The Smoke Ring t-2

by Larry Niven

  They couldn’t hear him. He couldn’t really suffocate this fast, could he?

  Jeffer lifted the headpiece. “Listen first. Put your hand here.” He guided Rather’s fingers to a row of square buttons on the outside of the neck ring. He pushed one (colored lights lit below Rather’s chin), and another (air jetted inward from all around the neck ring). He used Rather’s fingertip to roll a small wheel back and forth (the air jets grew weaker, then stronger). “Close the helmet.”

  Rather did as Jeffer had shown him. Air from the neck ring hissed around his head.

  Clave was saying something inaudible. Jeffer guided Rather’s fingertip to another tiny wheel, and suddenly Clave’s voice was a roar. “ — use up the air? Does that thing have to be closed? We’re not going back out of the Smoke Ring again, are we?”

  “Let’s hope not. Rather, you’re leaking. Close that flap at your chest. The way Booce talks about honey hornets, you don’t want anything open.”

  Rather felt it out, then used finger pressure to close a snap he’d missed.

  Now he was being shown little wheels on his chest.

  He moved the left one experimentally. His left foot kicked upward and he was wheeling in the air, banging his head and elbow, snatching for a mooring loop while his other hand rolled the wheel back to zero. He banged both knees before he could stop his spin.

  Clave and Debbie were helpless with laughter. Jeffer had jumped clear. “Leave those alone while you’re inside! You fly with those. Now I’m going to walk you out the airlock. Play around with the jets. If you get in trouble we’ll come after you.”

  Rather braced himself in the airlock, feeling imprisoned. The sting jungle was a fat, fluffy ring half a klomter across, dark green around the outside, slowly rotating. The inner rim flamed in orange and scarlet. Rather, looking out through the airlock, saw motion there like jittery fog.

  Clave and Booce eased him into the sky.

  They couldn’t have any idea what the boy was going through, Kendy thought. How would they? None could fly the ancient pressure suit. Rather would have to be an agoraphile and an acrophile both.

  Kendy had explained the pressure suit with diagrams and pointers; but had he shown Jeffer how to replenish the suit’s oxygen and fuel? Replay that memory…no. Do that soon, if it wasn’t already too late. What Kendy was watching was already two hours past.

  But the CARM was in range again, and in present time the boy was aboard, and out of the suit, and still alive.

  Kendy kept the tape running:

  Debby and Clave hovered a safe distance away. The boy floundered. He was all over the sky, spinning, faster …slower, tilting himself back and sideways to slow the spin…learning to move arms and legs to change his attitude. He found the throttle dials and turned both jets to minimum. He circled the CARM, then arced off toward the green doughnut that Booce had made his target.

  Jeffer spoke through the suit radio. “Not yet. Rather. Come back. You don’t have anything to carry the, the, Booce?”

  “Honey.”

  “The honey. Booce, what does he need?”

  “That’s what the sacks are for.”

  Rather oriented toward the CARM, increased the thrust, doubled on himself for two seconds, then arched backward as he fell toward the airlock. Fir sprayed from his ankles, arcing forward. Nice, Kendy thought. Of course he wasn’t a complete novice. He’d flown with those giant swim-fin fans.

  The boy left his helmet open (but didn’t turn off the air jets!). Debby began strapping twelve coarse sacks to his back, got yelled at, and strapped them to his chest instead, where he could reach them. She used several loops of line. The savages were never without line, Kendy recalled. Good practice in a free-fall environment.

  In present time Rather was leaving the airlock again, and the signal was fading. Kendy waited.

  The great green torus became landscape as Rather came near. It was darker than integral tree foliage, and fluffy, finely divided to catch as much sunlight as possible. Scarlet and orange peeked over the curve, becoming clearer. Orange hom shapes, rocket-nostril shapes, quite pretty. Thousands of them.

  The jittering mist cleared too: not steam roiled by wind, but myriads of particles swirling round the blossoms, dipping in and out. Now the motes abandoned the horn shapes and streamed toward Rather.

  They were all around him, a humming black cloud of rage.

  “Scientist? I’m in the center. I can hardly see. The honey hornets are—”

  “Look for red,” said Booce’s voice.

  Orange and scarlet. Orange horns the size of drinking gourds, and scarlet of another shape. Rather jetted closer.

  The honey hornets came with him. Thousands of thumb-sized birds: tiny harpoon for a nose, invisible blur of wing behind. He could hear the angry buzz through his helmet. “I’ve got a red thing…Booce, it’s a kind of a sloppy polyhedron half a meter through, covered with lots of little triangle holes. It’s growing between these horn shapes.”

  “Those are flowers. It didn’t grow there, it’s attached. Did you take a knife?”

  “No. Wait a breath, there’s a matchet on mv leg. It must be Mark’s.”

  “Cut the honeypod loose and put the sack around it. Tie the neck shut.”

  Rather swung the matchet behind the scarlet polyhedron. The silver suit made all movements stiff. Presently the honeypod was floating loose. Rather pulled a sack free, opened the mouth, and swept it around the honeypod.

  “Got it? Tie the bag shut. Done?”

  “Done. There’s sticky red stuff all over my gloves.”

  “Stet. Now keep doing that till you run out of sacks. Don’t lick the honey.”

  “With my helmet closed?”

  “Don’t ever lick honey. It’s suicide.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Honey Track

  from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 1426 State:

  GOLDBLATT’S WORLD

  GOLDBLATT’S WORLD MAY HAVE BEGUN LIFE AS A NEPTUNE-LIKE BODY IN THE COMET CLOUD AROUND THE PAIRED STARS. IN GOLDBLATT’S SCENARIO, THE BODY WAS CAPTURED SOME MILLIONS OF YEARS AFTER THE SUPERNOVA EVENT. THE COLLAPSING CORE OF THE SUPERNOVA, SPEWING ITS OUTER ENVELOPE ASYMMETRICALLY DUE TO A TRAPPED MAGNETIC FIELD, MAY HAVE PICKED UP A SKEW VELOCITY THAT NEARLY MATCHED THE VELOCITY OF THE PROTO-NEPTUNE. ROBBED OF ITS ORBITAL VELOCITY, GOLDBLATT’S WORLD WOULD FALL ALONG A DRASTICALLY ECCENTRIC ORBIT, PASSING VERY NEAR LEVOY’S STAR. EXTREME ROCHE TIDES WOULD WARP THE ORBIT INTO A CIRCLE WITHIN A FEW SCORES OF PASSES.

  IT SEEMS LIKELY THAT GOLDBLATT’S WORLD’S ORBIT AND THE ASSOCIATED GAS TORUS HAVE BEEN CONTRACTING FOR ALL OF THEIR BILLION YEARS. MEANWHILE LEVOY’S STAR HAS BEEN COOLING — SINCE NEUTRON STARS NO LONGER UNDERGO FUSION — MAINTAINING A RELATIVELY STABLE BALANCE OF TEMPERATURE IN THE SMOKE RING.

  NOTE THAT THE ROCHE LIMIT IS NEVER AN ABSOLUTE. IT VARIES AS THE DENSITY OF THE ORBITING BODY. A GASBALL WORLD MAY BE WITHIN ITS ROCHE LIMIT, AND THIS ONE PROBABLY WAS. BUT THE ROCK-AND-METAL CORE IS DENSE. GOLDBLATT’S WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN WELL OUTSIDE ITS ROCHE LIMIT AFTER THE GASBALL LOST SOME OF ITS GAS AND THE ECCENTRIC ORBIT BECAME MORE CIRCULAR.

  THE PLANET IS NOW NO MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF TIMES THE MASS OF EARTH…

  — SAM GOLDBLATT, PLANETOLOGIST

  “YOU SEE THE PROBLEM? TOO MUCH OF IT IS GIBBERish,” Jeffer told the children. Rather and Carlot were nodding, but their eyes were glassy. “You can look up some of the words. You can guess a little. Goldblatt’s World is Gold. There’s a file on Earth and Neptune and the rest of the solar system, but it’s hard going. Roche tides, Roche Limit — that seems to be a balance point between tide and some other force, maybe the same force that changes your orbit if you pass too close to Gold. Fusion is power: it makes the Sun bum, and Discipline ran on fusion. Oort cloud, magnetic field, supernova — Lawri and I never figured those out.”

  He turned to Booce. “The kids need this, but I hate to make you sit through it again at your age—”

  Booce’s eyes were glassy too. �
��No, no, no. This is all new to me.”

  “Didn’t you have classes? There’s the Library—”

  “For officer’s kids only,” Booce said brusquely. “Go on with this. What’s eccentric?”

  “That’s a round path that isn’t a circle. It goes out and in. Booce, am I committing a crime if I teach you and Carlot these things?”

  “But I want to learn!”

  “Shush, Carlot. It’s never come up before,” Booce said. “You’re not showing us the Library, after all.”

  Carlot demanded, “Scientist, what’s the point in stopping now?”

  Jeffer laughed. He tapped, and the window was restored. The Clump was nearer now, and a score of parallel dashes lay across the CARM’s path. “You’re right. Carlot, but the lesson’s over anyway. We’re getting too close.”

  Debby answered with a raspberry.

  “Booce?” Jeffer said. “Any special favorites?”

  “The smallest, I’d think, but let’s have a better look.”

  Booce disengaged his seat tethers and moved aft. “Jeffer, would you open those doors?”

  “Will do.” He did. “Booce, don’t you trust the windows?”

  “I prefer my eyes. Swing us around, will you?” He braced himself in the airlock. Others of the crew had followed him.

  Jeffer began the maneuver. In the forward view, now moving into the port view, one of the trees had begun blinking: a green halo going on, off, on, off.

  Nobody was near. Jeffer whispered, “Why?”

  Now a point far in along the trunk was doing the blinking. Then that stopped—

  An arm stabbed past Jeffer’s ear, and he had to repress a shriek. “There,” Booce said, pointing at one of the trees. “Thirty klomters, and it seems healthy.”

  “What about this one, Booce?” Jeffer tapped the tree that had blinked at him.

  “Nothing wrong with it. It’s bigger, twice the mass. Take us longer to get it to the Market, but of course there’d be more wood too, and there’s the CARM… Why that one?”

  “A hunch. You’ve got no objection?”

  Now Clave was behind him too. “Jeffer, are you playing dominance games?”

  “?”

  “I’m the Chairman, you captain the CARM, Booce is the logger. Booce chooses the tree.”

  Jeffer repressed a sigh. “Yes, Chairman. Booce?”

  Booce pointed to Jeffer’s selection. “That one.”

  Ten klomters above the tuft, the wood of the trunk had grown to enclose a node of foreign matter. Jeffer saw Booce catch his daughter’s eye as Carlot was about to speak. She held her silence.

  At the tree midpoint Jeffer nosed the CARM against the trunk. He ran the attitude jets while his crew pounded spikes into the bark to mark a rectangle the size of the CARM’s bow. The CARM drifted while they chopped out a dock with matchets.

  Even on this younger tree, the bark was a meter thick.

  They made life easier for themselves by chopping along cracks. The five of them lifting together could rip great mattresses of bark away from the wood beneath, then saw off sections. Booce and Carlot used the saw, then let others take over until they got the hang of it.

  Booce and Carlot rejoined Jeffer in the CARM. Booce said, “They seem to be doing all right.”

  “But it’s scarred,” Carlot objected.

  “And how much wood will that cost us?”

  She shrugged. “Five percent? And weren’t we in a hurry to get home?”

  Booce was smiling. “Exactly. Jeffer, why this tree?”

  “You’ll be painting a line of honey down the trunk, stet? Have a look at that scar.”

  “Can you tell me what I’m supposed to find?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Jeffer the Scientist, Citizens Tree gave us shelter and a place among you. We’re grateful. I will not quarrel with any decision you make. You won’t need to test it again.”

  Jeffer could feel his ears and cheeks burning. “If that scar isn’t more interesting than you expect, you can count on it that I won’t make a fool of myself twice. Stet?”

  “Stet. I won’t raise this subject with the Chairman, ever.”

  “You are kind. What’s next?”

  “The honey line.”

  In the cabin the roar of the main drive was like a great beast heard far away; but outside the airlock the roar was deafening. A translucent blue flame reached out from the CARM’s main rocket nostril. Warmth backwashed against the bark.

  Carlot’s eyes were big with fear. Rather pulled at her arm to set her kicking toward the in tuft, and followed, with Booce following him.

  They stopped where the noise had decreased somewhat. The rough bark itself absorbed sound. Booce screamed, “That noise is beyond belief! What is that damn CARM, a ship from the stars?”

  “Jeffer says it rode here on the starship. My father never saw Discipline.” What Rather said would be true whoever his father was. “But he’s seen the stars. They’re real.”

  “I’m afraid of it. I admit it. Look, the noise is scaring the bugs out of the bark! Let’s get to work.”

  Booce used a branchwood matchet to open a hole in one of the honeypots. The interior was partitioned; the cells held red, sticky honey. Booce used the blade to paint it on the bark.

  “You’ll find a few hornets still in there,” he told Rather. “They try to sting through the sack if you give them a few days to get restless, and then they die. But don’t count on it. Don’t let one get at you. Now you paint dabs a couple of meters apart. Closer, you waste honey. Farther apart, the bugs lose their way.”

  Rather had thought he was a climber, but this was different. He had problems keeping up. He was almost lost among the sacks he was carrying. Booce and Carlot climbed head down; they would have left him behind if Booce had not been stopping to paint the trunk.

  They took a breather when the sun was at nadir and the shadows had become confusing. The sun was passing closer to Voy as the year waned.

  A day later they took a longer rest. “This is the part I like best,” Booce said. “We’re usually in too much of a hurry. This time your CARM is already pushing us home. We can take our time, do what we like!”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll show you as we go.” Booce began tearing up sheets of bark greater than a man, mooring them edgewise against the bare wood. When he had them arrayed he set them alight.

  The smoke tended to stay where it formed. Booce moored a four-kigram slab of shellbird meat in the cloud. They broiled smaller steaks on their matchets, closer to the fire, and ate them still hot.

  “The smoked meat will keep till we’re down,” Booce said. “But there are other things on the trunk. You’ve never climbed?”

  “When we were children we did a little climbing, but just on the lower trunk. We weren’t supposed to go more than a klomter up. If you fell, the foliage would catch you. Any higher, we rode the elevator.”

  They slept carefully tethered in cracks in the bark.

  Sometimes, for moments, the roar of the CARM could be heard above the wind. A dark cloud had formed above them and was gradually drifting down.

  The bugs of the tree had found the honey.

  They breakfasted on smoked bird. Then Carlot did the painting while Booce carried the food.

  The sun circled them, once and again. Always they stopped when the shadows were pointing straight out.

  Water was beginning to flow sluggishly in alongside their path. “Bugs like it damp,” Booce said. “The bark’s wet enough for them around the midpoint, but not lower down. You have to paint down the east side, alongside the waterfall, or they won’t come. Also the trunk blocks the wind. You don’t want the bugs blown away.”

  There was fan fungus like so many pallid hands reaching from the bark. Carlot showed Rather how to tear the red fringe off before eating the white interior. It was bland, almost tasteless, but went well enough with the strongly flavored smoked meat.

  With lunch came entertainment: a
gust of roses on the wind. The stems were four meters long. Dark-red blossoms fragile as tissue paper pointed straight toward Voy, soaking up blue Voy-light. Rather had never seen the like.

  He and Carlot watched the roses blowing east until they were out of sight.

  Rather took his turn painting. Booce kept a close watch, but it seemed simple enough. A dab the size of a baby’s hand; the next dab two meters lower.

  A dark cloud flowed after them down the trunk.

  The wind grew stronger, though the trunk blocked most of it. The growing tide made climbing easier for Rather. The water flowed more strongly. It was cleaner than pond water, cleaner than the water that reached the basin in the commons. It tasted wonderful, and painting was hard, thirsty work.

  In two days. Rather’s arm was one long cramp.

  He was too tired to help with dinner. Booce managed alone. He found shelled things hiding in the bark and pulled them loose. Roasted, their white flesh made a fine meal.

  Again they wedged themselves along a wide crack in the bark, with Carlot between the men. There were dangers on the trunk.

  Rather’s aches kept him awake. He presently noticed Carlot’s feet stirring restlessly. “Carlot?”

  He would not have spoken twice, but she answered at once. “Can’t sleep?”

  “No. My father told me about climbing up a tree. When they got to the top the tree came apart.”

  “That’s one reason we don’t just chop off the tuft or burn it loose. This is easier, but it also gets the bugs away from the midpoint. When the tree dies, they’re not there to eat it apart.”

  “How do you get rid of the out tuft?”

  “Oh, some of the bugs won’t follow the honey. They’ll be breeding while we travel. When we get close to the Clump we’ll paint another trail out.”

  “Why are you awake?”

  “Tide. I have trouble sleeping in tide.” But her voice trailed off raggedly. He stopped talking, and presently slept.

  After breakfast Booce said, “There’s something I want to see on the west side of the trunk. Leave the gear here.”