The Smoke Ring

He kicked toward the surface with Minya in tow. They blew water from their faces before they inhaled, and were back on duty before any child could get into trouble.

Debby was some distance from where the children swam. She stayed just under the surface, motionless, peering, her spear poised. She expelled stale air — which stayed before her as a bubble — raised her head, snatched a breath, ducked again.

Debby had lived her first nineteen years in free-fall.

Fourteen years in the tree tide had put muscle on her without shrinking her height. Her children — and lisa’s, the children they had borne to Anthon — were no taller than ordinary tree dwellers. But Debby was two and a half meters tall. Her fingers were long and fragile; her toes were sturdier if less agile, and the big toes measured six ce’meters. Her rich brown hair was begi

The water was murky. This was a new skill for Debby, but she was learning.

She struck. The ripple other thrust expanded outward around the great globule, past playing children and the Scientists working their cloth sheet.

A silver shape wriggled on Debby’s spearpoint. Debby reached above her head, tugged hard at the tether, and gasped as her head broke the surface. The waterbird, suddenly thrust into air, expanded its small wings and thrashed mightily. A blow to the head end quieted it.

Debby pushed it into a net bag to join five others.

Her chest still heaved with the need for air. She rested quietly on her back, her hands fluttering from time to time to keep surface tension from pulling her under.

Eastward, a thousand klomters past Citizens Tree, the cloud patterns thickened into a flattened whirlpool. The Smoke Ring converged beyond and below the whorl in a stream of white touched with blue-green, narrowing as it dropped toward the dazzling point of Voy.

Things tended to collect in that special part of the Smoke Ring, east of Gold by sixty degrees of arc. The citizens had reason to know that the storm-whorl around Gold was dangerous. They assumed that the Clump was too. They had never taken the tree nearer than this.

They had never visited a jungle.

Human beings certainly lived elsewhere in the Smoke Ring, but Citizens Tree had never attempted to contact them.

Citizens Tree was placid, safe. Working within the pond was as much excitement as Debby ever got these days. Life in Carther States had been different. The occasional raids from London Tree forced the citizens to be always prepared for war, until in one magnificent raid they had ended London Tree’s power forever.

Debby’s co

From westward came a cheerful cry. “Citizens! We need muscle!” Debby saw Lawri the Scientist floating in the sky with one hand on the main tether.

Debby snatched at the” net bag (six was a nice day’s catch), kicked herself into the sky, and began reeling her line in. She was first to reach the Scientist. Clave and Minya and Mark the Silver Man were leaving the pond, reeling in lines. Gavving had stayed to gather the children.

Four tethers led to the corners of the sheet-covered net, which was now deep underwater. Lawri stationed them along the main tether as they arrived. “Gather it in,” she directed them. “Make loops. Steady pull.”

Debby wrapped her toes and her fingers around the cable, and did her savage best to contract her body. No loop formed. She knew she wasn’t as strong as a tree dweller, but the others were having trouble too.

Lawri called, “Good! It’s coming straight out.”

That was not obvious to Debby. She strained…and gradually the pond bulged. The sheet and its net backing were rising, carrying tons of water. Debby pulled until her knees and elbows met, then shifted her grip and continued pulling.

The pond stretched, and tore. A baby pond pulled clear, leaving a trail of droplets the size of a man’s head.

Water flowed over the edges of the cloth but was not lost, for surface tension held it. The main pond pulsed as surface tension tried to form the sphere again.

“Keep pulling!” Lawri shouted. “Steady…okay. That should do it.”

The citizens relaxed. The bud-pond continued to move east on its own momentum, toward the tree, with the net and sheet now in the middle of a pulsing sphere.

Debby coiled line that was now slack. Glancing toward the trunk, she saw what the curve of the pond had hidden earlier.

Parallel to the trunk and many klomters beyond it floated a slender dark line. A young tree, no more than thirty klomters long, and injured; for the in tuft was missing, chopped away somehow. The view was confusing, for the midtrunk was wreathed in cloud…dark, dirty cloud…smoke!

Debby tugged abruptly at another line. The motion set her drifting toward the Chairman. Clave caught her ankle as she arrived. “Something?”

Debby pointed with her toes. “That tree. It’s on fire!”

“…I believe you’re right. Treefodder! It’ll be coming apart. Two fires to worry about.”

Debby had never seen a tree break in half, but Clave spoke from dreadful experience. They might have to move the tree. It would take time to get the CARM ready—

Clave had already thought that far. His voice became a whipcrack roar. “Citizens, it’s getting toward di

His voice dropped. “You go now, Debby. Tell Jeffer we may need the CARM. We’ll get the women and children down into the tuft, if we’ve got time. Your eyes are better than mine. Do you see anything leaving the tree? Like clouds of insects?”

There were black specks, big enough to show detail.

“Not insects. Something bigger…three, four… birds?”

“Doesn’t matter. Get going.”

It had taken Jeffer the Scientist a fifth of a day to cross three klomters of line.

Free-fall brought back memories. When Qui

Fourteen years later, the grandmother of all ponds floated three klomters from Citizens Tree; and now their main problem was to get rid of most of it. Jeffer wondered if the children appreciated their wealth.

Perhaps they did. Most of Citizens Tree, thirty naked adults and children, had come to swim in that shimmering sphere of water.

There was no foliage on the high trunk. It was thick rough bark, with fissures deep enough to hide a man. Jeffer found and do

The lift cable ended two hundred meters short of the CARM’s dock. The citizens may have feared that careless use of the CARM might spray fire across a rising cage.

More likely, they feared the CARM itself. They would not lightly come too near that ancient scientific thing.

The CARM was old science. It was roughly brickshaped, four meters by ten by thirty-two, and made of starstuff: metal and glass and plastic, sheathed with darkly luminous stuff that took the energy from sunlight.

The bulk of it was tanks for hydrogen and oxygen and water. Nostrils at the aft end — four at each corner, and a larger one in the middle — would spurt blue fire on command.

They had neglected the CARM of late, and Jeffer accepted some of the blame. The CARM made two “flavors” of fuel out of water and the power in the batteries.

The batteries held their full scientific charge — they filled themselves, somehow, as long as sunlight could reach the CARM’s glassy surface — but the hydrogen and oxygen tanks were almost empty. It was high time they filled the water tank.