Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

"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.

For a long moment no one spoke. Then part of Woodcarver got to her feet. She looked at Scrupilo. "Are you all right?" It was the first time she had spoken since the beginning of the meeting.

Scrupilo was licking his forehead. "Yes. It smarts is all."

"Your curiosity will kill you some day."

The other huffed indignantly, but also seemed flattered by the prediction.

Queen Woodcarver looked at her councillors. "I see an important question here. Scrupilo thinks one alien member would be as agile as an entire pack of us. Is that so?" She pointed the question at Peregrine rather than Scriber.

"Yes, Your Majesty. If those ropes had been tied within its reach, it could easily have unknotted them." He knew where this was going; he'd had three days to get there himself. "And the noises it makes sound like coordinated speech to me."

There was a swell of talk as the others caught on. An articulate member can often make semi-sensible speech, but usually at the expense of dexterity.

"Yes… A creature like nothing on our world, whose boat flew down from the top of heaven. I wonder at the mind of such a pack, if a single member is almost as smart as all of one of us?" Her blind one looked around as it made the words, almost as if it could see. Two others wiped at her drooler's muzzle. She was not an inspiring sight.

Scrupilo poked a head up. "I hear not a hint of thought sound from this one. There is no fore-tympanum." He pointed at the torn clothing around the creature's wound. "And I see no sign of shoulder tympana. Perhaps it is pack smart even as a singleton… and perhaps that's all the aliens ever are." Peregrine smiled to himself; this Scrupilo was a prickly twit, but not one who held with tradition. For centuries, academics had debated the difference between people and animals. Some animals had larger brains; some had paws or lips more agile than a member's. In the savannahs of Easterlee, there were creatures that even looked like people and ran in groups, but without much depth of thought. Leaving aside wolf nests and whales, only people were packs. It was the coordination of thought between members that made them superior. Scrupilo's theory was a heresy.

Jaqueramaphan said, "But we did hear thought sounds, loud ones, during the ambush. Perhaps this one is like our unweaned, unable to think — "

"And yet still almost as smart as a pack," Woodcarver finished somberly. "If these people are not smarter than we, then we might learn their devices. No matter how magnificent they are, we could eventually be their equals. But if this member is just one of a superpack…" For a moment there was no talk, just the muted underedge of her councillors' thoughts. If the aliens were superpacks, and if their envoy had been murdered — then there might not be anything they could do to save themselves.

"So. Our first priority should be to save this creature, to befriend it and learn its true nature." Her heads lowered, and she seemed lost within herself — or perhaps just tired. Abruptly, she turned several heads toward her chamberlain. "Move the creature to the lodge by mine."

Vendacious started with surprise. "Surely not, Your Majesty! We've seen that it is hostile. And it needs medical attention."

Woodcarver smiled and her voice turned silky. Peregrine remembered that tone from before. "Do you forget that I know surgery? Do you forget… that I am the Woodcarver?"

Vendacious licked his lips and looked at the other advisors. After a second he said, "No, Your Majesty. It will be as you wish."

And Peregrine felt like cheering. Perhaps Woodcarver did still run things.

— =*=

Peregrine was sitting back to back on the steps of his quarters when Woodcarver came to see him next day. She came alone, and wearing the simple green jackets he remembered from his last visit.

He didn't bow or go out to meet her. She looked at him coolly for a moment, and sat down just a few yards away.

"How is the Two-Legs?" he asked.

"I took out the arrow and sewed the wound shut. I think it will survive. My advisors were pleased: the creature didn't act like a reasoning being. It fought even after it was tied down, as though it had no concept of surgery… How is your head?"

"All right, as long as I don't move around." The rest of him — Scar -lay behind the doorway in the dark interior of the lodge. "The tympanum is healing straight, I think. I'll be fine in a few days."

"Good." A wrecked tympanum could mean continuing mental problems, or the need for a new member and the pain of finding a use for the singleton that was sent into silence. "I remember you, pilgrim. All the members are different, but you really are the Peregrine of before. You had some great stories. I enjoyed your visit."

"And I enjoyed meeting the great Woodcarver. That is the reason I returned."

She cocked a head wryly. "The great Woodcarver of before, not the wreck of now?"

He shrugged. "What happened?"

She didn't answer immediately. For a moment, they sat and looked across the city. It was cloudy this afternoon, with rain coming. The breeze off the channel was a cool stinging on his lips and eyes. Woodcarver shivered, and puffed her fur out a bit. Finally she said, "I held my soul six hundred years — and that's counting by foreclaws. I should think it's obvious what has become of me."

"The perversion never hurt you before." Peregrine was not normally so blunt. Something about her brought out the frankness in him.

"Yes, the average incest degrades to my state in a few centuries, and is an idiot long before then. My methods were much cleverer. I knew who to breed with whom, which puppies to keep and which to put on others. So it was always my flesh bearing my memories, and my soul remained pure. But I didn't understand enough — or perhaps I tried the impossible. The choices got harder and harder, till I was left with choosing between brains and physical defect." She wiped away the drool, and all but the blind one looked out across her city. "These are the best days of summer, you know. Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season." And the green did seem to be everywhere it could be: featherleaf down the hillside and in the town, ferns all over the near hillsides, and heather struggling toward the gray crowns of the mountains across the channel. "I love this place."

He never expected to be comforting the Woodcarver of Woodcarvers. "You made a miracle here. I've heard of it all the way on the other side of the world… And I'll bet that half the packs around here are related to you."

"Y-yes, I've been successful beyond a rake's wildest dreams. I've had no shortage of lovers, even if I couldn't use the pups myself. Sometimes I think my get has been my greatest experiment. Scrupilo and Vendacious are mostly my offspring… but so is Flenser."

Huh! Peregrine hadn't known that last.

"The last few decades, I'd more or less accepted my fate. I couldn't outwit eternity; sometime soon I would let my soul slip free. I let the council take over more and more; how could I claim the domain after I was no longer me? I went back to art — you saw those monochrome mosaics."