Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

"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.