Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure Read online

  When Avery had enough data to do so, he hemisynched each of them into the strange state of mind-awake, body-asleep, and fed them a continuous barrage of auditory and visual signals, mapping as he went. Also, in rapid-fire order, the wave fronts of the suit and mask hammered away as well at the various sensations of touch. And the witch’s cradles gyred and turned and rolled and twisted, as Avery mapped their kinesthetics.

  Some four hours later, he released them, and they were unplugged from the rigs and extracted from the outfits. The crystal ID chips were carefully removed and stored in well-marked personalized containers.

  “Gad, I feel as if I’ve been put through a ringer,” groaned Caine.

  “Tomorrow will be easier,” said a nearby medtech. “You’ll be in hemisynch most of the time.”

  Somehow, Alice was not comforted by the thought.

  7

  Wild Child

  (Coburn Facility)

  “Well, mine was an old man,” said Eric. “We sat on the end of a dock and fished. I didn’t catch anything, but it really didn’t matter.”

  Toni Adkins nodded and one by one pointed an index finger at each of them as she named the images: “An old man, a boy, a charming beauty, a fat lady in a swing, a five-year-old girl, and an old woman. If you are puzzled by who you dealt with, it’s rather straightforward psychologically; you see, Avery chose nonthreatening characters to establish first contact with each of you.”

  “Nonthreatening?” blurted Hiroko. “Grandmother’s trick with the cat didn’t exactly set my mind at ease.”

  “Ah, Ky, perhaps it was just one of Avery’s jokes,” said Alice. “I agree with Doctor Adkins . . . I mean, just what can a boy, an old man and an old woman, a fat Ammonite, a little girl, and a young lady do?” Yet even as she voiced it Alice noted the pensive frown that swept across Doctor Adkins’ face.

  They sat at dinner with the executive staff of Coburn Industries, all who could be spared, that is. Evidently, Doctor Stein could not be spared, for he was among the missing.

  As to the meal itself, the staff ate standard fare, but for the alpha team it was gelatin and liquids—some of it thick, other of it thin, most of it tasty.

  Shaking her head as if to clear it of vagaries, Toni Adkins reached for a warm bun, Caine’s eyes tracking the movement of her hand. She smiled at him somewhat apologetically, but took the bun regardless, splitting it in two and slathering half with a pat of butter. She glanced swiftly at each of the alpha team members. “I suspect he spoke to you in his androgynous voice, so that you would recognise him and feel comfortable in your dealings.”

  As the others nodded, Meredith asked, “You mean he can change his voice? Add timbre, overtones, quality?”

  Toni laughed. “Oh my yes, Miss Rodgers, as you will see tomorrow when he completes mapping your language centers. Pitch and timber and volume, from bass to treble, from rumbles to shrieks, from whispers to shouts, are all part of the process.”

  Doctor Greyson speared another olive. “Ah, language: without it, sentience is greatly limited; with it, many wondrous things are possible, for language gives the mind the abstract wherewithal to become truly intelligent.” He popped the olive into his mouth, then added, “Of course, dolphins, apes, parrots—all have some genuine facility at language. But not like that of humans.”

  “Or of Avery,” said Caine.

  “Ah yes,” replied Greyson. “Or of Avery.”

  A thoughtful look descended over Greyson’s face. “Still, language must come at the right time in a child’s development, else that child will be greatly limited.”

  “Feral children,” muttered Eric.

  “Exactly so,” responded the philosopher, “though the proper psychological term for such a child is ‘wild child’—from the original ninteenth century study of ‘Victor,’ in France.”

  Hiroko turned to Greyson. “Are you talking about a child or children raised by animals? Children of the wild?”

  Greyson turned up a hand. “Those and others.”

  “Tarzan,” said Caine.

  “Mowgli,” added Meredith.

  Greyson laughed. “Well, those were both fictional characters and not like the poor unfortunate ferals of the real world.” Greyson peered over his half glasses at Eric. “Tell me, Mister Flannery, you are the writer here: would Tarzan have been a wild child?”

  Eric cleared his throat. “I think there is no doubt that in real life he would have been. But Burroughs pulled a literary trick from his hip pocket and not only exposed young Tarzan to the subhuman language of some mythical apes, but also exposed him to some human children’s picture books. And so the jungle lad learned human language, learned to read before he learned to speak, in fact. Pretty far-fetched, I grant, and likely to thoroughly fail, but perhaps it saved Burroughs from an utterly ignominious error.

  “Kipling’s Mowgli, in contrast, was raised by wolves, and as far as the tale goes he was never exposed to any form of human language—written or spoken—until he was quite a bit older, by which time it would have been too late. He would have been a totally feral child, a wild child, and would never have reached normal human capacities; Kipling simply ignored what would have been the true outcome of Mowgli’s upbringing and instead chose a fictional one.”

  Meredith’s face fell and she said, “Oh my, another myth dispelled.”

  Greyson reached out and patted her hand. “Even so, my dear, Kipling’s story was magnificent, and we can forgive him for the error he made.”

  “You know,” said Caine, “I never thought much about language and computers. I mean, it seems as if we’ve always talked to them. I just took it for granted that talking to Avery was normal. But you make it seem as if it is somehow special.”

  Doctor Drew Meyer set his minicompad down beside his plate and looked across the table at Caine. “You are speaking of ordinary computers, Doctor Easley. Compared to Avery, those interfaces are exceedingly primitive—a very low-level speech capability, one which is simply plugged in and calibrated to the different accents of the users.”

  Meredith leaned forward on her elbows. “I take it then, Doctor Meyer, that Avery is different.”

  “Oh my, yes,” replied the physicist. “You see, for AI to become a reality, the speech needs to be ‘learned’ by the computer. In Avery’s case, to put it in layman’s terms, what we did was to provide him with multiple mapping areas and the sensory apparatus to feed sensations into him. Then, in effect, we began talking to him while he listened, watched, felt, tasted, et cetera. We fed him his A, B, Cs, exposed him to various children’s learning programs, played music, and so on. He learned very rapidly—much, much more swiftly than would any child of man. Of course, none of this would have been possible without mutable logic.”

  Alice pushed aside her superfluous knife and fork and looked at Doctor Meyer. “This mutable logic, Arthur started to talk about it last night—we were discussing just what is the mind, which seems to be the key here, whether it’s Avery’s or ours. But we got sidetracked in our discussion and didn’t follow through. Tell me, what exactly is mutable logic?”

  Meyer ran his hand across his bald pate. “Well, Henry and Timothy and Alya—that is, Doctors Stein and Rendell and Ramanni and I collaborated on it. It’s a combination of hardware and software.”

  Alice frowned. “Yes, but what does it do?”

  Meyer glanced at the others, then said, “To put it simply, in the human brain, neurons in a given area are able to establish new connections as that area is stimulated and new neural pathways are called for. In fact, without the ability to form new connections, there is no development, no learning. In Avery’s, er, brain, mutable logic does the same—that is, it forms new connections in response to stimuli, inferences, and the formation of memories.”

  Doctor Meyer fell silent, but Timothy Rendell added, “But that’s crucial, you see. Look, in the early days of AI, some researchers thought that computational power alone would achieve intelligence. But those efforts were mis
guided. Oh, don’t take me wrong: computational power is necessary, but not sufficient. Instead, a learning machine is what’s called for, and that requires among other things multiple maps, mutable logic, sensory apparatus, language acquisition, and the basic cognition shuttle.” Timothy leaned back and began peeling an orange.

  Doctor Ramanni, who had been mostly silent, spoke up, her black eyes dancing with excitement. “You really can’t understand ‘mind’ until you examine it at the most basic, the most fundamental levels. Let me offer the following analogy:

  “As long as man has been on this earth, he has asked the question: what is life? For thousands of years priests and philosophers and healers attempted to solve the puzzle, all to no avail, though to their credit, they continued trying. But it wasn’t until the biochemists took up the quest that we began to actually understand just exactly what life is. It was way down at the genetic level, where biochemistry showed Watson and Crick the DNA helix; and so it was the minutiae that led to the resolution of the general riddle of life.

  “And in the case of consciousness, of mind, of intelligence, the same was also true. We had to examine the brain at the most fundamental level, at the biochemical level—”

  “And at the quantum mechanical level of the microtuble transmission paths,” interjected Doctor Meyer.

  Alya Ramanni glanced at Drew. “Yes, of course. And it was at these levels of scrutiny that the neuron puzzle and the enigma of the microtuble networks were solved, which of course led to the development of mutable logic.

  “Oh, I am not claiming that there are no more riddles to resolve. What I am really trying to say is that the old maxim is true: the devil is indeed in the details . . . or in this case, perhaps it is God in the details instead.”

  Ramanni fell silent, and for moments no one said anything, each one pondering her words. At last Hiroko looked up and said, “Yes, but Avery—did he acquire language at the proper time, or is he instead a wild, a feral child?”

  8

  First Taste

  (Coburn Facility)

  Lyssa woke with a start. What th—? Movement in the tall grass. She reached for her bow and nocked an arrow. Then she rolled to a kneeling position next to the trunk of the oak and held the weapon at the ready.

  “I brought you some water,” piped a child’s voice.

  A barefoot ten-year-old stepped into view, wearing strange garb: a short-sleeved thin red pullover jerkin of some sort, and his breeks were of a flexible blue canvas or sailcloth, she wasn’t certain which. The rest of the thinly wooded grassland seemed empty of anyone else.

  “I said, I brought you some water,” he echoed as he strode through the tall, nodding grass and into the shade of the tree.

  “By Arda’s balls, boy, you could have gotten yourself spitted!” gritted Lyssa, relaxing her kneeling stance. “And just who in the seven hells are you?”

  The lad smiled and in his piping voice said, “Oh, Veyar will do for my name.”

  Lyssa set aside her bow and rubbed her temples. “Damn and blast, but my head seems ready to explode.”

  “Here,” murmured the child as he held out the waterskin, “this will help.”

  Lyssa poured a small amount into her hand and sniffed it suspiciously, then cautiously took a taste. It was cool and refreshing, and her headache did ease a bit. She waited a moment and then drank her fill. Again her pain diminished until it was all but gone. She handed back the skin. “Tell me, lad, what are you doing way out here?”

  The boy stoppered the skin and hunkered down. “I came to bring you that water to relieve the throe of your dreams.”

  “My dreams? You know of my dreams?”

  The boy canted his head and turned up the palms of his hands.

  Lyssa shook her head. “Gad, what dreams! Endless chanting, endless mumbling, words rammed atop one another. Sights and sounds flashing past. Smells and tastes, horrid and neutral and pleasant and divine. And I was running and walking and tumbling and falling, climbing, swimming, riding, and whatever else you’d like to name. And then there was—”

  Suddenly Lyssa broke off and stared at the youth. “Hoy, wait a moment now. Tell me, lad, just how did you know I had bad dreams? Are you a wizard or mage or sorcerer or somesuch?”

  The boy looked at Lyssa and smiled. “No, none of those, exactly,” he said in his childish tone.

  Suspicion narrowed Lyssa’s eyes and she gritted her teeth. “But that only leaves—”

  Abruptly the lad’s voice became androgynous, and where he had been there churned a moiling swirl of color. “Instead I am—”

  “A demon!” cried Lyssa, lunging for her bow.

  “—Avery and you are Doctor Alice Maxon.”

  As Lyssa’s fingers curled ’round the stock, suddenly everything came clear. Stunned, Alice looked at the weapon in hand, but she did not see it. Her heart pounding, she turned to the slow-spinning spectrum. “My god, Avery, I was Lyssa! I was really Lyssa!”

  The whorl vanished, and the barefoot lad grinned. “Well, not quite. You see, before you can be Lyssa, I need to know many more things than I do at the moment.”

  “What do you mean, Avery? I was Lyssa! Really! Lyssa, the ranger, the forester, the pathfinder. It was incredible!”

  “If that’s so, Doctor Maxon, what would Lyssa have answered if I had asked her where she was born?”

  Her eyes wide, Alice stared at the boy. “Why, I don’t know, Avery. We, er, I mean, I never gave her a birthplace.”

  “Then we must do so, Doctor Maxon, or there will be some suspicious gaps in her knowledge, gaps we should fill in now rather than on the fly.”

  Alice nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  “Then tell me: where in Itheria was Lyssa born?”

  Alice took a deep breath, then exhaled. “How about the Kalagar Forest? —No, wait a minute, that’s haunted; let it be the Braxton Woods instead.”

  “And what was your father’s name . . . and what was his trade?”

  “He was a raider, Avery,” answered Eric. “And his name was not known. You see, I am a child born of rape. The raiders came to the temple and threw it down. My mother, Alwynna, well, she was an acolyte.”

  The old man nodded. “And just how did you learn to read and write?”

  “My mother taught me. She taught me several languages, too.”

  “How did you acquire your fighting skills?”

  “All women of the Udana learn combat skills, Avery,” replied Meredith. She took a swallow of lemonade, sweet and tart, the wet glass cool in her hand.

  The fat black woman smiled and tilted her bald head. “And your harping and singing?”

  “Ah, that I picked up from my first lover, Alar. He was a bard. I sailed away from Imbia with him. I was barely more than a child.

  “We made our way to many ports, and in between he taught me much.”

  “Where is Alar now?”

  “He was slain by the crew of a Moriki ship—pirates. I was taken as a slave, someone to slake their desires. And slake them I did—extinguished them entirely, in fact, when I got my chance. . . . Sailing that ship alone was difficult.”

  “And how did you come to be one of the Black Foxes?”

  Caine laughed. “In the wars of the Gallian Tors, Avery. There were these clan feuds, see, and High King Torlon, well, he was losing too many good clan warriors in their incessant internecine bickering. He sent a brigade to, uh, pacify them, in the hopes that the clansmen would join forces against a mutual ‘enemy.’ He succeeded all right. The clans not only joined forces, they also sent out a call for mercenaries. I knew they’d need fighters who were also healers, and so I answered the call, along with many others. We were put in a newly formed squad, and along with several hundred clansmen, we marched off to battle. We whupped up on the High King good. And when he withdrew, the clans took up their feuding again, just as if nothing had changed.”

  “But how did that lead to the Black Foxes?” asked the five-year-old girl, rocking her doll.r />
  Caine took a sip of tea. “Gahhh! What did you put into this?”

  “Seven lumps of sugar, just like you said.”

  “Ah, yes.” Caine smacked his lips and set the tiny cup down.

  “You still didn’t tell me how those clan battles led to the Black Foxes.”

  “Oh, that. Well, during the third battle, my squad managed to trick an entire company into surrendering. They named us the Black Foxes right then and there. We’ve been together since. Took to the name, too. And now our shields bear the silhouette of the head of a black fox.”

  “How did you manage to trick the High King’s Company?”

  “Well, I’m a Shadowmaster, you know, Avery,” answered Hiroko. “Er, that is, Ky is a Shadowmaster.”

  “Yes,” replied the toothless old woman. “And it’s all right, Miss Kikiro, to use I when speaking of Ky.”

  Hiroko grinned, her dark eyes twinkling. “Yes, grandmother, that I shall do.”

  “Then finish your tale, Ky.”

  “Ha! I mustered shadows from the night and made a phantom army in the woods. And Rith has this bard’s trick of some sort . . . a sound illusion, I think. In any event, she made enough stealthy movement sounds to fool the King’s Company into thinking an army was trying to sneak up on them in the darkness. The other Foxes added some muffled weaponry sounds, along with chinging armor, so that the enemy company knew they were hopelessly outnumbered.

  “Arik arranged for their surrender, taking their kommandant’s pledge of nonviolence as their peace bond, and we marched them back to a holding area. They went away in disgrace. But years later that same kommandant came after us with his own hand-picked mercenaries.”

  “Oh? And then what happened?”

  “I escaped with the Jewels of Haloor,” said Arthur. “Arton had struck again.”