by Larry Niven
Other debris floated in the smoke trail. The Grad made out great fragments of torn wood and bark; a cloud of flashers whirling in panic; a flapping mote, perhaps a nose-arm fled from its burrow. In that confusion he could still see that the cloud of citizens and corpses was slowly drifting apart.
Far in toward Voy, Gavving maneuvered half his own weight in smoked meat. He’d be hard to reach. He’d gone far to save that meat, and the wind-wake must have pulled him further. Save Gavving for last, and hope.
The fan brushed against the Grad and he clutched it, fungus springy under his hands. Clave watched as if bemused. He asked, “What happened?”
Safe now. “The tree came apart. Clave, I’m going to dig in your pack. We’ve got to start rescuing citizens.”
Clave neither helped nor resisted as the Grad searched through his pack. They could use the big fan as a base of operations…rescue Alfin first, because he was nearest…He took half a dozen pods. He slid to somewhere near the fan’s center of mass and fired a jet pod, then another.
“The tree came apart?”
“You saw it.”
“How? Why?”
The Grad was judging distances. He cast a line in a wide circle. It brushed Alfin’s back, and Alfin convulsed and snatched the line in a deathgrip. He didn’t try to reel it in. The Grad had to do that, while Alfin watched in near-mindless terror. Alfin lunged across the last meter or so and wrapped himself around the stalk and buried his fingers in white fungus to the last knuckle.
A hand closed around the Grad’s neck. Long, strong fingers overlapped the thumb, tightening like a steel collar. Clave’s voice was a hot snarl in his ear. “You’ll tell me now!”
The Grad froze. Clave had gone crazy.
“Tell me what happened!”
“The tree came apart.”
“Why?”
“Maybe the fire set it off, but it was ready. Clave, everything in the Smoke Ring has some way of getting around. Some way to stay near the median…middle, where there’s water and air. Where do you think jet pods come from?” The hand relaxed a little, and the Grad kept talking. “It’s a plant’s way of getting around. If a plant wanders out of the median, too far into the gas torus region—”
“The what?”
Alfin asked, “What on Earth is going on?”
“Clave wants to know what happened. Alfin, can you steer this thing and pick up some more of us? Here—” He passed across his store of jet pods.
Alfin took them. He took his time deciding what to do with them, and the Grad ignored him while he lectured. “The Smoke Ring runs down the median of a much bigger region. That’s the gas torus, where the molecules…the bits of air have long mean-free-paths. The air is very thin in the gas torus, but there’s some. It gets thicker along the median. That’s where you find all the water and the soil and the plants. That’s what the Smoke Ring is, just the thickest part of the gas torus, and that’s where every living thing wants to stay.”
“Where it can breathe. All right, go on.”
“Everything in the Smoke Ring can maneuver somehow. Animals mostly have wings. Plants, well, some plants grow jet pods. They spit seeds back toward the median where they can grow and breed, or they spit sterile seeds farther into the gas torus, and the reaction pushes the plant back toward the median. Then there are plants that send out a long root to grab anything that’s passing. There are kites—”
“What about the jungles?”
“I…I don’t know. The Scientist never—”
“Skip it. What about the trees?”
“Now, that’s really interesting. The Scientist came up with this, but be couldn’t prove it—”
The hand tightened. The Grad babbled, “If an integral tree falls too far out of the median, it starts to die. It dies in the center. The insects eat it out. They’re symbiotes, not parasites. When the center rots, the tree comes apart. See, half of it falls further away, and half of it drops back toward the median. Half lives, half dies, and it’s better than nothing.”
Clave mulled that. He said, “Which half?”
“East takes you out, out takes you west, west—”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to remember. We were too far in toward Voy, so our end—” It only hit him then. The revelation blocked his throat.
A moment later, so did Clave’s fingers. “Keep talking, you copsik. I’ve had it up to here with you telling half a secret!”
Thickly the Grad said, “Mister Chairman, you may call me the Scientist.”
The hand relaxed in shock.
“Quinn Tribe is dead. We are Quinn Tribe.”
Alfin broke the long silence that followed that terrible declaration. “Are you happy, Grad? You were right. The tree was dying.”
“Shut up,” said Clave. He released the Grad’s neck. Maybe that had been a mistake, maybe not; he’d have to apologize presently. For now, he clambered around to the edge of the fan. Jayan and Jinny were coming near, watching his approach alternately as they spun.
He’d never felt like this, so helpless, so fearful of making decisions. It bothered him that Alfin and the Grad bad seen him like that. He tried his voice and found it normal:
“They’re almost here. Good work, Alfin. Go for Merril next. I don’t see Glory.”
The Grad said, “I haven’t seen her since…since.” He rubbed his throat.
“She may not have jumped. Seven of us. Seven.” He flung a line. Jinny snagged it in her toes, and Clave pulled them both in together. He said, “Welcome to what’s left of Quinn Tribe.”
They clung to Clave more in desperation than affection. Jinny pulled back to look into his face. “They’re dead? All the rest?” As if she’d already guessed.
Alfin demanded, “Why didn’t the Scientist see that coming?”
“He did,” said the Grad.
“Treefodder. Why did he stay, then?”
“He was an old man. He couldn’t climb fifty klomters of tree.”
Alfin gaped. “But…but that’s the same as murdering everyone who could climb!”
There wasn’t time for this. Clave said, “Alfin, pay attention to what you’re doing.”
Alfin set off two jet pods, then another. The fan drifted toward Merril, who waited in what might have been stoic calm. He murmured, “The children!”
Somewhere off to the side, there was motion.
What Clave had taken for a purple-clad corpse was floundering in air. Clave pointed. “One killer left.”
They watched. She wasn’t floundering now. She’d tied a line to her long knife, and now she cast it out. She snagged a dead companion and reeled it in. She searched the corpse, then pushed off from it in the direction of the next.
She hadn’t found much, but it must have been what she wanted. Now she fired two jet pods in turn. The thrust carried her in toward Voy. Alfin said, “She’s not coming here. Or going home. What does she think she’s doing?”
“Not our problem.”
Merril caught a line thrown by Alfin and pulled herself close. By now there was no room to clutch the fan itself. Clave asked her, “Did you see any sign of Glory?”
“Hanging on to the bark for dear life, last I saw her. She was in the out section. Gavving’s a good distance in.”
“We’ll go after him. I hope we get there in time.”
By then it was obvious. The woman in purple had passed them and was heading toward Gavving.
Gavving watched her coming. There was little else he could do. When he could see her face he watched her watching him. The rictus of hate he’d seen earlier wasn’t there. He saw close-cut dark hair, a triangular face with an oddly narrow chin, an expression that was thoughtful, judging.
She was going to go past.
He didn’t know how to feel about that. He didn’t want to die alone; but he surely didn’t want to die with those mini-harpoons through him. She was close now. She reached behind her back for a tethered mini-harpoon. He could only try to put the
meat between them as she pulled her odd weapon apart, looking him in the eye, and released it.
The feathered thing buried itself in warm meat.
Then Gavving moved in frantic haste, pulling his knife, reaching for her line—
Her words were strangely twisted, but he understood her. “No, no, no, let me live! I have water! I have jet pods! I beg you!”
It might be so. He shouted, “Freeze! Don’t reel yourself in! I have to think”
“I obey.”
She hung, tethered, motionless.
“You’ve got water and I’ve got food. What if you kill me and keep both?”
“My sword,” she answered and produced the long knife and threw it. Startled, Gavving reached out and managed to catch it by the handle. “My bow,” she said, and he had time to bed the knife in the meat before she threw him the pull-it-apart weapon. He caught that too.
Now what? She was just waiting.
“What do you want?”
“I want to join you, your people. There’s nobody else.”
He could festoon himself with his weapons and hers, and so what? With nothing between them but forty kilograms of smoked meat, either could snatch a weapon and kill the other at any time. He’d have to sleep sometime…and still she waited.
He thought suddenly, Why not? I’m dead anyway. He called, “Come on.”
She coiled the line as she came. Gavving had been hanging onto his pack, but she hugged herself up against the meat with no thought for what it would do to her purple clothing. She worked a jet pod out of one of the dozen pockets that gave her body its shapeless, lumpy look. She set it and twisted the end. When it had expended itself there was some change in their velocity. She used another. Then another.
“Why were you carrying so many?” he asked.
“I took them from my friends.”
From their corpses. Gavving turned away. Quinn Tribe now formed a single clump around—
“The Checker’s Hand,” said his enemy. He had trouble understanding her odd pronunciation. “They’re all moored to the Checker’s Hand. Good enough. Fans are edible. So is dumbo meat.”
“I know that word. Checker: the Grad’s used it, but he never tells anyone what it means.”
“You should not have attacked the Checker’s Hand. We tend it…tended it.”
“Is that why you killed Jiovan? For a fan fungus?”
“For that, and for returning from exile. You were cast out for assassinating a Chairman.”
“That’s news to me. We’ve been in Quinn Tuft for over a hundred years.”
She nodded as if it didn’t matter. She was strange…she was a stranger. Gavving knew every man, woman, and child in Quinn Tuft. This citizen had dropped on him out of the sky, complete and unknown. He wasn’t even sure he should hate her.
“I’m thirsty,” he said.
She passed him a squeezegourd pod half full of water. He drank.
The clump that was Quinn Tribe seemed minutely closer. Gavving might have been imagining it. He said, “What do we do now? The way you use a jet pod, maybe you handle yourself better in the sky than we do. Can you tell us what to do next? Dalton Tuft—”
“Dalton-Quinn Tuft,” she corrected him.
“Your half of the tree is probably safe, but it’s being pulled out by the tide. I can’t think of any way to reach it. We’re lost.” Then his curiosity suddenly became unbearable. “Who are you?”
“Minya Dalton-Quinn.”
“I’m Gavving Quinn,” he said for the second time in his life. The first had been at his rite of passage into adulthood. He tried again. “Who are you all? Why did you want to kill us?”
“Smitta was…excitable. Some of us are like that in the Triune Squad, and you were killing the Hand.”
“Triune Squad. Mostly women?”
“All women. Even Smitta, by courtesy. We serve the tuft as fighters.”
“Why did you want to be a fighter?”
She shook her head, violently. “I don’t want to talk about it. Will your citizens accept me or kill me?”
“We’re not—” killers? He’d killed two himself. It came to him that if the Grad had taught him rightly, those times when the Scientist would have whipped them both for such talk, then…then Minya’s half of the tree, falling out from Voy, was also falling out of a drought. So. “Can I tell them this? If we can get you back to the far tuft, you’ll see to it that we’re made members of your tribe. It looks better if I can say that. Well?”
She didn’t speak at once, and then she said, “I have to think.”
The meat and the fan were passing at fair speed when Clave cast out a weighted line. He’d reserved their last pod. Another mistake, maybe. Now they’d have only one chance…but the dark stranger caught the line neatly and made it fast. They braced against their mutual spin.
Gavving shouted across the gap. “This is Minya of Dalton-Quinn. Tribe. She wants to join us.”
“Don’t pull in yet. Is she armed?”
“She was.”
“I want her weapons.” Clave cast another line. An impressively thick bundle came back. Clave studied the haul: a knife the length of his own arm, a smaller knife, a bundle of mini-harpoons, and two of the pull-it-apart weapons, one of wood and one of metal. He preferred the look of the wooden one. The metal thing looked like it had been made from something else. By now he’d guessed how they must work, and he liked the idea.
Alfin said, “She tried to kill us all.”
“True.” Clave handed the Grad his last jet pod, not without reluctance. “Stop our spin. Wait. See that sheet of bark, out from us and not moving very fast? See if you can stop our spin and move us that way too.”
Alfin persisted. “What are you going to do?”
“Recruit her, if she’ll stand for it,” Clave answered. “Seven citizens in a tribe is ridiculous.”
“There isn’t room to guard her.”
“Where do you want to spend the rest of your life?”
The jet pod sprayed gas and seeds. The Grad said, “We won’t reach the bark this way. Not enough push.”
Alfin still hadn’t answered. Clave told him, “Unless you’ve learned to like falling, I’d guess you want to live in an integral tree tuft. We now have a prisoner who lives in a tuft. We have the chance to earn her gratitude.”
“Bring her in.”
Chapter Nine
THE RAFT
The pond was a small, perfect sphere, twenty klomters out from the Checker’s Hand: a giant water droplet trailing a tail of mist in the direction away from the sun. When the sun shone through from behind, as it did now, Minya glimpsed shadows wriggling within it.
It was going to drift past.
The ends of the tree were far away and still separating: Dalton-Quinn Tuft drifting out and west, the Dark Tuft in and east. The smoke trail that joined them was growing faint, save for dark streamers that were indecisive clouds of insects.
Something surged from the pond, and the pond rippled and convulsed in its wake. The creature was big even at this distance. Hard to judge its size, but it seemed little more than a mouth with fins. Minya watched it uneasily. It didn’t seem to be coming toward them. It was flapping toward the smoke trail.
A loose cluster of citizens floated about the Checker’s Hand. They couldn’t all cling. There wasn’t room, and the fungus wasn’t holding together that well, either. They used spikes and tethers and showed a reluctance to approach Minya too closely.
The old one, Alfin, clung to the stalk. His look of terror had smoothed out, but he wouldn’t talk and he wouldn’t move.
The Grad studied her. He said, “Meen Ya. Have I got that right?”
“Close enough. Minya.”
“Ah. Mineeya—if we could reach your end of the tree, could you help us join your tribe?”
Their eyes were on her. The old one’s seemed desperate. Well, it had had to come. She said, “We have a drought. Too many mouths to feed already.”
The Grad sa
id, “Your drought’s probably ending about now. There’ll be water.”
“You’re the Quinn Tribe Scientist’s apprentice?”
“That’s right.”
“I accept what you say. How long before that new water grows new food? In any—”
“There’ll be meatbirds in the wind now—”
“I don’t want to go back!” There, it was said.
Clave asked, “Did you commit a crime?”
“I was thinking about committing a crime. I would have had to. Please!”
“Leave it then. But if we spend our lives here, they’re likely to be short. Any passing triune family would think we’re some kind of mushroom tidbit. Or that flying mouth that came out of the pond a minute ago—”
“Can’t we get to another tree, one with nobody in it? I know we can’t go anywhere now, but if we could get to Dalton-Quinn Tuft, we could get to another tree, don’t you think?” They weren’t buying it. Distract them? “Anyway, we can do better than we’re doing now. We should be eating the Hand, not clinging to it. It won’t last long now that it’s been picked. We need a place to moor ourselves.”
She pointed. “That.”
That was a ragged sheet of bark, ten meters long and half that wide, a couple of hundred meters away. Most of its spin had by now been lost to air friction, Clave—the Chairman?—said, “I’ve been watching it for the past day. It isn’t getting any closer. Treefodder, if we could move ourselves, I’d go for the pond!”
The Grad said, “Maybe the tree left a partial vacuum. That might pull it in. We can hope.”
“We can do more than that. The bark may be close enough.” Minya reached for the weapons.
A hand clamped on her wrist, the fingers circling almost twice around. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Long, strong fingers, and no qualms about touching another citizen. There were men like this Clave in Dalton-Quinn Tuft. They had driven Minya into the Triune Squad…Minya shook her head, violently. She was his prisoner, and she had come as a killer. She spoke slowly, carefully.
“I think I can put a tethered arrow into that wood.”