by Larry Niven
Smitta had pulled herself against the trunk and was readying her weapons. “I fought a triune once. They’re smarter than swordbirds. You can scare them off. Just remember, if we kill one, we’ll have to kill all three.”
The torpedo-shaped object was closer now. It was nearly the blue of the sky, slowly rotating. Six big eyes showed in turn around the circumference, and three great gauzy fins…one smaller than the other. That would be the juvenile. Minya whispered, “What do we need?”
“Bows and arrows ready? Tether your arrow and scoop up some burning old-man’s-hair on the point. Lucky we had a fire going. Know where your jet pods are, you may need them.”
Minya could feel her heart pulsing in her throat. It was her second trip up the trunk…but Smitta and Sal had been up many times. They were tough and experienced. Sal was a burly, red-haired forty-year-old who had joined the Triune Squad at age twelve. Smitta had been born a man; she was a woman by courtesy.
Stay clear of Smitta, Minya told herself. Smitta was slow to anger, but under pressure something could snap in her mind. Then Smitta fought like a berserker, even among her own, and the only way to at her was to pile on her.
Minya strung her hardwood bow and used an arrow point to dig a gob of burning fungus. Ready—?
The torpedo split in three. Three slender torpedoes flapped lazily toward them, showing small lateral fins and violent-orange bellies. A male and a female, forever mated, plus a single juvenile who would take on body mass fast, then mature more slowly. They divided only to hunt or fight. The Triune Squad itself was named for the triune family’s interdependence.
The juvenile would be the smallest, the one hanging back a little. Two adults swept forward.
“Aim for the male,” Smitta said and loosed, the line trailing out behind the arrow. Which was male? Minya waited a moment to judge Smitta’s target, then loosed her own weapon. She judged that they weren’t in range yet…and she was right; the male’s body ripped him free of the arrows’ paths, while the female bored in. Sal had held back. Now she loosed, and the veering female caught an arrow in her fin.
She bellowed. She flapped once, and the arrow snapped free. Sal appeared from the smoke, yanked into the sky. It didn’t seem to bother her as she reeled in, her ancient metal bow slung safe over her shoulder. The smoldering old-man’s-hair had been left on the female’s tail, a she was flapping madly.
Smitta sent a tethered arrow winging at the juvenile.
Both adults screamed. The female tried to block the arrow. Too slow. The juvenile didn’t seem to see the arrow coming. Smitta yanked at the line and stopped it a meter short.
The female gaped.
The women were reeling frantically, but it wasn’t necessary. The adults moved in alongside the infant, infinitely graceful. Small hands reached out from their orange bellies to pull them together. They moved away like a single blurred blue ghost against the blue sky.
“See? They’re smart. You can reason with them,” Smitta said.
Sal pulled a teardrop-shaped jet pod from one of the cluster of pockets that ran down and across the front of her tunic. She twisted the tip. A cloud of seeds and mist spurted away from her, thrusting Sal back toward the bark.
She coiled line and stowed her weapons, including the valuable bow. Springy metal, it was, handed down from old to young within the Triune Squad for at least two hundred years. “Well done, troops, but I think the fire is getting to the wood. I wish Thanya would get here. She couldn’t have missed us, could she?”
To Minya’s eye, the fire might have reached wood by now, or not. Hard to tell where old-man’s-hair shaded over into rotted wood. “It’s not bad yet,” she said.
“I hate to waste jet pods, but…treefodder. I want to look for them,” Sal decided. She gathered her legs under her, hands gripping the bark to brace herself, and jumped. She waved her arms to flip herself around until she could see the trunk. They watched her drift along the trunk, out toward Dalton-Quinn Tuft.
“She worries too much,” Smitta said.
Seventy days had passed since Clave’s citizens had departed Quinn Tuft.
The tree fed a myriad parasites, and the parasites fed Clave’s team. They had killed another nose-arm, easily, chopping through its nose, then jabbing harpoons into its den. There were patches of fan fungus everywhere. Merril had slept a full eight days after eating from the red fringe of a fan fungus. The subsequent throbbing headache didn’t seem to affect her climbing, and presently it went away. So the fan fungus served them as food, and they had found more of the shelled burrowers and other edibles…
The Grad saw it all as evidence of the tree’s decline.
They had found a jet pod bush, like a mass of bubbles on the bark. Clave had packed a dozen ripe pods in a pouch of scraped nose-arm hide.
They had taken to camping just outside the water-washed wood. Clave laughed and admitted that they should have been doing that all along. They’d slept three times more on the tree: last night in a nose-arm’s den, twice before in deep wounds in the wood, cracks overgrown with “fuzz” that had to be burned out first. The char had turned their clothing black.
They had learned not to try to boil water. The bubbles just foamed it out in a hot, expanding mass.
Tidal gravity continued to decrease until they were almost floating up the trunk. Merril loved it. Recovering from the fan fungus hadn’t changed that. You couldn’t fall; you’d just yell for help, and someone would presently throw you a line. Glory loved it, and Alfin smiled sometimes.
But there were penalties. Now water had grown scarce too. There was no wind this high, and thus no leeward stream of water. Sometimes you found wet wood, wet enough to lick dry. There was water in fan fungus flesh.
Here was the DQ mark Jinny had found. Good: it looked nearly clean. And half a klomter farther up the trunk, a fan-shape showed like a white hand against the sky. It must be huge. The Grad pointed. “Dinner?”
Clave said, “We’ll find smaller ones around it.”
“But wouldn’t it look grand,” Merril asked, “coming into the Commons?”
The Grad was pulling himself toward the tribal mark when Clave said, “Hold it.”
“What?”
“This mark isn’t overgrown like the others were. Grad, doesn’t it look funny to you? Tended?”
“There’s some fuzz growing, but maybe not enough.” Then the Grad was close enough to see the real discrepancy. “There’s no takeout mark. Citizens, this isn’t Quinn territory.”
Gavving and Jiovan had been left behind to tend the smokefire.
Hard-learned lessons showed here. Bark torn from the rim of a patch of fuzz served as fuel. Healthy bark resisted fire. A circle of coals surrounded the meat, all open to the fitful breezes. A sheltered fire wouldn’t burn. The smoke wouldn’t rise; it would stay to smother the fire. Even here in the open, the smoke hovered in a squirming cloud. The heat of burning stayed in the smoke, so the fire didn’t need to be large. Gavving and Jiovan stayed well back. A shift in the breeze could smother an incautious citizen.
The meat should be rotated soon. It was Gavving’s turn, but it didn’t have to be done instantly.
“Jiovan?”
“What?”
Even Gavving wouldn’t ask Jiovan how he lost his leg—nobody would; but one thing about that tale had bothered him for years. And he asked.
“Why were you hunting alone, that day? Nobody hunts alone.”
“I did.”
“Okay.” Topic closed. Gavving drew his harpoon. He pulled air into his lungs, then lunged into the smoke. Half-blind, he reached over the coals with the harpoon butt to turn the nose-arm legs—one, two, three. He yanked hard on his line to pull himself into open air. Smoke came with him, and he took an instant to fan it away before he drew breath.
Jiovan was looking in, past the small green tuft that had once enclosed his life, into the bluish white spark that was Voy. His head came up, and Gavving faced a murderous glare. “This isn’t something I’d want told aro
und.”
Gavving waited.
“All right. I’ve got…I had a real gift for sarcasm, they tell me. When I was leading a hunt…well, the boys were there to learn, of course, and I was there to teach. If someone made a mistake, I left him in no doubt.”
Gavving nodded.
“Pretty soon they were giving me nothing but the fumblers. I couldn’t stand it, so I started hunting alone.”
“I shouldn’t have asked. It used to bother me.”
“Forget it.”
Gavving was trying to forget something else entirely. This last sleep period he had wakened to find three citizens missing. He’d followed a sound…and watched Clave and Jayan and Jinny moor lines to the bark, and leap outward, and make babies while they drifted.
What lived in his head now was lust and envy balanced by fear of Clave’s wrath or Jinny’s scorn (for he had fixed on Jinny as marginally lovelier.) He might as well dream. Any serious potential mate was back in Quinn Tuft, and Gavving couldn’t offer anyway; he hadn’t the wealth or the years.
That would change, of course. He would return (of course) as a hero (of course!). As for the Chairman’s wrath…he hadn’t been able to send Harp. Possibly Clave could have resisted him too. If they could end the famine, the Chairman could do nothing; they would be heroes.
Gavving could have his choice of mates—
“So I was hunting alone,” Jiovan said, “the day Glory busted open the turkey pen.”
For an instant Gavving couldn’t imagine what Jiovan was talking about. Then he smiled. “Harp’s told that tale.”
“I’ve heard him. I was down under the branch that day, with one line to tether me and another loose, nibbling a little foliage with my head sticking down into the sky, you know, just waiting. It was full night at the New Year’s occlusion. The sun was a wide bright patch shining up at me, and Voy drifting right across the center.
“Here came a turkey, flapping against the wind, still moving pretty fast, and backward. I put a net on my free line, quick, and threw it. The turkey’s caught. Here comes another one. I’ve got more nets, and in two breaths I’ve got a turkey on each end. But here come two more, then four, and they’re coming from above, and by now I can guess they’re ours. I throw the end of the line I’m moored to, and I get a third turkey—”
“Good throwing,” Gavving said.
“Oh, sure, there wasn’t anything wrong with my throwing that day. But the sky was full of turkeys, and most of them were going to get away, and I still thought it was kind of hilarious.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why I never told this story before.”
Gavving suddenly guessed what was coming. “I can live with it if you don’t want to finish.”
“No, that’s okay. It was funny,” Jiovan said seriously. “But the sky was full of turkeys, and a triune family came to do something about all that meat on the wing. They split up and went after the loose turkeys. There wasn’t a thing I could do but pull in my three.”
Jiovan certainly wasn’t smiling now. “The male went after one of my turkeys. Swallowed it whole and tried to swim away. It got the wrong line…picture one end of a line spiked deep in the branch, and that massive beast pulling on the other, and me in a loop in the middle. I suddenly saw what was happening, and I pulled the loop open and tried to jump out, and the loop snicked shut and my leg was ripped almost off and I was falling into the sky.”
“Treefodder.”
“I thought I was treefodder, all right. Remember, I still had a line in my hands? But with a turkey on each end, flapping like crazy, and I was falling. I tried throwing a turkey, I really did, I thought it might get caught in the branchlets, but it didn’t.
“Meanwhile the triune male’s been caught by something, and it doesn’t know what. It pulls back against the line and feels a tug in its belly and throws up. I think that’s what must have happened. All I know is something smacks me in the face, and it’s a dead turkey covered with goo, and I grab it—I hug it to me with all my heart and climb the line back into the tuft.”
Gavving was afraid to laugh.
“Then I tie off what’s left of my leg. What’s hanging loose, I had to cut off. Well, kid, did Harp ever tell you a story like that?”
“No. Treefodder, he’d love it! Oh.”
“He’d make me famous. I don’t want to be famous that way.”
Gavving chewed it over. “Why tell me now?”
“I don’t know. My turn,” Jiovan said suddenly. He filled his lungs and disappeared into the smoke.
Gavving felt burdened. Always he asked too many questions. He grinned guiltily, picturing Jiovan trying to throw a line with a turkey flapping at each end. But what if Jiovan regretted telling it?
He saw Clave appear from behind the curve of the trunk.
Jiovan emerged, bringing smoke, and Gavving held his breath while it cleared. Jiovan coughed a little. “It’s been so long,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t hurt as much. Maybe I just wanted to tell it. Maybe I had to.”
“They’re coming back,” Gavving said. “I wonder what’s got them so excited?”
Clave bellowed, “I will not go home without learning something about them!”
“I know quite a lot about them,” the Grad answered. “We all lived in the far tuft once. The Quinns left after some kind of disagreement. Before that, it was Dalton-Quinn Tribe.”
“Then they’re relatives.”
The argument had grown a little less chaotic, but only because half the troop was trailing back. It was no less vehement. Alfin shouted, “You’re not listening. They kicked us out! For all we know, they think they’re still at war with us!”
The Grad said, “Clave, the tribemarks are tended, and we aren’t finding as many fan fungi lately, or the shelled things either. I’m thinking they keep this stretch of trunk clean. They must be still around. Our move is to get out of here!”
“You want to run from something you haven’t even seen!”
“We saw the tribal insignia,” the Grad said. “DQ. No takeout mark across the Q. Maybe they still call themselves Dalton-Quinn. What does that make us? Intruders on their tree? We’ve passed the meridian anyway, we’re in their space. Clave, let’s go home. Kill another nose-arm, pick some fan fungus and one of the shells, and go home with plenty of food.” Clave was shaking his head. “The tribe won’t have to go thirsty any more either! We bring water from the trunk.—”
Clave waved it away. “That water would get to the tuft anyway. No. I want to meet the Daltons. It’s been hundreds of years, we don’t know what they’re like…maybe they know better tending methods for the earthlife, or ways to get water. Maybe they grow food we never heard of. Something. ’Day, Jiovan.”
“’Day. What’s going on?”
“We found a tribemark and it isn’t ours. The question before the citizenry is, do we say hello before going home? Or do we just run?”
The Grad jumped in. “Don’t you see, we can’t fight and we can’t negotiate! We’ve got one good fighter, and two cripples and a boy and four women and a treemouth tender, and all of us thrown out of Quinn Tuft, we can’t even make promises—”
Clave broke in. “Alfin, you’re for leaving too?”
“Yes.”
“Jiovan?”
“What are we running from?”
“Maybe nothing. That mark wasn’t tended for a long time. Treefodder, the drought could have killed them off! We could settle the far tuft—”
Merril broke in, though she was puffing from the climb. “Oh no. If everyone died there…we won’t want to…go anywhere near it. Sickness.”
“Are you for going back or going on?”
“I don’t…back, I guess, but…let’s get that…big fan fungus first. Wouldn’t that impress the citizens! And smoke another nose-arm…if we can. Far as that goes…we know there’s meat to be hunted on the trunk. We should tell the Chairman that.”
“Jayan? Jinny?”
“She makes sens
e,” Jinny said, and Jayan nodded.
“Gavving?”
“No opinion.”
“Treefodder. Glory?”
“Go back,” Glory said. “I haven’t tasted foliage in days and days.”
Clave sighed. “If I was sure I was right, we’d go on. Aaall right.” His voice became fuller, more resonant. “We’ll have enough to carry anyway, what with the giant fan and whatever meat we find. Citizens, we’ve done very well for ourselves and Quinn Tuft. We go home as heroes. Now, I don’t want to lose anyone on the way down, so don’t take the tide for granted! It’ll get stronger with every klomter. Most of the way down we’ll need lines for the meat and the fan fungus—”
Their goals had become Clave’s own. Gavving noticed, and remembered.
The flashers had come back. Minya watched them at their mating dance. Two males strutted before the same female with their wing-cloaks spread wide, and the female’s head snapped back and forth almost too fast to see. Decisions decisions—
“Something’s been worrying you, woman.”
—Decisions. Was it any of Smitta’s business? Minya made a swift decision: she had to talk to someone, or burst. “I’ve started wondering if—if I’m right for the Triune Squad.”
Smitta showed shock. “Really? You were eager enough to join eight years ago. What’s changed?”
“I don’t know.”
But she did, and suddenly Smitta did too. “Don’t talk to Sal about this. She wouldn’t understand.”
“I was only fourteen.”
“You looked older…more mature. And maybe the loveliest recruit we ever got.”
Minya grimaced. “Every man in the tuft wanted to make babies with me. I must have heard every possible way of saying that. I just didn’t want to do that with anyone. Smitta, that’s what the Triune Squad is for!”
“I know. What would I be without the Triune Squad? A woman born as a man, a man who wants to be a woman…”
“Do you ever want—” What was the right word? Not make babies, not for Smitta.
“I used to,” Smitta said. “With Risher—he was a lot prettier once—and lately with Mik, the Huntmaster’s boy.” Minya flinched. Maybe Smitta noticed. “We give all that up when we join. You just have to hold it inside. You know that.”
