The Children of the Sky

Ravna nodded back, and tried to keep a smile pasted on her face. She was beginning to guess where all this was going. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Nevil was drifting around the outer edge of the group in Ravna’s direction. Help!

Her smile must have been encouraging, for Øvin continued with his explanation: “This is really just a test case for a much larger class of problems—namely medicine in general. If we can learn enough of Oobii’s programming interface, we can get the ship to generate pathologies on the motor stability region and compare them with the symptoms it perceives in—”

“In me!” said Timor. The boy had settled down on the floor when Øvin began his demo, but now he struggled up to his knees, making sure that Ravna would notice. “They’re going to cure what’s wrong in me.”

Øvin glanced down at the boy. “We’re going to try, Timor. Everything’s a crap shoot Down Here.”

“I know.” Timor sounded irritated by the obvious caveat.

After a second, Øvin looked back at Ravna. “Anyway, if—I mean, as soon as—we do all that, we’ll have Oobii start generating treatment targets and running experiments.” Suddenly, Øvin was more hesitant. He was looking at Ravna for some kind of approval. “We think we have something, Ravna. What do you think?”

Ravna stared at the network sim for a moment. That was so much easier than looking into Øvin Verring’s eyes. These kids were very bright, the children of geniuses. The oldest ones, before their flight from the High Lab, had had a good Straumer education. Down Here? Down Here, the kids were relatively uneducated. Down Here, experiments didn’t run themselves, there were intermediate steps required, infrastructure to create.

She looked back at Øvin Verring, saw that he saw through her attempt at mellowness. Her smile cracked apart, and she said, “Øvin. How can I say this? You—”

And then rescue miraculously arrived. Nevil. He patted Øvin on the shoulder and smiled comfortingly in Ravna’s direction. “This will be okay, guys. Let me talk to Ravna.”

The wannabe medical researchers seemed relieved—though not nearly as relieved as Ravna felt.

Ravna gave them all her best smile. “I’ll get back to you.” She looked down. “I promise, Timor.”

“I know you will,” said Timor.

Then she let Nevil spirit her away. Thank goodness. He must have some control on the New Meeting Place environment, since they hadn’t gone five meters before she felt the sound quality shift and knew that even standing here in the middle of the floor, it was just the two of them who could hear each other. “Thanks, Nevil. That was awful. How did the kids come to try—”

Nevil made an angry gesture. “It was my fault. Damn. The Meeting Place has plenty of these Slow Zone games, but I figured the best of us would want to see how what we’ve learned in the Academy could be put to work here.”

“I think we both wanted that. I do need planning help.”

“Yeah, but I should have guessed that they’d zero in on the impractical. We both know how crazy it would be to get diverted into heavy bioscience at this stage.”

Ravna turned so that only Nevil would see her unhappiness. “I’ve tried to explain this to Øvin before.”

Nevil shook his head. “I know. Øvin … he can be a little unrealistic. He thinks this is as easy as improving harvest yields. You need to sit everybody down together and—”

“Right, my speech.” More and more, that looked essential. “And the sooner the better.” Get everybody together, explain the problem and ask for their support. “I could ask for formal procedures for handling medical emergencies, how we might use the remaining sleep caskets till we have proper medicine.”

“Yes!”

“I should go back, tell Øvin and the others and try to explain.” She looked over his shoulder at where the amateur Oobii managers were still clustered around their network simulation. Except for Timor, none of them were quite looking in her direction.

Nevil seemed to notice the indecision in her face. “If you want, I can explain to Øvin and the others. I mean, the general idea—and how you’re still working out the details.”

“Would you?” These all were Nevil’s friends. He understood them in a way that Ravna never could. “Oh, thank you, Nevil.”

He waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

Ravna stepped out of their bubble of audio privacy. As Nevil turned to go back to Øvin and the others, she gave them a little wave. Then she was off to the exit leading up the bridge. There was so much she had to get right for this speech, for making it something that everyone—including Woodcarver—could get behind.

•  •  •

A full tenday quickly passed. Outside, the snow now stayed on the ground, even on the streets of Hidden Island. There was more twilight and true night. The moon and the aurora were coming to dominate the sky.