The Mantis tavern had a vaulted ceiling, and space for padded alcoves all around the upper walls. Today, the clientele was mainly human. There were two or three packs up in the lofts, but the bartender pack was the only one on the main floor. All the music was—no surprise—coming from the bartender.
“Back so soon?” someone shouted at Amdi and Jefri. Then they caught sight of Ravna and Johanna, and there was nervous laughter. “Wow, we can’t talk treason for more than five minutes and the secret police show up.”
“I ran into them on the steps,” said Jefri.
“Just shows you should use the exit stairs, like decent folk do.” That was Heida Øysler. She was still laughing about her secret police crack. Some of the others seemed a bit pained by it, but then Heida’s sense of humor was her greatest enemy. At least here there were none of the closed expressions Ravna had seen on the stairs. Heida pulled over extra chairs and waved them to sit down.
As they did so, the bartender’s roving member was already bringing out more beer. Ravna glanced around the table, taking in just who was here. Ten kids—no. Ten adults. Jefri and Heida might be the youngest here. None of these were parents yet, though there was one recently married couple.
Johanna snagged a beer. She raised it to Heida in a mock salute. “So now that the secret police are here, consider yourselves under interrogation. What are you miscreants up to?”
“Oh, the usual mayhem.” But then Heida was out of clever responses. That could be a blessing. When Heida babbled, things could get marvelously embarrassing. There had been that mock adultery claim about Tami and Wilm—which then turned out to be essentially true. “We were just, you know, speculating about the Disaster Study Group.”
“Ah.” Johanna settled her beer back on the table.
“What’s that?” said Ravna. “It sounds terribly official. And I thought I was into all the terribly official things around here.”
“Well, that’s only because—” began Heida, but one of the other girls, Elspa Latterby, stepped on her wit:
“It’s just three big words covering up a lot of wishful thinking.” No one else said anything. After a moment, Elspa shrugged and continued, “You see, Ma’am—”
“Please, Elspa, call me Ravna.” Oops, I always say that, and some, like Elspa, always forget.
“Sure, Ravna. Y’see, the thing is, well, you and the Tines have done your best to stand in for our parents. I know how much Woodcarver and Flenser-Tyrathect have spent on our academy. And now we’re doing our best to make something of ourselves—in this world. Some of us, the very youngest, are quite happy.” A smile flickered on her face. “My little sister has Beasly and human playmates. She has me—and she doesn’t remember our folks very well. To Geri, this seems like a wonderful place.”
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, Øvin 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,” Øvin 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.” Øvin 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, Øvin. 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,” Øvin 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.