The Smoke Ring

He turned to Booce. “The kids need this, but I hate to make you sit through it again at your age—”

Booce’s eyes were glassy too. “No, no, no. This is all new to me.”

“Didn’t you have classes? There’s the Library—”

“For officer’s kids only,” Booce said brusquely. “Go on with this. What’s eccentric?”

“That’s a round path that isn’t a circle. It goes out and in. Booce, am I committing a crime if I teach you and Carlot these things?”

“But I want to learn!”

“Shush, Carlot. It’s never come up before,” Booce said. “You’re not showing us the Library, after all.”

Carlot demanded, “Scientist, what’s the point in stopping now?”

Jeffer laughed. He tapped, and the window was restored. The Clump was nearer now, and a score of parallel dashes lay across the CARM’s path. “You’re right. Carlot, but the lesson’s over anyway. We’re getting too close.”

Debby answered with a raspberry.

“Booce?” Jeffer said. “Any special favorites?”

“The smallest, I’d think, but let’s have a better look.”

Booce disengaged his seat tethers and moved aft. “Jeffer, would you open those doors?”

“Will do.” He did. “Booce, don’t you trust the windows?”

“I prefer my eyes. Swing us around, will you?” He braced himself in the airlock. Others of the crew had followed him.

Jeffer began the maneuver. In the forward view, now moving into the port view, one of the trees had begun blinking: a green halo going on, off, on, off.

Nobody was near. Jeffer whispered, “Why?”

Now a point far in along the trunk was doing the blinking. Then that stopped—

An arm stabbed past Jeffer’s ear, and he had to repress a shriek. “There,” Booce said, pointing at one of the trees. “Thirty klomters, and it seems healthy.”

“What about this one, Booce?” Jeffer tapped the tree that had blinked at him.

“Nothing wrong with it. It’s bigger, twice the mass. Take us longer to get it to the Market, but of course there’d be more wood too, and there’s the CARM… Why that one?”

“A hunch. You’ve got no objection?”

Now Clave was behind him too. “Jeffer, are you playing dominance games?”

“?”

“I’m the Chairman, you captain the CARM, Booce is the logger. Booce chooses the tree.”

Jeffer repressed a sigh. “Yes, Chairman. Booce?”

Booce pointed to Jeffer’s selection. “That one.”

Ten klomters above the tuft, the wood of the trunk had grown to enclose a node of foreign matter. Jeffer saw Booce catch his daughter’s eye as Carlot was about to speak. She held her silence.

At the tree midpoint Jeffer nosed the CARM against the trunk. He ran the attitude jets while his crew pounded spikes into the bark to mark a rectangle the size of the CARM’s bow. The CARM drifted while they chopped out a dock with matchets.

Even on this younger tree, the bark was a meter thick.

They made life easier for themselves by chopping along cracks. The five of them lifting together could rip great mattresses of bark away from the wood beneath, then saw off sections. Booce and Carlot used the saw, then let others take over until they got the hang of it.

Booce and Carlot rejoined Jeffer in the CARM. Booce said, “They seem to be doing all right.”

“But it’s scarred,” Carlot objected.

“And how much wood will that cost us?”

She shrugged. “Five percent? And weren’t we in a hurry to get home?”

Booce was smiling. “Exactly. Jeffer, why this tree?”

“You’ll be painting a line of honey down the trunk, stet? Have a look at that scar.”

“Can you tell me what I’m supposed to find?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Jeffer the Scientist, Citizens Tree gave us shelter and a place among you. We’re grateful. I will not quarrel with any decision you make. You won’t need to test it again.”

Jeffer could feel his ears and cheeks burning. “If that scar isn’t more interesting than you expect, you can count on it that I won’t make a fool of myself twice. Stet?”

“Stet. I won’t raise this subject with the Chairman, ever.”

“You are kind. What’s next?”

“The honey line.”

In the cabin the roar of the main drive was like a great beast heard far away; but outside the airlock the roar was deafening. A translucent blue flame reached out from the CARM’s main rocket nostril. Warmth backwashed against the bark.

Carlot’s eyes were big with fear. Rather pulled at her arm to set her kicking toward the in tuft, and followed, with Booce following him.

They stopped where the noise had decreased somewhat. The rough bark itself absorbed sound. Booce screamed, “That noise is beyond belief! What is that damn CARM, a ship from the stars?”

“Jeffer says it rode here on the starship. My father never saw Discipline.” What Rather said would be true whoever his father was. “But he’s seen the stars. They’re real.”

“I’m afraid of it. I admit it. Look, the noise is scaring the bugs out of the bark! Let’s get to work.”

Booce used a branchwood matchet to open a hole in one of the honeypots. The interior was partitioned; the cells held red, sticky honey. Booce used the blade to paint it on the bark.

“You’ll find a few hornets still in there,” he told Rather. “They try to sting through the sack if you give them a few days to get restless, and then they die. But don’t count on it. Don’t let one get at you. Now you paint dabs a couple of meters apart. Closer, you waste honey. Farther apart, the bugs lose their way.”

Rather had thought he was a climber, but this was different. He had problems keeping up. He was almost lost among the sacks he was carrying. Booce and Carlot climbed head down; they would have left him behind if Booce had not been stopping to paint the trunk.

They took a breather when the sun was at nadir and the shadows had become confusing. The sun was passing closer to Voy as the year waned.

A day later they took a longer rest. “This is the part I like best,” Booce said. “We’re usually in too much of a hurry. This time your CARM is already pushing us home. We can take our time, do what we like!”

“Like what?”

“I’ll show you as we go.” Booce began tearing up sheets of bark greater than a man, mooring them edgewise against the bare wood. When he had them arrayed he set them alight.

The smoke tended to stay where it formed. Booce moored a four-kigram slab of shellbird meat in the cloud. They broiled smaller steaks on their matchets, closer to the fire, and ate them still hot.

“The smoked meat will keep till we’re down,” Booce said. “But there are other things on the trunk. You’ve never climbed?”

“When we were children we did a little climbing, but just on the lower trunk. We weren’t supposed to go more than a klomter up. If you fell, the foliage would catch you. Any higher, we rode the elevator.”

They slept carefully tethered in cracks in the bark.

Sometimes, for moments, the roar of the CARM could be heard above the wind. A dark cloud had formed above them and was gradually drifting down.

The bugs of the tree had found the honey.

They breakfasted on smoked bird. Then Carlot did the painting while Booce carried the food.

The sun circled them, once and again. Always they stopped when the shadows were pointing straight out.

Water was begi

There was fan fungus like so many pallid hands reaching from the bark. Carlot showed Rather how to tear the red fringe off before eating the white interior. It was bland, almost tasteless, but went well enough with the strongly flavored smoked meat.

With lunch came entertainment: a gust of roses on the wind. The stems were four meters long. Dark-red blossoms fragile as tissue paper pointed straight toward Voy, soaking up blue Voy-light. Rather had never seen the like.