don’t know exactly how they work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?”
Amdi was getting all excited now, the way he did when he’d thought of some great prank. “No, no, no. We don’t have to understand everything.” Three more of him jumped to the floor; he waved random sheets of paper up at Jefri. “Ravna doesn’t know for sure how we make sound. The directions include options for making small changes. I’ve been thinking. I can see how the changes relate.” He paused and made a high-pitched squealing noise. “Darn. I can’t explain it exactly. But I think we can expand the tables, and that will change the machine in ob-obvious ways. And then…” Amdi was beside himself for a moment, and speechless. “Oh Jefri, I wish you could be a pack, too! Imagine putting one of yourself each on a different mountain top, and then using radio to think. We could be as big as the world!”
Just then there was the sound of interpack gobbling from outside the cabin, and then the Samnorsk: “Dinner time. We go now, Amdijefri. Okay?” It was Mr. Shreck; he spoke a fair amount of Samnorsk, though not as well as Mr. Steel. Amdijefri picked up the scattered sheets and carefully slipped them into the pockets on the back of Amdi’s jackets. They powered down the display equipment and crawled into the main hold.
“Do you think Mr. Steel will let us make the changes?”
“Maybe we should also send them back to Ravna.”
The whitejackets’ member retreated from the hatch, and Amdijefri descended. A minute later they were out in the slanting sunlight. The two kids scarcely noticed; they were both caught up in Amdi’s vision.
CHAPTER 24
For Johanna, lots of things changed in the weeks after Scriber Jaqueramaphan died. Most were for the better, things that might never have happened but for the murder… and that made Johanna very sad.
She let Woodcarver live in her cabin, and take the place of the helper pack. Apparently Woodcarver had wanted to do this from the beginning, but had been afraid of the human’s anger. Now they kept the dataset in the cabin. There were never less than four packs of Vendacious’ security surrounding the place, and there was talk of building barracks around it.
She saw the others during the day at meetings, and individually when they needed help with the dataset. Scrupilo, Vendacious, and Scarbutt—the “Pilgrim'—all spoke fluent Samnorsk now, more than good enough so that she could see the character behind their inhuman forms: Scrupilo, prissy and very bright. Vendacious, as pompous as Scriber had ever seemed, but without the playfulness and imagination. Pilgrim Wickwrackscar. She felt a chill every time she saw his big, scarred one. It always sat in the back, hunched down to look unthreatening. Pilgrim obviously knew how the sight affected her and tried not to offend, but even after Scriber’s death she couldn’t do more than tolerate that pack… And after all, there could be traitors in the Woodcarver castle. It was only Vendacious’ theory that the murder had been a raid from outside. She kept a suspicious eye on Pilgrim.
At night Woodcarver chased the other packs away. She huddled around the firepit, and asked the dataset questions that had no conceivable connection with fighting the Flenserists. Johanna sat with her and tried to explain things that Woodcarver didn’t understand. It was strange. Woodcarver was something very like the Queen of these people. She had this enormous (primitive, uncomfortable, ugly—yet still enormous) castle. She had dozens of servants. Yet she spent most of each night in this little wood cabin with Johanna, and helped with the fire and the food at least as much as the pack who had been here before.
So it was that Woodcarver became Johanna’s second friend among the Tines. (Scriber was the first, though she hadn’t known it till after he was dead.) Woodcarver was very smart and very strange. In some ways she was the smartest person Johanna had ever known, though that conclusion came slowly. She hadn’t really been surprised when the Tines mastered Samnorsk quickly -that’s the way it was in most adventures, and more to the point, they had the language learning programs in the dataset. But night after night Johanna watched Woodcarver play with the set. The pack showed no interest in the military tactics and chemistry that preoccupied them all during the day. Instead she read about the Slow Zone and the Beyond and the history of Straumli Realm. She had mastered nonlinear reading faster than any of the others. Sometimes Johanna would just sit and stare over her shoulders. The screen was split into windows, the main one scrolling much faster than Johanna could follow. A dozen times a minute, Woodcarver might come upon words she didn’t recognize. Most were just unfamiliar Samnorsk: she’d tap a nose on the offending word and the definition would flicker briefly in a dictionary window. Other things were conceptual, and the new windows would lead the pack off into other fields, sometimes for just a few seconds, sometimes for many minutes—and sometimes the detour would become her new main path. In a way, she was everything that Scriber had wanted to be.
Many times she had questions the dataset couldn’t really answer. She and Johanna would talk late into the night. What was a human family like? What had Straumli Realm thought to make at the High Lab? Johanna no longer thought of most packs as gangs of snake-necked rats. Deep past midnight, the dataset’s screen was brighter than the gray light from the firepit. It painted the backs of Woodcarver in cheerful colors. The pack gathered round her, looking up, almost like small children listening to a teacher.
But Woodcarver was no child. Almost from the first, she had seemed old. Those late night talks were beginning to teach Johanna about the Tines, too. The pack said things she never did during the day. They were mostly things that must be obvious to other Tines, but never talked about. The human girl wondered if Woodcarver the Queen had anyone to confide in.
Only one of Woodcarver’s members was physically old; two were scarcely more than puppies. It was the pattern of the pack that was half a thousand years old. And that showed. Woodcarver’s soul was held together by little more than willpower. The price of immortality had been inbreeding. The original stock had been healthy, but after six hundred years… One of her youngest members couldn’t stop drooling; it was constantly patting a kerchief to its muzzle. Another had milky white in its eyes where there should have been deep brown. Woodcarver said it was stone blind, but healthy and her best talker. Her oldest member was visibly feeble; it was panting all the time. Unfortunately, Woodcarver said it was the most alert and creative of all. When it died…
Once she started looking for it, Johanna could see weakness in all of Woodcarver. Even the two healthiest members, strong and with plush fur, walked a little strangely compared to normal pack members. Was that due to spinal deformities? The two were also gaining weight, which wasn’t helping the problem.
Johanna didn’t learn this all at once. Woodcarver had told her about various Tinish affairs, and gradually her own story came out, too. She seemed glad to have someone to confide in, but Johanna saw little self-pity in her. Woodcarver had chosen this path—apparently it was perversion to some—and had beaten the odds for longer than any other pack in recorded history. She was more wistful than anything else, that her luck had finally run out.
Tines architecture tended to extremes—grotesquely oversized, or too cramped for human use. Woodcarvers council chamber was at the large extreme; it was not a cozy place. You could get three hundred humans into the bowl-shaped cavity with room to spare. The separated balconies that ran around its upper circumference could have held another hundred more.
Johanna had been here often enough before; this was where most work was done with the dataset. Usually there was herself and Woodcarver and whoever else needed information. Today was different, not a day to consult the dataset at all: This was Johanna’s first council meeting. There were twelve packs in the High Council, and they were all here. Every balcony contained a pack, and there were three on the floor. Johanna knew enough about Tines now to see that for all the empty space, the place was hideously crowded. There was the mind noise of fifteen packs. Even with all the padded tapestries, she felt an occasional buzzing in her head or through her hands from the railing.
Johanna stood with Woodcarver on the largest balcony. When they arrived, Vendacious was already down on the main floor, arranging diagrams. As the packs of the council came to their feet, he looked up and said something to Woodcarver. The Queen replied in Samnorsk: “I know it will slow things down, but perhaps that’s a good thing.” She made a human laughing sound.
Peregrine Wickwrackscar was standing on the next balcony over, just like some council pack. Strange. Johanna had not yet figured out why, but Scarbutt seemed to be one of Woodcarver’s favorites. “Pilgrim, would you translate for Johanna?”
Pilgrim bobbed several heads. “Is, is that okay, Johanna?”
