Ravna nodded. "But for the older ones, life here is just the epilogue to a holocaust, right?" Certainly, that was often how Ravna saw it.

Elspa nodded, "It's wrongheaded maybe. But there it is. Not all us feel this way, but we remember our parents, and civilization. It's not surprising that some of us feel just a little bitter to have lost so much. Disasters have that effect even when no one living is responsible."

Jefri hadn't bothered with a human chair. He had set himself on one of the high perches normally used by the Tines. From there he looked down gloomily. "So it's not surprising such people might call themselves the Disaster Study Group," he said.

Ravna gave them all a smile. "I guess we've all been members of that club at one time or another-all of us who seriously look at the recent history."

Now that the bartender's member had retreated, Amdi had surfaced all around the two tables, a head here, a head there, some of him perched on the high stools. He liked to watch from all directions-and there were enough of him to do a good job of it. The two on the stools cocked their heads, but his voice seemed to come from everywhere. "So then it's a little bit like me and some of Lord Steel's other experiments. A lot of killing went into our making. I came out very well, maybe, but others are still a mess. Sometimes we get together and just moan and groan about how we've been abused. But it's not like we can do anything about it."

Elspa nodded. "You're right, Amdi, but at least you have a specific monster to dump the hate on."

"Well," said Ravna, "we have the Blight. It was monstrous beyond the mind of any in the Beyond. We know that in the end, fighting that evil killed your parents and Straumli Realm, and indirectly killed Sjandra Kei. Stopping the Blight destroyed civilization in much of the galaxy."

They were shaking their heads. One of the boys, vin Verring, said, "We can't know all that."

"Okay, we can't be sure of that last; the destruction was so vast that it destroyed our ability to measure it. But-"

"No, I mean there's very little we can know of any of it. Look. Our parents were scientists. They were doing research in the Low Transcend, a dangerous place. They were playing with the unknown."

You got it, kiddo, thought Ravna.

"But millions of other races have done that," vin continued. "It's the most common way that new Powers are born. My father figured that Straum itself would eventually colonize some vacated brown dwarf system in the Low Transcend, that we would transcend. He said we Straumers have always had an outward reach, we are risk takers." vin must have noticed the look coming into Ravna's face. He hurried on: "And then something went terribly wrong. That has also happened to thousands of races. Expeditions like our High Lab sometimes get consumed by what lives Up There, or are simply destroyed. Sometimes, the originating star system is destroyed, too. But what happened to us-what has forced us Down Here-that just doesn't square with what we personally know about the situation."

"I-" Ravna began, then hesitated. How can I say this? Your parents were greedy and careless and exceptionally unlucky. She loved these kids-well, most of them, and she would do almost anything to protect all of them-but when she looked at them, sometimes all she could think of was the destruction their parents' greed had brought down. She glanced at Johanna. Help me.

As often happened when the going got tough, Johanna came through: "I have a little more personal memory than most of us, vin. I remember my parents preparing our escape. The High Lab was no ordinary attempt at Transcendence. We had an abandoned archive. We were doing archeology on the Powers themselves."

"I know that, Johanna," vin said, a little sharply.

"So the archive woke. My parents knew there was the possibility that we were being led around by the nose. Okay, I guess all the grownups knew that. But in the end, my folks realized that the risks were much greater than was obvious. We had dug up something that could be a threat to the Powers Themselves."

"They told you that?"

"Not at the time. In fact, I'm not sure quite how Daddy and Mom pulled off the preparations. There were originally three hundred of us Children. Somehow, coldsleep units were smuggled out of medical storage, put aboard the container ship. Somehow we were all checked out of our classes-you all remember that."

Heads nodded.

"If a Power were coming awake, surely it would have noticed what your parents were up to."

"I-" Johanna hesitated. "You're right. They should have been caught. There must have been others working with them to set up our escape."

"I didn't notice anything," said Heida.

"No," said someone else.

"Me neither," said vin. "Remember how we were living, the temporary pressurized habs, the lack of privacy? I could tell my folks were getting edgy-okay, frightened-but there wasn't room to do things on the sly. It seems reasonable-and this is one of the Disaster Study Group's points-that our escape was just a move in Something's game."

Ravna said, "We talked about Countermeasure at the Academy, vin. You children did get special help. Ultimately, Countermeasure-" with Pham and Old One-"was what stopped the Blight."

"Yes, Ma'am," said vin. "But all this illustrates how little we know about the good guys and the bad guys. We're stuck Down Here. We older kids feel that we have lost everything. But the official history could just as well have the good guys and the bad guys switched."

"Huh? Who is peddling such crap?" Ravna couldn't help herself; the words just popped out. So much for gracious leadership.

vin seemed to shrink back on himself. "It's not anybody in particular."

"Oh? What about those three I passed on the stairs?"

Jefri shifted on his high stool. "You ran into me on the stairs, too, Ravna. Those three are just gossips. You might as well be blaming all of us."

"If it's 'just everybody' then where did a name like Disaster Study Group come from? Somebody must be behind this, and I want to-"

A hand pressed lightly on Ravna's sleeve. Johanna held the touch for an instant, long enough to shut down her spew of angry words. Then the girl said, "Something like this doubting has always been around."

"You mean doubts about the Blighter threat?"

Johanna nodded. "Yes, in varying degrees. You yourself have doubts on that, I know. For instance, now that the Blighter fleet has been stopped by Countermeasure, will it have any further interest in harming Tines World?"

"We have no choice but to believe that what remains wants to destroy us." My dream- "Okay, but even then there's the question of just how deadly they can be. The fleet is thirty lightyears out, probably not capable of travelling more than a lightyear per century. We have millennia to prepare, even if they do wish us ill."

"Parts of the fleet could be faster."

"So we have 'only' a few centuries. Tech civilizations have been built in less."

Ravna rolled her eyes. "They've been rebuilt in less. And we may not have that much time. Maybe the fleet can build small ramscoops. Maybe the Zones will slip again-" She took a breath and proceeded a little more calmly: "The point is, the point of everything we're teaching in the Academy is, we have to get ready as fast as we possibly can. We must make sacrifices."

A little boy's voice spoke from all around them. Amdi. "I think that's what the Disaster Study Group disputes. They deny that the Blight was ever a threat to humans or Tines. And if it is, they say, Countermeasure made it so."

Silence. Even the background music from the bartender had faded away. Apparently Ravna was the last to realize the monstrous issue under discussion. Finally she said, softly, "You can't mean that, Amdi."

An expression rippled across Amdi: embarrassed contrition. Each of his members was fourteen years old, each an adult animal, but his mind was younger than any pack she knew. For all his genius, Amdi was a shy and childlike creature.

Across the table, Jefri patted one of Amdi comfortingly. "Of course he doesn't mean he believes it, Ravna. But he's telling you the truth. The DSG starts from the position that we can't know exactly what happened at the High Lab and how we managed to escape. Reasoning from what we do know, they argue that we could have the good and the bad reversed. In which case, Countermeasure's actions of ten years ago were a galactic-scale atrocity-and there are no terrible monsters bearing down on us."

"Do you believe that?"

Jefri raised his hands in exasperation. "... No. Of course not! I'm just spelling out what some people are too, ah, diplomatic to say. And before you ask, I wager none of us here believe it, either. But among the kids as a whole-"

"Especially some of the older ones," said vin.

"-it's a very attractive way of looking at things." Jefri glowered at her for a moment, challenging. "It's attractive because it means that what our parents created was not a monstrous 'blight.' Our parents were not silly fools. And it's also attractive because it means that the sacrifices we're making now are ... unnecessary."

Ravna struggled to keep her voice steady: "What sacrifices in particular? Learning low-tech programming? Learning manual arithmetic?"

Heida chipped in with, "Oh, part of it is just having other people tell us what to do!"

These kids probably didn't even know the names of pre-tech consensus-building methods. Skipping that stage had just been one of the simplifications Ravna had chosen. She had hoped that trust and affection and common goals would suffice until they had more tech and more people.

"Getting bossed around may be part of it," said vin, "but for some, the medical situation is a bigger issue." He looked directly at Ravna. "The years pass and you rule and you still look young, just as young as Johanna does now."

"vin! I'm thirty-five years old." That was human-standard thirty-megasecond years, the same as Straumers used. "It should be no surprise I look young. Back in Sjandra Kei, I'd still be a very junior specialist."

"Yes, and a thousand years from now, you'll still look that young. All of us-even the older children-will be dead in a few hundred years. Some of us already look decayed-you know, losing our hair like we've suffered rad damage. Getting fat. The youngest of us have scarcely had any prolongevity treatment. And our children will die like flies, decades before us."

Ravna thought of Wenda Larsndot's graying hair. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong! "Look, vin. We'll get the medical research ramped up eventually. It just doesn't make sense to put it first. I can show you the progress charts that Oobii generates. Effective medicine has a million gotchas. Which cure is going to be hard-and hard for which child-that's something we can't know ahead of time. A crash medical program would just be a morass of delay. We've got at least twenty coldsleep caskets that are still in working order. I'm sure we can generate the consumables for them eventually. If necessary, we can freeze anyone who gets mortally old. No one need die."

vin Verring raised his hand. "I understand, ma'am. I think all of us here do-even Screwfloss, Benky, and Catchip-who are so quietly listening in." There was some embarrassed shifting around in the tavern's lofts. From across the room, the bartender said, "Heh, this is all between you two-legs."

Heida couldn't resist: "You packs just don't die properly!"

vin gave a little smile but waved for Heida to pipe down. "Nevertheless, you see the attraction of the Disaster Study Group. They deny that our parents messed up. They deny that there's a need for sacrifice. We refugees can't really know what happened or who was to blame in getting us Down Here. The extremists-and I don't think any of us have knowingly talked to such; the extremists are always referred to at third hand-they say since we know the goodness of our own parents, then the right bet is that the Blight is no monster at all, and all this preparation and sacrifice may be in service to ... well, maybe to something evil."

Johanna gave her head a sharp little shake. "Huh? vin, that logic is a jumble."

"Maybe that's why we can't find anyone who says it for themselves, Jo."

Ravna listened to the back and forth. What can I say to this that I haven't said before? But she could not keep silent: "When these deniers say 'we can't really know,' that is a lie. I know. I was at Relay, working for Vrinimi Org. The Blight was doing evil almost half a year before Oobii took flight. It spread out from your High Lab, probably within a few hours of your escape. It took over the Top of the Beyond. I could read about it in the news. With Vrinimi's resources I could follow the destruction in detail, the Blight killing whomever it pleased. The thing took over Straumli Realm. It destroyed Relay. It chased Pham and me and the Skroderiders down here, and the wake of that pursuit killed Sjandra Kei and most of the humans in the Beyond." These were things she had told them again and again and again. "The defense against the Blight wasn't undertaken until we arrived here. Yes, what Pham and Countermeasure did was horrendous-more so than we can measure. Countermeasure did strand us. But it stopped the Blight and it left us with a chance. Those are facts that are being denied. They are not something beyond knowing. I was there."

And all around the table, these Children now grown up were nodding respectfully.

CHAPTER 06.

Ravna had plenty of time to think about that terrible surprise at the Sign of the Mantis. More accurately, she couldn't think about anything else. Everything she'd ever said or done looked different now that she imagined it through the eyes of the Deniers.

In the beginning, the Children had all lived in the New Castle on Starship Hill, just a hundred meters from the academy. The youngest ones still lived there with older siblings or Best Friend packs. Most of the others-grown and with the beginnings of families-lived on Hidden Island or in the string of houses south of the New Castle.

But Ravna still lived aboard the starship Out of Band II-thirty thousand tonnes of unflyable junk, but with technology from the stars.

She must seem crazed and remote, hunkered down aboard the supreme power in this world.

But I have to be here! For the Oobii had a small library, and Ravna was a librarian. The tiny onboard archive comprised the technological tricks of myriads Slow Zone races. Humankind on Earth had taken four thousand years to go from the smelting of iron to interstellar travel. That had been more or less a random walk. In the wars and catastrophes that followed, humans were like most races. They had blown themselves back to the medieval many times, and sometimes to the Neolithic, and, on a few worlds, even to extinction. But-at least where humankind survived at all-the way back to technology had been no random walk. Once the archeologists dug up the libraries, renaissance was a matter of a few centuries. With Oobii, she could cut that recovery time down to less than a century. To thirty years, if bad luck will just stay out of my way!

That afternoon, at the Sign of the Mantis, bad luck showed it had been around all the time. How could this have blindsided me? Ravna asked herself that question again and again. The Children had always been full of questions. Many times over the years, she and the Tines had told them the story of the Battle on Starship Hill, and the history before. They all had walked around Murder Meadows, seen how the land looked when Lord Steel had killed half the Children. But they had only Ravna's words about other half of the battle, how Pham had stopped the Blighter fleet and the price that had been paid. The Children had always had lots of questions about that, and about what had happened to their parents at the beginning of the disaster. The Children had gone from a world with families and friends, to waking up surrounded by Tines and a single human adult. All they had was her word about what had made that happen. Foolish Ravna, she had thought that that would be enough.

Now the Children had more than doubts. Now they had something called the Disaster Study Group.

Just hours after the Sign of the Mantis, she and Johanna and Jefri (and Amdi of course) had another chat. These were the first two kids Ravna had met Down Here. Ten years ago, they had shared a terrible few hours. Ever since, Ravna had felt they had a special relationship-even when Jefri hit his teenage years and seemed lost to all reason.

Now Johanna was livid about the Disaster Study Group-but even more angry with Jefri, since he hadn't told her of the group's latest lies.

Jefri had flared right back at her. "You want to go on a witch hunt, Jo? You want to flush out everyone who believes some part of the DSG claims? That would be just about everybody, you know." He paused, his glance flickering doubtfully in Ravna's direction. "I don't mean the worst of it, Ravna. We know you and Pham were good guys."

Ravna had nodded, trying to look calm. "I know. I can see how natural some of the doubting is." Yeah she could see, with brilliant hindsight. "I just wish I had known before."

Johanna bowed her head. "I'm sorry I never talked to you about this. The DSG says some despicable things, but both Nevil and I thought it was so nuts it would just die away. Now, the whole thing seems much more organized." She cast a look at Jefri. They were back on the Oobii's bridge, a good place for very small, very private meetings. Amdi was out of sight, hiding around under the furniture. "You and Amdi obviously knew that the DSG has turned a whole lot more nasty."

Jefri started to snap back, then gave a reluctant nod. In fact, Ravna suddenly realized, he looked ashamed. Jefri had the same stubbornness as his sister; he just frittered it away on aimless frustration. Their parents were the closest thing to heroes in the sorry High Lab mess. They had worked miracles to get the kids here. When Jefri finally spoke, his voice was soft. "Yeah. But like vin said, the worst of the claims are just third-hand ... repeated by foolish people like Gannon Jorkenrud."

Johanna shook her head. "Why do you still hang out with that loser?"

"Hei! Gannon was my friend at the Lab, okay? I could talk to him about things even the teachers didn't understand. Maybe now he is a loser, but..."

Johanna's angry expression shifted to frank worry. "This is too much, Jef. Suddenly DSG seems like a real threat."

Jefri shrugged. "I don't know, Jo. The latest stuff just sort of popped up, one or two people on Meri's expedition, then more when I got back here. And even if there is a conspiracy, putting pressure on the likes of Gannon is only going to make the Executive Council look thuggish-and Gannon might just start accusing people he's got it in for. He's got a mean streak."

Ravna nodded. "How about this, Jefri: Maybe this is complaining based on legitimate issues-issues I do intend to address, by the way. But maybe this is the doing of a clique of older Children planning some kind of mayhem and exaggerating the real issues for their own ends. You are in a position to find out which is which. Everybody knows, um, that you-"

Jefri's glance flickered at Johanna, and the boy grinned. He'd always had a nice smile. "Don't be shy," he said. "Everyone knows I've been a bloody asshole. Still am sometimes. Part of my refugee angst, y'know."

"In any case," said Ravna, "people seem quite happy to confide in you. If you act sympathetic toward this evil nonsense, and if there really is a Denier conspiracy, I'll bet they will approach you more directly. Is this a role that, ah, you'd-"

"You mean, will I find out which of my friends might be behind this and rat them out?" There was no venom in his words, but Jefri didn't look happy. Fortunately, Johanna remained quiet, keeping to herself any sisterly harangues. Finally, he shook his head. "Yeah. I'll do it. I still don't think there is any real conspiracy, but if there is, I'll find it."

Ravna realized she had been holding her breath. "Thank you, Jefri." If the ones like Jefri Olsndot were on her side, then this was something she could get through.

Johanna was smiling, looking a bit relieved herself. She started to say something to her brother, then wisely left well enough alone. Instead she looked around the table. "Hei, Amdi! You got all this? Any problems?"

Silence, and not a head in sight. That was the trouble with Amdi. Sometimes he got distracted with the math problems that forever flitted around in his heads, and was lost to daydreams beyond the imagination of all but an Archimedes or a Nakamore. Sometimes-especially in recent years-he simply fell asleep.

"Amdi?"

"Yup, yup." Amdi's little boy voice drifted up from carpet level. He sounded wan, or a little sleepy. "Jefri and I are still a team."

Ravna's chat with Jo and Jef and Amdi had been only the first of several private conversations. Since Pilgrim was out of town, her next stop was Woodcarver.

Ravna's co-Queen had ruled much of the Northwest for more than three centuries. None of her individual members were that old, of course, but she had been very careful about keeping herself together, and the pack had clear memories going back to a time when she had been a simple artist in a cabin by the sea. For Woodcarver, empire had grown out of that art, the goal to build and mold and carve. Woodcarver was a true medieval lord. Given that she was also a decent (if occasionally bloody-minded) sort, her presence and position of authority were miraculous good fortune for Ravna and the refugees.

Nowadays, the co-Queens shared Starship Hill, Ravna in her starship Oobii and Woodcarver in the New Castle, the Dome of the Children's Lander.

Walking toward the castle gate, Ravna was always struck by the balance of symbolic powers that she and Woodcarver had achieved. Ravna had the technology, but she lived lower on the hill. Then a bit higher-between them-there was the Academy for Humans and Their packs (or packs and Their Humans), where everyone raced to learn what the future required of them. And finally, at the top, was Woodcarver in the New Castle. Deep beneath the dome of the castle were odd scraps of technology that had come down with the Children. There were the coldsleep caskets, and the Lander with its remnant automation. There was the spot in the Lander where Pham Nuwen had died, and a slime of silicaceous mold that had once been Countermeasure itself.

Today, Ravna pursued the upper corridors, sunlit from dozens of narrow window slots. But the caskets, the mold, and her terrible dream-they were still near in her mind.

Ravna talked to Woodcarver in the Thrones Room. In the beginning, New Castle had been scarcely more than a shell, Lord Steel's trap for Pham and Ravna. Woodcarver had filled in the interior spaces, completing the place. The Thrones Room was the most visible addition, a huge, tiered hall. On audience days, all the Children could fit in here, along with a number of packs.

Today it was empty but for one pack and one human. As the guards closed the doors behind her, Ravna started down the long carpet toward the thrones and the altar. Out of the shadows on either side of her, Woodcarver emerged, accompanying her on the walk.