"Just what are your orders?" Her voice was casual, peremptory.
"I don't have orders yet. The Navy may be interested in these. scientific items."
"Confiscate them, if you're sure enough. And I'll tell the Scientist what happened to them, as soon as I'm allowed to contact him. Will you confiscate the copsik too? He says he knows how to work them. Maybe you'd better confiscate me, to talk to him."
The pilot was looking nervous. His glance at the Grad was venomous. A witness to his discomfiture…He decided. "Citadel, right."
His hands moved.
The girl, forewarned, was clutching the back of a chair. The Grad wasn't. The lurch threw him off balance. He grabbed at something to stop his fall. A handleon the back walclass="underline" it twisted in his hand, and dirty water spilled from a nozzle. He turned it off quick and met the girl's look of disgust.
After perhaps twenty heartbeats the pilot lifted his fingers The familiar whistling roar-barely audible through the metal walls, but still fearfully strange-went quiet. The Grad immediately made his way to one of the chairs.
The carm was moving away from the tuft, east and out. Were they leaving London Tree? Why? He didn't ask. He was uncharacteristically leery of playing the fool. He watched the pilot's hands. Symbols and numbers glowed in the bow window and in the panel below it, but the pilot touched only the panel, and only the blue. He could feel the response in shifting sound and shifting tide. Blue moves the carm?
"Jeffer. How did you get those wounds?" The blond girl spoke as if she didn't care very much.
Wounds? Oh, his face. "The tree came apart," he said. "They do that if they fall too far out of the Smoke Ring. We had a close encounter with Gold some years ago."
That touched her curiosity nerve. "What happens to the people?"
"Quinn Tuft must be dead except for us. Five of us now." He'd accepted that Clave and Merril were gone too.
"You'll have to tell me about it sometime." She tapped what she was carrying. "What are these?"
"Cassettes and a reader. Records."
She thought it over, longer than seemed necessary. Then she reached to plug one of the Grad's cassettes into a slot in front of the pilot. The pilot said, "Hey—"
"Science. My preogative," she said. She tapped two buttons. (Buttons, permanent fixtures in a row of five: yellow, blue, green, white, red. The panel was otherwise blank, save for the transitory glowing lights within. A tap of the yellow button made all the yellow lights disappear; the white button raised new symbols in white.) "Prikazyvat Menu."
The familiar table of contents appeared within the glass: white print flowing upward. She'd chosen the cassette for cosmology. The Grad felt his hands curling to strangle her. Classifie4 classtfled! Mine!
"Prikazyvat Gold." The print shifted. The pilot was gripped by ternfled fascination, unable to look away. The Scientist's Apprentice asked the Grad, "Can you read?"
"Certainly."
"Goldblatt's World probably originated as a Neptune-like body, a gas giant world in the cometary halo that circles Levoy's Star and TeeThree, hundreds of billions of kilometers…klomters out. A supernova can spew its outer envelope asymmetrically due to its trapped magnetic field, leaving the remaining neutron star with an altered velocity. The planetary orbits go all to hell. In Levoy's s-scenario Goldblatt's World would have dropped very close to Levoy's Star, with its per perihelion actually inside the neutron star's Roche Limit. Strong Roche tides would quickly warp the orbit into a circle. The planet would have continued to leak atmosphere to the present day, replacing gasses lost from the Smoke Ring and the gas torus to interstellar space.
"Goldblatt estimates that Levoy's Star went supernova a billion years ago. The planet must have been losing atmosphere for all of that time. In its present state Goldblatt's World defies description: a worldsized core of rock and metals—"
"Enough. Very good, you can read. Can you understand what you read?"
"Not that. I can guess that Levoy's Star is Voy and Goldblatt's World is Gold. The rest of it—" The Grad shrugged. His eye caught the pilot's, and the pilot flinched. He seemed shrunken into himself.
Dominance games. The Scientist's Apprentice had assaulted the pilot's mind with the wonders and the cryptic language of science. Now she was saying, "We have that data on our own cassettes, word for word, as far as I can remember. I hope you brought us something new."
A shadow was congealing in the silver fog around them. They were drifting back toward London Tree.
The carm's free-falling path had curved back toward the tree's midpoint. East takes you out. Out takes you west-He had a great deal to learn about flying the carm. Because he must learn. He would learn to fly this thing, or end his days as a copsik.
There were structures here. Huge wooden beams formed a square.
Inward, four huts in a column, not of woven foliage, but of cut wood.
Cables and tubes ran down the trunk in both directions, further than the Grad could follow. A pond had touched the trunk: a silvery globule clung to the bark, and that seemed strange. A single pond in this region of mist? Men in red moved around it, feeding it water carried in seed pods. It too must be artificial.
With all these artificial structures, London Tree made Quinn Tuft look barbaric! But was it wise to. "Scientist's Apprentice, do you cut the wood for these structures from the tree itself?"
She answered without looking at him. "No. We bring it from other integral trees."
Now she turned, startled and annoyed. He wasn't expected to judge London Tree. The Grad was developing a dislike for the Scientist's Apprentice…which he would try to keep in check. If she was behaving as a typical citizen toward a copsik, it augured badly for Quinn Tribe.
The trunk was coming at them, too fast. The Grad was relieved when he heard the motors start and felt the carm slowing. Those wooden beams would just about fit against the carm's windowed end…and that was what the pilot was doing, tapping at blue lights, fitting the window into that wooden frame. Watch his hands!
Chapter Fourteen
Treemouth and Citadel
IN THE LARGE HUT THE WOMEN WERE STRIPPED NAKED AND examined by two women taller than humans, like Ilsa of Carther Tribe.
Their long hair was white and thin enough to expose scalp. The skin seemed to have withered on their bones. Forty to fifty years old, Minya thought, though that was hard to judge; they looked so strange. They wore ponchos in tuftberry-juice scarlet, closed between the legs. Their walk was easy, practiced. Minya judged that they had spent many years in the tide of London Tree.
"It looks like people live a long time here," she whispered to Jayan, and Jayan nodded.
The supervisors would not answer questions, though they asked many.
They found dirt and wounds in plenty, but no disease. They treated Minya's bruises, and brusquely advised her to avoid offending citizens in future. Minya smiled. Offended? She was sure she had broken a man's arm before they clubbed her unconscious.
Ilsa was clearly pregnant. Jayan was also declared pregnant, to her obvious surprise, and sent off with Usa. Minya gripped Jinny's arm, afraid that she would attempt a futile battle for her twin.
One of the supervisors noticed Jinny's distress. "They'll be all right," she said. "They carry guests. One of the Scientist's apprentices will have to look them over. Also, the men won't be allowed near them."
The what would what? But she would say no more, and Minya had to wait.
The Grad watched through the small windows; the big bow window now gave on to rugged bark four ce'meters distant. Things were happening outside.
A man in a white tunic was talking to men in blue or red ponchos that fit like oversized sacks. Presently the others all launched themselves along the bark toward the lowest of the column of huts.