The Children of the Sky (29 page)

“Don’t be that way, Ravna.” Johanna eased the scarred one aside and came around the low table to hold her hand. “Nevil has outsmarted everybody.” She sat on the carpet beside Ravna’s chair, rested her head in their clasped hands. “Everybody. That’s the biggest surprise, you know. So what if we Children have disagreements with you, or complain that you make mistakes? Most of the kids love you, Ravna.”

“Yes, Nevil said something similar to me. He—”

“Okay then. I’ll bet his biggest problem is keeping the Children from connecting that affection with their common sense.” She paused for a long moment, staring at the floor.

“You finally noticed the carpet, eh?” said Pilgrim.

Johanna gave him a weak glare. “Yes.” Her gaze swept along the windows, the carven knicknacks that Bili had set on the wall shelves. “This place is beautiful, Ravna. Nevil has set you up with swankier digs than Woodcarver’s own inner rooms.”

Pilgrim: “And I’ll bet he wants Ravna to work in separate quarters, too.”

Ravna nodded.

Johanna made a grumpy noise. “We already know he’s a great manipulator.” She came to her feet and walked to the windows. There was a break in the overcast way out at the horizon. Aurora light spilled through. After a moment she said. “You know what we need?”

“To finally get some sleep?” said Pilgrim, but Ravna noticed that his eyes were open and all watching Jo.

“True, but I’m thinking further ahead. If Nevil is a great politician, we just have to be better. There must be whole sciences of sneaky. Ravna knows
Oobii
’s archives. We’re smart; we can learn.” Johanna was looking at her expectantly, and suddenly Ravna realized that the girl thought librarians must be experts at
everything
.

“Johanna, I could set up a sneakiness research program, but—”

“Oh! You think Nevil knows enough about
Oobii
to track you on this?”

“Ah,” said Ravna. “I didn’t tell you what happened yesterday,” They had gotten sidetracked by the overwhelming unpleasantness that had come before. “Nevil explained my new situation.”

“Okay?” Suddenly Johanna looked wary.

Ravna described Nevil’s “moderate” position, his plea for her help. “Then, well, he said that since I had lost the vote and agreed to step down, it was only right that I give him system administration authority over
Oobii
.”

Pilgrim said, “Is that what it sounds like?”

“Ravna, you didn’t!”

“I gave him the sysadmin authority, but—”

Johanna had covered her face with her hands. “So now he can see everything we do? He can block whatever archive access he wants? He can redocument records?”

“Not … exactly. I gave him what he literally asked for. I lucked out; if I’d had to actively lie, I’m sure I would have botched it.”

Johanna peeked from between her fingers. “So … what does sysadmin mean?”

“Literally, bureaucratic control over the
Oobii
’s automation. The thing that Nevil didn’t understand is that
Oobii
is a
ship
. It must have a captain, and the captain’s command must exist independent of administration.”

“Really? I don’t think it was like that on Straumer vessels.”

Ravna remembered back to the near-lethal conflict between Pham Nuwen and the Skroderider Blueshell. “Maybe not, but it’s the case for
Oobii
.”
Straumli Realm always cut corners
—but she didn’t say that out loud. “The
Out of Band
II
has a n-partite memory system. Only a minority is accessible through sysadmin. If that deviates from the rest, then the person with Command Privilege has a number of options.”

Johanna had lowered her hands. A look of triumph was spreading across her face. “And …
you
 … have Command Privilege?”

Ravna nodded. “Pham set up a contingent transfer, just before he dropped onto Starship Hill. It, it was one of the last things he did for me.”

Pilgrim: “So you’re like the
Goddess on the Bridge
!” The pack looked back and forth at itself, embarrassed. “Sorry. That’s one of your Sjandra adventure novels.”

Ravna remembered no such title, but that was no surprise. Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history. In any case: “I’m deleting such references from what Nevil and company can read.”

“Command Privilege can do that?”

“Oh yes. The places he’s likely to see, anyway.
Oobii
doesn’t have the compute power to revise its entire archive. The point is, Nevil can go on about his business, messing and snooping—”

“But it’s all in an invisible box!”

“Right. He shouldn’t notice a thing, unless we have bad luck or we cause some external effect.”

A few days later, Ravna had her very own office aboard
Oobii
 … and the opportunity to begin her research into sneakiness.
Oobii
’s archives were mostly about technology. Even so, “sneakiness” was far too broad a search concept. Normally in the Beyond, where interactions were almost always positive-sum, “sneakiness” was no more than knowing one’s customer and driving a shrewd deal. It was exactly the peaceful pursuit of her old employers at the Vrinimi Organization. The winners got fabulously wealthy and the losers—well, they only got rich. At the other extreme, in the unhappiest corners of the Slow Zone, there were sometimes true negative-sum games. On those worlds, only a saint could believe in return business, and all advancement depended on diminishing others. Pham Nuwen’s childhood had been in such a place—or so he had remembered.

Alas and thank goodness, neither extreme was appropriate here. The sneakiness Ravna was interested in was nonviolent maneuvering and politics, what had worked so well for Nevil.
Oobii
’s little social science archive covered hundreds of millions of years, in the Slow Zone and the Beyond, data from a million different races. The ship popped up a query classification template. She filled it out, leaving aside for now the pack nature of the Tines—group minds were so rare that it could easily skew the results. But the rest of the situation, including the presence of exiled spacer travelers, should get lots of matches. The present situation on Tines world was a marginally positive-sum game, teetering on the edge of a takeoff into enlightenment.

She glanced at her command window, which showed all the various snoopers that Nevil was running. Most of them were targeted on her, and all were clumsy, wasteful things. In any case, all they would see of Ravna was the agricultural research she had been assigned.

Then she fed her template into a syllabus generator, setting its priority very low. That was probably over-cautious, but if she pushed the system too hard, everything else would drag—one of those “external effects” she must be careful to avoid. So this dredging operation would take a while. She sat back for a minute or two, content to watch the process. Okay,
that
was not a good use of her time. She should be down in the New Meeting Place, talking to the Children, fighting fire with fire, innocently undermining Nevil’s position.

Ravna waved away the displays and left her “private office.” It was even bigger than Nevil’s, but there was a large Keep Out sign splashed helpfully across the door. Of course, Nevil didn’t have such a sign. On the other hand—as Pilgrim had pointed out—his office probably had a back entrance.

Jo and Pilgrim seemed to be enjoying every hour of this campaign. Ravna was not so naturally talented, but she was very happy that the two were now living at her town house. Thanks to Nevil’s “generosity,” there was more than enough room. Johanna had chortled at that irony.

Ravna walked out of the maze of office corridors and down the
ad hoc
wood stairs to the main floor, where Nevil had left the game stations. Nowadays, this area of the New Meeting Place was almost deserted. The remaining game addicts consisted of a few packs, and of course Timor and Belle. Strange. Timor wasn’t at his usual station. She walked around the floor watching the games. Normally, when Timor wandered, it was to give long-winded advice to any game-player who did not shoo him away.

She turned, headed for the ramp to midlevel, where most of the programming stations were located. Those had gained popularity as the limitations of the games had become apparent. In earlier years, the kids had turned up their noses at Slow Zone programming. Now their vision of medical necessity had changed that. It made perfect sense for Children and Tines to gather and work with
Oobii
in a nearly civilized venue. Some of that was gaming, but most was research that forced them to deal with the available automation.
I should have created this place years ago.
But at the time, she had been too concerned with the colony’s self-sufficiency and establishing the Children’s Academy. She would have seen the New Meeting Place as frivolous.

There were plenty of human-sounding voices up ahead, including the polite insistence of Timor Ristling: “But I just want to ask you—”

“Not now, I’m trying to set up the day’s projects.” That sounded like Øvin Verring.

The top of the ramp was dark, just another place where the makeshift construction interfered with Nevil’s lighting. Ravna hesitated there, watching the scene. Øvin was facing five or six of the oldest kids, the most intense of the medical researcher wannabes, essentially a group Nevil had whipped up for his coup.

Øvin was talking to the group even as he fiddled with the interface of the big display, which at the moment was just showing idle status. “What I wanted to show you all was the tutorial I found yesterday. We not only have to—”

“Øvin, I just want to ask you if—” interrupted Timor.

Øvin waved the boy away. “Not now, Timor.” He continued to work at the interface. He was speaking again to the group: “
Oobii
’s automation is pitiful, but the tutorial I found claims to show how we can solve simple—”

Timor again said, “Øvin, I was wondering, could I—”

That got Timor a moment of Øvin’s full attention. He glared at the boy and Ravna prepared to rush in. She didn’t think Øvin Verring had ever been one of the kids who had been mean to Timor—but she was damned if he was going to start now.

“Look Timor! Give me a minute, huh? I just want to get this display to show folks the tutorial. Then you can ask me whatever you want.”

Timor glanced at the display pedestal, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh that. You need to—” He reached out, his fingers flicking across the maintenance interface, below where Øvin had been working. “It’s just partly broken,” he said, as if that was an explanation.

Øvin Verring stepped back as the expanding display image formed into what Ravna recognized as a programmer primer environment. Huh, Øvin had found one she hadn’t seen, “Algorithms for Bottom Feeders.” His audience was already sucking in notes and playing with the first lesson, “Constrained Search.”

Øvin stared at it for second. “Oh! Yes, that’s what—” he glanced down at Timor. “Okay then. What did you want to ask me?”

“Is it okay if I use that workstation? I mean, just for today.” The boy waved across the room to the station that Belle Ornrikak was already lolling around, staking out the territory for Timor. It was the only station without an obvious user in residence.

Verring hesitated. “Um, sure. Go ahead.”

Timor gave a whoop and hustled across the room to Belle.

Ravna let out her breath and strolled in as if she had just come up the ramp.

“Oh, hei, Ravna.” Øvin came around his audience—which was now thoroughly distracted by the tutorial—and walked over to her. He made a small gesture in the direction of Timor and Belle. “Now that I seem to have lost my workstation … could we talk for a minute?”

“Sure.”

Since Ravna’s fall, Øvin had actually been friendly. Lately, most of the medical wannabes had seemed friendlier.

“As—as a kind of starter project, we want to refurbish more of the coldsleep containers. But the in-casket manuals are useless, and so far we can’t get
Oobii
to refine us a wish list—even though coldsleep is an ancient, simple technology.”

Ah
. This sounded like something from her speech—the part she hadn’t gotten to say. So Nevil had put him up to this? She looked over at Øvin’s team, all working hard to understand the tutorial.

Okay
. “You’re right about the manuals, Øvin. Down Here, they can’t do repairs. On the other hand,
Oobii
does have an enormous amount of information about coldsleep implementations. If you could devise a search list that uses what you see in the casket manuals and properly feed that to
Oobii
.…”

“You’d really help? Even after…?”

Ravna nodded. “One important decision you have to make is what level of medical risk you will tolerate.” Her gaze drifted almost involuntarily to where Timor sat on the other side of the room.

“Oh.” Then Øvin seemed to follow her gaze. “Oh!… I remember risk was one of the reasons you wanted to postpone this kind of work.” He watched Timor Ristling for a few moments. Timor had set his workstation display to large, perhaps so it would be easier for Belle to follow what he was doing. That was wasted effort, since the foursome had curled up on the floor around his chair, all eyes closed. At the moment, Timor was oblivious to this. He pounded away enthusiastically. This was no ordinary game. It looked … much simpler. Ravna could see simple dotmarkers making rows across a plane. Below that was what looked like a synthetic machine language, three-letter abbreviations and numerical operands.

“It looks like he’s written a binary counter,” Øvin said softly. “That’s so sad. The human mind should not be wasted on tasks so trivial.” Øvin glanced back at Ravna and seemed to think better of making a further comment.

She smiled. “You feel sorry for me, too, hei Øvin?”

“Actually, I was feeling sorry for
me
and…” he waved at his friends struggling away at the bottom feeder tutorial. “It’s such a waste.”