‘My parents spent all they had keeping me out of the labour colonies.’
‘Yes. But now you’re here, and there’s work to do. What do you think?’
His head whirled, full of new ideas and images and the lingering shadow of his nightmare. ‘I think I’m tired.’
She laughed. ‘Back to bed for both of us, then. We’ll talk more in the morning.’ She led him to their tetrahedral shack.
He lay down in his pallet. Soon his thoughts were dissolving into sleep.
But he was woken by Vala, outside the shack, murmuring questions. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon. Seek possible translations and date the language. And keep the noise down . . .’
A solemn synthesised voice murmured a reply.
And Vala asked, ‘How old?’
He was next woken by the tumbling crash of supersonic flight, a noise too familiar from Centre. Without dressing, without looking for Vala, impatiently waiting for the walls to open, he rushed out of the building.
The sky was full of Second Coalition warships.
2
Massive sensor dysfunction!
Sometimes Lura thought that if she could only understand that strange complaint of the Mole, she would be able to make much more sense of the machine itself, her mother’s strange bequest. On the other hand, if it just kept quiet she wouldn’t have to fret so much about hiding it. Nothing was ever simple!
But right now she had other problems, for her tree wasn’t happy. Lura could feel it, even hanging as she was in her fire pod, dangling from the central trunk of Tree Forty-Seven.
She had spent her shift as tree pilot artfully shaping the screen of grey smoke beneath the tree, and so she looked up at it now through billowing, sooty clouds. The tree was a wheel fifty paces across, its twelve radial branches fixed to the stout trunk at the centre. And that wheel turned, ponderously graceful like all of its kind, the light of the endlessly falling stars casting subtle shades and blood-red highlights, and she could feel the downwash created by its shaped branches as they bit into the air. Tree Forty-Seven was at the bottom of the great stack of the Forest, layer upon layer of straining trees all tethered by their long cables to the kernel far below her – the husk of a burned-out star, no wider than the tree, pocked and hollowed-out and rusted the colour of blood.
And she could sense her tree’s unhappiness in the faint shudders that rustled those banks of leaves as it turned, and a groan of wood on wood as the massive bolus counterturned within the hollow trunk. She knew what was wrong, but there was nothing she could do about it, not for now.
It was a relief when she heard the whistles and rattles sound all across the Forest, calling the shift change.
Sweating, her bare arms covered in soot, her lungs full of smoke and her eyes gritty, she swarmed up the rope from the fire-pot through her smokescreen. Passing through the blade-like branches, with disturbed skitters spinning up around her, she picked up her pack of rope and food where she had left it hooked on a stubby branchlet.
She stroked the trunk’s hard surface. ‘Well, you’ve a right to be unhappy, Forty-Seven,’ she said. ‘Stuck down here as you are.’ She didn’t agree with the Brothers’ policy of ‘punishing’ ill or poorly performing trees by marooning them at the base of the Forest stack – she’d argued over this with Brother Pesten, her own old tutor, many times. The tree had a subtle gravity sense and would be well aware of the pull of the kernel – very strong down on its surface, and still a perceptible drag here, two hundred paces or so up. Trees were creatures of the open air, and sought to flee deep gravity wells – which, of course, was the instinct their human masters exploited to put them to work. Lura, eighteen thousand shifts old, understood that to be unable to escape this deep well for shift after shift was torture for Forty-Seven. So she patted the tree’s trunk, and put her cheek to its rugged surface and felt the mass of the bolus spinning in its confinement within. ‘I’ll see if those idiots in the pilots’ conference will allow me to move you—’
‘You still talking to the trees, Lura?’ The coarse voice of Ord was loud in the branches above her. He came swinging down through the turning branches, and settled his webbed feet on a trunk gnarl near her. He was her replacement as tree pilot for the next shift. A thousand shifts older than Lura, he was a big man, strong, clumsy-looking, but graceful enough when he moved in the shifting gravity fields of the Forest.
‘Oh, leave me alone, Ord.’
He swung closer, and she could feel the half-gee drag of his heavy body. He pulled his goad from his belt, a stabbing-spear of fire-hardened wood. ‘This is all you need to make a tree do what you want it to do.’
She kicked away from the trunk and settled on a branch. ‘You stink. You’re so fat you trap your own foul air in your gee-well.’
‘That’s my manhood you’re smelling, little girl,’ he said, and he waggled his goad. ‘Rumour is you’ve still never lain with a man. Maybe you should carve this tree a dick. Then you wouldn’t have to bother with people at all.’
‘Sooner that than lie with you.’ She grabbed her pack and swarmed up through the tree’s patiently turning branches, leaving Ord’s coarse shouts behind her.
She climbed easily up through the stacked Forest, pulling herself through one turning tree after another or swinging on tether cables, and as she rose further out of the kernel’s gravity well the climbing got easier still. She was making for Tree Twenty-Four, at the very apex of the stack, where she had hidden the Mole – and she was glad of an excuse to get as far as possible from Ord and his crude advances.
People lived in the Forest. Houses of wood and woven bark dangled in the air, fixed to tether cables that spanned the tiers of the turning trees, and the air was full of smoke from the fire-pots – the trees fled from shade as much as from gravity and could be controlled that way. Here folk lived and died, ate, slept and played, and worked with their trees, encouraging them in the generations-long task of feeding star kernels into the unfillable maw of the Core of Cores. Right now it was shift-change time, and people were in motion everywhere, the adults making their way to and from their assignments, the Brothers letting the children out of their classes.
She passed one party laden with baskets of food. You couldn’t eat the substance of the trees themselves, neither the skitters, which were the trees’ tiny spinning seeds, nor their round, pale leaves. But you could eat the fruit and berries and fungi that colonised the trunks and branch roots, and trap the various species of rat that fed off those growths in turn. Some said that the existence of the fruit and the rats proved that humans were part of this world, as much as flying trees and whales and the Core of Cores, and stars that fell through the air. Others clung to a legend that humans had come to this place from somewhere else – ‘Humans don’t belong here’, went the slogan – and held that the rats and the fungi and the rest, everything people could eat, had come out of the Ship that had brought the people here, the Ship itself long since lost.
But all around her people swam in the air, their webbed feet kicking, and children played complicated aerial games of chase, dancing through each other’s pinprick gravity wells with unconscious confidence. Lura felt a surge of joy as she watched the children – and envy for their carefree play. Wherever people had originally come from, this had been the reality of life for uncounted generations.
At last she’d climbed up through the forest to the highest tree in the stack: Twenty-Four, broad and handsome, its number etched into its bark. The pilot conference held that the trees were smart enough to respond to the lead of the strongest among them, and Lura wasn’t about to say they were wrong. Clambering easily up Twenty-Four’s tether, she swept with a smile past old Jorg, the tree’s pilot this shift, with his battered fire-pot and grimy blankets. And, once up in the tree itself, she made her way to the trunk, scattering clouds of skitters that spun briefly before nestling back in their parent tree’s leaves. For here, at the very crown of the trunk in a knot of immature branches, she had hidden the Mole.