by Larry Niven
“I want to go to the Clump,” Lawri said.
“Me too. Clave would never let both Scientists go.” Jeffer kissed her cheek. “Let’s wait till the last minute and then fight about it.”
“What about the sikenwire?”
“We’ll think of something. Do you think Clave will let us take the carm?”
“…No.”
She felt him shrug. “Okay. We go as loggers?” She nodded (their foreheads brushed) and he said, “I’d guess Clump citizens will all look like jungle giants. We should have a few. Anthon and Debby’ll come. A couple of the Serjents for guides. Defenses…we wouldn’t want to risk the carm in the Clump, but we could take the silver suit.”
“Wrong. A lot of citizens don’t want anything changed. Clave thinks we’re too close to the Clump already. He wants to take us farther west. Mark agrees with him.”
“Yeah, I’ve talked to Mark. Treefodder. Without him we can’t use the silver suit…Lawri? Clave wants to move us west?”
“What are you thinking?”
“We don’t know enough yet. Forget it. Look what you missed when you were a little girl…”
Whatever the disagreements now roiling through Citizens’ Tree, there was at least this bone of consensus: they all wanted to fly.
The Serjent girls were willing. From branchwood sticks and from cloth that was made on the looms below the branch, they made wings. Karilly worked quietly and skillfully and without words. Mishael and Carlot explained as they went, and corrected the mistakes of the children who emulated them. The work went fast. Citizens would wear their old tunics and pants for half a year longer, for cloth was not made quickly; but twenty-four wings were ready within twelve days.
Jeffer took Mishael, Minya, Gavving, and eight of the older children to the midpoint via the lift. Other children ran with zeal in the treadmill, knowing that theirs would be the next flight.
Jeffer had chosen with some care. These were the children who had not shied back from crossing to the pond on the day of the firetree. Yet there had been lines to cling to then. Today there was only bark, and some of them clung to that.
Rather flew, and was instantly in love with wings. Jill looked like she was facing death, but when wings were bound to her ankles and Rather was already in the sky, she flew. Mishael served as instructor. Jeffer learned how to kick, how to turn. When the sky was filled with winged adults and children, the rest gulped hard and loosed their hold on the bark and flew.
They were in the sky for one full circle of the sun. The adults had their hands full herding them back to the lift. Arth made a game of it, fleeing across the sky until Jeffer and Gavving closed in on him and pulled his wings off. The sun was rising up the east before they had the children rounded up.
Then Jeffer sent the others down without him. He told Minya, “I want to do some maintenance. Start the lift again after you’re down.”
“Kendy for the State. Hello, Scientist.”
“Hello, Kendy.”
“How are your refugees?”
“Four of the Serjents recovered. One of the girls, Karilly, looks okay but she doesn’t talk.”
“Shock. She may recover. When may I see them?”
“Kendy, I wanted to give Mishael a tour of the carm. The Chairman vetoed that. He’s afraid they’ll try to steal the carm.”
“Nonsense. What do the rest of your tribe think?”
“We’re split down the middle. Half of us want to go see what’s in the Clump. They’ve got a place…the Market?…where we could get anything we want. The Serjents told us about it.”
“And?”
“The Chairman is scared spitless of the Clump. He thinks we’re too close now. Some of the others feel the same way. Jayan and Jinny, of course, but Mark and Minya too. Even the Serjents don’t all want to leave. Mark’s asked Ryllin for permission to marry Karilly, and she gave it.”
“Good. How do you feel about this, Jeffer?”
“I want to see the Clump. Booce told me they’ve got something they call the Library, but it sounds like a carm autopilot. I want to scan their cassettes. Kendy, I’m doing what I can. I just took some of them flying. They like that. Maybe they’ll start wondering what else they’re missing.”
“I remember Clave. He leads his citizens where they want to go. Call a council. Force your citizens to make a decision.”
“What good does that do us?”
“If you lose the vote, you’ll know where you stand. Then make Clave set a date for moving the tree. Decide what you need and who you need. Is there any chance you can talk Mark around?”
“None.”
“The Serjents told you how to go about setting up a logging enterprise. Tell me.”
The children slept on, exhausted by their flying. Gavving was making an early breakfast on a slice of smoked dumbo meat. He said, “The Admiralty has earthlife plants.”
“We’ve lived without them for fourteen years,” Minya said sleepily.
“We lived without lifts and the carm for longer than that. It was because we didn’t know.”
“The Admiralty has never touched us. We wouldn’t know it exists, except that Booce tells us so. But you want to know more. Aren’t these matters more properly discussed in council?”
Gavving looked closely at his wife. “You looked like this fourteen years ago, when you were trying to kill me. The whole tuft is like that. There hasn’t been fighting like this since the War of London Tree!”
“I haven’t forgotten London Tree. We made a home here. Any change is for the worse.”
“Dear, are you sorry they came?”
“No!” Minya said with some force. She was fully awake now. “There aren’t enough of us. We all feel that.”
“Lawri the Scientist talks about the gene pool being too small—”
“We don’t need that gibberish. We can feel we’re too few. Now we have three more women, even if Ryllin is too old to host a guest, and they’re different from us—”
“They are indeed!”
“Well, that’s good!”
“Suppose they want to go home?”
“They can’t,” Minya said flatly.
A child stirred: Qwen. Gavving lowered his voice. “Suppose we built them another rocket. Suppose some of us wanted to go with them.”
Minya stopped to sort words through her head. Gavving waited patiently. Presently she said, “They’d have to be crazy. We’d have to be crazy to let them go. Gav, have you forgotten London Tree?”
“No. I haven’t forgotten Quinn Tuft, either, or Carther States. They didn’t make citizens into copsiks, and neither did your people.”
“…No. But we attacked you the instant we saw you.”
“True.”
“Do you remember being lost in the sky, clinging to a sheet of bark and dying of thirst? We faced dangers we can’t even describe to our children, because they were too strange! We fought hard for Citizens’ Tree! And now both Scientists want to cross a thousand klomters to the Clump shouting ‘Here we are!’ Why do you want to risk what we’ve got?”
“They’ve got things to trade. They’ve got wings—”
“We’ve got wings.”
“We picked jet pods, when we could find them. All this time. And it’s so simple! Minya, what would you have given for a pair of wings, when we were stranded in the sky? Everything in the Smoke Ring can fly except men, and all it takes is spine branches and cloth! They’ve got a rocket that moves a tree, and it isn’t stolen starstuff, it’s made mostly from things they find in the Smoke Ring. What have they got in the Clump? What haven’t we seen yet?”
She put bitterness in her laughter. “A thousand people and a drastic need for copsiks, maybe.”
Gavving sighed. “Stet, you don’t want anything changed. What should we do? They’re here.”
“Make them welcome,” said Minya. “Teach them how to live in a tree. Get the girls married. Make them part of us. Gavving, Mark intends to marry Karilly.”
“Karilly’s sick in the mind. She isn’t getting over it.”
“Sure, and Mark’s a dwarf. He’s needed a wife, and none of us would touch him. I never did feel sorry for the copsik runner, but…but he’s willing to take care of her. And I think you ought to marry one of the other girls.”
Bang! Gavving stared. This was a woman afraid of changes? “I am married.”
“Clave has two wives. Anthon did, until Ilsa died. I’m getting too old to make babies, dear.”
“You don’t mean—”
“No!” She hugged him. “But it won’t give me a guest to carry.”
“You’re serious? Okay, who?”
She hesitated. Then, bravely (he thought): “I would have thought Mishael. She’s the oldest. Gavving, she showed me how to fly. I like her.”
“Have you mentioned any of—”
“No, you fool! A woman doesn’t ask a woman to be her wife!” And when he laughed she smiled, weakly. Gavving saw how difficult this was for her. Minya must have thought long and hard about this.
“There’s room to extend the hut,” she said. “We’d have another pair of hands, adult hands. The children are growing up, they’re not as much fun anymore—”
And if some of us marry Serjent women, we’ll have their loyalty when the Admiralty comes to us! Logbearer can’t be the only ship in the sky. Gavving wondered if his brain was working in the service of his seeds. Minya had not referred to Mishael’s alien beauty.
And if we do visit the Clump, his brain ran on, we’ll need guides. Booce or Ryllin would have to go. With their daughters among us, we’d have their loyalty—
Chapter Five
THE SILVER SUIT
from the Admiralty cassettes, year 3 SM:
We were chosen for this. No citizen leaves Earth orbit until the State has learned his tolerance for free fall. One in ten thousand have the genetic quirks to survive months or years of free fall without softening of the bones, without failure of the digestive system, without the terror of falling.
We served the State by flying to the stars. When the drive was off we played at flying, while cramped in a seeder ramship with barely room to flap our arms. Here is real flight. Of course the Smoke Ring seems an incredible dream come true—to us.
—Sharon Levoy, Astrogation
“Kendy for the State. Hello, Jeffer. It’s been more than thirty days.”
“I was busy. We got our council. It’s over.”
“How did it go?”
“We lost.”
“Who sided against you?”
“Clave. Jayan and Jinny. Minya. Mark.”
“Five out of ten. If you count the Serjents, twelve.”
“Thirteen. Mishael’s old enough, and married too, but she acts like a junior wife. She won’t make Minya or Gavving angry. Gavving doesn’t want to fight with Minya. The Serjents don’t think like citizens yet. Anthon won’t get into the arguments. I’m not really sure where he stands. The rest of us want to see what’s out there, but we don’t all want it enough. Debby loves arguing, but she’s not very good at it. We didn’t give Clave any trouble at all.”
“You’re disappointed. Don’t be. Did you think that flying would bring them around? People tend to side with authority, and authority tends to protect its own power. Clave is the key. Clave has everything he wants in Citizens’ Tree.”
“Kendy, do you see us as savages?”
“Yes. Don’t take that too seriously, Scientist. I would probably see the Admiralty as savages too. I want to educate you all.”
“Then educate me, Kendy. I can’t just take Booce and Ryllin and go off into the sky. We—”
“You must go, Jeffer. The wealth of the L4 point is almost irrelevant. It takes many people to hold a civilization together. There are too few of you here to be more than savages!”
Jeffer didn’t react to the insult, barring an increase in infrared radiation from his cheeks, neck, and ears. “We’d need things Citizens’ Tree can’t spare. Lawri’s on my side, but we can’t both go. The tree needs a Scientist. We’d have to take the carm too. We—”
“Take it.”
“You’re not serious. Dalton-Quinn Tree died because we couldn’t move it. I won’t see it happen to Citizens’ Tree.”
“Bring the carm back when you’re through with it.”
Jeffer paused to think. (Kendy never did that. It was another reason to distrust Kendy: he seemed to leap at his answers, without forethought.) “We might lose the carm.”
“You can build a steam rocket. Jeffer, I’m drifting out of range.”
“We’ve got one pipe, and we need that to be loggers. Without the pipe, Citizens’ Tree couldn’t build a steam rocket. I wouldn’t have believed that so much could change in twenty sleeps. Kendy?” The signal dissolved in noise.
Kendy returned to his records.
For twenty State years CARM #6 had been taking pictures, not just through the CARM cameras but through the fish-eye lens on the pressure suit too.
Here: the squirrel cage that ran a muscle-powered lift, and the lines leading up. Far too much footage of that.
Here: fire burned in a great bowl of soft clay. The silver suit moved around the edges of the fire, poking it, or adjusting sheets of bark that had been set as vanes to channel the wind into the burning wood. The look of the clay began to change.
Here: less fire than smoke. What looked like enough spaghetti to feed Sol system’s entire State government had been spread leeward of smoldering wood. The pressure suit moved around and within the mass, turning it and loosening the strands—vines—with the handle of a harpoon so that the smoke would cure them. These were the lines that now served Citizens’ Tree.
Ingenious. A poor way to treat State property; but they were making use of local resources too.
The platform around the cookpot was of boards tied with line. It had always been flimsy, and that didn’t matter much in Citizens’ Tree’s low tide; but over the years the lines had loosened. Jayan and Jinny complained about the way the platform lurched while they tried to make dinner. So Rather and Carlot had been sent to repair the platform.
Rather enjoyed the work. It called for muscle rather than dexterity. He lifted one end of a new branchwood plant into place. He called, “Hold this,” and waited until Carlot was set. Then he bounded down to the other end and hoisted that.
Carlot giggled.
Rather began to tie the planks. One loop of line to hold it, then he could work on a more elaborate mooring. He asked, “What’s funny?”
“Never mind,” Carlot said. “Are you going to tie this for me?”
“I thought I’d just leave you there. You make a good mooring, and decorative too.”
“Oh.” She held the planks in place with one arm while she reached out. Her right leg was twenty ce’meters longer than the left, and she usually reached with that. Her long toes grasped a coil of line and pulled it to her hands. She tied a temporary binding.
In the twenty-two sleeps since their arrival, all of the Serjent family had become dextrous in Citizens’ Tree tide.
Rather wrapped a dozen loops of line around the plank ends, then began tightening them. Heave on a loop, pull the slack around; again. From the opening beyond the treemouth the wind blew steadily, drying sweat as fast as it formed.
Carlot called from her corner. “That’s as tight as I can get it.”
Rather was finished at his end. He jogged down to Carlot’s end (ripe copter plants buzzed up around his feet) and began pulling in slack. She’d left a good deal, of course. Carlot was agile, but not strong. He asked, “What got you giggling?”
“Just the way you scurry.”
Rather’s hands paused for less than a second, then continued.
“You did ask,” she said defensively. “You have to go running back and forth because you can’t reach as far as—”
“I know that.”
“Did you make this cauldron yourselves? I wouldn’t have thought you could do that here. It�
�s big enough to boil two people at once.”
“Hey, Carlot, you don’t really eat people in the Empire, do you?”
She laughed at him. “No! There’s a happyfeet tribe that’s supposed to do that. But how did you make it?”
“The grown-ups found a glob of gray mud west of the tree. Maybe it was the middle of a pond that came apart. They brought some back. We took all the rocks in Citizens’ Tree and piled them in a bowl-shape, out on the branch where we couldn’t do any damage. I was just a kid, but they let me help with the rocks. We plastered the mud over the rocks. We got firebark from another tree and piled it in the bowl-shape and fired it. It took a dozen days to cool off, and then it was like that. We did it twice—”
“You’re cute,” she said solemnly.
Carlot was a year older than Rather. An exotic beauty was growing in her. Half her hair had been burned off, and she had cut the rest to match. Now it was like a skullcap of black wire. She was two and a half meters tall, with long fingers and long, agile toes, and arms and legs that could reach out forever.
Carlot affected Rather in ways he wasn’t quite ready to accept. He said, “Put it in the treemouth. When do I get to be overwhelmingly handsome?”
“Cute is good. If I weren’t your aunt—”
“Treefodder.”
“Are you not my nephew?”
Rather studied his work. “I think we’re done.—It’s an Empire thing, is it? You don’t make babies even with relatives of relatives? Fine, but you’ve got a thousand people in the Empire! At least that’s what your parents say. We had ten adults and twenty children when you came. I won’t get much choice about who I marry.”
“Who, then?”
He shrugged. “Jill’s a half year older than me. All the other girls are younger. I’d have to wait.” The subject made him uncomfortable. He looked up past the treadmill and along the trunk, to where a handful of citizens were trying their wings. “I wish I was up there. You’ve been flying all your life, haven’t you?”
“I should be there, showing you people how to fly. This damn fluff,” Carlot said. Long sleeves were sewn loosely to her tuftberry-scarlet tunic. She pulled one away. The green fur along her arm had turned brown; the patch had shrunk. “How’s yours?” She touched his cheek. The patch felt half numb and raspy; it ran from his face down his neck and across part of his chest. “It’s drying up. Ten days, it’ll be cleared up.”