by Larry Niven
Clave came around the bulge of the bark. He slowed when he saw the strangers. Gavving and Minya joined him. They moved toward the strangers.
There were four on the trunk now: a girl, the man, and the older woman with her coughing burden. Rather watched Clave take the burned man’s line, hurl a sine wave across the one-winged girl’s torso, and pull her in.
“Looks okay,” the Scientist murmured.
Clave looked up and waved. Jeffer nodded and set the carm moving. “It’s all right,” he said. “They sure don’t look dangerous. I wonder what happened to them? Where are they from?”
“I never saw strangers before,” Jill said. “I don’t know what to think.”
“That burning tree is still coming at us,” Rather said.
Jeffer nodded. The carm surged, turning.
Black smoke wreathed the middle section of the tree. Flame glowed sluggishly from within, illuminating blurred curves and oblongs. Debby said, “There’s stuff in the fire. Made stuff, machinery. It’ll burn up.”
That was knowledge burning in the core of the fire. Jeffer hated what he had to say. “We can’t save it. If we had Mark and the silver suit…no. That might burn even him.”
“You’re not taking us into the fire?”
“We can push anywhere. The tide will hold the tree straight.” Jeffer had already taken them below the inward limit of the firecloud, where a black plume drifted east. The carm was passing north of the trunk. Jeffer tapped: the carm turned. “It’s still dangerous. The tree could come apart while we’re on it.”
He moved in on the trunk. The bow grated against bark; Jeffer’s crew surged forward against their elastic bands. “I think the carm was built for pushing,” he said. He tapped a blue dash in the center of the panel, and the whisper of power became a whistling roar. Tide surged against his back.
This was what it was to be a Scientist. Knowledge, power, mastery of a universe. This was what Kendy the Checker had to offer. At what price? Who but a Scientist would have the strength to resist?
The sun passed zenith and started down its arc. Jeffer had changed the display; he watched sets of letters and numbers. The roar of the main motor strummed his bones.
Chapter Three
REFUGEES
from the Citizens’ Tree cassettes, year 4 SM:
TIME
We’ve been trying to keep to Earth time, but that word “day” is about as useful as balls on a Checker. The closer you get to Voy, the shorter the days get, down to about two hours. Closer than that, the air’s too thin and there’s no water to speak of. At a ten-hour orbit, same thing, there’s nothing to breathe. We’ve been keeping to ship-time. Twenty-four hours constitute a “sleep.” A “day” is one orbit around Voy, wherever you happen to be. Gold’s orbit is a “standard day.”
The State takes its dates from the year of its founding. We’ve done the same, dating Smoke Ring years from four years ago. Our years are half a rotation of Voy and its companion sun…half because it’s more convenient.
If Discipline ever does come back for us, Kendy will have to learn a whole new language.
—Michelle Michaels, Communications
The huts of Citizens’ Tree were enclosures made by weaving living spine branches into a kind of wickerwork. The Scientists’ hut was larger than most, and more cluttered too.
The Scientists were the tribe’s teachers and doctors. Any hut would have harpoons protruding from the walls and high ceiling; but here the wicker sprouted starstuff knives, pots of herbs and pastes, and tools for writing.
The hut was crowded. Lawri stepped carefully among five sleeping jungle giants.
She’d covered their wounds in undyed cloth. The strangers moaned and twisted in their sleep. The youngest girl, with her hair burned down to the scalp on one side of her head, was holding herself half in the air.
The noise from outside wasn’t helping. Lawri bent to get through the doorway. “Could you hold it down!” she whisper-snarled. “These citizens don’t need…oh. Clave…Chairman, I’m trying to give them some quiet. Can you take the talk to the commons?”
Clave and Anthon were intimidated into silence. Jeffer asked, “Can any of them answer questions?”
“They’re asleep. They haven’t said anything sensible.”
Her husband merely nodded. Lawri went back in. Rustling sounds receded. For a moment she felt remorse. Jeffer would want to see the strangers as much as anyone.
When the burns healed, the strangers would be handsome, but in weird fashion. Only birds wore the gaudy colors of their scorched clothing. Their skin was dark; their lips and noses were broad; their hair was like black pillows.
The youngest girl stirred, thrashed, and opened her eyes. “Tide,” she said wonderingly. The dark eyes focused. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Lawri the Scientist. You’re in Citizens’ Tree. You’re safe now.”
The girl twisted to see the others. “Wend?”
“One of you died.”
The girl moaned.
“Can you tell me who you are and how you came here?”
“I’m Carlot,” the girl said. Two tears were growing. “We’re Serjent House. Loggers. There was a fire…the whole tree caught fire. Wend got caught when the water tank let go.” She shook her head; teardrop globules flew wide.
“All right, Carlot. Have some water, then go to sleep.”
Carlot’s drinking technique was surprising. She took the pottery vessel, set two fingers to nearly block the opening, then jerked the pottery vessel toward her face. The jet of water struck her lower lip. She tried again and reached her mouth.
“Would you like something to eat? Foliage?”
“What’s that?”
Lawri went out to strip some branchlets of their foliage. Carlot looked dubiously at the fluffy green stuff. “Oh, it’s greens.”
“You know it?”
“I’ve been in a tree tuft.” She tasted it. “This is sweet. Older tree?” She continued eating.
Lawri said, “Later I’ll get you some stew. You should sleep now.”
Carlot patted the wicker floor. “How can I sleep with this pushing up against me? All my blood wants to settle on one side.”
London Tree, Lawri’s home, had been bigger, with a stronger tide. In Citizens’ Tree you could drop a stone from eye level and draw a slow breath and let it out before the stone struck. But this Carlot must be used to no tide at all.
She turned over, gingerly. Her eyes closed and she was asleep.
They moved through the green gloom of the corridor, back toward the commons. Anthon said, “I always wondered. Lawri doesn’t take orders from you either, does she?”
Jeffer laughed. “Treefodder, no!”
Clave said, “I really wanted to ask them some questions before we tackle the firetree.”
“We can’t wait,” Jeffer said. “Let’s go see what we can scavenge. This is the most interesting thing that has happened to us in fourteen years.”
“It’s bound to bring changes.”
“Like what?”
Clave grinned at Jeffer. “They’ve already changed your home life. You can’t sleep in the Scientists’ hut and Lawri won’t leave.”
“I’ve got the children too. I’m living in the bachelors’ longhut with my three kids and Rather. Look, I want to go now, before that burned tree drifts too far. Anthon?”
“Ready,” said the jungle giant.
Clave nodded, reluctantly. “Just us three? Stet. We’ll round up some kids to run the treadmill. And let’s take those wings along. I want to try them.”
The tree still burned. Fire had eaten six or seven klomters in from the midpoint along the lee side, progressing alongside the waterfall channel, where there was partial protection from the wind. The flames streamed east like the mane of a skyhorse. At the midpoint there were only red patches glowing in black char. In the center of the burn was a prominent uneven lump. Jeffer eased the carm toward that.
Clave said, “I don�
�t understand why it hasn’t come apart.”
Anthon nodded uneasily. Jeffer said, “It’s a short tree. With a tuft missing it’s even shorter. Tide would pull harder on a grown tree, but that thing could still come apart while we’re on it. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
Anthon asked, “Why do trees come apart?”
“They do it when they’re dying,” Clave said.
Jeffer said, “When a tree drifts too far away from the Smoke Ring median, it starves. It saves itself by coming apart. The tide takes half of it out, half in. One half falls back to where the water and fertilizer are. The other half…dies, I guess.”
“I still don’t see any bugs,” Clave said. “It’s the bugs that eat a tree apart, isn’t it? The tree isn’t getting fed, so the bark lets the bugs get inside—”
“I don’t know everything, Clave.”
“Pity.”
They were close enough now to make out black lumps at the center of the charred region. There: a shape like a huge seed pod split open from inside. There: a thin shell of char, a bell shape not unlike the fire-spitting nostrils at the carm’s aft end. A ridge of white ash joined the bell to the split pod. Beyond: several fragile sheets of charred wood, the remains of an oblong hut with interior walls.
Clave reached for the wings he’d bound to cargo hooks. “Scientist, can you hold the carm here? We’ll go see what there is to see. If the tree breaks in half, you’ll still have us tethered.”
Jeffer stifled a protest. He ached to explore that ruined structure, but—“I can handle it. Take lines too.”
The sun would be dead east in a few tens of breaths.
A stick protruded from the butt end of each fan-shaped wing. After some experimentation they settled for lining the stick along their shins and binding them with the straps. The wings tended to hang up on things even when folded. Clave and Anthon wriggled through the airlock and flapped into the sky.
Jeffer tapped the white button. “Prikazyvat Voice,” he said.
The carm said, “Ready, Jeffer the Scientist.”
Clave and Anthon fluttered erratically through the air. Suddenly Anthon moved purposefully toward the blister of charred machinery, moving easily, as if he had always been a bird. Clave moved after him, fighting a tendency to veer left.
They swept away the white ash that lay between the bell and the tank. The ash enclosed them in cloud. When the cloud dispersed, they had exposed a length of tube and a loose webbing of metal strands around it.
“Kendy for the State. Hello, Jeffer.”
Jeffer didn’t jump. “Hello, Kendy. What do you make of all this?”
“You’d know more about the injured plant than I. I’ve been studying the machinery.” Within the bow window the metal strands and the enclosed pipe began blinking, an outline of red light. “These, the pipe and the chicken wire, are metal. The ruptured tank—” another blinking outline “—appears to have been a large seed pod. The cone is half of a similar seed pod. The ash around the pipe appears to be wood ash.
“We’re looking at a steam rocket, Jeffer. Your invaders used a wood fire to heat the pipe. They ran water through the pipe and into the nozzle. Very inefficient, but in your peculiar environment they could move a tree with that. Slowly, of course.”
“Why would they pick an injured tree?”
“Ask them. Did any survive?”
“One’s dead. Five more are in bad shape. My wife won’t let me near them. Wait a few days and see.”
Clave and Anthon flew along the split in the great tank. They reached the cluster of black oblongs at the other end.
The Checker said, “Their wounds won’t become infected. We didn’t bring disease bacteria.”
“What?”
“I was thinking aloud. I want to talk to your invaders. Take them on a tour, Jeffer, when they’re ready. Show them the CARM.”
“Kendy, I’m not sure I want them to know about you.”
“I will observe only.”
Clave and Anthon were flapping back to the carm. They carried blackened cargo, and they no longer wore tethers. “Company coming,” Jeffer said.
“Jeffer, you’ve concealed your contact with me from the rest of your tribe, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t mentioned it to them yet.”
“I’ll keep my silence while others are aboard. Play the game any way you like.”
Clave and Anthon returned black with soot. They untied the now-clumsy wings, then wiggled in, pushing armfuls of blackened salvage ahead of them. Clave crowed, “I love it! It’s really flying!”
“You never did like tide, did you, Clave? How’s the leg?”
“It never gets any better.” Clave flexed his right leg. The misshapen lump on his thighbone bulged beneath the skin and muscle. The compound fracture he’d suffered in Carther States had healed, but in the jungle there had been no tide to tell the bone to stop growing. “It feels like I strained it. If I have to fly any distance I’ll use just one wing.”
They set to mooring their loot along the walls. Two tremendous hooks, wood stiffened with metal. A meter’s length of metal band with tiny teeth along one edge. A hardwood tube had kept its shape if not its strength; the remnants of charred plastic hose clung to one end.
“Weapons and tools,” Clave said. “There was wire twisted together like a harebrain net, but it was burned through in too many places. Nothing else worth taking except the pipe. We’ve got to have that pipe. We moored the lines to it, Jeffer. Let’s pull it loose.”
“It must be important, given that you’ve moored the carm to a tree that’s about to come apart. Why? Just because it’s metal?”
“I’ve got a vague idea what this setup is for,” Clave said. “We could duplicate everything except the pipe, in theory anyway. The pipe isn’t just metal, it’s starstuff, something out of the old science.”
“Why do you say that?”
“We couldn’t find a seam,” Anthon said. “It gleams when you rub away the soot. Clave, I’m not sure I like any of this. Jeffer’s right, that tree could come apart and throw us spinning across the sky, and for what? Wings, sure, those are wonderful, but the rest of this is just weird!”
Clave the Chairman said, “Pull that pipe out. Scientist.”
Anthon fumed and was silent. Jeffer said, “Strap down. Let’s hope the tethers hold.”
Under attitude jets the carm shuddered and lurched. Then six meters of metal pipe two hundred ce’meters across pulled loose in a cloud of ash.
When Anthon and Clave went out to retrieve it, Jeffer went too. They watched, grinning, while he thrashed and spun; and suddenly he was flying, kicking stiff-legged across the sky like any swordbird.
They bound the pipe up against the hull and took the carm back to Citizens’ Tree. The burning tree continued to drift west and in.
Lawri kept the citizens away from her hut for five days, a full waking-sleeping cycle. That became impossible when she sent Rather for food. Rather came back with waterbird stew, and Clave, Jeffer, Gavving, Minya, Debby, Jayan, Jinny, Mark, Jill, and a host of children. She kept them outside while the strangers ate. Then she and Jeffer pulled the hut’s entrance apart. It could be rebuilt later.
The man named himself: Booce Serjent. He shaped his words strangely. He named the others: his wife Ryllin, and their daughters Mishael, Karilly, and Carlot.
“We’ve delayed the funeral until you’re strong enough,” Clave said. “Can you make yourself discuss funeral practices?”
Booce shrugged painfully. “We cremate. The ashes go into the earthlife tanks. What do you do here?”
“The dead go to feed the tree.”
“All right. Chairman Clave, what has happened to Logbearer?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Logbearer is our ship. You saw a burning tree? The fire started around Logbearer, in the middle.”
“We went there. We brought back a metal pipe and some other stuff.”
“You saved the main
feed pipe! How?”
“We used the carm. It’s an old starstuff relic, still working. We use it to move the tree.”
Booce smiled and sighed and seemed about to drift off to sleep.
Lawri asked, “What are you? Carlot said loggers.”
“Let him alone. I’m awake.” The older woman sounded tired. “I’m Ryllin. Yes, we’re loggers. We take lumber back to the Clump and sell it there.”
Chairman Clave asked, “You mean there are men in there?”
Ryllin’s laugh chopped off as if it had hurt her. “More than a thousand. With children, near two thousand.”
“Thousands. Huh. And you move trees. Don’t you have trees in the Clump?”
“No. The tide’s wrong.”
“How do you move a tree?”
“You cut off one tuft. Then the wind only blows on the other tuft. Booce generally takes us west, so of course we want the log to go east. So we cut the in tuft. The wind pushes just on the out tuft, so it pushes the tree west, and that slows it down. The tree drops closer to Voy and speeds up—”
The children and some adults were looking confused. We taught them this! Lawri thought angrily. West takes you in. Pushing a tree against the Smoke Ring’s rotation—west—would drop it closer to Voy. Lower orbits were faster orbits. The tree would move east toward the Clump.
“—But of course we need the rocket too,” Ryllin was saying. “A rocket is a tank of water, and a nozzle, and a metal pipe with a fire around it. You run water through the pipe. The steam sprays away from where you want to go. Without the pipe there’s no Logbearer. You understand reaction effects?”
The citizens looked at each other. Children understood the law of reaction before they could speak!
Ryllin said, “Well, when you get to the Clump you sever the other tuft and work the log to a mooring with the steam rocket. Then you have to sell it. We’ve done it all our lives. But the pipefire got away from us…Lawri? I’m tired.”