The Children of the Sky

Oobii.” Ravna raised her chin in the direction of Starship Hill. “You needed me to begin with, but now Children like you have grown up. My technical planning is needed more than ever, but … but I’m tired of being the leader.”

“Your decisions are popular, Ravna.”

“Some of them. Some of them not, or not for a year or five or ten.” Some might seem obviously wrong for a century—and then suddenly, dreadfully right.

“I hadn’t realized you felt so … alone. We all have you, so I guess we thought you see all of us the same.” Johanna looked down at various bags of fabric samples and birthday trinkets. She gave a little laugh. “Okay, turn it all around. I’ve been so happy with Nevil. He’s made life a bright place. I should think what it would be like without that, without anyone to share it all with. Do you think about Pham very much?”

“Sometimes.” Often. “We had something fine, but there was too much else going on within him. What owned him was scary.”

“Yeah.” Johanna had met Pham Nuwen, just before the end. She had seen how scary scary could be. “There are one hundred and fifty of us, Ravna. We all love you—at least most of the time. Have you ever thought that there might be enough people now that you could find some one person you could—you could be with?”

Up the street, Ravna could see some Children. They were Johanna’s age and older. They were just going into one of the pubs. Ravna gave a nod in their direction. “Are you serious?”

The girl gave an embarrassed smile. “Look, I found someone. I’m just saying, you think of us all as children. Think … well, you’ll live longer than any of us.”

“Don’t say that. You’re ageing now, but that’s only for the present. Someday we’ll have the resources to go back and rebuild a decent medical science. This is just temporary.”

“Right. If you guide us there, we’ll eventually have the technology. And eventually, there’ll be tens of thousands of us. If you can’t find Mister Right in that mob, there’s something wrong with you!”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I am!” said Johanna. “In the meantime, please remember how grateful we are, even when we complain. And Nevil and I will work harder to support you.”

“I want debate.”

“You know what I mean. It’s your voice, up front, that makes the big difference for people like Wenda and Ben.”

“Okay, I’ll lay off you and Nevil, at least for now.”

“Whew!” Johanna’s look of relief was comic exaggeration, but behind it Ravna saw the real thing. “Oh, and Ravna? Please don’t mention this to Nevil. It would just go to his head.”

•  •  •

The tavern district was near the center of Hidden Island, just south of the Old Castle. In fact, the castle was not really old, though it pre-dated the Children’s arrival by some decades. Flenser’s castle had been a fearsome place, a legend across the continent. Flenser—the unreformed Flenser—had had extraordinary plans for the Tinish race. Before the humans arrived, this world had not even discovered gunpowder, and the printing press was the big new thing. From that, Flenser had been busy building both a totalitarian state and something like the scientific method. There were rumors that his monster packs still lurked in the Old Castle. Ravna knew that wasn’t true, though Flenser-Tyrathect still did have his supporters, spies who shadowed Woodcarver’s own secret agents.

The sun was sliding into the north, the shadows now extending all the way across the street.

The two women walked past the first of the public houses. “Been there just yesterday,” Johanna said of it. “These days the customers are mostly herders from the mainland, celebrating the livestock drive.

Up ahead were the pubs more likely to attract merchants from the Long Lakes and spies from East Home. Those shops were full of gossip and questions and strangeness. She noticed the pack across the street; it looked a lot like the one that had been hanging around behind them in the market.

Johanna saw her glance. “Don’t worry. That’s Borodani, one of Woodcarver’s guys. I recognize his low-sound ears.” She gave the pack a wave, then laughed. “And you say this is really like a city of the Middle Beyond?”

“A little. I could fool myself for minutes at a time. Sjandra Kei had half a dozen major races, though nothing like packs. We humans were only the third most numerous. But we were popular. There were tourist towns that imitated olden human times—and they attracted at least two of the other races as much as us humans.”

“So folks would promenade, right? We could almost imagine we’re out looking for action in some high-priced dive?”

“You had such romances in Straumli Realm?”

“Well, yes. I was a precocious tot, you know. But you actually lived it, right?”

“Um, yes. A few times,” as a shy college girl, before she graduated and shipped out to the Vrinimi Organization. At Vrinimi, the socializing had been exclusively nonhuman—at least till Pham came along.

“So are these taverns much like the bars you remember back in civilization?”

“Hmpf. Not too much. The ‘bars’ in Sjandra Kei were very crowded—choir-crowded, by Tinish standards. For the humans and some of the other races, it was a bit of a courtship thing. Here—”

“Here, every human has known every other since they were little, and there aren’t enough of us all together to fill these public houses. Still, it’s fun to imagine. For instance, this place up ahead.”

That would be the Sign of the Mantis. The words were chiseled in Tinish runes below a one-meter-high carving of an odd insect that walked on two legs. Ravna had never seen the real thing, but she’d heard that the critters were a ubiquitous pest in downcoast towns. Of course, the largest of the real mantises were less than five centimeters tall. Whenever the story of the human landing was told, there was always the question of what the strange new aliens looked like. And since there were no videos to show around, just a pack talking to credulous listeners—also packs—the humans were often likened to “huge, huge mantises.” The Sign of the Mantis sign—the wooden sign itself—had actually been imported from a bar in the Long Lakes. Here it was a great joke, since this particular pub was indeed a human favorite.

Music came from within.

“See? Just like a nightclub back in civilization?” said Johanna.

It was human music, human voices and the sounds of a dozen instruments—or one synth. Inside, there would be no synth, no instruments and maybe not even any singing humans. The words were some children’s rhyme, and the music … not quite a child’s melody. A single pack was probably the source of all the sounds. No doubt it was embellishing on something from Oobii. Human culture was being re-created from the ground up on the Tines World, from machine memories and the distortions of a race of medieval pack critters.

A set of neatly painted wooden stairs wrapped back and forth up to the overhang of the main floor. Johanna bounced up the shallow steps with Ravna just behind. They were about halfway to the entrance when the door above opened and a group of teenaged humans came out onto the top landing.

One of them leaned back into the bar and said something like. “Yeah, just think about that. It makes more sense than…”

Ravna had scooched out of the way when she saw the crowding above. These steps were intended to be one-way for a pack; they were just a bit wider than a single member. The boys hadn’t seen her, but when they saw Johanna, suddenly their voices cut short. As they came down the steps, she heard one of them say, “It’s your sister, Jef.”

Johanna’s voice sounded a little sharp. “Hei now, so what are you doing?”

The lead boy—it sounded like Gannon Jorkenrud—replied, “Just telling people the truth, little missy.” Yes, that was Gannon. The boy saw Ravna and the sneer left his face. For a wonder, he actually looked furtive! He carefully edged past her without quite making eye contact.

The three boys who followed were younger, two seventeen, one nineteen, all fairly large pains in the neck. And today, all looked similarly sneaky, passing by her silently, then proceeding a little too quickly down the steps. Something else about them: they wore those short pants and silly low-cut shoes that had come into fashion at the beginning of the summer. Given a cool, rainy day, they’d have freezing shins and soaked feet.

Further up on the stairs, Johanna was saying, “So Jefri. What’s up?” The words were lightly spoken, but Ravna saw that the girl had stepped into the middle of the stairway. And there indeed, at the top of the stairs, were Jefri and Amdi. Both human and pack were a study in unhappy surprise. The pack—Amdiranifani—was the more obviously upset; even Ravna could see it in his aspect. Jefri was a bit smoother. “Hei, Sis. Hei, Ravna. Been a