The Children of the Sky (47 page)

On the second day, she sought out one of those temporary almost-packs that gathered near the booms and was tentatively pulling the sheets this way or that. Not all of these Tines were sparse-haired Tropicals. Some had deep fur pelts, scruffy and ragged and surely uncomfortable in the heat, but very Northern-looking.

“Hei, Johanna. Hei, hei.” A clot of five was all looking at her and the Samnorsk words were very clear. When Johanna sat down by them, the almost-pack surrounded her, the heads bobbing with friendly regard.

“We sailing north, I think,” it said. That might be nonsense blather, since actually they were sailing west, and the coast of the continent was just few thousand meters to the north. But if they sailed west far enough to round the Southwest Horn of the continent, then it would be north to the Domain. She took a closer look at the five heads. The nearest had a white star splash on the back of its head. It was hard to remember all the fragments she’d known over the years, but this one … she reached out her hand. “Cheepers?”

“Hei, some maybe, some,” it said. Wow. Cheepers would count as a failure by broodkenner standards, but he had survived his flight from Harmony’s Fragmentarium, and made it all the way to the Choir. Over the years, others had too, but there were still only hundreds spread through all the millions of the Choir. When Vendacious chased Johanna into the Choir, when the killing swarm knocked her down, the image and the strangeness of her must have spread at near-soundspeed across the city. Here and there, the sight had reached some few who remembered, and mercy percolated back. Just in time.

The almost-pack stayed with her a moment longer, then was joined by others and reassorted. Some of them wandered off to another mast while others merged with the larger mob that was tricking seabirds to come down for lunch.

By now all the Tines on her raft seemed to recognize her. She had no more aborted, hostile encounters. And yet, the mob did have moods. Five nights out to sea, there was a deadly riot. Johanna hunkered down, listened to mouth-screams of mortal pain. The next day, she saw dark stains smeared across timbers near the edge of the raft.
I hope they weren’t fighting over me
. Maybe not. Even milder fights were rare, but she eventually saw one or two in daylight, sub-mobs of Tines facing off. She couldn’t see any motive, nothing like food or sex—and there didn’t seem to be enduring fighter cliques. Singletons were scarcely smarter than dogs, but something like memes must battle around in this choir. After a while she learned to recognize the crowd’s most harmful moods and craziest rules. For instance, she always got in trouble if she tried to open any of the storage boxes that were stacked everywhere, highest at the middle of the raft. Maybe that reaction was some vagrant meme left over from the raft squatters; maybe it was something kinkier. The wooden sides of each box were marked with circular burn marks, a little like Northerner hex signs. For whatever reason, nobody messed with cargo.

Perforce, Johanna spent hours each day studying her mob. This wasn’t like the Fragmentarium; random sex and mindsound was perversity to coherent packs, and the broodkenners did their best to suppress it. Here, perversity was the name of the game. But these singletons rarely did really stupid things like pissing in the raft’s rain cistern. In fact, they had some sailor skills, and they were quite coordinated in their diving for fish. That last was good for Jo, though raw fish could not sustain her indefinitely.

Most coherent packs didn’t like to swim, couldn’t stand the way the water interfered with their mindsounds. The members of the mob were not so squeamish. In the water, they zoomed around like they were born of the sea. Parts of her crew were in the water almost all the time—except when something black-and-white and larger than any Tines swept through the area. The Children called those animals whales; they spooked the Tropicals as thoroughly as they did Northern packs.

The whales must have been loud and relatively stupid, because the Tines seemed to know when it was safe to go back in the water. By the fourth day, Johanna was swimming with the Tines. Over the next tenday, she visited all the other rafts. The mobs on each were similar to those on her own. In the end, she became familiar with all the “crews.”

On every raft, she eventually communicated the same question: “Where are we going?” The answers were mostly variations on “we go north,” “we go with you,” and “this big river is fun!”

She eventually returned to the first raft, partly because Cheepers was there, but partly because she had decided that this raft had been intended as the primary vessel of the fleet. It was the largest, certainly. It also had an open area near the masts: the space was bounded by drawered cabinets—
not
subject to the cargo taboo, though the drawers were mostly empty. If she hadn’t hijacked the fleet, perhaps these drawers would have held equipment for the proper crew.

The first couple of tendays were all cloudy and rainy, with open sea on one side, and coastal jungle on the other. They were going generally west and at a fair average speed. She did some arithmetic—not for the first time she thanked goodness that Ravna had forced them to learn that manual skill—and concluded that soon they would round the Southwest Horn. Truly, this fleet might be headed for the Domain.
Was I really that persuasive? Or was this flotilla supposed to go north, and I just forced a premature departure?

Johanna had a lot of time to think, perhaps more time than ever before in her life. Most of that time was useless circling; some of it might save her life.

Nevil had turned out to be evil beyond anyone’s imagination. She saw so much in a different light now that she understood that. Since well before he had betrayed Ravna, he had been spreading lies. She thought of all the times he had persuaded Pilgrim and herself to steer clear of the Tropics. For
years
they had searched for Tycoon, everywhere but where he was. Now, perhaps, Nevil had overreached himself. Woodcarver and surely Ravna had known of this flight to the Tropics. Not even Nevil’s marvelous persuasiveness could cover things up for long now.

The first time Johanna looped through that logic, her spirits had risen—for about three seconds, until the implications came crashing down upon her. Who
else
did Nevil murder the night he crashed Pilgrim and Johanna? If she ever got home, what allies might still live?

There will be allies. I must be smart enough to get home and find them.
So she spent a lot of time thinking about everything Nevil had ever said, assuming every word a lie. There was a world of consequences. Nevil said the orbiter’s vision was barely a horizon sensor, with only one-thousand-meter resolution. What if it was better? She remembered the orbiter; she and Jef were the only Children who had seen the inside of it. She remembered her mom saying that there was nothing useful left aboard. So Nevil’s claim had been plausible—but wouldn’t one-centimeter resolution be equally plausible? Unfortunately, just assuming Nevil lied about everything did not give her definite numbers!

The first time she’d run through this reasoning was only a day out to sea; up until then, there’d been very little clear sky, and
that
had been at night. She’d looked up into the rain and overcast and concluded that probably Nevil’s “horizon sensor” could not see through clouds—else she would not be around to think about the issue. And even in clear weather, the orbiter’s surveillance could not be much better than one-meter resolution and/or not effective at night.

Two tendays into the voyage, the sky was often clear, and stars were visible at night. The rafts were truly headed north; Johanna was all but certain that they had rounded the Horn. By day, she kept under the sails, or hunkered down in a little cubbyhole she’d made for herself in the jumble at the center of the raft. At night, she would carefully peek out. The orbiter was a bright star, always high in the southeastern sky, further east than it had ever been since Nevil took control.
How does he explain this to Woodcarver? Does he have to explain anything anymore? What service does this do Vendacious and Tycoon?
She had lots of such questions and no way to get answers. The good news was that if Nevil was searching for
her
, he was looking in the wrong place! She became a little less paranoid about exposure to the sky.

Perhaps another thirty days would bring the rafts to Woodcarver’s old capital. Then the life and death of Johanna and her friends might depend on how quickly she could discover just what was going on in the Domain.

For a while she stewed on possible scenarios. A few more days passed. There was only so much she could do with scenarios. She needed some clues about where this fleet had originally been headed. She needed to break into the cargo.

How could she persuade the mob to let her do that?

By now, Johanna had been all over the surface of all the rafts. Every one of them was Tropic chaos, and yet they were nothing like the wrecks she had seen in the Domain. Somebody coherent had suggested specific design tricks. The masts and spars and rigging were much like Woodcarvers’. The cargo boxes were regular and uniform, quite unlike everything she associated with a choir. Now that she’d had time to study them, she realized that the burn marks on the sides were a version of Tycoon’s Pack of Packs logo.

Those boxes aside, the mob was quite happy to have Jo around. She was often a real help, with her clever hands, and with her very sharp and durable knife. In many ways the mob was more fun than coherent packs. These creatures were all among themselves, playing and fighting like young children—leaving aside their occasional fits of madness and their rule about cargo tampering.

Sometimes, they would break apart in the middle of some serious job and start playing with the elastic balls that seemed to have no other function than mob amusement. (The balls floated in water, but every day a few more were lost overboard. They would not be an unending source of fun.)

Other times, especially at night, the Tines would gather in a mass on the highest part of the raft. Across the water, the same would happen on the other rafts. All together, they roared and hissed, and sometimes sang pieces of Straumer music overheard years ago in the Domain. At dawn, most would come down and fool around in quieter ways. Some would dribble off the edges of the raft to fish. Johanna had plenty of opportunity to try little experiments. She had almost ten years of experience with packs and singletons and pieces of packs—but that was under broodkenner rules, and Northern notions of acceptable behavior.

She’d found lots that was new and bizarre here. Choirs were almost as strange compared to coherent packs as the packs were, compared to humans. She found a shaded spot high on the raft. She could stand there and be seen by almost everyone on board. When she shouted to them, some heads would turn in her direction. The few who understood Samnorsk were enough so that
all
the mob had some idea of her meaning. Of course, this wasn’t a super-intelligence, but it was a different-intelligence. In some ways dumb as a dog, yet a choir could do local search-and-optimization better than any pack or natural human. She could ask it questions—“Where are the play balls?”—and within seconds, all the balls on the raft seemed to be bouncing in the air, even ones that she had carefully hidden the day before. She looked across the hundred meters of sea to the two nearest rafts. Yellow balls were bouncing into the air there, too!

Hmm.
Choirs could do miracles of local optimization, but they couldn’t see the big picture, they couldn’t see across the vastness of the search space to connect results. They were like a spreadthink toy without an aggregator. That limitation applied to everything from the space of ideas to the space of … fishing.

Once she had the idea, making it work took almost a tenday of preaching to the choir—and the choirs on the other rafts. Often, they didn’t want to play. Since the fleet had turned north, the sea and the air had gotten steadily colder, the storms deadlier. The water was too cold for even the Tines to comfortably fish. The mobs’ mood was grumpy and sullen. But day by day, she achieved more complex results. Finally there were temporary godsgifts who would climb the masts and shout out fragments of Interpack or Samnorsk about the schools of fish they were seeing. Eventually, the coordination included the part-time sail masters, and the fleet managed to catch enough fish with just a fraction of the swim time.

Credit assignment was a near-incomprehensible idea for a choir, but Johanna liked to think that the Tines trusted her more after this success. They certainly tried harder to understand what she asked of them—and were quicker to do what they thought she wanted. Maybe it was safe for her to break into Tycoon’s cargo boxes.

From furtive experiments, she had learned that the boxes were tough, not designed for easy in-and-out privileges. Her knife was not up to the job. Okay. But she’d found a steel prybar in one of those drawered cabinets by the masts. It looked a lot like the leveraging tools used by packs up north. Given the prybar and some time, she could break into a cargo box.

After a morning storm—the sort of meatgrinder that had killed several Tines before her riverboat sailors got serious about safety tiedowns—Johanna noticed that one of the cargo boxes had slipped partway off the central mound. As usual, the mob tried to prevent more slippage. As usual, the result was a mishmash of ropes, fastened with variously effective knots. She noticed a crack in the box’s wood panelling, black tar oozing out—waterproofing?

She watched the crowd swirl around the box, Tines bobbing and bouncing, somewhat more incompetent than usual. Another time, they might have noticed the crack, but not today. Johanna waited till the crowd drifted away, mostly to huddle together under a “stolen” sail on the lee side of the raft. The cold weather affected the Tropicals the most, but everybody was suffering.
Sorry guys. If I hadn’t persuaded you to hijack this fleet …

This side of the raft was about as Tines-free as it ever got; Johanna grabbed her prybar and scrambled across to the damaged cargo box. “Just doing repairs,” she said. Her words should be audible to everyone on the raft, and they might give her some protection via the Tines who understood Samnorsk. She slipped the prybar into the cracked panel—and hesitated an instant. The sound of breaking wood could bring all hell down her.