The Children of the Sky

He turned and glanced at the others. Each was suddenly busy with details on his or her own display. What Ravna could see looked like art programming, but performed in some incredibly roundabout way. Elspa Latterby looked up. “Yes, all clear. Go for it, Ovin.”

The structure forming in the space between the kids didn’t look like art. There were thousands of points of light, variously connected by colored lines.

Will someone please explain this to me? thought Ravna. It might be a network simulation, but there was no labelling. Ah, wait, she could almost guess at the power law on the connections. Maybe this was a—

Ovin was talking again: “This was hell to put together using Oobii’s interface, but we’ve visualized a whole-body map of the transduction network in a modern human. Well, it’s what Oobii has on file, a racial average across Sjandra Kei. We Straumers can’t be much different. Anyway—” He zoomed in on one cluster in the network. The rest of the complexity shifted to the sides, not exactly disappearing, but moving into the far distance. “This,” Ovin continued, “covers part of the motor stability region.”

Ravna nodded back, and tried to keep a smile pasted on her face. She was beginning to guess where all this was going. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Nevil was drifting around the outer edge of the group in Ravna’s direction. Help!

Her smile must have been encouraging, for Ovin continued with his explanation: “This is really just a test case for a much larger class of problems—namely medicine in general. If we can learn enough of Oobii’s programming interface, we can get the ship to generate pathologies on the motor stability region and compare them with the symptoms it perceives in—”

“In me!” said Timor. The boy had settled down on the floor when Ovin began his demo, but now he struggled up to his knees, making sure that Ravna would notice. “They’re going to cure what’s wrong in me.”

Ovin glanced down at the boy. “We’re going to try, Timor. Everything’s a crap shoot Down Here.”

“I know.” Timor sounded irritated by the obvious caveat.

After a second, Ovin looked back at Ravna. “Anyway, if—I mean, as soon as—we do all that, we’ll have Oobii start generating treatment targets and running experiments.” Suddenly, Ovin was more hesitant. He was looking at Ravna for some kind of approval. “We think we have something, Ravna. What do you think?”

Ravna stared at the network sim for a moment. That was so much easier than looking into Ovin Verring’s eyes. These kids were very bright, the children of geniuses. The oldest ones, before their flight from the High Lab, had had a good Straumer education. Down Here? Down Here, the kids were relatively uneducated. Down Here, experiments didn’t run themselves, there were intermediate steps required, infrastructure to create.

She looked back at Ovin Verring, saw that he saw through her attempt at mellowness. Her smile cracked apart, and she said, “Ovin. How can I say this? You—”

And then rescue miraculously arrived. Nevil. He patted Ovin on the shoulder and smiled comfortingly in Ravna’s direction. “This will be okay, guys. Let me talk to Ravna.”

The wannabe medical researchers seemed relieved—though not nearly as relieved as Ravna felt.

Ravna gave them all her best smile. “I’ll get back to you.” She looked down. “I promise, Timor.”

“I know you will,” said Timor.

Then she let Nevil spirit her away. Thank goodness. He must have some control on the New Meeting Place environment, since they hadn’t gone five meters before she felt the sound quality shift and knew that even standing here in the middle of the floor, it was just the two of them who could hear each other. “Thanks, Nevil. That was awful. How did the kids come to try—”

Nevil made an angry gesture. “It was my fault. Damn. The Meeting Place has plenty of these Slow Zone games, but I figured the best of us would want to see how what we’ve learned in the Academy could be put to work here.”

“I think we both wanted that. I do need planning help.”

“Yeah, but I should have guessed that they’d zero in on the impractical. We both know how crazy it would be to get diverted into heavy bioscience at this stage.”

Ravna turned so that only Nevil would see her unhappiness. “I’ve tried to explain this to Ovin before.”

Nevil shook his head. “I know. Ovin … he can be a little unrealistic. He thinks this is as easy as improving harvest yields. You need to sit everybody down together and—”

“Right, my speech.” More and more, that looked essential. “And the sooner the better.” Get everybody together, explain the problem and ask for their support. “I could ask for formal procedures for handling medical emergencies, how we might use the remaining sleep caskets till we have proper medicine.”

“Yes!”

“I should go back, tell Ovin and the others and try to explain.” She looked over his shoulder at where the amateur Oobii managers were still clustered around their network simulation. Except for Timor, none of them were quite looking in her direction.

Nevil seemed to notice the indecision in her face. “If you want, I can explain to Ovin and the others. I mean, the general idea—and how you’re still working out the details.”

“Would you?” These all were Nevil’s friends. He understood them in a way that Ravna never could. “Oh, thank you, Nevil.”

He waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

Ravna stepped out of their bubble of audio privacy. As Nevil turned to go back to Ovin and the others, she gave them a little wave. Then she was off to the exit leading up the bridge. There was so much she had to get right for this speech, for making it something that everyone—including Woodcarver—could get behind.

•  •  •

A full tenday quickly passed. Outside, the snow now stayed on the ground, even on the streets of Hidden Island. There was more twilight and true night. The moon and the aurora were coming to dominate the sky.

Except for a trip with Scrupilo to Smeltertop and Cold Valley, Ravna spent most of her time indoors, on Oobii’s command deck. There was so much to do. Up north, the bottom of Cold Valley had been planed smooth. Scrupilo’s packs were nearly done with carving a thousand square meter design; two of Oobii’s micro lasers were already on site. Come the truly cold weather, they planned on fabbing their first hundred-micron-scale components … ten thousand adder circuits. Ta-dah! Really! It was a silly goal, but a major proof of principle. The previous winter they hadn’t quite reached that point when spring arrived.

Her work on the speech was coming along, hopefully a masterpiece of realistic optimism. Every day, Nevil came to her with way too many details of what they were doing with New Meeting Place. The speech and the New Meeting Place would work together. And she’d set the date for the speech. She was committed. It felt good!

There was only one full Executive Council meeting in that time; Woodcarver was in an ugly mood again. Scrupilo, too, was being a pain. He was the most politically ignorant fellow Ravna had ever met—an amazing thing considering his parentage. Even though he got most of Ravna’s attention and most of Oobii’s support, he was still complaining about her lack of attention for the Cold Valley fab. He was right—if you ignored the political necessity of assuring support in the future. Nevertheless, she gave Scrupilo extra time and attention, letting Nevil handle more of the event details.

There were other reasons for not having more Council meetings. Ravna had reviewed the early years of her Flenser surveillance; she was still certain the camera infestation had been accurate for the first few years. That and the patent absurdities of the most recent session made it very foolish to get paranoid about Flenser. And yet she was still a bit uncomfortable about seeing him at a Council meeting.

And finally, Pilgrim and Johanna were out of town, on what Ravna considered a dangerous and unnecessary adventure. The two had taken the agrav flier and were snooping around East Home, five thousand kilometers away. That was beyond direct radio range, but they’d reset one of Oobii’s few remaining commsets to transmit in the five-to-twenty-megahertz range. They splattered their radio emissions off the sky and let the planet’s ionosphere reflect them across the continent. On Starship Hill, Oobii was clever enough to pick out the signal even when the aurora hung its brightest curtains above the Domain—and to