The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  The singleton came awkwardly to its feet, but its adult human voice sounded amused. “I think in this case, you will not stay together. Fatso and the remnant are coming with me.”

  Jefri glanced at the twin barrels facing him. His hands were in fists.

  Amdi came around his friend, pulling him back from the confrontation. “We have to, Jefri. Please. I’ll be okay.” But Ravna noticed that Amdi was trembling.

  The singleton chuckled, started to say something, and then its voice shifted to the tones of the little girl: “Don’t be s-scared. You’ll like m-my ship.”

  Jefri unclenched his fists and stepped back. The anger in his face was replaced by wonder. “This thing”—he gestured at the singleton— “isn’t anybody. It’s just a comms network!”

  Amdi was nodding. “What a dumb use for radio cloaks. We never guessed they’d be so—”

  “Enough!” said the singleton, and the gunpacks pushed and prodded the captives toward their respective flying jails.

  At the base of the ship, the air stank of fuel oil. It smelled exactly like Scrupilo’s concoction. But Tycoon’s industrial plagiarism was not complete; the dropdown stairs were pack-wide, grandiose compared to Scrupilo’s design. I wonder if they got the trick of stabilizing the hydrogen in the lift bags?

  Partway up the steps, she turned and looked across the square. There was no sign of Prince Purity, but she could see townsfolk and peasants still watching from the shadows. We had a great show tonight. The thought flitted inanely through her mind. Over by the other airship, the radio-cloaked singleton was still on the ground; Screwfloss and most of Amdi had already gone aboard. Two of Amdi’s heads looked their way, and he chirped something encouraging.

  Jefri stooped to look out from under the curve of the hull. He waved back at Amdi. Then the pack beside Ravna waggled its gun barrels and Jef continued up the steps, Ravna close behind. To aft, the steam induction engines were buzzing up to speed.

  • • •

  Tycoon’s airship was the collision of Tinish imagination with the engineering realities of Oobii’s original design. The passenger carriage had been crudely split into two levels, the resulting interior decorated in a grand East Coast style. The main corridor was polished softwood veneer (easy on the hearing, you know), with frequent padded turnouts; packs could walk past each other with only moderate mental discomfort. The ceilings were mostly one meter thirty high—airy for Tines, but not high enough for a human to stand.

  “I wonder what Nevil thinks when he comes visiting?” said Jefri. The two humans had been stuffed in a—well, to be fair, it might be a stateroom. The distance from the door to the outer hull was about two meters. The walls were heavily padded, probably thick enough to make a pack comfortable even though there might be other passengers within centimeters, in the rooms on either side.

  “I guess Nevil’s allies have about the same respect for him as he has for Tines,” said Ravna.

  A pair of fifteen-centimeter portholes were mounted in the hull, far enough apart to give a pack a good parallax view. The ship had turned and moonlight splashed across the cabin. “There’s some kind of metal lid here in the corner.” She lifted the cover. There was a faint whiff of potty smell, and the engine noise came louder. Ravna laughed. “A stateroom with its own toilet.” The sanitary facilities aboard Tycoon’s flying palace might be adequate—as long as you didn’t care about the folks living in the lands below.

  Jefri crawled to the hull and looked out one of the portholes. His face was a pale blur in the moonlight. “We seem to be heading south. I don’t see the other airship.” He stared out for a long moment. “Nothing!” He turned away from the port and continued more quietly, “I’m so afraid for Amdi.”

  “I don’t know, Jef. Tycoon seems to be treating us decently.” Her optimism sounded weak even to Ravna herself.

  Jefri shook his head. “Only for the moment. There were two packs speaking through the radio cloak. The one who took Amdi had a voice like in Oliphaunt’s tutor programs. I’m betting that was Vendacious.”

  Ravna bowed her head. “And the other voice, the little girl—”

  “That was Tycoon. The monster said as much. And he dared to use the voice of one of his victims to speak the words.”

  Tines often favored a human voice based on their first language tutor, but the little girl’s voice had been frightened and shrill, almost unrecognizable. How long do you have to torture someone to learn their language? “Geri Latterby,” Ravna said softly.

  • • •

  In the end, their speculation and futile planning fell into uneasy drowsing. Jefri shifted uncomfortably on the cabin’s mat. Of course, neither of them could stand up in the tiny space, but at least it was wide enough for Ravna to lie flat. Jefri was not so fortunate. Even with his feet propped up on the toilet lid, he was still cramped.

  The sound of the airship’s engines was a steady buzz, making the floor and walls hum in sympathy. Sleep eventually came.

  • • •

  Dawn was brilliantly bright. Ravna awoke thoroughly disoriented. Where could she be to see sunlight on embroidered pillows? Then she felt the buzz of the engines. She looked around. Jefri was watching her silently from the other side of their tiny cabin. The sunlight was from the twin portholes. The “pillows” were the room’s acoustic quilting; their soft fabric was decorated with elegant landscapes.… And somehow she had annexed most of the floor space.

  “Oops, sorry,” she said, moving back to her side. “I didn’t mean to thrash around.”

  Jefri just shrugged, but she noticed that he was quick to use the freed space to get close to a porthole. After a moment, he spoke: “It’s all clouds down there, but we’re still heading south. So much for the theory that Tycoon’s headquarters is on the East Coast. I think—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of something rolling down the main corridor. A moment later the door bolt lifted—but the door itself remained shut. Whoever was in the corridor tapped politely, emitting chords that Ravna recognized as a cheerful request to enter.

  Jefri turned on his knees, crawled to the door, and slid it open. Outside stood a small-bodied foursome, dressed all in blue capes, surely a uniform. The creature stepped back a little fearfully, but then—perhaps because Jefri’s eyes were at its own level, or perhaps because it was putting on a brave front—two of it pushed forward with a tray of food. “Twenty-three minutes. Twenty-three minutes, okay?” The words were spoken with Geri Latterby’s voice, but they sounded like rote repetition. This creature scarcely seemed a torturer.

  The food came in soft wooden bowls and consisted of overcooked vegetables and curd soup. Ravna guessed that it had been carefully chosen by someone with a secondhand knowledge of human diet. It tasted so good. Strange that in the clutches of Tycoon she was eating better than in all the time since the kidnapping. She lost herself in the food for a moment. When she looked up she noticed the Jefri had already finished and was watching her intently. Had he said something to her?

  “Um. So what do you think is going to happen in twenty-three minutes?” said Ravna. They take us off to interrogation? They come back for the dirty plates?

  “Dunno. But till then, let’s check out the view.” He returned to his porthole. Ravna downed the rest of her breakfast, then went to the other window. The sun was out of her face now. She could see clear sky above unending, brilliant clouds. Many kilometers away, a thunderhead broke the horizon. Details were lost in the distorted window glass, another example of what happened when Tycoon customized Oobii’s design.

  Abruptly, the engine noise increased and she felt a chilly breeze.

  “Jefri!” Somehow he had managed to open his port! Now she noticed the metal clasps and hinges.

  “Hei, the benefits of low tech,” he said.

  “Um.” Of course, it should be safe. They weren’t more than three thousand meters up, with an airspeed of only a few dozen meters per second. She popped the other tiny hatch and pulled the glass inwar
ds. The engine sound became a buzzing roar, and eddies of frigid air blasted around the cabin. But the view was utterly clear. She stared into the cloud deck, seeing detail within detail.

  Jefri looked down as steeply as he could. “I figure they’re taking us to the Choir!”

  For a moment, Ravna’s mind looked out much farther than the physical windows. So Nevil had been conspiring with just about every one of the Domain’s antagonists. Who was villain-in-chief?

  “Wow.” Jefri’s voice was muffled by the wind, but it brought her back to the physical view. The thunderhead was closer now, its tower a maze of light on dark, its anvil climbing out of sight above them. Flying with Pilgrim on the antigravity skiff, Ravna had come much too near such things. Pilgrim loved to fly right into the vertical drafts of great storms.

  The pitch of the engines changed. The ship was angling away from the storm, but losing altitude at the same time. Soon the cloud deck had become fog, curling up to them. The turbulence grew.

  “I hope these people know what they’re doing,” said Ravna.

  “Maybe that was what the steward pack meant when it said ‘twenty-three minutes.’”

  Yes, a courteous warning.

  The clouds closed darkly around them. They motored along for some minutes. Still descending? The clouds had come into their cabin. She felt tiny droplets of moisture condensing on her face and eyelashes. Outside, lightning flashed electric blue, diffused by the dense mist. The deck tilted as thunder crashed. Their breakfast bowls were scattered all over the cabin.

  The lightning gradually diminished and after some minutes the airship broke through the bottom of the clouds. There were still more clouds below, but they were scattered flotsam in the grayish-green depths. A steady rain ricocheted off the hull. The turn and descent had brought the other airship into view. It was pacing them, perhaps a thousand meters away, but it was almost invisible except when silhouetted by the glow of distant lightning. Jefri was silent for some time, just watching the other craft.

  • • •

  In the hours that followed, the thunder and lightning were more distant, but the airship was not the stable platform of before. It rode up and down like a boat on ocean swells, except that this motion was much more arbitrary and abrupt.

  They spent most of the time at the portholes, watching their progress from forest to jungle and swamp. They were flying so low that when the rain lessened, they could see flowers in the treetops and wader birds in the open swamps. This was very much like the environment of equatorial Nyjora, when the Techie had battled both the exploiters and the plague that was killing the last of their men. She glanced at Jefri; how little of that history made any sense here.

  Jef didn’t seem to notice her look. He was staring downward more intently than ever. “I still don’t understand what Vendacious and Tycoon are doing here. We seem to be as far south as coherent packs can survive.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I can see a bit under the trees when we pass over rivers. There are Choir settlements—at least that’s what I think they are. When these settlements begin to connect together, there’s no way that packs can penetrate and still keep their minds. Look down there. Around the trees. That mottling, I think that’s floating shacks.”

  “… Yes.” She could see a change in the texture of the river shore. And here and there, she saw polygonal shapes that might have been real buildings. Within an hour, they were flying over settlements in open clearings. As the day darkened into true twilight, the settlements merged and the forest was replaced by an unending, chaotic jumble of vegetation, swamp, and artifact.

  By the time their little steward showed up, it was night outside—and pitch black in their cabin. The cabin had a small mantle lamp but it had seemed to be disabled. Besides delivering dinner, the steward showed them how to light the lamp. The foursome was a cheerful creature, not at all the jailer Ravna would have expected.

  After dinner, the rain slackened and—strangely—the air became steadily warmer. They doused the cabin lamp and returned to the portholes. There was no more lightning, but no stars or moonlight either. Here and there, what looked like campfires shone below. The air coming in the ports smelled faintly of compost and sewage.

  “We’re descending,” said Jefri. “We’ll come down in the middle of that.” But an hour passed. Two. They fell asleep as the rain increased and the air grew choppy.

  • • •

  The door bolt clicked, lifting open. Someone was scratching at the cabin door. Ravna struggled to wakefulness, confused. The steward would have tapped politely on the door and sung out for them to rouse themselves.

  Jefri was up on his elbows. “What—?” he said, but very softly.

  “Maybe we’re finally landing?” Ravna noticed that she was whispering too. Pointlessly. Any Tines on the other side of that door could hear them fine.

  The furtive scratching continued.

  She put out a warning hand, but Jefri was already at the door. The hall beyond was lit by a single gaslamp. Two members were visible, but only in silhouette. One stuck a snout into the room, peering about. Then it wriggled past Jefri.

  Powers above, it was Ritl! And quieter than Ravna had ever seen her. The singleton looked over her shoulder and gestured at the—pack?—beyond.

  Not a pack, a piece of Mr. Radio; in the lamplight, Ravna could see an occasional glint off its cloak. The creature hesitated, perhaps communing with far off employers. Then it squeezed past Ritl and blundered around in the dark, evidently not much good at echo location. It flinched back every time it stepped on their legs, but there wasn’t very much human-free floorspace. It ended up scrunched against the wall.

  Ritl slid the door almost shut, then sprawled across Ravna’s shins and pressed her head close to the narrow door opening, as if listening out into the hall. The light from the hall lamp made it easy for Ravna to see, though for the Tines, the room must seem very dark. The radio-singleton looked seriously nervous. And Ritl? Well, maybe she was scared quiet, but more likely she was just being animal crafty.

  After a moment, Jefri said dryly—but softly!—“Well, who do we have here?”

  The radio singleton looked up at the sound and seemed to relax. “Jefri, is it just you and Ravna there?” The words were barely the breath of whisper … but the voice belonged to Amdi.

  Jef gave a stifled whoop. “Amdi! Are you okay? How—?”

  “Shh shh! Gotta be very quiet. If you get discovered, it’ll be almost as bad as if I do. But I’m fine, specially now that I’m talking to you. Part of our good luck is that Vendacious is indisposed, some kind of upchuck bug. That’s why you didn’t see him in person; he’s still talking snooty, but he’s barfing from half his mouths. Anyway, two of me are jammed in Ut’s off-duty compartment. Ut and Il are the radio-cloak members on this ship. Your guy is Zek. Anyway, we have the door cracked open and the rest of me is next door. There’s just enough of a sound path that I can think straight.”

  Jefri was silent for a moment, seemingly stunned by the turn of events.

  On the other side of the tiny cabin, Ritl gobbled softly. It wasn’t an alarm, just a variant of her usual scolding. Amdi’s voice was resigned: “That Ritl. Even when she’s helping, she’s a pain.” Then he continued, “We had to try and talk, Jefri. There are things you have to know, things we have to plan.” To Ravna these assertions had a rushed, questioning quality.

  Certainly, Jefri heard that too. His tone was reassuring: “It’s okay, Amdi. How did you manage this? Who—what—is Mr. Radio Cloaks?”

  “Utzekfyrforfurtariil is a Vendacious creation—though Tycoon doesn’t know that. Vendacious figures that by controlling the Mr. Radio network, he’s the puppetmaster of everybody.”

  Ravna looked at Zek suspiciously. “So what went wrong?”

  Zek relayed Amdi’s very human, little-boy laughter. “What do you think? Vendacious himself. He’s smart, but he’s the craziest, meanest of Woodcarver’s offspring. And he’s still all-m
ale.”

  “Still?” said Jefri. “Any other pack with that makeup would have self-destructed years ago. That’s Vendacious’ miracle and a disaster for everyone else.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Amdi, “Even his minions hate him. In any case, Vendacious isn’t as smart as Old Flenser. And he’s nowhere near as smart as me.” Amdi’s voice filled with confidence. “It’s been scarcely a day, and I’ve already figured how to talk along paths Vendacious can’t hear. That’s how I contacted Ut, right under Vendacious’ snouts. That’s how we smuggled out Ut’s cloak during his off-duty time. Of course, it helped that most of Vendacious was barfing sick at the time.” His voice trailed off. “Vendacious has already figured out who Screwfloss really is. Vendacious, he capered when he learned the truth. Poor Screwfloss. Oh Jefri—” His voice collapsed into weeping, all confidence fled. “Oh, Jefri, this isn’t like my show in the circus.” The sounds of weeping abruptly stopped, and his voice continued: “Th-this is something I have to do. I’ll do my best; I promise.”

  Jefri started to say something comforting, but was interrupted by another voice:

  “I help.”

  “Who spoke?” said Ravna. There was a moment of silence, long enough to be aware of oppressive meat breath and animal body heat. Finally:

  “I’m sure that was some part of Utzekfyrforfurtariil,” said Amdi. “Every one of him hates Vendacious.”

  “But I thought Mr. Radio was being used like a line? How smart can it be?”

  Amdi said, “As a line or a ring or a star, he’s as dumb as you’d expect, just good enough for Vendacious’ purpose. I think if he were all in range of himself, he’d be smarter than most packs. But he hasn’t been together much since Vendacious’ broodkenners first assembled him.”