"Oh." She held the planks in place with one arm while she reached out. Her right leg was twenty ce'meters longer than the left, and she usually reached with that. Her long toes grasped a coil of line and pulled it to her hands. She tied a temporary binding.

In the twenty-two sleeps since their arrival, all of the Serient family had become dextrous in Citizens Tree tide.

Rather wrapped a dozen loops of line around the plank ends, then began tightening them. Heave on a loop, pull the slack around; again. From the opening beyond the treemouth the wind blew steadily, drying sweat as fast as it formed.

Carlot called from her corner. "That's as tight as I can get it."

Rather was finished at his end. He jogged down to Carlot's end (ripe copter plants buzzed up around his feet) and began pulling in slack. She'd left a good deal, of course. Carlot was agile, but not strong. He asked, "What got you giggling?"

"Just the way you scurry."

Rather's hands paused for less than a second, then continued.

"You did ask," she said defensively. "You have to go running back and forth because you can't reach as far as-"

"I know that."

"Did you make this cauldron yourselves? I wouldn't have thought you could do that here. It's big enough to boil two people at once."

"Hey, Carlot, you don't really eat people in the Empire, do you?"

She laughed at him. "No! There's a happyfeet tribe that's supposed to do that. But how did you make it?"

"The grownups found a glob of gray mud west of the tree. Maybe it was the middle of a pond that came apart. They brought some back. We took all the rocks in Citizens Tree and piled them in a bowl-shape, out on the branch where we couldn't do any damage. I was just a kid, but they let me help with the rocks. We plastered the mud over the rocks. We got firebark from another tree and piled it in the bowl-shape and fired it. It took a dozen days to cool off, and then it was like that. We did it twice-"

"You're cute," she said solemnly.

Carlot was a year older than Rather. An exotic beauty was growing in her. Half her hair had been burned off, and she had cut the rest to match. Now it was like a skullcap of black wire. She was two and a half meters tall, with long fingers and long, agile toes, and arms and legs that could reach out forever.

Carlot affected Rather in ways he wasn't quite ready to accept. He said, "Put it in the treemouth. When do I get to be overwhelmingly handsome?"

"Cute is good. If I weren't your aunt-"

"Treefodder."

"Are you not my nephew?"