The Smoke Ring

Silence and discomfort. Debby came to join them. “Wet,” she said. “What did you do to get it so wet?”

Jeffer didn’t answer. To Clave he said, “I felt much worse when I killed Klance the Scientist to steal the CARM. He wasn’t expecting it. These citizens were. They were making war.”

“Right!” Debby said enthusiastically. “When London Tree raided us, I used to wish we could capture this thing and set their whole tree burning. The bandits aren’t the same, but by the State, we finally did it!”

“Don’t do it again,” Clave said. Jeffer nodded.

Section Three

CIVILIZATION

Chapter Twelve

Customs

Year 384, day 1992, by heliograph:

STATION TWO TO GYRFALCON. SWALLOW REPORTS LARGE INCOMING LOG EAST OF ADMIRALTY. MASTER UNIDENTIFIED. YOU WILL RENDEZVOUS FOR CUSTOMS

DUTY IF CONVENIENT. LOCATION OF LOG AT DAY 1990 WAS TWO-NINE-OH DEGREES FLAT, FIVE DEGREES NORTH, TWO-EIGHT-OH KLOMTERS RADIAL. ACKNOWLEDGE.

“RICE, DID THIS JUST COME IN?”

“Yes, sir. I was scraping the hull when I saw the light blinking near the Market. Took the message and came straight in, but I don’t know how long the helio was blinking.”

Petty Mart Wheeler thought it through. Gyr falcon carried six crew; Swallow, two. The Navy preferred that civilians notice the big armed ships. In the act of paying customs they should remember what they were buying. So.

“Where are we?”

“I’ll find out, sir.” Spacer Rice turned toward the instrument closet.

“No, not you. Bosun Murphy, take our position.” This was not an urgent mission. He’d use it as a training exercise.

The dwarf nodded cheerfully; her flame-red hair swirled around her. Her short but powerful legs shot her across the cabin to the instrument closet. She chose what she needed and went out.

The long hair would have to go when she reached higher rank. Pity. But dwarves were rare, and Bosun Sectry Murphy must be trained quickly…

Through the hatch Wheeler could see a blue light, tiny and intense: a Navy heliograph, reflected Voy-light blinking near the east limb of the whorl. Red hair and a squarish feminine face suddenly blocked the view. “Petty, we’re at two-sixty-five flat, six south, two-forty klomters.”

“And we’ve got better than half a tank, right?” Murphy nodded. “Get on the heliograph. We’ll rendezvous with the log. Jimson, Rice, get us ready for a burn.”

The thick, disordered sky made Rather dizzy. If he fell into that he would be more than ordinarily lost. He climbed with care. Clave and Debby trailed him.

There had been hard work followed by a long climb.

They were all tired. Rather’s fingers and toes were starting to cramp. But the rocket was in sight, a hundred meters out…if that direction was still out.

The log was rising through the Clump’s eastern fringes.

Wind slapped at Rather from ambush, here, there, everywhere, as if he were embedded in a flock of terrified turkeys. Clouds ran in peculiar directions, not east-west, not flattened spirals, but shallow in-out curves. A line of small green puff jungles flowed in an arc that was not tidelike at all. Confronted by such strangeness, Rather’s bewildered eyes sought the one unchanging reference point.

Voy burned blue-white and steady…twenty-five degrees east of the stump of the in tuft! Choppy clouds blurred the sun. Shadows pulsed, blurring and sharpening. Overlaid on those, Voy’s faint, sharp blue shadows lay in skew directions. Children learned not to see Voyshadows. Voyshadows told nothing, for they never moved, never changed, never distracted the eye.

The tree had turned; the trunk was pointing wrong.

Booce and Carlot waited at the rocket. Debby called, “Booce! How can you stand it?”

“The tide? I grew up in it. You’ll get used to it. The happyfeet do.”

“The shadows are making me sick to my stomach,” Debby said.

Rather’s own stomach was queasy. “Carlot—”

“We’re almost home.” There was no mistaking her joy. She liked it here. “Look, we’ve got the pipefire going.”

“I’ll start the water.” A smaller pod had been carved into Logbearer’s new cabin. Booce crawled inside. “Tether yourselves.”

The rocket cone pointed east. Rather poked his nose into the small hatch. “Booce, are you slowing us again?”

Booce’s voice echoed. “What? No, tide’s different in the Clump. We’ll push west, straight toward the Dark.” He pulled a wooden plug from the water tank. He inhaled, put his lips to the hole, and blew.

Rather withdrew his head to watch the completed rocket in action. Yellow-white coals glowed within the iron firebox that had given them so much trouble. The iron glowed dull red. A fourth pod nearby was filled with water in case the plates didn’t hold together.

At the nozzle end of the rocket — “Nothing’s happening.”

His answer was the sound of Booce inflating his lungs. Then the rocket went Chuff! and sprayed steam.

“It’s going, Booce,” Rather said, and looked in.

Booce’s face dripped with water. He was coughing and choking while he pounded the plug in with the heel of his hand. His glare was murderous.

CHUFF, CHUFF, Chuff chuffchuffchuff…The rocket settled down. A row of cloud-puffs became a steady stream jogged by the play of capricious wind. Rather felt no acceleration. It would be gentle, with so great a mass to be moved.

Carlot came up behind him; her long fingers found his hand and enclosed it. “Father? Shouldn’t we—”

Booce sounded like his throat was still full of water. “Yes, go play lookout on the west face, you two. Watch for Navy and anything we might hit.”

The maelstrom revealed itself to them as they circled the trunk. Flying was a continuing wonder to Rather, but Carlot did it better. She kept darting ahead, then circled to urge him on. At a vantage point on the west face they doffed their wings and rested.

The Clump was a whorl like a tremendous fingerprint.

Inward, matter thickened. There were puzzle trees, distorted cotton-candy jungles, the much smaller puffballs that Carlot had pointed out for him (“fisher jungles”), and greenery that was totally unfamiliar. Ponds took odd shapes in the distorted tide. The sky was thick with birds: skyhorses, triunes, and a thousand tiny red and yellow darts converging on a puff jungle. Everything moved in arcs, tighter near the center of the whorl, and darker. The center itself was almost black, but motion could still be seen there.

The triune families were hard to spot, but two had turned to observe the passing log. They were fat sky-blue cigar-shapes with wide triple fins: male and female and child, linked along their bellies. Three slender blue shapes flashed violent-orange bellies as they converged on the red-and-yellow bird-swarm: another triune family, separated to hunt.

A thin stream of cloud cut across other patterns of cloud-flow. Rather spotted it in the moment before Carlot pointed. “There. Navy.”

“How do you know?” Rather saw only a dark point at the end of the line of cloud.

“It’s coming toward us. Customs. They’ll make a burn and intercept us in a day. Oh, treefodder.”

Rather laughed. She’d borrowed his curse. “What?”

She showed him.

Far in toward the Clump’s dark center, in the thick of moving matter, was a broad, flat ring-shape with a pebbly i

He judged its size by an even larger natural object nearby: a tree with one tuft missing. The log was smaller than their own, Rather thought. At its midpoint he could make out a rocket-shape, cone and tank and angular cabin.