The Children of the Sky

Zek shook himself and gobbled briefly. Then in Samnorsk: “I mostly survive, not the best talkers. No thanks to you murderous humans. If it had been Johanna—”

Zek was interrupting himself even before he finished, Tinish chords overlaying the Samnorsk. Poor Zek twisted this way and that. It seemed to Ravna as though he was shrinking from invisible blows. After a moment, Zek recovered and spoke with Vendacious’ voice. “Sorry, we hit a spot of turbulence here. My lord, I have various suggestions about how we might accommodate late arrival—but if you intend your two humans to be present at the landing, I suggest we carry on this conversation in private.”

There was a back-and-forth between Tycoon and the remote advisors, entirely in Interpack. At least four of Tycoon was looking out at the sunset colors that were deepening across the icefields. He gobbled something at the gunpack and Ravna and Jefri were led down the twisty stairs.

As they crawled along the main corridor toward their cell, Jefri said, “I wish we were even half as clever as Vendacious says.”

•  •  •

By now, Johanna had been at sea for six tendays. Since the crates of radios had revealed themselves, it had been a never-ending struggle to keep the mob away from the devices. Thank goodness, only this primary raft carried radios. (But why so many? She still hadn’t figured that out.) She’d persuaded her people to repair the crack in the crate that had split open, so the only loose radio was the one that had fallen out of it, the one she still “protected.”

You’d think that fooling a choir would either be impossible or trivial. In fact, Cheepers’ various associations truly did believe her every word. They had defended her again and again from the complaints and the little nips, and in one case from a screeching crowd of the incredulous.

For a time, Johanna had been tempted to throw her own radio overboard: just wait for a stormy night and hope that no Tines heard her commit the act. But then she noticed the occasional Tines sniffing around the radio crates. Such random contrarians were a major source of choir creativity. When their foolishness didn’t kill them, these fragments discovered things no one else had imagined. Even if the mob stayed generally loyal, eventually someone would break into those crates—and the fleet’s radio silence would fail in a big way.

So she might as well hold on to her own radio. It took some nights of work, messing around under the blankets, but she’d managed to get the gadget open and remove the spring on the send switch. She was a little unclear about mechanical springs, what would make them push or pull when you pushed and pulled on them—so she took out all the little moving parts. She bet herself that even the mob’s distributed intellect couldn’t make that button work.

After that, she put the radio out in the sun. The mob immediately swirled around her, amazingly quiet. They were listening intently as only Tines can. After a time, they relaxed a bit. Cheepers reported to her, “It sounds like this.” He played back his amplified interpretation, a clicking and stuttering that sounded like random impulsive noise to Johanna. Maybe Nevil had given up on his robot query—but then loud noises came from the box, interrupting Cheepers’ rendition. It was that Tinish voice, asking for a reply again and again. The mob went wild trying to answer—with no success, of course.

The transmission ceased after about five minutes. An hour later, the voice loop ran again, and again an hour after that. Vendacious and Nevil were just poking them desultorily on the off chance that comms could be established. Johanna smiled to herself. That wasn’t going to happen, but she would find some use for this gadget.

•  •  •

They were past Woodcarver’s old downcoast capital. To the east, Johanna recognized the cliffs and glacier-reamed valleys of the Domain, of … of home. The west was no longer open sea. The islands of the North began as little mounds. Gradually, she saw more and more of them, half-drowned mountains that turned this part of the sea into a network of straits. Very soon they would run into Hidden Island or Cliffside and things would get really exciting. One way or another she wouldn’t have to drink fetid water and choose between smoked meat and raw fish anymore.

One afternoon, multiboats flying Domain colors came into view. The vessels cruised along on the mainland side of her path, but at a distance, never coming close. When Johanna first saw them, she almost raced to the top of her raft to wave and shout. Surely Nevil and Vendacious hadn’t taken over Woodcarver’s Domain? Surely?

In fact, she didn’t know, so she hunkered down, out of sight.

The next day, her radio was still receiving hourly pokes from Nevil or Vendacious, but now there were more interesting sounds. Many of these were lost in noise, but Cheepers and his friends repeated them to her clearly. They were human voices; they belonged to Nevil’s special pals.