The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  Ravna nodded. Once the ship began heating her water, it wouldn’t matter how much heat was leaking through those windows, except as it was used by Oobii’s sensors as thermostat feedback. Ah, the wonders of central heating and central computing.

  After a moment, Bili seemed to realize she wasn’t going to respond further. “Well, I should go down and help the guys get your baggage installed.”

  Yngva went downstairs, and she heard him shouting out the front door. In moments there was crashing and banging, the sounds of people doing battle with large objects. Ravna followed him downstairs, but Bili was firm in preventing her from helping out. In fact, the boxes were intimidating, not something that Tines or small humans could do much with. Bili had four helpers, some of the biggest older boys. They didn’t have much to say to Ravna, though every once in a while, Gannon Jorkenrud cast a sneering smile in her direction.

  There was so much furniture, crockery, curtains, clothing. None of it was really hers, not her stuff from Oobii. Aboard ship, she’d had a few souvenirs and everything else was ship recycles. What Bili’s crew was bringing in was pack made, though much of it had benefited from Oobii’s technological contributions to the Domain.

  The first floor rapidly filled with physical loot. Bili gave her a big grin, acknowledging the scale of the job. “Hei, I know it’s crazy, but you need a lot of stuff to live well in primitive conditions. We’ll get you helpers for the cooking and laundry.”

  Servants.

  Ravna retreated to the top floor. She walked around the polished parquet floor, stopped at the window to examine the fittings. In the early years, many of the Children had had trouble with raw physicality, with systems so stupid that you had to understand them. She remembered how often the little ones were unnecessarily cold. In the early days, she’d had to remind the kids that they must consciously plan for their comfort. Down Here there was a harsher truth: even planning was not sufficient to avoid physical hardship.

  Her new situation crippled her abilities with Oobii, yet it was far more luxurious than what most Children possessed. Nevil’s maneuvering had not ended with his coup. Surely Bili understood all this, even as he smiled and indulged her.

  There was noise on the stairs. Yngva’s gang of movers had discovered the second floor. But it wasn’t furniture that came up first. She turned to see an enormous roll of carpeting snaking up, one push-and-heave at a time. Yngva and Jorkenrud and the others finally got the thing across the center of the room. A pack carrying hammers came up the stairs after them. She recognized Screwfloss, sometime bartender and Flenser minion. And a carpet installer, too?

  “Hei, Ravna, hei, hei,” said Screwfloss, his heads bobbing at all the humans. He did some ostentatious measuring, then unrolled the carpet, four of him moving to the corners. One watched from the side. The pack edged the carpet into position. “Oops, not quite square.” He tried again … and a third time, finally nailing it down with tacks lipped from one of his panniers. The margins were still not quite right, but no one said Screwfloss was an expert carpet installer. On the other hand, the carpet itself was magnificent. This wasn’t one of those plain, durable items that came out of the weaving mills. She leaned down and felt the plush. This was an art weave, some classic Tinish scene. The multiple anamorphic images were a meaningless jumble to Ravna, but the piece looked extremely expensive, the work of thousands of hours of traditional Tinish labor.

  Ravna stood and noticed that Bili seemed faintly impatient at all the adjustments.

  “Heh! Looks great, doesn’t it?” said Screwfloss; he was asking her, but two of him were slanting an impudent look at Bili.

  “It’s … beautiful,” said Ravna.

  “Good!” said Bili. “We want the Technical Advisor to be happy. Let’s get the rest of the furniture up here.”

  “It looks like you’ve thought of everything, Bili, but—”

  “Yes?” his smile became questioning.

  “There’s nothing … nothing to think with.” That was how a Straumer would say it.

  Bili nodded. “Oh yes, computation, data access, communication? We’ll install the house telephone tomorrow, Ravna. But remember, this is all any of us have away from Oobii.”

  Gannon Jorkenrud made a little noise, and Ravna saw the smirk on his face. Bili’s other guys were blank-faced. Bili Yngva was only one with a friendly smile pasted on his face. “Don’t worry, Ravna, we’re working on special access for you down in the New Meeting Place.”

  “There are things I really need to keep up with, Bili. If I’m to be Technical Advisor, I—”

  Yngva raised his hands placatingly. “I know, I know! We really need your help. Working out the priorities of that is just about Nevil’s most important job these days. He’ll get back to you with the task list in just a few days. He’s promised me.” He glanced out the windows. It was late afternoon and the sun had already set. “We should finish up here, or you’re going to be cold.”

  They were already trooping down the stairs. Only Screwfloss seemed to notice that Ravna was not following. She waved the pack to go ahead, and then it was gone, too. Down below, they were banging around again, but this sounded like plumbing. Were Bili and Gannon and the other boys really this handy? Or was the noise mainly Screwfloss?

  She resisted the urge to go downstairs and check on them. Instead she walked across the room to the broad windows. The glass had seemed distortion free earlier, but now there were faint ripples … Oh. Warm air was already rising from the vents.

  Ravna gazed out at the neighborhood. There were only a few other town houses visible in this direction, nothing to block the view. Beyond the darkening lands and black sea, the sky was now without color. She could see a handful of the brighter stars. Now that she was stuck on a single planet, the random position of a few bright stars told her of the seasons and the hours and … there, at the edge of a pair of stars settling toward the sea, she was looking at the most important place in all the heavens. It was a nondescript patch of sky, showing only a few faint stars on even the darkest, clearest nights.

  Just thirty lightyears out were perhaps one hundred starships. It was the threat that had hung over her for ten years, informing every decision, forcing her to push and persuade and bully both Children and Tines to attempt the impossible: to prevail against the Blight.

  Now? Those terrible decisions were no longer hers to make, and she felt the strangest feeling … of peace.

  • • •

  There was no word from Nevil the next day, or the next. A few of the Children visited her at her new house, but they didn’t stay long. The older ones looked around at its glory and seemed to sense invisible walls.

  The storms of the previous tenday had moved inland, blocking Johanna and Pilgrim’s return. Their agrav was battened down hundreds kilometers to the east. Not all misfortune was Nevil’s doing.

  Ravna visited the Out of Band II every day. Bili Yngva had given her an interim access credential for the New Meeting Place. The cargo bay’s one night of megalomaniac glory was past. Nevil had reverted the place to something like his original design. As Ravna had expected, the popularity of the primitive game stations had waned; what Oobii could create and display was pitifully weak compared to what the older Children remembered. Nowadays, the gamers were mainly packs and the youngest Children—and Timor. The boy was practically camped out by one of the stations, boring even the also-addicted Belle Ornrikak. Sometimes Timor didn’t even notice Ravna, and when he did he was an unending firestorm of gaming esoterica. Ravna’s only sympathizer was now distracted and ecstatically happy.

  Other than Timor, the kids seemed reluctant to talk to her. Maybe when they saw her, they remembered only how she had seemed at that terrible meeting. So Ravna sat in the public area and puttered around with an interface, careful not to exceed the powers that came with Nevil’s “interim access credential.” That meant no sysadmin activity of course. The compute-and-search allowance was minimal, and some of the archives were not visible. />
  On her third visit, Wenda Larsndot came over and asked for help. “Needles is in love with the idea of mass production. So I’ve been trying to see what Oobii says. There’s tonnes of stuff about numerical control tailoring, but I need something easy and low tech.”

  So Ravna gave her a tour of the hybrid planning tools that she’d built on top of the ship’s archives. It was the sort of thing she’d pushed at the Children for years, even though it was awfully dull—at least by Straumer standards. There were millions of dead ends in such searches, and Oobii couldn’t prune them all away. But solving this problem might be easy! In her mad race to head off the Blight, Ravna had chosen to skip over mechanical automation.… It turned out that most pretechnical civilizations invented mechanical readers for pattern-driven looms. So Wenda’s real problem was simply to find one such that could easily fit the weaving equipment the Tines already had. Once Ravna had properly set up the Tinish constraints, it didn’t take long. Oobii dredged up some insect race whose ancient history included a gadget for driving a near perfect match for a Tinish loom.

  “Wow,” said Wenda as she looked at the first-pass designs. “So now we can just hire a good artist, and turn out thousand-hour capes in less than a day!”

  Ravna grinned back at her. “It still might not work. There are lots of small moving parts, and our weaving mills aren’t exactly the same as this. Oobii is weak on doing final coordination.” She waved at the design uncertainty flags that floated over the gears and cams. “You might have to ask Scrupilo to make a special purpose mill.”

  “Oh, we’ll make this work.” Wenda was already lost in consideration of the options and parts lists. Somehow it made her look twenty again.

  Ravna glanced up and noticed that Edvi Verring and some still-younger kids were clustered about. Edvi gave her a nervous smile, “I was wondering, Ravna, we’ve been having some trouble with a game…”

  • • •

  It had been so long since she’d had time for this. And helping the Children with games was fun. These games didn’t have the intransigence of reality. Ravna didn’t need the good luck she’d had with Wenda. When something didn’t work right, she could often just step back and tweak the game parameters. Sometimes, librarians—even with just an interim access credential—could have godlike powers.

  “Ravna?” That was an adult voice, bringing her back from the depths of Edvi Verring’s game craft.

  She looked up and saw Bili Yngva standing beside her. How long have I been playing around? Wenda was still here, working on the weaving mill gadget.

  “Sorry to bother you, Ravna, but—”

  Then she noticed various mail flags. “Oops, I didn’t notice.”

  “No problem. I just got word from Nevil. He’d like to chat with you, if you can drag yourself away from the important business here.” He grinned at Wenda and the gamers.

  • • •

  About half of the New Meeting Place had been converted to offices. Yngva led her down tiny corridors. The construction was local timber and the lightweight plastic sheeting that Oobii could still extrude.

  Ravna found herself lagging behind Bili. She could feel outrage thrusting up through her numbness. Sooner or later she and Nevil would have to talk, but she couldn’t imagine how he could face her, what he could say.…

  Bili looked back at where Ravna had slowed to a halt. “It’s just a little further, Ravna.”

  … so why am I the one who can’t face this meeting?

  After a moment, Ravna nodded and followed along. Indeed, Nevil’s office was just around the corner. It looked no different from the others except that the display function showed his name in businesslike Samnorsk script.

  Inside, Nevil Storherte looked unchanged, as handsome and calm as ever. He was seated at a plain workplace, surrounded by plain gray walls. “Come in, come in,” he said, waving Ravna to one of the chairs beyond his desk. He glanced at Bili. “This will be about ten minutes. Can you come back then?”

  “Sure thing.” Bili departed.

  And for the first time since The Day, Nevil and Ravna were alone, face to face. Ravna folded her arms and gave Nevil a long stare. Words wouldn’t quite come.

  Nevil stared back mildly, and after a moment raised an eyebrow. “So you’re looking for an explanation, an apology?”

  “The truth, before all else.” But she couldn’t help the strangled way her words came out.

  “Okay, the truth.” Nevil looked away from her for a moment. “The truth is that you brought this on yourself, Ravna. In the early years, you did enormous good. You’re still the most important human being in the world. That’s why everyone let you run loose for so long, that and the fact that anyone who thinks about it knows how much we owe you. That’s also what makes your … quirks … so tragic.”

  “You really don’t believe in the Blight?”

  Nevil shrugged irritably. “I believe that we’re not in a position to know exactly what happened Up There. Our presence here is good evidence that a deadly accident happened at the High Lab. Your presence here, and what’s visible in Oobii’s files—those are good evidence that your home worlds and probably mine have been destroyed. The silence across the sky is proof that some terrible catastrophe has been visited upon the Beyond. But your obsession with the ‘Blight’ goes beyond reasonable logic.”

  “What’s left of their fleet is just thirty lightyears out, Nevil.”

  Storherte shook his head. “Thirty lightyears. Yes. Perhaps a hundred ships, moving at just a few kilometers per second on no coherent bearing and without ramscoop drives—all this by your own telling! Thousands of years from now, they may make planetfall, somewhere. When that eventually happens, whatever the facts behind all this uncertainty will be ancient history. Meantime—”

  “That’s all wishful thinking, Nevil. The—”

  “No. I’ve heard all this from you before, Ravna. Over and over. It’s your mantra, your excuse for hiding aboard this ship. The problem just got worse in the years since we older kids could take care of younger ones. You might still be in charge now, if you had not so totally lost touch with us.”

  Ravna stared for a moment, vaguely aware that her mouth was hanging open. “No one complained—”

  “You never would have listened.” He paused. “Understand me: I’m a moderate. We Children remember our parents, and we know they were not fools. The High Lab attracted the best minds of Straumli Realm. They would not have wakened a Great Evil. And yet, when we look at your ship’s records, we see how you and Pham Nuwen brought disaster wherever you went. You admit Pham Nuwen was infested by some part of a Power. You call it Countermeasure and admit it destroyed civilizations for as far as our eyes can see. Some of us look at these facts and conclude that everything you say may be true—but with the values of good and evil reversed.” He waved his hand dismissively. “I regard that position as extremism, as nutty as yours but not nearly as dangerous.”

  “Not … as … dangerous?”

  “Ravna, you were running wild, diverting more and more resources into your obsession. You had to be stopped. So yes. I lied to you. And I told Woodcarver of your deceit. I set you up for a fall. But however brutal it seems to you, it was the gentlest way I could find to make the change. It removed you from authority, but it left you in a position to contribute.” He was staring into her eyes, perhaps assessing, perhaps waiting for some response. When none came, he leaned forward and his voice was a little softer. “Ravna, we need you. You are beloved by all the younger ones. You were the only adult they had. On a coldly logical level, your importance is that you’re the only surviving professional, and a librarian at that. Some of my friends are smart and cocky. All their lives they’ve lived with decent computation. They’ve solved lots of problems—but at the Top of the Beyond. Now they are beginning to realize their cluelessness. You are on a different level from all of them.”

  Nevil leaned back, watched her steadily for a moment. “Ravna, I don’t care that you hate my guts
, but I’m desperate for your cooperation. That’s why I’ve tried to make your new quarters as comfortable as possible. That’s why I’ve tried to minimize the humiliation you may feel. Even if you can’t run the show anymore, I’m hoping you’ll help. Our projects are mundane and practical, but they’re essential for survival on this world.”

  Ravna gave a jerky nod. “And you expect this with the game-level access that Bili gave me today?”

  Nevil gave her a smile. It was his first of the conversation, and perhaps more meaningful than all his friendliness of before the coup. “Sorry. That was all he has authority to pass out. I’ve discussed this with Woodcarver. She understands that you are best qualified to exploit what computational powers Oobii possesses. We’ll get you an office like this so you won’t have to waste time on frivolous distractions. We ask for two limitations: Your work should always leave other users with continuity of access. And second, Woodcarver—well frankly, me too—we don’t want you taking control.” He hesitated again. “You have some kind of bureaucratic authority over Oobii, right? Is that called ‘system administration’ on a machine this small?”

  Ravna thought a moment. “Sysadmin is the usual term,” she said. And you have no idea what that means, do you, Nevil? Once upon a time, Ravna had been equally ignorant. It was Pham Nuwen and the Skroderider Blueshell who had shown her what a very special, terrible thing it was to command a starship.

  “Ah. Well, I want to thank you for staying within the access that Bili gave you this afternoon. It shows that Woodcarver’s worst fears are groundless.” He looked a little embarrassed, another first for this conversation. “Nevertheless, we ask that you transfer that authority now.”

  “To you.”

  “Yes. That would only make the facts fit the result of the general vote.” When she didn’t reply he said, “It’s for the best, Ravna, and no more than what you accepted at the time of the meeting.”