The Smoke Ring t-2

by Larry Niven

  Ryllin said, “My husband is very good with machinery, not so good at trading. He did much better after he had the good sense to marry me. But Logbearer understands him, he—”

  “Without you they’ll get a better trade?”

  “Damn right they will,” Booce said bitterly. Then: “Yes, they will.”

  “They’ll like that? They won’t be too curious about where their luck comes from?”

  It was Ryllin who nodded. “It’s all right, love. Think of a story. They’ll want to believe it.”

  “But we’re missing three daughters too!”

  “The house. They must have finished building our house by now. The girls and I are with Logbearer or we’re at the house, wherever you’re not. Maybe I’m somewhere in the Market buying furniture. That was the whole point of this last trip, we were going to — we were—” She turned away suddenly.

  Emotional displays weren’t needed here! Clave said, “We’re not hiding anything but the silver suit and the CARM. Otherwise we can tell any story we want. What’s next? Gawing, Lawri, Ryllin, you back each other up when you go back to the tuft. Whoever’s asking, the Chairman had to be talked into this, but I did agree, and I put the fine details in.”

  Rather called from aft. “Jeffer, the pipe’s moored to the hull. We’ve got everything else, but it all has to be moored.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll check you later. Gawing, are you willing?”

  “Treefodder. Well, it’ll probably keep Minyafrom killing me…Clave, will this work? Is it enough?”

  “Only if we come back. We come back with the CARM and something else too. It almost doesn’t matter what.”

  “Stet. I’m the Chairman Pro Tem.”

  Jeffer killed the main motor. “Somebody go out and get our lines untied.”

  Rather went. Debby joined Booce aft. They began mooring what remained of the cargo: two big hooks, spare clothing, sacks of undyed cloth, harpoons, crossbows.

  Lawri said, “Jeffer, let me show you something.” She eased up next to him and tapped at the controls, whispering. Her shoulder blocked Clave’s view. Clave’s mind still raced, seeking flaws…he was looking for holes in a harebrain net! There was no way to make mutiny smell sweet.

  “Are we bringing the spitgun? No, of course not.” The weapon Mark had been carrying when he was captured was now in custody of the Chairman. “Gavving, it’s in the older part of my hut, what used to be the common room. If you don’t have the spitgun, you’re not the Chairman. Get it before anyone notices.”

  Rather scrambled back through the airlock. Gavving, Ryllin, and Lawri left. Jeffer let them get well clear before he pulled away on the little jets.

  The tree receded. Three tiny citizens fluttered toward the elevator dock, A cage had nearly reached the dock. One of the occupants was shrieking and waving its fists.

  “Somebody must have found Mark,” Debby said.

  “Relax, Clave, we only tied him up.”

  “Yeah. But if I’d known a rescue party was coming …skip it. You’d have closed the airlock in their faces. I hope you treefeeders can find something worthwhile in the Clump. It’s my reputation on the line now.”

  Section Two

  THE LOGGERS

  Chapter Seven

  The Honey Hornets

  from the Citizens Tree cassettes:

  YEAR 384, DAY 1590. JEFFER, SCIENTIST. WE HAVE DEPARTED CITIZENS TREE TO EXPLORE THE FOURTH LAGRANGE POINT, WITH ATTENTION TO RESOURCES AND POPULATION. THE MISSION AS OUTLINED IS REVISED AS FOLLOWS: CHAIRMAN CLAVE NOW LEADS. THIS EXPEDITION HAS BECOME AN APPROVED ACTIVITY OF CITIZENS TREE. I NOW TURN THE LOG OVER TO CHAIRMAN CLAVE.

  CLAVE, CHAIRMAN. CREW CONSISTS OF JEFFER AS SCIENTIST AND CAPTAIN, CITIZENS DEBBY AND RATHER, BOOCE AND CARLOT SERJENT AS GUIDES, AND MYSELF. PRIORITY AT ALL TIMES WILL GO TO PROTECTING THE CARM AND OTHER VITAL PROPERTY OF CITIZENS TREE. NO KNOWLEDGE IS WORTH GAINING UNLESS IT CAN BE REPORTED TO CITIZENS TREE.

  CARLOT WAS WATCHING OVER THEIR SHOULDERS.

  “You use—”

  “Prikazyvat End log,” said Jeffer.

  “ — the same dates we do?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, how do you know?” Carlot demanded. “Years, you just watch for the sun to go behind Voy, but what about days? We sleep a couple of days out of five, right? But maybe you lose count—”

  “Who cares?” Clave said. “Who knows how many days there are in a year? It depends on where you are.”

  Jeffer summoned up numbers on the panel. “The CARM logs a standard day, about four and a half per sleep. We used to keep marks on sticks in the Scientist’s hut. How do you keep time?”

  Carlot said, “The Admiralty posts the time.”

  Booce laughed. “They must get it the same way! The Library looks a lot like this panel, Jeffer. Like somebody ripped out this part of the CARM.”

  “Keys like this too?”

  “I wasn’t close enough to see. They don’t let ordinary crew near it. Let’s see…in the crossyear ceremony Radyo Mattson did the talking, but there was a Navy officer standing in front of the Library, and his hands moved…”

  And Kendy watched them all.

  The CARM autopilot heard everything. Every ten hours and a little, it squirted its records at Discipline. Kendy sorted the conversations for what he could use.

  Two CARM autopilots, separated for five hundred and thirty-two years and eleven months, were both keeping Smoke Ring time, with Discipline’s arrival set at zero.

  Interesting. The mutineers must have adjusted them after it was certain that they would never return. They had severed relations with the past, with Kendy, with Earth, with the State itself.

  Yet they used mutiny as an obscenity. Puzzling.

  The CARM flew east, airspeed seventy-one kph, partially fueled, carrying water that would become fuel. Solar collector efficiency was running at fifty-two percent, the collectors partially shadowed by the old pipe moored to the hull.

  It was a liquid oxygen pipe ripped from a CARM. Many CARMs must have been dismantled when they stopped working. The Admiralty “Library” was certainly the control panel from a ruined CARM; but was it still functional?

  The cabin interior was offensively dirty. Kendy detected traces of old meals eaten aboard; feathers and bird shit from the turkey roundup ten years back; the black clay that had returned the same trip; and mud repeatedly expelled from the water tank. Dirt was not dangerous, only aesthetically distressing. Kendy foresaw no problems other than those of microsociology.

  He was on course.

  Humankind was scattered. No telling how far they had spread through the Smoke Ring. They had settled cottoncandy jungles and the tufts of integral trees; he knew of four tiny civilizations outside the L4 point. But the Admiralty seemed to be the densest gathering, the most numerous, the best organized: the political entity most suited to become the heart of an expanding empire.

  It would not resemble the State at first. Conditions were fantastically different. Never mind. Give them communications, gather them into one political group. Then shape it.

  He must know more. Hearsay from a family of wandering loggers wasn’t good enough. The Admiralty “Library,” that would tell him how to proceed next…but he already knew that he must eventually contact the officers themselves.

  Somehow the CARM must be moved into the Clump.

  Jeffer had seemed to have matters well in hand. The effects of mutiny on Citizens Tree did not concern Kendy …but Clave had ended a mutiny by joining it! Now he must persuade Jeffer and Clave both. But Kendy couldn’t talk to Clave. Exposing Jeffer’s secret would lose Jeffer’s trust.

  It was precisely the kind of problem a Checker enjoyed most.

  For now Kendy watched six savages in a recording made over the past ten hours. They had much to teach him.

  Booce speaking: “We own — owned our own ship. I suppose that made us richer than most. I inherited Logbearer from my father, and I made my first trips with him. Ryllin was another logger
’s daughter, and she was used to the life. We had four daughters and a few lost ones out of maybe twenty pregnancies, all while hauling logs. I’ve become a good maternity doctor…” The cassette ended.

  Men had changed in the Smoke Ring.

  Pregnancy was easy in low gravity. Women became pregnant many times during their lifetimes.

  Infant mortality (“lost ones”) was high, perhaps around sixty percent; the natives seemed to take it for granted. Discipline had carried no diseases. Yet the growth of bones and organs was altered by altered gravity. Some children could not digest food. Some grew strangely, until their kidneys or livers or hearts or intestines would no longer work because of their shape.

  The environment was user-friendly for those who survived childhood. Kendy’s citizens came in odd shapes. Kendy caught a reference to Merril Quinn and learned that she had died six years ago, in early middle age. Merril had had no legs. She had fought against London Tree, and not as a cripple.

  Distorted children had wandered through the CARM to be photographed. Ryllin Serjent had an awesomely long neck, quite lovely and graceful and fragile looking. Carlot’s legs…Kendy wished he could see her walk or run.

  They matured more slowly. Carlot claimed fourteen and a half years; she would be twenty by Earth’s reckoning. But she looked no more than fifteen.

  Men had not evolved for the Smoke Ring. Infant mortality must have been ghastly among the original crew. Five hundred years of natural selection was taking care of that. As with the cats a few generations back: the near future should see an impressive population explosion.

  Kendy would guide the civilization that resulted. He had been right to move now.

  The CARM was coming back into range. Kendy’s telscope array picked it up falling east and out, slowing.

  In present time, Booce and Carlot and Rather were on watch while the others slept. The CARM moved through a patch of thin fog. Fog didn’t block the CARM’s senses. Kendy noticed the anomaly some time before the crew did.

  He saw birds of unfamiliar type. They had lungs (the CARM’s sonar could see the triple cavity), but they had retained part of what must once have been an exoskeleton: an oval of hard sky-blue shell covered one side. Fourteen of these birds, each about the mass of a boar pig, were strung in a line across the sky. They were folded into themselves, fins and wings and heads folded against that oval of shell. Sky-blue blobs, cool in infrared, comatose or dead.

  Booce had noticed now. He shook Jeffer awake. “A whole flock of dead birds. What killed them?”

  “Nothing that can touch us with the airlock closed.”

  Jeffer’s fingers danced. “Outside air’s okay, nothing poisonous. Well, treefodder!”

  “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 d
etails. “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.”