de, 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
CHAPTER 23
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
CHAPTER 24
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
CHAPTER 25
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