by Larry Niven
They were dropping too fast. The Grad swung the carm nose-down and fired forward jets. He said, “Nice of you to ask. We’ve got the Scientist’s Apprentice and the silver suit and the only man alive who can fit into it. Maybe they would trade. We keep the carm.”
“Never,” said Lawri. “Trade with copsiks!”
Anthon and Clave looked at each other. The Grad said, “Never mind,” and they laughed. Lawri’s tone of voice said it all.
Minya stopped and looked out through a screen of branchlets.
The supervisors had found Gwen. Haryet was scolding her as they led her toward the huts. Haryet was second-generation copsik, shorter than Minya; she looked tiny beside her very pregnant captive.
They’ll have heard us coming, Minya thought. Jinny must have realized that too. She stepped out through the crackling foliage, ten meters east of Minya’s position. Good! They’ll think they heard one not two—
Dloris came toward Jinny with thunder in her face. Breaking new paths was strictly forbidden.
Minya emerged behind Haryet and stabbed her.
Gwen turned with her baby in her arms and shrieked. Dloris whirled and stared. Perhaps this place of mothers and babies had given the supervisor a false sense of safety. She reacted slowly. Before she could reach her truncheon, Jinny was pinning her arms and Minya was running at her in long, low leaps.
Dloris flipped forward. Jinny flew over her back: and came spinning at Minya, who lost a moment sidestepping. Then Dloris held half a meter of hardwood at guard, but she faced a Navy sword.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
“My child will not be born a copsik!” Minya screamed and lunged.
Dloris danced backward. The tunnel was behind her, and Minya knew she had to stop the supervisor from reaching it. She ran at her, ready to bat the truncheon aside. Then Jayan and Ilsa were moving into place behind Dloris. Jayan held the big paddle well up the haft, blade first, like a two-handed sword.
Dloris dropped her truncheon. “Don’t kill me. Please.”
“Dloris, tell us what’s happening.”
“Carther States is all over the trunk. I don’t know who’s winning.”
“Have they got the carm?”
“The carm?” Dloris showed nothing but astonishment.
They tied her with line. Ilsa wanted to do more; Minya knew Dloris too well to allow it. She wouldn’t have killed Haryet either, if…if.
Gavving watched the carm descend in fire. Patry was talking to his box, too far away for Gavving to hear; but the Navy officer looked furious and frightened.
He caught Gavving watching him. “You! All of you! Stay where you are! Move and you’ll be shot. Do you understand? Arny, take cover.”
The two Navy men disappeared into the foliage. Presently Alfin said, “We’re bait.”
“There’s only two.”
Horse asked, “Do you really think your friends have the carm? What will they do with it?”
“Rescue us,” Gavving said with more assurance than he felt. “Alfin, when it comes down, jump for the doors and hope they open.”
Alfin snorted. “You’ve got to be out of your mind. Look at that thing, you want to ride in it?”
“I’ll ride anything to get out of here, if I can take Minya.”
“You don’t have Minya. Listen, Gavving. I remember you with your eyes red and half-closed and crying in rivers. They make their own weather here! Nobody starves, nobody goes thirsty. It’s a good, healthy tree with a good crop of earthlife. I’ve got a responsible position—”
“You like it here?”
“Oh…treefodder. Maybe I don’t really like it anywhere. I took orders in Dalton-Quinn too. I’m seeing a supervisor, a nice woman even if she towers over me. I didn’t have that in Quinn Tuft. Kor’s a year or two old for the citizens, but we get along…and I don’t like that box.”
“I do.” It was Horse who bad spoken. “Gavving, cede me Alfin’s place.”
The carm was falling straight at them. Those had better be friends aboard! He could only die fighting if they were not. He told Horse, “It’s not my decision. Just do what I do, and we’ll see what Clave says.”
“Done.”
“Alfin. Last chance—”
“No.”
“Why?”
Alfin met his eyes. “There’s tide here.”
Gwen’s shriek of terror had started her baby screaming. He was quieter now. Gwen’s awareness was in the hands that stroked and patted the child. There was none in her eyes.
The conspirators ignored Gwen as she ignored them. Ilsa led her back, once, when she tried to return to the huts. They didn’t want Gwen talking to the others.
Jayan asked, “Ilsa, are you sure you want in on this?”
Jinny wasn’t pregnant; Jayan and Minya were not obtrusively so. Ilsa was. She said, “My baby won’t be born a copsik either.”
The branch shuddered with the force of a tremendous blow. Ilsa said, “The second elevator. Karal said two.”
Jayan said, “Minya, you’ve talked to the Grad. What did he say?”
“The Grad said to go up. He’ll try to capture the carm. If he can’t get the carm—”
“Then he’s dead,” Ilsa concluded, “and all the Carther States warriors are going to die, and we’ll never get loose at all. So he’s got to have the carm. He’s got the carm and as many Carther States warriors as he can get aboard, and he’s trying to reach us. Who goes with us?”
Nobody suggested a name. Jayan said, “We’re the only new copsiks. Let the rest run their own revolt.”
“You can’t go up.”
They turned, surprised. Dloris’s eyes shied from their potentially lethal attention. She repeated doggedly, “You can’t go up. The tunnels lead to the fin and the treemouth. There isn’t any connecting tunnel to the top of the tuft; that’s where the men live. None of you are in shape to tunnel through foliage, and if you got to the top you’d stand out like so many mobies in a stewpot.”
“Then what?”
“Stay here till your friends come for you.”
Ilsa shook her head. “The children’s complex? Karal must have the upper reaches evacuated by now.”
“Ilsa, it’s big and complicated and it doesn’t connect to the top. The most you’d do is get lost.”
“What’s your stake in this, Dloris?”
“Let me live. Don’t tell anyone I helped.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to escape once myself. Now I’ve been a supervisor too long. Somebody would be sure to want me dead. But you can’t go up. Stay here and wait.”
They looked at each other. Minya said, “You did that. For thirty years? No. I think I know what we have to do.”
The Grad tapped at the motor controls…tricky. They had to be used in pairs and clusters or they’d spin the carm. He dropped into the foliage several meters from the platform, with a horrendous crashing, and opened the doors at once.
Three men jumped toward the door. Gavving gripped an older man’s arm. The third man wore blue, and he was swinging a sword. Debby took careful aim and put a crossbow bolt through him.
Gavving and the stranger pulled themselves inside. The older man was gasping. “Get us moving,” Gavving said. “This is Horse. He wants to join Quinn Tribe. Alfin isn’t coming. He likes it here.”
A feathered harpoon ricocheted through the doors. The Grad closed them. He said, “I left Minya and Jayan in the pregnant women’s compound—”
“What? Minya?”
“She’s carrying a guest, Gavving. Your child. And men aren’t permitted there.” Later the Grad would tell him the truth…part of it. For now, for witnesses and the record, Minya is carrying her husband’s child. “Ilsa’s there too, Anthon. I told Minya to gather them all and go up. We’ll have to wait for them.”
Clave nodded. Gavving stared with open mouth. He said, “Grad, don’t you know the men’s tunnels don’t connect to the women’s?”
“What?”
/> “They’d have to go all the way to the fin or the treemouth, and back! Or break trail—Grad, they’re sure to be captured!”
Clave had a hand on Gavving’s shoulder. “Calm down, boy. Grad, where would they go?”
The Grad tried to think. It was Horse who spoke. “Not the fin. That’s Navy. Maybe nobody would notice some extra women at the Commons or the schools. Or maybe they’d just stay where they are and wait.”
“Jinny’ll be at the treemouth anyway. Okay.” The Grad fired the forward motors.
The carm lifted tail-first from the tuft, leaving fires in its wake. Lawri screamed, “You’re setting the tree on fire!”
She was ignored. “I’ve been to the pregnant women’s complex,” the Grad said. “I haven’t been in the Commons.”
“Alfin has,” Gavving said. “It’s big, and it reaches to the treemouth. If we can get the carm into the treemouth—”
Lawri writhed. “You can’t! You can’t burn the treemouth, what are you? This isn’t mutiny anymore, it’s just wanton destruction!”
Anthon asked mildly, “Will London Tree trade with copsik mutineers?”
Lawri was silent.
“Lying wouldn’t have helped. You were too convincing before. We’ll go get our people.”
The carm moved sideways above the tuft, accelerating sluggishly. Then there was clear sky below, and the Grad swung the carm around.
They were dropping past the treemouth. The carm slowed, hovered. The Grad touched paired yellow dots. Light flared into the Commons in twin beams, as if the carm were a tethered sun.
Women were running…away. Jungle giants all, leapfrogging across the woven spine-branch floor. None were the right size, nor dark enough, to be Jinny.
“Drop it,” Clave said as if his voice hurt him. “Go for the pregnant women’s compound. How do we get there?”
The Grad let the carm sink. They were below the tuft now: blue sky below, green passing above. “It’s under the branch. I think our best move is to go up into it. I may not hit it exactly, and the Navy may have figured out what we’re doing by now. Are you ready for a fight?”
“Yes,” said several voices.
The Grad grinned. “Maybe I can scrape off the silver man too. I notice he’s still with us…Now what’s that?”
Things were falling from the foliage. A bundle of cloth tied with line. Long loaves of bread. A bird carcass, cleaned and skinned. Then the green sky was raining women. Jayan, Jinny, and a jungle giant: Ilsa?
“They jumped,” Gavving said in wonder. “What if we hadn’t come?”
“We did,” Merril said. “Get ’em!”
Two big leather bags fell, and then another woman, leaping head-down to catch up with the rest: Minya.
The Grad cut the motors and took a moment to think. He was aware of voices yelling at him but was able to ignore the intrusive noises.
Got to catch them in the airlock What about the silver man? He was still clinging to the dorsal surface. The Grad rotated the carm to put it between the pressure-suited dwarf and the falling women.
They were separating. It would be three operations. Jayan and Jinny first. They faced each other across clasped hands, as they had after Dalton-Quinn Tree came apart. They seemed calm enough under the circumstances. The carm eased toward them.
The silver man was crawling around to the airlock.
“Hang on,” the Grad said, and he started the carm spinning. Faster. His head spun too; he could see sickness in the faces behind him. The silver man, caught rounding a corner, was hanging by his hands. The Grad used the motors again, against the spin, and slapped the silver man hard against the hull. He flew free.
The Grad opened the doors. The twins were flying at him. He jetted flame to slow the carm; stopped just alongside them, backed and moved sideways. Then they were crawling into the carm.
Blue shapes crawled within the green sky. Armed Navy men, carrying jet pods and footbows and a massive thing that took three men to handle.
The reunion would have to wait. “Get ’em into chairs,” he called back to Clave. Minya next. He was flying the carm like he’d done it all his life. He got a little careless; Minya thumped the hull, then came in with a bloody nose. “Sorry,” he said. “Gavving, never mind that, get her to a chair! Who’s the other one?”
“It’s Ilsa,” Anthon said. “They’re shooting at her! Grad, get her!”
“I’m doing that. Do we need the food and other stuff?” He was alongside Ilsa now, between her and the falling Navy men. Voy glared behind her. Footbow arrows ticked off the hull…but that thump had no place in his scheme. What—?
Ilsa’s look of terror and determination faded into blissful sleep. He knew before he looked: the silver man was back, spitgun and all. He was on the dorsal surface, out of reach of the doors, and Anthon had thrown a line round Ilsa’s waist and was pulling her in.
“Get her into—” The chairs were full. “Get her against the back wall and stay with her. Don’t turn any fixtures. Debby, put a tethered bolt in that carcass and we’ll pull it in.”
Anthon said, “The silver man—”
“These are close quarters. If he gets through the door, swarm him. The spitgun doesn’t kill, but if he shoots us all, he owns us.”
Jinny called to the Grad, “We brought a stack of clean laundry and a water supply.”
“We’ve got water. Laundry…why not? Hey, I told Minya to go up. You did it right, we’d never have found you—”
Minya said, “If you had the carm, you could find us in the sky. So we grabbed what we could and went down.”
The Navy men had not left the branch’s green underside. Hardly surprising. If they failed to capture the carm, how would they reach the tree again? They would have looked futile, the Grad thought, were it not for the bulky starstuff thing they handled like a weapon.
The salmon bird carcass was a black silhouette with Voy painfully bright behind it. Anthon and Debby had to squint…but their tethered arrows nailed it and they reeled it in. Maybe the silver man was hoping someone would show his head; none did. He tried to enter with the stack of ponchos, and the Grad almost managed to catch him in the closing door. That left the laundry outside too, and a red border around the yellow diagram. “I never saw red before. What’s it mean?”
Lawri deigned to answer, contemptuously. “Emergency. Your line’s holding the airlock open.”
The Grad opened the door (the red warning disappeared) and Debby pulled the mass in. The silver man didn’t try to follow. The door may have scared him. It was his last chance: the Grad closed the doors and sighed with satisfaction.
His sigh chopped off when his ventral view flared pure, dazzling red, then disappeared from the bow window.
From other displays he caught glimpses of painfully bright scarlet. “Can that thing hurt us?” Anthon demanded, while Lawri cried, “Now you’ll see! They’ll cut us in half!” and Clave said, “They’re almost on us. We’ll have them all over the hull if—”
“Feed it to the tree!” the Grad shouted at them all. He couldn’t think. What could that light do to them? Neither Klance nor Lawri had ever mentioned such a thing.
We’ve got what we need. Forget the bread, forget the water. Get out! They’ll never catch the carm.
Lawri saw his hand move and screamed, “Wait!” The Grad didn’t. He tapped the center of the big blue vertical bar.
Chapter Twenty
THE POSITION OF SCIENTIST’S APPRENTICE…
The air sighed out of the Grad’s lungs. He was being crushed flat. His left arm had missed the armrest; it was behind him, being pulled gradually from the shoulder socket. The chair was too low to support his head. His neck hurt savagely. Above the muted shriek of the main motor he heard his passengers fighting for breath.
This must be killing the jungle giants.
London Tree dwindled like a dream in the aft view. They were in the storm now, and blind. The Grad tried to raise his right arm, to touch the blue bar, to end the fo
rce that flattened him. Up, up…farther…his arm fell back across his chest with a jolt that smashed the last sipful of air from his lungs. His sight blurred.
Lawri’s chin was tucked down against her collarbone. She was sure that if she relaxed her neck the tide would snap it.
She watched Jeffer trying to turn off the motor and knew he couldn’t make it. And Lawri’s arms were bound.
They will kill some mutineer, she thought with alloyed satisfaction. And I did it to them. The com laser would burn or blind at close range, but almost certainly it would not have hurt the carm. She’d lied in hope that the mutineers would panic. She’d succeeded beyond her ambitions. But it’s killing me!
The screen of clouds swept past and away.
Gold was to left of center in the bow window. The Smoke Ring trailed left of Gold. They were accelerating east and a little out.
East takes you out.
They were leaving the Smoke Ring.
I knew it. That crazy Jeffer’s killed us all.
With his head pulled far back, with the points of what should have been a neckrest digging savagely into his shoulder blades, Gavving looked along his nose and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
The sky flowed away at the edges of the bow window. A triune family split and fluttered and were gone before they could move. A small, flattish green jungle drifted close, accelerated, whipped past. A fluffy white cloud showed ahead. Closer. White blindness, and the carm shuddered and rang with the impact of water droplets. Something tiny struck the bow window a terrific blow and left a pink film a quarter meter across. In a breath the rain had pounded it clear.
The cloud was gone, and the sky ahead was clear of further obstructions. Gold and the Smoke Ring showed like a puffball on a stem, against blue sky…a deep, dark blue sky, a color he’d never seen in his life.
He rolled his head to look at Minya. The agony in his neck shifted…the pressure was easier to take this way. She looked back at him. Lovely Minya, her face fuller than he remembered. He tried to speak and couldn’t. He could barely breathe.
She sighed, “Almost.”
The light of the CARM’s main drive was back, and blue-shifting!