see three possibilities,
sir. First, that it is magic." Vendacious winced away from him. "Indeed, the
box may be so far beyond our understanding, that it is magic. But that is
the one heresy the Woodcarver has never accepted, and so I courteously omit
it." He flicked a sardonic smile at Woodcarver. "Second, that it is an
animal. A few on the Council thought so when Scriber first made it talk. But
it looks like a stuffed pillow, even down to the amusing figure stitched on
its side. More importantly, it responds to stimuli with perfect
repeatability. That is something I do recognize. That is the behavior of a
machine."
"That's your third possibility?" said Scriber. "But to be a machine
means to have moving parts, and except for -- "
Woodcarver shrugged a tail at them. Scrupilo could go on like this for
hours, and she saw that Scriber was the same type. "I say, let's learn more
and then speculate." She tapped the corner of the box, just as Scriber had
in his original demonstration. The alien's face vanished from the picture,
replaced by a dizzying pattern of color. There was a splatter of sound, then
nothing but the mid-pitch hum the box always made when the top was open.
They knew the box could hear low-pitched sounds, and it could feel through
the square pad on its base. But that pad was itself a kind of picture
screen: certain commands transformed the grid of touch spots into entirely
new shapes. The first time they did that, the box refused any further
commands. Vendacious had been sure they had "killed the little alien". But
they had closed the box and reopened it -- and it was back to its original
behavior. Woodcarver was almost certain that nothing they could do by
talking to it or touching it would hurt the thing.
Woodcarver retried the known signals in the usual order. The results
were spectacular, and identical to before. But change that order in any way
and the effects would be different. She wasn't sure if she agreed with
Scrupilo: The box behaved with the repeatability of a machine ... yet the
variety of its responses was much more like an animal's.
Behind her, Scriber and Scrupilo edged members across the floor. Their
heads were stuck high in the air as they strained for a clear look at the
screen. The buzz of their thoughts came louder and louder. Woodcarver tried
to remember what she'd been planning next. Finally, the noise was just too
much. "Will you two please back off! I can't hear myself think." This isn't
a choir, you know.
"Sorry ... this okay?" They moved back about fifteen feet. Woodcarver
nodded. The two members were less than twenty feet from each other. Scrupilo
and Scriber must be really eager to see the screen. Vendacious had kept a
proper distance, and a look of alert enthusiasm.
"I have a suggestion," said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the
effort of concentrating over Scrupilo's thoughts. "When you touch the
four/three square and say -- " he made the alien sounds; they were all very
easy to do "-- the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match
the squares. I think we ... we are being given choices."
Hm. "The box could end up training us." If this is a machine, we need
some new definitions. "... Very well, let's play with it."
Three hours passed. Toward the end, even Vendacious had moved a member
nearer the screen; the noise in the room verged on mindless chaos. And
everybody had suggestions; "say that", "press this", "last time it said
that, we did thus and so". There were intricate colored designs, sprinkled
with things that must have been written language. Tiny, two-legged figures
scampered across the screen, shifting the symbols, opening little
windows.... Scriber Jaqueramaphan's idea was quite right. The first pictures
were choices. But some of those led to further pictures of choices. The
options spread out -- tree-like, Scriber said. He wasn't quite right;
sometimes they came back to an earlier point; it was a metaphorical network
of streets. Four times they ended in cul de sacs, and had to shut the box
and begin again. Vendacious was madly drawing maps of the paths. That would
help; there were places they would want to see again. But even he realized
there were unnumbered other paths, places that blind exploration would never
find.
And Woodcarver would have given a good part of her soul for the
pictures she had already seen. There were starscapes. There were moons that
shone blue and green, or banded orange. There were moving pictures of alien
cities, of thousands of aliens so close that they were actually touching. If
they ran in packs, those packs were bigger than anything in the world, even
in the tropics.... And maybe the question was irrelevant; the cities were
beyond anything she ever imagined.
Finally Jaqueramaphan backed off. He huddled together. There was a
shiver in his voice. "T-there's a whole universe in there. We could follow
it forever, and never know...."
She looked at the other two. For once, Vendacious had lost his
smugness. There were ink stains on all his lips. The writing benches around
him were littered with dozens of sketches, some clearer than others. He
dropped the pen, and gasped. "I say we take what we have and study it." He
began gathering the sketches, piling them into a neat stack. "Tomorrow,
after a good sleep, our heads will be clear and -- "
Scrupilo dropped back and stretched. His eyes had excited red rims.
"Fine. But leave the sketches, friend Vendacious." He jabbed at the
drawings. "See that one and that? It's clear that our blundering gets us
plenty of empty results. Sometimes the picture box just locks us out, but
much more often we get that picture: No options, just a couple of aliens
dancing in a forest and making rhythm sounds. Then if we say -- " and he
repeated part of the sequence, "-- we get that picture of piles of sticks.
The first with one, the second with two, and so on."
Woodcarver saw it too. "Yes. And a figure comes out and points to each
of the piles and says a short noise by each." She and Scrupilo stared at
each other, seeing the same gleam in each others' eyes. The excitement of
learning, of finding order where there had seemed only chaos. It had been a
hundred years since she last felt this way. "Whatever this thing is ... it's
trying to teach us the Two-Legs' language."
In the days that followed, Johanna Olsndot had lots of time to think.
The pain in her chest and shoulder gradually eased; if she moved carefully,
it was only a pulsing soreness. They had taken the arrow out and sewed the
wound closed. She had feared the worst when they had tied her down, when she
saw the knives in their mouths and the steel on their claws. Then they began
cutting; she had not known there could be such pain.
She still shuddered with remembered agony. But she didn't have
nightmares about it, the way she did about....
Mother and Dad were dead; she had seen them die with her own eyes. And
Jefri? Jefri might still be alive. Sometimes Johanna could go a whole
afternoon full of hope. She had seen the coldsleepers burning on the ground
below the ship, but those inside might have survived. Then she would
remember the indiscriminate way the attackers had flamed and slashed,
killing everything around the ship.
She was a prisoner. But for now, the murderers wanted her well. The
guards were not armed -- beyond their teeth and tines. They kept well away
from her when they could. They knew she could hurt them.
They kept her inside a big dark cabin. When she was alone she paced the
floor. The dogthings were barbarians. The surgery without anesthetics was
probably not even intended as torture. She hadn't seen any aircraft, or any
sign of electricity. The toilet was a slot carved in a marble slab. The hole
went so deep you could scarcely hear the plop hit bottom. But it still
smelled bad. These creatures were as backward as people in the darkest ages
on Nyjora. They had never had technology, or they had thoroughly forgotten
it. Johanna almost smiled. Mom had liked novels about shipwrecks and
heroines marooned on lost colonies. The big deal was usually to reinvent
technology and repair the spacecraft. Mom was ... had been ... so into the
history of science; she loved the details of those stories.
Well, Johanna was living it now. But with important differences. She
wanted rescue, but she also wanted revenge. These creatures were nothing
like human. In fact, she couldn't remember reading of anything quite like
them. She'd have looked for them in her dataset, except they had taken that.
Ha. Let them play with it. They'd quickly run into her booby traps and find
themselves totally locked out.
At first there were only blankets to keep warm. Then they'd given her
clothes cut like her jump suit but made of puffy quilting. They were warm
and sturdy, the stitching neater than anything she imagined a nonmachine
could do. Now she could comfortably walk around outside. The garden beyond
her cabin was the best thing about the place. It was about a hundred meters
square, and followed the slope of a hillside. There were lots of flowers,
and trees with long, feathery leaves. Flagstoned walks curved back and forth
through mossy turf. It was a peaceful place if she let it be, a little like
their backyard on Straum.
There were walls, but from the high end of the garden, she could see
over them. The walls angled this way and that, and in places she could see
their other side. The windows slits were like something out of her history
lessons: they let you shoot arrows or bullets without making a target of
yourself.
When the sun was out, Johanna liked to sit where the smell of the
feather leaves was strongest, and look over the lower walls at the bay. She
still wasn't sure just what she was seeing. There was a harbor; the forest
of spars was almost like the marinas on Straum. The town had wide streets,
but they zigged and zagged and the buildings along them were all askew. In
places there were open-roofed mazes of stone; from up here, she could see
the pattern. And there was another wall, a rambling thing that ran for as
far as she could see. The hills beyond were crowned with gray rock and
patches of snow.
She could see the dogthings down in the town. Individually, you could
almost mistake them for dogs (snake-necked, rat-headed ones). But watch them
from a distance and you saw their true nature. They always moved in small
groups, never more than six. Within the pack they touched, cooperated with
clever grace. But she never saw one group come closer than about ten meters
to another. From her distant viewpoint, the members of a pack seemed to
merge ... and she could imagine she was seeing one multilimbed beast ambling
cautiously along, careful not to come too close to a similar monster. By
now, the conclusion was inescapable: one pack, one mind. Minds so evil they
could not bear to be close to one another.
Her fifth time in the garden was the prettiest yet, a coercion toward
joy. The flowers had sprayed downy seeds into the air. The lowering sunlight
sparkled off them as they floated by the thousands on the slow breeze, clots
in an invisible syrup. She imagined what Jefri would do here: first pretend
grownup dignity, then bounce from one foot to the other. Finally he would
race down the hillside, trying to capture as many of the flying tufts as he
could. Laughing and laughing --
"One, two, how do you do?" It was a child's voice, behind her.
Johanna jumped up so fast she almost tore her stitches. Sure enough,
there was a pack behind her. They -- it? -- was the one who had cut the
arrow out of her. A mangy lot. The five were crouched, ready to run away.
They looked almost as surprised as Johanna felt.
"One, two, how do you do?" The voice came again, exactly as before. It
might as well have been a recording, except that one of the animals was
somehow synthesizing the sound with the buzzing patches of skin on its
shoulders, haunches and head. The parrot act was nothing new to her. But
this time ... the words were almost appropriate. The voice was not hers, but
she had heard that chant before. She put hands on hips and stared at the
pack. Two of the animals stared back; the others seemed to be admiring the
scenery. One licked nervously at its paw.
The two rear ones were carrying her dataset! Suddenly she knew where
they'd gotten that singsong question. And she knew what they expected in
response. "I am fine and how do you do?" she said.
The pack's eyes widened almost comically. "I am fine, so then are we
all!" It completed the game, then emitted a burst of gobbling. Someone
replied from down the hill. There was another pack there, lurking in the
bushes. She knew that if she stayed near this one, the other wouldn't
approach.
So the Tines -- she always thought of them by those claws on their
front feet; those she would never forget -- had been playing with the Pink
Oliphaunt, and hadn't been stopped by the booby traps. That was better than
Jefri ever managed. It was clear they had fallen into the kindermode
language programs. She should have thought of that. When the dataset noted
sufficiently asinine responses it would adapt its behavior, first for young
children, and -- if that didn't work -- for youngsters who didn't even speak
Samnorsk. With just a little cooperation from Johanna, they could learn her
language. Did she want that?
The pack walked a little nearer, at least two of them watching her all
the time. They didn't seem quite so ready to bolt as before. The nearest one
dropped to its belly and looked up at her. Very cute and helpless, if you
didn't see the claws. "My name is -- " Johanna heard a short burst of gobble
with an overtone that seemed to buzz right through her head. "What is your
name?"
Johanna knew it was all part of the language script. There was no way
the creature could understand the individual words it was saying. That "my
name, your name" pair was repeated over and over again between the children
in the language program. A vegetable would get the point eventually. Still,
the Tines pronunciation was so perfect....
"My name is Johanna," she said.
"Zjohanna," said the pack, with Johanna's voice, and splitting the word
stream incorrectly.
"Johanna," corrected Johanna. She wasn't even going to try saying the
Tines name.
"Hello, Johanna. Let's play the naming game!" And that was from the
script too, complete with silly enthusiasm. Johanna sat down. Sure, learning
Samnorsk would give the Tines power over her ... but it was the only way she
could learn about them, the only way she could learn about Jefri. And if
they had murdered Jefri, too? Well then, she would learn to hurt them as
much as they deserved.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 13
At Woodcarvers and then -- a few days later -- at Flenser's Hidden
Island, the long daylight of arctic summer ended. At first there was a
little twilight just around midnight, when even the highest hill stood in
shadow. And then the hours of dark grew quickly. Day fought night, and night
was winning. The featherleaf in the low valleys changed to autumn colors.
Looking up a fjord in daylight was to see orange red on the lower hills,
then the green of heather merging imperceptibly to the grays of lichen and
the darker grays of naked rock. The snowpatches waited for their time; it
would come soon.
At every sunset, each day a few minutes earlier, Tyrathect toured the
ramparts of Flenser's outer wall. It was a three-mile walk. The lower levels
were guarded by linear packs, but up here there were only a few lookouts.
When she approached, they stepped aside with military precision. More than
military precision; she saw the fear in their look. It was hard to get used
to that. For almost as far back as she had clear memories -- twenty years --
Tyrathect had lived in fear of others, in shame and guilt, in search of
someone to follow. Now all that was turned on its head. It was not an
improvement. She knew now, from the inside, the evil she had given herself
to. She knew why the sentries feared her. To them, she was Flenser.
Of course, she never gave any hint of these thoughts. Her life was only
as safe as the success of her fraud. Tyrathect had worked hard to suppress
her natural, shy mannerisms. Not once since coming to Hidden Island had she
caught herself in the old bashful habit of heads lowering, eyes closing.
Instead, Tyrathect had the Flenser stare -- and she used it. Her
passage around the top wall was as stark and ominous as Flenser's had ever
been. She looked out over her -- his -- domain with the same hard gaze as
before, all heads front, as if seeing visions beyond the petty minds of the
disciples. They must never guess her real reason for these sunset sweeps:
for a time, the days and nights were like in the Republic. She could almost
imagine she was still back there, before the Movement and the massacre at
Parliament Bowl, before they cut her throats and wed pieces of Flenser to
the stumps of her soul.
In the gold and russet fields beyond the stone curtains, she could see
peasants trimming the fields and the herds. Flenser ruled lands far beyond
her view, but he had never imported food. The grain and meat that filled the
storehouses were all produced within a two-day march of the straits. The
strategic intent was clear; still, it made for a peaceful evening's view and
brought back memories of her home and school.
The sun slid sideways into the mountains; long shadows swept the farm
lands. Flenser's castle was left an island in a sea of shadow. Tyrathect
could smell the cold. There would be frost again tonight. Tomorrow the
fields would be covered with false snow that would last an hour past
sunrise. She pulled the long jackets close around her and walked to the
eastern lookout. Across the straits, one of the near hilltops was still in
the sun. The alien ship had landed there. It was still there, but now behind
wood and stone. Steel began building there right after the landing. The
quarries at the north end of Hidden Island were busier now than ever in
Flenser's time. The barges hauling stone to the mainland made a steady
traffic across the straits. Even now that the light was not dayround,
Steel's construction went on nonstop. His Incallings and lesser inspections
were harsher than Flenser's had used to be.
Lord Steel was a killer; worse, a manipulator. But since the alien
landing, Tyrathect knew that he was something else: deathly afraid. He had
good reason. And even though the folk he feared might ultimately kill them
all, in her secret soul she wished them well. Steel and his Flenserists had
attacked the star people without warning, more out of greed than fear. They
had killed dozens of beings. In a way the murders were worse than what the
Movement had done to her. Tyrathect had followed the Flenser of her own free
will. She had had friends who warned her about the Movement. There had been
dark stories about the Flenser, and not all had been government propaganda.
But she had so wanted to follow, to give herself to Something Greater....
They had used her, literally as their tool. Yet she could have avoided it.
The star people had had no such option; Steel simply butchered them.
So now Steel labored out of fear. In the first three days he had
covered the flying ship with a roof: a sudden, silly farmhouse had appeared
on the hilltop. Before long the alien craft would be hidden behind stone
walls. Ultimately, the new fortress might be bigger than the one on Hidden
Island. Steel knew that if his villainy did not destroy him, it would make
him the most powerful pack in the world.
And that was Tyrathect's reason for staying, for continuing her
masquerade. She couldn't go on forever. Sooner or later the other fragments
would reach Hidden Island; Tyrathect would be destroyed and all of Flenser
would live again. Perhaps she wouldn't survive even that long. Two of
Tyrathect were of Flenser. The Master had miscalculated in thinking they
could dominate the other three. Instead the conscience of the three had come
to own the brilliance of the two. She remembered almost everything the great
Flenser had known, all the tricks and all the betrayals. The two had given
her an intensity she had never had before. Tyrathect laughed to herself. In
a sense, she had gained what she had been so naively seeking in the
Movement; and the great Flenser had made exactly the mistake that in his
arrogance he thought impossible. As long as she could keep the two under
control, she had a chance. When she was all awake, there wasn't much
problem; she still felt herself a "she", still remembered her life in the
Republic more clearly than the Flenser memories. It was different when she
slept. There were nightmares. The memories of torment inflicted suddenly
seemed sweet. Sleep-time sex should soothe; with her it was a battle. She
awoke sore and cut, as if she had been fighting a rapist. If the two ever
broke free, if she ever awoke a "he".... It would take only a few seconds
for the two to denounce the masquerade, only a little longer to kill the
three and put the Flenser members aboard a more manageable pack.
Yet she stayed. Steel meant to use the aliens and their ship to spread
Flenser's nightmare worldwide. But his plan was fragile, with risks on every
side. If there was anything she could do to destroy it and the Flenser
Movement, she would.
Across the castle, only the western tower still hung in sunlight. No
faces showed at the window slits, but eyes looked out: Steel watched the
Flenser Fragment -- the Flenser-in-Waiting as it styled itself -- on the
ramparts below. The fragment was accepted by all the commanders. In fact,
they accorded it almost the awe they had given to the full Flenser. In a
sense, Flenser had made them all, so it wasn't surprising they felt a chill
in the Master's presence. Even Steel felt it. In his shaping, Flenser had
forced the aborning Steel to try to kill him; each time Steel had been
caught and his weakest members tortured. Steel knew the conditioning that
was there, and that helped him fight it. If anything, he told himself, the
Flenser Frag was in greater danger because of it: in trying to counter the
fear, Steel might just miscalculate, and act more violently than was
appropriate.
Sooner or later Steel had to decide. If he didn't kill it before the
other fragments reached Hidden Island, then all of Flenser would be here
again. If two members could dominate Steel's regime, then six would totally
erase it. Did he want the Master dead? And if he did, was there any surely
safe way...? Steel's mind flickered lightly all around the issue as he
watched the black-frocked pack.
Steel was used to playing for high stakes. He had been born playing for
them. Fear and death and winning were his whole life. But never had the
stakes been as high as now. Flenser had come close to subverting the largest
nation on the continent, and had had dreams of ruling the world.... Lord
Steel looked to the hillside across the straits, at the new castle he was
building. In his present game, world conquest would follow easily on
victory, and the destruction of the world was a conceivable consequence of
failure.
Steel had visited the flying ship shortly after the ambush. The ground
was still steaming. Every hour it seemed to grow hotter. The mainland
peasants talked of demons wakened in the earth; Steel's advisors could not
do much better. The whitejackets needed padded boots to get close. Steel had
ignored the steam, donned the boots, and walked beneath the curving hull.
The bottom was vaguely like a boat's hull, if you ignored the stilts. Near
the center was a teat-like projection; the ground directly underneath
burbled with molten rock. The burned-out coffins were on the uphill side of
the ship. Several of the corpses had been removed for dissection. In the
first hours his advisors had been full of fanciful theories: the mantis folk
were warriors fleeing a battle, come to bury their dead....
So far no one had been able to take a careful look inside the craft.
The gray stairs were made of something as strong as steel yet feather
light. But they were recognizably stairs, even if the risers were high for
the average member. Steel scrambled up the steps, leaving Shreck and his
other advisors outside.
He stuck a head through the hatch -- and winced back abruptly. The
acoustics were deadly. He understood what the whitejackets were complaining
about. How could the aliens bear it? One by one he forced himself through
the opening.
Echoes screamed at him -- worse than from unpadded quartz. He quieted
himself, as he had so often done in the Master's presence. The echoes
diminished, but they were still a horde raging in the walls all around. Not
even his best whitejackets could tolerate more than five minutes here. The
thought made Steel stand straighter. Discipline. Quiet does not always mean
submission; it can mean hunting. He looked around, ignoring the howling
murmurs.
Light came from bluish strips in the ceiling. As his eyes adjusted, he
could see what his people had described to him: the interior was just two
rooms. He was standing in the larger one -- a cargo hold? There was a hatch
in the far wall and then the second room. The walls were seamless. They met
in angles that did not match the outer hull; there would be dead spaces. A
breeze moved fitfully about the room, but the air was much warmer than
outside. He had never been in a place that felt more of power and evil.
Surely it was only a trick of acoustics. They would bring in some absorbent
quilts, some side reflectors, and the feeling would go away. Still....
The room was filled with coffins, these unburned. The place stank with
the aliens' body odor. Mold grew in the darker corners. In a way that was
comforting: the aliens breathed and sweated as other living things, and for
all their marvelous invention, they could not keep their own den clean.
Steel wandered among the coffins. The boxes were mounted on railed racks.
When the ones outside had been here, the room must have been crammed full.
Undamaged, the coffins were marvels of fine workmanship. Warm air exited
slots along the sides. He sniffed at it: complex, faintly nauseating, but
not the smell of death. And not the source of the overpowering stench of
mantis sweat that hung everywhere.
Each coffin had a window mounted on its top side. What effort to honor
the remains of single members! Steel hopped onto one and looked down. The
corpse was perfectly preserved; in fact, the blue light made everything look
frozen. He cocked a second head over the edge of the box, got a double view
on the creature within. It was far smaller than the two they had killed
under the ship. It was even smaller than the one they had captured. Some of
Steel's advisors thought the small ones were pups, perhaps unweaned. It made
sense; their prisoner never made thought sounds.
Partly as an act of discipline, he stared for a long while at the
alien's queer, flat face. The echo of his mind was a continuing pain, eating
at his attention, demanding that he leave. Let the pain continue. He had
withstood worse before, and the packs outside must know that Steel was
stronger than any of them. He could master the pain and have the greater
insight.... And then he would work their butts off, quilting these rooms and
studying the contents.
So Steel stared, almost thoughtless, into the face. The screaming in
the walls seemed to fade a little. The face was so ugly. How could the
creature eat? He had looked at the charred corpses outside, noticed their
small jaws and randomly misshapen teeth.
A few minutes passed; the noise and ugliness mixed together,
dream-like.... And out of his trance, Steel new a nightmare horror: The face
moved. The change was small, and it happened very, very slowly. But over a
period of minutes, the face had changed.
Steel's fell from the coffin; the walls screamed back terror. For a few
seconds, he thought the noise would kill him. Then he regained himself with
quiet thought. He crawled back onto the box. All his eyes stared through the
crystal, waiting like a pack on hunt.... The change was regular. The alien
in the box was breathing, but fifty times more slowly than any normal
member. He moved to another box, watched the creature in it. Somehow, they
were all alive. Inside those boxes, their lives were simply slowed.
He looked up from the boxes, almost in a daze. That the room reeked of
evil was an illusion of sound ... and also the absolute truth.
The mantis alien had landed far from the tropics, away from the
collectives; perhaps it thought the Arctic Northwest a backward wilderness.
It had come in a ship jammed with hundreds of mantis pups. These boxes were
like larval casings: the pack would land, raise the small ones to adulthood
-- out of sight of civilization. Steel felt his pelts puff up as he thought
about it. If the mantis pack had not been surprised, if Steel's troops had
been any less aggressive ... it would have been the end of the world.
Steel staggered to the outer hatch, his fears coming louder and louder
off the walls. Even so, he paused a moment in the shadows and the screams.
When his members trooped down the stairs, he moved calmly, every jacket
neatly in place. Soon enough his advisors would know the danger, but they
would never see fear in him. He walked lightly across the steaming turf, out
from under the hull. But even he could not resist a quick look across the
sky. This was one ship, one pack of aliens. It had had the misfortune of
running into the Movement. Even so, its defeat had been partly luck. How
many other ships would land, had already landed? Was there time for him to
learn from this victory?
Steel's mind returned to the present, to his eyrie lookout above the
castle. That first encounter with the ship was many tendays past. There was
still a threat, but now he understood it better, and -- as was true of all
great threats -- it held great promise.
On the rampart, Flenser-in-Waiting slid through the deepening twilight.
Steel's eyes followed the pack as it walked beneath the torches, and one by
one disappeared down stairs. There was an awful lot of the Master in that
fragment; it had understood many things about the alien landing before
anyone else.
Steel took one last look across the darkening hills as he turned and
started down the spiral stair. It was a long, cramped climb; the lookout sat
atop a forty-foot tower. The stair was barely fifteen inches wide, the
ceiling less that thirty inches above the steps. Cold stone pressed in from
all around, so close that there were no echoes to confuse thought -- yet
also so close that the mind was squeezed into a long thread. Climbing the
spiral required a twisting, strung-out posture that left any attacker easy
prey for a defender in the eyrie. Such was military architecture. For Steel,
crawling the cramped dark was pleasant exercise.
The stairs opened onto a public hallway, ten feet across with back-off
nooks every fifty feet. Shreck and a bodyguard were waiting for him.
"I have the latest from Woodcarvers," said Shreck. He was holding
sheets of silkpaper.
Losing the other alien to Woodcarvers had once seemed a major blow.
Only gradually had he realized how well it could work out. He had
Woodcarvers infiltrated. At first he'd intended to have the other alien
killed; it would have been easy to do. But the information that trickled
north was interesting. There were some bright people at Woodcarvers. They
were coming up with insights that had slipped past Steel and the Master --
the fragment of the Master. So. In effect, Woodcarvers had become Steel's
second alien laboratory, and the Movement's enemies were serving him like
any other tool. The irony was irresistible.
"Very good, Shreck. Take it to my den. I'll be there shortly." Steel
waved the whitejackets into a back-up nook and swept past him. Reading the
report over brandy would be a pleasant reward for the day's work. In the
meantime, there were other duties and other pleasures.
The Master had begun building Hidden Island Castle more than a century
earlier; it was growing yet. In the oldest foundations, where an ordinary
ruler might put dungeons, were the Flenser's first laboratories. Many could
be mistaken for dungeons -- and were by their inhabitants.
Steel reviewed all the labs at least once a tenday. Now he swept
through the lowest levels. Crickers fled before the light of his guard's
torches. There was a smell of rotting meat. Steel's paws skidded where
slickness lay upon the stone. Holes were dug in the floor at regular
intervals. Each could hold a single member, its legs jammed tight to its
body. Each was covered by a lid with tiny air holes. It took the average
member about three days to go mad in such isolation. The resulting "raw
material" could be used to build blank packs. Generally, they weren't much
more than vegetables, but then that was all the Movement asked of some. And
sometimes remarkable things came from these pits: Shreck for instance.
Shreck the Colorless, some called him. Shreck the stolid. A pack who was
beyond pain, beyond desire. Shreck's was the loyalty of clockwork, but built
from flesh and blood. He was no genius, but Steel would have given an
eastern province for five more of him. And the promise of more such
successes made Steel use the isolation pits again and again. He had recycled
most of the wrecks from the ambush that way....
Steel climbed back to higher levels, where the really interesting
experiments were undertaken. The world regarded Hidden Island with
fascinated horror. They had heard of the lower levels. But most didn't
realize what a small part those dark spaces played in the Movement's
science. To properly dissect a soul, you need more than benches with blood
gutters. The results from the lower levels were simply the first steps in
Flenser's intellectual quest. There were great questions in the world,
things that had bothered packs for thousands of years. How do we think? Why
do we believe? Why is one pack a genius and another an oaf? Before Flenser,
philosophers argued them endlessly and never got closer to the truth. Even
Woodcarver had pranced around the issues, unwilling to give up her
traditional ethics. Flenser was prepared to get the answers. In these labs,
nature itself was under interrogation.
Steel walked across a chamber one hundred yards wide, with a roof
supported by dozens of stone pillars. On every side there were dark
partitions, slate walls mounted on tiny wheels. The cavern could be blocked
off, maze-like, into any pattern. Flenser had experimented with all the
postures of thought. In the centuries before him, there had been only a few
effective postures: the instinctive heads together, the ring sentry, various
work postures. Flenser had tried dozens more: stars, double rings, grids.
Most were useless and confusing. In the star, only a single member could
hear all the others, and each of those could only hear the one. In effect,
all thought had to pass through the hub member. The hub could contribute
nothing rational, yet all its misconceptions passed uncorrected to the rest.
Drunken foolishness resulted.... Of course, that experiment was reported to
the outside world.
But at least one of the others -- still secret -- worked strangely
well: Flenser posted eight packs around the floor and on temporary
platforms, blocked them from each another with the slate partitions, and
then put members from each pack in connection with their counterparts in
three others. In a sense, he created a pack of eight packs. Steel was still
experimenting with that. If the connectors were sufficiently compatible (and
that was the hard part), the resulting creature was far smarter than a ring
sentry. In most ways it was not as bright as a single heads-together pack,
yet sometimes it had striking insights. Before he left for the Long Lakes,
the Master had developed a plan to rebuild the castle's main hall so council
sessions could be conducted in this posture. Steel hadn't pursued that idea;
it seemed just a bit too risky. Steel's domination of others was not quite
as complete as Flenser's had been.
No matter. There were other, far more significant, projects. The rooms
ahead were the true heart of the Movement. Steel's soul had been born in
these rooms; all of Flenser's greatest creations had begun here. During the
last five years, Steel had continued the tradition ... and improved upon it.
He walked down the hall that linked the separate suites. Each bore its
number in inlaid gold. At each he opened a door and stepped partway through.
His staff left their report on the previous tenday just inside. Steel
quickly read each one, then poked a nose over the balcony to look at the
experiment within. The balconies were well-padded, and screened; it was easy
to observe without being seen.
Flenser's one weakness (in Steel's opinion) was his desire to create
the superior being. The Master's confidence was so immense, he believed that
any such success could be applied to his own soul. Steel had no such
illusions. It was a commonplace that teachers are surpassed by their
creations -- pupils, fission-children, adoptions, whatever. He, Steel, was a
perfect illustration of this, though the Master didn't know it yet.
Steel had determined to create beings that would each be superior in
some single way -- while flawed and malleable in others. In the Master's
absence, he had begun a number of experiments. Steel worked from scratch,
identifying inheritance lines independent of pack membership. His agents
purchased or stole pups that might have potential. Unlike Flenser, who
usually melded pups into existing packs in an approximation of nature, Steel
made his totally newborn. His puppy packs had no memories or fragments of
soul; Steel had total control from the beginning.
Of course, most such constructions quickly died. The pups had to be
parted from their wet nurses before they began to participate in the adult's
consciousness. The resulting pack was taught entirely in speech and written
language. All inputs could be controlled.
Steel stopped before door number thirty-three: Experiment Amdiranifani,
Mathematical Excellence. It was not the only attempt in this direction, but
it was by far the most successful. Steel's agents had searched the Movement
for packs with ability for abstraction. They had gone further: the world's
most famous mathematician lived in the Long Lakes Republic. The pack had
been preparing to fission; she had several puppies by herself and a
mathematically talented lover. Steel had had the pups taken. They matched
his other acquisitions so well that he decided to make an eightsome. If
things worked out, it might be beyond all nature in its intelligence.
Steel motioned his guard to shield the torches. He opened door
thirty-three