Gavving and Minya: married. Clave, Jayan, Jinny: a unit, and the twins seemed to like it that way. Anthon, Debby, Ilsa might all have left mates in Carther States, and they might all be looking around…but Anthon didn’t seem to think so, and even if Debby or Ilsa were available…a romp might be fun, but they looked so odd. Which left…Lawri.
He said, being nearly sure he could get away with it, “Lawri, will you forgive me for murdering Klance?”
“I notice you said murder. Not kill.”
“I’m not even claiming it was war. I know what he was to you. Lawri, I demand this.”
She turned her back and wept. The Grad did not turn his back. He’d virtually invited her to try to kill him. Now or never, Lawri! You can add too. There’s me or there’s Mark or there’s nobody. I might be giving Mark another reason to kill me. Do I want to risk that?
She turned around. “I forgive you for murdering Klance.”
“Then let’s go to the carm and register a marriage. We’ll pick up witnesses along the way.”
Clave looked down into the treemouth. “I see rocks down there. Good. We’ll have to collect them for a cookfire. Cook Gavving’s waterbirds. Tear out some foliage so we’ll have room. Where do we want the Commons?”
He didn’t see many of his citizens in earshot, and none were listening.
He raised his voice. “Treefodder, we have to get organized! A reservoir. Tunnels. Huts. Pens. Maybe we won’t find turkeys, but we’re bound to find something. Maybe dumbos. We need everything. Sooner or later we want elevators to the midpoint so we can moor the carm there. But for now—”
Anthon, flat on his back in the foliage with a long, long woman in each arm, bellowed, “Claaave! Feed it to the treeee!”
Gave grinned at Anthon. He did seem to represent the majority opinion. “Take a break, citizens. We’re home.”
For good or ill, they were alive and safe, two-thirds of the distance from Goldblatt’s World to the congestion of masses and life-forms around the L4 point; and they would remember Kendy.
He had promised a treasure of knowledge. A pity he hadn’t had time to give them more of a foretaste; but they must have experienced exactly what he’d predicted during reentry, given that they’d survived. A savage’s gods were omniscient, weren’t they? Or were they gullible, easily manipulated? Kendy’s memory had been pruned of such data.
Whatever: the legend would spread.
I can show you how to link your little tribes into one great State.
He had altered the programming in the CARM. The CARM would watch their behavior and record everything. Before the children of the State came again to Kendy, he would know them…
He would know one tiny enclave within that vast cloud. The Smoke Ring was roomy enough for endless variety. 1014 cubic kilometers of breathable atmosphere was about thirty times the volume of the Earth! Kendy wished for a thousand CARMs, ten thousand. What were they doing in there?
Never mind. Sooner or later there would come a man eager to carve out an empire, determined enough to take the CARM, crazy enough to trust his life to the ancient, leaky service vehicle. Kendy would know how to use him. Such men had helped to shape the State on Earth. They would again, in this strange environment.
Kendy waited.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Crew of Discipline
Sharls Davis Kendy Once a Checker for the State, now deceased. Also, the recordings of Sharls Davis Kendy’s personality in the master computer of the seeder ramship Discipline and its service spacecraft.
Quinn Tuft
Gavving A young warrior subject to allergies.
Harp The teller, or bard.
Laython The Chairman’s son.
Martal Quinn Tuft’s cook (deceased).
The Scientist Quinn Tuft’s guardian of knowledge.
The Grad The Scientist’s half-trained apprentice.
The Chairman Ruler of Quinn Tribe.
Clave A mighty warrior, the Chairman’s son-in-law.
Mayrin Clave’s wife, the Chairman’s daughter.
Jayan and Jinny Twin sisters enamored of Clave.
Merril An older woman, strong, but barren. Small, withered legs.
Jiovan A hunter.
Glory A woman of unwanted fame.
Alfin An older man, Keeper of the treemouth.
Others
Minya A fighting woman of the Triune Squad, of Dalton-Quinn Tuft.
Sal, Smitta, Jeel, Thanya, Denisse Others of the Triune Squad.
Kara Sharman (or Scientist) of Carther States.
Debby, Ilsa, Hild, Lizeth, Anthon Citizens of Carther States.
Klance London Tree’s Scientist.
Lawri London Tree’s Scientist’s Apprentice.
Horse, Jorg, Heln, Gwen Copsiks in London Tree.
Dloris, Haryet, Kor Supervisors in London Tree.
Karal, Mark, Patry London Tree Navy men.
GLOSSARY
blue ghost and ghost child Auroralike glow patches produced by magnetic effects above Levoy’s Star’s poles. Rarely visible.
branch One at each end of an integral tree, curving to leeward.
branchlets Grow from the spine branches and sprout into foliage.
carm Cargo And Repair Module. Discipline originally carried ten of these.
the clump The L4 and L5 points for Gold. They tend to collect debris.
copsik Slave. Used as a general insult.
copsik runner Slavetaker or slavemaster.
cotton-candy jungle or jungles Describes almost any large cluster of plants. A good many plants and clusters of plants look like fluffy green cotton candy. Many are edible.
day One orbit about Levoy’s Star, the neutron star (equals two hours for Dalton-Quinn Tree).
dumbo A predator of the integral trees.
fan fungus An integral tree parasite. Parts are edible.
“feed the tree” Defecate, or move garbage, or die.
flasher An insectivorous bird.
ghost child See blue ghost.
go for gold Rush headlong into disaster. Or battle!
gold See Goldblatt’s World. Secondary meaning: something to avoid.
Goldblatt’s World A gas giant planet captured after Levoy’s Star went supernova/neutron. Named for Discipline’s Astrophysicist, Sam Goldblatt.
huts Any dwelling. In the integral trees, huts are woven from living spine branches.
integral tree A crucial plant.
jet pod Some plants grow pods that may be carried for attitude control: they jet gases (of corruption, or of oxygen in plants that favor the outer fringes of the Smoke Ring). Other plants fire seeds when dying, or going to seed, or falling too far out of the Smoke Ring. There are tropisms.
Levoy’s Star A neutron star, the heart of the Smoke Ring system. Named for its discoverer, Sharon Levoy, Astrogator assigned to Discipline.
nose-arm See dumbo.
old-man’s-hair A fungus parasite on integral trees.
pond Any large globule of water.
prikazyvat Originally, Russian for “command.” Presently used to activate computer programs.
quinn tuft The in tuft (or point nearest Levoy’s Star) of Dalton-Quinn Tree.
the scientist Quinn Tuft’s guardian of knowledge. Tribes elsewhere use the same term.
spine branches Grow from the branch of an integral tree.
sun A G0 star orbits the neutron star at 2.5 × 108 kilometers, supplying the sunlight that feeds the Smoke Ring’s water-oxygen-DNA ecology.
treefodder Used as a curse. Treefodder is anything that might feed the tree: excrement, or garbage, or a corpse.
tuftberries Fruiting bodies growing in the tuft of an integral tree. They fruit and scatter seed only at the tuft closest to the Smoke Ring median.
Voy See Levoy’s Star.
year Half of a complete circuit of the sun around Levoy’s Star, equal to 1.385 Earth years.
Directions
out Away from Levoy’s Star.
 
; in Toward Levoy’s Star.
east In the orbital direction of the gas torus.
west Against the orbital direction of the gas torus. The way the sun moves.
windward Into the wind.
leeward The direction toward which the wind blows.
port To the left if your head is out and you’re facing west, or if your head is in and you’re facing east, and so forth. Direction of the Ghost Child.
starboard Opposite port. Toward the Blue Ghost.
down and up Usually applied only where tides or thrust operate. The general rule as known to all tribes is “East takes you out. Out takes you west. West takes you in. In takes you east. Port and starboard bring you back.” Even those tribes who no longer can maneuver within the Smoke Ring know the saying.
THE
SMOKE RING
It is reassuring to know that the human race is still capable of producing big, roomy minds. This book is dedicated to Dan Alderson.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Discipline
Section One CITIZENS’ TREE
ONE The Pond
TWO Discipline
THREE Refugees
FOUR The In Tuft
FIVE The Silver Suit
SIX The Appearance of Mutiny
Section Two THE LOGGERS
SEVEN The Honey Hornets
EIGHT The Honey Track
NINE The Rocket
TEN Secrets
ELEVEN Happyfeet
Section Three CIVILIZATION
TWELVE Customs
THIRTEEN The Termite Nest
FOURTEEN Docking
FIFTEEN Half Hand’s
SIXTEEN High Finance
SEVENTEEN Serjent House
EIGHTEEN Headquarters
Section Four THE DARK AND THE LIGHT
NINETEEN The Dark
TWENTY The Library
TWENTY-ONE The Silver Suit
TWENTY-TWO Loop
TWENTY-THREE Beginnings
Dramatis Personae
Glossary
Prologue
DISCIPLINE
The planet below him was hidden to all of Sharls’s senses save for the Neutrino Screen, the Neudar. What had been a gas giant planet a billion years ago was still a world two and a half times the size of the Earth: an egg of rock and nickel-iron hidden in world-sized storms. The storms spread out into a cloudy ring occupying the entirety of Goldblatt’s World’s orbit around the neutron star.
Sharls watched storms spin outward from the gas giant. Streams of fog and cloud and dust ran slow near the Smoke Ring’s outer rim, faster at the Smoke Ring median, faster yet as they neared Levoy’s Star; and everywhere there were flattened whorls of hurricane. The gravity gradient was savage this near the ancient neutron star. The innermost limits of the Smoke Ring circled Levoy’s Star every two hours.
The Smoke Ring was tinged with green—it had its own billion-year-old ecology—and somewhere in that cloud were men.
The temptation to go to them was a constant low-level irritant.
When moving between stars, Discipline burned the near-infinite hydrogen of interstellar space; but Discipline had been at rest for a long time now, and onboard fuel was limited. Refueling could not have progressed far when the mutiny came. Sharls’s supply of deuterium-tritium mix was finite. He had no way of knowing how long he must wait for the children of Discipline’s crew to rediscover civilization, to build their own spacecraft, to come to him. He was always short of power. The solar collectors on his two remaining CARMs didn’t give him much.
Sharls ignored the stars, most of the time. He watched the Smoke Ring. When the boredom became too much for him, he edited it from his memory. Boredom was a recurring surprise.
Five hundred and thirty-two Earth years was one hundred and ninety-two orbits of Levoy’s Star round its companion star. But the natives of the Smoke Ring measured years from the passings of the neutron star (Levoy’s Star, “Voy”) across the face of the yellow dwarf (T3, “Sun”); so a Smoke Ring “year” was 1.384 Earth years. Sharls had been waiting in the L2 point behind Goldblatt’s World for three hundred and eighty-four Smoke Ring years.
Best to sit it out in a stable orbit, and watch, and wait for men to develop civilization. Best to edit the memory of boredom…
Discipline’s computer/autopilot stored its information as a human brain did, or a hologram, though Sharls could feel differences. Memories from his time aboard Discipline were sharp and vivid. Those he had edited were gone completely. But memories from his time as a man, transferred long ago from a human brain now long dead, were blurred, hard to retrieve.
So: it wasn’t like a relay clicking over.
But somewhere in the computer there was a change of state. Five hundred and thirty-two years, and enough is enough. Sharls Davis Kendy was done with waiting.
Section One
CITIZENS’ TREE
Chapter One
THE POND
from the Citizens’ Tree cassettes, year 19 SM:
PONDS
Water droplets come in all sizes here. Clouds may hold everything from fine mist, to globules the size of a fist, to spheroids that house all manner of life. The biggest “pond” we’ve seen massed ten million metric tons or so; but the tide from Levoy’s Star had pulled it into two lobes and the differential winds were tearing it apart.
The ecology of the ponds is one rather than many. Life is queer and wonderful, but in every pond we have examined it is the same life. Ponds are temporary; pond life must occasionally migrate. In the Smoke Ring even the fish can fly.
—Carol Burnes, Life Support
Lawri and Jeffer swam beneath murky pondwater, trailing forty square meters of fabric stretched across the net more commonly used to sieve harebrains from the sky. They gripped its corners in strong toes and swam with their arms.
The sheet resisted. The leading edge tried to crumple. Tethers at the corners of the harebrain net got in their way. We could have had some help, Jeffer thought. Lawri wouldn’t have it. Lawri’s idea. Lawri’s project! She’d be doing this by herself if she possibly could.
Air! He slapped her thigh. She dropped the sheet and they swam toward the light.
Air is the sweetest taste, though one must risk drowning to appreciate it.
They were at the arc of the pond nearest Citizens’ Tree. The center of the trunk was a mere three klomters east. Seventy klomters of trunk ran out and in from the pond, ending in paired curved tufts. The in tuft, home, looked greenish black, with Voy’s blue pinpoint shining almost behind it. A single line ran from the trunk, and divided.
The sheet was a ghostly shadow deep within the pond. Lines ran from the corners, up through the water and out, to join the main cable that ran to the trunk.
“Almost in place,” Lawri said doubtfully.
“Close enough.”
“All right. You go get the carm ready. I’ll draft some hands to pull it in.”
Jeffer nodded. His legs scissored and shot him into the air. He drifted toward the main cable in a spray of droplets.
It was easier than arguing. Lawri would not leave Jeffer to organize the final stage. When Lawri the Scientist got an idea, nobody else got credit. Particularly not Citizens’ Tree’s other Scientist, her husband.
Partway around the curve of the pond, Minya and Gavving floated in the interface between air and water, surrounded by thrashing children.
Lines ran from each child toward the cable from Citizens’ Tree. The children were taught the backstroke first. It kept their faces in the air. Some preferred the frog-kick that let them look beneath the water. Swimming was a balance of surface tension versus the thrust of arms and legs.
If a child kicked himself entirely out of the water, an adult must go after him. A child who went beneath the surface could panic and must be pulled out before he drowned. There were carnivores among the waterbirds. Minya and Gavving wore harpoons. They had three of their own among the swimmers.
Gavving used lazy
strokes to change his attitude, moving his field of view in a clockwise circle.
“Look at Rather,” Minya said.
The oldest of the children were swimming together. Daughter of two jungle giants, golden-blond Jill had grown to merely normal height in the tide of Citizens’ Tree. She was thirty ce’meters shorter than her parents…but the contrast between Jill and Rather was startling. At fourteen, Minya’s dark-haired firstborn son was less than two meters in height. Jill had more than half a meter on him.
Yet Minya never spoke of Rather’s height. Gavving looked again and said, “Right. Rather!”
Rather paddled over, reluctantly. Fine green fur, barely visible, grew a mi’meter long on his left cheek. Gavving gripped the boy’s arm and lifted him partway out of the water, against surface tension. The green could be traced down Rather’s neck, over his shoulder, and partway across his chest.
“Fluff,” Gavving said. “Why didn’t you tell someone?”
Rather grinned guiltily. “I’ve never swum before.”
Minya snapped, “You go straight—”
“No. Finish your swim. You’ll pay for it. You’ve seen your last of the sun for a while. Have we raised a fool? It’s almost reached your eye!”
Rather nodded solemnly and paddled away. Minya watched him go, her mouth pursed in anger. Her husband wriggled and was silently underwater; kicked, and was beneath her; grasped an ankle and dove. Minya doubled back on herself and kicked him across the jaw. Gavving reached through the defense of her waving arms and legs and had her head between his hands; pulled her to him by main strength and kissed her hard. She laughed bubbles.
He kicked toward the surface with Minya in tow. They blew water from their faces before they inhaled, and were back on duty before any child could get into trouble.
Debby was some distance from where the children swam. She stayed just under the surface, motionless, peering, her spear poised. She expelled stale air—which stayed before her as a bubble—raised her head, snatched a breath, ducked again.