A Fire Upon the Deep (12 page)

Peregrine was sitting back to back on the steps of his quarters when Woodcarver came to see him next day. She came alone, and wearing the simple green jackets he remembered from his last visit.

He didn't bow or go out to meet her. She looked at him coolly for a moment, and sat down just a few yards away.

"How is the Two-Legs?" he asked.

"I took out the arrow and sewed the wound shut. I think it will survive. My advisors were pleased: the creature didn't act like a reasoning being. It fought even after it was tied down, as though it had no concept of surgery.... How is your head?"

"All right, as long as I don't move around." The rest of him -- Scar -- lay behind the doorway in the dark interior of the lodge. "The tympanum is healing straight, I think. I'll be fine in a few days."

"Good." A wrecked tympanum could mean continuing mental problems, or the need for a new member and the pain of finding a use for the singleton that was sent into silence. "I remember you, pilgrim. All the members are different, but you really are the Peregrine of before. You had some great stories. I enjoyed your visit."

"And I enjoyed meeting the great Woodcarver. That is the reason I returned."

She cocked a head wryly. "The great Woodcarver of before, not the wreck of now?"

He shrugged. "What happened?"

She didn't answer immediately. For a moment, they sat and looked across the city. It was cloudy this afternoon, with rain coming. The breeze off the channel was a cool stinging on his lips and eyes. Woodcarver shivered, and puffed her fur out a bit. Finally she said, "I held my soul six hundred years -- and that's counting by foreclaws. I should think it's obvious what has become of me."

"The perversion never hurt you before." Peregrine was not normally so blunt. Something about her brought out the frankness in him.

"Yes, the average incest degrades to my state in a few centuries, and is an idiot long before then. My methods were much cleverer. I knew who to breed with whom, which puppies to keep and which to put on others. So it was always my flesh bearing my memories, and my soul remained pure. But I didn't understand enough -- or perhaps I tried the impossible. The choices got harder and harder, till I was left with choosing between brains and physical defect." She wiped away the drool, and all but the blind one looked out across her city. "These are the best days of summer, you know. Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season." And the green did seem to be everywhere it could be: featherleaf down the hillside and in the town, ferns all over the near hillsides, and heather struggling toward the gray crowns of the mountains across the channel. "I love this place."

He never expected to be comforting the Woodcarver of Woodcarvers. "You made a miracle here. I've heard of it all the way on the other side of the world.... And I'll bet that half the packs around here are related to you."

"Y-yes, I've been successful beyond a rake's wildest dreams. I've had no shortage of lovers, even if I couldn't use the pups myself. Sometimes I think my get has been my greatest experiment. Scrupilo and Vendacious are mostly my offspring ... but so is Flenser."

Huh! Peregrine hadn't known that last.

"The last few decades, I'd more or less accepted my fate. I couldn't outwit eternity; sometime soon I would let my soul slip free. I let the council take over more and more; how could I claim the domain after I was no longer me? I went back to art -- you saw those monochrome mosaics."

"Yes! They're beautiful."

"I'll show you my picture loom sometime. The procedure is tedious but almost automatic. It was a nice project for the last years of my soul. But now -- you and your alien have changed everything. Damn it! If only this had happened a hundred years ago. What I would have done with it! We've been playing with your 'picture box', you know. The pictures are finer than any in our world. They are a bit like my mosaics -- the way the sun is like a glowbug. Millions of colored dots go to make each picture, the tiles so small you can't see them without one of Scriber's eye-tools. I've worked for
years
to make a few dozen mosaics. The picture box can make unnumbered thousands, so fast they seem to move. Your aliens make my life less than an unweaned pup's scratching in its cradle."

The queen of the Woodcarvers was softly crying, but her voice was angry. "And now the whole world is going to change, but too late for such wreckage as I!"

Almost without conscious thought, Peregrine extended one of his members toward the Woodcarver. He walked unseemly close: eight yards, five. Their thoughts were suddenly fuzzy with interference, but he could feel her calming.

She laughed blearily. "Thank you.... Strange that you should be sympathetic. The greatest problem of my life is nothing to a pilgrim.

"You were hurting." It was all he could think to say.

"But you pilgrims change and change and change --" She eased one of herself close to him; they were almost touching, and it was even harder to think.

Peregrine spoke slowly, concentrating on every word, hoping he wouldn't forget his point. "But I do keep something of a soul. The parts that remain a pilgrim must have a certain outlook." Sometimes great insight comes in the noise of battle or intimacy. This was such at time. "And -- and I think the world itself is due for a change of soul now that we have Two-Legs dropping from the sky. What better time for Woodcarver to give up the old?"

She smiled, and the confusion became louder, but a pleasant thing. "I ... hadn't ... thought of it that way. Now is the time to change...."

Peregrine walked into her midst. The two packs stood for a moment, necking, thoughts blending into sweet chaos. Their last clear recollection was of stumbling up the steps and into his lodge.

Late that afternoon, Woodcarver brought the picture box to Scrupilo's laboratory. When she arrived Scrupilo and Vendacious were already present. Scriber Jaqueramaphan was there too, but standing farther from the others than courtesy might demand. She had interrupted some kind of argument. A few days before, such squabbling would have just depressed her. Now -- she dragged her limper into the room and looked at the others through her drooler's eyes -- and smiled. Woodcarver felt the best she had in years. She had made her decision and acted on it, and now there were new adventures to be had.

Scriber brightened at her entrance. "Did you check on Peregrine? How is he?"

"He is fine, fine, just fine."
Oops, no need to show them
how
fine he really is!
"I mean, there'll be a full recovery."

"Your Majesty, I'm very grateful to you and your doctors. Wickwrackscar is a good pack, and I ... I mean, even a pilgrim can't change members every day, like suits of clothes."

Woodcarver waved an offhand acknowledgment. She walked to the middle of the room, and set the alien's picture box on the table there. It looked like nothing so much as a big pink pillow -- with floppy ears and a weird animal design sewed in its cover. After playing with it for a day and a half, she was getting pretty good ... at opening the thing up. As always, the Two-Legs's face appeared, making mouth noises. As always, Woodcarver felt an instant of awe at seeing the moving mosaic. A million colored "tiles" had to flip and shift in absolute synchrony to create the illusion. Yet it happened exactly the same each time. She turned the screen so Scrupilo and Vendacious could see.

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."

"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 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."