A Fire Upon the Deep zot-1, page 16
part #1 of Zones of Thought Series
“Oh, that’s okay. He meant a special call. Jefri says the ship has been signaling… all by itself… ever since it landed.”
And Steel wondered if he had ever heard a deadly threat uttered in such sweet innocence.
They began letting Amdi and Jefri outside to play. Beforehand Amdi was nervous about going out. He was unused to wearing clothes. His whole life -all four years of it—had been spent in that one big room. He read about the outside and was curious about it, yet he was also a little afraid. But the human boy seemed to want it. Every day he’d been more withdrawn, his crying softer. Mostly he was crying for his parents or sister, but sometimes he cried about being locked up so deep away.
So Amdi had talked to Mr. Steel, and now they got out almost every day, at least to an inner courtyard. At first, Jefri just sat, not really looking around. But Amdi discovered that he loved the outdoors, and every time he got his friend to play a little more.
Packs of teachers and guards stood at the corners of the yellowing moss and watched. Amdi—and eventually Jefri—got a big kick out of harassing them. They hadn’t realized it down in the room, where visitors came at the balconies, but most adults were nervous around Jefri. The boy was half again as tall as a normally standing pack member. When he came close, the average pack would clump together and edge away. They didn’t like having to look up at him. It was silly, Amdi thought. Jefri was so tall and skinny, he looked like he might topple over at any moment. And when he ran it was like he was wildly trying to recover from a fall and never quite succeeding. So Amdi’s favorite game those first days was tag. Whenever he was the chaser, he contrived to run Jefri right through the most prim looking whitejackets. If he and Jefri did it right they could turn the tag into a three-way event, Amdi chasing Jefri and a whitejackets racing to stay away from both of them.
Sometimes he felt sorry for the guards and whitejackets. They were so stiff and grownup. Didn’t they understand how much fun it was to have a friend that you walk right next to, that you could actually touch?
It was mostly night now. Daylight hovered for a few hours around noon. The twilight before and after was bright enough to dim the stars and aurora, but still too faint to show colors. Though Amdi had spent his life indoors, he understood the geometry of the situation, and liked to watch the change of light. Jefri didn’t much like the dark of winter… until the first snow fell.
Amdi got his first set of jackets. And Mr. Steel had special clothes made for the human boy, big puffy things that covered his whole body and kept him warmer than a good pelt would have done.
On one side of the courtyard the snow was just six inches deep, but elsewhere it piled into drifts higher than Amdi’s head. Torches were mounted in wind shields on the walls; their light glittered golden off the snow. Amdi knew about snow—but he’d never seen it before. He loved to splash it on one of his jackets. He would stare and stare, trying to see the snowflakes without his breath melting them. The hexagonal pattern was tantalizing, just at the limit of his vision.
But tag was no fun anymore; the human could run through drifts that left Amdi swimming in the white stuff. There were other things the human could do, wonderful things. He could make balls of snow and throw them. The guards were very upset by this, especially when Jefri plinked a few members. It was the first time he ever saw them get angry.
Amdi raced around the windswept side of the courtyard, dodging snowballs and keening frustration. Human hands were such wicked, wicked things. How he would love to have a pair—four pairs! He circled round from three sides and sprinted right at the human. Jefri backed quickly into deeper snow, but too late. Amdi hit him high and low, tipping the Two-Legs over into a snowdrift. There was a mock battle, slashing lips and paws against Jefri’s hands and feet. But now Amdi was on top. The human got paid back for his snowballs with plenty of snow stuffed down the back of his jacket.
Sometimes they just sat and watched the sky for so long that rumps and paws went numb. Sitting behind the largest snow drift, they were shaded from the castle torches and had a clear view of the lights in the sky.
At first Amdi had been entranced by the aurora. Even some of his teachers were. They said this part of the world was one of the best places to see the sky glow. Sometimes it was so faint that the torchlight glimmering off the snow was enough to blot it out. Other times it ran from horizon to horizon: green light trimmed with hints of pink, twisting as though ruffled by a slow wind.
He and Jefri could talk very easily now, though always in Jefri’s language. The human couldn’t make many of the sounds of interpack speech; even his pronunciation of Amdi’s name was a scarcely recognizable. But Amdi understood Samnorsk pretty well; it was fun, their own secret language.
Jefri was not especially impressed by the aurora. “We have that lots at home. It’s just light from—” He said a new word, and glanced at Amdi. It was funny how the human couldn’t look in more than one place at time. His eyes and head were always moving. “— you know, places where people make things. I think the gas and waste leaks out, and then the sun lights it up or it gets—” unintelligible.
“Places where people make things?” In the sky? Amdi had a globe; he knew the size of the world and its orientation. If the aurora were reflecting sunlight, it must be hundreds of miles above the ground! Amdi leaned a back against Jefri’s jacket and made a very human whistling sound. His knowledge of geography was not up to his geometry, but, “The packs don’t work in the sky, Jefri. We don’t even have flying boats.”
“Uh, that’s right, you don’t… I don’t know what that stuff is then. But I don’t like it. It gets in the way of the stars.” Amdi knew all about the stars; Jefri had told him. Somewhere out there were the friends of Jefri’s parents.
Jefri was silent for several minutes. He wasn’t looking at the sky anymore. Amdi wriggled a little closer, watching the shifting light in the sky. Behind them the wind-sharpened crest of the drift was edged with yellow light from the torches. Amdi could imagine what the other was thinking. “The commsets from the boat, they really aren’t good enough to call for help?”
Jefri slapped the ground. “No! I told you. They’re just radio. I think I can make them work, but what’s the use? The ultrawave stuff is still on the boat and it’s too big to move. I just don’t understand why Mr. Steel won’t let me go aboard… I’m eight years old, you know. I could figure it out. Mom had it all set up before, before…” His words guttered into the familiar, despairing silence.
Amdi rubbed a head against Jefri’s shoulder. He had a theory about Mr. Steel’s reluctance. It was an explanation he hadn’t told Jefri before: “Maybe he’s afraid you’ll just fly away and leave us.”
“That’s stupid! I’d never leave you. Besides, that boat is real hard to fly. It was never meant to land on a world.”
Jefri said the strangest things; sometimes Amdi was just misunderstanding—but sometimes they were literal truth. Did the humans really have ships that never came to ground? Where did they go then? Amdi could almost feel new scales of reference clicking together in his mind. Mr. Steel’s geography globe represented not the world, but something very, very small in the true scheme of things.
“I know you wouldn’t leave us. But you can see how Mr. Steel might be afraid. He can’t even talk to you except through me. We have to show him that we can be trusted.”
“I guess.”
“If you and I could get the radios working, that might help. I know my teachers haven’t figured them out. Mr. Steel has one, but I don’t think he understands it either.”
“Yeah. If we could get the other one to work…”
That afternoon the guards got a break: their two charges came in from the cold early. The guards didn’t question their good fortune.
Steel’s den had originally been the Master’s. It was very different from the castle’s meeting halls. Except for choirs, only a single pack would fit in any room. It was not exactly that the suite was small. There were five rooms, not counting the bath. But except for the library, none was more than fifteen feet across. The ceilings were low, less than five feet; there was no space for visitor balconies. Servants were always on call in the two hallways that shared a wall with the quarters. The dining room, bedroom, and bath had servant hatches, just big enough to give orders and to receive food and drink, or preening oils.
The main entrance was guarded on the outside by three trooper packs. Of course, the Master would never live in a den with only one exit. Steel had found eight secret hatches (three in the sleeping quarters). These could only be opened from within; they led to the maze that Flenser had built within the solid rock of the castle’s walls. No one knew the extent of that maze, not even the Master. Steel had rearranged parts of it—in particular the passages leading from this den—in the years since Flenser’s departure.
The quarters were nearly impregnable. Even if the castle fell, the rooms’ larder was stocked for half a year; ventilation was provided by a network of channels almost as extensive as the Master’s secret passages. All in all, Steel felt tolerably safe here. There was always the possibility that there were more than eight secret entrances, perhaps one that could be opened from the other side.
And of course choirs were out of the question, here or anywhere. The only extrapack sex that Steel indulged was with singletons—and that as part of his experiments; it was just too dangerous to mix one’s self with others.
After dinner, Steel drifted into the library. He relaxed around his reading desk. Two of him sipped brandy while another smoked southern herbs. This was pleasure, but also calculation: Steel knew just what vices, applied to just which members, would raise his imagination to its keenest pitch.
… And more and more he was coming to see that imagination was at least as important as raw intelligence in the present game. The desk between him was covered with maps, reports from the south, internal security memos. But lying in all the silkpaper, like an ivory slug in its nest, was the alien radio. They had recovered two from the ship. Steel picked the thing up, ran a nose along the smooth, curved sides. Only the finest stressed wood could match its grace—and that in musical instruments or statuary. Yet the mantis claimed this could be used to talk across dozens of miles, as fast as a ray of sunlight. If true… Steel wondered how many lost battles might have been won with these, and how many new conquests might be safely undertaken. And if they could learn to make far-talkers… the Movement’s subordinates, scattered across the continent, would be as near as the guards by Steel’s den. No force in the world could stand against them.
Steel picked up the latest report from Woodcarvers. In many ways they were having more success with their mantis than Steel with his. Apparently theirs was almost an adult. More important, it had a miraculous library that could be interrogated almost like a living being. There had been three other datasets. Steel’s whitejackets had found what was left of them in the burnt-out wreckage around the ship. Jefri thought that the ship’s processors were a little like a dataset, “only stupider” (Amdi’s best translation), but so far the processors had been useless.
But with their dataset, several on Woodcarver’s staff had already learned mantis talk. Each day they discovered more about the aliens’ civilization than Steel’s people could in ten. He smiled. They didn’t know that all the important stuff was being faithfully reported to Hidden Island… For now he would let them keep their toy, and their mantis; they had noticed several things that would have slipped by him. Still he damned the luck.
Steel paged through the report… Good. The alien at Woodcarvers was still uncooperative. He felt his smile spreading into laughter: it was a small thing, the creature’s word for the Packs. The report tried to spell out the word. It didn’t matter; the translation was “claws” or “tines". The mantis had a special horror for the tine attachments that soldiers wore on their forepaws. Steel licked pensively at the black enamel of his manicured claws. Interesting. Claws could be threatening things, but they were also part of being a person. Tines were their mechanical extension, and potentially more frightening. It was the sort of name you might imagine for an elite killer force… but never for all the Packs. After all, the race of packs included the weak, the poor, the kindly, the naive… as well as persons like Steel and Flenser. It said something very interesting about mantis psychology that the creature picked tines as the characterizing feature of the Packs.
Steel eased back from his desk and gazed at the landscape painted around the library’s walls. It was a view from the castle towers. Behind the paint, the walls were lined with patterns of mica and quartz and fiber; the echoes gave a vague sense of what you might hear looking out across the stone and emptiness. Combination audiovisuals were rare in the castle, and this one was especially well-done; Steel could feel himself relaxing as he stared at it. He drifted for a moment, letting his imagination roam.
Tines. I like it. If that was the alien’s image, then it was the right name for his race. His pitiful advisors—and sometimes even the Flenser Fragment—were still intimidated by the ship from the stars. No question, there was power in that ship beyond anything in the world. But after the first panic, Steel understood that the aliens were not supernaturally gifted. They had simply progressed—in the sense that Woodcarver made so much of—beyond the current state of his world’s science. Certainly the alien civilization was a deadly unknown right now. Indeed, it might be capable of burning this world to a cinder. Yet the more Steel saw, the more he realized the intrinsic inferiority of the aliens: What a bizarre abortion they were, a race of intelligent singletons. Every one of them must be raised from nothing, like a wholly newborn pack. Memories could only be passed by voice and writing. Each creature grew and aged and even died as a whole. Despite himself, Steel shivered.
He had come a long way from the first misconceptions, the first fears. For more than a thirty days now he’d been scheming to use the star ship to rule the world. The mantis said that ship was signaling others. That had reduced some of his Servants to incontinence. So. Sooner or later, more ships would arrive. Ruling the world was no longer a practical goal… It was time to aim higher, at goals even the Master had never imagined. Take away their technical advantages and the mantis folk were such finite, fragile beings. They should be easy to conquer. Even they seemed to realize this. Tines, the creature calls us. So it will be. Some day Tines would pace between the stars and rule there.
But in the years till then, life would be very dangerous. Like a newborn pup, all their potential could be destroyed by one small blow. The Movement’s survival—the world’s survival—would depend upon superior intelligence, imagination, discipline, and treachery. Fortunately, those had always been Steel’s great strengths.
Steel dreamed in the candlelight and haze… Intelligence, imagination, discipline, treachery. Done right… could the aliens be persuaded to eliminate all of Steel’s enemies… and then bare their throats to him? It was daring, almost beyond reason, but there might be a way. Jefri claimed he could operate the ship’s signaler. By himself? Steel doubted it. The alien was thoroughly duped, but not especially competent. Amdiranifani was a different story. He was showing all the genius of his bloodlines. And the principles of loyalty and sacrifice his teachers drilled into him had taken hold, though he was a bit… playful. His obedience didn’t have the sharp edge that fear could bring. No matter. As a tool he was useful beyond all others. Amdiranifani understood Jefri, and seemed to understand the alien artifacts even better than the mantis did.
The risk must be taken. He would let the two aboard the ship. They would send his message in place of the automatic distress signal. And what should that first message be? Word for word, it would be the most important, most dangerous thing any pack had ever said.
Three hundred yards away, deep in the experiment wing, a boy and a pack of puppies came across an unexpected piece of good luck: an unlocked door, and a chance to play with Jefri’s commset.
The phone was more complex than some. It was intended for hospital and field work, for the remote control of devices as well as for voice talk. By trial and error, the two gradually narrowed the options.
Jefri Olsndot pointed to numbers that had appeared on the side of the device. “I think that means we’re matched with some receiver.” He glanced nervously at the doorway. Something told him they really shouldn’t be here.
“That’s the same pattern as on the radio Mr. Steel took,” said Amdi. Not even one of his heads was watching the door.
“I bet if we press it here, what we say will come out on his radio. Now he’ll know we can help… So what should we do?”
Three of Amdi raced around the room, like dogs that couldn’t keep their attention on the conversation. By now, Jefri knew this was the equivalent of a human looking away and humming as he thought. The angle of his gaze was another gesture, in this case a spreading and mischievous smile. “I think we should surprise him. He is always so serious.”
“Yeah.” Mr. Steel was pretty solemn. But then all the adults were. They reminded him of the older scientists at the High Lab.
Amdi grabbed the radio and gave him a “just watch this” look. He nosed on the “talk” switch and sang a long ululation into the mike. It sounded only vaguely like pack speech. One of Amdi translated, next to Jefri’s ear. The human boy felt giggles stealing up his throat.
In his den, Lord Steel was lost in scheming. His imagination—loosed by herbs and brandy—floated free, playing with the possibilities. He was settled deep in velvet cushions, comfortable in the den’s safety. The remaining candles shone faintly on the landscape mural, glinting from the polished furniture. The story he would tell the aliens, he almost had it now…
The noise on his desk began as a small thing, submerged beneath his dreaming. It was mostly low-pitched, but there were overtones in the range of thought, like slices of another mind. It was a presence, growing. Someone is in my den! The thought tore like Flenser’s killing blade. Steel’s members spasmed panic, disoriented by smoke and drink.
