In the end, if the Visitors are treacherous, we will make the best stand that can be. And if they are not… well I think you’ll agree that my reach has at least matched my teacher’s.”
For once, the Flenser Fragment had no reply.
The ship’s control cabin was Jefri and Amdi’s favorite place in all of Lord Steel’s domain. Being here could still make Jefri very sad, but now the good memories seemed the stronger… and here was the best hope for the future. Amdi was still entranced by the window displays—even if the views were all of wooden walls. By their second visit they had already come to regard the place as their private kingdom, like Jefri’s treehouse back on Straum. And in fact the cabin was much too small to hold more than a single pack. Usually a member of their bodyguard would sit just inside the entrance to the main hold, but even that seemed to be uncomfortable duty. This was a place where they were important.
For all their rambunctiousness, Amdi and Jefri realized the trust that Lord Steel and Ravna were placing in them. The two kids might race around out-of-doors, driving their guards to distraction, but the equipment in this command cabin must be treated as cautiously as when Mom and Dad were here. In some ways, there was not much left in the ship. The datasets were destroyed; Jefri’s parents had them outside when Woodcarver attacked. During the winter, Mr. Steel had carried out most of the loose items to study. The coldsleep boxes were now safe in cool chambers nearby. Every day Amdijefri inspected the boxes, looked at each familiar face, checked the diag displays. No sleeper had died since the ambush.
What was left on the ship was hard-fastened to the hull. Jefri had pointed out the control boards and status elements that managed the container shell’s rocket; they stayed strictly away from those.
Mr. Steel’s quilting shrouded the walls. Jefri’s folks’ baggage and sleeping bags and exercisers were gone, but there were still the acc webbing and hard-fastened equipment. And over the months, Amdijefri had brought in paper and pens and blankets and other junk. There was always a light breeze from the fans sweeping through the cabin.
It was a happy place, strangely carefree even with all the memories it brought. This was where they would save the Tines and all the sleepers. And this was the only place in the world where Amdijefri could talk to another human being. In some ways, the means of talking seemed as medieval as Lord Steel’s castle: They had one flat display—no depth, no color, no pictures. All they could coax from it were alphanumerics. But it was connected to the ship’s ultrawave comm, and that was still programmed to track their rescuers. There was no voice recognition attached to the display; Jefri had almost panicked before he realized that the lower part of the screen worked as a keyboard. It was a laborious job typing in every letter of every word—though Amdi had gotten pretty good at it, using four noses to peck at the keys. And nowadays he could read Samnorsk even better than Jefri.
Amdijefri spent many afternoons here. If there was a message waiting from the previous day, they would bring it up page by page and Amdi would copy and translate it. Then they would enter the questions and answers that Mr. Steel had talked to them about. Then there was a lot of waiting. Even if Ravna was watching at the other end, it could take several hours to get a reply. But the link was so much better than during the winter; they could almost feel Ravna getting closer. The unofficial conversations with her were often the high point of their day.
So far, this day had been quite different. After the false workers attacked, Amdijefri had the shakes for about half an hour. Mr. Steel had been wounded trying to protect them. Maybe there was nowhere that was safe. They messed with the outside displays, trying to peek through cracks in the rough planking of the compound’s walls.
“If we’d been able to see out, we could have warned Mr. Steel,” said Jefri.
“We should ask him to put some holes in the walls. We could be like sentries.”
They batted the idea around a bit. Then the latest message started coming in from the rescue ship. Jefri jumped into the acc webbing by the display. This was his dad’s old spot, and there was plenty of room. Two of Amdi slid in beside him. Another member hopped on the armrest and braced its paws on Jefri’s shoulders. Its slender neck extended toward the screen to get a good view. The rest scrambled to arrange paper and pens. It was easy to play back messages, but Amdijefri got a certain thrill out of seeing the stuff coming down “live'.
There was the initial header stuff—that wasn’t so interesting after about the thousandth time you saw it— then Ravna’s actual words. Only this time it was just tabular data, something to support the radio design.
“Nuts. It’s numbers,” said Jefri.
“Numbers!” said Amdi. He climbed a free member onto the boy’s lap. It stuck its nose close to the screen, cross-checking what the one by Jefri’s shoulder was seeing. The four on the floor were busy scratching away, translating the decimal digits on the screen into the X’s and O’s and 1’s and deltas of Tines’ base four notation. Almost from the beginning Jefri had realized that Amdi was really good at math. Jefri wasn’t envious. Amdi said that hardly any of the Tines were that good, either; Amdi was a very special pack. Jefri was proud that he had such a neat friend. Mom and Dad would have liked Amdi. Still… Jefri sighed, and relaxed in the webbing. This number stuff was happening more and more often. Mom had read him a story once, “Lost in the Slow Zone', about how some marooned explorers brought civilization to a lost colony. In that, the heroes just collected the right materials and built what they needed. There had been no talk of precision or ratios or design.
He looked away from the screen, and petted the two of Amdi that were sitting beside him. One of them wriggled under his hand. Their whole bodies hummed back at him. Their eyes were closed. If Jefri didn’t know better, he would have assumed they were asleep. These were the parts of Amdi that specialized in talking.
“Anything interesting?” Jefri said after a while. The one on his left opened its eyes and looked at him.
“This is that bandwidth idea Ravna was talking about. If we don’t make things just right, we’ll just get clicks and clacks.”
“Oh, right.” Jefri knew that the initial reinventions of radio were usually not good for much more than Morse code. Ravna seemed to think they could jump that stage. “What do you think Ravna is like?”
“What?” The scritching of pens on paper stopped for an instant; he had all of Amdi’s attention, even though they’d talked of this before. “Well, like you… only bigger and older?”
“Yeah, but—” Jefri knew Ravna was from Sjandra Kei. She was a grownup, somewhere older than Johanna and younger than Mom. What exactly does she look like? “I mean, she’s coming all this way just to rescue us and finish what Mom and Dad were trying to do. She must really be a great person.”
The scritching stopped again, and the display scrolled heedless on. They would have to replay it. “Yes,” Amdi said after a moment. “She—she must be a lot like Mr. Steel. It will be nice to meet someone I can hug, the way you do Mr. Steel.”
Jefri was a little miffed by that. “Well wait, you can hug me!”
The parts of Amdi next to him purred loudly. “I know. But I mean someone that’s a grownup… like a parent.”
“Yeah.”
They got the tables translated and checked in about an hour. Then it was time to send up the latest things that Mr. Steel was asking about. There were about four pages, all neatly printed in Samnorsk by Amdi. Usually he liked to do the typing, too, all bunched up over the keyboard and display. Today he wasn’t interested. He lay all over Jefri, but didn’t pay any special attention to checking what was being keyed in. Every so often Jefri felt a buzzing through his chest, or the screen mounting would make a strange sound—all in sympathy to the unhearable sounds that Amdi was making between his members. Jefri recognized the signs of deep thought.
He finished typing in the latest message, adding a few small questions of his own. Things like, “How old are you and Pham? Are you married? What are Skroderiders like?”
Daylight had faded from the cracks in the walls. Soon the digger teams would be turning in their hoes and marching off to the barracks over the edge of the hill. Across the straits, the towers on Hidden Island would be golden in the mist, like something in a fairy tale. Their whitejackets would be calling Amdi and Jefri out for supper any minute now.
Two of Amdi jumped off the acc webbing, and began chasing each other around the chair. “I’ve been thinking! I’ve been thinking! Ravna’s radio thing: why is it just for talking? She says all sound is just different frequencies of the same thing. But sound is all that thought is. If we could change some of the tables, and make the receivers and transmitters to cover my tympana, why couldn’t I think over the radio?”
“I don’t know.” Bandwidth was a familiar constraint on many everyday activities, though Jefri had only a vague notion of exactly what it was. He looked at the last of the tables, still displayed on the screen. He had a sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never attain. “I use these things all the time, but I
