The Integral Trees t-1 Page 9

  Somewhere off to the side, there was motion.

  What Clave had taken for a purple-clad corpse was floundering in air. Clave pointed. "One killer left."

  They watched. She wasn't floundering now. She'd tied a line to her long knife, and now she cast it out. She snagged a dead companion and reeled it in. She searched the corpse, then pushed off from it in the direction of the next.

  She hadn't found much, but it must have been what she wanted. Now she fired two jet pods in turn. The thrust carried herintoward Voy. Alfin said, "She's not coming here. Or going home. What does she think she's doing?"

  "Not our problem."

  Merril caught a line thrown by Alfin and pulled herself close. By now there was no room to clutch the fan itself. Clave asked her, "Did you see any sign of Glory?"

  "Hanging on to the bark for dear life, last I saw her. She was in the out section. Gavving's a good distance in."

  "We'll go after him. I hope we get there in time."

  By then it was obvious. The woman in purple had passed them and was heading toward Gavving.

  Gavving watched her coming. There was little else he could do. When he could see her face he watched her watching him. The rictus of hate he'd seen earlier wasn't there. He saw close-cut dark hair, a triangular face with an oddly narrow chin, an expression that was thoughtful, judging.

  She was going to go past.

  He didn't know how to feel about that. He didn't want to die alone, but he surely didn't want to die with those mini-harpoons through him. She was close now. She reached behind her back for a tethered miniharpoon. He could only try to put the meat between them as she pulled her odd weapon apart, looking him in the eye, and released it.

  The feathered thing buried itself in warm meat.

  Then Gavving moved in frantic haste, pulling his knife, reaching for her line-Her words were strangely twisted, but he understood her. "No, no, no, let me live! I have water! I have jet pods! I beg you!"

  It might be so. He shouted, "Freeze! Don't reel yourself in! I have to think"

  "I obey."

  She hung, tethered, motionless.

  "You've got water and I've got food. What if you kill me and keep both?"

  "My sword," she answered and produced the long knife and threw it.

  Startled, Gavving reached out and managed to catch it by the handle.

  "My bow," she said, and he had time to bed the knife in the meat before she threw him the pull-it-apart weapon. He caught that too.

  Now what? She was just waiting.

  "What do you want?"

  "I want to join you, your people. There's nobody else."

  He could festoon himself with his weapons and hers, and so what? With nothing between them but forty kilograms of smoked meat, either could snatch a weapon and kill the other at any time. He'd have to sleep sometime…and still she waited.

  He thought suddenly, W7iy not? I'm dead anyway. He called, "Come on.',

  She coiled the line as she came. Gavving had been hanging onto his pack, but she hugged herself up against the meat with no thought for what it would do to her purple clothing. She worked a jet pod out of one of the dozen pockets that gave her body its shapeless, lumpy look. She set it and twisted the end. When it had expended itself there was some change in their velocity. She used another. Then another.

  "Why were you carrying so many?" he asked. "I took them from my friends."

  From their corpses. Gavving turned away. Quinn Tribe now formed a single clump around. "The Checker's Hand," said his enemy. He had trouble understand ing her odd pronunciation. "They're all moored to the Checker's Hand. Good enough. Fans are edible. So is dumbo meat."

  "I know that word. Checker: the Grad's used it, but he never tells anyone what it means."

  "You should not have attacked the Checker's Hand. We tend it tended it."

  "Is that why you killed Jiovan? For a fan fungus?"

  "For that, and for returning from exile. You were cast out for assassinating a Chairman."

  "That's news to me. We've been in Quinn Tuft for over a hundred years."

  She nodded as if it didn't matter. She was strange…she was a stranger. Gavving knew every man, woman, and child in Quinn Tuft. This citizen had dropped on him out of the sky, complete and unknown. He wasn't even sure he should hate her.

  "I'm thirsty," he said.

  She passed him a squeezegourd pod half-full of water. He drank.

  The clump that was Quinn Tribe seemed minutely closer. Gavving might have been imagining it. He said, "What do we do now? The way you use a jet pod, maybe you handle yourself better in the sky than we do. Can you tell us what to do next? Dalton Tuft—"

  "Dalton-Quinn Tuft," she corrected him.

  "Your half of the tree is probably safe, but it's being pulled out by the tide. I can't think of any way to reach it. We're lost." Then his curiosity suddenly became unbearable. "Who are you?"

  "Minya Dalton-Quinn."

  "I'm Gavving Quinn," he said for the second time in his life. The first had been at his rite of passage into adulthood. He tried again. "Who are you all? Why did you want to kill us?"

  "Smitta was…excitable. Some of us are like that in the Triune Squad, and you were killing the Hand."

  "Triune Squad. Mostly women?"

  "All women. Even Smitta, by courtesy. We serve the tuft as fighters."

  "Why did you want to be a fighter?"

  She shook her head, violently. "I don't want to talk about it. Will your citizens accept me or kill me?"

  "We're not—" killers? He'd killed two himself. It came to him that if the Grad had taught him rightly, those times when the Scientist would have whipped them both for such talk, then…then Minya's half of the tree, falling out from Voy, was also falling out of a drought. So.

  "Can I tell them this? If we can get you back to the far tuft, you'll see to it that we're made members of your tribe. It looks better if I can say that. Well?"

  She didn't speak at once, and then she said, "I have to think."

  The meat and the fan were passing at fair speed when Clave cast out a weighted line. He'd reserved their last pod. Another mistake, maybe. Now they'd have only one chance… but the dark stranger caught the line neatly and made it fast. They braced against their mutual spin.

  Gavving shouted across the gap. "This is Minya of Dalton-Quinn. Tribe. She wants to join us."

  "Don't pull in yet. Is she armed?"

  "She was."

  "I want her weapons." Clave cast another line. An impressively thick bundle came back. Clave studied the haul: a knife the length of his own arm, a smaller knife, a bundle of mini-harpoons, and two of the pull-itapart weapons, one of wood and one of metal. He preferred the look of the wooden one. The metal thing looked like it had been made from something else. By now he'd guessed how they must work, and he liked the idea.

  Alfin said, "She tried to kill us all."

  "True." Clave handed the Grad his last jet pod, not without reluctance. "Stop our spin. Wait. See that sheet of bark, out from us and not moving very fast? See if you can stop our spin and move us that way too."

  Alfin persisted. "What are you going to do?"

  "Recruit her, if she'll stand for it," Clave answered. "Seven citizens in a tribe is ridiculous."

  "There isn't room to guard her."

  "Where do you want to spend the rest of your life?"

  The jet pod sprayed gas and seeds. The Grad said, "We won't reach the bark this way. Not enough push."

  Alfin still hadn't answered. Clave told him, "Unless you've learned to like falling, I'd guess you want to live in an integral tree tuft. We now have a prisoner who lives in a tuft. We have the chance to earn her gratitude."

  "Bring her in."

  Chapter Nine

  The Raft

  THE POND WAS A SMALL, PERFECT SPHERE, TWENTY KLOMTERS out from the Checker's Rand: a giant water droplet trailing a tail of mist in the direction away from the sun. When the sun shone through from behind, as it did now,
Minya glimpsed shadows wriggling within it.

  It was going to drift past.

  The ends of the tree were far away and still separating: Dalton-Quinn Tuft drifting out and west, the Dark Tuft in and east. The smoke trail that joined them was growing faint, save for dark streamers that were indecisive clouds of insects.

  Something surged from the pond, and the pond rippled and convulsed in its wake. The creature was big even at this distance. Hard to judge its size, but it seemed little more than a mouth with fins. Minya watched it uneasily. It didn't seem to be coming toward them. It was flapping toward the smoke trail.

  A loose cluster of citizens floated about the Checker's Hand. They couldn't all cling. There wasn't room, and the fungus wasn't holding together that well, either. They used spikes and tethers and showed a reluctance to approach Minya too closely.

  The old one, Alfin, clung to the stalk. His look of terror had smoothed out, but he wouldn't talk and he wouldn't move.

  The Grad studied her. He said, "Meen Ya. Have I got that right?"

  "Close enough. Minya."

  "Ah. Mineeya-if we could reach your end of the tree, could you help us join your tribe?"

  Their eyes were on her. The old one's seemed desperate. Well, it had had to come. She said, "We have a drought. Too many mouths to feed already."

  The Grad said, "Your drought's probably ending about now. There'll be water."

  "You're the Quinn Tribe Scientist's apprentice?"

  "That's right."

  "I accept what you say. How long before that new water grows new food? In any—"

  "There'll be meatbirds in the wind now—"

  "I don't want to go back!" There, it was said.

  Clave asked, "Did you commit a crime?"

  "I was thinking about committing a crime. I would have had to. Please!"

  "Leave it then. But if we spend our lives here, they're likely to be short. Any passing triune family would think we're some kind of mushroom tidbit. Or that flying mouth that came out of the pond a minute ago—"

  "Can't we get to another tree, one with nobody in it? I know we can't go anywhere now, but if we could get to Dalton-Quinn Tuft, we could get to another tree, don't you think?" They weren't buying it. Distract them? "Anyway, we can do better than we're doing now. We should be eating the Hand, not clinging to it. It won't last long now that it's been picked. We need a place to moor ourselves."

  She pointed. "That."

  That was a ragged sheet of bark, ten meters long and half that wide, a couple of hundred meters away. Most of its spin had by now been lost to air friction, Clave-the Chairman?-said, "I've been watching it for the past day. It isn't getting any closer. Treefodder, if we could move ourselves, I'd go for the pond!"

  The Grad said, "Maybe the tree left a partial vacuum. That might pull it in. We can hope."

  "We can do more than that. The bark may be close enough." Minya reached for the weapons.

  A hand clamped on her wrist, the fingers circling almost twice around. "What do you think you're doing?"

  Long, strong fingers, and no qualms about touching another citizen. There were men like this Clave in Dalton-Quinn Tuft. They had driven Minya into the Triune Squad…Minya shook her head, violently.

  She was his prisoner, and she had come as a killer. She spoke slowly, carefully.

  "I think I can put a tethered arrow into that wood." He hesitated, then released her. "Go ahead and try." She used Sal's metal bow. The arrow slowed as it flew, and presently drifted. She tried another. Now two arrows floated at the ends of slack lines. There were murmurs of disgust as the boy Oavving reeled the lines in.

  "I'd like to try that," Clave said and took the bow. When he released it, the string brushed his forearm, and he cursed. The arrow stopped short.

  Minya never dithered. She made decisions fast, important or no: that too had helped to put her in the Triune Squad. Now she said, "Hold your left arm straight and rigid. Pull as hard as you can. Swing the string a little right and you won't hit your arm. Look along the arrow. Now don't move."

  She picked up the loop of line and hurled it as hard as she could in the direction of the sheet of bark. Now the arrow wouldn't pull so much weight. "Whenever you feel ready."

  The arrow sped away. It ticked a corner of the bark and stayed. Clave put pressure on the line, slowly, slowly…it was coming…the arrow worked itself free.

  Clave repeated the exercise with no sign of impatience. The bark was meters closer now. He reached it again and pulled line in as if he were fighting some huge meatbird.

  The bark came to them. Clave fired another arrow deep into the wood. They crossed on the line. Minya noticed Alfin's shuddering breath once he was safely moored to the bark.

  And she noticed Clave's, "Well done, Minya." But he kept the bow.

  "We'll used the other side of the bark for privacy," Clave instructed. "Now, the bark is all we've got, so there's no point in getting it dirty. When you feed the tree, the fertilizer should go outward."

  "It'll float around us," Alfin said, his first words in hours. He must have seen how they looked at him. "Yes, I do have a better idea. Be at the rim when you feed the tree. The spin will throw it away from us. Won't it, Grad?"

  "Yes. Good thinking."

  Minya chewed on fan fungus. It was fibrous and nearly tasteless, but there was damp in it, and the damp was delicious. Minya looked longingly toward the pond, which was no closer. So near, so far

  They had eaten the smoked dumbo meat down to the bone, to prevent its spoiling. Maybe that had been a mistake. Their bellies were full, even overfull, but they were left thirstier yet. They could die of thirst here.

  Aside from that, things were going well.

  The golden-haired boy, Gavving: she had made a good choice there. Perhaps he thought he owed her his life. Perhaps it was true. Harmless as he looked, she had seen him kill twice. He'd make a better ally than enemy.

  Alfin she couldn't judge. If he was that terrified of falling, he'd be dead soon anyway.

  Merril was something else again. Legless, but she swung a fist like another woman's kick! After all she'd lived through, she must be tough. More: handicapped as she was, she'd be dead without friends. She must be well thought of, then. Minya intended to make Merril her friend.

  The Grad was a dreamer. He'd never notice whether Minya was dead or alive.

  Clave was the dominant male. Perhaps he still considered her an enemy. But she had brought them to this raft and let Clave take the credit. It couldn't hurt. If Clave thought he needed her, she didn't care if he trusted her.

  But what else might he want of her?

  Jayan and Jinny: they both acted as if Clave belonged to them, or vice versa. Two women sharing a man was not unheard of. They seemed to accept Clave's decisions. But would they resent a potential third? Best stay clear of Clave, if she could.

  She could solve that problem, perhaps. Merril spoke around a prodigious yawn. "Does it feel like sleeptime? I personally feel like I've been hit on the head."

  Clave said, "I want someone awake at all times on each side of the tree. Is there anyone who isn 't sleepy?"

  "I'm not," said Alfin.

  So Alfin and Jayan took the first day's watch. Gavving and Merril would be next, then-Minya ignored the rest. Physically and emotionally, she was exhausted. She settled for sleep, floating next to the bark, curled half into fetal position.

  The sun was just passing north of Voy. She half noticed activity as citizens took their turns behind the bark, feeding the tree. Clave and Jmny slapped bugs off each other. Jayan presently disappeared around the edge. Alfin…Alfin was hovering next to her. He said, "Mineeya?"

  She straightened. "Alfin. What do you want?"

  "I want you for my wife."

  Suddenly she was utterly awake. She could not afford enemies now. She said carefully, "I had not considered marriage." He hadn't recognized her uniform.

  "You'd be a fool to turn me down. What better way to become one of us?"
/>
  "I will consider what you say," she said and closed her eyes.

  "I'm a respected man. In Clave Tuft I supervised the tending of the treemouth."

  Her arms hugged her knees and tightened her into a ball, without her volition.

  Alfin's hand shook her shoulder. "Mineeya, your choices aren't wide, here on this sheet of bark. You came as a killer. Some of us may still see you that way."

  He wouldn't leave her alone. Well. She tried to keep her voice cool, but she couldn't make herself uncoil, and it came out muffled. "Your argument is good. I should marry one of you. Clave is spoken for, isn't he?"

  Alfin laughed. "Thrice."

  "Amazing. And the Grad?"

  "You're playing games with me. Consider my offer." Then he saw that she was sobbing.

  Minya was horrified, but she couldn't stop. The sobs racked her like convulsions. She couldn't even muffle the sounds of distress. She wanted a man, yes, but not this man! Did she have a choice? She might find herself forced to mate this ugly, abrasive old man, only to prevent Quinn Tribe from killing her. Or she could speak of her oath to the Triune Squad and never be mated at all. It was just too much.

  "I-I'll come back when you're feeling better." She heard Alfin's distress and guilt, then quiet. When she forced herself to look, she saw him weaving among the sleepers-stealthily?-to reach the far edge of the bark.

  She had lost her home, her family, her friends; she was lost in the sky, cast among strangers. Copsik! How could he inflict such a decision on her now? Filthy treefeeding copsik!

  The tears were drying on her face. At least no Triune Squad companion had seen her so shamed. It came to her that her tears had driven Alfin away…just as they had been her primary defense when she was fourteen.

  But what could she do? She hadn't been quite fair to the old man. He had spoken a partial truth, one she'd already considered: marriage was the way into Quinn Tribe.

  — And she found that she had made her decision after all.

  Dared she sleep now? She must. The sun was a hand's breadth past Voy; and she curled up and slept.