Amdi came down the stairs, butted one head softly against Johanna and two more against Ravna. “It’s good to see you!” said the pack, using its little-boy voice. Amdiranifani was an eightsome, about as numerous as a clear-thinking pack could be. When Ravna had first met him, he’d been entirely puppies. They were so small you could carry half of him in your arms, while the other half tumbled around your ankles, asking questions and showing off. He and little Jefri had been so close that some Tines thought of them as a single pack, and gave them the name Amdijefri. No packs called them that anymore. Now, each of Amdi’s members had grown to be large and a little overweight. At first glance, he was physically intimidating. At second glance and after casual conversation, you’d realize Amdi was too shy to menace anybody. And at third glance—if you really got to know him or if he wanted to show off—you’d realize that Amdi was about the smartest creature you could ever meet Down Here.
Ravna patted the nearest head, and smiled at the pack and then at Jefri. “Yes, it is good to see you.”
“And about time,” Johanna inserted, not buying her brother’s casual manner.
Ravna waved a kind of “it’s okay” at Johanna. Civility had been in very short supply from Jefri; she had no desire for a return to his rebellious years.
Johanna didn’t seem to notice. “So, Brother?”
There was a shadow of a glower from the boy. “So. You know. I’ve been the whole spring downcoast with Meri Lyssndot’s team, surveying the special metals that Oobii thought—”
“I know that, Jef. And I know you’ve been screwing Meri and every other girl you can lay your hands on. But you’ve been back how many days and not a word from you?”
Now the glower was on full. “Lay off, Jo. You don’t own me.”
“I’m your sister! I…” Indignation choked off her words.
Ravna noticed that Amdi had snuck back and seemed to be trying to hide behind Jefri. She cast about for something that might deflect the oncoming debacle. Things had been going so well with Jefri this past year. Ah: “It’s okay, Jefri. I’ve seen the survey report. Good work.” Or maybe that was laying it on too thick. “I’m more interested in what was going on with those three…” She waved down the stairs. Should I call them your friends? I hope they’re not. “What was this ‘truth’ that Gannon was talking about?”
“Um, nothing.”
“Yup, nothing,” said Amdi, nodding all his heads.
“Well then.” Ravna came up the stairs. Jefri was nineteen, an adult by the human standards of Sjandra Kei and Straumli Realm. It didn’t matter any more that Jef had been the nicest child, brave and well-meaning. It shouldn’t matter that in later years he was often the most rebellious of the pimply mob. Thank goodness that Johanna had pointed Nevil at him. Where even Johanna had not managed to talk sense into him, the level-headed, diplomatic Nevil had succeeded. With any luck, his current problem was just a temporary backsliding. “We just want to see how people are doing,” said Ravna. She waved at the entrance just beyond Jefri and Amdi. “The three of us can talk another time if you want.”
Jefri dithered a second, and then her mild words seemed to bring him around. “That’s okay. Let’s talk. The whole thing is, um, a bit strange.” He turned and held the pub’s door open for Ravna and his sister.
• • •
Inside the pub it was warm, a reminder that even the summer-day shadows could be cold. There was the smell of smoke and spice and the usual pack body odor. Jefri eased past Jo and Ravna, leading them along a low, narrow corridor, where the smoke was even thicker. Health and fire-safety regulations were still in this world’s future.
Ravna just followed along silently, bemused by the crazy carvings that lined the walls—Tines’ ideas about what life in the Beyond had been like—and wondering at the changes that even ten years had made in her Children. Funny. She had always thought of Johanna as being tall, even when she was only thirteen. But that was Johanna’s personality. Even now, Johanna was only one meter seventy, scarcely taller than Ravna. And Jefri? He had always seemed so small to her. He had been short, when Pham had landed and saved him from Lord Steel. She remembered the little orphan raising his arms to her. But now she noticed how much he had to scrunch down to clear the ceiling. The guy was nearly two meters tall when he stood straight.
The music was loudest straight ahead. There was a flickering colored light that must be one of those crazy mood candelabras. Jefri stepped through the opening, Ravna and Johanna and Amdi right behind.
The Mantis tavern had a vaulted ceiling, and space for padded alcoves all around the upper walls. Today, the clientele was mainly human. There were two or three packs up in the lofts, but the bartender pack was the only one on the main floor. All the music was—no surprise—coming from the bartender.
“Back so soon?” someone shouted at Amdi and Jefri. Then they caught sight of Ravna and Johanna, and there was nervous laughter. “Wow, we can’t talk treason for more than five minutes and the secret police show up.”
“I ran into them on the steps,” said Jefri.
“Just shows you should use the exit stairs, like decent folk do.” That was Heida Øysler. She was still laughing about her secret police crack. Some of the others seemed a bit pained by it, but then Heida’s sense of humor was her greatest enemy. At least here there were none of the closed expressions Ravna had seen on the stairs. Heida pulled over extra chairs and waved them to sit down.
As they did so, the bartender’s roving member was already bringing out more beer. Ravna glanced around the table, taking in just who was here. Ten kids—no. Ten adults. Jefri and Heida might be the youngest here. None of these were parents yet, though there was one recently married couple.
Johanna snagged a beer. She raised it to Heida in a mock salute. “So now that the secret police are here, consider yourselves under interrogation. What are you miscreants up to?”
“Oh, the usual mayhem.” But then Heida was out of clever responses. That could be a blessing. When Heida babbled, things could get marvelously embarrassing. There had been that mock adultery claim about Tami and Wilm—which then turned out to be essentially true. “We were just, you know, speculating about the Disaster Study Group.”
“Ah.” Johanna settled her beer back on the table.
“What’s that?” said Ravna. “It sounds terribly official. And I thought I was into all the terribly official things around here.”
“Well, that’s only because—” began Heida, but one of the other girls, Elspa Latterby, stepped on her wit:
“It’s just three big words covering up a lot of wishful thinking.” No one else said anything. After a moment, Elspa shrugged and continued, “You see, Ma’am—”
“Please, Elspa, call me Ravna.” Oops, I always say that, and some, like Elspa, always forget.
“Sure, Ravna. Y’see, the thing is, well, you and the Tines have done your best to stand in for our parents. I know how much Woodcarver and Flenser-Tyrathect have spent on our academy. And now we’re doing our best to make something of ourselves—in this world. Some of us, the very youngest, are quite happy.” A smile flickered on her face. “My little sister has Beasly and human playmates. She has me—and she doesn’t remember our folks very well. To Geri, this seems like a wonderful place.”
Ravna nodded. “But for the older ones, life here is just the epilogue to a holocaust, right?” Certainly, that was often how Ravna saw it.
Elspa nodded, “It’s wrongheaded maybe. But there it is. Not all us feel this way, but we remember our parents, and civilization. It’s not surprising that some of us feel just a little bitter to have lost so much. Disasters have that effect even when no one living is responsible.”
Jefri hadn’t bothered with a human chair. He had set himself on one of the high perches normally used by the Tines. From there he looked down gloomily. “So it’s not surprising such people might call themselves the Disaster Study Group,” he said.
Ravna gave them all a smile. “I guess
we’ve all been members of that club at one time or another—all of us who seriously look at the recent history.”
Now that the bartender’s member had retreated, Amdi had surfaced all around the two tables, a head here, a head there, some of him perched on the high stools. He liked to watch from all directions—and there were enough of him to do a good job of it. The two on the stools cocked their heads, but his voice seemed to come from everywhere. “So then it’s a little bit like me and some of Lord Steel’s other experiments. A lot of killing went into our making. I came out very well, maybe, but others are still a mess. Sometimes we get together and just moan and groan about how we’ve been abused. But it’s not like we can do anything about it.”
Elspa nodded. “You’re right, Amdi, but at least you have a specific monster to dump the hate on.”
“Well,” said Ravna, “we have the Blight. It was monstrous beyond the mind of any in the Beyond. We know that in the end, fighting that evil killed your parents and Straumli Realm, and indirectly killed Sjandra Kei. Stopping the Blight destroyed civilization in much of the galaxy.”
They were shaking their heads. One of the boys, Øvin Verring, said, “We can’t know all that.”
“Okay, we can’t be sure of that last; the destruction was so vast that it destroyed our ability to measure it. But—”
“No, I mean there’s very little we can know of any of it. Look. Our parents were scientists. They were doing research in the Low Transcend, a dangerous place. They were playing with the unknown.”
You got it, kiddo, thought Ravna.
“But millions of other races have done that,” Øvin continued. “It’s the most common way that new Powers are born. My father figured that Straum itself would eventually colonize some vacated brown dwarf system in the Low Transcend, that we would transcend. He said we Straumers have always had an outward reach, we are risk takers.” Øvin must have noticed the look coming into Ravna’s face. He hurried on: “And then something went terribly wrong. That has also happened to thousands of races. Expeditions like our High Lab sometimes get consumed by what lives Up There, or are simply destroyed. Sometimes, the originating star system is destroyed, too. But what happened to us—what has forced us Down Here—that just doesn’t square with what we personally know about the situation.”
“I—” Ravna began, then hesitated. How can I say this? Your parents were greedy and careless and exceptionally unlucky. She loved these kids—well, most of them, and she would do almost anything to protect all of them—but when she looked at them, sometimes all she could think of was the destruction their parents’ greed had brought down. She glanced at Johanna. Help me.
As often happened when the going got tough, Johanna came through: “I have a little more personal memory than most of us, Øvin. I remember my parents preparing our escape. The High Lab was no ordinary attempt at Transcendence. We had an abandoned archive. We were doing archeology on the Powers themselves.”
“I know that, Johanna,” Øvin said, a little sharply.
“So the archive woke. My parents knew there was the possibility that we were being led around by the nose. Okay, I guess all the grownups knew that. But in the end, my folks realized that the risks were much greater than was obvious. We had dug up something that could be a threat to the Powers Themselves.”
“They told you that?”
“Not at the time. In fact, I’m not sure quite how Daddy and Mom pulled off the preparations. There were originally three hundred of us Children. Somehow, coldsleep units were smuggled out of medical storage, put aboard the container ship. Somehow we were all checked out of our classes—you all remember that.”
Heads nodded.
“If a Power were coming awake, surely it would have noticed what your parents were up to.”
“I—” Johanna hesitated. “You’re right. They should have been caught. There must have been others working with them to set up our escape.”
“I didn’t notice anything,” said Heida.
“No,” said someone else.
“Me neither,” said Øvin. “Remember how we were living, the temporary pressurized habs, the lack of privacy? I could tell my folks were getting edgy—okay, frightened—but there wasn’t room to do things on the sly. It seems reasonable—and this is one of the Disaster Study Group’s points—that our escape was just a move in Something’s game.”
Ravna said, “We talked about Countermeasure at the Academy, Øvin. You children did get special help. Ultimately, Countermeasure—” with Pham and Old One—“was what stopped the Blight.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Øvin. “But all this illustrates how little we know about the good guys and the bad guys. We’re stuck Down Here. We older kids feel that we have lost everything. But the official history could just as well have the good guys and the bad guys switched.”
“Huh? Who is peddling such crap?” Ravna couldn’t help herself; the words just popped out. So much for gracious leadership.
Øvin seemed to shrink back on himself. “It’s not anybody in particular.”
“Oh? What about those three I passed on the stairs?”
Jefri shifted on his high stool. “You ran into me on the stairs, too, Ravna. Those three are just gossips. You might as well be blaming all of us.”
“If it’s ‘just everybody’ then where did a name like Disaster Study Group come from? Somebody must be behind this, and I want to—”
A hand pressed lightly on Ravna’s sleeve. Johanna held the touch for an instant, long enough to shut down her spew of angry words. Then the girl said, “Something like this doubting has always been around.”
“You mean doubts about the Blighter threat?”
Johanna nodded. “Yes, in varying degrees. You yourself have doubts on that, I know. For instance, now that the Blighter fleet has been stopped by Countermeasure, will it have any further interest in harming Tines World?”
“We have no choice but to believe that what remains wants to destroy us.” My dream—
“Okay, but even then there’s the question of just how deadly they can be. The fleet is thirty lightyears out, probably not capable of travelling more than a lightyear per century. We have millennia to prepare, even if they do wish us ill.”
“Parts of the fleet could be faster.”
“So we have ‘only’ a few centuries. Tech civilizations have been built in less.”
Ravna rolled her eyes. “They’ve been rebuilt in less. And we may not have that much time. Maybe the fleet can build small ramscoops. Maybe the Zones will slip again—” She took a breath and proceeded a little more calmly: “The point is, the point of everything we’re teaching in the Academy is, we have to get ready as fast as we possibly can. We must make sacrifices.”
A little boy’s voice spoke from all around them. Amdi. “I think that’s what the Disaster Study Group disputes. They deny that the Blight was ever a threat to humans or Tines. And if it is, they say, Countermeasure made it so.”
Silence. Even the background music from the bartender had faded away. Apparently Ravna was the last to realize the monstrous issue under discussion. Finally she said, softly, “You can’t mean that, Amdi.”
An expression rippled across Amdi: embarrassed contrition. Each of his members was fourteen years old, each an adult animal, but his mind was younger than any pack she knew. For all his genius, Amdi was a shy and childlike creature.
Across the table, Jefri patted one of Amdi comfortingly. “Of course he doesn’t mean he believes it, Ravna. But he’s telling you the truth. The DSG starts from the position that we can’t know exactly what happened at the High Lab and how we managed to escape. Reasoning from what we do know, they argue that we could have the good and the bad reversed. In which case, Countermeasure’s actions of ten years ago were a galactic-scale atrocity—and there are no terrible monsters bearing down on us.”
“Do you believe that?”
Jefri raised his hands in exasperation. “… No. Of course not! I’m just spelling out
what some people are too, ah, diplomatic to say. And before you ask, I wager none of us here believe it, either. But among the kids as a whole—”
“Especially some of the older ones,” said Øvin.
“—it’s a very attractive way of looking at things.” Jefri glowered at her for a moment, challenging. “It’s attractive because it means that what our parents created was not a monstrous ‘blight.’ Our parents were not silly fools. And it’s also attractive because it means that the sacrifices we’re making now are … unnecessary.”
Ravna struggled to keep her voice steady: “What sacrifices in particular? Learning low-tech programming? Learning manual arithmetic?”
Heida chipped in with, “Oh, part of it is just having other people tell us what to do!”
These kids probably didn’t even know the names of pre-tech consensus-building methods. Skipping that stage had just been one of the simplifications Ravna had chosen. She had hoped that trust and affection and common goals would suffice until they had more tech and more people.
“Getting bossed around may be part of it,” said Øvin, “but for some, the medical situation is a bigger issue.” He looked directly at Ravna. “The years pass and you rule and you still look young, just as young as Johanna does now.”
“Øvin! I’m thirty-five years old.” That was human-standard thirty-megasecond years, the same as Straumers used. “It should be no surprise I look young. Back in Sjandra Kei, I’d still be a very junior specialist.”
“Yes, and a thousand years from now, you’ll still look that young. All of us—even the older children—will be dead in a few hundred years. Some of us already look decayed—you know, losing our hair like we’ve suffered rad damage. Getting fat. The youngest of us have scarcely had any prolongevity treatment. And our children will die like flies, decades before us.”
Ravna thought of Wenda Larsndot’s graying hair. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong! “Look, Øvin. We’ll get the medical research ramped up eventually. It just doesn’t make sense to put it first. I can show you the progress charts that Oobii generates. Effective medicine has a million gotchas. Which cure is going to be hard—and hard for which child—that’s something we can’t know ahead of time. A crash medical program would just be a morass of delay. We’ve got at least twenty coldsleep caskets that are still in working order. I’m sure we can generate the consumables for them eventually. If necessary, we can freeze anyone who gets mortally old. No one need die.”
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