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 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.
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.
