by Vernor Vinge
Note 320
Jaqueramaphan edged toward the others, and craned a pair of heads to look. “You still think the box is an animal?” he said to Vendacious. “Perhaps you could feed it sweets and it would tell us its secrets, eh?” Woodcarver smiled to herself. Scriber was no pilgrim; pilgrims depend on goodwill too much to go around giving the needle to the powerful.
Vendacious just ignored him. All his eyes were on her. “Your Majesty, please do not take offense. I — we of the Council — must ask you again. This picture box is too important to be left in the mouths of a single pack, even one so great as you. Please. Leave it to the rest of us, at least when you sleep.”
Note 321
“No offense taken. If you insist, you may participate in my investigations. Beyond that, I will not go.” She gave him an innocent look. Vendacious was a superb spymaster, a mediocre administrator, and an incompetent scientist. A century ago she would have the likes of him out tending the crops, if he chose to stay at all. A century ago there had been no need for spymasters and one administrator had been enough. How things had changed. She absentmindedly nuzzled the picture box; perhaps things would change again.
Scrupilo took Scriber’s question seriously. “I see three possibilities, sir. First, that it is magic.” Vendacious winced away from him. “Indeed, the box may be so far beyond our understanding, that it is magic. But that is the one heresy the Woodcarver has never accepted, and so I courteously omit it.” He flicked a sardonic smile at Woodcarver. “Second, that it is an animal. A few on the Council thought so when Scriber first made it talk. But it looks like a stuffed pillow, even down to the amusing figure stitched on its side. More importantly, it responds to stimuli with perfect repeatibility. 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—”
Note 322
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.
Note 323
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.
Note 324
“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.
Note 325
“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.”
Note 326
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.
Note 327
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.”
Note 328
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.”
Note 329
* * *
Note 330
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.
Note 331
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 the
m 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.
Note 332
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.
Note 333
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.
* * *
Note 334
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.
Note 335
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.
Note 336
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.
* * *
Note 337
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 —
Note 338
“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.
Note 339
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 pronounciation was so perfect….
“My name is Johanna,” she said.
Note 340
“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.
Note 341
“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.
Note 342
Chapter 13
Note 343
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 i
n 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.
Note 344
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.
Note 345
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.
Note 346
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.