The Children of the Sky

For a moment Bili couldn’t make sense of the representation—and of course Oobii made no effort to enlighten him. Now usage was at 100% times ten thousand! Maybe Oobii had found a new way to go wrong. Over the next five seconds, usage increased to 100% times seven million. And then he noticed that the user was listed as … Bili Yngva.

Somebody is jerking me around. And this was not some school-chum jape. He searched wildly for options. Could he shut this down? That green resource alarm—he’d never seen that before. He queried help, and for once got a relevant reply:

The resource monitor notes that the ship has upgraded to standard processing components. The ship is now handling your planning job in state—0 which is only ten million times greater than the capacity of the Slow Zone emergency processors. For more reasonable performance, you should consider asking for non-deterministic extensions.

“Holy shit,” he said softly. This could mean only one thing. The great darkness had ebbed; Tines World was no longer in the Slow Zone. The walls around him shimmered, jobs wakening. Some of these tasks must be ten years old, suspended when Pham Nuwen had done his killing. Most of the jobs flickered into termination, the ship recognizing that they were no longer relevant. A few jobs grew across Bili’s vision. His painfully constructed planning program was being rewritten, being merged with the Oobii’s tech archive, which was now running with something like internal motivation.

Bili watched the process for several seconds, shocked into immobility. The displays were mostly unintelligible, but he recognized the inference patterns. This was mid-Beyond automation, perhaps the best Oobii had ever been capable of. Bili was surprised to feel tears come to his eyes, that something so simple-minded could bring such a surge of joy. I can work with this. He waved for an interface, but felt no increased understanding. Shit. Maybe all the salvage wrecking they’d done on Oobii had destroyed the capability. Or maybe the ship had never been that capable. He leaned forward, watching the patterns. It didn’t really matter. He could see that the basic patterns were Beyonder. Reality graphics should be possible, even if they had to bootstrap from natural matter. He looked from process to process, probing with questions, thinking about the answers and the consequences. Most of the thinking still had to go on inside his head, but after ten years he’d gotten pretty good at that.

Then he hit the most important insight of all. And apparently it was a gift from Ravna Bergsndot: a set of simple windows that pointed him where he should have been looking all along. The bitch had known something like this could happen! She’d set the Oobii to run a zonograph, to monitor the relevant physical laws. But what had just happened was orders of magnitude greater than that program’s detection threshold. It was so great that Oobii had restarted its standard automation.

He pushed the other projects aside, waved for more detail and explanation.… Okay, Bergsndot had used a seismic metaphor for shifts in the zone boundary. Bili’s lips twisted into a smile. That made sense, depending on your model’s probability distribution. In this case, hah! Maybe the better metaphor was the ending of sleep state. The shift had begun one hundred seconds earlier, but had risen so fast that Oobii could go to its standard mode automation less than ten seconds later. Improvement had leveled off over the next minute, but now the physics was mid-Beyonder. A reasonable starship—even the Out of Band II, if they hadn’t gutted it—could fly at dozens of lightyears per hour. For this region of space, that was better than status quo ante Pham Nuwen. And that meant …

Rescue was not centuries in the future, the remote promise that Bergsndot’s twisted mind considered a threat. She had always claimed that the rescue fleet was just thirty lightyears away. Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher?

Bili turned the zonograph program this way and that, trying to see the state of near interstellar space. Oobii was smart enough that it should be helping. Oh. Explanations hung all around his various demands. The only accessible zone probes were onboard. If the ship had slightly more distant stations— even a lightyear away—a reasonable extrapolation might be made.

Bili waved down the objections and forced an extrapolation, presumably based on historical gradients. The result came back in the pale violet of extreme uncertainty. Bili was warned. Nevertheless … the windows showed a fleet of dozens of starships, translating under ultradrive. The rescuers were thirty lightyears zone-higher, and the violet estimate showed a pseudo-velocity of fifty lightyears per hour. Rescue was not centuries or even years away. It would arrive within the hour.

The hard numbers from the ship’s instruments showed that the Zone improvements had leveled off. It didn’t matter! After today, this exile would just be a very bad memory. With working ultradrive, the rescuers could take them higher and higher, finally reaching the Transcend. There, borkners like Gannon and Jefri (at least if this world had not completely destroyed Jef’s potential) could rebuild the High Lab, complete what their parents and all of Straumli Realm had dreamed of.

In less than an hour they could say good-bye to this soul-sucking trap.

Huh? In the violet display, the estimated fleet velocity had fallen to thirty lightyears per hour. Yeah, but that was vaporous conjecture. Oobii’s zonograph still showed—Bili’s eyes flickered around the displays; data fusion was next to impossible Down Here. The ship’s zonograph showed local conditions degrading. Maximum possible ultradrive velocity right here, right now, was fifteen lightyears per hour. Twelve.

So what does it matter? Rescue might be an hour away, or a day. Or a tenday. But a sickening chill spread up from Bili’s gut. Maybe Pham Nuwen’s Zone Shift was not a diseased sleep. Maybe Ravna Bergsndot had had the right metaphor.

Conditions still degrading. The hard local estimate: five lightyears per … year. No, no, no! The violet fleet was just twenty lightyears out, broadjump distance if you were at the Top of the Beyond.

Two lightyears per year. Operation alarms were flickering all over. Oobii couldn’t maintain standard computation in this deadly environment. Bili waved for it to try.

Afterwards, Bili realized that it was unwise to make demands of Beyonder automation when it was near its operational limits; you might win the argument. The zonograph estimate hit 1.0 lightyears per year—and all around him the displays reformatted, or simply crashed. The ship’s lighting brightened, but Bili knew that it and he and all of Tines World had fallen back into stygian darkness.

He sat in the programmatic ruins for a moment, too shocked to move. For just—193 seconds according to a surviving clock display—salvation had been at hand. Now it was jerked away. He just wanted to start bawling. Instead he forced himself to survey the damage. During those three minutes, the Oobii had probably done more solid computation than it had in the last ten years. There were the results of his planning project—now reinforced with technical details for using their surviving equipment, and political options for Nevil. There was the record of the Zone surge itself. Maybe they could learn from that what more progress might be expected. There was … there was ongoing data loss! The ship had run on its standard processors right till the Slow Zone crashed down on it. The transition to backup computation had been successful, but translating data to passive/dumb formats had been interrupted. Absent intelligent refresh, the physical memories themselves were fading. What was left, even the passives, needed manual backup immediately.

Bili hunched forward, waving commands. Don’t panic. He had lots of practice getting things done in this environment. Don’t skip any steps, don’t make any mistakes. Don’t panic. If Nevil and Ovin or Merto had been online, all working together, they could have saved almost everything. Yeah, but what did the dogs say? “If wishes were froghens we’d never go hungry?” The dogs knew the limits of their world, even though they didn’t recognize them as limits.

Bili managed to capture almost all the data from his planning program. From the headers, it looked like good stuff, insight that would help him persuade Nevil that Best Hope was doable. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell how much detail had survived reformatting. And partway through his rescue of the Best Hope data, a burning smell rose from the zonograph displays, the classic diagnostic for lost data. Damn it, I can’t be everywhere at once! He riffled through Bergsndot’s notes. The program itself was a simple sequential, something that would have made sense to the earliest humans. That kind of recipe did not easily get