The Children of the Sky (4 page)

“Oh, Belle,” Timor said to himself. He moved to the south side of his rock, trying to get a better view. There! Gannon and the others had finally reached the water. He could see most of them now. There were also a couple of packs with them, but Gannon’s pals didn’t have much to do with Tines. These packs looked pretty uncomfortable, huddling close among themselves and complaining loudly enough that Timor could hear them from fifty meters way. The Children didn’t look comfortable either. Their pants were soaked; Øvin and the others were visibly shivering. Gannon had climbed onto a little terrace, was waving to the others to follow him.

A big part of the raft was barely ten meters from the kids. It bobbed out and in, sometimes getting so close to the terrace that Timor feared it would ram the Children. This piece of raft had remnants of sails flying from broken-looking masts. Timor hadn’t taken any sailing classes; those were only for the older kids, the ones who wanted to be explorers and diplomats. But these masts and sails weren’t the tidy, regular things he saw in the Hidden Island harbor or at Cliffside. Unless these parts were regenerating—and the Tines had no such technology—this raft system was totally out of control. It probably had been ever since it ran into some storm.

Belle continued to ignore everything except her barrel of treasure, but Gannon and the other kids were shouting to the mob on the raft. The two packs on the shore were shouting too. Timor couldn’t understand any of it, but the noise
from
the Tropicals was loud. It didn’t sound much like Interpack. Maybe it was some other Tinish language, or just frightened screeching.

Timor couldn’t imagine what the kids could do to help. He looked again in the direction of Cliffside harbor. Hei! Something was moving along the curve of rocky beach. It looked like four or five packs hauling carts. And way high above them—the antigravity skiff! It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a human design and that it constantly teetered like a falling leaf. It was a little bit of home.

The agrav descended along the cliffs, cautiously tipping around the updrafts. It was coming down well ahead of the approaching packs, but still short of Timor’s position. For a moment, Timor wondered why Pilgrim—the only possible pilot—hadn’t brought it closer. Then the skiff tipped over, scraping the rocks with its canopy. It flipped again and landed with a crash. It crashed a lot lately. Fortunately the hull was stronger than wood and harder than rock. The top hatch popped open and after a second a human head appeared. No surprise, it was Johanna Olsndot; she was almost always the passenger.

Timor turned back to give a shout to Gannon and the others. Help had arrived!

Gannon Jorkenrud was teetering near the edge of his rocky terrace. The big piece of raft had grounded just out of reach. Øvin Verring and some of the kids were hanging back, but Gannon and others were throwing things at the raft. They were shouting, or laughing, and throwing again and again.
They were throwing stones at the Tropicals.

Timor stood up and shouted, “Hei, you guys! Stop that!” No doubt his words were lost in the wind, but his windmilling arms caught their attention. Gannon gave him a wave, perhaps thinking Timor was warning of discovery. The stone throwers backed away from the edge of the water. Timor slipped on the rock, landing hard in one of the puddles that pocked the surface.

So he’d probably earned Gannon’s good will. That had been awfully important to him, but it seemed kind of ugly now.

The Year Two shipwreck was the first since the Children had come to Tines World. Johanna Olsndot was just sixteen, yet she managed to establish her Bad Girl reputation in the aftermath of the wreck—a remarkable achievement considering that other kids misbehaved for years without getting so labeled.

Pilgrim Wickllrrackscar had heard there was a shipwreck, and the two of them had flown down to help out. Certainly that was not Bad Girl behavior. They bounced to ground well ahead of Woodcarver’s shore patrol. Johanna was out the hatch and running toward the wreckage even before Pilgrim had the agrav locked down. Behind her, the flyer rose briefly back into the air, and fell again. She paid that scant attention. The Tropicals’ raft had already broken on the rocks.

She saw that other rescuers were already here, an unlikely crowd of Children led by Gannon Jorkenrud. And—well, by damn!—they were throwing rocks at the drowning Tines! Johanna skirted the boulders, splashing through the icy water of the Inner Straits, shouting and swearing at Gannon’s gang.

The group had already retreated from their position on the rocks. They were busy disappearing in the direction of the cliff path. All of them were younger than Johanna and none quite as tall. Besides, Johanna was the one with the reputation for temper and she was the only Child who had actually fought in the Battle on Starship Hill.

Johanna took one long look around the blocky talus, searching for any other wrongdoers. There, one more Child, very small. It was Timor Ristling, awkwardly scrambling down from a rock, helped by Belle Ornrikakihm. Now there was a sneaky pack of beasties. Then Timor and Belle were out of sight, too, and the thought flitted from her mind. Pilgrim had come down from the agrav. All five of him was trying to drag her out of the ankle-deep water.

“Hei, what’s the problem?” protested Johanna. “The water’s still enough.” It was bone-chilling cold, but here behind the rocks, the sea was tamed into a gently swirling pond.

Pilgrim led her along the gravel, a meter or so back from the water. “It’s not all that shallow. There are holes and dropoffs. You get confident, walk about, and things can get very bad, very fast.” For a death-defying pilgrim he could be a wuss. But to be honest … just four or five meters from where they were standing, there was already white foam spinning up from the water. Standing at the level of the sea, the surface of the water was almost indistinct, the churn of sea mist transforming the daylight into murk.

The shore patrol had arrived. The five packs were already working with ropes to slide the biggest parts of the raft away from the grinding rocks.

Out on the wreckage, dozens of Tines were perched on piles of junk. These were the first Tropicals Johanna had ever seen. They were every bit as strange as the locals claimed. The foreigners didn’t cluster into packs. They were like a mob of singletons, doing whatever they pleased. Some of them cooperated to pull on the ropes thrown to them; others cowered in terror. She looked across the misty water. Here and there, she saw a head, or a single Tine lying across a bit of broken timber. Dozens of the creatures had been swept overboard.

Johanna reached out to the nearest of Pilgrim. It was Scarbutt, still the largest of the pack. “Look there! Those ones in the water are going to drown! We should go after them first.”

Pilgrim gave a general nod of agreement. “Not sure that can be helped.”

“Hei, it sure as hell can be helped!” Johanna pointed at the coils of rescue rope that the shore patrol packs had brought. “Grab those ropes! Get the shore patrol to do the important stuff first!”

Pilgrim was normally a very forward fellow. Now he hung back for a second, then ran along behind the shore patrol packs, gobbling loudly. Even after three years of listening to Interpack, Johanna found the language mostly unintelligible. The words got stacked up in chords, some them too high pitched to hear. By the time you got the sounds separated out, you were trying to make sense of the next chord. Just now, Pilgrim was shouting some kind of demand. The sounds of “Woodcarver” popped up several times. Okay, so he was invoking higher authority.

Two of the shore patrol packs left their posts and helped Pilgrim drag unused loops of rope away from the rocks. More packs were running toward them from Cliffside harbor. These didn’t look like shore patrol. Most of them avoided Johanna and Pilgrim. Like the rest, they seemed mostly interested in the raft. Well, there were more lives at stake there, but the ones who needed immediate help were out
in
the water. In all, only three packs—counting Pilgrim—were now working to save them. Over and over again, the packs would whirl about, tossing floater-tipped ropes out into the sea. The struggling singletons leaped from the water, desperately reaching. They looked almost like seamals when they moved like that. In warmer, quieter water they would have been quite safe. Here, the rescue ropes were essential; when a singleton managed to snatch a throw, it was quickly dragged into a stretch of flat pebbly beach. Johanna and the others managed to save a dozen of the swimmers, but there had been at least thirty heads out there before. The others must have been lost to the cold or been swept further north.

Meantime, the rest of the packs had dragged in what remained of the raft. The Tropicals on board came streaming off as the shore patrol and local citizens climbed on the junk heaps and began rooting around. Johanna belatedly realized that the main purpose of the “rescue” was to get at the wreck’s cargo.

There were no more survivors visible in the straits. Except for Pilgrim, the packs who had been helping with the rescue tosses had joined the other salvage maniacs. Along the flat stretch of beach, the surviving Tropicals were clumped together in shivering groups. The smallest of those was at least twenty Tines. These weren’t packs; they were just singletons hunkered together for warmth.

Johanna walked to the edge of the crowd, listening for Interpack speech. There was nothing that she recognized. After all, there were no real packs here. She could feel an occasional buzzing sensation, though; these creatures were not silent in the range that the packs called mindsound—about forty to two hundred fifty kilohertz.

Pilgrim was pacing her progress, but staying fifteen meters or more away from the nearest of the Tropicals. “You’re not too popular right now,” he said.

“Me?” replied Johanna, keeping her eyes on the strange mob. Scarcely any of them had clothing, but their pelts were just as mangy as the stories had claimed. Some of the creatures were almost hairless except down near their paws. “We saved these fellows.”

“Oh, they aren’t the ones you’re unpopular with,” said Pilgrim. Johanna drifted a little nearer the mob. Now there were dozens of heads following her, jaws snapping nervously. Pilgrim continued, “Hei, I didn’t say the Tropicals like you either! I’ll wager that none of them realize you helped save them.”

Necks lunged in her direction, and one or two of the critters tumbled down from atop the others. For a moment, she thought this was an attack, but when the Tines reached the ground, they just looked startled. Johanna backed away a step or two. “Yes, I see what you mean. These are like battle fragments. They’re scared and mindless.” And they could go into attack mode if something spooked them.

“That’s about right,” said Pilgrim. “But keep in mind that these fellows are not the remains of packs. Most likely they have never been part of a coherent pack. Their mindsound is just a pointless choir.”

Johanna continued along the edge of the mob. There was a certain distance the crowd seemed comfortable with. If she got inside that, they would begin to come at her. Pilgrim was right. These weren’t like war casualties. Battle fragments she had known longed to be part of coherent packs. They would react with friendliness toward Pilgrim, trying to entice him close. If they had known humans before they were damaged, they would be quite friendly to her. “So what’s going to happen to them?” she said.

“Ah well, that’s why you’re a bit unpopular with the shore patrol. You know we get a shipwreck like this every few years. The cargo is mostly junk, not the sort of things you’d find if serious trade were intended.”

Johanna looked across the misty beach. There really weren’t enough shore patrol packs to contain the rescuees. The Tropicals wobbled around weakly and most seemed intimidated by the coherent packs, but there was a steady trickle of mangy seafarers who took advantage of the gaps in the shore patrol cordon and ran off along the beach. When a pack pursued,
then
there was a concerted rush by five or ten of the other refugees. Not everyone could be corralled and brought back. She looked at Pilgrim, “So the patrol would prefer that more of them had drowned?”

Pilgrim cocked a couple of heads at Johanna. “Just so.” He might be consort to a Queen of the Realm, but he was not the least bit diplomatic. “Woodcarver has enough trouble with local fragments. These will just be trouble.”

Inside herself, Johanna felt something colder than the water. The packs’ treatment of fragments was her most unfavorite thing about Tines World. “So what happens to them, then? If anyone tries to force them back into the sea—” Her voice rose, along with her temper. Ravna Bergsndot would not put up with that, Johanna was sure. Not if Johanna got to her in time. She turned and began walking quickly back to the agrav flier.

All of Pilgrim turned about and trotted along beside her. “No, don’t worry about that happening. In fact, Woodcarver has a longstanding decree that any survivors be allowed the run of Cliffside village. These patrol packs are waiting for reinforcements, to chivvy the mob into town.”

About a third of the seafarers had already disappeared, trotting off as singletons and duos. They might do better than the fragments Johanna was used to. Frags of coherent packs were generally anxious mental cripples; many starved to death even if they were basically healthy. Elderly singletons, the castoffs, lasted only a short time. Johanna didn’t slow down. An idea was percolating up.…

“You’re planning something crazy, aren’t you?” said Pilgrim. Sometimes he claimed he stayed with her because in a year she did as many weird things as he would see in ten anywhere else. Pilgrim really was a pilgrim, so that was an extreme claim indeed. His memories went back centuries, hazing off into unreliable history and myth. Few packs had traveled their world so much, or seen so much. The price of the adventuring was that Pilgrim was more a surviving point of view than an enduring mind. It was Johanna’s great good fortune that that point of view was currently embodied in someone whose attitudes were so basically decent. Of all the Tines in the world, Pilgrim and Scriber had been the first she’d known. That bit of luck had saved her. Ultimately, it had saved all the remaining Children.