by Larry Niven
“Mission accomplished.”
“Yes! But, Hanny, I still can’t get Zeera. I can’t even get readings from the Orbiter.”
He’d been hoping for better news. The time machine couldn’t reach Mars. The Orbiter was to carry them back to Earth orbit. Without the Orbiter…? “Don’t kill anyone from now on, all right, Miya? Without the Orbiter, what we are is immigrants.”
“Hanny, the blaster is the only weapon I’ve got. How do I rescue you without killing anyone?” She sounded brittle.
“They haven’t hurt me yet. When we get air I’ll try to talk my way out.”
Miya said, “I’m looking over the … you called them roots, but I don’t think so, Hanny. They’re anchors. Some of them have fallen over. They all fell eastward. The ones still standing are already sprouting black fuzz at their torn ends. I think I know what’s going on here.”
“Yes. Yes. Futz, Miya, that’s awesome. Should we be looking for two kinds of seeds?”
“I think so. Hanny, are you glad you came?”
“Let’s wait on that.”
“These flying yachts keep nosing around. I can dodge them, but there are too many now, and they’re shooting at each other, and I just think I’ll get out of town. Any idea where you’re likely to land?”
“I’ll ask the captain when we get some air. Maybe you’d better check in with Zeera.”
“That would take days. I’ll hide and wait. Keep in touch.”
* * *
There were big holes in the city, big enough to see from a hundred klicks high: fallen towers and fallen anchor trees, and fires spreading unchecked. Open water glittered where a fallen tree had blocked a canal. These trees had seemed mere roots when the main trunk was in place. Now they seemed immense, bigger than any building.
The ship had fallen far. Svetz could feel an honest wind blowing now, and hear the rumble of a motor. The vessel didn’t hover long over the city. It chugged toward where a vertical thread hung from the sky.
“Miya. We’re following the skyhook tree. That’s west, isn’t it?” Freed of the mass of its anchor trees, the tree rises. The orbit expands. Moving west-to-east with the planet’s rotation, the tree lags and falls behind. “There’s nothing west of us but desert.”
“I’ll follow. Keep me posted.”
His captors took off their helmets and sucked air like they’d never tasted it before. Martian suit recyclers didn’t seem to be as good as Space Bureau’s. Their features were narrow and their heads were long, with pointed chins, but they seemed quite human. One crewman reached down and fumbled around Svetz’s head until he found how to open his bubble.
Svetz couldn’t move his entangled hands. “I’m going to faint now,” he said.
The man didn’t understand, of course. He spoke a few words. Svetz said, “My translator must hear you speak before it can help us.”
The man spoke at length.
Svetz talked with the Martian, and breathed whenever he remembered. The Martian taught Svetz one word at a time. Eyes. Fingers. Grasp. Breathe. Fall. Matth from Noblegas, the Martian who was teaching him, Sailor middle rank. Svetz, himself. Skyrunner, this dirigible yacht beneath them. The orbiting space elevator still drifting ahead of Skyrunner, with its far end sprouting silver flowers, was the Hangtree. Aft was Hangtree City.…
The air was pre-Industrial, and thin. Breathe! But there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in his blood. Breathe …
He revived because they’d closed his helmet and Miya was shouting in his ear. “Hanny! Answer!”
“I’ve been unconscious.” His arms were still bound. His translator had a pickup outside the helmet. It must have heard whatever was said, storing the sounds without understanding. “I’m having one of those days,” Svetz said.
Miya said, “Ride it out.”
Matth was answering too. The translator hiccuped and said, “Why do Svetz throw the—?”
Svetz guessed, and bellowed his answer to get it through the bubble. “Why did I throw the flight stick?”
“Yes. Buy your life with it?”
“You hurt my flight stick. I thought it would hurt us. I bought all our lives.”
Another Martian shouted, “Matth? I tried to net it.” He displayed a net with a black hole burned through it. “The flare would have killed many of us.”
Matth nodded. “Svetz, did you make that happen?”
“No!”
Miya: “I’m turning down the volume.”
Matth said, “You are slave to the ship now. Your life you must give for the safety of Skyrunner.” There was no question in his voice, and no doubt. Did Martians become slaves that easily? It would explain why he had been rescued, not killed.
“Why did you sleep?” Matth asked.
“You opened my helmet and left me with not enough breath.”
Matth made an intuitive leap. “You come from where the air is different. Another world! Earth?”
“Yes.”
“From Earth?”
Svetz was growing hoarse. “Matth, free my hands! I can make my voice loud.”
“With your hands?” Matth considered. “Swear not to attack us or Skyrunner.”
“I swear.”
“Swear for your friends.”
He couldn’t really vouch for Miya, and Zeera had a bloodthirsty streak. He said it anyway. “I swear.”
Matth freed him. Svetz stood up. He twiddled the volume control and asked, “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” said Matth and Miya.
“Good.”
The deck surged with little gusts of wind, just enough to throw his balance off. Lower gravity seemed to make it worse. There were handholds all about him and a rope along the deck’s rim. Svetz wobbled forward, handhold to handhold, seeking a better view.
He said, “I see other sky ships.”
Matth said, “Those are enemies.”
Svetz lowered his helmet over his head and zoomed. “The closest is bigger than Skyrunner. The next two are about our size, and one of them has big crabs all over the deck.”
“They are part of the—” Something wasn’t translated.
“The ships further back are too slow. They won’t catch us. Some of them look like the lens of an eye. I can’t tell how big they are. I count fifteen total.”
“You have good eyes.”
“You said the crabs are part of … something?”
“Several kinds of men gathered to make Hangtree City. The”—the translator hesitated—“Allied Peoples. There is a prophecy, Svetz. The world will dry and die. We hoped to use the Hangtree to lift ourselves to space.”
“When did the Hangtree come?”
“When Lord Pfee was a child. Lord Pfee?”
A Martian answered from a higher platform. “Matth, I have a vessel to fight!”
Matth went to join him. The two spoke. Presently Lord Pfee bellowed a string of orders, then came with Matth to join Svetz. Lord Pfee asked, “Can you see great distances?”
“Yes. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me what you see?”
“Ahead, nothing but desert.” Svetz zoomed his view. “Some right-angle patterns just at the horizon, right by a few degrees. Might be foundations for a city. Behind us, two ships our size and one twice as long and more flat, all at about our altitude. They’re pacing each other now, and they’re all closer than they were.”
“The markings?”
“Where would I look for them? Never mind, I see what you mean. It’s a hand, fingers spread, painted across the bow. All three ships.”
“Flags?”
Miya misread his hesitation. “Brightly painted cloth on a mast or pole.”
Svetz knew that! “I see them. They’re flapping, I can’t read them at all. Blue on the big one, the same pattern on a little one, and the other one is yellow and red.” Svetz looked up. The banner flapping above him was yellow and black. “None like yours. One of the lens shapes is catching up.”
Lord Pfee asked, “Weapon
s?”
“I don’t know what to look for. The ships all have little holes in front. The big ship has two, and there are tubes on deck that look like they can turn.”
Lord Pfee nodded. He barked rapid orders to Matth. Matth left.
Svetz asked, “Tell me how the Hangtree came.”
Lord Pfee peered at him suspiciously. “If I take this glass thing off you, you die?”
“Yes.” It might take an hour, but he’d be unconscious, unable to save himself.
“What you threw away, wasn’t it to keep a secret from us?”
“I thought it might explode and kill me. Weren’t you told?”
“Yes. What of this?” The rocket pack. “For flight on the tree?”
“Yes.” Svetz wobbled across deck to where they’d mounted it. He showed Lord Pfee how to work the rockets.
“And this?”
“Needle gun. These needle crystals dissolve in blood. It puts animals to sleep. Enemies too, but only from close.”
“Not a useful thing.”
“Tell me how the Hangtree came.”
“I do have a ship to fight, Svetz. Still … come.” Lord Pfee led him up a ladder to a railed balcony. “I can command from here. You can use your far-vision to keep me informed. What is your interest in the Hangtree?”
“We hope to lift vessels into the sky, to the other planets.”
“Yes, the Allied Peoples thought so too.…”
20
Lord Feshk ruled a city of many thousands where two canals crossed. “I was his fourth son out of fourteen,” Lord Pfee said. “Few of us are left.”
A city of a hundred thousand or more, Svetz decided as he listened, and hundreds of klicks of canals bordered by farming land. Lord Pfee wasn’t counting slaves, children, women, elderly, or maimed: only men who could fight.
When Lord Pfee was three, peculiar black-headed plants were found growing around the edge of a canal.
Ten years later they were a mighty grove that partly blocked the canal. They threatened a bridge of great age and beauty. Lord Feshk ordered them cut down.
Beneath woody silver-brown bark, they were stronger than any metal made on Mars. Uprooting them would have involved digging out a canal. Lord Feshk didn’t order that. He thought he had something valuable.
He built a fortress twenty manheights above the ground with the alien grove as his pillars.
When Lord Pfee was seven, a black string floated down from the sky. Children watched it wavering through the grove, blown by winds but always returning. “We chased it for days. I was still young enough to enjoy climbing.” Ultimately it got tangled in the black trees, and there it clung.
No man could see how high it led. Over years, the trees bowed inward, crumpling Lord Feshk’s fortress, until the tops of every tree in the clump had grown into a single knot around the dangling string. That grew to a thick silver-gray vine. Children were told not to pull on it. They did that anyway, and it held their weight.
A century passed.
“Lord Pfee, do you mean a hundred martian years?”
“Yes. I was married and a landholder and had four girls by then.” And what had been a black string hanging from the sky grew thick and thicker, until it and the anchor grove merged into one vast trunk. The black tufts became a ragged black collar that rose to the edge of space with the growing of the anchor grove. More black foliage ran up the Hangtree’s silver-brown flank.
Savants came from all over Mars to study the Hangtree. Lord Feshk didn’t like them. He taxed those who came, and restricted their movements, until the races of Mars allied and attacked his city.
“We were killed or scattered, Lord Feshk’s children. My sisters married. They’re safe, and they know my secret. I and my few remaining brothers and our children rule homes buried in a desert.”
“But we found you on the tree. Did you join this Allied Peoples?”
Lord Pfee spoke with the reluctance of a criminal confessing. “We scavenged a city abandoned when its water source dried up. We found wealth to build a few airships and modify them for vacuum. We unburied their gate, marked in ancient runes whose meaning was madness. Green Cross, on a featureless desert! We scavenged the name too, and joined the Allied Peoples as Green Cross.
“But I wear Lord Feshk’s face.” Lord Pfee tapped his silver mask, now tilted back on his head. “We all wear our ancestors’ faces. We have not forgotten who killed our father. When word came that creatures had crossed from another world, we sensed opportunity—”
A man shouted. Lord Pfee left him abruptly.
There was a mast. Svetz zoomed on its peak to find an observer tending a mounted tube. Lord Pfee was bellowing thinly, gesturing widely at men tending a similar tube on a rigid mounting. They were playing with objects (zoom) feeding small pointed cylinders into a feed belt for the tube.
Lord Pfee returned and spoke as if they had never been interrupted. “Allied Peoples comprises five tool-building species including the insect giants, the Tunnel Crabs and their mindless symbiote carriers, the Smiths and the Soft-fingers and ourselves. Most of Mars accepts the prophecy that the world will dry and die. The High Folk counsel us to accept our fate. But the Allied Peoples would change that future. Some factions babble of settling Earth. Svetz, would you give them help or war?”
Svetz said, “It wouldn’t matter. You couldn’t stand or walk or fight under the pull of the Earth.”
“I’ve heard that too. And some babble of siphoning water from a large ice-shelled moon of”—the translator hiccuped—“Saturn. When I was a child we had no notion that that world had moons or rings!”
Miya broke in. “Europa is lighter than Mars. It’s water under an ice shell. Hanny, you could position a tether with its center of mass in the second Lagrange point, with Europa between it and Jupiter. Europa’s tide-locked, so you’d still have an orbital tower.”
Svetz relayed most of that. “And people of your world could move around there too.”
“Their plan is not mad?”
“No. I’m worried about your sky ships, though. How do you lift?”
“We use a gas that pulls up when irradiated with the sixth kind of light. Inert, the gas is still lighter than air.”
“That is weird,” Svetz said. “Bizarre! But if it works by lifting away from the mass of a planet, then you can’t get to Europa. Between the worlds you’d be adrift.”
“The Softfingers use something else, something secret.”
“Rockets?”
“Do you mean like the recoil of a gun? Is that what you use? Can you teach us?”
Svetz said, “I can do that. Lord Pfee, is that one of the High Folk?” Indicating the skeletal giant on the mast.
“Yes. Ignore him. He is with Skyrunner but not of it, with the Allied Peoples but not of it. Man, when we fought to reach you on the Hangtree, we hoped for more from you than a weapon that puts animals to sleep if they’re close enough! What would your people pay for your life?”
“Ransom?” He heard the gap: the translator didn’t have that martian word.
Pfee spoke, and “Ransom,” the translator agreed. “Weapons or wealth or ideas, power to take back Hangtree City! We must command the Hangtree itself, I suppose, to hold the city. We might rule in tandem, my people and your men of Earth. But have you anything to offer?”
“Rockets, eventually, but maybe I can buy my way free now.” It might be worth his life. “Lord Pfee, give me some object you don’t need anymore.”
Lord Pfee spoke to a warrior.
The enemy ships—“They’re rising,” Svetz said.
Lord Pfee laughed. “Why, so they are!” And he went below deck.
What happened then looked like group madness. Twelve men boiled out from below deck, all wearing pressure suits like golden armor. They replaced men at various stations. Those disappeared below. The ship surged upward.
Smoke and fire puffed from the nose of one of the enemy ships. Railing along the leftward side of Skyrunner splintered.
Then the other ships fired too. The big tubes made a guttural drumbeat boom. Some of the crew fired devices that were more like needle guns; Svetz heard their higher-pitched snap, and a flurry of snaps from oncoming ships. It all sounded distant, harmless. Near vacuum was eating the sound.
But impact weapons chewed the rails and the masts. The crewman who was carrying Svetz’s needle gun sprayed red mist and screamed a diminuendo behind the calm of his silver mask.
The skeletal alien clung to a mast and watched.
Lord Pfee emerged with his mask closed. He shouted through it. “They’re trying to get above Skyrunner. Fools! We can rise higher than they. We’re stripped to leave the air entirely!” He handed Svetz a double handful of vertebrae as big as a man’s. “A terwheeel was our dinner two days back. Will these do?”
Svetz ignored Lord Pfee’s evident amusement. “Yes. You should not see what I do next.”
“It nibbles my mind that I should not leave you alone, Svetz!”
Svetz shrugged. “You’ll have to fight your ship. Set me a guard you can trust with wealth.”
“I do not have even one man to spare,” Lord Pfee decided. He closed his silver mask and began moving about the sky ship, giving his commands in sign language. He stopped briefly beside the High Folk observer.
Svetz felt his suit contracting in near vacuum.
As for the following ships, two had fallen away. The largest was spraying vermilion. But a ship marked with yellow and red lifted to keep pace while its crew threw mass overboard, and one of the lens-shapes had come much nearer.
Svetz opened his trade kit, and suddenly realized that the observer was squatting beside him, all bones inside a heat-insulating fluff of tiny white feathers, its knees higher than its head. It made no signs and didn’t try to speak.
As instructed, Svetz ignored him. He fished out the superconducting net and wrapped it around the bones from dinner and sealed the edge. He started the conversion sequence.
Skyrunner tilted far forward. Svetz squealed and rescued the trade kit without releasing his scissors-lock on a mast.
