The Smoke Ring

“You ran out of fuel, that’s all,” Jeffer told him. “See that little red light below your chin?”

“It was on when I started out. I don’t know what it means.”

“Means you’re out of hydrogen. There must be a way to refuel the suit. I’ll search the cassettes. If I can’t find anything we’ll have to ask Mark, after this is all over. Calm, now! We’ve got pods and we’ve got honey. Maybe we won’t need the silver suit again.”

A forty-klomter-long tree is hard to lose from six hundred klomters away. Jeffer had no trouble bringing them home.

Booce attacked the first pod gingerly, hacking at the stem with the matchet, flinching back at each blow. At the sixth blow the pod suddenly spewed foggy air under terrific pressure. Booce threw himself into the sky. He flapped back, staying well clear.

He opened the other pod in the same cautious fashion. Then he and Carlot sawed it in half. The inside was lined with fist-sized puffballs, each with a dangling tendril. Booce scraped these away.

He sawed the stem off the first pod, leaving a small hole. He shaved the edges until the hole was just smaller than the metal pipe, and quit for di

They resumed work after breakfast. It took four of them to shove the ends of the pipe into the holes in both pods.

Clave asked, “Now how do you get water in there?”

“Punch a little hole in the other end of the tank. Put the pipe in a’pond and suck. You need good lungs to be a logger.”

“We’re too far in to find many ponds.”

“I know. Usually we fuel Logbearer before we go to work on the tree. But, dammit, we’ve got the CARM, and there’ll be a pond somewhere, and Logbearer is whole again! Except for the lines. And cabins. We’ll need wood to build cabins.”

“We’ll go for wood after the next sleep,” Jeffer said. “The out branch, I think. The in branch may be about to fall off.”

“No. Another thirty days at least.”

Carlot said, “Father—”

“Don’t trust that,” Booce said instantly. “We’ll use the out branch.”

“You’re the logger. What changed your mind?”

Booce sighed. “I was guessing. I don’t really know when the in branch will fall off. Jeffer, there’s likely to be a shock when the branch tears loose. Stay aboard the CARM. Stay strapped in when you sleep. Leave the motor off.”

“Stet. Will the rest of you be okay on the trunk?”

“As long as we keep our wings handy. Always have your wings in reach…always. But you should be in the CARM in case we need rescue.”

The steam rocket still required attention. Booce and Carlot festooned the water tank with lines and wove a braid of lines around the bow end. “We’ll moor the cabins here. Other than that…I still don’t know what we’re going to use for sikenwire. There has to be some way to hold the coals in place.”

Clave had a suggestion. “We could arrive crippled. Get a push from the CARM to drift the log into range, then signal for help somehow. Tell the Navy we lost our sikenwire, got home by luck.”

“Mmm…maybe. I’d look like a fool, but maybe. I just don’t want to be in too much of a hurry.” He stopped abruptly. Then he said, “Ryllin and the girls, they — we were in a hurry to get back to the Admiralty. We started the rocket ru

“What’s — ?”

“Did I tell you you’re rich?”

“I don’t know what it means,” Clave said.

“That wart on the trunk is thousands of kilos of metal. With metal you can buy anything that’s for sale in the Market. It also makes us a target. Someone might try to steal it.”

“Good news and bad news.”

“Right. We’ll set up shop to sell the wood, and take our time selling the metal. No hurry.”

Food had grown short again. Debby and Clave flew in along the trunk until they found a covey of flashers. With the trunk as a backstop they fired their full complement of arrows and shot half a dozen of the small birds. It took them six days.

They built a fire on the trunk to cook the birds. Logbearer’s crew was ready for a feast.

Booce was the exception. He ate little. He was uncharacteristically silent, his eyes on the fire, until Carlot said, “Dad? Twenty, twenty-five days?”

“About that,” Booce said. Then: “I guessed last time. I should be in the tuft watching the bugs.”

“Dad, you couldn’t warn us from down there anyway.”

“I could start climbing ten or fifteen days early…”

“Dad—”

“I’m glad we don’t have the rocket ru

The silence stretched. Debby asked, “What happened?”

Booce told it.

Booce was fast asleep when the cabin’s yielding wooden wall slammed into his face and chest. His grunt of surprise was lost among feminine shrieks. He was reaching for his wings before his eyes were fully open.

The women were a flurry of action around him, snatching for their wings, moving out. Ryllin reached the door, looked about her, then immediately turned toward a violet-white glare that hadn’t been there when they’d gone to sleep. Carlot and Karilly followed. Wend hadn’t found her wings. She was near tears as she searched.

Booce left her. Nothing terrible could happen to Wend aboard Logbearer, and this would teach her always to know where her wings were.

He saw it all at a glance:

Logbearer was moored against a vast wall of bark, the east side of the trunk. Coals in their retaining net burned bright orange along the middle length of the pipe. The nozzle cone pointed east toward the Clump. Some meters from the cone, live steam condensed into a white stream klomters long.

The Clump was a distant whori of white-and-gray storm, with the misty white tube of the Smoke Ring converging beyond and below it. The eye might follow that white line down the sky…and where the tree converged to a point, there was Voy.

The glare-white pinpoint had been masked by the in tuft when Booce went to sleep. The in tuft was gone. It had torn loose days before Booce expected it. Freed from its weight, the tree had lurched outward. Booce had guessed as much; now he could see it.

In toward Voy, a fluttering black silhouette was haloed in blue light.

Mishael had been outside on watch. The lurch had torn her loose. She was far in along the trunk, flapping outand-east to bring her out, just as she’d been taught. But he’d never taught her to lose one of her wings!

Ryllin and the girls flew toward her: foreshortened black silhouettes. They made slow progress. In-and-west would have taken them straight in, but the west was a wall of black bark.

Booce followed slowly. Mishael seemed to have it under control.

With the in tuft gone the center of mass was higher on the tree. Tide was pulling Booce away from the tree, and in. A new breeze a

She kicked toward him, screaming—

Booce turned toward Logbearer, too late.

The lurch and the breeze and Booce’s inattention, these had caused the disaster. A flurry of coals had been jarred loose from the sikenwire cage. Irradiated by the pipefire, the bark had been drying and warming for tens of days. It had been ready to ignite.

Under normal circumstances an integral tree is in equilibrium with the wind. A steady gale blows at each tuft, and no wind blows at its center. Air must move past a fire to keep it burning. But a tree under sail is moving, and there is wind. Coals reached the bark and blazed up.

Booce flapped hard toward a Logbearer already embedded in flame.

He hadn’t panicked then. There was a hose, and pressure in the water tank, for the fire would be heating it. He would use the hose to spray water and steam on the fire. Booce breathed deeply as he flew, hyperoxygenating. He’d hold his breath while he worked. The danger was that he might breathe flame.