The Children of the Sky

should be down and—she heard faint sounds! The orbiter’s signal must be strong. The message was Tinish, a simple chord repeated again and again: “Answer if you hear.”

“It’s not dead,” Cheepers said helpfully.

“… Yes,” said Johanna, thinking fast. She noticed that the send button was in the off position. “But it’s dying, right?” she said.

Heads drooped, a wave of despondency that spread beyond her vision. “Maybe. We shout louder and louder, but it not hear.”

The trio thought a second more, maybe listening to advice from the larger group. Then it added, “Voice sound dead.”

Yeah, it wasn’t surprising the transmission sounded strange. No doubt it was an audio loop. Tines could repeat sounds with great fidelity, but doing so again and again bored them.

“We bring to you, right? You fix?”

Sure. Fixing it would amount to waiting for sunrise and then pressing the send button. Then her friends could chat with Vendacious and innocently report that Johanna would arrive in the Domain some tenday soon.

She looked around at Cheepers and all the rest. She had to lie to them. Closer to the Domain, this gadget might be very useful, but for now she should just disable the snout-friendly send button. That could be tricky. She had seen how this mob played with objects that interested them. They’d bounce the radio around, maybe even break it—but they’d also tweak and push at things in ways she hadn’t imagined. Watching the mob play with puzzles reminded Johanna of little Wenda Larsndot. That girl’s naive fumbling was a constant source of surprise. Once she’d even bypassed a cabinet lock to play inside the gear train of her parents’ loom; Wenda, Jr. was lucky she hadn’t killed herself. These Tines would eventually either break the radio or get it into send mode.

Johanna turned the box this way and that, pretending to inspect it. Finally she said, “It’s almost dead, but I can help it.” A happy movement swept across the Tines. “But it may take days.”

The Cheepers trio drooped, and as Jo’s meaning spread, wider distress was evident. But the choir trusted her now more than ever, and over the next few minutes the crowd dispersed. Johanna made a big deal of taking extra cloaks and making a nest for the sacred object. Then she wrapped her own cloaks around herself and the nest.

Cheepers and his trio were all that remained nearby. They looked at her hesitantly.

“I will care for the radio every minute,” Johanna promised.

They dithered a moment more, maybe wondering if they should break apart or stay the night with her. Then they bobbed their heads and turned to leave. Whew.

“We go,” said Cheepers and his friends. “Listen to the other radios.”

“What?”

“In boxes. Fours of fours of fours of radios.”

Chapter 24

Bili Yngva was the number two player in Nevil Storherte’s Disaster Study Group. Privately, Bili considered himself the brains of the operation and Nevil the smooth-talking mouth. Thus Bili was always amazed at how much scutwork he ended up with. For instance, somebody had to do maintenance aboard Oobii. The starship was the center of power on this world and the highest system technology for lightyears around. Lose control of Oobii and the DSG would fall in a matter of days. The traitors, the know- nothings, and the dog-lovers would take over. More likely, the local warlord would kill all the humans, dog-lovers or not. Woodcarver was a deadly threat even when she was at the mercy of Oobii.

Whoever did maintenance had to have admin authority over the starship. Very rightly, Nevil didn’t trust anyone but himself and Bili Yngva with that power. So, natch, Bili ended up here most nights, “master of the world.”

Bili switched from camera to camera, snooping around through places that Woodcarver and Scrupilo thought were their private territory. It might have been fun if it weren’t so tedious. Without a doubt, Oobii was the dumbest piece of automation Bili had ever encountered. In the High Beyond, there were ribosome plugins smarter than this starship. Sitting here at the local Pinnacle of Everything just reminded Bili of how low they were in the pits of hell. He could almost see why the dog-lovers had gone native. If you wanted to do anything with the Oobii, it had to be done manually. The ship couldn’t think tactically, much less do strategic planning. All that must be done by Nevil and— mostly—Bili. The starship was simply too dumb for a real genius like Gannon Jorkenrud to use. And if you let the ship putter forward on its own defaults, all sorts of terrible crap would start to happen.

This was where Bili really missed Ravna Bergsndot. Powers, what a slope-skulled Neanderthal that Sjandran was. Yes, she looked like a human, but just talk to her for a few minutes and you realized you were trying to make points with a monkey. On the other hand, her limitations had made her a perfect match for Oobii. Bili remembered the thousands of hours she had spent here, working out the tedious details that made this little settlement possible. Hell, it was what he was trying to adapt for his own project. It was a shame she’d been so bloody dangerous.

Bili pulled up the notes he had compiled for his Best Hope planning: they just sat there, drawing only the simplest conclusions from the latest spy camera surveillance. Both Johanna Olsndot and the pack Pilgrim were definitively out of the picture. That had weakened Woodcarver as much as the disappearance of the Bergsndot woman, but there were a lot of loose ends.

Gannon must be retrieved. Unfortunately, Eyes Above 2 was proving hellishly difficult to operate; after all, it was a machine from before the dawn of technology. For that matter, Oobii had lost track of Gannon’s expedition! Bili had shifted the orbiter some degrees eastwards, trying to get a better view of the search area. So far he had found nothing.

Nevil’s contacts with Woodcarver’s enemies claimed Ravna Bergsndot was dead, or soon would be. Okay, if that’s the way it had to be. But even with her gone, Woodcarver had managed to co-opt more of the Children. If they demanded another election and if Nevil couldn’t smooth-talk his way to another victory—well, then Nevil said (very privately, just to Bili) that maybe they should use Oobii against their own classmates. Nevil figured it would just be a few deaths, a temporary tyranny. Besides, he said, tyranny was the natural organizational form Down Here. Maybe so, but Nevil had gotten way too bloody-minded; now he’d upgraded the ship’s beam gun with an amplifier stage. We should be protecting humanity. We need everyone if we’re going to climb back to the Transcend. Bili was working on an alternative plan to cope with a Woodcarver attack, something that wouldn’t harm any more Children, whatever their loyalties—and would leave the Disaster Study Group in a position to counter-move at its leisure. He just had to model the thing clearly enough to convince Nevil.

Bili forced his mind to plod through the endless detail that was necessary to work with Oobii. How had humankind ever survived the dark ages of Slow Zone programming…?

When next he noticed the time, it was nearing morning. This was going to turn into an all-nighter. He must have been at it for another hour or so, when Oobii began acting strangely. That wasn’t unusual, of course. Any time you asked Oobii for something novel, however simple, you were also asking for new stupidity. At first, this latest weirdness just looked like more bugs: three million lines of intermediate code had just collapsed into a few squiggles of script that Bili didn’t recognize. The so-called “results window” started scrolling sentences in simple Samnorsk. At first he thought it was another of those infinitely useless stack tracebacks that happened every time the system claimed that Bili had made a mistake.

Something was flashing a friendly shade of green at him. It was a warning from the resource monitor. He’d set that up to watch for secret grabs by players such as the Bergsndot woman. With both her and Ristling gone, this would be somebody else messing around. Ovin Verring? Ovin was more and more a pain in the neck, but he wasn’t the kind who conspired. Wait. Resource use was, huh, over one hundred percent.