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tree.
    He was only ten or twelve meters up, where the ascending and straight branches were still thick enough to support the weight of a nine-year-old, and where the thorns were long but well spaced and usually easy to avoid.
    Usually easy to avoid.
    As sometimes happened, the wrist-thick risers would cross in long and narrow X-shapes. Normally this was good, 'cause it gave more support to a climber. This time, though, it just happened that three or four thorns bunched up on the inside of the top angle of the X, and when he'd put one foot there, the pressure had lodged his thin boot smack in the middle of the thorns. When he'd tried to move, he found he was caught. He'd tried to shake his foot loose, but that hadn't worked. He'd tried to pull his boot off, but the angles of the thorns only dug them in deeper. Some of the little spikes, each as long as his forefinger and needle-sharp, pointed upward and some of them pointed down, and at least two of them went completely through the boot's plastic and into his ankle. They hurt, and he'd cried for a while, but that hadn't done any good. He was caught, and unless somebody came to help him, he was going to stay caught.
    It was almost noon; he could tell by the way the light slanted through the upper part of the arches. It was hot and damp, like usual, and he was dressed for climbing, with his no-snag suit on, so he was hotter still. The smell of the flowers above him filled the hot air with a rich dusty-spice odor, sharp and heavy in his sinuses.
    Let go! He jerked his leg, but that only made another thorn stab his foot. Ow! Ow! Ow!
    He was about a klick from home, on Prime Row, maybe five hundred boles away from First Tree. These were the largest of the crop, a long time from being harvested but still almost as big as they were going to get. The rows ran on for kilometers and kilometers; he'd once gone with his father in the fanner as far away as eight thousand boles and they hadn't even been close to the end. From Prime, you could see the way the boles came up, arrow-straight rows, each row with its arch of branches that came back to the ground, so that it looked like dozens and dozens of tunnels going off to the end of the world. There were planets where you could see the sky in other than long strips between rows of trees, he had seen them in edcom holoprojics, but they didn't seem real to him. It was hard to imagine such places. Sometimes he dreamed about being on a world where there were only scattered trees. Frightening dreams they were, being exposed out in the open under the big sky.
    Stuck in a tree. The other children would never let him live it down. It was bad enough that he was the youngest at Prime Tree Station. And the smallest. It was going to be a lot worse if one of the teeners spotted him up here and laughed. And they would laugh, sure as shit stinks. They laughed at him a lot because he was so clumsy and so small. He couldn't keep up with them, and when their parents made them take him along for games or outings, they resented him. It wasn't his fault; he didn't want to go!
    Well, that wasn't true. He did want to go, but not like that. He wanted them to like him, only they didn't.
    He tried again to twist his foot out of the clamp that held it fast. One of the thorns sank deeper into his flesh. He could feel a trickle of blood run down to his toes inside the boot. Ow! Oh, ow! Somebody please!
    His parents didn't understand. They looked at him like he was some kind of bug that had wandered into their house. His father would blink at him and look puzzled, as if he'd never seen him before. When his father was in the lab, he snapped out orders and had people running every which way. And his father was brilliant, a genius, everybody said so and it was even in the ed programs. His mother, too. They were two of the smartest people in. the whole galaxy, everybody knew that. Everybody.
    Why hadn't any of that come to him? Why was he so stupid and clumsy and afraid of