by Larry Niven
Alin was decelerating, the free kite pulling in-and-east. His passengers led him westward toward the triune symbol. They had grown weary of terror during four days of flying. Now they only clung in silence. Alin had grown to hate their shifting, uneasy weight.
Somebody was waiting next to one of the huts.
Alin brought his passengers to a stop a few tens of meters short of the trunk. Better than smashing them against the bark. Tired men make mistakes. Alin started to bring the free kite around…almost no wind, and tricky too, distorted by the two-klomter thickness of the trunk…He gave up and stowed the kites instead, because Capability’s Captain Ling was kick-kick-kicking at the end of the line, towing them all toward the tree.
The man on the bark came flapping out to help. Alin recognized his younger brother David. David and Ling flew the line back to the trunk and began pulling in the rest.
One by one the refugees spread themselves across the bark, men and women and children, facedown, clawing and twitching as if trying to mate with the tree. Alin was the last to be reeled in. He tethered himself and let it go at that, for his dignity’s sake.
“You didn’t say you’d gone hunting,” David said.
“I’d gladly have shared the catch,” Alin answered. His mind was fuzzy with exhaustion.
“Captain Burns says they can have the in tuft.”
The in tuft had been empty for just over two years. Shortly after the tree arrived in the East Grove, most of the crops had died quite suddenly and for unknown reasons. Alin said, “Good. You can tell Captain Ling—him—but give him some time first.”
“I’d say he needs it! Are you all right?”
“Tired.”
“Bertam and Gilly got back without you. The others are still out.”
“There was a Navy ship. I sent Stevn there to get help.”
“Did you. What about Marlo?”
“He was flying nicely, last I saw him. He’s the oldest, he did fine on the tests…” Two boys missing out of four.
Ling and two others had recovered a little. They were examining the lift arrangements, tactfully out of earshot.
David was studying his face. “You and Natlee are having trouble, stet?”
Alin shrugged. “Nothing special.”
“She doesn’t smile anymore, and the kids don’t talk to each other. Now, what is it? She’s carried guests before.”
“Sure, David, and she turns mean as a snake. You never noticed?”
“No. Three children and, what, a dozen lost ones? She’d be used to it. Other women don’t have trouble carrying guests.”
“Nobody but Natlee. David, I’m too tired for this.”
“I would have noticed. This is something else, Alin. When Bertam and Gilly came down, and no Stevn, I saw Natlee’s face. Have you ever taken her flying?”
“Hah! I got her as far as the lift line. As soon as we…yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Natlee is afraid of falling. There’s just no reasoning with that kind of fear.”
“She doesn’t want Stevn flying either. Stet?”
“As soon as the line lifted us clear of the foliage, as soon as she saw open sky, Natlee freaked. No, she doesn’t want Stevn flying. She doesn’t want me flying, and I’m the Kitemaster!”
“Look, if…” If Stevn doesn’t come back. “If you need help, come to me.”
“David, she’ll be all right as soon as our guest is born. And Stevn, he’s…” Had training? It was their first time in the sky. The boys had flown kites from the branch, they’d climbed to the midpoint and watched Alin flying. That wasn’t training. First time out, and he’d lost two students including his own son.
First things first. “Captain Ling, you can leave the children with me. Take whoever can travel and go down on the lift line. There’ll be a lift cage along for the children.”
Ling said, “I’ll wait for my people, Kitemaster.”
“Stet.” He was their Captain. “David, go home.”
“Alin, have you noticed?” David pointed east.
A rectangular fleck…a pair of yellow flecks. Marlo?
“That’s good. Now go down to your dinner.” Alin would not be stared at while he waited.
“Will you and Marlo join us? Shall I tell—”
“I’ll send Marlo down. The Navy ship—If Stevn—” And if it didn’t come, he’d still sleep better on the trunk. If he went down without Stevn, Natlee would make him fight before she’d let him rest.
David seemed to read his thoughts. He moved away to speak to Captain Ling, who was stringing refugees on the line to the in tuft. “Captain Burns begs you to make free of our unoccupied in tuft…”
Alin tuned him out. The kites did seem to be coming here. Yellow? He didn’t notice when David left.
Ling didn’t try to rush his people. Many needed more time to huddle against the bark. He asked, “Who’s running the treadwheel, Kitemaster?”
“No treadwheel, Captain. We’ve got a windmill moving the lift line.”
Ling nodded and changed the subject. “And you don’t seem to have a rocket. How on Earth did you get to the East Grove?”
“Classified, sir. You can examine the windmill, though.” Ling clearly hadn’t recognized the word.
The pair of kites was closer now. Yellow with a broad scarlet stripe. Alin felt the knot of his intestines sliding loose.
Ling was counting his citizens. Twenty citizens and eleven children: a big jump in Brighton Tree’s population. No wonder Burns wanted them in the empty tuft. But Ling must be counting the ones who were missing. He didn’t look happy…Hell, he looked as tired as they did, finally. He put them on the line and watched it carry them in. Adults only: a child might lose his grip.
The cage came up. Alin used a ratchet to disconnect it from the line. He helped Ling load the children in. While Captain Ling spoke to the children, Alin wandered away to wait for Marlo and his passengers.
Marlo was close now. His mouth was slack with exhaustion. His arms and legs moved in jerks. Two frightened older women clung to his tow line and each other.
An exhausted rage was trying to boil up inside Alin. He should be proud; perhaps he was…but it hurt his mind to watch his student trying to maneuver. His own musculature kept trying to help.
When Marlo thumped against the trunk, Ling and Alin were there to catch his line. They towed the women in. The old women wrapped themselves around Captain Ling. He made soothing noises and presently helped them into the lift cage.
“You were to come straight back to the midpoint,” Alin said.
“Kitemaster, I saved lives!”
“You saved them. Good. But I might have had to go looking for you. Do I look as tired as I feel?” Marlo didn’t answer. “I could go back and search through that cloud of bark and bugs. But you didn’t have orders to be there. Maybe you lost your kites. Maybe I should be looking east and in—”
“Stet, Kitemaster, stet.” I’m sorry. The boy was as tired as Alin.
“Look, when you get down, my wife will have questions. Tell her I didn’t send you to do rescue work. You’re a hero. It was all your own idea.”
That surprised Marlo through his fog of fatigue. “You’re not coming down?”
“No. I’ll sleep better falling. Tell the out-Captain…tell everyone I’ll be down for breakfast.”
Marlo took the outline and was carried away.
What he had taken for distant birds, and dismissed, weren’t. Four more refugees, winged, definitely headed for Brighton if exhaustion and exposure didn’t kill them first.
Ling hadn’t reconnected the lift cage yet. He called, “Kitemaster? Is that your Navy ship?”
Alin peered toward the darkened Clump.
“No, no, down!”
It still didn’t register. Various tribes used up and down in various ways, often obscene…but Ling was pointing along the trunk, in toward Voy.
A Navy spinner ship was landing in the tuft.
Alin said,
“Hell, I thought they’d come to the midpoint. Captain, I think I’ll join you.”
YEAR 419 DAY 116
Flutterby moved into place and hovered above the in tuft of Brighton Tree. The dark trunk seemed a pure mathematical entity, a cylinder rising to a vanishing point. The foliage looked like a soft, billowy green cloud.
Captain Murphy chopped air with her hand. Dunninger turned off the fuel feed. The propeller blades unblurred, slowed, stopped.
The tide eased to nothing under Maxell’s feet: reassuring, until he realized…
Stevn Newbry, braced in the cabin doorway, said, “Hey…” and bit off further comment.
Capability’s Harp tightened her grip on the lines. “We’ll fall.”
“I’ve done this before,” Captain Murphy said briskly. “Can’t land on the bare branch. It’s only a meter wide.”
Harp’s voice went just a bit ragged. “Can’t you dock at the midpoint?”
“Oh, sure. And then ride forty klomters down to the tuft, hanging on to a line strung by somebody else? No, thank you.”
But Flutterby was definitely falling, and Maxell Curtz’s knuckles were white. Surely Captain Murphy wouldn’t risk the propeller. Of course not. And her smile was purely malicious.
The green billows caught them and buoyed them. A propeller blade bent, and recoiled. Murphy said, “All out. Renho, we’ll have refugees coming down at us pretty quick. How many did you see?”
“Hard to tell, Captain. Two kitemen pulling…somewhere around twenty, thirty?”
“They’ll need help. Renho, Dunninger, escort the climbers. Rabin, we’ll stay with the ship. Hey, boy…Stevn? Show us a way in.”
The young kiteman crawled out of the cabin and paused in the sunlight. Curtz had watched his fear dwindle as they approached the tree. Had seen his face light when they spotted one, then another pair of kites in flight. Now he watched him stretched like a growing plant as he savored the tide.
Curtz was feeling natural tide for the first time. It was weird but tolerable. He knew intellectually that he was under thrust, as in a ship’s cabin. Tension in the trunk was pulling the tuft outward against the inward pull of Levoy’s Star.
Stevn Newbry bounded across the greenery in shallow arcs. Against the constant whistle of the wind Renho called, “Hey!”
The boy called back, “Citizen Renho, the corridors are all choked off. Our whole tribe moved out of here two years ago. I’ve got to…here, maybe…find an opening. Here!”
Renho jumped in a shallow arc toward Stevn. Harp followed. That decided Maxell Curtz. He braced against a submerged spine branch and jumped after her.
Too high. A touch of boot jets put him almost behind Harp. Stevn waited until they were close, then disappeared: poof and a puff of pollen, gone.
Harp landed, looked about her, than dived into the green billows.
Maxell found a dimple in the foliage. He pushed through—and was blind.
The Sun at nadir is only dimmer and more blurred than the Sun at zenith. Voy’s light never changes: it’s always at nadir. Darkness can be found inside a storm. The Dark is the sunless core of the Clump, a sluggish storm of matter squeezed close until it is almost solid…yet darkness is rare in the Smoke Ring.
Curtz might have guessed that it would be dim in the in tuft of Brighton Tree, too. But it was black!
Curtz moved by feel and by Harp’s rustling. Rustling behind him told him that Renho and Dunninger had found their way in. All the corridors had closed to the width of a child. Luxuriant foliage clogged everything, leaving no room for man. Man formed no part of an integral tree’s intent.
Ahead of him, the climber boy said, “It turns here. Everyone all right?” Voices answered him.
Maxell reached what must be the turn: lower pressure this way…
Behind him Renho asked, “You all right, Guardian?”
“I feel claustrophobic…and blind, of course.”
“Hungry?”
“That too. We’ll have to make a chance to hunt.”
Renho chuckled. Dunninger snickered. Stevn barked incredulous laughter, then tried to choke it back.
Renho had set him up. He should have remembered: he was buried in food! He stripped a branchlet of the fluffy stuff that covered it and brought it to his mouth. He licked it.
Renho was blind too. “Try some foliage, then, Silver Man.”
“Mmmm!”
Harp called back, “That’s the best thing about tree living. Eat all you want. It keeps the corridors open.”
“Mmmm! Twuss me. I ne’wer—’Ff thiss—Nemmine.”
“I think he likes it,” Renho chortled.
The corridors twisted like wormholes through an apple. The Sun circled unseen. How far had they traveled, for how long? Impossible to tell…but Maxell’s knees recoiled from springy solidity. He reached down to touch interlaced spine branches.
Then the corridor opened out.
He’d grown used to the dark. The sudden light was painful. He had to guess some of what he was seeing:
All the outlines were soft and rounded, overgrown. Stevn Newbry bounded through the open space toward a westward-facing conical pit…the treemouth, no doubt, as this must have been the Commons. The smell was earthy, faintly unpleasant. Yellow-white Sunlight glared through sparser foliage in radial beams.
Stevn said, “Wow. I grew up here. It’s like there were never people here at all.”
A whirring, a steady mechanical sound from overhead. Maxell asked, “What’s that?”
“Let’s go see,” Harp said instantly.
They followed the sound up toward the light.
Above the foliage, the trunk seemed to rise forever. Water collected all along its length and thundered down the east face into the tuft. And here on the north side, a bigger version of Flutterby’s motor spun round and round in the ceaseless west wind.
“Clever,” Maxell said.
Harp examined the structure with some care. A line ran round a wheel that turned on the propeller’s axis, then straight out along the trunk. She said, “I was here two years ago. They wouldn’t let any of us see the lift mechanisms. They wanted to trade their secrets for ours. We don’t have any.”
“What, none?”
She smiled at him. “Whatever you want to know, just ask. We used a treadwheel and a line with loops along it. Cages are for effetes.”
Stevn popped up nearby. He said, “In about two days we’ll have a thousand refugees coming down at us. Misters Renho and Dunninger have gone hunting. We’ll want to feed them.”
Harp said, “Good. Did you have a garden?”
“Yah. The bad news is, you’re in it.”
Harp looked around her. “Hah! Well, we can search. Guardian, would you rather hunt? Mister Dunninger says he’s hunted trees…”
“I’ll help you look for crop plants.” The silver suit made him too clumsy to hunt anything more agile than a carrot, and he wasn’t about to take it off among strangers. “Let’s see, branchlets migrate along the branch into the treemouth, so if the garden used to be here—”
Stevn was climbing. He called back, “Actually it was on top and forty meters east. Earthlife needs sunlight. We’d let it drift for a year and then replant. But the way the branchlets move, any plant that lived through the famine is going to be all over the top of the tuft. Like…here!” He dropped something the size of Maxell’s head. “Most of the crops died, but there should be something.”
The object drifted down; Maxell jumped and caught it halfway. A big mushroom.
They searched, burrowing through the greenery like worms in an apple, while the sun arced from west to east. There were runner beans, and little red beans, and oats. Harp found a corn plant, but nothing was growing on it. The find of the day was a string of small trees, the roots twined intimately with the foliage, bearing tiny red apples.
Harp looked tired, drained…hardly surprising, given what she’d been through. Her voice still set Maxell’s nerves singing. “They’ll want f
ood and warmth and a bath and rest. Even if the hunters get nothing, we’ve got food. Let’s do something about warmth.”
Harp and Stevn burrowed back down into the wicker-floored open space, the Commons. They searched, half-burrowing. Stevn began tearing at foliage, throwing it behind him. Maxell joined him, for lack of a better idea. Suddenly his knuckles brushed stone.
Big stones formed a ring three meters across, buried beneath the foliage.
“Rock must be hard to find in a tree,” Maxell said.
“They were pried out of the trunk,” Stevn said. “After we moved to the out tuft, we kids had to find more. There weren’t enough, so Captain Rennick took some wingmen out to a dried-up pond. But you’ve got to have something, because you sure don’t want a fire getting loose in a tree tuft!”
Harp and Stevn had run out of strength. They settled into the foliage while Maxell continued to expose the stone ring. “What do we burn here?” he asked.
Stevn laughed. “What have we got plenty of?”
Burning branchlets threw an orange light through the Commons, a light kinder than the daylight pouring in from above. Maxell let it warm his hands. “Take a break,” he called to Harp, who had wandered away and was searching through foliage.
A head popped through the Commons floor. Dunninger looked around him and said, “Ah! A fire!” His hand rose too. “There are angel moles everywhere! I got these in a few minutes of just following the rustling.”
Maxell took the bundle: five narrow short-furred bodies. “Where’s Renho?”
“Underside. He still thinks he can catch a turkey or something.”
“That’d be good. Otherwise we could use a few more angel moles.”
Harp called, “Come back in half a day, we’ll have a bath.”
“Oh, lady-bard, that would go nicely!”
Maxell asked, “Won’t they want food and sleep first?”
Stevn said, “If we’re going to cook anything, we may want to dig out the bath and use it as a vat.”
Harp objected. “No, Stevn, the bath is important! It binds us together. For that matter, we should be clean before the refugees get down. Treefodder, where did they put it? Stevn?”