by Vernor Vinge
She brought it close to her mouth, touched it with her tongue. Salty. On Straum, most shellfish would make you very sick if you ate them raw. How could she know, all alone without parents or a local commnet? She felt tears coming. She said a bad word, stuffed the green thing into her mouth, and tried to chew. Blandness, with the texture of suet and gristle. She gagged, spat it out … and tried to eat another. Altogether she got parts of two down. Maybe that was for the best; she’d wait and see how much she barfed up. She lay back and saw several pairs of eyes watching. The gobbling with the other side of the boat picked up. Then one of them sidled toward her, carrying a leather bag with a spigot. A canteen.
This creature was the biggest of all. The leader? It moved its head close to hers, putting the spout of the canteen near her mouth. The big one seemed sly, more cautious about approaching her than the others. Johanna’s eyes traveled back along its flanks. Beyond the edge of its jacket, the pelt on its rear was mostly white … and scored deep with a Y-shaped scar. This is the one that killed Dad.
Johanna’s attack was not planned; perhaps that’s why it worked so well. She lunged past the canteen and swung her free arm around the thing’s neck. She rolled over the animal, pinning it against the hull. By itself, it was smaller than she, and not strong enough to push her off. She felt its claws raking through the blankets but somehow never quite cutting her. She put all her weight on the creature’s spine, grabbed it where throat met jaw, and began slamming its head against the wood.
Then the others were on her, muzzles poking under her, jaws grabbing at her sleeve. She felt rows of needle teeth just poking through the fabric. Their bodies buzzed with a sound from her dreams, a sound that went straight through her clothes and rattled her bones.
They pulled her hand from the other’s throat, twisting her; she felt the arrowhead tearing her inside. But there was still one thing she could do: Johanna push off with her feet, butting her head against the base of the other’s jaw, smashing the top of its head into the hull. The bodies around her convulsed, and she was flipped onto her back. Pain was the only thing she could feel now. Neither rage nor fear could move her.
Yet part of her was still aware of the four. She had hurt them. She had hurt them all. Three wandered drunkenly, making whistling sounds that for once seemed to come from their mouths. The one with the scarred butt lay on its side, twitching. She had punched a star-shaped wound in the top of its head. Blood dripped down past its eyes. Red tears.
Minutes passed and the whistling stopped. The four creatures huddled together and the familiar hissing resumed. The bleeding from her chest had started again.
They stared at each other for a while. She smiled at her enemies. They could be hurt. She could hurt them. She felt better than she had since the landing.
ELEVEN
Before the Flenser Movement, Woodcarvers had been the most famous city-state west of the Icefangs. Its founder went back six centuries. In those days, things had been harder in the north; snow covered even the lowlands through most of the year. The Woodcarver had started alone, a single pack in a little cabin on an inland bay. The pack was a hunter and a thinker as much as an artist. There had been no settlements for a hundred miles around. Only a dozen of the carver’s early statues ever left his cabin, yet those statues had been his first fame. Three were still in existence. There was a city by the Long Lakes named for the one in its museum.
With fame had come apprentices. One cabin became ten, scattered across Woodcarver’s fjord. A century or two passed, and of course the Woodcarver slowly changed. He feared the change, the feeling that his soul was slipping away. He tried to keep hold of himself; almost everyone does to one extent or another. In the worst case, the pack falls into perversion, perhaps becomes soul-hollow. For Woodcarver, the quest was itself the change. He studied how each member fits within the soul. He studied pups and their raising, and how you might guess the contributions of a new one. He learned to shape the soul by training the members.
Of course little of this was new. It was the base of most religions, and every town had romance advisors and brood kenners. Such knowledge, whether valid or not, is important to any culture. What Woodcarver did was to look at it all again, without traditional bias. He gently experimented on himself and on the other artists in his little colony. He watched the results, using them to design new experiments. He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.
By the various standards of his age, what he did was heresy or perversion or simple insanity. In the early years, King Woodcarver was hated almost as much as Flenser was three centuries later. But the far north was still going through its time of heavy winters. The nations of the south could not easily send armies as far as Woodcarvers. Once when they did, they were thoroughly defeated. And wisely, Woodcarver never attempted to subvert the south. Not directly. But his settlement grew and grew, and its fame for art and furniture was small beside its other reputations. Old of heart traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It wasn’t the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and the outlook he had created.
Wickwrackscar and Jaqueramaphan arrived at Woodcarvers late in the afternoon. It had rained most of the day, but now the clouds had blown away and the sky was that bright cloudless blue that was all the more beautiful after a stretch of cloudy days.
Woodcarver’s Domain was paradise to Peregrine’s eyes. He was tired of the packless wilderness. He was tired of worrying about the alien.
Twinhulls paced them suspiciously for the last few miles. The boats were armed, and Peregrine and Scriber were coming from very much the wrong direction. But they were all alone, clearly harmless. Long callers hooted, relaying their story ahead. By the time they reached the harbor they were heros, two packs who had stolen (unspecified) treasure from the villains of the north. They sailed around a breakwater that hadn’t existed on Peregrine’s last trip, and tied in at the moorage.
The pier was crowded with soldiers and wagons. Townspeople were all over the road leading up to the city walls. This was as close to a mob scene as you could get and still have room for sober thought. Scriber bounced out of the boat and pranced about in obvious delight at the cheers from the hillside. “Quickly! We must speak with the Woodcarver.”
Wickwrackscar picked up the canvas bag that held the alien’s picture box, and climbed carefully out of the boat. He was dizzy from the beating the alien had given him. Scar’s fore-tympanum had been cut in the attack. For a moment he lost track of himself. The pier was very strange—stone at first glance, but walled with a spongy black material he hadn’t seen since the Southseas; it should be brittle here… Where am I? I should be happy about something, some victory. He paused to regroup. After a moment both the pain and his thoughts sharpened; he would be like this for days yet, at least. Get help for the alien. Get it ashore.
King Woodcarver’s Lord Chamberlain was a mostly overweight dandy; Peregrine had not expected to see such at Woodcarvers. But the fellow became instantly cooperative when he saw the alien. He brought a doctor down to look at the Two-Legs (and incidentally, at Peregrine). The alien had gained strength in the last two days, but there had been no more violence. They got it ashore without much trouble. It stared at Peregrine out of its flat face, a look he knew was impotent rage. He touched Scar’s head thoughtfully … the Two-Legs was just waiting for the best opportunity to do more damage.
Minutes later, the travelers were in kherhog-drawn carriages, rolling up the cobblestone street toward the city walls. Soldiers cleared the way through the crowd. Scriber Jaqueramaphan waved this way and that, the handsome hero. By now Peregrine knew the shy insecurity that lurked within Scriber. This might be the high point of his whole life till now.
Even if he wanted it, Wickwrackscar could not be so expansive. With one of Scar’s tympana hurt, wild gesture
s made him lose track of his thoughts. He hunkered down on the carriage seats and looked out in all directions:
But for the shape of the outer harbor, the place was not at all what he remembered from fifty years ago. In most parts of the world, not much changed in fifty years. A pilgrim returning after such an interval might even be bored by the sameness. But this … it was almost scary.
The huge breakwater was new. There were twice as many piers, and multiboats with flags he had never seen on this side of the world. The road had been here before, but narrow, with only a third as many turnoffs. Before, the town walls had been more to keep the kherhogs and froghens in than any invaders out. Now they were ten feet high, the black stone extending as far as Peregrine could see… And there had been scarcely any soldiers last time; now they were everywhere. That was not a good change. He felt a sinking in the pit of Scar’s stomach; soldiers and fighting were not good.
They rode through the city gates and past a market maze that spread across acres. The alleys were only fifty feet wide, narrow where bolts of cloth, furniture displays, and crates of fresh fruit encroached. Smells of fruit and spice and varnish hung in the air. The place was so crowded that the haggling was almost an orgy, and dizzy Peregrine almost blacked out. Then they were on a narrower street that zigzagged through ranks of half-timbered buildings. Beyond the roofs loomed heavy fortifications. Ten minutes later they were in the castle yard.
They dismounted and the Lord Chamberlain had the Two-Legs moved to a litter.
“Woodcarver, he’ll see us now?” said Scriber.
The bureaucrat laughed. “She. Woodcarver changed gender more than ten years ago.”
Peregrine’s heads twisted about in surprise. Precisely what would that mean? Most packs change with time, but he had never heard of Woodcarver being anything but “he”. He almost missed what the Lord Chamberlain said next.
“Even better. Her whole council must see … what you’ve brought. Come inside.” He waved the guards away.
They walked down a hall almost wide enough for two packs to pass abreast. The chamberlain led, followed by the travelers and the doctor with the alien’s litter. The walls were high, padded with silver-crusted quilting. It was far grander than before … and again, unsettling. There was scarcely any statuary, and what there was dated from centuries before.
But there were pictures. He stumbled when he saw the first, and behind him he heard Scriber gasp. Peregrine had seen art all around the world: The mobs of the tropics preferred abstract murals, smudges of psychotic color. The Southseas islanders had never invented perspective; in their watercolors, distant objects simply floated in the upper half of the picture. In the Long Lakes Republic, representationism was currently favored, especially multiptychs that gave a whole-pack view.
But Peregrine had never seen the likes of these. The pictures were mosaics, each tile a ceramic square about a quarter inch on a side. There was no color, just four shades of gray. From a few feet away, the graininess was lost, and … they were the most perfect landscapes Peregrine had ever seen. All were views from hilltops around Woodcarvers. Except for the lack of color, they might have been windows. The bottom of each picture was bounded by a rectangular frame, but the tops were irregular; the mosaics simply broke off at the horizon. The hall’s quilted wall stood where the pictures should have shown sky.
“Here now, fellow! I thought you wanted to see Woodcarver.” The remark was directed at Scriber. Jaqueramaphan was strung out along the landscapes, one of him sitting in front of a different picture all down the hall. He turned a head to look at the chamberlain. His voice sounded dazed. “Soul’s end! It’s like being God, as if I have one member on each hilltop and can see everything at once.” But he scrambled to his feet and trotted to catch up.
The hall opened on one of the largest indoor meeting rooms Peregrine had ever seen.
“This is as big as anything in the Republic,” Scriber said with apparent admiration, looking up at the three levels of balconies. They stood alone with the alien at the bottom.
“Hmf.” Besides the chamberlain and the doctor, there were already five other packs in the room. More showed up as they watched. Most were dressed like nobles of the Republic, all jewels and furs. A few wore the plain jackets he remembered from his last trip. Sigh. Woodcarver’s little settlement had grown into a city and now a nation-state. Peregrine wondered if he—she—had any real power now. He trained one head precisely on Scriber and Hightalked at him. “Don’t say anything about the picture box just yet.”
Jaqueramaphan looked puzzled and conspiratorial all at once. He High Talked back, “Yes … yes. A bargaining card?”
“Something like that.” Peregrine’s eyes swept back and forth across the balconies. Most packs entered with an air of harried self-importance. He smiled to himself. One glance into the pit was enough to shatter their smugness. The air above him was filled with buzzing talk. None of the packs looked like Woodcarver. But then, she’d have few of her members from before; he could only recognize her by manner and bearing. It shouldn’t matter. He had carried some friendships far longer than any member’s lifespan. But with others the friend had changed in a decade, its viewpoints altering, affection turning to animosity. He’d been counting on Woodcarver being the same. Now…
There was a brief sound of trumpets, almost like a call to order. The pubic doors of a lower balcony slid open and a fivesome entered. Peregrine felt a twitchy thrill of horror. This was Woodcarver, but so … misarranged. One member was so old it had to be helped by the rest. Two were scarcely more than puppies, and one of those a constant drooler. The largest member was white-eyed blind. It was the sort of thing you might see in a waterfront slum, or in the last generation of incest.
She looked down at Peregrine, and smiled almost as if she recognized him. When she spoke, it was with the blind one. The voice was clear and firm. “Please carry on, Vendacious.”
The chamberlain nodded. “As you wish, Your Majesty.” He pointed into the pit, at the alien. “That is the reason for this hasty meeting.”
“We can see monsters at the circus, Vendacious.” The voice came from an overdressed pack on the top balcony. To judge from the shouting that came from all sides, this was a minority view. One pack on a lower balcony jumped over the railing and tried to shoo the doctor away from the alien’s litter.
The chamberlain raised a head for silence, and glared down at the fellow who had jumped into the pit. “If you please, Scrupilo, be patient. Everyone will get a chance to look.”
“Scrupilo” made some grumbling hisses, but backed off.
“Good.” Vendacious turned all his attention on Peregrine and Scriber. “Your boat has outrun any news from the north, my friends. No one but I knows anything of your story—and what I have is guard codes hooted across the bay. You say this creature flew down from the sky?”
An invitation to speechify. Peregrine let Scriber Jaqueramaphan do the talking. Scriber loved it. He told the story of the flying house, of the ambush and the murders, and the rescue. He showed them his eye-tools and announced himself as a secret agent of the Long Lakes Republic. Now what real spy would do that? Every pack on the council had eyes on the alien, some fearful, some—like Scrupilo—crazily curious. Woodcarver watched with only a couple of heads. The rest might have been asleep. She looked as tired as Peregrine felt. He rested his own heads on his paws. The pain in Scar was a pulsing beat; it would be easy enough to set the member asleep, but then he’d understand very little of what was being said. Hey! maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. Scar drifted off and the pain receded.
The talk went on for some minutes more, not making a whole lot of sense to the threesome that was Wickwrack. He understood the tones of voice though. Scrupilo—the pack on the floor—complained several times, impatiently. Vendacious said something, agreeing with him. The doctor retreated, and Scrupilo advanced on Wickwrack’s alien.
Peregrine pulled himself to full wakefulness. “Be careful. The creature is not f
riendly.”
Scrupilo snapped back, “Your friend has already warned me once.” He circled the litter, staring at the alien’s brown, furless face. The alien stared back, impassive. Scrupilo reached forward cautiously and drew back the alien’s quilt. Still no response. “See?” said Scrupilo. “It knows I mean no harm.” Peregrine said nothing to correct him.
“It really walks on those rear paws alone?” said one of the other advisors. “Can you imagine it, towering over us? One little bump would knock it down.” Laughter. Peregrine remembered how mantis-like the alien had seemed when upright. These fellows hadn’t seen it move.
Scrupilo wrinkled a nose. “The thing is filthy.” He was all around her, a posture that Peregrine knew upset the Two-Legs. “That arrow shaft must be removed, you know. Most of the bleeding has stopped, but if we expect the creature to live for long, it needs medical attention.” He looked disdainfully at Scriber and Peregrine, as if they were to blame for not performing surgery aboard the twinhull. Something caught his eye and his tone abruptly changed: “By the Pack of Packs! Look at its forepaws.” He loosened the ropes about the creature’s front legs. “Two paws like that would be as good as five pairs of lips. Think what a pack of these creatures could do!” He moved close to the five-tentacled paw.
“Be—” careful, Peregrine started to say. The alien abruptly bunched its tentacles into a club. Its foreleg flicked out at an impossible angle, ramming its paw into Scrupilo’s head. The blow couldn’t have been too strong, but it was precisely placed on the tympanum.
“Ow! Yow! Wow. Wow.” Scrupilo danced back.
The alien was shouting, too. It was all mouth noise, thin and low-pitched. The eldritch sound brought up every head, even Woodcarver’s. Peregrine had heard it many times by now. There was no doubt in his mind—this was the aliens’ interpack speech. After a few seconds, the sound changed to a regular hacking that gradually faded.
