A Fire Upon the Deep zot-1, page 30
part #1 of Zones of Thought Series
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?”
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.”
