The Children of the Sky

442741542471.74351920 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269471

442741542481.74351935 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269369

442741542491.74354327 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269373

442741542501.75439121 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269313

442741542511.75439144 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269265

442741542521.74351947 Advisory Notice Only:

Flenser sensor count summary: 140269215

… 29980242 lines omitted

“Explain!” her voice sound strangled even to her own ears.

A window popped up, defining the relevant fields, pointing to the provenance of these notices, pointing to analysis of the sensor devices on each of Flenser-Tyrathect’s members.

The short of it was that these notices said precisely what she thought they said. In all of the Flenser pack, there remained fewer than one hundred and fifty million sensors. The original infestation had numbered in the low trillions and even that had been barely sufficient. If the infestation had fallen to the low hundred millions then … then her surveillance was a self-deceiving joke!

How long has this been going on? She waved up a curve fitter and asked for the best three models of the failure history. It gave back three of course, but the first was near certain: from day one of her surveillance, almost ten years ago, her little spies had been steadily failing, a smooth decay with a half-life of less than a year. In the Beyond the sensor infestation would have been good for a century. For that matter, the supporting software would have been smart enough to tell her if she was using junk. No wonder these gadgets aren’t on the Usables Manifest. Her desperate cleverness had turned around and bitten her on the nose.

Ravna curled up in her chair, miserable. Tonight was just a microcosm of her life over the last few tendays. But if I review past surveillance, knowing how bogus it really is, maybe I can see how far my trust of Flenser should still extend. She opened her eyes, wiped away her tears, and looked at the inexorable decay curve glowing in the air before her. It had been years since the surveillance had had even a trillion sensors. During all those years the failure notifications had been piling up, but at invisibly low priority levels. Meantime, the higher layers of the spy program had continued supplying Ravna with—face it—fantasy. She might never have noticed, if the real threats had not become so numerous that the fantasy began to spout flagrant lies.

If I decide the past surveillance was bogus too—I’ll have to tell Woodcarver about this. Yeah, and destroy whatever trust still remains between us.

For some moments, her attention was lost in bleak contemplation. Had she ever messed up this badly before? No. Had things ever looked darker?… Well, watching the Battle on Starship Hill, that had been scarier. Losing Pham a few hours later, that had been sadder. But for despair, there had been nothing worse since the destruction of her home civilization at Sjandra Kei.

I got through that. Pham had been there for her.

Ravna opened her eyes. It was just past midnight. The outside windows looked upon a dark landscape; they were that far into the autumn.

There was something she must do, irrational though it might be. She hadn’t done it in more than a year. Neither the Children nor the Tines would understand, and she had no desire to encourage superstition. But if ever there was a time, this was the time to go visit Pham.

Chapter 09

Cemeteries were ghastly places. There had been a few such memorials at Sjandra Kei. People in the Beyond died, eventually. The death rate was comparable to the half-lives of the underlying civilizations, which mostly migrated up and up and—if they were not supremely stupid, like the greedy fools of Straumli Realm—eventually transformed themselves into Powers.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time. Ravna remembered seeing something similar in the terranes of Harmonious Repose: the cemetery had gradually transformed the terrane into a mausoleum with incidental living tenants.

The cemetery on Starship Hill had been Ravna’s idea, come to her when she suddenly realized why cemeteries played such an important part in the stories of the Age of Princesses. She had picked the spot before the town grew up around the New Castle. The two hectare plot stretched across a curving slope of heather, with a view extending from the northwest islands all the way to Oobii in the south. In another ten years, the place might be surrounded by Newcastle town. There was no room allotted for cemetery expansion. And if I have my way, thought Ravna, this terrible place will never need to become larger.

The Children came up here sometimes, but in the warmth of day. The youngest didn’t understand about cemeteries. The oldest didn’t want to understand, but they didn’t want to forget their friends, either.

Ravna mostly came after dark, and when she felt the darkest. By that measure, tonight was most definitely the time for a visit. She walked along the main path, her shoes crunching the frost- stiffened moss. Night in the arctic autumn, even here near the channel currents, ranged from cold to deathly frigid. Tonight was relatively mellow. The clouds had come in around sunset, stacking deeper and deeper over the land, trapping the day’s warmth. The hillside breeze had dropped to nothing more than a faint, chill breath. Oobii said there would be rain a little later, but for now the sky was dark and dry and there was clear air down to the waters of the inner channel. Here and there, she could see lights on the north end of Hidden Island. Very close by, there were occasional glows of lavender. Glowbugs. The tiny insects put on a big show only two or three nights a year, and usually earlier in the autumn than this. As she walked on, there were more of the lavender glints. The occasional glimmer was not enough to light her way … but they were welcome.

Rows of graves lay on either side of the cemetery’s main path. Each place was marked by a headstone carved with a name and a star. The design was modeled after something she’d found in Oobii’s classical human archive. The little four-pointed stars were an early religious symbol, perhaps the most common in human histories, though she was not clear on the details. There were 151 graves in these four rows, almost all the inhabitants of the cemetery. One hundred and fifty-one Children, from less than a year old to sixteen, all murdered on the same summertime night, burned to death as they lay in coldsleep.