The Integral Trees

The feathered thing buried itself in warm meat.

Then Gavving moved in frantic haste, pulling his knife, reaching for her line-Her words were strangely twisted, but he understood her. "No, no, no, let me live! I have water! I have jet pods! I beg you!"

It might be so. He shouted, "Freeze! Don't reel yourself in! I have to think"

"I obey."

She hung, tethered, motionless.

"You've got water and I've got food. What if you kill me and keep both?"

"My sword," she answered and produced the long knife and threw it.

Startled, Gavving reached out and managed to catch it by the handle.

"My bow," she said, and he had time to bed the knife in the meat before she threw him the pull-it-apart weapon. He caught that too.

Now what? She was just waiting.

"What do you want?"

"I want to join you, your people. There's nobody else."

He could festoon himself with his weapons and hers, and so what? With nothing between them but forty kilograms of smoked meat, either could snatch a weapon and kill the other at any time. He'd have to sleep sometime…and still she waited.

He thought suddenly, W7iy not? I'm dead anyway. He called, "Come on.',

She coiled the line as she came. Gavving had been hanging onto his pack, but she hugged herself up against the meat with no thought for what it would do to her purple clothing. She worked a jet pod out of one of the dozen pockets that gave her body its shapeless, lumpy look. She set it and twisted the end. When it had expended itself there was some change in their velocity. She used another. Then another.

"Why were you carrying so many?" he asked. "I took them from my friends."

From their corpses. Gavving turned away. Qui

"I know that word. Checker: the Grad's used it, but he never tells anyone what it means."

"You should not have attacked the Checker's Hand. We tend it tended it."

"Is that why you killed Jiovan? For a fan fungus?"

"For that, and for returning from exile. You were cast out for assassinating a Chairman."

"That's news to me. We've been in Qui

She nodded as if it didn't matter. She was strange…she was a stranger. Gavving knew every man, woman, and child in Qui

"I'm thirsty," he said.

She passed him a squeezegourd pod half-full of water. He drank.

The clump that was Qui

"Dalton-Qui

"Your half of the tree is probably safe, but it's being pulled out by the tide. I can't think of any way to reach it. We're lost." Then his curiosity suddenly became unbearable. "Who are you?"

"Minya Dalton-Qui

"I'm Gavving Qui

"Smitta was…excitable. Some of us are like that in the Triune Squad, and you were killing the Hand."

"Triune Squad. Mostly women?"

"All women. Even Smitta, by courtesy. We serve the tuft as fighters."

"Why did you want to be a fighter?"

She shook her head, violently. "I don't want to talk about it. Will your citizens accept me or kill me?"

"We're not—" killers? He'd killed two himself. It came to him that if the Grad had taught him rightly, those times when the Scientist would have whipped them both for such talk, then…then Minya's half of the tree, falling out from Voy, was also falling out of a drought. So.

"Can I tell them this? If we can get you back to the far tuft, you'll see to it that we're made members of your tribe. It looks better if I can say that. Well?"

She didn't speak at once, and then she said, "I have to think."

The meat and the fan were passing at fair speed when Clave cast out a weighted line. He'd reserved their last pod. Another mistake, maybe. Now they'd have only one chance… but the dark stranger caught the line neatly and made it fast. They braced against their mutual spin.

Gavving shouted across the gap. "This is Minya of Dalton-Qui

"Don't pull in yet. Is she armed?"

"She was."

"I want her weapons." Clave cast another line. An impressively thick bundle came back. Clave studied the haul: a knife the length of his own arm, a smaller knife, a bundle of mini-harpoons, and two of the pull-itapart weapons, one of wood and one of metal. He preferred the look of the wooden one. The metal thing looked like it had been made from something else. By now he'd guessed how they must work, and he liked the idea.

Alfin said, "She tried to kill us all."

"True." Clave handed the Grad his last jet pod, not without reluctance. "Stop our spin. Wait. See that sheet of bark, out from us and not moving very fast? See if you can stop our spin and move us that way too."

Alfin persisted. "What are you going to do?"

"Recruit her, if she'll stand for it," Clave answered. "Seven citizens in a tribe is ridiculous."

"There isn't room to guard her."

"Where do you want to spend the rest of your life?"

The jet pod sprayed gas and seeds. The Grad said, "We won't reach the bark this way. Not enough push."

Alfin still hadn't answered. Clave told him, "Unless you've learned to like falling, I'd guess you want to live in an integral tree tuft. We now have a prisoner who lives in a tuft. We have the chance to earn her gratitude."

"Bring her in."

Chapter Nine

The Raft

THE POND WAS A SMALL, PERFECT SPHERE, TWENTY KLOMTERS out from the Checker's Rand: a giant water droplet trailing a tail of mist in the direction away from the sun. When the sun shone through from behind, as it did now, Minya glimpsed shadows wriggling within it.

It was going to drift past.

The ends of the tree were far away and still separating: Dalton-Qui

Something surged from the pond, and the pond rippled and convulsed in its wake. The creature was big even at this distance. Hard to judge its size, but it seemed little more than a mouth with fins. Minya watched it uneasily. It didn't seem to be coming toward them. It was flapping toward the smoke trail.

A loose cluster of citizens floated about the Checker's Hand. They couldn't all cling. There wasn't room, and the fungus wasn't holding together that well, either. They used spikes and tethers and showed a reluctance to approach Minya too closely.

The old one, Alfin, clung to the stalk. His look of terror had smoothed out, but he wouldn't talk and he wouldn't move.

The Grad studied her. He said, "Meen Ya. Have I got that right?"

"Close enough. Minya."

"Ah. Mineeya-if we could reach your end of the tree, could you help us join your tribe?"

Their eyes were on her. The old one's seemed desperate. Well, it had had to come. She said, "We have a drought. Too many mouths to feed already."

The Grad said, "Your drought's probably ending about now. There'll be water."

"You're the Qui

"That's right."

"I accept what you say. How long before that new water grows new food? In any—"