And of course choirs were out of the question, here or anywhere. The only extrapack ###### that Steel indulged was with singletons -- and that as part of his experiments; it was just too dangerous to mix one's self with others. After dinner, Steel drifted into the library. He relaxed around his reading desk. Two of him sipped brandy while another smoked southern herbs. This was pleasure, but also calculation: Steel knew just what vices, applied to just which members, would raise his imagination to its keenest pitch. ... And more and more he was coming to see that imagination was at least as important as raw intelligence in the present game. The desk between him was covered with maps,
mbt shuguli,
mbt staka beluga, reports from the south, internal security memos. But lying in all the silkpaper, like an ivory slug in its nest,
复件 (74) air max1, was the alien radio. They had recovered two from the ship. Steel picked the thing up, ran a nose along the smooth,
复件 (40) air max, curved sides. Only the finest stressed wood could match its grace -- and that in musical instruments or statuary. Yet the mantis claimed this could be used to talk across dozens of miles, as fast as a ray of sunlight. If true ... Steel wondered how many lost battles might have been won with these, and how many new conquests might be safely undertaken. And if they could learn to make far-talkers ... the Movement's subordinates, scattered across the continent,
mbt kaya denim, would be as near as the guards by Steel's den. No force in the world could stand against them. Steel picked up the latest report from Woodcarvers. In many ways they were having more success with their mantis than Steel with his. Apparently theirs was almost an adult. More important, it had a miraculous library that could be interrogated almost like a living being. There had been three other datasets. Steel's whitejackets had found what was left of them in the burnt-out wreckage around the ship. Jefri thought that the ship's processors were a little like a dataset, "only stupider" (Amdi's best translation), but so far the processors had been useless. But with their dataset, several on Woodcarver's staff had already learned mantis talk. Each day they discovered more about the aliens' civilization than Steel's people could in ten. He smiled. They didn't know that all the important stuff was being faithfully reported to Hidden Island.... For now he would let them keep their toy, and their mantis; they had noticed several things that would have slipped by him. Still he damned the luck. Steel paged through the report.... Good. The alien at Woodcarvers was still uncooperative. He felt his smile spreading into laughter: it was a small thing, the creature's word for the Packs. The report tried to spell out the word. It didn't matter; the translation was "claws" or "tines". The mantis had a special horror for the tine attachments that soldiers wore on their forepaws. Steel licked pensively at the black enamel of his manicured claws. Interesting. Claws could be threatening things,
复件 (19) air max, but they were also part of being a person. Tines were their mechanical extension, and potentially more frightening. It was the sort of name you might imagine for an elite killer force ... but never for all the Packs. After all, the race of packs included the weak, the poor, the kindly, the naive ... as well as persons like Steel and Flenser. It said something very interesting about mantis psychology that the creature picked tines as the characterizing feature of the Packs. Steel eased back from his desk and gazed at the landscape painted around the library's walls. It was a view from the castle towers.