Smoke Ring, The

In the free-fall environment of the Smoke Ring, a doughnut-shaped gaseous envelope surrounding a neutron star, whole societies had evolved from the descendants of the crew of the Discipline. None of them remembered their Earth root - or the existence of Sharls Davis Kendy, the computer program that had acted as “adviser” to and despot of the tiny State microcosm that was the ship. Until the time of The Integral Trees, when Kendy once more made contact with the humans of the Smoke Ring.

The ringleaders of the rebellion that followed lived for the next fourteen years on Citizens Tree. But only Jeffer, their Scientist, knew that Sharls Davis Kendy was still watching - and waiting. Then the Citizens Tree people rescued a family of loggers and learned for the first time of the Admiralty, a large society living in free fall amid the floating debris called the Clump. And it was likely that the Admiralty had maintained, intact, Discipline’s original computer library.

Exploration was a temptation neither Jeffer nor Kendy could resist, and neither Citizens Tree nor Sharls Davis Kendy would ever be the same again…