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. They listened intently, and spoke in vowel-twisting accents and strange words…but for Karilly, who huddled close in the circle of her family, silent.
Booce and his family came back tired. Their new home was primitive, and roomy, and oddly beautiful. These citizens had managed well with so little.
Lawri the Scientist looked them over and judged them 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 subject to 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 half-grown girl said, “How do you move a tree without a carm?”
Booce 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 forty-eight 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?”
“To move. You know the rule? West takes you in, in takes you east. I want the tree to move east, back to the Clump. So I cut the in tuft. Now I’ve got a west wind blowing on the out tuft, and nothing at the in stump to catch the wind. The tree accelerates west. It drops toward Voy. Things move faster when their orbits are closer to Voy, so the tree
moves east. After a while I’m in from the Clump and still moving. That’s when I need the rocket. I have to cut off the other tuft, then fire the rocket to move the tree into the Clump.”
The dwarf boy asked, “What then?”
“Then I sell the log for what I can get, and hope nobody else brought a log in at the same time. If there are two of us competing, we might not get enough to pay us for the work.”
Most of the children looked puzzled. The dwarf asked, “What went wrong this time?”
Booce’s throat closed up. His decision! With some relief he heard Ryllin say, “We were in a hurry. We thought we could get more water for the rocket. So we set the rocket going before the tuft dropped off. That started a fire. Wend was trying to get out of the huts when the water tank—well, it got too hot and—”
Booce jumped in, hastily. “The water tank split open. Wend got caught. Carlot and I were burned pulling her out of the steam. We were steering the log for that pond out there, and your tree moved in front of it, so it was the closest. So we made for it. And you found six of us clinging to the trunk like toes in hair, and—and Wend was dead, and the rest of us were ready to die, I think.”
The adults had all been served. The children drifted toward the cookpot. Booce ate. He’d let his stew get cold.
Likely he would never see the Clump again. It was as well. He and his family would be paupers there. He had never owned anything but Logbearer itself, and even that was gone. But was it really beyond belief that these people could build another Logbearer?
When all the adults were eating, the children drifted into line at the cookpot. Rather was just ahead of three tall and dark young women, and just behind his brother Harry.
“Take Jill’s place,” Rather told Harry.
“Why should I?”
“Beats me. Will you do it?”
“All right.”
The favor would be repaid. Rather would take Harry’s place at the cookpot or in the treadmill, or show him a wrestling trick; something. These things didn’t need discussion. Harry stepped out of line and talked to Jill where she was serving stew. Jill served herself and Harry took her place.
The blond girl joined Rather. “What’s that for?” she asked; but she seemed pleased.
“I’ve been listening to the old ones. Now I want to talk to the girls. Come along?” If they wouldn’t talk to a dwarf boy, maybe they’d talk to a girl.
They followed the Serjent girls as they made their exaggeratedly careful way across the commons’ wicker floor. The refugees settled slowly into the foliage, keeping their eyes fixed on their bowls. Stew still slopped over the edge of Carlot’s bowl. “The hole’s too big,” she said.
“You just need practice.—I’m Jill, he’s Rather.”
“How do you eat when you’re at the midpoint?”
Jill and Rather settled across from them. Rather stripped four branchlets for chopsticks. Jill said, “I’d take a smoked turkey along. What do you use? Bowls with smaller holes?”
“Yes, and we carry these.” Carlot produced a pair of bone sticks, ornately carved. “You’re lucky. You’ve always got…spine branches?”
“These are branchlets. The spine branches are the big ones.”
The third girl, Karilly, had not spoken. She was concentrating fully on her bowl.
Mishael said, “You seem to be happy.”
Rather found the comment disconcerting. “What do you mean?”
“You, all of you. You’ve got your tree and it’s all you need. Lumber from the bare end of the branch. The clothes you wear, the cloth comes from branchlet fibers, doesn’t it?”
“It’s foliage with the sugar washed out.”
“And the dye is from berries. Water comes running down the trunk into that basin, and you eat foliage and catch meat from the sky. And there’s the carm. Without the carm you’d have to build a rocket to move the tree.”
“Right.” Rather thought, We don’t know how to do that. The carm is all that keeps us from being savages. Is that how they see us? “We had to leave the tree to get our lines. And the adults keep talking about earthlife crops. They couldn’t bring seeds and eggs with them.”
“You could buy them in the Market if you were rich enough.”
Jill said, “We don’t know those words. Rich? Buy?”
Carlot said, “Rich means you can have whatever you want.”
“Like being Chairman?”
“No—”
Mishael took over. “Look, suppose you want earthlife seeds or pigeons or turkeys. Stet, you go to the Market and you find what you want. Then you’ve got to buy it. You need something to give the owner. Metal, maybe.”
“We don’t have much metal,” Rather said. “What are the people like? Like you?”
“Sometimes,” Carlot said. “What do you mean? Tall? Dark? We get dark and light, short and…well, mostly we’re about as tall as me, and the men are taller.”
“No dwarves?”
“Oh, of course there are dwarves. In the Navy.”
“What do you think of dwarves?” He hadn’t meant to ask so directly; he hadn’t realized how important the question was to him.
Carlot asked, “What do you think of my legs?”
Rather blushed. “They’re fine.” They were hidden anyway; Carlot was wearing the scarlet tunic and pantaloons of Citizens’ Tree.
“One’s longer than the other. My teacher’s got one leg longer than mine and one leg like yours, and it never bothers him. And the Admiral’s got an arm like a turkey wishbone. I’ve seen him. We’re all kinds. Rather.”
It was Mark’s habit to eat near the cauldron, where others might find him. Rarely did he get company. This day he was mildly surprised when Clave and Minya settled themselves across from him. They plucked branchlets and ate. Presently Clave asked, “What do you think of the Serjents?”
“They’re doing all right.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Clave said, while Minya was saying, “What will they do to Citizens’ Tree?”
“Oh.” Mark thought it over. “Half of you came from the in tuft of a broken tree. You were from the out tuft, Minya. Three from Carther States. Lawri and me from London Tree. London Tree used to raid Carther States for copsiks. Fourteen years we’ve been living here, and nobody’s killed anyone yet. We can live with the Serjents too.”
Clave said, “Oh, we can live with them—” while Minya wondered, “What do they think of us?”
Clave snorted. “They think we’re a little backward, and they’d like to talk us into going to the Clump.”
Where was this leading? Mark asked, “Are you thinking they want the carm?”
“No, not that. Not impossible either…Have you talked to Gavving or Debby lately?”
“They don’t like my company. Neither do you, Minya.”
Minya ignored that. “They’re trying to figure out how to build a steam rocket, starting with just the metal tube they brought back!”
“Uh-huh” Mark saw the point now. “They can build us a machine that moves trees around. They can tell us why we should all go to the Clump. So you’re a little nervous. Chairman? We could lose half the tribe. Lawri keeps saying there aren’t enough of us now.”
“And what do you want. Mark?”
Mark would have wished for a wife or three, but he saw no point in telling Clave or Minya that. “I want nothing from the Clump. We’re here. Twelve adults, twenty children, happy as dumbos in Citizens’ Tree. We shouldn’t be announcing that all over the sky. Even if the Clump doesn’t keep copsiks, maybe somebody out there does. Things aren’t perfect here, but they’re good. I wouldn’t want to wind up as somebody’s copsik.”
Clave nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Minya said, “We worked so hard to make this our home. Gavving knows how close we came to dying. How can he risk what we’ve got?”
“We seem to be agreed,” Clave said briskly. “Well? What do we do about it?”
Lawri and Jeffer we
re missing dinner. Lawri had led her husband east along the branch, beyond the region of the huts. In a dark womb of foliage and branchlets, they were making babies.
Resting, relaxed for the first time in many days, Lawri plucked foliage and put it in Jeffer’s mouth. He talked around it, indistinctly. “Does this remind you of being young?”
She lost her smile. “No.”
He leered. “Little London Tree boys and girls never snuck off into the foliage—?”
She shook her head violently. “It isn’t like that for a girl in London Tree. When boys get old enough, they don’t need us. They go to the in tuft. Copsik women belong to any male citizen. Jeffer, you know that much!”
“I should. That’s how Mark got Minya pregnant, before we got loose.”
She changed position to lie along his length. “If he did. Any man can father a dwarf.”
“Even Rather doesn’t believe that.”
“Bother him?”
“Yeah…But women had children in London Tree, didn’t they? And married?”
“Yes, if we were willing to act like copsiks ourselves. How else could we compete? I would’ve been some man’s copsik if I wanted to make babies. So I never made babies.”
Jeffer looked into her eyes as if seeing her for the first time. “Are you glad I came?”
She nodded. Perhaps he couldn’t see her blushing in the near-darkness.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
That was a stupid question. Knowing how she needed him, he’d use his advantage to win arguments! “This wasn’t what we came to talk about.”
“Did we come to talk?”
“What did you find on the burned tree?”
“We didn’t keep any secrets.—That’s right, you weren’t there when Booce was telling us what we had. Well, we got a pot full of charred stuff—honey, he said—and a metal thing for cutting wood, and hooks…miscellaneous stuff. And the metal pipe. Everything else that burned—I’ve forgotten what he called it all, but it can all be replaced, except the—what did Booce call it? The sikenwire.”