by Larry Niven
By watching the cats and rats and plants and turkeys and pigeons interact, Sharls hoped to learn how an ecological system would behave in a free-fall environment…like the larger ecosystem that flowed beneath Discipline in endless rivers of curdled cloud.
Or had he simply become lonely? In his youth Sharls had never been a cat lover. (A sudden memory: his hand swelling with white patches rimmed in red, itching horribly. A kitten had scratched him playfully while he was stroking it.) And now? They didn’t obey orders worth a damn…but neither had his crew.
A computer program would hardly have retained allergies; but who would expect a computer program to become lonely?
Discipline skimmed above the curdled whorl of the fourth Lagrange point. A fraction of Sharls Davis Kendy’s attention watched on various wavelengths. This close, he could confirm an earlier sighting: minor amounts of carbon were being burned at sites around the edges of that endless storm. This was no forest fire: too small, and it had gone on for years. It might indicate human industry at a primitive level.
Now, where was CARM #6?
…Funny that the cats hadn’t gone with the mutineers. The crew had loved cats. Somewhere in the lost part of his memory, there must be a reason. Perhaps Sharls had pulled free of the Smoke Ring without warning. He might have done that if the mutineers planned something really foul, like cutting the computer out and trying to run Discipline manually.
The mutiny was a blank to Sharls.
He had edited those memories. He even remembered why. The descendants of the mutineers would need Sharls Davis Kendy someday. It was not good that he hold grudges against specific ancestors, against old names. But had he been too thorough?
—There! CARM #6’s communications system had come alive.
It was a thousand kilometers behind him and something less than six thousand kilometers in toward Voy. Kendy did several things at once. Before his new orbit could carry him away, he restarted the drive. He beamed, “Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State.”
The CARM autopilot responded.
“Link to me. Beam records.”
He’d made mistakes enough during that unexpected contact twenty Earth years ago! At least he’d accomplished something: he’d broken the program that denied him access to the Cargo and Repair Module. The drive systems were beyond his reach. The original mutineers must have physically cut the fiber-optic cable. But the CARM would talk to him!
He’d instructed the autopilot to take photographs at ten-minute intervals. Reentry was in progress when he sent that message. Static might well have fuzzed him out. But pictures were streaming in.
Time passed at a furious rate. CARM #6 flamed as it plowed through thickening air, veering from plants and ponds and creatures. It dipped into a pond to refuel, then bedded itself in the Voy-ward tuft of the largest of a cluster (grove?) of integral trees. It stayed there, with not much of a view at all, for most of a Smoke Ring year. Flickering shapes carved cavities through the foliage and wove small branches into wasp’s-nest structures. Abruptly the CARM backed into the sky, skittered outward under inexpert handling, and docked at the midpoint of the tree.
With another part of his mind, Kendy fiddled with Discipline’s fusion motor. He could not match his orbit to that of the CARM. He must stay well outside the Smoke Ring to protect Discipline from corrosion. The best he could do was twice the CARM’s orbital period, to dip low above the CARM’s position once every ten hours and eight minutes. But he’d be in range for half an hour while his motor was firing.
More of his attention went to watching the CARM’s lone occupant in real time.
Jeffer the “Scientist” was stored in memory. He had aged twenty Earth years: hair and beard going gray, wrinkles across his forehead (broken by a white line of scar that was a healing pink wound in Kendy’s records), and knuckles turning knobby. Height: 2.3 meters. Mass: 86 kilograms. Long arms and legs, toes like stubby fingers, fingers like a spider’s legs: long, fragile, the hands of a field surgeon.
The Smoke Ring had altered Discipline’s descendants. The tribes of London Tree and Dalton-Quinn Tree had all looked like that. The jungle giants who had grown up without tidal gravity were hardly human: freakishly tall, with long, fragile, agile fingers and toes; and one of the twelve was a cripple, and others had legs of different length. Only Mark the Silver Man had looked like a normal State citizen. They had called him “dwarf.”
They were savages; but they had learned to use State technology in the form of the CARM. Still human. Perhaps they could be made citizens again.
To Kendy, who thought with the speed of a computer, the “Scientist” moved much too slowly. Now he was at the controls, auditing a cassette; now checking the camera views in present time…
The incoming CARM records showed clouds and ponds and trees and trilaterally symmetric fishlike birds swirling across the sky. Natives flickered through the CARM cabin: the same savages, growing older; a growing handful of children.
At fifteen years minus-time the CARM backed out of its timber dock for a journey of exploration. It visited a green puffball several kilometers across, and when it emerged there was vegetation like a houseful of green spaghetti bound to its dorsal surface. It hovered in the open sky while men darted among a flock of birds—real birds with real wings: turkeys—and returned to its dock with prisoners.
At thirteen years minus-time it left the trunk to return with a dubious prize: several tons of black mud.
There were no more such forays. The Cargo and Repair Module had become a motor for the tree.
It was docked when the main drive fired for several hours. Kendy watched side views as the integral tree drifted across the sky. It had been circling too far from the neutron star. Air grew thin away from the Smoke Ring median.
The tree was lower now; the air would be as thick as mountain air on Earth. And now the CARM was not being used at all; but there was plenty to watch. The Smoke Ring environment was fascinating. Huge spheres of water, storms, jungles like tremendous puffs of green cotton candy.
In present time, the aft CARM camera showed nearly thirty natives maneuvering between the tree and a tremendous globule of water. They were using the free-fall environment better than any State astronaut. The State had need of these people!
Discipline’s own telescope had found the foreshortened tree, with the pond to mark it. And what was that on the opposite side of the tree? Infrared light glowed near its center…
Half a thousand years of sensory deprivation were being compensated in a few minutes. After more than five hundred years, Sharls Kendy had left the stable point behind Goldblatt’s World. He had burned irreplaceable fuel, and it was worth it! Sharls tried to absorb it all, integrate it all…but that could wait. The “Scientist” might leave at any minute!
He beamed: “Interrupt records.” It was twenty Earth years of nothing happening, and the tiny CARM autopilot couldn’t handle too many tasks at once. “Activate voice.”
“Voice on.” The .04-second delay was almost too short to notice.
“Send—” He displayed a picture of himself as a human being, with minor improvements. At age forty-two Kendy had been handsome, healthy, mature, firm of jaw, authoritative: a recruitment-poster version of a State checker.
These were not obedient State citizens. They hadn’t trusted him twenty years ago. What words might give him a handle on Jeffer the “Scientist”?
He sent, “Kendy for the State. Jeffer the Scientist, your citizens have been idle too long.”
Jeffer jumped like a thief caught in the act. Two long seconds passed before he found his voice. “Checker?”
“Speaking. How stands your tribe?”
Out beyond the terrible whorl of storm that surrounded Gold, out where water boiled and froze at the same time and the legendary stars were a visible truth, lived Kendy the Checker. He had claimed to be something like an elaborate cassette: the recording of a man. He had claimed authority over every human being in the Smoke Ring. He had off
ered knowledge and power, while they were still near enough to hear his ravings.
Perhaps he was only a madman trapped somehow aboard the spacecraft that had brought men from the stars. But he had knowledge. He had coached them through that terrible fall back into the Smoke Ring, fourteen years ago.
The face in the carm’s window had not been seen since. It was the face of a dwarf, a brutal throwback. The jaw and orbital ridges were more massive even than Mark’s, the musculature more prominent.
“We lived through the reentry,” Jeffer told him. “Ilsa and Merril are dead now. There are children.”
“Jeffer, your tribe has possessed the CARM for fourteen of your years. In that time you have moved the tree twice and thenceforth done nothing at all. What have you learned of the people of the fourth Lagrange point?”
The what? “I don’t understand the question.”
“Sixty degrees ahead of Goldblatt’s World on the arc of the Smoke Ring and sixty degrees behind are regions where matter grows dense. They are points of stability in Goldblatt’s World’s orbit. Material tends to collect there.” The dwarf’s brutal features registered impatience. “East of you by twelve hundred kilometers, a vast, sluggish, permanent storm.”
“The Clump? You’re saying there are people in the Clump?”
“I sense activity there. A civilization is growing twelve hundred kilometers from where your tree has floated for fifteen Earth years. Jeffer, where is your curiosity? Has it been bred out of you?”
“What do you want from me, Checker?”
Kendy said, “I can be in range to advise you every ten hours and eight minutes, once every two of your days. I want to know more of the people of the Smoke Ring. In particular, I want to know about you and about the Clump civilization. I think you should link with them, perhaps rule them.”
Jeffer’s one previous experience indicated that Kendy was harmless. For good or ill, he could only talk. Jeffer gathered his courage and said, “Kendy, the tales say that you abandoned us here, long ago. Now I expect you’re bored and—”
“I am.”
“And you want to talk to someone. You also claim authority I won’t grant you. Why should I listen?”
“Are you aware that you are being invaded?”
“What?”
The face of Kendy was suddenly replaced by a dizzying view. Jeffer looked into a river of storm, streaming faster as the eye moved inward toward a tiny, brilliant violet pinpoint. Jeffer had seen this once before: the Smoke Ring seen from outside.
Before he could remember to breathe, the view jumped. He was looking at what had been the center of the picture, vastly enlarged.
“Look.” Scarlet arrowheads appeared, pointing—“Here, your tree.”
“Citizens’ Tree, from the out tuft? Yeah, and that must be the pond.” Both were tiny. Opposite the pond was…another tree? And dark cloud clinging to the trunk?
The view jumped again. Through the blur and flicker in the illusion of a window, Jeffer watched a tree on fire. Moving between the two trees were creatures he had never seen before.
“Treefodder! Everybody’s on the other side of the trunk. Those bird-things will be on the tree before anyone knows it.”
“Look in infrared.” The picture changed again, to red blobs on black. Jeffer couldn’t tell what he was looking at. The scarlet arrowhead pointed again. “You are seeing heat. This is fire in the intruder tree. Here, these five points are just the temperature of a man.”
Jeffer shook his head. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
The enlarged picture returned…and suddenly those tiny “creatures” jumped into perspective. “Winged men!”
“I would have called those enlarged swimming fins rather than wings. Never mind. Have you ever heard tales of winged men?”
“No. There’s nothing in the cassettes either. I’ve got to do something about this. Prikazyvat Voice off.” Jeffer made for the airlock without waiting to see the face fade. His citizens wouldn’t have a chance against winged warriors!
The sun was at three o’clock: dead east, just above where the Smoke Ring began to take definite shape. Kendy can only talk, sure, but he talks with pictures, and he tells things nobody can know. He’ll be in range every other day at this time. Do I want to know that? But Jeffer had other concerns, and the rest of that thought lay curled unfinished in the bottom of his mind.
Jill was leaving Rather behind. She glanced back once and moved on, and there was laughter in the sound of her panting.
Jill was his elder by half a year. When he wanted company it was generally Jill he wanted; but they did compete. There had been a year during which she could beat him at wrestling, when she suddenly grew tall and he’d lagged behind. She’d taught him the riblock the hard way: she’d held his floating ribs shut with her knees so that he couldn’t breathe. He could wrestle her now—he was a boy and a dwarf—but her longer arms and legs gave her an unbeatable advantage at racing. He’d never catch her.
So he moved outward at his own pace, giving due care to his handholds and footholds in the rough bark, following the blond girl in the scarlet tunic. Her long-limbed mother had already reached the carm ahead of them.
At fourteen-plus. Rather was considered an adult. He was built wide and muscular, with heavy cheek, jaw, and orbital bones. His fingers were short and stubby, and his toes, though strong, were too short to be much use. His hair was black and curly like his mother’s. His beard was sparse, without much curl to it yet. His eyes were green (and green tinged his cheek, with a growth of fluff that would be many days healing). He stood a meter and three-quarters tall.
Dwarf. Arms too short, legs too short. He should have gone around the trunk. Jill could have told the Scientist about the burning tree; Debby might already know. He could have been getting a closer look!
The carm loomed ahead of him. It was as big…no, bigger than the Citizens’ Tree commons.
Debby shouted into the airlock. Someone emerged: Jeffer. They talked, heads bobbing. Debby moved to the front of the carm; Jeffer was about to go back inside—
Rather heard Jill calling. “Scientist! There’s a burning tree coming toward us!” She paused to catch her breath. “We saw it, me and Rather, we—while we were swimming—”
Jeffer called back. “Debby told me. Did you see anything like winged men?”
“…No.”
“Okay. Help Debby with the moorings, there at the bow.” He noticed Rather struggling in Jill’s wake. “Get Rather to help you.”
Debby and Jill were both fighting knots, and Jill was muttering “Treefodder, treefodder, treefodder,” when Rather caught up. “I bent my finger,” she said.
Debby said, “I hate to cut lines. See what you can do.”
The carm’s tethers hadn’t been moved in years, and the knots were tight. Rather’s stubby fingers worked them loose. Dwarf. Clumsy but strong. Presently the carm was held by nothing but its own inertia. Jill did not look pleased. Debby and Rather grinned at each other. It was something, to do a thing an adult warrior could not!
Jeffer called from the airlock, twelve meters beyond the bark. “Come aboard!”
Debby jumped and Jill followed. Rather hesitated until he saw them bump against the airlock door. The jump looked dangerous. Tide was gentle, but one could fall into the sky. Rather had never been inside the carm, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be. The starstuff box was like nothing else in or on the tree.
But he had to follow. He caught the edge of the outer door as it passed, pivoted on the strength of his arms, and entered feetfirst. Can’t jump right, can’t reach far. What if I missed?
It was weird inside the carm. There were openings in the back wall, and hard round loops sticking out of the dorsal and side walls. Farther toward the front were rows of cradles almost the size of an adult, ten in all, made of nothing like wood or cloth.
Rather made his way forward. The others were in the first row of cradles. “Take a seat and strap yourself in,” Jeffer ordered. �
��Here, like this.” He fastened two elastic tethers across Jill’s torso. “Lawri showed me how to work these, years ago.”
The cradle had a headrest that fitted nicely behind his ears. Jill’s and Debby’s dug into their shoulders. It’s true, Rather thought suddenly. The carm was built for dwarves! He liked the thought.
“The winged men weren’t very close,” the Scientist said. “We’ve got time.” His fingers drummed against the flat panel below the window.
There was tide pulling Rather forward, and a whisper-roar like a steady wind. The bark receded; the tree backed into the sky. Jill gripped the armrests of her cradle. Her mouth was wide. Debby said, “Clave didn’t say take off, Scientist. He said get ready.”
“No time. They’re headed for the trunk. Also the carm is mine, Debby. We settled that once.”
“Tell it to Clave.”
“Clave knows.”
The invaders kicked themselves through the air, slowly, in the last stages of exhaustion. Five, it looked like, until Rather realized that the older woman carried a half-grown girl in her arms.
Jeffer nudged the carm toward them, in along the trunk.
Smoke Ring people came long, longer, or dwarf. These invaders were of the longer persuasion, like jungle giants, born and raised in free fall. They were quite human: an older man and woman and four girls. The wings were artificial, bound to their shins, made of cloth over splayed ribs. One girl trailed behind, struggling along with only one wing.
They were in sorry shape. Closer now, and Rather could see details. The man’s hair was burned, and the loose sheet that covered him was charred. The wingless girl was coughing; she didn’t even have the strength to cling to the woman who carried her.
Their legs stopped pumping as, one by one, they saw the carm.
Debby said, “I don’t see anything like bows or harpoons. Can we take them aboard?”
“I thought of that, but look at them. The carm scares them worse than being lost in the sky. Anyway, the man’s almost there.”
The burned man hadn’t seen them. Kicking steadily, far ahead of the others, he reached the bark and clung. Without a pause he pounded a stake into the bark, moored a coil of line, and hurled the coil at the older woman. She freed a hand and caught it, pulled herself toward the tree, then snapped the line to send a sine wave rolling toward the trunk. The nearer girl caught the line in her toes as it bowed toward her.