by Larry Niven
“What?”
“The temperature. It’s cold out there.”
Kendy had already found the source of the cold.
The present-time transmission showed Jeffer easing the CARM alongside one of the big birds. The other crew were in and around the airlock. Debby sent a tethered crossbow bolt into the bird. It twitched. She loosed another…
…while Kendy set a blinking light around the image of the pond.
Only Jeffer was there to see it. He said softly, “Stet.”
They had pulled the bird aboard. Clave said, “Well, it’s dead now.”
“I’ve got something,” Jeffer said. “Clave, there’s a pond in that dense cloud. Do you see anything odd about it?”
“No life around it. That cloud’s awfully thick for being so small. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Ice. The pond was a core of foamy ice within a shell of meltwater. Ice was rare within the Smoke Ring. The pond was huge now, several hundred thousand tons, but Kendy guessed that it had been bigger yet. A tremendous pond must have been flung out of the Smoke Ring by a gravity-assist from Gold. In the near-vacuum of the gas torus it would have boiled and frozen at the same time, and later fallen back, reduced by evaporation, reduced further by reentry heat. Now it cooled the sky around it as it melted. Kendy could hear the pings as bubbles of near-vacuum crumpled within the ice core.
“I don’t like it here,” Booce said. “It’s too strange.”
“Your wish is granted. Strap the bird down and take your seats.” Jeffer waited while they did that, then fired the aft attitude jets. The CARM surged away.
Carlot pointed into the aft view. “Look!”
The shieldbirds tumbled in the CARM’s hot wake. One by one they fluttered, then spread a rainbow of wings and tails and fluffy feathers. They basked in the heat, catching as much of it as they could. Now their shells were no bigger in proportion than a warrior’s shield. As Discipline moved out of range, the birds were lining up and flying west, putting distance between themselves and the melting glacier.
“There’s no point picking out a tree till you’ve got honey,” Booce said. “You can find a tree a hundred klomters from the Clump and still go half a thousand klomters to find your sting jungle.”
Their catch was moored by cargo hooks, divested of skin and guts and some of the scarlet meat. Booce was holding raw bird flesh sliced thin and rolled around a stalk of lemon fern. He used it to point into the dorsal view. “And that is a sting jungle. The green dot, straight out.”
“Stet.” Jeffer tapped attitude jets to life. The carm turned. Carlot squeaked and grabbed Rather, startling him awake. Booce dropped his meal to snatch at a seat back.
Jeffer hid a grin. These sophisticated Admiralty folk found the carm as unsettling as Jeffer’s own citizens did.
He aimed the carm east of Booce’s green dot. East takes you out…“Half a day and we’ll have honey. What else do we need?”
“Some way to collect it,” Booce answered.
“We’ll put Rather in the silver suit. No treefeeding insect will sting him through that!”
“Right. Better than armor.”
“Tell us about the Admiralty,” Clave said.
Booce closed his eyes to think. Then: “You’re lonely out here. There’s too much space. Everything is dense in the Clump. Think of a seed pod, and think of the Admiralty as the shell. There are more people in the Market alone, any time of day or night, than you’ve ever seen.
“We pull the logs back to the Clump over the course of a year or two, and we arrange an auction in the Market. Twice we’ve been attacked by happyfeet bandits. Once we got back just as another log was being docked, and we got half what we expected for the wood. But over the years we put enough money together to buy my retailer’s license. This was going to be our last trip. We were going to settle in the Clump, and I’d work the wood myself and sell finished planks and burl, while Ryllin set about finding good husbands for our daughters. That was the point: they’re reaching that age…”
Clave asked, “Can we really make the Admiralty believe we’re loggers?”
“We’ll be loggers,” Booce said. “Rebuilding Logbearer’s no problem. We should have more weapons in case happyfeet come by, and it all has to look like Admiralty gear…and we still won’t look like a typical logging family. But we don’t have to, because I’ve got my retailer’s license.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we don’t have to sell the log straight off. The Navy ships will escort us in and give us a berth. I can set up shop in the Market and sell wood, and hire anyone I like; which means that the rest of you can be workers hired off a happyfeet jungle, or bought as copsiks. Some of the happyfeet keep copsiks. The Admiralty doesn’t, so you’d be free if I bought you.”
“Free, but not citizens.”
“Right.”
“Why can’t you have hired us off a tree?”
Booce thought about it, and smiled. “You have a gift, Clave. Tell as much of the truth as possible. Debby, you’re from Carther States, directly. You were stranded in the sky, you made your way to a tree, and now you want to live in a jungle again. Okay, Debby?”
Debby’s lips were moving as she silently repeated the details. “Stet.”
“We’ll have to say Citizens’ Tree is close to the Clump. Otherwise we got home too fast, and we’d have to explain about the carm.”
Clave nodded. “So then we sell the log. How?”
“Set up in the Market and announce an auction. Buy your earthlife seeds with the money and go home. The Admiralty’ll take half in taxes—”
Clave exclaimed, “Half?”
Jeffer said, “Taxes?”
“Taxes,” Booce said, “is the money the Admiralty takes to run itself. Everybody pays, but the rich pay more. A good log is wealth. For the price of the carm you could be very rich indeed.”
“The carm is what makes us what we are. We won’t risk that,” Clave said.
“Then don’t take it into the Clump. The Navy won’t want something that powerful floating around. They’ll pay well, but they’ll buy it whether or not you’re selling.”
Jeffer tapped the forward jets awake. They were pulling near the sting jungle.
Certain mooring loops fit the silver suit too perfectly, as if it were their specific purpose. Four sets. For four suits?
Jeffer pulled it loose. “The silver suit is yours, Rather. I’m going to teach you everything about it.”
Rather had seen the silver suit as a mark of rank. He hadn’t thought of it as an obligation. “Did Mark show you how to work it?”
“I’ve watched him. Lift this latch. Take the head and turn it till it stops. Pull up. Turn it the other way. Lift. Now this latch. Now pull this down…pull it apart…good.”
The suit looked like the flayed skin of a dwarf.
Legs first, then arms. Duck under the neck ring. Rather closed the sliding catches, the latches. “Do I have to close the head?”
“Cover yourself. You don’t want to be stung,” Booce said. “Those little mutineers can sting a moby to death.”
Rather closed the headpiece. He said, “The air’s getting stale.”
They couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t really suffocate this fast, could he?
Jeffer lifted the headpiece. “Listen first. Put your hand here.” He guided Rather’s fingers to a row of square buttons on the outside of the neck ring. He pushed one (colored lights lit below Rather’s chin), and another (air jetted inward from all around the neck ring). He used Rather’s fingertip to roll a small wheel back and forth (the air jets grew weaker, then stronger). “Close the helmet.”
Rather did as Jeffer had shown him. Air from the neck ring hissed around his head.
Clave was saying something inaudible. Jeffer guided Rather’s fingertip to another tiny wheel, and suddenly Clave’s voice was a roar. “—use up the air? Does that thing have to be closed? We’re not going back ou
t of the Smoke Ring again, are we?”
“Let’s hope not. Rather, you’re leaking. Close that flap at your chest. The way Booce talks about honey hornets, you don’t want anything open.”
Rather felt it out, then used finger pressure to close a snap he’d missed.
Now he was being shown little wheels on his chest. He moved the left one experimentally. His left foot kicked upward and he was wheeling in the air, banging his head and elbow, snatching for a mooring loop while his other hand rolled the wheel back to zero. He banged both knees before he could stop his spin.
Clave and Debbie were helpless with laughter. Jeffer had jumped clear. “Leave those alone while you’re inside! You fly with those. Now I’m going to walk you out the airlock. Play around with the jets. If you get in trouble we’ll come after you.”
Rather braced himself in the airlock, feeling imprisoned. The sting jungle was a fat, fluffy ring half a klomter across, dark green around the outside, slowly rotating. The inner rim flamed in orange and scarlet. Rather, looking out through the airlock, saw motion there like jittery fog.
Clave and Booce eased him into the sky.
They couldn’t have any idea what the boy was going through, Kendy thought. How would they? None could fly the ancient pressure suit. Rather would have to be an agoraphile and an acrophile both.
Kendy had explained the pressure suit with diagrams and pointers; but had he shown Jeffer how to replenish the suit’s oxygen and fuel? Replay that memory…no. Do that soon, if it wasn’t already too late. What Kendy was watching was already two hours past.
But the CARM was in range again, and in present time the boy was aboard, and out of the suit, and still alive. Kendy kept the tape running:
Debby and Clave hovered a safe distance away. The boy floundered. He was all over the sky, spinning, faster…slower, tilting himself back and sideways to slow the spin…learning to move arms and legs to change his attitude. He found the throttle dials and turned both jets to minimum. He circled the CARM, then arced off toward the green doughnut that Booce had made his target.
Jeffer spoke through the suit radio. “Not yet. Rather. Come back. You don’t have anything to carry the, the, Booce?”
“Honey.”
“The honey. Booce, what does he need?”
“That’s what the sacks are for.”
Rather oriented toward the CARM, increased the thrust, doubled on himself for two seconds, then arched backward as he fell toward the airlock. Fire sprayed from his ankles, arcing forward. Nice, Kendy thought. Of course he wasn’t a complete novice. He’d flown with those giant swim-fin fans.
The boy left his helmet open (but didn’t turn off the air jets!). Debby began strapping twelve coarse sacks to his back, got yelled at, and strapped them to his chest instead, where he could reach them. She used several loops of line. The savages were never without line, Kendy recalled. Good practice in a free-fall environment.
In present time Rather was leaving the airlock again, and the signal was fading. Kendy waited.
The great green torus became landscape as Rather came near. It was darker than integral tree foliage, and fluffy, finely divided to catch as much sunlight as possible. Scarlet and orange peeked over the curve, becoming clearer. Orange horn-shapes, rocket-nostril shapes, quite pretty. Thousands of them.
The jittering mist cleared too: not steam roiled by wind, but myriads of particles swirling round the blossoms, dipping in and out. Now the motes abandoned the horn-shapes and streamed toward Rather.
They were all around him, a humming black cloud of rage.
“Scientist? I’m in the center. I can hardly see. The honey hornets are—”
“Look for red,” said Booce’s voice.
Orange and scarlet. Orange horns the size of drinking gourds, and scarlet of another shape. Rather jetted closer.
The honey hornets came with him. Thousands of thumb-sized birds: tiny harpoon for a nose, invisible blur of wing behind. He could hear the angry buzz through his helmet. “I’ve got a red thing…Booce, it’s a kind of a sloppy polyhedron half a meter through, covered with lots of little triangle holes. It’s growing between these horn shapes.”
“Those are flowers. It didn’t grow there, it’s attached. Did you take a knife?”
“No. Wait a breath, there’s a matchet on mv leg. It must be Mark’s.”
“Cut the honeypod loose and put the sack around it. Tie the neck shut.”
Rather swung the matchet behind the scarlet polyhedron. The silver suit made all movements stiff. Presently the honeypod was floating loose. Rather pulled a sack free, opened the mouth, and swept it around the honeypod.
“Got it? Tie the bag shut. Done?”
“Done. There’s sticky red stuff all over my gloves.”
“Stet. Now keep doing that till you run out of sacks. Don’t lick the honey.”
“With my helmet closed?”
“Don’t ever lick honey. It’s suicide.”
Chapter Eight
THE HONEY TRACK
from the Citizens’ Tree cassettes, year 1426 State:
GOLDBLATT’S WORLD
Goldblatt’s World may have begun life as a Neptune-like body in the comet cloud around the paired stars. In Goldblatt’s scenario, the body was captured some millions of years after the supernova event. The collapsing core of the supernova, spewing its outer envelope asymmetrically due to a trapped magnetic field, may have picked up a skew velocity that nearly matched the velocity of the proto-Neptune. Robbed of its orbital velocity, Goldblatt’s World would fall along a drastically eccentric orbit, passing very near Levoy’s Star. Extreme Roche tides would warp the orbit into a circle within a few scores of passes.
It seems likely that Goldblatt’s World’s orbit and the associated gas torus have been contracting for all of their billion years. Meanwhile Levoy’s Star has been cooling—since neutron stars no longer undergo fusion—maintaining a relatively stable balance of temperature in the Smoke Ring.
Note that the Roche Limit is never an absolute. It varies as the density of the orbiting body. A gasball world may be within its Roche Limit, and this one probably was. But the rock-and-metal core is dense. Goldblatt’s World would have been well outside its Roche Limit after the gasball lost some of its gas and the eccentric orbit became more circular.
The planet is now no more than two and a half times the mass of Earth…
—Sam Goldblatt, Planetologist
“You see the problem? Too much of it is gibberish,” Jeffer told the children. Rather and Carlot were nodding, but their eyes were glassy. “You can look up some of the words. You can guess a little. Goldblatt’s World is Gold. There’s a file on Earth and Neptune and the rest of the solar system, but it’s hard going. Roche tides, Roche Limit—that seems to be a balance point between tide and some other force, maybe the same force that changes your orbit if you pass too close to Gold. Fusion is power: it makes the Sun burn, and Discipline ran on fusion. Oort cloud, magnetic field, supernova—Lawri and I never figured those out.”
He turned to Booce. “The kids need this, but I hate to make you sit through it again at your age—”
Booce’s eyes were glassy too. “No, no, no. This is all new to me.”
“Didn’t you have classes? There’s the Library—”
“For officer’s kids only,” Booce said brusquely. “Go on with this. What’s eccentric?”
“That’s a round path that isn’t a circle. It goes out and in. Booce, am I committing a crime if I teach you and Carlot these things?”
“But I want to learn!”
“Shush, Carlot. It’s never come up before,” Booce said. “You’re not showing us the Library, after all.”
Carlot demanded, “Scientist, what’s the point in stopping now?”
Jeffer laughed. He tapped, and the window was restored. The Clump was nearer now, and a score of parallel dashes lay across the carm’s path. “You’re right. Carlot, but the lesson’s over anyway. We’re getting too close.�
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Debby answered with a raspberry.
“Booce?” Jeffer said. “Any special favorites?”
“The smallest, I’d think, but let’s have a better look.” Booce disengaged his seat tethers and moved aft. “Jeffer, would you open those doors?”
“Will do.” He did. “Booce, don’t you trust the windows?”
“I prefer my eyes. Swing us around, will you?” He braced himself in the airlock. Others of the crew had followed him.
Jeffer began the maneuver. In the forward view, now moving into the port view, one of the trees had begun blinking: a green halo going on, off, on, off.
Nobody was near. Jeffer whispered, “Why?”
Now a point far in along the trunk was doing the blinking. Then that stopped—
An arm stabbed past Jeffer’s ear, and he had to repress a shriek. “There,” Booce said, pointing at one of the trees. “Thirty klomters, and it seems healthy.”
“What about this one, Booce?” Jeffer tapped the tree that had blinked at him.
“Nothing wrong with it. It’s bigger, twice the mass. Take us longer to get it to the Market, but of course there’d be more wood too, and there’s the carm…Why that one?”
“A hunch. You’ve got no objection?”
Now Clave was behind him too. “Jeffer, are you playing dominance games?”
“I—”
“I’m the Chairman, you captain the carm, Booce is the logger. Booce chooses the tree.”
Jeffer repressed a sigh. “Yes, Chairman. Booce?”
Booce pointed to Jeffer’s selection. “That one.”
Ten klomters above the tuft, the wood of the trunk had grown to enclose a node of foreign matter. Jeffer saw Booce catch his daughter’s eye as Carlot was about to speak. She held her silence.
At the tree midpoint Jeffer nosed the carm against the trunk. He ran the attitude jets while his crew pounded spikes into the bark to mark a rectangle the size of the carm’s bow. The carm drifted while they chopped out a dock with matchets.
Even on this younger tree, the bark was a meter thick. They made life easier for themselves by chopping along cracks. The five of them lifting together could rip great mattresses of bark away from the wood beneath, then saw off sections. Booce and Carlot used the saw, then let others take over until they got the hang of it.