"Sure, I talk good. That could be it."

"You could volunteer. Have you thought of the stories you could bring back?"

Harp opened his mouth, closed it, shrugged.

Gavving dropped it. He had wondered, and now he knew. Harp was afraid. . . "I can't get anyone to tell me anything," he said. "What have you heard?"

"Good news and bad. Nine of you, supposed to be eight. You were an afterthought. The good news is just a rumor. Clave's your leader."

"Clove?"

"Himself. Maybe. Now, it could still be true that the Chairman's getting rid of anyone he doesn't like. He-"

"dave's the top hunter in the tuft! He's the Chairman's son-in-law!"

"But he's not living with Mayrin. Aside from that. . . I'd be guessing."

"What?"

"It's too complicated. I could even be wrong." And Harp drifted off.

The Smoke Ring was a line of white emerging from the pale blue sky, narrowing as it curved around in the west. Far down the arc, Gold was a clot of streaming, embattled storms. His gaze followed the arm around and down and in, until it faded out near Voy. Voy was directly below, a blazing pinpoint like a diamond set in a ring.

It was all sharper and clearer than it had been when Gavving was a child. Voy had been dimmer then and blurred.

At the passing of Gold, Gavving had been ten years old. He remembered hating the Scientist for his predictions of disaster, for the fear those predictions raised. The shrieking winds had been terrible enough

but Gold had passed, and the storms had diminished. . The allergy attack had come days later.

This present drought had taken years to reach its peak, but Gavving

had felt the disaster at once. Blinding agony like knives in his eyes, runny nose, tightness in his chest. Thin, dry air, the Scientist said. Some could tolerate it, some could not. Gold had dropped the tree's orbit, he was told, the tree had moved closer to Voy, too far below the Smoke Ring median. Gavving was told to sleep above the treemouth, where the rivulets ran. That was before the rivulets had dwindled so drastically.

The wind too had become stronger.

It always blew directly into the treemouth. Quinn Thit spread wide green sails into the wind, to catch anything that the wind might bear. Water, dust or mud, insects or larger creatures, all were filtered by the finely divided foliage or entangled in the branchiets. The spine branches migrated slowly forward, west along the branch, until gradually all was swallowed into the great conical pit. Even old huts migrated into the treemouth to be crushed and swallowed, and new ones had to be built every few years.

Everything came to the treemouth. The streams that ran down the trunk found an artificial catchbasin above, but the water reached the treemouth as cookwater, or washwater, or when citizens came to rid themselves of body wastes, to "feed the tree."