After a moment, Oobii generated its best guess: The displays jigged back a second or two and restarted. Flenser was saying: "Even so, my boy. What problems are troubling you?"

Amdi moved a little closer. "You made Steel and Steel made me."

Gentle laughter. "Of course. I made Steel, and mainly from my own members. But Steel assembled you from the new-born puppies of geniuses that he purchased, stole, and murdered for-from all across the continent. You are among the rarest of packs, born all at once, all of puppies. Like a two-legs."

"Yes, like a human." Oobii's imagery showed tears in Amdi's eyes. "And now dying like a human, even though humans don't begin to get old while they're still children."

"Ah," said Flenser. Ravna noticed that the one with the white tipped ears had tilted its wheelbarrow forward and extended its neck toward Amdi. Wow. The overlapping mindsounds should be loud enough to be emotionally confusing to both packs. But Flenser's voice-as represented by the surveillance program, always keep that in mind-was as cool as ever: "Haven't we discussed this before? Unanimous ageing is a tragedy, but your members are still only fourteen years old. Your bad times are easily twenty years in the future, when my grand schemes will finally-"

Amdi's interruption didn't quite fit: "I loved Mr. Steel. Of course, I didn't know he was a monster."

Flenser shrugged. "That's how I made him. My mistake, I'm afraid."

"I know. But you made up for that!" Amdi hesitated, his voice coming more quietly. "And now there's Jefri's problem. You...."

Ravna's head came up. What about Jefri? But Amdi didn't finish the sentence.

After a moment, Flenser said, "Yes, I'm doing what I can about that. Now what new problem has ambushed you?"

Amdi was making human crying sounds, the sounds of a small lost child. "I've learned that two of me are Great Plains short-timers."

Ravna had to think for a second. Great Plains short-timers? That was a racial group. They didn't look different from most other Tines, though they tended to congenital heart disease. Short-timers rarely lived more than twenty years.

In the other windows, Ravna could see Flenser's heads bobbing. "Those two of you have chest pains?"

"Yes. And eyesight problems."

"Oh my," said Flenser. "Short-timers. That is a problem. I'll check-" The audio faltered, perhaps Oobii grappling with some exceptionally great ambiguity. "I'll check Steel's records, but I fear you may be right. It's a well-known tradeoff among broodkenners: the Great Plains short-timers often have excellent geometrical imaginations. Still and all, it's not unanimous ageing."

Amdiranifani was shivering. "When those two of me die-I won't be me anymore."

"Every pack faces that, my boy. Unless we get killed all at once, change is what life is all about."

"For you, maybe! For ordinary packs. But I came into the world all at once, with nothing before. Mr. Steel struck a balance when he brought me together. If I lose two, if I lose even one, I'll-"

"Woodcarver's broodkenners can find some kind of match. Or you may find that six is as large as your mind can comfortably be." Flenser's tone was overtly sympathetic, but-quite consistent with his usual manner-somehow dismissive at the same time.

"No, please! If I lose any one of my eight, I will fall apart like an arch without a keystone. I beg you, Mr. Tyrathect. You made Mr. Steel. You made the Disaster Study Group. You made Jefri betray everyone. In all that monstering, can't there be some good miracles?"

Ravna watched, numb, making no move to pause the stream or look at the log window. Now that the scene had surpassed all bounds of credibility, it played on with scarcely a hiccup. Amdi wasn't talking anymore; there was just the sound of human weeping. That sort of made sense. The eightsome had crumpled into a posture of abject despair. The Reformed Flenser wasn't saying anything either, but what Oobii was showing in the displays was incredible: All five of Flenser-Tyrathect edged closer to Amdi. The two that had been the original Flenser pushed White Tips and its wheelbarrow forward. Some of them were less than a meter from Amdi's nearest members. That was almost as unbelievable as anything else. Flenser-Tyrathect was notorious for his fastidious, standoffish behavior. Normal packs, friendly ones, would often send one or two of their number into the space between for a brief exchange of mindsounds. It was like a human social embrace or a light kiss. Flenser-Tyrathect was never so familiar. He was always the pack at the far end of the table, or hunched behind the thickest acoustic quilts.

In this increasingly fantastic video, White Tips had reached forward to cuddle two of Amdi against its neck. Several of the other were almost as close. To a naive human it might look like one crowd of animals giving comfort to another. Between Tinish packs it would be profound intimacy.

And any resemblance to what is really happening is purely coincidental! Ravna angrily flicked all the views into nothingness.

Ravna sat for a long time, staring into the gentle warm darkness of her study. She had pushed the analysis much too far. Oobii's attempt to make sense out of nearly pure noise was madness. And yet ... the proper nouns could scarcely have been introduced by the software without some reason. She knew she was damned to return and return to this scene, to try to tease apart software glitches from signal noise from underlying revelation. Maybe she could get something out of it by starting with external truths-for instance, the fact that Jefri was no traitor.

She went back over the data, only now she wasn't looking at the lying video. Instead she went down to the surveillance program's logs. As she suspected, the transmission conditions tonight had been poor to rotten. And yet, it had been almost this bad before and she had still received sensible results. She waved the network logs away and moved up to the program's analysis. These were probability trees showing the options considered and how those options related to one another. The crisp video Ravna had been watching was simply the most probable interpretation coming out of that jungle of second-guessing. For instance, Amdi had almost certainly asserted that some particular person was behind the Disaster Study Group. She found that node of the analysis, expanded it; reasons and probabilities appeared. Yeah, and Flenser had been named as that person simply because of context and something about Amdi's posture. Similarly, Amdi had probably said that "someone" had betrayed "something"-but the software had generated the particular nouns from a long list of suspects.

It was amazing that Jefri had even made it onto that list, much less coming out at the top. So what logic had put him there? She drilled down through the program's reasoning, into depths she had never visited. As suspected, the "why I chose 'this' over 'that'" led to a combinatorial explosion. She could spend centuries studying this-and get nowhere.

Ravna leaned back in her chair, turning her head this way and that, trying to get the stress out her neck. What am I missing? Of course, the program could simply be broken. Oobii's emergency automation was specially designed to run in the Slow Zone, but the surveillance program was a bit of purely Beyonder software, not on the ship's Usables manifest. It just happened to work Down Here.

Surely, if something serious happened, there would be warnings? Ravna looked idly through the application's error logs. The high-priority messages were just what she expected: "Proceeding with Inadequate Data, blah blah blah." She dipped down into low-priority advisory messages. No surprise. Just for this evening's session, there were literally billions of those. She sorted them a couple of different ways and spent some quality time browsing the results....

Ravna froze in her chair, staring at the monster she found lurking: 442741542471.74351920 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269471 442741542481.74351935 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269369 442741542491.74354327 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269373 442741542501.75439121 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269313 442741542511.75439144 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269265 442741542521.74351947 Advisory Notice Only: Flenser sensor count summary: 140269215 ... 29980242 lines omitted "Explain!" her voice sound strangled even to her own ears.

A window popped up, defining the relevant fields, pointing to the provenance of these notices, pointing to analysis of the sensor devices on each of Flenser-Tyrathect's members.

The short of it was that these notices said precisely what she thought they said. In all of the Flenser pack, there remained fewer than one hundred and fifty million sensors. The original infestation had numbered in the low trillions and even that had been barely sufficient. If the infestation had fallen to the low hundred millions then ... then her surveillance was a self-deceiving joke!

How long has this been going on? She waved up a curve fitter and asked for the best three models of the failure history. It gave back three of course, but the first was near certain: from day one of her surveillance, almost ten years ago, her little spies had been steadily failing, a smooth decay with a half-life of less than a year. In the Beyond the sensor infestation would have been good for a century. For that matter, the supporting software would have been smart enough to tell her if she was using junk. No wonder these gadgets aren't on the Usables Manifest. Her desperate cleverness had turned around and bitten her on the nose.

Ravna curled up in her chair, miserable. Tonight was just a microcosm of her life over the last few tendays. But if I review past surveillance, knowing how bogus it really is, maybe I can see how far my trust of Flenser should still extend. She opened her eyes, wiped away her tears, and looked at the inexorable decay curve glowing in the air before her. It had been years since the surveillance had had even a trillion sensors. During all those years the failure notifications had been piling up, but at invisibly low priority levels. Meantime, the higher layers of the spy program had continued supplying Ravna with-face it-fantasy. She might never have noticed, if the real threats had not become so numerous that the fantasy began to spout flagrant lies.

If I decide the past surveillance was bogus too-I'll have to tell Woodcarver about this. Yeah, and destroy whatever trust still remains between us.

For some moments, her attention was lost in bleak contemplation. Had she ever messed up this badly before? No. Had things ever looked darker?... Well, watching the Battle on Starship Hill, that had been scarier. Losing Pham a few hours later, that had been sadder. But for despair, there had been nothing worse since the destruction of her home civilization at Sjandra Kei.

I got through that. Pham had been there for her.

Ravna opened her eyes. It was just past midnight. The outside windows looked upon a dark landscape; they were that far into the autumn.

There was something she must do, irrational though it might be. She hadn't done it in more than a year. Neither the Children nor the Tines would understand, and she had no desire to encourage superstition. But if ever there was a time, this was the time to go visit Pham.

CHAPTER 09.

Cemeteries were ghastly places. There had been a few such memorials at Sjandra Kei. People in the Beyond died, eventually. The death rate was comparable to the half-lives of the underlying civilizations, which mostly migrated up and up and-if they were not supremely stupid, like the greedy fools of Straumli Realm-eventually transformed themselves into Powers.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time. Ravna remembered seeing something similar in the terranes of Harmonious Repose: the cemetery had gradually transformed the terrane into a mausoleum with incidental living tenants.

The cemetery on Starship Hill had been Ravna's idea, come to her when she suddenly realized why cemeteries played such an important part in the stories of the Age of Princesses. She had picked the spot before the town grew up around the New Castle. The two hectare plot stretched across a curving slope of heather, with a view extending from the northwest islands all the way to Oobii in the south. In another ten years, the place might be surrounded by Newcastle town. There was no room allotted for cemetery expansion. And if I have my way, thought Ravna, this terrible place will never need to become larger.

The Children came up here sometimes, but in the warmth of day. The youngest didn't understand about cemeteries. The oldest didn't want to understand, but they didn't want to forget their friends, either.

Ravna mostly came after dark, and when she felt the darkest. By that measure, tonight was most definitely the time for a visit. She walked along the main path, her shoes crunching the frost-stiffened moss. Night in the arctic autumn, even here near the channel currents, ranged from cold to deathly frigid. Tonight was relatively mellow. The clouds had come in around sunset, stacking deeper and deeper over the land, trapping the day's warmth. The hillside breeze had dropped to nothing more than a faint, chill breath. Oobii said there would be rain a little later, but for now the sky was dark and dry and there was clear air down to the waters of the inner channel. Here and there, she could see lights on the north end of Hidden Island. Very close by, there were occasional glows of lavender. Glowbugs. The tiny insects put on a big show only two or three nights a year, and usually earlier in the autumn than this. As she walked on, there were more of the lavender glints. The occasional glimmer was not enough to light her way ... but they were welcome.

Rows of graves lay on either side of the cemetery's main path. Each place was marked by a headstone carved with a name and a star. The design was modeled after something she'd found in Oobii's classical human archive. The little four-pointed stars were an early religious symbol, perhaps the most common in human histories, though she was not clear on the details. There were 151 graves in these four rows, almost all the inhabitants of the cemetery. One hundred and fifty-one Children, from less than a year old to sixteen, all murdered on the same summertime night, burned to death as they lay in coldsleep. The heather south of town was called Murder Meadows, but the actual killing field lay beneath the center of the New Castle, the central chamber where the Children's Lander still sat upon charred moss.

Ravna had known none of those Children. They had died before she even knew they existed. Her pace slowed. There could have been more dead Children here; many of the surviving coldsleep coffins had suffered fire damage. Reviving Timor had taught her what she could safely do. Only a few of the original kids still slept in their caskets under the castle, along with the four miscarriages from the new generation, and two accidents; someday she would wake them all. Someday she would fix Timor, too.

Strange as it might seem, there were also a few Tines buried in the cemetery. Originally, that had been just twelve packs who had fully died in the Battle on Starship Hill. In recent years, Johanna's Fragmentarium for Old Members had begun to change that-much to the chagrin of redjacket factions.

There was a thirteenth pack, buried just before Pham's place: six little markers, each with the glyph of its one member, then a bigger one that marked the group: Ja-que-ram-a-phan and then the pack's taken name, Scriber. Scriber was another whom Ravna had never met, but she knew his story from both Pilgrim and Johanna: Scriber, the gallant, foolish inventor who had persuaded Pilgrim to befriend Johanna, the pack that Johanna had reviled, and who had been murdered for his efforts. Ravna knew that Jo had her own midnight trips up here, too.

Just ten years, and so many people to remember. Sjana and Arne Olsndot. Skroderider Blueshell. Amdi was one of the few packs who came up here regularly-always with Jefri, of course.

Ravna had reached the huge glacial boulder that marked the end of the path. Pham's stone made a shoulder in the hill, protecting the children's graves from the north winds. But tonight, the air was almost still. The glowbugs didn't need to hide in the heather. In fact, they were thickest in the air around Pham's grave, so many that their pulsing was in sync. Every few seconds, there was a silent surge of lavender that washed around her like a welcoming tide. She had seen them in such numbers only once before. That had also been around Pham's grave. It must be the flowers that she had planted here, now grown high. Ravna and the Children had put flowers round their classmates' graves, but they had never taken quite so well as here. That was strange, considering Pham's northern exposure.

Ravna turned off the end of the path, walking around to a special spot at the side of the rock. Funny thing about religion. At the Top of the Beyond, religion was the scary, practical matter of creating and dealing with gods. Down here in the Slow Zone, where humankind had been born ... Down Here, religion was a naturally grown hodgepodge, mostly the slave of local evolutionary biology.

Still, it's amusing how quickly our weakness makes us embrace these old ways.

It was dead dark between the slow pulses of lavender light, but Ravna knew exactly where she stood. She reached out and set her palm on a familiar stretch of smooth granite. It was so cold ... and then after a long moment, her body heat warmed it. Pham Nuwen had been a little like that. Quite possibly, he had never existed but for the year or so that she knew him. Quite possibly, the Power that created Pham had made him as a joke, stocked with bogus memories of an heroic past. Whatever the truth, in the end Pham had made of himself a real hero. Sometimes when she came up here, it was to pray for Pham. Not tonight. Tonight was one of the despairing nights. Worse, tonight there was an objective reason for despair. But Pham had overcome worse.

She silently leaned against the rock for a time.

And then she heard footsteps crunching on the main path. She turned away from Pham's stone, suddenly very glad that she hadn't been sobbing. She wiped her face and slipped the hood of her jacket a little forward.

The approaching figure blocked an occasional light from up in New Castle town. She thought for a moment that this was Jefri Olsndot. Then the glowbugs pulsed together, a lavender haze that swept out around her and revealed the other. Not Jefri. Nevil Storherte was not quite Jefri's height, and in all frankness, he was not as pretty-boy handsome.

"Nevil!"

"Ravna? I-I didn't mean to surprise you."

"That's okay." She didn't know whether to be embarrassed or just pleased to see a sympathetic face suddenly pop out of the void. "Whatever are you doing up here?"

Nevil's hands were fumbling nervously with each other. He glanced over her head at the huge boulder. Then the light dimmed and there was just his voice. "I lost my best friends on Murder Meadows. Leda and Josj. I should care about all my classmates, but they were special.... I come up sometimes to, you know, to see them."

Sometimes Ravna had to tell herself that the Children weren't all children anymore. Sometimes they told her that themselves.

"I understand, Nevil. When things get bad, I like to come up here, too."

"Things are going badly? I know there's lots to worry about, but your idea with the ship's cargo bay has been a wonder."

Of course, he wouldn't know about Woodcarver's anger, much less about the terrible screw-up with her own special surveillance of Flenser.

Nevil's voice continued, puzzled. "You shouldn't keep to yourself if there are problems, Ravna. That's what we have the Executive Council for."

"I know. But I'm afraid that on this..." I've messed up so badly that certain Council members are the last people I can talk to. The glowbugs pulsed again and she saw Nevil's intelligent, questioning gaze. Since Johanna and Nevil had been together-which was also since Nevil had been on the Council-she had rarely chatted with the fellow except when the two young people were together. Somewhere deep down she'd been afraid that Johanna might take the interest wrong. Tonight, that thought almost made her laugh. My problems are so much worse than all I used to worry about. "There are things that can't really be brought up in the full Council."

She couldn't see his face now. Would he condemn her for plotting out of the Council's sight? But his voice was sympathetic. "I think I understand. It's a very hard job you have. I can wait to hear-"

"That's not what I meant. Do you have a minute, Nevil? I'd like to ... I'd really like to get some advice."

"Why sure." A diffident laugh. "Though I'm not sure how much my advice is really worth."

Pulse of lights. It was as if they were suddenly standing in a field of lavender flowers, surely the most beautiful glowbug show she'd ever seen, so bright it lit the huge boulder almost to the top. Ravna scrambled up to a perch she had discovered years ago, and waved Nevil to a spot almost as comfortable. He nodded, clambered up in the dying light. The boy-the man-was sure-footed. He settled on the rock, half a meter down from her and almost a meter away. Good. Any crying on his shoulder would be safely metaphorical.

They sat silently for a moment. Then Nevil said, "It's about the Disaster Study Group, isn't it?"

"It started with the Disaster Study Group. That's where I first realized how totally I was messing up."

"That was my mess-up, and Johanna's. We should be your objective pipeline to what our people are-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know Johanna has beaten herself up about that. But the DSG was only the beginning." And then Ravna found herself letting go about the problems that had been weighing her down. It felt so good, and after a few minutes she realized this wasn't just because it gave her a chance to say what she had said to no one previously. In fact, Nevil actually had intelligent questions, and insights that came close to being workable advice. He understood instantly why Woodcarver was so upset about the converting the cargo bay into a meeting place.

"The New Meeting Place is the best thing that has happened in years, Ravna. But I can see what you're saying. The effect on Woodcarver is a negative, but that just makes it that much more important-not to retreat on the New Meeting Place-but to make it something that Woodcarver wants to buy into."

It was the sort of thing that Ravna had thought, but hearing him say the words was heartwarming. She caught a glimpse of his face as he finished the sentence. Nevil Storherte had always had a kind of brash diffidence, and now she realized what that contradiction amounted to. Nevil Storherte had charisma. Even untrained and unplanned, it fairly oozed from him.

"Your mother was the chief administrator at the High Lab, wasn't she?"

"Actually, it was my dad. Mom was the vice chief, or chief of vice when she was feeling mischievous."

Ravna had her low opinion of the Straumers' High Lab. At best it was good intentions gone cosmically wrong. But the Lab had been the pinnacle of the Straumer civilization. It had been mind-boggling hubris, but it had also enlisted the best and the brightest of their entire civilization. Very likely there had been other heroes besides the parents of Johanna and Jefri. "Your Dad must have been a management superstar." A more talented leader than anyone on this poor world.

Nevil gave an embarrassed laugh. "If you go by the selection process, he was. I remember how it dragged on through most of my grade school years, all the hoops my folks had to jump through. But Dad said it didn't matter, that there were so many geniuses at the Lab that 'administration' was more like herding cats.... You know? You had cats at Sjandra Kei, didn't you?"

Ravna smiled in the darkness. "Oh, yes. Cats go back a lot farther than Sjandra Kei."

Nevil Storherte might have only childhood recollections to go by, but he'd grown up among real leaders. And obviously, he had the magic touch himself. And stupid me, all self-pitying, ignoring resources that were here all the time. She took a deep breath and launched into something more than the shallow confidences of a minute before: "You know, Nevil, the most important thing in the world-maybe in this part of the Galaxy-is our raising a civilization here in time to face the Blighter fleet."

"I agree."

"But the DSG thing has made me realize how much our long-term goal distracted me from what's happening in the here and now. I fear I've screwed up so badly that we may lose the main game before it ever begins."

Silence, but then in a moment of pale light she saw that it was a thoughtful, attentive silence, and she continued: "Nevil, I'm trying to correct my mistakes, but what I've tried so far has had unhappy side-effects."

"Woodcarver's reaction to the New Meeting Place?"

"That's just one."

"Maybe I can help on that. I don't have a private channel to Woodcarver, but Johanna certainly does. And I'll bet my friends can think of changes to the New Meeting Place that will convince Woodcarver that it honors the whole of the Domain."

"Yes! That would be great." Thank you. "Let me fly the other changes by you. Most are a lot scarier to me than the New Meeting Place seemed." Maybe you can show me which is dead wrong and which can somehow be made to work. One by one she described her ideas for reforms, and for every one Nevil's reaction was like warm sunlight, sometimes agreeing, sometimes not, but always illuminating.

About instituting formal democracy: Nevil was in favor. "Yes, that's something we must do, and fairly soon now that so many of us are adults. But I think it's something that has to grow up naturally, not imposed from above."

"But the only traditions the Children-I mean you all-have experienced are embedded in heavy automation and large marketplaces. How can the idea come from within?"

Nevil chuckled. "Yeah, lots of nonsense can emerge too. But ... I trust my classmates. They have good hearts. I'll talk this around. Maybe we can use the New Meeting Place to model how things were handled in the most successful of the Slow Zone democracies. And figure out how to do it without offending Woodcarver!"

About Ravna moving out of Oobii: Surprisingly, Nevil was almost as uneasy about this suggestion as she was. "We need you aboard Oobii, Ravna. Anybody who thinks about the question knows that you're the only person who knows how to use the planning tools there. If we're going to raise civilization before we die of old age, we need you there." He was silent for a moment. "On the other hand, you're right in fearing that this angers people who don't think things through-and it's an irritant for everyone sitting out in the cold. We Children were born into a comfortable civilization. Now that's been lost-except where we see it sitting, gleaming green on Starship Hill. So maybe it makes sense for you to move out for a while. But choose the time, some turning point where it gains the greatest good will. If you stay out, our highest priority will have to be getting you proper communications back with Oobii."

"Okay. So we should begin planning for just when to make the move. Can you-"

"Yes. I'll check around, but very quietly. I suggest you don't discuss this with others. I'll bet that it's the sort of thing that once suggested becomes a popular imperative."