The Smoke Ring

Chapter Two

Discipline

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 6 SM:

FIRE

MAKING A COOKFIRE IN FREE-FALL IS AN EXCES SIVELY INTERESTING EXPERIENCE IF WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED WAS DINNER. IT’S TAKEN ME EIGHT STATE YEARS TO PERFECT MY TECHNIQUE.

THE FIRST LESSON IS THAT A FLAME DOESN’T RISE IN FREE-FALL. I LEARNED THAT WITH A CANDLE, WHEN I WAS A CADET DREAMING OF STRANGE WORLDS. IF THERE’S NO WIND (TURN OFF THE AIR FEED), THE CANDLE FLAME SEEMS TO GO OUT.

BUT IT ISN’T OUT YET. THERE’S WAX VAPOR, AND THERE’S THE AIR AROUND IT, AND AT THE INTERFACE IS AN ENVELOPE OF PLASMA WHERE GAS AND OXYGEN INTERACT. IT CAN STAY HOT FOR MINUTES. COMBUSTION CONTINUES AT THE INTERFACE. WAVE THE CANDLE AND POP! THE FLAME IS BACK.

IN THE CASE OF A COOKFIRE, THE WOOD CONTINUES TO CHAR. WAIT AN HOUR, THEN BLOW ON THE COALS WITH A BELLOWS. THE FIRE JUMPS TO LIFE AND THERE WENT YOUR EYEBROWS.

DISCIPLINE HAD BEEN DETERIORATING.

Cameras outside the hull showed rainbow-hued scars from matter that had penetrated the electromagnetic ramscoop while Discipline was in flight. They also showed newer micrometeorite pocks. Sharls could ward off anything big enough to see coming, by turning on those magnetic shields for a few seconds, but they ate power in great gulps.

One day he might regret even the little power he used to maintain the gardens and the cats.

Within the hull, time had discolored metal and plastic.

The air was dust-free; metal was clean, but not recently polished. Many of the servomechs had worn out. All but a few of the crew cubicles were kept cold and dark and airless. Kitchen machinery was in storage, with power shut down. Some of the bedding had decayed. Water mattresses had been drained and stored.

Sharls kept the control room free of water vapor and almost cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide. He hoped that the computer and its extensions would survive longer in the cold. But the gardens and corridors and even some of the cubicles were kept habitable. Sharls left the lighting on a day-night cycle, for the birds and cats and plants.

The gardens were surviving nicely. It was true that some of the plants had died out completely; but after all, his ecosystem was missing its most important factor.

Human crew were supposed to be in that cycle, and they had been gone for half a thousand years.

Scores of cats prowled the ship hunting hundreds of rats and a lesser number of turkeys and pigeons. The turkeys made a formidable enemy. The cats had learned to attack them in pairs.

Sharls trained the cats to respond to his voice. He had released the experimental rats long ago. The birds were already loose; they must have been released during that blank spot in his memory, the mutiny; but by themselves they wouldn’t have fed the cats. They were too agile, for one thing. With all of the animal life in the system now, the gardens had a better chance of surviving.

By watching the cats and rats and plants and turkeys and pigeons interact, Sharls hoped to learn how an ecological system would behave in a free-fall environment…like the larger ecosystem that flowed beneath Discipline in endless rivers of curdled cloud.

Or had he simply become lonely? In his youth Sharls had never been a cat lover. (A sudden memory: his hand swelling with white patches rimmed in red, itching horribly. A kitten had scratched him playfully while he was stroking it.) And now? They didn’t obey orders worth a damn…but neither had his crew.

A computer program would hardly have retained allergies; but who would expect a computer program to become lonely?

Discipline skimmed above the curdled whorl of the fourth Lagrange point. A fraction of Sharls Davis Kendy’s attention watched on various wavelengths. This close, he could confirm an earlier sighting: minor amounts of carbon were being burned at sites around the edges of that endless storm. This was no forest fire: too small, and it had gone on for years. It might indicate human industry at a primitive level.

Now, where was CARM #6?

…Fu

He might have done that if the mutineers pla

The mutiny was a blank to Sharls.

He had edited those memories. He even remembered why. The descendants of the mutineers would need Sharls Davis Kendy someday. It was not good that he hold grudges against specific ancestors, against old names. But had he been too thorough?

—There! CARM #6’s communications system had come alive.

It was a thousand kilometers behind him and something less than six thousand kilometers in toward Voy. Kendy did several things at once. Before his new orbit could carry him away, he restarted the drive. He beamed, “Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State.”

The CARM autopilot responded.

“Link to me. Beam records.”

He’d made mistakes enough during that unexpected contact twenty Earth years ago! At least he’d accomplished something: he’d broken the program that denied him access to the Cargo and Repair Module. The drive systems were beyond his reach. The original mutineers must have physically cut the fiber-optic cable. But the CARM would talk to him!

He’d instructed the autopilot to take photographs at ten-minute intervals. Reentry was in progress when he sent that message. Static might well have fuzzed him out.

But pictures were streaming in.

Time passed at a furious rate. CARM #6 flamed as it plowed through thickening air, veering from plants and ponds and creatures. It dipped into a pond to refuel, then bedded itself in the Voy-ward tuft of the largest of a cluster (grove?) of integral trees. It stayed there, with not much of a view at all, for most of a Smoke Ring year.

Flickering shapes carved cavities through the foliage and wove small branches into wasp’s-nest structures. Abruptly the CARM backed into the sky, skittered outward under inexpert handling, and docked at the midpoint of the tree.

With another part of his mind, Kendy fiddled with Discipline’s fusion motor. He could not match his orbit to that of the CARM. He must stay well outside the Smoke Ring to protect Discipline from corrosion. The best he could do was twice the CARM’s orbital period, to dip low above the CARM’s position once every ten hours and eight minutes. But he’d be in range for half an hour while his motor was firing.

More of his attention went to watching the CARM’s lone occupant in real time.

Jeffer the “Scientist” was stored in memory. He had aged twenty Earth years: hair and beard going gray, wrinkles across his forehead (broken by a white line of scar that was a healing pink wound in Kendy’s records), and knuckles turning knobby. Height: 2.3 meters. Mass: 86 kilograms. Long arms and legs, toes like stubby fingers, fingers like a spider’s legs: long, fragile, the hands of a field surgeon.

The Smoke Ring had altered Discipline’s descendants.

The tribes of London Tree and Dalton-Qui

They were savages; but they had learned to use State technology in the form of the CARM. Still human. Perhaps they could be made citizens again.