"What do this load of hillbillies do?" Kibbo asked as they rocked and shook their way through yet another tunnel of vegetation. Two hours in the cool forest, and they still hadn't seen any sign of human habitation.
"I think they grow tigercotton," Amersy said.
"That's Laeti Province," Lawrence said. "Arnoon collects willow webs. It's a vine that only grows in this forest, similar to wool apparently. They have a load of cybernetic looms that churn out clothes and rugs. The cities pay a premium for it" He grunted at the sudden echoes of memory. Isolated crofters living amid the mountains, selling their crafts to the rich city folk so they could buy the few items necessary to maintain their independence.
Either Great Loop Highway marker posts were being stolen, or the transport office had decided to space them farther apart in the forest. Up in the lead jeep, Ntoko was relying heavily on his inertial guidance and maps uploaded from the Memu Bay Town Hall, which were at least a decade out of date. They kept coming across junctions and forks in the muddy road that simply didn't exist in the old files.
Sometime around midafternoon, Lawrence caught sight of what he assumed to be a willow web. A small jade ball of what looked like tightly packed velvet gossamer was hanging from a high bough by a single sapphire-blue stem. The wood where the end of the stem was attached had swollen to three times the bough's ordinary width. In contrast to the rest of the forest vegetation, which was slick and damp, the furry surface of the ball was completely dry, as if it repelled the alternating deluges of rain and mist that inundated the trees.
They began to appear regularly after that. The first one had been a baby. Some he glimpsed deeper in the trees were as tall as himself, their surfaces mottled with dark lichen and plagued by ordinary creepers. Now that he knew what to look for, he could often see the shriveled stems protruding from distended branches, their ends cut cleanly.
Ntoko had actually driven into the village before he realized it. To start with he thought it was just a broad clearing. Then there were small children racing in front of the jeep, and he slammed the brakes on. Wheels slid on the carpet of wet mossgrass as the children squealed. They stopped, mercifully without hitting anyone. Smiling faces were suddenly surrounding the vehicle, hands waving as excitable young voices chattered.
Lawrence, who admittedly wasn't wearing his safety belt, had been thrown forward into the front seats. He straightened up and scanned his helmet sensors round the clearing. It was like a multiphase image that resolved only when you looked at it in the correct focus. Where before he'd seen trees with drooping branches tangled by vines, there were now wooden A-frame houses with roofs of elaborate reed mats that were obviously still alive. What he'd taken as a random scattering of shaggy bushes were actually compact gardens.
"Holy crap," Ntoko muttered as he climbed down. "This place is like the most perfect camouflage."
"You're thinking military, Sarge," Lawrence said. "This is just the way people like this live." ' "And you'd know all about people like this, space boy."
Adults were emerging from the foliage, or doors, to gather around the convoy's parked vehicles. They hung on to their lively children, waiting expectantly. Captain Lyaute launched into his standard speech about Z-B acquiring ownership of the planet's founding corporation and requiring a dividend. Instead of the anger and resentment rife in Rhapsody and Stanlake, the Arnoon villagers grinned at him, amused by the whole concept. Even putting collateral necklaces on two of them didn't curtail their open derision.
The squaddies started to search the arboreal A-frames. Lawrence began to revise his opinion of the villagers as simple crofters. The inside of the houses were far from primitive. They had electric lighting, and air-conditioning, and running water; kitchens that were fully equipped with every modern convenience, fridges, washing cabinets, microwaves. Lounges that had full AS desktop pearls with large panes and sheet screens to play the thousands of hours of multimedia recordings stored in extensive libraries.
Domestic convenience items aside, it was the decor that impressed him the most. The villagers had put a lot of effort into fashioning their homes according to individual taste. Many of the frames were carved, then painted or bound with willow wool in vibrant primary colors to emphasize curves and textures. Carvings invariably followed the Hindu or Buddhist school, with many-armed gods and goddesses serenely contemplating the village as they sat astride powerful serpentine dragons. Inside the houses mood decoration was favored, with children's playrooms formed inside nests of brash, exciting patterns; lounges came in elegant abstracts or classical ornate, making them cozy and welcoming, bedrooms in cool, subtly blended pastels. He began to wonder how many of the villagers were artisans. Somebody had to take care of the practical stuff.
Spaced among the houses were carpentry shops where the furniture was fabricated along with the trusses and internal structure for the A-frames. There was a pottery as well. Another craft shop made jewelry. Lawrence found that one easily enough. Skins clustered around it like bees swarming over their queen. Few of the pieces were made from gold or silver or platinum, and none had precious gemstones, but the bracelets and necklace pendants and earrings were all beautiful, handcrafted with care and precision. Most of them had cavities to hold neurotronic pearls. They were all being stuffed into Skin pouches.
Lyaute held court with the village council in what passed for the meeting place, a pavilion created from ten big snow-bark trees planted in a circle, their upper branches closely interlaced to form a broad dome of contiguous leaves that admitted slender ultramarine sunbeams while remaining closed against the rain. The captain was alarmed at the lack of anything valuable enough to qualify as a valid asset. The village did have a doctor, but a quick search of her surgery produced only five or six packets of medicines, all close to their expiration date. As in Stanlake, all serious accidents and illnesses were immediately shipped down to Dixon or on to Memu Bay. When Lyaute asked how many people lived in the village, the council said about six hundred. That was a lot more than the file from Memu Bay's Town Hall indicated. Even so, there weren't enough A-frames to house them all. Because many of us live out in the forest where we gather the webs, the council replied. Directions to such homesteads were not given by grid reference, they were in the form of walk half a kilometer along the northwest path, take a right-hand turn and walk for another kilometer, then ford the stream and head for the second peak to the south...