Booce thought while he ate. He said, "You need a rocket. My rocket was Logbearer, and it was my father's rocket before me. To make a rocket you need a rocket." One asked, "How did anyone build the first rocket?" Booce smiled at the dwarf boy. "The first rocket was given by Discipline. It had a mind-the Library-and the Admiralty still has that, with more knowledge in it than you'll find in your little cassettes. Anyway, you've got to have a rocket so you can get to the pod groves."

A woman of Booce's own size settled within earshot. Booce pretended not to notice. "The biggest pod you can find in the pod grove becomes your water tank. You cut another pod in half and it's your rocket nozzle. You run the pipe into the stem end. You wrap sikenwire around the pipe to hold the firebark. You light the firebark. You pump water through the hot pipe and it turns to steam and goes racing out the nozzle, and that pushes you the other way."

The pudgy girl (though all the children looked a bit pudgy, well fed and compressed by tide) asked, "Where does pipe come from?"

"I don't know. Discipline, maybe, if there ever was a Discipline." The children snickered. Booce didn't know why, so he ignored it. "There's a hundred and twenty meters of pipe in the Empire, so they tell me, and fortyeight of that makes up the pipes in eleven logging ships. Woodsman carried a spare pipe, but they're richer than we are.

"So. A rocket is one and a half pods, and a pipe, and some sikenwire, and the hut complex at the other end of the tank. You need big hooks for towing, saws to carve up wood, and crossbows, because you've got to find your own food. A trip takes a year or two. Most of us travel in families.

"Now you find a sting jungle. The honey hornets live in the sting jungles, and there's nothing so big they can't kill it. You need to cover yourself all over to get at the nest. Honey is sticky red stuff, sweeter than foliage.

"Now you pick a tree. If it's more than forty klomters long, the wood'll be too coarse and you'll be forever coming home. Thirty's about right. You moor your rocket at the midpoint, but you don't use it yet. You paint a line of honey down the trunk to one of the tufts. Then you gash the bark in a circle above the tuft, and paint honey along that. You know the bugs that eat a tree apart if it starts to die?"

Heads nodded. The Servants had been told of the death of Dalton-Quinn Tree. Children must hear that tale early.