, of course, ever saying anything directly against
him). Flenser sighed, and patted Jefri's arm comfortingly. "Ravna will be
back. I'm sure of it." The human sniffled a little, then reached out to pet
the part of Flenser's head that was not shrouded by the cloak. They sat in
companionable silence for a moment, and his attention drifted back to --
-- the forest and Rangolith's troops. The group had been moving uphill
for almost ten minutes. The others were lightly burdened and used to this
sort of exercise. Flenser's two members were lagging. He hissed at the group
leader.
The group leader sidled back, his squad shifting briskly out of his
way. He stopped when his nearest was fifteen feet from Flenser's. The
soldier's heads cocked this way and that. "Your wishes ... My Lord?" This
one was new; he had been briefed about the cloaks, but Flenser knew the
fellow didn't understand the new rules. The gold and silver that glinted in
the darkness of the cloaks -- those colors were reserved for the Lords of
the Domain. Yet there only two of Flenser here; normally such a fragment
could barely carry on a conversation, much less give reasonable orders. Just
as disconcerting, Flenser knew, was his lack of mind sound. "Zombie" was the
word some of the troops used when they thought themselves alone.
Flenser pointed up the hill; the timberline was only a few yards away.
"Farscout Rangolith is on the other side. We will take a short cut," he said
weakly.
Part of the other was already looking up the hill. "That is not good,
sir." The trooper spoke slowly. Stupid damn duo, his posture said. "The bad
ones will see us."
Flenser glowered at the other, a hard thing to do properly when you are
just two. "Soldier, do you see the gold on my shoulders? Even one of me is
worth all of you. If I say take a short cut, we do it -- even if it means
walking belly deep through brimstone." Actually, Flenser knew exactly where
Vendacious had put lookouts. There was no risk in crossing the open ground
here. And he was so tired.
The group leader still didn't know quite what Flenser was, but he saw
the dark-cloaks were at least as dangerous as any full-pack lord. He backed
off humbly, bellies dragging on the ground. The group turned up hill and a
few minutes later were walking across open heather.
Rangolith's command post was less than a half mile away along this path
--
Flenser with Steel walked into the inner keep. The stone was freshly
cut, the walls thrown up with the feverish speed of all this castle's
construction. Thirty feet over their heads, where vault met buttresses,
there were small holes set in the stonework. Those holes would soon be
filled with gunpowder -- as would slots in the wall surrounding the landing
field. Steel called those the Jaws of Welcome. Now he turned a head back to
Flenser. "So what does Rangolith say?"
"Sorry. He's been out on patrol. He should be here -- I mean, he should
be in camp -- any minute." Flenser did his best to conceal his own trips
with the scouts. Such recons were not forbidden, but Steel would have
demanded explanations if he knew.
Flenser with Rangolith's troops sloshed through water-soaked heather.
The air over the snowmelt was delightfully chill, and the breeze pushed cool
tongues partway under his wretched cloaks.
Rangolith had chosen the site for his command post well. His tents were
in a slight depression at the edge of a large summer pond. A hundred yards
away, a huge patch of a snow covered the hill above them and fed the pond,
and kept the air pleasantly cool. The tents were out of sight from below,
yet the site was so high in the hills that from the edge of the depression
there was a clear view across three points of the compass, centered on the
south. Resupply could be accomplished from the north with little chance of
detection, and even if the damn fires struck the forests below, this post
would be untouched.
Farscout Rangolith was lounging about his signal mirrors, oiling the
aiming gears. One of his subordinates lay with snouts stuck over the lip of
the hill, scanning the landscape with its telescopes. He came to attention
at the sight of Flenser, but his gaze wasn't full of fear. Like most
long-range scouts, he wasn't completely terrorized by castle politics.
Besides, Flenser had cultivated an "us against the prigs" relationship with
the fellow. Now Rangolith growled at the group leader: "The next time you
come prancing across the open like that, your asses go on report."
"My fault, Farscout," put in Flenser. "I have some important news."
They walked away from the others, down toward Rangolith's tent.
"See something interesting, did you?" Rangolith was smiling oddly. He
had long ago figured out that Flenser was not a brilliant duo, but part of a
pack with members back at the castle.
"When is your next session with Craddleheads?" That was the fieldname
for Vendacious.
"Just past noon. He hasn't missed in four days. The Southerners seem to
be on one big squat."
"That will change." Flenser repeated Steel's orders for Vendacious. The
words came hard. The traitor within him was restive; he felt the beginnings
of a major attack.
"Wow! You're going to move everything over to Margrum Climb in less
than two -- Never mind, that's something I'd best not know."
Under his cloaks, Flenser bristled. There are limits to chumminess.
Rangolith had his points, but maybe after all this was over he could be
smoothed into something less ... ad hoc.
"Is that all, My Lord?"
"Yes -- No." Flenser shivered with uncharacteristic puzzlement. The
trouble with these cloaks, sometimes they made it hard to remember things.
By the Great Pack, no! It was that Tyrathect again. Steel had ordered the
killing of Woodcarver's human -- all things considered, a perfectly sensible
move, but...
Flenser with Steel shook his head angrily, his teeth clicking together.
"Something the matter?" said Lord Steel. He really seemed to love the pain
that the radio cloaks caused Flenser.
"Nothing, my lord. Just a touch of the static." In fact there was no
static, yet Flenser felt himself disintegrating. What had given the other
such sudden power?
Flenser with Amdijefri snapped his jaws open and shut, open and shut.
The children jumped back from him, eyes wide. "It's okay," he said grimly,
even as his two bodies thrashed against each other. There really were lots
of good reasons why they should keep Johanna Olsndot alive: In the long run,
it assured Jefri's good will. And it could be Flenser's secret human.
Perhaps he could fake the Two Leg's death to Steel and -- No. No. No!
Flenser grabbed back control, jamming the rationalizations out of mind. The
very tricks he had used against Tyrathect, she thought to turn against him.
It won't work on me. I am the master of lies.
And then her attack twisted again, became a massive bludgeoning that
destroyed all thought.
With Flenser, with Rangolith, with Amdijefri -- all of him was making
little gibbering noises now. Lord Steel danced around him, unsure whether to
laugh or be concerned. Rangolith goggled at him in frank amazement.
The two children edged back to touch him, "Are you hurt? Are you hurt?"
The human slipped those remarkable hands under the radio cloak and brushed
softly at Flenser's bleeding fur. The world blurred in a surge of static.
"No. Don't do that. It might hurt him more," came Amdi's voice. The puppies'
tiny muzzles reached out, trying to help with the cloaks.
Flenser felt his being pushed downwards, towards oblivion. Tyrathect's
final attack was a frontal assault, without rationalizations or sly
infiltration, and...
... And she looked out upon herself in astonishment. After so many
days, I am me. And in control. Enough butchering of innocents. If anyone is
to die, it is Steel and Flenser. Her head followed Steel's prancing forms,
picked out the most articulate member. She gathered her legs beneath her,
and prepared to leap at its throat. Come just a little closer ... and die.
Tyrathect's last moment of consciousness probably didn't last longer
than five seconds. Her attack on Flenser was a desperate, all-out thing that
left her without reserves or internal defense. Even as she tensed to leap
upon Steel, she felt her soul being pulled back and down, and Flenser rising
up from the darkness. She felt the member's legs spasm and collapse, the
ground smash into its face...
... And Flenser was back in control. The weakling's attack had been
astonishing. She really had cared for the ones who were to be destroyed,
cared so much she was willing to sacrifice herself if it would kill Flenser.
And that had been her undoing. Suicide is never something to hang pack
dominance on. Her very resolve had weakened her hold on the hindmind -- and
given The Master his chance. He was back in control, and with a great
opportunity. Tyrathect's assault had left her defenseless. The innermost
mental barriers around her three members were suddenly as thin as the skin
of an overripe fruit. Flenser slashed through the membrane, pawed at the
flesh of her mind, spattering it across his own. The three who had been her
core would still live, but never again would they have a soul separate from
his.
Flenser with Steel sprawled as though unconscious, his convulsions
subsiding. Let Steel think him incapacitated. It would give him time to
think of the most advantageous explanation.
Flenser with Rangolith came slowly to his feet, though the two members
were still in a posture of confusion. Flenser pulled them together. No
explanations were due here, but it would be best if Farscout didn't suspect
soulstrife. "The cloaks are powerful tools, dear Rangolith; sometimes a bit
too powerful."
"Yes, my lord."
Flenser let a smile spread across his features. For a moment he was
silent, savoring what he would say next. No, there was no sign of the
weak-willed one. This had been her last, best try at domination -- her last
and biggest mistake. Flenser's smile spread further, all the way to the two
with Amdijefri. It suddenly occurred to him that Johanna Olsndot would be
the first person he had ordered killed since his return to Hidden Island.
Johanna Olsndot would therefore be the first blood on three of his muzzles.
"There's one more item for Craddleheads, Farscout. An execution...." As
he spoke the details, the warmth of a decision well-made spread through his
members.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
The only good thing about all the waiting had been the chance it gave
the wounded. Now that Vendacious had found a way past the Flenserist
defenses, everyone was anxious to break camp, but....
Johanna spent the last afternoon at the field hospital. The hospital
was laid off in rough rectangles, each about six meters across. Some of the
plots had ragged tents -- those belonging to wounded who were still smart
enough to care for themselves. Others were surrounded by stranded fencing;
inside each of those was a single member, the survivor of what had once been
an entire pack. The singletons could easily have jumped the fences, but most
seemed to recognize their purpose, and stayed within.
Johanna pulled the food cart through the area, stopping at first one
patient and then another. The cart was a bit too large for her, and
sometimes it got caught in the roots that grew across the the forest floor.
Yet this was a job that she could do better than any pack, and it was nice
to find a way she could help.
In the forest around the hospital there was the sound of kherhogs being
coaxed up to wagon ties, the shouts of crews securing the cannons and
getting the camp gear stowed. From the maps Vendacious had shown at the
meeting, it was clear the next two days would be an exhausting time -- but
at the end of it they would have the high ground behind unsuspecting
Flenserists.
She stopped at the first little tent. The threesome inside had heard
her coming and was outside now, running little circles around her cart.
"Johanna! Johanna!" it said in her own voice. This was all that was left of
one of Woodcarver's minor strategists; once upon a time, it had known some
Samnorsk. The pack had originally been six; three had been killed by the
wolves. What was left was the "talker" part -- about as bright as a five
year old, though with an odd vocabulary. "Thank you for food. Thank you."
Its muzzles pushed at her. She patted the heads before reaching into the
cart and pulling out bowls of lukewarm stew. Two of them dug in right away,
but the third sat back for a moment and chatted. "I hear, we fight soon."
Not you anymore, but "Yes. We are going up by the dry fall, just east
of here."
"Uh, oh." It said. "Uh, oh. That's bad. Poor seeing, no control, ambush
scary." Apparently the fragment had some memories of its own tactical work.
But there was no way Johanna could explain Vendacious's reasoning to it.
"Don't worry, we will make it okay."
"You sure? You promise?"
Johanna smiled gently at what was left of a rather nice fellow. "Yes. I
promise."
"Ah-ah-ah.... Okay." Now all three had their muzzles stuck into stew
bowls. This was one of the lucky ones, really. It showed plenty of interest
in what went on around it. Just as important, it had childlike enthusiasms.
Pilgrim said that fragments like this could grow back easily if they were
just treated right long enough to bear a puppy or two.
She pushed the cart a few meters further, to the fenced square that was
the symbolic corral for a singleton. There was a faint odor of shit in the
air. Some of the singletons and duos were not housebroken; in any case, the
camp latrines were a hundred meters away.
"Here, Blacky. Blacky?" Johanna banged an empty bowl against the side
of the cart. A single head eased up from behind some root bushes; sometimes
this one wouldn't even do that much. Johanna got on her knees so her eyes
weren't much higher than the black-faced one. "Blacky?"
The creature pulled himself out of the bushes and slowly approached.
This was all that was left of one of Scrupilo's cannoneers. She vaguely
remembered the pack, a handsome sixsome all large and fast. But now, even
"Blacky" wasn't whole: a falling gun had crushed his rear legs. He dragged
his legless rear on a little wagon with thirty centimeter wheels... sort of
like a Skroderider with forelegs. She pushed a bowl of stew toward him, and
made the noises that Pilgrim coached her in. Blacky had refused food the
last three days, but today he rolled and walked close enough that she could
pet his head. After a moment he lowered his muzzle to the stew.
Johanna grinned in surprised pleasure. This hospital was a strange
place. A year ago she would have been horrified by it; even now she didn't
have the proper Tinish outlook on the wounded. As she continued to pet
Blacky's lowered head, Johanna looked across the forest floor at the crude
tents, the patients and parts of patients. It really was a hospital. The
surgeons did try to save lives, even if the medical science was a horrifying
process of cutting and splinting without anesthetics. In that regard, it was
quite comparable to the medieval human medicine that Johanna had seen on
Dataset. But with the Tines there was something more. This place was almost
a spare parts warehouse. The medics were interested in the welfare of packs.
To them, singletons were pieces that might have a use in making larger
fragments workable, at least temporarily. Injured singletons were at the
bottom of all medical priorities. "There's not much left to save in such
cases," one medic had said to her via Pilgrim, "And even if there was, would
you want a crippled, loose-bonded member in your self?" The fellow had been
too tired to notice the absurdity of his question. His muzzles had been
dripping blood; he'd been working for hours to save wounded members of whole
packs.
Besides, most wounded singletons just stopped eating and died in less
than a tenday. Even after a year with Tines, Johanna couldn't quite accept
it. Every singleton reminded her of dear Scriber; she wanted them to have a
better chance than his last remnant had. She had taken over the food cart
and spent as much time with the wounded singletons as she did with any of
the other patients. It had worked out well. She could get close to each
patient without mindsound interference. Her help gave the brood kenners more
time to study the larger fragments and the uninjured singletons, and try to
build working packs from the wreckage.
And now maybe this one wouldn't starve. She'd tell Pilgrim. He'd done
miracles with some of the other match ups, and seemed to be the only pack
who shared some of her feelings for damaged singletons. "If they don't
starve it often means a strength of mind. Even crippled, they could be an
advantage to a pack," he'd said to her. "I've been crippled off and on in my
travels; you can't always pick and choose when you're down to three and
you're a thousand miles into an unknown land."
Johanna set a bowl of water beside the stew. After a moment, the
crippled member turned on his axle and took some shallow sips. "Hang on,
Blacky, we'll find someone for you to be."
Chitiratte was where he was supposed to be, walking his post exactly as
expected. Nevertheless, he felt a thrill of nervousness. He always kept at
least one head gazing at the mantis creature, the Two-Legs. Nothing
suspicious about that posture either. He was supposed to be doing security
duty here, and that meant keeping a lookout in all directions. He shifted
his crossbow nervously about from jaws to field pack and back to jaws. Just
a few more minutes....
Chitiratte circled the hospital compound once more. It was soft duty.
Even though this stretch of wood had been spared, the drywind fires had
chased the bigger wildlife downstream. This close to the river, the ground
was covered with softbush, and there was scarcely a thorn to be found.
Pacing around the hospital was like a walk on Woodcarver's Green down south.
A few hundred yards east was harder work -- getting the wagons and supplies
in shape for the climb.
The fragments knew that something was up. Here and there, heads stuck
up from pallets and burrows. They watched the wagons being loaded, heard the
familiar voices of friends. The dumbest ones felt a call to duty; he had
chased three able-bodied singles back into the compound. No way such feebs
could be of any help. When the army marched up Margrum Climb, the hospital
would stay behind. Chitiratte wished he could too. He'd been working for the
Boss long enough to guess whence his orders ultimately came; Chitiratte
suspected that not many would be coming back from Margrum Climb.
He turned three pairs of eyes toward the mantis creature. This latest
job was the riskiest thing he'd been a part of. If it worked out he might
just demand that the Boss leave him with the hospital. Just be careful, old
fellow. Vendacious didn't get where he is by leaving loose ends. Chitiratte
had seen what happened to that easterner who nosed a little too close into
the Boss's business.
Damn but the human was slow! She'd been grunting at that one singleton
for five minutes. You'd think she was having sex with these frags for all
the time she spent with them. Well, she'd pay for the familiarity very soon.
He started to cock his bow, then thought better of it. Accident, accident.
It must all look like an accident.
Aha. The Two-legs was collecting food and water bowls and stowing them
on the meal cart. Chitiratte made unobtrusive haste around the hospital
perimeter, positioning himself in view of the Kratzi duo -- the fragment
that would actually do the killing.
Kratzinissinari had been a foot trooper before losing the Nissinari
parts of himself. He had no connection with the Boss or Security. But he'd
been known as a crazy-headed get of bitches, a pack that was always on the
edge of combat rage. Getting killed back to two members normally has a
gentling influence. In this case -- well, the Boss claimed that Kratzi was
specially prepared, a trap ready to be sprung. All Chitiratte need do was
give the signal, and the duo would tear the mantis apart. A great tragedy.
Of course, Chitiratte would be there, the alert hospital warden. He would
quickly put arrows through Kratzi's brains ... but alas, not in time to save
the Two-Legs.
The human dragged the meal cart awkwardly around root bushes toward
Kratzi, her next patient. The duo came out of its burrow, speaking
half-witted greetings that even Chitiratte could not understand. There were
undertones though, a killing anger that edged its friendly mien. Of course,
the mantis thing didn't notice. She stopped the cart, began filling food and
water bowls, all the time grunting away at the twosome. In a moment, she
would bend down to put the food on the ground.... For half an instant,
Chitiratte considered shooting the mantis himself if Kratzi were not
immediately successful. He could claim it was a tragic miss. He really
didn't like the Two-Legs. The mantis creature was a menacing thing; it was
so tall and moved so weirdly. By now he knew it was fragile compared to
packs, but it was scary to think of a single animal so smart as this. He
shelved the temptation even faster than he had thought it. No telling what
price he might pay for that, even if they believed his shot was an accident.
No altruism today, thank you very much; Kratzi's jaws and claws would have
to do.
One of Kratzi's heads was looking in Chitiratte's general direction.
Now the mantis picked up the bowls and turned from the meal cart --
"Hei, Johanna! How is it going?"
Johanna looked up from the stew to see Peregrine Wickwrackscar walking
along the edge of the hospital. He was moving to get as close as possible
without invading the mind sounds of the patients. The guard who had stopped
there a moment before retreated before his advance and stopped a few meters
further on. "Pretty good," she called back. "You know the one on wheels? He
actually ate some stew tonight."
"Good. I've been thinking about him and the threesome on the other side
of the hospital."
"The wounded medic?"
"Yes. What's left of Trellelak is all female, you know. I've been
listening to mind sounds and -- " Pilgrim's explanation was delivered in
fluent Samnorsk, but it didn't make much sense to Johanna. Brood kenning had
so many concepts without referents in human language that even Pilgrim
couldn't make it clear. The only obvious part was that since Blacky was a
male, there was a chance that he and the medic threesome might have pups
early enough to bind the group. The rest was talk of "mood resonance" and
"meshing weak points with strong". Pilgrim claimed to be an amateur at brood
kenning, but it was interesting the way the docs -- and even Woodcarver
sometimes -- deferred to him. In his travels he had been through a lot. His
matchups seemed to "take" more often than anybody's. She waved him to
silence. "Okay. We'll try it soon as I've fed everybody."
Pilgrim cocked a head or two at the nearby hospital plots. "Something
strange is going on. Can't quite 'put my finger on it', but ... all the
fragments are watching you. Even more than usual. Do you feel it?"
Johanna shrugged. "No." She knelt to set the water and stew bowls
before the twosome patient. The pair had been vibrating with eagerness,
though they had been quite polite in not interrupting. Out of the corner of
her eye, she noticed the hospital guard make a strange dipping motion with
its two middle heads, and --
The blows were like two great fists smashing into her chest and face.
Johanna fell to the ground, and they were on her. She raised bloody arms
against the slashing jaws and claws.
When Chitiratte gave the signal, both of Kratzi leaped into action --
crashing into each other, almost incidentally knocking the mantis on her
back. Their claws and teeth were tearing at empty air and each other as much
as the Two-legs. For an instant, Chitiratte was struck motionless with
surprise. She might not be dead. Then he remembered himself and jumped over
the fence, at the same time cocking and loading his bow. Maybe he could miss
the first shot. Kratzi was shredding the mantis, but slow --
Suddenly, there was no possibility of shooting the twosome. A wave of
snarling black and white surged over Kratzi and the mantis. Every
able-bodied fragment in the hospital seemed to be running to the attack. It
was instant killing rage, far wilder than anything that could come from
whole packs. Chitiratte fell back in astonishment before the sight and the
mindsound of it.
Even the pilgrim seemed caught up in it; the pack raced past Chitiratte
and circled the melee. The pilgrim never quite plunged in, but nipped here
and there, screaming words that were lost in the general uproar.
A splash of coordinated mindsound boomed out from the mob, so loud it
numbed Chitiratte twenty yards away. The mob seemed to shrink in on itself,
the frenzy gone from most of its members. What had been near a single beast
with two dozen bodies was suddenly a confused and bloody crowd of random
members.
The pilgrim still ran around the edge, somehow keeping his mind and
purpose. His huge, scarred member dived in and out of the remaining crowd,
clawing at anything that still fought.
The patients dragged themselves away from the killing ground. Some that
had gone in as threesomes or duos came out single. Others seemed more
numerous than before. The ground that was left was soaked with blood. At
least five members had died. Near the middle, a pair of prosthetic wheels
lay incongruously.
The pilgrim paid it all no attention. The four of him stood around and
over the bloody mound at the center.
Chitiratte smiled to himself. Mantis splatter. Such a tragedy.
Johanna never quite lost consciousness, but the pain and the
suffocating weight of dozens of bodies left no room for thought. Now the
pressure eased. Somewhere beyond the local din she could hear shouts of
normal Tinish talk. She looked up and saw Pilgrim standing all around her.
Scarbutt was straddling her, its muzzle centimeters away. It reached down
and licked her face. Johanna smiled and tried to speak.
Vendacious had arranged to be in conference with Scrupilo and
Woodcarver. Just now the "Commander of Cannoneers" was deep into tactics,
using Dataset to illustrate his scheme for Margrum Climb.
Squalls of rage sounded from down by the river.
Scrupilo looked up peevishly from the Pink Oliphaunt. "What the muddy
hell -- "
The sounds continued, more than a casual brawl. Woodcarver and
Vendacious exchanged worried glances even as they arched necks to see among
the trees. "A fight in the hospital?" said the Queen.
Vendacious dropped his note board and lunged out of the meeting area,
shouting for the local guards to stay with the Queen. As he raced across the
camp, he could see that his roving guards were already converging on the
hospital. Everything seemed as smooth as a program on Dataset ... except,
why so much noise?
The last few hundred yards, Scrupilo caught up with him and pulled
ahead. The cannoneer raced into the hospital and stumbled over himself in
abrupt horror. Vendacious burst into the clearing all prepared to display
his own shock combined with alert resolve.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing by a meal cart, Chitiratte not far
behind him. The pilgrim was standing over the Two-Legs in a litter of
carnage. By the Pack of Packs, what happened? There was too much blood by
far. "Everybody back except the doctors," Vendacious bellowed at the
soldiers who crowded at the edge of the compound. He picked his way along a
path that avoided the loudest-minded patients. There were a lot of fresh
wounds, and here and there speckles of blood dark on the pale tree trunks.
Something had gone wrong.
Meanwhile Scrupilo had run around the edge of the hospital and was
standing just a few dozen yards from the Pilgrim. Most of him was staring at
the ground under Wickwrackscar. "It's Johanna! Johanna!" For a moment it
looked like the fool would jump over the fence.
"I think she's okay, Scrupilo." Wickwrackscar said. "She was just
feeding one of the duos and it went nuts -- attacked her."
One of the doctors looked over the carnage. There were three corpses on
the ground, and blood enough for more. "I wonder what she did to provoke
them."
"Nothing, I tell you! But when she went down, half the hospital went
after Whatsits here." He waggled a nose at unidentifiable remains.
Vendacious looked at Chitiratte, at the same time saw Woodcarver
arrive. "What about it, Soldier?" he asked. Don't screw up, Chitiratte.
"I-it's just like the pilgrim says, my lord. I've never seen anything
like it." He sounded properly astounded by the whole affair.
Vendacious stepped a little closer to the Pilgrim. "If you'll let me
take a closer look, Pilgrim?"
Wickwrackscar hesitated. He had been snuffling around the girl, looking
for wounds that might need immediate attention. Then the girl nodded weakly
to him, and he backed off.
Vendacious approached, all solemn and solicitous. Inside he raged. He'd
never heard of anything like this. But even if the whole damn hospital had
come to her aid, she should still be dead; the Kratzi duo could have ripped
her throat out in half a second. His plan had seemed fool-proof (and even
now the failure would cause no lasting damage), but he was just beginning to
understand what had gone wrong: For days, the human had been in contact with
these patients, even Kratzi. No Tinish doctor could approach and touch them
like the Two-Legs. Even some whole packs felt the effect; for fragments it
must be overwhelming. In their inner soul, most of the patients considered
the alien part of themselves.
He looked at the Two-Legs from three sides, mindful that fifty packs of
eyes were watching his every move. Very little of the blood was from the
Two-Legs. The cuts on her neck and arms were long and shallow, aimless
slashings. At the last minute, Kratzi's conditioning had failed before the
notion of the human as pack member. Even now, a quick flick of a forepaw
would rip the girl's throat open. He briefly considered putting her under
Security medical protection. The ploy had worked well with Scriber, but it
would be very risky here. Pilgrim had been nose to nose with Johanna; he
would be suspicious of any claims about "unexpected complications". No. Even
good plans sometimes fail. Count it as experience for the future. He smiled
at the girl and spoke in Samnorsk, "You're quite safe now," for the moment
and quite unfortunately. The human's head turned to the side, looking off in
the direction of Chitiratte.
Scrupilo had been pacing back and forth along the fence, so close to
Chitiratte and Pilgrim that the two had been forced back. "I won't have it!"
The cannoneer said loudly. "Our most important person attacked like this. It
smells of enemy action!"
Wickwrackscar goggled at him. "But how?"
"I don't know!" Scrupilo said, his voice a desperate shout. "But she
needs protection as much as nursing. Vendacious must find some place to keep
her."
The pilgrim pack was clearly impressed by the argument -- and unnerved
by it. He inclined a head at Vendacious and spoke with uncharacteristic
respect, "What do you think?"
Of course, Vendacious had been watching the Two-legs. It was
interesting how little humans could disguise their point of attention.
Johanna had been staring at Chitiratte, now she was looking up at
Vendacious, her shifty little close-set eyes narrowing. Vendacious had made
a project this last year of studying human expressions, both on Johanna and
in stories in Dataset. She suspected something. And she also must have
understood part of Scrupilo's speech. Her back arched and one arm fell
raised weakly. Fortunately for Vendacious, her shout came out a whisper that
even he could scarcely hear: "No ... not like Scriber."
Vendacious was a pack who believed in careful planning. He also knew
that the best-made schemes must be altered by circumstances. He looked down
at Johanna and smiled with the gentlest public sympathy. It would be risky
to kill her like Scriber's frag, but now he saw that the alternatives were
far more dangerous. Thank goodness Woodcarver was stuck with her limper on
the other side of the camp. He nodded back at Pilgrim and drew himself
together. "I fear Scrupilo is right. Just how it might have been done, I
don't know, but we can't take a chance. We'll take Johanna to my den. Tell
the Queen." He pulled cloaks from his backs and began gently to wrap the
human for the last trip she would ever make. Only her eyes protested.
Johanna drifted in and out of consciousness, horrified at her inability
to scream her fears. Her strongest cries were less than whispers. Her arms
and legs responded with little more than twitches, even that lost in
Vendacious's swaddling. Concussion, maybe, something like that, the
explanation came from some absurdly rational corner of her mind. Everything
seemed so far away, so dark....
Johanna woke in her cabin at Woodcarver's. What a terrible dream! That
she had been so cut up, unable to move, and then thinking Vendacious was a
traitor. She tried to shrug herself to a sitting position, but nothing
moved. Darn sheets are all wrapped around me. She lay quiet for a second,
still massively disoriented by the dream. "Woodcarver?" she tried to say,
but only a little moan came out. Some member moved gently around the
firepit. The room was only dimly lit, and something was wrong with it.
Johanna wasn't lying in her usual place. There was a moment of puzzled
lassitude as she tried to make sense of the orientation of the dark walls.
Funny. The ceiling was awfully low. Everything smelled like raw meat. The
side of her face hurt, and she tasted blood on her lips. She wasn't at
Woodcarver's and that terrible dream was --
Three Tinish heads drifted in silhouette nearby. One came closer, and
in the dim light she recognized the pattern of white and black on its face.
Vendacious.
"Good," he said, "You are awake."
"Where am I?" the words came out slurred and weak. The terror was back.
"The abandoned cotter's hut at the east end of the camp. I've taken it
over. As a security den, you know." His Samnorsk was quiet and fluent,
spoken in one of the generic voices of Dataset. One of his jaws carried a
dagger, the blade a glint in the dimness.
Johanna twisted in the tied cloaks and whispered screams. Something was
wrong with her; it was like shouting on empty breath.
One of Vendacious paced the hut's upper level. Daylight splashed across
its muzzle as it peered out first one and then another of the narrow slits
cut in the timbers. "Ah, it's good that you don't pretend. I could see that
you somehow guessed about my second career. My hobby. But screaming -- even
loud -- won't help either. We have only a brief time to chat. I'm sure the
Queen will come visiting soon ... and I will kill you just before she
arrives. So sad. Your hidden wounds were tragically severe...."
Johanna wasn't sure of all he said. Her vision blurred every time she
moved her head. Even now she couldn't remember the details of what had
happened back in the hospital compound. Somehow Vendacious was a traitor,
but how ... memories wriggled past the pain. "You did murder Scriber, didn't
you? Why?" Her voice came louder than before, and she choked on blood
dribbling back down her throat.
Soft, human, laughter came from all around her. "He learned the truth
about me. Ironic that such an incompetent would be the only one to see
through me.... Or do you mean a larger why?" The three nearby muzzles moved
closer still, and the blade in one's jaw patted the side of Johanna's cheek.
"Poor Two-Legs, I'm not sure you could ever understand. Some of it, the will
to power maybe. I've read what Dataset has to say about human motivation,
the 'freudian' stuff. We Tines are much more complicated. I am almost
entirely male, did you know that? A dangerous thing to be, all one sex.
Madness lurks. Yet it was my decision. I was tired of being an indifferently
good inventor, of living in Woodcarver's shadow. So many of us are her get,
and she dominates most all of us. She was quite happy about my going into
Security, you know. She doesn't quite have the combination of members for
it. She thought that all male but one would make me controllably devious."
His sentry member made another round of the window slits. Again there
was a human chuckle. "I've been planning a long time. It's not just
Woodcarver I'm up against. The power-side of her soul is scattered all over
the arctic coast; Flenser had almost a century headstart on me; Steel is
new, but he has the empire Flenser built. I made myself indispensable to all
of them: I'm Woodcarver's chief of security ... and Steel's most valued spy.
Played aright, I will end up with Dataset and all the others will be dead."
His blade tapped her face again. "Do you think you can help me?" Eyes
peered close into her terror. "I doubt it very much. If my proper plan had
succeeded, you would be neatly dead now." A sigh breathed around the room.
"But that failed, and I'm stuck with carving you up myself. And yet it may
all turn out for the best. Dataset is a torrent of information about most
things, but it scarcely acknowledges the existence of torture. In some ways,
your race seems so fragile, so easily killable. You die before your minds
can be dismembered. Yet I know you can feel pain and terror; the trick is to
apply force without quite killing."
The three nearby members snuggled into more comfortable positions, like
a human settling down for serious talk. "And there are some questions you
may be able to answer, things I couldn't really ask before. Steel is very
confident, you know, and it's not just because he has me with Woodcarver.
That pack has some other advantage. Could he have his own Dataset?"
Vendacious paused. Johanna didn't answer, her silence a combination of
terror and stubbornness. This was the monster that killed Scriber.
The muzzle with the knife slid between the blankets and Johanna's skin,
and pain shot up Johanna's arm. She screamed. "Ah, Dataset said a human
could be hurt there. No need to answer that one, Johanna. Do you know what I
think is Steel's secret? I think one of your family survived -- most likely
your little brother, considering what you've told us about the massacre."
Jefri? Alive? For an instant she forgot the pain, almost forgot the
fear. "How...?"
Vendacious gave a Tinish shrug. "You never saw him dead. You can be
sure Steel wanted a live Two-Legs, and after reading about cold sleep in
Dataset, I doubt he could have revived any of the others. And he's got
something up there. He's been eager for information from Dataset, but he's
never demanded I steal the device for him."
Johanna closed her eyes, denying the traitor pack's existence. Jefri
lives! Memories rose before her: Jefri's playful joy, his childish tears,
his trusting courage aboard the refugee ship.... things she had thought
forever lost to her. For a moment they seemed more real than the slashing
violence of the last few minutes. But what could Jefri do to help the
Flenserists? The other datasets had surely burned. There's something more
here, something that Vendacious still is missing.
Vendacious grabbed her chin, and gave her head a little shake. "Open
your eyes; I've learned to read them, and I want to see.... Hmm, I don't
know if you believe me or not. No matter. If we have time, I will learn just
what he might have done for Steel. There are other, sharper questions.
Dataset is clearly the key to all. In less than half a year, I and
Woodcarver and Pilgrim have learned an enormous amount about your race and
civilization. I daresay we know your people better than you do -- sometimes
I think we know them even better than we know our own world. When all the
violence is over, the winner will be the pack that still controls Dataset. I
intend to be that pack. And I've often wondered if there are other
passwords, or programs I can run that would actually watch for my safety --
"
The babysitter code.
The watching heads bobbed a grin, "Aha, so there is such a thing!
Perhaps this morning's bad luck is all for the best. I might never have
learned -- " his voice broke into dischords. Two of Vendacious jumped up to
join the one already at the window slits. Softly by her ear, the voice
continued, "It's the Pilgrim, still far away, but coming toward us.... I
don't know. You would be much better safely dead. One deep wound, all out of
sight." The knife slide further down. Johanna arched futilely back from the
point. Then the blade withdrew, the point poised gently against her skin.
"Let's hear what Pilgrim has to say. No point in killing you this instant if
he doesn't insist on seeing you." He pushed a cloth into her mouth and tied
it tight.
There was a moment of silence, maybe the crunch of paws in the brush
right around the cabin. Then she heard a pack warble loud from beyond the
timbered walls. Johanna doubted that she would ever learn to recognize packs
by their voices, but ... her mind stumbled through the sounds, trying to
decode the Tinish chords that were words piled on top of one another:
"Johanna
something interrogative
screech safe."
Vendacious gobbled back,
"Hail Peregrine Wrickwrackscar
Johanna trill
not visible hurts
sad uncertain squeak."
And the traitor murmured in her ear: "Now he'll ask if I need medical
help, and if he insists ... our chat will have an early end."
But the only reply Pilgrim made was a chorus of sympathetic worry.
"Damn assholes are just sitting down out there," came Vendacious's irritated
whisper.
The silence stretched on a moment, and then Peregrine's human voice,
the Joker from Dataset, said in clear Samnorsk. "Don't do anything foolish,
Vendacious, old man."
Vendacious made a sound of polite surprise -- and tensed around her.
His knife jabbed a centimeter deep between Johanna's ribs, a thorn of pain.
She could feel the blade trembling, could feel his member's breath on her
bloody skin.
Pilgrim's voice continued, confident and knowing: "I mean we know what
you're up to. Your pack at the hospital has gone completely to pieces,
confessed what little he knew to Woodcarver. Do you think your lies can get
by her? If Johanna is dead, you'll be bloody shreds." He hummed an ominous
tune from Dataset. "I know her well, the Queen. She seems such a gracious
pack ... but where do you think Flenser got his gruesome creativity? Kill
Johanna and you'll find just how far her genius in that exceeds Flenser's."
The knife pulled back. One more of Vendacious leaped to the window
slits, and the two by Johanna loosened their grip. He stroked the blade
gently across her skin. Thinking? Is Woodcarver really that fearsome? The
four at the windows were looking in all directions; no doubt Vendacious was
counting guard packs and planning furiously. When he finally replied, it was
in Samnorsk: "The threat would be more credible if it were not at second
hand."
Pilgrim chuckled. "True. But we guessed what would happen if she
approached. You're a cautious fellow; you'd have killed Johanna instantly,
and been full of lying explanation before you even heard what the Queen
knows. But seeing a poor pilgrim amble over ... I know you think me a fool,
only one step better than Scriber Jaqueramaphan." Peregrine stumbled on the
name, and for an instant lost his flippant tone. "Anyway, now you know the
situation. If you doubt, send your guards beyond the brush; look at what the
Queen has surrounding you. Johanna dead only kills you. Speaking of which, I
assume this conversation has some point?"
"Yes. She lives." Vendacious slipped the gag from Johanna's mouth. She
turned her head, choking. There were tears running down the sides of her
face. "Pilgrim, oh Pilgrim!" The words were scarcely more than a whisper.
She drew a painful breath, concentrated on making noise. Bright spots danced
before her eyes. "Hei Pilgrim!"
"Hei Johanna. Has he hurt you?"
"Some, I -- "
"That's enough. She's alive, Pilgrim, but that's easily corrected."
Vendacious didn't jam the gag back in her mouth. Johanna could see him
rubbing heads nervously as he paced round and round the ledge. He trilled
something about "stalemated game".
Peregrine replied, "Speak Samnorsk, Vendacious. I want Johanna to
understand -- and you can't talk quite as slick as in pack talk."
"Whatever." The traitor's voice was unconcerned, but his members kept
up their nervous pacing. "The Queen must realize we have a standoff here.
Certainly I'll kill Johanna if I'm not treated properly. But even then,
Woodcarver could not afford to hurt me. Do you realize the trap Steel has
set on Margrum Climb? I'm the only one who knows how to avoid it."
"Big deal. I never wanted to go up Margrum anyway."
"Yes, but you don't count, Pilgrim. You're a mongrel patchwork.
Woodcarver will understand how dangerous this situation is. Steel's forces
are everything I said they weren't, and I've been sending them every secret
I could write down from my investigations of Dataset."
"My brother is alive, Pilgrim," Johanna said.
"Oh.... You're kind of a record setter for treason aren't you,
Vendacious? Everything to us was a lie, while Steel learned all the truth
about us. You figure that means we daren't kill you now?"
Laughter, and Vendacious's pacing stopped. He sees control coming back
to him. "More, you need my full-membered cooperation. See, I exaggerated the
number of enemy agents in Woodcarver's troops, but I do have a few -- and
maybe Steel has planted others I don't know about. If you even arrest me,
word will get back to the Flenser armies. Much of what I know will be
useless -- and you'll face an immediate, overwhelming attack. You see? The
Queen needs me."
"And how do we know this is not more lies?"
"That is a problem, isn't it? Matched only by how I can be guaranteed
safety once I've saved the expedition. No doubt it's beyond your mongrel
mind. Woodcarver and I must have a talk, someplace mutually safe and unseen.
Carry that message back to her. She can't have this traitor's hides, but if
she cooperates she may be able to save her own!"
There was silence from outside, punctuated by the squeaking of animals
in the nearer trees. Finally, surprisingly, Pilgrim laughed. "Mongrel mind,
eh? Well, you have me in one thing, Vendacious. I've been all the world
round, and I remember back half a thousand years
-- but of all the villains and traitors and geniuses, you take the
record for bald impudence!"
Vendacious gave a Tinish chord, untranslatable but as a sign of smug
pleasure. "I'm honored."
"Very well, I'll take your points back to the Queen. I hope the two of
you are clever enough to work something out.... One thing more: the Queen
requires that Johanna come with me."
"The Queen requires? That sounds more like your mongrel sentiment to
me."
"Perhaps. But it will prove you are serious in your confidence. View it
as my price for cooperation."
Vendacious turned all his heads toward Johanna, silently regarding.
Then he scanned out all the windows one last time. "Very well, you may have
her." Two jumped down to the cabin's hatch while another pair pulled her
toward it. His voice was soft and near her ear. "Damn Pilgrim. Alive, you're
just going to cause me trouble with the Queen." His knife slid across her
field of view. "Don't oppose me with her. I am going to survive this affair
still powerful."
He lifted back the hatch and daylight spilled blindingly across her
face. She squinted; there was a sweep of branches and the side of the hut.
Vendacious pushed and pulled her cot onto the forest floor, and the same
time gobbling at his guards to keep their positions. He and Peregrine
chatted politely, agreeing on when the pilgrim would return.
One by one, Vendacious trotted back through the cabin's hatch. Pilgrim
advanced and grabbed the handles at the front of the cot. One of his pups
reached out from his jacket to nuzzled her face. "You okay?"
"I'm not sure. I got bashed in the head ... and it seems kind of hard
to breathe."
He loosened the blankets from around her chest as the rest of him
dragged the cot away from the hut. The forest shade was peaceful and deep
... and Vendacious's guards were stationed here and there about the area.
How many were really in on the treason? Two hours ago, Johanna had looked to
them for protection. Now their every glance sent a shiver through her. She
rolled back to the center of the cot, dizzy again, and stared up into the
branches and leaves and patches of smoke-stained sky. Things like Straumli
tree squigglies chased each other back and forth, chittering in seeming
debate.
Funny. Almost a year ago Pilgrim and Scriber were dragging me around,
and I was even worse hurt, and terrified of everything -- including them.
And now ... she had never been so glad to see another person. Even Scarbutt
was a reassuring strength, walking beside her.
The waves of terror slowly subsided. What was left was an anger as
intense, though more reasoning, than the year before. She knew what had
happened here; the players were not strangers, the betrayal was not random
murder. After all Vendacious's treachery, after all his murders, and his
planning to kill them all ... he was going to go free! Pilgrim and
Woodcarver were just going to overlook that, "He killed Scriber, Pilgrim. He
killed Scriber...." He cut Scriber to pieces, then chased down what was left
and killed that right out of our arms. "And Woodcarver is going to let him
go free? How can she do it? How can you do it?" The tears were coming again.
"Sh, sh." Two of Pilgrim's heads came into view. They looked down at
her, then swiveled around almost nervously. She reached out, touching the
short plush fur. Pilgrim was shivering! One of him dipped close; his voice
didn't sound jaunty at all. "I don't know what the Queen will do, Johanna.
She doesn't know about any of this."
"Wha -- "
"Sh." And his voice became scarcely a buzzing through her hand. "His
people can still see us. He could still figure things out.... Only you and I
know, Johanna. I don't think anyone else suspects."
"But the pack that confessed ...?"
"Bluff, all bluff. I've done some crazy things in my life but next to
following Scriber down to your starship, this takes the prize.... After
Vendacious took you away, I began to think. You weren't that badly injured.
It was all too much like what happened to Jaqueramaphan, but I had no
proof."
"And you haven't told anyone?"
"No. Foolish as poor Scriber, aren't I?" His heads looked in all
directions. "If I was right, he'd be silly not to kill you immediately. I
was so afraid I was already too late...."
You would have been, if Vendacious weren't quite the monster I know he
is.
"Anyway, I learned the truth just like poor Scriber -- almost by
accident. But if we can get another seventy meters away, we won't die like
him. And everything I claimed to Vendacious will be true."
She patted his nearest shoulder, and looked back. The tiny cabin and
its ring of guards disappeared behind the forest brush.
...and Jefri lives!
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
Crypto: 0 [95 encrypted packets have been discarded]
As received by: Ølvira shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Tredeschk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Zonograph Eidolon [Co-op (or religious order) in Middle Beyond
maintained by subscription of several thousand Low Beyond civilizations, in
particular those threatened by immersion]
Subject: Surge Bulletin Update and Ping
Distribution:
Zonograph Eidolon Subscribers, Zonometric Interest Group, Threats Interest Group, subgroup: navigational, Ping participants
Date: 1087892301 seconds since Calibration Event 239011, Eidolon Frame
[66.91 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei]
Key phrases: galactic scale event, superluminal, charitable emergency
announcement
Text of message:
(Please include accurate local time in any ping responses.)
If you receive this, you know that the monster surge has receded. The
new zone surface appears to be a stable froth of low dimensionality (between
2.1 and 2.3). At least five civilizations are trapped in the new
configuration. Thirty virgin solar systems have achieved the Beyond.
(Subscribers may find specifics in the encrypted data that follow this
bulletin.)
The change corresponds to what is seen in a normal period of two years
across the whole galaxy's Slow Zone surface. Yet this surge happened in less
than a two hundred hours and less than one thousandth of that surface.
Even these numbers do not show the scale of the event. (The following
can only be estimates, since so many sites were destroyed, and no
instruments were calibrated for this size event.) At its maximum, the surge
reached 1000 light-years above Zone Surface Standard. Surge rates of more
than thirty million times lightspeed (about one light-year per second) were
sustained for periods of more than 100 seconds. Reports from subscribers
show more than ten billion normalized sophont deaths directly attributable
to the Surge (local network failures, failures leading to environment
collapse, medical collapse, vehicle crashes, security failures). Posted
economic damage is much greater.
The important question now is what can we expect in aftersurges. Our
predictions are based on instrumented sites and zonometric surveys, combined
with historical data from our archives. Except for long-term trends,
predicting zone changes has never been a science, but we have served our
subscribers well in advising of aftersurges and in identifying available new
worlds. The present situation makes all previous work almost useless. We
have precise documentation going back ten million years. Faster than light
surges happen about every twenty thousand years (usually with speeds under
7.0c). Nothing like this monster is on file. The surge just seen is the kind
described at third-hand in old and glutted databases: Sculptor had one this
size fifty million years ago. The [Perseus Arm] in our galaxy probably
suffered something like this half a billion years ago.
This uncertainty makes our Mission nearly impossible, and is an
important reason for this public message to the Zonometry newsgroup and
others: Everyone interested in zonometry and navigation must pool resources
on this problem. Ideas, archive access, algorithms -- all these things could
help. We pledge significant contributions to non-subscribers, and
one-for-one trades to those with important information. Note: We are also
addressing this message to the Swndwp oracle, and direct beaming it to
points in the Transcend thought to be inhabited. Surely an event such as
this must be of interest even there? We appeal to the Powers Above: Let us
send you what we know. Give us some hint if you have ideas about this event.
To demonstrate our good faith, here are the estimates we have
currently. These are based on naive scale-up of well-documented surges in
this region. Details are in the non-crypted appendix to this sending. Over
the next year there will be five or six aftersurges, of diminishing speed
and range. During this time at least two more civilizations (see risk list)
will likely be permanently immersed. Zone storm conditions will prevail even
when aftersurges are not in progress. Navigation in the the volume
[coordinate specification] will be extremely dangerous during this period;
we recommend that shipping in the volume be suspended. The time line is
probably too short to admit feasible rescue plans for the civilizations at
risk. Our long-range prediction (probably the least uncertain of all): The
million-year-scale secular shrinkage will not be affected at all. The next
hundred thousand years will however show a retardation in the shrinkage of
the Slow Zone boundary in this portion of the galaxy.
Finally, a philosophical note. We of Zonographic Eidolon watch the zone
boundary and the orbits of border stars. For the most part, the zone changes
are very slow: 700 meters per second in the case of the long-term secular
shrinkage. Yet these changes together with orbital motion affect billions of
lives each year. Just as the glaciers and droughts of a pretechnical world
must affect a people, so must we accept these long-term changes. Storms and
surges are obvious tragedies, near-instant death for some civilizations. Yet
these are as far beyond our control as the slower movements. Over the last
few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets,
of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such -- and those living
more peaceably around them -- we say: Look out on the universe. It does not
care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not
avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort
from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to
villainy or good, but which simply is.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Ølvira shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Arbwyth->Trade24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK
units
From: Twirlip of the Mists [Who knows what this is, though probably not
a propaganda voice. Very sparse priors.]
Subject: The cause of the recent Great Surge
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Great Secrets of Creation, Zonometric Interest Group
Date: 66.47 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Zone Instability and the Blight, Hexapodia as the key
insight
Text of message:
Apologies if I am repeating obvious conclusions. My only gateway onto
the Net is very expensive, and I miss many important postings. The Great
Surge now in progress appears by all accounts to be an event of cosmic scope
and rarity. Furthermore, the other posters put its epicenter less than 6,000
light-years from recent warfare related to the Blight. Can this be mere
coincidence? As has long been theorized [citations from various sources,
three known to Ølvira; the theories cited are of long standing and
nondisprovable] the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by
something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms, or
[hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores.
Now for the first time in Net history we have a Transcendent form, the
Blight, that can effectively dominate the Beyond. Many on the Net [cites
Hanse and Sandor at the Zoo] believe that it is searching for an artifact
near the Bottom. Is it no wonder that this could upset the Natural Balance
and provoke the recent Event?
Please write to me and tell me what you think. I don't get much mail.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Ølvira shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed union of five empires below
Straumli Realm. No references prior to the Fall of the Straumli Realm.
Numerous counter claims (including from Out of Band II) that this Alliance
is a front for the old Aprahant Hegemony. Cf, Butterfly Terror.]
Subject: Courageous Mission Accomplished
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 67.07 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Subsequent to our action against the human nest at [Sjandra Kei] a part
of our fleet pursued human and other Blight-controlled forces toward the
Bottom of the Beyond. Evidently, the Perversion hoped to protect these
forces by putting them in an environment too dangerous to challenge. That
thinking did not count on the courage of Alliance commanders and crews. We
can now report the substantial destruction of those escaping forces.
The first major operation of your Alliance has been an enormous
success. With the extermination of their most important supporters, Blight
encroachment on the Middle Beyond has been brought to a standstill. Yet much
remains to be done:
The Alliance Fleet is returning to the Middle Beyond. We've suffered
some casualties and need substantial reprovisioning. We know that there are
still scattered pockets of humanity in the Beyond, and we've identified
secondary races that are aiding humanity. The defense of the Middle Beyond
must be the goal of every sophont of good will. Elements of your Alliance
Fleet will soon visit systems in the volume [parameter specification]. We
ask for your aid and support against what is left of this terrible enemy.
Death to vermin.
-=*=-
Kjet Svensndot was alone on Ølvira's bridge when the Surge
passed. They had long since done all the preparations that were meaningful,
and the ship had no realistic means of propulsion in the Slowness that
surrounded it. Yet the Group Captain spent much of his time up here, trying
to program some sort of responsiveness into the automation that remained.
Half- assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to
the beginning of the human experience.
Of course, the actual transition out of Slowness would have been
totally unnoticed if not for all the alarms he and the Dirokimes had
installed. As it was, the noise and lights blew him out of a half-drowse
into hair-raised wakefulness. He punched the ship's comm: "Glimfrelle!
Tirolle! Get your tails up here."
By the time the brothers reached the command deck, preliminary nav
displays had been computed, and a jump sequence was awaiting confirmation.
The two were grinning from ear to ear as they bounced in, and strapped
themselves down at action posts. For a few moments there was little
chitchat, only an occasional whistle of pleasure from the Dirokimes. They
had rehearsed this over and over during the last hundred plus hours, and
with the poor automation there was a lot for them to do. Gradually the view
from the deck's windows sharpened. Where at first there had only been vague
blurs, the ultrawave sensors were posting individual traces with steadily
improving information on range and rates. The communication window showed
the queue of fleet comm messages getting longer and longer.
Tirolle looked up from his work "Hei, Boss, these jump figures look
okay -- at least as a first cut."
"Good. Commit and allow autocommit." In the hours after the Surge, they
had decided that their initial priority should be to continue with the
pursuit. What they did then ... they had talked long on that, and Group
Captain Svensndot had thought even longer. Nothing was routine any more.
"Yes, sir!" The Dirokime's longfingers danced across the controls, and
'Rolle added some verbal control. "Bingo!"
Status showed five jumps completed, ten. Kjet stared out the true-view
window for a few seconds. No change, no change ... then he noticed that one
of the brightest stars in the field had moved, was sliding imperceptibly
across the sky. Like a juggler getting her pace, Ølvira was coming up
to speed.
"Hei, hei!" Glimfrelle leaned over to see his brother's work. "We're
making 1.2 light-years per hour. That's better than before the Surge."
"Good. Comm and Surveillance?" Where was everybody else and what were
they up to?
"Yup. Yup. I'm on it." Glimfrelle bent his slender frame back to the
console. For some seconds, he was almost silent. Svensndot began paging
through the mail. There was nothing yet from Owner Limmende. Twenty-five
years Kjet had worked for Limmende and SjK Commercial Security. Could he
mutiny? And if he did, would any follow?
"Okay. Here's the situation, Boss." Glimfrelle shifted the main window
to show his interpretation of the ship's reports. "It's like we guessed,
maybe a little more extreme." They had realized almost from the beginning
that the surge was bigger than anything in recorded history; that's not what
the Dirokime meant by "extreme". He swept his shortfingers down, making a
hazy blue line across the window. "We guessed that the leading edge of the
Surge moved normal to this line. That would account for it taking Boss
Limmende out four hundred seconds before it hit the Out of Band, and hitting
us ten seconds after that.... Now if the trailing edge were similar to
ordinary surges" -- upgraded a million times -- "then we, and then the rest
of the pursuing fleets should come out well before Out of Band." He pointed
at a single glowing dot that represented the Ølvira. Around and just
ahead of it dozens of points of light were popping into existence as the
ship's detectors reported seeing the initiation of ultradrive jumps. It was
like a cold fire sweeping away from them into the darkness. Eventually
Limmende and the heart of the anonymous fleet would all be back in business.
"Our pickup log shows that's about what happened. Most all the pursuing
fleets will be out of the surge before the Out of Band."
"Hm. So it'll lose part of its lead."
"Yup. But if it's going where we think -- " a G-star eighty light-years
ahead "-- it'll still get there before they kill it." He paused, pointed at
a haze that was spreading sideways from the growing knot of light. "Not
everybody is still chasing."
"Yeah...." Svensndot had been reading the News even as he listened to
'Frelle's summary. "... according to the Net, that's the Alliance for the
Defense departing the battle field, victorious."
"Say what?" Tirolle twisted abruptly in his harness. His large, dark
eyes held none of their usual humor.
"You heard me." Kjet put the item where the brothers could see it. The
two read rapidly, 'Frelle mumbling phrases aloud, "... courage of Alliance
commanders.... substantial destruction of escaping forces...."
Glimfrelle shuddered, all flippancy departed. "They don't even mention
the Surge. Everything they say is a cowardly lie!" His voice shifted up to
its normal speaking range and he continued in his own language. Kjet could
understand parts of it. The Dirokimes that left their dream habitats were
normally light-hearted folk, full of whimsy and gentle sarcasm. Glimfrelle
sounded almost that way now, except for the high edges to his whistling and
the insults more colorful than Svensndot had ever heard from them: "... get
from a verminous cow-pie ... killers of innocent dreams ..." even in
Samnorsk the words were strong, but in Dirokime "verminous cow-pie" was
drenched in explicit imagery that almost brought the smell of such a thing
into the room. Glimfrelle's voice went higher and higher, then beyond the
human register. Abruptly, he collapsed, shuddering and moaning low.
Dirokimes could cry, though Svensndot had never seen such a thing before.
Glimfrelle rocked in his brother's arms.
Tirolle looked over Glimfrelle's shoulder at Kjet. "Where does revenge
take us now, Group Captain?"
For a moment, Kjet looked back silently. "I'll let you know,
Lieutenant." He looked at the displays. Listen and watch a little longer,
and maybe we'll know. "Meantime, get us nearer the center of pursuit," he
said gently.
"Aye, sir." Tirolle patted his brother's back gently and turned back to
the console.
During the next five hours, Ølvira's crew watched the Alliance
fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called
a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not
hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there
might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the
possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars,
they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were
full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn't be disguised. Former neutrals
pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance
was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than
altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who
might next receive Alliance attention.
Major transceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have
been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally
beyond Ølvira's present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot
kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue, some insight.... The
majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the
Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the
Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the
Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more
interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the
Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on
permanent parasitization.
In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the Out of
Band and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not
completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an
hour.
The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to Ølvira.
They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours
headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they
had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets' emergence and
establishing Ølvira's identity with the other vessels of Commercial
Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet
Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was
personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral
type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a
Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers.
But now...
The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were
not pursued. ("Wait till we can all act together," ordered Svensndot.)
Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet,
including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders,
Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende's flag ship was
in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that
true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the "treason" he planned.
The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of
the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across
Ølvira's deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship's
crypto. "Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority," said the ship's
voice.
Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a
chill certainty spread up his neck.
... All units are to pursue fleeing vessels. These are the enemy, the
killers of our people. WARNING: Masquerades suspected. Destroy any vessels
countermanding these orders. Order of Battle and validation codes follow....
Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards.
Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to
destroy "masqueraders". Kjet said to Glimfrelle, "How about the validation
codes?"
The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: "They're clean. We wouldn't
be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today's one-time
pad.... We're beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and
video channels. They want to know what to do."
If he hadn't prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet's
mutiny wouldn't have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real
military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without
question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that
Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the
fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it.
Yet "Limmende" had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made
perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was
also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to
show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible.
Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might
suspect.
Such a slender thread of reason Kjet and his friends were hanging from.
Kjet eyed the knot of light that represented the Blighter fleet. It was
suffering from no indecision. None of its vessels were straggling back
toward safer heights. Whatever commanded there had discipline beyond most
human militaries. It would sacrifice everything in its single-minded pursuit
of one small starship. What next, Group Captain?
Just ahead of that cold smear of light, a single tiny gleam appeared.
"The Out of Band!" said Glimfrelle. "Sixty-five light-years out now."
"I'm getting encrypted video from them, Boss. The same half-crocked xor
pad as before." He put the signal on the main window without waiting for
Kjet's direction.
It was Ravna Bergsndot. The background was a jumble of motion and
shouting, the strange human and a Skroderider arguing. Bergsndot was facing
away from the pickup, and doing her share of shouting. Things looked even
worse than Kjet's recollection of the first moments of his ship's emergence.
"It doesn't matter just now, I tell you! Let him be. We've got to
contact -- " she must have seen the signal Glimfrelle was sending back to
her. "They're here! By the Powers, Pham, please -- " She waved her hand
angrily and turned to the camera. "Group Captain. We're -- "
"I know. We've been out of the surge for hours. We're near the center
of the pursuit now."
She caught her breath. Even with a hundred hours of planning, events
were moving too fast for her. And for me too. "That's something," she said
after an instant. "Everything we said before holds, Group Captain. We need
your help. That's the Blight that's coming behind us. Please!"
Svensndot noticed a telltale by the window. Sassy Glimfrelle was
retransmitting this to all the fleet they could trust. Good. He had talked
about the situation with the others these last hours, but it meant something
more to see Ravna Bergsndot on the comm, to see someone from Sjandra Kei who
still survived and needed their help. You can spend the rest of your life
chasing revenge in the Middle Beyond, but all you kill will be the vultures.
What's chasing Ravna Bergsndot may be the first cause.
The Butterflies were long gone, still singing their courage across the
Net. Less than one percent of Commercial Security had followed "Limmende's"
order to chase after them. Those were not the problem: it was the ten
percent that stayed behind and arrayed themselves with the Blight's forces
that bothered Kjet Svensndot. Some of those ships might not be subverted,
might simply be loyal to orders they believed. It would be very hard to fire
on them.
And there would be fighting, no doubt of that. Maneuvering for conflict
while under ultradrive was difficult -- if the other side attempted to
evade. But Blight's fleet was unwavering in its pursuit of the Out of Band.
Slowly, slowly the two fleets were coming to occupy the same volume. At
present they were scattered across cubic light-years, but with every jump,
the Group Captain's Aniara fleet was more finely tuned to the stutter of
their quarries' drives. Some ships were actually within a few hundred
million kilometers of the enemy -- or where the enemy had been or would be.
Targeting tactics were set. First fire was only a few hundred seconds away.
"With the Aprahanti gone, we have numerical superiority. A normal enemy
would back off now -- "
"But of course, that is one thing the Blight fleet is not." It was the
red-haired guy who was doing the talking now. It was a good thing Glimfrelle
hadn't relayed his face to the rest of Svensndot's fleet. The guy acted edgy
and alien most of the time. Just now, he seemed intent on bashing every idea
Svensndot advanced. "The Blight doesn't care what its losses are as long as
it arrives with the upper hand."
Svensndot shrugged. "Look, we'll do our best. First fire is seventy
seconds off. If they don't have any secret advantage, we may win this one."
He looked sharply at the other. "Or is that your point? Could the Blight --
" Stories were still coming down about the Blight's progress across the Top
of the Beyond. Without a doubt, it was a transhuman intelligence. An unarmed
man might be outnumbered by a pack of dogs, yet still defeat them. So might
the Blight...?
Pham Nuwen shook his head. "No, no, no. The Blight's tactics down here
will probably be inferior to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where
it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here
are like badly-synched waldoes." Nuwen frowned at something off camera. "No,
what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness." His voice suddenly had a
detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It
wasn't the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of
the demented. "One hundred seconds to contact.... Group Captain, we have a
chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points." Ravna floated
down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the red-head's shoulder.
Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy.
Godshatter, a Power's dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?
Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following
Pham Nuwen make us? But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was
saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle
had scattered through the enemy fleet. "Anything special about those
targets, 'Rolle?"
The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly
slowly on the windows before him. "The ships he's targeting aren't the
biggest or the fastest. It's gonna take extra time to position on them."
Command vessels? "One other thing. Some of 'em show high real velocities,
not natural residuals at all." Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?
"Hm." Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty
seconds and Jo Haugen's ship Lynsnar would be in contact, but not with one
of Nuwen's targets. "Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell Lynsnar to back off,
retarget." Retarget everything.
The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the
Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and
not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not
built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot's appeal successful
was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then
there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende's channel: kill the
mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was
valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske
Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct
decision, anyway.
Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets.
Glimfrelle opened the main window on the Lynsnar's data stream: The view was
almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars. The target was less
than thirty million kilometers from Lynsnar, but about a millisecond out of
synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.
"Drones away," Haugen's voice said. Now they had a true view of Lynsnar
from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones
launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond
-- a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving
spawn. The picture flickered, Lynsnar disappearing, reappearing, as the
drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship's
hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by Lynsnar, calibrating itself,
orienting on the enemy.
The light faded from around Lynsnar as the drones moving fractionally
out of synch in space and time. Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million
klick sphere centered at Lynsnar. The target vessel was a red dot that
flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect. Lynsnar was stalking
prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target
disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times Lynsnar and the
target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at
less than a million kilometers remove. What could not be accurately
displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad
trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.
"What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?" said
Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug. What they were watching was three
light-years away. No way he could know.
But Jo Haugen replied, "I don't think my bogie is swarming. I've lost
only five drones, no more'n you'd expect from fratricide. We'll see -- " She
paused, but Lynsnar's trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the
other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed
swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from Out of Band. The godshatter had
had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.
And now good news and bad came in very fast:
"Got him!" from Jo Haugen. The red dot in Lynsnar's swarm was no more.
It had passed within a few thousand kilometers of one of the drones. In the
milliseconds necessary to compute a new jump, the drone had discovered its
presence and detonated. Even that would not have been fatal if the target
had jumped before the blast front hit it; there had been several near misses
in earlier seconds. This time the jump did not reach commit in time. A
mini-star was born, one whose light would be years in reaching the rest of
the battle volume.
Glimfrelle gave a rasping whistle, an untranslatable curse, "We just
lost Ablsndot and Holder, Boss. Their target must have counter-swarmed."
"Send in Gliwing and Trance." Something in the back of his head curled
up in horror. These were his friends who were dying. Kjet had seen death
before, but never like this. In police action, no one took lethal chances
except in a rescue. And yet... he turned from the field summary to order
more ships on a target that had acquired defending vessels. Tirolle was
moving in others on his own. Ganging up on a few nonessential targets might
lose in the long run, but in the short term ... the enemy was being hurt.
For the first time since the fall of Sjandra Kei, Commercial Security was
hurting someone back.
Haugen: "Powers, that guy was moving! Secondary drone got EM spectrum
on the kill. Target was going 15000 kps true speed." A rocket bomb ramping
up? Damn. They should be postponing those till after they controlled the
battlefield.
Tirolle: "More kills, far side of battle volume. The enemy is
repositioning. Somehow they've guessed which we're after -- "
Glimfrelle: Triumph whistle. "Get 'em, get 'em -- oops. Boss, I think
Limmende has figured we're coordinating things -- "
A new window had opened over Tirolle's post. It showed the five million
kilometers around Ølvira. Two other ships were there now: the window
identified them as Limmende's flag and one of the vessels that had not
responded to Svensndot's recruiting.
There was an instant of stillness on Ølvira's command deck. The
voices of triumph and panic coming from the rest of the fleet seemed
suddenly far away. Svensndot and his crew were looking at death close up.
"Tirolle! How long till swarm -- "
"They're on us already -- just missed a drone by ten milliseconds."
"Tirolle! Finish running current engagements. Glimfrelle, tell Lynsnar
and Trance to chain command if we lose contact." Those ships had already
spent their drones, and Jo Haugen was known to all the other captains.
Then the thought was gone, and he was busy coordinating Ølvira's
own battle swarm. The local tactics window showed the cloud dissipating,
taking on colors coded by whether they were lagging or leading in time
relative to Ølvira.
Their two attackers had matched pseudospeeds perfectly. Ten times per
second all three ships jumped a tiny fraction of a light-year. Like rocks
skipping across the surface of a pond, they appeared in real space in
perfectly measured hops -- and the distance between them at every emergence
was less that five million kilometers. The only thing that separated them
now was millisecond differences in jump times, and the fact the light itself
could not pass between them in the brief time they spent at each jump point.
Three actinic flashes lit the deck, casting shadows back from Svensndot
and the Dirokimes. It was second-hand light, the display's emergency signal
of nearby detonation. Run like hell was the message any rational person
should take from that awful light. It would be easy enough to break synch
... and lose tactical control of Aniara fleet. Tirolle and Glimfrelle bent
their heads away from the local window, shying from the glare of nearby
death. Their whistling voices scarcely broke cadence, and the commands from
Ølvira to the others continued. There were dozens of other battles
going on out there. Just now Ølvira was the only source of precision
and control available to their side. Every second they remained on station
meant protection and advantage to Aniara. Breaking off would mean minutes of
chaos till Lynsnar or Trance could pick up control.
Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen's targets were destroyed now. The price
had been high, half of Svensdot's friends. The enemy had lost much to
protect those targets, yet much of its fleet survived.
An unseen hand smashed Ølvira, driving Svensndot hard against
his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows.
Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by
one small monitor. 'Rolle whistled softly, "We're out of the game, Boss,
least while it counts. I didn't know you could get misses that near."
Maybe it wasn't a miss. Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted
across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor. Maybe we're
already dead. Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated, the wave front
reaching Ølvira before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer
part of the ship's hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of
the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the
damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances
were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt
insulation floated across the room on the ventilator's breeze.
"Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn't have been
clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!" And
somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The
gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would
slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship's
surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the Ølvira's
automation ...
Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice
recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across
the screen. "Central automation suspended. Display management suspended.
Drive computation suspended." Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. "Hei,
'Frelle, it looks like 'Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most
of this back!"
Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case
Tirolle wasn't far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had
been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the
next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor's hardened
processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were
beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and
the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted.
(Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that
should have been disabled along with all the rest of Ølvira's
automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.
... and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was
smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was
long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four
light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with
numerical superiority. If they'd fought properly, they might have won.
Instead they'd destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities -- and
knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels
survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than
four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained
of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit,
and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy's behavior.
Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and
trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had
lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been
hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms
to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual
exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were
as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.
Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed.
The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future.
It might better have been a wake -- for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part
way through the meeting, a new window appeared, a view onto the bridge of
the Out of Band. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The
erstwhile "godshatter" was nowhere in evidence.
"What more to do?" said Johanna Haugen. "The damn Butterflies are long
gone."
"Are we sure we have rescued everyone?" asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot
bit back an angry reply. The commander of Trance had become a recording loop
on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of
his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in
the deep night.
"We've accounted for everything, even to vapor," Haugen spoke as gently
as the words allowed. "The question is where to go now."
Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, "Gentlemen and Ladies, if --
"
Trenglets looked up at her transceived image. All his hurt transformed
into a blaze of anger. "We're not your gentlemen, slut! You're not some
princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more."
The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. "I -- "
"You put us into this suicidal battle," shouted Trenglets. "You made us
attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is
locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your
course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our
path."
"I doubt that would have helped, sir," said Ravna. "The Blight seems
most interested in where we're bound." The solar system just fifty-five
light-years beyond the Out of Band. The fugitives would arrive there just
over two days before their pursuers.
Jo Haugen shrugged. "You must realize what your friend's crazy battle
plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction
of its present size. If it chose to continue, we might have been able to
protect you at this, this Tines' world." She seemed to taste the strange
name, wondering at its meaning. "Now ... no way am I going to chase them
there. What's left of the enemy could wipe us out." She glanced at
Svensndot's viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might
blame Out of Band, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot's word that had
persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara's sacrifice had been ill-
spent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to
him at all now. "Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous
in one thousand seconds, Kjet."
"I'll be ready."
"Good." Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna
Bergsndot. Seconds later, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It
was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes -- and Ravna Bergsndot looking out
her window from Out of Band.
Finally, Bergsndot said, "When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes
we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security. I always dreamed of being
rescued by your company from fates worse than death."
Kjet smiled bleakly, "Well, you got the rescue attempt," and you not
even a currently subscribed customer. "This was far the biggest gun fight
we've ever been in."
"I'm sorry, Kje -- Group Captain."
He looked into her dark features. A lass from Sjandra Kei, down to the
violet eyes. No way this could be a simulation, not here. He had bet
everything that she was not; he still believed she was not. Yet -- "What
does your friend say about all this?" Pham Nuwen had not been seen since his
so-impressive godshatter act at the beginning of the battle.
Ravna's glance shifted to something off-camera. "He's not saying much,
Group Captain. He's wandering around even more upset than your Captain
Trenglets. Pham remembers being absolutely convinced he was demanding the
right thing, but now he can't figure out why it was right."
"Hmm." A little late for second thoughts. "What are you going to do
now? Haugen is right, you know. It would be useless suicide for us to follow
the Blighters to your destination. I daresay it's useless suicide for you,
too. You'll arrive maybe fifty-five hours before them. What can you do in
that time?"
Ravna Bergsndot looked back at him, and her expression slowly collapsed
into sobbing grief. "I don't know. I ... don't know." She shook her head,
her face hidden behind her hands and a sweep of black hair. Finally she
looked up and brushed back her hair. Her voice was calm but very quiet. "But
we are going ahead. It's what we came for. Things could still work out....
You know there's something down there, something the Blight wants
desperately. Maybe fifty-five hours is enough to figure out what it is and
tell the Net. And ... and we'll still have Pham's godshatter."
Your worst enemy? Quite possibly this Pham Nuwen was a construct of the
Powers. He certainly looked like something built from a second-hand
description of humanity. But how can you tell godshatter from simple
nuttery?
She shrugged, as if acknowledging the doubts -- and accepting them. "So
what will you and Commercial Security do?"
"There is no Commercial Security anymore. Virtually all our customers
got shot out from under us. Now we've killed our company's owner -- or at
least destroyed her ship and those supporting her. We are Aniara Fleet now."
It was the official name chosen at the fleet conference just ended. There
was a certain grim pleasure in embracing it, the ghost from before Sjandra
Kei and before Nyjora, from the earliest times of the human race. For they
were truly cast away now, from their worlds and their customers and their
former leaders. One hundred ships bound for.... "We talked it over. A few
still wanted to follow you to Tines' world. Some of the crews want to return
to Middle Beyond, spend the rest of their lives killing Butterflies. The
majority want to start the races of Sjandra Kei over again, some place where
we won't be noticed, some place where no one cares if we live."
And the one thing everyone agreed on was that Aniara must be split no
further, must make no further sacrifices outside of itself. Once that was
clear, it was easy to decide what to do. In the wake of the Great Surge,
this part of the Bottom was an incredible froth of Slowness and Beyond. It
would be centuries before the zonographic vessels from above had reasonable
maps of the new interface. Hidden away in the folds and interstices were
worlds fresh from the Slowness, worlds where Sjandra Kei could be born
again. Ny Sjandra Kei?
He looked across the bridge at Tirolle and Glimfrelle. They were busy
bringing the main navigation processors out of suspension. That wasn't
absolutely necessary for the rendezvous with Lynsnar, but things would be a
lot more convenient if both ships could maneuver. The brothers seemed
oblivious to Kjet's conversation with Ravna. And maybe they weren't paying
attention. In a way, the Aniara decision meant more to them than to the
humans of the fleet: No one doubted that millions of humans survived in the
Beyond (and who knew how many human worlds might still exist in the
Slowness, distant cousins of Nyjora, distant children of Old Earth). But
this side of the Transcend, the Dirokimes of Aniara were the only ones that
existed. The dream habitats of Sjandra Kei were gone, and with them the
race. There were at least a thousand Dirokimes left aboard Aniara, pairs of
sisters and brothers scattered across a hundred vessels. These were the most
adventurous of their race's latter days, and now they were faced with their
greatest challenge. The two on Ølvira had already been scouting among
the survivors, looking for friends and dreaming a new reality.
Ravna listened solemnly to his explanations. "Group Captain, zonography
is a tedious thing ... and your ships are near their limits. In this froth
you might search for years and not find a new home."
"We're taking precautions. We're abandoning all our ships except the
ones with ramscoop and coldsleep capability. We'll operate in coordinated
nets; no one should be lost for more than a few years." He shrugged. "And if
we never find what we seek -- " if we die between the stars as our life
support finally fails "-- well then, we will have still lived true to our
name." Aniara. "I think we have a chance." More than can be said for you.
Ravna nodded slowly. "Yes, well. It ... helps me to know that."
They talked a few minutes more, Tirolle and Glimfrelle joining in. They
had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of
the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the
strivings.
"Rendezvous Lynsnar two hundred seconds," said the ship's voice.
Ravna heard it, nodded. She raised her hand. "Fare you well, Kjet
Svensndot and Tirolle and Glimfrelle."
The Dirokimes whistled back the common farewell, and Svensndot raised
his hand. The window on Ravna Bergsndot closed.
... Kjet Svensndot remembered her face all the rest of his life, though
in later years it seemed more and more to be the same as Ølvira's.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
CHAPTER 37
"Tines' world. I can see it, Pham!"
The main window showed a true view upon the system: a sun less than two
hundred million kilometers off, daylight across the command deck. The
positions of identified planets were marked with blinking red arrows. But
one of those -- just twenty million kilometers off -- was labeled
"terrestrial". Coming off an interstellar jump, you couldn't get positioning
much better than that.
Pham didn't reply, just glared out the window as if there were
something wrong with what they were seeing. Something had broken in him
after the battle with the Blight. He'd been so sure of his godshatter -- and
so bewildered by the consequences. Afterwards he had retreated more than
ever. Now he seemed to think that if they moved fast enough, the surviving
enemy could do them no harm. More than ever he was suspicious of Blueshell
and Greenstalk, as if somehow they were greater threats than the ships that
still pursued.
"Damn," Pham said finally. "Look at the relative velocity." Seventy
kilometers per second.
Position matching was no problem, but "Matching velocities will cost us
time, Sir Pham."
Pham's stare turned on Blueshell. "We talked this out with the locals
three weeks ago, remember? You managed the burn."
"And you checked my work, Sir Pham. This must be another nav system bug
... though I didn't expect anything was wrong in simple ballistics." A sign
inverted, seventy klicks per second closing velocity instead of zero.
Blueshell drifted toward the secondary console.
"Maybe," said Pham. "Just now, I want you off the deck, Blueshell."
"But I can help! We should be contacting Jefri, and rematching
velocities, and -- "
"Get off the deck, Blueshell. I don't have time to watch you anymore,"
Pham dived across the intervening space and was met by Ravna, just short of
the Rider.
She floated between the two, talking fast, hoping whatever she said
would both make sense and make peace. "It's okay, Pham. He'll go." She
brushed her hand across one of Blueshell's wildly vibrating fronds. After a
second, Blueshell wilted. "I'll go. I'll go." She kept an encouraging touch
on him -- and kept herself between him and Pham, as the Skroderider made a
dejected exit.
When the Rider was gone, she turned to Pham. "Couldn't it have been a
nav bug, Pham?"
The other didn't seem to hear the question. The instant the hatch had
closed, he had returned to the command console. OOB's latest estimate put
the Blight's arrival less than fifty-three hours away. And now they must
waste time redoing a velocity match supposedly accomplished three weeks
earlier. "Somebody, something, screwed us over ..." Pham was muttering, even
as he finished with the control sequence, "Maybe it was a bug. This next
damn burn is going to be as manual as it can be." Acceleration alarms echoed
down the core of the OOB. Pham flipped through monitor windows, searching
for loose items that might be big enough to be dangerous. "You tie down,
too." He reached out to override the five minute timer.
Ravna dived back across the deck, unfolding the free-fall saddle into a
seat and strapping in. She heard Pham speaking on the general announce
channel, warning of the timer override. Then the impulse drive cut in, a
lazy pressure back into the webbing. Four tenths of a gee -- all the poor
OOB could still manage.
When Pham said manual, he meant it. The main window appeared to be
bore-centered now. The view didn't drift at the whim of the pilot, and there
were no helpful legends and schematics. As much as possible, the were seeing
true view along OOB's main axis. Peripheral windows were held in fixed
geometry with main. Pham's eyes flickered from one to another, as his hands
played over the command board. As near as could be, he was flying by his own
senses, and trusting no one else.
But Pham still had use for the ultradrive. They were twenty million
klicks off target, a submicroscopic jump. Pham Nuwen fiddled with the drive
parameters, trying to make an accurate jump smaller than the standard
interval. Every few seconds the sunlight would shift a fraction, coming
first over Ravna's left shoulder and then her right. It made reestablishing
comm with Jefri nearly impossible.
Suddenly the window below their feet was filled by a world, huge and
gibbous, blue and swirling white. The Tines' world was as Jefri Olsndot
advertised, a normal terrestrial planet. After the months aspace and the
loss of Sjandra Kei, the sight caught Ravna short. Ocean, the world was
mostly ocean, but near the terminator there were the darker shades of land.
A single tiny moon was visible beyond the limb.
Pham sucked in his breath. "It's about ten thousand kilometers off.
Perfect. Except we're closing at seventy klicks per second." Even as she
watched, the world seemed to grow, falling toward them. Pham watched it for
few seconds more. "Don't worry, we're going to miss, fly right past the, um,
north limb."
The globe swelled below them, eclipsing the moon. She had always loved
the appearance of Herte at Sjandra Kei. But that world had smaller oceans,
and was criss-crossed with Dirokime accidents. This place was as beautiful
as Relay, and seemed truly untouched. The small polar cap was in sunlight,
and she could follow the coastline that came south from it toward the
terminator. I'm seeing the northwest coast. Jefri's right down there! Ravna
reached for her keyboard, asked the ship to attempt both ultrawave comm and
a radio link.
"Ultrawave contact," she said after a second.
"What does it say?"
"It's garbled. Probably just a ping response," acknowledgment to OOB's
signal. Jefri was housed very near the ship these days; sometimes she had
gotten responses almost immediately, even during his night time. It would be
good to talk to him again, even if ...
Tines' world filled the entire aft and side windows now, its limb a
barely curving horizon. Sky colors stood before them, fading to the black of
space. Icecap and icebergs showed detail within detail against the sea. She
could see cloud shadows. She followed the coast southwards, islands and
peninsulas so closely fit that she could not be sure of one from the other.
Blackish mountains and black-striped glaciers. Green and brown valleys. She
tried to remember the geography they had learned from Jefri. Hidden Island?
But there were so many islands.
"I have radio contact from planet's surface," came the ship's voice.
Simultaneously a blinking arrow pointed at a spot just in from the coast.
"Do you want the audio in real time?"
"Yes. Yes!" said Ravna, then punched at her keyboard when the ship did
not respond immediately.
"Hei, Ravna. Oh, Ravna!" The little boy's voice bounced excitement
around the deck. He sounded just as she had imagined.
Ravna keyed in a request for two-way. They were less than five thousand
klicks from Jefri now, even if they were sweeping by at seventy kilometers
per second. Plenty close enough for a radio conversation. "Hei, Jefri!" she
said. "We're here at last, but we need -- " we need all the cooperation your
four-legged friends can give us. How to say that quickly and effectively?
But the boy on the ground already had an agenda: "-- need help now,
Ravna! The Woodcarvers are attacking now."
There was a thumping, as if the transmitter was bouncing around.
Another voice spoke, high-pitched and weirdly inarticulate. "This Steel,
Ravna. Jefri right. Woodcarver -- " the almost human voice dissolved into a
hissing gobble. After a moment she heard Jefri's voice: "'Ambush', the word
is 'ambush'."
"Yes ... Woodcarver has done big, big ambush. They all around now. We
die in hours if you not help."
Woodcarver had never wanted to be a warrior. But ruling for half a
thousand years requires a range of skills, and she had learned about making
war. Some of that -- such as trusting to staff -- she had temporarily
unlearned these last few days. There had indeed been an ambush on Margrum
Climb, but not the one that Lord Steel had planned.
She looked across the tented field at Vendacious. That pack was
half-hidden by noise baffles, but she could see he wasn't so jaunty as
before. Being put to the question will loosen anyone's control. Vendacious
knew his survival now depended on her keeping a promise. Yet ... it was
awful to think that Vendacious would live after he had killed and betrayed
so many. She realized that two of herself were keening rage, lips curled
back from clenched teeth. Her puppies huddled back from threats unseen. The
tented area stank of sweat and the mindnoise of too many people in too small
a space. It took a real effort of will to calm herself. She licked the
puppies, and daydreamed peaceful thoughts for a moment.
Yes, she would keep her promises to Vendacious. And maybe it would be
worth the price. Vendacious had only speculations about Steel's inner
secrets, but he had learned far more about Steel's tactical situation than
the other side could have guessed. Vendacious had known just where the
Flenserists were hiding and in what numbers. Steel's folk had been
overconfident about their super guns and their secret traitor. When
Woodcarver's troops surprised them, victory had been easy -- and now the
Queen had some of these marvelous guns.
From behind the hills, those cannons were still pounding away, eating
through the stocks of ammunition the captured gunners had revealed.
Vendacious the traitor had cost her much, but Vendacious the prisoner might
yet bring her victory.
"Woodcarver?" It was Scrupilo. She waved him closer. Her chief gunner
edged out of the sun, sat down an intimate twenty-five feet away. Battle
conditions had blown away all notions of decorum.
Scrupilo's mind noise was an anxious jumble. He looked by parts
exhausted and exhilarated and discouraged. "It's safe to advance up the
castle hill, Your Majesty," he said. "Answering fire is almost extinguished.
Parts of the castle walls have been breached. There is an end to castles
here, My Queen. Even our own poor cannons would make it so."
She bobbed agreement. Scrupilo spent most of his time with Dataset in
learning to make -- cannons in particular. Woodcarver spent her time
learning what those inventions ultimately created. By now she knew far more
than even Johanna about the social effects of weapons, from the most
primitive to ones so strange that they seemed not weapons at all. A thousand
million times, castle technologies had fallen to things like cannon; why
should her world be different?
"We'll move up then -- "
From beyond the shade of the tent there was a faint whistle, a rare,
incoming round. She folded the puppies within herself, and paused a moment.
Twenty yards away, Vendacious shrank down in a great cower. But when it
came, the explosion was a muffled thump above them on the hill. It might
even have been one of our own. "Now our troops must take advantage of the
destruction. I want Steel to know that the old games of ransom and torture
will only win him worse." We'll most likely win the starship and the child.
The question was, would either be alive when they got them? She hoped
Johanna would never know the threats and the risks she planned for the next
few hours.
"Yes, Majesty." But Scrupilo made no move to depart, and suddenly
seemed more bedraggled and worried than ever. "Woodcarver, I fear ..."
"What? We have the tide. We must rush to sail on it."
"Yes, Majesty.... But while we move forward, there are serious dangers
coming up on our flanks and rear. The enemy's far scouts and the fires."
Scrupilo was right. The Flenserists who operated behind her lines were
deadly. There weren't many of them; the enemy troops at Margrum Climb had
been mostly killed or dispersed. The few that ate at Woodcarver's flanks
were equipped with ordinary crossbows and axes ... but they were
extraordinarily well-coordinated. And their tactics were brilliant; she saw
the snouts and tines of Flenser himself in that brilliance. Somehow her evil
child lived. Like a plague of years past, he was slipping back upon the
world. Given time, those guerrilla packs would seriously hurt Woodcarver's
ability to supply her forces. Given time. Two of her stood and looked
Scrupilo in the eyes, emphasizing the point: "All the more reason to move
now, my friend. We are the ones far from home. We are the ones with limited
numbers and food. If we don't win soon, then we will be cut up a bit at a
time." Flensed.
Scrupilo stood up, nodding submission. "That's what Peregrine says,
too. And Johanna wants to chase right through the castle walls.... But
there's something else, Your Majesty. Even if we must lunge all forward: I
worked for a ten of tendays, using every clue I could understand from
Dataset, to make our cannon. Majesty, I know how hard it is to do such. Yet
the guns we captured on Margrum have three times the range and one quarter
the weight. How could they do it?" There were chords of anger and
humiliation in his voice. "The traitor," Scrupilo jerked a snout in the
direction of Vendacious, "thinks they may have Johanna's brother, but
Johanna says they have nothing like Dataset. Majesty, Steel has some
advantage we don't yet know."
Even the executions were not helping. Day by day, Steel felt his rage
growing. Alone on the parapet, he whipped back and forth upon himself,
barely conscious of anything but his anger. Not since he had been under
Flenser's knife had the anger been such a radiant thing. Get back control,
before he cuts you more, the voice of some early Steel seemed to say.
He hung on the thought, pulled himself together. He stared down at
bloody drool and tasted ashes. Three of his shoulders were streaked with
tooth cuts -- he'd been hurting himself, another habit Flenser had cured him
of long ago. Hurt outwards, never toward yourself. Steel licked mechanically
at the gashes and walked closer to the parapet's edge:
At the horizon, gray-black haze obscured the sea and the islands. The
last few days, the summer winds coming off the inland had been a hot breath,
tasting of smoke. Now the winds were like fire themselves, whipping past the
castle, carrying ash and smoke. All last dayaround the far side of Bitter
Gorge had been a haze of fire. Today he could see the hillsides: they were
black and brown, crowned with smoke that swept toward the sea's horizon.
There were often brush and forest fires in the High Summer. But this year,
as if nature was a godly pack of war, the fires had been everywhere. The
wretched guns had done it. And this year, he couldn't retreat to the cool of
Hidden Island and let the coastlings suffer.
Steel ignored his smarting shoulders and paced the stones more
thoughtfully, almost analytical for a change. The creature Vendacious had
not stayed bought; he had turned traitor to his treason. Steel had
anticipated that Vendacious might be discovered; he had other spies who
should have reported such a thing. But there had been no sign ... until the
disaster at Margrum Climb. Now the twist of Vendacious's knife had turned
all his plans on their heads. Woodcarver would be here very soon, and not as
a victim.
Who would have guessed that he would really need the Spacers to rescue
him from Woodcarver? He had worked so hard to confront the Southerners
before Ravna arrived. But now he did need that help from the sky -- and it
was more than five hours away. Steel almost slipped back into rage state at
the thought. In the end, would all the cozening of Amdijefri be for nothing?
Oh, when this is over, how much will I enjoy killing those two. More than
any of the others, they deserved death. They had caused so much
inconvenience. They had consistently required his kindliest behavior, as
though they ruled him. They had showered him with more insolence than ten
thousand normal subjects.
From the castle yard there was the sound of laboring packs, straining
winches, the screech and groan of rock being moved about. The professional
core of Flenser's Empire survived. Given a few more hours, the breaches in
the walls would be repaired and new guns would be brought in from the north.
And the grand scheme can still succeed. As long as I am together, no matter
what else is lost, it can succeed.
Almost lost in the racket, he heard the click of claws on the inward
steps. Steel drew back, turned all heads toward the sound. Shreck? But
Shreck would have announced himself first. Then he relaxed; there was only
one set of claw sounds. It was a singleton coming up the stairs.
Flenser's member cleared the steps, and bowed to Steel, an incomplete
gesture without other members to mirror it. The member's radio cloak shone
clean and dark. The army was in awe of those cloaks, and of the singletons
and duos who seemed smarter than the brightest pack. Even Steel's
lieutenants who understood what the cloaks really were -- even Shreck --
were cautious and tentative around them. And now Steel needed the Flenser
Fragment more than anyone, more than anything except Starfolk gullibility.
"What news?"
"Leave to sit?" Was the sardonic Flenser smile behind that request?
"Granted," snapped Steel.
The singleton eased itself onto the stones, a parody of an insolent
pack. But Steel saw when the other winced; the Fragment had been dispersed
across the Domain for almost twenty days now. Except for brief periods, he
had been wrapped in the radio cloaks that whole time. Dark and golden
torture. Steel had seen this member without its cloak, when it was bathed.
Its pelt was rubbed raw at shoulder and haunch, where the weight of the
radio was greatest. Bleeding sores had opened at the center of the bald
spots. Alone without its cloak, the mindless singleton had blabbered its
pain. Steel enjoyed those sessions, even if this one was not especially
verbal. It was almost as if he, Steel, were now the One who Teaches with a
Knife, and Flenser were his pupil.
The singleton was silent for a moment. Steel could hear its
ill-concealed panting. "The last dayaround has gone well, My Lord."
"Not here! We've lost almost all our cannon. We're trapped inside these
walls." And the starfolk may arrive too late.
"I mean out there." The singleton poked its nose toward the open spaces
beyond the parapet. "Your scouts are well-trained, My Lord, and have some
bright commanders. Right now, I am spread round Woodcarvers rear and
flanks." The singleton made its part of a laughing gesture. "'Rear and
flanks'. Funny. To me Woodcarver's entire army is like a single enemy pack.
Our Attack Infantries are like tines on my own paws. We are cutting the
Queen deep, My Lord. I set the fire in Bitter Gorge. Only I could see
exactly where it was spreading, exactly how to kill with it. In another four
dayarounds there will be nothing left of the Queen's supplies. She will be
ours."
"Too long, if we're dead this afternoon."
"Yes." The singleton cocked its head at Steel. He's laughing at me.
Just like all those times under Flenser's knife when a problem would be
posed and death was the penalty for failure. "But Ravna and company should
be back here in five hours, no?" Steel nodded. "Well, I guarantee you that
will be hours ahead of Woodcarver's main assault. You have Amdijefri's
confidence. It seems you need only advance and compress your previous
schedule. If Ravna is sufficiently desperate -- "
"The starfolk are desperate. I know that." Ravna might mask her precise
motives, but her desperation was clear. "And if you can slow Woodcarver -- "
Steel settled all of himself down to concentrate on the scheming at hand. He
was half-conscious of his fears retreating. Planning was always a comfort.
"The problem is that we have to do two things now, and perfectly
coordinated. Before, it was simply a matter to feign a siege and trick the
starship into landing in the castle's Jaws." He turned a head in the
direction of the courtyard. The stone dome over the landed starship had been
in place since midspring. It showed some artillery damage now, the marble
facing chipped away, but hadn't taken direct hits. Beside it lay the field
of the Jaws: large enough to accept the rescue ship, but surrounded by
pillars of stone, the teeth of the Jaws. With the proper use of gunpowder,
the teeth would fall on the rescuers. That would be a last resort, if they
didn't kill and capture the humans as they came out to meet dear Jefri. That
scheme had been lovingly honed over many tendays, aided by Amdijefri's
admissions about human psychology and his knowledge of how starships
normally land. But now: "-- now we really need their help. What I ask them
must do double duty, to fool them and to destroy Woodcarver."
"Hard to do all at once," agreed the Cloak. "Why not play it in two
steps, the first more or less undeceitful: Have them destroy Woodcarver,
then worry about taking them over?"
Steel clicked a tine thoughtfully on stone. "Yes. Trouble is, if they
see too much.... They can't possibly be as naive as Jefri. He says that
humankind has a history that includes castles and warfare. If they fly
around too much, they'll see things that Jefri never saw, or never
understood.... Maybe I could get them to land inside the castle and mount
weapons on the walls. We'll have them hostage the moment that they stand
between our Jaws. Damn. That would take some clever work with Amdijefri."
The bliss of abstract planning foundered for a moment on rage. "It's getting
harder and harder for me to deal with those two."
"They're both wholly puppies, for Pack's sake." The Fragment paused a
second. "Of course, Amdiranifani may have more raw intelligence than any
pack I've ever seen. You think he may even be smart enough to see past his
childishness," he used the Samnorsk word, "and see the deception?"
"No, not that. I have their necks in my jaws, and they still don't see
it. You're right, Tyrathect; they do love me." And how I hate them for it.
"When I'm around him, the mantis thing is all over me, close enough to cut
my throat or poke out my eyes, but hugging and petting. And expecting me to
love him back. Yes, they believe everything I say, but the price is
accepting unending insolence."
"Be cool, dear student. The heart of manipulation is to empathize
without being touched." The Fragment stopped, as always, just short of the
brink. Steel felt himself hissing at the words even before he was
consciously aware of his reaction.
"Don't ... lecture ... me! You are not Flenser. You are a fragment.
Shit! You are a fragment of a fragment now. A word and you will be cut up,
dead in a thousand pieces." He tried to suppress the trembling that spread
through his members. Why haven't I killed him before now? I hate Flenser
more than anything in the world, and it would be so easy. Yet the fragment
was always so indispensable, somehow the only thing between Steel and
failure. And he was under Steel's control.
And the singleton was doing a very good terrified cower. "Sit up, you!
Give me your counsel and not your lectures, and you will live.... Whatever
the reason, it's impossible for me to carry on the charade with these
puppies. Perhaps for a few minutes at a time I can do it, or if there are
other packs to keep them away from me, but none of this unending loving.
Another hour of that and I-I know I'll start killing them. So. I want you to
talk with Amdijefri. Explain the 'situation'. Explain -- "
"But -- " The singleton was looking at him in astonishment.
"I'll be watching; I'm not giving up those two to your possession. Just
handle the close diplomacy."
The Fragment drooped, the pain in its shoulders undisguised. "If that
is your wish, My Lord."
Steel showed all his teeth. "It is indeed. Just remember, I'll be
present for everything important, especially direct radio communication." He
waved the singleton off the parapet. "Now go and cuddle up to the children;
learn something of self-control yourself."
After the Cloak was gone, he called Shreck up to the parapet. The next
few hours were spent in touring the defenses and planning with his staff.
Steel was very surprised how much clearing up the puppy problem improved his
quality of mind. His advisors seemed to pick up on it, relaxed to the point
of offering substantive suggestions. Where the breaches in the walls could
not be repaired, they would build deadfalls. The cannon from the northern
shops would arrive before the end of the dayaround, and one of Shreck's
people had worked out an alternate plan for food and water resupply. Reports
from the far scouts showed steady progress, a withering of the enemy's rear;
they would lose most of their ammunition before they reached Starship Hill.
Even now there was scarcely any shot falling on the hill.
As the sun rose into the south, Steel was back on the parapets,
scheming on just what to say to the Starfolk.
This was almost like earlier days, when plans went well and success was
wondrous yet achievable. And yet ... at the back of his mind all the hours
since talking with the singleton, there had been the little claws of fear.
Steel had the appearance of ruling. The Flenser Fragment gave the appearance
of following. But even though it was spread across miles, the pack seemed
more together than ever before. Oh, in earlier times, the Fragment often
pretended equilibrium, but its internal tension always showed. Lately, it
seemed self-satisfied, almost ... smug. The Flenser Fragment was responsible
for the Domain's forces south of Starship Hill, and after today -- after
Steel had forced the responsibility upon him -- the Cloaks would be with
Amdijefri every day. Never mind that the motivation had come from within
Steel. Never mind that the Fragment was in an obvious state of agonized
exhaustion. In its full genius, the Great One could have charmed a forest
wolf into thinking Flenser its queen. And do I really know what he's saying
to the packs beyond my hearing? Could my spies be feeding me lies about him?
Now that he had a moment away from immediate concerns, these little
claws dug deeper. I need him, yes. But the margin for error is smaller now.
After a moment, he grated a happy chord, accepting the risk. If necessary,
he would use what he had learned with the second set of cloaks, something he
had artfully concealed from Flenser Tyrathect. If necessary, the Fragment
would find that death can be radio swift.
Even as he flew the velocity match, Pham was working the ultradrive.
This would save them hours of fly back time, but it was a chancy game, one
the ship had never been designed for. OOB bounced all around the solar
system. One really lucky jump was all they needed. (And one really unlucky
jump, into the planet, would kill them. A good reason why this game was not
normally played.)
After hours of hacking the flight automation, of playing ultradrive
roulette, poor Pham's hands were faintly trembling. Whenever Tines' World
came back into view -- often no more than a far point of blue light -- he
would glare for a second at it. Ravna could see the doubts rising within
him: His memories told him he should be good with low-tech automation, yet
some of the OOB primitives were almost impenetrable. Or maybe his memories
of competence, of the Qeng Ho, were cheap fakes.
"The Blighter fleet. How long?" asked Pham.
Greenstalk was watching the nav window from the Riders' cabin. It was
the fifth time the question had been asked in the last hour, yet her voice
came back calm and patient. Maybe the repeated questions even seemed a
natural thing. "Range forty-nine light-years. Estimated time of arrival
forty-eight hours. Seven more ships have dropped out." Ravna could subtract:
one hundred and fifty-two were still coming.
Blueshell's voder sounded over his mate's, "During the last two hundred
seconds, they have made slightly better time than before, but I think that
is local variance in Bottom conditions. Sir Pham, you are doing well, but I
know my ship. We could get a little more time if you only you'd allow me
control. Please -- "
"Shut up." Pham's voice was sharp, but the words were almost automatic.
It was a conversation -- or the abortion of one -- that occurred almost as
often as Pham's demand for status info on the Blighter fleet.
In the early weeks of their journey, she had assumed that godshatter
was somehow superhuman. Instead it was parts and pieces, automation loaded
in a great panic. Maybe it was working right, or maybe it had run amok and
was tearing Pham apart with its errors.
The old cycle of fear and doubt was suddenly broken by soft blue light.
Tines' World! At last, a wondrously accurate jump, almost as good as the
shocker of five hours before: Twenty thousand kilometers away hung a vast
narrow crescent, the edge of planetary daylight. The rest was a dark blot
against the stars, except where the auroral ring hung a faint green glow
around the south pole. Jefri Olsndot was on the other side of the world from
them, in the arctic day. They wouldn't have radio communication until they
arrived -- and she hadn't figured out how to recalibrate the ultrawave for
shortrange transmission.
She turned back from the view. Pham still stared upward into the sky
behind her. "... Pham, what good is forty-eight hours? Will we just destroy
the Countermeasure?" What of Jefri and Mr. Steel's folk?
"Maybe. But there are other possibilities. There must be." That last
softly. "I've been chased before. I've been in bigger jams before." His eyes
avoided hers.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Jefri hadn't seen the sky for more than an hour in the last two days.
He and Amdi were safe enough in the great stone dome that sheltered the
refugee ship, but there was no way to see outside. If it weren't for Amdi, I
couldn't have stood it a minute. In some ways it was worse even than his
first days on Hidden Island. The ones who killed Mom and Dad and Johanna
were just a few kilometers away. They captured some of Mr. Steel's guns and
the last few days the explosions had gone on for hours, a booming that shook
the ground beneath them and sometimes even smashed at the walls of the dome.
Their food was brought in to them, and when they weren't sitting in the
ship's command cabin, the two wandered outside the ship, to the rooms with
the sleeping children. Jefri had kept up with the simple maintenance
procedures he remembered, but looking through the chill transp of the
coldsleep coffins, he was terribly afraid. Some of them weren't breathing
very much. The inside temperature seemed too high. And he and Amdi didn't
know how to help.
Nothing had changed here, but now there was joy. Ravna's long silence
had ended. Amdijefri and Mr. Steel had actually talked to her in voice!
Three more hours and her ship would be here! Even the bombardment had ended,
almost as if Woodcarver realized that her time was near to ending.
Three more hours. Left to himself, Jefri would have spent the time in a
state of wall-climbing anxiety. After all, he was nine years old now, a
grown-up with grown up problems. But then there was Amdi. The pack was much
smarter than Jefri in some ways, but he was such a little kid -- about five
years old, as near as Amdijefri could figure it. Except when he was into
heavy thinking, he could not stay still. After the call from Ravna, Jefri
wanted to sit down for serious worrying, but Amdi began chasing himself
around the pylons. He shouted back and forth in Jefri's voice and Ravna's,
and bumped into the boy accidentally on purpose. Jefri hopped up and glared
at the careening puppies. Just a little kid. And suddenly, happy and so sad
all at once: Is this how Johanna saw me? And so he had responsibilities now
too. Like being patient. As one of Amdi came rushing past his knees, Jefri
swept down to grab the wriggling form. He raised it to shoulder level as the
rest of the pack converged gleefully, pounding on him from all directions.
They fell to the dry moss and wrestled for a few seconds. "Let's
explore, let's explore!"
"We have to be here for Ravna and Mr. Steel."
"Don't worry. We'll remember when."
"Okay." Where was there really to go?
The two walked through the torchlit dimness to the clerestory that
ringed the inner edge of the dome. As far as Jefri could see, they were
alone. That was not unusual. Mr. Steel was very worried that Woodcarver
spies might get into the ship. Even his own soldiers rarely came here.
Amdijefri had investigated the inside wall before. Behind the quilts,
the stone felt cool and damp. There were some holes to the outside -- for
ventilation -- but they were almost ten meters up where the wall was already
curving inwards toward the apex of the dome. The stone was rough cut, not
yet polished. Mr. Steel's workers had been in a frantic hurry to complete
the protection before Woodcarver's army arrived. Nothing was polished, and
the quilts were undecorated.
Ahead and behind him, Amdi was sniffing at the cracks and fresh mortar.
The one in Jefri's arms gave a concerted wiggle. "Ha! Up ahead. I knew that
mortar was coming loose," the pack said. Jefri let all of his friend rush
forward to a nook in the wall. It didn't look any different than before, but
Amdi was scratching with five pairs of paws.
"Even if you can get it loose, what good does it do you?" Jefri had
seen these blocks as they were lowered into place. They were almost fifty
centimeters across, laid in alternating rows. Getting past one would just
bring them to more stone.
"Heh heh, I don't know. I've been saving this up till we had some time
to kill... Yech. This mortar burns my lips." More scratching, and the pack
passed back a fragment as big as Jefri's head. There really was a hole
between the blocks, and it was big enough for Amdi. One of him darted into
the tiny cave.
"Satisfied?" Jefri plunked himself down by the hole and tried to look
in.
"Guess what!" Amdi's shrill came from a member right by his ear.
"There's a tunnel back here, not just another layer of stone!" A member
wriggled past Jefri and disappeared into the dark. Secret tunnels? That was
too much like a Nyjoran fairy tale. "These are big enough for a full-grown
member, Jefri. You could get through these on hands 'n' knees." Two more of
Amdi disappeared into the hole.
The tunnel he had discovered might be large enough for a human child,
but the entrance hole was a tight fit even for the puppies. Jefri had
nothing to do but stare into the darkness. The parts of Amdi that remained
at the entrance talked about what he had found. "-- Goes on for a long, long
way. I've doubled back a couple of times. The top of me is about five meters
up, way over your head. This is kooky. I'm getting all strung out." Amdi
sounded even sillier than his normal playfulness. Two more of him went into
the hole. This was developing into serious adventure -- that Jefri could
have no part of.
"Don't go too far; it might be dangerous."
One of the pair that remained looked up at him. "Don't worry. Don't
worry. The tunnel isn't an accident. It feels like it was cut as grooves in
the stones when they were laid. This is some special escape route Mister
Steel made. I'm all right. I'm all right. Ha ha, hoohooo." One more
disappeared into the hole. After a moment the last remaining one ran in, but
stayed near enough to the entrance so Amdi could still talk to Jefri. The
pack was having a high old time, singing and screeching to itself. Jefri
knew exactly what the other was up to; it was another of the games he could
never play. In this posture, Amdi's thoughts would be the weirdest rippling
things. Darn. Now that he was playing within stone, it must be even neater
than before, since he was totally cut off from all thoughts except from
member to adjacent member.
The stupid singing went on a little longer, and then Amdi spoke in an
almost reasonable tone. "Hei, this tunnel actually splits off in places. The
front of me has come to a fork. One side is heading down.... Wish I had
enough members to go both ways!"
"Well, you don't!"
"Hei ho, I'll take the upper tunnel today." A few seconds of silence.
"There's a little door here! Like a member-size room door. Not locked." Amdi
relayed the sounds of stone scritching against stone. "Ha! I can see light!
Up just a few more meters, it opens onto a window. Hear the wind." He
relayed wind sound and the keening of the sea birds that soared up from
Hidden Island. It sounded wonderful. "Oh oh, this is stretching things, but
I wanna look out.... Jefri, I can see the sun! I'm outdoors, sitting way up
on the side of the dome. I can see all round to the south. Boy, it's smoky
down there."
"What about the hillside?" Jefri asked the nearest member; its
white-splotched pelt was barely visible through the entrance hole. At least
Amdi was staying in touch.
"A little browner than last tenday. I don't see any soldiers out
there." Relayed sound of a cannon firing. "Yipes. We're shooting though....
It hit just on this side of the crest. There's someone out there, just below
my line of sight." Woodcarver, come at last. Jefri shivered, angry that he
couldn't see, frightened of what might be seen. He often had nightmares
about what Woodcarver must truly be, how she had done it to Mom and Dad and
Johanna. Images never fully formed ... yet almost memories. Mister Steel
will get Woodcarver.
"Oh, oh. Old Tyrathect is coming across the castle yard this way."
Thumping sounds came from the hole as Amdi blundered back down. No point in
letting Tyrathect know that there was a tunnel hidden in the wall. He'd
probably just order them to stay away from it. One, two, three, four -- half
of Amdi popped out of the wall. The four wandered around a little dazedly.
Jefri couldn't tell if it was because of their stretched-out experience or
if they were temporarily split from the other half of the pack. "Act
natural. Act natural."
Then the other four arrived, and Amdi began to settle down. He led
Jefri away from the wall at a fast trot. "Let's get the commset. We'll
pretend we've been trying to raise Ravna with it." Amdi knew well that the
starship couldn't be back for another thirty minutes or so. In fact, he had
been the one who verified the math for Mister Steel. Nevertheless, he chased
up the ship's steps and dragged down the radio. The two were already
plugging the antenna into a signal booster when the public doors on the west
side of the dome were unlatched. Silhouetted against the daylight were parts
of a guard pack, and a single member of Tyrathect. The guard retired,
sliding the doors shut, and the Cloak walked slowly across the moss towards
them.
Amdi rushed over and chattered about their attempts to use the radio.
It was a little forced, Jefri thought. The puppies were still confused by
their trip through the walls.
The singleton looked at the powdering of mortar dust on Amdi's pelt.
"You've been climbing in the walls, haven't you?"
"What?" Amdi looked himself over, noticed the dust. Usually he was more
clever. "Yes," he said shamefacedly. He brushed the powder away. "You won't
tell, will you?"
Fat chance he'll help us, thought Jefri. Mr. Tyrathect had learned
Samnorsk even better than Mr. Steel, and besides Steel was the only one who
had much time to talk with them. But even before the radio cloaks, he'd been
a short-tempered, bossy sort. Jefri had had baby-sitters like him. Tyrathect
was nice up to a point, and then would get sarcastic or say something mean.
Lately that had improved, but Jefri still didn't like him much.
But Mr. Tyrathect didn't say anything right away. He sat down slowly,
as if his rump hurt. "... No, I won't tell."
Jefri exchanged a surprised glance with one of Amdi. "What is the
tunnel for?" he asked timidly.
"All castles have hidden tunnels, especially in my ... in the domain of
Mr. Steel. You want ways to escape, ways to spy on your enemies." The
singleton shook its head. "Never mind. Is your radio properly receiving,
Amdijefri?"
Amdi cocked a head at the comm's display. "I think so, but there's
nothing yet to receive. See, Ravna's ship had to decelerate and um, I could
show you the arithmetic...?" But Mr. Tyrathect was obviously not interested
in playing with chalk boards. "... well, depending on their luck with the
ultradrive, we should have radio with them real soon."
But the little window on the comm showed no incoming signal. They
watched it for several minutes. Mr. Tyrathect lowered his muzzle and seemed
to sleep. Every few seconds his body twitched as with a dream. Jefri
wondered what the rest of him was doing.
Then the comm window was glowing green. There was a garble of sound as
it tried to sort signal from background noise. "... over you in five
minutes," came Ravna's voice. "Jefri? Are you listening?"
"Yes! We're here."
"Let me talk to Mr. Steel, please."
Mr. Tyrathect stepped nearer to the comm. "He is not here now, Ravna."
"Who is this?"
Tyrathect's laugh was a giggle; he had never heard any other kind. "I?"
He made the Tinish chord that sounded like "Tyrathect" to Jefri. "Or do you
mean a taken name, like Steel? I don't know the exact word. You may call me
... Mr. Skinner." Tyrathect laughed again. "For now, I can speak for Steel."
"Jefri, are you all right?"
"Yes, yes. Listen to Mr. Skinner." What a strange name.
The sounds from the comm became muffled. There was a male voice,
arguing. Then Ravna was back, her voice kind of tight, like Mom when she was
mad. "Jefri ... what's the volume of a ball ten centimeters across?"
Amdi had been fidgeting impatiently through the conversation. All
through the last year he had been hearing stories of humans from Jefri, and
dreaming what Ravna might really be like. Now he had a chance to show off.
He jumped for the comm, and grinned at Jefri. "That's easy, Ravna." His
voice was perfect Jefri -- and completely fluent. "It's 523.598 cubic
centimeters ... or do you want more digits?"
Muffled conversation. "...No, that's fine. Okay, Mr. Skinner. We have
pictures from our earlier pass and a general radio fix. Where exactly are
you?"
"Under the castle dome at top of Starship Hill. It's right at the coast
by a -- "
A man's voice cut in. Pham? He had a funny accent. "I got it on the
map. We still can't see you direct. Too much haze."
"That's smoke," said the Cloak. "The enemy is almost upon us from the
south. We need your help immediately -- " The singleton lowered its head
from the commset. Its eyes closed and opened a couple of times. Thinking?
"Hmm, yes. Without your help, we and Jefri and this ship are lost. Please
land within the castle courtyard. You know we've specially reinforced it for
your arrival. Once down we can use your weapons to -- "
"No way," the guy replied immediately. "Just separate the friendlies
from the bad guys and let us take care of things."
Tyrathect's voice took on a wheedling tone, like a little kid
complaining. He really has been studying us. "No, no, didn't mean to be
impolite. Certainly, do it your own way. About the enemy force: everyone
close to the castle on the south side of the hill are enemy. A single pass
with your ship's ... um, torch ... would send them running."
"I can't fly that torch inside an atmosphere. Did your Pop really land
with the main jet, Jefri? No agrav?"
"Yes, sir. All we had was the jet."
"He was a lucky genius."
Ravna: "Maybe we could just float across, a few thousand meters up.
That might scare them away."
Tyrathect began, "Yes, that might -- "
The public doors on the north side of the dome slid open. Mr. Steel
stood silhouetted against the daylight beyond. "Let me talk to them," he
said.
The goal of all their voyaging lay just twenty kilometers below OOB.
They were so close, yet those twenty thousand meters might be as hard to
bridge as the twenty thousand light-years they had come so far.
They floated on agrav directly over "Starship Hill". OOB's
multispectral wasn't working very well, but where smoke did not obscure, the
ship's optics could count the needles on the trees below. Ravna could see
the forces of "Woodcarver" ranged across the slopes south of the castle.
There were other troops, and apparently cannon, hidden in the forests that
lined the fjord south of that. Given a little more time they would be able
to locate them too. Time was the one thing they did not have.
Time and trust.
"Forty-eight hours, Pham. Then the fleet will be here, all around us."
Maybe, maybe godshatter could work a miracle; they'd never know stewing
about it up here. Try: "You've got to trust somebody, Pham."
Pham glared back at her, and for an instant she feared he might go
completely to pieces. "You'd land in the middle of that castle? Medieval
villains are just as smart as any you've seen in the Beyond, Rav. They could
teach the Butterflies a thing or two. An arrow in the head will kill you as
sure as an antimatter bomb."
More fake memories? But Pham was right on this: She thought about the
just-concluded conversation. The second pack -- Steel -- had been a bit too
insistent. He had been good to Jefri, but he was clearly desperate. And she
believed him when he said that a high fly-by wouldn't scare the Woodcarvers
off. They needed to come down near the ground with firepower. Just now,
about all the firepower they had was Pham's beam gun. "Okay, then! Do what
you and Steel talked about. Fly the lander past Woodcarver's lines, laser
blast them."
"God damn it, you know I can't fly that. The landing boat is like
nothing either of us know, and without the automation I -- "
Softly: "Without the automation, you need Blueshell, Pham." There was
horror on Pham's face. She reached out to him. He was silent for a long
moment, not seeming to notice.
"Yeah." His voice was low, strangled. Then: "Blueshell! Get up here."
OOB's lander had more than enough room for the Skroderider and Pham
Nuwen. The craft had been built specifically for Rider use. With higher
automation working, it would have been easy for Pham -- for even a child --
to fly. Now, the craft could not provide stable flight, and the "manual"
controls were something that gave even Blueshell a hard time. Damn
automation. Damn optimization. For most of his adult life Pham had lived in
the Slowness. All those decades, he had managed spacecraft and weapons that
could have reduced the feudal empire below to slag. Yet now, with equipment
that should have been enormously more powerful, he couldn't even fly a damn
landing boat.
Across the crew compartment, Blueshell was at the pilot's position. His
fronds stretched across a web of supports and controls. He had turned off
all display automation; only the main window was alive, a natural view from
the boat's bow camera. OOB floated some hundred meters ahead, drifting up
and out of view as their craft slid backwards and down.
Blueshell's fidgety nervousness -- furtiveness, it seemed to Pham --
had disappeared as he got into piloting the craft. His voder voice became
terse and preoccupied, and the edges of his fronds writhed across the
controls, an exercise that would have been impossible to Pham even if he had
a lifetime of experience with the gear. "Thank you, Sir Pham.... I'll prove
you can trust...." The nose lurched downwards and they were staring almost
straight into the fjord-carven coastline twenty kilometers below. They fell
free for half a minute while the rider's fronds writhed on their supports.
Hot piloting? No: "Sorry, sorry." Acceleration, and Pham sank into his
restraints under a grav load that wobbled between a tenth gee and an
intolerable crush. The landscape rotated and they had a brief glimpse of
OOB, now like a tiny moth above them.
"Is it necessary to kill, Sir Pham? Perhaps simply our appearance over
the battle...."
Nuwen gritted his teeth. "Just get us down." The Steel creature had
been adamant that they fry the entire hillside. Despite all Pham's
suspicions, the pack might be right on that. They were up against a crew of
murderers that had not hesitated to ambush a starship; the Woodcarvers
needed a real demonstration.
Their boat fluttered down the kilometers. Steel's fortifications were
clearly visible even in the natural view: the rough polygon that guarded the
refugee ship, the much larger structure that rambled across an island
several kilometers westward. I wonder if this is how my Father's castle
looked to the Qeng Ho landers? Those walls were high and unsloping. Clearly
the Tines had had no idea of gunpowder till Ravna had clued them to it.
The valley south of the castle was a blot of dark smoke smoothly
streaming toward the sea. Even without data enhancement, he could see hot
spots, fringes of orange edging the black.
"You're at two thousand meters," came Ravna's voice. "Jefri says he can
see you."
"Patch me through to them."
"I will try, Sir Pham." Blueshell fiddled, his lack of attention
spinning the boat through a complete loop. Pham had seen falling leaves with
more control.
A child's piping voice: "A-are you okay? Don't crash!"
And then the Steel pack's hybrid of Ravna and the kid: "South to go!
South to go! Use fire gun. Burn them quick."
Blueshell was entirely too cooperative to this direction. He had them
down in the smoke already. For seconds they were flying blind. A break in
the smoke showed the hillside less than two hundred meters off, coming up
fast. Before Pham could curse at Blueshell, the Rider had turned them around
and floated the boat into clearer air. Then he pitched over so they might
see directly down.
After thirty weeks of talk and planning, Pham had his first glimpse of
the Tines. Even from here, it was obvious they were different from any
sophonts Pham had encountered: Clusters of four or five or six members hung
together so close they seemed a single spiderlike being. And each pack stood
separated from the others by ten or fifteen meters.
A cannon flashed in the murk. The pack crewing it moved like a single,
coordinated hand to rock the barrel back and ram another charge down the
muzzle.
"But if these are the enemy, Sir Pham, where did they get the guns?"
"They stole 'em." But muzzle loaders? He didn't have time to pursue the
thought.
"You're right over them, Pham! I can see you in and out of the smoke.
You're drifting south at fifteen meters per second, losing altitude." It was
the kid, speaking with his usual incredible precision.
"Kill them! Kill them!"
Pham wriggled out of his restraints and crawled back to the hatch where
they had mounted his beam gun. It was about the only thing salvaged from the
workshop fire, but by God this was something he could operate.
"Keep us steady, Blueshell. Bounce me around and I'll fry you as likely
as anything!" He pushed open the hatch, and gagged on spicy smoke. Then
Blueshell's agravs wafted them into a clear space and Pham lined the beamer
down the ranks of packfolk.
Originally Woodcarver had demanded Johanna stay at the base camp.
Johanna's response had been explosive. Even now the girl was a little
surprised at herself. Not since the first days on Tines world had she come
so close to attacking a pack. No way was anyone going to keep her from
finding out about Jefri. In the end they had compromised: Johanna would
accept Pilgrim as her guard. She could follow the army into the field, as
long as she obeyed his direction.
Johanna looked up through the drifting smoke. Damn. Pilgrim was always
such a carefree joker. By his own telling, he had gotten himself killed over
and over again through the years. And now he wouldn't even let her up to
Scrupilo's cannons. The two of them paced across a terrace in the hillside.
The brush fire had swept through here hours before, and the spicy smell of
moss ash was thick around them. And with that smell came the bright memory
of horror, of a year ago, right here....
Trusted guard packs paced their course twenty meters on either side.
This area was supposedly safe from infiltration, and there had been no
artillery fire from the Flenserists for hours. But Peregrine absolutely
refused to let her get any closer.
It's nothing like last year. Then all had been sunny blue skies and
clean air -- and her parents' murder. Now she and Pilgrim had returned, and
the blue sky was yellow-gray and the sweeps of mossy hillside were black.
And now the packs around her were fighting with her. And now there was a
chance....
"Lemme closer, damn it! Woodcarver will have the Oliphaunt no matter
what happens to me."
Peregrine shook himself, a Tinish negative. One of his puppies reached
out from a jacket pouch to catch at her sleeve. "A little longer," Pilgrim
said for the tenth time. "Wait for Woodcarver's messenger. Then we can -- "
"I want to be up there! I'm the only one who knows the ship!" Jefri,
Jefri. If only Vendacious was right about you....
She was twisting about to slap at Scarbutt when it happened: A glare of
heat on her back, and the smoke flashed bright. Again. Again. And then the
impact of rapid thunder.
Pilgrim shuddered against her. "That's not gunfire!" he shouted. "Two
of me are almost blinded. C'mon." He surrounded her, almost knocking her off
her feet as he pushed/dragged her down the hill.
For a second Johanna went along, more dazed than cooperative. Somehow
they had lost their escort.
From up the hill the shouts of battle had stopped. The sharp thunder
had silenced all. Where the smoke thinned she could see one of Scrupilo's
cannons, the barrel extending from a puddle of melted steel. The cannoneer
had been blown to bits. Not gunfire. Johanna spasmed out of Pilgrim's grip.
Not gunfire.
"Spacers! Pilgrim, that must be a drive torch."
Peregrine grabbed her, continuing down the hill. "Not a drive torch!
That I've heard. This is quieter -- and somebody's aiming it."
There had been a long stutter of separate blasts. How many of
Woodcarver's people had just died? "They must think we're attacking the
ship, Pilgrim. If we don't do something, they'll wipe out everyone."
His jaws eased their grip on her sleeves and pants. "What can we do?
Hanging around here will just get us killed."
Johanna stared into the sky. No sign of fliers, but there was so much
smoke. The sun was a dull bloody ball. If only the rescuers knew they were
killing her friends. If only they could see. She dug her feet into the
ground. "Let go of me, Pilgrim! I'm going uphill, out of the smoke."
He'd stopped moving but his grip was fiercely tight. Four adult faces
and two puppy ones looked up at her, and indecision was in every look.
"Please, Pilgrim. It's the only way." Packs were straggling down, some
bleeding, some in fragments.
His frightened eyes stared at her an instant longer. Then he let go and
touched her hand with a nose. "I guess this hill will always be the death of
me. First Scriber, now you -- you're all crazy." The old Pilgrim smile
flickered across his members. "Okay. Let's try it!" The two without puppies
went up the hillside, scouting for the safest route.
Johanna and the rest of him followed. They were moving across a sloping
terrace. The summer drought had drained the chill swamp water she remembered
from the landing, and the blackened moss was firm under her. The going
should have been easy, but Peregrine wound through the deepest hummocks,
hunkering down every few seconds to look in all directions. They reached the
end of the terrace and began climbing. There were places so steep she had to
grab the epaulet stirrups on two of Peregrine and let him hoist her up. They
passed the nearest cannon, what was left of it. Johanna had never seen
weapons fired except in stories, but the splash of metal and the carbonized
flesh could only mean some kind of beam weapon. Running across the hill were
similar craters, destruction punched into the already burned land.
Johanna leaned against a smooth rounding of rock. "Just pull over this
one and we're on the next terrace," Pilgrim's voice came in her ear. "Hurry,
I hear shouting." He leaned two of himself down, tilting his epaulets toward
her hands. She grabbed them, and jumped. For a moment she and the pack
teetered over a four- meter fall, and then she was lying on brownish,
unburned moss. Pilgrim clustered around her, hiding her. She peeked out
between his legs. The outermost walls of Steel's castle were visible from
here. Tinish archers stood boldly on the ramparts, taking advantage of the
chaos among Woodcarver's troops. In fact, the Queen's force had not lost
many packs in the air attack, but even the unwounded were milling around.
The Queen's soldiers were no cowards -- Johanna knew that by now -- but they
had just been confronted by force beyond all defense.
Overhead the smoke faded into blue. The battlefield ahead of her lay
under clear sky. In the years before the High Lab, Johanna and her mother
had often gone on nature trips over Bigby Marsh at Straum. With the sensors
on their camper packs they'd had no trouble watching the skyggwings there:
even if this flier's automation was not specifically looking for a human on
the ground, it should notice her. "Do you see anything?"
The four adult heads angled back and forth in coordinated pairs. "No.
The flier must be very far away or behind the smoke."
Nuts. Johanna came off her knees, trotted toward the castle walls. They
must be watching there!
"Woodcarver's not going to like this."
Two of the Queen's soldiers were already running toward them, attracted
by their purposeful movement or the sight of Johanna. Pilgrim waved them
back.
Alone on an open field less than two hundred meters from the castle
wall. Even with normal vision, how could they be overlooked? In fact, they
were noticed: There was a soft hissing, and a meter-long arrow thunked into
the turf on their left. Scarbutt grabbed her shoulder, pulling her to a
crouch. The puppies shifted his shields into position: Pilgrim made a
barricade of himself on the castle side and started back out of range. Back
into the smoke.
"No! Run parallel! I want to be seen."
"Okay, okay." Soft sounds of death whispered down. Johanna kept one
hand on his shoulder as they ran across the field. She felt Scarbutt falter.
The arrow had caught him in the thick of his shoulder, centimeters from a
tympanum. "I'm okay! Stay down, stay down."
The front line of Woodcarver's force was rallying toward them now, a
dozen packs racing across the terrace. Pilgrim bounced up and down, shouting
with a voice that punched like physical force. Something about staying back,
and danger from the sky. It didn't stop their advance. "They want you away
from the arrows."
And suddenly they noticed that the fire from the castle had stopped.
Pilgrim scanned the sky, "It's back! Coming from the east, maybe a kilometer
out."
She looked in the direction he was pointing. It was a lumpy thing,
probably space-based though it had no ultradrive spines. It bobbled and
staggered. There was no sign of jets. Some kind of agrav? Nonhumans? The
thoughts skittered through her mind, alongside the joy.
Pale light flickered from a mast on its belly and dirt geysered around
the troops who were racing to protect her. Again the stuttering thunder,
only now the light was marching right across her friends toward her.
Amdijefri was on the battlements. Steel hid his glares from the two.
There simply was no help for it; Ravna had demanded Jefri be by the radio to
guide the strike. The human was not completely stupid. It shouldn't make any
difference. An army looks like an army whether it is foe or friend. Very
soon the army beyond these walls would cease to exist.
"How did the first run go?" Ravna's voice came clearly from the
commset. But it wasn't Jefri who answered: all eight of Amdiranifani was
poking around the battlements, some of him sitting on the crenellations
practicing stereo vision, others eyeing Steel and the radio. Telling him to
stay back had no effect. Now Amdi answered the question with Jefri's voice.
"Okay. I counted fifteen pulses. Only ten hit anything. I bet I could shoot
better than that."
"Damn it, that's the best I can do with this [unknown words]." The
voice was not Ravna's. Steel heard the irritation in it. Everybody can find
something to hate in these pups. The thought warmed him.
"Please," said Steel. "Fire again. Again." He looked over the
stonework. The air attack had taken out a band of enemy by the edge of the
near terrace. It was spectacular destruction, like enormous cannon blows, or
the separate landing of twenty starships. And all from a little craft that
fluttered like a falling leaf. The enemy front line was dissolving in panic.
Up and down the ramparts, his own troops danced about their stations. Things
had been bleak since their cannon were knocked out; they needed something to
cheer about. "The archers, Shreck! Shoot upon the survivors." Then,
continuing in Samnorsk: "The front ranks are still coming. They are -- they
are -- " Damn, what's the word for "confident"? "They will kill us without
more help."
The human child looked at Steel in puzzlement. If he called that a lie,
then.... A moment later Ravna said. "I don't know. They're well back from
your walls, at least all that I can see. I don't want to butcher...." Rapid
fire conversation with the human in the flier, perhaps not even in Samnorsk.
The gunner did not sound pleased. "Pham will pull back a few kilometers,"
she said. "We can come back instantly if your enemy advances."
"Ssssst!" Shreck's Hightalk hiss was like a physical jab. Steel
wheeled, glaring. How dare -- But his lieutenant was wide-eyed, pointing
toward the center of the battlefield. Of course Steel had had a pair of eyes
on that direction, but he hadn't been paying attention: The other Two-Legs!
The mantis figure dropped behind an accompanying pack, mercifully
before Amdijefri noticed. Thank the Pack of Packs that puppies are
near-sighted. Steel swept forward, surrounding some of Amdi, shouting at the
others to get off the parapet. Both of Tyrathect ran in close, physically
grabbing for the disobedient wretches. "Get below!" Steel screamed in
Tinish. For a second all was confusion, as his own mind sounds mixed with
the puppies'. Amdi tumbled away from him, thoroughly distracted by the noise
and the rough handling. And then in Samnorsk Steel said, "There are more
cannons out there. Get below before you're hurt!"
Jefri started for the parapet. "But I don't see -- " And fortunately
there was nothing special to see. Now. The other Two-Legs was still crouched
behind one of Woodcarver's packs. Shreck took the human child in paw and
jaw. He and one of Tyrathect hustled the protesting children down the
stairs. As they departed, Tyrathect was already embellishing on Steel's
story, reporting on the troops it could see from below the crest of the
hill.
"Blow up the lesser powder dump," Steel hissed at the departing Shreck.
That dump was near empty, but its destruction might persuade the spacers
where words could not.
After they were gone, Steel stood for an instant, silent and shivering.
He had never seen disaster so narrowly avoided. Along the ramparts, his
archers were showering arrows upon the enemy pack and the Two-Legs. Damn.
They were almost out of range.
In the castle yard, Shreck detonated the lesser dump. The explosion was
a satisfying one, much louder than an artillery hit. One of the inner towers
was blown apart. Flying rock showered the yard, the smallest pieces reaching
all the way to where Steel stood on the ramparts.
Ravna's voice was shouting in swift Samnorsk, too fast for Steel to
understand. Now all the planning, all the hopes, all balanced on a knife
edge. He must bet everything: Steel leaned a shoulder close to the comm and
said, "Sorry. Things go fast here. Many more Woodcarver come up under smoke.
Can you kill all on hillside?" Could the mantises see through smoke? That
was part of the gamble.
The gunner's voice came back, "I can try. Watch this."
A third voice, thready and narrow even by human standards: "It will be
fifty seconds more, Sir Steel. We're having trouble turning."
Good. Concentrate on your flying and your killing. Don't look at your
victims too carefully. The archers had driven the human back, part way under
the cover of smoke. Other packs were rushing out to protect her. By the time
the Visitors circled back, there would be lots of targets, the human lost
among them.
Two of him caught sight of the spacer floating down through the haze.
The Visitors would have no clear view of what they were shooting at. Pale
light flickered from beneath the craft. A scythe swept across the hillside
toward Woodcarver's troops.
Pham was bounced around his perch as Blueshell turned the boat back to
the target. They weren't moving fast; the airstream couldn't have been more
than thirty meters per second. But every second was full of the damnedest
jerks and tumbles. At one point Pham's grip on the gun mount was all that
kept him indoors. Forty some hours from now the deadliest thing in the
universe is going to arrive, and I'm taking potshots at dogs.
How to take out the hillside? Steel's whiny voice still echoed in his
ears. And Ravna wasn't sure what OOB was seeing beneath all the smoke. We
might do better without automation than with this bastard mix. At least his
beamer had a manual control. Pham embraced the barrel with one arm while he
reached with the other. At wide dispersion the beam was useless against
armor, but could burst eyes and set skin and hair afire -- and the beam
width would be dozens of meters across at ground level.
"Fifteen seconds, Sir Pham," Blueshell's voice came in his ear.
They were low this time. Gaps in the smoke flickered past like
stop-action art. Most of the ground was burned-over black, but there were
precipices of naked rock and even sooty patches of snow trapped in crannies
and shadowed pits.... Here and there was a pile of doggy bodies, an
occasional gun tube.
"There's a crowd of them ahead, Sir Pham. Running near the castle."
Pham leaned down and looked forward. The mob was about four hundred
meters ahead. They were running parallel to the castle walls, through a
field that was a spinehide of arrowshafts. He pressed the firing stud, swept
the beam out from below the boat. There was plenty of water under that dried
cover; it exploded in steam as the beam passed over it.... But further out,
the wide dispersion wasn't doing much. It would be another few seconds
before he'd have a good shot at the hapless packs.
Time for the little suspicions. So how come the enemy had
muzzle-loading cannon? Those they must have made themselves -- in a world
with no evidence of firearms. Steel was the classic medieval manipulator;
Pham had spotted the type from a thousand light-years out. They were doing
the critter's dirty work, that was obvious. Shut up. Deal with Steel later.
Slanting in on the packs, Pham fired again, sweeping through living
flesh this time. He fired ahead of them and on the castle side; maybe they
wouldn't all die. He stuck his head further into the slipstream, trying for
a better view. Ahead of the packs was a hundred meters of open field, a
single pack of four and -- a human figure, black-haired and slim, jumping
and waving.
Pham smashed the barrel up against the hull, safing it at the same
time. The back flash was a surge of heat that crisped his eyebrows.
"Blueshell! Get us down! Get us down!"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
"A bad understanding. She was lied to."
Ravna tried to read something behind the voice. Steel's Samnorsk was as
creaky as ever, the tones childish and whiny. He sounded no different than
before. But his story was stretched very thin by what had just happened. He
was either a galaxy master of impudence -- or his story was actually true.
"The human must have been hurt, then lied to by Woodcarver. This
explains a lot, Ravna. Without her, Woodcarver could not attack. Without
her, all may be safe."
Pham's voice came to Ravna on a private channel. "The girl was
unconscious during part of the ambush, Rav. But she practically scratched my
eyes out when I suggested she might be wrong about Steel and Woodcarver. And
the pack with her is a lot more convincing than Steel."
Ravna looked questioningly across the deck at Greenstalk. Pham didn't
know she was here. Tough. Greenstalk was an island of sanity amidst the
madness -- and she knew the OOB infinitely better than Ravna.
Steel spoke into her hesitation: "See now, nothing has changed, except
for the better. One more human lives. How can you doubt us? Speak to Jefri;
he understands. We have done the best for the children in ..." a gobbling
noise, and (another?) voice said, "coldsleep."
"Certainly, we must speak to him again, Steel. He's our best proof of
your good intentions."
"Okay. In a few minutes, Ravna. But see, he is also my good protection
against treachery from you. I know how powerful you Visitors are. I ... fear
you. We need to -- " gobbling consultation "-- accommodate each other in our
fears."
"Um. We'll work something out. Just let us speak to Jefri now."
"Yes."
Ravna switched channels. "What do you think, Pham?"
"There's no question in my mind. This Johanna is not a naive kid like
Jefri. We've always known Steel was a tough critter. We just had some other
facts wrong. The landing site is in the middle of his territory. He's the
killer." Pham's voice became quieter, almost a whisper. "Hell of it is, this
may not change anything. Steel does have the ship. I've got to get in
there."
"It will be another ambush."
"... I know. But does it matter? If we can get me time with the
Countermeasure, it could be -- it will be -- worth it." What matter a
suicide mission within a suicide mission?
"I'm not sure, Pham. If we give him everything, he'll kill us before we
ever get near the ship."
"He'll try. Look, just keep him talking. Maybe we can get a directional
on his radio, blow the bastard away." He did not sound optimistic.
Tyrathect didn't take them back to the ship, or to their rooms. They
descended stairs within the outer walls, part of Amdi first, then Jefri with
the rest of Amdi, then the singleton from Tyrathect.
Amdi was still complaining. "I don't understand, I don't understand. We
can help."
Jefri: "I didn't see any enemy cannons."
The singleton was full of explanations, though it sounded even more
preoccupied than usual. "I saw them from one of my other members, out in the
valley. We're pulling in all our soldiers. We must make a stand, or none of
us will be alive to be rescued. For now, this is the best place for you to
be."
"How do you know?" said Jefri. "Can you talk to Steel right now?"
"Yes, one of me is still up there with him."
"Well, tell him we have to help. We can talk better Samnorsk even than
you."
"I'll tell him right now," was the Cloak's quick reply.
There were no more window slots cut in the walls. The only light came
from wick torches set every ten meters along the tunnel. The air was cool
and musty; wetness glistened on unquilted stone. The tiny doors were not of
polished wood. Instead there were bars, and darkness beyond. Where are we
going? Jefri was suddenly reminded of the dungeons in stories, the treachery
that befell the Greater Two and the Countess of the Lake. Amdi didn't seem
to feel it. For all his mischievous nature, Puppies was basically trusting;
he had always depended on Mr. Steel. But Jefri's parents had never acted
quite like this, even during the escape from High Lab. Mr. Steel suddenly
seemed so different, as if he couldn't be bothered pretending to be nice
anymore. And Jefri had never really trusted the sullen Tyrathect; now that
one was acting downright sneaky.
There had been no new threat on the hillside.
Fear and stubbornness and suspicion all came together: Jefri spun
around, confronting the Cloak. "We're not going any farther. This isn't
where we're supposed to go. We want to talk to Ravna and Mr. Steel." A
sudden, liberating realization: "And you're not big enough to stop us!"
The singleton backed up abruptly, then sat down. It lowered its head,
blinked. "So you don't trust me? You are right not to. There is no one here
but yourselves that you can trust." Its gaze drifted from Jefri to the ranks
of Amdi, and then down the hall. "Steel doesn't know I've brought you here."
The confession was so quick, so easily made. Jefri swallowed hard. "You
brought us down here to k-kill us." All of Amdi was staring at him and
Tyrathect, every eye wide with shock.
The singleton bobbed its head in part of a smile. "You think I am
traitor? After all this time, some healthy suspicion. I am proud of you."
Mr. Tyrathect continued smoothly, "You are surrounded by traitors,
Amdijefri. But I am not one of them. I am here to help you."
"I know that." Amdi reached forward to touch a muzzle to the
singleton's. "You're no traitor. You're the only person besides Jefri that I
can touch. We've always wanted to like you, but -- "
"Ah, but you should be suspicious. You will all die if you aren't."
Tyrathect looked over the puppies, at the frowning Jefri. "Your sister is
alive, Jefri. She's out there now, and Steel has known all along. He killed
your parents; he did almost everything he said Woodcarver did." Amdi backed
away, shaking himself in frightened negations. "You don't believe me? That's
funny. Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right
into my mouths. But now, when only the truth will work, I can't convince
you.... Listen:"
Suddenly it was Steel's human-speaking voice that came from the
singleton, Steel talking with Ravna about Johanna being alive, excusing the
attack he had just ordered on her.
Johanna. Jefri rushed forward, fell on his knees before the Cloak.
Almost without thought, he grabbed the singleton by the throat, shaking it.
Teeth snapped at his hands as the other tried to shake free. Amdi rushed
forward and pulled hard on his sleeves. After a moment Jefri let go.
Centimeters away from his face, the singleton peered back at him, the
torchlight glinting in its dark eyes. Amdi was saying: "Human voices are
easy to fake -- "
The fragment was disdainful. "Of course. And I'm not claiming that was
a direct relay. What you heard is several minutes old. Here's what Steel and
I are planning this very second." His Samnorsk abruptly stopped, and the
hallway was filled with the gobbling chords of Pack talk. Even after a year,
Jefri could only extract vague sense from the conversation. It did sound
like two packs. One of them wanted the other to do something, bring
Amdijefri -- that chord was clear -- up.
Amdiranifani went suddenly still, every member straining at the relayed
sounds. "Stop it!" he shrilled. And the hallway was as quiet as a tomb. "Mr.
Steel, oh Mr. Steel." All of Amdi huddled against Jefri. "He's talking about
hurting you if Ravna doesn't obey. He wants to kill the Visitors when they
land." The wide eyes were ringed with tears. "I don't understand."
Jefri jabbed a hand at the Cloak. "Maybe he's faking that, too."
"I don't know. I could never fake two packs that well." The tiny bodies
shuddered against Jefri, and there was the sound of human weeping, the
eerily familiar sound of a small child desolated.... "What are we going to
do, Jefri?"
But Jefri was silent, remembering and finally understanding, the first
few minutes after Steel's troops had rescued -- captured? -- him. Memories
suppressed by later kindness crept out from the corners of his mind. Mom,
Dad, Johanna. But Johanna still lived, just beyond these walls....
"Jefri?"
"I don't know either. H-hide maybe?"
For a moment they just stared at each other. Finally the fragment
spoke. "You can do better than hide. You already know about the passages
through these walls. If you know the entrance points -- and I do -- you can
get to almost anywhere you want. You can even get outside."
Johanna.
Amdi's crying stopped. Three of him watched Tyrathect front, aft, and
sideways. The rest still clung to Jefri. "We still don't trust you,
Tyrathect," said Jefri.
"Good, good. I am a pack of various parts. Perhaps not entirely
trustable."
"Show us all the holes." Let us decide.
"There won't be time -- "
"Okay, but start showing us. And while you do, keep relaying what Mr.
Steel is saying."
The singleton bobbed its head, and the multiple streams of Pack talk
resumed. The Cloak got painfully to its feet and led the two children down a
side tunnel, one where the wick torches were mostly burned out. The loudest
sound down here was the soft dripping of water. The place was less than a
year old, yet -- except for the jagged edges of the cut stone -- it seemed
ancient.
Puppies was crying again. Jefri stroked the back of the one that clung
to his shoulder, "Please Amdi, translate for me."
After a moment Amdi's voice came hesitantly in his ear. "M-Mr. Steel is
asking again where we are. Tyrathect says we're trapped by a ceiling fall in
the inner wing." In fact, they had heard the masonry shift a few minutes
before, but it sounded far away. "Mr. Steel just sent the rest of Tyrathect
to get Mr. Shreck and dig us out. Mr. Steel sounds so ... different."
"Maybe it's not really him," Jefri whispered back.
Long silence. "No. It's him. He just seems so angry, and he's using
strange words."
"Big words?"
"No. Scary ones. About cutting and killing ... Ravna and you and me. He
... he doesn't like us, Jefri."
The singleton stopped. They were beyond the last wall torch, and it was
too dark to see anything but shadowy forms. He pointed to a spot on the
wall. Amdi reached forward and pushed at the rock. All the while Mr.
Tyrathect continued talking, reporting from the outside.
"Okay," said Amdi, "that opens. And it's big enough for you, Jefri. I
think -- "
Tyrathect's human voice said, "The Spacers are back. I can see their
little boat.... I got away just in time. Steel is getting suspicious. A few
more seconds and he will be searching everywhere."
Amdi looked into the dark hole. "I say we go," he said softly, sadly.
"Yeah." Jefri reached down to touch one of Amdi's shoulders. The member
led him to a hole cut in sharp-edged stone. If he scrunched his shoulders
there would be enough room to crawl in. One of Amdi entered just ahead of
him. The rest would follow. "I hope it doesn't get any narrower than this."
Tyrathect: "It shouldn't. All these passages are designed for packs in
light armor. The important thing: keep to upward curving passages. Keep
moving and you'll eventually get outside. Pham's flying craft is less than,
uh, five hundred meters from the walls.
Jefri couldn't even look over his shoulder to talk to the Cloak. "What
if Mr. Steel chases us into the walls?"
There was a brief silence. "He probably won't do that, if he doesn't
know where you entered. It would take too long to find you. But," the voice
was suddenly gentler, "but there are openings on the top of the walls. In
case enemy soldiers tried to sneak in from the outside, there has to be some
way to kill them in the tunnels. He could pour oil down the tunnels."
The possibility did not frighten Jefri. At the moment it just sounded
bizarre. "We've got to hurry then."
Jefri scrabbled forward as the rest of Amdi crawled in behind him. He
was already several meters deep in stone when he heard Amdi's voice back at
the entrance, the last one to enter: "Will you be okay, Mr. Tyrathect?"
Or is this all another lie? thought Jefri.
The other's voice had its usual, cynical tone. "I expect to land on my
feet. Please do remember that I helped you."
And then the hatch was shut and they scrambled forward, into the dark.
Negotiations, shit. It was obvious to Pham that Steel's idea of
"mutually safe meeting" was a cover for mayhem. Even Ravna wasn't fooled by
the pack's new proposals. At least it meant that Steel was ad libbing now --
that he was beyond all the scripts and schemes. The trouble was, he still
wasn't giving them any openings. Pham would have cheerfully died for a few
undisturbed hours with the Countermeasure, but Steel's setup would have them
dead before they ever saw the inside of the refugee ship.
"Keep moving around, Blueshell. I want Steel to have us weighing on his
mind, without being a good target."
The Rider waved a frond in agreement and the boat bounced briefly up
from the moss, drifted a hundred meters parallel to the castle walls, and
descended again. They were in the no-man's land between the forces of
Woodcarver and Steel.
Johanna Olsndot twisted around to look at him. The boat was a very
crowded place now, Blueshell stretched across the Riderish controls at the
bow, Pham and Johanna jammed into the seats behind him -- and a pack called
Pilgrim in every empty space in between. "Even if you can locate the
commset, don't fire. Jefri could be close by." For twenty minutes Steel had
been promising the momentary reappearance of Jefri Olsndot.
Pham eyed her smudged face. "Yeah, we won't fire unless we can see
exactly what we'll hit." The girl nodded shortly. She couldn't have been
more than fourteen, but she was a good trooper. Half the people he had known
in Qeng Ho would have been in limp hysterics after this pickup. And of the
rest, few could have given a better status report than Johanna and her
friend.
He glanced at the pack. It would take a while to get used to these
critters. At first he'd thought that two of the dogs were sprouting extra
heads -- then he noticed the small ones were just puppies carried in jacket
pockets. The "Pilgrim" was all over the boat; just what part of him should
he talk to? He picked the head that was looking in his direction. "Any
theories how to deal with Steel?"
The pack's Samnorsk was better than Pham's: "Steel and Flenser are as
tricky as anything I've seen in Johanna's dataset. And Flenser is cool."
"Flenser? Hadn't realized there was a person with that name.... There
was a 'Mr. Skinner' we talked to. Some kind of assistant to Steel."
"Hmm. He's tricky enough to play flunky.... wish we could drop back and
chat with Woodcarver about this." The request was artfully contained in his
intonation. Pham wondered briefly what percentage of Packfolk were so
flexible. They might be one hell of a trading race if they ever reached
space.
"Sorry, we don't have time for that. In fact, if we can't get in right
away, we've lost everything. I just hope Steel doesn't guess that."
The heads subtly rearranged themselves. The biggest member, the one
with a broken arrow shaft sticking up from its jacket, moved closer to the
girl. "Well, if Steel is in charge, there's a chance. He's very smart, but
we think he runs amok when things get tough. Your finding Johanna has
probably put him to chasing his tails. Keep him off balance, and you can
expect some big mistakes."
Johanna spoke abruptly, "He might kill Jefri."
Or blow up the starship. "Ravna, any luck with Steel?"
Her voice came back over the comm: "No. The threats are a bit more
transparent now, and his Samnorsk is getting harder to understand. He's
trying to bring cannon in from north of the Castle; I don't think he knows
how much I can see.... He still hasn't brought Jefri back to the radio."
The girl paled, but she didn't say anything. Her hand stole up to grasp
one of Pilgrim's paws.
Blueshell had been very quiet all through the rescue, first because he
had his fronds full with flying, then because the girl and the Pack had so
much to say. Pham had noticed that part of Pilgrim had been politely nosing
around the Rider. Blueshell hadn't seemed upset by the attention; his race
had plenty of experience with others.
But now the Rider made a brap for attention, "Sir Pham, there is action
in front of the castle."
Pilgrim was on it at almost the same instant, one head helping another
look through a telescope. "Yes. That's the main sally port that's coming
open. But why would Steel send packs out now? Woodcarver will chew them up."
The enemy was indeed fielding infantry. The packs spewed out the wide hole
in a headlong dash, much like troops of Pham's recollection. But once they
cleared the entrance they broke of into clumps of four to six dogs each and
spread across the castle perimeter.
Pham leaned forward, trying to see as far along the walls as possible.
"Maybe not. These guys aren't advancing. They're staying in range of the
archers on the walls."
"Yeah. But we still have cannons." Pilgrim's perfect imitation of
humanity broke for a second, and a Tinish chord filled the cockpit.
"Something is really strange. It's like they're trying to keep someone from
getting out."
"Are there other entrances?"
"Probably. And lots of little tunnels, just one member wide."
"Ravna?"
"Steel's not talking at all now. He said something about traitors
infifltrating the castle. Now all I'm getting is Tinish gobble." From
embrasure to embrasure along the battlements, Pham could see enemy soldiers
moving above those on the ground. Something had upset the rats' nest.
Johanna Olsndot was a vision of horrified concentration, her free hand
gathered into a fist, her lips faintly trembling. "All this time I thought
he was dead. If they kill him now, I...." Her voice suddenly scaled up:
"What are they doing?" Cast iron kettles had been dragged to the top of the
walls.
Pham could guess. Siege fighting on Canberra had involved similar
things. He looked at the girl, and kept his mouth shut. There's nothing we
can do.
The Pilgrim pack was not so kind -- or not so patronizing: "It's oil,
Johanna. They want to kill someone in the walls. But if he can get out....
Blueshell, I've read about loudspeakers. Can I use one? If Jefri is in the
walls, Woodcarver can safely scrape Steel's troops off the field and
battlements."
Pham opened his mouth to object, but the Rider had already opened a
channel. Pilgrim's Tinish voice echoed across the hillside. Along the castle
walls heads turned. To them, the voice must have sounded like a god's. The
chords and trills continued a moment longer, then ceased.
Ravna's voice was on the line an instant later, "Whatever you did just
now, it pushed Steel over the edge. I can barely understand him; He seems to
be describing how he'll torture Jefri if we don't pull the Woodcarvers
back."
Pham grunted. "Okay then. Get us in the air, Blueshell." It felt good
to kiss subtlety goodbye.
Blueshell wobbled the boat aloft. They moved forward, scarcely faster
than a man can run. Behind them more of Woodcarver's troops were coming over
the military crest of the hill. Those fellows had been pulled well back
after Pham's strafing run: things might be decided before they got to the
castle.... But Woodcarver's reach was still long and deadly: splashes of
smoke and fire appeared along the battlements, followed by sharp popping
noises. Killing Jefri Olsndot was going to be a very expensive proposition
for Steel.
"Can you use the beamer to clear Steel's troops away from the wall?"
asked Johanna.
Pham started to nod, then noticed what was happening by the castle.
"See the oil." Dark pools were growing between the enemy packs and the walls
they guarded. Until they knew where the kid was coming out, it would be best
not to start fires.
Pilgrim: "Oops." Then he was shouting something more on the
loudspeakers. Woodcarver's artillery ceased.
"Okay," said Pham, "for now, all eyes on the castle wall. Circle the
perimeter, Blueshell. If we can see the kid before Steel's guys, we may have
a chance."
Ravna: "They're spread evenly around every side except the North, Pham.
I don't think Steel has any idea were the boy is."
When you challenge Heaven, the stakes are high. And I could have won.
If he had not betrayed me, I could have won. But now the masks were down,
and the enemy's brute physical power was all that counted. Steel brought
himself down from the hysterical blackout of the last few minutes. If I can
not have Heaven, at least I can still take them to Hell. Kill Amdijefri,
destroy the ship the Visitors wanted so ... most of all, destroy his
traitorous teacher.
"My lord?" It was Shreck.
Steel turned a head in Shreck's direction. The time for hysteria was
past. "How goes the flooding?" he said mildly. He wouldn't ask about
Tyrathect again.
"All but complete. The oil is pooling beyond the castle walls." The two
packs crouched as one of Woodcarver's bombs exploded just beyond the
battlement. Her troops were already halfway back across the field -- and
Steel's archers were preoccupied with flooding the tunnels and watching the
exits. "We may have flushed out the traitors, my lord. Just before
Woodcarver resumed fire, we heard something by the southeast wall. But I
fear the spacers will see whatever we do there." His heads bobbed
spastically.
Strange to see Shreck coming apart, Steel thought vaguely. Shreck's was
the loyalty of clockwork, but now his orderly world was failing and there
was nothing left to support him. The madness he was born from was all that
was left.
If Shreck was close to breaking, then the siege of Starship Hill was
nearly at an end. Just a little longer, that is all I ask now. Steel forced
a confident expression upon his members. "I understand. You have done well,
Shreck. We may still win. I know how these mantises think. If you can kill
the child, especially before their eyes, it will break their spirit -- just
as puppies can be broken by the right terrors."
"Yes, sir." There was dull incredulity in Shreck's eyes, but this would
hold him, a plausible excuse to continue the charade.
"Light the oil beyond the walls. Move the troops in front of where you
think Amdijefri will exit. The Visitors must see this if it is to have
proper effect. And -- " and blow up the refugee ship! The words almost
slipped out, but he caught himself in time. The explosives built into the
Jaws and the Starship dome would bring down everything interior to the
outerwalls and would kill most of the packs within. Ordering Shreck do that
would make Steel's real goal all too clear. "-- And move quickly before
Woodcarver's troops can close. This is the Movement's last hope, Shreck."
The pack bowed its way back down the steps. Steel maintained an
expansive posture, boldly looking across the battlefield until the other was
out of sight. Then he reached across the battlements and slammed the radio
into the stone walkway. This one didn't break, and now the Ravna mantis's
voice came querulously from it. Steel bounded down the stairs. "You get
nothing," he shrieked back at her in Tines' talk. "Everything you want will
die!"
And then he was down the stairs and running across the courtyard. He
ducked out of sight, into the hallway that circled the Jaws of Welcome. He
could blow those easily, but very likely the main dome and the ship within
would survive. No, he must go to the heart. Kill the ship and all the
sleeping mantises. He stepped into a secret room, picked up two crossbows --
and the extra radio cloak he had prepared. Inside that cloak was a small
bomb. He had tested the idea with the second set of radios; the receiving
pack had died instantly.
Down another set of stairs, into a supply corridor. The sounds of
battle were lost behind him. His own tines' clatter was the loudest noise.
Around him loomed bins of gunpowder, food supplies, fresh timber. The fuses
and set charges were only fifty yards further on. And Steel slowed to a
walk, curled his paws so the metal on them made no noise. Listening. Looking
in every direction. Somehow he knew the other would be here. The Flenser
Fragment. Flenser had haunted him from the beginning of his existence, had
haunted even after Flenser had mostly died. But not until this clear treason
had Steel been able to free his hate. Most likely the Master thought to
escape with the children, but there was a chance that Flenser schemed to win
everything. There was a chance that he had returned. Steel knew his own
death would come soon. And yet there might still be triumph. If, by his own
jaws and claws, he could kill the Master.... Please, please be here, dear
Master. Be here thinking you can trick me one more time.
A wish granted. He heard faint mind sounds. Close. Heads rose from
behind the bins above him. Two of the Fragment showed themselves in the
corridor ahead.
"Student."
"Master." Steel smiled. All five of the other were here; the Fragment
had smuggled himself all back. But gone were the radio cloaks. The members
stood naked, their pelts covered with oozing sores. The radio bomb would be
useless. Perhaps it didn't matter; Steel had seen corpses that looked
healthier than these. Out of sight, he raised his bows. "I have come to kill
you."
The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try."
Jaws on claws, Steel would have had no trouble killing the other. But
the Fragment had positioned three of himself above, by cargo bins that
looked strangely off-balance. A straight forward rush could be fatal. But if
he could get good bow shots... Steel eased forward, to just short of where
the cargo bins would fall. "Do you really expect to live, Fragment? I am not
your only enemy." He waved a nose back up the corridor. "There are thousands
out there who hunger for your death."
The other bobbed its heads in a ghastly smile. New blood oozed from the
wounds that were opened. "Dear Steel, you never seem to understand. You have
made it possible for me to survive. Don't you see? I have saved the
children. Even now, I am preventing you from harming the starship. In the
end this will win me a conditional surrender. I will be weak for a few
years, but I will survive."
The old Flenser glittered through the pain and the wounds. The old
opportunism.
"But you are a fragment. Three-fifths of you is -- "
"The little school teacher?" Flenser lowered his heads and blinked
shyly. "She was stronger than I expected. For a while she ruled this pack,
but bit by bit I forced my way back. In the end, even without the others, I
am whole."
Flenser whole once more. Steel edged back, almost in retreat. Yet there
was something strange here. Yes, the Flenser was at peace with himself,
self-satisfied. But now that Steel could see the pack all together, he saw
something in its body language that... Insight came then, and with it a
flash of intensest pride. For once in my life, I understand better than the
Master. "Whole, you say? Think. We both know how souls do battle within, the
little rationalizations, the great unknowings. You think you've killed the
other, but whence comes your recent confidence? What you're doing is exactly
what Tyrathect would do now. All thought is yours now, but the foundation is
her soul. And whatever you think, it's the little school teacher who won!"
The Fragment hesitated, understanding. Its inattention lasted only a
fraction of a second, but Steel was ready: He leaped into the open, loosing
his arrows, lunging across the open space for the other's throats.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Any time before now, the climb through the walls would have been fun.
Even though it was pitch dark, Amdi was in front and behind him, and his
noses gave him a good feel for the way. Anytime before now there would have
been the thrill of discovery, of giggling at Amdi's strung-out mental state.
But now Amdi's confusion was simply scary. He kept bumping into Jefri's
heels. "I'm going as fast as I can." The fabric of Jefri's pants' knees was
already torn apart on the rough stone. He hustled faster, the stabbing beat
of rock on knees barely penetrating his consciousness. He bumped into the
puppy ahead of him. The puppy had stopped, seemed to be twisting sideways.
"There's a fork. I say we ... what should I say, Jefri?"
Jefri rolled back, knocking his head on top of the wormhole. For most
of a year, it had been Amdi's confidence, his cheeky cleverness, that had
kept him going. Now ... suddenly he was aware of the tonnes of rock that
were pressing in from all directions. If the tunnel narrowed just a few
centimeters, they would be stuck here forever.
"Jefri?"
"I-- " Think! "Which side seems to be going up?"
"Just a second." The lead member ran off a little ways down one fork.
"Don't go too far!" Jefri shouted.
"Don't worry. I ... he'll know to get back." Then he heard the patter
of return, and the lead member was touching its nose to his cheek. "The one
on the right goes up."
They hadn't gone more than fifteen meters before Amdi started hearing
things. "People chasing us?" asked Jefri.
"No. I'm mean, I'm not sure. Stop. Listen.... Hear that? Gluppy,
syrupy." Oil.
No more stopping. Jefri moved faster than ever up the tunnel. His head
bumped into the ceiling and he stumbled to his elbows, recovered without
thinking and raced on. A trickle of blood dripped down his cheek.
Even he could hear the oil now.
The sides of the tunnel closed down on his shoulders. Ahead of him,
Amdi said, "Dead end -- or we're at an exit!" Scritching sounds. "I can't
move it." The puppy turned around and wiggled back between Jefri's legs.
"Push at the top, Jefri. If it's like the one I found in the dome, it opens
at the top."
The darn tunnel got narrow right before the door. Jefri hunched his
shoulders and squeezed forward. He pushed at the top of the door. It moved,
maybe a centimeter. He crawled forward a little further, squished so tightly
between the walls that he couldn't even take a deep breath. Now he pushed
hard as he could. The stone turned all the way and light spilled onto his
face. It wasn't full daylight; they were still hidden from the outside
behind angles of stone -- but it was the happiest sight Jefri had ever seen.
Half a meter more and he would be out -- only now he was jammed.
He twisted forward a fraction, and things only seemed to get worse.
Behind him, Amdi was piling up. "Jefri! My rear paws are in the oil. It's
filled the tunnel all up behind us."
Panic. For a second Jefri couldn't think of anything. So close, so
close. He could see color now, the bloody smears on his hands. "Back up!
I'll take off my jacket and try again."
Backing up was itself almost impossible, so thoroughly wedged had he
become. Finally he'd done it. He turned on his side, shrugged out of the
jacket.
"Jefri! Two of me under ... oil. Can't breathe." The puppies jammed up
around him, their pelts slick with oil. Slick!
"Jus' second!" Jefri wiped the fur, smeared his shoulders with the oil.
He extended his arms straight past his head and used his heels to push back
into the narrowness. Then the stone closed in on his shoulders. Behind him,
what was left of Amdi was making whistling noises. Jam. Push. Push. A
centimeter, another. And then he was out to his armpits and it was easy.
He dropped to the ground and reached back to grab the nearest part of
Amdi. The pup wriggled out of his hands. It blubbered something not Tinish
and not human. Jefri could see the dark shadows of several members pulling
at something out of sight. A second later, a cold, wet blob of fur rolled
out of the darkness into his arms. A second more, and out came another.
Jefri lowered the two to the ground and wiped goo away from their muzzles.
One rolled onto its legs and began to shake itself. The other started
choking and coughing.
Meanwhile the rest of Amdi dropped out of the hole. All eight were
covered with some amount of oil. They straggled drunkenly into a heap,
licking each another's tympana. Their buzzing and croaking made no sense.
Jefri turned from his friend and walked toward the light. They were
hidden by a turn in the stone ... fortunately. From around the corner he
could hear the marshaling calls of Steel's troopers. He crept to the edge
and peered around. For an instant he thought he and Amdi were back inside
the castle yard; there were so many troopers. But then he saw the unbounded
sweep of the hillside and the smoke rising out of the valley.
What next? He glanced back at Amdi, who was still frantically grooming
his tympana. The chords and hums were sounding more rational now, and all of
Amdi was moving. He turned back to the hillside. For an instant he almost
felt like rushing out to the troops. They had been his protectors for so
long.
One of Amdi bumped against his legs, and looked out for himself. "Wow.
There's a regular lake of oil between us and Mr. Steel's soldiers. I -- "
The booming sound was loud, but not like a gunpowder blast. It lasted
almost a second, then became a background roar. Two more of Amdi stretched
necks around the corner. The lake had become a roaring sea of flame.
Blueshell had maneuvered the boat within two hundred meters of the
castle wall, opposite the point where the packs had bunched up. Now the
lander floated just a man's height off the moss. "Just our being here is
driving the packs away," said Pilgrim.
Pham glanced over his shoulder. Woodcarver's troops had regained the
field and were racing toward the castle walls. Another sixty seconds, max,
and they would be in contact with Steel's packs.
There was a loud brap from Blueshell's voder, and Pham looked forward.
"By the Fleet," he said softly. Packs on the ramparts had fired some kind of
flamethrowers into the pools of oil below the castle walls. Blueshell flew
in a little closer. Long pools of oil lay parallel to the walls. The enemy's
packs on the outside were all but cut off from their castle now. Except for
one thirty-meter-wide gap, the section they had been guarding was high fire.
The boat bobbed a little higher, tilting and sliding in the fire-driven
whirl of air. In most places the oil lapped the sloped base of the walls.
Those walls were more intricate than the castles of Canberra -- in many
places it looked like there were little mazes or caves built into the base.
Looks damn stupid in a defensive structure.
"Jefri!" screamed Johanna, and pointed toward the middle of the
unburning section. Pham had a glimpse of something withdrawing behind the
stonework.
"I saw him too." Blueshell tilted the boat over and slid downwards,
toward the wall. Johanna's hand closed on Pham's arm, pushing and shaking.
He could barely hear her voice over the Pilgrim's shouting. "Please, please,
please," she was saying.
For a moment it looked like they would make it: Steel's troops were
well back from them and -- though there were ponds of oil below them -- they
were not yet alight. Even the air seemed quieter than before. For all that,
Blueshell managed to lose control. A gentle tipping went uncorrected, and
the boat slid sideways into the ground. It was a slow collision, but Pham
heard one of the landing pods cracking. Blueshell played with the controls
and the other side of the craft settled to earth. The beamer was stuck
muzzle first into the earth.
Pham's gaze snapped up at the Skroderider. He'd known it would come to
this.
Ravna: "What happened? Can you get up?"
Blueshell dithered with the controls a moment longer, then gave a
Riderish shrug. "Yes. But it will take too long -- " He was undoing his
restraints, unclamping his skrode from the deck. The hatch in front of him
slid open, and the noise of battle and fire came loud.
"What in hell do you think you're doing, Blueshell!"
The Rider's fronds angled attention at Pham, "To rescue the boy. This
will all be afire in a moment."
"And this boat could fry if we leave it here. You're not going
anywhere, Blueshell." He leaned forward, far enough to grab the other by his
lower fronds.
Johanna was looking wildly from one to the other in an uncomprehending
panic. "No! Please -- " And Ravna was shouting at him too. Pham tensed, all
his attention on the Rider.
Blueshell rocked toward him in the cramped space and pushed his fronds
close to Pham's face. The voder voice frayed into nonlinearity: "And what
will you do if I disobey? You need me whole or the boat is useless. I go,
Sir Pham. I prove I am not the thrall of some Power. Can you prove as much?"
He paused, and for a moment Rider and human stared at each other from
centimeters apart. But Pham did not grab him.
Brap. Blueshell's fronds withdrew. He rolled back onto the lip of the
hatch. The skrode's third axle reached the ground, and he descended in a
controlled teeter. Still Pham had not moved. I am not some Power's program.
"Pham?" The girl was looking up at him, and tugging at his sleeve.
Nuwen shook the nightmare away and saw again. The Pilgrim pack was already
out of the boat. Short swords were held in the mouths of the four adults;
steel claws gleamed on their forepaws.
"Okay." He flipped open a panel, withdrew the pistol he'd hidden there.
Since Blueshell had crashed the damn boat, there was no choice but to make
the best of it.
The realization was a cool breath of freedom. He pulled free of the
crash restraints and clambered down. Pilgrim stood all around him. The two
with puppies were unlimbering some kind of shields. Even with all his mouths
full, the critter's voice was as clear as ever: "Maybe we can find a way
closer in -- " between the flames. There were no more arrows from the
ramparts. The air above the fire was just too hot for the archers.
Pham and Johanna followed Pilgrim as he skirted pools of black goo.
"Stay as far from the oil as we can."
The packs of Mr. Steel were rounding the flames. Pham couldn't tell if
they were charging the lander or simply fleeing the friendlies that chased
them. And maybe it didn't matter. He dropped to one knee and sprayed the
oncoming packs with his handgun. It was nothing like the beamer, especially
at this range, but it was not to be ignored: the front dogs tumbled. Others
bounded over them. They reached the far edge of the oil. Only a few ventured
into the goo -- they knew what it could become. Others shifted out of Pham's
sight, behind the landing boat.
Was there a dry approach? Pham ran along the edge of the oil. There had
to be a gap in the "moat", or surely the fire would have spread. Ahead of
him the flames towered twenty meters into the air, the heat a physical
battering on his skin. Above the top of the glow, tarry smoke swept back
over the field, turning the sunlight into reddish murk. "Can't see a thing,"
came Ravna's voice in his ear, despairing.
"There's still a chance, Rav." If he could hold them off long enough
for Woodcarver's troops....
Steel's packs had found a safe path inwards and were coming closer.
Something sighed past him -- an arrow. He dropped to the ground and sprayed
the enemy packs at full rate. If they had known how fast he was getting to
empty they might have kept coming, but after a few seconds of ripping
carnage, the advance halted. The enemy sweep broke apart and the dogthings
were running away, taking their chances with Woodcarver's packs.
Pham turned and looked back at the castle. Johanna and Pilgrim stood
ten meters nearer the walls. She was pulling against the pack's grasp. Pham
followed her gaze.... There was the Skroderider. Blueshell had paid no
attention to the packs that ran around the edge of the fire. He rolled
steadily inwards, oily tracks marking his progress. The Rider had drawn in
all his externals and pulled his cargo scarf close to his central stalk. He
was driving blind through the superheated air, deeper and deeper into the
narrowing gap between the flames.
He was less than fifteen meters from the walls. Abruptly two fronds
extended out from his trunk, into the heat. There. Through the heat shimmer,
Pham could see the kid, walking uncertainly out from the cover of stone.
Small shapes sat on the boy's shoulders, and walked beside him. Pham ran up
the slope. He could move faster over this terrain than any Rider. Maybe
there was time.
A single burst of flame arched down from the castle, into the pond of
oil between him and the Rider at the wall. What had been a narrow channel of
safety was gone, and the flames spread unbroken before him.
"There's still lots of clear space," Amdi said. He reached a few meters
out from their hiding place to reconnoiter around the corners. "The flier is
down! Some ... strange thing ... is coming our way. Blueshell or
Greenstalk?"
There were lots of Steel's packs out there too, but not close --
probably because of the flier. That was a weird one, with none of the
symmetry of Straumer aircraft. It looked all tilted over, almost as if it
had crashed. A tall human raced across their field of view, firing at
Steel's troops. Jefri looked further out, and his hand tightened almost
unconsciously on the nearest puppy. Coming toward them was a wheeled
vehicle, like something out of a Nyjoran historical. The sides were painted
with jagged stripes. A thick pole grew up from the top.
The two children stepped a little ways out from their protection. The
Spacer saw them! It slewed about, spraying oil and moss from under its
wheels. Two frail somethings reached out from its bluish trunk. Its voice
was squeaky Samnorsk. "Quickly, Sir Jefri. We have little time." Behind the
creature, beyond the pond of oil, Jefri could see ... Johanna.
And then the pond exploded, the fire on both sides sprouting across all
escape routes. Still the Spacer was waving its tendrils, urging them onto
the flat of its hull. Jefri grasped at the few handholds available. The
puppies jumped up after him, clinging to his shirt and pants. Up close,
Jefri could see that the stalk was the person: the skin was smudged and dry,
but it was soft and it moved.
Two of Amdi were still on the ground, ranging out on either side of the
cart for a better view of the fire. "Wah!" shrieked Amdi by his ear. Even so
close, he could scarcely be heard over the thunder of the fire. "We can
never get through that, Jefri. Our only chance is to stay here."
The Spacer's voice came from a little plate at the base of its stalk.
"No. If you stay here, you will die. The fire is spreading." Jefri had
huddled as much behind the Rider's stalk as possible, and still he could
feel the heat. Much more and the oil in Amdi's fur would catch fire.
The Rider's tendrils lifted the colored cloth that lay on its hull.
"Pull this over you." It waggled a tendril at the rest of Amdi. "All of
you."
The two on the ground were crouched behind the creature's front wheels.
"Too hot, too hot," came Amdi's voice. But the two jumped up and buried
themselves under the peculiar tarpaulin.
"Cover yourself, all the way!" Jefri felt the Rider pulling the cover
over them. The cart was already rolling back, toward the flames. Pain burned
through every gap in the tarp. The boy reached frantically, first with one
hand and then the other, trying to get the cloth over his legs. Their course
was a wild bouncing ride, and Jefri could barely keep hold. Around him he
felt Amdi straining with his free jaws to keep the tarpaulin in place. The
sound of fire was a roaring beast, and the tarp itself was searing hot
against his skin. Every new jolt bounced him up from the hull, threatening
to break his grip. For a time, panic obliterated thought. It was not till
much later that he remembered the tiny sounds that came from the voder
plate, and understood what those sounds must mean.
Pham ran toward the new flames. Agony. He raised his arms across his
face and felt the skin on his hands blistering. He backed away.
"This way, this way!" Pilgrim's voice came from behind him, guiding him
out. He ran back, stumbling. The pack was in a shallow gully. It had shifted
its shields around to face the new stretch of fire. Two of the pack moved
out of his way as he dived behind them.
Both Johanna and the pack were slapping at his head.
"Your hair's on fire!" the girl shouted. In seconds they had the fire
out. The Pilgrim looked a bit singed, too. Its shoulder pouches were tucked
safely shut; for the first time, no inquisitive puppy eyes peeked out.
"I still can't see anything, Pham." It was Ravna from high above.
"What's going on?"
Quick glance behind him. "We're okay," he gasped. "Woodcarver's packs
are tearing up Steel's. But Blueshell -- " He peered between in the shields.
It was like looking into a kiln. Right by the castle wall there might be a
breathing space. A slim hope, but --
"Something is moving in there." Pilgrim had tucked one head briefly
around the shield. He withdrew it now, licking his nose from both sides.
Pham looked again through the crack. The fire had internal shadows,
places of not-so-bright that wavered ... moved? "I see it too." He felt
Johanna stick her head close to his, peering frantically. "It's Blueshell,
Rav.... By the Fleet." This last said too softly to carry over the fire
sound. There was no sign of Jefri Olsndot, but -- "Blueshell is rolling
through the middle of the fire, Rav."
The skrode wheeled out of the deeper oil. Slowly, steadily making its
way. And now Pham could see fire within fire, Blueshell's trunk flaring in
rivulets of flame. His fronds were no longer gathered into himself. They
extended, writhing with their own fire. "He's still coming, driving straight
out."
The skrode cleared the wall of fire, rolled with jerky abandon down the
slope. Blueshell didn't turn toward them, but just before he reached the
landing boat, all six wheels grated to a fast stop.
Pham stood and raced back toward the Skroderider. Pilgrim was already
unlimbering his shields and turning to follow him. Johanna Olsndot stood for
a second, sad and slight and alone, her gaze stuck hopelessly on the fire
and smoke on the castle side. One of the Pilgrim grabbed her sleeve, drawing
her back from the fire.
Pham was at the Rider now. He stared silently for a second. "...
Blueshell's dead, Rav, no way you could doubt if you could see." The fronds
were burnt away, leaving stubs along the stalk. The stalk itself had burst.
Ravna's voice in his ear was shuddery. "He drove through that even
while he was burning?"
"Can't be. He must have been dead after the first few meters. This must
all have been on autopilot." Pham tried to forget the agonized reaching of
fronds he had seen back in the fire. He blanked out for a moment, staring at
the fire-split flesh.
The skrode itself radiated heat. Pilgrim sniffed around it, shying away
abruptly when a nose came too close. Abruptly he reached out a steel-tined
paw and pulled hard on the scarf that covered the hull.
Johanna screamed and rushed forward. The forms beneath the scarf were
unmoving, but unburned. She grabbed her brother by the shoulders, pulling
him to the ground. Pham knelt beside her. Is the kid breathing? He was
distantly aware of Ravna shouting in his ear, and Pilgrim plucking tiny
dogthings off the metal.
Seconds later the boy started coughing. His arms windmilled against his
sister. "Amdi, Amdi!" His eyes opened, widened. "Sis!" And then again.
"Amdi?"
"I don't know," said the Pilgrim, standing close to the seven -- no,
eight -- grease-covered forms. "There are some mind sounds but not
coherent." He nosed at three of puppies, doing something that might have
been rescue breathing.
After a moment the little boy began crying, a sound lost in the fire
sounds. He crawled across to the puppies, his face right next to one of
Pilgrim's. Johanna was right behind him, holding his shoulders, looking
first to Pilgrim and then at the still creatures.
Pham came to his knees and looked back at the castle. The fire was a
little lower now. He stared a long time at the blackened stump that had been
Blueshell. Wondering and remembering. Wondering if all the suspicion had
been for naught. Wondering what mix of courage and autopilot had been behind
the rescue.
Remembering all the months he had spent with Blueshell, the liking and
then the hate -- Oh, Blueshell, my friend.
The fires slowly ebbed. Pham paced the edge of receding heat. He felt
the godshatter coming finally back upon him. For once he welcomed it,
welcomed the drive and the mania, the blunting of irrelevant feeling. He
looked at Pilgrim and Johanna and Jefri and the recovering puppy pack. It
was all a meaningless diversion. No, not quite meaningless: It had had an
effect, of slowing down progress on what was deadly important.
He glanced upwards. There were gaps in the sooty clouds, places where
he could see the reddish haze of high-level ash and occasional splotches of
blue. The castle's ramparts appeared abandoned, and the battle around the
walls had died. "What news?" he said impatiently at the sky.
Ravna: "I still can't see much around you, Pham. Large numbers of Tines
are retreating northwards. Looks like a fast, coordinated retreat. Nothing
like the 'fight-to-the-last' that we were seeing before. There are no fires
within the castle -- or evidence of remaining packs either."
Decision. Pham turned back to the others. He struggled to turn sharp
commands into reasonable-sounding requests. "Pilgrim! Pilgrim! I need
Woodcarver's help. We have to get inside the castle."
Pilgrim didn't need any special persuasion, though he was full of
questions. "You're going to fly over the walls?" he asked as he bounded
toward him.
Pham was already jogging toward the boat. He boosted Pilgrim aboard,
then clambered up. No, he wasn't going to try to fly the damn thing. "No,
just use the loudspeaker to get your boss to find a way in."
Seconds later, packtalk was echoing across the hillside. Just minutes
more. Just minutes more and I will be facing the Countermeasure. And though
he had no conscious notion what might come of that, he felt the godshatter
bubbling up for one final takeover, one final effort to do Old One's will.
"Where is the Blighter fleet, Rav?"
Her answer came back immediately. She had watched the battle below, and
the hammer coming down from above. "Forty-eight light-years out." Mumbled
conversation off-mike. "They've speeded up a little. They'll be in-system in
four-six hours.... I'm sorry, Pham."
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
Apparently From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence [Not the usual
originator, but verified by intermediate sites. Originator may be a branch
office or a back-up site.]
Subject: Our final message?
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Where Are They Now, Extinctions Log
Date: 72.78 days since the Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: vast new attack, the Fall of Sandor Arbitration
Text of message:
As best we can tell, all our High Beyond sites have been absorbed by
the Blight. If you can, please ignore all messages from those sites.
Until four hours ago, our organization comprised twenty civilizations
at the Top. What is left of us doesn't know what to say or what to do.
Things are so slow and murky and dull now; we were not meant to live this
low. We intend to disband after this mailing.
For those who can continue, we want to tell what happened. The new
attack was an abrupt thing. Our last recollections from Above are of the
Blight suddenly reaching in all directions, sacrificing all its immediate
security to acquire as much processing power as possible. We don't know if
we had simply underestimated its power, or if the Blight itself is somehow
now desperate -- and taking desperate risks.
Up to 3000 seconds ago we were under heavy assault along our
organization's internal networks. That has ceased. Temporarily? Or is this
the limit of the attack? We don't know, but if you hear from us again, you
will know that the Blight has us.
Farewell.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Optima->Acquileron->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Society for Rational Investigation [Probably a single system in
the Middle Beyond, 7500 light-years antispinward of Sjandra Kei]
Subject: The Big Picture
Key phrases: The Blight, Nature's Beauty, Unprecedented Opportunities
Summary: Life goes on
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Society for Rational Network Management, War Trackers Interest Group Date: 72.80 days since the Fall of Sjandra Kei
Text of message:
It's always amusing to see people who think themselves the center of
the universe. Take the recent spread of the Blight [references follow for
readers not on those threads and newsgroups]. The Blight is an unprecedented
change in a limited portion of the Top of the Beyond -- far away from most
of my readers. I'm sure it's the ultimate catastrophe for many, and I
certainly feel sympathy for such, but a little humor too, that these people
somehow think their disaster is the end of everything. Life goes on, folks.
At the same time, it's clear that many readers are not paying proper
attention to these events -- certainly not seeing what is truly significant
about them. In the last year, we have witnessed the apparent murders of
several Powers and the establishment of a new ecosystem in a portion of the
High Beyond. Though far away, these events are without precedent.
Often before, I have called this the Net of a Million Lies. Well,
people, we now have an opportunity to view things while the truth is still
manifest. With luck we may solve some fundamental mysteries about the Zones
and the Powers.
I urge readers to watch events below the Blight from as many angles as
possible. In particular, we should take advantage of the remaining relay at
Debley Down to coordinate observations on both sides of the Blight-affected
region. This will be expensive and tedious, since only Middle and Low Beyond
sites are available in the affected region, but it will be well worth it.
General topics to follow:
The nature of the Blight Net communications: The creature is part Power
and part High Beyond, and infinitely interesting.
The nature of the recent Great Surge in the Low Beyond beneath the
Blight: This is another event without clear precedent. Now is the time to
study it.
...
The nature of the Blighter fleet now closing on an off-net site in the
Low Beyond: This fleet has been of great interest to War Trackers over the
last weeks, but mainly for asinine reasons (who cares about Sjandra Kei and
the Aprahant Hegemony; local politics is for locals). The real question
should be obvious to all but the brain damaged: Why has the Blight made this
great effort so far out its natural depth?
If there are any ships still in the vicinity of the Blight's fleet, I
urge them to keep War Trackers posted. Failing that, local civilizations
should be reimbursed for forwarding ultrawave traces.
This is all very expensive, but worth it, the observations of the aeon.
And the expense will not continue long. The Blight's fleet should arrive at
the target star momentarily. Will it stop and retrieve? Or will we see how a
Power destroys the systems which oppose it? Either way, we are blessed with
opportunity.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Ravna walked across the field toward the waiting packs. The thick smoke
had been blown away, but its smell was still heavy in the air. The hillside
was burned-over desolation. From above, Steel's castle had looked like the
center of a great, black nipple, hectares of natural and pack-made
destruction capping the hill.
The soldiers silently made way for her. More than one cast an uneasy
glance at the starship grounded behind her. She walked slowly past them
toward the ones who waited. Eerie the way they sat, like picnickers but all
uneasy about each other's presence. This must be the equivalent of a close
staff conference for them. Ravna walked toward the pack at the center, the
one sitting on silken mats. Intricate wooden filigree hung around the necks
of the adults, but some of those looked sick, old. And there were two
puppies sitting out front of it. They stepped precisely forward as Ravna
crossed the last stretch of open ground.
"Er, you're the Woodcarver?" she asked.
A woman's voice, incredibly human, came from one of the larger members.
"Yes, Ravna. I'm Woodcarver. But it's Peregrine you want. He's up in the
castle, with the children.
"Oh."
"We have a wagon. We can take you inwards right away." One of them
pointed at a vehicle being drawn up the hillside. "But you could have landed
much closer, could you not?"
Ravna shook her head. "No. Not ... anymore." This was the best landing
that she and Greenstalk could make.
The heads cocked at her, all a coordinated gesture. "I thought you were
in a terrible hurry. Peregrine says there is a fleet of spacers coming hot
on your trail."
For an instant Ravna didn't say anything. So Pham had told them of the
Blight? But she was glad he had. She shook her head, trying to clear it of
the numbness. "Y-yes. We are in a great hurry." The dataset on her wrist was
linked to the OOB. Its tiny display showed the steady approach of the
Blight's fleet.
All the heads twisted, a gesture that Ravna couldn't interpret. "And
you despair. I fear I understand."
How can you? And if you can, how can you forgive us? But all that Ravna
said aloud was, "I'm sorry."
The Queen mounted her wagon and they rolled across the hillside toward
the castle walls. Ravna looked back once. Down slope, the OOB lay like a
great, dying moth. Its topside drive spines arched a hundred meters into the
air. They glistened a wet, metallic green. Their landing had not been quite
a crash. Even now, agrav canceled some of the craft's weight. But the drive
spines on the ground side were crumpled. Beyond the ship, the hillside fell
steeply away to the water and the islands. The westering sun cast hazy
shadows across the islands and on the castle beyond the straits. A fantasy
scene of castles and starships.
The display on her wrist serenely counted down the seconds.
"Steel put gunpowder bombs all around the dome." Woodcarver swept a
couple of noses, pointing upwards. Ravna followed her gesture. The arches
were more like a Princess cathedral than military architecture: pink marble
challenging the sky. And if it all came down, it would surely wreck the
spacecraft parked beneath.
Woodcarver said that Pham was in there now. They rolled indoors,
through dark, cool rooms. Ravna glimpsed row after row of coldsleep boxes.
How many might still be revivable? Will we ever find out? The shadows were
deep. "You're sure that Steel's troops are gone?"
Woodcarver hesitated, her heads staring in different directions. So
far, pack expressions were impossible for Ravna to read. "Reasonably sure.
Anybody still in the castle would need to be behind lots of stone, or my
search parties would have found them. More important, we have what's left of
Steel." The Queen seemed to read Ravna's questioning expression perfectly.
"You didn't know? Apparently Lord Steel came down here to blow all the
bombs. It would have been suicide, but that pack was always a crazy one.
Someone stopped him. There was blood all over. Two of him are dead. We found
the rest wandering around, a whimpering mess... Whoever did Steel in is also
behind the rapid retreat. That someone is doing his best to avoid any
confrontation. He won't be back soon, though I fear I'll have to face dear
Flenser eventually."
Under the circumstances, Ravna figured that was one problem that would
never materialize. Her dataset showed forty-five hours till the Blight's
arrival.
Jefri and Johanna were by their starship, under the main dome. They sat
on the steps of the landing ramp, holding hands. When the wide doors opened
and Woodcarver's wagon drove through, the girl stood and waved. Then they
saw Ravna. The boy walked first quickly then more slowly across the wide
floor. "Jefri Olsndot?" Ravna called softly. He had a tentative, dignified
posture that seemed much too old for an eight-year-old. Poor Jefri had lost
much, and lived with so little for so long. She stepped down from the wagon
and walked toward him.
The boy advanced out of the shadows. He was surrounded by a near mob of
small-size pack members. One of them hung on his shoulder; others tumbled
around his feet without ever seeming to get in his way; still others
followed his path both in front and behind. Jefri stopped well back from
her. "Ravna?"
She nodded.
"Could you step a little closer? The Queen's mind sound is too close."
The voice was still the boy's, but his lips hadn't moved. She walked the few
meters that still separated them. Puppies and boy advanced hesitantly. Up
close she could see the rips in his clothing, and what looked like wound
dressings on his shoulders and elbows and knees. His face looked recently
washed, but his hair was a sticky mess. He looked up at her solemnly, then
raised his arms to hug her. "Thank you for coming." His voice was muffled
against her, but he wasn't crying. "Yes, thank you, thank poor Mr.
Blueshell." His voice again, sad but unmuffled, coming from the pack of
puppies all around them.
Johanna Olsndot had advanced to stand just behind them. Only fourteen
is she? Ravna reached a hand toward her. "From what I hear, you were a
rescue force all by yourself."
Woodcarver's voice came from the wagon. "Johanna was that. She changed
our world."
Ravna gestured up the ship's ramp, at the glow of the interior
lighting. "Pham's up there?"
The girl started to nod, was preempted by the pack of puppies. "Yes, he
is. He and the Pilgrim are up there." The pups disentangled themselves and
started up the steps, one remaining behind to tug Ravna toward the ramp. She
started after them, with Jefri close beside her.
"Who is this pack?" she said abruptly to Jefri, pointing to the
puppies.
The boy stopped in surprise. "Amdi of course."
"I'm sorry," Jefri's voice came from the puppies. "I've talked to you
so much, I forget you don't know -- " There was a chorus of tones and chords
that ended in a human giggle. She looked down at the bobbing heads, and was
certain the little devil was quite aware of his misrepresentations. Suddenly
a mystery was solved. "Pleased to meet you," she said, angered and charmed
at the same time. "Now -- "
"Right, there are much more important things now." The pack continued
to hop up the stairs. "Amdi" seemed to alternate between shy sadness and
manic activity. "I don't know what they're up to. They kicked us out as soon
as we showed them around."
Ravna followed the pack, Jefri close behind. It didn't sound like
anything was going on. The interior of the dome was like a tomb, echoing
with the talk of the few packs who guarded it. But here, halfway up the
steps, even those sounds were muted, and there was nothing coming through
the hatch at the top. "Pham?"
"He's up there." It was Johanna, at the base of the stairs. She and
Woodcarver were looking up at them. She hesitated, "I'm not sure if he's
okay. After the battle, he -- he seemed strange."
Woodcarver's heads weaved about, as if she were trying to get a good
look at them through the glare of the hatch lights. "The acoustics in this
ship of yours are awful. How can humans stand it?"
Amdi: "Ah, it's not so bad. Jefri and I spent lots of time up here. I
got used to it." Two of his heads were pushing at the hatch. "I don't know
why Pham and Pilgrim kicked us out; we could have stayed in the other room
and been real quiet."
Ravna stepped carefully between the pack's lead puppies and pounded on
the hull metal. It wasn't hard-latched; now she could hear the ship's
ventilation. "Pham, what progress?"
There was a rustling sound and the click of claws. The hatch slid
partway back. Bright, flickering light spilled down the ramp. A single doggy
head appeared. Ravna could see white all around its eyes. Did that mean
anything? "Hi," it said. "Uh, look. Things are a bit tense just now. Pham --
I don't think Pham should be bothered."
Ravna slipped her hand past the gap. "I'm not here to bother him. But I
am coming in." How long we've fought for this moment. How many billions have
died along the way. And now some talking dog tells me things are a bit
tense.
The Pilgrim looked down at her hand. "Okay." He slid the hatch far
enough open to let her through. The pups were quick around her heels, but
they recoiled before the Pilgrim's glance. Ravna didn't notice....
The "ship" was scarcely more than a freight container, a cargo hull.
The cargo this time -- the coldsleep boxes -- had been removed, leaving a
mostly level floor, dotted with hundreds of fittings.
All this she scarcely noticed. It was the light, the thing that held
her. It grew out from the walls and gathered almost too bright to bear at
the center of the hold. Its shape changed and changed again, the colors
shifting from red to violet to green. Pham sat crosslegged by the
apparition, within it. Half his hair was burned away. His hands and arms
were shivering, and he mumbled in some language she didn't recognize.
Godshatter. Two times it had been the companion to disaster. A dying Power's
madness ... and now it was the only hope. Oh Pham.
Ravna took a step toward him, felt jaws close on her sleeve. "Please,
he mustn't be disturbed." The one that was holding her arm was a big dog,
battle-scarred. The rest of the pack -- Pilgrim -- all faced inwards on
Pham. The savage stared at her, somehow saw the anger rising in her face.
Then the pack said, "Look ma'am, your Pham's in some sort of fugue state,
all the normal personality traded for computation."
Huh? This Pilgrim had the jargon, but probably not much else. Pham must
have been talking to him. She made a shushing gesture. "Yes, yes. I
understand." She stared into the light. The changing shape, so hard to look
at, was something like the graphics you can generate on most displays, the
silly cross-sections of high-dimensional froths. It glowed in purest
monochrome, but shifted through the colors. Much of the light must be
coherent: interference speckles crawled on every solid surface. In places
the interference banded up, stripes of dark and light that slid across the
hull as the color changed.
She walked slowly closer, staring at Pham and ... the Countermeasure.
For what else could it be? The scum in the walls, now grown out to meet
godshatter. This was not simply data, a message to be relayed. This was a
Transcendent machine. Ravna had read of such things: devices made in the
Transcend, but for use at the Bottom of the Beyond. There would be nothing
sentient about it, nothing that violated the constraints of the Lower Zones
-- yet it would make the best possible use of nature here, to do whatever
its builder had desired: Its builder? The Blight? An enemy of the Blight?
She stepped closer. The thing was deep in Pham's chest, but there was
no blood, no torn flesh. She might have thought it all trick holography
except that she could see him shudder at its writhing. The fractal arms were
feathered by long teeth, twisting at him. She gasped and almost called his
name. But Pham wasn't resisting. He seemed deeper into godshatter than ever
before, and more at peace. The hope and fear came suddenly out of hiding:
hope that maybe, even now, godshatter could do something about the Blight;
and fear, that Pham would die in the process.
The artifact's twisting evolution slowed. The light hung at the pale
edge of blue. Pham's eyes opened. His head turned toward her. "The Riders'
Myth is real, Ravna." His voice was distant. She heard the whisper of a
laugh. "The Riders should know, I guess. They learned the last time. There
are Things that don't like the Blight. Things my Old One only guessed
at...."
Powers beyond the Powers? Ravna sank to the floor. The display on her
wrist glowed up at here. Less than forty-five hours left.
Pham saw her downward glance, "I know. Nothing has slowed the fleet.
It's a pitiful thing so far down here ... but more than powerful enough to
destroy this world, this solar system. And that's what the Blight wants now.
The Blight knows I can destroy it ... just as it was destroyed before."
Ravna was vaguely aware that Pilgrim had crawled in close on all sides.
Every face was fixed on the blue froth and the human enmeshed within. "How,
Pham?" Ravna whispered.
Silence. Then, "All the zone turbulence ... that was Countermeasure
trying to act, but without coordination. Now I'm guiding it. I've begun ...
the reverse surge. It's drawing on local energy sources. Can't you feel it?"
Reverse surge? What was Pham talking about? She glanced again at her
wrist -- and gasped. Enemy speed had jumped to twenty light-years per hour,
as fast as might be expected in the Middle Beyond. What had been almost two
days of grace was barely two hours. And now the display said twenty-five
light-years per hour. Thirty.
Someone was pounding on the hatch.
Scrupilo was delinquent. He should be supervising the move up the
hillside. He knew that, and really felt quite guilty -- but he persevered in
his dereliction. Like an addict chewing krima leaves, some things are too
delicious to give up.
Scrupilo dawdled behind, carrying Dataset carefully between him so that
its floppy pink ears would not drag on the ground. In fact, guarding Dataset
was certainly more important than hassling his troopers. In any case, he was
close enough to give advice. And his lieutenants were more clever than he at
everyday work.
During the last few hours, the coastal winds had taken the smoke clouds
inland, and the air was clean and salty. On this part of the hill, not
everything was burned. There were even some flowers and fluffy seed pods.
Bob-tailed birds sailed up the rising air from the sea valley, their cries a
happy music, as if promising that the world would soon be as before.
Scrupilo knew it could not be. He turned all his heads to look down the
hillside, at Ravna Bergsndot's starship. He estimated the surviving drive
spines as one hundred meters long. The hull itself was more than one hundred
and twenty. He hunkered down around Dataset, and popped open its cushioned
Oliphaunt face. Dataset knew lots about spacecraft. Actually, this ship was
not a human design, but the overall shape was fairly ordinary; he knew that
from his previous readings. Twenty to thirty thousand tonnes, equipped with
antigravity floats and faster-than-light drive. All very ordinary for the
Beyond.... But to see it here, through the eyes of his very own members!
Scrupilo couldn't keep his gaze from the thing. Three of him worked with
Dataset while the other two stared at the iridescent green hull. The
troopers and guncarts around him faded to insignificance. For all its mass,
the ship seemed to rest gently on the hillside. How long will it be before
we can build such? Centuries, without outside help, the histories in Dataset
claimed. What I wouldn't give for a dayaround aboard her!
Yet this ship was being chased by something mightier. Scrupilo shivered
in the summer sun. He had often enough heard Pilgrim's story of the first
landing, and he had seen the human's beam weapon. He had read much in
Dataset about planet-wrecker bombs and the other weapons of the Beyond.
While he worked on Woodcarver's cannon -- the best weapons he could bring to
be -- he had dreamed and wondered. Until he saw the starship floating above,
he had never quite felt the reality in his innermost hearts. Now he did. So
a fleet of killers lay close behind Ravna Bergsndot. The hours of the world
might be few indeed. He tabbed quickly through Dataset's search paths,
looking for articles about space piloting. If there be only hours, at least
learn what there is time to learn.
So Scrupilo was lost in the sound and vision of Dataset. He had three
windows open, each on a different aspect of the piloting experience.
Loud shouts from the hillside. He looked up with one head, more
irritated than anything else. It wasn't a battle alarm they were calling,
just a general unease. Strange, the afternoon air seemed pleasantly cool.
Two of him looked high, but there was no haze. "Scrupilo! Look, Look!"
His gunners were dancing in panic. They were pointing at the sky ... at
the sun. He folded the pink covers over Dataset's face, at the same time
looking sunward with shaded view. The sun was still high in the south,
dazzling bright. Yet the air was cool, and the birds were making the cooing
sounds of low-sun nesting. And suddenly he realized that he was looking
straight at the sun's disk, had been for five seconds -- without pain or
even watering of his eyes. And there was still no haze that he could see. An
inner chill spread across his mind.
The sunlight was fading. He could see black dots on its disk. Sunspots.
He had seen them often enough with Scriber's telescopes. But that had been
through heavy filters. Something stood between him and the sun, something
that sucked away its light and warmth.
The packs on the hillside moaned. It was a frightened sound Scrupilo
had never heard in battle, the sound of someone confronted by unknowable
terror.
Blue faded from the sky. The air was suddenly cold as deep dark night.
And the sun's color was a gray luminescence, like a faded moon. Less.
Scrupilo hunkered bellies to ground. Some of him was whistling deep in the
throat. Weapons, weapons. But Dataset never spoke of this.
The stars were the brightest light on the hillside.
"Pham, Pham. They'll be here in an hour. What have you done?" A
miracle, but of ill?
Pham Nuwen swayed in Countermeasure's bright embrace. His voice was
almost normal, the godshatter receding. "What have I done? Not much. And
more than any Power. Even Old One only guessed, Ravna. The thing the
Straumers brought here is the Rider Myth. We -- I, it -- just moved the Zone
boundary back. A local change, but intense. We're in the equivalent of the
High Beyond now, maybe even the Low Transcend locally. That's why the
Blighter fleet can move so fast."
"But -- "
Pilgrim was back from the hatch. He interrupted Ravna's incoherent
panic with a matter-of-fact, "The sun just went out." His heads bobbed in an
expression she couldn't fathom.
Pham answered, "That's temporary. Something has to power this
maneuver."
"W-why, Pham?" Even if the Blight was sure to win, why help it?
The man's face went blank, Pham Nuwen almost disappearing behind the
other programs at work in his mind. Then, "I'm ... focusing Countermeasure.
I see now, Countermeasure, what it is.... It was designed by something
beyond the Powers. Maybe there are Cloud People, maybe this is signaling
them. Or maybe what it's just done is like an insect bite, something that
will cause a much greater reaction. The Bottom of the Beyond has just
receded, like the waterline before a tsunami." The Countermeasure glared
red-orange, its arcs and barbs embracing Pham more tightly than before. "And
now that we've bootstrapped to a decent Zone ... things can really happen.
Oh, the ghost of Old One is amused. Seeing beyond the Powers was almost
worth dying for."
The fleet stats flowed across Ravna's wrist. The Blight was coming on
even faster than before. "Five minutes, Pham." Even though they were still
thirty light-years out.
Laughter. "Oh, the Blight knows, too. I see this is what it feared all
along. This is what killed it those aeons ago. It's racing forward now, but
it's too late." The glow brightened; the mask of light that was Pham's face
seemed to relax. "Something very ... far ... away has heard me, Rav. It's
coming."
"What? What's coming?"
"The Surge. So big. It makes what hit us before seem a gentle wave.
This is the one nobody believes, because no one's left to record it. The
Bottom will be blown out beyond the fleet.
Sudden understanding. Sudden wild hope. "... And they'll be trapped out
there, won't they?" So Kjet Svensndot had not fought in vain, and Pham's
advice had not been nonsense: Now there wasn't a single ramscoop in the
Blighter fleet.
"Yes. They're thirty-light years out. We killed all the speed-capable
ones. They'll be a thousand years getting here...." The artifact abruptly
contracted, and Pham moaned. "Not much time. We're at maximum recession.
When the surge comes, it will -- " Again a sound of pain. "I can see it! By
the Powers, Ravna, it will sweep high and last long."
"How high, Pham?" Ravna said softly. She thought of all the
civilizations above them. There were the Butterflies and the treacherous
types who supported the pogrom at Sjandra Kei.... And there were trillions
who lived in peace and made their own way toward the heights.
"A thousand light-years? Ten thousand? I'm not sure. The ghosts in
Countermeasure -- Arne and Sjana thought it might rise so high it would
punch into the Transcend, encyst the Blight right where it sits.... That
must be what happened Before."
Arne and Sjana?
The Countermeasure's writhing had slowed. Its light flickered bright
and then out. Bright and then out. She heard Pham's breath gasp with every
darkness. Countermeasure, a savior that was going to kill a million
civilizations. And was killing the man who had triggered it.
Almost unthinking, she dodged past the thing, reaching for Pham. But
razors on razors blocked her, raking her arms.
Pham was looking up at her. He was trying to say something more.
Then the light went out for a final time. From the darkness all around
came a hissing sound and a growing, bitter smell that Ravna would never
forget.
For Pham Nuwen, there was no pain. The last minutes of his life were
beyond any description that might be rendered in the Slowness or even in the
Beyond.
So try metaphor and simile: It was like ... it was like ... Pham stood
with Old One on a vast and empty beach. Ravna and Tines were tiny creatures
at their feet. Planets and stars were the grains of sand. And the sea had
drawn briefly back, letting the brightness of thought reach here where
before had been darkness. The Transcendence would be brief. At the horizon,
the drawn-back sea was building, a dark wall higher than any mountain,
rushing back upon them. He looked up at the enormity of it. Pham and
godshatter and Countermeasure would not survive that submergence, not even
separately. They had triggered catastrophe beyond mind, a vast section of
the Galaxy plunged into Slowness, as deep as Old Earth itself, and as
permanent.
Arne and Sjana and Straumers and Old One were avenged ... and
Countermeasure was complete.
And as for Pham Nuwen? A tool made, and used, and now to be discarded.
A man who never was.
The surge was upon him then, plunging depths. Down from the
Transcendent light. Outside, the Tines' world sun would be shining bright
once more, but inside Pham's mind everything was closing down, senses
returning to what eyes can see and ears can hear. He felt Countermeasure
slough toward nonexistence, its task done without ever a conscious thought.
Old One's ghost hung on for a little longer, huddling and retreating as
thought's potential ebbed. But it let Pham's awareness be. For once it did
not push him aside. For once it was gentle, brushing at the surface of
Pham's mind, as a human might pet a loyal dog.
More a brave wolf, you are, Pham Nuwen. There were only seconds left
before they were fully in the depths, where the merged bodies of
Countermeasure and Pham Nuwen would die forever and all thought cease.
Memories shifted. The ghost of Old One stepped aside, revealing certainties
it had hidden all along. Yes, I built you from several bodies in the
junkyard by Relay. But there was only one mind and one set of memories that
I could revive. A strong, brave wolf -- so strong I could never control you
without first casting you into doubt....
Somewhere barriers slipped aside, the final failing of Old One's
control, or His final gift. It did not matter which now, for whatever the
ghost said, the truth was obvious to Pham Nuwen and he would not be denied:
Canberra, Cindi, the centuries avoyaging with Qeng Ho, the final flight
of the Wild Goose. It was all real.
He looked up at Ravna. She had done so much. She had put up with so
much. And even disbelieving, she had loved. It's okay. It's okay. He tried
to reach out to her, to tell her. Oh, Ravna, I am real!
Then the full weight of the depths was upon him, and he knew no more.
There was more pounding on the door. She heard Pilgrim walk to the
hatch. A crack of light shone in. Ravna heard Jefri's piping voice: "The sun
is back! The sun is back!... Hei, why is it so dark in here?"
Pilgrim: "The artifact -- the thing Pham was helping -- its light went
out."
"Geez, you mean you left off the main lights?" The hatch slid all the
way open, and the boy's head, along with several puppies', was silhouetted
against the torchlight beyond. He scrambled over the lip of the hatch. The
girl was right behind him. "The control is right over here ... see?"
And soft white light shone on the curving walls. All was ordinary and
human, except.... Jefri stood very still, his eyes wide, his hand over his
mouth. He turned to hold onto his sister. "What is it? What is it?" his
voice said from the opened hatch.
Now Ravna wished she could not see. She dropped back to her knees.
"Pham?" she said softly, knowing there would be no answer. What was left of
Pham Nuwen lay amid the Countermeasure. The artifact didn't glow any more.
Its tortuous boundaries were blunted and dark. More than anything it looked
like rotted wood.... but wood that embraced and impaled the man who lay with
it. There was no blood, and no charring. Where the artifact had pierced Pham
there was an ashy stain, and the flesh and the thing seemed to merge.
Pilgrim was close around her, his noses almost touching the still form.
The bitter smell still hung in the air. It was the smell of death, but not
the simple rotting of flesh; what had died here was flesh and something
else.
She glanced at her wrist. The display had simplified to a few
alphanumeric lines. No ultradrives could be detected. OOB status showed
problems with attitude control. They were deep in the Slow Zone, out of
reach of all help, out of reach of the Blight's fleet. She looked into
Pham's face. "You did it, Pham. You really did it," she said the words
softly, to herself.
The arches and loops of Countermeasure were a fragile, brittle thing
now. The body of Pham Nuwen was part of that. How could they break those
arches without breaking...? Pilgrim and Johanna gently urged Ravna out of
the cargo hold. She didn't remember much of the next few minutes, of them
bringing out the body. Blueshell and Pham, both gone beyond all retrieval.
They left her after a while. There was no lack of compassion, but
disaster and strangeness and emergency were in too abundant a supply. There
were the wounded. There was the possibility of counterattack. There was
great confusion, and a desperate need for order. It made scarcely any
impression on her. She was at the end of her long desperate run, at the end
of all her energy.
Ravna must have sat by the ramp for much of the afternoon, so deep in
loss as not to think, scarcely aware of the sea song that Greenstalk shared
with her through the dataset. Eventually she realized she was not alone.
Besides Greenstalk's comfort ... sometime earlier, the little boy had
returned. He sat beside her, and around them all the puppies, all silent.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
Peace had come to what had once been Flenser's Domain. At least there
was no sign of belligerent forces. Whoever had pulled them back had done it
very cleverly. As the days passed, local peasantry showed themselves. Where
the people weren't simply dazed, they seemed glad to be rid of the old
regime. Life picked up in the farmlands, peasants doing their best to
recover from the worst fire season of recent memory, compounded by the most
fighting the region had ever known.
The Queen had sent messengers south to report on the victory, but she
seemed in no rush to return to her city. Her troops helped with some of the
farm work, and did their best not to be a burden on the locals. But they
also scouted through the castle on Starship Hill, and the huge old castle on
Hidden Island. Down there were all the horrors that had been whispered about
over the years. But still there was no sign of the forces that had escaped.
The locals were eager with their own stories, and most were ominously
credible: That before Flenser had undertaken his attempt upon the Republic,
he had created redoubts further north. There had been reserves there --
though some thought that Steel had long since used them. Peasants from the
northern valley had seen the Flenserist troops retreating. Some said they
had seen Flenser himself -- or at least a pack wearing the colors of a lord.
Even the locals did not believe all the stories, the ones about Flenser
being here and there, singletons separated by kilometers, coordinating the
pull out.
Ravna and the Queen had reason to believe the story, but not the
foolhardiness to check it out. Woodcarver's expeditionary force was not a
large one, and the forests and valleys stretched on for more than one
hundred kilometers to where the Icefangs curved west to meet the sea. That
territory was unknown to Woodcarver. If Flenser had been preparing it for
decades -- as was that pack's normal method of operation -- there would be
deadly surprises, even for a large army hunting just a few dozens of
partisans. Let Flenser be, and hope that his redoubts had been gutted by
Lord Steel.
Woodcarver worried that this would be the great peril of the next
century.
But things were resolved much sooner than that. It was Flenser who
sought them out, and not with a counterattack: About twenty days after the
battle, at the end of a day when the sun dipped just behind the northern
hills, there was the sound of signal horns. Ravna and Johanna were wakened
and shortly found themselves on the castle's parapet, peering into something
like a sunset, all orange and gold silhouetting the hills beyond the
northern fjord. Woodcarver's aides were gazing from many eyes at the
ridgeline. A few had telescopes.
Ravna shared her binocs with Johanna. "Someone's up there." Stark
against the sky glow, a pack carried a long banner with separate poles for
each member.
Woodcarver was using two telescopes, probably more effective than
Ravna's gear, considering the pack's eye separation. "Yes, I see it. That's
a truce flag, by the way. And I think I know who's carrying it." She
yammered something at Peregrine. "It's been a long time since I've talked to
that one."
Johanna was still looking through the binoculars. finally she said, "He
... made Steel, didn't he?"
"Yes, dear."
The girl lowered the binocs. "I ... think I'll pass up meeting him."
Her voice was distant.
They met on the hillside north of the castle just eight hours later.
Woodcarver's troops had spent the intervening time scouting the valley. It
was only partly a matter of protecting against treachery from the other
side: one very special pack of the enemy would be coming, and there were
plenty of locals who would like that one dead.
Woodcarver walked to where the hill fell off in supersteepness toward
forest. Ravna and Pilgrim followed behind her at a Tinishly close ten
meters. Woodcarver wasn't saying much about this meeting, but Pilgrim had
turned out to be a very talkative sort. "This is just the way I came
originally, a year ago when the first ship landed. You can see how some of
the trees were burned by the torch. Good thing it wasn't as dry that summer
as this."
The forest was dense, but they were looking down over the treetops.
Even in the dryness, there was a sweet, resinous smell in the air. To their
left was a tiny waterfall and a path that led to the valley floor -- the
path their truce visitor had agreed to take. Farmland, Peregrine called the
valley bottom. It was undisciplined chaos to Ravna's eyes. The Tines grew
different crops together in the same fields, and she saw no fences, not even
to hold back livestock. Here and there were wooden lodges with steep roofs
and outward curving walls; what you might expect in a region with snowy
winters.
"Quite a mob down there," said Pilgrim.
It didn't look crowded to her: little clumps, each a pack, each
well-separated from the others. They clustered around the lodge buildings.
More were scattered across the fields. Woodcarver packs were stationed along
the little road that crossed the valley.
She felt Pilgrim tense next to her. A head extended past her waist,
pointing. "That must be him. All alone, as promised. And -- " part of him
was looking through a telescope, "now that's a surprise."
A single pack trekked slowly down the road, past Woodcarver's guards.
It was pulling a small cart -- containing one of its own members,
apparently. A cripple?
The peasants in the fields drifted toward the edge of the field,
paralleling the lone pack's course. She heard the gobble of Tinish talk.
When they wanted to be loud, they could be very, very loud. The troopers
moved to chase back any local who got too close to the road.
"I thought they were grateful to us?" This was the closest thing to
violence she had seen since the battle of Starship Hill.
"They are. Most of those are shouting death to Flenser."
Flenser, Skinner, the pack who had rescued Jefri Olsndot. "They can
hate one pack so much?"
"Love and hate and fear, all together. More than a century they've been
under his knife. And now he is here, half-crippled, and without his troops.
Yet they are still afraid. There are enough cotters down there to overwhelm
our guard, but they're not pushing hard. This was Flenser's Domain, and he
treated it like a good farmer might treat his yard. Worse, he treated the
people and the land like some grand experiment. From reading Dataset, I see
he is a monster ahead of his time. There are some out there who might still
kill for the Master, and no one is sure who they are...." He paused a
second, just watching.
"And you know the greatest reason for fear? That he would come here
alone, so far from any help we can conceive."
So. Ravna shifted Pham's pistol forward on her belt. It was a bulky,
blatant thing ... and she was glad to have it. She glanced westward towards
Hidden Island. OOB was safely grounded against the battlements of the castle
there. Unless Greenstalk could do some basic reprogramming, it would not fly
again. And Greenstalk was not optimistic. But she and Ravna had mounted the
beam gun in one of its cargo bays, and that remote was dead simple. Flenser
might have his surprises, but so did Ravna.
The fivesome disappeared beneath the steepness.
"It will be a while yet," said Pilgrim. One of his pups stood on his
shoulders and leaned against Ravna's arm. She grinned: her private
information feed. She picked it up and placed it on her shoulder. The rest
of Peregrine sat his rumps on the ground and watched expectantly.
Ravna looked at the others of the Queen's party. Woodcarver had posted
crossbow packs to her right and left. Flenser would sit directly before her
and a little downslope. Ravna thought she could see nervousness in
Woodcarver. The members kept licking their lips, the narrow pink tongues
slipping in and out with snake-like quickness. The Queen had arranged
herself as if for a group portrait, the taller members behind and the two
little ones sitting erect in front. Most of her gaze seem focused on the
break in the verge, where the path from below reached the terrace they sat
upon.
Finally she heard the scritching of claws on stone. One head appeared
over the drop off, and then more. Flenser walked out onto the moss, two of
his members pulling the wheeled cart. The one in the cart sat erect, its
hindquarters covered by a blanket. Except for its white-tipped ears, it
seemed unremarkable.
The pack's heads peered in every direction. One stayed disconcertingly
focused on Ravna as the pack proceeded up the slope toward the Queen.
Skinner -- Flenser -- was the one who had worn the radio cloaks. None were
worn now. Through gaps in the jackets Ravna could see scabby splotches,
where the fur had been rubbed away.
"Mangy fellow, isn't he?" came the little voice in Ravna's ear. "But
cool too. Catch his insolent look." The Queen hadn't moved. She seemed
frozen, every member staring at the oncoming pack. Some of her noses were
trembling.
Four of Flenser tipped the cart forward, helping the white-tipped one
slide to the ground. Now Ravna could see that under the blanket, its
hindquarters were unnaturally twisted and still. The five settled themselves
rumps together. Their necks arched up and out, almost like the limbs of a
single creature. The pack gobbled something that sounded to Ravna like
strangling songbirds.
Pilgrim's translation came immediately from the puppy on Ravna's
shoulder. The pup spoke in a new voice, a traditional villain voice from
children's stories, a dry and sardonic voice. "Greetings ... Parent. It has
been many years."
Woodcarver said nothing for a moment. Then she gobbled something back,
and Pilgrim translated: "You recognize me?"
One of Flenser's heads jabbed out toward Woodcarver. "Not the members
of course, but your soul is obvious."
Again, silence from the Queen. Peregrine, annotating: "My poor
Woodcarver. I never thought she would be this flummoxed." Abruptly he spoke
loud, addressing Flenser in Samnorsk. "Well, you are not so obvious to me, O
former traveling companion. I remember you as Tyrathect, the timid teacher
from the Long Lakes."
Several the heads turned toward Peregrine and Ravna. The creature
replied in pretty good Samnorsk, but with a childish voice. "Greetings,
Peregrine. And greetings, Ravna Bergsndot? Yes. Flenser Tyrathect I am." The
heads angled downwards, eyes blinking slowly.
"Sly bugger," Peregrine muttered.
"Is Amdijefri safe?" the Flenser suddenly asked.
"What?" said Ravna, not recognizing the name at first. Then, "Yes, they
are fine."
"Good." Now all the heads turned back to the Queen, and the creature
continued in Pack talk; "Like a dutiful creation, I have come to make peace
with my Parent, dear Woodcarver."
"Does he really talk like that?" Ravna hissed at the puppy on her
shoulder.
"Hei, would I exaggerate?"
Woodcarver gobbled back, and Pilgrim picked up the translation, now in
the Queen's human voice: "Peace. I doubt it, Flenser. More likely you want
breathing space to build again, to try to kill us all again."
"I wish to build again, that is true. But I have changed. The 'timid
teacher' has made me a little ... softer. Something you could never do,
Parent."
"What?" Pilgrim managed to inject a tone of injured surprise into the
word.
"Woodcarver, have you never thought on it? You are the most brilliant
pack to live in this part of the world, perhaps the most brilliant of all
time. And the packs you made, they are mostly brilliant, too. But have you
not wondered on the most successful of them? You created too brilliantly.
You ignored inbreeding and [things that I can't translate easily], and you
got ... me. With all the ... quirks that have so pained you over the last
century."
"I-I have thought on that mistake, and done better since."
"Yes, as with Vendacious? [Oh, look at my Queen's faces. He really hurt
her there.] Never mind, never mind. Vendacious may well have been a
different sort of error. The point is, you made me. Before, I thought that
your greatest act of genius. Now ... I'm not so sure. I want to make amends.
Live in peace." One of the heads jabbed at Ravna, another at the OOB down by
Hidden Island. "And there are other things in the universe to point our
genius at."
"I hear the arrogance of old. Why should I trust you now?"
"I helped to save the children. I saved the ship."
"And you were always the world's greatest opportunist."
Flenser's flanking heads shifted back. "[That's a kind of dismissing
shrug.] You have the advantage, Parent, but some of my power is left in the
north. Make peace, or you will have more decades of maneuvering and war."
Woodcarver's response was a piercing shriek. "[And that's a sign of
irritation, in case you didn't guess.] Impudence! I can kill you here and
now, and have a century of certain peace."
"I've bet that you won't harm me. You gave me safe passage, separately
and in the whole. And one of the strongest things in your soul is your hate
for lies."
The back members of Woodcarver's pack hunkered down, and the little
ones at the front took several quick steps toward the Flenser. "It's been
many decades since we last met, Flenser! If you can change, might not I?"
For an instant every one of Flenser's members was frozen. Then part of
him came slowly to its feet, and slowly, slowly edged toward Woodcarver. The
crossbow packs on either side of the meeting ground raised their weapons,
tracking him. Flenser stopped six or seven meters from Woodcarver. His heads
weaved from side to side, all attention on the Queen. Finally, a wondering
voice, almost abashed: "Yes, you might. Woodcarver, after all the centuries
... you've given up yourself? These new ones are ..."
"Not all mine. Quite right." For some reason, Pilgrim was chuckling in
Ravna's ear.
"Oh. Well...." The Flenser backed to its previous position, "I still
want peace."
"[Woodcarver looks surprised.] You sound changed, too. How many of you
are really of Flenser?"
A long pause. "Two."
"... Very well. Depending on the terms, there will be peace."
Maps were brought out. Woodcarver demanded the location of Flenser's
main troops. She wanted them disarmed, with two or three of her packs
assigned to each unit, reporting by heliograph. Flenser would give up the
radio cloaks, and submit to observation. Hidden Island and Starship Hill
would be ceded to Woodcarver. The two sketched new borders, and wrangled on
the oversight the Queen would have in his remaining lands.
The sun reached its noon point in the southern sky. In the fields
below, the peasants had long since given up their angry vigil. The only
tensely watchful people left were the Queen's crossbow packs.
Finally Flenser stepped back from his end of the maps. "Yes, yes, your
folk can watch all my work. No more ... ghastly experiments. I will be a
gentle gatherer of knowledge [is this sarcasm?], like yourself."
Woodcarver's heads bobbed in rippling synchrony. "Perhaps so; with the
Two-Legs on my side, I'm willing to chance it."
Flenser rose again from his seated posture. He turned to help his
crippled member back on the cart. Then he paused. "Ah, one last thing, dear
Woodcarver. A detail. I killed two of Steel when he tried to destroy Jefri's
starship. [Squashed them like bugs, actually. Now we know how Flenser hurt
himself.] Do you have the rest of him?"
"Yes." Ravna had seen what was left of Steel. She and Johanna had
visited most of the wounded. It should be possible to adapt OOB first aid
for the Tines. But in the case of Steel, there had been a bit of vengeful
curiosity; that creature had been responsible for so much unnecessary death.
What was left of Steel didn't really need medical attention: There were some
bloody scratches (self-inflicted, Johanna guessed), and one twisted leg. But
the pack was a pitiable, almost an unnerving, thing. It had cowered at the
back of its pen, all shivering in terror, heads shifting this way and that.
Every so often the creature's jaws would snap open and shut, or one member
would make an aborted run at the fence. A pack of three was not of human
intelligence, but this one could talk. When it saw Ravna and Johanna, its
eyes went wide, the whites showing all around, and it rattled barely
intelligible Samnorsk at them. The speech was a nightmare mix of threats and
pleas that they "not cut, not cut!" Poor Johanna started crying then. She
had spent most of a year hating the pack these were from, yet -- "They seem
to be victims, too. It's b-bad to be three, and no one will ever let them be
more."
"Well," continued Flenser, "I would like custody of what remains, I --
"
"Never! That one was almost as smart as you, even if crazy enough to
defeat. You're not going to build him back."
Flenser came together, all eyes staring at the Queen. His "voice" was
soft: "Please, Woodcarver. This is a small matter, but I will throw over
everything," he jabbed at the maps, "rather than be denied in it."
"[Oh, oh.]" The crossbow packs were suddenly at the ready. Woodcarver
came partly around the maps, close enough to Flenser that their mind noise
must collide. She brought all her heads together in a concerted glare. "If
it is so unimportant, why risk everything for it?"
Flenser bumped around for an instant, his members actually staring at
one another. It was a gesture Ravna had not seen till now. "That is my
affair! I mean ... Steel was my greatest creation. In a way, I am proud of
him. But ... I am also responsible for him. Don't you feel the same about
Vendacious?"
"I've got my plans for Vendacious," the response was grudging. "[In
fact, Vendacious is still whole; I fear the Queen made too many promises to
do much with him now.]"
"I want to make up to Steel the harm I made him. You understand."
"I understand. I've seen Steel and I understand your methods: the
knives, the fear, the pain. You're not going to get another chance at it!"
It sounded to Ravna like faint music, something from far beyond the
valley, an alien blending of chords. But it was Flenser answering back.
Pilgrim's translating voice held no hint of sarcasm: "No knives, no cutting.
I keep my name because it is for others to rename me when they finally
accept that ... in her way, Tyrathect won. Give me this chance, Woodcarver.
I am begging."
The two packs stared at each other for more than ten seconds. Ravna
looked from one to the other, trying to divine their expressions. No one
said anything. There was not even Pilgrim's voice in her ear to speculate on
whether this was a lie or the baring of a new soul.
It was Woodcarver who decided: "Very well. You may have him."
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went
back almost a thousand years -- and not one of them could come near to this!
He would have burst into song except that it would pain his passengers. They
were already unhappy enough with his rough piloting, even though they
thought it was simply his inexperience.
Peregrine stepped across clouds, flew among and through them, danced
with an occasional thunderstorm. How many hours of his life had he stared up
at the clouds, gauging their depths -- and now he was in them, exploring the
caves within caves within caves, the cathedrals of light.
Between scattered clouds, the Great Western Ocean stretched forever. By
the sun and the flier's instruments, he knew that they had nearly reached
the equator, and were already some eight thousand kilometers southwest of
Woodcarver's Domain. There were islands out here, the OOB's pictures from
space said so, and so did the Pilgrim's own memories. But it had been long
since he ventured here, and he had not expected to see the island kingdoms
in the lifetime of his current members.
Now suddenly he was going back. Flying back!
The OOB's landing boat was a wonderful thing, and not nearly as strange
as it had seemed in the midst of battle. True, they had not yet figured out
how to program it for automatic flight. Perhaps they never would. In the
meantime, this little flier worked with electronics that were barely more
than glorified moving parts. The agrav itself required constant adjustment,
and the controls were scattered across the bow periphery -- conveniently
placed for the fronds of a Skroderider, or the members of a pack. With the
Spacers' help and OOB's documentation, it had taken Pilgrim only a few days
to get the hang of flying the thing. It was all a matter of spreading one's
mind across all the various tasks. The learning had been happy hours, a
little bit scary, floating nearly out of control, once in a screwball
configuration that accelerated endlessly upward. But in the end, the machine
was like an extension of his jaws and paws.
Since they descended from the purpling heights and began playing in the
cloud tops, Ravna had been looking more and more uncomfortable. After a
particularly stomachs-lurching bump and drop, she said, "Will you be able to
land okay? Maybe we should have postponed this till -- " unh! "-- you can
fly better."
"Oh yes, oh yes. We'll be past this, um, weather front real soon." He
dived beneath the clouds and swerved a few tens of kilometers eastwards. The
weather was clear here, and it was actually more on a line with their
destination. Secretly chastened, he resolved to do no more joy-riding ... on
the inbound leg, anyway.
His second passenger spoke up then, only the second time in the
two-hour flight. "I liked it," said Greenstalk. Her voder voice charmed
Pilgrim: mostly narrow-band, but with little frets high up, from the
squarewaves. "It was ... it was like riding just beneath the surf, feeling
your fronds moving with the sea."
Peregrine had tried hard to know the Skroderider. The creature was the
only nonhuman alien in the world, and harder to know than the Two-Legs. She
seemed to dream most of the time, and forgot all but things that happened
again and again to her. It was her primitive skrode that accounted for part
of that, Ravna told him. Remembering the run that Greenstalk's mate had made
through the flames, Pilgrim believed. Out among the stars, there were things
even stranger than Two-Legs -- it made Pilgrim's imagination ache.
Near the horizon he saw a dark ring -- and another, beyond. "We'll have
you in real surf very soon."
Ravna: "These are the islands?"
Peregrine looked over the map displays as he took a shot on the sun.
"Yes, indeed," though it didn't really matter. The Western Ocean was over
twelve thousand kilometers across, and all through the tropics it was dotted
with atolls and island chains. This group was just a bit more isolated than
others; the nearest Islander settlement was almost two thousand kilometers
away.
They were over the nearest island. Pilgrim took a swing around it,
admiring the tropic ferns that clung to the coral. At this tide, their bony
roots were exposed. Not any flat land here at all; he flew on to the next, a
larger one with a pretty glade just within the ringwall. He floated the boat
down in a smooth glide that touched the ground without even the tiniest
bump.
Ravna Bergsndot looked at him with something like suspicion. Oh oh.
"Hei, I'm getting better, don't you think?" he said weakly.
An uninhabited little island, surrounded by endless sea. The original
memories were blurred now; it had been his Rum member who had been a native
of the island kingdoms. Yet what he remembered all fit: the high sun, the
intoxicating humidity of the air, the heat soaking through his paws.
Paradise. The Rum aspect that still lived within him was most joyous of all.
The years seemed to melt away; part of him had come home.
They helped Greenstalk down to the ground. Ravna said her skrode was an
inferior imitation, its new wheels an ad hoc addition. Still, Pilgrim was
impressed: the four balloon tires each had a separate axle. The Rider was
able to make it almost to the crest of the coral without any help from Ravna
or himself. But near the top, where the tropic ferns were thickest and their
roots grew across every path, there he and Ravna had to help a bit, lifting
and pulling.
Then they were on the other side, and they could see the ocean.
Now part of Pilgrim ran ahead, partly to find the easiest descent,
partly to get close to the water and smell the salt and the rotting
floatweed. The tide was nearly out now, and a million little pools -- some
no more than stony-walled puddles -- lay exposed to the sun. Three of him
ran from pool to pool, eyeing the creatures that lay within. The strangest
things in the world they had seemed to him when he first came to the
islands. Creatures with shells, slugs of all dimensions and colors,
animal-plants that would become tropic ferns if they ever got trapped far
enough inland.
"Where would you like to sit?" he asked the Skroderider. "If we go all
the way out to the surf right now, you'll be a meter underwater at high
tide."
The Rider didn't reply. But all her fronds were angled toward the water
now. The wheels on her skrode slipped and spun with a strange lack of
coordination. "Let's take her closer," Ravna said after a moment.
They reached a fairly level stretch of coral, pocked with holes and
gullies not more than a few centimeters deep. "I'll go for a swim, find a
good place," Peregrine said. All of him ran down to where the coral broke
the water; going for a swim was not something you did by parts. Heh heh.
Fact was, damn few mainland packs could swim and think at the same time.
Most mainlanders thought that there was a craziness in water. Now Peregrine
knew it was simply the great difference in sound speed between air and
water. Thinking with all tympana immersed must be a little like using the
radio cloaks: it took discipline and practice to do it, and some were never
able to learn. But the Island folk had always been great swimmers, using it
for meditation. Ravna even thought the Packs might be descended from of
whales!
Peregrine came to the edge of the coral and looked down. Suddenly the
surf did not seem a completely friendly thing. He would soon find out if
Rum's spirit and his own memories of swimming were up to the real thing. He
pulled off his jackets.
All at once. It's best done all at once. He gathered himself and
plopped awkwardly into the water. Confusion, heads out and in. Keep all
under. He paddled about, holding all his heads down. Every few seconds, he'd
poke a single nose into the air and refresh that member. I still can do it!
The six of him slipped through swarms of squidlets, dived separately through
arching green fronds. The hiss of the sea was all around, like the mindsound
of a vast sleeping pack.
After a few minutes he'd found a nice level spot, sand all about and
shielded from the worst fury of the sea. He paddled back to where the sea
crashed against stony coral.... and almost broke some legs scrambling out.
It was just impossible to exit all at once, and for a few moments it was
every member for itself. "Hei, over here!" He shouted to Greenstalk and
Ravna. He sat licking at coral cuts as they crossed the white rock. "Found a
place, more peaceful than this -- " He waved at the crash and spray.
Greenstalk rolled a little closer to the edge, then hesitated. Her
fronds turned back and forth along the curving sweep of the shore. Does she
need help? Pilgrim started forward, but Ravna just sat down beside the Rider
and leaned against the wheeled platform. After a moment, Pilgrim joined
them. They sat for a time, human looking out to the sea, Rider looking he
wasn't sure quite where, and pack looking in most all directions.... There
was peace here, even with (or because of?) the booming surf and the haze of
spray. He felt his hearts slowing, and just lazed in the sunlight. On every
pelt the drying sea water was leaving a glittery powder of salt. Grooming
himself tasted good at first, but ... yech, too much dry salt was one of the
bad memories. Greenstalk's fronds settled lightly across him, too fine and
narrow to provide much shade, but a light and gentle comfort.
They sat for a long while -- long enough so that later some of Pilgrims
noses were blistered, and even darkskinned Ravna was sun burned.
The Rider was humming now, a sort of song that after long minutes came
to be speech. "It is a good sea, a good edge. It is what I need now. To sit
and think at my own pace for a while."
And Ravna said, "How long? We will miss you." That was not just
politeness. Everyone would miss her. Even in her mind adrift, Greenstalk was
the expert on OOB's surviving automation.
"Long by your measure, I fear. A few decades...." She watched (?) the
waves a few minutes more. "I am eager to get down there. Ha ha. Almost like
a human in that.... Ravna, you know my memories are muddled now. I had two
hundred years with Blueshell. Sometimes he was petty and a little spineful,
but he was a great trader. We had many wonderful times. And at the end even
you could see his courage."
Ravna nodded.
"We found a terrible secret on this last journey. I think that hurt him
as much as the final ... burning. I am grateful to you for protecting us.
Now I want to think, to let the surf and the time work with my memories and
sort them out. Maybe if this poor imitation skrode is up to it, I'll even
make a chronicle of our quest."
She touched Peregrine on two of his heads. "One thing, Sir Pilgrim. You
trust much to give me freedom of your seas.... But you should know,
Blueshell and I were pregnant. I have a mist of our common eggs within me.
Leave me here and there will be new Riders by this island in future years.
Please do not take that as betrayal. I want to remember Blueshell with
children -- but modestly; our kind has shared ten million worlds and never
been bad neighbors ... except in a way that, Ravna can tell you, cannot
happen here."
In the end, Greenstalk was not at all interested in the protected
stretch of water that Peregrine had discovered. She wanted -- of all the
places here -- the one where the ocean crashed most ferociously. It took
them more than an hour to find a path down to that violent place, and
another half hour to get Rider and skrode safely into the water. Peregrine
didn't even try to swim here. The coral rock came in close from all sides,
slimy green in patches, razor jagged in others. Five minutes in that meat
grinder and he might be too weak to get out. Strange that there was so much
green in the water here. It was all but opaque with sea grasses and swarms
of foam midges.
Ravna was a little better off; at the water's greatest height, she
could still keep feet to ground -- at least most of the time. She stood in
the foam, bracing herself with feet and an arm, and helped the skrodeling
over the lip of rock. Once in, the mechanical crashed firmly to the bottom
beside the human.
Ravna looked up at Pilgrim, made an "okay" gesture. Then she huddled
down for a moment, holding to the skrode to keep her place. The surf crashed
over the two, obscuring all but Greenstalk's tallest standing fronds. When
the foam moved back, he could see that the lower fronds draped across the
human's back, and hear a voder buzzing that wasn't quite intelligible
against all the other noise.
The human stood and slogged through the waist deep-water toward the
rocks Peregrine occupied. Peregrine grabbed onto himself, reached down to
give Ravna some paws. She scrambled up the slime green and coral white.
He followed the limping Two-Legs toward the crest of tropical ferns.
They stopped under the shade, and she sat down, leaned back into the mat of
a fern's trunk. Cut and bruised, she looked almost as hurt as Johanna ever
had.
"You okay?"
"Yeah," she ran her hands back through disheveled hair. Then she looked
at him and laughed. "We both look like casualties."
Um, yes. Sometime soon he needed a fresh-water bath. He looked around
and out. From the crest of the atoll ring they had a view of Greenstalk's
niche. Ravna was looking down there too, minor injuries forgotten.
"How can she like that spot?" Peregrine said wonderingly. "Imagine
being smashed and smashed and smashed."
There was a smile on Ravna's face, but she kept her two eyes on the
surf. "There are strange things in the universe, Pilgrim; I'm glad there are
some you have not read about yet. Where the surf meets the shore -- lots of
neat things can happen there. You saw all the life that floated in that
madness. Just as plants love the sun, there are creatures that can use the
energy differences down at that edge. There they have the sun and the surge
and the richness of the suspension.... Still, we should keep watch a little
longer." Between each insurge of the waves, they could still see
Greenstalk's fronds. He already knew that those limbs weren't strong, but he
was beginning to realize that they must be very tough. "She'll be okay,
though that cheap skrode may not last long. Poor Greenstalk may end up
without any automation at all ... she and her children, the lowest of all
Riders."
Ravna turned to look at the pack. There was still that smile on her
face. Wondering, yet pleased? "You know the secret Greenstalk spoke of?"
"Woodcarver told me what you told her."
"I'm glad -- surprised -- she was willing to let Greenstalk come here.
Medieval minds -- sorry, most any minds -- would want to kill before taking
even the faintest risk with something like this."
"Then why did you tell the Queen?" About the skrode's perversion.
"It's your world. I was tired of playing god with the Secret. And
Greenstalk agreed. Even if the Queen had refused, Greenstalk could have used
a cold box on the OOB." And likely slept forever. "But Woodcarver didn't
refuse. Somehow she understood what I was saying: it's the true skrodes that
can be perverted, but Greenstalk no longer has one of those. In a decade,
this island's shore will be populated with hundreds of young Riders, but
they would never colonize beyond this archipelago without permission of the
locals. The risk is vanishingly small ... but I was still surprised
Woodcarver took it."
Peregrine settled down around Ravna, only one pair of eyes still
watching the Rider's fronds down in the foam. Best to give some explanation.
He cocked a head a Ravna, "Oh, we are medieval, Ravna -- even if changing
fast, now. We admired Blueshell's courage in the fire. Such deserves reward.
And medieval types are used to courting treachery. So what if the risk is of
cosmic size? To us, here, it is no more deadly for that. We poor primitives
live with such all the time."
"Ha!" Her smile spread at his flippant tone.
Peregrine chuckled, heads bobbing. His explanation was the truth, but
not all the truth, or even the most important part. He remembered back to
the day before, when he and Woodcarver had decided what to do with
Greenstalk's request. Woodcarver had been afraid at first, statecraftly
cautious before an evil secret billions of years old. Even leaving such a
being in cold sleep was a risk. The statecraftly ... the medieval ... thing
to do, would be to grant the request, leave the Rider ashore on this distant
island ... and then sneak back a day or two later and kill it.
Peregrine had settled down by his Queen, closer than any but mates and
relations could ever do without losing their train of thought. "You showed
more honor to Vendacious," he had said. Scriber's murderer still walked the
earth, complete, scarcely punished at all.
Woodcarver snapped at the empty air; Peregrine knew that sparing
Vendacious hurt her too. "...Yes. And these Skroderiders have shown us
nothing but courage and honesty. I will not harm Greenstalk. Yet I am
afraid. With her, there's a risk that goes beyond the stars."
Peregrine laughed. It might be pilgrim madness but -- "and that's to be
expected, My Queen. Great risks for great gains. I like being around the
humans; I like touching another creature and still being able to think at
the same time." He darted forward to nuzzle the nearest of Woodcarver, and
then retreated to a more rational distance. "Even without their starships
and their datasets, they would make our world over. Have you noticed ... how
easy it is for us to learn what they know? Even now, Ravna can't seem to
accept our fluency. Even now, she doesn't understand how thoroughly we have
studied Dataset. And their ship is easy, my Queen. I don't mean I understand
the physics behind it -- few even among star folk do. But the equipment is
easy to learn, even with the failures it has suffered. I suspect Ravna will
never be able to fly the agrav boat as well as I."
"Hmmf. But you can reach all the controls at once."
"That's only part of it. I think we Tines are more flexibly minded than
the poor Two-Legs. Can you imagine what it will be like when we make more
radio cloaks, when we make our own flying machines?"
Woodcarver smiled, a little sadly now. "Pilgrim, you dream. This is the
Slow Zone. The agrav will wear out in a few years. Whatever we make will be
far short of what you play with now."
"So? Look at human history. It took less than two centuries for Nyjora
to regain spaceflight after their dark age. And we have better records than
their archaeologists. We and the humans are a wonderful team; they have
freed us to be everything we can be." A century till their own spaceships,
perhaps another century to start building sub- light-speed starships. And
someday they would get out of the Slow Zone. I wonder if packs can be bigger
than eight up in the Transcend.
The younger parts of Woodcarver were up, pacing around the rest. The
Queen was intrigued. "So you think, like Steel seemed to, that we are some
kind of special race, something with a happy destiny in the Beyond?
Interesting, except for one thing: These humans are all we know from Out
There. How do they compare with other races there? Dataset can't fully
answer that."
"Ah, and there, Woodcarver, is why Greenstalk is so important. We do
need experience of more than one other race. Apparently the Riders are among
the most common throughout the Beyond. We need them to talk to. We need to
discover if they are as much fun, as useful, as the Two-Legs. Even if the
risk was ten times what it seems, I would still want to grant this Rider her
wish."
"... Yes. If we are to be all we can be, we need to know more. We need
to take a few risks." She stopped her pacing; all her eyes turned toward
Peregrine in a gesture of surprise. Abruptly she laughed.
"What?"
"Something we've thought before, dear Peregrine, but now I see how true
it may be. You're being a little bit clever and scheming here. A good
statesman and planner for the future."
"But still for a pilgrimly goal."
"To be sure.... And I, now I don't care so completely about the
planning and the safety. We will visit the stars someday." Her puppies
waggled a joyous salute. "I've a little of the pilgrim in me now, too."
She went down all on her bellies and crept across the floor toward him.
Consciousness slowly dissolved into a haze of loving lust. The last thing
Peregrine remembered her saying was, "How wonderful the luck: that I had
grown old and had to be new, and that you were just the change we need."
Peregrine's attention drifted back to the present, and Ravna. The human
was still grinning at him. She reached a hand across to brush one of his
heads. "Medieval minds indeed."
They sat in the fern shade for another couple of hours and watched the
tide come in. The sun fell through midafternoon -- even then it was as high
in the sky as any noontime sun could be at Woodcarver's. In some ways, the
quality of the light and the motion of the sun were the strangest things
about the scene. The sun was so high, and came down so straight, with none
of the long sliding glide of afternoon in the arctic. He had almost
forgotten what it was like in the land of Short Twilight.
Now the surf was thirty yards inland of where they had put the Rider.
The crescent moon was following the sun toward the horizon; the water
wouldn't rise any further. Ravna stood, shaded her eyes against the lowering
sun. "Time for us to go, I think."
"You think she'll be safe?"
Ravna nodded. "This was long enough for Greenstalk to notice any
poisons, and most predators. Besides, she's armed."
Human and Tines picked their way to the crest of the atoll, past the
tallest of the ferns. Peregrine kept a pair of eyes on the sea behind them.
The surf was well past Greenstalk now. Her location was still swept by deep
waves, but it was beyond the spume and spray. His last sight of her was in
the trough behind a crasher: the smoothness of the sea was broken for an
instant by two of her tallest fronds, the tips gently swaying.
Summer took gentle leave of the land around Hidden Island. There was
some rain, and no more brush fires. There would even be a harvest, war and
drought notwithstanding. Each dayaround the sun hid deeper behind the
northern hills, a time of twilight that broadened with the weeks till true
night held at midnight. And there were stars.
It was something of an accident that so many things came together on
the last night of summer. Ravna took the kids out skygazing on the fields by
Starship Castle.
No urban haze here, nor even near-space industry. Nothing to fog the
view of heaven except a subtle pinkness in the north that might have been
vagrant twilight -- or aurora. The four of them settled on the frosty moss
and looked around. Ravna took a deep breath. There was no hint of ash left
in the air, just a clean chill, a promise of winter.
"The snow will be deep as your shoulders, Ravna," said Jefri,
enthusiastic about the possibility. "You'll love it." The pale blotch that
was his face seemed to be looking back and forth across the sky.
"It can be bad," said Johanna Olsndot. She hadn't objected to coming up
here tonight, but Ravna knew that she would rather have stayed down on
Hidden Island to worry about the doings of tomorrow.
Jefri picked up on her unease -- no, that was Amdi talking now; they
would never cure those two of pretending to be each other. "Don't worry,
Johanna. We'll help you."
For a moment no one said anything. Ravna looked down the hill. It was
too dark to see the six hundred meter drop, too dark to see where fjord and
islands lay below. But the torchlight on the ramparts of Hidden Island
marked its location. Down there in Steel's old inner court -- where
Woodcarver now ruled -- were all the working coldboxes from the ship. One
hundred and fifty-one children slept there, the last survivors of the
Straumer's flight. Johanna claimed that most could be revived, with best
chance of success if it were done soon. The Queen had been enthusiastic
about the idea. Large sections of the castle had been set aside, refurbished
for human needs. Hidden Island was well sheltered -- if not from winter
snow, at least from the worst winds. If they could be revived, the children
would have no trouble living there. Ravna had come to love Jefri and Johanna
and Amdi -- But could she handle one hundred and fifty more? Woodcarver
seemed to have no misgivings. She had plans for a school where Tines would
learn of humans and the children would learn of this world.... Watching
Jefri and Amdi, Ravna was beginning to see what might become of this. Those
two were closer than any children she had ever known, and in sum more
competent. And that was not just the puppies' math genius; they were
competent in other ways.
Humans and Packs fit, and Old Woodcarver was clever enough to take
advantage of it. Ravna liked the Queen, and liked Pilgrim even more, but in
the end the Packs would be the great beneficiaries. Woodcarver clearly
understood the disabilities of her pack race. Tinish records went back at
least ten thousand years. For all their recorded history they had been
trapped in cultures not much less advanced than now. A race of sharp
intelligence, yet they had a single overwhelming disadvantage: they could
not cooperate at close range without losing that intelligence. Their
civilizations were made of isolated minds, forced introverts who could never
progress beyond certain limits. The eagerness of Pilgrim and Scrupilo and
the others for human contact was evidence of this. In the long run, we can
move the Tines out of this cul de sac.
Amdi and Jefri were giggling about something, the Pack sending runners
out almost to the limit of consciousness. These last weeks, Ravna had come
to learn that pell-mell activity was the norm for Amdi, that his initial
slowness had been part of his hurt over Steel. How ... perverse (or how
wonderful?) ... that a monster like Steel could be the object of such love.
Jefri shouted, "You watch in all directions, let me know where to
look." Silence. Then Jefri's voice again: "There!"
"What are you doing?" Johanna asked with sisterly belligerence.
"Watching for meteors," one of the two said. "Yes, I watch in all
directions and jab Jefri -- there! -- where to look when one comes by."
Ravna didn't see anything, but the boy had twisted around abruptly at
his friend's signal.
"Neat, neat," came Jefri's voice. "That was about forty kilometers up,
speed -- " the two's voice murmured unintelligibly for a second. Even with
the pack's wide vision, how could they know how high it was?
Ravna sat back in the hollow formed by the hummocky moss. It was a good
parka the locals had made for her; she barely felt the chill in the ground.
Overhead, the stars. Time to think, get some peace before all the things
that would begin tomorrow. Den Mother to one hundred and fifty kids ... and
I thought I was a librarian.
Back home she had loved the night sky; at one glance she could see the
other stars of Sjandra Kei, sometimes the other worlds. The places of her
home had been in her sky. For a moment the evening chill seemed part of a
winter that would never go away. Lynne and her folks and Sjandra Kei. Her
whole life till three years ago. It was all gone now. Don't think on it.
Somewhere out there was what was left of Aniara fleet, and what was left of
her people. Kjet Svensndot. Tirolle and Glimfrelle. She had only known them
for a few hours, but they were of Sjandra Kei -- and they had saved more
than they would ever know. They would still live. SjK Commercial Security
had some ramscoops in its fleet. They could find a world, not here, but
nearer the battle site.
Ravna tilted her head back, wondering at the sky. Where? Maybe not even
above the horizon now. From here the galactic disk was a glow that climbed
across the sky almost at right angles to the ecliptic. There was no sense of
its true shape or their exact position in it; the greater picture was lost
to nearby splendors, the bright knots of open clusters, frozen jewels
against the fainter light. But down near the southern horizon, far from the
galactic way, there were two splotchy clouds of light. The Magellanics!
Suddenly the geometry clicked, and the universe above was not completely
unknown. Aniara fleet would be --
"I -- I wonder if we can see Straumli Realm from here," said Johanna.
For more than a year now she had had to play the adult. Come tomorrow, that
role would be forever. But her voice just now was wistful, childlike.
Ravna opened her mouth, about to say how unlikely that must be.
"Maybe we can, maybe we can." It was Amdi. The pack had pulled itself
together, snuggled companionably among the humans. The warmth was welcome.
"See, I've been reading Dataset about where things are, and trying to figure
how it matches what we see." A pair of noses were silhouetted against the
sky for instant, like a human waving his hands exuberantly at the heavens.
"The brightest things we see are just kind of local dazzle. They aren't good
guide posts." He pointed at a couple of open clusters, claimed they matched
stuff he'd found in the Dataset. Amdi had also noticed the Magellanic
galaxies, and figured out far more than Ravna. "So anyway, Straumli Realm
was" -- was! you got it kid -- "in the High Beyond, but near the galactic
disk. So, see that big square of stars?" Noses jabbed. "We call that the
Great Square. Anyway, just left of the upper corner and go six thousand
light-years, and you'd be at Straumli Realm."
Jefri came to his knees and stared silently for a second. "But so far
away, is there anything to see?"
"Not the Straumli stars, but just forty light-years from Straum there's
a blue-white giant -- "
"Yeah," whispered Johanna. "Storlys. It was so bright you could see
shadows at night."
"Well that's the fourth brightest star up from the corner; see, they
almost make a straight line. I can see it, so I know you can."
Johanna and Jefri were silent for a long time, just staring up at that
patch of sky. Ravna's lips compressed in anger. These were good kids; they
had been through hell. And their parents had fought to prevent that hell;
they had escaped the Blight with the means of its destruction. But ... how
many million races had lived in the Beyond, had probed the Transcend and
made bargains with devils? How many more had destroyed themselves There? Ah,
but that had not been enough for Straumli Realm. They had gone into the
Transcend and wakened Something that could take over a galaxy.
"Do you think anybody's left there?" said Jefri. "Do you think we're
all that's left?"
His sister put an arm around him. "Maybe, maybe not Straumli Realm. But
the rest of the universe -- look, it's still there." Weak laughter. "Daddy
and Mom, Ravna and Pham. They stopped the Blight." She waved a hand against
the sky. "They saved most all of it."
"Yes," said Ravna. "We're saved and safe, Jefri. To begin again." And
as far as it went, that comfort was probably true. The ship's zone probes
were still working. Of course, a single measure point is of no use for
precise zonography, but she could tell that they were deep in the new volume
of the Slowness, the volume created by Pham's Revenge. And -- much more
significant -- the OOB detected no variation in zonal intensity. Gone was
the continuous trembling of the months before. This new status had the
feeling of mountain roots, to be moved only by the passage of the ages.
Fifty degrees along the galactic river was another unremarkable space
of sky. She didn't point it out to the kids, but what was of interest there
was much nearer, just under thirty light-years out: the Blighter Fleet.
Flies trapped in amber. At normal jump rates for the Low Beyond, they had
been just hours away when Pham created the Great Surge. And now ...? If they
had been bottom luggers, ships with ramscoops, they could close the gap in
less than fifty years. But Aniara Fleet had made their sacrifice; they had
followed Pham's godshattered advice. And though they didn't know it, they
had broken the Blight. There wasn't a single Slow Zone capable vessel in the
approaching fleet. Perhaps they had some in-system capability -- a few
thousand klicks per second. But no more, not Down Here, where new
construction was not a matter of waving a magic wand. The Blight's
extermination force would sweep past Tines World in ... a few thousand
years. Time enough.
Ravna leaned back against one of Amdi's shoulders. He nestled
comfortably around her neck. The puppies had grown these last two months;
apparently Steel had kept them on some sort of stunting drugs. Her gaze lost
itself in the dark and glow: far upon far that were all the Zones above her.
And where are the boundaries now? How awesome was Pham's Revenge. Maybe she
should call it Old One's Revenge. No, it was far more even than that. "Old
One" was just a recent victim of the Blight. Even Old One was no more than
midwife to this revenge. The first cause must be as old as the original
Blight and more powerful than the Powers.
But whatever caused it, the Surge had done more than revenge. Ravna had
studied the ship's measurement of zone intensity. It could only be an
estimate, but she knew they were trapped between one thousand and thirty
thousand light-years deep in the new Slowness. Powers only knew how far the
Surge had pushed the Slowness.... And maybe even some of the Powers were
destroyed by it. This was like some vision of planetary armageddon -- the
type of thing that primitive civilizations nightmared about -- but blown up
to a galactic scale. A huge hunk of the Milky Way galaxy had been gobbled up
by the Slowness, all in a single afternoon. Not just the Blighter Fleet were
flies trapped in amber. Why, the whole vault of heaven -- excepting the
Magellanics faint and far away -- might now be a tomb of Slowness. Many must
still be alive out there, but how many millions of starships had been
trapped between the stars? How many automated systems had failed, killing
the civilizations that depended on them? Heaven was truly silent now. In
some ways the Revenge was a worse thing than the Blight itself.
And what of the Blight -- not the fleet that chased the OOB, but the
Blight itself? That was a creature of the Top and the Transcend. At a very
far remove, it covered much of the sky they could see this night. Could
Pham's revenge have really toppled it? If there was a point to all the
sacrifice, then surely so. A surge so great that it pushed the Slowness up
thousands of light-years, through the Low and Mid Beyond, past the great
civilizations at the Top ... and into the Transcend. No wonder it was so
eager to stop us. A Power immersed in the Slowness would be a Power no more,
would likely be a living thing no more. If, if, if. If Pham's Surge could
climb so high.
And that is something I will never know.
Crypto: 0
As received by:
Language path: Optima
From: Society for Rational Investigation
Subject: Ping
Key phrases: Help me!
Summary: Has there been a network partition, or what?
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Society for Rational Network Management, War Trackers Interest Group
Date: 0.412 Msec since loss of contacts
Text of message:
I have still not recovered contact with any network site known to be
spinward of me. Apparently, I am right at the edge of a catastrophe.
If you receive this ping, please respond! Am I in danger?
For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are
antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long
way around the galaxy. At least that would give us an idea how big the loss
is. Nothing has come back as yet -- not surprising, I guess, considering the
great number of hops and the expense.
In the meantime, I am sending out pings such as this. I am expending
enormous resources to do this, let me tell you -- but it is that important.
I've beamed direct at all the hub sites that are in range to the spinward of
me. No replies.
More ominous: I have tried to transmit "over the top", that is by using
known sites in the Transcend that are above the catastrophe. Most such would
not normally respond, Powers being what they are. But I received no replies.
A silence like the Depths is there. It appears that a portion of the
Transcend itself has been engulfed.
Again: If you receive this message, please respond!
Last-modified: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:11:37 GmT