A Fire Upon the Deep (21 page)

Three hours later and Relay was a hundred and fifty light-years behind them. The
OOB
had caught up with the main body of fleeing ships. What with the archives and the tourism, there had been an extraordinary number of interstellar ships at Relay: ten thousand vehicles were spread across the light-years around them. But stars were rare this far off the galactic plane and they were at least a hundred hours flying time from the nearest refuge.

For Ravna, it was the start of a new battle. She glared across the deck at Blueshell. The Skroderider dithered, its fronds twisting on themselves in a way she had not seen before. "See here, my lady Bergsndot, High Point is a lovely civilization, with some bipedal participants. It is safe. It is nearby. You could adapt." He paused.
Reading my expression is he?
"But -- but if that is not acceptable, we will take you further. Give us a chance to contract the proper cargo, and -- and we'll take you all the way back to Sjandra Kei. How about that?"

"No. You already have a contract, Blueshell. With Vrinimi Organization. The three of us --"
and whatever has become of Pham Nuwen
"-- are going to the Bottom of the Beyond."

"I am shaking my head in disbelief! We received a preliminary retainer, true. But now that Vrinimi Org is dead, there is no one to make good on the rest of the agreement. Hence we are free of it also."

"Vrinimi is not dead. You heard Grondr 'Kalir. The Org had --
has
-- branch offices all across the Beyond. The obligation stands."

"On a technicality. We both know that those branches could never make the final payment."

Ravna didn't have a good answer to that. "You have an obligation," she said, but without the proper forcefulness. She had never been good at bluster.

"My lady, are you truly speaking from Org ethics, or from simple humanity?"

"I-- " In fact, Ravna had never completely understood Org ethics. That was one reason why she had intended to return to Sjandra Kei after her 'prenticeship, and one reason the Org had dealt cautiously with the human race. "It doesn't matter which I speak from! There is a contract. You were happy to honor it when things looked safe. Well, things turned deadly -- but that possibility was part of the deal." Ravna glanced at Greenstalk. She had been silent so far, not even rustling at her mate. Her fronds were tightly held against her central stalk. Maybe -- "Listen, there
are
other reasons besides contract obligation. The Perversion is more powerful than anyone thought.
It killed a Power today.
And it's operating in the Middle Beyond.... The Riders have a long history, Blueshell, longer than most races' entire existence. The Perversion may be strong enough to put an end to all of that."

Greenstalk rolled toward her and opened slightly. "You -- you really think we might find something on that ship at the Bottom, something that could harm a Power among Powers?"

Ravna paused. "Yes. And Old One himself thought so, just before he died."

Blueshell wrapped even tighter around himself, twisting. In anguish? "My Lady, we are traders. We have lived long and traveled far ... and survived by minding our own business. No matter what romantics may think, traders do not go on quests. What you ask ... is impossible, mere Beyonders seeking to subvert a Power."

Yet that was a risk you signed for.
But Ravna didn't say it aloud. Perhaps Greenstalk did: her fronds rustled, and Blueshell scrinched even more. Greenstalk was silent for a second, then she did something funny with her axles, bumping free of the stickem. Her wheels spun on nothing as she floated through a slow arc, till she was upside down, her fronds reaching down to brush Blueshell's. They rattled back and forth for almost five minutes. Blueshell slowly untwisted, the fronds relaxing and patting back at his mate.

Finally he said. "Very well.... One quest. But mark you! Never another."

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PART II

Spring came wet and cold, and excruciatingly slow. It had been raining the last eight days. How Johanna wished for something else, even the dark of winter back again.

She slogged across mud that had been moss. It was midday; the gloomy light would last another three hours. Scarbutt claimed that without the overcast, they would be seeing a bit of direct sunlight nowadays. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.

The castle's great yard was on a hillside. Mud and sullen snow spread down the hill, piled against the wooden buildings. Last summer there had been a glorious view from here. And in the winter, the aurora had spilled green and blue across the snow, glinted on the frozen harbor, and outlined the far hills against the sky. Now: The rain was a close mist; she couldn't even see the city beyond the walls. The clouds were a low and ragged ceiling above her head. She knew there were guards on the stone walls of the castle curtain, but today they must be huddled behind watch slits. Not a single animal, not a single pack was visible. The Tines' world was an empty place compared to Straum -- but not like the High Lab either. High Lab was a airless rock orbiting a red dwarf. The Tines' world was
alive
, moving; sometimes it looked as beautiful and friendly as a holiday resort on Straum. Indeed, Johanna realized that it was kindlier than most worlds the human race had settled -- certainly a gentler world than Nyjora, and perhaps as nice as Old Earth.

Johanna had reached her bungalow. She paused for a second under its outcurving walls and looked across the courtyard. Yes, it looked a little like medieval Nyjora. But the stories from the Age of Princesses hadn't conveyed the implacable power in such a world: The rain went on for as far as she could see. Without decent technology, even a cold rain could be a deadly thing. So could the wind. And the sea was not something for an afternoon's fun sailing; she thought of surging hillocks of coldness, puckered with rain ... going on and on. Even the forests around the town were threatening. It was easy to wander into them, but there were no radio finders, no refresh stalls disguised as tree trunks. Once lost, you would simply die. Nyjoran fairy tales had a special meaning for her now: no great imagination was needed to invent the elementals of wind and rain and sea. This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you.

And she
did
have plenty of enemies. Johanna pulled open the tiny door and went inside.

A pack of Tines was sitting around the fire. It scrambled to its feet and helped Johanna out of her rainjacket. She didn't shrink from the fine-toothed muzzles anymore. This was one of her usual helpers; she could almost think of the jaws as hands, deftly pulling the oilskin jacket down her arms and hanging it near the fire.

Johanna chucked her boots and pants, and accepted the quilted wrap that the pack "handed" her.

"Dinner. Now," she said to the pack.

"Okay."

Johanna settled on a pillow by the fire pit. In fact the Tines were
more
primitive than the humans on Nyjora: The Tines' world was not a fallen colony. They didn't even have legend to guide them. Sanitation was a sometime thing. Before Woodcarver, Tinish doctors bled their patients/victims.... She knew now that she was living in the Tines' equivalent of a luxury apartment. The deep-polished wood was not a normal thing. The designs painted on the pillars and walls were the result of many hours' labor.

Johanna rested her chin on her hands and stared into the flames. She was vaguely aware of the pack prancing around the pit, hanging pots over the fire. This one spoke very little Samnorsk; it wasn't in on Woodcarver's dataset project. Many weeks ago, Scarbutt had asked to move in here -- what better way to speed the learning process? Johanna shivered at the memory. She knew the scarred one was just a single member, that the
pack
that killed Dad had itself died. Johanna understood, but every time she saw "Peregrine", she saw her father's murderer sitting fat and happy, thinking to hide itself behind its three smaller fellows. Johanna smiled into the flames, remembering the whack she had landed on Scarbutt when he made the suggestion. She'd lost control, but it had been worth it. No one else suggested that "friends" should share this house with her. Most evenings they left her alone. And some nights ... Dad and Mom seemed so near, maybe just outside, waiting for her to notice. Even though she had seen them die, something inside her refused to let them go.

Cooking smells slipped past the familiar daydream. Tonight it was meat and beans, with something like onions. Surprise. The stuff smelled good; if there had been any variety, she would have enjoyed it. But Johanna hadn't seen fresh fruit in sixty days. Salted meat and veggies were the only winter fare. If Jefri were here, he'd throw a fit. It was months past since the word came from Woodcarver's spies up north: Jefri had died in the ambush.... Johanna was getting over it, she really was. And in some ways, being all alone made things ... simpler.

The pack put a plate of meat and beans before her, along with a kind of knife.
Oh, well.
Johanna grabbed the crooked hilt (bent sideways to be held by Tinish jaws) and dug in.

She was almost finished when there was a polite scratching at the door. Her servant gobbled something. The visitor replied, then said in rather good Samnorsk (and a voice that was eerily like her own), "Hello there, my name is Scriber. I would like a small talk, okay?"

One of the servant's turned to look at her; the rest were watching the door. Scriber was the one she thought of as Pompous Clown. He'd been with Scarbutt at the ambush, but he was such a fool that she scarcely felt threatened by him.

"Okay," she said, starting toward the door. Her servant (guard) grabbed crossbows in its jaws, and all five members snaked up the staircase to the loft; there wasn't space for more than one pack down here.

The cold and wet blew into the room along with her visitor. Johanna retreated to the other side of the fire while Scriber took off his rain slickers. The pack members shook themselves the way dogs do, a noisy, amusing sight -- and you didn't want to be near when it happened.

Finally Scriber sauntered over to the fire pit. Under the slickers he wore jackets with the usual stirrups and the open spaces behind the shoulders and at the haunches. But Scriber's appeared to be padded above the shoulders to make his members look heavier than they really were. One of him sniffed at her plate, while the other heads looked this way and that ... but never directly at her.

Johanna looked down at the pack. She still had trouble talking to more than one face; usually she picked on whichever was looking back at her. "Well? What did you come to talk about?"

One of the heads finally looked at her. It licked its lips. "Okay. Yes. I thought to see how do you do? I mean ..."
gobble
. Her servant answered from upstairs, probably reporting what kind of mood she was in. Scriber straightened up. Four of his six heads looked at Johanna. His other two members paced back and forth, as if contemplating something important. "Look here. You are the only human I know, but I have always been a big student of character. I know you are not happy here --"

Pompous Clown was also master of the obvious.

"-- and I understand. But we do the best to help you. We are not the bad people who killed your parents and brother."

Johanna put a hand on the low ceiling and leaned forward.
You're all thugs; you just happen to have the same enemies I do.
"I know that, and I am cooperating. You'd still be playing the dataset's kindermode if it weren't for me. I've shown you the reading courses; if you guys have any brains, you'll have gunpowder by summer." The Oliphaunt was an heirloom toy, a huggable favorite thing she should have outgrown years ago. But there was history in it -- stories of the queens and princesses of the Dark Ages, and how they had struggled to triumph over the jungles, to rebuild the cities and then the spaceships. Half-hidden on obscure reference paths there were also hard numbers, the history of technology. Gunpowder was one of the easiest things. When the weather cleared up, there would be some prospecting expeditions; Woodcarver had known about sulfur, but didn't have quantities in town. Making cannon would be harder. But then.... "Then your enemies will be killed. Your people are getting what they want from me. So what's your complaint?"

"Complaint?" Pompous Clown's heads bobbed up and down in alternation. Such distributed gestures seemed to be the equivalent of facial expressions, though Johanna hadn't figured many of them out. This one might mean embarrassment. "I have no complaint. You are helping us, I know. But, but ..." Three of his members were pacing around now. "It's just that I see more than most people, perhaps a little like Woodcarver did in oldendays. I am a -- I've seen your word for it -- a 'dilettante'. You know, a person who studies all things and who is talented at everything. I am only thirty years old, but I have read almost every book in the world, and --" the heads bowed, perhaps in shyness? "-- I'm even planning to write one, perhaps the true story of your adventure."

Johanna found herself smiling. Most often she saw the Tines as barbarian strangers, inhuman in spirit as well as form. But if she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that Scriber was a fellow Straumer. Mom had a few friends just as brainless and innocently self-convinced as this one, men and women with a hundred grandiose projects that would never ever amount to anything. Back on Straum, they had been boring perils that she avoided. Now ... well, Scriber's foolishness was almost like being back home again.

"You're here to study me for your book?"

More alternating nods. "Well, yes. And also, I wanted to talk to you about my other plans. I've always been something of an inventor, you see. I know that doesn't mean much now. It seems that everything that can be invented is already in Dataset. I've seen many of my best ideas there." He sighed, or made the sound of a sigh. Now he was imitating one of the pop science voices in the dataset. Sound was the easiest thing for the Tines; it could be darn confusing.

"In any case, I was just wondering how to improve some of those ideas --" four of Scriber's members bellied down on the bench by the fire pit; it looked like he was settling in for a long conversation. His other two walked around the pit to give her a stack of paper threaded with brass hoops. While one on the other side of the fire continued to talk, the two carefully turned the pages and pointed at where she should look.

Well, he did have plenty of ideas: Tethered birds to hoist flying boats, giant lenses that would concentrate the sun's light on enemies and set them afire. From some of the pictures, it appeared he thought the atmosphere extended beyond the moon. Scriber explained each idea in numbing detail, pointing at the drawings and patting her hands enthusiastically. "So you see the possibilities? My unique slant combined with the proven inventions in Dataset. Who knows where it could lead?"

Johanna giggled, overcome by the vision of Scriber's giant birds hauling kilometer-wide lenses to the moon. He seemed to take the sound for approval.

"Yes! It's brilliant, okay? My latest idea, I never would have thought it except for Dataset. This 'radio', it projects sound very far and fast, okay? Why not combine it with the power of our Tinish thoughts? A pack could think as one even spread across hundreds of, um, kilometers."

Now that almost made sense! But if gunpowder took months to make -- even given the exact formula -- how many
decades
would it be before the packs had radio? Scriber was an immense fountain of half-baked ideas. She let his words wash over her for more than an hour. It was insanity, but less alien than most of what she had endured this last year.

Finally he seemed to run down; there were longer pauses and he asked her opinion more often. Finally he said, "Well, that was certainly fun, okay?"

"Unh, yes, fascinating."

"I knew you would like it. You're just like my people, I really think. You're not all angry, not all the time...."

"Just what do you mean by that?" Johanna pushed a soft muzzle away and stood. The dogthing rocked back on its haunches to look up at her.

"I, well ... you have much to hate, I know. But you seem so angry at
us
all the time, and we're the ones who are trying to help you! After the day work you stay here, you don't want to talk with people -- though now I see that was our fault. You wanted us to come here but were too proud to say it. I have these insights into character, you see. My friend, the one you call Scarbutt: he is truly a nice fellow. I know I can tell you that honestly, and that as my new friend you will believe. He would very much like to come to visit you, too....
urk
."

Johanna walked slowly around the fire pit, forcing the two members to back away from her. All of Scriber was looking up at her now, the necks arching around one another, the eyes wide.

"I'm
not
like you. I
don't
need your talk, or your stupid ideas." She threw Scriber's notebook into the pit. Scriber leaped to the fire's edge, desperately reached for the burning notes. He pulled most of them back and clutched them to his chests.

Johanna kept walking toward him, kicking at his legs. Scriber retreated, backing and sprawling. "Stupid, dirty, butchers. I'm not like you." She slapped her hand on a ceiling beam. "Humans don't
like
to live like animals. We don't adopt killers. You tell Scarbutt, you tell him. If he ever comes by for a friendly chat, I-I'll smash in his head; I'll smash in all of them!"

Scriber was backed into the wall now. His heads turned wildly this way and that. He was making plenty of noise. Some of it was Samnorsk, but too high-pitched to understand. One of his mouths found the door pole. He pushed open the door, and all six members raced into the twilight, their rain slickers forgotten.

Johanna knelt and stuck her head through the doorway. The air was a wind-driven mist. In an instant, her face was so cold and wet that she couldn't feel the tears. Scriber was six shadows in the darkening grayness, shadows that raced down the hillside, sometimes tumbling in their haste. In a second he was gone. There was nothing but the vague forms of nearby cabins, and the yellow light that spilled out around her from the fire.

Strange. Right after the ambush, she had felt terror. The Tines had been unstoppable killers. Then, on the boat, when she smashed Scarbutt ... it had been so wonderful: the whole pack collapsed, and suddenly she knew that she could fight back, that she could break their bones. She didn't have to be at their mercy.... Tonight she had learned something more. Even without touching them, she could hurt them. Some of them, anyway. Her dislike alone had undone Pompous Clown.

Johanna backed into the smoky warmth and shut the door. She should feel triumph.

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