Vernor Vinge: The Children of the Sky

Ravna Bergsndot was thousands of lightyears from reliable advice. Oobii and this strange Lander were all she had. She remembered pounding on the data for almost an hour, combining Timor’s casket records with Oobii ’s latest medical tests, and finally understanding what had gone wrong. No one and no machine Down Here could have known that ahead of time. In cold, cruel truth, Timor had turned out to be a very valuable … experiment.

When she’d finally realized that, Ravna had put her head in her arms, too tired to look for any more technical fixes and raging against the possibility that she had become a player with other people’s lives.

So then I just fell asleep and had the nightmare? She stared at the greenish bulkheads. She had been very tired, and totally beaten down. Ravna sighed. She often had nightmares about the Blighter fleet, though this was the most bizarre yet. A tip of the hat then to the subconscious mind; it had dug up something that could distract her from Timor, if only briefly.

She disconnected her tiara interface from the Lander, and climbed down from the freight cabin. Three years ago, when Sjana and Arne Olsndot had brought the Children here, this ground had been open meadow. She stood for a moment by the spidery pylons, looking round the cool, dry catacombs. Imagine a spacecraft with a castle built over it. Only in the Slow Zone.

She would have to come back here again and again until all the Children were revived—but she was grateful to be done with this place for today. Up two flights of stairs and she would be in the castle yard, in the summer sunlight. There would be the Children just leaving class, playing with each other and with their Tinish friends. If she stayed to chat, she would likely be in the new castle all afternoon. It might be the sunny evening before she had to be back in her cabin aboard the Oobii . As she started up the steps, she could imagine feeling light-hearted. She would take some time off, just to play with the Children. Somehow she would make things right for Timor.

She was still in the dark of the stairs when she remembered something else about the dream. She paused, steadying herself with a hand against the cool stonework. The mind in the fleet had said, “Rules change.” Yes, if the Zone shifted and faster-than-light transport became possible again—well, the Blight could arrive very soon indeed. It was a possibility she obsessed upon both awake and in her dreams. She had zonographs aboard the Oobii that monitored the relevant physical laws, had done so since the Battle on Starship Hill. There had never been an alarm.

Still leaning against the wall, Ravna queried Out of Band II , requesting a window on the zonograph. The graphic came up, a stupidly self-formatted plot. Yes, there was the usual noise. Then she noticed the scaling. That couldn’t be right! She slewed her gaze back five hundred seconds, and saw that the trace had spiked. For almost ten milliseconds, Zone physics had shot above the probe’s calibration, so high it might have been Transcendent. Then she noticed the pulsing red border. It was the Zone alarm she had so carefully set—the alarm she should have received at the instant of the spike. Impossible, impossible. This had to be some sort of screw-up. She rummaged in diagnostics, horror rising. Yes, there had been a screw-up: she had only enabled the Zone alarm for when she was local to Oobii . Why hadn’t ship logic caught that stupid error? She knew the answer to that question. She’d explained it to the Children dozens of time. The kids could not understand that when you scrape your knee, it might be your own fault. We’re living in the Slow Zone. We have virtually no automation, and what we have is painfully simple, devoid of common sense. Down Here, if you wanted something done right, you had to provide the good judgment yourself. The kids didn’t like that answer. Where they came from, it was a far more alien idea than it was even for Ravna Bergsndot.

She glared at the displays that hung in the dark all around her. This was clearly a Zone alarm, but it could be a false alarm. It had to be! The spike had been so brief, less than ten probe samples. An instrumental transient. Yes. She turned and continued up the stairs, still searching back and forth along the timeline’s trace, looking for evidence of an innocuous explanation. There were a number of system diagnostics she could run.

She thought about this for five more steps, making a turn from one flight of stairs to the next. Up ahead she could see a square of daylight.

Since the Battle on Starship Hill, the Zone physics had been as solid as a mountain’s roots … but that was a comparison with fatal consequence. Earthquakes happen. Foreshocks happened. What she was seeing could be a tiny, sudden slip in the foundation of the local universe. She looked at the times on the Zone trace. The spike occurred about when she took her odd little nap down in the Children’s Lander. So then. For almost one hundredth of a second, maybe c had not been the ultimate speed, and the Lander could have known the current state of the Blighter fleet. For almost one hundredth of a second, Countermeasure could have functioned.

And her dream was simply news .

Even so, she still didn’t know how much time they had left. It might be just hours. But if it were years, or decades—then every moment must be made to count. Somehow.

“Hei, Ravna!” came a childish shout from across the yard, in the direction of the school. They would be around her in a moment.

I can’t do this. She half turned, retreating toward the stairway. Nightmares can be the truth. It wasn’t just villains who had to make the hard decisions.

Chapter 02

There was no school on the last day of every ten. Sometimes that made the end of the tenday terribly boring to Timor Ristling. Other times, Belle would show him some dank corner of the New Castle, or Ravna Bergsndot would take him across the straits to Hidden Island.

Today was turning into the most entertaining kind of day, one where the other kids let him come along on their projects.

“You’ll be the lookout, Timor,” Gannon had told him. Gannon Jorkenrud had organized the expedition, and specifically invited Timor, even though it meant they had to carry him part of the way down from Starship Hill. Gannon and the others even helped Timor across the boulder field at the base of the cliffs. Sea birds skirled all about.

The kids were right down on the seashore now, the cliffs towering behind them. It was strange to be at eye level with the water. The froth of the waves seemed to merge with the sea haze above, misting over the buildings of Hidden Island just a couple of kilometers away. Here you could see what was beneath the cliffs. You could see how “low tide” had pulled back the water, leaving this field of slick rocks, a jumble of giants. There wasn’t a single dry place; all this was underwater when the tide was highest.

Belle pattered along beside and around Timor, grumbling as she often did. “This dirty water is going to smudge my pelts.” Belle was all white. This was quite rare among Tines—though one of her, the old male, might have had black patches when he was younger.

“You didn’t have to come, crapheads,” said Gannon. He and Belle didn’t get along.

Belle gave a hiss and a laugh at the same time. “Try and keep me away. I haven’t been to a good shipwreck in years. How did you figure it was going to come ashore here?”

“We’re humans. We’ve got our ways.”

Some of the other kids laughed. They were strung out, walking down a narrow path between the rocks. One of them said, “Actually, Nevil saw it on Oobii ’s surveillance monitors when he was studying shipside. Ravna and the packs know about the wreck, but they haven’t seen the latest updates.”