The Grad couldn't find Gavving, nor Glory, nor Jiovan. Jiovan's

corpse must have gone with the tree, but where wer~ the others? And why wasn't Clave doing something? He and the fan were drifting away. The Grad sighed. He shrugged out of his backpack and searched out his jet pods. Old jet pods, from Quinn Tuft stores. Were they still active? He'd never fired a jet pod. He knew nobody who had. Hunters carried them in case they fell into the sky; but no hunter lost in the sky had ever returned in the Grad's lifetime. He did it carefully: he donned his pack again, then clutched a jet pod in both hands over his navel. When Clave was approximately behind him, he twisted the tip, smartly.

The pod drove into his belly. He grunted. He maneuvered the point, hoping to kill his spin. The push died; he released the pod, and it jumped away on the last of its stored gas.

Looking over his shoulder, he found the fan fungus drifting toward him. Clave still wasn't doing anything constructive, and he hadn't noticed the Grad.

The smoke of the disaster split the sky from end to end. Dense, flickering black clouds were pulling free of the paler smoke. The same insects that had eaten the tree apart were now casting loose to find other prey.

Other debris floated in the smoke trail. The Grad made out great fragments of torn wood and bark; a cloud of flashers whirling in panic; a flapping mote, perhaps a nose-arm fled from its burrow. In that confusion he could still see that the cloud of citizens and corpses was slowly drifting apart.

Far in toward Voy, Gavving maneuvered half his own weight in smoked meat. He'd be hard to reach. He'd gone far to save that meat, and the wind-wake must have pulled him further. Save Gavving for last, and hope.

The fan brushed against the Grad and he clutched it, fungus springy under his hands. Clave watched as if bemused. He asked, "What happened?"

Safe now. "The tree came apart. Clave, I'm going to dig in your pack. We've got to start rescuing citizens."

Clave neither helped nor resisted as the Grad searched through his pack. They could use the big fan as a base of operations . . . rescue Alfin first, because he was nearest . . . He took half a dozen pods. He slid to somewhere near the fan's center of mass and fired a jet pod, then another.

"The tree came apart?"

"You saw it."

"How? Why?"

The Grad was judging distances. He cast a line in a wide circle. It brushed Alfin's back, and Alfin convulsed and snatched the line in a deathgrip. He didn't try to reel it in. The Grad had to do that, while Alfin watched in near mindless terror. Alfin lunged across the last meter or so and wrapped himself around the stalk and buried his fingers in white fungus to the last knuckle.