The Children of the Sky (88 page)

Something had awakened here, the combination of the Choir and Tycoon and the shortcuts from
Oobii
. Jo knew it; Tycoon knew it. He never tired of bragging about the size of his “new markets”; sometimes the businesscritter in him literally rubbed its snouts together in glee. This camera and the reports that Mr. Radio made from the new reservations were all part of Tyco’s ceaseless efforts to anticipate his customers.

“Okay,” came the voice from the camera. “Point a little to south. That’s good! Nevil may have his eye in the sky, but
I
know what’s happening on the ground. And when I get better telescopes mounted on the video…” Tycoon’s voice drifted off, his technical imagination taking over. When he resumed, he was back to worrying about her. “Now that you’ve got the camera set up, you should get yourself back down here. I have a godsgift on a dumb radio from North One. He says there’s been some kinky moodshifting up there. If that propagates to us, there could be a sex riot on the Pyramid.”

Johanna looked down at the House of Tycoon. Tycoon’s audience hall was marked by a row of windows. The new ones were three meters high, but still tiny-looking at this distance. She’d bet Tyco was watching her from there. She gave a little wave. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen that before. No big deal.” That was a little bit of an exaggeration. “Besides,” she continued, “I didn’t come up here just to fix your silly camera. I want to sit and take in the scenery.”

“
Grump. Mumble.
” The tiny speaker on the camera couldn’t do justice to Tycoon’s response, the mix of indignation and concern and envy.

Jo gave the palace another cheery wave and sat herself down on the parapet. In this swelter, her most extensive piece of clothing was her sunhat, and now she plunked it on her head. Black hair and dark skin were all very fine, but she still needed some protection against this sun.

Johanna looked out, but she wasn’t watching the
physical
scenery. She liked to tell Tycoon that from here she had a clear view of the Choir’s innermost thoughts. Tyco claimed she was spouting superstitious nonsense—but then he tracked the moods that swept across the Tropics like superfast weather fronts.
That
was marketing information.

Here at the City of the Choir, it all came together, a million times bigger than what Johanna had seen on the rafts. She leaned her elbows onto her knees, and stared off toward the northern horizon. This world was in the Slow Zone, not the Beyond, not the Transcend. Most intelligent life in the galaxy had originated in this primordial ooze. Nothing much smarter than human could survive Down Here. So no way was the Choir a superhuman intellect. Right? It was the sort of question that made Johanna wish she knew more about Slow-Zone limitations. The subject had never been big in the High Lab. The grownups were too busy becoming God to waste their time on the problems of lesser minds.

Very soon the charade with Nevil must be abandoned; the cooperation between Tycoon and Woodcarver was too blatant to disguise.
My friends will know I’m alive. I can visit them!
Ravna would be able to come down here and see Greenstalk, and see what the Choir was really like. Commset chats were not enough. There were things Ravna didn’t understand—like that promise she’d asked of Johanna, to save the Choir from exploitation. In one sense that was an easy promise to keep. But at the level of individual Tines, of Cheepers—the problem was just the same as Johanna had argued with Harmony Redjackets and even with Pilgrim.…

Johanna drew herself a little further under the shade of her broad hat. It would be great when she could travel back to the Domain, but there were so few humans in the world; she couldn’t imagine finding anyone now. Even Ravna was better off,
at least if my stupid little brother will get his act together
. From what Johanna could tell, Jef alternated between thinking Rav was too good for him and regarding her as the agent of ultimate evil.

Finally, the sun was too much. Johanna stood and started slowly down from the summit. She often hit an emotional low just as she retreated from the pyramid. Sometimes she thought the Choir’s mood changed too.
Maybe the Tines are unhappy to see me go!
Hah, absurd of course. And yet, after losing the High Lab, losing her parents, losing the promise of Nevil … after losing it all, she had a fate that was kind of a marvelous thing. She knew that Nevil’s gang had called her the “Dog Lady.” Well, they were right. She had the fragments, the packs, and the Choir. It was a weird trade she had made, and maybe she didn’t care about the rest.

Today was the longest day of summer. For many Tinish nations, that was a big holiday. Here in Woodcarver’s Domain, the holiday was celebrated, but it came in the middle of almost seven tendays when the sun never set. The dayaround tendays had always been a time for unending, often joyous, activity. There was an unrelenting enthusiasm about the sunlight, something that only total exhaustion could correct. Both Children and Tines worked almost nonstop, slowing down just a little when the sun got lowest, what would be the starry dark in any other season. Even then, there were often parties at low sun, exhausted kids
dancing
.

On this Longest Day, Ravna took a low-sun break of her own. Coming out from her private entrance to
Oobii
, she skirted the western edge of the Meadows. The path should have kept her out of sight of where the kids partied. But this time she ended up walking past Children and Tines playing with the gliders that Scrupilo had recently built. She stood in awe for a moment, forgetting why she was outside so late. Øvin Verring was running straight toward the cliff’s edge. He leaped over the dropoff and popped his wings. Ravna felt an instant of stark fear. True, the glider rig was an
Oobii
synthesis of a thousand civilizations’ history, optimized for exactly these conditions—but there was not a bit of automation aboard the contraption! It could tumble and fall, and she had already seen enough bodies rain from the sky.… But the wings did not tumble. The glider sank smoothly, flying straight. And then Øvin, the mind onboard, took the glider into a shallow bank, searching for updrafts, climbing across them until he was
above
his launch point, soaring almost as if he had agrav.

A sigh went up from the Children on the ground, maybe remembering heritage lost. Then everyone was cheering, and the packs among them were complaining because there was no way
they
could participate in the adventure.
This is
so
dangerous,
thought Ravna. Someone turned and saw her standing there. A year ago, Ravna would have had to stop this, and the kids would have known that and everybody would have been hurt and embarrassed and irritated. More recently, after her return, it would have been worse; they might have meekly obeyed her! Now when the Children saw her, they waved. And Ravna waved back … and few moments later, another glider sailed out over the abyss. Ravna stayed at the fringes of the crowd, watching the launches. She counted five of the craft in the air, circling back and forth along and above the cliff face. These vehicles would never be of use in real applications.
But the pilots may be.
It all depended on how fast other tech progressed.

Ravna watched for a few minutes more, then drifted back from the crowd and continued on her walk. The shouts of excitement faded behind her. Ahead, sunlight sparkled blindingly off the north end of the Hidden Island straits. The island itself was set in a kind of silhouette by the brilliance of the surrounding water. Her path led around the northwest face of Starship Hill, toward a very special place.

The Cemetery for Children and Tines. She had been here only once since her return, a memorial for Edvi Verring and the Norasndots. She hadn’t been here by herself since that rainy, treacherous night with Nevil.
You’d think that that night would have cured me of my attraction to this place.
Okay, the important lesson was that if she ran into anyone up here, she should question the coincidence very seriously.

And truly, this visit wasn’t one of desperation. Things were going
well
. Come this winter, Scrupilo’s Cold Valley lab would fabricate its first microprocessors. When those made it into Tycoon’s production stream, tech would be everywhere. Something like civilization would be right around the corner.

Even Jefri seemed to be doing okay. He and Amdi were working with the reconstituted Screwfloss to build cargo highways. Both Woodcarver and Flenser were sure that Jef wasn’t acting as Nevil’s agent. More and more, it looked like he would stay with the Domain.

Ravna walked between rows of headstones set in a field of spongy moss. At the memorial, she’d noticed a few new stones, not just those for Edvi and the Norasndots. There’d been flowers on the graves of Belle Ornrikak and Dumpster Peli. The Children, at least some of those who remained with the Domain, were turning to older forms of remembrance. It was something they argued about among themselves.

Today—tonight—she had one particular person she wished to remember. Pham’s rock, the huge irregularly shaped boulder that crowned the promontory, was at the far end of the field. She could sit on the north side for a time, leaning against the sun-warmed rock.

She came around the rock—and was confronted by eight Tinish heads looking back at her.

“Ah! Hello, Amdi.”

“Hei, Ravna! What a coincidence.”

The pack occupied almost every flattish niche on the north side of the rock. Amdi had regained most of his weight, and nowadays he wore rakish eyepatches on two of his heads. He didn’t really seem surprised to see her. Of course, he probably had heard her coming from forty meters away.

Amdi shifted aside to make room for her on a human-butt-sized flat space.

As Ravna sat down, he said, “You up here to talk to Pham?” There was no sarcasm in his question.

Ravna nodded.
I was.
She looked down at Amdi’s nearest heads. He was already snuggling close. “What are
you
doing here, Amdi?”

“Oh, I come up here a lot now. You know, to sit and think.”
Amdi was into solitary contemplation?
Could he be that changed?

He settled a head in her lap and looked up at her. “Really! Well, today I had another reason. I was waiting for someone.”

She brushed her hand across the plush fur. “Am I that predictable?” So not a coincidence at all.

Amdi shrugged. “You’re somebody to depend on.”

“And why were you waiting for me?”

“Well,” he said mischievously, “I didn’t say you were the person I was waiting for.” But he didn’t deny it.

They sat there for a time, warming in the sun, watching its glare reflected off the chop in the straits. There really was peace here, even if it didn’t feel quite the same with Amdi above, below, and beside her. Amdi reached another head up to her. Petting it, she could feel a deep scar under the fur. It ran from the throat to just short of a fore-tympanum. So, more of Vendacious’ work. “Don’t worry,” said Amdi. “It’s all healed, good as new.”

“Okay.” But not his two eyes; those could not be fixed as easily as his other wounds or Ravna’s broken face.

Just now there wasn’t a single boat visible, and the country further north was lost in the glare. Ravna and Amdi might be the only human and pack in the world.

Correction. One of the kids’ gliders had drifted into view from the south. It had caught some marvelous air current and climbed halfway up the sky, angling around the curve of Starship Hill. As it turned to loop back it seemed to hang, motionless, in the sky.

Amdi poked a snout in the direction of the aircraft: “You know, that’s another reason why we need radio cloaks. A single pack member is way smaller than a human. It could fly fine, with all the rest on the ground—or on other gliders!”

Contemplative mood broken, Ravna grinned. “I remember my promise, Amdi; you’ll get your own radio cloaks. Scrupilo is working on that second set, but you know the problems. Vendacious did some very brutal things to create a pack that could use the cloaks.”

“But Flenser used the cloaks straight away,” said Amdi. That had been eleven years ago, at the Battle on Starship Hill. Ever since Amdi had been puppies—even before Ravna had met him—he had been wild about radio cloaks. She remembered his endless whining to be allowed to wear radio. Today he was more mellow: “We’ll figure it out. Just you wait, Ravna. Radio cloaks will make us packs be like
gods!
”

“Hmm.” Amdi’s problem was his limited experience with real gods.

Amdi was chortling to himself. “And if we don’t do it, Tycoon will. You know, Mr. Radio is now his closest advisor—not counting Johanna.”

“Hei, Johanna is on
our
side.”

“‘Advisor,’ ‘friend,’ whatever. My point is, it’s Radio who is his closest Tinish advisor. He’s even more enthusiastic about cloaks than I am. He thinks that with clever broodkenning a tensome—maybe even a twelvesome—could have coherent intelligence.”

Twelve. Like Tycoon’s pack-of-packs logo. “Down Here there are other limits on mind, Amdi. You’re not going to get much above the most brilliant human genius, except in the Transcend.”

“Yes, okay, right. But the way radio packs can
use
their smarts will be amazing. Mr. Radio is already pretty smart. He’s back to eight. You know he found a replacement for Ut?”

This question was delivered with shy, almost embarrassed, sidewise looks.

“Ritl?” said Ravna. “She’s able to use Ut’s cloak?”

Amdi gave a nod. He was smiling in a wobbly way.

“Well, good! I mean, I know she caused you problems, Amdi. But the critter was desperate. She didn’t mean to do you harm.”

“Oh, she meant to do me harm all right! She tried to break me up. I was terrified of her. But yes, she was in a desperate situation. Part of me misses her, but all of me is relieved she’s gone. You know, she’s turned out to be the keystone member of Mr. Radio. She makes him smarter and a lot more articulate. I talk to Mr. Radio when he reaches up here. Now that Ritl is not on the make … well, Mr. Radio is really a nice fellow. The story of Ritl and Radio would make a nice Tinish romance novel … if I were into writing romance fiction, I mean. Which of course I’m not.”