by Larry Niven
The Smoke Ring
( Trees - 2 )
Larry Niven
The setting of Niven’s 1984 novel The Integral Trees was striking and imaginative, even for this acclaimed world builder; it’s well worth the second visit made in this sequel. Around a neutron star an envelope of gas holds a breathable atmosphere and a strange profusion of plant and animal life, all floating in free-fall. Five hundred years after the crew of the Earth ship Discipline mutinied and deserted to this paradise, their descendants are still watched over by the ship’s unbalanced computer mind. The machine is busy manipulating its one small contact group into exploring the larger city they have been avoiding for years. Aspects of this society are intriguing: for instance, the disdain of the better-adapted taller, thinner people for the “dwarfish” throwbacks, even though only the short can fit into the scientific relics of the old ship. As usual with Niven, character and story are just an excuse for working out the properties of his wonderful imaginary world, where people can fly like birds and ponds full of fish hang in midair. Unfortunately, in this book he fails to marshal the visual and dramatic flair needed to show it off to best effect.
The Smoke Ring
by Larry Niven
Prologue
Discipline
THE PLANET BELOW HIM WAS HIDDEN TO ALL OF SHARLS’ senses save for the Neutrino Screen, the Neudar. What had been a gas giant planet a billion years ago was still a world two and a half times the size of the Earth: an egg of rock and nickel-iron hidden in world-sized storms. The storms spread out into a cloudy ring occupying the entirety of Goldblatt’s World’s orbit around the neutron star.
Sharls watched storms spin outward from the gas giant.
Streams of fog and cloud and dust ran slow near the Smoke Ring’s outer rim, faster at the Smoke Ring median, faster yet as they neared Levoy’s Star; and everywhere there were flattened whorls of hurricane. The gravity gradient was savage this near the ancient neutron star. The innermost limits of the Smoke Ring circled Levoy’s Star every two hours.
The Smoke Ring was tinged with green — it had its own billion-year-old ecology — and somewhere in that cloud were men.
The temptation to go to them was a constant low-level irritant.
When moving between stars, Discipline burned the near-infinite hydrogen of interstellar space; but Discipline had been at rest for a long time now, and onboard fuel was limited. Refueling could not have progressed far when the mutiny came. Sharls’s supply of deuterium-tritium mix was finite. He had no way of knowing how long he must wait for the children of Discipline’s crew to rediscover civilization, to build their own spacecraft, to come to him. He was always short of power. The solar collectors on his two remaining CARMs didn’t give him much.
Sharls ignored the stars, most of the time. He watched the Smoke Ring. When the boredom became too much for him, he edited it from his memory. Boredom was a recurring surprise.
Five hundred and thirty-two Earth years was one hundred and ninety-two orbits of Levoy’s Star round its companion star. But the natives of the Smoke Ring measured years from the passings of the neutron star (Levoy’s Star, “Voy”) across the face of the yellow dwarf (T3, “Sun”); so a Smoke Ring “year” was 1.384 Earth years.
Sharls had been waiting in the L2 point behind Goldblatt’s World for three hundred and eighty-four Smoke Ring years. Best to sit it out in a stable orbit, and watch, and wait for men to develop civilization. Best to edit the memory of boredom…
Discipline’s computer/autopilot stored its information as a human brain did, or a hologram, though Sharls could feel differences. Memories from his time aboard Discipline were sharp and vivid. Those he had edited were gone completely. But memories from his time as a man, transferred long ago from a human brain now long dead, were blurred, hard to retrieve.
So: it wasn’t like a relay clicking over.
But somewhere in the computer there was a change of state. Five hundred and thirty-two years, and enough is enough. Sharls Davis Kendy was done with waiting.
Section One
CITIZENS TREE
Chapter One
The Pond
from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 19 SM:
PONDS
WATER DROPLETS COME IN ALL SIZES HERE. CLOUDS MAY HOLD EVERYTHING FROM FINE MIST, TO GLOBULES THE SIZE OF A FIST, TO SPHEROIDS THAT HOUSE ALL MANNER OF LIFE. THE BIGGEST “POND” WE’VE SEEN MASSED TEN MILLION METRIC TONS OR SO; BUT THE TIDE FROM LEVOY’S STAR HAD PULLED IT INTO TWO LOBES AND THE DIFFERENTIAL WINDS WERE TEARING IT APART.
THE ECOLOGY OF THE PONDS IS ONE RATHER THAN MANY. LIFE IS QUEER AND WONDERFUL, BUT IN EVERY POND WE HAVE EXAMINED IT IS THE SAME LIFE. PONDS ARE TEMPORARY; POND LIFE MUST OCCASIONALLY MIGRATE. IN THE SMOKE RING EVEN THE FISH CAN FLY.
— CAROL BURNES, LIFE SUPPORT
LAWRI AND JEFFER SWAM BENEATH MURKY PONDWATER, trailing forty square meters of fabric stretched across the net more commonly used to sieve harebrains from the sky. They gripped its corners in strong toes and swam with their arms.
The sheet resisted. The leading edge tried to crumple.
Tethers at the comers of the harebrain net got in their way. We could have had some help, Jeffer thought. Lawri wouldn’t have it. Lawri’s idea. Lawri’s project! She’d be doing this by herself if she possibly could.
Air! He slapped her thigh. She dropped the sheet and they swam toward the light.
Air is the sweetest taste, though one must risk drowning to appreciate it.
They were at the arc of the pond nearest Citizens Tree.
The center of the trunk was a mere three klomters east.
Seventy klomters of trunk ran out and in from the pond, ending in paired curved tufts. The in tuft, home, looked greenish black, with Voy’s blue pinpoint shining almost behind it. A single line ran from the trunk, and divided.
The sheet was a ghostly shadow deep within the pond.
Lines ran from the comers, up through the water and out, to join the main cable that ran to the trunk.
“Almost in place,” Lawri said doubtfully.
“Close enough.”
“All right. You go get the CARM ready. I’ll draft some hands to pull it in.”
Jeffer nodded. His legs scissored and shot him into the air. He drifted toward the main cable in a spray of droplets.
It was easier than arguing. Lawri would not leave Jeffer to organize the final stage. When Lawri the Scientist got an idea, nobody else got credit. Particularly not Citizens
Tree’s other Scientist, her husband.
Partway around the curve of the pond, Minya and Gavving floated in the interface between air and water, surrounded by thrashing children.
Lines ran from each child toward the cable from Citizens Tree. The children were taught the backstroke first.
It kept their faces in the air. Some preferred the frog-kick that let them look beneath the water. Swimming was a balance of surface tension versus the thrust of arms and legs.
If a child kicked himself entirely out of the water, an adult must go after him. A child who went beneath the surface could panic and must be pulled out before he drowned. There were carnivores among the waterbirds.
Minya and Gavving wore harpoons. They had three of their own among the swimmers.
Gavving used lazy strokes to change his attitude, moving his field of view in a clockwise circle.
“Look at Rather,” Minya said.
The oldest of the children were swimming together.
Daughter of two jungle giants, golden-blond Jill had grown to merely normal height in the tide of Citizens Tree. She was thirty ce’meters shorter than her parents…but the contrast between Jill and Rather was startling. At fourteen, Minya’s dark-haired firstborn son was less than two met
ers in height. Jill had more than half a meter on him.
Yet Minya never spoke of Rather’s height. Gavving looked again and said, “Right. Rather!”
Rather paddled over, reluctantly. Fine green fur, barely visible, grew a mi’meter long on his left cheek.
Gavving gripped the boy’s arm and lifted him partway out of the water, against surface tension. The green could be traced down Rather’s neck, over his shoulder, and partway across his chest.
“Fluff,” Gavving said. “Why didn’t you tell someone?”
Rather grinned guiltily. “I’ve never swum before.”
Minya snapped, “You go straight—”
“No. Finish your swim. You’ll pay for it. You’ve seen your last of the sun for a while. Have we raised a fool? It’s almost reached your eye!”
Rather nodded solemnly and paddled away. Minya watched him go, her mouth pursed in anger. Her husband wriggled and was silently underwater; kicked, and was beneath her; grasped an ankle and dove. Minya doubled back on herself and kicked him across the jaw. Gavving reached through the defense of her waving arms and legs and had her head between his hands; pulled her to him by main strength and kissed her hard. She laughed bubbles.
He kicked toward the surface with Minya in tow. They blew water from their faces before they inhaled, and were back on duty before any child could get into trouble.
Debby was some distance from where the children swam. She stayed just under the surface, motionless, peering, her spear poised. She expelled stale air — which stayed before her as a bubble — raised her head, snatched a breath, ducked again.
Debby had lived her first nineteen years in free-fall.
Fourteen years in the tree tide had put muscle on her without shrinking her height. Her children — and lisa’s, the children they had borne to Anthon — were no taller than ordinary tree dwellers. But Debby was two and a half meters tall. Her fingers were long and fragile; her toes were sturdier if less agile, and the big toes measured six ce’meters. Her rich brown hair was beginning to show gray, but she still wore it a meter long. For swimming she wore it looped in a braid around her throat.
The water was murky. This was a new skill for Debby, but she was learning.
She struck. The ripple other thrust expanded outward around the great globule, past playing children and the Scientists working their cloth sheet.
A silver shape wriggled on Debby’s spearpoint. Debby reached above her head, tugged hard at the tether, and gasped as her head broke the surface. The waterbird, suddenly thrust into air, expanded its small wings and thrashed mightily. A blow to the head end quieted it.
Debby pushed it into a net bag to join five others.
Her chest still heaved with the need for air. She rested quietly on her back, her hands fluttering from time to time to keep surface tension from pulling her under.
Eastward, a thousand klomters past Citizens Tree, the cloud patterns thickened into a flattened whirlpool. The Smoke Ring converged beyond and below the whorl in a stream of white touched with blue-green, narrowing as it dropped toward the dazzling point of Voy.
Things tended to collect in that special part of the Smoke Ring, east of Gold by sixty degrees of arc. The citizens had reason to know that the storm-whorl around Gold was dangerous. They assumed that the Clump was too. They had never taken the tree nearer than this.
They had never visited a jungle.
Human beings certainly lived elsewhere in the Smoke Ring, but Citizens Tree had never attempted to contact them.
Citizens Tree was placid, safe. Working within the pond was as much excitement as Debby ever got these days. Life in Carther States had been different. The occasional raids from London Tree forced the citizens to be always prepared for war, until in one magnificent raid they had ended London Tree’s power forever.
Debby’s connection with the jungle warriors had ended too. A mixed group of copsiks and warriors had stolen London Tree’s CARM. The vehicle was old science, powerful and unfamiliar. They and their prisoners had been lucky to bring the CARM to any kind of safety; but Carther States was lost somewhere in the sky beyond Gold.
From westward came a cheerful cry. “Citizens! We need muscle!” Debby saw Lawri the Scientist floating in the sky with one hand on the main tether.
Debby snatched at the” net bag (six was a nice day’s catch), kicked herself into the sky, and began reeling her line in. She was first to reach the Scientist. Clave and Minya and Mark the Silver Man were leaving the pond, reeling in lines. Gavving had stayed to gather the children.
Four tethers led to the corners of the sheet-covered net, which was now deep underwater. Lawri stationed them along the main tether as they arrived. “Gather it in,” she directed them. “Make loops. Steady pull.”
Debby wrapped her toes and her fingers around the cable, and did her savage best to contract her body. No loop formed. She knew she wasn’t as strong as a tree dweller, but the others were having trouble too.
Lawri called, “Good! It’s coming straight out.”
That was not obvious to Debby. She strained…and gradually the pond bulged. The sheet and its net backing were rising, carrying tons of water. Debby pulled until her knees and elbows met, then shifted her grip and continued pulling.
The pond stretched, and tore. A baby pond pulled clear, leaving a trail of droplets the size of a man’s head.
Water flowed over the edges of the cloth but was not lost, for surface tension held it. The main pond pulsed as surface tension tried to form the sphere again.
“Keep pulling!” Lawri shouted. “Steady…okay. That should do it.”
The citizens relaxed. The bud-pond continued to move east on its own momentum, toward the tree, with the net and sheet now in the middle of a pulsing sphere.
Debby coiled line that was now slack. Glancing toward the trunk, she saw what the curve of the pond had hidden earlier.
Parallel to the trunk and many klomters beyond it floated a slender dark line. A young tree, no more than thirty klomters long, and injured; for the in tuft was missing, chopped away somehow. The view was confusing, for the midtrunk was wreathed in cloud…dark, dirty cloud…smoke!
Debby tugged abruptly at another line. The motion set her drifting toward the Chairman. Clave caught her ankle as she arrived. “Something?”
Debby pointed with her toes. “That tree. It’s on fire!”
“…I believe you’re right. Treefodder! It’ll be coming apart. Two fires to worry about.”
Debby had never seen a tree break in half, but Clave spoke from dreadful experience. They might have to move the tree. It would take time to get the CARM ready—
Clave had already thought that far. His voice became a whipcrack roar. “Citizens, it’s getting toward dinnertime, and we’ve got all these waterbirds. Let’s break up the swim.”
His voice dropped. “You go now, Debby. Tell Jeffer we may need the CARM. We’ll get the women and children down into the tuft, if we’ve got time. Your eyes are better than mine. Do you see anything leaving the tree? Like clouds of insects?”
There were black specks, big enough to show detail.
“Not insects. Something bigger…three, four… birds?”
“Doesn’t matter. Get going.”
It had taken Jeffer the Scientist a fifth of a day to cross three klomters of line.
Free-fall brought back memories. When Quinn Tribe was lost in the sky after Dalton-Quinn Tree came apart, his crew would have given eyes and limbs to reach a pond.
Fourteen years later, the grandmother of all ponds floated three klomters from Citizens Tree; and now their main problem was to get rid of most of it. Jeffer wondered if the children appreciated their wealth.
Perhaps they did. Most of Citizens Tree, thirty naked adults and children, had come to swim in that shimmering sphere of water.
There was no foliage on the high trunk. It was thick rough bark, with fissures deep enough to hide a man. Jeffer found and donned his tunic and pants, then anchored hi
s toes in a crevice and thrust to send himself gliding out along the bark, toward the CARM.
The lift cable ended two hundred meters short of the CARM’s dock. The citizens may have feared that careless use of the CARM might spray fire across a rising cage.
More likely, they feared the CARM itself. They would not lightly come too near that ancient scientific thing.
The CARM was old science. It was roughly brickshaped, four meters by ten by thirty-two, and made of starstuff: metal and glass and plastic, sheathed with darkly luminous stuff that took the energy from sunlight.
The bulk of it was tanks for hydrogen and oxygen and water. Nostrils at the aft end — four at each corner, and a larger one in the middle — would spurt blue fire on command.
They had neglected the CARM of late, and Jeffer accepted some of the blame. The CARM made two “flavors” of fuel out of water and the power in the batteries.
The batteries held their full scientific charge — they filled themselves, somehow, as long as sunlight could reach the CARM’s glassy surface — but the hydrogen and oxygen tanks were almost empty. It was high time they filled the water tank.
The CARM’s bow was moored in a dock of wooden beams. Double doors led into a hut with cradles for passengers, moorings for cargo, and a broad transparent window. The window looked forth on nothing but bark.
Ventral to the window was a gray sheet of glass and a row of colored buttons.
Jeffer went forward. A touch of a blue button lit the gray glass panel. Blue governed what moved the CARM: the motors, the two flavors of fuel supply, the water tank, fuel flow. Jeffer read the blue script:
H2: 0,518
O2: 0,360
H2O: 0,001
POWER: 8,872
The batteries danced with energy. Why not? The CARM wasn’t using power. Nobody in Citizens Tree had bothered to fill the water tank in seven years; so power wasn’t needed to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.