by Larry Niven
“It belongs to Carther States,” Lizeth informed him.
He found he didn’t care. His belly was stridently empty. “That wood looks too green to make a cookfire—”
“Salmon bird is eaten raw, with falling onion when we can get it.”
Raw. Yuk. “Falling onion?”
They showed him. Falling onion was a plant parasite that grew at the forks of the branchlets. It grew as a green tube with a spray of pink blossoms at the tip. The pretty brown-haired woman named Debby assembled a handful and cut the blossom-ends off. Ilsa’s sword carved the scarlet meat in translucently thin slices.
Meanwhile Kara bound the Grad’s right wrist to his ankles, then freed his left. “Don’t untie anything else,” she warned him.
Raw meat, he thought and shuddered; but his mouth watered. Hild wrapped sheets of pink meat around the stalks and passed one to the Grad. He bit into it.
His mind went blank. You learned to put hunger out of your mind during a famine…but he had definitely been hungry. The meat had an odd, rubbery texture. The flavor was rich; the onion taste was fiery, mouth-filling.
They watched him eat. I have to talk to them, he thought hazily. It’s our last chance. We have to join them. Otherwise, what is there? Stay here and be hunted or let the invaders catch us, or jump into the sky…The man-sized bird was dwindling. Lizeth seemed content to carve slices until they stopped disappearing; Debby was now cutting the falling onions to stretch them. The women had long since finished eating. They watched with irritating smiles. The Grad wondered if they would consider a belch bad manners, and belched anyway, and had to swallow again. He’d learned while climbing the tree: a belch was bad news in free fall, without tide to bring gas to the top of the stomach.
He asked for water. Lizeth gave it to him in a squeezegourd. He drank a good deal. The falling onion had run out. Feeling pleasantly full, the Grad topped off his meal with a handful of foliage.
Nothing could be entirely bad when he felt this good.
Kara the Sharman said, “One thing is clear. You are certainly a refugee. I never saw a starving copsik runner.”
A test? The Grad took his time swallowing. “Cute,” he said. “Now that that’s established, shall we talk?”
“Talk.”
“Where are we?”
“Nowhere in particular. I wouldn’t lead you to the rest of the tribe until I knew who you were. Even here, the copsik runners might find us.”
“Who are they, these…runners?”
“Copsik runners. Don’t you use the word copsik?” It sounded more like corpsik when she said it.
He answered, “It’s just an insult-word.”
“Not to us or them. They take us for copsiks, to work for them the rest of our lives. Boy, what are you doing?”
The Grad had reached for his pack with his free hand. “I am the Quinn Tribe Scientist,” he said in freezing tones. “I thought I might find some background on that word.”
“Go ahead.”
The Grad unwrapped his reader. He had Carther States’ undivided attention. The women were awed and wary; Lizeth held her spear at the ready. He chose the records cassette, inserted it into the reader, and said, “Prikazyvat Find copsik.”
NOT FOUND
“Prikazyvat Find—” the Grad said and held the reader to Kara’s face. The Sharman shied, then spoke to the machinery. “Corpsik.”
CORPSICLE?
The Grad said, “Prikazyvat Expound.”
The screen filled with print. The Grad asked, “Can you read it?”
“No,” Kara said for them all.
“‘Corpsicle is an insult-term first used to describe people frozen for medical purposes. In the century preceding the founding of the State, some tens of thousands were frozen immediately after death in the hope of someday being revived and cured. This was found to be impossible. The State later made use of the stored personalities. Memory patterns could be recorded from a frozen brain, and RNA extracted from the central nervous system. A brainwiped criminal could thus be fitted with a new personality. No citizenship was conferred upon these corpsicles. The treatment was later refined and used by passengers and crew on long interstellar voyages.
“‘The seeder ramship Discipline’s crew included eight corpsicles. The memory sets were those of respected citizens of advanced age, with skills appropriate to an interstellar venture. It was hoped that the corpsicles would be grateful to find themselves in healthy, youthful bodies. This assumption proved—’ I can’t make sense of all that. One thing seems clear enough. A copsik isn’t a citizen. He has no rights. He’s property.”
“That’s right,” said Debby, to the Sharman’s evident annoyance.
So the Sharman doesn’t trust me. So? “How do they find you in here? There must be cubic klomters of it, and you know it and they don’t. I don’t see why you fight at all.”
“They find us. Twice now they have found us hidden in the jungle,” Kara said bitterly. “Their Sharman is better than I am. It may be that their science enhances their senses. Grad, we would be glad to have your knowledge.”
“Would you make us citizens?”
The pause lasted only seconds. “If you fight,” said Kara.
“Clave broke his leg coming down.”
“We make citizens only of those who will fight. Our warriors are fighting now, and who knows if they will repel the corpsik runners? If we can hurt a few, perhaps they will not seek out the children and old men and women who host guests.”
Guests? Oh, the pregnant ones. “What about Clave and the women? What happens to them?”
The Sharman shrugged. “They may live with us, but not as citizens.”
Not good, but it might be the best they could get. “I can’t say yes or no. We’ll have to talk. Kara…ah!”
“What is it?”
“I just remembered something. Kara, there are kinds of light you can’t see. There used to be machines that could see the warmth of a body. That’s how they find you.”
The women looked at each other in dread. Debby whispered, “But only a corpse is cold.”
“So light little fires all through the forest. Make them check each one.”
“Very dangerous. The fire might…” she trailed off. “Never mind. Fires go out unless fanned. The smoke smothers them. It might be possible after all, near the jungle surface.”
The Grad nodded and reached for more foliage. Things were looking better. If some could become citizens, they could protect the rest. Perhaps Quinn Tribe had found a home…
“Three groups, and they’re all going deeper. The traces are getting blurred,” said the pilot’s blurred voice. The carm hung behind Squad Leader Patry’s shoulder, bow aimed at the jungle. “Are you going after them?”
“Groups how big?”
“Three and three and a bigger group. The big group started first. You probably won’t catch them.”
In the hands of Patry’s men a mass of greenery rose from the rest and floated free. Patry reported, “We’ve found where they dug in. Okay, we’re going after them.” He joined the waiting men. “Mark, take the point. The rest of you follow me. Go wide of that yellow stuff, it’s poison fern.”
Mark was a dwarf the only man in London Tree who could wear the ancient armor, and thus the only possible custodian of the spitgun. Ten years ago he had tended to shy back from an attack, until he gained confidence in his invulnerability. The men had called him Tiny until Patry himself raised hell about it. Mark was born to wear the armor. He’d learned to wear it well.
He climbed past the severed bush and into the dark with London Tree’s infantry behind him.
The agony was real, centered above Clave’s knee, but spreading in flashes throughout his body. The rest faded in and out. He was being towed through a tunnel. Soon the Scientist’s plant extracts would erase the pain. But hadn’t the plants died in the drought? And…the tree was gone. There wasn’t any Scientist, and the Grad had no drugs, and the Grad was gone too. Too few su
rvivors followed the Grad through green gloom. Clave’s pitiful remnant of a tribe was split, and there was no medicine for an injured man.
Jinny and Minya stopped abruptly, jarring his leg. The pain shouted in his brain. Then they had plunged into the tunnel’s branchlet walls, and Clave tumbled in free fall, abandoned.
His tumble turned him and the dream turned nightmare. He faced a bulky, faceless silver thing. The apparition raised something…metal? A splinter stabbed into Clave’s ribs. He plucked it out. His mind was muzzy…was it a thorn? The metal-and-glass creature forced itself through the tunnel wall, ignoring Clave. Acolytes followed it in, blue men carrying huge, unwieldy bows.
The pain had gone and reality was fading. Here was medicine after all.
“I see you’ve caught up with the first group,” the pilot said. “The forward group has stopped. The middle group has joined them. Maybe you should quit.”
“I sent Toby back with two copsiks. The third had a broken leg, so we left him. We’re almost at full strength. Let’s just see what happens.”
“Patry, is there something unusual about your mission?”
Classified…oh, what did it matter? “Catch some copsiks. Shoot some meatbirds. Collect some spices. Pick up anything scientific.” That last wasn’t usual. Maybe the First Officer wanted the Scientist to owe him a favor. Patry didn’t comment, not with the Scientist’s Apprentice listening.
“Fine. You’ve got copsiks. How many do you need? You don’t really expect to find science here, do you?”
“There’s a big group ahead. I’m going to at least look at the situation.” Patry turned the volume down. Pilots tended to argue a point to death, and Patry wanted silence.
Gavving hadn’t burrowed far before Jayan’s line led them to a tunnel carved through the foliage. They moved faster then.
Despite its alien smell, Gavving was hungry enough to try the foliage. The taste was alien too; but it was sweet and went down well. He ate more.
In fact, he felt almost at home here. His toes thrust into branchlets and pushed him down the tunnel in remembered rhythm. Cheeping and croaking rose from thousands of unseen throats. They wouldn’t be birds, this deep in the thicket; but they chirped, and if need came they could probably fly. The sound was the sound of Gavving’s childhood, before the drought killed the small life throughout the tuft.
It was an effort to remember that this wasn’t Quinn Tuft; that he followed enemies who knew this thicket as Gavving knew his tree.
Minya, it seemed, didn’t have that problem. She was snatching handfuls of foliage, but the hand she used clutched an arrow, and her bow was in the other.
They were moving faster than the line that slithered ahead of them. Merril wound it up as they went. The coil trailed from a thumb; she used both hands to move herself. When Gavving noticed, he said, “Let me do that for a while. Eat.”
“Keep your hands free!” A little later, perhaps regretting her sharpness, she said, “I need my hands to move. You can fight with your hands. Where’s your harpoon?”
“On my back. We’re all right as long as Jayan is still pulling on the line,” he said and immediately noticed that the line had gone slack. Gavving reached for his harpoon before he moved again.
A disembodied white arm thrust out of the tunnel wall and beckoned.
Jayan looked out through a screen of branchlets. Her voice was a hoarse and frightened whisper. “They’re ahead of us.”
“Where?”
“Not far. Don’t take the tunnel. There’s a long, straight part, then it swells out. They’d see you. Go where I go, or they’ll hear branchlets breaking.”
They followed her into the thicket.
Jayan had broken a trail. Twice she’d had to cut thicker spine branches. In the end they watched from behind a screen of branchlets as the Grad spoke with the weird women.
They were lean and elongated, like exaggerated cartoons of the ideal woman, or like a further stage in human evolution. They looked relaxed. So did the Grad. His feet and one hand were bound, but he was casually eating foliage while they talked. The carcass of a bird was mostly bones.
Minya’s breath was warm on his shoulder. She whispered, “It looks like the Grad may have talked them around. I can’t hear, can you?”
“No.” There was too much birdsong…and an occasional crackling as someone moved, making Gavving glad for the birdsong. Still, someone was making too much noise…
Minya leapt through the branchlets in a hideous crackling, straight into the midst of the weird women, screaming, “Monster made of starstuff! There!”
Gavving leapt after her, ready to do battle. He’d have appreciated some warning—
The weird women didn’t hesitate an instant. Five of them jumped toward other tunnels and were gone in three directions. The sixth jumped clumsily. She struck the edge of the opening and tumbled away unconscious. Had she struck that hard?
The Grad was struggling to free his hands. Gavving felt something sting his leg. He turned to fight.
To fight what? A thing of glass and metal! There were men behind it—ordinary men who floated free, sighting over their toes as they pulled huge bows taut with their hands—but they didn’t fire. The thing of science pointed a metal tube at Minya, then at the Grad. Gavving’s harpoon bounced off its mirror-glass face. It pointed at Gavving and stung him again.
You can’t fight science, Gavving thought, and he drew his long knife and leapt at the monster. Then everything went dreamy.
“You’re too deep,” the pilot said. “I can’t get individual readings on you. I’ve got a hot spot, a cluster of a dozen or so. You and the copsiks together?”
“Sounds right. We’ve got six copsiks here, one already tied up for us. We’ll leave the one with no legs. That gives us seven total. A bunch went off through the tunnels. Can you locate them?”
“Yes. It looks like they’re together again. There’s you, and there’s a tighter, brighter spot east of you. I’d say quit now. Kill some meatbirds on the way out.”
“There’s something here…I’ve got something scientific here, something I don’t understand. Too scientific by half.” Squad Leader Patry picked up a rectangular mirror that didn’t reflect, a mirror that shone by its own light. With some trepidation he flipped an obvious switch. The light went out, to his relief. “You’re right, we’ve got enough. We’re coming out.”
Chapter Thirteen
THE SCIENTIST’S APPRENTICE
Lassitude…an odd, pleasant sensation like fizzing in the blood…constriction and resistance at his wrists and ankles…memories drifting into place, sorting themselves. The Grad waited until his mind was straight before he opened his eyes.
He was bound again, tension at wrists and ankles holding his body straight. Getting to be a habit. His bonds gave as he tugged at them. He was tied to netting, facedown to a wall that was hard and cold and smooth, and translucent to a millimeter’s depth, over a gray substrate.
He’d never seen the like before; but from a distance this stuff might look like metal.
It was the flying box. He was tied to the flying box. He twisted his head left and saw others: Minya, Gavving, Jayan (already awake and trying to hide it), Jinny. To his right, a row of dead salmon birds and ribbon birds, Alfin smiling in his sleep, and one of the Carther Tribe women, the pregnant one, Ilsa. Her eyes were open and empty of hope.
A jovial voice boomed at them. “Some of you are awake by now—” The Grad arched his back to see over his head. The copsik runner was big, burly, cheerful. He clung to the net near the windowed end. “Don’t try to wriggle loose. You’ll just get lost in the sky, and we won’t come back for you. We don’t want fools for copsiks.”
Minya called to him. “May we talk among ourselves?”
“Sure, if you don’t interrupt me. Now, you’re wondering what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to join London Tree. There’s tide when you’re in a tree. You’ll have to get used to the pull on things, and balancing on your
feet without falling, and so forth. You’ll get to like it. You can heat water till it boils without it spewing all over the place, and that lets you cook things you never tasted. You always know where you are, by what a thing does if you let go of it. You can drop garbage—” From below their feet came an unnerving whistling roar. The copsik runner’s voice rose “—and know it won’t float back at you.” He stopped talking because some of his prisoners were screaming.
A tide pulled toward the Grad’s feet. He was not surprised to see sky wheeling past: green forest, a strip of blue, billowing white. The textured green below his feet began to contract.
A wet wind blew past. Mist thickened around them. The panicky screams thinned to whimpers, and the Grad heard Alfin’s, “Treefodder! We’re going back into the treefeeding storm cloud! Whose bright idea—” and he must have silenced himself, because nobody else could have reached him.
Their guard waited for quiet. He said, “It’s very impolite for a copsik to interrupt a citizen. I am a citizen. I’ll forget it for the duration of this voyage, but you will learn. Questions?”
Minya screamed, “What gives you the right?”
“Don’t ever say that again,” the copsik runner said. “Anything else?”
Minya seemed to calm herself in an instant. “What about our children? Will they be copsiks too?”
“They’ll have the chance to be citizens. There’s an initiation. Some won’t want to take it. Some won’t pass.”
Mist enclosed them completely. The copsik runner himself was half-invisible. A wave of droplets each the size of a thumb swept across them, leaving them soaked.
Nobody else seemed inclined to, so the Grad spoke. “Is London Tree stuck in this storm cloud?”
The copsik runner laughed. “We’re not stuck anywhere! We moved into the cloud because we need water. After we get you home we’ll move out, I expect.”
“How?”
“Classified.”
Gavving was just waking up. He looked left and right and found the Grad. “What’s happening?”
“The good news is we’re going to live in a tree.”