The Children of the Sky

by VernorVinge

  Ravna waved away the displays and left her “private office.” It was even bigger than Nevil’s, but there was a large Keep Out sign splashed helpfully across the door. Of course, Nevil didn’t have such a sign. On the other hand—as Pilgrim had pointed out—his office probably had a back entrance.

  Jo and Pilgrim seemed to be enjoying every hour of this campaign. Ravna was not so naturally talented, but she was very happy that the two were now living at her town house. Thanks to Nevil’s “generosity,” there was more than enough room. Johanna had chortled at that irony.

  Ravna walked out of the maze of office corridors and down the ad hoc wood stairs to the main floor, where Nevil had left the game stations. Nowadays, this area of the New Meeting Place was almost deserted. The remaining game addicts consisted of a few packs, and of course Timor and Belle. Strange. Timor wasn’t at his usual station. She walked around the floor watching the games. Normally, when Timor wandered, it was to give long-winded advice to any game-player who did not shoo him away.

  She turned, headed for the ramp to midlevel, where most of the programming stations were located. Those had gained popularity as the limitations of the games had become apparent. In earlier years, the kids had turned up their noses at Slow Zone programming. Now their vision of medical necessity had changed that. It made perfect sense for Children and Tines to gather and work with Oobii in a nearly civilized venue. Some of that was gaming, but most was research that forced them to deal with the available automation. I should have created this place years ago. But at the time, she had been too concerned with the colony’s self-sufficiency and establishing the Children’s Academy. She would have seen the New Meeting Place as frivolous.

  There were plenty of human-sounding voices up ahead, including the polite insistence of Timor Ristling: “But I just want to ask you—”

  “Not now, I’m trying to set up the day’s projects.” That sounded like Øvin Verring.

  The top of the ramp was dark, just another place where the makeshift construction interfered with Nevil’s lighting. Ravna hesitated there, watching the scene. Øvin was facing five or six of the oldest kids, the most intense of the medical researcher wannabes, essentially a group Nevil had whipped up for his coup.

  Øvin was talking to the group even as he fiddled with the interface of the big display, which at the moment was just showing idle status. “What I wanted to show you all was the tutorial I found yesterday. We not only have to—”

  “Øvin, I just want to ask you if—” interrupted Timor.

  Øvin waved the boy away. “Not now, Timor.” He continued to work at the interface. He was speaking again to the group: “Oobii’s automation is pitiful, but the tutorial I found claims to show how we can solve simple—”

  Timor again said, “Øvin, I was wondering, could I—”

  That got Timor a moment of Øvin’s full attention. He glared at the boy and Ravna prepared to rush in. She didn’t think Øvin Verring had ever been one of the kids who had been mean to Timor—but she was damned if he was going to start now.

  “Look Timor! Give me a minute, huh? I just want to get this display to show folks the tutorial. Then you can ask me whatever you want.”

  Timor glanced at the display pedestal, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh that. You need to—” He reached out, his fingers flicking across the maintenance interface, below where Øvin had been working. “It’s just partly broken,” he said, as if that was an explanation.

  Øvin Verring stepped back as the expanding display image formed into what Ravna recognized as a programmer primer environment. Huh, Øvin had found one she hadn’t seen, “Algorithms for Bottom Feeders.” His audience was already sucking in notes and playing with the first lesson, “Constrained Search.”

  Øvin stared at it for second. “Oh! Yes, that’s what—” he glanced down at Timor. “Okay then. What did you want to ask me?”

  “Is it okay if I use that workstation? I mean, just for today.” The boy waved across the room to the station that Belle Ornrikak was already lolling around, staking out the territory for Timor. It was the only station without an obvious user in residence.

  Verring hesitated. “Um, sure. Go ahead.”

  Timor gave a whoop and hustled across the room to Belle.

  Ravna let out her breath and strolled in as if she had just come up the ramp.

  “Oh, hei, Ravna.” Øvin came around his audience—which was now thoroughly distracted by the tutorial—and walked over to her. He made a small gesture in the direction of Timor and Belle. “Now that I seem to have lost my workstation…could we talk for a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Since Ravna’s fall, Øvin had actually been friendly. Lately, most of the medical wannabes had seemed friendlier.

  “As—as a kind of starter project, we want to refurbish more of the coldsleep containers. But the in-casket manuals are useless, and so far we can’t get Oobii to refine us a wish list—even though coldsleep is an ancient, simple technology.”

  Ah. This sounded like something from her speech—the part she hadn’t gotten to say. So Nevil had put him up to this? She looked over at Øvin’s team, all working hard to understand the tutorial.

  Okay. “You’re right about the manuals, Øvin. Down Here, they can’t do repairs. On the other hand, Oobii does have an enormous amount of information about coldsleep implementations. If you could devise a search list that uses what you see in the casket manuals and properly feed that to Oobii…”

  “You’d really help? Even after…?”

  Ravna nodded. “One important decision you have to make is what level of medical risk you will tolerate.” Her gaze drifted almost involuntarily to where Timor sat on the other side of the room.

  “Oh.” Then Øvin seemed to follow her gaze. “Oh!…I remember risk was one of the reasons you wanted to postpone this kind of work.” He watched Timor Ristling for a few moments. Timor had set his workstation display to large, perhaps so it would be easier for Belle to follow what he was doing. That was wasted effort, since the foursome had curled up on the floor around his chair, all eyes closed. At the moment, Timor was oblivious to this. He pounded away enthusiastically. This was no ordinary game. It looked…much simpler. Ravna could see simple dotmarkers making rows across a plane. Below that was what looked like a synthetic machine language, three-letter abbreviations and numerical operands.

  “It looks like he’s written a binary counter,” Øvin said softly. “That’s so sad. The human mind should not be wasted on tasks so trivial.” Øvin glanced back at Ravna and seemed to think better of making a further comment.

  She smiled. “You feel sorry for me, too, hei Øvin?”

  “Actually, I was feeling sorry for me and…” he waved at his friends struggling away at the bottom feeder tutorial. “It’s such a waste.”

  —————

  Even without the daylight, the northern winter still had its time markers. There was bright twilight in the hours near noon. On clear nights, away from the twilight, the aurora swept from horizon to horizon, shifting minute by minute. The moon bobbed along the horizon in its tenday cycle. Winter storms came every third or fourth day, some lasting hours, some continuing on with no letup through to the next storm front. Many buildings were reduced to bizarre humps beneath the snow, the smoothness broken only by streets that absolutely must be kept clear.

  The lowest parts of Oobii were lapped by the snow. The rest, the arching drive fronds, the curves of the hull—all that glittered green in whatever light there was. The area around the main entrance was tramped down by the constant traffic.

  Twice a tenday, Nevil held his public meetings in the New Meeting Place, and every day the Children of Øvin’s team and others were working in the ship, honestly trying to master its automation. One group managed to revive the freight device that had carried the Lander. Nevil had a big party after that—and Ravna had to admit that the orbiter would improve things. It was close to being a dead hulk, but still had enough
life in it to act as a remote sensor and radio relay.

  The Executive Council no longer met, its members now keeping to their separate factions. Scrupilo’s Cold Valley lab had not been directly affected by Nevil’s coup, though that was mainly because the necessary simulations had already been done and the experimental equipment was in place. Scrupilo was clearly nervous about the future, but he continued to play along with Nevil and Woodcarver, and radio relay through the orbiter had made the Cold Valley setup much more convenient.

  And tenday by tenday, Ravna and Johanna and Pilgrim pursued their little conspiracy from the second floor of their town house.

  “It’s just a matter of time,” said Johanna. “Nevil is losing support every day. That’s what Ravna’s programs say. And that’s what I see when I talk to Scrupilo and Benky and the Larsndots.” She looked around at Pilgrim, seemed to detect insufficiently enthusiastic agreement. “So what’s your problem?”

  “Heh, someone has to balance your mood swings.” Pilgrim was perched at various viewpoints of Ravna’s grand carpet. Pilgrim loved that carpet. He said it was a Long Lakes masterpiece. Just now, three of his heads were resting on the plush, staring across its interleaved landscapes. “I agree with Ravna’s projections, yes. I’m even more pleased that Ravna’s able to counterspy on Nevil.”

  Ravna grinned. “Yes! Abusing Command Privilege is much more fun than I ever imagined.”

  “I’m also pleased with what an excellent politician one of my friends has turned out to be—not you, Johanna, you’re still the Mad Bad Girl.”

  Johanna frowned. “We’re gonna teach that bas—that fellow Nevil a proper lesson in, um, civic leadership. See? I can be suave.”

  Ravna said, “You can’t mean that I’m the excellent politician! I haven’t been able to do any of the clever maneuvers in Oobii’s guide. I’d trip on my tongue if I tried, and besides, Øvin Verring and the others are doing their best. I don’t want to fool them.”

  Pilgrim nodded from all around the carpet. “Yes. And they know that. Since Nevil’s coup, you’ve done your best for them, more than anything Nevil has done.”

  “They know it, too!” said Johanna.

  Nevil had assigned some of the oldest kids to help with the research. These were his special friends, mostly top students at the High Lab. The effort had lasted scarcely a tenday. Nevil’s friends had no concept of Oobii’s limitations. Gannon Jorkenrud had spent less than a day trying to “negotiate” with Oobii—that was the word Gannon himself used. He had almost punched Timor when the boy tried to give him advice about access methods. In the end, Gannon had departed in a towering rage.

  Pilgrim was grinning. “You haven’t played the little games, but you are playing the big one. The Children know you’re their friend. More and more, they realize that your planning methods can work, but the shortcuts they’ve undertaken will not.”

  “Okay, then,” said Johanna. “If you agree everything is going so well, what does worry you?”

  “A couple of things. My dear Woodcarver has rejected me. No more hanky-panky.” Some of the cheeriness had gone out of his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Pilgrim,” said Ravna, though even after ten years she wasn’t quite clear about Interpack romance—there were so many different things it could be.

  Pilgrim gave a little shrug. “Nothing lasts forever; we made good puppies for each other. But now—well, that little Sht is something else. Woodcarver is more suspicious and less forgiving than ever. If you really love another pack, if you have members from the other, sometimes secrets can leak across when you get intimate. It’s hardly ever more than mood and attitude, but for now…well, there is only talk going on between us.” His heads angled around toward Johanna. “But at least we are still talking.”

  Jo bowed her head, some of her aggressive optimism evaporating. “Yeah. I still haven’t been able to pin down my little brother.” Jefri and Amdi were at Smeltertop, about sixty kilometers to the north. That was the base camp for the Cold Valley lab, and also the lab’s source of glass templates and high purity carbon. “They have a radio at Smeltertop, but it’s very public.” She looked at Ravna. “I’ll bet he’ll stay up there the whole winter; my guess is he’s terribly, terribly ashamed.”

  Ravna gave a nod. Her sharpest, most painful memory of Nevil’s coup was the moment when Jefri stood and denounced her. She looked around at Pilgrim, searching for something less uncomfortable to discuss: “What’s the other thing bothering you?”

  “Oh yes. That’s the prospect of our inevitable success. You’ve focused Oobii’s political science research too purely. Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there’s always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.”

  Jo’s chin came up with a little start. “You mean violence? Between the Children? We kids grew up together, Pilgrim. Nevil is a sneaky rat bastard, but I think he’s doing what he thinks is right. At the bottom of it all, Nevil is not evil.”

  —————

  A tenday passed. There was another sea storm, followed by days when the moon skittered along beneath the aurora.

  Ravna spent more than fifteen hours a day in the New Meeting Place and her little office. The various programming teams were improving, but it was the younger Children who did best with Oobii. Timor Ristling was the star. He could reach the depths of Oobii’s automation; he claimed that he could program without user development tools, though Ravna doubted that. Again and again it was Timor who patched together little fixes for the Children, or explained things in ways that made sense to them.

  More Children came and talked to Ravna, some to apologize, some to give a friendly word. Some wanted her okay to demand another election.

  Besides working with the kids, she had other…projects. There was her agriculture assignment; that ran in the space Nevil could see. Oobii’s genetic modification capability was extremely simple-minded, but it had been one of the ship’s greatest success stories. The modified fodder crops brought in more tech rent than the rest of Oobii’s services combined. Tines of Woodcarver’s Domain had prospered as hundreds of small farms—scarcely more than private game reserves—had merged into large ranches. Newcastle town itself could never have grown as it had without the livestock herds that were now possible.

  But Nevil wanted a more direct payoff, some new and tasty food for humans. That was tricky, since Oobii didn’t have the computational power to avoid ecological disasters with modified plants that were fully human-compatible. In the end, Ravna made a minor tweak in natural hardicore grass—well within natural selection bounds—and then enabled another of the epigenetic triggers that most humans had carried since their earliest stargoing civilizations. The Children who used the trigger would be able to eat and enjoy the new hardicore grass. The combination mod should be safe for both humans and Tines World, though Ravna wouldn’t have done it she had still been in charge: every new human compatibility carried a small risk of making the user more susceptible to local diseases.

  Eventually, her project was complete except for minor window-dressing. So now, when she was alone in her office, she had plenty of time to review her spy programs. These were not the high-tech magic she had used on Flenser—but at least they worked. Pham Nuwen was the sneakiest good person she had ever known, and a Slow Zone programmer to boot. During his most paranoid time aboard Oobii, Pham had set up an elaborate system of booby traps and internal security. That had contributed to the hellish atmosphere of that terrible time; undoing the traps had cured some of Oobii’s worst glitches. But now she found that the security programs gave her a kind of protection that she could have never managed by herself. Pham’s last gift, unrecognized till now.

  So Ravna could check directly on Pilgrim’s fear of Nevilish villainy. Using Command Privilege and Pham’s programs, she could see inside every one of Nevil’s Oobii operations, could r
ead every mail and every conversation. She could even see much of what was happening in the orbiter.

  Yes, Nevil and Bili and their inner circle were getting desperate. They had stepped up their snooping, and even planted supporters in the groups who were going to demand new elections. But there was no talk of violence, just spin and nasty tricks. Both Oobii’s guide and Pilgrim were recommending that Ravna begin to talk compromise with Nevil’s people, something mellow enough that no one would regard the outcome of the elections as unendurable disgrace.

  It all kept Ravna shipside more and more, with her catching little naps and working all the way through till twilight of the next day. Up north, Scrupilo was ready to fabricate his adders! Unfortunately, that meant he needed new results from Oobii.

  Ravna juggled that problem all through one night, hoping that the kids’ programs would give the system some slack. She could have used her command privileges to invisibly override the Children’s priority. But that might be noticed…and in any case, it would’ve felt like a betrayal. In the end, she let the Children’s priority stand. Finally, she straggled out of the ship via the private corridors behind the cargo bay, too tired to talk to anyone in the New Meeting Place.

  Outside, the brightest of the midday twilight had faded. To Tinish eyes, this might qualify as full night. To human vision, the landscape was gray on gray, lighter sweeps of the recent snowfall piled up around the arching spines of her starship, falling away to the darker grays of steep, naked rock, thence to snows that covered the sea ice far below.

  Ravna trudged uphill toward Newcastle town. It was just beginning to snow, per Oobii’s predictions. But this was a soft, windless fall. It would be a big problem by the time it ended, but for now it just brought a nearly inaudible sighing to the air. She lit her handlamp and continued on. Earlier snows had narrowed the way, but there were only a few humans and fewer packs abroad.

  She knew that until humans arrived, the winters in the Domain had brought life nearly to a halt. Even in recent years, with indoor light and heat, most businesses slowed in the dark and cold. But up ahead, in the heart of town, the Academy classes would be in session. Almost all the youngest Children, both first and second generation, would be there. They were the least affected by winter depression. The youngest humans had so much energy that if you gave them light and food and warmth, they got along fine. Before the New Meeting Place, the Academy had been the center of social life in winter. There would still be dozens of packs up there, dazzled by the warmth and the energy. She wondered if Nevil realized that the Academy still gave Ravna leverage.