The Smoke Ring

Chapter One The Pond

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 19 SM:

LAWRI AND JEFFER SWAM BENEATH MURKY PONDWATER, trailing forty square meters of fabric stretched across the net more commonly used to sieve harebrains from the sky. They gripped its corners in strong toes and swam with their arms.

The sheet resisted. The leading edge tried to crumple.

Tethers at the comers of the harebrain net got in their way. We could have had some help, Jeffer thought. Lawri wouldn’t have it. Lawri’s idea. Lawri’s project! She’d be doing this by herself if she possibly could.

Air! He slapped her thigh. She dropped the sheet and they swam toward the light.

Air is the sweetest taste, though one must risk drowning to appreciate it.

They were at the arc of the pond nearest Citizens Tree.

The center of the trunk was a mere three klomters east.

Seventy klomters of trunk ran out and in from the pond, ending in paired curved tufts. The in tuft, home, looked greenish black, with Voy’s blue pinpoint shining almost behind it. A single line ran from the trunk, and divided.

The sheet was a ghostly shadow deep within the pond.

Lines ran from the comers, up through the water and out, to join the main cable that ran to the trunk.

“Almost in place,” Lawri said doubtfully.

“Close enough.”

“All right. You go get the CARM ready. I’ll draft some hands to pull it in.”

Jeffer nodded. His legs scissored and shot him into the air. He drifted toward the main cable in a spray of droplets.

It was easier than arguing. Lawri would not leave Jeffer to organize the final stage. When Lawri the Scientist got an idea, nobody else got credit. Particularly not Citizens

Tree’s other Scientist, her husband.

Partway around the curve of the pond, Minya and Gavving floated in the interface between air and water, surrounded by thrashing children.

Lines ran from each child toward the cable from Citizens Tree. The children were taught the backstroke first.

It kept their faces in the air. Some preferred the frog-kick that let them look beneath the water. Swimming was a balance of surface tension versus the thrust of arms and legs.

If a child kicked himself entirely out of the water, an adult must go after him. A child who went beneath the surface could panic and must be pulled out before he drowned. There were carnivores among the waterbirds.

Minya and Gavving wore harpoons. They had three of their own among the swimmers.

Gavving used lazy strokes to change his attitude, moving his field of view in a clockwise circle.

“Look at Rather,” Minya said.

The oldest of the children were swimming together.

Daughter of two jungle giants, golden-blond Jill had grown to merely normal height in the tide of Citizens Tree. She was thirty ce’meters shorter than her parents…but the contrast between Jill and Rather was startling. At fourteen, Minya’s dark-haired firstborn son was less than two meters in height. Jill had more than half a meter on him.

Yet Minya never spoke of Rather’s height. Gavving looked again and said, “Right. Rather!”

Rather paddled over, reluctantly. Fine green fur, barely visible, grew a mi’meter long on his left cheek.

Gavving gripped the boy’s arm and lifted him partway out of the water, against surface tension. The green could be traced down Rather’s neck, over his shoulder, and partway across his chest.

“Fluff,” Gavving said. “Why didn’t you tell someone?”

Rather grinned guiltily. “I’ve never swum before.”

Minya snapped, “You go straight—”

“No. Finish your swim. You’ll pay for it. You’ve seen your last of the sun for a while. Have we raised a fool? It’s almost reached your eye!”

Rather nodded solemnly and paddled away. Minya watched him go, her mouth pursed in anger. Her husband wriggled and was silently underwater; kicked, and was beneath her; grasped an ankle and dove. Minya doubled back on herself and kicked him across the jaw. Gavving reached through the defense of her waving arms and legs and had her head between his hands; pulled her to him by main strength and kissed her hard. She laughed bubbles.

He kicked toward the surface with Minya in tow. They blew water from their faces before they inhaled, and were back on duty before any child could get into trouble.

Debby was some distance from where the children swam. She stayed just under the surface, motionless, peering, her spear poised. She expelled stale air — which stayed before her as a bubble — raised her head, snatched a breath, ducked again.

Debby had lived her first nineteen years in free-fall.

Fourteen years in the tree tide had put muscle on her without shrinking her height. Her children — and lisa’s, the children they had borne to Anthon — were no taller than ordinary tree dwellers. But Debby was two and a half meters tall. Her fingers were long and fragile; her toes were sturdier if less agile, and the big toes measured six ce’meters. Her rich brown hair was beginning to show gray, but she still wore it a meter long. For swimming she wore it looped in a braid around her throat.

The water was murky. This was a new skill for Debby, but she was learning.

She struck. The ripple other thrust expanded outward around the great globule, past playing children and the Scientists working their cloth sheet.

A silver shape wriggled on Debby’s spearpoint. Debby reached above her head, tugged hard at the tether, and gasped as her head broke the surface. The waterbird, suddenly thrust into air, expanded its small wings and thrashed mightily. A blow to the head end quieted it.

Debby pushed it into a net bag to join five others.

Her chest still heaved with the need for air. She rested quietly on her back, her hands fluttering from time to time to keep surface tension from pulling her under.

Eastward, a thousand klomters past Citizens Tree, the cloud patterns thickened into a flattened whirlpool. The Smoke Ring converged beyond and below the whorl in a stream of white touched with blue-green, narrowing as it dropped toward the dazzling point of Voy.

Things tended to collect in that special part of the Smoke Ring, east of Gold by sixty degrees of arc. The citizens had reason to know that the storm-whorl around Gold was dangerous. They assumed that the Clump was too. They had never taken the tree nearer than this.

They had never visited a jungle.

Human beings certainly lived elsewhere in the Smoke Ring, but Citizens Tree had never attempted to contact them.

Citizens Tree was placid, safe. Working within the pond was as much excitement as Debby ever got these days. Life in Carther States had been different. The occasional raids from London Tree forced the citizens to be always prepared for war, until in one magnificent raid they had ended London Tree’s power forever.

Debby’s connection with the jungle warriors had ended too. A mixed group of copsiks and warriors had stolen London Tree’s CARM. The vehicle was old science, powerful and unfamiliar. They and their prisoners had been lucky to bring the CARM to any kind of safety; but Carther States was lost somewhere in the sky beyond Gold.

From westward came a cheerful cry. “Citizens! We need muscle!” Debby saw Lawri the Scientist floating in the sky with one hand on the main tether.

Debby snatched at the” net bag (six was a nice day’s catch), kicked herself into the sky, and began reeling her line in. She was first to reach the Scientist. Clave and Minya and Mark the Silver Man were leaving the pond, reeling in lines. Gavving had stayed to gather the children.

Four tethers led to the corners of the sheet-covered net, which was now deep underwater. Lawri stationed them along the main tether as they arrived. “Gather it in,” she directed them. “Make loops. Steady pull.”

Debby wrapped her toes and her fingers around the cable, and did her savage best to contract her body. No loop formed. She knew she wasn’t as strong as a tree dweller, but the others were having trouble too.

Lawri called, “Good! It’s coming straight out.”

That was not obvious to Debby. She strained…and gradually the pond bulged. The sheet and its net backing were rising, carrying tons of water. Debby pulled until her knees and elbows met, then shifted her grip and continued pulling.

The pond stretched, and tore. A baby pond pulled clear, leaving a trail of droplets the size of a man’s head.

Water flowed over the edges of the cloth but was not lost, for surface tension held it. The main pond pulsed as surface tension tried to form the sphere again.

“Keep pulling!” Lawri shouted. “Steady…okay. That should do it.”

The citizens relaxed. The bud-pond continued to move east on its own momentum, toward the tree, with the net and sheet now in the middle of a pulsing sphere.

Debby coiled line that was now slack. Glancing toward the trunk, she saw what the curve of the pond had hidden earlier.

Parallel to the trunk and many klomters beyond it floated a slender dark line. A young tree, no more than thirty klomters long, and injured; for the in tuft was missing, chopped away somehow. The view was confusing, for the midtrunk was wreathed in cloud…dark, dirty cloud…smoke!

Debby tugged abruptly at another line. The motion set her drifting toward the Chairman. Clave caught her ankle as she arrived. “Something?”

Debby pointed with her toes. “That tree. It’s on fire!”

“…I believe you’re right. Treefodder! It’ll be coming apart. Two fires to worry about.”

Debby had never seen a tree break in half, but Clave spoke from dreadful experience. They might have to move the tree. It would take time to get the CARM ready—

Clave had already thought that far. His voice became a whipcrack roar. “Citizens, it’s getting toward dinnertime, and we’ve got all these waterbirds. Let’s break up the swim.”

His voice dropped. “You go now, Debby. Tell Jeffer we may need the CARM. We’ll get the women and children down into the tuft, if we’ve got time. Your eyes are better than mine. Do you see anything leaving the tree? Like clouds of insects?”

There were black specks, big enough to show detail.

“Not insects. Something bigger…three, four… birds?”

“Doesn’t matter. Get going.”

It had taken Jeffer the Scientist a fifth of a day to cross three klomters of line.

Free-fall brought back memories. When Quinn Tribe was lost in the sky after Dalton-Quinn Tree came apart, his crew would have given eyes and limbs to reach a pond.

Fourteen years later, the grandmother of all ponds floated three klomters from Citizens Tree; and now their main problem was to get rid of most of it. Jeffer wondered if the children appreciated their wealth.

Perhaps they did. Most of Citizens Tree, thirty naked adults and children, had come to swim in that shimmering sphere of water.

There was no foliage on the high trunk. It was thick rough bark, with fissures deep enough to hide a man. Jeffer found and donned his tunic and pants, then anchored his toes in a crevice and thrust to send himself gliding out along the bark, toward the CARM.

The lift cable ended two hundred meters short of the CARM’s dock. The citizens may have feared that careless use of the CARM might spray fire across a rising cage.

More likely, they feared the CARM itself. They would not lightly come too near that ancient scientific thing.

The CARM was old science. It was roughly brickshaped, four meters by ten by thirty-two, and made of starstuff: metal and glass and plastic, sheathed with darkly luminous stuff that took the energy from sunlight.

The bulk of it was tanks for hydrogen and oxygen and water. Nostrils at the aft end — four at each corner, and a larger one in the middle — would spurt blue fire on command.

They had neglected the CARM of late, and Jeffer accepted some of the blame. The CARM made two “flavors” of fuel out of water and the power in the batteries.

The batteries held their full scientific charge — they filled themselves, somehow, as long as sunlight could reach the CARM’s glassy surface — but the hydrogen and oxygen tanks were almost empty. It was high time they filled the water tank.

The CARM’s bow was moored in a dock of wooden beams. Double doors led into a hut with cradles for passengers, moorings for cargo, and a broad transparent window. The window looked forth on nothing but bark.

Ventral to the window was a gray sheet of glass and a row of colored buttons.

Jeffer went forward. A touch of a blue button lit the gray glass panel. Blue governed what moved the CARM: the motors, the two flavors of fuel supply, the water tank, fuel flow. Jeffer read the blue script:

H₂: 0,518

O₂: 0,360

H₂O: 0,001

POWER: 8,872

The batteries danced with energy. Why not? The CARM wasn’t using power. Nobody in Citizens Tree had bothered to fill the water tank in seven years; so power wasn’t needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The water tank was virtually dry.

And he could get something done while he waited for Lawri’s pond. Jeffer touched the blue button (the panel went blank) and the yellow (there appeared a line diagram of the CARM’s bow, the hut section). He touched a yellow dot in the image, and turned his fingertip. Then he moved aft.

The residual goop in pond water stayed in the tank after the pure water was gone. Jeffer’s finger motions had (magically, scientifically) caused a spigot in the aft wall to ooze brown mud. He cupped the globule in his hands. He tossed it at the airlock, and most of it got through. Another globule formed, and he sent it after the first. He wiped his hands on his tunic. The mud flow had stopped.

Next he pulled several loops of hose from cargo hooks.

He rotated one end onto the spigot, then tossed the coil through the twin doors. Done! When Lawri’s blob of pond arrived, she would find the CARM ready to be fueled.

Jeffer returned to the controls. He had a surprise for his wife.

Two sleeps ago, while the rest of the tribe was roasting waterbirds from the pond, Lawri had held one of the creatures up for his perusal. “Have you ever really looked at these?”

Jeffer had seen waterbirds before…but he’d kept his mouth shut, and looked.

There were no feathers. The modified trilateral symmetry common to Smoke Ring life expressed itself in two wings and a tailfin, all in smooth membrane on collapsible ribs. The wings could be held half collapsed for motion within the denser medium of water. Only one of the three eyes looked like a normal bird’s eye. The others were big and bulbous, with large pupils and thick lids. The bodies were slippery-smooth.

“I’ve eaten them, but…you’re right. I’ve seen everything from mobies to triunes to flashers to drillbits, and they don’t look like this. Earthlife doesn’t either. Do you think it’s so they can move through water?”

“I’ve tried looking them up in the cassettes,” Lawri had said. “I tried bird. I tried water and pond. There’s nothing.”

Jeffer’s next sleep had ended with a dream fading in his mind, leaving a single phrase: “…even the fish can fly.”

He’d had to wait until now to try it.

He tapped yellow (the display vanished), then white (and got a tiny white rectangle at the dorsal-port comer).

White read the cassettes; white summoned Voice. “Prikazyvat Voice,” he said.

The voice of the CARM was a throaty bass, as deep as Mark the dwarf’s voice. “Ready, Jeffer the Scientist.”

“Prikazyvat Read Fish. Read it aloud.”

The cassette was one that Jeffer had stolen from London Tree, but it was no different from Quinn Tribe’s lost records of Smoke Ring life forms. As Voice spoke, print scrolled down the display screen: words recorded long ago by one of Discipline’s abandoned crew.

FISH

IF THE BIRDS WITHIN THE SMOKE RING RESEMBLE FISH — LEGLESS, DESIGNED TO MOVE THROUGH AIR WEIGHTLESSLY, AS A FISH MOVES THROUGH WATER —THEN THE FISH THAT LIVE WITHIN THE PONDS RESEMBLEBIRDS.

EVERY FISH WE HAVE EXAMINED BREATHES AIR. THEY ARE NOT MAMMALS, BUT LUNGFISH. THE SINGLE CLASS OF EXCEPTIONS, GILLFISH, ARE DISCUSSED ELSEWHERE.

SOME CAN EXTRUDE A TUBE TO THE POND’S SURFACE.

A FEW CAN EXPAND THE SIZE OF THEIR FINS VIA MEMBRANES, TO MAKE THEM SERVE AS WINGS. ONE FORM, CORE FISH, INFLATES ITSELF WITH AIR, DIVES TO THE CENTER OF A POND, AND EXPELS A BUBBLE. IT CAN STAY SUBMERGED FOR UP TO A DAY — SEVERAL SMOKE RING DAYS — REBREATHING ITS AIR BUBBLE, MAKING FORAYS TO HUNT, AND THEN RETURNING.

THE WHALE-SIZED MOBY USES ITS POND AS A LAIR FROM WHICH IT BURSTS TO SWEEP THROUGH PASSING CLOUDS OF INSECTS. MOB VIS A COMPROMISE FORM, AND THERE ARE OTHERS.

CLEARLY EVEN THE LARGEST PONDS CAN BREAK UP OR EVAPORATE OR BE TORN APART BY STORM. EVERY CREATURE THAT LIVES IN A POND MUST BE PREPARED TO MIGRATE TO ANOTHER: TO BEHAVE LIKE A BIRD. EVEN GILLFISH—

“Prikazyvat Stop,” Jeffer said. This memory that had surfaced from his adolescent training under Quinn Tribe’s Scientist was going to put him one up on his wife!

Back to work. He tapped white, then green, then each of the five green rectangles now onscreen. Within the great window that faced the bark, five smaller windows appeared, looking starboard, port, dorsal, ventral, and aft. The ventral view had a blur and a flicker to it. The rest were clear, like the window itself.

The aft view looked along the line that led west to the pond. Citizens were returning to the tree. Behind them a bud of pond was already drifting toward the tree, with the harebrain net showing as a shadow within. Lawri’s crazy idea was working.

They swarmed back along the cable toward the midpoint of Citizens Tree. Gavving and Minya and Anthon hung back, counting heads to be sure that all children were accounted for. A girl lost her grip and drifted; she was chortling and trying to swim through the air when Anthon scooped her up.

As children arrived, Clave herded the smaller ones, with some difficulty, into a rectangular frame with a slatted floor: the lift cage. He stopped when twelve children were inside. Leave room for a couple of adults.

The rest clung to the rough bark or floated like balloons on their tethers. There were wrestling matches. Eightyear-old Arth was getting good at using the recoil of his opponent’s line. He was Clave’s youngest, and just beginning the tremendous growth of adolescence.

Debby had arrived first. Clave could see her a hundred meters out along the bark, climbing toward the CARM.

The bud-pond continued to move. Lawri wore a proprietary smile. Still, Citizens Tree had better have more line next time they tried this. The pond was too close. If the tree had brushed it there would have been a flood.

The lift now held a score of children. Whoever was in the treadmill would have a problem braking that weight.

It couldn’t be helped. Clave looked about. Mark and Anthon looked ludicrous together. Mark short and wide, Anthon long and narrow, their heads pointing in opposite directions — He called, “Anthon, Mark. Take the children down and bring back any adult you can find. Be prepared to fight a fire.”

Anthon stared in astonishment. “Fire?”

“Burning tree. It’s around the other side of the trunk now. Go down and get some help. Rather — Where on Earth is Rather?”

Mark pointed outward. “I didn’t know any reason to stop them,” he said defensively. “They won’t fit in the lift this trip—”

Clave cursed silently as he watched Rather and Jill clawing their way out along the bark. There was no tide to hurt them here. If they slipped, someone would go get them. But he could have used their help.

Jeffer couldn’t guess how long it took him to realize that the background had changed. Behind the five camera views superimposed upon it, the window no longer showed bark a few ce’meters distant. It showed a huge face, strong, with massive bones: the brutal face of a dwarf.

Chapter Two Discipline

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 6 SM:

DISCIPLINE HAD BEEN DETERIORATING.

Cameras outside the hull showed rainbow-hued scars from matter that had penetrated the electromagnetic ramscoop while Discipline was in flight. They also showed newer micrometeorite pocks. Sharls could ward off anything big enough to see coming, by turning on those magnetic shields for a few seconds, but they ate power in great gulps.

One day he might regret even the little power he used to maintain the gardens and the cats.

Within the hull, time had discolored metal and plastic.

The air was dust-free; metal was clean, but not recently polished. Many of the servomechs had worn out. All but a few of the crew cubicles were kept cold and dark and airless. Kitchen machinery was in storage, with power shut down. Some of the bedding had decayed. Water mattresses had been drained and stored.

Sharls kept the control room free of water vapor and almost cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide. He hoped that the computer and its extensions would survive longer in the cold. But the gardens and corridors and even some of the cubicles were kept habitable. Sharls left the lighting on a day-night cycle, for the birds and cats and plants.

The gardens were surviving nicely. It was true that some of the plants had died out completely; but after all, his ecosystem was missing its most important factor.

Human crew were supposed to be in that cycle, and they had been gone for half a thousand years.

Scores of cats prowled the ship hunting hundreds of rats and a lesser number of turkeys and pigeons. The turkeys made a formidable enemy. The cats had learned to attack them in pairs.

Sharls trained the cats to respond to his voice. He had released the experimental rats long ago. The birds were already loose; they must have been released during that blank spot in his memory, the mutiny; but by themselves they wouldn’t have fed the cats. They were too agile, for one thing. With all of the animal life in the system now, the gardens had a better chance of surviving.

By watching the cats and rats and plants and turkeys and pigeons interact, Sharls hoped to learn how an ecological system would behave in a free-fall environment…like the larger ecosystem that flowed beneath Discipline in endless rivers of curdled cloud.

Or had he simply become lonely? In his youth Sharls had never been a cat lover. (A sudden memory: his hand swelling with white patches rimmed in red, itching horribly. A kitten had scratched him playfully while he was stroking it.) And now? They didn’t obey orders worth a damn…but neither had his crew.

A computer program would hardly have retained allergies; but who would expect a computer program to become lonely?

Discipline skimmed above the curdled whorl of the fourth Lagrange point. A fraction of Sharls Davis Kendy’s attention watched on various wavelengths. This close, he could confirm an earlier sighting: minor amounts of carbon were being burned at sites around the edges of that endless storm. This was no forest fire: too small, and it had gone on for years. It might indicate human industry at a primitive level.

Now, where was CARM #6?

…Funny that the cats hadn’t gone with the mutineers. The crew had loved cats. Somewhere in the lost part of his memory, there must be a reason. Perhaps Sharls had pulled free of the Smoke Ring without warning.

He might have done that if the mutineers planned something really foul, like cutting the computer out and trying to run Discipline manually.

The mutiny was a blank to Sharls.

He had edited those memories. He even remembered why. The descendants of the mutineers would need Sharls Davis Kendy someday. It was not good that he hold grudges against specific ancestors, against old names. But had he been too thorough?

—There! CARM #6’s communications system had come alive.

It was a thousand kilometers behind him and something less than six thousand kilometers in toward Voy. Kendy did several things at once. Before his new orbit could carry him away, he restarted the drive. He beamed, “Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State.”

The CARM autopilot responded.

“Link to me. Beam records.”

He’d made mistakes enough during that unexpected contact twenty Earth years ago! At least he’d accomplished something: he’d broken the program that denied him access to the Cargo and Repair Module. The drive systems were beyond his reach. The original mutineers must have physically cut the fiber-optic cable. But the CARM would talk to him!

He’d instructed the autopilot to take photographs at ten-minute intervals. Reentry was in progress when he sent that message. Static might well have fuzzed him out.

But pictures were streaming in.

Time passed at a furious rate. CARM #6 flamed as it plowed through thickening air, veering from plants and ponds and creatures. It dipped into a pond to refuel, then bedded itself in the Voy-ward tuft of the largest of a cluster (grove?) of integral trees. It stayed there, with not much of a view at all, for most of a Smoke Ring year.

Flickering shapes carved cavities through the foliage and wove small branches into wasp’s-nest structures. Abruptly the CARM backed into the sky, skittered outward under inexpert handling, and docked at the midpoint of the tree.

With another part of his mind, Kendy fiddled with Discipline’s fusion motor. He could not match his orbit to that of the CARM. He must stay well outside the Smoke Ring to protect Discipline from corrosion. The best he could do was twice the CARM’s orbital period, to dip low above the CARM’s position once every ten hours and eight minutes. But he’d be in range for half an hour while his motor was firing.

More of his attention went to watching the CARM’s lone occupant in real time.

Jeffer the “Scientist” was stored in memory. He had aged twenty Earth years: hair and beard going gray, wrinkles across his forehead (broken by a white line of scar that was a healing pink wound in Kendy’s records), and knuckles turning knobby. Height: 2.3 meters. Mass: 86 kilograms. Long arms and legs, toes like stubby fingers, fingers like a spider’s legs: long, fragile, the hands of a field surgeon.

The Smoke Ring had altered Discipline’s descendants.

The tribes of London Tree and Dalton-Quinn Tree had all looked like that. The jungle giants who had grown up without tidal gravity were hardly human: freakishly tall, with long, fragile, agile fingers and toes; and one of the twelve was a cripple, and others had legs of different length. Only Mark the Silver Man had looked like a normal State citizen. They had called him “dwarf.”

They were savages; but they had learned to use State technology in the form of the CARM. Still human. Perhaps they could be made citizens again.

To Kendy, who thought with the speed of a computer, the “Scientist” moved much too slowly. Now he was at the controls, auditing a cassette; now checking the camera views in present time…

The incoming CARM records showed clouds and ponds and trees and trilaterally symmetric fishlike birds swirling across the sky. Natives flickered through the CARM cabin: the same savages, growing older; a growing handful of children.

At fifteen years minus-time the CARM backed out of its timber dock for a journey of exploration. It visited a green puffball several kilometers across, and when it emerged there was vegetation like a houseful of green spaghetti bound to its dorsal surface. It hovered in the open sky while men darted among a flock of birds — real birds with real wings: turkeys — and returned to its dock with prisoners.

At thirteen years minus-time it left the trunk to return with a dubious prize: several tons of black mud.

There were no more such forays. The Cargo and Repair Module had become a motor for the tree.

It was docked when the main drive fired for several hours. Kendy watched side views as the integral tree drifted across the sky. It had been circling too far from the neutron star. Air grew thin away from the Smoke Ring median.

The tree was lower now; the air would be as thick as mountain air on Earth. And now the CARM was not being used at all; but there was plenty to watch. The Smoke Ring environment was fascinating. Huge spheres of water, storms, jungles like tremendous puffs of green cotton candy.

In present time, the aft CARM camera showed nearly thirty natives maneuvering between the tree and a tremendous globule of water. They were using the free-fall environment better than any State astronaut. The State had need of these people!

Discipline’s own telescope had found the foreshortened tree, with the pond to mark it. And what was that on the opposite side of the tree? Infrared light glowed near its center…

Half a thousand years of sensory deprivation were being compensated in a few minutes. After more than five hundred years, Sharls Kendy had left the stable point behind Goldblatt’s World. He had burned irreplaceable fuel, and it was worth it! Sharls tried to absorb it all, integrate it all…but that could wait. The “Scientist” might leave at any minute!

He beamed: “Interrupt records.” It was twenty Earth years of nothing happening, and the tiny CARM autopilot couldn’t handle too many tasks at once. “Activate voice.”

“Voice on.” The .04 second delay was almost too short to notice.

“Send—” He displayed a picture of himself as a human being, with minor improvements. At age forty-two Kendy had been handsome, healthy, mature, firm of jaw, authoritative: a recruitment-poster version of a State checker.

These were not obedient State citizens. They hadn’t trusted him twenty years ago. What words might give him a handle on Jeffer the “Scientist”?

He sent, “Kendy for the State. Jeffer the Scientist, your citizens have been idle too long.”

Jeffer jumped like a thief caught in the act. Two long seconds passed before he found his voice. “Checker?”

“Speaking. How stands your tribe?”

Out beyond the terrible whorl of storm that surrounded Gold, out where water boiled and froze at the same time and the legendary stars were a visible truth, lived Kendy the Checker. He had claimed to be something like an elaborate cassette: the recording of a man. He had claimed authority over every human being in the Smoke Ring. He had offered knowledge and power, while they were still near enough to hear his ravings.

Perhaps he was only a madman trapped somehow aboard the spacecraft that had brought men from the stars. But he had knowledge. He had coached them through that terrible fall back into the Smoke Ring, fourteen years ago.

The face in the CARM’s window had not been seen since. It was the face of a dwarf, a brutal throwback. The jaw and orbital ridges were more massive even than Mark’s, the musculature more prominent.

“We lived through the reentry,” Jeffer told him. “Ilsa and Merril are dead now. There are children.”

“Jeffer, your tribe has possessed the CARM for fourteen of your years. In that time you have moved the tree twice and thenceforth done nothing at all. What have you learned of the people of the fourth Lagrange point?”

The what? “I don’t understand the question.”

“Sixty degrees ahead of Goldblatt’s World on the arc of the Smoke Ring and sixty degrees behind are regions where matter grows dense. They are points of stability in Goldblatt’s World’s orbit. Material tends to collect there.” The dwarf’s brutal features registered impatience. “East of you by twelve hundred kilometers, a vast, sluggish, permanent storm.”

“The Clump? You’re saying there are people in the Clump?”

“I sense activity there. A civilization is growing twelve hundred kilometers from where your tree has floated for fifteen Earth years. Jeffer, where is your curiosity? Has it been bred out of you?”

“What do you want from me, Checker?”

Kendy said, “I can be in range to advise you every ten hours and eight minutes, once every two of your days. I want to know more of the people of the Smoke Ring. In particular, I want to know about you and about the Clump civilization. I think you should link with them, perhaps rule them.”

Jeffer’s one previous experience indicated that Kendy was harmless. For good or ill, he could only talk. Jeffer gathered his courage and said, “Kendy, the tales say that you abandoned us here, long ago. Now I expect you’re bored and—”

“I am.”

“And you want to talk to someone. You also claim authority 1 won’t grant you. Why should I listen?”

“Are you aware that you are being invaded?”

“What?”

The face ofKendy was suddenly replaced by a dizzying view. Jeffer looked into a river of storm, streaming faster as the eye moved inward toward a tiny, brilliant violet pinpoint. Jeffer had seen this once before: the Smoke Ring seen from outside.

Before he could remember to breathe, the view jumped. He was looking at what had been the center of the picture, vastly enlarged.

“Look.” Scarlet arrowheads appeared, pointing — “Here, your tree.”

“Citizens Tree, from the out tuft? Yeah, and that must be the pond.” Both were tiny. Opposite the pond was… another tree? And dark cloud clinging to the trunk?

The view jumped again. Through the blur and flicker in the illusion of a window, Jeffer watched a tree on fire.

Moving between the two trees were creatures he had never seen before.

“Treefodder! Everybody’s on the other side of the trunk. Those bird-things will be on the tree before anyone knows it.”

“Look in infrared.” The picture changed again, to red blobs on black. Jeffer couldn’t tell what he was looking at. The scarlet arrowhead pointed again. “You are seeing heat. This is fire in the intruder tree. Here, these five points are just the temperature of a man.”

Jeffer shook his head. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The enlarged picture returned…and suddenly those tiny “creatures” jumped into perspective. “Winged men!”

“I would have called those enlarged swimming fins rather than wings. Never mind. Have you ever heard tales of winged men?”

“No. There’s nothing in the cassettes either. I’ve got to do something about this. Prikazyvat Voice off.” Jeffer made for the airlock without waiting to see the face fade.

His citizens wouldn’t have a chance against winged warriors!

The sun was at three o’clock: dead east, just above where the Smoke Ring began to take definite shape.

Kendy can only talk, sure, but he talks with pictures, and he tells things nobody can know. He’ll be in range every other day at this time. Do I want to know that? But Jeffer had other concerns, and the rest of that thought lay curled unfinished in the bottom of his mind.

Jill was leaving Rather behind. She glanced back once and moved on, and there was laughter in the sound of her panting.

Jill was his elder by half a year. When he wanted company it was generally Jill he wanted; but they did compete.

There had been a year during which she could beat him at wrestling, when she suddenly grew tall and he’d lagged behind. She’d taught him the riblock the hard way: she’d held his floating ribs shut with her knees so that he couldn’t breathe. He could wrestle her now — he was a boy and a dwarf — but her longer arms and legs gave her an unbeatable advantage at racing. He’d never catch her.

So he moved outward at his own pace, giving due care to his handholds and footholds in the rough bark, following the blond girl in the scarlet tunic. Her long-limbed mother had already reached the CARM ahead of them.

At fourteen-plus. Rather was considered an adult. He was built wide and muscular, with heavy cheek, jaw, and orbital bones. His fingers were short and stubby, and his toes, though strong, were too short to be much use. His hair was black and curly like his mother’s. His beard was sparse, without much curl to it yet. His eyes were green (and green tinged his cheek, with a growth of fluff that would be many days healing). He stood a meter and threequarters tall.

Dwarf. Arms too short, legs too short. He should have gone around the trunk. Jill could have told the Scientist about the burning tree; Debby might already know. He could have been getting a closer look!

The CARM loomed ahead of him. It was as big… no, bigger than the Citizens Tree commons.

Debby shouted into the airlock. Someone emerged:

Jeffer. They talked, heads bobbing. Debby moved to the front of the CARM; Jeffer was about to go back inside—

Rather heard Jill calling. “Scientist! There’s a burning tree coming toward us!” She paused to catch her breath.

“We saw it, me and Rather, we — while we were swimming—”

Jeffer called back. “Debby told me. Did you see anything like winged men?”

“…No.”

“Okay. Help Debby with the moorings, there at the bow.” He noticed Rather struggling in Jill’s wake. “Get Rather to help you.”

Debby and Jill were both fighting knots, and Jill was muttering “Treefodder, treefodder, treefodder,” when Rather caught up. “I bent my finger,” she said.

Debby said, “I hate to cut lines. See what you can do.”

The CARM’s tethers hadn’t been moved in years, and the knots were tight. Rather’s stubby fingers worked them loose. Dwarf. Clumsy but strong. Presently the CARM was held by nothing but its own inertia. Jill did not look pleased. Debby and Rather grinned at each other. It was something, to do a thing an adult warrior could not!

Jeffer called from the airlock, twelve meters beyond the bark. “Come aboard!”

Debby jumped and Jill followed. Rather hesitated until he saw them bump against the airlock door. The jump looked dangerous. Tide was gentle, but one could fall into the sky. Rather had never been inside the CARM, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. The starstuff box was like nothing else in or on the tree.

But he had to follow. He caught the edge of the outer door as it passed, pivoted on the strength of his arms, and entered feet first. Can’t jump right, can’t reach far. What if I missed?

It was weird inside the CARM. There were openings in the back wall, and hard round loops sticking out of the dorsal and side walls. Farther toward the front were rows of cradles almost the size of an adult, ten in all, made of nothing like wood or cloth.

Rather made his way forward. The others were in the first row of cradles. “Take a seat and strap yourself in,” Jeffer ordered. “Here, like this.” He fastened two elastic tethers across Jill’s torso. “Lawri showed me how to work these, years ago.”

The cradle had a headrest that fitted nicely behind his ears. Jill’s and Debby’s dug into their shoulders. It’s true, Rather thought suddenly. The CARM was built for dwarves! He liked the thought.

“The winged men weren’t very close,” the Scientist said. “We’ve got time.” His fingers drummed against the flat panel below the window.

There was tide pulling Rather forward, and a whisperroar like a steady wind. The bark receded; the tree backed into the sky. Jill gripped the armrests of her cradle. Her mouth was wide. Debby said, “Clave didn’t say take off, Scientist. He said get ready.”

“No time. They’re headed for the trunk. Also the CARM is mine, Debby. We settled that once.”

“Tell it to Clave.”

“Clave knows.”

The invaders kicked themselves through the air, slowly, in the last stages of exhaustion. Five, it looked like, until Rather realized that the older woman carried a half-grown girl in her arms.

Jeffer nudged the CARM toward them, in along the trunk.

Smoke Ring people came long, longer, or dwarf. These invaders were of the longer persuasion, like jungle giants, born and raised in free-fall. They were quite human: an older man and woman and four girls. The wings were artificial, bound to their shins, made of cloth over splayed ribs. One girl trailed behind, struggling along with only one wing.

They were in sorry shape. Closer now, and Rather could see details. The man’s hair was burned, and the loose sheet that covered him was charred. The wingless girl was coughing; she didn’t even have the strength to cling to the woman who carried her.

Their legs stopped pumping as, one by one, they saw the CARM.

Debby said, “I don’t see anything like bows or harpoons. Can we take them aboard?”

“I thought of that, but look at them. The CARM scares them worse than being lost in the sky. Anyway, the man’s almost there.”

The burned man hadn’t seen them. Kicking steadily, far ahead of the others, he reached the bark and clung.

Without a pause he pounded a stake into the bark, moored a coil of line, and hurled the coil at the older woman. She freed a hand and caught it, pulled herself toward the tree, then snapped the line to send a sine wave rolling toward the trunk. The nearer girl caught the line in her toes as it bowed toward her.

Clave came around the bulge of the bark. He slowed when he saw the strangers. Gavving and Minya joined him. They moved toward the strangers.

There were four on the trunk now: a girl, the man, and the older woman with her coughing burden. Rather watched Clave take the burned man’s line, hurl a sine wave across the one-winged girl’s torso, and pull her in.

“Looks okay,” the Scientist murmured.

Clave looked up and waved. Jeffer nodded and set the CARM moving. “It’s all right,” he said. “They sure don’t look dangerous. I wonder what happened to them? Where are they now?”

“I never saw strangers before,” Jill said. “I don’t know what to think.”

“That burning tree is still coming at us,” Rather said.

Jeffer nodded. The CARM surged, turning.

Black smoke wreathed the middle section of the tree.

Flame glowed sluggishly from within, illuminating blurred curves and oblongs. Debby said, “There’s stuff in the fire. Made stuff, machinery. It’ll burn up.”

That was knowledge burning in the core of the fire.

Jeffer hated what he had to say. “We can’t save it. If we had Mark and the silver suit…no. That might burn even him.”

“You’re not taking us into the fire?”

“We can push anywhere. The tide will hold the tree straight.” Jeffer had already taken them below the inward limit of the firecloud, where a black plume drifted east.

The CARM was passing north of the trunk. Jeffer tapped: the CARM turned. “It’s still dangerous. The tree could come apart while we’re on it.”

He moved in on the trunk. The bow grated against bark; Jeffer’s crew surged forward against their elastic bands. “I think the CARM was built for pushing,” he said. He tapped a blue dash in the center of the panel, and the whisper of power became a whistling roar. Tide surged against his back.

This was what it was to be a Scientist. Knowledge, power, mastery of a universe. This was what Kendy the Checker had to offer. At what price? Who but a Scientist would have the strength to resist?

The sun passed zenith and started down its arc. Jeffer had changed the display; he watched sets of letters and numbers. The roar of the main motor strummed his bones.

Chapter Three Refugees

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 4 SM:

THE HUTS OF CITIZENS TREE WERE ENCLOSURES MADE BY weaving living spine branches into a kind of wicker-work. The Scientists’ hut was larger than most, and more cluttered too. The Scientists were the tribe’s teachers and doctors.

Any hut would have harpoons protruding from the walls and high ceiling; but here the wicker sprouted starstuff knives, pots of herbs and pastes, and tools for writing.

The hut was crowded. Lawri stepped carefully among five sleeping jungle giants.

She’d covered their wounds in undyed cloth. The strangers moaned and twisted in their sleep. The youngest girl, with her hair burned down to the scalp on one side of her head, was holding herself half in the air.

The noise from outside wasn’t helping. Lawri bent to get through the doorway. “Could you hold it down!” she whisper-snarled. “These citizens don’t need…oh. Clave…Chairman, I’m trying to give them some quiet. Can you take the talk to the commons?”

Clave and Anthon were intimidated into silence. Jeffer asked, “Can any of them answer questions?”

“They’re asleep. They haven’t said anything sensible.”

Her husband merely nodded. Lawri went back in. Rustling sounds receded. For a moment she felt remorse. Jeffer would want to see the strangers as much as anyone.

When the burns healed, the strangers would be handsome, but in weird fashion. Only birds wore the gaudy colors of their scorched clothing. Their skin was dark; their lips and noses were broad; their hair was like black pillows.

The youngest girl stirred, thrashed, and opened her eyes. “Tide,” she said wonderingly. The dark eyes focused. “Who’re you?”

“I’m Lawri the Scientist. You’re in Citizens Tree. You’re safe now.”

The girl twisted to see the others. “Wend?”

“One of you died.”

The girl moaned.

“Can you tell me who you are and how you came here?”

“I’m Carlot,” the girl said. Two tears were growing.

“We’re Serjent House. Loggers. There was afire…the whole tree caught fire. Wend got caught when the water tank let go.” She shook her head; teardrop globules flew wide.

“All right, Carlot. Have some water, then go to sleep.”

Carlot’s drinking technique was surprising. She took the pottery vessel, set two fingers to nearly block the opening, then jerked the pottery vessel toward her face.

The jet of water struck her lower lip. She tried again and reached her mouth.

“Would you like something to eat? Foliage?”

“What’s that?”

Lawri went out to strip some branchlets of their foliage. Carlot looked dubiously at the fluffy green stuff.

“Oh, it’s greens.”

“You know it?”

“I’ve been in a tree tuft.” She tasted it. “This is sweet. Older tree?” She continued eating.

Lawri said, “Later I’ll get you some stew. You should sleep now.”

Carlot patted the wicker floor. “How can I sleep with this pushing up against me? All my blood wants to settle on one side.”

London Tree, Lawri’s home, had been bigger, with a stronger tide. In Citizens Tree you could drop a stone from eye level and draw a slow breath and let it out before the stone struck. But this Carlot must be used to no tide at all.

She turned over, gingerly. Her eyes closed and she was asleep.

They moved through the green gloom of the corridor, back toward the commons. Anthon said, “I always wondered. Lawri doesn’t take orders from you either, does she?”

Jeffer laughed. “Treefodder, no!”

Clave said, “I really wanted to ask them some questions before we tackle the firetree.”

“We can’t wait,” Jeffer said. “Let’s go see what we can scavenge. This is the most interesting thing that has happened to us in fourteen years.”

“It’s bound to bring changes.”

“Like what?”

Clave grinned at Jeffer. “They’ve already changed your home life. You can’t sleep in the Scientists’ hut and Lawri won’t leave.”

“I’ve got the children too. I’m living in the bachelors’ longhut with my three kids and Rather. Look, I want to go now, before that burned tree drifts too far. Anthon?”

“Ready,” said the jungle giant.

Clave nodded, reluctantly. “Just us three? Stet. We’ll round up some kids to run the treadmill. And let’s take those wings along. I want to try them.”

The tree still burned. Fire had eaten six or seven klomters in from the midpoint along the lee side, progressing alongside the waterfall channel, where there was partial protection from the wind. The flames streamed east like the mane of a skyhorse. At the midpoint there were only red patches glowing in black char. In the center of the burn was a prominent uneven lump. Jeffer eased the CARM toward that.

Clave said, “I don’t understand why it hasn’t come apart.”

Anthon nodded uneasily. Jeffer said, “ It’ s a short tree. With a tuft missing it’s even shorter. Tide would pull harder on a grown tree, but that thing could still come apart while we’re on it. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

Anthon asked, “Why do trees come apart?”

“They do it when they’re dying,” Clave said.

Jeffer said, “When a tree drifts too far away from the Smoke Ring median, it starves. It saves itself by coming i apart. The tide takes half of it out, half in. One half falls back to where the water and fertilizer are. The other half…dies, I guess.”

“I still don’t see any bugs,” Clave said. “It’s the bugs that eat a tree apart, isn’t it? The tree isn’t getting fed, so the bark lets the bugs get inside—”

“I don’t know everything, Clave.”

“Pity.”

They were close enough now to make out black lumps at the center of the charred region. There: a shape like a huge seed pod split open from inside. There: a thin shell of char, a bell shape not unlike the fire-spitting nostrils at the CARM’s aft end. A ridge of white ash joined the bell to the split pod. Beyond: several fragile sheets of charred wood, the remains of an oblong hut with interior walls.

Clave reached for the wings he’d bound to cargo hooks.

“Scientist, can you hold the CARM here? We’ll go see what there is to see. If the tree breaks in half, you’ll still have us tethered.” Jeffer stifled a protest. He ached to explore that ruined structure, but — “I can handle it. Take lines too.” The sun would be dead east in a few tens of breaths.

A stick protruded from the butt end of each fan-shaped wing. After some experimentation they settled for lining the stick along their shins and binding them with the straps. The wings tended to hang up on things even when folded. Clave and Anthon wriggled through the airlock and flapped into the sky.

Jeffer tapped the white button. “Prikazyvat Voice,” he said.

The CARM said, “Ready, Jeffer the Scientist.”

Clave and Anthon fluttered erratically through the air.

Suddenly Anthon moved purposefully toward the blister of charred machinery, moving easily, as if he had always been a bird. Clave moved after him, fighting a tendency to veer left.

They swept away the white ash that lay between the bell and the tank. The ash enclosed them in cloud. When the cloud dispersed, they had exposed a length of tube and a loose webbing of metal strands around it.

“Kendy for the State. Hello, Jeffer.”

Jeffer didn’t jump. “Hello, Kendy. What do you make of all this?”

“You’d know more about the injured plant than I. I’ve been studying the machinery.” Within the bow window the metal strands and the enclosed pipe began blinking, an outline of red light. “These, the pipe and the chicken wire, are metal. The ruptured tank—” another blinking outline “—appears to have been a large seed pod. The cone is half of a similar seed pod. The ash around the pipe appears to be wood ash.

“We’re looking at a steam rocket, Jeffer. Your invaders used a wood fire to heat the pipe. They ran water through the pipe and into the nozzle. Very inefficient, but in your peculiar environment they could move a tree with that. Slowly, of course.”

“Why would they pick an injured tree?”

“Ask them. Did any survive?”

“One’s dead. Five more are in bad shape. My wife won’t let me near them. Wait a few days and see.”

Clave and Anthon flew along the split in the great tank.

They reached the cluster of black oblongs at the other end.

The Checker said, “Their wounds won’t become infected. We didn’t bring disease bacteria.”

“What?”

“I was thinking aloud. I want to talk to your invaders. Take them on a tour, Jeffer, when they’re ready. Show them the CARM.”

“Kendy, I’m not sure I want them to know about you.”

“I will observe only.”

Clave and Anthon were flapping back to the CARM.

They carried blackened cargo, and they no longer wore tethers. “Company coming,” Jeffer said.

“Jeffer, you’ve concealed your contact with me from the rest of your tribe, haven’t you?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to them yet.”

“I’ll keep my silence while others are aboard. Play the game any way you like.”

Clave and Anthon returned black with soot. They untied the now-clumsy wings, then wiggled in, pushing armfuls of blackened salvage ahead of them. Clave crowed, “I love it! It’s really flying!”

“You never did like tide, did you, Clave? How’s the leg?”

“It never gets any better.” Clave flexed his right leg.

The misshapen lump on his thighbone bulged beneath the skin and muscle. The compound fracture he’d suffered in Carther States had healed, but in the jungle there had been no tide to tell the bone to stop growing. “It feels like I strained it. If I have to fly any distance I’ll use just one wing.”

They set to mooring their loot along the walls. Two tremendous hooks, wood stiffened with metal. A meter’s length of metal band with tiny teeth along one edge. A hardwood tube had kept its shape if not its strength; the remnants of charred plastic hose clung to one end.

“Weapons and tools,” Clave said. “There was wire twisted together like a harebrain net, but it was burned through in too many places. Nothing else worth taking except the pipe. We’ve got to have that pipe. We moored the lines to it, Jeffer. Let’s pull it loose.”

“It must be important, given that you’ve moored the CARM to a tree that’s about to come apart. Why? Just because it’s metal?”

“I’ve got a vague idea what this setup is for,” Clave said. “We could duplicate everything except the pipe, in theory anyway. The pipe isn’t just metal, it’s starstuff, something out of the old science.”

“Why do you say that?”

“We couldn’t find a seam,” Anthon said. “It gleams when you rub away the soot. Clave, I’m not sure I like any of this. Jeffer’s right, that tree could come apart and throw us spinning across the sky, and for what? Wings, sure, those are wonderful, but the rest of this is just weird!”

Clave the Chairman said, “Pull that pipe out. Scientist.”

Anthon fumed and was silent. Jeffer said, “Strap down. Let’s hope the tethers hold.”

Under attitude jets the CARM shuddered and lurched.

Then six meters of metal pipe two hundred ce’meters across pulled loose in a cloud of ash.

When Anthon and Clave went out to retrieve it, Jeffer went too. They watched, grinning, while he thrashed and spun; and suddenly he was flying, kicking stiff-legged across the sky like any swordbird.

They bound the pipe up against the hull and took the CARM back to Citizens Tree. The burning tree continued to drift west and in.

Lawri kept the citizens away from her hut for five days, a full waking-sleeping cycle. That became impossible when she sent Rather for food. Rather came back with waterbird stew, and Clave, Jeffer, Gavving, Minya, Debby, Jayan, Jinny, Mark, Jill, and a host of children.

She kept them outside while the strangers ate. Then she and Jeffer pulled the hut’s entrance apart. It could be rebuilt later.

The man named himself: Booce Serjent. He shaped his words strangely. He named the others: his wife Ryllin, and their daughters Mishael, Karilly, and Carlot.

“We’ve delayed the funeral until you’re strong enough,” Clave said. “Can you make yourself discuss funeral practices?”

Booce shrugged painfully. “We cremate. The ashes go into the earthlife tanks. What do you do here?”

“The dead go to feed the tree.”

“All right. Chairman Clave, what has happened to Logbearer?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Logbearer is our ship. You saw a burning tree? The fire started around Logbearer, in the middle.”

“We went there. We brought back a metal pipe and some other stuff.”

“You saved the main feed pipe! How?”

“We used the CARM. It’s an old starstuff relic, still working. We use it to move the tree.”

Booce smiled and sighed and seemed about to drift off to sleep.

Lawri asked, “What are you? Carlot said loggers.”

“Let him alone. I’m awake.” The older woman sounded tired. “I’m Ryllin. Yes, we’re loggers. We take lumber back to the Clump and sell it there.”

Chairman Clave asked, “You mean there are men in there?”

Ryllin’s laugh chopped off as if it had hurt her. “More than a thousand. With children, near two thousand.”

“Thousands. Huh. And you move trees. Don’t you have trees in the Clump?”

“No. The tide’s wrong.”

“How do you move a tree?”

“You cut off one tuft. Then the wind only blows on the other tuft. Booce generally takes us west, so of course we want the log to go east. So we cut the in tuft. The wind pushes just on the out tuft, so it pushes the tree west, and that slows it down. The tree drops closer to Voy and speeds up—”

The children and some adults were looking confused.

We taught them this! Lawri thought angrily. West takes you in. Pushing a tree against the Smoke Ring’s rotation — west — would drop it closer to Voy. Lower orbits were faster orbits. The tree would move east toward the Clump.

“ — But of course we need the rocket too,” Ryllin was saying. “A rocket is a tank of water, and a nozzle, and a metal pipe with a fire around it. You run water through the pipe. The steam sprays away from where you want to go. Without the pipe there’s no Log bearer. You understand reaction effects?”

The citizens looked at each other. Children understood the law of reaction before they could speak!

Ryllin said, “Well, when you get to the Clump you sever the other tuft and work the log to a mooring with the steam rocket. Then you have to sell it. We’ve done it all our lives. But the pipefire got away from us… Lawri? I’m tired.”

Gavving said, “Sell?”

“Forget it, Ryllin. Everybody out,” Lawri ordered.

“Chairman, can you move them?”

The citizens drifted away in clumps of heated discussion.

Four sleeps after reaching Citizens Tree, all of the Serjents were on their feet. Various citizens volunteered to lead them about. They moved tentatively, slowed by healing burns and unaccustomed to tide. Tb tently, and spoke in vowel-twisting aecen words…but for Karilly, who huddled ck of her family, silent.

Booce and his family came back tired. It was primitive, and roomy, and oddly beautiful. These citizens had managed well with so little.

Lawri the Scientist looked them over ai well enough to attend a funeral.

Chapter Four The In Tuft

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 7 SM:

FOLIAGE FRAMED HALF A WORLD OF SKY.

The treemouth faced west, at the junction between branch and trunk. Spine branches migrated west along the branch, carrying whatever their foliage had picked up from the wind, to be swallowed by the conical pit. Citizens came too, to feed the tree. The treemouth was their toilet, their garbage disposal, and their cemetery.

Lawri the Scientist had described all of this in advance.

Booce tried to tell himself that it made sense; it was reasonable in context; it only took getting used to.

Wend had been placed at the lip of the pit. She’d had time to ride the spine branches halfway into the cone of the treemouth. Booce was glad that he could not see her better.

Burning was cleaner. Reducing the body to ashes burned away memories too…

How was Karilly taking it?

Karilly was the quiet one. She obeyed orders, but rarely showed initiative. She almost never spoke to strangers. A good child, but Booce had never really understood her.

She hadn’t been burned. All of them had watched Wend die; how could it be worse for Karilly? But she hadn’t spoken a word since the fire.

Chairman Clave spoke, welcoming Wend into the tribe. Lawri spoke of a citizen’s last duty, to feed the tree.

Ryllin spoke her memories of her lost daughter. Karilly cried silently; the tears sheathed her eyes in crystal.

Older citizens ate first. Booce saw his daughters hanging back — they had learned that much already — while a Citizens Tree girl-child filled his bowl with waterbird stew from a large, crude ceramic pot. He lurched away across the woven-spine-branch floor of the commons, following his wife, trying to keep his bowl upright.

“You think of the tide as something to fight,” his wife said softly. “Think of it as a convenience.”

“Hah.”

“Tide gives you a preferred direction. Something to push against. Look.” With the bowl held in one hand, Ryllin leapt one-legged into the air and spun in a slow circle before her feet touched the floor again. She hadn’t spilled a drop.

“Moving isn’t unpleasant in a tide, it’s just different. These, ah, citizens make us look clumsy, but we can adjust, love. We will adjust.”

“Stet. I’ve climbed trees all my life…Company.”

They were surrounded by children. A pudgy halfgrown girl said, “How do you move a tree without a CARM?”

Booee said, “Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.”

A dozen children waited patiently while Booce and Ryllin nested themselves in foliage. Then they all settled at once.

Booce thought while he ate. He said, “You need a rocket. My rocket was Logbearer, and it was my father’s rocket before me. To make a rocket you need a rocket.”

One asked, “How did anyone build the first rocket?”

Booce smiled at the dwarf boy. “The first rocket was given by Discipline. It had a mind — the Library — and the Admiralty still has that, with more knowledge in it than you’ll find in your little cassettes. Anyway, you’ve got to have a rocket so you can get to the pod groves.”

A woman of Booce’s own size settled within earshot.

Booce pretended not to notice. “The biggest pod you can find in the pod grove becomes your water tank. You cut another pod in half and it’s your rocket nozzle. You run the pipe into the stem end. You wrap sikenwire around the pipe to hold the firebark. You light the firebark. You pump water through the hot pipe and it turns to steam and goes racing out the nozzle, and that pushes you the other way.”

The pudgy girl (though all the children looked a bit pudgy, well fed and compressed by tide) asked, “Where does pipe come from?”

“I don’t know. Discipline, maybe, if there ever was a Discipline.” The children snickered. Booce didn’t know why, so he ignored it. “There’s a hundred and twenty meters of pipe in the Empire, so they tell me, and fortyeight of that makes up the pipes in eleven logging ships. Woodsman carried a spare pipe, but they’re richer than we are.

“So. A rocket is one and a half pods, and a pipe, and some sikenwire, and the hut complex at the other end of the tank. You need big hooks for towing, saws to carve up wood, and crossbows, because you’ve got to find your own food. A trip takes a year or two. Most of us travel in families.

“Now you find a sting jungle. The honey hornets live in the sting jungles, and there’s nothing so big they can’t kill it. You need to cover yourself all over to get at the nest. Honey is sticky red stuff, sweeter than foliage.

“Now you pick a tree. If it’s more than forty klomters long, the wood’ll be too coarse and you’ll be forever coming home. Thirty’s about right. You moor your rocket at the midpoint, but you don’t use it yet. You paint a line of honey down the trunk to one of the tufts. Then you gash the bark in a circle above the tuft, and paint honey along that. You know the bugs that eat a tree apart if it starts to die?”

Heads nodded. The Serjents had been told of the death of Dalton-Quinn Tree. Children must hear that tale early.

Booce said, “The bugs follow the honey down. They eat the honey above the tuft. Then they’re stuck, because they’ve eaten all the honey. There’s nothing left to eat but wood. After a few sleeps the tuft drops off.”

There were sounds of dismay. “We don’t use occupied trees, you know,” Booce said gently. “The tree would die anyway when it gets near the Clump. Integral trees want a straightforward tidal pull, straight through Voy.”

The pudgy girl asked a little coldly, “How many trees have you killed?” Booce saw that she was almost an adult. Her height had fooled him: the tide had stunted her growth.

“Ten.”

The dwarf (an adult too, with beard beginning to sprout) asked, “Why do you cut off the tuft?”

“To move. You know the rule? West takes you in, in takes you east. I want the tree to move east, back to the Clump. So I cut the in tuft. Now I’ve got a west wind blowing on the out tuft, and nothing at the in stump to catch the wind. The tree accelerates west. It drops toward Voy. Things move faster when their orbits are closer to Voy, so the tree moves east. After a while I’m in from the Clump and still moving. That’s when I need the rocket. I have to cut off the other tuft, then fire the rocket to move the tree into the Clump.”

The dwarf boy asked, “What then?”

“Then I sell the log for what I can get, and hope nobody else brought a log in at the same time. If there are two of us competing, we might not get enough to pay us for the work.”

Most of the children looked puzzled. The dwarf asked, “What went wrong this time?”

Booce’s throat closed up. His decision! With some re- r lief he heard Ryllin say, “We were in a hurry. We thought we could get more water for the rocket. So we set the rocket going before the tuft dropped off. That started a fire. Wend was trying to get out of the huts when the water tank — well, it got too hot and—”

Booce jumped in, hastily. “The water tank split open. Wend got caught. Carlot and I were burned pulling her out of the steam. We were steering the log for that pond out there, and your tree moved in front of it, so it was the closest. So we made for it. And you found six of us clinging to the trunk like toes in hair, and — and Wend was dead, and the rest of us were ready to die, I think.”

The adults had all been served. The children drifted toward the cookpot. Booce ate. He’d let his stew get cold.

Likely he would never see the Clump again. It was as well. He and his family would be paupers there. He had never owned anything but Logbearer itself, and even that was gone. But was it really beyond belief that these people could build another Logbearer?

When all the adults were eating, the children drifted into line at the cookpot. Rather was just ahead of three tall and dark young women, and just behind his brother Harry.

“Take Jill’s place,” Rather told Harry.

“Why should I?”

“Beats me. Will you do it?”

“All right.”

The favor would be repaid. Rather would take Harry’s place at the cookpot or in the treadmill, or show him a wrestling trick; something. These things didn’t need discussion. Harry stepped out of line and talked to Jill where she was serving stew. Jill served herself and Harry took her place.

The blond girl joined Rather. “What’s that for?” she asked; but she seemed pleased.

“I’ve been listening to the old ones. Now I want to talk to the girls. Come along?” If they wouldn’t talk to a dwarf boy, maybe they’d talk to a girl.

They followed the Serjent girls as they made their exaggeratedly careful way across the commons’ wicker floor. The refugees settled slowly into the foliage, keeping their eyes fixed on their bowls. Stew still slopped over the edge of Carlot’s bowl. “The hole’s too big,” she said.

“You just need practice. — I’m Jill, he’s Rather.”

“How do you eat when you’re at the midpoint?”

Jill and Rather settled across from them. Rather stripped four branchlets for chopsticks. Jill said, “I’d take a smoked turkey along. What do you use? Bowls with smaller holes?”

“Yes, and we carry these.” Carlot produced a pair of bone sticks, ornately carved. “You’re lucky. You’ve always got…spine branches?”

“These are branchlets. The spine branches are the big ones.”

The third girl, Karilly, had not spoken. She was concentrating fully on her bowl.

Mishael said, “You seem to be happy.”

Rather found the comment disconcerting. “What do you mean?”

“You, all of you. You’ve got your tree and it’s all you need. Lumber from the bare end of the branch. The clothes you wear, the cloth comes from branchlet fibers, doesn’t it?”

“It’s foliage with the sugar washed out.”

“And the dye is from berries. Water comes running down the trunk into that basin, and you eat foliage and catch meat from the sky. And there’s the CARM. Without the CARM you’d have to build a rocket to move the tree.’’

“Right.” Rather thought, We don’t know how to do that. The CARM is all that keeps us from being savages. Is that how they see us? “We had to leave the tree to get our lines. And “the adults keep talking about earthlife crops. They couldn’t bring seeds and eggs with them.”

“You could buy them in the Market if you were rich enough.”

Jill said, “We don’t know those words. Rich? Buy?”

Carlot said, “Rich means you can have whatever you want.”

“Like being Chairman?”

“No—”

Mishael took over. “Look, suppose you want earthlife seeds or pigeons or turkeys. Stet, you go to the Market and you find what you want. Then you’ve got to buy it. You need something to give the owner. Metal, maybe.”

“We don’t have much metal,” Rather said. “What are the people like? Like you?”

“Sometimes,” Carlot said. “What do you mean? Tall? Dark? We get dark and light, short and…well, mostly we’re about as tall as me, and the men are taller.”

“No dwarves?”

“Oh, of course there are dwarves. In the Navy.”

“What do you think of dwarves?” He hadn’t meant to ask so directly; he hadn’t realized how important the question was to him.

Carlot asked, “What do you think of my legs?”

Rather blushed. “They’re fine.” They were hidden anyway; Carlot was wearing the scarlet tunic and pantaloons of Citizens Tree.

“One’s longer than the other. My teacher’s got one leg longer than mine and one leg like yours, and it never bothers him. And the Admiral’s got an arm like a turkey wishbone. I’ve seen him. We’re all kinds. Rather.”

It was Mark’s habit to eat near the cauldron, where others might find him. Rarely did he get company. This day he was mildly surprised when Clave and Minya settled themselves across from him. They plucked branchlets and ate. Presently Clave asked, “What do you think of the Serjents?”

“They’re doing all right.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Clave said, while Minya was saying, “What will they do to Citizens Tree?”

“Oh.” Mark thought it over. “Half of you came from the in tuft of a broken tree. You were from the out tuft, Minya. Three from Carther States. Lawri and me from London Tree. London Tree used to raid Carther States for copsiks. Fourteen years we’ve been living here, and nobody’s killed anyone yet. We can live with the Serjents too.”

Clave said, “Oh, we can live with them—” while Minya wondered, “What do they think of us?”

Clave snorted. “They think we’re a little backward, and they’d like to talk us into going to the Clump.”

Where was this leading? Mark asked, “Are you thinking they want the CARM?”

“No, not that. Not impossible either…Have you talked to Gavving or Debby lately?”

“They don’t like my company. Neither do you, Minya.”

Minya ignored that. “They’re trying to figure out how to build a steam rocket, starting with just the metal tube they brought back!”

“Uh-huh” Mark saw the point now. “They can build us a machine that moves trees around. They can tell us why we should all go to the Clump. So you’re a little nervous. Chairman? We could lose half the tribe. Lawri keeps saying there aren’t enough of us now.”

“And what do you want. Mark?”

Mark would have wished for a wife or three, but he saw no point in telling Clave or Minya that. “I want nothing from the Clump. We’re here. Twelve adults, twenty children, happy as dumbos in Citizens Tree. We shouldn’t be announcing that all over the sky. Even if the Clump doesn’t keep copsiks, maybe somebody out there does. Things aren’t perfect here, but they’re good. I wouldn’t want to wind up as somebody’s copsik.”

Clave nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Minya said, “We worked so hard to make this our home. Gavving knows how close we came to dying. How can he risk what we’ve got?”

“We seem to be agreed,” Clave said briskly. “Well? What do we do about it?”

Lawri and Jeffer were missing dinner. Lawri had led her husband east along the branch, beyond the region of the huts. In a dark womb of foliage and branchlets, they were making babies.

Resting, relaxed for the first time in many days, Lawri plucked foliage and put it in Jeffer’s mouth. He talked around it, indistinctly. “Does this remind you of being young?”

She lost her smile. “No.”

He leered. “Little London Tree boys and girls never snuck off into the foliage — ?”

She shook her head violently. “It isn’t like that for a girl in London Tree. When boys get old enough, they don’t need us. They go to the in tuft. Copsik women belong to any male citizen. Jeffer, you know that much!”

“I should. That’s how Mark got Minya pregnant, before we got loose.”

She changed position to lie along his length. “If he did. Any man can father a dwarf.”

“Even Rather doesn’t believe that.”

“Bother him?”

“Yeah…But women had children in London Tree, didn’t they? And married?”

“Yes, if we were willing to act like copsiks ourselves. How else could we compete? I would’ve been some man’s copsik if I wanted to make babies. So I never made babies.”

Jeffer looked into her eyes as if seeing her for the first time. “Are you glad I came?”

She nodded. Perhaps he couldn’t see her blushing in the near-darkness.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

That was a stupid question. Knowing how she needed him, he’d use his advantage to win arguments! “This wasn’t what we came to talk about.”

“Did we come to talk?”

“What did you find on the burned tree?”

“We didn’t keep any secrets. — That’s right, you weren’t there when Booce was telling us what we had. Well, we got a pot full of charred stuff — honey, he said — and a metal thing for cutting wood, and hooks…miscellaneous stuff. And the metal pipe. Everything else that burned — I’ve forgotten what he called it all, but it can all be replaced, except the — what did Booce call it? The sikenwire.”

“I want to go to the Clump,” Lawri said.

“Me too. Clave would never let both Scientists go.”

Jeffer kissed her cheek. “Let’s wait till the last minute and then fight about it.”

“What about the sikenwire?”

“We’ll think of something. Do you think Clave will let us take the CARM?”

“…No.”

She felt him shrug. “Okay. We go as loggers?” She nodded (their foreheads brushed) and he said, “I’d guess Clump citizens will all look like jungle giants. We should have a few. Anthon and Debby’ll come. A couple of the Serjents for guides. Defenses…we wouldn’t want to risk the CARM in the Clump, but we could take the silver suit.”

“Wrong. A lot of citizens don’t want anything changed. Clave thinks we’re too close to the Clump already. He wants to take us farther west. Mark agrees with him.”

“Yeah, I’ve talked to Mark. Treefodder. Without him we can’t use the silver suit…Lawri? Clave wants to move us west?”

“What are you thinking?”

“We don’t know enough yet. Forget it. Look what you missed when you were a little girl…”

Whatever the disagreements now roiling through Citizens Tree, there was at least this bone of consensus: they all wanted to fly.

The Serjent girls were willing. From branchwood sticks and from cloth that was made on the looms below the branch, they made wings. Karilly worked quietly and skillfully and without words. Mishael and Carlot explained as they went, and corrected the mistakes of the children who emulated them. The work went fast. Citizens would wear their old tunics and pants for half a year longer, for cloth was not made quickly; but twenty-four wings were ready within twelve days.

Jeffer took Mishael, Minya, Gawing, and eight of the older children to the midpoint via the lift. Other children ran with zeal in the treadmill, knowing that theirs would be the next flight.

Jeffer had chosen with some care. These were the children who had not shied back from crossing to the pond on the day of the firetree. Yet there had been lines to cling to then. Today there was only bark, and some of them clung to that.

Rather flew, and was instantly in love with wings. Jill looked like she was facing death, but when wings were bound to her ankles and Rather was already in the sky, she flew. Mishael served as instructor. Jeffer learned how to kick, how to turn. When the sky was filled with winged adults and children, the rest gulped hard and loosed their hold on the bark and flew.

They were in the sky for one full circle of the sun. The adults had their hands full herding them back to the lift.

Arth made a game of it, fleeing across the sky until Jeffer and Gawing closed in on him and pulled his wings off.

The sun was rising up the east before they had the children rounded up.

Then Jeffer sent the others down without him. He told Minya, “I want to do some maintenance. Start the lift again after you’re down.”

“Kendy for the State. Hello, Scientist.”

“Hello, Kendy.”

“How are your refugees?”

“Four of the Serjents recovered. One of the girls, Karilly, looks okay but she doesn’t talk.”

“Shock. She may recover. When may I see them?”

“Kendy, I wanted to give Mishael a tour of the CARM. The Chairman vetoed that. He’s afraid they’ll try to steal the CARM.”

“Nonsense. What do the rest of your tribe think?”

“We’re split down the middle. Half of us want to go see what’s in the Clump. They’ve got a place…the Market?…where we could get anything we want. The Serjents told us about it.”

“And?”

“The Chairman is scared spitless of the Clump. He thinks we’re too close now. Some of the others feel the same way. Jayan and Jinny, of course, but Mark and Minya too. Even the Serjents don’t all want to leave. Mark’s asked Ryllin for permission to marry Karilly, and she gave it.”

“Good. How do you feel about this, Jeffer?”

“I want to see the Clump. Booce told me they’ve got something they call the Library, but it sounds like a CARM autopilot. I want to scan their cassettes. Kendy, I’m doing what I can. I just took some of them flying. They like that. Maybe they’ll start wondering what else they’re missing.”

“I remember Clave. He leads his citizens where they want to go. Call a council. Force your citizens to make a decision.”

“What good does that do us?”

“If you lose the vote, you’ll know where you stand. Then make Clave set a date for moving the tree. Decide what you need and who you need. Is there any chance you can talk Mark around?”

“None.”

“The Serjents told you how to go about setting up a logging enterprise. Tell me.”

The children slept on, exhausted by their flying. Gavving was making an early breakfast on a slice of smoked dumbo meat. He said, “The Admiralty has earthlife plants.”

“We’ve lived without them for fourteen years,” Minya said sleepily.

“We lived without lifts and the CARM for longer than that. It was because we didn’t know.”

“The Admiralty has never touched us. We wouldn’t know it exists, except that Booce tells us so. But you want to know more. Aren’t these matters more properly discussed in council?”

Gavving looked closely at his wife. “You looked like this fourteen years ago, when you were trying to kill me. The whole tuft is like that. There hasn’t been fighting like this since the War of London Tree!”

“I haven’t forgotten London Tree. We made a home here. Any change is for the worse.”

“Dear, are you sorry they came?”

“No!” Minya said with some force. She was fully awake now. “There aren’t enough of us. We all feel that.”

“Lawri the Scientist talks about the gene pool being too small—”

“We don’t need that gibberish. We can feel we’re too few. Now we have three more women, even if Ryllin is too old to host a guest, and they’re different from us—”

“They are indeed!”

“Well, that’s good!”

“Suppose they want to go home?”

“They can’t,” Minya said flatly.

A child stirred: Qwen. Gavving lowered his voice.

“Suppose we built them another rocket. Suppose some of us wanted to go with them.”

Minya stopped to sort words through her head. Gavving waited patiently. Presently she said, “They’d have to be crazy. We’d have to be crazy to let them go. Gav, have you forgotten London Tree?”

“No. I haven’t forgotten Quinn Tuft, either, or Carther States. They didn’t make citizens into copsiks, and neither did your people.”

“…No. But we attacked you the instant we saw you.”

“True.”

“Do you remember being lost in the sky, clinging to a sheet of bark and dying of thirst? We faced dangers we can’t even describe to our children, because they were too strange! We fought hard for Citizens Tree! And now both Scientists want to cross a thousand klomters to the Clump shouting ‘Here we are!’ Why do you want to risk what we’ve got?”

“They’ve got things to trade. They’ve got wings—”

“We’ve got wings.”

“We picked jet pods, when we could find them. All this time. And it’s so simple. Minya, what would you have given for a pair of wings, when we were stranded in the sky? Everything in the Smoke Ring can fly except men, and all it takes is spine branches and cloth! They’ve got a rocket that moves a tree, and it isn’t stolen starstuff, it’s made mostly from things they find in the Smoke Ring. What have they got in the Clump? What haven’t we seen yet?”

She put bitterness in her laughter. “A thousand people and a drastic need for copsiks, maybe.”

Gavving sighed. “Stet, you don’t want anything changed. What should we do? They’re here.”

“Make them welcome,” said Minya. “Teach them how to live in a tree. Get the girls married. Make them part of us. Gavving, Mark intends to marry Karilly.”

“Karilly’s sick in the mind. She isn’t getting over it.”

“Sure, and Mark’s a dwarf. He’s needed a wife, and none of us would touch him. 1 never did feel sorry for the copsik runner, but…but he’s willing to take care other.

And I think you ought to marry one of the other girls.”

Bang! Gavving stared. This was a woman afraid of changes? “I am married.”

“Clave has two wives. Anthon did, until lisa died. I’m getting too old to make babies, dear.”

“You don’t mean—”

“No!” She hugged him. “But it won’t give me a guest to carry.”

“You’re serious? Okay, who?”

She hesitated. Then, bravely (he thought): “I would have thought Mishael. She’s the oldest. Gavving, she showed me how to fly. I like her.”

“Have you mentioned any of—”

“No, you fool! A woman doesn’t ask a woman to be her wife!” And when he laughed she smiled, weakly.

Gavving saw how difficult this was for her. Minya must have thought long and hard about this.

“There’s room to extend the hut,” she said. “We’d have another pair of hands, adult hands. The children are growing up, they’re not as much fun any more—”

And if some of us marry Serjent women, we’ll have their loyalty when the Admiralty comes to us! Logbearer can’t be the only ship in the sky. Gavving wondered if his brain was working in the service of his seeds. Minya had not referred to Mishael’s alien beauty.

And if we do visit the Clump, his brain ran on, we’ll need guides. Booce or Ryllin would have to go. With their daughters among us, we’d have their loyalty—

Chapter Five The Silver Suit

from the Admiralty cassettes, year 3 SM:

“KENDY FOR THE STATE. HELLO, JEFFER. IT’S BEEN more than thirty days.”

“I was busy. We got our council. It’s over.”

“How did it go?”

“We lost.”

“Who sided against you?”

“Clave. Jayan and Jinny. Minya. Mark.”

“Five out of ten. If you count the Serjents, twelve.”

“Thirteen. Mishael’s old enough, and married too, but she acts like a junior wife. She won’t make Minya or Gavving angry. Gavving doesn’t want to fight with Minya. The Serjents don’t think like citizens yet. Anthon won’t get into the arguments. I’m not really sure where he stands. The rest of us want to see what’s out there, but we don’t all want it enough. Debby loves arguing, but she’s not very good at it. We didn’t give Clave any trouble at all.”

“You’re disappointed. Don’t be. Did you think that flying would bring them around? People tend to side with authority, and authority tends to protect its own power. Clave is the key. Clave has everything he wants in Citizens Tree.”

“Kendy, do you see us as savages?”

“Yes. Don’t take that too seriously, Scientist. I would probably see the Admiralty as savages too. I want to educate you all.”

“Then educate me, Kendy. I can’t just take Booce and Ryllin and go off into the sky. We—”

“You must go, Jeffer. The wealth of the L4 point is almost irrelevant. It takes many people to hold a civilization together. There are too few of you here to be more than savages!”

Jeffer didn’t react to the insult, barring an increase in infrared radiation from his cheeks, neck, and ears. “We’d need things Citizens Tree can’t spare. Lawri’s on my side, but we can’t both go. The tree needs a Scientist. We’d have to take the CARM too. We—”

“Take it.”

“You’re not serious. Dalton-Quinn Tree died because we couldn’t move it. I won’t see it happen to Citizens Tree.”

“Bring the CARM back when you’re through with it.”

Jeffer paused to think. (Kendy never did that. It was another reason to distrust Kendy: he seemed to leap at his answers, without forethought.) “We might lose the CARM.”

“You can build a steam rocket. Jeffer, I’m drifting out of range.”

“We’ve got one pipe, and we need that to be loggers. Without the pipe, Citizens Tree couldn’t build a steam rocket. I wouldn’t have believed that so much could change in twenty sleeps. Kendy?” The signal dissolved in noise.

Kendy returned to his records.

For twenty State years CARM #6 had been taking pictures, not just through the CARM cameras but through the fisheye lens on the pressure suit too.

Here: the squirrel cage that ran a muscle-powered lift, and the lines leading up. Far too much footage of that.

Here: fire burned in a great bowl of soft clay. The silver suit moved around the edges of the fire, poking it, or adjusting sheets of bark that had been set as vanes to channel the wind into the burning wood. The look of the clay began to change.

Here: less fire than smoke. What looked like enough spaghetti to feed Sol system’s entire State government had been spread leeward of smoldering wood. The pressure suit moved around and within the mass, turning it and loosening the strands — vines — with the handle of a harpoon so that the smoke would cure them. These were the lines that now served Citizens Tree.

Ingenious. A poor way to treat State property; but they were making use of local resources too.

The platform-around the cookpot was of boards tied with line. It had always been flimsy, and that didn’t matter much in Citizens Tree’s low tide; but over the years the lines had loosened. Jayan and Jinny complained about the way the platform lurched while they tried to make dinner.

So Rather and Carlot had been sent to repair the platform.

Rather enjoyed the work. It called for muscle rather than dexterity. He lifted one end of a new branchwood plant into place. He called, “Hold this,” and waited until Carlot was set. Then he bounded down to the other end and hoisted that.

Carlot giggled.

Rather began to tie the planks. One loop of line to hold it, then he could work on a more elaborate mooring. He asked, “What’s funny?”

“Never mind,” Carlot said. “Are you going to tie this for me?”

“I thought I’d just leave you there. You make a good mooring, and decorative too.”

“Oh.” She held the planks in place with one arm while she reached out. Her right leg was twenty ce’meters longer than the left, and she usually reached with that. Her long toes grasped a coil of line and pulled it to her hands. She tied a temporary binding.

In the twenty-two sleeps since their arrival, all of the Serjent family had become dextrous in Citizens Tree tide.

Rather wrapped a dozen loops of line around the plank ends, then began tightening them. Heave on a loop, pull the slack around; again. From the opening beyond the treemouth the wind blew steadily, drying sweat as fast as it formed.

Carlot called from her corner. “That’s as tight as I can get it.”

Rather was finished at his end. He jogged down to Carlot’s end (ripe copter plants buzzed up around his feet) and began pulling in slack. She’d left a good deal, of course. Carlot was agile, but not strong. He asked, “What got you giggling?”

“Just the way you scurry.”

Rather’s hands paused for less than a second, then continued.

“You did ask,” she said defensively. “You have to go running back and forth because you can’t reach as far as—”

“I know that.”

“Did you make this cauldron yourselves? I wouldn’t have thought you could do that here. It’s big enough to boil two people at once.”

“Hey, Carlot, you don’t really eat people in the Empire, do you?”

She laughed at him. “No! There’s a happyfeet tribe that’s supposed to do that. But how did you make it?”

“The grownups found a glob of gray mud west of the tree. Maybe it was the middle of a pond that came apart. They brought some back. We took all the rocks in Citizens Tree and piled them in a bowl-shape, out on the branch where we couldn’t do any damage. I was just a kid, but they let me help with the rocks. We plastered the mud over the rocks. We got firebark from another tree and piled it in the bowl-shape and fired it. It took a dozen days to cool off, and then it was like that. We did it twice—”

“You’re cute,” she said solemnly.

Carlot was a year older than Rather. An exotic beauty was growing in her. Half her hair had been burned off, and she had cut the rest to match. Now it was like a skullcap of black wire. She was two and a half meters tall, with long fingers and long, agile toes, and arms and legs that could reach out forever.

Carlot affected Rather in ways he wasn’t quite ready to accept. He said, “Put it in the treemouth. When do I get to be overwhelmingly handsome?”

“Cute is good. If I weren’t your aunt—”

“Treefodder.”

“Are you not my nephew?”

Rather studied his work. “I think we’re done. — It’s an Empire thing, is it? You don’t make babies even with relatives of relatives? Fine, but you’ve got a thousand people in the Empire! At least that’s what your parents say. We had ten adults and twenty children when you came. I won’t get much choice about who I marry.”

“Who, then?”

He shrugged. “Jill’s a half year older than me. All the other girls are younger. I’d have to wait.” The subject made him uncomfortable. He looked up past the treadmill and along the trunk, to where a handful of citizens were trying their wings. “I wish I was up there. You’ve been flying all your life, haven’t you?”

“I should be there, showing you people how to fly. This damn fluff,” Carlot said. Long sleeves were sewn loosely to her tuftberry-scarlet tunic. She pulled one away. The green fur along her arm had turned brown; the patch had shrunk. “How’s yours?” She touched his cheek. The patch felt half numb and raspy; it ran from his face down his neck and across part of his chest. “It’s drying up. Ten days, it’ll be cleared up.”

“Too treefeeding slow.”

“We just have to stay in the shade for a while. Fluff needs sunlight.”

“Yeah.”

From eastward, his first mother’s voice called above the wind-roar. “Rather!”

Rather bounded toward Minya across the floor of braided, live-spine branches. Carlot gave him a good head start, then bounded after him. Her asymmetric legs gave her an odd run, a pleasure to watch: boundBOUND, boundBOUND, low-flying flight. Soon she’d be faster than Jill. She reached Minya a good six meters ahead of Rather, turned and flashed a grin at him. She lost it immediately.

“—Crawled too far toward the treemouth, and now he can’t—” Minya stopped and began again. “Rather! It’s the children. Harry and Qwen and Gorey went crawling around in the old west rooms. Gorey went too far, and Harry and Qwen can’t reach him, and he can’t get out.”

“You can’t get to him?”

“I didn’t try. Rather, we don’t know how long it was before Harry came to get us.”

“Oh.” Harry would have tried to rescue Gorey himself, then spent more time working up the nerve to tell his mother. And Gorey was only five! “I’ll need some kind of knife,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m no narrower than you are, First Mother. I’m just shorter. I may have to cut through some spine branches.”

The wind didn’t reach Mark’s long hair and beard.

They held the sweat like two sponges. The slab of hard branchwood strapped to his back massed as much as he did. He scrambled up the slope of the treadmill, panting, trying to stay higher than Karilly and seven children. With a weight on his back, Mark was the equal of any two adults.

The treadmill was six meters across and four wide, a fragile wheel of branchwood sticks. Water running down the trunk helped to spin it, but runners were still needed.

It was getting easier; the treadmill was spinning faster.

The cages must be almost passing each other. “Out!”

Mark panted. “Runners, out!” Seven laughing children jumped from both sides of the treadmill, until only Mark and Karilly were left.

Above was a sudden glare as the sun passed into view.

Karilly’s dark skin shone with sweat; she breathed deeply as she bounded uphill alongside him. He knew she could understand him. “Karilly. When the up cage is at the top it…doesn’t weight anything. It takes all of us…to lift the down cage. Right now…the cages are next to each other. I can run by myself. In a little while…the down cage will be falling. I’ll have to get out. Use the brake. Slow it down.” She watched him as if she were listening. “So you jump out now.”

Then he saw that she was afraid.

“Okay.” He let the cage carry him around. Inverted, he scrambled down the other side. “I’m slowing it. Can you get out now?”

Karilly scrambled out.

Twenty klomters over his head, Lawri and her student flyers must be wondering what had gone wrong. Mark started the cage spinning again, letting his body do its accustomed work while his mind drifted.

Long ago and far away, there had been civilization.

London Tree had had stationary bicycles to run the elevators to the tree midpoint, and copsiks to run the bicycles. Citizens Tree was primitive. They had London Tree’s CARM, of course: a thing of science dating from the day men came from the stars. Otherwise they must build everything.

Mark had shown the refugees how to build a lift. Mark had wanted to make bicycles, but the Scientists had built the treadmill instead. They kept the silver suit next to the treadmill with its helmet open. Citizens at the CARM could call for the lift through the radio in the suit.

Below him he could see the hollow space of the commons, and two children bounding east. The tall, dark girl was far ahead of the smaller boy, who moved in slower, shorter steps, as if tide were heavier for him.

His son. His size proved it. Mark would not have wished that on him; yet Rather would be the next Silver Man. Mark wondered if the citizens would appreciate their fortune. In the short lifetime of Citizens Tree there had been no need for an invulnerable fighter, and the silver suit had become a mere communications device.

Had it not been for one stupid, stubborn act, Mark would still be a citizen of London Tree. But he would never have seen the stars, and he would never have seen his son.

The treadmill was spinning by itself. Mark jumped out.

He set the branchwood slab down. He looked up along the trunk, but he couldn’t see the down cage yet. “We’ll let it run for a bit.”

If Karilly could talk, would she still smile at him like this? He took her hand. “Lawri wanted you with them.

You were afraid to go up, weren’t you?” He had known a London Tree citizen who was afraid of falling. It was instinct gone wrong. If such a woman were born in a place like Carther States, would she be afraid all the time? Until the added terror of a fire pushed her over the edge.

“Lawri wanted me up there too. I wonder what it’s like. Flying.”

But the silver suit caught his eye. No.

His business in London Tree had been war. Were there copsik runners in the Clump? Karilly would know. “I wish you could talk. The Scientists can’t marry us till you can say the words. The key word is yes. Will you try? Yes.”

“Mark!”

He jumped. “Debby?”

She called from below. “Yeah. Shall we relieve you?”

Mark swallowed his irritation. “The empty’s coming down. You want to brake when the sun’s at about eleven.”

“We’ll do it.” Debby and Jeffer climbed up to join them. “Hello, Karilly.”

Jeffer said, “You didn’t go flying? You should try it.”

“Not me. I’m the Silver Man. I fly with the silver suit. Come on, Karilly.” Maybe somebody would need muscle at the cookpot platform.

The tunnels ran through the tuft like wormholes in an apple. Unused tunnels tended to close up; but passersby ate from the foliage as they passed, so the tunnels in normal use stayed open. One such tunnel ran past Rather’s home.

At its west end Rather could have circled the hut with his legs. This was the oldest section. As the spine branches migrated west along the branch, eventually to be swallowed by the treemouth, enclosures tended to shrink. The newest sections were the largest.

This disappearing section had been small when new.

It had housed only Gavving and Minya and the baby Rather. Other children had come, and Gavving wove new rooms eastward, faster than the treemouth could swallow them. By now there were seven children, and a new wife for Gavving, and a far bigger common room; for the Citizens Tree populace was growing too. The original rooms had disappeared into the treemouth. These that he was passing now, wicker cages alongside the tunnel, were still less than Rather’s height. The children tended to claim these for their own.

Rather found a deformed door. As he crawled inside he heard Minya saying, “Keep going, Carlot. Go to the common room and get my old matchet off the wall and bring it back. Hurry.”

Harry, eight years old and Rather’s height, was crying into Mishael’s chest. Rather nodded to Mishael. “Second Mother. Which way did he go? Straight west?”

Mishael, seven years older than Carlot, had Carlot’s dark, exotic beauty in fully developed form, and legs that caused even Rather to stare: long and slender and perfectly matched. She’d cut her trousers into loose shorts, odd-looking in Citizens Tree. The low roof cost her some dignity. She had to crouch. She looked uncomfortable and annoyed. “Straight on in. And he’s stopped talking. I think he’s mad at us.”

Rather said, “You know this is no big deal, don’t you? It happens all the time.”

“I don’t know. Rather, I still get the shivers in your crawling huts! Your parents just don’t understand that. And poor Gorey, he is frightened.”

“Sure. Carlot’s coming with Mother’s matchet. Send her after me. I need it to cut my way through.” It didn’t feel odd to be speaking thus peremptorily to his second mother. Mishael wasn’t that much older than Rather; she was new to all this, and it showed.

Rather crawled west.

Memories tried to surface around him. His parents’ bedroom: he’d lived in a basket, in a corner too small for a baby now. The private dining area, and ghosts of wonderful smells: were they in his nose, or in his mind? The common room, and too many strangers: he’d cried and had to be taken away. The spaces were distorted and tiny, a green-black womb. The spine branches were still growing. He tore them away with his fists; tore through an old partition.

He didn’t like this. His past was too small to hold him.

“Gorey!”

From west by north, Gorey yelled piercingly. He sounded more angry than frightened. How had he gotten thereat What had been a kitchen wall had crumpled and grown half a meter thick! He must have found some way around—

“Rather?”

Carlot, behind him. He reached far back and took what was pushed into his hand. “Thanks.” He pulled it to the level of his face, turned it with some difficulty and pushed the blade further.

“Can you get to him?”

“One way or another.”

For years the matchet had been no more than a part of the wall. He’d never really looked at it. The handle was long and a bit too wide for his short fingers. The blade was sixty ce’meters of black metal, tinged red by time. Time and use had serrated the edge. It had once belonged to a Navy man of London Tree.

In this restricted space he must use it as a saw. He didn’t try to cut the wall. He cut branchlets west of him.

He turned starboard, still sawing through miscellaneous branchlets. “Gorey?”

Cautiously, doubtfully: “Rath?”

“Here. Give me your hand. Can you reach me?”

“I can’t move!”

Rather saw a thrashing foot. He pulled on it experimentally. Gorey was pinned between a spine branch and a smooth dark wall: the main branch itself. He must have tried to crawl between them. Rather wriggled forward.

He sawed the spine branch half through, reached farther and broke it with his hands. Gorey wriggled out and wrapped himself around his brother and clung. Presently he asked, “Are they mad?”

“Sure they’re mad. How did you get here? Hide and seek?”

“Yeah. Harry said he was gonna catch me and feed me to the triunes, so I kept going. Then I was afraid the treemouth would get me and I got really scared.”

“Harry wouldn’t get that close to a triune family. You know that.”

“Yeah, but I was mad.”

“You’d starve to death before you reached the treemouth. Here, grab my foot and follow me.”

The boy’s fingers were long enough to overlap Rather’s ankle. He was already taller than Rather. They crawled out, with easier going at every meter.

In the common room Rather’s mothers greeted him as a hero, while Gorey was scolded and petted. Rather took it with what grace he could. He wondered if Carlot was laughing at him; but in fact she seemed to think he had done something actively dangerous.

It made him uncomfortable. He was vastly relieved when Gavving poked his head through the door. “Treadmill runners!” he called. “Rather?” And Rather was rescued.

Harry and Carlot came with them. As they neared the treemouth Gavving said, “Harry, Carlot, why don’t you see if they need help with the laundry pot?”

They split off. Harry grumbling.

Rather followed his father up through the tunnels toward the treadmill. His nerves were prickling. Something odd was going on. “Father? Do they really need treadmill runners?”

“No,” Gavving said without looking down.

The treadmill was at rest. Debby and Jeffer lay in the foliage nearby, eating and talking. They sat up when Gavving appeared. “Got him,” Gavving said.

This must have something to do with the Serjent family; and the conference before the last sleep, from which children were barred; and the arguments that divided half the families in the tree. Do my mothers know about this? Would they approve? Rather asked instead, “Should we have brought Carlot?”

“No need. Rather, we have to find out something.” Gavving pointed at a short, faceless fat man made of silvery metal. “Try that on.”

“The silver suit?”

“Yeah. See if you can get into it.”

Rather looked it over. This thing had a fearsome, quasiscientific reputation. It was a flying fighting machine, stronger than crossbow bolts, stronger than the airlessness beyond all that was known. Rather had never before seen it with its head closed.

Jeffer instructed him. “Lift this latch. Take the head and turn it. Pull up. Turn it the other way.”

The head came up on a hinge.

“This latch too. Now pull this down…now pull it apart…good.”

The suit was open down the front, and empty.

“Can you get in?”

“Where’s Mark?”

“Debby?”

“No problem. We relieved him and he took Karilly to the kitchen.”

“Father…wait. Listen. I’m the only boy in the tree with two mothers and two fathers.” Rather plunged on despite the sudden hurt in Gavving’s face. “We’ve never talked about this, but I always knew…sooner or later I’d…does Mark know what you’re doing with the silver suit?”

“No.”

“What’s it all about?” Four big adults could make him do whatever they wanted; and it didn’t matter. They needed his cooperation, and he didn’t know enough to give it.

Jeffer the Scientist said, “It’s about seeing what’s outside Citizens Tree. It’s learning about the Smoke Ring, what we can use, what we need to be afraid of. Or else it’s about staying savages until someone comes out of the sky to teach us the hard way.”

“We’re going to the Clump,” Gavving said. “We’ll be safer if we can take the Silver Man.”

“Uh-huh. Mark doesn’t want to go?”

“Right.”

They watched as Rather tried to get into the suit. He had to get his legs in first, then duck under the neck ring.

He closed the sliding catches, the headpiece, the latches.

The suit was loose around his belly, snug everywhere else. “It fits.”

Jeffer closed the helmet on him. He rotated it left until it dropped two mi’meters, then right.

Rather was locked in a box his own size and shape.

The suit smelled faintly of former occupants, of exertion and fear. He moved his arms, then his legs, against faint resistance. He turned and reached and plucked a handful of foliage…good. He could move. He could move like a normal man.

The air was getting stale…but Jeffer was already turning the helmet, lifting it. The adults were smiling at each other. Gavving said, “Okay. Get out of it.”

Getting out of the silver suit was as difficult as getting in. Rather said, “Now tell me.”

“Some of us are going to visit the Clump. Do you want to come with us?”

“Who’s going? How long will it take?”

“Me,” said Jeffer. “Gavving. Booce and Ryllin. Anthon and Debby. The Clump is all jungle giants. We need people that size.”

“How does the Chairman—”

“He’ll try to stop us.”

“Father, I don’t really like the thought of not ever coming home.”

Gavving shook his head. “They’ll want the CARM back. They’ll want us back too. Citizens Tree isn’t so crowded that they can afford to lose anyone who breathes. They’ll want to know what we learned. They’ll want what we bring back. Half the citizens are on our side anyway; they just don’t want to buck the Chairman.”

“You’re taking the carm?”

“We are.” Gavving clapped him on the shoulder. “Think about it. We’ve got two sleeps to get ready. Whatever you decide, don’t mention this to anyone, particularly your mothers.”

“Father, you’d better tell it all.” Rather didn’t consider whether he had the right to ask. Clave wouldn’t like this; Minya wouldn’t like it; and if he agreed to this — it was only just coming to him — if Rather agreed, then he was the Silver Man.

Jeffer said, “It isn’t just the wealth of the Clump Admiralty. It’s—”

“Tell me what you’re going to do.”

They told him.

Chapter Six The Appearance of Mutiny

from Disciplined log, year 1893 State = 370 SM:

CLAVE PULLED HIMSELF OUT OF THE ELEVATOR FIRST.

Wings were tethered next to the cage, and he pulled one free and tied it in place along his left shin. “This was a good idea, Gavving. Wings aren’t much use in the tuft.”

“Oh, we’ll keep some there too. Hunters used to carry jet pods. Wings are better. But there’s no point porting them up and down every time someone wants to fly. What are you doing?”

“Fixing this.” He chopped with his matchet at his other wing. When ten ce’meters were gone, he tied the wing to his right shin. He felt distinctly lopsided.

Jeffer and Gavving were also winged now. The three flapped out toward the CARM, spurning the convenient handholds the bark afforded. Clave’s flight wavered, then steadied. He’d been right. This was easier on the warped muscles in his thigh.

Jeffer was first through the airlock. “Prikazyvat Voice.”

The CARM’s deep voice said, “Ready, Jeffer the Scientist—”

A woman’s voice broke in. “Jeffer, it’s Lawri. I think I want to join you.”

“Come on up. Bring something to eat. We’ll be running the main motor for maybe two days.”

“Will do. Lawri out.”

“What was that about?” Clave asked.

“Lawri doesn’t trust me with the CARM.” Jeffer laughed. “Now we refuel the beast.”

Clave sighed. “Pump?”

“Right. You pump while I do a checklist. Otherwise we’ll lose the pondlet when we go under thrust.”

Some pumping had been done, but megatons of water still nestled against the trunk. Clave ran the hose from the CARM to the pondlet. The pump was a wheel and a tube and piston, all carved from hard branchwood. Clave braced his back and arms against the bark and kicked the wheel around with his feet on the spokes. “Help would be appreciated,” he grunted.

Gavving joined him.

The pump leaked. The pond didn’t dwindle fast, but it dwindled. They broke to drink thirstily, then resumed pumping. The sun had dropped from zenith to nadir — which at the midyear was not behind Voy, but north by three full degrees — when Jeffer poked his head through the airlock. “Stop! The tank’s full!”

Clave tossed his head to shake some of the sweat out of his hair.

“Come inside.” Jeffer ushered them forward to the front row of seats. “Strap down.”

He tapped, and vertical blue dashes appeared in the panel below the window. Four clusters of four each at the corners of a square, and a larger dash in the center. He tapped the central dash.

The sound within the cabin was like the roaring of wind at the treemouth. Clave felt a featherweight of tide and knew the tree was in motion.

Jeffer told them, “We’re already placed right, with the motor aimed west. We thrust eastward. That puts Citizens Tree in a wider orbit, so we slow down and drift west, away from the Clump.”

Clave wondered if he wanted to watch from outside. “Is it dangerous out there?”

“Could be. You don’t want to fall into the flame. Anyway, the view’s better in here.” Jeffer’s fingers danced, and the CARM window sprouted five smaller windows.

“The ventral view got ruined when we fell back into the Smoke Ring—”

“Jeffer, you don’t lecture this much unless you’re nervous. What’s wrong? We’ve moved the tree before.”

Gavving laughed. It appeared that he had a touch of nerves too. “Remember how twitchy we were then? Merril was sure we’d break the tree apart and kill ourselves.”

Clave shrugged. He went aft and braced himself in the airlock.

What remained of the pondlet stretched itself out from the trunk, then broke into one big drop and a line of little ones. The mother pond they’d robbed twenty-two sleeps ago drifted west. The sun passed Voy and began to climb.

A fat triple-finned bird, dead west by a klomter or three, suddenly went into an epileptic seizure, split into three slender birds, and scattered. Clave was late in understanding what he’d seen: a triune family suddenly washed by the invisible heat of the CARM’s exhaust.

Clave went in and strapped down again.

He had been anticipating Lawri’s arrival for some time, but the CARM’s roar covered her entry. He turned to see her halfway up the aisle…and Debby behind her. And Ryllin. And Booce and Carlot. Clave fumbled to release the buckle that bound him to the chair.

It took too long. He was between Jeffer and Gavving, with Lawri behind him. He sighed. “What’s it all about?”

Jeffer’s fingers danced. The board went blank. He said, “We can fight or we can talk. Or we can talk and then fight, but there’s only one»of you. Clave. Cripple me and Lawri flies the CARM.”

Call for help? If he could get past Jeffer to use Voice, the elevator would still take a day to get up…forget it. Voice connected to the silver suit, which Rather was now pulling headfirst through the airlock.

It would have felt good to hit somebody. Clave said, “I’ll be good. Now what’s it all about?”

“We’re going to visit the Admiralty,” Jeffer said.

Rather and Booce were moving things inside: two smoked turkeys, a huge amount of foliage, water pods.

“All of us?”

“Not you. Clave. Lawri’s staying too. Citizens Tree needs a Chairman and a Scientist.”

“How did you decide—”

There was a bit of an edge in Lawri’s voice. “We knew one of us would have to stay. Now I’ve missed my time of blood. I’m hosting a guest. I wondered why the copsik was being so affectionate.”

“You should all be staying. You’re taking the CARM?”

“The CARM, the silver suit, and the pipe from Logbearer.”

They all looked very serious. The background roar prompted Clave to ask, “Are you planning to set the tree moving first? Or was that a lie too?”

“We’ll give you a day’s thrust,” Jeffer said. “No more. I won’t be here to decelerate you, and I want to be able to find you again.”

“With what? Would London Tree have let you keep the CARM? The Admiralty won’t either!”

Patiently Gavving said, “We’ve talked that over. We won’t take the CARM into the Clump. They’ll never know it exists. Jeffer will hide the CARM somewhere. The rest of us will go in as loggers, with Booce and Ryllin to show us how.”

Clave’s mind was racing. “Now listen to me. Will you listen?”

“Yes, Chairman.”

“First, are you all volunteers? Rather, how did they suck you into this?”

“They can’t go without the silver suit,” the boy said.

“Oh, they’d go. Wouldn’t you, Jeffer?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going anyway,” Rather said.

He didn’t look like he’d change his mind. Rather didn’t even bother to argue, though the boy was good at that. Clave knew how he would enlist a fourteen-year-old boy. Put him in the silver suit, call him the Silver Man, offer him status and adventure… “Carlot?”

“I’m going home,” the girl said defiantly.

“Debby?” But aglance told Clave he’d lost that battle.

Debby was fiercely happy. He hadn’t seen her like this since the War of London Tree. “What about Anthon?”

Debby said, “I never told him. Jeffer, I did get him talking. He likes Citizens Tree just fine and he doesn’t want any changes. Have you noticed how fat he’s getting?”

“Too bad,” Jeffer said.

Clave said, “Stet. I accept that you’re going to do this. I’ve heard your speeches, and you’ve heard mine, and the treemouth can have them both. But don’t you see that this will tear Citizens Tree apart? It’s mutiny. Hold it! I mean it’s mutiny the way you’ve planned it. If we don’t fix that. Citizens Tree will never recover. It’s got to look better than it does.”

The mutineers looked at each other.

“Here’s how it’s got to be,” said Clave. “First, I’m going. Gavving isn’t. You said it and you’re right. The tree needs a Chairman and it’s Gavving.”

Gavving said, “That’s silly. You’re—”

“I’m the treefeeding Chairman, and if I go the expedition is official. Besides that, I’ve got to see to it that you return the CARM and the silver suit. The citizens would be crazy to settle for less. I hereby appoint you my Chairman Pro Tem until I return.”

Coolly Gavving asked, “Anything else?”

“Yes. You don’t get both Booce and Ryllin. One of them stays. There has to be some reason for the Serjents to bring us home.”

“We can’t do that,” Ryllin said. “Booce takes care of Logbearer. I take care of business. I do all the buying and selling. Anyone who sees one of us in the Clump will expect to see us both.”

Clave was massaging the lump on his thigh. Sometimes that helped him think. Think! “The citizens you deal with, the…merchants? If they deal with Booce, what will happen?”

Ryllin said, “My husband is very good with machinery, not so good at trading. He did much better after he had the good sense to marry me. But Logbearer understands him, he—”

“Without you they’ll get a better trade?”

“Damn right they will,” Booce said bitterly. Then: “Yes, they will.”

“They’ll like that? They won’t be too curious about where their luck comes from?”

It was Ryllin who nodded. “It’s all right, love. Think of a story. They’ll want to believe it.”

“But we’re missing three daughters too!”

“The house. They must have finished building our house by now. The girls and I are with Logbearer or we’re at the house, wherever you’re not. Maybe I’m somewhere in the Market buying furniture. That was the whole point of this last trip, we were going to — we were—” She turned away suddenly.

Emotional displays weren’t needed here! Clave said, “We’re not hiding anything but the silver suit and the CARM. Otherwise we can tell any story we want. What’s next? Gawing, Lawri, Ryllin, you back each other up when you go back to the tuft. Whoever’s asking, the Chairman had to be talked into this, but I did agree, and I put the fine details in.”

Rather called from aft. “Jeffer, the pipe’s moored to the hull. We’ve got everything else, but it all has to be moored.”

“Go ahead. I’ll check you later. Gawing, are you willing?”

“Treefodder. Well, it’ll probably keep Minyafrom killing me…Clave, will this work? Is it enough?”

“Only if we come back. We come back with the CARM and something else too. It almost doesn’t matter what.”

“Stet. I’m the Chairman Pro Tem.”

Jeffer killed the main motor. “Somebody go out and get our lines untied.”

Rather went. Debby joined Booce aft. They began mooring what remained of the cargo: two big hooks, spare clothing, sacks of undyed cloth, harpoons, crossbows.

Lawri said, “Jeffer, let me show you something.” She eased up next to him and tapped at the controls, whispering. Her shoulder blocked Clave’s view. Clave’s mind still raced, seeking flaws…he was looking for holes in a harebrain net! There was no way to make mutiny smell sweet.

“Are we bringing the spitgun? No, of course not.” The weapon Mark had been carrying when he was captured was now in custody of the Chairman. “Gavving, it’s in the older part of my hut, what used to be the common room. If you don’t have the spitgun, you’re not the Chairman. Get it before anyone notices.”

Rather scrambled back through the airlock. Gavving, Ryllin, and Lawri left. Jeffer let them get well clear before he pulled away on the little jets.

The tree receded. Three tiny citizens fluttered toward the elevator dock, A cage had nearly reached the dock. One of the occupants was shrieking and waving its fists.

“Somebody must have found Mark,” Debby said.

“Relax, Clave, we only tied him up.”

“Yeah. But if I’d known a rescue party was coming …skip it. You’d have closed the airlock in their faces. I hope you treefeeders can find something worthwhile in the Clump. It’s my reputation on the line now.”