The Integral Trees

But his eyes inquired; they judged her. He asked, "Citizen, what will happen to them?"

"Call me Scientist's Apprentice," Lawri said. "Who are you?"

"I'm the Qui

That made her laugh. "I can hardly call you Scientist! Don't you have a name?"

He bristled, but he answered. "I did. Jeffer."

"Jeffer, the other copsiks don't concern you now. Get aboard the carm and stay out of the pilot's way."

He stood stupidly. "Carm?"

She slapped its metal flank and pronounced the syllables as she had been taught. "Cargo And Repair Module. CARM. In!"

He got through both doors and a few paces beyond, and there he stopped, gaping, trying to see in every direction at once. For the moment she left him to it. She didn't blame him. Few copsiks ever saw the interior of the carm.

Ten chairs faced into a tremendous curved window of thick glass. Images were there that couldn't be outside the glass, nor could they be reflections. They must be in the glass itself: numbers and letters and line drawings in blue and yellow and green.

Behind the chairs was thirty or forty cubic meters of empty space.

There were bars set to swivel out of the walls and floor and ceiling, and numerous loops of metal: anchorage for stored goods against the jerky pull of the motors. Even so, the cabin was only a fifth the size of the carm. What was the rest?

When the carm moved, flame had spurted from nostrils at the rear. It seemed that something must burn to move the carm…a good deal of it, if it occupied most of the carm's bulk…and pumps to move the fuel, and mysteries whose names he'd glimpsed in the cassettes: attitude jet ljfe support system, computer, mass sensor, echo laser.

The calm left by the needle had almost left his blood. He was starting to be afraid. Could he learn to read those numbers in the glass? Would he have the chance?

A man in blue lounged before the box window. A big-boned man of average height, he was still too tall for the chair; what would have been a curved head rest poked him between the shoulder blades. The Scientist's Apprentice spoke briskly. "Please take us to the Citadel."

"I don't have orders to do that."

"Just what are your orders?" Her voice was casual, peremptory.

"I don't have orders yet. The Navy may be interested in these. scientific items."

"Confiscate them, if you're sure enough. And I'll tell the Scientist what happened to them, as soon as I'm allowed to contact him. Will you confiscate the copsik too? He says he knows how to work them. Maybe you'd better confiscate me, to talk to him."

The pilot was looking nervous. His glance at the Grad was venomous. A witness to his discomfiture…He decided. "Citadel, right."

His hands moved.

The girl, forewarned, was clutching the back of a chair. The Grad wasn't. The lurch threw him off balance. He grabbed at something to stop his fall. A handleon the back wall: it twisted in his hand, and dirty water spilled from a nozzle. He turned it off quick and met the girl's look of disgust.

After perhaps twenty heartbeats the pilot lifted his fingers The familiar whistling roar-barely audible through the metal walls, but still fearfully strange-went quiet. The Grad immediately made his way to one of the chairs.

The carm was moving away from the tuft, east and out. Were they leaving London Tree? Why? He didn't ask. He was uncharacteristically leery of playing the fool. He watched the pilot's hands. Symbols and numbers glowed in the bow window and in the panel below it, but the pilot touched only the panel, and only the blue. He could feel the response in shifting sound and shifting tide. Blue moves the carm?

"Jeffer. How did you get those wounds?" The blond girl spoke as if she didn't care very much.

Wounds? Oh, his face. "The tree came apart," he said. "They do that if they fall too far out of the Smoke Ring. We had a close encounter with Gold some years ago."

That touched her curiosity nerve. "What happens to the people?"

"Qui

"You'll have to tell me about it sometime." She tapped what she was carrying. "What are these?"

"Cassettes and a reader. Records."

She thought it over, longer than seemed necessary. Then she reached to plug one of the Grad's cassettes into a slot in front of the pilot. The pilot said, "Hey—"

"Science. My preogative," she said. She tapped two buttons. (Buttons, permanent fixtures in a row of five: yellow, blue, green, white, red. The panel was otherwise blank, save for the transitory glowing lights within. A tap of the yellow button made all the yellow lights disappear; the white button raised new symbols in white.) "Prikazyvat Menu."

The familiar table of contents appeared within the glass: white print flowing upward. She'd chosen the cassette for cosmology. The Grad felt his hands curling to strangle her. Classifie4 classtfled! Mine!

"Prikazyvat Gold." The print shifted. The pilot was gripped by ternfled fascination, unable to look away. The Scientist's Apprentice asked the Grad, "Can you read?"

"Certainly."

"Goldblatt's World probably originated as a Neptune-like body, a gas giant world in the cometary halo that circles Levoy's Star and TeeThree, hundreds of billions of kilometers…klomters out. A supernova can spew its outer envelope asymmetrically due to its trapped magnetic field, leaving the remaining neutron star with an altered velocity. The planetary orbits go all to hell. In Levoy's s-scenario Goldblatt's World would have dropped very close to Levoy's Star, with its per perihelion actually inside the neutron star's Roche Limit. Strong Roche tides would quickly warp the orbit into a circle. The planet would have continued to leak atmosphere to the present day, replacing gasses lost from the Smoke Ring and the gas torus to interstellar space.

"Goldblatt estimates that Levoy's Star went supernova a billion years ago. The planet must have been losing atmosphere for all of that time. In its present state Goldblatt's World defies description: a worldsized core of rock and metals—"

"Enough. Very good, you can read. Can you understand what you read?"

"Not that. I can guess that Levoy's Star is Voy and Goldblatt's World is Gold. The rest of it—" The Grad shrugged. His eye caught the pilot's, and the pilot flinched. He seemed shrunken into himself.

Dominance games. The Scientist's Apprentice had assaulted the pilot's mind with the wonders and the cryptic language of science. Now she was saying, "We have that data on our own cassettes, word for word, as far as I can remember. I hope you brought us something new."

A shadow was congealing in the silver fog around them. They were drifting back toward London Tree.

The carm's free-falling path had curved back toward the tree's midpoint. East takes you out. Out takes you west-He had a great deal to learn about flying the carm. Because he must learn. He would learn to fly this thing, or end his days as a copsik.

There were structures here. Huge wooden beams formed a square.

Inward, four huts in a column, not of woven foliage, but of cut wood.

Cables and tubes ran down the trunk in both directions, further than the Grad could follow. A pond had touched the trunk: a silvery globule clung to the bark, and that seemed strange. A single pond in this region of mist? Men in red moved around it, feeding it water carried in seed pods. It too must be artificial.

With all these artificial structures, London Tree made Qui

She answered without looking at him. "No. We bring it from other integral trees."