by Vernor Vinge
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 pronounciation 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.
THIRTEEN
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 nake
d 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.