Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  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 harrassing 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 pronounciation 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.

  Steel’s den had originally been the Master’s. It was very different from the castle’s meeting halls. Except for choirs, only a single pack would fit in any room. It was not exactly that the suite was small. There were five rooms, not counting the bath. But except for the library, none was more than fifteen feet across. The ceilings were low, less than five feet; there was no space for visitor balconies. Servants were always on call in the two hallways that shared a wall with the quarters. The dining room, bedroom, and bath had servant hatches, just big enough to give orders and to receive food and drink, or preening oils.

  The main entrance was guarded on the outside by three trooper packs. Of course, the Master would never live in a den with only one exit. Steel had found eight secret hatches (three in the sleeping quarters). These could only be opened from within; they led to the maze that Flenser had built within the solid rock of the castle’s walls. No one knew the extent of that maze, not even the Master. Steel had rearranged parts of it—in particular the passages leading from this den—in the years since Flenser’s departure.

  The quarters were nearly impregnable. Even if the castle fell, the rooms’ larder was stocked for half a year; ventilation was provided by a network of channels almost as extensive as the Master’s secret passages. All in all, Steel felt tolerably safe here. There was always the possibility that there were more than eight secret entrances, perhaps one that could be opened from the other side.

  And of course choirs were out of the question, here or anywhere. The only extrapack sex that Steel indulged was with singletons—and that as part of his experiments; it was just too dangerous to mix one’s self with others.

  After dinner, Steel drifted into the library. He relaxed around his reading desk. Two of him sipped brandy while another smoked southern herbs. This was pleasure, but also calculation: Steel knew just what vices, applied to just which members, would raise his imagination to its keenest pitch.

  … And more and more he was coming to see that imagination was at least as important as raw intelligence in the present game. The desk between him was covered with maps, reports from the south, internal security memos. But lying in all the silkpaper, like an ivory slug in its nest, was the alien radio. They had recovered two from the ship. Steel picked the thing up, ran a nose along the smooth, curved sides. Only the finest stressed wood could match its grace—and that in musical instruments or statuary. Yet the mantis claimed this could be used to talk across dozens of miles, as fast as a ray of sunlight. If true … Steel wondered how many lost battles might have been won with these, and how many new conquests might be safely undertaken. And if they could learn to make far-talkers … the Movement’s subordinates, scattered across the continent, would be as near as the guards by Steel’s den. No force in the world could stand against them.

  Steel picked up the latest report from Woodcarvers. In many ways they were having more success with their mantis than Steel with his. Apparently theirs was almost an adult. More important, it had a miraculous library that could be interrogated almost like a l
iving

  being. There had been three other datasets. Steel’s whitejackets had found what was left of them in the burnt-out wreckage around the ship. Jefri thought that the ship’s processors were a little like a dataset, “only stupider” (Amdi’s best translation), but so far the processors had been useless.

  But with their dataset, several on Woodcarver’s staff had already learned mantis talk. Each day they discovered more about the aliens’ civilization than Steel’s people could in ten. He smiled. They didn’t know that all the important stuff was being faithfully reported to Hidden Island… For now he would let them keep their toy, and their mantis; they had noticed several things that would have slipped by him. Still he damned the luck.

  Steel paged through the report… Good. The alien at Woodcarvers was still uncooperative. He felt his smile spreading into laughter: it was a small thing, the creature’s word for the Packs. The report tried to spell out the word. It didn’t matter; the translation was “claws” or “tines”. The mantis had a special horror for the tine attachments that soldiers wore on their forepaws. Steel licked pensively at the black enamel of his manicured claws. Interesting. Claws could be threatening things, but they were also part of being a person. Tines were their mechanical extension, and potentially more frightening. It was the sort of name you might imagine for an elite killer force … but never for all the Packs. After all, the race of packs included the weak, the poor, the kindly, the naive … as well as persons like Steel and Flenser. It said something very interesting about mantis psychology that the creature picked tines as the characterizing feature of the Packs.

  Steel eased back from his desk and gazed at the landscape painted around the library’s walls. It was a view from the castle towers. Behind the paint, the walls were lined with patterns of mica and quartz and fiber; the echoes gave a vague sense of what you might hear looking out across the stone and emptiness. Combination audiovisuals were rare in the castle, and this one was especially well-done; Steel could feel himself relaxing as he stared at it. He drifted for a moment, letting his imagination roam.