by Larry Niven
Chapter Twenty-Two
CITIZENS’ TREE
Kendy’s readings were beginning to blur. Frustratingly, the CARM’s aft and ventral cameras worked perfectly. He had two fine views of the stars and the thickening Smoke Ring atmosphere. Plasma streamed past the dorsal camera, and Kendy sought the spectral lines of silicon and metals: signs that the CARM’s hull was boiling away. There was some ablation, not much more than he would have expected when the CARM was new.
Inside the cabin the CO2 content was building. The jolting looked bad enough to tenderize meat. The passengers were suffering: mouths wide, chests heaving. Temperature was up to normal and rising. A blurred figure snapped its safety bands loose and struggled to tear its clothing away. Kendy couldn’t get medical readings through the growing ionization, but the pilot had been under terrific tension earlier…
It looked chancy, whether the CARM would live or die. Kendy wasn’t sure which he preferred.
He had bungled.
The principle was simple and had served the State before. To further the cause, a potential convert was ordered to commit some obscene crime. He could never repudiate the cause after that. To do so would be to admit that he had committed an abomination.
The caveat was simple too. One must never give such an order unless it would be obeyed.
Kendy was ashamed and angry. He had attempted to bind their loyalty to him by ordering an execution. Instead, he had almost turned them all into mutineers! He’d had to back down gracefully and fast. He’d had no chance to recover from that, with the ionosphere building up around the CARM, cutting communications. His medical readings told him that they had lied to him, somewhere. He shouldn’t have forced them to do that either! He didn’t know enough even to guess at what they were hiding.
Too late now. If he sent some lethal course correction now, ionization would garble it. If they lived, they would tell of a Kendy who was powerful but gullible, a Kendy who could be intimidated. If they died…Kendy would remain a legend fading into a misty past.
The forward view was a blur of fire as the CARM plowed deeper into atmosphere. He was losing even the cabin sensors…
There was flame in front of them, transparent blue, streaming to the sides. The Grad felt the heat on his face. They’d be losing air again: the black ice around the rim of the bow window had turned to mud…mud that bubbled. He’d been wrong. The screaming flame-hot air massed before the bow was coming in.
Things came at them. Little things were hopeless; they hit or they didn’t. Blood spots turned black and evaporated. Larger objects could be avoided.
His hands strangled the chair arms. Trying to steer the carm through this would have been bad enough. Watching Lawri steer was distilled horror. From her rigid posture, the knotted jaw and bared teeth, she was just at the edge of screaming hysterics. Her hands hovered like claws, reached, withdrew, then tapped suddenly at blue dashes. His own hands twitched when she was slow to see danger.
The chairs were full. Citizens had objected, but the Grad had simply kept yelling until it got done: the corpse of Horse moored to cargo fixtures; Mark the silver man in back, gripping cargo moorings with his abnormal strength; Clave beside him, swearing that his own strength was enough; everyone else strapped into seats that would give some protection, even to jungle giants, against thrust from the bow. Reentry wasn’t like using the main motor. It was an attack. The air was trying to pound the carm into bits of flaming starstuff.
Lawri had lived half her life with the carm. She had to be better at this than the Grad, she’d insisted, and she was right. He gripped the chair arms and waited to be smashed like a bug.
The carm fell east and in. Integral trees showed foreshortened, as three…four pairs of green dots, hard to see…she’d seen them: jets fired. A bit of green fluff; dead ahead…Lawri fired port jets…the carm swung sluggishly around, shuddering as the flaming air blasted the nose off-center. Forward jets: the carm eased backward, too slowly, while the fluff swelled to become an oncoming jungle.
A grunt of pain, aft. Clave had been jarred loose. The silver man was holding him in place with a hand on his chest.
The Grad saw birds and scarlet flowers before the jungle was past. Lawri let the bow face forward again. A pond a klomter across just missed swatting them; droplets of fog in its wake rang the hull like a myriad tiny chimes. The debris was growing ever thicker.
And it was moving past them more slowly.
Something barred their path like a green web. It might have been half of an integral tree with the tuft gone wild, the foliage spreading like gauze, the trunk ending in a swollen knob. Small birds played in the slender branches. Swordbirds hovered at the edges. He’d never seen such a plant…and Lawri was steering clear of it.
The Grad said, “Lawri?”
“It’s over,” she said. “Damn, I’m tired. Take the controls, Jeffer.”
“I have it. Relax.”
Lawri rubbed her eyes fiercely. The Grad touched blue dashes to slow the carm further. A fingertip touch set the cabin warmth control to normal. The cabin was already warm. If it hadn’t been lethally cold when they entered atmosphere, they might well have roasted.
He looked back at his passengers. Six of Quinn Tribe remained. Twelve total, to start a new tribe…“We’re back,” he said. “I don’t know just where. Are we all alive? Does anyone need medical help?”
“Lawri! You did it!” Merril chortled. “We lived long enough to get thirsty!”
The Grad said, “We’re low on fuel and there’s no water at all. Let’s find a pond. Then pick a home.”
“Open the doors,” Jayan said. She released her straps and moved aft, with Jinny following.
“Why?”
“Horse.”
“…Right.” He opened the airlock to a mild breeze that smelled fresh, clean, wonderful. The carm’s air stank! It was stale, a treefodder stink, fear and rotting meat and too many people breathing in each other’s faces. Why hadn’t he noticed?
The twins released the corpse from its mooring, wincing at the touch. They towed it through the doors. The Grad waited while they sent the bones of the salmon bird after it.
Then he fired the aft motors. If I met his ghost, he wouldn’t even recognize me. How can I say I’m sorry? Never use the main motor unless—Horse dwindled into the sky.
The pond was huge, spinning fast enough to form a lens-shape, fast enough to have spun off smaller ponds. The Grad chose one of the smaller satellites, no bigger than the carm itself. He let the carm drift forward until the bow window just touched the silver sphere.
What happened then left him breathless. He was looking into the interior of the pond. There were water-breathing things shaped like long teardrops with tiny wings, moving through a maze of green threads. He turned on the bow lights, and the water glowed. There was a jungle in there, and swimming waterbirds darting in flocks among the plants.
Lawri roused him. “Come on, Jeffer. Nobody else knows how to do this. Pick two mutineers with good lungs.”
He followed her aft and didn’t ask her about lungs until he’d figured it out himself. “Clave, Anthon, we need some muscle. Bring the squeezegourds. Better than lungs, Scientist.”
“Squeezegourds, fine. If you’d planned your mutiny better, you’d have dismounted the pump and stored it aboard.”
He laughed and thought, Should I have asked your advice too? and didn’t say it. After all Lawri had been through, it was good to hear her joking, even in treemouth humor.
While she mounted the hose to the aft wall, the Grad carried the other end outside. He saw no sign of the nets that had covered the hull. Even the char had been burned off. He tethered himself before he jumped toward the water a few meters away. Clave came after him, also properly moored, carrying squeezegourds, followed by Jinny and Jayan.
Everyone was coming out. Mark was out of his pressure suit and tethered to Anthon. Merril, Ilsa, Debby…In a tangle of lines they plunged into the water and drank. The Grad hadn’t
let himself think of his thirst. Now he surrendered to it, submerging head and shoulders and doing his best to swallow the pond. The carm’s headlamps lit the water around him.
It was playtime. Why not? He tugged on his line, pulled himself out before he drowned. The rest of the citizens were drinking, splashing, washing themselves and each other.
Was Lawri alone in the carm?
Alone with the controls of a vehicle that could hover near the pond, spraying fire on men and women who would have to choose between burning and drowning—He saw Lawri emerge with Minya and Gavving behind her. He’d been careless; they hadn’t. The Grad kept an eye on her thenceforth to be sure she didn’t return alone.
She splashed in the water. She and the dwarf washed each other and talked a little, in earshot of Anthon. Her motions were jerky, twitchy. She looked wire-tense in the aftermath of reentry. His suspicions seemed silly; she was in no shape to contemplate a countermutiny. He wondered if she would have nightmares.
They took turns pumping. The technique was to shove the neck of a squeezegourd into the hose, warily, because there were three gourds in motion; squeeze; duck it under water, squeeze, wait while it filled; into the hose, squeeze…
“My arms just quit,” Minya said and handed her gourd to Merril. With her archer’s muscles she had lasted longer than most. Gavving was some distance from the others, motionless in the water. He’d already speared four peculiar, supple, scaly waterbirds. She watched him and wondered how he really felt about the guest growing in her.
How did she feel? Her impregnation was part of her past. The past was dead for anyone, but stone dead for these citizens, with hundreds of thousands of klomters and the storms of Gold itself between them and their homes. She would have a child. Time was when she had given up hope of that…but how did Gavving feel?
Merril said, “Nobody’s talking about Sharls Davis Kendy.”
“What for?” Debby wondered. “He never bothered us before and he never will again.”
“Still, it’s something to have seen the Checker, isn’t it? Something to tell our children. Someone that old must have learned a lot—”
“If he wasn’t lying, or crazy.”
“He had the facts right,” the Grad said. “We did take him at his word, didn’t we? Maybe he only had cassettes, like me. A dwarf Scientist, stuck out there in a carm, like we almost were. He’s not all that bright, either. He swallowed Mark’s story—”
“Come on, I was brilliant!” the silver man bellowed.
“You tell a fine story. Mark, why did you back me up?”
It was a breath or two before the dwarf answered. “You understand that I can’t support a bloody copsik revolution.”
“Okay. Why?”
“It was none of this Kendy’s business. Whoever he is. Whatever he is.”
“Yeah…He did have some interesting machinery. Maybe he got stuck aboard Discipline itself, somehow. I’d have liked to see Discipline.”
Lawri hadn’t even tried pumping. She flexed her fingers, wondering if they would heal. She had smelled the stink of fear on herself. That at least was gone.
She said, “I wouldn’t deal with Sharls Davis Kendy if he gave me Discipline. Ugly, arrogant treefeeder. He wanted Mark dead like you’d kill a turkey, because it’s time. Convenient. And he ordered us around like copsiks!”
They laughed at that. Even Mark.
At the end of three hours their forearms were distilled pain. The blue indicator inside read H2O: 260. The Grad asked Lawri, “Enough?”
“For what we’ve got in mind—”
“We wondered about going home,” Debby said.
Clave snorted, but they waited for Lawri’s reply. She said reluctantly, “I’d never find London Tree again. Carther States is even smaller, and they’re both on the wrong side of Gold. We’d have to accelerate west, drop in from the Smoke Ring, and let Gold pull us around. Do you want to go for Gold again?”
She smiled at their reactions. “Me neither. I’m tired. We can get to another tree and moor the carm. We’ll build a pump before we need more water than that.”
“We’d prefer a jungle, of course,” Ilsa said.
One of the women bristled. “Nine of us and three of you! If—”
Clave said, “Hold it, Merril. Ilsa, are you sure? You can move a jungle, and that’s good, right?”
Ilsa nodded cautiously. Anthon said, “That’s one of the things we like about jungle life.”
“But you can only do it every twenty years or so. We can moor the carrier…carm to the middle of an integral tree and move it when and where we like.”
“Why not do that with a jungle?”
“Where would you mount the carm?”
Anthon thought it over. “The funnel? No, it might suddenly blow live steam—” He smiled suddenly. “There are more of you than us anyway. Sure, pick a tree.”
There was a grove of eight small trees, thirty to fifty kilometers long. The Grad chose the biggest, without asking. He hovered on the forward jets at the western reach of the in tuft.
It was a wilderness. A stream ran down the trunk and directly into the treemouth. He looked for the rounded shapes of distorted old huts, and they weren’t there. The foliage around the treemouth had never been cut; there were no paths for burial ceremonies or moving of garbage. No earthlife showed, not even as weeds.
It was daunting. He said cheerily, “It seems we’re the first here. Lawri, have you thought of a way to land this thing?”
“You have the helm.”
He’d thought it through in detail. “I’m afraid our best move is to moor at the trunk and go down.”
“Climb?”
“We did it before. Clave could lead most of us down while, say, Gavving and I wait. We’d have the carm for rescue operations. After the rest of you get down, Gavving and I can follow. We’ve climbed before—”
“Hold it,” Clave said. “This is taking too treefeeding long. Grad, quit fooling around and just land in the treemouth.”
“We might set it on fire!”
“Then we try again with another tree!”
Lawri had gone berserk at the suggestion of landing in the treemouth of London Tree. Now she just rubbed her eyes. Tired…
They were all too tired. They’d had enough of shocks and strangeness. Clave was right, delay would be torment, and there were trees to waste.
There was no kind of landing site in that wilderness. Everything he saw was green; there was no drought here. Would it burn?
Go for Gold.
He went in over the treemouth and rammed the carm into the foliage hard enough to stick. Still shaken by the impact, they forced their way through the doors, fast, and flailed with ponchos at the smoldering fires until they went out.
Then, finally, they had time to look around.
Minya stood panting, grinning, her black hair wild and wet, the blackened poncho trailing from her hand. She snatched at his hand and cried, “Copter plants!”
Gavving laughed. “I didn’t know you liked copter plants.”
“I didn’t either. But in London Tree they weeded out the copter plants and flowers and anything else they couldn’t use.” She tapped at one, two, three ripe plants, and the seed pods buzzed upward. Suddenly, she was looking into his eyes, close. “We did it. Just like we planned, we found an unoccupied tree and it’s ours.”
“Six of us. Six out of Quinn Tuft…sorry.”
“Twelve of us. More to come.”
She had fought the fire with a predatory grace unhampered by the thickening around her hips. Mine, Gavving thought. Whether it looks like me or some copsik runner…or Harp, or Merril! Mine; ours. He’d tell her when the mood was right. But that was too serious for now. “Okay, everything you see is ours. What shall we call it?”
“The thing I like best…I can say citizen and mean all of us. I’m no copsik and I’m not a triune. Citizens’ Tree?”
The foliage tasted like Quinn Tuft in the Grad’s childhood, before the
drought. He lay on his back in virgin foliage and sucked contemplatively.
He became aware that Lawri was watching him from the dappled shadows. She looked cold, or just twitchy, hugging her elbows, cringing as if from a blow. He snapped, “Can’t you relax? Eat some foliage.”
“I did. It’s good,” she said without inflection.
It was irritating. “All right, what’s got you worried? Nobody’s ever going to call you a copsik runner. You saved our lives and everyone knows it. You’re clean, fed, rested, safe, and admired. Take a break, Scientist. It’s over.”
Now she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Jeffer, how does this sound? There are only two London Tree citizens for at least ten thousand klomters around. Doesn’t it stand to reason that we’d…get along best together?”
He sat back on his haunches. Why ask him? “I suppose it does.”
“Well, Mark thinks so too.”
“Okay.”
“He didn’t have to say so. We talked a little about building huts, that’s all, but he looks at me like he knows. Like, he’s too polite to broach the subject yet, but where else can I go, who else is there? Jeffer, don’t make me marry a dwarf!”
“Uh…huh.”
She turned, convulsively, to see his face. He held up a hand to stop her from speaking. “In principle, two Scientists ought to make good mates too. Does that make sense? But you watched me murder Klance. I didn’t warn him. I didn’t make any speeches about copsiks and freedom and war and justice. I just killed him the first good chance I got. I’d have killed you too to get us free of that place.”
She didn’t nod, she didn’t speak.
“You could put a harpoon in my belly while I’m sleeping. So don’t push me. I have to think.”
She waited. He thought. Now he knew why she irritated him with her twitchy unhappiness. He was guilty, and she had seen it. Not quite what one wanted in a mate!
Did he want a wife? He’d always thought he did, and with seven women and five men in Nameless Tuft…no chance for an unmarried man to play around in such a tiny population, but he should have his choice of wives. So who?