Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

and dissolved nutrients in the vessels. The tree hardly notices. The climbers give back the nutrients, anyway. They may even do some good—when their cups fill up, they move liquid through the vessels faster than the tree could do it.”
    Jao climbed into a cup and motioned Bram to join him. It was a tight fit and not very comfortable; the narrow cup was shaped to fit a Nar’s bundled lower limbs, and there was no way to brace one’s feet. “Hang on!” Jao said as the climber responded to their weight and dragged itself through a tube opening.
    The ascent was terrifying to a human though not, apparently, to a Nar. Bram clung to the muscular ridge around the cup rim and tried not to look downward. The climber was choosy about the route it took. If it encountered an artery whose diameter was too large for its bristling array of limbs, it backed down and tried an alternate path. It apparently was unwilling to climb unless it could brace itself all the way around. Under the circumstances, Bram found that comforting.
    “We’ve got a xylem wall between us and Penser’s expedition,” Jao said close to Bram’s ear. “They won’t see us. From here we just climb all the way to Nar country without stopping. Penser won’t do that. It would take too many bucket trips for his whole crowd, and he’d lose the element of surprise. He’ll regroup, give them a pep talk, and take them the last quarter mile on foot. We’ll have a chance to beat them.”
    The climber doggedly scrabbled upward through a tan darkness punctuated by occasional blotches of light that marked cross sections of transverse channels. Once, when it tried to abandon its climb for something enticing down a side channel, Jao corrected its course by reaching over the side of the cup and doing something with his hand that Bram couldn’t see. Enough moisture was being collected from the dewy trickle along the woody shaft so that Bram found himself standing in a small warm pool. “Should have brought something along to bail with,” Jao grumbled. “But we won’t be using this thing long enough to get wet past the ankles.”
    “I can see the drawbacks in using climbers as your elevator system,” Bram said.
    “Most humans won’t use them at all,” Jao told him. “Prejudice about animate machines with independent nervous systems. That goes double for anyone leeward of the Ascendists, like most of Penser’s crowd. Actually, I think the climber genome was put together at least partly from plant genes. But you’d know more about that, being a biologist.”
    “You seem to be more politically aware than most of the people here,” Bram said, remembering Marg’s blank puzzlement about the differences between Ascendists, Schismatists, and splinter groups.
    There was a pause. Bram could imagine Jao grimacing in the darkness. “No, I don’t suppose most of my fellow passengers have ever devoted much time to political thought,” Jao said at last.
    The climber was rising toward a region of amber light. Bram saw fluid moving sluggishly through translucent walls. Above, the vertical shaft widened slightly. Transverse openings on opposite sides of the shaft were linked by a narrow catwalk that was obviously the result of deliberate carpentry. More catwalks and openings could be seen farther up. But there was still plenty of room for the climber to get by.
    “The threshhold of Nar country,” Jao announced. “Penser and the others ought to be on the other side of that wall at about this level.”
    He reached over the side of the cup and did something to slow the climber down. Bram would have preferred to get past the catwalk quickly, but he supposed that Jao knew what he was doing.
    Then, as they drew abreast of the opening, Jao reached down again, and the climber stopped, hooked several limbs into the lip of the opening, and began to drag itself inside.
    “Where are you going?” Bram said. “This will take us into Penser’s hands!”
    “I know,” the redbeard said.
    He plucked Bram’s spear from its resting place against the side of the cup and tossed it overboard. Incredulously, Bram watched it tumble down the shaft.
    “You’re one of them!” he blurted. “You’ve been a secret Penserite all along!”
    Jao nodded. “Kept my opinions to myself. Jao, the happy colonist, without a serious thought in his head. More useful to the cause that way, you see.”
    Bram tried to scramble over the rim of the cup. The cup bobbed alarmingly as the