by Larry Niven
Clave worked his pack open while Alfin moved up to join him. Alfin was climbing with his eyes half-shut. Something odd there, something wrong.
“I was hoping you could at least keep up with Merril,” Clave said, handing Alfin the sandals.
Alfin said nothing while he strapped one on. Then, “What’s the difference? We’re all dead anyway. But it won’t do that copsik any good! He’s only got rid of the lames—”
“Who?”
“The Chairman, our precious Chairman! When people are starving, they’ll kick out whoever’s in charge. He’s kicked out the lames, the ones who couldn’t hurt him anyway. Let him see what he can snag when they kick him into the sky.”
“If you think I’m a lame, see if you can outclimb me,” Clave said lightly.
“Everyone knows why you’re here, you and your women too.”
“Oh, I suppose they do,” Clave said. “But if you think you’d like living with Mayrin, you can try it when we get back. I couldn’t. And she didn’t like that, and her father didn’t like it either. But you know, she was really built to make babies, when I was just old enough to notice that.”
Alfin snorted.
“I meant what I said,” Clave told him. “If there’s anything left that can save the tribe, it’s somewhere over our heads. And if we find it, I think I could be Chairman myself. What do you think?”
Startled, Alfin peered into Clave’s face. “Maybe. Power hungry, are you?”
“I haven’t quite decided. Let’s say I’m just mad enough to go for Gold. This whole crazy…well, Jayan and Jinny, they can take care of themselves, and if they can’t, I can. But I had to take Merril before the Chairman would give me jet pods, and then at the last minute he wished Gavving on me, and that was the last straw.”
“Gavving wasn’t much worse than the other kids I’ve had to train. Constantly asking questions, I don’t know any two people with that boy’s curiosity—”
“Not the point. He’s just starting to show beard. He never did anything wrong except be there when that damn fool Laython got swallowed…Skip it. Alfin, some of our party is dangerous to the rest.”
“You know it.”
“How would you handle that?”
It was rare to see Alfin smiling. He took his time answering. “Merril will kill herself sooner or later. But Glory will kill someone else. Slip at the wrong time. Easy enough to do something about it. Wait till we’re higher, till the tide is weaker. Knock against her when she’s off balance. Send her home the fast way.”
“Well, that’s what I was thinking too. You are a danger to us, Alfin. You hold grudges. We’ve got problems enough without watching our backs because of you. If you slow me down, if you give any of us trouble, I’ll send you home the fast way, Alfin. I’ve got enough trouble here.”
Alfin paled, but he answered. “You do. Get rid of Glory before she knocks someone off the trunk. Ask Jiovan.”
“I don’t take your orders,” Clave said. “One more thing. You spend too much energy being angry. Save it. You’re likely to need your anger. Now lead off.” And when Alfin resumed climbing, Clave followed.
Chapter Three
THE TRUNK
Day brightened and faded and brightened again while they climbed. The men doffed their tunics and tucked them into their pack straps; somewhat later, so did the women. Clave leered at Jayan and Jinny impartially. Gavving didn’t leer, but in fact the sight distracted him from his climbing.
Jayan and Jinny were twenty-year-old twins, identical, with pale skin and dark hair and lovely heart-shaped faces and nicely conical breasts. Some citizens called them stupid, for they had no fund of conversation, but Gavving wondered. In other matters they showed good sense. As now: Jinny was climbing with Cave, but Merril had dropped far behind, and Jayan stayed just beneath her, pacing her.
Jiovan had lost ground after Clave resumed the lead. He cursed as he climbed, steadily, monotonously: the wind, the bark handholds, his missing leg. Alfin should have been one of the leaders, Gavving thought; but he kept pausing to look down.
Gavving’s own shoulders and legs burned with fatigue. Worse, he was making mistakes, setting his claw sandals wrong, so that they slipped too often.
Tired people make mistakes. Gavving saw Glory slip, thrash, and fall two or three meters before she caught an edge of bark. While she hugged herself ferociously against the tree, Gavving moved crosswise until he was behind and to the side of her.
Fear held her rigid.
“Keep going,” Gavving said. “I’ll stay behind you. I’ll catch you.”
She looked down, nodded jerkily, began climbing again. She seemed to move in convulsions, putting too much effort into it. Gavving kept pace.
She slipped. Gavving gripped the bark. When she dropped into range he planted the palm of his hand under her buttocks and pushed her hard against the tree. She gasped, and clung, and resumed climbing.
Clave called down. “Is anybody thirsty?”
They needed their breath, and the answer was too obvious. Of course they were thirsty. Clave said, “Swing around east. We’ll get a drink.”
Falling water had carved a channel along the eastern side of the trunk. The channel was fifty meters across and nearly dry over most of its water-smoothed surface. But the tree still passed through the occasional cloud; mist still clung to the bark; wind and Coriolis force set it streaming around to the east as it fell; and water ran in a few pitiful streams toward Quinn Tuft below.
“Watch yourselves,” Clave told them. “Use your spikes if you have to. This is slippery stuff.”
“Here,” the Grad called from over their heads.
They worked their way toward him. A hill of rock must have smacked into the tree long ago, half embedding itself. The trunk had grown to enclose it. It made a fine platform, particularly since a stream had split to run round it on both sides. By the time Merril and Jayan had worked their way up, Clave had hammered spikes into the wood above the rock and attached lines.
Merril and Jayan worked their way onto the rock. Merril lay gasping while Jayan brought her water.
Glory lay flat on the rock with her eyes closed. Presently she crawled to the portside stream. She called to Clave. “Any limit?”
“What?”
“On how much we drink. The water goes—”
Clave laughed loudly. Like the Chairman hosting a midyear celebration, he bellowed, “Drink! Bathe! Have water fights! Who’s to stop us? If Quinn Tribe didn’t want their water secondhand, we wouldn’t be here.” He worked their single cookpot from his pack and threw streams of water at selected targets: Merril, who whooped in delight; Jiovan, who sputtered in surprise; Jayan and Jinny, who advanced toward him with menace in their eyes. “I dare not struggle on this precarious perch,” he cried and went limp. They rolled him in the stream, hanging onto his hands and feet so that he wouldn’t go over.
They climbed in a spiral path. They weren’t here just to climb, Clave said, but to explore. Gavving could hear Jiovan’s monotonous cursing as they climbed into the wind, until the wind drowned him out.
Gavving reached up for a fistful of green cotton and stuffed it in his mouth. The branch that waved above his pack was nearly bare now. The sky was empty out to some distant streamers of cloud and a dozen dots that might be ponds, all hundreds of klomters out. They’d be hurting for food when sleeptime came.
He was crossing a scar in the bark, a puckering that ran down into the wood itself. An old wound that the bark was trying to heal…big enough to climb in, but it ran the wrong way. Abruptly the Grad shouted, “Stop! Hold it up!”
“What’s the matter?” Clave demanded.
“The Quinn Tribe markings!”
Without the Grad to point it out, Gavving would never have realized that this was writing. He had seen writing only rarely, and these letters were three to four meters across. They couldn’t be read; they had to be inferred: DQ, with a curlicue mark across the D.
“We’ll have to gouge this
out,” the Grad said. “It’s nearly grown out. Someone should come here more often.”
Clave ran a critical eye over his crew. “Gavving, Alfin, Jinny, start digging. Grad, you supervise. Just dig out the Q, leave the D alone. The rest of you, rest.”
Merril said, “I can work. For that matter, I could carry more.”
“Tell me that tomorrow,” Clave told her. He made his way across the bark to clap her on the shoulder. “If you can take some of the load, you’ll get it. Let’s see how you do tomorrow with your muscles all cramped up.”
They carved away bark and dug deeper into the wood with the points of their harpoons. The Grad moved among them. The Q took shape. When the Grad approached him, Gavving asked, “Why are the letters so big? You can hardly read them.”
“They’re not for us. You could see them if you were a klomter away,” the Grad said.
Alfin had overheard. “Where? Falling? Are we doing this for swordbirds and triunes to read?”
The Grad smiled and passed on without answering. Alfin scowled at his back, then crossed to Gavving’s position. “Is he crazy?”
“Maybe. But if you can’t dig as deep as Jinny, the mark will look silly to the swordbirds.”
“He tells half a secret and leaves you hanging,” Alfin complained. “He does it all the time.”
They left the tribal insignia carved deep and clear into the tree. The wind was beating straight down on them now. Gavving felt a familiar pain in his ears. He worked his jaw while he sought the old memory, and when his ears popped it came: pressure/pain in his ears, a score of days after the passing of Gold, the night before his first allergy attack.
These days he rarely wondered if he would wake with his eyes and sinuses streaming in agony. He simply lived through it. But he’d never wakened on the vertical slope of the tree! He pictured himself climbing blind…
That was what distracted him while a thick, wood-colored rope lifted from the bark to wrap itself around Glory’s waist.
Glory yelped. Gavving saw her clinging to the bark with her face against it, refusing to look. The rope was pulling her sideways, away from him.
Gavving pulled his harpoon from his pack before he moved. He crawled around Glory toward the living rope.
Glory screamed again as her grip was torn loose. Now only the live rope itself held her from falling. He didn’t dare slash it. Instead he scampered toward its source, while the rope coiled itself around Glory, spinning her, reeling her in.
There was a hole in the tree. From the blackness inside Gavving saw a thickening of the live rope and a single eye lifting on a stalk to look at him. He jabbed at it. A lid flicked closed; the stalk dodged. Gavving tracked it. He felt the jar through his arm and shoulder as the harpoon punched through.
A huge mouth opened and screamed. The living rope thrashed and tried to fling Glory away. What saved Glory was Glory herself; she had plunged her own harpoon through the brown hawser and gripped the point where it emerged. She clung to the haft with both hands while the rope bent around to attack Gavving.
The mouth was lined with rows of triangular teeth. Gavving pulled his harpoon loose from the eye, with a twist, as if he had practiced all his life. He jabbed at the mouth, trying to reach the throat. The mouth snapped shut and he struck only teeth. He jabbed at the eye again.
Something convulsed in the dark of the hole. The mouth gaped improbably wide. Then a black mass surged from the hole. Gavving flung himself aside in time to escape being smashed loose. A hut-sized beast leapt into the sky on three short, thick legs armed with crescent claws. Short wings spread, a claw swiped at him and missed. Gavving saw with amazement that the rope was its nose.
He had thought it was trying to escape. Ten meters from its den it turned with astonishing speed. Gavving shrank back against the bark with his harpoon poised.
The beast’s wings flapped madly, in reverse, pulling it back against its stretching nose…futilely. The foray team had arrived in force. Lines wrapped Glory and trapped the creature’s rope of a nose. Lines spun out to bind its wings. Clave was screaming orders. He and Jinny and the Grad pulled strongly, turning the beast claws-outward from the tree In that position it was reeled in until harpoons could reach its head.
Gavving picked a spot and jabbed again and again, drilling through bone, then red-gray brain. He never noticed when the thing stopped moving. He only came to himself when Clave shouted, “Gavving, Glory, dinner’s on you. You killed it, you clean it.”
You killed it, you clean it was an easy honor to dodge. You only had to admit that your prey had hurt you…
Jayan and Jinny worked at building a fire in the creature’s lair. They worked swiftly, competently, almost without words, as if they could read each other’s minds. The others were outside, chopping bark for fuel. Gavving and Glory moored the corpse with lines and spikes, just outside the hole, and went to work.
The Grad insisted on helping. Strictly speaking, he didn’t have the right, but he seemed eager, and Glory was tired. They worked slowly, examining the peculiar thing they had killed.
It had a touch of trilateral symmetry, like many creatures of the Smoke Ring, the Grad said. A smaller third wing was placed far back: a steering fin. The forward pair were motive power and (as the Grad gleefully pointed out) ears. Holes below each wing showed as organs of hearing when the Grad cut into them. The wings could be cupped to gather sound.
It was a digger. Those little wings would barely move it. Everything in the Smoke Ring could fly in some sense; but this one would prefer to dig a hole and ambush its prey. Even its trunk wasn’t all that powerful. The Grad searched until he found the sting that had been in its tip. The size of an index finger, it was embedded in Glory’s pack. Glory nearly fainted.
They kept the claws. Clave would use them to tip his grapnels. They cut steaks to be broiled and passed to the rest, who by now were moored on spikes outside. They set bigger slabs of meat to smoke at the back of the wooden cave.
Gavving realized that his eyes were blurry with exhaustion. Glory was streaming sweat. He put his arm over her shoulders and announced, “We quit.”
“Good enough,” Clave called in. “Take our perches. Alfin, let’s carve up the rest.”
Clave’s team was well fed, overfed. They drifted on lines outside the cave. Meat smoked inside. The carcass, mostly bones now, had been set to block the entrance.
Clave said, “Citizens, give me a status report. How are we doing? Is anyone hurt?”
“I hurt all over,” Jiovan said and scowled at the chorus of agreement.
“All over is good. Glory, did that thing break any of your ribs?”
“I don’t think so. Bruises.”
“Uh-huh.” Clave sounded surprised. “Nobody’s fallen off. Nobody’s hurt. Have we lost any equipment?”
There was a silence. Gavving spoke into it. “Clave, what are you doing here?”
“We’re exploring the trunk, and renewing the Quinn markings, and stopping a famine, maybe. Today’s catch is a good first step.”
Gavving was prepared to drop it, but Alfin wasn’t. “The boy means, what are you doing here? You, the mighty hunter, why did you go out to die with the lames?”
There was muttering, perhaps, but no overt reaction to the word lames. Clave smiled at Alfin. “Turn it around, Quinn Tribe’s custodian of the treemouth. Why was the tribe able to spare you?”
The west wind had softened as they climbed, but it was still formidable; it blew streamers of smoke past the carcass. Alfin forced words from himself “The Chairman thought it was a good joke. And nobody…nobody wanted to speak up for me.”
“Nobody loves you.”
Alfin nodded and sighed as if a burden had been lifted from him. “Nobody loves me. Your turn.”
Gavving grinned. Clave was stuck, and he knew it. He said, “Mayrin doesn’t love me. I traded her in for two prettier, more loving women. Mayrin is the Chairman’s daughter.”
“That’s not all of it and you know it.”
“If you know better than I do, then keep talking,” Clave said reasonably.
“The Grad can back me up. He knows some tribal history. When things go wrong, when citizens get unhappy, the leader’s in trouble. The Scientist himself almost got drafted! The Chairman is scared, that’s what. The citizens are hungry, and there’s an obvious replacement for the Chairman. Clave, he’s scared of you.”
“Grad?”
“The Scientist knows what he’s doing.”
“He blamed it all on you!” Alfin cried. “I was there!”
“I know. He had his reasons.” The Grad noticed the silence and laughed. “No, I didn’t cause the drought! We rounded Gold, and Gold swung us too far in toward Voy, down to where the Smoke Ring thins out. It’s a gravity effect—”
“Many thanks for explaining it all,” Clave said with cheerful sarcasm. Gavving was irritated and a bit relieved: nobody else understood the Grad’s gibberish either. “Is there anything else we should settle?”
Into the silence Gavving said, “How do we cause a flood?”
There was some laughter. Clave said, “Grad?”
“Forget it.”
“It’d solve everybody’s problems. Even the Chairman’s.”
“This is silly…well. Floods come when a pond brushes the tree, somewhere on the trunk. A lot of water clings to the trunk. The tide pulls it down. Usually we get some warning from a hunting party, and we all scurry out along the branch. The big flood, ten years ago…most of us got to safety, but the waterfall tore away some of the huts, and most of the earthlife crops, and the turkey pens. It was a year before we caught any more turkeys.
“And I wish we’d have another flood,” the Grad said. “Sure I do. The Scientist thinks the whole tree—never mind. You can’t catch a pond. We’re too far into the gas torus region—”
“There,” Gavving said and pointed east and out, toward a metal-colored dot backed by rosy streamers of cloud. “I think it’s bigger than it was.”
“What of it? It’ll come or it won’t. If it did come floating past, what would you do, throw lines and grapnels? Forget it. Just forget it.”