A Fire Upon the Deep (14 page)

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 and soft-toed one member to the edge of the balcony. He looked down, carefully silencing that member's fore-tympanum. The skylight was dim, but he could see the pups huddled together ... with its new friend. The mantis. Serendipity, that was all he could call this, the reward that comes to a researcher who labors long enough, carefully enough. He had had two problems. The first had been growing for a year: Amdiranifani was slowly fading, its members falling into the usual autism of wholly newborn packs. The second was the captured alien; that was an enormous threat, an enormous mystery, an enormous opportunity. How to communicate with it? Without communication, the possibilities for manipulation were very limited.

Yet in a single blind stroke, an incompetent Servant had shown the way to solve both problems. Now that his eyes were adjusted to the dimness, Steel could see the alien beneath the pile of puppies. When first he'd heard that the creature had been put in with an experiment, Steel had been enraged beyond thought; the Servant who made the mistake had been recycled. But the days passed. Experiment Amdiranifani began showing more liveliness than any time since its pups were weaned. It quickly became obvious -- from dissecting the other aliens, and observing this one -- that mantis folk did
not
live in packs. Steel had a complete alien.

The alien moved in its sleep, and made a low-pitched mouth noise; it was totally incapable of any other kind of sound. The pups shifted to fit the new position. They were sleeping too, vaguely thinking among themselves. The low end of their sounds was a perfect imitation of the alien.... And that was the greatest coup of all.
Experiment Amdiranifani was learning the alien's speech.
To the pack of newborns this was simply another form of interpack talk, and apparently its mantis friend was more interesting than the tutors who appeared on these balconies. The Flenser Fragment claimed it was the physical contact, that the pups were reacting to the alien as a surrogate parent, thoughtless though the alien was.

It really didn't matter. Steel brought another head to the edge of the balcony. He stood quietly, neither member thinking directly at the other. The air smelled faintly of puppies and mantis sweat. These two were the Movement's greatest treasure: the key to survival and more. By now, Steel knew the flying ship was not part of an invasion fleet. Their visitors were more like ill-prepared refugees. There had been no word of other landings, and the Movement's spies were spread far.

It had been a close thing, winning against the aliens. Their single weapon had killed most of a regiment. In the proper jaws, such weapons could defeat armies. He had no doubt the ship contained more powerful killing machines -- ones that still functioned. Wait and watch, Steel counseled himself. Let Amdiranifani show the levers that could control this alien. The entire world would be the prize.

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