The Children of the Sky

everywhere. “So then it’s a little bit like me and some of Lord Steel’s other experiments. A lot of killing went into our making. I came out very well, maybe, but others are still a mess. Sometimes we get together and just moan and groan about how we’ve been abused. But it’s not like we can do anything about it.”

Elspa nodded. “You’re right, Amdi, but at least you have a specific monster to dump the hate on.”

“Well,” said Ravna, “we have the Blight. It was monstrous beyond the mind of any in the Beyond. We know that in the end, fighting that evil killed your parents and Straumli Realm, and indirectly killed Sjandra Kei. Stopping the Blight destroyed civilization in much of the galaxy.”

They were shaking their heads. One of the boys, Ovin Verring, said, “We can’t know all that.”

“Okay, we can’t be sure of that last; the destruction was so vast that it destroyed our ability to measure it. But—”

“No, I mean there’s very little we can know of any of it. Look. Our parents were scientists. They were doing research in the Low Transcend, a dangerous place. They were playing with the unknown.”

You got it, kiddo, thought Ravna.

“But millions of other races have done that,” Ovin continued. “It’s the most common way that new Powers are born. My father figured that Straum itself would eventually colonize some vacated brown dwarf system in the Low Transcend, that we would transcend. He said we Straumers have always had an outward reach, we are risk takers.” Ovin must have noticed the look coming into Ravna’s face. He hurried on: “And then something went terribly wrong. That has also happened to thousands of races. Expeditions like our High Lab sometimes get consumed by what lives Up There, or are simply destroyed. Sometimes, the originating star system is destroyed, too. But what happened to us—what has forced us Down Here—that just doesn’t square with what we personally know about the situation.”

“I—” Ravna began, then hesitated. How can I say this? Your parents were greedy and careless and exceptionally unlucky. She loved these kids—well, most of them, and she would do almost anything to protect all of them—but when she looked at them, sometimes all she could think of was the destruction their parents’ greed had brought down. She glanced at Johanna. Help me.

As often happened when the going got tough, Johanna came through: “I have a little more personal memory than most of us, Ovin. I remember my parents preparing our escape. The High Lab was no ordinary attempt at Transcendence. We had an abandoned archive. We were doing archeology on the Powers themselves.”

“I know that, Johanna,” Ovin said, a little sharply.

“So the archive woke. My parents knew there was the possibility that we were being led around by the nose. Okay, I guess all the grownups knew that. But in the end, my folks realized that the risks were much greater than was obvious. We had dug up something that could be a threat to the Powers Themselves.”

“They told you that?”

“Not at the time. In fact, I’m not sure quite how Daddy and Mom pulled off the preparations. There were originally three hundred of us Children. Somehow, coldsleep units were smuggled out of medical storage, put aboard the container ship. Somehow we were all checked out of our classes—you all remember that.”

Heads nodded.

“If a Power were coming awake, surely it would have noticed what your parents were up to.”

“I—” Johanna hesitated. “You’re right. They should have been caught. There must have been others working with them to set up our escape.”

“I didn’t notice anything,” said Heida.

“No,” said someone else.

“Me neither,” said Ovin. “Remember how we were living, the temporary pressurized habs, the lack of privacy? I could tell my folks were getting edgy—okay, frightened—but there wasn’t room to do things on the sly. It seems reasonable—and this is one of the Disaster Study Group’s points—that our escape was just a move in Something’s game.”

Ravna said, “We talked about Countermeasure at the Academy, Ovin. You children did get special help. Ultimately, Countermeasure—” with Pham and Old One—“was what stopped the Blight.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Ovin. “But all this illustrates how little we know about the good guys and the bad guys. We’re stuck Down Here. We older kids feel that we have lost everything. But the official history could just as well have the good guys and the bad guys switched.”

“Huh? Who is peddling such crap?” Ravna couldn’t help herself; the words just popped out. So much for gracious leadership.

Ovin seemed to shrink back on himself. “It’s not anybody in particular.”

“Oh? What about those three I passed on the stairs?”

Jefri shifted on his high stool. “You ran into me on the stairs, too, Ravna. Those three are just gossips. You might as well be blaming all of us.”

“If it’s ‘just everybody’ then where did a name like Disaster Study Group come from? Somebody must be behind this, and I want to—”

A hand pressed lightly on Ravna’s sleeve. Johanna held the touch for an instant, long enough to shut down her spew of angry words. Then the girl said, “Something like this doubting has always been around.”

“You mean doubts about the Blighter threat?”

Johanna nodded. “Yes, in varying degrees. You yourself have doubts on that, I know. For instance, now that the Blighter fleet has been stopped by Countermeasure, will it have any further interest in harming Tines World?”

“We have no choice but to believe that what remains wants to destroy us.” My dream—

“Okay, but even then there’s the question of just how deadly they can be. The fleet is thirty lightyears out, probably not capable of travelling more than a lightyear per century. We have millennia to prepare, even if they do wish us ill.”

“Parts of the fleet could be faster.”

“So we have ‘only’ a few centuries. Tech civilizations have been built in less.”

Ravna rolled her eyes. “They’ve been rebuilt in less. And we may not have that much time. Maybe the fleet can build small ramscoops. Maybe the Zones will slip again—” She took a breath and proceeded a little more calmly: “The point is, the point of everything we’re teaching in the Academy is, we have to get ready as fast as we possibly can. We must make sacrifices.”

A little boy’s voice spoke from all around them. Amdi. “I think that’s what the Disaster Study Group disputes. They deny that the Blight was ever a threat to humans or Tines. And if it is, they say, Countermeasure made it so.”

Silence. Even the background music from the bartender had faded away. Apparently Ravna was the last to realize the monstrous issue under discussion. Finally she said, softly, “You can’t mean that, Amdi.”

An expression rippled across Amdi: embarrassed contrition. Each of his members was fourteen years old, each an adult animal, but his mind was younger than any pack she knew. For all his genius, Amdi was a shy and childlike creature.

Across the table, Jefri patted one of Amdi comfortingly. “Of course he doesn’t mean he believes it, Ravna. But he’s telling you the truth. The DSG starts from the position that we can’t know exactly what happened at the High Lab and how we managed to escape. Reasoning from what we do know, they argue that we could have the good and the bad reversed. In which case, Countermeasure’s actions of ten years ago were a galactic-scale atrocity—and there are no terrible monsters bearing down on us.”

“Do you believe that?”

Jefri raised his hands in exasperation. “… No. Of course not! I’m just spelling out what some people are too, ah, diplomatic to say. And before you ask, I wager none of us here believe it, either. But among the kids as a whole—”

“Especially some of the older ones,” said Ovin.

“—it’s a very attractive way of looking at things.” Jefri glowered at her for a moment, challenging. “It’s attractive because it means that what our parents created was not a monstrous ‘blight.’ Our parents were not silly fools. And it’s also attractive because it means that the sacrifices we’re making now are … unnecessary.”