“Nice. Can you stay for a couple of sleeps? I’ve got food and—”
“Lonely?”
It showed in his face. “You know it.”
“We’ve got food you never tasted. Dark fungus and earthlife. You’ll love it.”
Their exotic dinner was nothing unusual for Rather, not any longer. What made it fun was watching Jeffer react.
Jeffer talked while he ate. “I had some trouble getting the silver suit. I found it okay, but it was right in the fire. I had to get the bow up against it and push it out along with a kilton of burning goo. I just wonder how many Admiralty citizens saw me.”
“The stories won’t match,” Clave said. “In sixty days it won’t matter at all. I’ve been thinking. We’ll bum the fringe here. If a Navy ship comes they’ll find that the Seekers had a hell of a party and then went away.”
“Good. I’ll have to take the CARM someplace you can find it—”
“No. You find us. Logbearer will be returning to Citizens Tree in due course, maybe another thirty days. Keep watch. Pick us up well outside the Clump.”
“Another fifty days of this? Treefodder. And I never even saw the treefeeding Clump.”
“We’ll leave you most of our food,” Clave said.
Carlot carefully wasn’t looking at Rather. “I’ll be bringing a guest. Raff Belmy and I’ll be married as soon as we get back to the Admiralty. I want to bring him back to the tree. What he tells his father is up to him, but he’ll have at least a quarter year to think about it.”
“So you decided,” Rather said. He felt he had almost gotten used to the loss.
“I’m like you. I’m tired of secrets.”
“There’s a plant here that grows good foliage,” Jeffer offered. “Dessert.”
Carlot tossed an orange sphere at him.
Jeffer’s acting like a happy eight-year-old. Rather thought as he tethered himself into a foliage patch for sleep. Being alone out here must be rough on him. Maybe all adults stay children someplace in their heads…
“Rather?”
“Yuh. Carlot?”
She wriggled under the lines and was alongside him. Rather opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he said, “I don’t like lying to you.”
“What now?”
“I was going to not say, ‘What would Raff think?’ ”
She didn’t move away. Presently she said, “You don’t understand us.”
“Nope.”
“We like to spread the genes around. Nobody talks about it in public, but you hear. A man and a woman get engaged. They make babies together. Sixty, seventy days later, they get married. Maybe the first kid looks like the rest and maybe he doesn’t.”
“But why?”
“It’s the last chance. See, I’m going to marry Raff, but there are men I turned down. They’re not going to just vanish. I wasn’t with Raff off those sleeps I was away. Raff’s been seeing friends too, I don’t know who. Rather, it’s just different. The officers say it’s good. They talk about gene drift.”
“Okay.”
“What Raff thinks about it is, he’d rather not know. I never did wonder what Jill would think.”
Jill. “We never made promises.”
“Sure. But who else is there? There’s nobody anywhere near her age in the tuft. Just you.”
“I suppose. I wish I could have told her I was leaving.’’
She said nothing. Rather couldn’t drop it. “I wish I could tell her it was worth it. You never wanted that raid on the Library. You were right. If Kendy’s really gone, then why did it happen? The Navy’11 never stop being suspicious ofus,and we didn’t learn anything, and I can’t even tell Jill about the raid because I can’t tell her about Kendy.”
She stirred. “You don’t want me?”
“Sure I want you. Every sleep we’re here, I want you. I wanted you for keeps.”
“You can’t have that. When we marry, that’s the end of that. Understand?”
“Stet.”
Kendy had run the records from CARMs #2 and #6 over and over. He’d built up a sublibrary of sorts under RESOURCES, LOCAL USAGE.
Here: Citizens Tree was firing mud to make a cookpot.
Here: firing the laundry vat. Both had been recorded by the silver suit as it moved unharmed through the fire. One clip every ten minutes.
Here: curing the lines from the spaghetti jungle. Mark the Silver Man unharmed in the smoke.
Here: the elevator in Citizens Tree. Here, recorded years earlier by Klance the Scientist: the London Tree elevator, run with stationary bicycles.
Here: CARM #6 changing the integral tree’s orbit.
Here: Logbearer moving another tree.
Here: Rather collecting honey. Booce’s voice explaining that it was usually done with handmade armor. Here: a set of hornet armor made to show the Navy customs collectors, lest they seek for such and find the silver suit instead.
The natives used materials from Discipline when they had it. When they didn’t, they made do. They were doing very well without Kendy.
Discipline was making its second aerobraking pass, ass-backward through the gas torus. The cone of the fusion drive approached fusion temperatures. That was hardly a danger, but the plasma streaming back along the hull had to be watched.
Velocity, Smoke Ring median: 11 kps. Velocity at Kendy’s distance: 3 kps. Discipline’s, relative velocity: 20 kps and falling. Discipline reached perihelion and began to rise, embedded in hot plasma. The animals were frantic. Kendy couldn’t spare attention for them. Nothing had melted on his first pass…but the gas ahead of him thickened as he rose, because Goldblatt’s World was ahead.
Visuaclass="underline" a raging, endless storm the size of Neptune.
Neudar: a core the size of two and a half Earths spun once every seven hours, carrying the storm around with it, until the atmospheric envelope trailed off into the Smoke Ring. Instruments: impacting plasma increased in temperature and density; velocity decreased. The ship was surviving. There’d been the risk that he would have to blow hydrogen ahead of him for cooling.
Goldblatt’s World passed below, warping the ship’s path into something nearer a circle. Now the plasma density dropped fast.
Fifteen minutes of that was enough excitement for any computer program. In an hour he’d be over the Admiralty and out of the gas torus. He’d make his last short bum then. It would hold him near the Admiralty for a good half hour.
Discipline would be glowing bright enough to see, if anyone looked in just the right direction. That might or might not be good. Kendy had taken his time returning.
His long-range plans were in tatters and he didn’t know what to do about it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Beginnings
from the Citizens Tree cassettes:
YEAR 384, DAY 2250. BOOCE RECORDED OUR HOLDINGS BEFORE WE LEFT. HE’S APPALLED THAT WE NEVER ASKED. BAD BUSINESS PERSONS, HE CALLS US. WE DON’T USUALLY BOTHER TO SPELL OUT WHO OWNS WHAT IN CITIZENS TREE. IT DRIVES BOOCE CRAZY.
WE SPENT A LOT ON SEEDS AND POOD AND WIDGETS, BUT WE STILL HAVE CREDIT — IMAGINARY MONEY — IN SOME VAGUE AMOUNT THAT DEPENDS ON WHAT BOOCE ACTUALLY GETS FOR THE WOOD AND THE METAL. WE’LLLEARNTHATWHEN, AND IF, WERETURN TO THE ADMIRALTY.
THE LIFT CAGE DROPPED. IT WAS CROWDED WITH EIGHT people and several bags from the CARM. Lawri and Gavving, Scientist and Chairman Pro Tern, seemed distinctly uncomfortable. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Raff Belmy was uncomfortable too. Carlot clung tight to his arm, possessively, protectively.