The Smoke Ring t-2

by Larry Niven

The tree still burned. Fire had eaten six or seven klomters in from the midpoint along the lee side, progressing alongside the waterfall channel, where there was partial protection from the wind. The flames streamed east like the mane of a skyhorse. At the midpoint there were only red patches glowing in black char. In the center of the burn was a prominent uneven lump. Jeffer eased the CARM toward that.

  Clave said, “I don’t understand why it hasn’t come apart.”

  Anthon nodded uneasily. Jeffer said, “ It’ s a short tree. With a tuft missing it’s even shorter. Tide would pull harder on a grown tree, but that thing could still come apart while we’re on it. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

  Anthon asked, “Why do trees come apart?”

  “They do it when they’re dying,” Clave said.

  Jeffer said, “When a tree drifts too far away from the Smoke Ring median, it starves. It saves itself by coming i apart. The tide takes half of it out, half in. One half falls back to where the water and fertilizer are. The other half…dies, I guess.”

  “I still don’t see any bugs,” Clave said. “It’s the bugs that eat a tree apart, isn’t it? The tree isn’t getting fed, so the bark lets the bugs get inside—”

  “I don’t know everything, Clave.”

  “Pity.”

  They were close enough now to make out black lumps at the center of the charred region. There: a shape like a huge seed pod split open from inside. There: a thin shell of char, a bell shape not unlike the fire-spitting nostrils at the CARM’s aft end. A ridge of white ash joined the bell to the split pod. Beyond: several fragile sheets of charred wood, the remains of an oblong hut with interior walls.

  Clave reached for the wings he’d bound to cargo hooks.

  “Scientist, can you hold the CARM here? We’ll go see what there is to see. If the tree breaks in half, you’ll still have us tethered.” Jeffer stifled a protest. He ached to explore that ruined structure, but — “I can handle it. Take lines too.” The sun would be dead east in a few tens of breaths.

  A stick protruded from the butt end of each fan-shaped wing. After some experimentation they settled for lining the stick along their shins and binding them with the straps. The wings tended to hang up on things even when folded. Clave and Anthon wriggled through the airlock and flapped into the sky.

  Jeffer tapped the white button. “Prikazyvat Voice,” he said.

  The CARM said, “Ready, Jeffer the Scientist.”

  Clave and Anthon fluttered erratically through the air.

  Suddenly Anthon moved purposefully toward the blister of charred machinery, moving easily, as if he had always been a bird. Clave moved after him, fighting a tendency to veer left.

  They swept away the white ash that lay between the bell and the tank. The ash enclosed them in cloud. When the cloud dispersed, they had exposed a length of tube and a loose webbing of metal strands around it.

  “Kendy for the State. Hello, Jeffer.”

  Jeffer didn’t jump. “Hello, Kendy. What do you make of all this?”

  “You’d know more about the injured plant than I. I’ve been studying the machinery.” Within the bow window the metal strands and the enclosed pipe began blinking, an outline of red light. “These, the pipe and the chicken wire, are metal. The ruptured tank—” another blinking outline “—appears to have been a large seed pod. The cone is half of a similar seed pod. The ash around the pipe appears to be wood ash.

  “We’re looking at a steam rocket, Jeffer. Your invaders used a wood fire to heat the pipe. They ran water through the pipe and into the nozzle. Very inefficient, but in your peculiar environment they could move a tree with that. Slowly, of course.”

  “Why would they pick an injured tree?”

  “Ask them. Did any survive?”

  “One’s dead. Five more are in bad shape. My wife won’t let me near them. Wait a few days and see.”

  Clave and Anthon flew along the split in the great tank.

  They reached the cluster of black oblongs at the other end.

  The Checker said, “Their wounds won’t become infected. We didn’t bring disease bacteria.”

  “What?”

  “I was thinking aloud. I want to talk to your invaders. Take them on a tour, Jeffer, when they’re ready. Show them the CARM.”

  “Kendy, I’m not sure I want them to know about you.”

  “I will observe only.”

  Clave and Anthon were flapping back to the CARM.

  They carried blackened cargo, and they no longer wore tethers. “Company coming,” Jeffer said.

  “Jeffer, you’ve concealed your contact with me from the rest of your tribe, haven’t you?”

  “I haven’t mentioned it to them yet.”

  “I’ll keep my silence while others are aboard. Play the game any way you like.”

  Clave and Anthon returned black with soot. They untied the now-clumsy wings, then wiggled in, pushing armfuls of blackened salvage ahead of them. Clave crowed, “I love it! It’s really flying!”

  “You never did like tide, did you, Clave? How’s the leg?”

  “It never gets any better.” Clave flexed his right leg.

  The misshapen lump on his thighbone bulged beneath the skin and muscle. The compound fracture he’d suffered in Carther States had healed, but in the jungle there had been no tide to tell the bone to stop growing. “It feels like I strained it. If I have to fly any distance I’ll use just one wing.”

  They set to mooring their loot along the walls. Two tremendous hooks, wood stiffened with metal. A meter’s length of metal band with tiny teeth along one edge. A hardwood tube had kept its shape if not its strength; the remnants of charred plastic hose clung to one end.

  “Weapons and tools,” Clave said. “There was wire twisted together like a harebrain net, but it was burned through in too many places. Nothing else worth taking except the pipe. We’ve got to have that pipe. We moored the lines to it, Jeffer. Let’s pull it loose.”

  “It must be important, given that you’ve moored the CARM to a tree that’s about to come apart. Why? Just because it’s metal?”

  “I’ve got a vague idea what this setup is for,” Clave said. “We could duplicate everything except the pipe, in theory anyway. The pipe isn’t just metal, it’s starstuff, something out of the old science.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “We couldn’t find a seam,” Anthon said. “It gleams when you rub away the soot. Clave, I’m not sure I like any of this. Jeffer’s right, that tree could come apart and throw us spinning across the sky, and for what? Wings, sure, those are wonderful, but the rest of this is just weird!”

  Clave the Chairman said, “Pull that pipe out. Scientist.”

  Anthon fumed and was silent. Jeffer said, “Strap down. Let’s hope the tethers hold.”

  Under attitude jets the CARM shuddered and lurched.

  Then six meters of metal pipe two hundred ce’meters across pulled loose in a cloud of ash.

  When Anthon and Clave went out to retrieve it, Jeffer went too. They watched, grinning, while he thrashed and spun; and suddenly he was flying, kicking stiff-legged across the sky like any swordbird.

  They bound the pipe up against the hull and took the CARM back to Citizens Tree. The burning tree continued to drift west and in.

  Lawri kept the citizens away from her hut for five days, a full waking-sleeping cycle. That became impossible when she sent Rather for food. Rather came back with waterbird stew, and Clave, Jeffer, Gavving, Minya, Debby, Jayan, Jinny, Mark, Jill, and a host of children.

  She kept them outside while the strangers ate. Then she and Jeffer pulled the hut’s entrance apart. It could be rebuilt later.

  The man named himself: Booce Serjent. He shaped his words strangely. He named the others: his wife Ryllin, and their daughters Mishael, Karilly, and Carlot.

  “We’ve delayed the funeral until you’re strong enough,” Clave said. “Can you make yourself discuss funeral practices?”

 
; Booce shrugged painfully. “We cremate. The ashes go into the earthlife tanks. What do you do here?”

  “The dead go to feed the tree.”

  “All right. Chairman Clave, what has happened to Logbearer?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Logbearer is our ship. You saw a burning tree? The fire started around Logbearer, in the middle.”

  “We went there. We brought back a metal pipe and some other stuff.”

  “You saved the main feed pipe! How?”

  “We used the CARM. It’s an old starstuff relic, still working. We use it to move the tree.”

  Booce smiled and sighed and seemed about to drift off to sleep.

  Lawri asked, “What are you? Carlot said loggers.”

  “Let him alone. I’m awake.” The older woman sounded tired. “I’m Ryllin. Yes, we’re loggers. We take lumber back to the Clump and sell it there.”

  Chairman Clave asked, “You mean there are men in there?”

  Ryllin’s laugh chopped off as if it had hurt her. “More than a thousand. With children, near two thousand.”

  “Thousands. Huh. And you move trees. Don’t you have trees in the Clump?”

  “No. The tide’s wrong.”

  “How do you move a tree?”

  “You cut off one tuft. Then the wind only blows on the other tuft. Booce generally takes us west, so of course we want the log to go east. So we cut the in tuft. The wind pushes just on the out tuft, so it pushes the tree west, and that slows it down. The tree drops closer to Voy and speeds up—”

  The children and some adults were looking confused.

  We taught them this! Lawri thought angrily. West takes you in. Pushing a tree against the Smoke Ring’s rotation — west — would drop it closer to Voy. Lower orbits were faster orbits. The tree would move east toward the Clump.

  “ — But of course we need the rocket too,” Ryllin was saying. “A rocket is a tank of water, and a nozzle, and a metal pipe with a fire around it. You run water through the pipe. The steam sprays away from where you want to go. Without the pipe there’s no Log bearer. You understand reaction effects?”

  The citizens looked at each other. Children understood the law of reaction before they could speak!

  Ryllin said, “Well, when you get to the Clump you sever the other tuft and work the log to a mooring with the steam rocket. Then you have to sell it. We’ve done it all our lives. But the pipefire got away from us… Lawri? I’m tired.”

  Gavving said, “Sell?”

  “Forget it, Ryllin. Everybody out,” Lawri ordered.

  “Chairman, can you move them?”

  The citizens drifted away in clumps of heated discussion.

  Four sleeps after reaching Citizens Tree, all of the Serjents were on their feet. Various citizens volunteered to lead them about. They moved tentatively, slowed by healing burns and unaccustomed to tide. Tb tently, and spoke in vowel-twisting aecen words…but for Karilly, who huddled ck of her family, silent.

  Booce and his family came back tired. It was primitive, and roomy, and oddly beautiful. These citizens had managed well with so little.

  Lawri the Scientist looked them over ai well enough to attend a funeral.

  Chapter Four

  The In Tuft

  from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 7 SM:

  INTEGRAL TREES

  …THESE INTEGRAL TREES GROW TO TREMENDOUS SIZE. WHEN SUCH A PLANT REACHES ITS FULL GROWTH, IT STABILIZES BY TIDAL EFFECT. IT FORMS A LONG, SLENDER TRUNK TUFTED WITH GREEN AT BOTH ENDS: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF RADIAL SPOKES CIRCLING LEVOY’S STAR, EACH SCORES OF KILOMETERS LONG.

  LIKE MANY PLANTS OF THE SMOKE RING, THE INTEGRAL TREE IS A SOIL COLLECTOR. THE ENDPOINTS ARE SUBJECTTO TIDAL GRAVITY. AND WIND’ THE TUFTS ARE IN A PERPETUAL WIND, BLOWING FROM THE WEST AT THE INNER TUFT AND FROM THE EAST AT THE OUTER TUFT. THE TIDE-ORIENTED TRUNK BOWS TO THE WINDS, CURVING INTO A SINGLE, NEARLY HORIZONTAL BRANCH AT EACH END, GIVING IT THE APPEARANCE OF AN INTEGRATION SIGN. THE TUFTS SIFT FERTILIZER FROM THE WIND: SOIL, WATER, EVEN ANIMALS AND PLANTS SMASHED BY IMPACT.

  FREE-FALL CONDITIONS PREVAIL EVERYWHERE EXCEPT IN THE INTEGRAL TREES. THE MEDICAL DANGERS OF LIFE IN FREE-FALL ARE WELL KNOWN. IF DISCIPLINE HAS INDEED ABANDONED US, IF WE ARE INDEED MAROONED WITHIN THIS WEIRD ENVIRONMENT, WE COULD DO WORSE THAN TO SETTLE THE TUFTS OF THE INTEGRAL TREES…

  — CLAIRE DALTON, SOCIOLOGY/MEDICINE

  FOLIAGE FRAMED HALF A WORLD OF SKY.

  The treemouth faced west, at the junction between branch and trunk. Spine branches migrated west along the branch, carrying whatever their foliage had picked up from the wind, to be swallowed by the conical pit. Citizens came too, to feed the tree. The treemouth was their toilet, their garbage disposal, and their cemetery.

  Lawri the Scientist had described all of this in advance.

  Booce tried to tell himself that it made sense; it was reasonable in context; it only took getting used to.

  Wend had been placed at the lip of the pit. She’d had time to ride the spine branches halfway into the cone of the treemouth. Booce was glad that he could not see her better.

  Burning was cleaner. Reducing the body to ashes burned away memories too…

  How was Karilly taking it?

  Karilly was the quiet one. She obeyed orders, but rarely showed initiative. She almost never spoke to strangers. A good child, but Booce had never really understood her.

  She hadn’t been burned. All of them had watched Wend die; how could it be worse for Karilly? But she hadn’t spoken a word since the fire.

  Chairman Clave spoke, welcoming Wend into the tribe. Lawri spoke of a citizen’s last duty, to feed the tree.

  Ryllin spoke her memories of her lost daughter. Karilly cried silently; the tears sheathed her eyes in crystal.

  Older citizens ate first. Booce saw his daughters hanging back — they had learned that much already — while a Citizens Tree girl-child filled his bowl with waterbird stew from a large, crude ceramic pot. He lurched away across the woven-spine-branch floor of the commons, following his wife, trying to keep his bowl upright.

  “You think of the tide as something to fight,” his wife said softly. “Think of it as a convenience.”

  “Hah.”

  “Tide gives you a preferred direction. Something to push against. Look.” With the bowl held in one hand, Ryllin leapt one-legged into the air and spun in a slow circle before her feet touched the floor again. She hadn’t spilled a drop.

  “Moving isn’t unpleasant in a tide, it’s just different. These, ah, citizens make us look clumsy, but we can adjust, love. We will adjust.”

  “Stet. I’ve climbed trees all my life…Company.”

  They were surrounded by children. A pudgy halfgrown girl said, “How do you move a tree without a CARM?”

  Booee said, “Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  A dozen children waited patiently while Booce and Ryllin nested themselves in foliage. Then they all settled at once.

  Booce thought while he ate. He said, “You need a rocket. My rocket was Logbearer, and it was my father’s rocket before me. To make a rocket you need a rocket.”

  One asked, “How did anyone build the first rocket?”

  Booce smiled at the dwarf boy. “The first rocket was given by Discipline. It had a mind — the Library — and the Admiralty still has that, with more knowledge in it than you’ll find in your little cassettes. Anyway, you’ve got to have a rocket so you can get to the pod groves.”

  A woman of Booce’s own size settled within earshot.

  Booce pretended not to notice. “The biggest pod you can find in the pod grove becomes your water tank. You cut another pod in half and it’s your rocket nozzle. You run the pipe into the stem end. You wrap sikenwire around the pipe to hold the firebark. You light the firebark. You pump water through the hot pipe and it turns to steam and goes racing out the nozzle, and that pushes you the other way.”

  The pudgy girl (though all the children looked a bit pudgy, well
fed and compressed by tide) asked, “Where does pipe come from?”

  “I don’t know. Discipline, maybe, if there ever was a Discipline.” The children snickered. Booce didn’t know why, so he ignored it. “There’s a hundred and twenty meters of pipe in the Empire, so they tell me, and fortyeight of that makes up the pipes in eleven logging ships. Woodsman carried a spare pipe, but they’re richer than we are.

  “So. A rocket is one and a half pods, and a pipe, and some sikenwire, and the hut complex at the other end of the tank. You need big hooks for towing, saws to carve up wood, and crossbows, because you’ve got to find your own food. A trip takes a year or two. Most of us travel in families.

  “Now you find a sting jungle. The honey hornets live in the sting jungles, and there’s nothing so big they can’t kill it. You need to cover yourself all over to get at the nest. Honey is sticky red stuff, sweeter than foliage.

  “Now you pick a tree. If it’s more than forty klomters long, the wood’ll be too coarse and you’ll be forever coming home. Thirty’s about right. You moor your rocket at the midpoint, but you don’t use it yet. You paint a line of honey down the trunk to one of the tufts. Then you gash the bark in a circle above the tuft, and paint honey along that. You know the bugs that eat a tree apart if it starts to die?”

  Heads nodded. The Serjents had been told of the death of Dalton-Quinn Tree. Children must hear that tale early.

  Booce said, “The bugs follow the honey down. They eat the honey above the tuft. Then they’re stuck, because they’ve eaten all the honey. There’s nothing left to eat but wood. After a few sleeps the tuft drops off.”

  There were sounds of dismay. “We don’t use occupied trees, you know,” Booce said gently. “The tree would die anyway when it gets near the Clump. Integral trees want a straightforward tidal pull, straight through Voy.”

  The pudgy girl asked a little coldly, “How many trees have you killed?” Booce saw that she was almost an adult. Her height had fooled him: the tide had stunted her growth.

  “Ten.”

  The dwarf (an adult too, with beard beginning to sprout) asked, “Why do you cut off the tuft?”