The Integral Trees

The Chairman's chest was still half-covered in fluff 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 Qui

"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…he could anchor at the median and go down well. He's lost to Qui

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 Qui

Chapter Two

Leavetaking

THE TREEMOUTH WAS A FUNNEL-SHAPED PIT THICKLY LINED with dead-looking, naked spine branches. The citizens of Qui

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. Qui

Martal was among them, at the lower rim of the fu

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—"

"Clave's the top hunter in the tuft! He's the Chairman's son-in-law!"

"But he's not living with Mayrin. Aside from that…I'd be guessing."

"What?"

"It's too complicated. I could even be wrong." And Harp drifted off.

The Smoke Ring was a line of white emerging from the pale blue sky, narrowing as it curved around in the west. Far down the arc, Gold was a clot of streaming, embattled storms. His gaze followed the arm around and down and in, until it faded out near Voy. Voy was directly below, a blazing pinpoint like a diamond set in a ring.

It was all sharper and clearer than it had been when Gavving was a child. Voy had been dimmer then and blurred.

At the passing of Gold, Gavving had been ten years old. He remembered hating the Scientist for his predictions of disaster, for the fear those predictions raised. The shrieking winds had been terrible enough but Gold had passed, and the storms had diminished…The allergy attack had come days later.

This present drought had taken years to reach its peak, but Gavving had felt the disaster at once. Blinding agony like knives in his eyes, ru

The wind too had become stronger.

It always blew directly into the treemouth. Qui