The Children of the Sky

by VernorVinge

  Where was Jefri? Ravna looked carefully in all the windows. Nothing more could be seen in the shadows. She rolled back a few seconds, and did some pattern analysis…No, there was no sign of Jef. She stifled the impulse to raise the humaniform probability and reanalyze.

  Amdi hunkered down as the lamplight spread across him. White Tips’ wheelbarrow was rolled forward amazingly close, and the rest of Flenser-Tyrathect spread out, forming a semi-circle around Amdiranifani.

  The video stream froze again; a diagnostic window showed that this delay was related to Flenser’s hearing. Till now, the sounds coming across the link hadn’t received much analysis. Ravna had heard the click of Flenser’s nails on the stone, the creak of the wheelbarrow, but Flenser’s mindsounds—ultrasonics from 40 up to 250kHz—were mostly ignored. Patterns that indicated startlement or anger would be reported, but constructing a detailed thought stream would have been impossible for the Oobii even in the Beyond.

  Now Oobii heard the chords and gobble-hiss of Interpack speech.

  After a moment more, video and synchronized sound continued, with Oobii’s best guess at translation appearing below the main window.

  Flenser-Tyrathect:

  You have my [time | curiosity],

  [little one | little ones].

  Why did you want this meeting?

  Amdiranifani:

  I [?] very sad. I [?] [?] scared.

  What [?] me [?] [?]

  Ravna replayed the audio a couple of times. By combining Oobii’s guesses with her own knowledge, she could often make sense of Tinish. Amdi’s last statement was pretty clearly: “What will become of me?”

  But now Amdi switched to Samnorsk: “Could we please speak in human, Mr. Tyrathect? It’s the language I like best. My problems are hard to say right in Tinish.”

  “Of course, my dear boy. Samnorsk will be fine.” Flenser’s human voice had its usual cordial tone, the manner of a clever sadist.

  Surely Amdi recognized the mockery in Flenser’s tone? After all, the eightsome had known Flenser-Tyrathect since the final days of the Flenserist regime. But now the eight huddled together and edged forward a few centimeters, almost crawling on their bellies. “I’m so afraid. There are so many things to be sad about. Maybe if there weren’t so many, I could cope and not just be a silly self-pitier.”

  Flenser-Tyrathect’s chuckle was gentle. “Ah. Poor Amdiranifani. You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simply can’t feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering. Even so—”

  The diagnostic window showed serious relay problems. Some of the forwarding devices were probably riding with the evening glowbugs up on the surface; maybe those insects were thinning as the night air cooled. Several seconds passed. Oobii’s guesses were not converging. Finally a little red flag appeared, indicating that clarity was unattainable with the data being received. Sigh. Ravna raised the level of acceptable uncertainty, and waved for the programs to proceed. Sometimes this surveillance reminded her too much of pre-tech fairy tales: She was a sorceress hunched over her crystal ball, doing her best to scry truth from uncertain auguries.

  After a moment, Oobii generated its best guess: The displays jigged back a second or two and restarted. Flenser was saying: “Even so, my boy. What problems are troubling you?”

  Amdi moved a little closer. “You made Steel and Steel made me.”

  Gentle laughter. “Of course. I made Steel, and mainly from my own members. But Steel assembled you from the new-born puppies of geniuses that he purchased, stole, and murdered for—from all across the continent. You are among the rarest of packs, born all at once, all of puppies. Like a two-legs.”

  “Yes, like a human.” Oobii’s imagery showed tears in Amdi’s eyes. “And now dying like a human, even though humans don’t begin to get old while they’re still children.”

  “Ah,” said Flenser. Ravna noticed that the one with the white tipped ears had tilted its wheelbarrow forward and extended its neck toward Amdi. Wow. The overlapping mindsounds should be loud enough to be emotionally confusing to both packs. But Flenser’s voice—as represented by the surveillance program, always keep that in mind—was as cool as ever: “Haven’t we discussed this before? Unanimous ageing is a tragedy, but your members are still only fourteen years old. Your bad times are easily twenty years in the future, when my grand schemes will finally—”

  Amdi’s interruption didn’t quite fit: “I loved Mr. Steel. Of course, I didn’t know he was a monster.”

  Flenser shrugged. “That’s how I made him. My mistake, I’m afraid.”

  “I know. But you made up for that!” Amdi hesitated, his voice coming more quietly. “And now there’s Jefri’s problem. You…”

  Ravna’s head came up. What about Jefri? But Amdi didn’t finish the sentence.

  After a moment, Flenser said, “Yes, I’m doing what I can about that. Now what new problem has ambushed you?”

  Amdi was making human crying sounds, the sounds of a small lost child. “I’ve learned that two of me are Great Plains short-timers.”

  Ravna had to think for a second. Great Plains short-timers? That was a racial group. They didn’t look different from most other Tines, though they tended to congenital heart disease. Short-timers rarely lived more than twenty years.

  In the other windows, Ravna could see Flenser’s heads bobbing. “Those two of you have chest pains?”

  “Yes. And eyesight problems.”

  “Oh my,” said Flenser. “Short-timers. That is a problem. I’ll check—” The audio faltered, perhaps Oobii grappling with some exceptionally great ambiguity. “I’ll check Steel’s records, but I fear you may be right. It’s a well-known tradeoff among broodkenners: the Great Plains short-timers often have excellent geometrical imaginations. Still and all, it’s not unanimous ageing.”

  Amdiranifani was shivering. “When those two of me die—I won’t be me anymore.”

  “Every pack faces that, my boy. Unless we get killed all at once, change is what life is all about.”

  “For you, maybe! For ordinary packs. But I came into the world all at once, with nothing before. Mr. Steel struck a balance when he brought me together. If I lose two, if I lose even one, I’ll—”

  “Woodcarver’s broodkenners can find some kind of match. Or you may find that six is as large as your mind can comfortably be.” Flenser’s tone was overtly sympathetic, but—quite consistent with his usual manner—somehow dismissive at the same time.

  “No, please! If I lose any one of my eight, I will fall apart like an arch without a keystone. I beg you, Mr. Tyrathect. You made Mr. Steel. You made the Disaster Study Group. You made Jefri betray everyone. In all that monstering, can’t there be some good miracles?”

  Ravna watched, numb, making no move to pause the stream or look at the log window. Now that the scene had surpassed all bounds of credibility, it played on with scarcely a hiccup. Amdi wasn’t talking anymore; there was just the sound of human weeping. That sort of made sense. The eightsome had crumpled into a posture of abject despair. The Reformed Flenser wasn’t saying anything either, but what Oobii was showing in the displays was incredible: All five of Flenser-Tyrathect edged closer to Amdi. The two that had been the original Flenser pushed White Tips and its wheelbarrow forward. Some of them were less than a meter from Amdi’s nearest members. That was almost as unbelievable as anything else. Flenser-Tyrathect was notorious for his fastidious, standoffish behavior. Normal packs, friendly ones, would often send one or two of their number into the space between for a brief exchange of mindsounds. It was like a human social embrace or a light kiss. Flenser-Tyrathect was never so familiar. He was always the pack at the far end of the table, or hunched behind the thickest acoustic quilts.

  In this increasingly fantastic video, White Tips had reached forward to cuddle two of Amdi against its neck. Several of the other were almost as close. To a naive human it might look like
one crowd of animals giving comfort to another. Between Tinish packs it would be profound intimacy.

  And any resemblance to what is really happening is purely coincidental! Ravna angrily flicked all the views into nothingness.

  —————

  Ravna sat for a long time, staring into the gentle warm darkness of her study. She had pushed the analysis much too far. Oobii’s attempt to make sense out of nearly pure noise was madness. And yet…the proper nouns could scarcely have been introduced by the software without some reason. She knew she was damned to return and return to this scene, to try to tease apart software glitches from signal noise from underlying revelation. Maybe she could get something out of it by starting with external truths—for instance, the fact that Jefri was no traitor.

  She went back over the data, only now she wasn’t looking at the lying video. Instead she went down to the surveillance program’s logs. As she suspected, the transmission conditions tonight had been poor to rotten. And yet, it had been almost this bad before and she had still received sensible results. She waved the network logs away and moved up to the program’s analysis. These were probability trees showing the options considered and how those options related to one another. The crisp video Ravna had been watching was simply the most probable interpretation coming out of that jungle of second-guessing. For instance, Amdi had almost certainly asserted that some particular person was behind the Disaster Study Group. She found that node of the analysis, expanded it; reasons and probabilities appeared. Yeah, and Flenser had been named as that person simply because of context and something about Amdi’s posture. Similarly, Amdi had probably said that “someone” had betrayed “something”—but the software had generated the particular nouns from a long list of suspects.

  It was amazing that Jefri had even made it onto that list, much less coming out at the top. So what logic had put him there? She drilled down through the program’s reasoning, into depths she had never visited. As suspected, the “why I chose ‘this’ over ‘that’” led to a combinatorial explosion. She could spend centuries studying this—and get nowhere.

  Ravna leaned back in her chair, turning her head this way and that, trying to get the stress out her neck. What am I missing? Of course, the program could simply be broken. Oobii’s emergency automation was specially designed to run in the Slow Zone, but the surveillance program was a bit of purely Beyonder software, not on the ship’s Usables manifest. It just happened to work Down Here.

  Surely, if something serious happened, there would be warnings? Ravna looked idly through the application’s error logs. The high-priority messages were just what she expected: “Proceeding with Inadequate Data, blah blah blah.” She dipped down into low-priority advisory messages. No surprise. Just for this evening’s session, there were literally billions of those. She sorted them a couple of different ways and spent some quality time browsing the results…

  Ravna froze in her chair, staring at the monster she found lurking:

  442741542471.74351920 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269471

  442741542481.74351935 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269369

  442741542491.74354327 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269373

  442741542501.75439121 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269313

  442741542511.75439144 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269265

  442741542521.74351947 Advisory Notice Only:

  Flenser sensor count summary: 140269215

  …29980242 lines omitted

  “Explain!” her voice sound strangled even to her own ears.

  A window popped up, defining the relevant fields, pointing to the provenance of these notices, pointing to analysis of the sensor devices on each of Flenser-Tyrathect’s members.

  The short of it was that these notices said precisely what she thought they said. In all of the Flenser pack, there remained fewer than one hundred and fifty million sensors. The original infestation had numbered in the low trillions and even that had been barely sufficient. If the infestation had fallen to the low hundred millions then…then her surveillance was a self-deceiving joke!

  How long has this been going on? She waved up a curve fitter and asked for the best three models of the failure history. It gave back three of course, but the first was near certain: from day one of her surveillance, almost ten years ago, her little spies had been steadily failing, a smooth decay with a half-life of less than a year. In the Beyond the sensor infestation would have been good for a century. For that matter, the supporting software would have been smart enough to tell her if she was using junk. No wonder these gadgets aren’t on the Usables Manifest. Her desperate cleverness had turned around and bitten her on the nose.

  Ravna curled up in her chair, miserable. Tonight was just a microcosm of her life over the last few tendays. But if I review past surveillance, knowing how bogus it really is, maybe I can see how far my trust of Flenser should still extend. She opened her eyes, wiped away her tears, and looked at the inexorable decay curve glowing in the air before her. It had been years since the surveillance had had even a trillion sensors. During all those years the failure notifications had been piling up, but at invisibly low priority levels. Meantime, the higher layers of the spy program had continued supplying Ravna with—face it—fantasy. She might never have noticed, if the real threats had not become so numerous that the fantasy began to spout flagrant lies.

  If I decide the past surveillance was bogus too—I’ll have to tell Woodcarver about this. Yeah, and destroy whatever trust still remains between us.

  For some moments, her attention was lost in bleak contemplation. Had she ever messed up this badly before? No. Had things ever looked darker?…Well, watching the Battle on Starship Hill, that had been scarier. Losing Pham a few hours later, that had been sadder. But for despair, there had been nothing worse since the destruction of her home civilization at Sjandra Kei.

  I got through that. Pham had been there for her.

  Ravna opened her eyes. It was just past midnight. The outside windows looked upon a dark landscape; they were that far into the autumn.

  There was something she must do, irrational though it might be. She hadn’t done it in more than a year. Neither the Children nor the Tines would understand, and she had no desire to encourage superstition. But if ever there was a time, this was the time to go visit Pham.

  CHAPTER 09

  Cemeteries were ghastly places. There had been a few such memorials at Sjandra Kei. People in the Beyond died, eventually. The death rate was comparable to the half-lives of the underlying civilizations, which mostly migrated up and up and—if they were not supremely stupid, like the greedy fools of Straumli Realm—eventually transformed themselves into Powers.

  Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time. Ravna remembered seeing something similar in the terranes of Harmonious Repose: the cemetery had gradually transformed the terrane into a mausoleum with incidental living tenants.

  The cemetery on Starship Hill had been Ravna’s idea, come to her when she suddenly realized why cemeteries played such an important part in the stories of the Age of Princesses. She had picked the spot before the town grew up around the New Castle. The two hectare plot stretched across a curving slope of heather, with a view extending from the northwest islands all the way to Oobii in the south. In another ten years, the place might be surrounded by Newcastle town. There was no room allotted for cemetery expansion. And if I have my way, thought Ravna, this terrible place will never need to become larger.

  The Children came up here sometimes, but in the warmth of day. The youngest didn’t understand about cemeteries. The oldest didn’t want to understand, but they didn’t want to forget their friends, either.

  Ravna mostly came after dark, and when sh
e felt the darkest. By that measure, tonight was most definitely the time for a visit. She walked along the main path, her shoes crunching the frost-stiffened moss. Night in the arctic autumn, even here near the channel currents, ranged from cold to deathly frigid. Tonight was relatively mellow. The clouds had come in around sunset, stacking deeper and deeper over the land, trapping the day’s warmth. The hillside breeze had dropped to nothing more than a faint, chill breath. Oobii said there would be rain a little later, but for now the sky was dark and dry and there was clear air down to the waters of the inner channel. Here and there, she could see lights on the north end of Hidden Island. Very close by, there were occasional glows of lavender. Glowbugs. The tiny insects put on a big show only two or three nights a year, and usually earlier in the autumn than this. As she walked on, there were more of the lavender glints. The occasional glimmer was not enough to light her way…but they were welcome.

  Rows of graves lay on either side of the cemetery’s main path. Each place was marked by a headstone carved with a name and a star. The design was modeled after something she’d found in Oobii’s classical human archive. The little four-pointed stars were an early religious symbol, perhaps the most common in human histories, though she was not clear on the details. There were 151 graves in these four rows, almost all the inhabitants of the cemetery. One hundred and fifty-one Children, from less than a year old to sixteen, all murdered on the same summertime night, burned to death as they lay in coldsleep. The heather south of town was called Murder Meadows, but the actual killing field lay beneath the center of the New Castle, the central chamber where the Children’s Lander still sat upon charred moss.

  Ravna had known none of those Children. They had died before she even knew they existed. Her pace slowed. There could have been more dead Children here; many of the surviving coldsleep coffins had suffered fire damage. Reviving Timor had taught her what she could safely do. Only a few of the original kids still slept in their caskets under the castle, along with the four miscarriages from the new generation, and two accidents; someday she would wake them all. Someday she would fix Timor, too.