by Larry Niven
Clave sighed. “Pump?”
“Right. You pump while I do a checklist. Otherwise we’ll lose the pondlet when we go under thrust.”
Some pumping had been done, but megatons of water still nestled against the trunk. Clave ran the hose from the carm to the pondlet. The pump was a wheel and a tube and piston, all carved from hard branchwood. Clave braced his back and arms against the bark and kicked the wheel around with his feet on the spokes. “Help would be appreciated,” he grunted.
Gavving joined him.
The pump leaked. The pond didn’t dwindle fast, but it dwindled. They broke to drink thirstily, then resumed pumping. The sun had dropped from zenith to nadir—which at the midyear was not behind Voy, but north by three full degrees—when Jeffer poked his head through the airlock. “Stop! The tank’s full!”
Clave tossed his head to shake some of the sweat out of his hair.
“Come inside.” Jeffer ushered them forward to the front row of seats. “Strap down.”
He tapped, and vertical blue dashes appeared in the panel below the window. Four clusters of four each at the corners of a square, and a larger dash in the center. He tapped the central dash.
The sound within the cabin was like the roaring of wind at the treemouth. Clave felt a featherweight of tide and knew the tree was in motion.
Jeffer told them, “We’re already placed right, with the motor aimed west. We thrust eastward. That puts Citizens’ Tree in a wider orbit, so we slow down and drift west, away from the Clump.”
Clave wondered if he wanted to watch from outside. “Is it dangerous out there?”
“Could be. You don’t want to fall into the flame. Anyway, the view’s better in here.” Jeffer’s fingers danced, and the carm window sprouted five smaller windows. “The ventral view got ruined when we fell back into the Smoke Ring—”
“Jeffer, you don’t lecture this much unless you’re nervous. What’s wrong? We’ve moved the tree before.”
Gavving laughed. It appeared that he had a touch of nerves too. “Remember how twitchy we were then? Merril was sure we’d break the tree apart and kill ourselves.”
Clave shrugged. He went aft and braced himself in the airlock.
What remained of the pondlet stretched itself out from the trunk, then broke into one big drop and a line of little ones. The mother pond they’d robbed twenty-two sleeps ago drifted west. The sun passed Voy and began to climb. A fat triple-finned bird, dead west by a klomter or three, suddenly went into an epileptic seizure, split into three slender birds, and scattered. Clave was late in understanding what he’d seen: a triune family suddenly washed by the invisible heat of the carm’s exhaust.
Clave went in and strapped down again.
He had been anticipating Lawri’s arrival for some time, but the carm’s roar covered her entry. He turned to see her halfway up the aisle…and Debby behind her. And Ryllin. And Booce and Carlot. Clave fumbled to release the buckle that bound him to the chair.
It took too long. He was between Jeffer and Gavving, with Lawri behind him. He sighed. “What’s it all about?”
Jeffer’s fingers danced. The board went blank. He said, “We can fight or we can talk. Or we can talk and then fight, but there’s only one of you. Clave. Cripple me and Lawri flies the carm.”
Call for help? If he could get past Jeffer to use Voice, the elevator would still take a day to get up…forget it. Voice connected to the silver suit, which Rather was now pulling headfirst through the airlock.
It would have felt good to hit somebody. Clave said, “I’ll be good. Now what’s it all about?”
“We’re going to visit the Admiralty,” Jeffer said.
Rather and Booce were moving things inside: two smoked turkeys, a huge amount of foliage, water pods.
“All of us?”
“Not you. Clave. Lawri’s staying too. Citizens’ Tree needs a Chairman and a Scientist.”
“How did you decide—”
There was a bit of an edge in Lawri’s voice. “We knew one of us would have to stay. Now I’ve missed my time of blood. I’m hosting a guest. I wondered why the copsik was being so affectionate.”
“You should all be staying. You’re taking the carm?”
“The carm, the silver suit, and the pipe from Logbearer.”
They all looked very serious. The background roar prompted Clave to ask, “Are you planning to set the tree moving first? Or was that a lie too?”
“We’ll give you a day’s thrust,” Jeffer said. “No more. I won’t be here to decelerate you, and I want to be able to find you again.”
“With what? Would London Tree have let you keep the carm? The Admiralty won’t either!”
Patiently Gavving said, “We’ve talked that over. We won’t take the carm into the Clump. They’ll never know it exists. Jeffer will hide the carm somewhere. The rest of us will go in as loggers, with Booce and Ryllin to show us how.”
Clave’s mind was racing. “Now listen to me. Will you listen?”
“Yes, Chairman.”
“First, are you all volunteers? Rather, how did they suck you into this?”
“They can’t go without the silver suit,” the boy said.
“Oh, they’d go. Wouldn’t you, Jeffer?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going anyway,” Rather said.
He didn’t look like he’d change his mind. Rather didn’t even bother to argue, though the boy was good at that. Clave knew how he would enlist a fourteen-year-old boy. Put him in the silver suit, call him the Silver Man, offer him status and adventure…“Carlot?”
“I’m going home,” the girl said defiantly.
“Debby?” But a glance told Clave he’d lost that battle. Debby was fiercely happy. He hadn’t seen her like this since the War of London Tree. “What about Anthon?”
Debby said, “I never told him. Jeffer, I did get him talking. He likes Citizens’ Tree just fine and he doesn’t want any changes. Have you noticed how fat he’s getting?”
“Too bad,” Jeffer said.
Clave said, “Stet. I accept that you’re going to do this. I’ve heard your speeches, and you’ve heard mine, and the treemouth can have them both. But don’t you see that this will tear Citizens’ Tree apart? It’s mutiny. Hold it! I mean it’s mutiny the way you’ve planned it. If we don’t fix that. Citizens’ Tree will never recover. It’s got to look better than it does.”
The mutineers looked at each other.
“Here’s how it’s got to be,” said Clave. “First, I’m going. Gavving isn’t. You said it and you’re right. The tree needs a Chairman and it’s Gavving.”
Gavving said, “That’s silly. You’re—”
“I’m the treefeeding Chairman, and if I go the expedition is official. Besides that, I’ve got to see to it that you return the carm and the silver suit. The citizens would be crazy to settle for less. I hereby appoint you my Chairman Pro Tem until I return.”
Coolly Gavving asked, “Anything else?”
“Yes. You don’t get both Booce and Ryllin. One of them stays. There has to be some reason for the Serjents to bring us home.”
“We can’t do that,” Ryllin said. “Booce takes care of Logbearer. I take care of business. I do all the buying and selling. Anyone who sees one of us in the Clump will expect to see us both.”
Clave was massaging the lump on his thigh. Sometimes that helped him think. Think! “The citizens you deal with, the…merchants? If they deal with Booce, what will happen?”
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? Gavving, 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. Gavving, are you willing?”
“Treefodder. Well, it’ll probably keep Minya from 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 cotton-candy 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 small, withered 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 telescope 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!”
