Jeffer spoke through the suit radio. “Not yet. Rather. Come back. You don’t have anything to carry the, the, Booce?”
“Honey.”
“The honey. Booce, what does he need?”
“That’s what the sacks are for.”
Rather oriented toward the CARM, increased the thrust, doubled on himself for two seconds, then arched backward as he fell toward the airlock. Fir sprayed from his ankles, arcing forward. Nice, Kendy thought. Of course he wasn’t a complete novice. He’d flown with those giant swim-fin fans.
The boy left his helmet open (but didn’t turn off the air jets!). Debby began strapping twelve coarse sacks to his back, got yelled at, and strapped them to his chest instead, where he could reach them. She used several loops of line. The savages were never without line, Kendy recalled. Good practice in a free-fall environment.
In present time Rather was leaving the airlock again, and the signal was fading. Kendy waited.
The great green torus became landscape as Rather came near. It was darker than integral tree foliage, and fluffy, finely divided to catch as much sunlight as possible. Scarlet and orange peeked over the curve, becoming clearer. Orange hom shapes, rocket-nostril shapes, quite pretty. Thousands of them.
The jittering mist cleared too: not steam roiled by wind, but myriads of particles swirling round the blossoms, dipping in and out. Now the motes abandoned the horn shapes and streamed toward Rather.
They were all around him, a humming black cloud of rage.
“Scientist? I’m in the center. I can hardly see. The honey hornets are—”
“Look for red,” said Booce’s voice.
Orange and scarlet. Orange horns the size of drinking gourds, and scarlet of another shape. Rather jetted closer.
The honey hornets came with him. Thousands of thumb-sized birds: tiny harpoon for a nose, invisible blur of wing behind. He could hear the angry buzz through his helmet. “I’ve got a red thing…Booce, it’s a kind of a sloppy polyhedron half a meter through, covered with lots of little triangle holes. It’s growing between these horn shapes.”
“Those are flowers. It didn’t grow there, it’s attached. Did you take a knife?”
“No. Wait a breath, there’s a matchet on mv leg. It must be Mark’s.”
“Cut the honeypod loose and put the sack around it. Tie the neck shut.”
Rather swung the matchet behind the scarlet polyhedron. The silver suit made all movements stiff. Presently the honeypod was floating loose. Rather pulled a sack free, opened the mouth, and swept it around the honeypod.
“Got it? Tie the bag shut. Done?”
“Done. There’s sticky red stuff all over my gloves.”
“Stet. Now keep doing that till you run out of sacks. Don’t lick the honey.”
“With my helmet closed?”
“Don’t ever lick honey. It’s suicide.”
Chapter Eight
The Honey Track
from the Citizens Tree cassettes, year 1426 State:
GOLDBLATT’S WORLD
GOLDBLATT’S WORLD MAY HAVE BEGUN LIFE AS A NEPTUNE-LIKE BODY IN THE COMET CLOUD AROUND THE PAIRED STARS. IN GOLDBLATT’S SCENARIO, THE BODY WAS CAPTURED SOME MILLIONS OF YEARS AFTER THE SUPERNOVA EVENT. THE COLLAPSING CORE OF THE SUPERNOVA, SPEWING ITS OUTER ENVELOPE ASYMMETRICALLY DUE TO A TRAPPED MAGNETIC FIELD, MAY HAVE PICKED UP A SKEW VELOCITY THAT NEARLY MATCHED THE VELOCITY OF THE PROTO-NEPTUNE. ROBBED OF ITS ORBITAL VELOCITY, GOLDBLATT’S WORLD WOULD FALL ALONG A DRASTICALLY ECCENTRIC ORBIT, PASSING VERY NEAR LEVOY’S STAR. EXTREME ROCHE TIDES WOULD WARP THE ORBIT INTO A CIRCLE WITHIN A FEW SCORES OF PASSES.
IT SEEMS LIKELY THAT GOLDBLATT’S WORLD’S ORBIT AND THE ASSOCIATED GAS TORUS HAVE BEEN CONTRACTING FOR ALL OF THEIR BILLION YEARS. MEANWHILE LEVOY’S STAR HAS BEEN COOLING — SINCE NEUTRON STARS NO LONGER UNDERGO FUSION — MAINTAINING A RELATIVELY STABLE BALANCE OF TEMPERATURE IN THE SMOKE RING.
NOTE THAT THE ROCHE LIMIT IS NEVER AN ABSOLUTE. IT VARIES AS THE DENSITY OF THE ORBITING BODY. A GASBALL WORLD MAY BE WITHIN ITS ROCHE LIMIT, AND THIS ONE PROBABLY WAS. BUT THE ROCK-AND-METAL CORE IS DENSE. GOLDBLATT’S WORLD WOULD HAVE BEEN WELL OUTSIDE ITS ROCHE LIMIT AFTER THE GASBALL LOST SOME OF ITS GAS AND THE ECCENTRIC ORBIT BECAME MORE CIRCULAR.
THE PLANET IS NOW NO MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF TIMES THE MASS OF EARTH…
“YOU SEE THE PROBLEM? TOO MUCH OF IT IS GIBBERish,” Jeffer told the children. Rather and Carlot were nodding, but their eyes were glassy. “You can look up some of the words. You can guess a little. Goldblatt’s World is Gold. There’s a file on Earth and Neptune and the rest of the solar system, but it’s hard going. Roche tides, Roche Limit — that seems to be a balance point between tide and some other force, maybe the same force that changes your orbit if you pass too close to Gold. Fusion is power: it makes the Sun bum, and Discipline ran on fusion. Oort cloud, magnetic field, supernova — Lawri and I never figured those out.”
He turned to Booce. “The kids need this, but I hate to make you sit through it again at your age—”
Booce’s eyes were glassy too. “No, no, no. This is all new to me.”
“Didn’t you have classes? There’s the Library—”
“For officer’s kids only,” Booce said brusquely. “Go on with this. What’s eccentric?”
“That’s a round path that isn’t a circle. It goes out and in. Booce, am I committing a crime if I teach you and Carlot these things?”
“But I want to learn!”
“Shush, Carlot. It’s never come up before,” Booce said. “You’re not showing us the Library, after all.”
Carlot demanded, “Scientist, what’s the point in stopping now?”
Jeffer laughed. He tapped, and the window was restored. The Clump was nearer now, and a score of parallel dashes lay across the CARM’s path. “You’re right. Carlot, but the lesson’s over anyway. We’re getting too close.”
Debby answered with a raspberry.
“Booce?” Jeffer said. “Any special favorites?”
“The smallest, I’d think, but let’s have a better look.”
Booce disengaged his seat tethers and moved aft. “Jeffer, would you open those doors?”
“Will do.” He did. “Booce, don’t you trust the windows?”
“I prefer my eyes. Swing us around, will you?” He braced himself in the airlock. Others of the crew had followed him.
Jeffer began the maneuver. In the forward view, now moving into the port view, one of the trees had begun blinking: a green halo going on, off, on, off.
Nobody was near. Jeffer whispered, “Why?”
Now a point far in along the trunk was doing the blinking. Then that stopped—
An arm stabbed past Jeffer’s ear, and he had to repress a shriek. “There,” Booce said, pointing at one of the trees. “Thirty klomters, and it seems healthy.”
“What about this one, Booce?” Jeffer tapped the tree that had blinked at him.
“Nothing wrong with it. It’s bigger, twice the mass. Take us longer to get it to the Market, but of course there’d be more wood too, and there’s the CARM… Why that one?”
“A hunch. You’ve got no objection?”
Now Clave was behind him too. “Jeffer, are you playing dominance games?”
“?”
“I’m the Chairman, you captain the CARM, Booce is the logger. Booce chooses the tree.”
Jeffer repressed a sigh. “Yes, Chairman. Booce?”