by Larry Niven
And Natlee was hardly speaking to him, because he was trying to teach their oldest son to fly.
Alin was now moving almost with the wind’s velocity. He deployed his free kite (a moby seen face-on, yellow on a scarlet background), but kept it on a short line. Was he going to have to rescue Stevn? Stevn was working more carefully now, getting himself untangled, glancing at Alin every few seconds while he tried to separate his running lines.
Stevn would overreact if his teacher-father began shouting instructions. Alin did too much of that anyway. Give him another few breaths.
One of the trees was getting longer.
Alin blinked. Capability Tree was separating into two halves.
There was no warning. There was only the numbing sight of a tree ripped in half at the midpoint, pulling ponderously apart, leaving a smoky trail of debris. One end fell into white Voylight, one toward the never-seen stars.
There were fifty to sixty people in Capability Tree, not counting children.
The Admiralty ship was still no more than a dot at the end of a vapor trail running through hazy blue-white. Alin watched the white curve as he worked his line.
Stevn had his line out now, east-and-in, as he’d been taught. He’d begun to accelerate.
Alin let his lines out gradually. The free kite pulled east-and-in, but he wrestled it horizontal. It went almost slack. Alin didn’t stand a chance of catching any of the boys already in flight, not even Gilly. He’d have to catch Stevn.
The white curve of the Navy ship’s path remained almost straight. They hadn’t seen.
Alin passed out from Stevn; he let his free kite swing drastically inward, to pull him in earshot.
“Stevn!”
“It’s all right, Kitemaster. I’ve got it.”
“Look at Capability Tree!”
Stevn needed a moment to orient himself, and another to wonder if he had the right direction, and then—“What on Earth?”
“They need help. Now—”
“Dad, Dad, the whole tree’s torn apart!”
“Don’t lose it, boy. They need help. Do you think you can reach that Navy ship? Look straight east!”
The boy looked. “I’m not sure, Dad.”
Frightened. “It has to be done. The haze may be blocking their view. Get their attention. We need Navy for rescue work. You don’t have to get aboard. We’ll come for you…” Stevn was drifting out of earshot. “Get their attention and tell them about Capability Tree!”
His kite was pulling him strongly now. He’d pass in from the debris cloud if he weren’t careful.
The halves of the tree were already widely separated, in toward Voy and out into the sky. Alin manipulated the free kite out…out…waited until he felt no strain on the lines, then tilted the kite and let it continue moving. It was east of him now, blown toward him on a slack line. He tilted his body to adjust the bound kite, gathered as much of the line as he could, and was ready when it pulled taut.
By then he was deep inside a cloud of shredded bark, and a hundred million bark-dwelling insects were getting lost in his nose and mouth and ears. He spit and snorted and blinked and looked around for citizens needing rescue.
None yet. The free kite pulled westward, slowing him…and now he was among big cylindrical blocks of mud. He tilted both kites edge-on to the wind, and was at rest.
The stench struck him like a blow.
Over a dozen human lifetimes an integral tree swallows immense quantities of…stuff.
Foliage at both tufts spreads wide to sieve birds and lesser plants out of the wind. A pond impacts somewhere on the trunk; tide slides the water and the mud core down into the nearer tuft. Branchlets gradually migrate forward along the branch, through the tuft and into the treemouth, carrying foliage and everything embedded in it: mud and water, plants, dead animals, even old huts that men have woven from the living branchlets. Humans use the great conical pit as a toilet and garbage service and mortuary. Everything disappears into the treemouth, to feed the tree.
A tree has a mouth at both ends, and no anus. Tide pulls hard on an integral tree. The accumulating mud weakens its structure. The time comes when it must be rid of its mud core.
It pulls apart at the midpoint, and starts over as twins.
The core of Capability Tree had broken into cylindrical segments. The stench was horrid. Alin resisted breathing, for fear of inhaling foul dust. But the dust seemed to be all bark dust.
There was music in the wind, nonsense-words sung in a high, sweet contralto.
“We located the Titanic two miles deep in the Atlantic,
And we didn’t know quite where that ship went down!”
Alin knew that voice. Where was she? “Harp!”
“Well, we photographed the wreck even down below her decks,
But those monsters in the lakes just can’t be found.”
North-and-out: human shapes clung to a black cylinder of mud. Alin shouted, “Hello!”
The singer stopped. A man’s voice shouted from the mud-log. “Hello?”
“Do you have line?”
“Yes!”
The unseen bard sang again:
“Twenty-six miles by one short mile
and a hundred fathoms deep.
Jagged rock at the bottom of the Loch
And the water’s thick with peat—”
A man cast loose from the mud log, kicking hard, trailing line. Wide fan-shaped wings were bound to his shins. As he kicked toward Alin, four more citizens let themselves be pulled loose. One, a six-year-old girl, was wailing in fear.
“The creature’s shy and shuns the sky,
And that’s why we must confess—
We can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find the creature in Loch Ness!”
Alin had his hands full keeping the kites tilted. They would pull him out of reach if he let them catch the wind. The winged man veered toward another mud block. The tow line trailed across it and picked up two more citizens, an older woman and a young man pulling a child by her ankle. Moments later an adolescent girl flew out of nowhere, out of the chaos of bark-dust fog and mud cylinders, with a baby in her arms and a larger boy clinging to her back. She caught the line with her toes.
Good enough. Alin tilted his kites and brought himself across their two line. It slid along his own main line, and Alin had it. He tied it to his kite-belt before it could go taut.
Now he let the free kite tilt. Lines grew taut and he felt himself pulled west. But where was Harp?
“We have sent a craft to Mars,
We have looked beyond the stars,
And a billion light-years don’t stand in our way—”
The winged man called into the sky, urgently. “Harp? Can you catch us?”
A voice came back. “I think not, Captain, but there’s other rescue coming.” For the first time Alin saw the singer, clinging with her toes to a sheet of bark.
He called, “Hello, Harp! Remember me? Alin Newbry, Brighton!”
“Suuure! Liftmaster’s Apprentice?”
“Kitemaster now. Are you really all right? I’d have trouble coming back for you.”
“Fine. I saw another kiteman.”
“I sent a Navy ship!”
“Fiiine!” She waved her windpipe in farewell, then resumed playing.
“We’ve sent rockets out to Saturn
and described its weather pattern,
But we still can’t find that beast in Loch Linné.”
The man pulled himself toward Alin until he was close enough to talk normally. Deep-set brown eyes, a curved sharp-edged nose, wide thin mouth, long gray hair bound by a ceramic ring: he looked like a man born to command. “I’m Captain Shan Ling, Capability Tree.”
“Kitemaster Alin Newbry, Brighton. Will she be all right?”
“Harp? Yeah. She called you to us, didn’t she? She’ll call that Navy ship too when it gets close eno
ugh. Kitemaster, can you move us all?”
“Not fast.” The kite was accelerating them nicely, pulling west. Maneuvering was going to be awkward. He must keep tension in the line; else his refugees would drift together.
There was no way he could wait for Capability’s Harp. He would have liked to see her again…just see her.
Alin adjusted his lines and moved away from the debris cloud. Eight passengers formed a tail behind him.
Captain Blinda Murphy and three of her crew scampered over the ship like so many spiders. The flame-haired Captain was pregnant. The bulge barely showed on her two-point-two meters of jungle-giant height. She was trying to move more slowly, to let her crew do the work, but she just didn’t have the habit.
Curtz didn’t try to duck aside. They treated Curtz as a familiar obstacle, and went around.
Curtz was not a navvy. He was a Navy Guardian.
His chief claim to rank was that he could wear the ancient armor of the starmen. His dwarfish size and the encumbrance of the silver suit decreased his agility. He could fight; he was invulnerable in battle; but he could not dart about the surface of a spinner ship trying to keep lines in order.
Renho and Dunninger and Rabin were long, spindly citizens up to two and a half meters tall, compared to Maxell’s one point eight, if you let him point his toes. Sometimes he wondered what they thought of him. The Captain might flay any navvy who insulted a Guardian. Blinda Murphy’s mother had been a dwarf. She’d have been a Silver Man herself if the armor had fit.
There in the mist: a pair of kites.
One kiteman? Half a dozen wouldn’t have been odd. Packs of Admiralty kitemen might fly out to the East Grove or farther yet, out to escort some incoming logger. But one? Could a party have got into trouble? The mist was too thin to hide more.
Guardian Maxell Curtz watched the kites coming…orange swordbird on a black field, intricately painted, very high quality compared to Admiralty work…coming almost straight at Flutterby.
Renho and Dunninger were pointing. Rabin scampered forward. The kiteman swept past by less than thirty meters. For a bare instant the Guardian saw him clearly: a boy, a ten-year-old climber frightened clean out of his mind.
Curtz jumped into the sky. A burst of his boot jets kicked him clear of Flutterby.
The prop blades were slowing, stopping. Rabin must have turned the motor off.
A rescue would look good on Flutterby’s record. Curtz’s too. Might help the Admiralty’s image. Climbers had been growing unhappy with Admiralty policies…All hindsight. Curtz had jumped by reflex.
The boy had tilted his kites flat to the wind. Curtz wouldn’t have to use his jets again. Good! Only one tribe of climbers in the whole sky could recharge boot jets, and they charged high.
Curtz fixed wings to his ankles and flapped toward the boy.
The boy was methodically reeling in his free kite, dismounting it, rolling it around the brace sticks. Thin, two meters tall or less, with a broad flat nose and straight brown hair: he was older than Curtz had guessed. Twelve, maybe. People raised in a tide were shorter than Admiralty citizens.
Closer…The boy twisted like a ribbon bird, reached far out and snatched Curtz’s wrist with panic strength. He was still frightened. Curtz wondered what the ancient pressure suit must look like to this savage. But he feared the sky more.
Curtz said, “I’m a Guardian, a Silver Man. That’s Flutterby. We’ll take you home.”
“No, no, you have to save them. Capability Tree’s come apart! Ripped in half!”
“What?”
The boy pointed. Curtz followed the line of his arm, west of out, following a dark wavering arc to a distant fisher-jungle…wait, it was farther away than that, bigger and…darksoil, was that a tree? Curtz looked in and east and found the other half.
“Your tree?”
“No, I’m from Brighton. That’s Capability Tree. Dad sent me to alert you. They need help.”
Flutterby wasn’t large. The ship had once carried thirty troops into a riot; but they’d been clinging to the hull. Two could work in the tiny cabin; four or five could huddle there while the ship was battered by triunes or swarming drillbits or a major storm.
The climber boy was in the way, of course, but what choice did they have? He braced himself in a corner, gripping handgrips with all his fingers and toes, and he couldn’t seem to stop shivering. Yet he spoke lucidly enough. He was Stevn Newbry, son of Kitemaster Newbry. He’d had a good flight, no surprises…other than the tree, of course…
Maxell left the cabin. The boy made him nervous.
Flutterby was in the debris cloud. Less than a day had passed, but both ends of the tree had vanished into the murky sky. The sun had nearly reached nadir: double sunlight made long single shadows through the dust. The sky was dark with wood dust and dirt and tree-dwelling insects, and mud.
A brave act for a climber, kiting across naked sky toward a moving target, and not even for his own people. A climber spent his life tunneling through green darkness. No Admiralty citizen would have been so shaken by a day or two of falling.
Guardsman Maxell Curtz gripped rope railings with hands and toes and let the sky turn past him.
Tremendous cylinders of black mud tumbled in the chaos. Maxell had heard that such things could happen, but he’d never tried to imagine a disaster on this scale. He wondered how the mud held together so well…and then he saw. The tree had wrapped the mud like a package, had lined its fertilizer core with wood fibers so that it would slide loose easily.
Fisher-jungles were already drifting into the debris cloud. Long tendrils stretched toward mud blocks tumbling in the chaos. In the roar of Flutterby’s motor could be heard an irregular ticking as bits of bark impacted the blades.
Flutterby’s hull was all ledges, toeholds and fingerholds, and rope: rope in coils, guardrail ropes, rope to tie boxes and bails to the ledges, lines to set the vanes at the tail.
Flutterby pulled itself through the air by the long, long blades turning at her nose. Tilted vanes aft kept the whole ship from spinning the other way round…but Captain Murphy generally modified the tilt so that the sky slowly turned to show all possible views.
A wind beat down on Maxell’s head, stinking of half-burned wood alcohol—which Maxell was used to—and eons-buried mud.
Captain Murphy poked her head into the doorway and bellowed, “Rabin? Cut to idle. How on Earth am I supposed to hear anything?”
The noise and the wind dropped almost to nothing. Maxell listened for the wailing of climbers lost in the sky. He heard the buzz of confused insects, and—
“We have set out traps to catch her
And sent dolphins down to fetch her,
And a million tourists watch from shore and ship—”
Somewhere a woman was singing some old nonsense-song as if she had never a care in the world.
The climber-kiteman’s head poked through the cabin door. He shouted, “That’s Capability’s Harp!”
“But we still wind up embarrassed,
For this creature won’t be harassed,
She just glides away and gives us all the slip.”
Curtz said, “I thought you were from—”
“Harp sang in Brighton Tree once,” the boy said. “She’s wonderful. Can we get to her?”
Captain Murphy bellowed aft. “Rabin, I’ve reversed the prop. Start her up, but watch your tethers.”
“Aye-firmative.”
“You all hear? Watch your tethers!”
“Ambitious dreams of our research teams
Are touted by the press
But we can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find
We can’t find the creature in Loch Ness!”
Curtz tested his own tether as the prop spun up and the ship eased backward. Admiralty fitters had mounted the blades aft, like the motors on a rocket, on the first few spinner ships they built. They’d stopped that after a crewma
n lost his grip and fell into the blades. A navvy could still manage that while a spinner ship was backing up.
The songbird was standing upright as if in tide, clinging with her toes to a plug of black mud. Short golden hair haloed a pale triangular face. A musical instrument, nearly two meters of wooden tube with holes along its length, was strapped across her back. She watched Flutterby’s approach without sign of fear.
“Cut it!” called the Captain. The woman waited until the blades spun to a stop, then jumped toward Flutterby.
Renho and Dunninger were already in the sky, tethers trailing as they leapt to catch her. Across the sky it was difficult to tell navvies apart. They weren’t identical. Renho was strong, but Dunninger had been a kiteman. His hands and wrists, feet and ankles were sinewy, laced with blood vessels, actually stronger than a dwarf’s. But they were skeletally tall, their hair was cut identically short, and their identical red uniforms were only distinguished by big black number-letter designations on chest and back.
Graceful as hell, they tugged their lines to stop just alongside the songbird. She offered a hand to each, smiling her thanks.
They looked like giants next to her.
Against the wind and the whupwhupwhup of the motor Maxell Curtz could hear his heart pounding in his ears. She was tiny.
Her voice came to him, clear and musical. “—pulled a bunch of us off toward Brighton. I saw another kiteman coming too. Most of us must have been rescued by now.”
“I’ll tell the Captain,” Renho said.