The Integral Trees t-1 Read online

  Missing citizens emerged from the green depths. Merrill, Jayan, Jinny, Grad…Minya. Gavving whooped and gathered her in his arms.

  Alfin asked, "Where's Clave?"

  The others looked around. The Grad tethered himself to the bark and jumped toward the storm, with a turning motion. "I don't see him anywhere," he shouted back.

  Jayan and Jinny burrowed into the foliage. Minya called, 'Wait, you'll get lost!" and prepared to follow.

  "He's here."

  Clave was under the bark sheet. They moved it to expose him. He was half-conscious and moaning softly. His thigh bent in the middle and white bone protruded through skin and blood.

  The Grad hung back, squeamishly; but everyone was looking at him, and it was clearly the Scientist's job. He set Alfin and Jayan to holding Clave's shoulders, Gavving to pulling on the ankle while the Grad moved the bones into place. It took too long. Clave revived and fainted again before it was finished.

  "That flying box," Alfin said. "It's coming here."

  "We're not finished here," said the Grad.

  The starstuff box fell toward them through the clear air between foliage and storm cloud. Men garbed in sky-blue clung to all four sides. The glassy end faced them like a great eye.

  Clave's eyes had opened, but it didn't seem he understood. Somebody had to do something. Gavving said, "Alibi, Minya, Jinny, let's get the bark sheet out of sight, at least."

  They turned it edgewise and pushed it down into the greenery. Gayving moved after it, and Minya after him, forcing their way through the thicket into dark green gloom. The foliage was dense at the surface. Underneath were open spaces and masses of springy branchiets.

  "Grad?"

  The Grad looked up. "Scientist."

  "All right, Scientist. I need a Scientist," Alibi said. "Can you leave him for a moment?"

  Clave was half-conscious and whimpering. He should be all right with two women watching him. "Call me if he starts thrashing around," he told them. He moved away, and Alibi followed.

  "What's the problem?"

  "I can't sleep."

  The Grad laughed. "It's been a busy time. Which of us do you accuse of sleeping well?"

  "I haven't slept since we reached the midpoint. We're in a jungle, we've got food and water, but Grad-Scientist, we're still falling!" Alfin's laugh surprised the Grad, it had a touch of hysteria in it.

  Alibi didn't look good. His eyes were puffy, his breathing was irregular, he was as jumpy as tonight's dinner turkey. The Grad said, "You know as much about free-fall as I do. You learned it the same way. Are you about to run amok?"

  "Feels that way. I'm not helpless. I killed a bird that was after Gayving." And for that moment his pride was showing.

  The Grad mulled the problem. "I've got a bit of that scarlet fringe from the fans. You know how dangerous it is. Anyway, you don't want to sleep now."

  Alfin glanced at the sky. The starstuff box was taking its sweet time, but…"No."

  "When it's safe. And I haven't got much."

  Alfin nodded and turned away. The Grad stayed where he was. He wanted solitude to nurse his jumpy stomach. He'd never set a broken bone before, and he'd had to do it without the Scientist's help.

  Alibi made his way back toward Jayan and Merril and Clave. He looked back once, and the Grad was looking at the sky.

  He looked back again, and the Grad was gone. Jayan screamed.

  The darkness and the strange, dappled shadows made them almost invisible, even to each other. "We can hide in here," Gavving said.

  Minya was nodding. "Burrow deep. Stick together. What about Clave?"

  "We'll have to pull him through. What looks like a good spot?"

  "None of it," Jinny said. "It would hurt him."

  Gavving tracked a dense cluster of branchlets back to a single spine branch. "Cut here," he told Minya.

  She didn't have room to swing. She used the sword as a saw, and it took her a hundred breaths or thereabouts. Then Gavving pushed against the freed end and found that the entire cluster moved outward as a plug. He pulled himself into open air and looked about him. "MennI! Here!"

  "Good," Merril called. She and Alibi towed Clave toward the opening, moving with frantic haste. The one-eyed box was too close. The occupants must be watching them by now.

  They'd have to dig in fast, get lost in the deep branchlets. But— "Where's Jayan? Where's the Grad?"

  "Gone," Mernil puffed. "He's gone. Something pulled him down into the thicket."

  "What?"

  "Move it, Gavving!"

  They got Clave inside and pulled the plug-bush closed. Gavving saw that Clave's leg had been splinted with strips of a blanket and two of Minya's arrows.

  "The men on the box," Minya said, "they'll follow us."

  "I know. Merril, what got the Grad? An animal?"

  "I didn't see. He yelled and disappeared. Jayan snatched up a harpoon and ducked through and saw people disappearing deeper in. She's trailing a line. Gavving, should we stop her? They'll trap her too."

  Why did it all have to happen at once? Clave's leg, the kidnappers, the moving box. "Okay. The soldiers on the box would be fools to come in here. It's the natives' territory—"

  "We're here."

  "We're more desperate…never mind, you're right. We go after Jayan right now, because it gets us away from that starstuff relic. Merril— " Would Merril slow them down? Probably not, in free-fall. Okay.

  "Merril, me, Minya. We'll follow Jayan and see what's going on. Maybe we can bust the Grad loose. Jinny, you and Alfin follow as fast as you can, with Clave. Merril, where's Jayan's line?"

  "Somewhere over there. Treefodder, why does it all have to happen at once?"

  "Yeah."

  Chapter Twelve

  The Copsik Runners

  Buws WERE RAISING AN INCREDIBLE RUCKUS. UNSEEN HANDS pulled the Grad headfirst through darkness and the rich smell of alien foliage. Branchlets no longer scratched his face; there must be open space around him.

  He'd had no warning at all. Hands had grasped his ankles and pulled him down into another world. His yell was strangled by something stuffed into his mouth, something that wasn't clean, and a rag was tied to hold it in. A blow on the head convinced him not to struggle.

  His eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom.

  A tunnel wound through the foliage. It was narrow: big enough for two to crawl side by side, not big enough to walk in. No need, the Grad thought. You couldn't walk with no tide.

  His captors were human, roughly speaking.

  They were all women, though this needed a second glance. They wore leather vests and trousers, dyed green. The looseness of the vests was their only concession to breasts. Three of the five wore their hair very short, and they all had a gaunt, stretched-out look: two and a half to three meters, taller than any of Quinn Tribe's men.

  They held implements: small wooden bows on wooden platforms, the bowstrings pulled back, ready to fire.

  They were making good time. The tunnel turned and twisted until the Grad was entirely disoriented. His directional senses wouldn't give him an up. It presently opened into a bulb-shape four or five meters across, with three other tunnels leading off. Here the women stopped. One pulled the rag out of his mouth. He spit to the side and said, "Treefodder!"

  A woman spoke. Her skin was dark, her hair a compact black storm cloud threaded with white lightning. Her pronunciation was strange, worse than Minya's. "Why did you attack us?"

  The Grad shouted in her face. "Stupid! We saw your attackers. They've got a traveling box made of starstuff. That's science! We got here on a sheet of bark!"

  She nodded as if she'd expected that. "An eccentric way to travel. Who are you? How many are you?"

  Should he be hiding that? But Quinn Tribe must find Mends somewhere. Go for Gold—"Eight of us. All of Quinn Tribe, now, plus Minya, from the opposite tuft. Our tree came apart and left us marooned."

  She frowned. "Tree dwellers? The copsik runners are tree dwellers."r />
  "Why not? You don't get a tide anywhere else. Who're you?"

  She studied him dispassionately. "For a captured invader, you are most impertinent."

  "I've got nothing to lose." A moment after he said it, the Grad realized how true it was. Eight survivors had done their best to reach safety, and this was the end of it. Nothing left.

  She had spoken. He said, "What?"

  "We are Carther States," the black-haired woman repeated impatiently. "I am Kara, the Sherman." She pointed. "Lizeth. Hild." They looked like twins to the Grad's untrained eye: spectrally tall, pale of skin, red hair cropped two centimeters from the skull. "Ilsa." Usa's pants were as loose as her vest. That discrete abdomingi bulge: Usa was pregnant. Her hair was blond ftizz her scalp showed through. Long hair must be a problem among the branchiets. "Debby." Debby's hair was clean and straight and soft brown, and half a meter long, tied in back. How did she keep it that neat?

  Sharman mean Shaman, an old word for Scientist. Could mean Chairman, except that she was a woman…but strangers wouldn't do everything the way Quinn Tribe did. Since when did the Chairman take a name?

  "You haven't given us your name," Kara said pointedly.

  There was something left to him after all. He said it with some pride:

  "I'm the Quinn Tribe Scientist."

  "Name?"

  "The Scientist doesn't take one. Once I was called Jeffer."

  "What are you doing in Carther States?"

  "You'd have to ask a moby."

  Lizeth snapped her knuckles across the back of his skull, hard enough to sting. He snarled, "I meant it! We were dying of thirst. We hooked a moby. Clave was hoping he'd try to lose us in a pond. He brought us here instead."

  The Sharman's face didn't reveal what she thought of that. She said, "Well, it all seems innocent enough. We should discuss your situation after we eat."

  The Grad's humiliation kept him silent…until he saw their meal and recognized the harpoon. "That's Alfin's bird."

  "It belongs to Carther States," Lizeth informed hini.

  He found he didn't care. His belly was stridently empty. "That wood looks too green to make a cookflre—"

  "Salmon bird is eaten raw, with falling onion when we can get it."

  Raw. Yuk. "Falling onion?"

  They showed him. Falling onion was a plant parasite that grew at the forks of the branchlets. It grew as a green tube with a spray of pink blossoms at the tip. The pretty brown-haired woman named Debby assembled a handful and cut the blossom-ends off. Usa's sword carved the scarlet meat in translucently thin slices.

  Meanwhile Kara bound the Grad's right wrist to his ankles, then freed his left. "Don't untie anything else," she warned him.

  Raw meat, he thought and shuddered; but his mouth watered. Hild wrapped sheets of pink meat around the stalks and passed one to the Grad. He bit into it.

  His mind went blank. You learned to put hunger out of your mind during a famine…but he had definitely been hungry. The meat had an odd, rubbery texture. The flavor was rich; the onion taste was fiery, mouth-filling.

  They watched him eat. I have to talk to them, he thought hazily. It's our last chance. We have to join them. Otherwise, what is there? Stay here and be hunted or let the invaders catch us, or jump into the sky.

  The man-sized bird was dwindling. Lizeth seemed content to carve slices until they stopped disappearing; Debby was now cutting the falling onions to stretch them. The women had long since finished eating.

  They watched with irritating smiles. The Grad wondered if they would consider a belch bad manners, and belched anyway, and had to swallow again. He'd learned while climbing the tree: a belch was bad news in free-fall, without tide to bring gas to the top of the stomach.

  He asked for water. Lizeth gave it to him in a squeezegourd. He drank a good deal. The falling onion had run out. Feeling pleasantly full, the Grad topped off his meal with a handful of foliage.

  Nothing could be entirely bad when he felt this good.

  Kara the Sharman said, "One thing is clear. You are certainly a refugee. I never saw a starving copsik runner."

  A test? The Grad took his time swallowing. "Cute," he said. "Now that that's established, shall we talk?"

  "Where are we?"

  "Nowhere in particular. I wouldn't lead you to the rest of the tribe until I knew who you were. Even here, the copsik runners might find us."

  'Who are they, these…runners?"

  "Copsik runners. Don't you use the word copsik?" It sounded more like corpsik when she said it.

  He answered, "It's just an insult-word."

  "Not to us or them. They take us for corpsiks, to work for them the rest of our lives. Boy, what are you doing?"

  The Grad had reached for his pack with his free hand. "I am the Quinn Tribe Scientist," he said in freezing tones. "I thought I might find some background on that word."

  "Go ahead."

  The Grad unwrapped his reader. He had Carther States' undivided attention. The women were awed and wary; Lizeth held her spear at the ready. He chose the records cassette, inserted it into the reader, and said, "Prikazyvat Find copsik."

  NOT FOUND

  "Prikazyvat Find—" the Grad said and held the reader to Kara's face. The Sharman shied, then spoke to the machinery. "Corpsik."

  CORPSICLE?

  The Grad said, "Prikazyvat Expound."

  The screen filled with print. The Grad asked, "Can you read it?"

  "No," Kara said for them all.

  "Corpsicle is an insult-term first used to describe people frozen for medical purposes. In the century preceding the founding of the State, some tens of thousands were frozen immediately after death in the hope of someday being revived and cured. This was found to be impossible.

  “The State later made use of the stored personalities. Memory patterns could be recorded from a frozen brain, and RNA extracted from the central nervous system. A brainwiped criminal could thus be fitted with a new personality. No citizenship was conferred upon these corpsicles. The treatment was later refined and used by passengers and crew on long interstellar voyages.

  "'The seeder ramship Discipline's crew included eight corpsicles. The memory sets were those of respected citizens of advanced age, with skills appropriate to an interstellar venture. It was hoped that the corpsicles would be grateful to find themselves in healthy, youthful bodies. This assumption proved-' I can't make sense of all that. One thing seems clear enough. A copsik isn't a citizen. He has no rights. He's property."

  "That's right," said Debby, to the Sharman's evident annoyance.

  So the Sharman doesn't trust me. So? "How do they find you in here? There must be cubic klomters of it, and you know it and they don't. I don't see why you fight at all."

  "They find us. Twice now they have found us hidden in the jungle," Kara said bitterly. "Their Sharman is better than I am. It may be that their science enhances their senses. Grad, we would be glad to have your knowledge."

  "Would you make us citizens?"

  The pause lasted only seconds. "If you fight," said Kara.

  "Clave broke his leg coming down."

  "We make citizens only of those who will fight. Our warriors are fighting now, and who knows if they will repell the corpsik runners? If we can hurt a few, perhaps they will not seek out the children and old men and women who host guests."

  Guests? Oh, the pregnant ones. "What about Clave and the women?

  What happens to them?"

  The Sharman shrugged. "They may live with us, but not as citizens." Not good, but it might be the best they could get. "I can't say yes or no. We'll have to talk. Kara…"

  "Wbat is it?"

  "I just remembered something. Kara, there are kinds of light you can't see. There used to be machines that could see the warmth of a body. That's how they find you."

  The women looked at each other in dread. Debby whispered, "But only a corpse is cold."

  "So light little fires all through the forest. Make them check each
one."

  "Very dangerous. The fire might…" she trailed off. "Never mind.

  Fires go out unless fanned. The smoke smothers them. It might be possible after all, near the jungle surface."

  The Grad nodded and reached for more foliage. Things were looking better. If some could become citizens, they could protect the rest. Perhaps Quinn Tribe had found a home…

  "Three groups, and they're all going deeper. The traces are getting blurred," said the pilot's blurred voice. The carm hung behind Squad Leader Patry's shoulder, bow aimed at the jungle. "Are you going after them?"

  "Groups how big?"

  "Three and three and a bigger group. The big group started first. You probably won't catch them."

  In the hands of Patry's men a mass of greenery rose from the rest and floated free. Patry reported, "We've found where they dug in. Okay, we're going after them." He joined the waiting men. "Mark, take the point. The rest of you follow me. Go wide of that yellow stufl it's poison fern."

  Mark was a dwarf the only man in London Tree who could wear the ancient armor, and thus the only possible custodian of the spitgun. Ten years ago he had tended to shy back from an attack, until he gained confidence in his invulnerability. The men had called him Tiny until Patty himself raised hell about it. Mark was born to wear the armor.

  He'd learned to wear it well.

  He climbed past the severed bush and into the dark with London Tree's infantry behind him.

  The agony was real, centered above Clave's knee, but spreading in flashes throughout his body. The rest faded in and out. He was being towed through a tunnel. Soon the Scientist's plant extracts would erase the pain. But hadn't the plants died in the drought? And…the tree was gone. There wasn't any Scientist, and the Grad had no drugs, and the Grad was gone too. Too few survivors followed the Grad through green gloom. Clave's pitiful remnant of a tribe was split, and there was no medicine for an injured man.

  Jinny and Minya stopped abruptly, jarring his leg. The pain shouted in his brain. Then they had plunged into the tunnel's branchlet walls, and Clave tumbled in free-fall, abandoned.