On the ground, Star 475A
Mission time: 14.5 planet days and counting
In which Jela wouldn’t leave ’til he’d dug up that damned skinny stick of a tree.
In Scout’s Progress, one of the chapter headings is an excerpt from Cantra’s Logbook in which she recalls Jela telling her the story of how he found the tree and how he refused to leave the planet without it. The story as she recalls it doesn’t go quite like this, but then stories often change some in the re-telling. (I suspect the embellishment about the tree being so puny Jela could pot it in a left-over ration tin of being Cantra’s own contribution, though; it doesn’t seem characteristic of Jela.)
It would appear that Corporal Kinto, if not a foe, isn’t exactly a friend of Jela’s either. I wonder if there’s something personal behind that or if it’s just interservice rivalry.
Jela’s stubborn when he knows he’s right. And he wouldn’t abandon a companion to certain death if there was any other choice. He has a fine sense of just how far he can push the limits (and then pushes a _little_ further).
The tree needed him and his wing needed him, and he stepped up to his duty — as he saw it — immediately.
Yes, agree with you. There is a disconnect in the sizes. The big bulb (brain??) under the tree was far bigger than a ration tin (assuming a ration tin is a personal mess tin). In this chapter, the “head” is described as “a bulbous part of the tree’s taproot, easily 12 times the diameter of the portion above the ground…”
Later, in the same chapter, it is called “a head-sized bulb” (lending strength to the idea that this is the brain / central processing unit of the Ssussdriads).
At the end of Crystal Dragon, Cantra got a vision from Spiral Dance, depicting a sweaty and straining Jela carrying Tree away. It was not teeny tiny.
I enjoyed the comparison Jela makes (in third person) between his own stubbornness and that of the Trees: Jela felt stronger than he had in days, and as stubborn as the trees he’d followed to the ocean of sand.
Regarding the “ration tin”: according to this chapter, he didn’t carry it away in any kind of container, he just wrapped his utility blanket around the roots and soil. It is not until Chapter 7 that a container, a “lightweight traveling pot” is mentioned.
Also important is the fact that the Tree itself willingly and actively contributed to his efforts to take it with him. Remember, when he reached under the bulb, he found several strong cord-like roots leading deep into the bowels of the planet. Not just deep into the soil, but deep into the bowels of the planet. That sounds to me as if the tiny Tree were still living because it had roots longer and maybe more sturdy even than its skinny trunk. And then he felt the tree shift as if some inner ballast had moved . . . with a sharp snap . . . the roots he’d been concerned about severed. So it was not until he had his hands under the bulb/brain that the Tree itself deliberately let go of the planet.
Sorry, I meant to make the point that “deep into the bowels of the planet” also adds to the sense that that one little Tree was holding the whole planet, which apparently meant the whole star system, against the sheriekas.