Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  Red brought up the map on the large high-res flatscreen in the plotting table and located their position. They were entering a complex of canyons that started from the edge of the polar cap and spiraled in around the North Pole. One canyon was over six hundred kilometers long.

  "Good thing it's just past summer solstice," Red said. "We can work twenty-four hours a day."

  "I bet the Simon Legree in you really chortles over the extra forty minutes a day you get out of your slaves," the driver said.

  "Well-paid slaves," Red retorted. "I didn't have to give you a supplement when I rented your services from Base Ops. If you're not happy with the arrangement—"

  "Oh, we's happy slaves, Miss Red Legree," the driver joked, turning and tugging at his imaginary fetlock. "Please don't sell us down the river to Base Ops. They don't have truffles in their pâtéde foie gras."

  "Pole bending," the copilot warned, reaching for the speed control and slowing the crawler down. The pilot jerked his attention back, the pole lifted as the fiber worked its way up through the snowdrift, and they continued slowly on.

  "Only two degrees from the pole," Viktor said, watching the red line that showed their course on the plotting table as it moved slowly along the spiral canyon. Red was still up in the central observation dome watching the spooling of the precious fiber.

  "The fiber seems to be taking us toward the inner wall," the driver said from up front. "There's an overhang. Shall I follow it under?"

  "Hold up," Red said, jumping down. The copilot moved back to a jump seat and she took his place to peer out the window. The Sun was low and around at the wrong angle, so the cliff face was in dark shadow despite the reflection from the snow. She turned on a floodlight and scanned the beam over the underside of the overhanging cliff face. It was ancient polar cap material, dark with the dust layers left behind as the ice had slowly sublimed away over the aeons. As Red swept the floodlight beam across the base of the cliff there was a momentary reflection. She went back and stopped the beam. There was a bright reflection, as if from a mirror.

  "A door!" she exclaimed. "A crystal-clear circular door set in a crystal-clear frame ..." Her blue-green eyes widened and stared intensely out the cockpit window. "Ten to one it's solid diamond!" she whispered.

  "Whe-e-e-w," the driver whistled, staring at the unbelievable sight in front of him.

  "Move on in," Red instructed him. "Slowly ..."

  The crawler moved slowly forward, the thread of fiber leading them directly to the door in the base of the cliff. By the time the driver had brought the crawler to a halt, Red and Viktor had suited up and were out the airlock, walking along under the body of the crawler.

  The door was a circle about sixty centimeters in diameter set low to the ground. They went carefully up to the door, hunkered down on their heels, and peered in. The door was set in a clear frame not quite a meter wide and a meter high, with a flat bottom and an arched top. Around the center of the circular door were six indentations. On the other side were six more indentations, offset by thirty degrees. Red had come prepared with a diamond ring she had dug out from her personal baggage and she scratched the large diamond hard across the face of the frame.

  "Not a scratch," Red said, examining where she had scribed the point of the hard gem. "Got to be diamond."

  They looked inside with the flashlight. A meter and a half away was another frame with another circular door. Between the two doors was a small room with a flat floor and arched roof that followed the contour of the outside frame.

  "Obviously an airlock," Red said. "What's beyond that?"

  "It's hard to see," Viktor said, waving the light beam from his flashlight around. "But it looks like a long tunnel, the same cross section as the airlock."

  "Let's go in," Red said eagerly, putting her fingers into the six holes around the center of the circular hatch door. The holes were slightly smaller than her gloved fingers, but fingertips were all that were needed. The door started to rotate.

  "Stop!" Viktor said, grabbing her arm.

  "Whatdaya mean, stop!" Red shouted, angrily slapping his arm away. "This is my find and I can do what I damn please with it."

  Viktor forced his way between Red and the hatch door, his back covering the finger holes.

  "This belongs to the human race first," he said firmly. She glared at him. "Then you second," he reassured her. "Just give me time to get some equipment and cameras here to make measurements and document everything while we open it up. Once we have the information, you can have the artifacts."

  "Okay! Okay!" Red said in frustration. "That's what my fossil hunting license says anyway." She patted the nearly meter square frame of centimeter thick diamond. "With building stones like this, I won't even need artifacts." She got up from her crouch and shook her cramped legs. "I'll call the director of the Sagan Institute and let him know of our find."

  "Go ahead," Viktor said. "I'll use my suit laser range finder to see how far back the tunnel goes." He fired the laser down the tunnel a number of times in slightly different directions, trying to make sense of the multiple returns.

  "I'll have to make a computer model," he finally decided. He got up from his seat in the snow, brushed off the seat of his Marsuit, and trudged back to the crawler.

  "Signaling/strange/from outside. Replying."

  No one saw the short answering flash of blue laser light that shot out the transparent doorway and momentarily illuminated the snow outside.

  "Signaling/strange/from outside/stop."

  THE BASE had been called, the experts were on their way, and there was now nothing to do but wait. Red was exhilarated by her find and was tingling all over. She began to look at Viktor as a man rather than as an employee. He was kind of small and thin, but it had been a long time since she had let herself relax in the arms of a man. The champagne they had shared with the techs had loosened both of them up, and now they were alone in the back, sipping vodka and nibbling on Bremner Wafers piled high with caviar.

  "This is very good, Red," Viktor said, beaming.

  "I'm glad you like it, Viktor," Red replied, sitting next to him. "Y'know, I'm going to miss you." She patted him on the shoulder and then left her arm there.

  "I'm going to miss you, too," he said, putting an arm around her waist and giving her a hug. She relaxed against him and turned her head. Their lips came close together. Suddenly she pulled back a little.

  "Say ... you aren't married, are you?" asked Red.

  "Well, yes," Viktor admitted. "She's a physicist at Novosibirsk." He tried to pull her close again, then added, "But she doesn't understand me!"

  Red put on a grim smile. That was the line her ex-husband had always used to use on the other women he seduced. The resultant divorce had hurt her so badly she had dropped out of her chief pilot's job at Lunar Spaceways in midcareer and had become another bum netting rocks in the belt. Fortunately, she had been lucky and ended up rich instead of dead, but she had sworn she would never hurt another woman like her husband's girlfriends had hurt her. She put both arms around Viktor, gave him a solid kiss, then disentangled herself.

  "That's your reward for being honest," she said. "But that's all you get." She got up and headed for a bunk.

  "It's going to be busy once those scientist-types get here, so let's get some shut-eye—in separate bunks."

  BY THE time Red and Viktor had finished their short vigil of self-enforced fitful catnaps, there were three hopiters landed at varying safe distances away down the canyon and three dozen excited specialists trudging through the snow carrying their instruments. Chris was there with his atmospheric composition analyzer, Max with a portable version of his materials composition analyzer, and Tanya with her medical bag in case they found another Lineup. Gus had just pulled rank. Another volcanic specialist was not needed, but he was not about to be left out of the find of the century. All the explorers wore surplus battle helmets fitted with helmeyes that would not only allow them to see in the darkness of a tunnel, but were
modified to record everything they saw on nanodisk.

  "Your guess was right, Red," Max MacFadden said as he lifted his portable pulsed laser materials analyzer from the face of the frame surrounding the circular hatch door. "Nothing but carbon—must be pure diamond." He looked closer at the readout. "With maybe a tiny bit of nitrogen added for strength." He used the analyzer to check the hatch door. "That's diamond, too."

  "Look down here," Gus said, bending down and brushing away the snow. In one corner of the frame were four fibers of glasslike material. One of the fibers turned out to be the one Red had been reeling up. The others went off under the snow, one down the canyon and two up the canyon.

  "You can have those," Red said, patting the door frame. "I'll take this."

  "I can't really tell, but it looks like there's an optical coupler built into the frame," a tech said after examining Gus' find. "There's four other fibers on the other side. But there are no connectors. They look as if they had been butt-welded to the frame."

  "Anybody want to do anything else before we open the first door?" Chris asked. Nobody answered, so he taped a plastic bag around the circular hatch door and the nozzle of his analyzer, used the analyzer to suck the residual Martian atmosphere out of the bag, and started to turn the door through the collapsed plastic material. Suddenly the bag started to inflate.

  "High pressure!" Chris said, quickly twirling the hatch door shut again. He read his display.

  "Nitrogen 60 percent, argon 6 percent, oxygen 15 percent, carbon dioxide 14, methane 3 percent, other junk 2 percent. You could breath it, but not for long. The carbon dioxide level is toxic. Wonder what the pressure is?"

  He turned the door open again while he monitored the pressure indicator on his analyzer. The bag ballooned up and the tape gave way.

  "It got to 620 millibars," he said. After six turns, the door unscrewed and fell outward. He climbed in. "Only room for one at a time," he said, picking up the door and screwing it back in place with the six offset holes in that side of the circular plate. He made a tare measurement of the Martian atmosphere trapped in the airlock with him, then opened the inner circular hatch. It rotated as easily as the first one.

  "Basically the same composition as the first one, but some water vapor this time. Total pressure is 690 millibars," Chris reported. "Shall I go on, or let someone else go first? We can change places by crawling over each other, but it's basically single file on hands and knees, unless you are good at the frog walk."

  "The next obstruction is 122 meters in and slightly upward," Viktor said.

  "How's your air supply?" Gus asked.

  "Fresh tanks," Chris assured.

  "Let's cycle Max and his laser analyzer through," Gus said. "He can take a few hundred meters of rope in with him and feed it out to you. Hook your helmeyes video output to the optical fiber in the rope so we can monitor your progress. If you find another crystal airlock like this one at the other end, you can analyze what's on the other side. If you find anything else, come back and let Max measure its composition before we proceed further."

  Chris screwed the hatch door closed and Max cycled through. Then Chris crawled off into the dark tunnel, his flashlight getting fainter and fainter in the distance. Gus found the channel where Chris' helmeyes output was being broadcast from Max's suit, and pulled down the visor in his helmet to watch along with Chris.

  "It's getting lighter," Chris said. Gus could see an illuminated door ahead through Chris' helmeyes.

  "Looks like another airlock," Gus said.

  Chris crawled to the door, his head-down position leaving the vicarious viewers only a view of dusty diamond floor moving downward across their visors. He reached the door and sat down in front of it, looking out.

  "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle," Chris said, holding his head still for the benefit of his coviewers. "Lookit that ..."

  "A live Lineup!" Tanya said as a six-segmented creature undulated past in the distance, its twenty-four legs working much like that of a caterpillar. The gray portions of the Lineup were much darker in color than the one found in the snow, and the zebralike black-and-white striped middle section on each segment seemed more complex. The eyerods were the most fascinating part of the creature, however. Instead of sticking stiffly out in a fan, as many of the computer reconstructions had shown them, the rods at the rear and front opened and shut like a sea anemone, while those between segments waved back and forth in a coordinated pattern that spiraled around the body.

  A five-segment Lineup passed by off in the distance and disappeared behind some plants.

  "The middle segments don't seem to have those black wings," Tanya remarked.

  "Let me get closer," Chris said. "I can't see the whole room from way back here behind this airlock."

  "Wait!" Gus said, but it was too late. The hatch door was soon unscrewed and Chris crawled into the airlock. He leaned forward until his helmeyes were pressed up against the last transparent door and scanned his viewer around the room.

  "It's a huge room," Chris said. "All full of beds of different kinds of plants, most of them dark gray or black, but some have a reddish or purplish tinge. The Lineups seem to be tending them." As they watched, the six-segment Lineup raised its first four segments four meters up in the air—twice as tall as a man—while balancing on its eight hind feet. Its front fan of eyerods clustered into six bunches pointed at the end of its elephantlike snout, while the prehensile fingerlike structures on the end of the snout carefully trimmed some ragged-looking dead white fronds from a tall fernlike plant that nearly reached the arched ceiling some five meters overhead. To get at the tallest of the dead fronds, the Lineup had to pull the top of the plant downward using the tender touch of six interleaved claws around the stem, three on each side. It ate everything it cleaned off the plant, then dropped down to loosen the soil at the base of the plant with its clawed paws.

  Chris tilted his head to scan along the ceiling. An upside-down spray of bent hexagonal rods with bright light emanating from the ends came into view.

  "Those must be light ducts coming down from the surface above," someone said.

  "Probably made of solid diamond," Red said. "Why did we have to find the place inhabited! The whole place—walls and ceiling, too—must be made of solid diamond slabs. How big is that room anyway?"

  "Let me take some measurements," Chris said. He activated the laser ranger built into his helmet and shot it at the far wall.

  "Signaling/strange/from outside."

  The six-segment Lineup bunched a number of its midsection eyerods together and sent a bright flash of blue light in Chris' direction.

  "Replying."

  A sudden cacophony sounded in Chris' helmet as if he were listening to a hundred shortwave channels at the same time.

  "What was that?" Gus asked.

  "I think it's the Lineup equivalent of 'Hello'," Chris said. "It must have splashed over into the emergency channel on the optical link option to my helmeyes system. Let's see ... How do I reconfigure my laser range finder into a laser communicator?"

  "Hello," Chris said, flooding the not-too-distant Lineup with a modulated beam of low-level laser light from his helmet-mounted laser. He hoped the Lineup would take the hint and lower the intensity level of its reply. As a precaution, however, he darkened his visor and lowered the volume on his helmet audio system. To make sure he heard any reply, however, he opened all the optical channels of the helmeyes comm system.

  "Signaling/strange/from outside. Replying."

  There was another bright blue flash and again the helmet was filled with a multitude of teletype sounds, but at the end came a distinct "Hello".

  "Investigating."

  "ONE WORD down, a few hundred thousand to go," Chris said over his fiber link back outside. "Now what?"

  "Look at that!" exclaimed someone watching the view through Chris' helmeyes. "The blooming bug is coming apart!"

  "One of the segments is detaching itself," Tanya said.

  The foremost se
ction of the six-segment Lineup pulled free from the remaining five, revealing a snout identical to the one on the first segment. The remaining five-part creature continued on the task of tending the plants while the single segment came over to the airlock where Chris sat.

  "I was wondering how such long creatures were able to use these airlocks," Gus said. "Now I see. They just go through one segment at a time."

  "I think I'd better get out of here," Chris said, climbing through the airlock back into the tunnel and screwing the door closed. "I don't like the looks of those claws."

  The single Lineup stopped at the door and made no attempt to open the hatch. Chris felt better and stayed where he was. The Lineup pointed his forward fan of eyerods at Chris and started scanning them over his body. After a few scans they started to give off a bright ultraviolet that changed to blue, then green, then yellow ...

  "You're a specimen being laser analyzed for composition content," Max said, watching the performance of the Lineup through Chris' helmeyes. "Show him your joints and hold up your equipment. Make his job easier."

  Chris waved his fingers "hello" at the Lineup, crawled a little way down the tunnel, then back again, held up his analyzer, pulled his visor up and down, turned on his flashlight and waved it around.

  "Consisting/of hydrocarbons/with artifacts/manufactured/this creature. Concluding/organism/living/intelligent."

  "Commanding/communicate/maximum."

  The Lineup then proceeded to do something down at the left corner of the airlock frame at the same time it flooded Chris' helmeyes with a hundred multicolored beams of laser light.

  "Turn it off!" Chris yelled, lowering his helmet volume to a relieving silence.

  "Hey!" came a voice over the common suit channel. "The coil of diamond fiber on the crawler is all lit up!"