“Me neither,” said Øvin. “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, Øvin. You children did get special help. Ultimately, Countermeasure—” with Pham and Old One—“was what stopped the Blight.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Øvin. “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.
Øvin 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 Øvin.
“—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 Øvin, “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.”
“Øvin! 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, Øvin. 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.”
Øvin 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!”
Øvin 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? Øvin, that logic is a jumble.”