A Fire Upon the Deep

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

-=*=-

CHAPTER 13
!CHK this timing
!PRO RETRO "Flensers" as a place name? NO June 12, 1991 use
!V Flenser's Domain, Flenser's Hidden Island, or Hidden Island
^ CHK IMP INCON CHRON how long it ought to take to make/build various things
^ and fit that into the overall

At Woodcarvers and then -- a few days later -- at Flenser's Hidden Island, the long daylight of arctic summer ended. At first there was a little twilight just around midnight, when even the highest hill stood in shadow. And then the hours of dark grew quickly. Day fought night, and night was winning. The featherleaf in the low valleys changed to autumn colors. Looking up a fjord in daylight was to see orange red on the lower hills, then the green of heather merging imperceptibly to the grays of lichen and the darker grays of naked rock. The snowpatches waited for their time; it would come soon. !Put in some of the stuff you much earlier said about Flenser's
! personal colors
!QU How come they don't use line/ring sentries?
!V ID Someplace, it might be nice to talk about various Tinish theories
!V of morality (see conversation with jrf) NO TIME June 12, 1991
!V June 4, 1991 INCON CHK this size with that which the new castle
!V eventually attains

At every sunset, each day a few minutes earlier, Tyrathect toured the ramparts of Flenser's outer wall. It was a three-mile walk. The lower levels were guarded by linear packs, but up here there were only a few lookouts. When she approached, they stepped aside with military precision. More than military precision; she saw the fear in their look. It was hard to get used to that. For almost as far back as she had clear memories -- twenty years -- Tyrathect had lived in fear of others, in shame and guilt, in search of someone to follow. Now all that was turned on its head. It was not an improvement. She knew now, from the inside, the evil she had given herself to. She knew why the sentries feared her. To them, she was Flenser.
Of course, she never gave any hint of these thoughts. Her life was only as safe as the success of her fraud. Tyrathect had worked hard to suppress her natural, shy mannerisms. Not once since coming to Hidden Island had she caught herself in the old bashful habit of heads lowering, eyes closing. !V June 7, 1991 you use "drooping", "closing" in later references to this
!V mannerism

Instead, Tyrathect had the Flenser stare -- and she used it. Her passage around the top wall was as stark and ominous as Flenser's had ever been. She looked out over her -- his -- domain with the same hard gaze as before, all heads front, as if seeing visions beyond the petty minds of the disciples. They must never guess her real reason for these sunset sweeps: for a time, the days and nights were like in the Republic. She could almost imagine she was still back there, before the Movement and the massacre at Parliament Bowl, before they cut her throats and wed pieces of Flenser to the stumps of her soul. !PRO write "trimming animal herds" DONE (thinning of froghens)

In the gold and russet fields beyond the stone curtains, she could see peasants trimming the fields and the herds. Flenser ruled lands far beyond her view, but he had never imported food. The grain and meat that filled the storehouses were all produced within a two-day march of the straits. The strategic intent was clear; still, it made for a peaceful evening's view and brought back memories of her home and school. !CHK agricultural timing
!QU Does anyone object to sun setting behind mountains here? I assume
! they are to the northwest and may actually islands.
!QU okay to apply "her" to Flenser's things?
!V I don't think should do it this early.
!INCON with later (maybe make it wood and mention working as fast as
! possible to be done before freeze of winter)
!NÆH RETRO write "dayaround"
!jrf Why? I like "dayround" better

The sun slid sideways into the mountains; long shadows swept the farm lands. Flenser's castle was left an island in a sea of shadow. Tyrathect could smell the cold. There would be frost again tonight. Tomorrow the fields would be covered with false snow that would last an hour past sunrise. She pulled the long jackets close around her and walked to the eastern lookout. Across the straits, one of the near hilltops was still in the sun. The alien ship had landed there. It was still there, but now behind wood and stone. Steel began building there right after the landing. The quarries at the north end of Hidden Island were busier now than ever in Flenser's time. The barges hauling stone to the mainland made a steady traffic across the straits. Even now that the light was not dayround, Steel's construction went on nonstop. His Incallings and lesser inspections were harsher than Flenser's had used to be. !PRO RETRO? first use of "star people"? -- NÆH, as of 10Feb91
!V you only use it in this chapter

Lord Steel was a killer; worse, a manipulator. But since the alien landing, Tyrathect knew that he was something else: deathly afraid. He had good reason. And even though the folk he feared might ultimately kill them all, in her secret soul she wished them well. Steel and his Flenserists had attacked the star people without warning, more out of greed than fear. They had killed dozens of beings. In a way the murders were worse than what the Movement had done to her. Tyrathect had followed the Flenser of her own free will. She had had friends who warned her about the Movement. There had been dark stories about the Flenser, and not all had been government propaganda. But she had so wanted to follow, to give herself to Something Greater.... They had used her, literally as their tool. Yet she could have avoided it. The star people had had no such option; Steel simply butchered them. !INCON. A general change you should be doing is to pace Steel's coming
! to his final attitude about the aliens
!V I think I've done this

So now Steel labored out of fear. In the first three days he had covered the flying ship with a roof: a sudden, silly farmhouse had appeared on the hilltop. Before long the alien craft would be hidden behind stone walls. Ultimately, the new fortress might be bigger than the one on Hidden Island. Steel knew that if his villainy did not destroy him, it would make him the most powerful pack in the world. !QU Where are you going to put in the fate of the other fragments?
!PRB Toward the end of this paragraph, too much s-alliteration

And that was Tyrathect's reason for staying, for continuing her masquerade. She couldn't go on forever. Sooner or later the other fragments would reach Hidden Island; Tyrathect would be destroyed and all of Flenser would live again. Perhaps she wouldn't survive even that long. Two of Tyrathect were of Flenser. The Master had miscalculated in thinking they could dominate the other three. Instead the conscience of the three had come to own the brilliance of the two. She remembered almost everything the great Flenser had known, all the tricks and all the betrayals. The two had given her an intensity she had never had before. Tyrathect laughed to herself. In a sense, she had gained what she had been so naively seeking in the Movement; and the great Flenser had made exactly the mistake that in his arrogance he thought impossible. As long as she could keep the two under control, she had a chance. When she was all awake, there wasn't much problem; she still felt herself a "she", still remembered her life in the Republic more clearly than the Flenser memories. It was different when she slept. There were nightmares. The memories of torment inflicted suddenly seemed sweet. Sleep-time sex should soothe; with her it was a battle. She awoke sore and cut, as if she had been fighting a rapist. If the two ever broke free, if she ever awoke a "he".... It would take only a few seconds for the two to denounce the masquerade, only a little longer to kill the three and put the Flenser members aboard a more manageable pack. !V CHKd sp manageable

Yet she stayed. Steel meant to use the aliens and their ship to spread Flenser's nightmare worldwide. But his plan was fragile, with risks on every side. If there was anything she could do to destroy it and the Flenser Movement, she would.

!INCON Earlier in your first statements about Steel he calls himself
! "self made" -- I think the contradiction is just evidence of self-
!V deception

Across the castle, only the western tower still hung in sunlight. No faces showed at the window slits, but eyes looked out: Steel watched the Flenser Fragment -- the Flenser-in-Waiting as it styled itself -- on the ramparts below. The fragment was accepted by all the commanders. In fact, they accorded it almost the awe they had given to the full Flenser. In a sense, Flenser had made them all, so it wasn't surprising they felt a chill in the Master's presence. Even Steel felt it. In his shaping, Flenser had forced the aborning Steel to try to kill him; each time Steel had been caught and his weakest members tortured. Steel knew the conditioning that was there, and that helped him fight it. If anything, he told himself, the Flenser Frag was in greater danger because of it: in trying to counter the fear, Steel might just miscalculate, and act more violently than was appropriate. !V May 31, 1991 PRB It really has been kinda a long time and the other
!V parts of Flenser have not arrived yet. How should this fact be
!V accomodated? TUF June 12, 1991
!V IMP to decide just the proper scene to reveal that the other parts
!V of Flenser are dead

Sooner or later Steel had to decide. If he didn't kill it before the other fragments reached Hidden Island, then all of Flenser would be here again. If two members could dominate Steel's regime, then six would totally erase it. Did he want the Master dead? And if he did, was there any surely safe way...? Steel's mind flickered lightly all around the issue as he watched the black-frocked pack. ^ V Rethink the second sentence up
!CHKd sp side effect
!V INCON should the castle be visible from Hidden Island? The ship is
!V not in line-of-sight, remember. Maybe he's seeing part of the castle

Steel was used to playing for high stakes. He had been born playing for them. Fear and death and winning were his whole life. But never had the stakes been as high as now. Flenser had come close to subverting the largest nation on the continent, and had had dreams of ruling the world.... Lord Steel looked to the hillside across the straits, at the new castle he was building. In his present game, world conquest would follow easily on victory, and the destruction of the world was a conceivable consequence of failure. !INCON Who calls it a ship, who calls it a house?
!V June 12, 1991 in c04 Pilgrim uses the "flying house" terminology
!V pretty consistently (and "ship" is not used, either in c02 or c04)
!V in c11 Woodcarver people use "house" (consistent with c04)
!V Scriber in c19 still uses "flying house" ... and ship is
!V not used by the Tines in these chapters, either Good.
! Similar questions about the terminology used for humans by the different
! groups and subgroups of nonhumans TUF June 12, 1991
!hld How many days after the landing is this? Molten rock probably skinned
!hld over at surface.

Steel had visited the flying ship shortly after the ambush. The ground was still steaming. Every hour it seemed to grow hotter. The mainland peasants talked of demons wakened in the earth; Steel's advisors could not do much better. The whitejackets needed padded boots to get close. Steel had ignored the steam, donned the boots, and walked beneath the curving hull. The bottom was vaguely like a boat's hull, if you ignored the stilts. Near the center was a teat-like projection; the ground directly underneath burbled with molten rock. The burned-out coffins were on the uphill side of the ship. Several of the corpses had been removed for dissection. In the first hours his advisors had been full of fanciful theories: the mantis folk were warriors fleeing a battle, come to bury their dead....
So far no one had been able to take a careful look inside the craft.
The gray stairs were made of something as strong as steel yet feather light. But they were recognizably stairs, even if the risers were high for the average member. Steel scrambled up the steps, leaving Shreck and his other advisors outside.
He stuck a head through the hatch -- and winced back abruptly. The acoustics were deadly. He understood what the whitejackets were complaining about. How could the aliens bear it? One by one he forced himself through the opening. !mARK 13Jun89
!QU BKG TINES quartz? TUF June 12, 1991
!INCON with previous use of "quiet"?
!QU is this paragraph too corny? TUF June 12, 1991

Echoes screamed at him -- worse than from unpadded quartz. He quieted himself, as he had so often done in the Master's presence. The echoes diminished, but they were still a horde raging in the walls all around. Not even his best whitejackets could tolerate more than five minutes here. The thought made Steel stand straighter. Discipline. Quiet does not always mean submission; it can mean hunting. He looked around, ignoring the howling murmurs.
Light came from bluish strips in the ceiling. As his eyes adjusted, he could see what his people had described to him: the interior was just two rooms. He was standing in the larger one -- a cargo hold? There was a hatch in the far wall and then the second room. The walls were seamless. They met in angles that did not match the outer hull; there would be dead spaces. A breeze moved fitfully about the room, but the air was much warmer than outside. He had never been in a place that felt more of power and evil. Surely it was only a trick of acoustics. They would bring in some absorbent quilts, some side reflectors, and the feeling would go away. Still.... !BKG TINES this implies that Tines have a better sense of smell than
! humans PRO RETRO? -- I don't think it does imply better smell

The room was filled with coffins, these unburned. The place stank with the aliens' body odor. Mold grew in the darker corners. In a way that was comforting: the aliens breathed and sweated as other living things, and for all their marvelous invention, they could not keep their own den clean. Steel wandered among the coffins. The boxes were mounted on railed racks. When the ones outside had been here, the room must have been crammed full. Undamaged, the coffins were marvels of fine workmanship. Warm air exited slots along the sides. He sniffed at it: complex, faintly nauseating, but not the smell of death. And not the source of the overpowering stench of mantis sweat that hung everywhere.
Each coffin had a window mounted on its top side. What effort to honor the remains of single members! Steel hopped onto one and looked down. The corpse was perfectly preserved; in fact, the blue light made everything look frozen. He cocked a second head over the edge of the box, got a double view on the creature within. It was far smaller than the two they had killed under the ship. It was even smaller than the one they had captured. Some of Steel's advisors thought the small ones were pups, perhaps unweaned. It made sense; their prisoner never made thought sounds. !INCON with later where Amdi accepts the ship's interior without
! apparent discomfort SOLN PRO write: make sure you mention quilting.
!V Aha, the quilting can disguise the spread of the mold
!V Also Amdi's thoughts are not as vicious
!pRB In general, this discomfort angle is overplayed. Things like this are
! around in various places on Tinesworld already (cf, the echo rocks
! that Tyrathect remembers in the radio cloak scene)
!QU Do you really want to use the word "face" instead of "muzzle" or <?> ?

Partly as an act of discipline, he stared for a long while at the alien's queer, flat face. The echo of his mind was a continuing pain, eating at his attention, demanding that he leave. Let the pain continue. He had withstood worse before, and the packs outside must know that Steel was stronger than any of them. He could master the pain and have the greater insight.... And then he would work their butts off, quilting these rooms and studying the contents.
So Steel stared, almost thoughtless, into the face. The screaming in the walls seemed to fade a little. The face was so ugly. How could the creature eat? He had looked at the charred corpses outside, noticed their small jaws and randomly misshapen teeth.
A few minutes passed; the noise and ugliness mixed together, dream-like.... And out of his trance, Steel new a nightmare horror: The face moved. The change was small, and it happened very, very slowly. But over a period of minutes, the face had changed. !INCON cure? That they aren't deep frozen because of thermal problems

Steel's fell from the coffin; the walls screamed back terror. For a few seconds, he thought the noise would kill him. Then he regained himself with quiet thought. He crawled back onto the box. All his eyes stared through the crystal, waiting like a pack on hunt.... The change was regular. The alien in the box was breathing, but fifty times more slowly than any normal member. He moved to another box, watched the creature in it. Somehow, they were all alive. Inside those boxes, their lives were simply slowed. !mARK 13Jun89

He looked up from the boxes, almost in a daze. That the room reeked of evil was an illusion of sound ... and also the absolute truth. !INCON why isn't Tyrathect more concerned about the possibility that
! the aliens are invaders
!jrf Good question -- you'd think he'd care
!V Ah, but remember that Tyrathect (at least the pure version)
!V was pathologically eager for terrible things to happen to
!V Steel
!TUF jrf2 Yes, but Tyrathect would still be aware and conflicted about
!jrf2 the issue

The mantis alien had landed far from the tropics, away from the collectives; perhaps it thought the Arctic Northwest a backward wilderness. It had come in a ship jammed with hundreds of mantis pups. These boxes were like larval casings: the pack would land, raise the small ones to adulthood -- out of sight of civilization. Steel felt his pelts puff up as he thought about it. If the mantis pack had not been surprised, if Steel's troops had been any less aggressive ... it would have been the end of the world.
Steel staggered to the outer hatch, his fears coming louder and louder off the walls. Even so, he paused a moment in the shadows and the screams. When his members trooped down the stairs, he moved calmly, every jacket neatly in place. Soon enough his advisors would know the danger, but they would never see fear in him. He walked lightly across the steaming turf, out from under the hull. But even he could not resist a quick look across the sky. This was one ship, one pack of aliens. It had had the misfortune of running into the Movement. Even so, its defeat had been partly luck. How many other ships would land, had already landed? Was there time for him to learn from this victory?

!CHKd is eyrie just the right word?
! Webster: "the nest of a bird on a cliff or mountaintop"
!CHKd sp lookout
!Suggest shortening up this scene NÆH,
! and rationalizing with the other
! descriptions of the castle
!V CHK CHRON <more like 14Jul..30Sep> and remember that a month is
!V about 10 days -- See notes in c01 (10Feb91 )
!V but there is still the question whether you want to
!V be using "month" or "tenday" as the term: Must use "tenday"

Steel's mind returned to the present, to his eyrie lookout above the castle. That first encounter with the ship was many tendays past. There was still a threat, but now he understood it better, and -- as was true of all great threats -- it held great promise.
On the rampart, Flenser-in-Waiting slid through the deepening twilight. Steel's eyes followed the pack as it walked beneath the torches, and one by one disappeared down stairs. There was an awful lot of the Master in that fragment; it had understood many things about the alien landing before anyone else. !V Where is the assertion of the preceding sentence
!V supported? TUF June 12, 1991
!V June 12, 1991 but in c24 Tyra may bring up the invasion theory
!V again
!INCON How come soldiers don't use armor (as in Earth's Middle Ages)?
! Any pack would have to walk single file, dragging any armor behind.
!V They probably do use light armor (and in fact I think I mention
!V such elsewhere

Steel took one last look across the darkening hills as he turned and started down the spiral stair. It was a long, cramped climb; the lookout sat atop a forty-foot tower. The stair was barely fifteen inches wide, the ceiling less that thirty inches above the steps. Cold stone pressed in from all around, so close that there were no echoes to confuse thought -- yet also so close that the mind was squeezed into a long thread. Climbing the spiral required a twisting, strung-out posture that left any attacker easy prey for a defender in the eyrie. Such was military architecture. For Steel, crawling the cramped dark was pleasant exercise. ^ PRO? Use of the word "public" for areas big enough for more than one
^ pack? -- not done as of 10Feb91

The stairs opened onto a public hallway, ten feet across with back-off nooks every fifty feet. Shreck and a bodyguard were waiting for him. !jrf2 "Shreck". Who?
! He wants some little more about Shreck
!V Certainly, I can mention him (perhaps with a
!V title in earlier scenes.
!V Shreck the Colorless -- And for Good Reason (? now think of
!V the reason :-)
!V Maybe even could be unmasked late in story by Tyra as the
!V thing behind the separate taking of Johanna -- NÆH
!V If you don't go for colorless, think of some reason why his
!V fate should be inextricably tied to Steel's safety
!V [ <-- PRB collision time!]
!V ID see the idea below in connection with the recycling holes
!
!IMP QU Somewhere have speculation about why Johanna was taken down the
! the other way? TUF June 12, 1991
!PRO RETRO BKG "silkpaper"

"I have the latest from Woodcarvers," said Shreck. He was holding sheets of silkpaper. !PRO write somewhere that Hidden Castle has effective central heating
! by contrast with Woodcarvers NÆH June 12, 1991
!IMP Should not mention Vendacious as the traitor until after Scriber
! murder

Losing the other alien to Woodcarvers had once seemed a major blow. Only gradually had he realized how well it could work out. He had Woodcarvers infiltrated. At first he'd intended to have the other alien killed; it would have been easy to do. But the information that trickled north was interesting. There were some bright people at Woodcarvers. They were coming up with insights that had slipped past Steel and the Master -- the fragment of the Master. So. In effect, Woodcarvers had become Steel's second alien laboratory, and the Movement's enemies were serving him like any other tool. The irony was irresistible.
"Very good, Shreck. Take it to my den. I'll be there shortly." Steel waved the whitejackets into a back-up nook and swept past him. Reading the report over brandy would be a pleasant reward for the day's work. In the meantime, there were other duties and other pleasures. !jrf ||||||why so familiar a name?
!V Isn't brandy a generic name for a very
!V low-tech fortified wine?
!jrf2 ok

!mARK 15Jun89
!V ID Aha! Here is a place where I might bring up the
!V nature of Shreck. Notion of someone pathologically interested
!V in maintaining the status quo. (not exactly the same things as
!V as loyalty; more like a stress syndrome)
!V May 31, 1991 contending idea: that to Shreck, sensation is what is
!V desired, but can't discriminate pain from pleasure

The Master had begun building Hidden Island Castle more than a century earlier; it was growing yet. In the oldest foundations, where an ordinary ruler might put dungeons, were the Flenser's first laboratories. Many could be mistaken for dungeons -- and were by their inhabitants. !V May 31, 1991 Unfortunately, "Shreck" means "fright" or "terror"
!V [German]
!V May 31, 1991 need airholes:

Steel reviewed all the labs at least once a tenday. Now he swept through the lowest levels. Crickers fled before the light of his guard's torches. There was a smell of rotting meat. Steel's paws skidded where slickness lay upon the stone. Holes were dug in the floor at regular intervals. Each could hold a single member, its legs jammed tight to its body. Each was covered by a lid with tiny air holes. It took the average member about three days to go mad in such isolation. The resulting "raw material" could be used to build blank packs. Generally, they weren't much more than vegetables, but then that was all the Movement asked of some. And sometimes remarkable things came from these pits: Shreck for instance. Shreck the Colorless, some called him. Shreck the stolid. A pack who was beyond pain, beyond desire. Shreck's was the loyalty of clockwork, but built from flesh and blood. He was no genius, but Steel would have given an eastern province for five more of him. And the promise of more such successes made Steel use the isolation pits again and again. He had recycled most of the wrecks from the ambush that way....
Steel climbed back to higher levels, where the really interesting experiments were undertaken. The world regarded Hidden Island with fascinated horror. They had heard of the lower levels. But most didn't realize what a small part those dark spaces played in the Movement's science. To properly dissect a soul, you need more than benches with blood gutters. The results from the lower levels were simply the first steps in Flenser's intellectual quest. There were great questions in the world, things that had bothered packs for thousands of years. How do we think? Why do we believe? Why is one pack a genius and another an oaf? Before Flenser, philosophers argued them endlessly and never got closer to the truth. Even Woodcarver had pranced around the issues, unwilling to give up her traditional ethics. Flenser was prepared to get the answers. In these labs, nature itself was under interrogation. !jrf2 "its". Whose?
!Might mention digger team postures here
!General notion of postures is good. There may be some places INCON
! where you use posture in a different sense
!PRB Seems like some of this would have been tried before

Steel walked across a chamber one hundred yards wide, with a roof supported by dozens of stone pillars. On every side there were dark partitions, slate walls mounted on tiny wheels. The cavern could be blocked off, maze-like, into any pattern. Flenser had experimented with all the postures of thought. In the centuries before him, there had been only a few effective postures: the instinctive heads together, the ring sentry, various work postures. Flenser had tried dozens more: stars, double rings, grids. Most were useless and confusing. In the star, only a single member could hear all the others, and each of those could only hear the one. In effect, all thought had to pass through the hub member. The hub could contribute nothing rational, yet all its misconceptions passed uncorrected to the rest. Drunken foolishness resulted.... Of course, that experiment was reported to the outside world.
But at least one of the others -- still secret -- worked strangely well: Flenser posted eight packs around the floor and on temporary platforms, blocked them from each another with the slate partitions, and then put members from each pack in connection with their counterparts in three others. In a sense, he created a pack of eight packs. Steel was still experimenting with that. If the connectors were sufficiently compatible (and that was the hard part), the resulting creature was far smarter than a ring sentry. In most ways it was not as bright as a single heads-together pack, yet sometimes it had striking insights. Before he left for the Long Lakes, the Master had developed a plan to rebuild the castle's main hall so council sessions could be conducted in this posture. Steel hadn't pursued that idea; it seemed just a bit too risky. Steel's domination of others was not quite as complete as Flenser's had been. !hld preceding sentence makes no sense
!V ||||||||||||||conducting meetings in the posture
!V described would have increased the chance that Steel's internal
!V deliberations might occasional leak out to his advisors.

No matter. There were other, far more significant, projects. The rooms ahead were the true heart of the Movement. Steel's soul had been born in these rooms; all of Flenser's greatest creations had begun here. During the last five years, Steel had continued the tradition ... and improved upon it. !V June 2, 1991 CHK this is just barely enough time to account for
!V Amdi's age

He walked down the hall that linked the separate suites. Each bore its number in inlaid gold. At each he opened a door and stepped partway through. His staff left their report on the previous tenday just inside. Steel quickly read each one, then poked a nose over the balcony to look at the experiment within. The balconies were well-padded, and screened; it was easy to observe without being seen. !on! You have Woodcarver give live birth!!
!CHKd sp meaning of the noun "commonplace"

Flenser's one weakness (in Steel's opinion) was his desire to create the superior being. The Master's confidence was so immense, he believed that any such success could be applied to his own soul. Steel had no such illusions. It was a commonplace that teachers are surpassed by their creations -- pupils, fission-children, adoptions, whatever. He, Steel, was a perfect illustration of this, though the Master didn't know it yet.
Steel had determined to create beings that would each be superior in some single way -- while flawed and malleable in others. In the Master's absence, he had begun a number of experiments. Steel worked from scratch, identifying inheritance lines independent of pack membership. His agents purchased or stole pups that might have potential. Unlike Flenser, who usually melded pups into existing packs in an approximation of nature, Steel made his totally newborn. His puppy packs had no memories or fragments of soul; Steel had total control from the beginning. !CHKd sp wet nurse (noun)

Of course, most such constructions quickly died. The pups had to be parted from their wet nurses before they began to participate in the adult's consciousness. The resulting pack was taught entirely in speech and written language. All inputs could be controlled.
Steel stopped before door number thirty-three: Experiment Amdiranifani, Mathematical Excellence. It was not the only attempt in this direction, but it was by far the most successful. Steel's agents had searched the Movement for packs with ability for abstraction. They had gone further: the world's most famous mathematician lived in the Long Lakes Republic. The pack had been preparing to fission; she had several puppies by herself and a mathematically talented lover. Steel had had the pups taken. They matched his other acquisitions so well that he decided to make an eightsome. If things worked out, it might be beyond all nature in its intelligence. !BKG INCON? that torches are used in Flenser's castle?
!V I'm not sure this is so big. They use candles indoors quite a bit
!V too
!V CHK usage Servant, Follower. Should be used consistently
!V thoughout the story
!V June 12, 1991 "Follower" is never used

Steel motioned his guard to shield the torches. He opened door thirty-three and soft-toed one member to the edge of the balcony. He looked down, carefully silencing that member's fore-tympanum. The skylight was dim, but he could see the pups huddled together ... with its new friend. The mantis. Serendipity, that was all he could call this, the reward that comes to a researcher who labors long enough, carefully enough. He had had two problems. The first had been growing for a year: Amdiranifani was slowly fading, its members falling into the usual autism of wholly newborn packs. The second was the captured alien; that was an enormous threat, an enormous mystery, an enormous opportunity. How to communicate with it? Without communication, the possibilities for manipulation were very limited.
Yet in a single blind stroke, an incompetent Servant had shown the way to solve both problems. Now that his eyes were adjusted to the dimness, Steel could see the alien beneath the pile of puppies. When first he'd heard that the creature had been put in with an experiment, Steel had been enraged beyond thought; the Servant who made the mistake had been recycled. But the days passed. Experiment Amdiranifani began showing more liveliness than any time since its pups were weaned. It quickly became obvious -- from dissecting the other aliens, and observing this one -- that mantis folk did not live in packs. Steel had a complete alien. !NÆH PRO RETRO write "packsleep"

The alien moved in its sleep, and made a low-pitched mouth noise; it was totally incapable of any other kind of sound. The pups shifted to fit the new position. They were sleeping too, vaguely thinking among themselves. The low end of their sounds was a perfect imitation of the alien.... And that was the greatest coup of all. Experiment Amdiranifani was learning the alien's speech. To the pack of newborns this was simply another form of interpack talk, and apparently its mantis friend was more interesting than the tutors who appeared on these balconies. The Flenser Fragment claimed it was the physical contact, that the pups were reacting to the alien as a surrogate parent, thoughtless though the alien was. !QU Make it clear somewhere that those weapons are no longer available
^ V In the messages might say that the hand gun is not working
!V Note that below you imply that the pistol no longer functions
!iNCON two weapons?
!IMP in analyzing the progression: Steel is fairly justified that
! there will be no follow-ons from space QU is this plausible at
! this point?

It really didn't matter. Steel brought another head to the edge of the balcony. He stood quietly, neither member thinking directly at the other. The air smelled faintly of puppies and mantis sweat. These two were the Movement's greatest treasure: the key to survival and more. By now, Steel knew the flying ship was not part of an invasion fleet. Their visitors were more like ill-prepared refugees. There had been no word of other landings, and the Movement's spies were spread far.
It had been a close thing, winning against the aliens. Their single weapon had killed most of a regiment. In the proper jaws, such weapons could defeat armies. He had no doubt the ship contained more powerful killing machines -- ones that still functioned. Wait and watch, Steel counseled himself. Let Amdiranifani show the levers that could control this alien. The entire world would be the prize. !Pacing: Later he can look back on the progression
!was the first part of 08.txt, p147-166
!
!BKG RETRO Writing/drawing/talking should not be done equally well
! by all members TUF June 12, 1991
!iNCON Skylights in dungeons!
!ID (For end of story) chapter TITLE: One Last Flensing (for Steel)
!Make it clear that Johanna likes what she eats, mostly
!ID Maybe Amdi has special switching techniques to accomodate being 8
!ID Somewhere Woodcarver should give a Society of Mind commentary
!ID "Duty" and "Honor" should be a big element of Amdi's education
!ID You might want an afterword, saying you don't believe in Zones
!jrf |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||??
!ID Maybe Steel became Mr. Tines (the other big possibility is Pilgrim)
!V as of February 10, 1991 , I think I have mainly done this:
!V IMP INCON w Blabber: one-sex pack pathologies
!ID Speaking of a one-sex pack: "It would go crazy; it couldn't
! sleep with itself" but also consider not having this feature of Tines
! if you decide to go for the maximum inconsistency version with
! "Blabber"
!QU Does Amdi's and/or Jefri's age seem to vary too much? What is
! it?