The Children of the Sky

by VernorVinge

  Belatedly, Ravna bowed toward Woodcarver. As she did so, it seemed like a great shadow moved across the wall behind the platform. It was…herself…her own image, towering across the ten meter expanse. Just staring up at it made Ravna a little dizzy. There was no place in the hall her image would not intimidate. And the camera must be a fixed tracker. Even when she looked back at Woodcarver, she could tell that the giantess on the wall was still herself, not her co-Queen.

  This was when Nevil was to come on stage, introduce the two Queens and Ravna’s own very special speech. But Nevil was not to be seen. Surely Woodcarver will let him give his intros?

  She gave Woodcarver a second bow, at the same time searching for a private voice channel.

  Then Woodcarver showed mercy. She shifted a bit awkwardly on her human-style thrones, bringing her heads closer to one another. When she spoke, her voice seemed to come from everywhere, conversational tones that sounded as if she were just a meter or two away. Hopefully, she sounded like that to everyone here. “Welcome all to the New Meeting Place. I hope this place will bring openness and power to those who deserve it.”

  Ravna’s face was still the one on the giant display, but Woodcarver was sitting only a few meters away. Ravna could see that her dress was Tinish queenly, but not much different from the fur cloaks and half jackets that she normally wore. As for her expression—a pack’s aspect lay mainly in the posture of its members: sitting on her thrones, Woodcarver seemed to have a sardonic expression. “So today, my co-Queen, Ravna, wishes to tell you what her rule may bring and what it will expect of you.” Woodcarver extended a snout in Ravna’s direction and waved her graciously toward the lectern.

  For an instant, Ravna froze, thoroughly rattled. There were so many things, little and maybe not so little, that already had gone wrong. This is not how it was supposed to be! But she still had her speech and the ideas she had slaved over. And now she had the undivided attention of everyone she had hoped to reach. She turned and climbed the steps to the lectern. A window opened on the familiar, glowing words of her speech. For one moment, she ignored those words and simply looked out at her audience: one hundred and fifty humans, perhaps fifty packs. From her lectern, the main floor was almost three meters down. It spread into a misty, artificial distance. The seating was far plainer than anything on the stage, barely more than wooden benches and perches. Everywhere faces were looking up, and all—even most of the packs—were so familiar to her.

  And there was Nevil, right in the first row! He was dressed in the same country-spun quilting as all the Children, and right now he looked cold and soaked and dripping—much like the rest, come in from this morning’s rain.

  But he’d been here after all, just hidden from her view by the lectern. Sitting right beside him was Timor Ristling, for once without his possessive Best Friend pack. The boy had an enormous smile on his face. He seemed totally taken by Ravna’s image on the wall. Then he saw that she was looking at him and he started waving. Something going right at last. Ravna twitched her hand up to wave at them both and Nevil gave her back a wide grin of his own.

  Now there was her speech to give. She slid the text window so that wherever she looked, the words were writ large and translucent across her view. If she had been Nevil or Woodcarver or Johanna, she could have ad libbed a new beginning to the talk, something that would mellow all the screw-ups, that would honor Woodcarver and maybe give everybody a good laugh. But she was Ravna Bergsndot and she knew that if she departed from her written speech she would be lost. It was her life raft.

  This was where all the rehearsing would come to her rescue. She could looked through the misty words, speak them even as her gaze moved from face to face.

  “Thank you, um, Woodcarver.” Hei, an ad lib!

  She essayed a sympathetic smile. “Thank you all for coming here this morning despite the weather.” That wasn’t really an ad lib, since Oobii had been confident of this morning’s storm front.

  “We humans have been here on the Tines World for a little more than ten years. The packs rescued us and became some of our best friends. But we must remember, both humans and packs, that our coming was part of a vast and tragic debacle.” Here she made the proper gesture, dramatically pointing at the heavens beyond the crystal dome. “The evil that chased the humans to Tines World, still waits—even though diminished—in the near interstellar space.” And Ravna went on to describe Oobii’s best estimate of the status of the Blighter fleet, thirty light years out. She didn’t bring up the possibility of further Zone shifts; a real shift would be a game ender, and she had no hint of such beyond the weird glitch Oobii had reported years before. No, the story she told was pretty much what she’d been telling the Children from the day they came out of coldsleep. Nevil had told her that many of the kids had lost sight of that big picture. Telling them one more time, in this awesome setting, could make it clear why their present sacrifices were so necessary.

  “In just twenty years, the first light from the Blighter fleet will arrive at Tines World. Will that by itself be a danger? Perhaps, though I have my doubts. But in the decades after that, it’s possible that very small payloads, just milligrams, may arrive—all that the Blighters can accelerate to near-light speeds. With sufficiently high technology, even such tiny payloads could conceivably harm Tines World.” That was speculation from the nebulous end of Oobii’s weapons archive, extrapolating as best it could from their last information on the Blighters and the most exotic weapon systems that had ever been fielded in the Slow Zone.

  “What’s sure is that if the Blighters still wish us harm, then over the next century, certainly over the next thousand years, they can kill everyone in the world, unless—” here she paused dramatically just exactly as in all her rehearsals, and swept a steely look across her audience “—unless we, both humans and packs, quickly raise this world to the highest technology the Slow Zone can sustain. It’s our best hope, perhaps our only hope. It is worth hard sacrifices.”

  As she spoke, she continued to look back and forth across her audience, occasionally sending a nod in the direction of her co-Queen. Ravna wasn’t running any analysis tools, but she had the speech so well rehearsed that there was time to notice the listeners’ reactions. Her eyes caught on those she most respected. Nevil—not really a good test case, but a comforting one—was nodding his head at the right times, even though this all was something he’d heard over and over again during the last few days. Others: Øvin Verring and Elspa Latterby, they were paying close attention, but every so often they would look at each other with a shake of their heads. The tailors, Ben and Wenda Larsndot, they were sitting far in the back with their kids. They had given up listening early on, were spending their time keeping their children quiet. They acted as though they had heard all this before. Which they have, in a dozen dozen conversations with me over the years. Some, the likes of Gannon Jorkenrud, were mugging her words.

  I have to move on. If only she and Nevil could have foreseen this reaction when they were planning the speech—or if she were clever enough to amend it on the fly—she would skip forward with some clever segue and keep everyone’s attention on the overall message.

  The thought made her stumble on the words, almost lose her place. No. Her only hope was to plow ahead. These words might not sing, but she knew they made logical sense.

  “So what is the greatest sacrifice that we must make for ultimate survival? It’s a sacrifice I see each of us making every day. It’s a very hard thing, though I want to convince you that the alternatives aren’t really workable. That sacrifice is the relatively low priority that we’re putting on biomedical products.” That seemed to get everyone’s attention. Even the packs perked up heads here and there.

  Start with the bad news, build up to the good—but it was taking so long to get there! Okay, she was almost to her ideas for repairing more of the coldsleep caskets and creating an emergency medical committee. “For now we can treat only minor injuries. We have only basic epigenetic tr
iggers. Ultimately, all that will change. In the meantime, how are we to deal with ageing? It’s what our ancestors accepted for thousands of years…” Ravna never got to the “but.”

  “We are not your fucking ancestors!” It was Jefri Olsndot. He was halfway back in the crowd; she hadn’t seen him before this moment. But now he was on his feet, enraged.

  Jefri? Amdi was clustered all round him, his heads extended in an expression Ravna could not parse.

  Jefri was shouting at the top of his lungs. “How dare you dictate to us, you so safe and smug? We refuse to die for you, Ravna! We—” he was still shouting and gesturing, but the sound was gone. Oobii’s acoustics had damped his voice.

  Now Gannon Jorkenrud and another fellow were on their feet. “We will not die for you, Queenie! We will not die for—” and then their voices slipped away, too.

  Then there were Tami Ansndot and others, all shouting yet silent. Ravna cast about for sound controls, but they were bundled in the meeting place’s general automation. I don’t mean to shut people up!

  Her eyes focused back on the words of her speech. She had paragraphs to go! She felt a moment of helpless terror. Then she saw that, down in the first row, Nevil had come to his feet.

  Thank goodness. She and Nevil had planned that he would speak later, when they went to Question and Answer. If only they could go to that now, and bail out of the nightmare her speech had become.

  She gave him a jerk of her hand, urging him to come up to the lectern.

  Nevil climbed the steps to the platform, but did not come around to take her place. In the audience, Jefri and the others were still standing, but they weren’t shouting now. Instead there just a fretful murmur that seem to come from the crowd as a whole.

  Nevil turned to them and raised his palms placatingly. After a moment, the protesters settled back on their benches. “This is our New Meeting Place, folks. It’s what Ravna has built for us. We should use it to do what’s right.” The murmuring and angry sounds died away—naturally, as far as Ravna could see—and everyone was watching Nevil, giving his sensible words the attention they deserved.

  Ravna looked over her shoulder at the monster display that loomed behind the stage. The camera was still locked on her. Maybe it would switch to Nevil if she moved away from the lectern. She stepped to one side, then descended from the platform. But even when she sat in one of the side seats, there was still her face up there, now frowning down upon them.

  The audience could only see Nevil as a human-sized figure, standing beside the lectern. At least his voice was not damped:

  “That’s probably the most important thing about the New Meeting Place. It’s where we refugees have our say and our vote.” He looked to his left, toward Woodcarver.

  Woodcarver gave him a civil nod or two, and her voice was downright conciliatory. “You’re quite right, Nevil. It is more than time that the humans and the packs of the Domain have their say.”

  Nevil looked to his right, at Ravna. “And you, Ravna?”

  “Yes, indeed! I—” but he had looked back at the audience, and Ravna let him run with his presentation. It was going better than her rehearsing.

  “So then I suppose the question is, what to vote on?” He grinned, and there was even laughter from the crowd. “I think there might be a lot of separate things to vote on. For instance, it’s important that when we are given the floor to speak, that our voices always be heard.”

  Agreement on that was loud and, happily, now unstifled.

  “I think the most important issue is medical research. And that’s not just to keep us looking young and beautiful.” He flashed his smile again, then became very solemn. “You all know Timor Ristling.” Nevil waved down toward the front row. Timor still sat there. When Nevil pointed at the child, the tracking camera finally woke up to its higher logic and suddenly Timor’s image was towering on the wall behind the stage. This was not just a head and shoulders shot. The unhappy twistedness of his limbs was evident, and the faint tremor in his hands. The boy stared up at the giant image, then clapped in surprised glee.

  Nevil smiled back at him, then looked out at the crowd. “How many of you remember Timor as he was back at the High Lab? I do, even though he was scarcely four years old. His mother and father maintained our legacy bootstrap logic—honorable work, and they did it well. They had every reason to believe their son would be just as steady.” His voice fell. “But that was not to be. Instead, our situation here has nearly killed him.” He paused and looked out again at his audience, and spoke with sober determination. “This is not a burden to be borne, not by Timor, not by anyone.” The words brought a cheer.

  In the tendays that followed, Ravna Bergsndot played this part of the meeting over and over in her mind, and marveled at the patchwork way the facts breached her preconceptions, and puzzlement yielded to understanding. She remembered standing, waving for Nevil’s attention, trying to guide him back where she thought he’d been going, to talk about improved coldsleep facilities.

  But Nevil had already moved on, riding the approval that seemed to come from all directions. “So yes, that is something we must surely vote on. But even that is only a symptom of the systematic problem we must cure. For whatever reason, there’s been too much secrecy. The Executive Council should not be meeting in private. Perhaps there should be no Executive Council at all. I would give up my place on it.”

  Several in the audience had stood to speak. Nevil stopped and gestured, “Jefri?”

  Jefri stood arms akimbo. His voice was angry, and he never quite looked at Ravna. Amdi had hunkered down around him with only a head visible here and there. “You want the one thing to vote on? It’s not whether we have an Executive Council or whether you’re on it, Nevil. The real question is whether we’re going to have a megalomaniac nut case running us all into the ground!”

  For a moment, there was true silence. For a moment, perhaps everyone was as shocked as Ravna. Then Gannon Jorkenrud was on his feet, shouting loud support for Jefri. But others were on their feet, too. Wenda Larsndot and Gannon Jorkenrud were suddenly in an angry shouting match.

  Nevil raised his hands again. After some seconds the tumult died. Wenda angrily sat down and then so did Jorkenrud and the others. Nevil let the silence grow for a moment. Then he said, “It’s clear we have much to discuss, more than we can vote on in this one meeting. We also have the day-to-day problems of maintaining the Domain. Perhaps there is a safe compromise. For everyday administration, we have a stable, proven resource.” He turned and bowed to Woodcarver. “Madame, are you content to continue without the advice of an Executive Council? To administer in those noncontroversial issues of Domain affairs?”

  Two of Woodcarver cast a look at Ravna. The others, including her puppy, were looking at Nevil and the audience. The co-Queen’s aspect was one of sober attention. But Ravna had worked closely with Woodcarver for ten years. And right now, behind the solemn aspect, Ravna thought she detected amused satisfaction. None of that showed in her voice or words: “Quite content, Mister Storherte. Of course, I would still want everyone’s advice.”

  “Of course,” Nevil gave Woodcarver a nod that was almost a bow. And then he turned to Ravna. But he didn’t have any similar request for her. Instead, his tone was comforting, conciliatory. “Ravna, we owe you so much. You supported Woodcarver in her war against Steel and the Old Flenser. We all remember your love in the early days of our exile, how you made it possible for Woodcarver and her packs to care for the youngest of us. Even now, we desperately need your expertise with Oobii’s archives.” He hesitated, as if uncertain about how to continue. “But at the same time…we…we think you have become fixated on potential threats that are very far away. We think you have fallen into a kind of mental trap, where your losses and loneliness lead you into a”—he looked up at the magnificent fakery of the Age of Princesses architecture—“into a kind of personal fantasy.” His gaze came back to her, compassionate and probing. And now, finally, Ravna fully understood. Sh
e could feel the eyes of all the Children and packs upon her. Some might hate her, as Jefri seemed to. But most simply saw the uniform she wore, and this imperial hall—and concluded that her grand plans were madness. She could almost see that conclusion spread in the five or ten seconds of Nevil’s silence. Then his voice gently continued: “So that is why I think that that must be our vote here today: That we ask you to stand aside from administration for a time, that you continue to give us the value of your insights and your help with Oobii, but that you let Woodcarver and the votes of this New Meeting Place do the governing. Do you understand the vote I’m suggesting, Ravna?”

  For the first time in several minutes, Ravna looked Nevil Storherte straight in the eye. He did not flinch. There was nothing but firm respect in the gaze he showed to her and the world. Ravna opened her mouth to shout denunciations back at him,…but she didn’t have the words. Without a minute or two to think, only enraged babble would emerge. But I could stop him. Nevil Storherte might have his petty audio and scene control, everything she had given him to make the New Meeting Place, but Ravna still had overall master control of the starship Out of Band II. She could take control of this room, blow out the Age of Princesses lie and force everyone to listen to…the ravings of one now proven mad. She noticed that Woodcarver had tensed. She realized that at the level of raw force, Ravna held the whip hand.

  But I’m not a mad woman. And so, when she spoke, Ravna said, “I understand, Nevil. I understand very well.”

  “Thank you, Ravna,” Nevil’s voice was full of compassion and relief.

  Now Nevil was looking back at this audience. “And so I think we have something to vote for. A serious change that gives us all a hand in making a safe and healthy future. Is there debate before we vote?”

  Actually there was, but not very much. Jorkenrud had his say, and then Jefri. That was more detailed and pointed and cutting than Jefri’s shouted interruptions had been. Ravna almost started crying in the middle of it. As far as she could tell, Nevil was not using the Oobii’s acoustics to shut anyone up, but there were very few who had much to say in opposition, and they seemed a bit confused. All around them they had the evidence of Ravna’s megalomania, and when she turned a bit to the side, she noticed that the camera was tracking her again. Her scowling glare was monstrous on the wall above.