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."
"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!