The Children of the Sky

by VernorVinge

  Maybe it was because of good words from Pilgrim to Woodcarver, but the Fragmentarium remained open. Indeed, one happy consequence was exactly as Johanna had imagined: now there was plenty of room in the institution. Woodcarver did not move to boot the old members out of the place. Mr. Stonemason and the others had a place for their elderly parts, even doomed as they were. That crowding problem was postponed for a while—and Harmony looked like the ineffectual, pompous assholes that he was!

  Any time in the first days after the Breakout, Johanna could easily have proclaimed her innocence. After all, the evidence against her was circumstantial, with Harmony the loudest proclaimer of her guilt. The only eyewitnesses were very confused singletons, and some of them apparently thought she had been the one to throw the gate open. She almost told Pilgrim the truth—except that she soon guessed that he already knew. Johanna came even closer to telling Ravna Bergsndot. It hurt to think that Ravna saw her as just a stupid little teenager; the poor lady had to deal with too many of those already. But the days passed, and Johanna’s reputation grew and solidified. Yeah, she was very glad she hadn’t done what people thought she had. But hell, it had happened—and in the future, maybe people like Harmony would think twice before they crossed the Mad Bad Girl of Starship Hill.

  Three years after the

  Battle on Starship Hill

  CHAPTER 04

  Remasritlfeer had been working for the Great Tycoon for more than two years. This was a constant source of surprise to Remasritlfeer, who had never taken kindly to fools, even ones as rich as Tycoon. The two years had been one crackbrained mission after another, some more dangerous and exciting than the explorer in Remasritlfeer would have ever dreamed. And maybe that was why he continued to work for the madpack.

  This latest piece of insanity might finally bring an end to their relationship. Exploring the Tropics! The assignment was more dangerous, more insane—literally insane—than anything Tycoon had demanded before. But truthfully, the first few days had been magnificent: Remasritlfeer had totally survived and in two ways he’d matched or exceeded the triumph of any explorer in the history of the world.

  Unfortunately, that was four tendays ago. Tycoon just didn’t know when to give up. Glory had degenerated into deadly tedium, tenday after tenday of failures.

  “There has to come an end to it, you know.” The words expressed Remasritlfeer’s heartfelt opinion, but they were spoken by his passenger on this flight. This final trip, if there was any mercy in the world. Chitiratifor was a well-dressed sixsome who barely fit in the balloon’s passenger platform. The Sea Breeze’s gondola was a cramped place where every pound had to be accounted for. The insulation round the passenger platform was so thin that Chitiratifor’s anxiety was painfully loud. Remasritlfeer could see claws and jaws here and there through the partition. His passenger was gouging the frame of the gondola with all his strength. There were retching sounds, some of his members barfing into the muddy water below.

  Remasritlfeer waggled a semaphore at Tycoon’s sailing fleet below. They paid out the tether a bit faster, let the sea breeze blow the Sea Breeze steadily toward the swampy inland. This had been the routine twice a tenday since the beginning of this horrid exercise. All through the predawn, Tycoon’s support vessels would puff away, mixing iron filings with various corrosive poisons, filling the gas bag of the Sea Breeze or its alternate. Then, as the morning wind picked up, Remasritlfeer would lift off, sailing through the air like no one in history, like no one in the world (if you didn’t count the Sky Maggots).

  “We’ll be over land in a matter of minutes now, sir,” he said cheerfully to Chitiratifor.

  Chitiratifor made some more mouth noise. Then he said, “This has to look good, you know. My master says that Tycoon is still claiming the Tropics will make him rich beyond the dreams of all packs past. If we are not convincing today, he’ll be sailing around down here forever, pissing away our treasure.”

  Our treasure? Chitiratifor and his master Vendacious were a presumptuous pair. They had some reason. They had provided critical fixes that made Tycoon’s inventions—including these balloons—workable. Remasritlfeer could sense their contempt. They figured they could use Tycoon; it seriously upset them when the Boss could not be swayed.

  It was too bad that in this particular case Chitiratifor and Vendacious were absolutely right. Remasritlfeer looked inland. The weather had been perfect so far, but there were high clouds ranked to the north. If those clouds marched south, this afternoon could get exciting. At the moment, they simply blocked the far view, the jungle basin that fed the River Fell. Even on the clearest days, one pack’s eyes could not see the all of that. The Fell stretched northward to beyond the horizon. Its fringes were a vast network of great rivers descending from smaller and smaller ones, ultimately from mountain streams at the edge of arctic cold. Those lands had their own mysteries and threats. They were the scene of endless deadly stories and many of Remasritlfeer’s own explorations—but they could not compare to the Lower Fell, to the mystery and the threat of the ground below him now. Their balloon wasn’t more than a thousand feet up. Details were lost in the humid mist—except when he looked almost straight down. There was the muddy water, the occasional swamp grass. It was hard to tell just where the outflow of the Fell ended. Normal ships ran aground on barely submerged mudflats that extended more than a hundred miles out. The color of the shallows and their smell had given the Fell its name before any pack set eyes on the river mouth itself. You needed rafts or special-built ships to get as close as Tycoon’s fleet. And I am even closer yet! thought Remasritlfeer. It was a rare privilege, one that he would treasure—after he was far away from here. As for now, well, he’d seen cesspools in East Home with much the same appearance as the murk below, and the smell was like nothing he had ever experienced, a mix of rot and body odor and exotic plants.

  The Sea Breeze moved steadily northwards, not much faster than a pack might walk. The wind and the tether combined to keep them at altitude, sparing them the awful death that had claimed all previous explorers—and incidentally keeping them out of the heat and damp of the tropical jungle. The grass below had taken on its tree form. The trunks might still be below water, but yard by yard, as the balloon drifted north, those trunks became thicker, holding more silt from the Fell. “Most of what we’re seeing now stays above sea level except during storms and the highest tides,” said Remasritlfeer.

  More of Chitiratifor’s snouts were visible now. The pack was peering down. “How far still to go?” he said.

  “We just have to move a little eastwards.” Remasritlfeer had been watching the ground, and Tycoon’s ships, and the payout of the tether. You could be sure Tycoon was watching back. If Tycoon had stayed back in East Home, they all could have abandoned this foolishness by now. Directly below, he recognized a pattern of trees that he had used on the last few flights; he signaled for the ship to stop the payout and move eastward. The Sea Breeze bounced gently against the limit of the tether. The ground below slid sideways. Remasritlfeer took on the manner of a tour guide: “And now you’ll see the lost city of legend, the Great Choir of the Tropics.” Maybe it was a city. There were hundreds of Tines wherever he looked. As the balloon took them across higher ground, they could see more. Thousands of Tines. More. Perhaps as many as legend claimed. And nowhere was there even one coherent pack, just the simple mindlessness of the vast crowd. The sound…the sound was tolerable. The Sea Breeze was several hundred feet up, too high for mindsound to reach. What Tinish sounds did reach the gondola were in the range of normal Interpack speech. Some of it might be language, but the chords that sounded from thousands of tympana were smeared of any meaning they might have had. It was an eerie dirge of ecstasy.

  And it squashed Chitiratifor’s arrogance. Remasritlfeer could feel the gondola shift as the fat sixsome huddled in on himself. There was fascinated horror in his voice: “So many. So close. It…really is a Choir.”

  “Yup,” Remasritlfeer said cheerfully, thou
gh he had been similarly affected the first few times he’d been here.

  “But how do they eat? How can they sleep?” In endless debauchery went unsaid, but Remasritlfeer could almost hear the thought.

  “We don’t know the details, but if we go lower—”

  “No! Don’t do that!”

  Remasritlfeer grinned to himself and continued. “If we go lower you’d see that these creatures look half starved. And yet there are buildings. See?” He made a pointing sound. Indeed, there were mud structures visible, some reduced to worn foundations peeking out from below later structures, and those submerged beneath still later mounds. No coherent pack would ever make such random things, barely recognizable as artificial constructions.

  In places, the generations of mud structures were piled five or six deep, a chaotic mixture of midden and pyramid and multistory hovel. There must be holes and crannies within; you could see Tines entering and emerging. Remasritlfeer recognized the neighborhood from previous flights. There were patterns, as if some fragment of conscious planning had worked for a few days and then been swept away by noise or some other plan. In a couple of tendays, all the landmarks would be changed again.

  “Another hundred feet will do it,” he said, and signaled to Tycoon’s ship to drop anchor. Actually, navigating the tethered balloon was rarely this precise. Today’s sea breeze was as smooth as fine silk. “Coming up on the Great Trading Plaza.”

  There was some shifting around on the passenger platform above him, Chitiratifor screwing up his courage to poke additional snouts over the railing. Then an unbelieving, “You call that a plaza?”

  “Well, that’s Tycoon’s term for it.” More objectively, it was an open patch of mud, fifty feet across; Tycoon had a peddler’s talent for using words to redefine reality. For several moments, Remasritlfeer was too busy for chitchat. He reached over the edge of the gondola to cast a mooring line downward. At the same time he shouted a big halloo to the Tines below. Of course, there were always watchers down there, though sometimes they seemed to forget the point of this exercise. Today, the response was almost immediate. Three Tines ran toward the center of the open space. They came from widely different points and were clearly singletons. Only when they got within a few feet of each other was there any sort of coordinated activity. Then they scrambled around clumsily, snapping at the rope that Remasritlfeer dangled down to them. Finally, two stood steady and third scrambled up and got the rope. Then all three got jaws on it and dragged the cord round and round a mud pillar.

  Chitiratifor did not seem encouraged by this show of local cooperation. “Now we’re trapped, are we? They could just pull us down.”

  “Yup, but they don’t try that so much anymore. When they do, we just drop the rope and fly away home.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Chitiratifor said nothing for a moment, but his mindsound was intense. “Well then, let’s proceed. We have a failure to observe, and I want some details for my devastating report to our employers.”

  “As you say.” Remasritlfeer was at least as anxious as anyone to dump Tycoon’s Tropical fiasco, but he didn’t feel like agreeing with the likes of this rag-eared thug. “One moment while I prepare the trade.” Remasritlfeer ducked down to the bottom of the gondola, opened the drop door. Their cargo was in a bannerwood kettle hung just below. It didn’t look like any water had slopped over during the balloon’s ascent.

  “Are you guys ready?” Remasritlfeer focused his words into the kettle.

  “Yessir!” “Righto.” “Let’s go!”…The words coming back were all piled up, the response of dozens—perhaps all—of the creatures in the kettle.

  Remasritlfeer ladled a dozen of the wriggling cuttlefish into a trade basket. Their huge eyes looked up at him. Their dozens of tentacles waved at him. In all the jabbering, he did not hear a particle of fear. He stuck a snout down to just above the rippling surface of the basket. The cuttlefish were very crowded in the small space, but that was the least of the problems they would soon face. “Okay, guys. You know the plan.” He ignored the tiny cries of enthusiastic agreement. “You talk to the folk below—”

  “Y-ye-yes, yes, y-yes! We ask them for safe landing for you. More trade. Harbor rights. Yes, yes! Yes!” The chords piled up in a tinkling mass, the speech of a dozen little creatures, each with voracious memories, each smarter than any singleton—but so scatterbrained that Remasritlfeer could not decide how smart they really were.

  “Okay then!” Remasritlfeer gave up on his attempt at guidance. “Good luck!” He latched the trade basket’s rope to the mooring line and paid out the cord.

  “B-b-b-bye, g’bye!” The tinkling of chords came from both the basket and from the crowd in the bannerwood kettle, comrades calling to one another. Way beyond the tiny basket, the muddy space below was still empty of all but a few Tines. That was normally a good sign.

  Chitiratifor’s voice came from above: “So why not send down the whole kettle of fish?”

  “Tycoon wants to see how this goes, then maybe send down a few more with different instructions.”

  Chitiratifor was silent for a moment, perhaps watching the trade basket as it swayed down and down along the mooring line. “Your boss is freaking insane. You know that, don’t you?”

  Remasritlfeer made no reply, and Chitiratifor continued, “See, Tycoon is a self-made patchwork. Half of him is a skinflint accountant. But the other half is four mad puppies the accountant picked just for their crazy imaginations. That might be a good idea, if the miser was the dominant half. But this miser is driven by the lunatic four. So do you know the reason he’s mucking around here?”

  Remasritlfeer couldn’t resist showing that he understood something of the matter. “Because he counted the snouts?”

  “What?—Yes! The accountant in him estimated the number of Tines in the Tropics.”

  “It could be more than one hundred million.”

  “Right. Then his lunatic four realized that dwarfed any other market in the world!”

  “Well,” said Remasritlfeer, “Tycoon is always on the lookout for new markets, the larger the better.” In fact, new markets were Tycoon’s greatest obsession, the driver of almost everything he did.

  Two of Remasritlfeer continued to watch the descent of the cuttlefish. Their multiple monologues were still clearly audible. The basket would touch down in just a couple of minutes.

  Angry talk continued to come from the passenger platform: “Tycoon has lots of stupid ideas, including the notion of getting power by selling things. But this time…so what if the Tropics has—what crazy number did you say? The point is, those millions are animals, a mob. Unless we could kill them all and exploit the land, the Tropics are worthless. I’m telling you, in confidence of course, my boss is getting tired of this tropical adventure. It’s bleeding from our essential strengths, the technological advances that Vendacious is providing, the factory base at East Home. This foolishness has to stop, now!”

  “Hmm, I hope your boss has not been this emphatic with my boss. Tycoon doesn’t react…favorably…to being ordered around.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Vendacious is much more the diplomat than I am. I’m just an honest worker, much like yourself, um, sharing my doubts and irritations about our betters.” Remasritlfeer himself was far from being a diplomat, but he could tell when someone was feeling him out. He almost blasted back, telling the six assholes above him where he could stuff Vendacious and his treacherous plans. No. Be cool.

  After another moment of silence, Chitiratifor changed the subject. “The talking cuttlefish have almost reached the ground.”

  “Yup.” In fact, the cuttlefish in the bannerwood kettle were chirping their interest, too. Apparently they could hear their siblings far below.

  “Your boss told my boss that this would be the definitive test. If it fails, we can all go home. I count that as very good news—and yet, who but a madpack would bet on speech-mimicking cuttlefish?”

  That was a reasonable question, and unfortunately R
emasritlfeer didn’t have any answer that would not make Tycoon look like an idiot. “Well, they’re not really cuttlefish.”

  “They look delightful. I love cuttlefish.”

  “If you took a taste of their water, you wouldn’t be interested in eating these. Their flesh is nearly inedible.” Remasritlfeer had never eaten one of the strange wrigglers, but the South Seas packs who fished the atolls in the far west had learned of the creatures’ intelligence and foul taste almost at the same time. It was Tycoon’s collecting of fantastic rumors that had sent Remasritlfeer halfway around the world to visit those islands, talk to the natives, and bring back a colony of the strange animals. What had seemed as absurd as the present adventure had ended up being the most exciting time of Remasritlfeer’s life. “And these little critters really can talk.”

  “But it’s nonsense, like the words of a singleton.”

  “No, they’re smarter than that.” Maybe. “They’re so intelligent that Tycoon has conceived the test we do today.”

  “Yes, his secret plan. I don’t care what it is, as long as this is the last try…” Chitiratifor was silent for a moment, presumably watching the trade basket descend the last few feet to the muddy ground. Others were watching. Intently. At the edges of the open space, where the unending mobs swirled and eddied, there were heads turning, thousands of eyes watching the Sea Breeze and the little package that was descending from it. It had taken tendays of dangerous balloon flights—and some truly expensive jewels—to establish this small open space and the erratically obeyed rules for these exchanges.

  “Okay, tell me!” Chitiratifor’s curiosity had won out. “What in heaven’s name are you doing with these fish?”