The Smoke Ring

“Are we bringing the spitgun? No, of course not.” The weapon Mark had been carrying when he was captured was now in custody of the Chairman. “Gavving, it’s in the older part of my hut, what used to be the common room. If you don’t have the spitgun, you’re not the Chairman. Get it before anyone notices.”

Rather scrambled back through the airlock. Gavving, Ryllin, and Lawri left. Jeffer let them get well clear before he pulled away on the little jets.

The tree receded. Three tiny citizens fluttered toward the elevator dock, A cage had nearly reached the dock. One of the occupants was shrieking and waving its fists.

“Somebody must have found Mark,” Debby said.

“Relax, Clave, we only tied him up.”

“Yeah. But if I’d known a rescue party was coming …skip it. You’d have closed the airlock in their faces. I hope you treefeeders can find something worthwhile in the Clump. It’s my reputation on the line now.”

Section Two

THE LOGGERS

Chapter Seven

The Honey Hornets

from the Citizens Tree cassettes:

YEAR 384, DAY 1590. JEFFER, SCIENTIST. WE HAVE DEPARTED CITIZENS TREE TO EXPLORE THE FOURTH LAGRANGE POINT, WITH ATTENTION TO RESOURCES AND POPULATION. THE MISSION AS OUTLINED IS REVISED AS FOLLOWS: CHAIRMAN CLAVE NOW LEADS. THIS EXPEDITION HAS BECOME AN APPROVED ACTIVITY OF CITIZENS TREE. I NOW TURN THE LOG OVER TO CHAIRMAN CLAVE.

CLAVE, CHAIRMAN. CREW CONSISTS OF JEFFER AS SCIENTIST AND CAPTAIN, CITIZENS DEBBY AND RATHER, BOOCE AND CARLOT SERJENT AS GUIDES, AND MYSELF. PRIORITY AT ALL TIMES WILL GO TO PROTECTING THE CARM AND OTHER VITAL PROPERTY OF CITIZENS TREE. NO KNOWLEDGE IS WORTH GAINING UNLESS IT CAN BE REPORTED TO CITIZENS TREE.

CARLOT WAS WATCHING OVER THEIR SHOULDERS.

“You use—”

“Prikazyvat End log,” said Jeffer.

“ — the same dates we do?”

“Why not?”

“Well, how do you know?” Carlot demanded. “Years, you just watch for the sun to go behind Voy, but what about days? We sleep a couple of days out of five, right? But maybe you lose count—”

“Who cares?” Clave said. “Who knows how many days there are in a year? It depends on where you are.”

Jeffer summoned up numbers on the panel. “The CARM logs a standard day, about four and a half per sleep. We used to keep marks on sticks in the Scientist’s hut. How do you keep time?”

Carlot said, “The Admiralty posts the time.”

Booce laughed. “They must get it the same way! The Library looks a lot like this panel, Jeffer. Like somebody ripped out this part of the CARM.”

“Keys like this too?”

“I wasn’t close enough to see. They don’t let ordinary crew near it. Let’s see…in the crossyear ceremony Radyo Mattson did the talking, but there was a Navy officer standing in front of the Library, and his hands moved…”

And Kendy watched them all.

The CARM autopilot heard everything. Every ten hours and a little, it squirted its records at Discipline. Kendy sorted the conversations for what he could use.

Two CARM autopilots, separated for five hundred and thirty-two years and eleven months, were both keeping Smoke Ring time, with Discipline’s arrival set at zero.

Interesting. The mutineers must have adjusted them after it was certain that they would never return. They had severed relations with the past, with Kendy, with Earth, with the State itself.

Yet they used mutiny as an obscenity. Puzzling.

The CARM flew east, airspeed seventy-one kph, partially fueled, carrying water that would become fuel. Solar collector efficiency was ru

It was a liquid oxygen pipe ripped from a CARM. Many CARMs must have been dismantled when they stopped working. The Admiralty “Library” was certainly the control panel from a ruined CARM; but was it still functional?

The cabin interior was offensively dirty. Kendy detected traces of old meals eaten aboard; feathers and bird shit from the turkey roundup ten years back; the black clay that had returned the same trip; and mud repeatedly expelled from the water tank. Dirt was not dangerous, only aesthetically distressing. Kendy foresaw no problems other than those of microsociology.

He was on course.

Humankind was scattered. No telling how far they had spread through the Smoke Ring. They had settled cottoncandy jungles and the tufts of integral trees; he knew of four tiny civilizations outside the L4 point. But the Admiralty seemed to be the densest gathering, the most numerous, the best organized: the political entity most suited to become the heart of an expanding empire.

It would not resemble the State at first. Conditions were fantastically different. Never mind. Give them communications, gather them into one political group. Then shape it.

He must know more. Hearsay from a family of wandering loggers wasn’t good enough. The Admiralty “Library,” that would tell him how to proceed next…but he already knew that he must eventually contact the officers themselves.

Somehow the CARM must be moved into the Clump.

Jeffer had seemed to have matters well in hand. The effects of mutiny on Citizens Tree did not concern Kendy …but Clave had ended a mutiny by joining it! Now he must persuade Jeffer and Clave both. But Kendy couldn’t talk to Clave. Exposing Jeffer’s secret would lose Jeffer’s trust.

It was precisely the kind of problem a Checker enjoyed most.

For now Kendy watched six savages in a recording made over the past ten hours. They had much to teach him.

Booce speaking: “We own — owned our own ship. I suppose that made us richer than most. I inherited Logbearer from my father, and I made my first trips with him. Ryllin was another logger’s daughter, and she was used to the life. We had four daughters and a few lost ones out of maybe twenty pregnancies, all while hauling logs. I’ve become a good maternity doctor…” The cassette ended.

Men had changed in the Smoke Ring.

Pregnancy was easy in low gravity. Women became pregnant many times during their lifetimes.

Infant mortality (“lost ones”) was high, perhaps around sixty percent; the natives seemed to take it for granted. Discipline had carried no diseases. Yet the growth of bones and organs was altered by altered gravity. Some children could not digest food. Some grew strangely, until their kidneys or livers or hearts or intestines would no longer work because of their shape.

The environment was user-friendly for those who survived childhood. Kendy’s citizens came in odd shapes. Kendy caught a reference to Merril Qui

Distorted children had wandered through the CARM to be photographed. Ryllin Serjent had an awesomely long neck, quite lovely and graceful and fragile looking. Carlot’s legs…Kendy wished he could see her walk or run.

They matured more slowly. Carlot claimed fourteen and a half years; she would be twenty by Earth’s reckoning. But she looked no more than fifteen.

Men had not evolved for the Smoke Ring. Infant mortality must have been ghastly among the original crew. Five hundred years of natural selection was taking care of that. As with the cats a few generations back: the near future should see an impressive population explosion.

Kendy would guide the civilization that resulted. He had been right to move now.

The CARM was coming back into range. Kendy’s telscope array picked it up falling east and out, slowing.