The Smoke Ring

Gavving said, “Sell?”

“Forget it, Ryllin. Everybody out,” Lawri ordered.

“Chairman, can you move them?”

The citizens drifted away in clumps of heated discussion.

Four sleeps after reaching Citizens Tree, all of the Serjents were on their feet. Various citizens volunteered to lead them about. They moved tentatively, slowed by healing burns and unaccustomed to tide. Tb tently, and spoke in vowel-twisting aecen words…but for Karilly, who huddled ck of her family, silent.

Booce and his family came back tired. It was primitive, and roomy, and oddly beautiful. These citizens had managed well with so little.

Lawri the Scientist looked them over ai well enough to attend a funeral.

Chapter Four

The In Tuft

from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 7 SM:

INTEGRAL TREES

…THESE INTEGRAL TREES GROW TO TREMENDOUS SIZE. WHEN SUCH A PLANT REACHES ITS FULL GROWTH, IT STABILIZES BY TIDAL EFFECT. IT FORMS A LONG, SLENDER TRUNK TUFTED WITH GREEN AT BOTH ENDS: TENS OF THOUSANDS OF RADIAL SPOKES CIRCLING LEVOY’S STAR, EACH SCORES OF KILOMETERS LONG.

LIKE MANY PLANTS OF THE SMOKE RING, THE INTEGRAL TREE IS A SOIL COLLECTOR. THE ENDPOINTS ARE SUBJECTTO TIDAL GRAVITY. AND WIND’ THE TUFTS ARE IN A PERPETUAL WIND, BLOWING FROM THE WEST AT THE INNER TUFT AND FROM THE EAST AT THE OUTER TUFT. THE TIDE-ORIENTED TRUNK BOWS TO THE WINDS, CURVING INTO A SINGLE, NEARLY HORIZONTAL BRANCH AT EACH END, GIVING IT THE APPEARANCE OF AN INTEGRATION SIGN. THE TUFTS SIFT FERTILIZER FROM THE WIND: SOIL, WATER, EVEN ANIMALS AND PLANTS SMASHED BY IMPACT.

FREE-FALL CONDITIONS PREVAIL EVERYWHERE EXCEPT IN THE INTEGRAL TREES. THE MEDICAL DANGERS OF LIFE IN FREE-FALL ARE WELL KNOWN. IF DISCIPLINE HAS INDEED ABANDONED US, IF WE ARE INDEED MAROONED WITHIN THIS WEIRD ENVIRONMENT, WE COULD DO WORSE THAN TO SETTLE THE TUFTS OF THE INTEGRAL TREES…

FOLIAGE FRAMED HALF A WORLD OF SKY.

The treemouth faced west, at the junction between branch and trunk. Spine branches migrated west along the branch, carrying whatever their foliage had picked up from the wind, to be swallowed by the conical pit. Citizens came too, to feed the tree. The treemouth was their toilet, their garbage disposal, and their cemetery.

Lawri the Scientist had described all of this in advance.

Booce tried to tell himself that it made sense; it was reasonable in context; it only took getting used to.

Wend had been placed at the lip of the pit. She’d had time to ride the spine branches halfway into the cone of the treemouth. Booce was glad that he could not see her better.

Burning was cleaner. Reducing the body to ashes burned away memories too…

How was Karilly taking it?

Karilly was the quiet one. She obeyed orders, but rarely showed initiative. She almost never spoke to strangers. A good child, but Booce had never really understood her.

She hadn’t been burned. All of them had watched Wend die; how could it be worse for Karilly? But she hadn’t spoken a word since the fire.

Chairman Clave spoke, welcoming Wend into the tribe. Lawri spoke of a citizen’s last duty, to feed the tree.

Ryllin spoke her memories of her lost daughter. Karilly cried silently; the tears sheathed her eyes in crystal.

Older citizens ate first. Booce saw his daughters hanging back — they had learned that much already — while a Citizens Tree girl-child filled his bowl with waterbird stew from a large, crude ceramic pot. He lurched away across the woven-spine-branch floor of the commons, following his wife, trying to keep his bowl upright.

“You think of the tide as something to fight,” his wife said softly. “Think of it as a convenience.”

“Hah.”

“Tide gives you a preferred direction. Something to push against. Look.” With the bowl held in one hand, Ryllin leapt one-legged into the air and spun in a slow circle before her feet touched the floor again. She hadn’t spilled a drop.

“Moving isn’t unpleasant in a tide, it’s just different. These, ah, citizens make us look clumsy, but we can adjust, love. We will adjust.”

“Stet. I’ve climbed trees all my life…Company.”

They were surrounded by children. A pudgy halfgrown girl said, “How do you move a tree without a CARM?”

Booee said, “Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.”

A dozen children waited patiently while Booce and Ryllin nested themselves in foliage. Then they all settled at once.

Booce thought while he ate. He said, “You need a rocket. My rocket was Logbearer, and it was my father’s rocket before me. To make a rocket you need a rocket.”

One asked, “How did anyone build the first rocket?”

Booce smiled at the dwarf boy. “The first rocket was given by Discipline. It had a mind — the Library — and the Admiralty still has that, with more knowledge in it than you’ll find in your little cassettes. Anyway, you’ve got to have a rocket so you can get to the pod groves.”

A woman of Booce’s own size settled within earshot.

Booce pretended not to notice. “The biggest pod you can find in the pod grove becomes your water tank. You cut another pod in half and it’s your rocket nozzle. You run the pipe into the stem end. You wrap sikenwire around the pipe to hold the firebark. You light the firebark. You pump water through the hot pipe and it turns to steam and goes racing out the nozzle, and that pushes you the other way.”

The pudgy girl (though all the children looked a bit pudgy, well fed and compressed by tide) asked, “Where does pipe come from?”

“I don’t know. Discipline, maybe, if there ever was a Discipline.” The children snickered. Booce didn’t know why, so he ignored it. “There’s a hundred and twenty meters of pipe in the Empire, so they tell me, and fortyeight of that makes up the pipes in eleven logging ships. Woodsman carried a spare pipe, but they’re richer than we are.

“So. A rocket is one and a half pods, and a pipe, and some sikenwire, and the hut complex at the other end of the tank. You need big hooks for towing, saws to carve up wood, and crossbows, because you’ve got to find your own food. A trip takes a year or two. Most of us travel in families.

“Now you find a sting jungle. The honey hornets live in the sting jungles, and there’s nothing so big they can’t kill it. You need to cover yourself all over to get at the nest. Honey is sticky red stuff, sweeter than foliage.

“Now you pick a tree. If it’s more than forty klomters long, the wood’ll be too coarse and you’ll be forever coming home. Thirty’s about right. You moor your rocket at the midpoint, but you don’t use it yet. You paint a line of honey down the trunk to one of the tufts. Then you gash the bark in a circle above the tuft, and paint honey along that. You know the bugs that eat a tree apart if it starts to die?”

Heads nodded. The Serjents had been told of the death of Dalton-Qui

Booce said, “The bugs follow the honey down. They eat the honey above the tuft. Then they’re stuck, because they’ve eaten all the honey. There’s nothing left to eat but wood. After a few sleeps the tuft drops off.”

There were sounds of dismay. “We don’t use occupied trees, you know,” Booce said gently. “The tree would die anyway when it gets near the Clump. Integral trees want a straightforward tidal pull, straight through Voy.”

The pudgy girl asked a little coldly, “How many trees have you killed?” Booce saw that she was almost an adult. Her height had fooled him: the tide had stunted her growth.

“Ten.”

The dwarf (an adult too, with beard begi