"How, if he can't communicate?"
"Yes, but he can still show us. I've ordered Vendacious's men to confine the staff to quarters. When Ja is calmer, we'll march every pack in the castle past him. The fragment certainly remembers what happened to Scriber, and wants to tell us. If any of the killers are our own people, he'll see them."
"And he'll make a fuss." Just like a dog.
"Right. So the main thing is to provide him with security right now… and hope our doctors can save him."
They found the rest of Scriber a couple of hours later, on a turret of the old wall. Vendacious said it looked like one or two packs had come out of the forest and climbed the turret, perhaps in an attempt to see onto the grounds. It had all the markings of an incompetent, first-time probe: nothing of value could be seen from that turret, even on a clear day. But for Scriber it had been fatally bad luck. Apparently he had surprised the intruders. Five of his members had been variously arrowed, hacked, decapitated. The sixth — Ja — had broken his back on the sloping stonework at the base of the wall. Johanna walked out to the turret the next day. Even from the ground she could see brownish stains on the parapet. She was glad she couldn't go to the top.
Ja died during the night, though not from any further enemy action; he was under Vendacious's protection the whole time.
Johanna went the next few days without saying much. At night she cried a little. God damn their "doctoring". A broken back they could diagnose, but hidden injuries, internal bleeding — of such they were completely ignorant. Apparently, Woodcarver was famous for her theory that the heart pumped the blood around the body. Give her another thousand years and maybe she could do better than a butcher!
For a while she hated them all: Scarbutt for all the old reasons, Woodcarver for her ignorance, Vendacious for letting Flenserists get so close to the castle… and Johanna Olsndot for rejecting Scriber when he had tried to be a friend.
What would Scriber say now? He had wanted her to trust them. He said that Scarbutt and the others were good people. One night, about a week later, she came close to making peace with herself. She was lying on her pallet, the quilt heavy and warm upon her. The designs painted on the walls glimmered dim in the emberlight. All right, Scriber. For you… I will trust them.
Pham Nuwen remembered almost nothing of the first days after dying, after the pain of the Old One's ending. Ghostly figures, anonymous words. Someone said he'd been kept alive in the ship's surgeon. He remembered none of it. Why they kept the body breathing was a mystery and an affront. Eventually the animal reflexes had revived. The body began breathing of its own accord. The eyes opened. No brain damage, Greenstalk(?) said, a full recovery. The husk that had been a living being spoke no contradiction.
What was left of Pham Nuwen spent a lot of time on the OOB's bridge. From before, the ship reminded him of a fat sowbug. The bugs had been common in the straw laid across the floor of the Great Hall of this father's castle on Canberra. The little kids had played with them. The critters didn't have real legs, just a dozen feathery spines sticking out from a chitinous thorax. No matter how you tumbled them, those spines/antennas would twitch the bug around and it would scuttle on its way, unmindful that it might be upside down from before. Yes, the OOB's ultradrive spines looked a lot like a sowbug's, though not as articulate. And the body itself was fat and sleek, slightly narrowed in the middle.
So Pham Nuwen had ended inside of a sowbug. How fitting for a dead man.
And now he sat on the bridge. The woman brought him here often; she seemed to know it should fascinate him. The walls were displays, better than he had ever seen in merchantman days. When the windows looked out the ship's exterior cameras, the view was as good as from any crystal-canopy bridge in the Qeng Ho fleet.
It was like something out of the crudest fantasy — or a graphics simulation. If he sat long enough, he could actually see the stars move in the sky. The ship was doing about ten hyperjumps per second: jump, recompute and jump again. In this part of The Beyond they could go a thousandth of a light-year on each jump — farther, but then the recompute time would be substantially worse. At ten per second that added up to more than thirty light-years per hour. The jumps themselves were imperceptible to human senses, and between the jumps the were in free fall, carrying the same intrinsic velocity they'd had on departing Relay. So there was none of the doppler shifting of relativistic flight; the stars were as pure as seen from some desert sky, or in low-speed transit. Without any fuss, they simply slid across the sky, the closer ones the faster. In half an hour he went farther than he had in half a century with the Qeng Ho.
