The Children of the Sky

by VernorVinge

  Perhaps another thirty days would bring the rafts to Woodcarver’s old capital. Then the life and death of Johanna and her friends might depend on how quickly she could discover just what was going on in the Domain.

  For a while she stewed on possible scenarios. A few more days passed. There was only so much she could do with scenarios. She needed some clues about where this fleet had originally been headed. She needed to break into the cargo.

  How could she persuade the mob to let her do that?

  By now, Johanna had been all over the surface of all the rafts. Every one of them was Tropic chaos, and yet they were nothing like the wrecks she had seen in the Domain. Somebody coherent had suggested specific design tricks. The masts and spars and rigging were much like Woodcarvers’. The cargo boxes were regular and uniform, quite unlike everything she associated with a choir. Now that she’d had time to study them, she realized that the burn marks on the sides were a version of Tycoon’s Pack of Packs logo.

  Those boxes aside, the mob was quite happy to have Jo around. She was often a real help, with her clever hands, and with her very sharp and durable knife. In many ways the mob was more fun than coherent packs. These creatures were all among themselves, playing and fighting like young children—leaving aside their occasional fits of madness and their rule about cargo tampering.

  Sometimes, they would break apart in the middle of some serious job and start playing with the elastic balls that seemed to have no other function than mob amusement. (The balls floated in water, but every day a few more were lost overboard. They would not be an unending source of fun.)

  Other times, especially at night, the Tines would gather in a mass on the highest part of the raft. Across the water, the same would happen on the other rafts. All together, they roared and hissed, and sometimes sang pieces of Straumer music overheard years ago in the Domain. At dawn, most would come down and fool around in quieter ways. Some would dribble off the edges of the raft to fish. Johanna had plenty of opportunity to try little experiments. She had almost ten years of experience with packs and singletons and pieces of packs—but that was under broodkenner rules, and Northern notions of acceptable behavior.

  She’d found lots that was new and bizarre here. Choirs were almost as strange compared to coherent packs as the packs were, compared to humans. She found a shaded spot high on the raft. She could stand there and be seen by almost everyone on board. When she shouted to them, some heads would turn in her direction. The few who understood Samnorsk were enough so that all the mob had some idea of her meaning. Of course, this wasn’t a super-intelligence, but it was a different-intelligence. In some ways dumb as a dog, yet a choir could do local search-and-optimization better than any pack or natural human. She could ask it questions—“Where are the play balls?”—and within seconds, all the balls on the raft seemed to be bouncing in the air, even ones that she had carefully hidden the day before. She looked across the hundred meters of sea to the two nearest rafts. Yellow balls were bouncing into the air there, too!

  Hmm. Choirs could do miracles of local optimization, but they couldn’t see the big picture, they couldn’t see across the vastness of the search space to connect results. They were like a spreadthink toy without an aggregator. That limitation applied to everything from the space of ideas to the space of…fishing.

  Once she had the idea, making it work took almost a tenday of preaching to the choir—and the choirs on the other rafts. Often, they didn’t want to play. Since the fleet had turned north, the sea and the air had gotten steadily colder, the storms deadlier. The water was too cold for even the Tines to comfortably fish. The mobs’ mood was grumpy and sullen. But day by day, she achieved more complex results. Finally there were temporary godsgifts who would climb the masts and shout out fragments of Interpack or Samnorsk about the schools of fish they were seeing. Eventually, the coordination included the part-time sail masters, and the fleet managed to catch enough fish with just a fraction of the swim time.

  Credit assignment was a near-incomprehensible idea for a choir, but Johanna liked to think that the Tines trusted her more after this success. They certainly tried harder to understand what she asked of them—and were quicker to do what they thought she wanted. Maybe it was safe for her to break into Tycoon’s cargo boxes.

  From furtive experiments, she had learned that the boxes were tough, not designed for easy in-and-out privileges. Her knife was not up to the job. Okay. But she’d found a steel prybar in one of those drawered cabinets by the masts. It looked a lot like the leveraging tools used by packs up north. Given the prybar and some time, she could break into a cargo box.

  After a morning storm—the sort of meatgrinder that had killed several Tines before her riverboat sailors got serious about safety tiedowns—Johanna noticed that one of the cargo boxes had slipped partway off the central mound. As usual, the mob tried to prevent more slippage. As usual, the result was a mishmash of ropes, fastened with variously effective knots. She noticed a crack in the box’s wood paneling, black tar oozing out—waterproofing?

  She watched the crowd swirl around the box, Tines bobbing and bouncing, somewhat more incompetent than usual. Another time, they might have noticed the crack, but not today. Johanna waited till the crowd drifted away, mostly to huddle together under a “stolen” sail on the lee side of the raft. The cold weather affected the Tropicals the most, but everybody was suffering. Sorry guys. If I hadn’t persuaded you to hijack this fleet…

  This side of the raft was about as Tines-free as it ever got; Johanna grabbed her prybar and scrambled across to the damaged cargo box. “Just doing repairs,” she said. Her words should be audible to everyone on the raft, and they might give her some protection via the Tines who understood Samnorsk. She slipped the prybar into the cracked panel—and hesitated an instant. The sound of breaking wood could bring all hell down her.

  She didn’t get a chance to test this possibility, for even as she hesitated there came a bass honking behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Powers! It was Tines on another raft, up in the rigging. Maybe it was a crazy-diligent fish watcher, but now it was watching her—and raising the alarm!

  Within seconds her own mob came surging back, hissing all around her. Johanna dropped to her knees, tilted her head to the side and turned her hands outward. That was about as nonthreatening as a human could get with Tines.

  Jaws snapped close, lunging, tipping toward a killing flood. But the crowd coming up behind the first wave wasn’t pushing inward. Here and there, thoughtful clusters tried to form. Just now there was too much anger and chaos for that to work: the almost-packs lasted for bare seconds before they were shouted down, before they shouted each other down.

  Johanna leaned back against the cracked cargo box. She hoped the gesture might seem protective of it. In fact, some of the most threatening heads moved back a bit, and the roar of humanly audible sound diminished. She looked around, trying to spot any grouping she might use as an intermediary. No, they were still all mobbed together. Okay. She had talked to the whole mob before: “Please listen to my words,” Johanna said. “We go North. True?”

  The mob’s effort to comprehend was so strong she could feel the buzz. Finally a single word of Samnorsk sounded. “Yes,” and then a dribble of other words, like echoes: “To Domain.” “To home.” “To old home.”

  Johanna bobbed her head, a singleton form of a nod. “I can help. But I need to know more.”

  The mob continued to dither, the buzz of mindsound growing stronger and stronger. This was a situation where a godsgift would really be one. But the mob didn’t make the space. Instead it swayed back and forth, its Tines shuffling about. After some seconds, another bit of Samnorsk floated in the air: “Trusting you.”

  —————

  So Johanna got a peek into the damaged cargo box, maybe a big insight into Vendacious’ master plan. As the mob watched, all quiet and nervous looking, she split open the wood covering, pulled back the tarry waterproofing goo…and a casc
ade of yellow play balls bounced onto the deck. The crowd forgot itself as it variously grabbed and bounced the balls, sending most of them right back in Jo’s direction.

  Okay! A fix for the incipient shortage of play balls! Behind the yellow balls was a wall of tidy bricks. But they were soft to her touch. She used her prybar to lever the tightly wedged objects free, then pushed the loose mass out into the open. When she recognized the cargo, she stepped quickly out of the way and gave a loud whistle. The crowd continued to play with the balls for a few seconds, but Jo could see a ripple of understanding pass around it. The cargo box was mostly full of heavy jacket-cloaks. In another second, the yellow balls were forgotten as the mob swarmed down on the promise of warmth.

  —————

  The box didn’t contain enough cloaks for everybody. There was much pushing and shoving all around the crate, but nobody got killed. Very quickly, the notion of breaking into more of Tycoon’s cargo outweighed the taboo against such activity. Johanna led the way with her steel prybar. They found many more cloaks, another box that was mostly play balls, and a very well-sealed store of smoked meat. At this point, the mob was totally preoccupied with the plunder. Johanna decided not to risk spoilage with more exploration. She wrapped herself in a couple of cloaks and retreated to her usual cubbyhole to think about what had been discovered: So the top layers of cargo were just supplies, set by planners who expected this to be a long voyage. Was Tycoon’s deliverable cargo further down? Or maybe she’d stolen the fleet before both its proper crew and main cargo had been put aboard.

  All over the raft, Tines were playing with their new clothes, trying them on, making little tents out of them. At the same time, they were passing around the smoked meat. She’d never seen such Tinish enthusiasm for cold, dead flesh; well, it wasn’t fish.

  Very loud gangs of Tines had gathered at the edges of the raft, flaunting their warm cloaks at the rest of the fleet. Their shouting was mainly Interpack but she heard her name in it.

  Johanna watched the Tines on the other rafts. At first, they responded with bogus counter-brags, but there was also much clueless cocking of heads.

  Finally the mob on the nearest raft—the one with the snoopy Tine who had ratted on Johanna—seemed to get the idea. The mob swarmed their top cargo boxes, slashing at them with claws and jaws, pounding them with weighted ropes. This went on for five or ten minutes with no success; the Tycoon boxes were proof against unaided Tines. What the mob needed was Johanna’s prybar—or someone of human or pack intelligence.

  The futile assault subsided as the mob backed off and hunkered down. Any second now, its unity of purpose would dribble away…But no: The mob spread out, creating a kind of belly-down mesh across their raft. They were chanting, rhythmic whoops that swept up through Johanna’s hearing into silence, and then started low again. After several minutes, the chanting ended; the Tines hesitated, silent. Abruptly, they scrambled to their feet and began dancing. Well, hopping up and down, anyway. They danced on and on, a beat that circled their raft in time with the sea waves, and in time with the movements of their cargo. Almost imperceptibly, the whole platform began to tip and sway. The oscillations grew. The cargo boxes at the top of the raft’s pile were free to move since the mob’s initial assault had cut them loose. First one crashed down and then another and another. The effect was worse—or more effective—than storm damage. The avalanche of shattering wood swept half the pile into the sea. So much for Tycoon’s cargo taboo!

  Now the sea around the raft was crowded with boxes and pieces of boxes. She could see heads in the water and Tines hanging on to the main wreck. It was much like the raft disasters she remembered in the Domain—except that in this case no one was being smashed into a rocky shore. Tines paddled out from what remained of their raft in some kind of salvage and rescue operation. As the sun slid down to the sea, it looked like most everybody had managed to return to the surviving part of their raft.

  That evening, the sounds from the other rafts seemed generally happy. Each had succeeded with its own “shakedown” demolition—though the Choir on the half-wrecked raft sounded more boastful than any. The gobbling and honking only got louder as the wind picked up. Johanna sat in her usual place, but well-fed and wrapped up toasty warm. What wonderful things were Tinish storm jackets—even if they were narrow and short, and the tympana cutouts so terribly drafty.

  She watched as the moon rose higher and the festivities became wilder. It was the usual mix of chanting and orgy and mad rushing around. And yet, tonight there was a difference. Every few minutes a singleton or a duo or trio would shyly approach her. Almost every group brought her some gift, an extra cloak, a block of smoked meat. In some ways, this reminded Johanna of the Fragmentarium. There, too, she had wistful, friendly relations with creatures who could not quite understand what was going on—but who were grateful for her help. For all the hard times of this voyage, the rafts were a happier place than the Fragmentarium. Here her friends weren’t haunted by the fear that they would never become people again. Choirs didn’t look at these issues the way broodkenners did!

  The celebration peaked around midnight with a serious attempt at synchrony between all the rafts. The screeching pounded a rhythm that beat against similar sounds from across the water. For a brief time, the combination warbled like a single voice, a huge, slow, coherence.

  Johanna drowsed. She was vaguely aware that even though the celebration had quieted, individual Tines were still snouting around. They weren’t going to get into any more cargo boxes without her prybar. Hmmm, unless they tried to shake the whole raft apart; that was something she’d have to discourage…tomorrow. She burrowed deeper into the warm cloaks and gave in to sleep.

  Some unknown time later: “What’s this? What’s this? What’s this?” A snout was poking her shoulder.

  “Whuh?” Johanna struggled back to wakefulness. It wasn’t morning. Not at all. The moon was only halfway down the sky. By its light she could see the crowd surrounding her. A trio that included Cheepers stood closest.

  “What’s this?” Cheepers said again, and another of the trio stepped toward her, giving her a small box that glittered like dark glass in the moonlight.

  “Powers!” she swore softly. What glittered in the moonlight was the solar-electric side of a torsion antenna. This was one of the analog radios Scrupilo had built. Each had taken significant effort. Pride aside, Scrupilo had had important uses for each of them. She remembered him complaining every time one was missing.

  “What’s this?” Cheepers—the whole crowd, really—continued to ask.

  Johanna looked up. “It’s a radio.” At best, its peer-to-peer range would be a few kilometers, but with the orbiter relaying, it could reach across the world—all the way to Vendacious and Nevil.

  “Where did you find it?” she said.

  The Cheepers trio gestured toward the pile of junk around the masts. Ah, up where she had found the prybar, maybe. This radio must have been intended for the proper crew.

  From somewhere in the crowd, someone else said, “Heard it.”

  Heard it? She held the box close to her ear. If it hadn’t been in the sun, its charge should be down and—she heard faint sounds! The orbiter’s signal must be strong. The message was Tinish, a simple chord repeated again and again: “Answer if you hear.”

  “It’s not dead,” Cheepers said helpfully.

  “…Yes,” said Johanna, thinking fast. She noticed that the send button was in the off position. “But it’s dying, right?” she said.

  Heads drooped, a wave of despondency that spread beyond her vision. “Maybe. We shout louder and louder, but it not hear.”

  The trio thought a second more, maybe listening to advice from the larger group. Then it added, “Voice sound dead.”

  Yeah, it wasn’t surprising the transmission sounded strange. No doubt it was an audio loop. Tines could repeat sounds with great fidelity, but doing so again and again bored them.

  “We bring to you, right? Yo
u fix?”

  Sure. Fixing it would amount to waiting for sunrise and then pressing the send button. Then her friends could chat with Vendacious and innocently report that Johanna would arrive in the Domain some tenday soon.

  She looked around at Cheepers and all the rest. She had to lie to them. Closer to the Domain, this gadget might be very useful, but for now she should just disable the snout-friendly send button. That could be tricky. She had seen how this mob played with objects that interested them. They’d bounce the radio around, maybe even break it—but they’d also tweak and push at things in ways she hadn’t imagined. Watching the mob play with puzzles reminded Johanna of little Wenda Larsndot. That girl’s naive fumbling was a constant source of surprise. Once she’d even bypassed a cabinet lock to play inside the gear train of her parents’ loom; Wenda, Jr. was lucky she hadn’t killed herself. These Tines would eventually either break the radio or get it into send mode.

  Johanna turned the box this way and that, pretending to inspect it. Finally she said, “It’s almost dead, but I can help it.” A happy movement swept across the Tines. “But it may take days.”

  The Cheepers trio drooped, and as Jo’s meaning spread, wider distress was evident. But the choir trusted her now more than ever, and over the next few minutes the crowd dispersed. Johanna made a big deal of taking extra cloaks and making a nest for the sacred object. Then she wrapped her own cloaks around herself and the nest.

  Cheepers and his trio were all that remained nearby. They looked at her hesitantly.