other race. Apparently the Riders are among the most common throughout the Beyond. We need them to talk to. We need to discover if they are as much fun, as useful, as the Two-Legs. Even if the risk was ten times what it seems, I would still want to grant this Rider her wish.”
“… Yes. If we are to be all we can be, we need to know more. We need to take a few risks.” She stopped her pacing; all her eyes turned toward Peregrine in a gesture of surprise. Abruptly she laughed.
“What?”
“Something we’ve thought before, dear Peregrine, but now I see how true it may be. You’re being a little bit clever and scheming here. A good statesman and planner for the future.”
“But still for a pilgrimly goal.”
“To be sure… And I, now I don’t care so completely about the planning and the safety. We will visit the stars someday.” Her puppies waggled a joyous salute. “I’ve a little of the pilgrim in me now, too.”
She went down all on her bellies and crept across the floor toward him. Consciousness slowly dissolved into a haze of loving lust. The last thing Peregrine remembered her saying was, “How wonderful the luck: that I had grown old and had to be new, and that you were just the change we need.”
Peregrine’s attention drifted back to the present, and Ravna. The human was still grinning at him. She reached a hand across to brush one of his heads. “Medieval minds indeed.”
They sat in the fern shade for another couple of hours and watched the tide come in. The sun fell through midafternoon—even then it was as high in the sky as any noontime sun could be at Woodcarver’s. In some ways, the quality of the light and the motion of the sun were the strangest things about the scene. The sun was so high, and came down so straight, with none of the long sliding glide of afternoon in the arctic. He had almost forgotten what it was like in the land of Short Twilight.
Now the surf was thirty yards inland of where they had put the Rider. The crescent moon was following the sun toward the horizon; the water wouldn’t rise any further. Ravna stood, shaded her eyes against the lowering sun. “Time for us to go, I think.”
“You think she’ll be safe?”
Ravna nodded. “This was long enough for Greenstalk to notice any poisons, and most predators. Besides, she’s armed.”
Human and Tines picked their way to the crest of the atoll, past the tallest of the ferns. Peregrine kept a pair of eyes on the sea behind them. The surf was well past Greenstalk now. Her location was still swept by deep waves, but it was beyond the spume and spray. His last sight of her was in the trough behind a crasher: the smoothness of the sea was broken for an instant by two of her tallest fronds, the tips gently swaying.
Summer took gentle leave of the land around Hidden Island. There was some rain, and no more brush fires. There would even be a harvest, war and drought notwithstanding. Each dayaround the sun hid deeper behind the northern hills, a time of twilight that broadened with the weeks till true night held at midnight. And there were stars.
It was something of an accident that so many things came together on the last night of summer. Ravna took the kids out skygazing on the fields by Starship Castle.
No urban haze here, nor even near-space industry. Nothing to fog the view of heaven except a subtle pinkness in the north that might have been vagrant twilight—or aurora. The four of them settled on the frosty moss and looked around. Ravna took a deep breath. There was no hint of ash left in the air, just a clean chill, a promise of winter.
“The snow will be deep as your shoulders, Ravna,” said Jefri, enthusiastic about the possibility. “You’ll love it.” The pale blotch that was his face seemed to be looking back and forth across the sky.
“It can be bad,” said Johanna Olsndot. She hadn’t objected to coming up here tonight, but Ravna knew that she would rather have stayed down on Hidden Island to worry about the doings of tomorrow.
Jefri picked up on her unease—no, that was Amdi talking now; they would never cure those two of pretending to be each other. “Don’t worry, Johanna. We’ll help you.”
For a moment no one said anything. Ravna looked down the hill. It was too dark to see the six hundred meter drop, too dark to see where fjord and islands lay below. But the torchlight on the ramparts of Hidden Island marked its location. Down there in Steel’s old inner court—where Woodcarver now ruled—were all the working coldboxes from the ship. One hundred and fifty-one children slept there, the last survivors of the Straumer’s flight. Johanna claimed that most could be revived, with best chance of success if it were done soon. The Queen had been enthusiastic about the idea. Large sections of the castle had been set aside, refurbished for human needs. Hidden Island was well sheltered—if not from winter snow, at least from the worst winds. If they could be revived, the children would have no trouble living there. Ravna had come to love Jefri and Johanna and Amdi—But could she handle one hundred and fifty more? Woodcarver seemed to have no misgivings. She had plans for a school where Tines would learn of humans and the children would learn of this world… Watching Jefri and Amdi, Ravna was beginning to see what might become of this. Those two were closer than any children she had ever known, and in sum more competent. And that was not just the puppies’ math genius; they were competent in other ways.
Humans and Packs fit, and Old Woodcarver was clever enough to take advantage of it. Ravna liked the Queen, and liked Pilgrim even more, but in the end the Packs would be the great beneficiaries. Woodcarver clearly understood the disabilities of her pack race. Tinish records went back at least ten thousand years. For all their recorded history they had been trapped in cultures not much less advanced than now. A race of sharp intelligence, yet they had a single overwhelming disadvantage: they could not cooperate at close range without losing that intelligence. Their civilizations were made of isolated minds, forced introverts who could never progress beyond certain limits. The eagerness of Pilgrim and Scrupilo and the others for human contact was evidence of this. In the long run, we can move the Tines out of this cul de sac.
Amdi and Jefri were giggling about something, the Pack sending runners out almost to the limit of consciousness. These last weeks, Ravna had come to learn that pell-mell activity was the norm for Amdi, that his initial slowness had been part of his hurt over Steel. How… perverse (or how wonderful?)… that a monster like Steel could be the object of such love.
Jefri shouted, “You watch in all directions, let me know where to look.” Silence. Then Jefri’s voice again: “There!”
“What are you doing?” Johanna asked with sisterly belligerence.
“Watching for meteors,” one of the two said. “Yes, I watch in all directions and jab Jefri—there!—where to look when one comes by.”
Ravna didn’t see anything, but the boy had twisted around abruptly at his friend’s signal.
“Neat, neat,” came Jefri’s voice. “That was about forty kilometers up, speed—” the two’s voice murmured unintelligibly for a second. Even with the pack’s wide vision, how could they know how high it was?
Ravna sat back in the hollow formed by the hummocky moss. It was a good parka the locals had made for her; she barely felt the chill in the ground. Overhead, the stars. Time to think, get some peace before all the things that would begin tomorrow. Den Mother to one hundred and fifty kids… and I thought I was a librarian.
Back home she had loved the night sky; at one glance she could see the other stars of Sjandra Kei, sometimes the other worlds. The places of her home had been in her sky. For a moment the evening chill seemed part of a winter that would never go away. Lynne and her folks and Sjandra Kei. Her whole life till three years ago. It was all gone now. Don’t think on it. Somewhere out there was what was left of Aniara fleet, and what was left of her people. Kjet Svensndot. Tirolle and Glimfrelle. She had only known them for a few hours, but they were of Sjandra Kei—and they had saved more than they would ever know. They would still live. SjK Commercial Security had some ramscoops in its fleet. They could find a world, not here, but nearer the battle site.
Ravna tilted her head back, wondering at the sky. Where? Maybe not even above the horizon now. From here the galactic disk was a glow that climbed across the sky almost at right angles to the ecliptic. There was no sense of its true shape or their exact position in it; the greater picture was lost to nearby splendors, the bright knots of open clusters, frozen jewels against the fainter light. But down near the southern horizon, far from the galactic way, there were two splotchy clouds of light. The Magellanics! Suddenly the geometry clicked, and the universe above was not completely unknown. Aniara fleet would be—'I—I wonder if we can see Straumli Realm from here,” said Johanna. For more than a year now she had had to play the adult. Come tomorrow, that role would be forever. But her voice just now was wistful, childlike.
