Their catch looked like a fleshy mushroom, with a stalk half a meter long and sense organs and a coiled tentacle under the edge of the cap. A lung ran down the center of the stalk/body to give the thing jet propulsion. Part of the cap had been ripped away, perhaps by some predator; the scar was half-healed. It looked far from appetizing, but society's law bound the Chairman too.
He took it. 'Tomorrow's breakfast,' he said courteously. 'Where's Laython?'
'Lost,' Harp said, before Gavving could say, 'Dead.'
The Chairman looked stricken. 'How?' Then, 'Wait, Eat first.'
That was common courtesy for returning hunters; but for Gavving the waiting was torture. They were given scooped-out seedpods containing a few mouthfuls of greens and turkey meat in broth. They ate with hungry eyes on them, and they handed the gourds back as soon as possible.
'Now talk,' the Chairman said.
Gavving was glad when Harp took up the tale. 'We left with the other hunters and climbed along the trunk. Presently we could raise our heads into the sky and see the bare trunk stretching out to infinity—'
'My son is lost and you give me poetry?'
Harp jumped. 'Your pardon. There was nothing on our side of the trunk, neither of danger nor salvation. We started around the trunk. Then Laython saw a swordbird, far west and borne toward us on the wind.'
The Chairman's voice was only half-controlled. 'You went after a swordbird?'
'There is famine in Quinn Tuft. We've fallen too far in, too far toward Voy, the Scientist says so himself. No beasts fly near, no water trickles down the trunk—'
'Am I not hungry enough to know this myself? Every baby knows better than to hunt a swordbird. Well, go on.'
Harp told it all, keeping his language lean, passing lightly over Laython's disobedience, letting him show as the doomed hero. 'We saw Laython and the swordbird pulled east by the wind,, along a klomter of naked branch, then beyond. There was nothing we could do.'
'But he has his line?'
'He does.'
'He may find rest somewhere,' the Chairman said. 'A forest somewhere. Another tree…he could anchor at the median and go down well. He's lost to Quinn Tribe at least.'
Harp said, 'We waited in the hope that Laython might find a way to return, to win out and moor himself along the trunk, perhaps. Four days passed. We saw nothing but a musrum borne on the wind. We cast our grapnels and I hooked the thing.'
The Chairman looked ill with disgust. Gavving heard in his mind, Have you traded my son for musrum meat? But the Chairman said, 'You are the last of the hunters to return. You must know of today's events. First, Martal has been killed by a drillbit.'
Martal was an older woman, Gavving's father's aunt. A wrinkled woman who was always busy, too busy to talk to children, she had been Quinn Tribe's premier cook. Gavving tried not to picture a drillbit boring into her guts. And while he shuddered, the Chairman said, 'Alter five days' sleep we will assemble for Martal's last rites. Second: the Council has decided to send a full hunting expedition up the trunk. They must not return without a means for our survival. Gavving, you will join the expedition. You'll be informed of your mission in detail after the funeral.'
Chapter Two
Leavetaking
THE TREEMOUTH WAS A FUNNEL-SHAPED PIT THICKLY LINED with dead-looking, naked spine branches. The citizens of Quinn Tuft nested in an arc above the nearly vertical rim. Fifty or more were gathered to say good-bye to Martal. Almost half were children.
West of the treemouth was nothing but sky. The sky was all about them, and there was no protection from the wind, here at the westernmost point of the branch. Mothers folded their babes within their tunics. Quinn Tribe showed like scarlet tuftberries in the thick foliage around the treemouth.
Martal was among them, at the lower rim of the funnel, flanked by four of her family. Gavving studied the dead woman's face. Almost calm, he thought, but with a last lingering trace of horror. The wound was above her hip: a gash made not by the drillbit, but by the Scientist's knife as he dug for it.
A drillbit was a tiny creature, no bigger than a man's big toe. It would fly out of the wind too fast to see, strike, and burrow into flesh, leaving its gut as an expanding bag that trailed behind it. If left alone it would eventually burrow through and depart, tripled in size, leaving a clutch of eggs in the abandoned gut.
Looking at Martal made Gavving queasy. He bad lain too long awake, slept too little; his belly was already churning as it tried to digest a breakfast of musrum stew.
Harp edged up beside him, shoulder-high to Gavving. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
'For what?' Though Gavving knew what he meant.
'You wouldn't be going if Laython wasn't dead.'
'You think this is the Chairman's punishment. All right, I thought so too, but… wouldn't you be going?'
Harp spread his hands, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.
'You've got too many friends.'
'Sure, I talk good. That could be it.'
'You could volunteer. Have you thought of the stories you could bring back?'
Harp opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged.
Gavving dropped it. He had wondered, and now he knew. Harp was afraid…'I can't get anyone to tell me anything,' he said. 'What have you heard?'
'Good news and bad. Nine of you, supposed to be eight. You were an afterthought. The good news is just a rumor. Clave's your leader.'
'Clove?'
'Himself. Maybe. Now, it could still be true that the Chairman's getting rid of anyone he doesn't like. He —'
'Clave's the top hunter in the tuft! He's the Chairman's son-in-law!'
'But he's not living with Mayrin. Aside from that…I'd be guessing.'
'What?'
'It's too complicated. I could even be wrong.' And Harp drifted off.
The Smoke Ring was a line of white emerging from the pale blue sky, narrowing as it curved around in the west. Far down the arc, Gold was a clot of streaming, embattled storms. His gaze followed the arm around and down and in, until it faded out near Voy. Voy was directly below, a blazing pinpoint like a diamond set in a ring.
It was all sharper and clearer than it had been when Gavving was a child. Voy had been dimmer then and blurred.
At the passing of Gold, Gavving had been ten years old. He remembered hating the Scientist for his predictions of disaster, for the fear those predictions raised. The shrieking winds had been terrible enough but Gold had passed, and the storms had diminished…The allergy attack had come days later.
This present drought had taken years to reach its peak, but Gavving had felt the disaster at once. Blinding agony like knives in his eyes, runny nose, tightness in his chest. Thin, dry air, the Scientist said. Some could tolerate it, some could not. Gold had dropped the tree's orbit, he was told, the tree had moved closer to Voy, too far below the Smoke Ring median. Gavving was told to sleep above the treemouth, where the rivulets ran. That was before the rivulets had dwindled so drastically.
The wind too had become stronger.
It always blew directly into the treemouth. Quinn Thit spread wide green sails into the wind, to catch anything that the wind might bear. Water, dust or mud, insects or larger creatures, all were filtered by the finely divided foliage or entangled in the branchiets. The spine branches migrated slowly forward, west along the branch, until gradually all was swallowed into the great conical pit. Even old huts migrated into the treemouth to
