by Larry Niven
Battered and deafened, he pulled his helmet open to hear what Booce was shouting at him.
“That one was ripe! Try another plant!”
Rather jetted toward the grove. Booce guided him from a distance. “No, that one’s stunted. We want a big one.”
“Aren’t the big ones likely to be riper?”
“That’s why we use armor! Try there—”
The pod exploded, blowing him west and away, while seeds spanged off the silver suit. The spin was less this time; the blow had been more direct. Rather opened his helmet. “I think I had more fun on the tree!”
“It’s too wet here. The pods like to spread their seeds when there’s water around. Try that one. Close your helmet!”
Rather seriously considered telling the alien merchant to go feed himself to the tree. But he was already moving toward a third vine. There isn’t any other Silver Man, he thought. He swung viciously at the base of the pod. And what am I, if I’m not the Silver Man?
The pod dropped out and away. Carlot and Debby flapped after it.
The next one didn’t explode either. Rather chased the seed pod down, with Booce chasing him. They braced their shoulders against the pod and started back. They were near the carm when Rather’s jets died.
He fiddled with the throttle wheels. Nothing.
“Booce! Don’t leave me!”
“What’s wrong?”
“The suit won’t move!”
Booce laughed. “Are we going to have to put wings on that thing?”
“Can you push me—”
“Can and will. Here comes Debby. I’ll push you and the ladies can have the pods.” Booce seemed indecently cheerful, and Rather was a long time understanding why.
Booce had found a flaw in Citizens’ Tree’s intimidating science.
“You ran out of fuel, that’s all,” Jeffer told him. “See that little red light below your chin?”
“It was on when I started out. I don’t know what it means.”
“Means you’re out of hydrogen. There must be a way to refuel the suit. I’ll search the cassettes. If I can’t find anything we’ll have to ask Mark, after this is all over. Calm, now! We’ve got pods and we’ve got honey. Maybe we won’t need the silver suit again.”
A forty-klomter-long tree is hard to lose from six hundred klomters away. Jeffer had no trouble bringing them home.
Booce attacked the first pod gingerly, hacking at the stem with the matchet, flinching back at each blow. At the sixth blow the pod suddenly spewed foggy air under terrific pressure. Booce threw himself into the sky. He flapped back, staying well clear.
He opened the other pod in the same cautious fashion. Then he and Carlot sawed it in half. The inside was lined with fist-sized puffballs, each with a dangling tendril. Booce scraped these away.
He sawed the stem off the first pod, leaving a small hole. He shaved the edges until the hole was just smaller than the metal pipe, and quit for dinner.
They resumed work after breakfast. It took four of them to shove the ends of the pipe into the holes in both pods.
Clave asked, “Now how do you get water in there?”
“Punch a little hole in the other end of the tank. Put the pipe in a pond and suck. You need good lungs to be a logger.”
“We’re too far in to find many ponds.”
“I know. Usually we fuel Logbearer before we go to work on the tree. But, dammit, we’ve got the carm, and there’ll be a pond somewhere, and Logbearer is whole again! Except for the lines. And cabins. We’ll need wood to build cabins.”
“We’ll go for wood after the next sleep,” Jeffer said. “The out branch, I think. The in branch may be about to fall off.”
“No. Another thirty days at least.”
Carlot said, “Father—”
“Don’t trust that,” Booce said instantly. “We’ll use the out branch.”
“You’re the logger. What changed your mind?”
Booce sighed. “I was guessing. I don’t really know when the in branch will fall off. Jeffer, there’s likely to be a shock when the branch tears loose. Stay aboard the carm. Stay strapped in when you sleep. Leave the motor off.”
“Stet. Will the rest of you be okay on the trunk?”
“As long as we keep our wings handy. Always have your wings in reach…always. But you should be in the carm in case we need rescue.”
The steam rocket still required attention. Booce and Carlot festooned the water tank with lines and wove a braid of lines around the bow end. “We’ll moor the cabins here. Other than that…I still don’t know what we’re going to use for sikenwire. There has to be some way to hold the coals in place.”
Clave had a suggestion. “We could arrive crippled. Get a push from the carm to drift the log into range, then signal for help somehow. Tell the Navy we lost our sikenwire, got home by luck.”
“Mmm…maybe. I’d look like a fool, but maybe. I just don’t want to be in too much of a hurry.” He stopped abruptly. Then he said, “Ryllin and the girls, they—we were in a hurry to get back to the Admiralty. We started the rocket running before the tuft dropped off.”
“What’s—?”
“Did I tell you you’re rich?”
“I don’t know what it means,” Clave said.
“That wart on the trunk is thousands of kilos of metal. With metal you can buy anything that’s for sale in the Market. It also makes us a target. Someone might try to steal it.”
“Good news and bad news.”
“Right. We’ll set up shop to sell the wood, and take our time selling the metal. No hurry.”
Food had grown short again. Debby and Clave flew in along the trunk until they found a covey of flashers. With the trunk as a backstop they fired their full complement of arrows and shot half a dozen of the small birds. It took them six days.
They built a fire on the trunk to cook the birds. Logbearer’s crew was ready for a feast.
Booce was the exception. He ate little. He was uncharacteristically silent, his eyes on the fire, until Carlot said, “Dad? Twenty, twenty-five days?”
“About that,” Booce said. Then: “I guessed last time. I should be in the tuft watching the bugs.”
“Dad, you couldn’t warn us from down there anyway.”
“I could start climbing ten or fifteen days early…”
“Dad—”
“I’m glad we don’t have the rocket running. We were running the rocket when it happened.”
The silence stretched. Debby asked, “What happened?”
Booce told it.
Booce was fast asleep when the cabin’s yielding wooden wall slammed into his face and chest. His grunt of surprise was lost among feminine shrieks. He was reaching for his wings before his eyes were fully open.
The women were a flurry of action around him, snatching for their wings, moving out. Ryllin reached the door, looked about her, then immediately turned toward a violet-white glare that hadn’t been there when they’d gone to sleep. Carlot and Karilly followed. Wend hadn’t found her wings. She was near tears as she searched.
Booce left her. Nothing terrible could happen to Wend aboard Logbearer, and this would teach her always to know where her wings were.
He saw it all at a glance:
Logbearer was moored against a vast wall of bark, the east side of the trunk. Coals in their retaining net burned bright orange along the middle length of the pipe. The nozzle cone pointed east toward the Clump. Some meters from the cone, live steam condensed into a white stream klomters long.
The Clump was a distant whorl of white-and-gray storm, with the misty white tube of the Smoke Ring converging beyond and below it. The eye might follow that white line down the sky…and where the tree converged to a point, there was Voy.
The glare-white pinpoint had been masked by the in tuft when Booce went to sleep. The in tuft was gone. It had torn loose days before Booce expected it. Freed from its weight, the tree had lurched outward. Booce had guessed as much; now he could
see it.
In toward Voy, a fluttering black silhouette was haloed in blue light.
Mishael had been outside on watch. The lurch had torn her loose. She was far in along the trunk, flapping out-and-east to bring her out, just as she’d been taught. But he’d never taught her to lose one of her wings!
Ryllin and the girls flew toward her: foreshortened black silhouettes. They made slow progress. In-and-west would have taken them straight in, but the west was a wall of black bark.
Booce followed slowly. Mishael seemed to have it under control.
With the in tuft gone the center of mass was higher on the tree. Tide was pulling Booce away from the tree, and in. A new breeze announced that the tree was under sail, accelerated by the wind on the out tuft. He kick-flapped to adjust. Ryllin and the girls had nearly reached Mishael. Karilly looked up and flapped to turn. She was shouting at him. The wind tore her voice away. He tried to hear. She kicked toward him, screaming—
Booce turned toward Logbearer, too late.
The lurch and the breeze and Booce’s inattention, these had caused the disaster. A flurry of coals had been jarred loose from the sikenwire cage. Irradiated by the pipefire, the bark had been drying and warming for tens of days. It had been ready to ignite.
Under normal circumstances an integral tree is in equilibrium with the wind. A steady gale blows at each tuft, and no wind blows at its center. Air must move past a fire to keep it burning. But a tree under sail is moving, and there is wind. Coals reached the bark and blazed up.
Booce flapped hard toward a Logbearer already embedded in flame.
He hadn’t panicked then. There was a hose, and pressure in the water tank, for the fire would be heating it. He would use the hose to spray water and steam on the fire. Booce breathed deeply as he flew, hyperoxygenating. He’d hold his breath while he worked. The danger was that he might breathe flame.
Wend crawled gingerly through the cabin door. Her feet were wingless, her eyes and mouth wide in terror. She saw Booce, gathered herself, and leapt toward him, into the sky.
The water tank ruptured.
Booce saw Wend blown outward in a wind of live steam laced with boiling water. He flapped to catch her, hearing his own howl. She was flying past him. He stretched impossibly and caught her bare ankle, and felt the scalded skin slide loose beneath his hand.
There were comforting hands on Booce, on his shoulders and arm and ankle, for touching was the way of Citizens’ Tree. Rather hung back, uncertain, reluctant to take such liberties. Booce was a mature adult.
Where was Carlot?
Booce was hoarse, for he had been shouting, howling; but he sounded almost calm now. “Everything’s blurred after that…Lawri the Scientist was feeding me foliage and I couldn’t remember anything. It all came back a bit at a time.”
Rather eased away from the cookfire and flew toward Voy. Behind him Booce was speaking mostly to Debby, who was rubbing his temples.
“It never happened before…not to us. Sometimes a logging concern just disappears. We wonder why. We never find out. For Ryllin, for the girls, I should give it up. But logging’s all I know…”
The memories must have been too much for Carlot. If she wanted to hide…a crack in the bark? Bark walls would muffle the agony in her father’s voice. She might have gone in any direction…but the cracks ran out and in. Try in.
Rather coasted above the bark. He didn’t mind being seen. She’d have kept going until she couldn’t hear the words.
“Go away.”
He somersaulted and kicked air to stop himself. “Carlot?”
No answer. It had come from his left, from the north. There: scarlet showed in a crack. He said, “I wouldn’t have found you if you’d kept your mouth shut.”
She was pulled into herself, like the shellbirds around the ice pond. Her wings were on her back. He fluttered into the crack beside her but didn’t touch her. “It must have been bad.”
“It was bad.”
He tried again. “Want a hug?”
“I want Wend back.”
“You have to learn to think of her as a lost one.”
“She was fifteen!”
(“She wasn’t even two!” Jill had wailed after a sister sickened and died. Ilsa had hugged her daughter frequently. When Ilsa died at thirty-one, it had been no better for Jill.)
(Age didn’t matter. Touching helped.) Rather worked his fingers into her hair and began a scalp massage. She didn’t move. He said, “I’ve had brothers and sisters die. We all have. You forget.”
She’d removed her sleeves after the fluff died. The skin of her arms was smooth and richly dark, and she suddenly wriggled about and had him in a deathgrip.
Rotating, they drifted in the sky. Rather still wore his wings; his instincts told him to return to the tree. He held her.
She wasn’t sobbing. Presently she pulled her chin off his shoulder and kissed him.
He asked, “Better?”
“Yes. I don’t want to go back.”
“Will you be all right here? Shall I stay?” Half a dozen finger cactus drifted east, less than a klomter distant. A windborne finger cactus could be lethal. These were only drifting, and drifting away at that…but you never stopped looking for danger.
Carlot hadn’t answered. He said, “Your father might get upset if we stay here too long—”
“Father’s made mistakes before.”
“He tells you who to make babies with, though. Mishael had to ask, and she’s older than you.”
“Do you want to go?”
“…No.”
“I thought hard before I took my clothes off in front of you.”
He remembered swimming in the waterfall, and laughed. “I noticed. But Booce was there.”
She freed him, and all the muscles in his body jumped. Loose in the sky! But he had wings. Carlot drifted, rotating away from him…donning her wings? No: she pulled her tunic over her head, then rolled her pants off and balled them up together.
He looked. Now she was tying her wings to her ankles. Her clothes too. Nudity was not strange to him, but this was different. Carlot was long, one and a half times his own height. Her breasts were perfect cones, an abrupt break in the long smooth stretch of her torso. Rather resisted the urge to touch her. He spoke hurriedly, before he could lose that fight. “Now, what would happen if we really did make a baby? Could you still marry anyone you want to?”
She said, “It’s all right. We just have to watch what time we do this.”
“Yeah?” Rather had never heard anything about how not to make a baby. “When can you do it?”
“Now.”
“I’ve never done this before.” He swam toward her.
“I’ll show you. Take these off.”
Chapter Ten
SECRETS
from the Citizens’ Tree cassettes, year 31 SM:
FISHER PLANT is boll-shaped, 100-300 meters in diameter. It can extend a long water-inflated root into a passing pond, for fertilizer as well as water.
FISHER JUNGLE may be considered a large (400-700 meters) fisher plant with a sting. May attack big birds as well as ponds. Prey are brought into the jungle to rot.
FINGER CACTUS—The newly budded form looks a little like a green potato, with eyes. Fingers sprout from the eyes, and branch and rebranch, until an adult in flower may bear 20-30 fingers. Each finger is tipped with a spine. Any creature that comes too near may be speared; and then roots grow into the victim. Later in life, fingers bud new finger cactus. Dangerous.
Rather woke because his eyes burned.
They were filled with tears. Blinking did no good. The tears were under his eyelids, filling them. The pain had him whimpering. He tried lifting his eyelids with his fingertips to let the water out. That hurt. Mopping his eyes with his tunic brought agony. He couldn’t see!
“Carlot?” He remembered that she wasn’t with him. They had not returned to the cookfire until all were asleep except Debby, on watch. She had winked at them…the
y had separated…
Sleep, then daggers in the eyes. He would not have wanted Carlot to see him like this. But he was alone, and blind!
“Clave? Debby? Anyone?”
Rather could feel bark surrounding him. Yell again? He’d yelled when the silver suit’s jets gave out. The memory embarrassed him. He’d had gritty eyes before, when he was tired…but not like this! “Someone help me! I can’t see!”
“Rather?”
“Debby? My eyes are on fire and I don’t know why!”
Her hands were cool and rough on his cheeks. “Open them.”
“I can’t…” He got them open, just a slit for just a moment. The light was agony.
“They’re bright red. I’ll get Clave. Don’t loose your tether.”
“No way!”
The pain grew no worse and no better. It was a long time before he heard voices.
“Rather?”
“Clave! What’s wrong with me?”
Long fingers held his head still; thumbs lifted his eyelids. “You’re not blind. You’re not dying either. It’s an allergy attack. Your father used to get this way when Dalton-Quinn Tree was dying of the drought. We were too far in toward Voy. Dry, thin air and not enough sleep.”
“What do I do?”
“Gavving mostly suffered. In half a day he’d be over it. Don’t rub your eyes. Let me think.”
It seemed to hurt less now that he knew it would go away. It hadn’t killed Gavving. And if they both had the same allergy, then—He’s really my father! I should tell him! Mother too…and Mark? But the pain was more urgent. “Clave, if this happens when I don’t sleep, and I can’t sleep because it hurts too much…Clave?”
His line went slack. “I’ve thought of something. Just relax. I’ll tow you.”
“Kendy for the State—”
“Kendy? Treefodder! It’s been a long time.”
“That’s not my fault, Jeffer. Every time our orbits have matched, there has been someone else in the CARM. Where are they now? I don’t find them outside either.”
“They’re asleep. I was too. Everyone but me sleeps on the bark. Kendy, how do I refuel the silver suit?”