The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  I could repeat the little speech I made to Jefri—but you’ve probably already heard that. Outside the factory, the thunder and lightning was building up to a real storm. Above that, the air would be cold and dry and thinning into the vacuum of interplanetary space. Somewhere thirty lightyears beyond that … the Blight was coming their way, the end for this world and everyone on it, perhaps the end of much more. And today, at this moment, I am closer to stopping it than ever before.

  She brought her attention back to the here and now, to the eightsome who waited on her reply. “What of Nevil?”

  “Nevil stays in overall charge of the two-legs. I will not betray a current ally to get a new one.” Tycoon bobbed a grin. “Be happy. Vendacious tells me that Nevil will be as unhappy about this deal as you are.”

  Hmm. She looked across the terrace to where Jef stood by Timor. They were in the shadows, but then the lightning shone stark blue-white across them all. Both were looking in her direction. Just in front of them, Aritarmo had spread out, no doubt straining to hear.

  She turned back, looked at Tycoon, every one. “I want the Children you stole.”

  “Timor and Geri. Certainly. I’m … I’m sorry about the third human, even though its death was an accident.” He seemed about say something more, to offer some excuse perhaps. One thing she was learning about Tycoon: he could not abide being in the wrong.

  “And no more killing,” she said.

  “Of course.” But then a startle rippled through the pack. “No more killing—except to serve justice. Johanna Olsndot murdered my brother. There must be justice for that, no excuses, no compromise.”

  Again, lightning flashed. Ravna waited for the thunder to pass and then replied in a quiet, hard voice. “Then deal with Vendacious. He is the one who killed your brother.”

  Tycoon hooted softly, but all his eyes were on her now. “You lie, or you repeat lies. I have years of evidence, and not just from Vendacious. Nevil Storherte—was he not like a pack lover to Johanna?—he himself reports Johanna’s confession. I’ve sometimes wondered if that was what turned him against her. Maybe he does have some respect for pack life.… I notice your mouth is open, but you aren’t saying anything. Are you surprised?”

  “N-no.” For a moment she thought she was going to throw up all over Tycoon. Instead, she swallowed hard and said, “What Nevil said is a lie. What Vendacious says are lies.”

  “Ah, so I’m surrounded by liars?” Tycoon gave a shrug. Two of him were looking back at Jefri and the others. “Do you know where Johanna Olsndot is now?”

  “No,” Ravna replied shortly, which was not a lie since she had only guesses.

  “Well, neither do I. Neither does Vendacious. Neither she nor her friend Pilgrim—nor their flier—has been seen since the night we abducted you. I suspect she’s in hiding back in the Domain, protected by Woodcarver. Vendacious thinks she may be dead, finally crashing that crazy flying machine. If she is never found, I will never be done with this!” He gave a little shriek that might have meant despair. “But Vendacious has offered a solution. He tells me that the Johanna-brother may well know what has become of the brother-murderer—and that if he does know, a few days of professional interrogation will retrieve the facts.”

  “Don’t you—”

  “Vendacious tells me the Johanna-brother would likely survive the questioning, but he makes no guarantees.” All his eyes swiveled back to Ravna.

  Ravna stepped into the middle of the pack, all but treading on claws to do so. Now most of Tycoon had to look straight up to see her face. “No more killing!”

  Tycoon swarmed up, forming a packish pyramid that put two of his heads above Ravna’s eye-level. He leaned forward, all teeth and bad breath, and rapped a glancing blow to her face. “Make no mistake, human. I will find Johanna Olsndot. If her brother dies in the process, it would be a form of justice. A brother for a brother.”

  Chapter 35

  Two days later, Tycoon’s much-bragged-about expedition to the Domain was ready to depart. Nothing had changed in the standoff between Ravna and the eightsome. The good news was that Jefri was still unharmed and still out of Vendacious’ claws. The bad news … wasn’t entirely clear yet, and probably depended on what Tycoon planned for this trip.

  Just after sunrise, a rickshaw took them out onto the airfield. The usual gunpack trotted along behind them. Puddles left by recent rain covered wide stretches of the concrete, but the top of the sky was clear, the air wet and still and almost cool. At the north end of the field, two hangars had opened, and their airships were being dragged out.

  They stopped near a rain pool in the middle of nowhere. The gunpack made no objection when Jefri scrambled down from the rickshaw. After a moment, Ravna followed, even though the view standing on the ground must surely be worse than the one from the rickshaw. Jef walked around the wagon.

  Ravna shaded her eyes and stared at the airships for a moment. At this distance, details were lost, but “This really looks like takeoff preparations,” she said. “And we’re standing nowhere close.”

  Jefri came to stand beside her. “I figure this is just more psychological warfare. Tycoon won’t leave you behind. He really needs you.”

  Ravna didn’t say anything for a moment. Jef could be right. The last four days had given her some feeling for Tycoon’s bragging and bluffing—and occasional murderous tantrums. She guessed there would be one more confrontation before Tycoon flew off, and even success could come in dark degrees. Which airship would they put Jefri on? And where are—

  “Where are Timor and Geri and Amdi and Screwfloss?” said Jefri, as if reading her mind. “We haven’t seen Timor since you told Tycoon to go to hell.” Jef had ragged on her mercilessly about that recent confrontation. At the same time, he had seemed to admire her “lack of restraint” more than anything she had done in a long time.

  They stood for some moments observing the activity around the hangars, watching for more wagons to appear from the palace and Vendacious’ almost-as-grand annex. The expanse of damp concrete had an eerie, open silence to it, a kind of vast obeisance to the pyramids beyond. Pillars of sunlight punched through the eastern clouds, glittering from the gilded surface of the great pyramid. As the sun rose above the thunderheads, an avalanche of light spilled across the field, bright and cheering … and searingly hot once it arrived.

  “Tycoon is trying to melt us down,” said Jefri. “We should get back in the wagon.” There was shade there. Their driver had retreated under some of it.

  “Yes—” Ravna took one more look around. The sunlight had put everything into sharp contrast. The shallow rain pool she had noticed earlier was further away than she’d thought. And it wasn’t shallow. “Hei, Jefri. We’re only about forty meters from one of the cuttlefish ponds.”

  She started walking toward it, and after a moment Jefri followed. The gunpack made a spiky sound of surprise. He trotted around and ahead of them as if to turn them back—but he kept his gun muzzles down and seemed more irritated than imperative.

  As they reached the pool, Jefri commented, “A wagon just left the palace. Want to bet that’s Tycoon?”

  She looked up. The wagon hardly seemed to be moving at all. Ah, it was headed here, not across to the hangars. Yes, one last confrontation. She wasn’t afraid to argue with Tycoon, but she was very afraid of the consequences of losing the argument. This time, things could not end in a draw.

  She knelt by the pool, hoping she looked unconcerned to whomever might be watching. Despite the open water, the swarms of bloodsucking insects were no thicker here than anywhere else. Maybe they didn’t have a water larval stage. Or maybe … Here and there across the water, there were flickers of motion, tentacles snapping up through the water’s surface. So in addition to their other virtues, the cuttlefish liked to eat insects.

  She leaned over the edge of the pool, looking straight down. The concrete wall was steep; even here, the bottom looked to be a meter or two under water. There was one of the squidlike cr
itters. And another. After a few seconds they seemed to swarming below her.

  “We seem to be attracting them,” said Jefri.

  “Yeah.” She reached her hand into the warm water.

  “Hei, careful!” Jef grabbed her arm, holding her back.

  “It’s okay. They get along well enough with the Tines.” Besides, she had a theory she wanted to test.

  “But you don’t know what else is in the pond.”

  The tiny bodies tumbled around her hand, the huge glossy eyes peering curiously up through the water at her. She felt tendrils tugging gently on her fingers. She waggled her hand, lifting the creature up for a better view. It was a small thing to be intelligent, but—

  “Hei, hei, hei!” piped a small voice. All around it other voices chimed. “Hei human. Hei humans!” The one who had touched her let go. The crowd darted off, then a moment later was back in even greater numbers. Dozens of little voices were shouting simple Samnorsk greetings.

  Jefri’s grip on her arm loosened and he dropped to his knees beside her. “So they really do talk! I wonder how they compare to singletons.”

  “Oh, I think they’re considerably smarter.” It was still a theory, but—she glanced across the airfield. The approaching wagon was much nearer, trailed by another gunpack. She recognized the elaborate ornamentation on the wagon; this was Tycoon. Maybe it was time to try to use her little theory.

  She and Jefri stood, but remained near the pool. Tycoon’s wagon slowed and came to a stop by the other wagon. When Ravna and Jefri did not move, there was some irritated gobbling. After a moment, Tycoon’s driver brought him over to the cuttlefish pool.

  The eightsome came streaming out of the wagon, followed by a radio singleton—hei, it looked like Zek! Behind him was a more expected companion, Ritl. She was in her usual fine form, bitching loudly about something or everything. When Tycoon sent a be quiet in her direction, Ritl shifted to sporadic muttering. She walked along with Zek for a few paces—and then seemed to notice the pond. She ran off around it, and for a time the air was free of her complaints.

  Tycoon ambled over to them with the air of a great leader slumming around without his entourage. Well, I’m just as glad not to see Vendacious or even Aritarmo, thought Ravna.

  “It’s g-going to be a very warm day,” said Tycoon, his Geri voice as incongruous as ever.

  “I’m sure it will be, sir,” replied Ravna.

  The eight bobbed a smile. “Not that it matters. This afternoon I will be flying away. You know, the air is quite cool even a few hundred meters up. It’s nature’s own air conditioning. I expect I will be quite comfortable.”

  “You’re not taking us then?” said Ravna, still trying make it sound like casual chitchat.

  “The passenger list and ship assignment isn’t entirely decided,” he said. Two of him were staring pointedly at Jefri.

  Ravna continued to play along. “Vendacious is going?”

  “Of course. In the second airship.” He waved a snout in the direction of the hangars. “No room for Aritarmo, but we’ll still have the network. I’ll continue to supervise my worldwide operations.”

  “And Ritl?” said Jefri, as if just passing the time of day.

  Tycoon made an irritated noise. “Not Ritl. In close quarters, that little monster—I mean, that remnant of a loyal employee—is too difficult to deal with.” All his heads turned toward Ravna. “But that’s not the important question as far as you two are concerned.”

  Ravna returned the look as best she could, having only one head. “Of course. There’s myself and Jefri, but also the Children you stole, Geri and Timor and—”

  “No.” It was flat negation, even if spoken in his high-pitched, little girl voice. “They will stay here.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want them getting in the way. I—” There was a subtle shifting around within the pack. Ravna could almost imagine that some faction was embarrassed and desired a bit of frankness. “Timor is a good worker, as honorable as a pack. He will be safe here. Geri will be safe as well. Protecting both of them is important to me, even if they are human. You should know, Vendacious dislikes humans even more than I, and sometimes I wonder if he realizes how fragile you are. Even I find it hard to understand what it means to be a truly new mind; it is not a natural state. Eventually, I promise to return them. In the meantime, they will be kept far from Vendacious.” He jabbed a snout at Ravna. “My inclination is to take you with me. The packs we captured with you will go north with Vendacious. They will provide a good cross check on assertions that you make.”

  “And Jefri?” Ravna asked.

  “That depends on you and him. I want to locate Johanna Olsndot. You two are hiding something; we could hear you all yesterday conspiring in your dungeon. Confess the truth, and you can both travel on my airship.”

  “We have told the truth,” said Jef, “and we weren’t conspiring!” But they had spent hours trying to decide what to say if it all came to this. Much of that conversation had been silent spelling and cloaked allusions.

  Tycoon’s words rolled on right over Jef’s: “Otherwise—it will be as I told you two days ago. Jefri will go north with Vendacious.”

  “I’m sure I can make the Johanna-brother talk, my lord.” That was Vendacious’ voice, via Zek.

  Ravna glanced at Jefri, saw his impatient look. The result of all their “conspiring” had been simple: You can’t win if you have nothing to confess and that fact is not accepted. Okay, you might postpone the nightmare simply by making a faux confession. Jef would have already started lying, except that she’d persuaded him to let her make the first move. There must be some other way. I just need a little more time. As if all of yesterday hadn’t been enough to find a way out, if one existed. She turned away from Tycoon and Jefri and Zek, and stared across the pond. There was something near the middle that she hadn’t noticed before. Here and there tentacles poked into the air, slowly moving. They weren’t jabbing at insects. They were larger and more frondlike than the cuttlefish limbs she had seen. They were hard proof for her theory about the cuttlefish. She felt a smile come to her lips; in other circumstances it would have been a joyous shout.

  She looked back at Tycoon. She had nothing but the lies she and Jefri had agreed on, but damned if she was going to say them while she could still stall. “Out of the whole airfield, you had us brought here. You wanted us to see this pond, didn’t you? Why?”

  An indignant chord came from Zek. That must be Vendacious, impatient with the change of topic. Tycoon, bless his various parts, was more easily distracted. He sidled around, some of him tilting a glance at the water. When he finally spoke, his geekiness seemed ascendant. “I noticed that you never asked hard questions about the cuttlefish, never said much about them even when you were alone with the Johanna-brother. I wondered if you would ever figure out how important they are to my program.”

  Ravna nodded. “I had a theory. Now I think I know much more about the cuttlefish than you do.”

  “Oh really?” Tycoon stepped closer, challenging. He didn’t seem angry, but she had the feeling that the pack’s enormous ego, both as businesscritter and inventor, was engaged. “And what is it that you think you know?”

  “The cuttlefish are more than mindless repeaters. They’ve learned your language and more recently mine. They can speak both sensibly.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “The cuttlefish were how you originally made contact with the Choir, how you were able to communicate with the Choir when all packs before had failed.”

  Tycoon emitted a string of clicks, mild applause. “Very good. You are absolutely right.” He settled down, continued almost chummily. “See Ritl playing with them?” On the other side of the pond, Ritl was racing back and forth, gobbling fiercely at the water. Tiny voices answered her. “It was Remasritlfeer who brought the creatures from the South Seas. It was my idea to use them here with the Choir. Remasritlfeer tried and failed, tried and failed. I don’t know how many
of the creatures were eaten—though they don’t really seem to care about their own lives. Finally Remasritlfeer gave up—but I demanded he go back and try again. And as usual, my diligence and initiative paid off.” He looked up smugly. “It was a small start, but we found a few things to trade and were able to negotiate the first, tiny reservation here.” He waved expansively at the airfield, the palaces, the factories. “The rest is history.”

  “It never puzzled you that something so strange could talk, that it could have a mind?”

  “Um, yes of course. I’m always thinking on deeper meanings. Early on, I had the theory that perhaps these were a baby form of whales. It’s well known that whales are smarter than weasels, almost as smart as singletons—and they swim in pods that may be even more intelligent.”

  Over the last ten years, an occasional “whale” carcass had washed ashore in the Domain. Ravna had overseen the dissection of two of them. They were like seamals. She’d run simple phylogenetic programs on the results and concluded that the animals were a distant cousin of the Tines, one that had never returned to a life on the land. “No way are the cuttlefish young whales,” she said.

  “Grmp. I know that. After a time it became evident that the creatures eventually lose their intelligence. The few who survive more than a year root themselves like plants and become mindless egg generators—making a new generation of cuttlefish. We almost lost the whole operation here before we figured that out. I sent an expedition back to the South Seas, found that single atoll where they spawn, uprooted all the mature egg-layers we could find. You can see the tops of them sticking out of the water.”

  “I saw them.” Now the fronds were a little higher out of the water, and more of them were turned broadside towards the humans and packs at the edge of the pool. The sight was so familiar, so welcome … okay, Pham, so unnerving, too. In the bright sunlight, she could even see the eyespots on the fronds. Mindless they were, more or less—but evidence that children of a friend had survived. She walked slowly along the edge of the pond toward the side that was closest to the forest of fronds. “You uprooted them? Brought them here? You’re lucky they survived. They much prefer the surf by the open sea, not this silty, brackish water.”