The receding Smoke Ring covered forty degrees of sky. His mind had been following a loop for just under two months! He'd missed the final stages of the explosion of Levoy's Star, the foray into the Admiralty might have disintegrated by now ...

To work. Discipline's drive had shut down without his attention. Good! He still had fuel.

He started the drive warming. His orbit was a comet's, highly eccentric. Equations ran through his mind ... fire a short burst at aphelion. Shed some velocity by aerobraking, by dipping into the gas torus around the Smoke Ring, twice. Use Goldblatt's World as a gravity sling, save a few cupfuls of deuterium that way . . .

Glowing in direct sunlight, the Clump was green-and-white chaos in Logbearer's steam trail. Clave felt good: loose and free, cruising through an uncluttered sky.

Rather crawled out of the angular cabin. His head was metal and glass. "The suit's too big, but I can wear the helmet."

Clave smiled at the sight. "Getting anything?"

"Getting . . . ? No, Jeffer hasn't called. Maybe he can't call this suit. I tried Kendy too."

"Too bad." Clave had been watching a distant brownish smudge of vegetation. Now he shouted aft. "Cariot? Could that be a fisher jungle?"

"Be with you in twelve breaths." Cariot finished what she was doing to the motor and crawled to them over the cabin. "Where?"

Clave's toes jabbed east and out.

"I don't see the root . . . right, that's what it is. I'd better turn off the motor or we'll go past. Rather?"

Rather followed her aft. Clave stayed at the bow while they worked the motor. Presently the tide behind him went away.

Closer now, the fisher jungle looked dead enough. Brown foliage and bare branchlets. Tufts and patches of vivid green: parasitical growths. The fisher root was half extended, like a dead man's hand with three scarlet fingernails. He looked for the CARM . . . and found a man flapping toward him.

Jeffer pulled himself aboard, panting. "Moor to the root. Treefodder, I'm glad to see you, but what are you doing here? Is everyone here?" He looked over the edge of cabin and shouted, "Hello, Cariot! Rather, what . . . is that a pressure suit helmet?"

"Yes. The rest of it's inside."

They told it in tandem while they moored Logbearer.

"I never did quite know if the Captain-Guardian believed me," Rather said, "but he left Serjent House without taking any copsiks-"

"The Navy watched us for the next forty, fifty days," Clave said. "We weren't doing anything peculiar. Booce sold wood and hired people to cut it. We bought more seeds and some tools and stuff. We're carrying all that. Mickl kept coming around, interrupting us, trying to get Rather to tell him more about Seekers-"