The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  The Blight’s prey is almost thirty lightyears away, an ordinary solar system … where Ravna and the Children have fled. And that is part of the reason this vision must be a dream. Thirty lightyears is impossibly far in this part of the universe, where nothing goes faster than light. There is no way she can know what is happening in the enemy fleet.

  The fleet floats in death, but is not dead itself. Look closer at the clustered ships. Things move. Construction proceeds. The fleet was once the hand of a living god; now it exists to resurrect that god. Even trapped here, in this encystment of pain, it plans and builds, second on second, year on year, working as hard as its living crews can be driven. If necessary, it can do this for centuries, breeding more crew to replace natural losses. This program will eventually produce ramscoop vessels. They will be the best that can exist Down Here, capable of reaching near-lightspeed.

  Now perhaps none of that effort is necessary, for the Blight can see Ravna as she sees it, and the encysted god is saying to her: Rules change. I am coming. I am coming. And much sooner than you think.

  • • •

  Ravna woke with a start, gasping for breath.

  She was lying on the floor, her right arm painfully bent. I must have fallen. What a terrible dream. She struggled back into her chair. She wasn’t in her cabin aboard the Out of Band II. The automation aboard Oobii would have turned the floor soft before she ever hit it. She looked around, trying to orient herself, but all she could remember was the dream.

  She ran her hand across the side of her chair. It was wood, local Tinish manufacture, as was the table. But the walls had a greenish cast, gently curving into the equally greenish floor. She was inside the Children’s landing craft, under Woodcarver’s new castle. That took long enough to recognize! She leaned her head into her hands, and let the cabin spin around to a stop. When her dizziness had passed, she sat back and tried to think. Except for the last few minutes, everything seemed reasonable:

  She had come down to the catacombs to inspect the Children’s caskets. This part of the castle spanned a range of technology from the pre-gunpowder to fallen transcendence, the walls carved with chisels and mallets, the light provided by lamps from Oobii. Two years ago, the coldsleep containers had been removed from the Straumer Lander and laid out with enough space between them to dissipate the waste heat of the refrigeration.

  Half the caskets were empty now, their passengers awakened. That included almost all the oldest Children. Nowadays, the kids lived in or near the new castle; some were in school classes here. If she listened carefully, she could hear occasional shrieks of laughter mixed with the gobble of Tinish packs.

  So why did I enter the Lander? Oh yes. She’d spent a only few minutes outside, looking through the casket windows at the faces of little ones who still slept, who waited unknowing for there to be enough grownup caregivers. Most of those revivals would be routine, but some of the caskets tested as borderline defective. How could she save the kids in those withered caskets? That had been the reason for today’s visit, to review the results on Timor Ristling, her first attempt with the withered caskets.

  The Lander was originally Top-of-the-Beyond technology. Much of that could not function down here in the Slow Zone; she’d never been able to transfer the Lander’s maintenance records to the stable technology of her own ship. She had to come onboard to access those records. Her gaze slid uneasily around the Lander’s freight cabin. Too much had happened in this green-walled room. The Lander wasn’t just Top of the Beyond. It had been at the High Lab, in the Low Transcend, and it had been … modified. If she looked up she would see some of that, the fungus hanging from the ceiling. The magical Countermeasure. Nowadays, it seemed to be as dead as a dusty cobweb, but Countermeasure had dimmed the sun, and killed her dearest love, and maybe saved the galaxy. The remains of the fungus bothered even the Straumer Children.

  This was not a surprising place to have a really bad dream.

  But now she remembered what she had been doing just before the crazy dream overtook her. The last two days had been a nonstop guilt trip, with far too little sleep. It was clear that she had screwed up Timor’s chances. Not deliberately, not through incompetence. But I did pick him for the first damaged-casket revival. The problem wasn’t the boy’s twisted leg, it wasn’t the fact that he might not be quite as brilliant as the other children. The problem was that in the tendays since his revival, Timor had not grown.

  Ravna Bergsndot was thousands of lightyears from reliable advice. Oobii and this strange Lander were all she had. She remembered pounding on the data for almost an hour, combining Timor’s casket records with Oobii’s latest medical tests, and finally understanding what had gone wrong. No one and no machine Down Here could have known that ahead of time. In cold, cruel truth, Timor had turned out to be a very valuable … experiment.

  When she’d finally realized that, Ravna had put her head in her arms, too tired to look for any more technical fixes and raging against the possibility that she had become a player with other people’s lives.

  So then I just fell asleep and had the nightmare? She stared at the greenish bulkheads. She had been very tired, and totally beaten down. Ravna sighed. She often had nightmares about the Blighter fleet, though this was the most bizarre yet. A tip of the hat then to the subconscious mind; it had dug up something that could distract her from Timor, if only briefly.

  She disconnected her tiara interface from the Lander, and climbed down from the freight cabin. Three years ago, when Sjana and Arne Olsndot had brought the Children here, this ground had been open meadow. She stood for a moment by the spidery pylons, looking round the cool, dry catacombs. Imagine a spacecraft with a castle built over it. Only in the Slow Zone.

  She would have to come back here again and again until all the Children were revived—but she was grateful to be done with this place for today. Up two flights of stairs and she would be in the castle yard, in the summer sunlight. There would be the Children just leaving class, playing with each other and with their Tinish friends. If she stayed to chat, she would likely be in the new castle all afternoon. It might be the sunny evening before she had to be back in her cabin aboard the Oobii. As she started up the steps, she could imagine feeling light-hearted. She would take some time off, just to play with the Children. Somehow she would make things right for Timor.

  She was still in the dark of the stairs when she remembered something else about the dream. She paused, steadying herself with a hand against the cool stonework. The mind in the fleet had said, “Rules change.” Yes, if the Zone shifted and faster-than-light transport became possible again—well, the Blight could arrive very soon indeed. It was a possibility she obsessed upon both awake and in her dreams. She had zonographs aboard the Oobii that monitored the relevant physical laws, had done so since the Battle on Starship Hill. There had never been an alarm.

  Still leaning against the wall, Ravna queried Out of Band II, requesting a window on the zonograph. The graphic came up, a stupidly self-formatted plot. Yes, there was the usual noise. Then she noticed the scaling. That couldn’t be right! She slewed her gaze back five hundred seconds, and saw that the trace had spiked. For almost ten milliseconds, Zone physics had shot above the probe’s calibration, so high it might have been Transcendent. Then she noticed the pulsing red border. It was the Zone alarm she had so carefully set—the alarm she should have received at the instant of the spike. Impossible, impossible. This had to be some sort of screw-up. She rummaged in diagnostics, horror rising. Yes, there had been a screw-up: she had only enabled the Zone alarm for when she was local to Oobii. Why hadn’t ship logic caught that stupid error? She knew the answer to that question. She’d explained it to the Children dozens of time. The kids could not understand that when you scrape your knee, it might be your own fault. We’re living in the Slow Zone. We have virtually no automation, and what we have is painfully simple, devoid of common sense. Down Here, if you wanted something done right, you had to provide the good judgment yourse
lf. The kids didn’t like that answer. Where they came from, it was a far more alien idea than it was even for Ravna Bergsndot.

  She glared at the displays that hung in the dark all around her. This was clearly a Zone alarm, but it could be a false alarm. It had to be! The spike had been so brief, less than ten probe samples. An instrumental transient. Yes. She turned and continued up the stairs, still searching back and forth along the timeline’s trace, looking for evidence of an innocuous explanation. There were a number of system diagnostics she could run.

  She thought about this for five more steps, making a turn from one flight of stairs to the next. Up ahead she could see a square of daylight.

  Since the Battle on Starship Hill, the Zone physics had been as solid as a mountain’s roots … but that was a comparison with fatal consequence. Earthquakes happen. Foreshocks happened. What she was seeing could be a tiny, sudden slip in the foundation of the local universe. She looked at the times on the Zone trace. The spike occurred about when she took her odd little nap down in the Children’s Lander. So then. For almost one hundredth of a second, maybe c had not been the ultimate speed, and the Lander could have known the current state of the Blighter fleet. For almost one hundredth of a second, Countermeasure could have functioned.

  And her dream was simply news.

  Even so, she still didn’t know how much time they had left. It might be just hours. But if it were years, or decades—then every moment must be made to count. Somehow.

  “Hei, Ravna!” came a childish shout from across the yard, in the direction of the school. They would be around her in a moment.

  I can’t do this. She half turned, retreating toward the stairway. Nightmares can be the truth. It wasn’t just villains who had to make the hard decisions.

  Chapter 02

  There was no school on the last day of every ten. Sometimes that made the end of the tenday terribly boring to Timor Ristling. Other times, Belle would show him some dank corner of the New Castle, or Ravna Bergsndot would take him across the straits to Hidden Island.

  Today was turning into the most entertaining kind of day, one where the other kids let him come along on their projects.

  “You’ll be the lookout, Timor,” Gannon had told him. Gannon Jorkenrud had organized the expedition, and specifically invited Timor, even though it meant they had to carry him part of the way down from Starship Hill. Gannon and the others even helped Timor across the boulder field at the base of the cliffs. Sea birds skirled all about.

  The kids were right down on the seashore now, the cliffs towering behind them. It was strange to be at eye level with the water. The froth of the waves seemed to merge with the sea haze above, misting over the buildings of Hidden Island just a couple of kilometers away. Here you could see what was beneath the cliffs. You could see how “low tide” had pulled back the water, leaving this field of slick rocks, a jumble of giants. There wasn’t a single dry place; all this was underwater when the tide was highest.

  Belle pattered along beside and around Timor, grumbling as she often did. “This dirty water is going to smudge my pelts.” Belle was all white. This was quite rare among Tines—though one of her, the old male, might have had black patches when he was younger.

  “You didn’t have to come, crapheads,” said Gannon. He and Belle didn’t get along.

  Belle gave a hiss and a laugh at the same time. “Try and keep me away. I haven’t been to a good shipwreck in years. How did you figure it was going to come ashore here?”

  “We’re humans. We’ve got our ways.”

  Some of the other kids laughed. They were strung out, walking down a narrow path between the rocks. One of them said, “Actually, Nevil saw it on Oobii’s surveillance monitors when he was studying shipside. Ravna and the packs know about the wreck, but they haven’t seen the latest updates.”

  “Yeah! Woodcarver’s packs are probably down at Cliffside harbor. We’ll be first where stuff really happens.”

  Walking down here, they still couldn’t see the wreck, just the water crashing on the rocks. Ahead, a swarm of seabirds towered over one particular spot. Timor felt an odd twinge of nostalgia. It still happened, when there was something about this world that reminded him of before. Those birds were so alien, but at the same time, their clustering was just like construction swarms back home.

  The water surged ankle deep now, soaking through Timor’s leather shoes, gripping like icy hands. “Wait up, guys!”

  “See, I told you walking in this was bad.” That was Belle, dancing around in discomfort.

  Gannon looked back. “What is it now?…” Then he shrugged. “Okay, this is where we put you up on a rock.”

  Gannon and some of the other kids came back and boosted Timor to a ledge on the nearest monster boulder. Belle climbed two of herself over the remaining three, and reached the same cleft in the rock.

  “You can make it to the top from there, can’t you?” said Gannon.

  Timor twisted around, trying to see beyond the slick curve of stone. He really didn’t like to say he couldn’t do something. “Yeah, I can.”

  “Okay. We’re gonna go on ahead. Heh. We’ll make friends with the shipwrecked doggies. You crawl on up to the top of this rock. If you see Woodcarver’s packs coming or Ravna Bergsndot, then have your pack give us a shout. Got it?”

  “Yup.”

  Gannon and the others continued on their way. Timor watched them for a moment, but only Øvin Verring turned to give him a little wave. Well, these kids had gotten older than him; he shouldn’t be surprised they didn’t include him in much. On the other hand, he was the lookout.

  He slid along the ledge toward some obvious handholds. Below him, Belle was poking around to find a way up for her bottom three. Oops, there was a pair of sea birds perched above him. He remembered the lectures about birds and nests. “Nests” were a little like autoform crèches except without the safety overrides; those birds might come down and peck at him if they thought he was after their replicates.

  Fortunately, the birds contented themselves with loud cackling, then one after the other they took off for the swarm that hovered over the water’s edge. He noticed that that was in the same direction the kids had been walking. Hei! He was almost at the top of the rock! He maneuvered carefully across the slippery black stone, doing his best to avoid the bird poop.

  One of Belle’s heads poked up from the edge of the rock. “How about a little help here?”

  “Sorry.” He lay flat on the rock and reached down to the first one’s forelegs. That was her one male, Ihm. By the time Timor had him pulled up, Belle was able to help him with the rest of herself. She clambered to the middle of the rock and sat on her feet, complaining all the while about her frozen paws. He turned awkwardly around and finally got a glimpse of the wreck. The raft was mostly still in the straits, but sliding meter by meter toward the rocks.

  Three of Belle hunkered down, listening. The others sat tall on either side of Timor. He guessed those two were watching the wreck. In most ways, Tinish vision was worse than humans’, but if they chose to spread out, they had much better depth perception.

  Belle said, “Can you hear the timbers breaking on the rocks?” And of course Tinish hearing was lightyears better than the naked human ear.

  “Maybe.” Timor looked at the front of the raft. Okay, rocks would break wood, right? Especially if the rocks didn’t have avoidance systems. And nothing had avoidance on this world. He saw how the timbers had split down the middle. The two halves of the vehicle were sloping separately. Surely that could not be part of its design.

  He squinted, trying to make out the details. The raft was piled high with barrels. And now he saw that there were lots of Tines, though they wore brownish rags and were mostly hunkered down between the barrels. Occasionally four or five of them stood together and tried to do something with the rigging. Yes, they were trying desperately to keep their craft off the rocks.

  “They’re in trouble,” he said.

  Belle made
a hooting sound, a Tinish laugh. “Of course they’re in trouble. Can’t you hear the ones in the water, screaming?”

  Now that she mentioned it, he could see heads here and there in the water. “This is terrible. Shouldn’t someone be trying to help?” Timor was quite sure that Gannon and the other kids weren’t capable of providing much help.

  He felt Belle shrug. “If they hadn’t been swept so far north, or if they had come at high tide, there’d be no problem.”

  “But shouldn’t we help those packs in the water?”

  One of Belle’s heads looked in his direction. “What packs? These are Tropicals. The individual members are probably as smart as any northern singleton, but they just don’t make packs except by accident. Look at that raft! Junk made by mindless Tines. Sometimes the idiots get swept away from their jungles and the ocean brings them up here. I say the more of them that die along the way, the better.” She grumbled on the way she often did, gossiping and complaining at the same time: “Our own war veterans are bad enough, broken up bits of people. But at least we keep them decently out of sight. These rabble coming in now have no call on us. They’ll be idling around town, soiling the alleys, dumbhead singletons and trios. Mangy, smelly, mindless thieves and beggars…”

  The rest made even less sense. Belle was one of those packs who spoke almost perfect Samnorsk, but sometimes part of her would rattle on even after her main attention was elsewhere. Timor noticed that the pack was intensely focused on the wreck, her long necks twitching back and forth. She had been even more eager than Timor when Gannon Jorkenrud had invited them to come along. He followed the center of her gaze. There were barrels bobbing in the foaming surf.

  “So if the Tropicals are such problem, why are you interested in the wreck?”