Integral Trees - Known Space - 2 – The Integral Trees

Larry Niven

This book is dedicated to Robert Forward, for the stories he's sparked in me, for his help in working out the parameters of the Smoke Ring and for his big roomy mind.

Prologue

Discipline

IT WAS TAKING TOO LONG, MUCH LONGER THAN HE HAD EXPECTED.

Sharis Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himself immune to impatience. But it was taking too long! What were they doing in there?

His senses were not limited. Sharis's telescopic array was powerful; he could sense the full electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave up to X-ray. But the Smoke Ring balked his view. It was a storm of wind, dust, clouds of water vapor, huge rippling drops of dirty water or thin mud, masses of free-floating rock; dots and motes and clumps of green, green surfaces on the drops and the rocks green tinges of algae in the clouds; trees shaped like integration signs, oriented radially to the neutron star and tufted with green at both ends; whale-sized creatures with vast mouths, to skim the green-tinged clouds .

Life was everywhere in the Smoke Ring. Claire Dalton had called it a Christmas wreath. Claire had been a very old woman before the State revived her as a corpsicle. The others had never seen a Christmas wreath; nor had Kendy. What they had seen, half a thousand years ago, was a perfect smoke ring several tens of thousands of kilometers across, with a tiny hot pinpoint in its center.

Their reports had been enthusiastic. Life was DNA-based, the air was not only breathable, but tasted fine

Disc~pline presently occupied the point of gravitational neutrality behind Goldblatt's World, the L2 point. This close, the sky split equally

into star-sprinkled, black- and green-tinged cloudscape. Directly below,

a vast distorted whirlpool of storm hid the residue of a gas giant planet,

a rocky nugget two and a half times the mass of Earth.

Sharis would not enter that inner region. The maelstrom of forces could damage his ship. He couldn't guess how long the seeder r~mship must survive to accomplish his mission. He had waited more than half a thousand years already. The L2 point was still within the gas torus of which the Smoke Ring was only the densest part. Disc~pline was subject to slow erosive forces. He couldn't last forever in this place.

At least the crew were not extinct.

That would have hurt him terribly.