"I feel wonderful," Gavving said. "Why do I feel so good? Something was on those thorns, maybe, like the red fringe on a fan fungus."
"Could be."
"You're not saying much."
The Grad said, "I don't want to miss anything. If I know how we get to London Tree, maybe I could get us back. I had some Carther Tribe citizens convinced that we should join them."
Gavving turned to Minya. They spoke together at length. The Grad didn't try to hear. It was too noisy anyway. The whistling roar had faded, but the windsong was nearly as loud.
"Too many changes," Minya said.
"I know."
"I can't seem to feel anything. I want to get angry, but I can't."
"We're drugged."
"It's not that. I was Minya of the Triune Squad of Dalton Quinn Tuft. Then I was lost in the sky and dying of thirst. I found you and married you and joined the Dark Tuft People. We hitched a ride with a moby and got slung into a jungle. Now we're what? Copsiks? It's too many changes. Too much."
"All right, I'm a little numb myself. We'll get over it. They can't keep us drugged forever. You're still Minya, the berserker warrior. Just forget it till you need it."
"What will they do with us?"
"I don't know. The Grad's talking escape. I think we'd better wait. We don't know enough."
She found a laugh, somewhere. "At least we don't die virgins."
"We met each other. We were dying, and now we're not dying at all. We're going to a tree, and it can move itself. We'll never see another drought. It could be worse. It's been worse…I wish I could see Clave, though."
It was dark and wet around them. Lightning marched a meandering path across the bow. The vehicle swung around. Npw the wind blew up from their feet. In that direction a' bushy shadow was forming.
"There," said Minya.
The roar of motors resumed.
Gavving watched for a time before he convinced himself that it was one tuft of an integral tree. He'd never seen any tree from such a vantage. They were coming up on the in branch. The tuft was greener and healthier-looking than Quinn Tuft had been, and foliage reached farther to cover the branch. The bare wooden tail sported a horizontal platform of hewn wood, clearly a work of tremendous labor.
The roar of science-in-action wavered, rose and fell, as the flying box settled toward the platform. A great arching gap had been chopped through the branch itseli linking this platform to one on the other side. At its west end, where foliage began to sprout, a large hut had been woven.
The whistling roar died.
Then things happened fast. People left the hut on the jump. More appeared from underneath, perhaps from inside the flying box. London Tree's citizens didn't have the incredible height of the forest denizens.
Some wore gaudy colors, but most wore tuftberry red, and the men had smooth faces scraped clean of hair. They swarmed to what was now the roof of the flying box and began pulling prisoners loose.
Jinny, Jayan, Minya, and the tall Carther Tribe woman were freed in turn and escorted off the roof of the vehicle. Then nothing happened for a time.
They took the women first. The drug on the needles still held him calm, but that bothered Gavving nonetheless. He couldn't see what was happening on the ledge. Presently he was pulled free of the net, lifted, and walked off the roof.
Somehow he had expected normal tides. Here was no more than a third of the tidal force at Quinn Tuft. He drifted down.
Alfin's eyes popped open when the copsik runners turned him loose.
They were closing again when he hit the platform. He grunted in protest, then went back to sleep. Two men in tuftberry red picked him up and carried him away.
A copsik runner, a golden-haired woman of twenty or so with a pretty, triangular face, held up the Grad's reader and tapes. "Which of you belongs to these?" she demanded.
The Grad called from above Gavving's head; he was still falling.
"They're mine."
"Stay with me," she commanded. "Do you know how to walk?
You're short enough to be a tree dweller."
The Grad staggered when he touched down, but stayed upright. "I can walk."
"Wait with me. We'll use the carm to reach the Citadel."
Strangers were among them, leading Gavving and Alfin toward the big hut. The Grad's eyes followed them, and Gavving would have waved, but his wrists were still tied. A smallish, fussy-looking man in red pushed a bird's carcass into his hampered arms-it was nearly his own mass-and said, "Take this along. Can you cook?"
"Come." The copsik's hand shoved against the small of his back. He moved in that direction, toward where the fin flowered into tuft. But where were the women?
The flying box had blocked his view. Now he saw the women through the arch, on the other ledge. Minya began struggling, crying, "Wait! That's my husband!"
The drug slowed him down, but Gavving threw the bird into the copsik's arms, sending him tumbling backward under its mass, and tried to jump toward Minya. He never completed the first step. Two men stepped in from either side and caught his arms. They must have been waiting for just such a move. One clouted him across the head hard enough to set the world spinning. They hustled him into the but.
The copsik was studying Lawri as she studied him. He was thin, with stringy muscles; three or four ce'meters taller than Lawri herself and not much older. His blond hair and beard were raggedly cut. He was dirty from head to foot. A line of dried blood ran from his right eyebrow to the corner of his jaw. He was very much the kind of copsik who might come spinning from the sky on a sheet of bark, and hardly a convincing man of science.
But his eyes inquired; they judged her. He asked, "Citizen, what will happen to them?"
"Call me Scientist's Apprentice," Lawri said. "Who are you?"
"I'm the Quinn Tribe Scientist," he said.
That made her laugh. "I can hardly call you Scientist! Don't you have a name?"
He bristled, but he answered. "I did. Jeffer."
"Jeffer, the other copsiks don't concern you now. Get aboard the carm and stay out of the pilot's way."
He stood stupidly. "Carm?"
She slapped its metal flank and pronounced the syllables as she had been taught. "Cargo And Repair Module. CARM. In!"
He got through both doors and a few paces beyond, and there he stopped, gaping, trying to see in every direction at once. For the moment she left him to it. She didn't blame him. Few copsiks ever saw the interior of the carm.
Ten chairs faced into a tremendous curved window of thick glass. Images were there that couldn't be outside the glass, nor could they be reflections. They must be in the glass itself: numbers and letters and line drawings in blue and yellow and green.
Behind the chairs was thirty or forty cubic meters of empty space.
There were bars set to swivel out of the walls and floor and ceiling, and numerous loops of metaclass="underline" anchorage for stored goods against the jerky pull of the motors. Even so, the cabin was only a fifth the size of the carm. What was the rest?
When the carm moved, flame had spurted from nostrils at the rear. It seemed that something must burn to move the carm…a good deal of it, if it occupied most of the carm's bulk…and pumps to move the fuel, and mysteries whose names he'd glimpsed in the cassettes: attitude jet ljfe support system, computer, mass sensor, echo laser.
The calm left by the needle had almost left his blood. He was starting to be afraid. Could he learn to read those numbers in the glass? Would he have the chance?
A man in blue lounged before the box window. A big-boned man of average height, he was still too tall for the chair; what would have been a curved head rest poked him between the shoulder blades. The Scientist's Apprentice spoke briskly. "Please take us to the Citadel."
"I don't have orders to do that."