Niven, Larry - The Integral Trees

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This book is dedicated to Robert Forward, for the stories he's sparked in me, for his help in
working out the parameters of the Smoke Ring and for his big roomy mind.
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright (c) 1983 by Larry Niven
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the
United States by Ballantine Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Diagrams by Shelly Shapiro
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Prologue: Discipline 1
Chapter One: Quinn Tuft 5
Chapter Two: Leavetaking 18
Chapter Three: The Trunk 27
Chapter Four: Flashers and Fan Fungus 36
Chapter Five: Memories 45
Chapter Si.x Middle Ground 52
Chapter Seven. The Checker's Hand 63
Chapter Eight: Quinn Tribe 69
Chapter Nine: The Raft . 78
Chapter Ten: The Moby 89
Chapter Eleven: The Cotton-Candy Jungle 97
Chapter Twelve: The Copsik Runners 105
Chapter Thirteen.- The Scientist's Apprentice 114
Chapter Fourteen. Treemouth and Citadel 123
Chapter F(fteen. London Tree 131
Chapter Sixteen: Rumblings of Mutiny 140
Chapter Seventeen. "When Birnhain Wood . . ." 149
Chapter Eighteen.- The War of London Tree 158
Chapter Nineteen: The Silver Man 168
Chapter Twenty: The Position of Scientist's
Apprentice . . . 178
Chapter Twenty-one: Go For Gold 189
Chapter Twenty-two: Citizens' Tree 198
Dramatis Personae 208
Glossary 210
Prologue
Discipline
IT WAS TAKING TOO LONG, MUCH LONGER THAN HE HAD EXPECTED.
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Sharis Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himself immune
to impatience. But it was taking too long! What were they doing in there?
His senses were not limited. Sharis's telescopic array was powerful; he could sense the
full electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave up to X-ray. But the Smoke Ring balked his view. It
was a storm of wind, dust, clouds of water vapor, huge rippling drops of dirty water or thin mud,
masses of free-floating rock; dots and motes and clumps of green, green surfaces on the drops and
the rocks green tinges of algae in the clouds; trees shaped like integration signs, oriented
radially to the neutron star and tufted with green at both ends; whale-sized creatures with vast
mouths, to skim the green-tinged clouds .
Life was everywhere in the Smoke Ring. Claire Dalton had called it a Christmas wreath.
Claire had been a very old woman before the State revived her as a corpsicle. The others had never
seen a Christmas wreath; nor had Kendy. What they had seen, half a thousand years ago, was a
perfect smoke ring several tens of thousands of kilometers across, with a tiny hot pinpoint in its
center.
Their reports had been enthusiastic. Life was DNA-based, the air was not only breathable,
but tasted fine
Disc~pline presently occupied the point of gravitational neutrality behind Goldblatt's
World, the L2 point. This close, the sky split equally
into star-sprinkled, black- and green-tinged cloudscape. Directly below,
a vast distorted whirlpool of storm hid the residue of a gas giant planet,
a rocky nugget two and a half times the mass of Earth.
Sharis would not enter that inner region. The maelstrom of forces could damage his ship.
He couldn't guess how long the seeder r~mship must survive to accomplish his mission. He had
waited more than half a thousand years already. The L2 point was still within the gas torus of
which the Smoke Ring was only the densest part. Disc~pline was subject to slow erosive forces. He
couldn't last forever in this place.
At least the crew were not extinct.
That would have hurt him terribly.
He had done his duty. Their ancestors had been mutineers, a potential threat to the State
itself. To reeducate their descendants was his goal, but if the Smoke Ring had killed them . . .
well, it would not have surprised him. It took more than breathable air to keep men alive. The
Smoke Ring was green with the life that had evolved for that queer environment. Native life might
well have killed of those Johnny-comelately rivals, the erstwhile crew of the seeder ramship
Discipline.
Sharls would have grieved; but he would have been free to return home.
They'd call me an obsolete failure, he thought gloomily while his instruments sought a
particular frequency in the radio range. A thousand years out of date by the time I'm home. They'd
scrap the computer for certain. And the program? The Sharls Davis Kendy program might be copied
and kept for the use of historians Or noL
But they hadn't died. Eight Cargo and Repair Modules had gone with the original mutineers.
Time and the corrosive environment must have ruined the CARMs; but at least one was still
operational. Someone bad been using it as late as six years ago. And-there: the light he'd been
searching for. For a moment it reached him clearly: the frequency of hydrogen burning with oxygen.
He fired a maser in ultrashort, high-powered pulses. "Kendy for the State. Kendy for the
State. Kendy for the State."
The response came four seconds later, sluggish, weak, and blurred. Kendy pinpointed it and
fine-focused his telescopes while he sent his next demand.
"Status. Tell me three times."
Kendy sorted the garbled respofise through a noise-eliminator program. The CARM was on
manual, mostly functional, using attitude jets only, operating well inside its safety limits. Once
it had been a simplified recording of Kendy's own personality. Now the program was deteriorating,
growing stupid and erratic.
"Course record for the past hour."
It came. The CARM had been free-falling at low relative velocity up to forty minutes ago.
Then, low-acceleration maneuvers, a course that looked like a dropped plate of spaghetti, a mad
waste of stored fuel. Malfunction? Or . . . it could have been a dogfight-style battle.
War?
"Switch to my command."
Four seconds; then a signal like a scream of bewildered agony. Massive malfunction.
The crew must have disconnected the autopilot system on every one of the CARMs, half a
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thousand years ago. It had still been worth a try, as was his next message.
"Give me video link with crew."
"Denied."
Oh ho! The video link hadn't been disconnected! A block must have been programmed in, half
a thousand years ago, by the mutineers. Certainly their descendants wouldn't know how to do that.
A block might be circumvented, eventually.
The CARM was too small to see, of course, but it must be somewhere near that green blob
not far from Goldblatt's World. A cotton-candy forest. Plants within the Smoke Ring tended to be
fluffy, fragile. They spread and divided to collect as much sunlight as possible, without worrying
about gravity.
For half a thousand years Kendy had watched for signs of a developing civilization-for
regular patterns in the floating masses, or infrared radiation from manufacturing centers, or
industrial pollution: metal vapor, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen. He hadn't found any of
that. If the children of Discipline's crew were developing beyond savagery, it was not in any
great numbers.
But they lived. Someone was using a CARM.
If only he could see them! Or talk to them-"Give me voiceover. Citizen, this is Kendy for
the State. Speak, and your reward will be beyond the reach of your imagination."
"Amplify. Amplify. Amplify," sent the CARM.
Kendy was already sending at full amplification. "Cancel voiceover," he sent.
Not for the first time, he wondered if the Smoke Ring could have proved too kindly an
environment. Creatures evolved in freefall would not have human strength. Huin~nc~ could be the
most powerful creatures in the Smoke Ring: happy as clams in there, and about as active.
Civilization develops to protect against the environment.
Or against other men. War would be a hopeful sign...
If he could know what was going on! Kendy could perturb the environment in a dozen
different ways. Cast them out of Eden and see what happened. But he dared not. He didn't know
enough.
Kendy waited.
Chapter One
Quinn Tuft
GAvvING COULD HEAR ThE RUSTLING AS HIS COMPAMONS TUNneled upward. They stayed alongside the great
flat wall of the trunk. Finger-thick spine branches sprouted from the trunk, divided endlessly
into wire-thin branchiets, and ultimately flowered into foliage like green cotton, loosely spun to
catch every stray beam of sunlight. Some light filtered through as green twilight.
Gavving tunneled through a universe of green cotton candy.
Hungry, he reached deep into the web of branchlets and pulled out a fistful of foliage. It
tasted like fibrous spun sugar. It cured hunger, but what Gavving's belly wanted was meat. Even
so, its taste was too fibrous . . . and the green of it was too brown, even at the edges of the
tuft, where sunlight fell.
He ate it anyway and went on.
The rising howl of the wind told him he was nearly there. A minute later his head broke
through into wind and sunlight.
The sunlight stabbed his eyes, still red and painful from this morning's allergy attack.
It always got him in the eyes and sinuses. He squinted and turned his head, and sniffled, and
waited while his eyes adjusted. Then, twitchy with anticipation, he looked up.
Gavving was fourteen years old, as measured by passings of the sun behind Voy. He had
never been above Quinn Tuft until now.
The trunk went straight up, straight out from Voy. It seemed to go out forever, a vast
brown wall that narrowed to a cylinder, to a dark line with a gentle westward curve to it, to a
point at infinity-and the point was tipped with green. The far tuft.
A cloud of brown-tinged green dropped away below him, spreading out into the main body of
the tuft. Looking east, with the wind whipping his long hair forward; Gavving could see the branch
emerging from its green sheath as a half-klomter of bare wood: a slender fin.
Harp's head popped out, and his face immediately dipped again, out of the wind. Laython
next, and he did the same. Gavving waited. Presently their faces lifted. Harp's face was broad,
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with thick bones, its brutal strength half-concealed by golden beard. Laython's long, dark face
was beginning to sprout strands of black hair.
Harp called, "We can crawl around to lee of the trunk. East. Get out of this wind."
The wind blew always from the west, always at gale velocities.
Laython peered windward between his fingers. He bellowed, "Negative!
How would we catch anything? Any prey would come right out of the wind!"
Harp squirmed through the foliage to join Laython. Gavving shrugged and did the same. He
would have liked a windbreak. . . and Harp, ten years older than Gavving and Laython, was
nominRily in charge. It seldom worked out that way.
"There's nothing to catch," Harp told them. "We're here to guard the trunk. Just because
there's a drought doesn't mean we can't have a flash flood. Suppose the tree brushed a pond?"
"What pond? Look around you! There's nothing near us. Voy is too close. Harp, you've said
so yourself!"
"The trunk blocks half our view," Harp said mildly.
The bright spot in the sky, the sun, was drifting below the western edge of the tuft. And
in that direction were no ponds, no clouds, no drifting forests . . . nothing but blue-tinged
white sky split by the white line of the Smoke Ring, and on that line, a roiled knot that must be
Gold.
Looking up, out, he saw more of nothing . . . faraway streamers of cloud shaping a whorl
of storm . . . a glinting fleck that might indeed have been a pond, but it seemed even more
distant than the green tip of the integral tree. There would be no flood.
Gavving had been six years old when the last flood came. He remembered terror, panic,
frantic haste. The tribe had bufrowed east along the branch, to huddle in the thin foliage where
the tuft tapered into bare wood. He remembered a roar that drowned the wind, and the mass of the
branch itself shuddering endlessly. Gavving's father and two apprentice hunters hadn't been warned
in time. They had been washed into the sky.
Laython started off around the trunk, but in the windward direction.
He was half out of the foliage, his long arms pulling him against the wind. Harp followed. Harp
had given in, as usual. Gavving snorted and moved to join them.
It was tiring. Harp must have hated it. He was using claw sandals, but he must have
suffered, even so. Harp had a good brain and a facile tongue, but he was a dwarf~ His torso was
short and burly; his muscular arms and legs had no reach, and his toes were mere decoration. He
stood less than two meters tall. The Grad had once told Gavving, "Harp looks like the pictures of
the Founders in the log. We all looked like that once."
Harp grinned back at him, though he was puffing. "We'll get you some claw sandals when
you're older."
Laython grinned too, superciliously, and sprinted ahead of them both. He didn't have to
say anything. Claw sandals would only have hampered his long, prehensile toes.
Night had cut the ffluniin~tion in halL Seeing was easier, with the sunglare around on the
other side of Voy. The trunk was a great brown wall three klomters in circumference. Gavving
looked up once and was disheartened at their lack of progress. Thereafter he kept his head bent to
the wind, clawing his way across the green cotton, until he heard Laython yell.
"Dinner!"
A quivering black speck, a point to port of windward. Laython said, "Can't tell what it
is."
Harp said, "It's trying to miss. Looks big."
"It'll go around the other side! Come on!"
They crawled, fast. The quivering dot came closer. It was long and narrow and moving tail-
first. The great translucent fin blurred with speed as it tried to win clear of the trunk. The
slender torso was slowly rotating.
The head came in view. Two eyes glittered behind the beak, one hundred and twenty degrees
apart.
"Swordbird," Harp decided. He stopped moving.
Laython called, "Harp, what are you doing?"
"Nobody in his right mind goes after a swordbird."
"It's still meati And it's probably starving too, this far in!"
Harp snorted. "Who says so? The Grad? The Grad's full of theory, but he doesn't have to
hunt."
The swordbird's slow rotation exposed what should have been its
third eye. What showed instead was a large, irregular, fuzzy green patch. Laython cried, "Fluff!
It's a bead injury that got infected with fluff. The thing's injured, Harp!"
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"That isn't an injured turkey, boy. It's an injured swordbinL"
Laython was half again Harp's size, and the Chairman's son to boot. He was not easy to
discipline. He wrapped long, strong fingers around
Harp's shoulder and said, "We'll miss it if we wait here e.rguing! I say we go for Gold." And he
stood up.
The wind smashed at him. He wrapped toes and one fist in branch-
lets, steadied himself, and semaphored his free arm. "Hiyo! Swordbird!
Meat, you copsik, meat!"
Harp made a sound of disgust.
It would surely see him, waving in that vivid scarlet blouse. Gavving thought, hopefully,
We'll miss it, and then it'll bepast~ But he would not show cowardice on his first hunt.
He pulled his line loose from his back. He burrowed into the foliage to pound a spike into
solid wood, and moored the line to it. The middle was attached to his waist. Nobody ever risked
losing his line. A hunter who fell into the sky might still find rest somewhere, if he had his
line.
The creature hadn't seen them. Laython swore. He hurried to anchor his own line. The
business end was a grapnel: hardwood from the finned end of the branch. Laython swung the grapnel
round his head, yelled, and flung it out.
The swordbird must have seen, or heard. It whipped around, mouth gaping, triangular tail
fluttering as it tried to gain way to starboard, to reach their side of the trunk. Starving, yes!
Gavving hadn't grasped that a creature could see him as meat until that moment.
Harp frowned. "It could work. If we're lucky it could smash itself against the trunk."
The swordbird seemed bigger every second: bigger than a man, bigger than a hut-all mouth
and wings and tail. The tail was a translucent membrane enclosed in a V of bone spines with
serrated edges. What was it doing this far in? Swordbirds fed on creatures that fed in the
drifting
forests, and there were few of these, so far in toward Voy. Little enough of anything. The
creature did look gaunt, Gavving thought; and there was that soft green carpet over one eye.
Fluff was a green plant parasite that grew on an ~nin'i~1 until the animal died. It
attacked humi~nc too. Everybody got it sooner or later, some more than once. But hnmRns had the
sense to stay in shadow until the fluff withered and died.
Laython could be right. A head injury, sense of direction fouled up and it was meat, a mass of
meat as big as the bachelors' longhut. It
must be ravenous . . . and now it turned to face them.
An isolated mouth came toward them: an elliptical field of teeth, expanding.
Laython coiled line in frantic haste. Gavving saw Harp's line fly past him, and tearing
himself out of his paralysis, he threw his own weapon.
The swordbird whipped around, impossibly fast, and snapped up Gavving's harpoon like a
tidbit. Harp whooped. Gavving froze for an instant; then his toes dug into the foliage while he
hauled in line. He'd hooked iL
The creature didn't try to escape: it was still fluttering toward them.
Harp's grapnel grazed its side and passed on. Harp yanked, trying to hook the beast, and
missed again. He reeled in line for another try.
Gavving was armpit-deep in branchlets and cotton, toes digging deeper, hands maintaining
his deathgrip on the line. With eyes on him, he continued to behave as if he wanted contact with
the killer beast. He bellowed, "Harp, where can I hurt it?"
"Eye sockets, I guess."
The beast had misjudged. Its flank smashed bark from the trunk above their heads,
dreadfully close. The trunk shuddered. Gavving howled in terror. Laython howled in rage and threw
his grapnel ahead of it.
It grazed the swordbird's flank. Laython pulled hard on the line and sank the hardwood
tines deep in flesh.
The swordbird's tail froze. Perhaps it was thinking things over, watching them with two
good eyes while the wind pulled it west.
Laython's line went taut. Then Gavving~'s. Spine branches ripped through Gavving's
inadequate toes. Then the immense mass of the beast had pulled him into the sky.
His own throat closed tight, but he heard Laython shriek. Laython too had been pulled
loose.
Torn branchlets were still clenched in Gavving~s toes. He looked
down into the cushiony expanse of the tuft, wondering whether to let go and drop. But his line was
still anchored . . . and wind was stronger than tide; it could blow him past the tuft, past the
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entire branch, out and away. Instead he crawled along the line, away from their predatorprey.
Laython wasn't retreating. He had readied his harpoon and was waiting.
The swordbird decided. Its body snapped into a curve. The serrated tail slashed
effortlessly through Gavving's line. The swordbird flapped hard, making west now. Laython's line
went taut; then branchlets ripped and his line pulled free. Gavving snatched for it and missed.
He might have pulled himself back to safety then, but he continued to watch.
Laython poised with spear ready, his other arm waving in circles to hold his body from
turning, as the predator flapped toward him. Almost alone among the creatures of the Smoke Ring,
men have no wings.
The swordbird's body snapped into a U. Its tail slashed Laython in half almost before he
could move his spear. The beast's mouth snapped shut four times, and Laython was gone. Its mouth
continued to work, trying to deal with Gavving's harpoon in its throat, as the wind carried it
east.
The Scientist's hut was like all of Quinn Tribe's huts: live spine branches fashioned into
a wickerwork cage. It was bigger than some, but there was no sense of luxury. The roof and walls
were a clutter of paraphernalia stuck into the wickerwork: boards and turkey quills and red
tuftberry dye for ink, tools for teaching, tools for science, and relics from the time before men
left the stars.
The Scientist entered the hut with the air of a blind man. His hands were bloody to the
elbows. He scraped at them with handfuls of foliage, talking under his breath. "Damn, damn
drillbits. They just burrow in, no way to stop them." He looked up. "Grad?"
"Day. Who were you talking to, yourself?"
"Yes." He scrubbed at his arms ferociously, then hurled the wads of bloody foliage away
from him. "Martal's dead. A drillbit burrowed into her. I probably killed her myself digging it
out, but she'd have died anyway . . . you can't leave drillbit eggs. Have you heard about the
expedition?"
"Yes. Barely. I can't get anyone to tell me anything."
The Scientist pulled a handful of foliage from the wall and tried to
scrub the scalpel clean. He hadn't looked at the Grad. "What do you think?"
The Grad had come in a fury and grown yet angrier while waiting in an empty hut. He tried
to keep that out of his voice. "I think the Chairman's trying to get rid of some citizens he
doesn't like. What I want to know is, why me?"
"The Chairman's a fool. He thinks science could have stopped the drought."
"Then you're in trouble too?" The Grad got it then. "You blamed it on me."
The Scientist looked at him at last. The Grad thought he saw guilt there, but the eyes
were steady. "I let him think you were to blame, yes. Now, there are some things I want you to
have-"
Incredulous laughter was his answer. "What, more gear to carry up a hundred klomters of
trunk?"
"Grad . . . Jeffer. What have I told you about the tree? We've studied the universe
together, but the most important thing in it is the tree. Didn't I teach you that everything that
lives has a way of staying near the Smoke Ring median, where there's air and water and soil?"
"Everything but trees and men."
"Integral trees have a way. I taught you."
"I . . . had the idea you were only guessing . . . Oh, I see. You're willing to bet my
life."
The Scientist's eyes dropped. "I suppose I am. But if I'm right, there won't be anything
left but you and the people who go with you. Jeffer, this could be nothing. You could all come
back with . . . whatever we need: breeding turkeys, some kind of meat animal living on the trunk,
I don't know-"
"But you don't think so."
"No. That's why I'm giving you these."
He pulled treasures from the spine-branch walls: a glassy rectangle a quarter meter by
half a meter, flat enough to fit into a pack four boxes each the size of a child's hand. The
Grad's response was a musical "O-ooh."
"You'll decide for yourself whether to tell any of the others what you're carrying. Now
let's do one last drill session." The Scientist plugged a cassette into the reader screen. "You
won't have much chance to study on the trunk."
PLANTS
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LIFE PERVADES THE SMOKE RING BUT IS NEITHER
DENSE NOR MASSIVE. IN THE FREE-FALL ENVIRONMENT
PLANTS CAN SPREAD THEIR GREENERY WIDELY TO CATCH
MAXIMUM SUNLIGHT AND PASSING WATER AND SOIL,
WITHOUT BOTHERING ABOUT STRUCTURAL STRENGTH. WE
FIND AT LEAST ONE EXCEPTION...
THESE INTEGRAL TREES GROW TO TREMENDOUS SIZE.
THE PLANT FORMS A LONG TRUNK UNDER TERRIFIC TENSION, TUFTED WITH GREEN AT BOTH ENDS, STABILIZED BY
THE TIDE. THEY FORM THOUSANDS OF RADIAL SPOKES CIRCLING LEVOY'S STAR. THEY GROW UP TO A HUNDRED
KILOMETERS IN LENGTH, WITH UP TO A FIFTH OF A GEE IN
TIDAL "GRAVITY" AT THE TUF1'S AND PERPETUAL HURRICANE WINDS.
THE WINDS DERIVE FROM SIMPLE ORBITAL MECHANICS.
THEY BLOW FROM THE WEST AT THE INNER TUFT AND
FROM THE EAST AT THE OUTER TUFT (WHERE IN IS TOw~ LEVOY'S STAR, AS USUAL). THE STRUCTURE BOWS
TO THE WINDS, CURVING INTO A NEARLY HORIZONTAL
BRANCH AT EACH END. THE FOLIAGE SIFTS FERTILIZER
FROM THE WIND.
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 SFITLE THE
TUFTS OF THE INTEGRAL TREES. IF THE TREES PROVE
MORE DANGEROUS THAN WE ANTICIPATE, ESCAPE IS EASY.
WE NEED ONLY JUMP AND WAIT TO BE PICKED UP.
The Grad looked up. "They really didn't know very much about the
trees, did they?'
"No. But, Jefi'er, they had seen trees from outside."
That was an awesome thought. While he chewed it, the Scientist said, "I'm afraid you may
have to start training your own Grad, and soon."
Jayan sat cross-legged, coiling lines. Sometimes she looked up to watch the children. They
had come like a wind through the Commons,
and the wind had died and left them scattered around Clave. He wasn't getting much work done,
though it seemed he wa~ trying.
The girls loved Clave. The boys imitated him. Some just watched, others buzzed around him,
trying to help him assemble the harpoons and the spikes or asking an endless stream of questions.
"What are you doing? Why do you need so many harpoons? And all this rope? Is it a hunting trip?"
"I can't tell you," Clave said with just the proper level of regret. "King, where have you
been? You're all sticky."
King was a happy eight-year-old painted in brown dust. "We went underside. The foliage is
greener there. Tastes better."
"Did you take lines? Those branches aren't as strong as they used to be. You could fall
through. And did you take a grownup with you?"
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Jill, nine, had the wit to distract him. "When's dinner? We're still hungry."
"Aren't we all." Clave turned to Jayan. "We've got enough packs, we won't be carrying
food, we'll find water on the trunk . . . claw sandals
jet pods, I'm glad we got those . . . hope we've got enough spikes what else do we need? Is Jinny
back?"
"No. What did you send her for, anyway?"
"Rocks. I gave her a net for them, but she'll have to go all the way to the treemouth. I
hope she finds us a good grindstone."
Jayan didn't blame the children. She loved Clave too. She would have kept him for herself,
if she could . . . if not for Jinny. Sometimes she wondered if Jinny ever felt that way.
"Mmm . . . we'll pick some foliage before we leave the tuft-"
Jayan stopped working. "Clave, I never thought of that. There's no foliage on the trunk!
We won't have anything to eat!"
"We'll find something. That's why we're going," Clave said briskly. "Thinking of changing
your mind?"
"Too late," Jayan said. She didn't add that she had never wanted to go at alL There was no
point, now.
"I could bust you loose. Jinny too. The citizens like you, they wouldn't let-"
"I won't stay." Not with Mayrin and the Chairman here, and Clave gone. She looked up and
said, "Mayrin."
Clave's wife stood in the half-shadows on the far side of the Cornmona. She might have
been there for some time. She was seven years older than dave, a stocky woman with the square jaw
of her father, the Chairman. She called, "Clave, mighty hunter, what game are you play-
ing with this young woman when you might be finding meat for the citizens?"
"Orders."
She approached, smiling. "The expedition. My father and I arranged it together."
"If you'd like to believe that, feel free."
The smile slipped. "Copsik! You've mocked me too long, dave. You and them. I hope you fall
into the sky."
"I hope I don't," Clave said mildly. "Would you like to assist our departure? We need
blankets. Better have an extra. Nine."
"Fetch them yourself," Mayrin said and stalked away.
Here in the main depths of Quinn Tuft there were tunnels through the foliage. Huts nestled
against the vertical flank of the branch, and the tunnels ran past. Now Harp and Gavving had room
to walk, or something like it. In the low tidal pull they bounced on the foliage as if it and they
were made of air. The branchiets around the tunnels were dry and nude, their foliage stripped for
food.
Changes. The days had been longer before the passing of Gold. It used to be two days
between sleeps; now it was eight. The Grad had tried to explain why, once, but the Scientist had
caught them at it and whacked the Grad for spilling secrets and Gavving for listening.
Harp thought that the tree was dying. Well, Harp was a teller, and world-sized disasters
make rich tales. But the Grad thought so too... and Gavving felt like the world had ended. He
almost wanted it to end, before he had to tell the Chairman about his son.
He stopped to look into his own dwelling, a long half-cylinder, the bachelors' longhut. It
was empty. Quinn Tribe must be gathered for the evening meal.
"We're in trouble," Gavving said and sniffled.
"Sure we are, but there's no point in acting like it. If we hide, we don't eat. Besides,
we've got this." Harp hefted the dead musrum.
Gavving shook his head. It wouldn't help. "You should have stopped him~'
"I couldn't." When Gavving didn't answer, Harp said, "Four days ago the whole tribe was
throwing lines into a pond, remember? A pond no bigger than a big hut. As if we could pull it to
us. We didn't think that was stupid till it was gone past, and nobody but Clave thought to go for
the cookpot, and by the time he got back-"
"I wouldn't send even Clave to catch a swordbird."
"Twenty-twenty," Harp jeered. The taunt was archaic, but its meaning was common. Any fool
can foresee the past.
An opening in the cotton: the turkey pen, with one gloomy turkey still alive. There would
be no more unless a wild one could be captured from the wind. Drought and famine.. . Water still
ran down the trunk sometimes, but never enough. Flying things still passed, meat to be drawn from
the howling wind, but rarely. The tribe could not survive on the sugary foliage forever.
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"Did I ever tell you," Harp asked, "about Glory and the turkeys?"
"No." Gavving relaxed a little. He needed a distraction.
"This was twelve or thirteen years back, before Gold passed by. Things didn't fall as fast
then. Ask the Grad to tell you why, 'cause I can't, but it's true. So if she'd just fallen on the
turkey pen, it wouldn't have busted. But Glory was trying to move the cookpot. She had it clutched
in her arms, and it masses three times what she does, and she lost her balance and started running
to keep it from hitting the ground. Then she smashed into the turkey pen.
"It was as if she'd thought it out in detail. The turkeys were all through the Clump and
into the sky. We got maybe a third of them back. That was when we took Glory off cooking duties."
Another hollow, a big one: three rooms shaped from spine branches. Empty. Gavving said,
"The Chairman must be almost over the fluff."
"It's night," Harp answered.
Night was only a dimming while the far arc of the Smoke Ring filtered the sunlight; but a
cubic klomter of foliage blocked light too. A victim of fluff could come out at night long enough
to share a meal.
"He'll see us come in," Gavving said. "I wish he were still in confinement."
There was firelight ahead of them now. They pressed on, Gavving sni~ing, Harp trailing the
musrum on his line. When they emerged into the Commons their faces were dignified, and their eyes
avoided nobody.
The Commons was a large open area, bounded by a wickerwork of branchiets. Most of the
tribe formed a scarlet circle with the cookpot in the center. Men and women wore blouses and pants
dyed with the scarlet the Scientist made from tuftberries and sometimes decorated with black. That
red would show vividly anywhere within the tuft. Children wore blouses only.
All were uncommonly silent.
The cookflre had nearly burned out, and the cookpot-an ancient
thing, a tall, transparent cylinder with a lid of the same material- retained no more than a
double handful of stew.
The Chairman's chest was still half-covered in flufl but the patch had contracted and
turned mostly brown. He was a square-jawed, brawny man in middle age, and he looked unhappy,
irritable. Hungry. Harp and Gavving went to him, handed him their catch. "Food for the tribe,"
Harp said.
Their catch looked like a fleshy mushroom, with a stalk half a meter long and sense organs
and a coiled tentacle under the edge of the cap. A lung ran down the center of the stalk/body to
give the thing jet propulsion. Part of the cap had been ripped away, perhaps by some predator; the
scar was half-healed. It looked far from appetizing, but society's law bound the Chairman too.
He took it. "Tomorrow's breakfast," he said courteously. "Where's Laython?"
"Lost," Harp said, before Gavving could say, "Dead."
The Chairman looked stricken. "How?" Then, "Wait, Eat first."
That was common courtesy for returning hunters; but for Gavving the waiting was torture.
They were given scooped-out seedpods containing a few mouthfuls of greens and turkey meat in
broth. They ate with hungry eyes on them, and they handed the gourds back as soon as possible.
"Now talk," the Chairman said.
Gavving was glad when Harp took up the tale. "We left with the other hunters and climbed
along the trunk. Presently we could raise our heads into the sky and see the bare trunk stretching
out to infinity-"
"My son is lost and you give me poetry?"
Harp jumped. "Your pardon. There was nothing on our side of the trunk, neither of danger
nor salvation. We started around the trunk. Then Laython saw a swordbird, far west and borne
toward us on the wind."
The Chairman's voice was only half-controlled. "You went after a swordbird?"
"There is famine in Quinn Tuft. We've fallen too far in, too far toward Voy, the Scientist
says so himself. No beasts fly near, no water trickles down the trunk-"
"Am I not hungry enough to know this myself? Every baby knows better than to hunt a
swordbird. Well, go on."
Harp told it all, keeping his language lean, passing lightly over Laython's disobedience,
letting him show as the doomed hero. "We saw
Laython and the swordbird pulled east by the wind,, along a klomter of naked branch, then beyond.
There was nothing we could do."
"But he has his line?"
"He does."
"He may find rest somewhere," the Chairman said. "A forest somewhere. Another tree . . .
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he could anchor at the median and go down
well. He's lost to Quinn Tribe at least."
Harp said, "We waited in the hope that Laython might find a way to return, to win out and
moor himself along the trunk, perhaps. Four days passed. We saw nothing but a musrum borne on the
wind. We cast our grapnels and I hooked the thing."
The Chairman looked ill with disgust. Gavving heard in his mind, Have you traded my son
for musrum meat? But the Chairman said, "You are the last of the hunters to return. You must know
of today's events. First, Martal has been killed by a drillbit."
Martal was an older woman, Gavving's father's aunt. A wrinkled woman who was always busy,
too busy to talk to children, she had been Quinn Tribe's premier cook. Gavving tried not to
picture a drillbit boring into her guts. And while he shuddered, the Chairman said, "Alter five
days' sleep we will assemble for Martal's last rites. Second: the Council has decided to send a
full hunting expedition up the trunk. They must not return without a means for our survival.
Gavving, you will join the expedition. You'll be informed of your mission in detail after the
funeral."
Chapter Two
Leavetaking
THE TREEMOUTH WAS A FUNNEL-SHAPED PIT THICKLY LINED
with dead-looking, naked spine branches. The citizens of Quinn Tuft nested in an arc above the
nearly vertical rim. Fifty or more were gathered to say good-bye to Martal. Almost half were
children.
West of the treemouth was nothing but sky. The sky was all about them, and there was no
protection from the wind, here at the westernmost point of the branch. Mothers folded their babes
within their tunics. Quinn Tribe showed like scarlet tuftberries in the thick foliage around the
treemouth.
Martal was among them, at the lower rim of the funnel, flanked by four of her family.
Gavving studied the dead woman's face. Almost calm, he thought, but with a last lingering trace of
horror. The wound was above her hip: a gash made not by the drillbit, but by the Scientist's knife
as he dug for it.
A drillbit was a tiny creature, no bigger than a man's big toe. It would fly out of the
wind too fast to see, strike, and burrow into flesh, leaving its gut as an expanding bag that
trailed behind it. If left alone it would eventually burrow through and depart, tripled in size,
leaving a clutch of eggs in the abandoned gut.
Looking at Martal made Gavving queasy. He bad lain too long
awake, slept too little; his belly was already churning as it tried to digest a breakfast of
musrum stew.
Harp edged up beside him, shoulder-high to Gavving. "I'm sorry,"
he said.
"For what?" Though Gavving knew what he meant
"You wouldn't be going if Laython wasn't dead."
"You think this is the Chairman's punishment. All right, I thought so too, but . . .
wouldn't you be going?"
Harp spread his hands, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
"You've got too many friends."
"Sure, I talk good. That could be it."
"You could volunteer. Have you thought of the stories you could bring back?"
Harp opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged.
Gavving dropped it. He had wondered, and now he knew. Harp was afraid. . . "I can't get
anyone to tell me anything," he said. "What have you heard?"
"Good news and bad. Nine of you, supposed to be eight. You were an afterthought. The good
news is just a rumor. Clave's your leader."
"Clove?"
"Himself. Maybe. Now, it could still be true that the Chairman's getting rid of anyone he
doesn't like. He-"
"dave's the top hunter in the tuft! He's the Chairman's son-in-law!"
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