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CHAPTER 12
!INCON with fønwind <-- I don't see the INCON
!PRO RETROwrite "backsy-frontsy" -- backs together, looking out in
! several
!V directions DONE
!hld (NO) is kindermode AI driven? If yes, how smart is it? Would it adapt
!hld to clumsy anccess and purne links to simplify presentation?
!V June 2, 1991 Woodcarver is using "it" for Johanna and yet you
!V (PoV Peregrine) used "she" in the preceding
!V chapter TUF June 12, 1991

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." ^ V awkward sentence:

"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." ^ V 09Feb91 <modes>
^ V Interesting IMP ID insight: Everything with the Tines seems to be
^ V on two tracks or modes:
^ V Names given names [Jaqueramaphan] and taken names [eg, Scriber]
^ V architecture of the large and the small
^ V gender of the pack and sex of the member
^ V Though actually the gender of the group is more a graded thing
^ V low sound ears and tympana
^ V Silence high and low
^ V ... probably others. A really good job, would incorporate this
^ V everywhere as subtle weirdness. In your case perhaps the best
^ V you can do is have Johanna think on it during their army trip.
^ V art: multiptych
^ V sailing: multiboats

"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." ^ V IMP CHK could Flenser's parentage be unknown (at least
^ V to Pilgrim)

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."
"Yes! They're beautiful." !V June 2, 1991 Do you show more of the working of the picture loom
!V anywhere? I don't think so, but TUF

"I'll show you my picture loom sometime. The procedure is tedious but almost automatic. It was a nice project for the last years of my soul. But now -- you and your alien have changed everything. Damn it! If only this had happened a hundred years ago. What I would have done with it! We've been playing with your 'picture box', you know. The pictures are finer than any in our world. They are a bit like my mosaics -- the way the sun is like a glowbug. Millions of colored dots go to make each picture, the tiles so small you can't see them without one of Scriber's eye-tools. I've worked for years to make a few dozen mosaics. The picture box can make unnumbered thousands, so fast they seem to move. Your aliens make my life less than an unweaned pup's scratching in its cradle."
The queen of the Woodcarvers was softly crying, but her voice was angry. "And now the whole world is going to change, but too late for such wreckage as I!"
Almost without conscious thought, Peregrine extended one of his members toward the Woodcarver. He walked unseemly close: eight yards, five. Their thoughts were suddenly fuzzy with interference, but he could feel her calming. !QU Is this romance to abrupt to be believable? (Perhaps this could be
! mitigated by having more of a point that Peregrine is different
! and therefore a good leavening,
! and having it that she has admired him for a long time
!CHKd blearily

She laughed blearily. "Thank you.... Strange that you should be sympathetic. The greatest problem of my life is nothing to a pilgrim.
"You were hurting." It was all he could think to say.
"But you pilgrims change and change and change --" She eased one of herself close to him; they were almost touching, and it was even harder to think.
Peregrine spoke slowly, concentrating on every word, hoping he wouldn't forget his point. "But I do keep something of a soul. The parts that remain a pilgrim must have a certain outlook." Sometimes great insight comes in the noise of battle or intimacy. This was such at time. "And -- and I think the world itself is due for a change of soul now that we have Two-Legs dropping from the sky. What better time for Woodcarver to give up the old?" ^ V June 12, 1991 tojrf: too repetitive?
!V Actually this point is repeated almost word for word at the end
!V Looks okay, though

She smiled, and the confusion became louder, but a pleasant thing. "I ... hadn't ... thought of it that way. Now is the time to change...." !IMP I think it would be good to show here that packs like physical
! contact (this to make Amdi's taking to Jefri even more plausible)

Peregrine walked into her midst. The two packs stood for a moment, necking, thoughts blending into sweet chaos. Their last clear recollection was of stumbling up the steps and into his lodge.






Late that afternoon, Woodcarver brought the picture box to Scrupilo's laboratory. When she arrived Scrupilo and Vendacious were already present. Scriber Jaqueramaphan was there too, but standing farther from the others than courtesy might demand. She had interrupted some kind of argument. A few days before, such squabbling would have just depressed her. Now -- she dragged her limper into the room and looked at the others through her drooler's eyes -- and smiled. Woodcarver felt the best she had in years. She had made her decision and acted on it, and now there were new adventures to be had.
Scriber brightened at her entrance. "Did you check on Peregrine? How is he?"
"He is fine, fine, just fine." Oops, no need to show them how fine he really is! "I mean, there'll be a full recovery."
"Your Majesty, I'm very grateful to you and your doctors. Wickwrackscar is a good pack, and I ... I mean, even a pilgrim can't change members every day, like suits of clothes." !mARK 12Jun89
!CHKd sp offhand
!V I think this is the case, since the last chapter ends with the
!V first examination of Johanna, and this chapter begins "the next day"
!CHRON RETRO Suggest making in less than two days that they've had to
! play with it. For credibility, it shouldn't be more than a single
! limited session (in addition to the demo before the council?)

Woodcarver waved an offhand acknowledgment. She walked to the middle of the room, and set the alien's picture box on the table there. It looked like nothing so much as a big pink pillow -- with floppy ears and a weird animal design sewed in its cover. After playing with it for a day and a half, she was getting pretty good ... at opening the thing up. As always, the Two-Legs's face appeared, making mouth noises. As always, Woodcarver felt an instant of awe at seeing the moving mosaic. A million colored "tiles" had to flip and shift in absolute synchrony to create the illusion. Yet it happened exactly the same each time. She turned the screen so Scrupilo and Vendacious could see. ^ ?Despite his name... ?
!iNCON with Scriber's later awe for Vendacious? Maybe he doesn't yet
! know he is spymaster

Jaqueramaphan edged toward the others, and craned a pair of heads to look. "You still think the box is an animal?" he said to Vendacious. "Perhaps you could feed it sweets and it would tell us its secrets, eh?" Woodcarver smiled to herself. Scriber was no pilgrim; pilgrims depend on goodwill too much to go around giving the needle to the powerful.
Vendacious just ignored him. All his eyes were on her. "Your Majesty, please do not take offense. I -- we of the Council -- must ask you again. This picture box is too important to be left in the mouths of a single pack, even one so great as you. Please. Leave it to the rest of us, at least when you sleep." !V chron incon about Vendacious and his bio?
!V He was born 99 years "ago".

"No offense taken. If you insist, you may participate in my investigations. Beyond that, I will not go." She gave him an innocent look. Vendacious was a superb spymaster, a mediocre administrator, and an incompetent scientist. A century ago she would have the likes of him out tending the crops, if he chose to stay at all. A century ago there had been no need for spymasters and one administrator had been enough. How things had changed. She absentmindedly nuzzled the picture box; perhaps things would change again.
Scrupilo took Scriber's question seriously. "I see three possibilities, sir. First, that it is magic." Vendacious winced away from him. "Indeed, the box may be so far beyond our understanding, that it is magic. But that is the one heresy the Woodcarver has never accepted, and so I courteously omit it." He flicked a sardonic smile at Woodcarver. "Second, that it is an animal. A few on the Council thought so when Scriber first made it talk. But it looks like a stuffed pillow, even down to the amusing figure stitched on its side. More importantly, it responds to stimuli with perfect repeatability. That is something I do recognize. That is the behavior of a machine."
"That's your third possibility?" said Scriber. "But to be a machine means to have moving parts, and except for --" !QU BKG TINES do I have to do more NÆH with what it means to be "born"
! Actually there would be different degrees of creation
! de novo like amdi to very mild changes
!mARK 12Jun89
!QU Try to find a different word than "screen" here
!PRB wish I had a use for "nose-sized"

Woodcarver shrugged a tail at them. Scrupilo could go on like this for hours, and she saw that Scriber was the same type. "I say, let's learn more and then speculate." She tapped the corner of the box, just as Scriber had in his original demonstration. The alien's face vanished from the picture, replaced by a dizzying pattern of color. There was a splatter of sound, then nothing but the mid-pitch hum the box always made when the top was open. They knew the box could hear low-pitched sounds, and it could feel through the square pad on its base. But that pad was itself a kind of picture screen: certain commands transformed the grid of touch spots into entirely new shapes. The first time they did that, the box refused any further commands. Vendacious had been sure they had "killed the little alien". But they had closed the box and reopened it -- and it was back to its original behavior. Woodcarver was almost certain that nothing they could do by talking to it or touching it would hurt the thing.
Woodcarver retried the known signals in the usual order. The results were spectacular, and identical to before. But change that order in any way and the effects would be different. She wasn't sure if she agreed with Scrupilo: The box behaved with the repeatability of a machine ... yet the variety of its responses was much more like an animal's. !PROwrite stuff about standing on shoulders
!NÆH QU should I change the last line to:
! And I've already had enough romance for today.
!PRB If you use "hear myself think" elsewhere, then drop it from here
! (I did grep "hear myself" ??.txt on the original, and this was
! the only find.)
!QU Is it okay that I don't use a balcony room in this scene YES
!V this is another place where you could bring up "choir"

Behind her, Scriber and Scrupilo edged members across the floor. Their heads were stuck high in the air as they strained for a clear look at the screen. The buzz of their thoughts came louder and louder. Woodcarver tried to remember what she'd been planning next. Finally, the noise was just too much. "Will you two please back off! I can't hear myself think." This isn't a choir, you know. !V done otherwise:
!ID To further downrate the dataset, you might make the point that it
! was an extremely mass-produced design, or a replica of something from
! an earlier era.

"Sorry ... this okay?" They moved back about fifteen feet. Woodcarver nodded. The two members were less than twenty feet from each other. Scrupilo and Scriber must be really eager to see the screen. Vendacious had kept a proper distance, and a look of alert enthusiasm. !V June 12, 1991 FRAG: ; he always was a pack of assholes.
!V June 2, 1991 ||||||
!V ??????
!jrf2 "pack of assholes" is too colloquial
!jrf ||||||||||||||||<illeg?> too colloquial

"I have a suggestion," said Scriber. His voice was slurred from the effort of concentrating over Scrupilo's thoughts. "When you touch the four/three square and say --" he made the alien sounds; they were all very easy to do "-- the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match the squares. I think we ... we are being given choices." !PRB But I kinda liked <and Scrupilo thought there were only three
! possibilities?>

Hm. "The box could end up training us." If this is a machine, we need some new definitions. "... Very well, let's play with it."
Three hours passed. Toward the end, even Vendacious had moved a member nearer the screen; the noise in the room verged on mindless chaos. And everybody had suggestions; "say that", "press this", "last time it said that, we did thus and so". There were intricate colored designs, sprinkled with things that must have been written language. Tiny, two-legged figures scampered across the screen, shifting the symbols, opening little windows.... Scriber Jaqueramaphan's idea was quite right. The first pictures were choices. But some of those led to further pictures of choices. The options spread out -- tree-like, Scriber said. He wasn't quite right; sometimes they came back to an earlier point; it was a metaphorical network of streets. Four times they ended in cul de sacs, and had to shut the box and begin again. Vendacious was madly drawing maps of the paths. That would help; there were places they would want to see again. But even he realized there were unnumbered other paths, places that blind exploration would never find. !ID QU seek suggestions for the dataset from hld, gg

And Woodcarver would have given a good part of her soul for the pictures she had already seen. There were starscapes. There were moons that shone blue and green, or banded orange. There were moving pictures of alien cities, of thousands of aliens so close that they were actually touching. If they ran in packs, those packs were bigger than anything in the world, even in the tropics.... And maybe the question was irrelevant; the cities were beyond anything she ever imagined.
Finally Jaqueramaphan backed off. He huddled together. There was a shiver in his voice. "T-there's a whole universe in there. We could follow it forever, and never know...."
She looked at the other two. For once, Vendacious had lost his smugness. There were ink stains on all his lips. The writing benches around him were littered with dozens of sketches, some clearer than others. He dropped the pen, and gasped. "I say we take what we have and study it." He began gathering the sketches, piling them into a neat stack. "Tomorrow, after a good sleep, our heads will be clear and --"
Scrupilo dropped back and stretched. His eyes had excited red rims. "Fine. But leave the sketches, friend Vendacious." He jabbed at the drawings. "See that one and that? It's clear that our blundering gets us plenty of empty results. Sometimes the picture box just locks us out, but much more often we get that picture: No options, just a couple of aliens dancing in a forest and making rhythm sounds. Then if we say --" and he repeated part of the sequence, "-- we get that picture of piles of sticks. The first with one, the second with two, and so on." !QU should I hunt for a better metaphor.
!QU What would Mother Nature be called?
!V March 16, 1991 Pack of packs (see reference to God's chisels in
!V c02)

Woodcarver saw it too. "Yes. And a figure comes out and points to each of the piles and says a short noise by each." She and Scrupilo stared at each other, seeing the same gleam in each others' eyes. The excitement of learning, of finding order where there had seemed only chaos. It had been a hundred years since she last felt this way. "Whatever this thing is ... it's trying to teach us the Two-Legs' language." !V June 2, 1991 Following paragraph deleted in my campaign to upgrade
!V Scriber:
!V
She and Scrupilo turned back to the picture box. Vendacious and
!V Jaqueramaphan were forgotten, along with fatigue and hunger.






!NÆH QU New Chapter?
!mARK 13Jun89

In the days that followed, Johanna Olsndot had lots of time to think. The pain in her chest and shoulder gradually eased; if she moved carefully, it was only a pulsing soreness. They had taken the arrow out and sewed the wound closed. She had feared the worst when they had tied her down, when she saw the knives in their mouths and the steel on their claws. Then they began cutting; she had not known there could be such pain. !RETRO make it clear that Johanna was unconscious on the travois after the
! ambush
!IMPER:
!QU Is this ordering of her priorities okay (namely that she thinks of
! hate before Jefri)?
!jrf This depends on her personality. If she is a nurturer, she'd
!jrf probably think of Jefri first. Also in survival terms, having Jefri
!jrf would help her more than hate would. Johanna doesn't seem like the
!jrf kind of person who would think of hate first. Decide on this.
!jrf2 illegible rearrangement of the end of second sentence:

She still shuddered with remembered agony. But she didn't have nightmares about it, the way she did about....
Mother and Dad were dead; she had seen them die with her own eyes. And Jefri? Jefri might still be alive. Sometimes Johanna could go a whole afternoon full of hope. She had seen the coldsleepers burning on the ground below the ship, but those inside might have survived. Then she would remember the indiscriminate way the attackers had flamed and slashed, killing everything around the ship. ^ FRAG:
^ spent long
^ stretches in mindless funk. Nothing could bring them back; nothing
^ could bring her own life back. Something deep her mind cast about for
^ some reason to go on, however slender. It was there, a durable
^ thread extending through it all: her hate for the murderers. She
^ pulled herself along it, grasping for rational thought.
^ I can hurt them. If I plan, I can kill them.
^ And once she started thinking,
^ there were other reasons to go on: Jefri might still be alive. And
^ though she had seen the coldsleepers burning on the ground, the ones
^ inside might still be alive.
!CHK for echoes with Witling
!RETRO PRO There is more gender inflection in Samnorsk than in Tinish
! Eg, "heroine" below
!V June 3, 1991 CHK specialty of Sjana Olsndot archeologist

She was a prisoner. But for now, the murderers wanted her well. The guards were not armed -- beyond their teeth and tines. They kept well away from her when they could. They knew she could hurt them.
They kept her inside a big dark cabin. When she was alone she paced the floor. The dogthings were barbarians. The surgery without anesthetics was probably not even intended as torture. She hadn't seen any aircraft, or any sign of electricity. The toilet was a slot carved in a marble slab. The hole went so deep you could scarcely hear the plop hit bottom. But it still smelled bad. These creatures were as backward as people in the darkest ages on Nyjora. They had never had technology, or they had thoroughly forgotten it. Johanna almost smiled. Mom had liked novels about shipwrecks and heroines marooned on lost colonies. The big deal was usually to reinvent technology and repair the spacecraft. Mom was ... had been ... so into the history of science; she loved the details of those stories. !jrf2 "as in" above be replace by "as"
!QU INCON Yes, how did they avoid getting locked out?
!jrf They're a little lucky, and smarter than she knows.
!V also, they went through the baby-talk code
!CHKd sp booby trap

Well, Johanna was living it now. But with important differences. She wanted rescue, but she also wanted revenge. These creatures were nothing like human. In fact, she couldn't remember reading of anything quite like them. She'd have looked for them in her dataset, except they had taken that. Ha. Let them play with it. They'd quickly run into her booby traps and find themselves totally locked out.
!was 07.txt, p125-146
^ ?CHK spiral stairs dimensions
!pRB ID Flenser's naming scheme seems something like the naming of
! pets
!PRB Survey for overuse of packisms
! jlc says emphatically no; he wants more.
!QU What are the acoustic characteristics of rock
!jrf depends on the type of rock






At first there were only blankets to keep warm. Then they'd given her clothes cut like her jump suit but made of puffy quilting. They were warm and sturdy, the stitching neater than anything she imagined a nonmachine could do. Now she could comfortably walk around outside. The garden beyond her cabin was the best thing about the place. It was about a hundred meters square, and followed the slope of a hillside. There were lots of flowers, and trees with long, feathery leaves. Flagstoned walks curved back and forth through mossy turf. It was a peaceful place if she let it be, a little like their backyard on Straum.
There were walls, but from the high end of the garden, she could see over them. The walls angled this way and that, and in places she could see their other side. The windows slits were like something out of her history lessons: they let you shoot arrows or bullets without making a target of yourself. !V June 3, 1991 PROwrite "feather leaves"? -- See c13 Tyrathect PoV

When the sun was out, Johanna liked to sit where the smell of the feather leaves was strongest, and look over the lower walls at the bay. She still wasn't sure just what she was seeing. There was a harbor; the forest of spars was almost like the marinas on Straum. The town had wide streets, but they zigged and zagged and the buildings along them were all askew. In places there were open-roofed mazes of stone; from up here, she could see the pattern. And there was another wall, a rambling thing that ran for as far as she could see. The hills beyond were crowned with gray rock and patches of snow. !QU Is this "minds so evil ..." repetitious? I don't think so
!QU Is this "you could almost mistake..." too repetitious?
!QU Is she too slow in figuring this out?

She could see the dogthings down in the town. Individually, you could almost mistake them for dogs (snake-necked, rat-headed ones). But watch them from a distance and you saw their true nature. They always moved in small groups, never more than six. Within the pack they touched, cooperated with clever grace. But she never saw one group come closer than about ten meters to another. From her distant viewpoint, the members of a pack seemed to merge ... and she could imagine she was seeing one multilimbed beast ambling cautiously along, careful not to come too close to a similar monster. By now, the conclusion was inescapable: one pack, one mind. Minds so evil they could not bear to be close to one another.





!jrf2 "coercion toward joy" -- nice phrase

Her fifth time in the garden was the prettiest yet, a coercion toward joy. The flowers had sprayed downy seeds into the air. The lowering sunlight sparkled off them as they floated by the thousands on the slow breeze, clots in an invisible syrup. She imagined what Jefri would do here: first pretend grownup dignity, then bounce from one foot to the other. Finally he would race down the hillside, trying to capture as many of the flying tufts as he could. Laughing and laughing -- !RETROwrite the crippled nature of Woodcarver's members

"One, two, how do you do?" It was a child's voice, behind her.
Johanna jumped up so fast she almost tore her stitches. Sure enough, there was a pack behind her. They -- it? -- was the one who had cut the arrow out of her. A mangy lot. The five were crouched, ready to run away. They looked almost as surprised as Johanna felt.
"One, two, how do you do?" The voice came again, exactly as before. It might as well have been a recording, except that one of the animals was somehow synthesizing the sound with the buzzing patches of skin on its shoulders, haunches and head. The parrot act was nothing new to her. But this time ... the words were almost appropriate. The voice was not hers, but she had heard that chant before. She put hands on hips and stared at the pack. Two of the animals stared back; the others seemed to be admiring the scenery. One licked nervously at its paw.
The two rear ones were carrying her dataset! Suddenly she knew where they'd gotten that singsong question. And she knew what they expected in response. "I am fine and how do you do?" she said.
The pack's eyes widened almost comically. "I am fine, so then are we all!" It completed the game, then emitted a burst of gobbling. Someone replied from down the hill. There was another pack there, lurking in the bushes. She knew that if she stayed near this one, the other wouldn't approach. !QU Is it best the way I have not brought explicitly the danger that
! they might torture her for information if they know Samnorsk?
!PRB Seems to me that they could learn even without her cooperation

So the Tines -- she always thought of them by those claws on their front feet; those she would never forget -- had been playing with the Pink Oliphaunt, and hadn't been stopped by the booby traps. That was better than Jefri ever managed. It was clear they had fallen into the kindermode language programs. She should have thought of that. When the dataset noted sufficiently asinine responses it would adapt its behavior, first for young children, and -- if that didn't work -- for youngsters who didn't even speak Samnorsk. With just a little cooperation from Johanna, they could learn her language. Did she want that?
The pack walked a little nearer, at least two of them watching her all the time. They didn't seem quite so ready to bolt as before. The nearest one dropped to its belly and looked up at her. Very cute and helpless, if you didn't see the claws. "My name is --" Johanna heard a short burst of gobble with an overtone that seemed to buzz right through her head. "What is your name?"
Johanna knew it was all part of the language script. There was no way the creature could understand the individual words it was saying. That "my name, your name" pair was repeated over and over again between the children in the language program. A vegetable would get the point eventually. Still, the Tines pronunciation was so perfect....
"My name is Johanna," she said. !V PRB ug. Following mispronunciation depends on
!V English! TUF June 12, 1991

"Zjohanna," said the pack, with Johanna's voice, and splitting the word stream incorrectly.
"Johanna," corrected Johanna. She wasn't even going to try saying the Tines name. !PRB small. Too bad you can't repeat somewhere about the moss.

"Hello, Johanna. Let's play the naming game!" And that was from the script too, complete with silly enthusiasm. Johanna sat down. Sure, learning Samnorsk would give the Tines power over her ... but it was the only way she could learn about them, the only way she could learn about Jefri. And if they had murdered Jefri, too? Well then, she would learn to hurt them as much as they deserved. !jrf2 Here you might rephrase to include "the only way she could
!jrf2 ever learn whether Jefri was still alive, or how to hurt them..."