The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

Ravna sat with Jo and Pilgrim on that beautiful carpet, and felt as cold and miserable as if she’d been in the blizzard outside.

  Maybe Johanna had been crying, but all that was left was the strain that showed on her face. “We would have let the Tropicals run right on into the wilderness, except that the storm had caught up with us.” She had reported most of this by radio. She’d be saying it again tomorrow morning when all the Children got together at the New Meeting Place. She punched angrily at the big pillow she held on her lap. Pilgrim was stretched out around her, also looking tired and unperky.

  “We rescued no one,” Jo said. “We discovered nothing. The only good thing that came out of this was getting to work with Jefri. He handled the ground chase, and for the first time in years we really cooperated.”

  “Jefri is the best of all the humans at woodcraft,” said Pilgrim. “He and Amdi came down from Smeltertop, watching all the way for signs of small escaping parties. They were just ahead of the main group of Tropicals when the storm hit.”

  “So between him and Woodcarver’s troops, the Tropicals were boxed in?” said Ravna. She had followed the chase with most of the other Children, just watching the comms from Oobii.

  “Yeah, we really had them trapped, and if we didn’t stop them, they could lose us in the storm.” Jo swatted her pillow again. “We should have captured a lot more of them, though. Damn that Gannon Jorkenrud. He just charged on through, whacking Tropicals. I’m gonna complain about that.”

  Ravna nodded. In fact, Johanna had already complained loudly and publicly, and her complaints had been heard by almost one hundred Children on Oobii. Jorkenrud’s attack had been ineffectual, except as it forced a complete loss of coherence among the Tropicals. “Yes,” said Ravna, “we saw.” Via the camera carried by Woodcarver. “The Tropicals were hunkered down around their sleighs, almost clumped into rational groups. Then Gannon and company came in—”

  “Yeah! And poof, the Tropicals ran off in all directions, as singletons.” Johanna glared at nowhere in particular for a moment. “No way could we catch many of them in the storm.” A shadow passed across her face. “Tropical singletons in a northern blizzard. I’ll bet they’re dead now.”

  “Jefri and Amdi brought nets,” said Pilgrim. “They managed to snag a few.” He shook a head wonderingly. “What an unlikely team they make. Jefri is almost as good in the woods as a pack—and Amdiranifani is a pudgy, overly nice genius who doesn’t even like to eat live food. I’ll bet the nets were Amdi’s idea. Between them, they caught more Tropicals than Woodcarver’s troops and Nevil’s idiots.”

  “What did you find in the sleighs?”

  Johanna shook her head. “We’re gonna have to wait for Nevil’s big meeting to learn that. We were still in the air, and Amdi and Jefri were busy with their nets. It was mainly Gannon and company on the wagons.… I swear, even after ten years Down Here, they still seem to think that the world is built just for them. If objects don’t have intentional response, or at least voice command obedience, they figure they’re broken. These bozos ended up using axes to make kindling of the sleighs and cargo boxes.”

  “I saw some of what they spilled out on the ground. It was a jumble, but here and there I saw rainbows.”

  “Big deal,” said Johanna. “For years, the Tropicals have been stealing tech items, mostly glittering garbage. I want some real clues. Where are Geri and Edvi and Timor? How can we get them back…” her voice became soft and sad, “… or can we ever get them back?” She looked up at Ravna. “I think Jefri is as upset as I’ve ever seen him, even when he was little. This takes us back to Murder Meadows.”

  Chapter 17

  A tenday passed. There had been no sign of Geri or Edvi or Timor, but something new happened up at the cemetery—hundreds of packs and all the remaining Children showed up and stood in snowy, windy twilight for the funeral of Belle and parts of Dumpster and almost all of Beasly. For better or worse, this looked like a new tradition among the packs. Nevil said just a few words, thanking the fallen Best Friends, and promising that the stolen Children would be found. Then various packs and humans spoke to remember the dead. They even found nice things to say about the ever-churlish Belle Ornrikak. The last of Beasly stood quietly beside his pack’s grave, looking sad and puzzled.

  The murders and kidnappings brought the Children together as nothing had before. The growing complaints died, and everyone pulled together. Though there were no signs of the missing Children, there were clues. Along with the pilfered trinkets and toys, the Tropicals’ sleighs had contained food supplies, including syrup-grain bars that only humans could stomach. Someone had planned to take the stolen Children far away. Nevil confessed that his leadership had been terribly unprepared and that their best rescue efforts had been a botch.

  So the Domain had an external enemy, someone who evidently was interested in learning more about two-legs. The names Vendacious and Tycoon were high on everyone’s suspect list. There was something very dangerous out beyond the Domain. This time it had used its puppets—but next time?

  Nevil and Woodcarver were forced into closer cooperation. Both Tines and humans volunteered their time for special watches. The youngest Children were never without double guards. Jefri and Amdi stayed in town, working to devise a sustainable town patrol. Nevil appointed special committees to recommend new policies.

  At twice-a-tenday meetings, Nevil summarized the results of the planning committees. The unsuccessful bioscience projects were swept away by the necessities of immediate safety.

  It was such a perfect fit for Pilgrim’s warning of what a regime might do to stay in power. But now Pilgrim was less the cynic: “Events have worked in Nevil’s political favor, but I don’t see how he could have engineered this.”

  “Not by himself,” said Johanna, “but if Nevil has fallen into Vendacious’ schemes, this is exactly the sort of thing that could happen.” She glanced at Ravna. “You told me Nevil looked overwhelmed in the embassy.”

  “Yes.”

  Jo nodded. “I think Nevil did a deal with the devil and now he can’t get out.” She was silent for a moment. “Or maybe he is totally innocent. I talked to Jefri again today. If he stays in town long enough, I really think I may learn what’s going on in his head. Jef and Amdi are desperate to keep this from happening again—but I’ll tell you, they’re whole-heartedly behind Nevil’s security schemes. Jefri says we really need those handcannons that Nevil mentioned at yesterday’s meeting. Jefri would never put up with the kind of dark-hearted alliance Flenser was claiming. And yet … Jef’s holding something back. Has Flenser had anything more to say to you?”

  Ravna shook her head. “No. You know that.” They had had this conversation before. Flenser had shown up at the meetings, generally backing Nevil, and without his usual sly innuendo. The help he had promised Ravna was not forthcoming.

  The Mad Bad Girl crossed her arms truculently. “I say Woodcarver should grab Flenser and put the bastards to the question.” She glared at Pilgrim. “How about it? You saw the Queen just this afternoon, right?”

  Pilgrim looked around at himself. Embarrassed? “As a matter of fact, our latest chat was a bit more, um, intimate than any we’ve had in some time. I got some real insight. I fear she is going to become even more erratic than before.”

  “It’s that puppy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Sht is older now, but the situation hasn’t stabilized. Woodcarver knows he’s a problem, but he’s such a part of her now that she can’t deal with it. She’s bouncing around between some very different states of mind. I caught her in an affectionate mood.”

  “Hmmph. You should tell her to ditch little Sht,” said Johanna, quite out of keeping with her normal soft-hearted attitude toward individual pack members.

  “Heh, even in the midst of our loving, I suspect that suggestion would have provoked a very negative reaction. The Old Woodcarver would have never drifted this far. She knew she was giving up the stability of centuries when she started fooling aroun
d with me—but we never thought she’d lose it like this. The good news is, she knows she has a problem and she’s trying to cope with it. I think she’ll eventually be successful. In the meantime—well, there are several very different places her opinions dwell: She fully supports Nevil’s plans for tightening up security. Some of the time she sees Nevil as a proper ally in those plans. Sometimes she is as suspicious of him as we are, regarding him as a puppet of Vendacious—or Flenser. Of course, she can’t get her claws on Vendacious, but she’s toying with exactly your suggestion: putting Flenser to the question!”

  • • •

  Fifteen days passed. Flenser-Tyrathect was holed up in the Old Castle down on Hidden Island, under unacknowledged house arrest. Ravna wondered if—considering all the secret exits—Flenser was really there at all. One thing was certain: he still wasn’t talking to Ravna!

  She continued her covert surveillance of Nevil’s online activity. Nevil and Bili were as clumsy and cautious as ever. Their attempts to spy on her would be laughable even if she didn’t have Command Privileges. On the other hand, Nevil had true control of the orbiter and the commsets he had appropriated. There were data links she couldn’t snoop on.

  Despite the tragedy and paranoia, Ravna found minor good news: the maiden flight of Eyes Above 2. The behemoth had the size and appearance of a small interplanetary freighter, and even though it was limited to the lower atmosphere and could hoist less mass than the agrav skiff, it was still a safe and relatively fast transport. Nevil was right when he said that EA2 would revolutionize the Domain’s rescue capability.

  Meantime she worked on her Cold Valley project and did the gun designing that was officially assigned her. Both projects involved working with Scrupilo. When he demanded she visit him down on the North End, it was almost like the good old days before the Disaster Study Group and Nevil and the murders.

  Ravna’s town house was less than five thousand meters from the North End, but to get there, she’d had to walk to the funicular and trundle down it to the Inner Channel. The channel was still mostly frozen, but rain had covered it with centimeters of freezing water. Getting across was an ugly combination of boating and sleigh ride. The rest of the trip hadn’t been much better, though Flenser’s packs had cut drainage channels in the icy piles along the streets. So an hour and a half after leaving home, here she was in Scrupilo’s office at the North End quarry. She was still drying out from the trip when Scrupilo trooped out from his glassware and electronics.

  “Hei, Scrupilo, so why did you need to see me in person? Is it the guns or the Cold Valley project?” And I so hope it’s Cold Valley. If not for the present dangers, that’s where all her attention would be.

  “Both and neither,” said the pack grumpily. “Let’s start with the fun things. Are you quite dried out? I don’t want you dripping on this.”

  “I’m dry.”

  “Okay, then.” He led her to a test stand at the side of the room. There were connectors and cables, locally made batteries and voltage regulators—prehistoric tech that had taken Ravna and Scrupilo years to make. Almost hidden in the middle of the equipment was a one-centimeter-wide smudge of carbon on glass. Scrupilo and his helpers had carefully cut it out of the ten thousand array, then connected power and data leads appropriately. “We just finished the setup this morning,” said Scrupilo. “I’ve already done some testing, but I wanted you to see it.” He clustered around the equipment, tapping switches with his noses, then correcting his own mistakes. Parts of Scrup were getting very old. His White Head member was nearly deaf in the lower frequencies, and Ravna figured from the way it was always closely surrounded by its peers that it also had problems with the ultrasonic frequencies of mindsounds. Scrupilo claimed that if he messed around getting younger members, he’d just lose his dedication. Considering what had happened to Woodcarver, maybe he was right. “There! I got it right. See? Binary of twelve coded on the top leads, binary of seventeen on the bottom.” He waggled a nose at pattern of tiny lights, and then pointed at a third row of lights below the other two: the outputs. “Twelve plus seventeen is twenty-nine!”

  “You did it, Scrupilo.” Ravna almost whispered the words.

  Scrupilo preened, but then some honest core of him replied, “We did it. Me and you and Oobii’s design programs. We three and the teams up north and down here.” His heads were bobbing almost maniacally. “I’ve spent all day playing with this. I had Oobii sending down test settings at variable speeds, checking the results. Our little adder can reliably do one hundred thousand operations per second, second after second, for hours!” He looked up at her. “And the design we’re making at Cold Valley now,” —the one Johanna and Pilgrim had delivered just before the kidnappings— “that’s a giant step up from this, but I bet it’ll work too; it’s the same hundred-micron feature size. Imagine, we’ll have clock, and memory, and an instruction set all together.”

  Now Ravna was nodding back. That next step was the distillation of a thousand civilizations’ processor designs, optimized for their grotesquely primitive situation at Cold Valley. “Of course,” she said, “that will be even more tedious to wire up.”

  “Yup, like tying good rug knots. Thousands of hours. But in a year we’ll have ten or twenty of our own processors. By then we’ll be making vision chips. There will be even more tedious work for paws and hands—”

  “But in ten years, we’ll have local automation.” The machines would be doing the wire-ups. It was the beginning she’d promised the Children. It would stink, but it would be enough: “Then we can start shrinking the feature size.” That was the transition point that had always marked the beginning of technological civilization.

  “Yup, yup,” said Scrupilo; he had long ago brought into the histories he’d read in Oobii’s archives. For a moment they just stood grinning at each other like idiots. Very happy idiots. She would so much like to play with these connectors, set up her own automatic addition. It was the sort of thing that by itself would not impress any of the Children, except maybe Timor. He—

  Timor would have loved this. The thought brought her back to their current awful situation. Play with the gear later. She stepped back from the miracle, her smile leaking away. “You seemed to have other things you wanted to talk about, Scrupilo?”

  The pack’s heads continued to bob for a moment, but Scrupilo eventually came down to earth too. He wandered to the window, looked down into the quarry, maybe at the actinic flashes coming from the shed where his crews were forging ribs and spars. Work had begun on a second huge airship, apparently to be called Eyes Above 3; Scrupilo had no imagination when it came to names.

  But when Scrup turned back from the window, it wasn’t to talk about EA3. “You know Nevil’s miniature cannon idea is really stupid.”

  That was Nevil’s main technological response to the kidnappings, an even higher priority than another airship. “Personal protection for all,” was his slogan for the project. Most of the Children were very much in favor of the idea. Of course, Ravna had always known that very small cannon could be made; such were a commonplace in early civilizations. The trouble was, they were so easy to make and copy, and the Domain already had military superiority in this part of the world; better not to give other nations a clue before it was necessary. Besides, Oobii had ideas for making much more effective personal weapons once the Domain became a little more technically advanced. “But Scrupilo, you know Woodcarver favors the notion of personal cannons.” As of the most recent twice-a-tenday meeting.

  The pack made an irritated noise. “You and I have discussed such weapons before. In principle, they are a moderately foolish idea, perhaps necessary in the current emergency. What is stupid is the actual design.” He sent a member across the room to fetch an engineering drawing and thrust it into Ravna’s hands.

  The graphic was done by Ravna, from Nevil’s overall description. She stared at it for a moment. “Um, I did include a flash and noise suppressor,” which hadn’t been on Nevil’s wish list. �
�Did you want a longer barrel?”

  “Well, yes! Would you want this going off in your face?” Scrupilo had damaged his White Head’s hearing in experiments with the first field artillery. “But that’s the least of it. Look at the, what do you call it, the stock.”

  That part was also Nevil’s idea, but it had seemed rather clever to Ravna. “That’s modeled after the handle on a Tinish jaw-axe, Scrupilo.” But turned sideways, the lower half looked much like the handgrip of Pham’s long-gone pistol.

  “Foolishness!” All but one of Scrupilo came over and grabbed the paper out of her hands. “For a human with arms and hands, this would be easy to hold and fire and reload. But for a pack—look, helper members have to come around on the sides and stick snouts forward of the gunner. The idea of cartridges and cartridge boxes is nice enough, but I can’t imagine scrambling around beneath the muzzle to insert a reload.”

  Ravna stared at the picture; she really should have fed Nevil’s suggestion through Oobii’s multi-species designer. This was a weapon for humans. “Do you have some changes to suggest?”

  “I could put my mind to it.” Again, he glanced down through the windows. “If we have to waste time, at least we can do it right.” He pulled blank paper from one of his panniers and began sketching. “Hmm, a longer barrel would improve accuracy and make the gun easier to shoot and hold and service.…”

  Over the next ten minutes the two of them—mainly Scrupilo, since Ravna was a dunce at design without Oobii—worked out a number of features. Not surprisingly, what they came up with looked a lot more like a crew-served weapon than a hand gun. “But I’m sure a single human would be quite proficient with it. Then—” He looked up, as if listening. All Ravna heard was the continuing bang of the drop forge—but the one of Scrupilo still by the window was scrunched against the glass, trying to look straight down.

  Okay, he was waiting for someone. Ravna crossed the room and leaned close to the glass, blocking the reflected room lighting with her hands. The flashes from the forge shone through the rain. Freezing water glittered as it fell from the lab’s eaves. Looking down in the direction of Scrupilo’s gaze, she could see the flight of rickety wooden stairs that zigzagged up the quarry wall to Scrupilo’s office. Twilight showed dark shapes ascending single-file. It looked like three packs. A flash of light from the forge revealed that the middle pack was a sevensome, all in heavy raincloaks, including one wee member who rode the shoulders of the largest. Queen Woodcarver.