The Smoke Ring t-2

by Larry Niven

  It sounded unpleasant. “Where do the Navy ships go?”

  “Mmm…Where do you come from?”

  “Citizens Tree. A little west of the Clump.”

  “You’re not likely to visit your family. We don’t see many tree dwellers. We send ships outside the Clump, but not often, and never more than a few thousand klomters. Mostly we cruise the Clump itself. We collect taxes, of course—”

  “Yeah.”

  “We fight the wildlife. Dark sharks and other things. Citizens find a drillbit nest, or honey hornets, they call us and we burn it out.”

  “Triunes too?”

  “Oh, no, the triunes got the idea fast. They never attack us. Some of them like us. There’s a guy, Exec Martin, he hunts swordbirds with triunes. Nobody knows how bright they really are, but they can be trained.”

  “Why do you burn honey hornets? Booce says they’re valuable.”

  Her expression soured. “Honey is contraband. Put just a tip of a fingernail’s worth on your tongue, you dream wonderful dreams. Then you can’t stop. Use a little more and you die in ecstasy. Some people will pay a lot for that.”

  Honey is suicide. Rather hadn’t realized that Booce meant it literally. He thought it over, then said, “But it’s their choice—”

  She shook her head. “Not my decision. Then there’s detective work, and riot control, and rescue work. We don’t specialize much. You learn to do all of that, but first you learn how to fly a ship.”

  “What happens to cadets who fail? Murphy, what happens to dwarves who fail?”

  “Nothing. I mean, they’re out of the Navy, of course. They hire out or they build a business, maybe they go diving in the Dark for mushrooms and fan fungus, or they go logging. Hell, what does a logger do if he fails at something?” She looked closely at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m having trouble with this. There’re more people here, so there’s more places for people, right? If you can’t hunt or do earthlife farming, you just try something else?”

  Murphy nodded brightly. “Next question?”

  Would we see each other if I joined up? May I call you Sectry? “Thank you, Bosun.”

  “Any time,” she said, and Sprang away. She coasted parallel to the bark, toward Wheeler as he emerged from behind the Wart.

  “It’s big,” Wheeler called. “Booce Serjent, you’ve made your fortune.”

  “Recouped it, anyway. The first thing I’ll do is rebuild Logbearer.”

  “Yes…Well, I’ve seen enough. Eight thousand tons or so. Those scars on the metal—”

  “We used the saw to get the slabs that make up the firebox. It worked better than I’d hoped. It’s a good substitute for sikenwire, and the saw’s not damaged.”

  Wheeler nodded, satisfied. “Can we lift you back to your ship?”

  “No, we need to cover this somehow before we reach the Market.”

  “I think you’re worrying over nothing. How could anyone steal anything this big7”

  “With saws…Well, you may be right.”

  They watched Gyrfalcon steam toward the Clump interior. Something bright twinkled at the bow. “He’s calling home,” Booce said. “They use mirrors to bounce Voy-light where they want it.”

  “What happens now?” Clave asked.

  “Wheeler thinks I sawed off more metal than just those plates for the firebox. He’ll watch to see if I sell it on the black market. He could have bought the Wart on the spot, but he thinks I’ll give him a better price if he waits. A few days after we dock I’ll get an offer. It’ll be too little, and I’ll boost them a bit and then take it so I can stop guarding the metal—”

  “What do we do now, Booce? Jeffer must be going crazy waiting for us to call in.”

  “We’re still being watched.”

  Gyrfalcon was tiny now. Its steam trail was dissipating.

  Clave asked, “Can they still see? Have they got something like the CARM windows?”

  “A box they hold to their eyes. Clave, we’d like some way to disguise this mucking great chunk of metal.”

  So Logbearer’s five crew swarmed over the Wart, taking their time, just looking at it from all angles, as if there were some way to hide a conspicuous pucker in the honest wood of a tree. The sun crept from zenith to pass north of Voy. And presently Debby said, “Booce, you’ve seen more trees than any of us. What kind of a thing causes this kind of scar?”

  “Something hits the tree…could be stony, it doesn’t have to be metal. I’ve seen this kind of gap with nothing in it at all, just chewed wood healing over. I never did figure it out.”

  Debby wondered, “Ice?”

  Booce’s face went…stupid? Mouth agape, eyes drifting. He said, “Heh. Yes! A chunk of ice could smash a tree, then melt.”

  “Still doesn’t do anything for us. What else? Disease? Is there something that builds nests? Or the tree bugs could chew just in one place—”

  “Sure, a honey pod could hit a tree, and the bugs would chew a huge hole…give me a breath, Debby.” Stupid again: thinking. “We can do it. Twenty days to reach the Market. Okay. We need a fisher jungle that’s got termites, and we need to look like we’ve been through a disaster, but we’ve got that already. I never thought I’d come home with a pod for Logbearer’s cabin!”

  “What do you need from us?” Clave asked.

  “Stay here, talk to Jeffer. The rest of us will fly up the trunk. This is nice. If Wheeler wonders why we’re still hovering around the Wart, he’ll see us hiding it!”

  Rather swallowed his protest, because Clave was saying, “You don’t need Rather. I want him.”

  “Stet.” Booce had his wings on. “Come, children.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Termite Nest

  from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 5 SM:

  THE LAGRANGE POINTS

  MATTER TENDS TO COLLECT IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH LAGRANGE POINTS (L4 AND L5) OF GOLDBLATT’S WORLD. THESE REGIONS APPEAR LESS TURBULENT THAN THE STORMS AROUND GOLDBLATT’S WORLD ITSELF, BUT WE HAVE POSTPONED EXPLORING THEM IN DEPTH.

  WE INSPECTED ONLY L4. THE MORE OR LESS STABLE REGION IS 600 KM ACROSS. MAPPING THE EQUIPOTENTIAL TIDE CURVES GETS US NESTED CRESCENTS. WHAT SHOWS TO THE EYE IS A MISSHAPEN WHORL DWINDLING EAST AND WEST INTO THE ARC OF THE SMOKE RING PROPER.

  THE WHORL IS GREEN AROUND THE PERIPHERY, DARKER AND BROWNER NEAR THE CENTER, WHERE ACCUMULATED MATTER BECOMES THICK ENOUGH TO BLOCK SUNLIGHT. TIDE-STABILIZED PLANTS DON’T THRIVE HERE. WE’VE FOUND FAMILIAR LIFE FORMS — TRIUNES AND COTTON-CANDY JUNGLES — BUT ALSO SOME SPECIALIZED LIFE FORMS NOT SEEN ELSEWHERE.

  DEEP RADAR INDICATES SOLID MASSES WITHIN THE DARK INNER REGION. NONE ARE LARGE.

  WE HAVE WONDERED WHY THE CLUMPS NEVER CONDENSED INTO ONE LARGE BODY. PERHAPS LIFE ITSELF ACTS TO REMOVE MATTER FROM THE INNER REGIONS. THE FISHER JUNGLES’ ROOTS DISRUPT LARGE PONDS. SAPROPHYTES PEED IN THE DENSE CORE, THEN FIRE SPORE PACKAGES AWAY INTO THE SMOKE RING. BIRDS ARE FORCED OUT BY FAMINE OR POPULATION PRESSURE…

  IT MADE HIS HEAD HURT.

  Jeffer ate as he read. When he reached the end he doggedly scrolled back to the beginning. His students had found it bewildering. So did Jeffer, but he had an advantage over his students. He had Kendy.

  If Kendy would call!

  Today he had hunted the sky. He’d returned to the dead fisher jungle trailing a sizable shieldbird. A small fire near the CARM had cooked his catch. He was getting good at it. Sandwiching the meat between two of the shieldbirds’ bone plates cooked it tender without scorching it.

  He almost choked when the CARM suddenly spoke. “Jeffer? This is Clave. Jeffer, can you hear me?”

  Jeffer swallowed hard and said, “Prikazyvat Send to pressure suit. And about treefeeding time too! Are you alive?”

  “Jeffer, we couldn’t get to the helmet. The Navy searched Logbearer. Even after they left they were watching us. Where are you? Are you hidden?”

  “Clave, I found something good. Do you remember Booce’s description of a fisher
jungle? A green puffball a klomter across, with a long coiled root. It reaches out to put the root in a pond, but there’s poison on it and it can attack life forms and kill them and draw them in to rot—”

  “Right. They’re not supposed to live outside the Clump.”

  “Maybe so. This one’s fifty klomters from the Clump fringes, and it’s dead. The axis trunk is hollow. There’s a Navy ship coming this way. It’s not likely they’ll want to sniff around a fisher jungle, but I’ve got the CARM moored inside the hollow anyway. When it goes away I’ll tether it above the root so the CARM can get some sunlight. Where are you? I can’t see anything.”

  “I’m in the dark. I’m in that channel we chopped past the Wart. We haven’t moved the silver suit yet.”

  Jeffer remembered extending the work done by the happyfeet. His back and shoulders still ached. “We should have let the happyfeet do more of the carving.”

  “It was worth it. Booce was right. The Navy knows if you’re carrying metal. This Petty Wheeler citizen knew about the Wart, but he didn’t look for anything behind it.”

  “What’s the Clump like?”

  “Crowded. We’ll have the log moored in twenty days. Booce has a way to hide the Wart. He’s afraid of thieves, and we can’t use the silver suit to win a fight, because—”

  “No, of course not.”

  “ — Because they’d recognize it. Jeffer, they’ve got three silver suits. It’s a mark of high rank. Dwarves are in good shape if they join the Navy, and Rather’s had an offer.”

  An offer? “Rather, you there?”

  Jeffer heard Clave’s distant yell. Presently Rather said, “Here.”

  “You had an offer to join the Navy? What was said? What did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t take the Petty seriously. The idea is to learn something about the Admiralty, buy some earthlife seeds, and get back to Citizens Tree!”

  “We want to know about the Navy too.”

  “I learned a little—”

  Clave interrupted. “How serious are we? Booce, what has the Navy got that we want to see? I’m not so eager to see the inside of a Navy rocket that I’d feed one of my—”

  “The Library! The cassettes! What’s on the Admiralty cassettes?”

  “All right, Jeffer. What makes you think Rather could get to any of that? Booce might know, but he isn’t here to ask.”

  Jeffer finished the shieldbird meat while he thought. “Ask him when you get the chance. Now, I’m getting terminally bored here. Are you free to move the silver suit into the rocket?”

  “’No. It’s too easily recognized,” Clave said.

  “How about just the helmet?”

  “We’ll have to ask Booce, but…I think not. Let’s get Kendy in on this. Are you in contact?”

  “He said he was changing orbit. He’ll be back in another day. Clave, I wish you could give me some kind of a view.”

  “I’ll think of something. Jeffer, Rather’s waving at me.”

  “Scientist out.”

  “Clave? You’d better see this,” Rather said.

  “What? I was talking to Jeffer.” Clave crawled out of the cavity behind the Wart. “Oh.”

  From out of the crowded sky came a shapeless thing colored a dead yellowish brown. Its outline was fuzzed with a jittering motion that caused the optic nerves to twitch. It was coming straight at them, and Logbearer was behind it.

  “Get out of its way, Rather, it’s going to hit! Got your wings?”

  They fled. The thing fell toward the Wart with a faint, frightening buzzing sound. Myriads of black flecks swarmed around it, insects much smaller than honey hornets.

  It struck the crater around the Wart and deformed like soft mud.

  Logbearer bumped the trunk more softly. Debby emerged from the hatch in the forward pod. She stared hard at the intrusionary mass. She called, “It’s going to stick.”

  Booce answered from inside. “Stet. Spread the honey.”

  Debby waved at Booce and Rather, but that was all the attention she gave them. She began spreading red sticky honey around the rim of the crater.

  The swarm of insects followed her. When she closed the circle, most of the insects had migrated to the honey.

  “Done!”

  “Good. Get aboard. Clave, Rather, I’ve got to moor this thing. Want a ride?”

  Clave bellowed, “Booce, you get out here and answer some questions!”

  Booce’s head popped out. He thought it over, then flapped to join them. He looked indecently self-satisfied.

  “It’s a termite nest,” he said before Clave could ask. “We’ll say we didn’t have any choice, it was the only tree around and we had to get back to the Clump because… I’ll think of something.”

  “Uh-huh. The honey?”

  “Encouragement. When the termites run out of honey they’ll eat wood. They’ll bond the nest to the Wart.”

  “What about the silver suit? Were you just going to leave it?”

  “Where would it be safer?”

  “Jeffer’s all alone in the sky. He’d go crazy!”

  Booce’s grimace told it all. Clave said, “He’s the Citizens Tree Scientist, and he is not a crazy murderer. He was in a fight with our lives at stake, Booce, and he used what he had. It was more powerful than he thought it was—”

  “He used it twice.”

  “Booce, if you’ve ever been a happyfeet bandit yourself, tell me now.”

  Booce was astonished, then amused. “Oh, really! No, I’m not protecting my own kind. I’m not defending bandits that prey on loggers. Granted they’d generally rather attack some tribe of helpless savages. Your suspicions are right there, Clave, but it doesn’t mean I like bandits. I wouldn’t have burned a whole damn tribe either!”

  “Uh-huh. You would have sent them away without hurting them so much. How? Describe the procedure in detail.”

  “I can’t do that. Jeffer hasn’t told any of us how to fly the CARM! Clave, the Scientist is not to burn any tribe, ever again. I’m telling you, not him. You are to stop him.”

  “I’ll tell him. Now what?”

  “Oh…we’ll leave everything but the helmet where it is. Jeffer’s scientific eyes are in the helmet, right? Those little windows in the forehead? We’ll moor it in the nest. He’ll have a view. We’ll be spending enough time around the Wart; we’ll talk to him then.”

  The CARM with its cameras was hidden in a dark place, the pressure suit was in another, the incoming recordings were days old, and in present time Jeffer wasn’t present. Kendy skimmed the recordings. He was learning more through Disciplined own senses.

  Logbearer was easy to follow: forty kilometers of tree with tufts missing and a metal mass off-center, now rounding the starward limb of the L4 whorl. Maintaining contact wasn’t going to be easy here. Discipline’s new orbit had twice the period of Goldblatt’s World, with Voy periodically falling north of the L4 point. Tilting his orbit out of the Smoke Ring allowed his instruments to penetrate less of the garbage in the Clump; but the log and the CARM and all of Kendy’s citizens would be circling that center on long kidney-shaped paths.

  At least he wouldn’t have to burn more fuel. If he could establish relations with the Admiralty, his present orbit might suffice for hundreds of years.

  Savages in a thriving civilization would find trouble sooner or later. Patience. Some emergency would force Jeffer to bring the CARM into the L4 point. Then he must open the airlock to the Navy…

  One problem at a time. Wait. Learn.

  Jeffer entered the cabin before Kendy passed out of range. There was fresh pink blood on his tunic and more on his hands.

  “Kendy for the State—”

  “Hello, Kendy. How can we—”

  “Jeffer, if Rather has an offer from the Navy, I want him to accept.”

  “You would. Rather didn’t sound too enthusiastic. Neither am I. How can we get away with not hiding the silver suit?”

  “An excellent question.” Kendy was using lig
ht amplification, but it only showed him iron ore and chewed wood. Clave and Rather had departed the hiding place. “If the Navy has pressure suits, they’ll recognize yours. I thought of disassembling it, but they’d know the helmet too. We would ruin the camera if we tried to dismount it, and the electrical source is in the helmet.”

  “So?”

  “Patience.”

  “Feed your patience to the tree, Kendy. I’ve got a cryptic entry under ‘Lagrange Points’—”

  “I’ve had three hundred and eighty-four years to leam r patience. You are almost out of range. Can you feed yourself there?”

  “Sure. There’s hand fungus, and flashers living on the bugs, and some other things. In a way it’s like learning to hunt all over again…” The link was lost.

  A chance to examine the Admiralty’s military arm from inside! But Rather wasn’t enthusiastic. And Kendy would have to talk Jeffer around before his arguments could even reach the boy.

  Patience…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Docking

  from Logbearer’s log. Captain Booce Serjent speaking:

  YEAR 384, DAY 1700. THIS TRIP WE NEED NOT FEAR HAPPYFEET.

  I FEAR JEFFER THE SCIENTIST. I FEAR THE SECRETS WE HIDE FROM THE ADMIRALTY AND THE SECRETS THE SCIENTIST KEEPS FROM ME. BUT I OWE A MAJOR DEBT TO CITIZENS TREE.

  DAY1710. WE’VE FOUND A SIMPLE WAY TO HIDE OUR EMPTY CREWMEMBER. MAY I NEVER HAVE THE CHANCE TO THANK THE HAPPYFEET FOR MAKING IT POSSIBLE.

  DAY 1780. WE’VE GONE FOR MORE PODS. ONE HAS BECOME OUR CABIN, ONE STORES EXTRA WATER IN CASE A FIRE SPREADS. RETURNING WITH A POD FOR LOG-BEARER’S CABIN GRATES IN MY SOUL, BUT IT WILL SURELY HIDE THE WEALTH WE CARRY.

  DAY 1810. MAKING PAINTS GAVE MORE TROUBLE THAN I EXPECTED. THE COLORS ARE STILL POOR, BUT WILL SUFFICE. WE’VE PAINTED THE HONEY HORNET LOGO ACROSS LOGBEARER’S CABIN. NOW WE’LL SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT MY CREW’S WINGS.