Free The Children Star by Joan Slonczewski

singing-trees, attracted scientists in search of hidden masters.
    Rod set out a nanoplastic tent stick, which promptly shaped itself into a shelter. Already the nightly drizzle was falling. The wind came up, and the trees keened so loudly that he thought he would never sleep. But he was dead tired, and, with his arms across the three of them, the night passed.
    He awoke to hear Chae screaming.
“Help!
We’re trapped!”
    Still half-asleep, Rod tried to extricate himself from his sleeping bag. His limbs were sore from the hard ground, and besides there were long filaments of some sort stretched out like a curtain over him and the children. He yanked the filaments out and tried to stand. The smell of glue was overpowering, and whirrs buzzed deafeningly around his head. Something huge towered over him—
    It was a tumbleround. There was no mistaking its filaments and the whirrs swarming over its stinking hide.
    Rod lost no time extricating the children and as much of their camping gear as they could salvage. The llamas remained tethered nearby, feeding placidly as if the commotion was nothing to them. The tumbleround itself made no sound or rapid movement. It had no eyes, or ears; so the scientists said. It must have been rooted nearby, near enough to migrate gradually over during the night. But why? Did it need some essential nutrient from the human bodies? Or did it seek something deeper?
    â€œWho are you?” Rod demanded aloud. “What do you want from us?” Hearing himself, he felt foolish. But it was odd how the tumbleround had migrated exactly to thepoint where the human travelers lay—and no farther. It could have crushed them, or sucked them dry, but instead all it wanted was . . . a touch? A look in at the window?
    They saddled the llamas, Rod taking one last look backward at their nocturnal visitor. Perhaps Sarai might know more about tumblerounds.
    Now the trail grew much steeper, for this stretch of forest extended onto the foot of Mount Anaeon, where the bands of “controlled” habitat at last gave out. Here was where the true wilderness began; where even the weather might be unpredictable, where flora and fauna seemed to obey no master save the creator of the universe.
    The travelers approached the fork of Fork River, where Mother Artemis’s holographic map led them up the steepest of the three tributaries. Now the water was rushing swiftly, gurgling, eddying around stones worn smooth. The trail continued along the left bank, rising ever higher above the stream itself. There stretched a vast U-shaped valley between Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon, carved by a long-departed glacier. Now in the valley grew singing-trees even taller than those on the plain. The rising mountainside became so steep that to his right Rod looked down upon the tops of the singing-trees, while to his left, where the trailblazers had blasted through, the root systems of trees were exposed, their double-roots clinging to rocks about to fall at any moment. From far below in the valley the roar of the stream echoed upward.
    Then the singing-trees shrank and thinned out, replaced by bushes of tough loopleaves, full of scarlet and golden flowers that cascaded hundreds of meters down toward the river. Above jutted rocks like the teeth of dead giants. At one point the rocks had broken and slid down onto the trail, where the llamas had to pick their way painfullyacross. The sun was rising, but the air grew cold. On the cliffs above clung diamond-shaped patches of snow.
    A bend around the mountain, and there it was: the waterfall. Millions of tongues of foam falling, falling forever to the Fork River tributary below, from a hanging valley cut off by the ancient glacier. The waters roared on, sending billows of mist upward. Above the falls piled layers of stone, up to the snow-covered peaks.
    Rod’s map box chirped at him. Inside the box, the bright line took a turn off the trail, somewhere near here. Sure