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.'
'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
