The Smoke Ring

“We don’t need that gibberish. We can feel we’re too few. Now we have three more women, even if Ryllin is too old to host a guest, and they’re different from us—”

“They are indeed!”

“Well, that’s good!”

“Suppose they want to go home?”

“They can’t,” Minya said flatly.

A child stirred: Qwen. Gavving lowered his voice.

“Suppose we built them another rocket. Suppose some of us wanted to go with them.”

Minya stopped to sort words through her head. Gavving waited patiently. Presently she said, “They’d have to be crazy. We’d have to be crazy to let them go. Gav, have you forgotten London Tree?”

“No. I haven’t forgotten Qui

“…No. But we attacked you the instant we saw you.”

“True.”

“Do you remember being lost in the sky, clinging to a sheet of bark and dying of thirst? We faced dangers we can’t even describe to our children, because they were too strange! We fought hard for Citizens Tree! And now both Scientists want to cross a thousand klomters to the Clump shouting ‘Here we are!’ Why do you want to risk what we’ve got?”

“They’ve got things to trade. They’ve got wings—”

“We’ve got wings.”

“We picked jet pods, when we could find them. All this time. And it’s so simple. Minya, what would you have given for a pair of wings, when we were stranded in the sky? Everything in the Smoke Ring can fly except men, and all it takes is spine branches and cloth! They’ve got a rocket that moves a tree, and it isn’t stolen starstuff, it’s made mostly from things they find in the Smoke Ring. What have they got in the Clump? What haven’t we seen yet?”

She put bitterness in her laughter. “A thousand people and a drastic need for copsiks, maybe.”

Gavving sighed. “Stet, you don’t want anything changed. What should we do? They’re here.”

“Make them welcome,” said Minya. “Teach them how to live in a tree. Get the girls married. Make them part of us. Gavving, Mark intends to marry Karilly.”

“Karilly’s sick in the mind. She isn’t getting over it.”

“Sure, and Mark’s a dwarf. He’s needed a wife, and none of us would touch him. 1 never did feel sorry for the copsik ru

And I think you ought to marry one of the other girls.”

Bang! Gavving stared. This was a woman afraid of changes? “I am married.”

“Clave has two wives. Anthon did, until lisa died. I’m getting too old to make babies, dear.”

“You don’t mean—”

“No!” She hugged him. “But it won’t give me a guest to carry.”

“You’re serious? Okay, who?”

She hesitated. Then, bravely (he thought): “I would have thought Mishael. She’s the oldest. Gavving, she showed me how to fly. I like her.”

“Have you mentioned any of—”

“No, you fool! A woman doesn’t ask a woman to be her wife!” And when he laughed she smiled, weakly.

Gavving saw how difficult this was for her. Minya must have thought long and hard about this.

“There’s room to extend the hut,” she said. “We’d have another pair of hands, adult hands. The children are growing up, they’re not as much fun any more—”

And if some of us marry Serjent women, we’ll have their loyalty when the Admiralty comes to us! Logbearer can’t be the only ship in the sky. Gavving wondered if his brain was working in the service of his seeds. Minya had not referred to Mishael’s alien beauty.

And if we do visit the Clump, his brain ran on, we’ll need guides. Booce or Ryllin would have to go. With their daughters among us, we’d have their loyalty—

Chapter Five

The Silver Suit

from the Admiralty cassettes, year 3 SM:

WE WERE CHOSEN FOR THIS. NO CITIZEN LEAVES EARTH ORBIT UNTIL THE STATE HAS LEARNED HIS TOLERANCE FOR FREE-FALL. ONE IN TEN THOUSAND HAVE THE GENETIC QUIRKS TO SURVIVE MONTHS OR YEARS OF FREE-FALL WITHOUT SOFTENING OF THE BONES, WITHOUT FAILURE OF THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, WITHOUT THE TERROR OF FALLING.

WE SERVED THE STATE BY FLYING TO THE STARS. WHEN THE DRIVE WAS OFF WE PLAYED AT FLYING, WHILE CRAMPED IN A SEEDER RAMSHIP WITH BARELY ROOM TO FLAP OUR ARMS. HERE IS REAL FLIGHT. OF COURSE THE SMOKE RING SEEMS AN INCREDIBLE DREAM COME TRUE — TO US.

“KENDY FOR THE STATE. HELLO, JEFFER. IT’S BEEN more than thirty days.”

“I was busy. We got our council. It’s over.”

“How did it go?”

“We lost.”

“Who sided against you?”

“Clave. Jayan and Ji

“Five out of ten. If you count the Serjents, twelve.”

“Thirteen. Mishael’s old enough, and married too, but she acts like a junior wife. She won’t make Minya or Gavving angry. Gavving doesn’t want to fight with Minya. The Serjents don’t think like citizens yet. Anthon won’t get into the arguments. I’m not really sure where he stands. The rest of us want to see what’s out there, but we don’t all want it enough. Debby loves arguing, but she’s not very good at it. We didn’t give Clave any trouble at all.”

“You’re disappointed. Don’t be. Did you think that flying would bring them around? People tend to side with authority, and authority tends to protect its own power. Clave is the key. Clave has everything he wants in Citizens Tree.”

“Kendy, do you see us as savages?”

“Yes. Don’t take that too seriously, Scientist. I would probably see the Admiralty as savages too. I want to educate you all.”

“Then educate me, Kendy. I can’t just take Booce and Ryllin and go off into the sky. We—”

“You must go, Jeffer. The wealth of the L4 point is almost irrelevant. It takes many people to hold a civilization together. There are too few of you here to be more than savages!”

Jeffer didn’t react to the insult, barring an increase in infrared radiation from his cheeks, neck, and ears. “We’d need things Citizens Tree can’t spare. Lawri’s on my side, but we can’t both go. The tree needs a Scientist. We’d have to take the CARM too. We—”

“Take it.”

“You’re not serious. Dalton-Qui

“Bring the CARM back when you’re through with it.”

Jeffer paused to think. (Kendy never did that. It was another reason to distrust Kendy: he seemed to leap at his answers, without forethought.) “We might lose the CARM.”

“You can build a steam rocket. Jeffer, I’m drifting out of range.”

“We’ve got one pipe, and we need that to be loggers. Without the pipe, Citizens Tree couldn’t build a steam rocket. I wouldn’t have believed that so much could change in twenty sleeps. Kendy?” The signal dissolved in noise.

Kendy returned to his records.

For twenty State years CARM #6 had been taking pictures, not just through the CARM cameras but through the fisheye lens on the pressure suit too.

Here: the squirrel cage that ran a muscle-powered lift, and the lines leading up. Far too much footage of that.

Here: fire burned in a great bowl of soft clay. The silver suit moved around the edges of the fire, poking it, or adjusting sheets of bark that had been set as vanes to cha

Here: less fire than smoke. What looked like enough spaghetti to feed Sol system’s entire State government had been spread leeward of smoldering wood. The pressure suit moved around and within the mass, turning it and loosening the strands — vines — with the handle of a harpoon so that the smoke would cure them. These were the lines that now served Citizens Tree.

Ingenious. A poor way to treat State property; but they were making use of local resources too.