Two CARM autopilots, separated for five hundred and thirty-two years and eleven months, were both keeping Smoke Ring time, with Discipline’s arrival set at zero.
Interesting. The mutineers must have adjusted them after it was certain that they would never return. They had severed relations with the past, with Kendy, with Earth, with the State itself.
Yet they used mutiny as an obscenity. Puzzling.
The CARM flew east, airspeed seventy-one kph, partially fueled, carrying water that would become fuel. Solar collector efficiency was running at fifty-two percent, the collectors partially shadowed by the old pipe moored to the hull.
It was a liquid oxygen pipe ripped from a CARM. Many CARMs must have been dismantled when they stopped working. The Admiralty “Library” was certainly the control panel from a ruined CARM; but was it still functional?
The cabin interior was offensively dirty. Kendy detected traces of old meals eaten aboard; feathers and bird shit from the turkey roundup ten years back; the black clay that had returned the same trip; and mud repeatedly expelled from the water tank. Dirt was not dangerous, only aesthetically distressing. Kendy foresaw no problems other than those of microsociology.
He was on course.
Humankind was scattered. No telling how far they had spread through the Smoke Ring. They had settled cottoncandy jungles and the tufts of integral trees; he knew of four tiny civilizations outside the L4 point. But the Admiralty seemed to be the densest gathering, the most numerous, the best organized: the political entity most suited to become the heart of an expanding empire.
It would not resemble the State at first. Conditions were fantastically different. Never mind. Give them communications, gather them into one political group. Then shape it.
He must know more. Hearsay from a family of wandering loggers wasn’t good enough. The Admiralty “Library,” that would tell him how to proceed next…but he already knew that he must eventually contact the officers themselves.
Somehow the CARM must be moved into the Clump.
Jeffer had seemed to have matters well in hand. The effects of mutiny on Citizens Tree did not concern Kendy …but Clave had ended a mutiny by joining it! Now he must persuade Jeffer and Clave both. But Kendy couldn’t talk to Clave. Exposing Jeffer’s secret would lose Jeffer’s trust.
It was precisely the kind of problem a Checker enjoyed most.
For now Kendy watched six savages in a recording made over the past ten hours. They had much to teach him.
Booce speaking: “We own — owned our own ship. I suppose that made us richer than most. I inherited Logbearer from my father, and I made my first trips with him. Ryllin was another logger’s daughter, and she was used to the life. We had four daughters and a few lost ones out of maybe twenty pregnancies, all while hauling logs. I’ve become a good maternity doctor…” The cassette ended.
Men had changed in the Smoke Ring.
Pregnancy was easy in low gravity. Women became pregnant many times during their lifetimes.
Infant mortality (“lost ones”) was high, perhaps around sixty percent; the natives seemed to take it for granted. Discipline had carried no diseases. Yet the growth of bones and organs was altered by altered gravity. Some children could not digest food. Some grew strangely, until their kidneys or livers or hearts or intestines would no longer work because of their shape.
The environment was user-friendly for those who survived childhood. Kendy’s citizens came in odd shapes. Kendy caught a reference to Merril Quinn and learned that she had died six years ago, in early middle age. Merril had had no legs. She had fought against London Tree, and not as a cripple.
Distorted children had wandered through the CARM to be photographed. Ryllin Serjent had an awesomely long neck, quite lovely and graceful and fragile looking. Carlot’s legs…Kendy wished he could see her walk or run.
They matured more slowly. Carlot claimed fourteen and a half years; she would be twenty by Earth’s reckoning. But she looked no more than fifteen.
Men had not evolved for the Smoke Ring. Infant mortality must have been ghastly among the original crew. Five hundred years of natural selection was taking care of that. As with the cats a few generations back: the near future should see an impressive population explosion.
Kendy would guide the civilization that resulted. He had been right to move now.
The CARM was coming back into range. Kendy’s telscope array picked it up falling east and out, slowing.
In present time, Booce and Carlot and Rather were on watch while the others slept. The CARM moved through a patch of thin fog. Fog didn’t block the CARM’s senses. Kendy noticed the anomaly some time before the crew did.
He saw birds of unfamiliar type. They had lungs (the CARM’s sonar could see the triple cavity), but they had retained part of what must once have been an exoskeleton: an oval of hard sky-blue shell covered one side. Fourteen of these birds, each about the mass of a boar pig, were strung in a line across the sky. They were folded into themselves, fins and wings and heads folded against that oval of shell. Sky-blue blobs, cool in infrared, comatose or dead.
Booce had noticed now. He shook Jeffer awake. “A whole flock of dead birds. What killed them?”
“Nothing that can touch us with the airlock closed.”
Jeffer’s fingers danced. “Outside air’s okay, nothing poisonous. Well, treefodder!”
“What?”
“The temperature. It’s cold out there.”
Kendy had already found the source of the cold.
The present-time transmission showed Jeffer easing the CARM alongside one of the big birds. The other crew were in and around the airlock. Debby sent a tethered crossbow bolt into the bird. It twitched. She loosed another…
…while Kendy set a blinking light around the image of the pond.
Only Jeffer was there to see it. He said softly, “Stet.”
They had pulled the bird aboard. Clave said, “Well, it’s dead now.”
“I’ve got something,” Jeffer said. “Clave, there’s a pond in that dense cloud. Do you see anything odd about it?”
“No life around it. That cloud’s awfully thick for being so small. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Ice. The pond was a core of foamy ice within a shell of meltwater. Ice was rare within the Smoke Ring. The pond was huge now, several hundred thousand tons, but Kendy guessed that it had been bigger yet. A tremendous pond must have been flung out of the Smoke Ring by a gravity-assist from Gold. In the near-vacuum of the gas torus it would have boiled and frozen at the same time, and later fallen back, reduced by evaporation, reduced further by reentry heat. Now it cooled the sky around it as it melted. Kendy could hear the pings as bubbles of near-vacuum crumpled within the ice core.
“I don’t like it here,” Booce said. “It’s too strange.”
“Your wish is granted. Strap the bird down and take your seats.” Jeffer waited while they did that, then fired the aft attitude jets. The CARM surged away.
Carlot pointed into the aft view. “Look!”
The shieldbirds tumbled in the CARM’s hot wake. One by one they fluttered, then spread a rainbow of wings and tails and fluffy feathers. They basked in the heat, catching as much of it as they could. Now their shells were no bigger in proportion than a warrior’s shield. As Discipline moved out of range, the birds were lining up and flying west, putting distance between themselves and the melting glacier.
“There’s no point picking out a tree till you’ve got honey,” Booce said. “You can find a tree a hundred klomters from the Clump and still go half a thousand klomters to find your sting jungle.”