The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  “It’s nice, Timor.”

  “No, it’s beautiful! Thank you for building it for us.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” said Ravna. In fact, virtually none of the detail design had been her own. Most was from Nevil and his friends, but Nevil thought it best if for now she got as much credit as possible.

  Belle slipped around Ravna to stand by Timor. The pack was mostly watching the stations running hunter games, but she sounded bored: “I’ve heard this is nothing like the real Beyond; the Children will get tired of the gimmicks soon enough.”

  “No, we won’t!” responded Timor, his voice getting a little loud. “I love it here, and there’s more! I’ll show you.” He turned away, leaving Belle’s gaze still caught with an addict’s intensity on the game displays. Not until Ravna had walked past her did she recover and follow along.

  Timor took them away from the game and sports floors and up a ramp. Here, the exciting noises of the gaming area were muted by Oobii’s active acoustics. Ten or twelve of the oldest Children were sitting around a projecting display space. Maybe this was a strategy game, or— Then she noticed Nevil standing a little back from the chairs. It looked as if he had just arrived, too. She started toward him, but Timor was plucking at her sleeve. “Do you see what they’re doing?”

  There were intricate models floating in the space between the chairs and the wall. Small windows hung by each of the kids. The models looked like some kind of network thing, but—she shook her head.

  “Øvin can explain!” Timor drew her over to where Øvin Verring and Elspa Latterby were sitting together.

  Øvin looked up at her appearance. There was a flash of surprise in his face, and perhaps nervousness. “Hello, Ravna!”

  “Hei,” said Elspa, and gave a little wave.

  Ravna grinned at him. “So what are you all doing?” She looked around at the entire group. Except for Heida Øysler, these were some of the most serious of the Children. “Not a game?”

  Elspa shook her head. “Ah, no. We’re trying to learn to, um—”

  Heida took over: “Ever wonder why we kids haven’t pushed to use Oobii’s automation?”

  “A little.” In fact, most of the Children had resisted learning programming almost as much as they had more primitive skills.

  “Two reasons,” said Heida. “You seemed to want it for your projects—but just as important, this starship is as dumb as a rock.”

  “It’s the best that can exist here, Heida.”

  “I like it a lot!” put in Timor.

  Heida grinned. “Okay then, so it’s not a dumb rock; it’s more like one of those whatsits, a flaked stone arrowhead. The point is, it’s worthless for—”

  Øvin shook his head. “What Heida is trying to say in her own gracious way is…” He thought for a second, perhaps trying to come up with something less ungracious. “… is that now that we have access beyond our classes, maybe we should learn to change our ways and make the best use of Oobii that we can. So far we’re visualizing the problem. That’s usually the hard part. Let me show you.”

  He turned and glanced at the others. Each was suddenly busy with details on his or her own display. What Ravna could see looked like art programming, but performed in some incredibly roundabout way. Elspa Latterby looked up. “Yes, all clear. Go for it, Øvin.”

  The structure forming in the space between the kids didn’t look like art. There were thousands of points of light, variously connected by colored lines.

  Will someone please explain this to me? thought Ravna. It might be a network simulation, but there was no labelling. Ah, wait, she could almost guess at the power law on the connections. Maybe this was a—

  Øvin was talking again: “This was hell to put together using Oobii’s interface, but we’ve visualized a whole-body map of the transduction network in a modern human. Well, it’s what Oobii has on file, a racial average across Sjandra Kei. We Straumers can’t be much different. Anyway—” He zoomed in on one cluster in the network. The rest of the complexity shifted to the sides, not exactly disappearing, but moving into the far distance. “This,” Øvin continued, “covers part of the motor stability region.”

  Ravna nodded back, and tried to keep a smile pasted on her face. She was beginning to guess where all this was going. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Nevil was drifting around the outer edge of the group in Ravna’s direction. Help!

  Her smile must have been encouraging, for Øvin continued with his explanation: “This is really just a test case for a much larger class of problems—namely medicine in general. If we can learn enough of Oobii’s programming interface, we can get the ship to generate pathologies on the motor stability region and compare them with the symptoms it perceives in—”

  “In me!” said Timor. The boy had settled down on the floor when Øvin began his demo, but now he struggled up to his knees, making sure that Ravna would notice. “They’re going to cure what’s wrong in me.”

  Øvin glanced down at the boy. “We’re going to try, Timor. Everything’s a crap shoot Down Here.”

  “I know.” Timor sounded irritated by the obvious caveat.

  After a second, Øvin looked back at Ravna. “Anyway, if—I mean, as soon as—we do all that, we’ll have Oobii start generating treatment targets and running experiments.” Suddenly, Øvin was more hesitant. He was looking at Ravna for some kind of approval. “We think we have something, Ravna. What do you think?”

  Ravna stared at the network sim for a moment. That was so much easier than looking into Øvin Verring’s eyes. These kids were very bright, the children of geniuses. The oldest ones, before their flight from the High Lab, had had a good Straumer education. Down Here? Down Here, the kids were relatively uneducated. Down Here, experiments didn’t run themselves, there were intermediate steps required, infrastructure to create.

  She looked back at Øvin Verring, saw that he saw through her attempt at mellowness. Her smile cracked apart, and she said, “Øvin. How can I say this? You—”

  And then rescue miraculously arrived. Nevil. He patted Øvin on the shoulder and smiled comfortingly in Ravna’s direction. “This will be okay, guys. Let me talk to Ravna.”

  The wannabe medical researchers seemed relieved—though not nearly as relieved as Ravna felt.

  Ravna gave them all her best smile. “I’ll get back to you.” She looked down. “I promise, Timor.”

  “I know you will,” said Timor.

  Then she let Nevil spirit her away. Thank goodness. He must have some control on the New Meeting Place environment, since they hadn’t gone five meters before she felt the sound quality shift and knew that even standing here in the middle of the floor, it was just the two of them who could hear each other. “Thanks, Nevil. That was awful. How did the kids come to try—”

  Nevil made an angry gesture. “It was my fault. Damn. The Meeting Place has plenty of these Slow Zone games, but I figured the best of us would want to see how what we’ve learned in the Academy could be put to work here.”

  “I think we both wanted that. I do need planning help.”

  “Yeah, but I should have guessed that they’d zero in on the impractical. We both know how crazy it would be to get diverted into heavy bioscience at this stage.”

  Ravna turned so that only Nevil would see her unhappiness. “I’ve tried to explain this to Øvin before.”

  Nevil shook his head. “I know. Øvin … he can be a little unrealistic. He thinks this is as easy as improving harvest yields. You need to sit everybody down together and—”

  “Right, my speech.” More and more, that looked essential. “And the sooner the better.” Get everybody together, explain the problem and ask for their support. “I could ask for formal procedures for handling medical emergencies, how we might use the remaining sleep caskets till we have proper medicine.”

  “Yes!”

  “I should go back, tell Øvin and the others and try to explain.” She looked over his shoulder at where the amateur Oobii manage
rs were still clustered around their network simulation. Except for Timor, none of them were quite looking in her direction.

  Nevil seemed to notice the indecision in her face. “If you want, I can explain to Øvin and the others. I mean, the general idea—and how you’re still working out the details.”

  “Would you?” These all were Nevil’s friends. He understood them in a way that Ravna never could. “Oh, thank you, Nevil.”

  He waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  Ravna stepped out of their bubble of audio privacy. As Nevil turned to go back to Øvin and the others, she gave them a little wave. Then she was off to the exit leading up the bridge. There was so much she had to get right for this speech, for making it something that everyone—including Woodcarver—could get behind.

  • • •

  A full tenday quickly passed. Outside, the snow now stayed on the ground, even on the streets of Hidden Island. There was more twilight and true night. The moon and the aurora were coming to dominate the sky.

  Except for a trip with Scrupilo to Smeltertop and Cold Valley, Ravna spent most of her time indoors, on Oobii’s command deck. There was so much to do. Up north, the bottom of Cold Valley had been planed smooth. Scrupilo’s packs were nearly done with carving a thousand square meter design; two of Oobii’s micro lasers were already on site. Come the truly cold weather, they planned on fabbing their first hundred-micron-scale components … ten thousand adder circuits. Ta-dah! Really! It was a silly goal, but a major proof of principle. The previous winter they hadn’t quite reached that point when spring arrived.

  Her work on the speech was coming along, hopefully a masterpiece of realistic optimism. Every day, Nevil came to her with way too many details of what they were doing with New Meeting Place. The speech and the New Meeting Place would work together. And she’d set the date for the speech. She was committed. It felt good!

  There was only one full Executive Council meeting in that time; Woodcarver was in an ugly mood again. Scrupilo, too, was being a pain. He was the most politically ignorant fellow Ravna had ever met—an amazing thing considering his parentage. Even though he got most of Ravna’s attention and most of Oobii’s support, he was still complaining about her lack of attention for the Cold Valley fab. He was right—if you ignored the political necessity of assuring support in the future. Nevertheless, she gave Scrupilo extra time and attention, letting Nevil handle more of the event details.

  There were other reasons for not having more Council meetings. Ravna had reviewed the early years of her Flenser surveillance; she was still certain the camera infestation had been accurate for the first few years. That and the patent absurdities of the most recent session made it very foolish to get paranoid about Flenser. And yet she was still a bit uncomfortable about seeing him at a Council meeting.

  And finally, Pilgrim and Johanna were out of town, on what Ravna considered a dangerous and unnecessary adventure. The two had taken the agrav flier and were snooping around East Home, five thousand kilometers away. That was beyond direct radio range, but they’d reset one of Oobii’s few remaining commsets to transmit in the five-to-twenty-megahertz range. They splattered their radio emissions off the sky and let the planet’s ionosphere reflect them across the continent. On Starship Hill, Oobii was clever enough to pick out the signal even when the aurora hung its brightest curtains above the Domain—and to blast a much stronger response signal back to Johanna’s commset.

  The one full Council meeting had been mainly about that expedition:

  “I’m glad we flew out here,” came Pilgrim’s voice. “The stories about Tycoon haven’t been exaggerated. He really has started his own industrial revolution.”

  Flenser looked up from his accustomed place at the far end of the table. “Aha! Vendacious shows his claws!”

  Woodcarver gave a little hiss, but didn’t otherwise respond. In fact, East Home was the only place there had been sure sightings of the misbegotten Vendacious. That had been eight years ago, shortly before a series of major disappearances from Scrupilo’s labs: printers, a telephone prototype, even one of the three printer interfaces. At the time, the thefts had been an even bigger scandal than the recent radio cloak theft, though two of the burglars had been caught—both former lieutenants of Vendacious. Since those thefts, Tycoon had been a steady source of “innovation.”

  “We’ve talked about this before,” said Ravna. “Tycoon may regard himself as our rival, but any diffusion of technology will just speed up our overall progress. Keep in mind the main threat.” The Blighter fleet coming down upon us.

  Flenser eyed himself slyly—a packish smirk. “The main threat won’t matter if you get the Domain murdered beforehand.”

  “That’s why Jo and I are checking this out,” said Pilgrim. “What we’re seeing makes us think that over the years, Tycoon may have accomplished much more than he advertised. Now the true operation is too big to be disguised. I think Tycoon—or Vendacious—has spies high in the Domain.”

  Woodcarver raised heads at this. Two of her—three if you counted her puppy, little Sht—were glaring at Flenser.

  “These are real technical innovations,” said Johanna. “I think the leaks have to originate in the North End labs.”

  “What!” Scrupilo’s interjection was an indignant squawk.

  “Have you met this Tycoon fellow?” said Ravna.

  “Not yet,” said Pilgrim. “Even his factory managers rarely see him. He doesn’t seem very involved in day-to-day operations.”

  “We’re being very cautious about this,” said Johanna. “And me, I’m staying completely out of sight.”

  “Good!” that was from both Ravna and Nevil, and very emphatic. There were things Johanna could do as a two-legs that gave the Pilgrim-Johanna team great advantages—that was Jo’s argument, anyway. Ravna was far from convinced that it justified her presence on a spy mission.

  “I wish you were back here,” said Nevil.

  “I’m fine, Nevil. Like I said, keeping a low profile.”

  A strange sound came over the radio link, probably a chord from Pilgrim. Ravna smiled, imagining the pack and the girl hunkered down by their commset. It would be early morning on the east coast now. She wondered just where they were hiding.

  Flenser-Tyrathect was shaking his heads, grinning.

  “What?” Ravna said to him.

  The pack gave a shrug. “Isn’t it obvious? There is no need for spies high in Scrupilo’s organization. Who stole the Oliphaunt computer? I know I could use Oliphaunt to engineer all—”

  Woodcarver’s shriek would have been downright painful but for Oobii’s sound damping. Three of her leaped partway onto the table, their claws clicking on the surface. “You confess to treason, do you now?” she said.

  Flenser showed lots of teeth even as he replied: “Don’t be an idiot. Ah, but I forgot, you’re already the idiot who didn’t kill Vendacious when you had the chance. You’re already the idiot who let him escape and who still blames me for stealing Oliphaunt.”

  This brought another of Woodcarver onto the meeting table. There was a time when Ravna could have been the peacemaker in such confrontations. Now? Ravna fleetingly wondered if Woodcarver might take a swipe at her if she tried to intervene.

  Nevil was braver, or faster, or perhaps just more foolish. As Woodcarver scrambled forward, he was already on his feet. “It’s okay, Your Majesty!” He started to extend a hand toward her, then seemed to realize he was cajoling someone who was seriously not human. “Um, this is just one of those burdens of a wise ruler.”

  The stilted, medieval approach seemed to work. Woodcarver didn’t retreat, but her forward surge subsided.

  “Flenser has a point,” said Johanna, sounding unperturbed, perhaps because the sounds of jaws and claws had not survived the low-quality radio transmission. “Tycoon may really be Vendacious plus Oliphaunt, but spies in Scrupilo’s labs could also explain his success.”

  That satisfied all except Scrupilo
: “I do not have spies in any of my labs!” But not surprisingly, he was perfectly happy to talk about technical fixes to such nonexistent espionage. Monitoring user access to Oobii was relatively easy. The problem was to correlate that with exactly what inventions were appearing elsewhere.

  Nevil was looking more and more unhappy. “We have to get this nailed down. Surely there must be clues at the Tycoon end of this. You’re due to leave East Home almost immediately, aren’t you, Jo?”

  “That was the plan.” There was mumbled conversation between Johanna and Pilgrim, too scattered for Oobii to clean up. “Our equipment is in good shape and we have a safe hidey-hole outside of the city. We’re good to stay a while if it will help, especially if you can feed us some clues to follow up on.”

  Nevil was clearly torn. Ravna could guess how much he’d been looking forward to Johanna’s return.

  “Do we have any clues to feed them?” Ravna asked.

  Pilgrim said, “There’s Scrupilo’s lab logs. We could look for coincidences in detail.”

  Woodcarver—now back on her seats—had a different angle. “From what Johanna and Pilgrim say, Tycoon grows steadily more powerful. If they come back now, we may have hard time getting this close again.”

  “We should have a full-time gang of spies over there,” said Flenser-Tyrathect.

  Woodcarver shrugged agreement. The two were almost talking to each other.

  In the end, that meeting was almost the sort of Exec Council meeting they should be having these days—except that now Johanna and Pilgrim would be absent for at least another twenty days.

  • • •

  Twenty days. Johanna and Pilgrim wouldn’t be back till after Ravna’s big speech. Since that night by Pham’s grave, she had not had much chance to talk to Johanna. The younger woman had been off spying most of the time, and when she’d been back she’d been mainly with Nevil. Now Ravna would have virtually no chance to chat privately with her.