The Children of the Sky (69 page)

She and Jefri stood, but remained near the pool. Tycoon’s wagon slowed and came to a stop by the other wagon. When Ravna and Jefri did not move, there was some irritated gobbling. After a moment, Tycoon’s driver brought him over to the cuttlefish pool.

The eightsome came streaming out of the wagon, followed by a radio singleton—hei, it looked like Zek! Behind him was a more expected companion, Ritl. She was in her usual fine form, bitching loudly about something or everything. When Tycoon sent a
be quiet
in her direction, Ritl shifted to sporadic muttering. She walked along with Zek for a few paces—and then seemed to notice the pond. She ran off around it, and for a time the air was free of her complaints.

Tycoon ambled over to them with the air of a great leader slumming around without his entourage.
Well, I’m just as glad not to see Vendacious or even Aritarmo,
thought Ravna.

“It’s g-going to be a very warm day,” said Tycoon, his Geri voice as incongruous as ever.

“I’m sure it will be, sir,” replied Ravna.

The eight bobbed a smile. “Not that it matters. This afternoon I will be flying away. You know, the air is quite cool even a few hundred meters up. It’s nature’s own air conditioning. I expect
I
will be quite comfortable.”

“You’re not taking us then?” said Ravna, still trying make it sound like casual chitchat.

“The passenger list and ship assignment isn’t entirely decided,” he said. Two of him were staring pointedly at Jefri.

Ravna continued to play along. “Vendacious is going?”

“Of course. In the second airship.” He waved a snout in the direction of the hangars. “No room for Aritarmo, but we’ll still have the network. I’ll continue to supervise my worldwide operations.”

“And Ritl?” said Jefri, as if just passing the time of day.

Tycoon made an irritated noise. “Not Ritl. In close quarters, that little monster—I mean, that remnant of a loyal employee—is too difficult to deal with.” All his heads turned toward Ravna. “But that’s not the important question as far as you two are concerned.”

Ravna returned the look as best she could, having only one head. “Of course. There’s myself and Jefri, but also the Children you stole, Geri and Timor and—”

“No.” It was flat negation, even if spoken in his high-pitched, little girl voice. “They will stay here.”

“But—”

“I don’t want them getting in the way. I—” There was a subtle shifting around within the pack. Ravna could almost imagine that some faction was embarrassed and desired a bit of frankness. “Timor is a good worker, as honorable as a pack. He will be safe here. Geri will be safe as well. Protecting both of them is important to me, even if they are human. You should know, Vendacious dislikes humans even more than I, and sometimes I wonder if he realizes how fragile you are. Even I find it hard to understand what it means to be a truly new mind; it is not a natural state. Eventually, I promise to return them. In the meantime, they will be kept far from Vendacious.” He jabbed a snout at Ravna. “My inclination is to take you with me. The packs we captured with you will go north with Vendacious. They will provide a good cross check on assertions that you make.”

“And Jefri?” Ravna asked.

“That depends on you and him. I want to locate Johanna Olsndot. You two are hiding something; we could hear you all yesterday conspiring in your dungeon. Confess the truth, and you can both travel on my airship.”

“We have told the truth,” said Jef, “and we weren’t conspiring!” But they had spent hours trying to decide what to say if it all came to this. Much of that conversation had been silent spelling and cloaked allusions.

Tycoon’s words rolled on right over Jef’s: “Otherwise—it will be as I told you two days ago. Jefri will go north with Vendacious.”

“I’m sure I can make the Johanna-brother talk, my lord.” That was Vendacious’ voice, via Zek.

Ravna glanced at Jefri, saw his impatient look. The result of all their “conspiring” had been simple: You can’t win if you have nothing to confess and that fact is not accepted. Okay, you might postpone the nightmare simply by making a faux confession. Jef would have already started lying, except that she’d persuaded him to let her make the first move.
There must be some other way. I just need a little more time.
As if all of yesterday hadn’t been enough to find a way out, if one existed. She turned away from Tycoon and Jefri and Zek, and stared across the pond. There was something near the middle that she hadn’t noticed before. Here and there tentacles poked into the air, slowly moving. They weren’t jabbing at insects. They were larger and more frondlike than the cuttlefish limbs she had seen.
They were hard proof for her theory about the cuttlefish.
She felt a smile come to her lips; in other circumstances it would have been a joyous shout.

She looked back at Tycoon. She had nothing but the lies she and Jefri had agreed on, but damned if she was going to say them while she could still stall. “Out of the whole airfield, you had us brought here. You wanted us to see this pond, didn’t you? Why?”

An indignant chord came from Zek. That must be Vendacious, impatient with the change of topic. Tycoon, bless his various parts, was more easily distracted. He sidled around, some of him tilting a glance at the water. When he finally spoke, his geekiness seemed ascendant. “I noticed that you never asked hard questions about the cuttlefish, never said much about them even when you were alone with the Johanna-brother. I wondered if you would ever figure out how important they are to my program.”

Ravna nodded. “I had a theory. Now I think I know much more about the cuttlefish than you do.”

“Oh
really?
” Tycoon stepped closer, challenging. He didn’t seem angry, but she had the feeling that the pack’s enormous ego, both as businesscritter and inventor, was engaged. “And what is it that you think you know?”

“The cuttlefish are more than mindless repeaters. They’ve learned your language and more recently mine. They can speak both sensibly.”

“Yes. So?”

“The cuttlefish were how you originally made contact with the Choir, how you were able to communicate with the Choir when all packs before had failed.”

Tycoon emitted a string of clicks, mild applause. “Very good. You are absolutely right.” He settled down, continued almost chummily. “See Ritl playing with them?” On the other side of the pond, Ritl was racing back and forth, gobbling fiercely at the water. Tiny voices answered her. “It was Remasritlfeer who brought the creatures from the South Seas. It was my idea to use them here with the Choir. Remasritlfeer tried and failed, tried and failed. I don’t know how many of the creatures were eaten—though they don’t really seem to care about their own lives. Finally Remasritlfeer gave up—but I demanded he go back and try again. And as usual, my diligence and initiative paid off.” He looked up smugly. “It was a small start, but we found a few things to trade and were able to negotiate the first, tiny reservation here.” He waved expansively at the airfield, the palaces, the factories. “The rest is history.”

“It never puzzled you that something so strange could talk, that it could have a mind?”

“Um, yes of course. I’m always thinking on deeper meanings. Early on, I had the theory that perhaps these were a baby form of whales. It’s well known that whales are smarter than weasels, almost as smart as singletons—and they swim in pods that may be even more intelligent.”

Over the last ten years, an occasional “whale” carcass had washed ashore in the Domain. Ravna had overseen the dissection of two of them. They were like seamals. She’d run simple phylogenetic programs on the results and concluded that the animals were a distant cousin of the Tines, one that had never returned to a life on the land. “No way are the cuttlefish young whales,” she said.

“
Grmp.
I know that. After a time it became evident that the creatures eventually lose their intelligence. The few who survive more than a year root themselves like plants and become mindless egg generators—making a new generation of cuttlefish. We almost lost the whole operation here before we figured that out. I sent an expedition back to the South Seas, found that single atoll where they spawn, uprooted all the mature egg-layers we could find. You can see the tops of them sticking out of the water.”

“I saw them.” Now the fronds were a little higher out of the water, and more of them were turned broadside towards the humans and packs at the edge of the pool. The sight was so familiar, so welcome …
okay, Pham, so unnerving
,
too
. In the bright sunlight, she could even see the eyespots on the fronds. Mindless they were, more or less—but evidence that children of a friend had survived. She walked slowly along the edge of the pond toward the side that was closest to the forest of fronds. “You uprooted them? Brought them here? You’re lucky they survived. They much prefer the surf by the open sea, not this silty, brackish water.”

“What? How would you know?” There was both anger and curiosity in Tycoon’s words. His sitting members scrambled up and he followed along behind her.

Jefri’s were wide with unbelieving surprise. “It can’t be, Ravna! The cuttlefish look completely different. The eyes, the—”

“They’re Rider larvae, Jef. I’d never seen riderlets before, so I wasn’t sure, but look what they grow up to be.” She waved at the fronds.

Tycoon came out around her. “What can you know? You guess that because they come from mid-ocean, that’s their ideal. I’ll have you know, since I brought them to the Fell estuary, their breeding has increased a hundredfold.”

Vendacious (via Zek, who was following along uncertainly): “My lord,
what
is going on?” His speech morphed into plaintive gobbling.
Poor Vendacious
, thought Ravna.
He had his next round of torture all set up, and now it’s been delayed.
The question was how to turn the diversion into something more lasting. She was still clueless about that.

All she could do was let the geekiness in her speak to the geekiness in Tycoon. She looked down at the eight around her and said, “Tell me, Tycoon, do you have any idea how rare it is that two intelligent races arise naturally on one world, and coexist there?”

“Of course I do! Vendacious’ spies have told us much about the other worlds. Multiple intelligent races are common everywhere.”

Ravna shook her head. “That’s on worlds of the Beyond, sir, where there is fast interstellar travel and decent technology. Down Here—where evolution runs at biological speeds, in its old bloody way—Down Here new intelligence does not tolerate competition. If two intelligent races arise naturally, one competes the other into extinction, usually before either begins its recorded history.”

“Nonsense!” But he brought himself together, thinking hard with all his heads close to one another. “So then this is a marvelous bit of good luck, or—”

“Or your cuttlefish are like us humans, recent arrivals from space. In fact, these are the children and grandchildren of two of my own shipmates.”

Tycoon dithered. “Implausible, but I don’t see how you would gain from lying. In any case, what difference does it make? The creatures have no technology. The adults—the egg-layers—have never spoken. They are vegetables.” He hooted. “What grand shipmates they must have been. Did you keep them as ornamental plants? Did you—” He paused, then gobbled something in Interpack, a question. The two gunpacks responded in the negative, but then they spread out … watching? listening?

Ravna wasn’t paying much attention. She looked out at the sessile-stage Riders, planted forever where the fate named Tycoon had stuck them. These would be the generation after Greenstalk. Without skrode devices, not even the do-it-yourself model that served Greenstalk, they would have almost no ability to form new memories. They’d be innocent, as nearly mindless as before their race was ever uplifted.
But I’m glad your children survived, Greenstalk.

“What
is
that sound?”

“Huh?” Ravna looked back from the water, noticed that Tycoon was spread out along the edge of the pool, an alert listening posture. “I don’t hear anything,” she said.

Tycoon made an irritated noise “Some of this is pitched where even you can hear. And it’s getting louder.”

“I hear something,” said Jefri.

“What’s going on?” That was Vendacious, more confused than anyone.

Now Ravna could hear the … buzzing. Such a familiar sound. Such an impossible sound. She looked across the pond, at the fronds that marked the immobile adults. Several of those slender blades had risen higher, just in the last few seconds. Impossible, impossible. But testable. She gave a little wave and took several quick steps along the edge, almost bumping into one of Tycoon. The tall fronds turned to follow her motion. They made a rattling noise against one another, a kind of language of its own, one that Ravna did not know. That didn’t matter; the buzzing became recognizable voder speech, though muffled by the water: “Ravna, oh
Ravna!
”

“Greenstalk?”

“What’s this? The egg-layers don’t talk!” Tycoon scrambled up all around her. Some of his paws were on her shoulders, giving him a view down into the water from as high as possible. On either side of her, the gunpacks were closing on the edge of the pool. Ravna was only vaguely aware of Tycoon waving them back.

Maybe there are limits to miracles. Greenstalk said Ravna’s name again, but now the voder was scaling up and down, the syllables almost unintelligible. Was that disuse or disrepair? If Tycoon had not noticed the skrode perhaps it had been cut apart in the transplanting. Ravna reached out her arms, waving back to her friend.

“The egg-layers can’t move, either!” shrieked Tycoon. The part of him that was teetering on Ravna’s shoulders lost its balance and tumbled into the pond. The rest of the pack collapsed around her and dragged the fallen member out of the water—but all of him and all of Ravna had their eyes on the tall, blade-like fronds in the pool. Those
were
moving, a lurching progress, a meter forward then a half-meter back. As the Rider rolled closer, Ravna could see its body below the waterline. There was the swelling of Greenstalk’s stem, the lower fronds. The flat platform of the skrode was … not gone, but hidden. No wonder Tycoon’s employees had not seen the machinery. Now Ravna saw smooth composite surfaces where Greenstalk’s current efforts were cracking away the coral that had grown upon her during years of sitting alone by her little atoll.