The Children of the Sky

agricultural research she had been assigned.

Then she fed her template into a syllabus generator, setting its priority very low. That was probably over- cautious, but if she pushed the system too hard, everything else would drag—one of those “external effects” she must be careful to avoid. So this dredging operation would take a while. She sat back for a minute or two, content to watch the process. Okay, that was not a good use of her time. She should be down in the New Meeting Place, talking to the Children, fighting fire with fire, innocently undermining Nevil’s position.

Ravna waved away the displays and left her “private office.” It was even bigger than Nevil’s, but there was a large Keep Out sign splashed helpfully across the door. Of course, Nevil didn’t have such a sign. On the other hand—as Pilgrim had pointed out—his office probably had a back entrance.

Jo and Pilgrim seemed to be enjoying every hour of this campaign. Ravna was not so naturally talented, but she was very happy that the two were now living at her town house. Thanks to Nevil’s “generosity,” there was more than enough room. Johanna had chortled at that irony.

Ravna walked out of the maze of office corridors and down the ad hoc wood stairs to the main floor, where Nevil had left the game stations. Nowadays, this area of the New Meeting Place was almost deserted. The remaining game addicts consisted of a few packs, and of course Timor and Belle. Strange. Timor wasn’t at his usual station. She walked around the floor watching the games. Normally, when Timor wandered, it was to give long-winded advice to any game-player who did not shoo him away.

She turned, headed for the ramp to midlevel, where most of the programming stations were located. Those had gained popularity as the limitations of the games had become apparent. In earlier years, the kids had turned up their noses at Slow Zone programming. Now their vision of medical necessity had changed that. It made perfect sense for Children and Tines to gather and work with Oobii in a nearly civilized venue. Some of that was gaming, but most was research that forced them to deal with the available automation. I should have created this place years ago. But at the time, she had been too concerned with the colony’s self-sufficiency and establishing the Children’s Academy. She would have seen the New Meeting Place as frivolous.

There were plenty of human-sounding voices up ahead, including the polite insistence of Timor Ristling: “But I just want to ask you—”

“Not now, I’m trying to set up the day’s projects.” That sounded like Ovin Verring.

The top of the ramp was dark, just another place where the makeshift construction interfered with Nevil’s lighting. Ravna hesitated there, watching the scene. Ovin was facing five or six of the oldest kids, the most intense of the medical researcher wannabes, essentially a group Nevil had whipped up for his coup.

Ovin was talking to the group even as he fiddled with the interface of the big display, which at the moment was just showing idle status. “What I wanted to show you all was the tutorial I found yesterday. We not only have to—”

“Ovin, I just want to ask you if—” interrupted Timor.

Ovin waved the boy away. “Not now, Timor.” He continued to work at the interface. He was speaking again to the group: “Oobii’s automation is pitiful, but the tutorial I found claims to show how we can solve simple—”

Timor again said, “Ovin, I was wondering, could I—”

That got Timor a moment of Ovin’s full attention. He glared at the boy and Ravna prepared to rush in. She didn’t think Ovin Verring had ever been one of the kids who had been mean to Timor—but she was damned if he was going to start now.

“Look Timor! Give me a minute, huh? I just want to get this display to show folks the tutorial. Then you can ask me whatever you want.”

Timor glanced at the display pedestal, as if noticing it for the first time. “Oh that. You need to—” He reached out, his fingers flicking across the maintenance interface, below where Ovin had been working. “It’s just partly broken,” he said, as if that was an explanation.

Ovin Verring stepped back as the expanding display image formed into what Ravna recognized as a programmer primer environment. Huh, Ovin had found one she hadn’t seen, “Algorithms for Bottom Feeders.” His audience was already sucking in notes and playing with the first lesson, “Constrained Search.”

Ovin stared at it for second. “Oh! Yes, that’s what—” he glanced down at Timor. “Okay then. What did you want to ask me?”

“Is it okay if I use that workstation? I mean, just for today.” The boy waved across the room to the station that Belle Ornrikak was already lolling around, staking out the territory for Timor. It was the only station without an obvious user in residence.

Verring hesitated. “Um, sure. Go ahead.”

Timor gave a whoop and hustled across the room to Belle.

Ravna let out her breath and strolled in as if she had just come up the ramp.

“Oh, hei, Ravna.” Ovin came around his audience—which was now thoroughly distracted by the tutorial—and walked over to her. He made a small gesture in the direction of Timor and Belle. “Now that I seem to have lost my workstation … could we talk for a minute?”

“Sure.”

Since Ravna’s fall, Ovin had actually been friendly. Lately, most of the medical wannabes had seemed friendlier.

“As—as a kind of starter project, we want to refurbish more of the coldsleep containers. But the in-casket manuals are useless, and so far we can’t get Oobii to refine us a wish list—even though coldsleep is an ancient, simple technology.”

Ah. This sounded like something from her speech—the part she hadn’t gotten to say. So Nevil had put him up to this? She looked over at Ovin’s team, all working hard to understand the tutorial.

Okay. “You’re right about the manuals, Ovin. Down Here, they can’t do repairs. On the other hand, Oobii does have an enormous amount of information about coldsleep implementations. If you could devise a search list that uses what you see in the casket manuals and properly feed that to Oobii.…”

“You’d really help? Even after…?”

Ravna nodded. “One important decision you have to make is what level of medical risk you will tolerate.” Her gaze drifted almost involuntarily to where Timor sat on the other side of the room.

“Oh.” Then Ovin seemed to follow her gaze. “Oh!… I remember risk was one of the reasons you wanted to postpone this kind of work.” He watched Timor Ristling for a few moments. Timor had set his workstation display to large, perhaps so it would be easier for Belle to follow what he was doing. That was wasted effort, since the foursome had curled up on the floor around his chair, all eyes closed. At the moment, Timor was oblivious to this. He pounded away enthusiastically. This was no ordinary game. It looked … much simpler. Ravna could see simple dotmarkers making rows across a plane. Below that was what looked like a synthetic machine language, three- letter abbreviations and numerical operands.

“It looks like he’s written a binary counter,” Ovin said softly. “That’s so sad. The human mind should not be wasted on tasks so trivial.” Ovin glanced back at Ravna and seemed to think better of making a further comment.

She smiled. “You feel sorry for me, too, hei Ovin?”

“Actually, I was feeling sorry for me and…” he waved at his friends struggling away at the bottom feeder tutorial. “It’s such a waste.”

•  •  •

Even without the daylight, the northern winter still had its time markers. There was bright twilight in the hours near noon. On clear nights, away from the twilight, the aurora swept from horizon to horizon, shifting minute by minute. The moon bobbed along the horizon in its tenday cycle. Winter storms came every third or fourth day, some lasting hours, some continuing on with no letup through to the next storm front. Many buildings were reduced to bizarre humps beneath the snow, the smoothness broken only by streets that absolutely must be kept clear.

The lowest parts of Oobii were lapped by the snow. The rest, the arching drive fronds, the curves of the hull—all that glittered green in whatever light there was. The area around the main