Free Children of the Comet by Donald Moffitt

burrowing shallowly to drink his air and water and the heat of his growth. But their microscopic needs were hardly noticeable in his vastness. He had hosted them as long as he could remember.
    Down below, where he drank the ice that nourished him, was a new kind of life that lived between his roots, tiny creatures that had arrived less than a million years ago. One of them was within him now, in the ovule where he gave birth to his seeds. It had brought him a surfeit of pollen—pollen from a Brother Tree—and it was hastening meiosis. He and his brothers had taught these odd new mites from beyond to do that when they had first arrived out of the void, rewarding them with hallucinations that they seemed to find pleasurable.
    He turned his ponderous attention to the mite that had climbed from his roots and entered his calyx. He could see it clearly from a height, stretched out on a bed of sepals, having removed its skin, which was made from the skins of other commensal animals, and it had lost its own consciousness and entered his.
    To his mild surprise, it seemed to be himself, too dizzy with hallucinogens to sort out the mingled perceptions. He saw himself through an undulating haze. He tried to get back to his body, but the Tree wasn’t through with him yet.
    He woke up suddenly and completely, perfectly aware of where he was. He had no idea of how long he’d been unconscious, but he was weak and very hungry. The pale light seeping through the pellucid walls had a pinkish cast, so it had been at least a day, maybe more.
    At last he was able to move. He got up stiffly and looked around. A central bulge on the receptacle floor seemed to have grown thicker while he slept, and the sweetish smell that had put him to sleep was fading, and that was all. There was sudden movement above and an occlusion of light. He looked up and saw a stovebeast inching its clumsy way downward. Whether it was his or another he couldn’t tell.
    He swept the little beast up, and it quickly attached itself to the small of his back. He could feel its warmth spreading through his aching spine. It seemed chubbier than before. He climbed into his airsuit and sealed its Face. When he poked his head through the calyx into airlessness, the Treescape was suffused with pink and the first of the Sisters was rising. So it was daybreak of whatever day it was.
    His belongings were where he’d left them. He bundled them into his sleeping sack and slung it over his shoulder. For some obscure reason, he didn’t feel like stowing his bow away with the rest of his possessions and strung it, carrying it along with his spear. He still had one of his original arrows with Claz’s rune on it, along with three more he’d whittled during the Climb, and he was pleased with himself for this evidence of his frugality.
    He looked around for Ning’s camp and saw what looked like a low-hanging bundle of meatbeast carcasses through the leaves. He set off in that direction with a low-gravity shuffle.
    The hanging bundle came into view, with Ning’s sleeping sack under it. At first, focused on the sleeping sack, he didn’t see the airsuited figure standing off to the side. Then, with a shock, it penetrated his consciousness.
    It was someone from his own tribe. Even at a distance, he could tell that it was Brank’s airsuit, with its splash of ostentatious beadwork spread across the upper shoulders and down the arms. Brank’s back was to him, but Torris could tell that he had an arrow trained on the shadowy form visible through the translucent integument of the sack. Brank had caught Ning during her morning wash, when she was out of her airsuit and unable to emerge into a vacuum. Otherwise she would have had an arrow through him.
    Brank seemed to be enjoying himself, taunting her by moving his bow around, aiming the arrow at various parts of her body and pantomiming what he was going to do.
    Torris saw it all in a horrified flash and