by Vernor Vinge
And after sixty days, Woodcarver’s pups couldn’t really walk. The Queen wore two special jackets with carrying pouches on the sides. Most of the waking day, her little ones stayed there, suckling through the fur on her tummy. In some ways, Woodcarver treated her offspring as a human would. She was very nervous when they were taken from her sight. She liked to cuddle them and play little games of coordination with them. Often she would lay both of them on their backs and pat their paws in a sequence of eight, then abruptly tap the one or the other on the belly. The two wriggled furiously at the attack, their little legs waving in all directions. “I nibble the one whose paw was last touched. Peregrine is worthy of me. These two are already thinking a little. See?” She pointed to the puppy that had convulsed into a ball, avoiding most of her surprise tickle.
In other ways Tinish parenting was alien, almost scary. Neither Woodcarver nor Peregrine ever talked to their pups in audible tones, but their ultrasonic “thoughts” seemed to be constantly probing the little ones. Some of it was so simple and regular that it set sympathetic vibrations through the walls of the little wagon. The wood buzzed under Johanna’s hands. It was like a mother humming a lullaby, but she could see it had another purpose. The little creatures responded to the sounds, twitching in complicated rhythms. Peregrine said it would be another thirty days before the pups could contribute conscious thought to the pack, but they were already being trained and exercised for the function.
They camped part of each dayaround, the troops standing turns as sentry lines. Even during the traveling part of the day, they stopped numerous times, to clear the trail, or await the return of scouts, or simply to rest. At one such stop, Johanna sat with Peregrine in the shade of a tree that looked like pine but smelled of honey. Pilgrim played with his young ones, helping them to stand up and walk a few steps. She could tell by the buzzing in her head that he was thinking at the pups. And suddenly they seemed more like marionettes than children to her. “Why don’t you let them play by themselves, or with their—”Brothers? Sisters? What do you call siblings born to the other pack?“—with Woodcarver’s pups?”
Even more than Woodcarver, the pilgrim had tried to learn human customs. He was by far the most flexible pack she knew … after all, if you can accomodate a murderer in your own mind, you must be flexible. But Pilgrim was visibly startled by her question. The buzzing in her head stopped abruptly. He laughed weakly. It was a very human laugh, though a bit theatrical. Peregrine had spent hours at interactive comedy on Dataset—whether for entertainment or insight, she didn’t know. “Play? By themselves? Yes … I see how natural that would seem to you. To us, it would be a kind of perversion… No, worse than that, since perversions are at least fun for some people some of the time. But if a pup were raised a singleton, or even a duo—it would be making an animal of what could be sturdy member.”
“You mean that pups never have life of their own?”
Peregrine cocked his heads and scrunched close to the ground. One of him continued to nose around the puppies, but Johanna had his attention. He loved to puzzle over human exotica. “Well, sometimes there is a tragedy—an orphan pup left to itself. Often there is no cure for it; the creature becomes too independent to meld with any pack. In any case, it is a very lonely, empty life. I have personal memories of just how unpleasant.”
“You’re missing a lot. I know you’ve watched children’s stories on Dataset. It’s sad you can never be young and foolish.”
“Hei! I never said that. I’ve been young and foolish lots; it’s my way of life. And most packs are that way when they have several young members by different parents.” As they talked, one of Peregrine’s pups had struggled to the edge of the blanket they sat on. Now it awkwardly extended its neck into the flowers that grew from the roots of a nearby tree. As it scruffed around in the green and purple, Johanna felt the buzzing begin again. The pup’s movement became a tad more organized. “Wow! I can smell the flowers with him. I bet we’ll be seeing through each other’s eyes well before we get to Flenser’s Hidden Island.” The pup backed up, and the two did a little dance on the blanket. Peregrine’s heads bobbed in time with the movement. “They are such bright little ones!” He grinned. “Oh, we are not so different from you, Johanna. I know humans are proud of their young ones. Both Woodcarver and I wonder what ours will become. She is so brilliant, and I am—well, a bit mad. Will these two make me a scientific genius? Will Woodcarver’s turn her into an adventurer? Heh, heh. Woodcarver’s a great brood kenner, but even she’s not sure what our new souls will be like. Oh, I can’t wait to be six again!”
It had taken Scriber and Pilgrim and Johanna only three days to sail from Flenser’s Domain to the harbor at Woodcarver’s. It would take this army almost thirty days to walk back to where Johanna’s adventure began. On the map it had looked a tortuous path, wiggling this way and that through the fjordland. Yet the first ten days were amazingly easy. The weather stayed dry and warm. It was like the day of the ambush stretched out forever and ever. A dry winds summer, Woodcarver called it. There should be occasional storms, at least cloudiness. Instead the sun circled endlessly above the forest canopy, and when they broke into the open (never for long, and then only when Vendacious was sure that it was safe), the sky was clear and almost cloudless.
In fact, there was already uneasiness about the weather. At noon it could get downright hot. The wind was constant, drying. The forest itself was drying out; they must be careful with fire. And with the sun always up and no clouds, they might be seen by lookouts many kilometers away. Scrupilo was especially bothered. He hadn’t expected to fire the cannons en route, but he had wanted to drill “his” troops more in the open.
Officially Strupilo was a council member and the Queen’s chief engineer. Since his experiment with the cannon, he had insisted on the title “Commander of Cannoneers”. To Johanna, the engineer had always seemed curt and impatient. His members were almost always moving, and with jerky abruptness. He spent almost as much time with the Dataset as the Queen or Peregrine Wickwrackscar, yet he had very little interest in people-oriented subjects. “He has a blindness for all but machines,” Woodcarver once said of him, “but that’s how I made him. He’s invented much, even before you came.”
Scrupilo had fallen in love with the cannons. For most packs, firing the things was a painful experience. Since that first test, Scrupilo had fired the things again and again, trying to improve the tubes, the powder, and the explosive rounds. His fur was scored with dozens of powder burns. He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
During rest stops Scrup was a familiar figure, strutting up and down the line, haranguing his cannoneers. He claimed even the shortest stop was an opportunity for training, since in real combat speed would be essential. He had designed special epaulets, based on Nyjoran gunners’ ear muffs. They didn’t cover his low-sound ears at all, but instead the forehead and shoulder tympana of his trigger member. Actually tying the muffs down was a mind-numbing thing to do, but for the moments right around firing it was worth it. Scrupilo wore his own muffs all the time, but unsnugged. They looked like silly little wings sticking out from his head and shoulders. He obviously thought the effect was raffish—and in fact, his gunner crews also made a big thing of wearing the gear at all times. After a while, even Johanna could see that the drill was paying off. At least, they could swing the gun tubes around at an instant’s notice, stuff them with fake powder and ball, and shout the Tinish equivalent of “BANG!”.
The army carried much more gunpowder than food. The packs were to live off the forest. Johanna had little experience with camping in an atmosphere. Were forests usually this rich? It was certainly nothing like the urban forests of Straum, where you needed a special license to walk off marked paths, and most of the wild life were mechanical imitations of Nyjoran originals. This place was wilder than even the stories of Nyjora. After all, that world had been well settled before it fell to medievalism
. The Tines’ had never been civilized, had never spread cities across continents. Pilgrim guessed there were fewer than thirty million packs in all the world. The Northwest was only beginning to be settled. Game was everywhere. In their hunting, the Tines were like animals. Troopers raced through the underforest. The favorite hunt was one of sheer endurance, where the prey was chased until it dropped. That was rarely practical here, but they got almost as much pleasure from chasing the unwary into ambushes.
Johanna didn’t like it. Was this a medieval perversion or a peculiarly Tinish one? If allowed the time, the troops didn’t use their bows and knives. The pleasure of the hunt included slashing at throats and bellies with teeth and claws. Not that the forest creatures were without defenses: for millions of years threat and counterthreat had evolved here. Almost every animal could generate ultrasonic screeching that totally drowned the thought of any nearby pack. There were parts of the forest that seemed silent to Johanna, but through which the army drove at a cautious gallop, troops and drivers writhing in agony from the unseen assault.
Some of the forest animals were more sophisticated…
Twenty-five days out, the army was stuck trying to get across the biggest valley yet. In the middle—mostly hidden by the forest—a river flowed down to the western sea. The walls of these valleys were like nothing Johanna had seen in the parks of Straum: If you took a cross-section at right angles to the river, the walls made a “U” shape. They were cliff-like steep at the high edges, then became slopes and finally a gentle plain where the river ran. “That’s how the ice gouges it,” explained Woodcarver. “There are places further up where I’ve actually watched it happen,” and she showed Johanna explanations in the Dataset. That was happening more and more; Pilgrim and Woodcarver and sometimes even Scrupilo seemed to know more of a child’s modern education than Johanna.
They had already been across a number of smaller valleys. Getting down the steep parts was always tedious, but so far the paths had been good. Vendacious took them to the edge this latest valley.
Woodcarver and staff stood under the forest cover just short of the dropoff. Some meters back, Johanna sat surrounded by Peregrine Wickwrackscar. The trees at this elevation reminded Johanna a little of pines. The leaves were narrow and sharp and lasted all year. But the bark was blistered white and the wood itself was pale blond. Strangest of all were the flowers. They sprouted purple and violet from the exposed roots of the trees. Tines’ world had no analog of honeybees, but there was constant motion among the flowers as thumb-sized mammals climbed from plant to plant. There were thousands of them, but they seemed to have no interest in anything except the flowers and the sweetness that oozed from them. She leaned back among the flowers and admired the view while the Queen gobbled with Vendacious. How many kilometers could you see from here? The air was as clear as she had even known it on Tines’ world. East and west the valley seemed to stretch forever. The river was a silver thread where it occasionally showed throught the forest of the valley floor.
Pilgrim nudged her with a nose and nodded toward the Queen. Woodcarver was pointing this way and that over the dropoff. “Argument is in the air. You want a translation?”
“Yeah.”
“Woodcarver doesn’t like this path,” Pilgrim’s voice changed to the tone the Queen used when speaking Samnorsk: “The path is completely exposed. Anyone on the other side can sit and count our every wagon. Even from miles away. [A mile is a fat kilometer.]”
Vendacious whipped his heads around in that indignant way of his. He gobbled something that Johanna knew was angry. Pilgrim chuckled and changed his voice to imitate the security chief’s: “Your Majesty! My scouts have scoured the valley and far wall. There is no threat.”
“You’ve done miracles, I know, but do you seriously claim to have covered that entire north face? That’s five miles away, and I know from my youth that there are dozens of cavelets—you have those memories yourself.”
“That stopped him!” said Pilgrim, laughing.
“C’mon. Just translate.” She was quite capable of interpreting body language and tone by now. Sometimes even the Tinish chords made sense.
“Hmph. Okay.”
The Queen hiked her baby packs around and sat down. Her tone became conciliatory. “If this weather weren’t so clear, or if there were night times, we might try it, but—You remember the old path? Twenty miles inland from here? That should be overgrown by now. And the road coming back is—”
Gobble-hiss from Vendacious, angry. “I tell you, this is safe! We’ll lose days on the other path. If we arrive late at Flenser’s, all my work will be for nothing. You must go forward here.”
“Oops,” Pilgrim whispered, unable to resist a little editorializing, “Ol’ Vendacious may have gone too far with that.” The Queen’s heads arched back. Pilgrim’s imitation of her human voice said, “I understand your anxiety, pack of my blood. But we go forward where I say. If that is intolerable to you, I will regretfully accept your resignation.”
“But you need me!”
“Not that much.”
Johanna suddenly realized that the whole mission could fall apart right here, without even a shot being fired. Where would we be without Vendacious? She held her breath and watched the two packs. Parts of Vendacious walked in quick circles, stopping for angry instants to stare at Woodcarver. Finally all his necks drooped. “Um. My apologies, Your Majesty. As long as you find me of use, I beg to continue in your service.”
Now Woodcarver relaxed, too. She reached to pet her puppies. They had responded with her mood, thrashing in their carriers and hissing. “Forgiven. I want your independent advice, Vendacious. It has been miraculously good.”
Vendacious smiled weakly.
“I didn’t think the jerk had it in him,” Pilgrim said near Johanna’s ear.
It took two dayarounds to reach the old path. As Woodcarver had predicted, it was overgrown. More: In places there was no sign of the path at all, just young trees growing from slumped earth. It would take days to get down the valley side this way. If Woodcarver had any misgivings about the decision, she didn’t mention them to Johanna. The Queen was six hundred years old; she talked often enough about the inflexibility of age. Now Johanna was getting a clear example of what that meant.
When they came to a washout, trees were cut down and a bridge constructed on the spot. It took a day to get by each such spot. But progress was agonizingly slow even where the path was still in place. No one rode in the carts now. The edge of the path had worn away, and the cart wheels sometimes turned on nothingness. On Johanna’s right she could look down at tree crowns that were a few meters from her feet.
They ran into the wolves six days along the detour, when they had almost reached the valley floor. Wolves. That’s what Pilgrim called them anyway; what Johanna saw looked like gerbils.
They had just completed a kilometer stretch of easy going. Even under the trees they could feel the wind, dry and warm and moving ceaselessly down the valley. The last patches of snow between the trees were being sucked to nothingness, and there was a haze of smoke beyond the north wall of the valley.
Johanna was walking alongside Woodcarver’s cart. Pilgrim was about ten meters behind, chatting occasionally with them. (The Queen herself had been very quiet these last days.) Suddenly there was a screech of Tinish alarm from above them.
A second later Vendacious shouted from a hundred meters ahead. Through gaps in the trees, Johanna could see troopers on the next switchback above them unlimbering crossbows, firing into the hillside above them. The sunlight came dappled through the forest cover, bringing plenty of light but in splotches that broke and moved as the soldiers hustled about. Chaos, but … there were things up there that weren’t Tines! Small, brown or gray, they flitted through the shadows and the splotches of light. They swept up the hillside coming upon the soldiers from the opposite direction that they were shooting.
“Turn around! Turn around.” Johanna screamed, but her voice was lost in
the turmoil. Besides, who there could understand her? All of Woodcarver was peering up at the battle. She grabbed Johanna’s sleeve. “You see something up there? Where?”
Johanna stuttered an explanation, but now Pilgrim had seen something too. His gobbled shouting came loud over the battle. He raced back up the trail to where Scrupilo was trying to get a cannon unlimbered. “Johanna! Help me.”
Woodcarver hesitated, then said, “Yes. It may be that bad. Help with the cannon, Johanna.”
It was only fifty meters to the gun cart, but uphill. She ran. Something heavy smashed into the path just behind her. Part of a soldier! It twisted and screamed. Half a dozen gerbil-sized hunks of fur were attached to the body, and its pelt was streaked with red. Another member fell past her. Another. Johanna stumbled but kept running.
Wickwrackscar was standing heads-together, just a few meters from Scrupilo. He was armed in every adult member—mouth knives and steel tines. He waved Johanna down next to him. “We run on a nest of, of wolves.” His speech was awkward, slurred. “Must be between here and path above. A lump, like a l’il castle tower. Gotta kill nest. Can you see?” Evidently he could not; he was looking all over. Johanna looked back up the hillside. There seemed to be less fighting now, just sounds of Tinish agony.
Johanna pointed. “You mean there, that dark thing?”
Pilgrim didn’t answer. His members were twitching, his mouth knives waving randomly. She leaped away from the flashing metal. He had already cut himself. Sound attack. She looked back along the path. She’d had more than a year to know the packs, and what she was seeing now was … madness. Some packs were exploding, racing in all directions to distances where thought couldn’t possibly be sustained. Others—Woodcarver on her cart—huddled in heaps, with scarcely a head showing.