A Fire Upon the Deep (15 page)

Sometimes Mom used to say that something was "more fun than a barrel full of puppies." Jefri Olsndot had never had more than one pet at a time, and only once had that been a dog. But now he understood what she meant. From the very first day, even when he had been so tired and scared, he had been entranced by the eight puppies. And they by him. They were all over him, pulling at his clothes, unfastening his shoes, sitting on his lap, or just running around him. Three or four were always staring at him. Their eyes were completely brown or pink, and seemed large for their heads. From the beginning the puppies had mimicked him. They were better than Straumli songbirds; anything he said, they could echo -- or play back later. And when he cried, often the puppies would cry too, and cuddle around him.

There were other dogs, big ones that wore clothes and entered the room through doorways high up on the walls. They lowered food into the room, sometimes making strange noises. But the food tasted awful, and they didn't respond to Jefri's screaming even by mimicking him.

Two days had passed, then a week. Jefri had investigated everything in the room. It wasn't really a dungeon; it was too big. And besides, prisoners don't get pets. He understood that this world was uncivilized, not part of the Realm, perhaps not even on the Net. If Mom or Dad or Johanna weren't nearby, it was possible that there was no one here to teach the dogs to speak Samnorsk! Then it would be up to Jefri Olsndot to teach the dogs and find his family. Now when the whitejacketed dogs came onto the corner balconies, Jefri shouted questions at them. It didn't help very much. Even the one with red stripes didn't respond. But the puppies did! They shouted right along with Jefri, sometimes echoing his words, sometimes making nonsense sounds.

It didn't take Jefri long to realize that the puppies were driven by a single mind. When they ran around him, some would always sit a little way off, their graceful necks arching this way and that -- and the runners seemed to know exactly what the others saw. He couldn't hide things behind his back if there was even one of them to alert the others. For a while he thought they were somehow talking to each other. But it was more than that: when he watched them unfasten his shoes or draw a picture -- the heads and mouths and paws cooperated
so
perfectly, like the fingers on a person's hands. Jefri didn't reason things out so explicitly; but over a period of days he came to think of all the puppies together as a single friend. At the same time he noticed that the puppies was mixing up his words -- and sometimes making new meanings.

"You me play." The words came out like a cheap voice splice, but they generally preceded a mad game of tag all around the furniture.

"You me picture." The slate board covered the lowest meter of the wall, all around the room. It was a display device like Jefri had never seen in his life: dirty, imprecise, imperfectly deletable, unstorable. Jefri loved it. His face and hands, and most of Puppies' lips, got covered with chalk stains. They drew each other, and themselves. Puppies didn't draw neat pictures like Jefri's; Puppies' dog figures had big heads and paws, with the bodies all smudged together. When he drew Jefri, the hands were always big, each finger carefully drawn.

Jefri drew his family and tried to make Puppies understand.

Day by day, the sunlight circled higher on the walls. Sometimes the room was dark now. At least once a day, packs came to talk to Puppies. This was one of the few things which could pull the little ones away from Jefri. Puppies would sit below the balconies, screeching and croaking at the adults. It was a school class! They'd lower scrolls for him to look at, and retrieve ones he had marked.

Jefri sat quietly and watched the lessons. He fidgeted, but he didn't shout at the teachers anymore. Just a little longer, and he and Puppies would really be talking. Just a little longer and Puppies could find out for him where Mom and Dad and Johanna were.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all. Once Amdiranifani was fluent in the mantis language, Steel had him explain about the "tragic death" of Jefri's parents and brood-sibling. The Flenser Fragment had argued against it, but Steel wanted quick and unquestioned control.

Now it seemed that the Fragment might have been right; at least he should have held out the hope that the brood-sibling lived. Steel looked solemnly at the Amdiranifani Experiment. "How can we help?"

The young pack looked up trustingly. "Jefri is so terribly upset about his parents and
sister
." Amdiranifani was using mantis words a lot, often unnecessarily:
sister
instead of brood-sibling. "He hasn't been eating much. He doesn't want to play. It makes me very sad."

Steel kept watch on the far balcony. The Flenser Fragment was there. It was not hiding, though most of its faces were out of the candlelight. So far its insights had been extraordinary. But the Fragment's stare was like old times, when a mistake could mean mutilation or worse.
So be it.
The stakes were higher now than ever before; if fear at Steel's throats could help him succeed, he welcomed it. He looked away from the balcony, and brought all his faces to an expression of tender sympathy for poor Jefri's plight. "You just have to make it -- him -- understand. No one can bring his parents or
sister
back to life. But we know who the murderers are. We're doing everything we can to defend against them. Tell him how hard this is. Woodcarvers is an empire that has lasted hundreds of years. In a fight, we are no match for them. That's why we need all the help he can give us. We need him to teach us to use his parents' ship."

The puppy pack lowered a head. "Yes. I'll try, but ..." The three members by Jefri made low-pitched grunting noises at it. The mantis sat head bowed; it held its tentacled paws across its eyes. The creature had been like this for several days, and the withdrawal was getting worse. Now it shook its head violently, made sharp noises a little higher pitched than its normal register.

"Jefri says he doesn't understand how things work in the ship. He's just a little ..." the pack searched for a translation. " ... he is really very young. You know, like me."

Steel nodded understandingly. It was an obvious consequence of the aliens' singleton nature, but weird even so: Every one of them started out all a puppy. Every one of them was like Steel's puppy-pack experiments. Parental knowledge was transmitted by the equivalent of interpack speech. That made the creature easy to dupe, but it was a damned inconvenience now. "Still, if there's anything he can help explain."

More grunting from the mantis. Steel should learn that language. The sounds were easy; these pitiful creatures used their
mouths
to talk, like a bird or a forest slug. For now he depended on Amdiranifani. For now that was okay; the puppy pack trusted him. Another piece of serendipity. With a few of his recent experiments, Steel had tried love in place of Flenser's original terror/love combination; there had been a slim chance that it might be superior. By great good luck Amdiranifani fell into the love group. Even his instructors had avoided negative reinforcement. The pack would believe anything he said ... and so, Steel hoped, would the mantis.

Amdiranifani translated: "There is something else; he has asked me about it before. Jefri knows how to wake the other children --" the word literally meant "pack of puppies", "-- on the ship. You look surprised, my lord Steel?"

Even though he no longer dreamed in terror of monster minds, Steel would just as soon
not
have a hundred more aliens running around. "I hadn't realized they could be wakened so easily.... But we shouldn't do it right now. We're having trouble finding food that Jefri can eat." That was true; the creature was an incredibly finicky eater. "I don't think we could feed any more right now."

More grunting. More sharp cries from Jefri. Finally, "There is one other thing, my lord. Jefri thinks it may be possible to use the ship's
ultrawave
to call for help from others like his parents."

The Flenser Fragment jerked out of the shadows. A pair of heads looked down at the mantis, while another stared meaningfully at Steel. Steel didn't react; he could be cooler than any loose pack. "That's something to think about. Perhaps you and Jefri could talk more about it. I don't want to try it till we're sure we won't hurt the ship." That was weak. He saw the Fragment twitch a muzzle in amusement.

As he spoke, Amdiranifani was translating. Jefri responded almost immediately.

"Oh, that's okay. He meant a special call. Jefri says the ship has been signaling ... all by itself ... ever since it landed."

And Steel wondered if he had ever heard a deadly threat uttered in such sweet innocence.

They began letting Amdi and Jefri outside to play. Beforehand Amdi was nervous about going out. He was unused to wearing clothes. His whole life -- all four years of it -- had been spent in that one big room. He read about the outside and was curious about it, yet he was also a little afraid. But the human boy seemed to want it. Every day he'd been more withdrawn, his crying softer. Mostly he was crying for his parents or sister, but sometimes he cried about being locked up so deep away.

So Amdi had talked to Mr. Steel, and now they got out almost every day, at least to an inner courtyard. At first, Jefri just sat, not really looking around. But Amdi discovered that
he
loved the outdoors, and every time he got his friend to play a little more.

Packs of teachers and guards stood at the corners of the yellowing moss and watched. Amdi -- and eventually Jefri -- got a big kick out of harassing them. They hadn't realized it down in the room, where visitors came at the balconies, but most adults were nervous around Jefri. The boy was half again as tall as a normally standing pack member. When he came close, the average pack would clump together and edge away. They didn't like having to look
up
at him. It was silly, Amdi thought. Jefri was so tall and skinny, he looked like he might topple over at any moment. And when he ran it was like he was wildly trying to recover from a fall and never quite succeeding. So Amdi's favorite game those first days was tag. Whenever he was the chaser, he contrived to run Jefri right through the most prim looking whitejackets. If he and Jefri did it right they could turn the tag into a three-way event, Amdi chasing Jefri and a whitejackets racing to stay away from both of them.

Sometimes he felt sorry for the guards and whitejackets. They were so stiff and grownup. Didn't they understand how much fun it was to have a friend that you walk right next to, that you could actually
touch
?

It was mostly night now. Daylight hovered for a few hours around noon. The twilight before and after was bright enough to dim the stars and aurora, but still too faint to show colors. Though Amdi had spent his life indoors, he understood the geometry of the situation, and liked to watch the change of light. Jefri didn't much like the dark of winter ... until the first snow fell.

Amdi got his first set of jackets. And Mr. Steel had special clothes made for the human boy, big puffy things that covered his whole body and kept him warmer than a good pelt would have done.

On one side of the courtyard the snow was just six inches deep, but elsewhere it piled into drifts higher than Amdi's head. Torches were mounted in wind shields on the walls; their light glittered golden off the snow. Amdi knew about snow -- but he'd never seen it before. He loved to splash it on one of his jackets. He would stare and stare, trying to see the snowflakes without his breath melting them. The hexagonal pattern was tantalizing, just at the limit of his vision.

But tag was no fun anymore; the human could run through drifts that left Amdi swimming in the white stuff. There were other things the human could do, wonderful things. He could make balls of snow and throw them. The guards were very upset by this, especially when Jefri plinked a few members. It was the first time he ever saw them get angry.

Amdi raced around the windswept side of the courtyard, dodging snowballs and keening frustration. Human hands were such wicked, wicked things. How he would love to have a pair -- four pairs! He circled round from three sides and sprinted right at the human. Jefri backed quickly into deeper snow, but too late. Amdi hit him high and low, tipping the Two-Legs over into a snowdrift. There was a mock battle, slashing lips and paws against Jefri's hands and feet. But now Amdi was on top. The human got paid back for his snowballs with plenty of snow stuffed down the back of his jacket.

Sometimes they just sat and watched the sky for so long that rumps and paws went numb. Sitting behind the largest snow drift, they were shaded from the castle torches and had a clear view of the lights in the sky.

At first Amdi had been entranced by the aurora. Even some of his teachers were. They said this part of the world was one of the best places to see the sky glow. Sometimes it was so faint that the torchlight glimmering off the snow was enough to blot it out. Other times it ran from horizon to horizon: green light trimmed with hints of pink, twisting as though ruffled by a slow wind.

He and Jefri could talk very easily now, though always in Jefri's language. The human couldn't make many of the sounds of interpack speech; even his pronunciation of Amdi's name was a scarcely recognizable. But Amdi understood Samnorsk pretty well; it was fun, their own secret language.

Jefri was not especially impressed by the aurora. "We have that lots at home. It's just light from --" He said a new word, and glanced at Amdi. It was funny how the human couldn't look in more than one place at time. His eyes and head were always moving. "-- you know, places where people make things. I think the gas and waste leaks out, and then the sun lights it up or it gets --" unintelligible.

"Places where people make things?"
In the sky?
Amdi had a globe; he knew the size of the world and its orientation. If the aurora were reflecting sunlight, it must be hundreds of miles above the ground! Amdi leaned a back against Jefri's jacket and made a very human whistling sound. His knowledge of geography was not up to his geometry, but, "The packs don't work in the sky, Jefri. We don't even have flying boats."

"Uh, that's right, you don't.... I don't know what that stuff is then. But I don't like it. It gets in the way of the stars." Amdi knew all about the stars; Jefri had told him. Somewhere out there were the friends of Jefri's parents.

Jefri was silent for several minutes. He wasn't looking at the sky anymore. Amdi wriggled a little closer, watching the shifting light in the sky. Behind them the wind-sharpened crest of the drift was edged with yellow light from the torches. Amdi could imagine what the other was thinking. "The commsets from the boat, they really aren't good enough to call for help?"

Jefri slapped the ground. "No! I told you. They're just radio. I think I can make them work, but what's the use? The ultrawave stuff is still on the boat and it's too big to move. I just don't understand why Mr. Steel won't let me go aboard.... I'm eight years old, you know. I could figure it out. Mom had it all set up before, before ..." His words guttered into the familiar, despairing silence.

Amdi rubbed a head against Jefri's shoulder. He had a theory about Mr. Steel's reluctance. It was an explanation he hadn't told Jefri before: "Maybe he's afraid you'll just fly away and leave us."

"That's stupid! I'd never leave you. Besides, that boat is
real
hard to fly. It was never meant to land on a world."

Jefri said the strangest things; sometimes Amdi was just misunderstanding -- but sometimes they were literal truth. Did the humans really have ships that
never
came to ground? Where did they go then? Amdi could almost feel new scales of reference clicking together in his mind. Mr. Steel's geography globe represented not the world, but something very, very small in the true scheme of things.

"I know you wouldn't leave us. But you can see how Mr. Steel might be afraid. He can't even talk to you except through me. We have to show him that we can be trusted."

"I guess."

"If you and I could get the radios working, that might help. I know my teachers haven't figured them out. Mr. Steel has one, but I don't think he understands it either."

"Yeah. If we could get the other one to work..."

That afternoon the guards got a break: their two charges came in from the cold early. The guards didn't question their good fortune.