A Fire Upon the Deep

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."

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.

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."

"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 — "

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.