The Children of the Sky

singleton hesitated, maybe taking one more close listen on the hallway, then it crawled close to Jefri. Ritl’s eyes were on Zek, her head shifting uneasily back and forth. Jefri scooched himself out of the way, then tugged at both creatures, urging them close together. Now they were both sitting mostly on Ravna.

Ritl made a Tinish “yech” sound, then gobbled on, softly complaining. Now that Zek was out from under his cloak, his mindsounds would be loud to any nearby member. This close to each other, the two creatures were in a fight, flight, or merge situation. For normal pack members, “merge” would have been by far the least likely outcome. Even in this desperate situation, the two acted like debutantes confronting sexual perversion.

“Well, crap.” The human words seem to come from the space between the Tines.

“They synched up!” Jefri’s voice was full of wonder. “Can you understand me?”

“Yesss.” The voice sounded more annoyed than frightened. Ritl plus Zek might be smarter than either was separately, but it wasn’t a happy camper.

Jef said, “You lost contact with the rest of yourself, right?”

“Hurt noise, lost all radio.”

Ravna said, “Zekritl? Can you make it back to your cabins?”

Puzzled head-weaving was the reply.

Jefri rephrased: “Go back? Safe and quiet?”

The duo looked at each other. “Okay. Will try.” The two climbed over Jefri and Ravna, an elaborate dance that endeavored to keep Zek’s exposed side available to Ritl’s hearing. Ritl lowered her head and slid the door open. A moment later she was out in the hall, turned so that mutual thought was still possible.

Zek followed, but the top of his cloak caught on the door. Jefri helped undo the snag and guided him out. Jef peeked out into the hall, blocking Ravna’s view. She heard someone say softly, “Bye bye.”

Jefri watched them for a few seconds more. Then he slid the door shut and jiggled its bolt into position. He was shaking his head. “By the Powers, they look like Tami and Wilm staggering home from the pub.”

He lay back, silent.… “You know, it could have been a low charge problem. Scrupilo’s radios fail like that. When they’ve been away from sunlight too long—bam, no error message, no bit-rate backoff, just silence.”

“Right,” said Ravna. “I’ll bet these cloaks were at the end of a long-use period.” She thought about it for a second, imagining innocuous explanations for the apparently global failure. They were possible.

After a moment, Jefri said, “Oh, Amdi. You didn’t have to be a hero.”

Chapter 32

The next morning, it was the friendly steward, not the gunpack, who was at their door. “Amdi must be okay, too, Jef,” said Ravna. Believe it.

The airships were cruising lower than ever, but the cloud cover was incomplete. Sunlight slanted down in misty shafts, shining in fragments of rainbows where it found patches of rainfall in the greenish dark.

The city extended to the limits of their vision. It was still chaotic; you could see it was a slum. But now Ravna sensed patterns lurking in the landscape. If you ignored its constituent junk, this place had a claim to beauty, a clash of fungus and forest pretending to be a great city. And even the details were not all unpleasant. She could smell cooking fires. The food smells were good, almost covering the sewage taint that also hung in the air.

“Powers. Look, Ravna, the Tines just swarm!”

Most of the streets were hidden by surrounding structures, but she saw … plazas? Most were just five or six meters across, but they were connected to occasional larger open spaces. In the distance she could see what might have been a hectare of stony open space. Tines were everywhere—on rooftops, in the streets, in the plazas. Myriads of Tines, but crowded so close together there surely could be no packs at all.

“Ten years ago, this looked different,” said Ravna. “Oobii took pictures as it approached Tines World.” The Tropics had been in the whole disk images only, and there had been only a few breaks in the jungle cloud cover, but, “What we saw back then was not so crowded and somehow—well, it looked simpler.” She watched silently for a moment, wondering. Down Here there was no possibility that the Choir itself was super-intelligent. For that matter, there wasn’t even the communication technology to support wide-area cognition: Mindsounds would take minutes to percolate across the megacity. And yet, there was some form of group activity. The mob seemed to have greater and lesser densities, and not just where Tines gathered around the piles of rotting vegetation that filled many of the smaller plazas. There were places where she could see the ground, where members were separated by meters of empty space. Such open areas couldn’t be for coherent thought, though, since there was no pack-like clustering. It was almost as if.… She focused on one particular empty area, watching until the airship had passed it by. Ah! “Those empty areas? They’re moving.”

“What?”

“Just look—” Given that they each had their own tiny porthole, it was impossible for her to point. “Look down that street,” zigzagging into the distance, mostly unobscured by surrounding structures, there was only one thing she could mean.

“Right … okay, I see a couple thin spots in the crowd.” He watched for the minute or so that they could keep the path in view. “Yes,” he finally said. “I think the uncrowded areas were slowly moving further away. Huh. I suppose you would see that in pre-tech cities. Didn’t they have special policemen to order the traffic around?”

“I don’t think it’s traffic control. The sparse areas also shrink and expand. Look at that plaza.”

For a moment the view was nearly perfect for Ravna’s purpose. Thinning swept in from a side path. Then the plaza and the main street became a little less crowded, Tines moving slightly to the sides of the street. As they drifted back to the middle of the street, it became as packed as ever—but the thinning continued to propagate down the side path.

“Yeah,” Jefri said slowly, amazement in his voice. “These are density waves moving across the city, but we can only see them in the streets and plazas.”

“It’s like the Tines are swaying to music.” Truly a Choir.

The airship executed one of its long, slow turns and their view swept across territory that had been directly ahead. Now the nearest lands were hidden by low clouds, but pillars of sunlight shone into the far distance … upon the largest structure Ravna had ever seen on Tines World. “Powers,” she said softly. “There was nothing like this in the approach photography.”

They were too far away to see details, but the main structure was tetrahedral. Its edges were slumped and irregular, but on average, the pyramid’s lines were perfectly straight. Parts of the surface gleamed golden even in the haze. Secondary pyramids sat at the base of the huge one, each quite possibly larger than Newcastle—and at the corners of those were still smaller pyramids. Smaller and smaller, Ravna followed the progression down to the limits of her vision.

Their airship was turning again. The pyramid slid out of sight. “There’s the other airship,” said Jefri. The craft was well below them, descending into the lower cloud deck. It swirled the cloud surface like a fish diving through sea foam. Then it was gone, and a moment after that they, too, were in the clouds. They broke through into a drizzly gray morning. The ground below looked nothing like the jumbled slums or the great pyramid. She caught sight of spires and domes very like the palaces of East Coast royalty. I’ll bet that’s where Vendacious and Tycoon lord it over the locals. Directly ahead of the other airship, the ground was as open and flat as a tabletop. The landing field would have been recognized by any low-tech inhabitant of an earthlike planet, though this one was marred by floodways and several large ponds.

Five structures hulked at the end of the field. They were small by comparison with the pyramid, but each was large enough to shelter an airship. The clamshell doors on two of them had been slid open.

•  •  •

Vendacious stood by his ship’s landing pylon and watched the ground crews work to lash down Tycoon’s airship.

How I hate the Tropics! The thought surfaced every time he returned here. The heat and humidity were as bad as any he’d known in his well-remembered life; this morning’s drizzle counted as