by Larry Niven
Miya: “What was that?”
Svetz said, “We’re in a battle. I’d better tie myself down.” He still had the net.
“I’ve been following your ship, Hanny, but you’ve gone way above me. Keep me posted.”
“Miya, they haven’t briefed me on their plans!”
Skyrunner’s nose gun fired. The sound was almost lost to vacuum, but Svetz felt the deck jump. The ships below were firing, but their missiles were fighting gravity. Sky-runner fired again, and again. The big ship sprayed vermilion and sank.
A missile struck Skyrunner’s side.
The trade kit had finished its work. Svetz took the altered vertebrae out and stowed the kit. Two ships below Skyrunner were both falling. Altitude was a major advantage here. But the red-and-yellow-marked ship was pacing Skyrunner. The lens had come in range too. It looked like two silver woks set edge to edge, with a small glass dome on the upper surface.
Skyrunner rocked to another hit.
Sailor-Second Matth crossed the deck at a run-and-climb, making full use of every handhold. Matth stopped by Svetz. From his bellow the translator picked out, “Weapon … buy your life and freedom…?”
Svetz handed him an altered vertebra. It hadn’t gained mass. It was porous gold now; it would melt down into a much smaller ingot.
“Gold.” Matth turned it in his hands; twisted it and broke it. “What shall we do with this? Push it down their throats?” He flipped the pieces overboard. “Mars has all the gold we need.” He was off at a half run, half climb, sprinting from handhold to handhold.
Svetz caught a flicker and turned in time to see what happened next.
The silver lens jetted a tight column of flame, very like Miya’s blasters. Flame grazed the right side of Skyrunner and ripped it from bow to stern. Skyrunner shuddered and was the center of a luminous vermilion cloud. The lurch and roll caught Sailor-Second Matth off balance, and then Matth was in flight, flapping wildly.
“Miya, I’ll be down shortly,” Svetz murmured. He felt the right side of the ship, his side, sink.
“No hurry.” Miya caught something in his voice. “Hanny?”
Once upon a time it had begun to bother him that all of the people he met in the past were dead. When he told Zeera his problem, her take was quite different. “They’re not dead, Hanny. Nobody’s dead. If you don’t believe me, go back and talk to them!”
“Hanny! What’s happening?”
He told her. He was hanging from a horizontal mast that projected from the vertical deck of a ship. The ship was falling toward noonday Mars with red desert below. One tank was still lifting. It wasn’t enough. In a few minutes he was going to be dead.
The crackle of gunfire paused, then became a continuous rattle. The remaining sailors were those who had found handholds. Now they saw no reason to reserve ammunition. Skyrunner lurched to two quick impacts from the big guns of the red-and-yellow sky ship.
Skyrunner was falling … and then it was really falling.
Svetz released the net that bound him and cast it as a line for climbing. Those hours on the tree were all the experience he’d had in free fall, and he’d better use them now. Too soon, Skyrunner would be in the winds.
Martian sailors watched him. Two, then three began crawling up the vertical deck.
Svetz reached his rocket pack.
The three didn’t like that. They moved toward him a little less timidly, a little faster, as he wiggled into the harness.
The rocket pack was built to maneuver in free fall, not to fly. It would thrust at half an Earth gravity. It must be almost empty. Svetz burnt another teaspoon of fuel jetting down to pluck his needle gun from a dead Martian tethered to the underside railing.
For an instant he might have gone further. Where was Matth? Svetz zoomed his view of a hundred falling dots scattered across red Mars. Some were debris. Some were men, and several of those were flailing.
Skyrunner had not lost lift quite soon enough for Matth. He would reach Mars ahead of Skyrunner. Svetz could never have reached him.
The sky ship was slowly tumbling. Crew were crawling up the vertical deck to tether themselves along the railing. Svetz clung where he was, but he didn’t tie himself. “Miya? Mind if I talk this out?”
“Brief me! Always talk it out.”
“I’m high enough to be in vacuum in a ship that has a tank of some light gas along either side. The gas lifts if it’s irradiated with what sounds like a laser. It’s antigravity, not our version. Now the right tank’s ruptured. Left side isn’t lifting either. If that tank’s been shot open too, then we’re just another crater.”
“What do the Martians think of all this?”
Svetz watched a crewman tying himself in place. They were all lined up along the left railing. Many of the silver masks were turned toward Svetz. Some had guns, but all wore swords.
“They’ve all tied themselves in place against the crash. I’ve been rescuing my belongings. They haven’t decided what to think of that.”
Lord Pfee was still belowdecks, where the controls must be.
Miya asked, “Where are you planning to hit?”
Planning? “Well, there’s something below us. A crater showing under the sand, with markings around the rim like the blueprints for a city. Maybe it’s a buried city. You might not see it from ground level.”
“I’ll watch.”
“O futz futz futz—”
“Hanny?”
He shouted in joy. “We’re lifting! I knew it! Ships were shooting at us. Lord Pfee dropped us away from them. Now he’s turned on the lift again. It’s just one side, we’ll still crash. That’s why they’re all clustered along what’s going to be the top. I don’t think that’ll save them.”
The dead men watched him, fascinated: an alien talking to himself, in vacuum and moments from death.
He watched the desert come up at him, and when it was very close, Svetz fired the rocket pack and jumped. He balanced facedown as flame roared past his ribs. A Martian snatched at his ankle as he went by, and missed. The man drew his firearm and sent a quick shot after Svetz. Then he was rising above Skyrunner, but Mars was rising faster.
21
He couldn’t see.
He could hear, though. A voice yammered in his ear. “Hanny! I saw you come down but I can’t find you. Hanny!”
He was bruised everywhere. His back hurt. Something hot was burning his elbow. He tried to push away from it. That pulled his face out of the sand, and then he saw sunset light.
In the triumph of the moment he bellowed, “I still live!”
“Where?”
The sun was high. Right on the too-close horizon were the sunset colors he’d seen, below a navy blue sky. Closer yet, Skyrunner looked like a glass bottle dropped on pavement. A big bird (zoom) flight stick and orange rider were circling the wreck.
“Miya, I’m not in the sky yacht.”
“Oh. Good!”
“It was getting some lift, but near the end I used the rocket pack. I think I ran dry. I hit like a bomb, but … not as hard as they did.”
Svetz stood up, testing, taking his time. That hurt. In reasonable gravity he’d never have made it. But broken bones would be a deeper hurt, and what had burned his elbow was a rocket nozzle.
“There you are. Can you walk?”
“Worth a try.” He took a few tentative steps. “I can walk.”
“That’s good, because we only have one flight stick.” She hovered above him. “I thought you were dead, Hanny. They’re all dead.”
“I’m not surprised. Are you all right?”
“I didn’t learn anything in … Hangtree Town? You got lucky. This Allied Peoples sounds like something we want to join.”
“Why?”
“They’ve been exploring the tree for a century! They must know where to find seeds! And it’s not as if we’re protecting Earth, Hanny. A Martian couldn’t stand up in Earth gravity.”
And these people were cosmonauts, like Miya. Still—
“They take ransom. Slaves too. Don’t trust them until we have to.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Are you always this distrustful?”
“Maybe.”
She changed the subject. “I think you were right about a buried city. It’s ten klicks west of here, so it’s on the way. Let’s give it a look.”
* * *
He limped across a crescent dune. Then another, watched by Miya hovering left and above. Then a wide arc of rough-edged rock. “Miya? Meteor crater?”
“Right. Mars has a lot of these.”
He favored his left ankle. There might be cracked ribs among all the other aches and bruises. Fatigue softened the sensations and martian gravity softened the load. He stagger-danced, light-headed and light-bodied, feeling a bit drunk.
Above a horizon that was knife-sharp and too close, the tip of the skyhook tree still showed as a spray of silver blossoms. A small crescent rode above it.
A line of gourds faced the sun, each as tall as a small man. Something odd about them, or about the lighting, or just their presence on a lifeless desert. It was out of their path, but Svetz turned toward them.
Miya was amused. “You’ve got energy to spare?”
“Curiosity. Curiosity to spare,” Svetz said.
No wonder they looked funny. They were black where they faced the sun. In the shade they were pale. Chameleons evolved to conserve heat.
He was moving too slowly for Miya, so she zipped over to see the grove for herself. The grove lurched into motion, scattering at turtle speed. Startled, Miya almost plowed into a dune.
She returned and settled ahead of him. “Just animals. Hanny, what’s our interest? Here, you ride for a while.” She handed him her flight stick.
There was a bag tied to the shaft. Svetz hefted it. Heavy. “Seeds?” He zipped the bag open.
She’d collected five yellow globes, big as a fist and heavier than Earthly fruit. Their rinds felt like ceramic. They had an apple’s dimple and the melted stump of a stem.
She said, “Now all we have to do is get home.”
He climbed onto the flight stick. Why hadn’t she put him on the flight stick first? Assessing her partner’s fitness? Or attitude?
Miya walked briskly, with a disconcerting bounce in her step that she brought under control by leaning forward. Svetz floated above her. She leaned farther, her feet pushing back, and farther, until she was running almost parallel to the sand. He had to speed up. He could hear her huffing breath, but the skintight suit slowed her not at all. The dust-puffs of her footfalls were two meters apart.
She ran up the slope of a dune that blocked her path, crossed the lip and was airborne for more than a second. Her laughter rang in his helmet, and he joined in.
“You’re wonderful to watch,” he said. “Practice?”
“Two years! Get some rest … then I’ll teach you.”
Another crescent moon rose behind the slender trunk. In a few minutes it emerged from behind the trunk and hurtled up the sky.
“Miya?”
“I’ve been watching.”
“Well, those moons are both bigger than the pair of wasted little captured asteroids we’ve been living with.”
“I know, Hanny.” She slowed to talk. “They don’t look like that on present-day Mars. Maybe it’s an atmospheric effect, some kind of optical illusion. Moonlight filtered through stratospheric ice crystals. Has anyone ever figured out why Earth’s moon looks bigger when it’s close to the horizon?”
“No.”
“We were right about the solar sails, though. The Hangtree is trying to steer itself. I wonder where it wants to go.”
“It left a set of roots at Hangtree City,” Svetz said, “and seeds for more.”
“But that’s where it got hurt. Maybe it’ll drop seeds in some safer place, or just move out and away.”
“Back where it came from?”
“It’s built to settle planets. I think we’re looking at a piece of genetic engineering by a race with techniques way ahead of ours. But Mars is ideal for an orbital tower. Low gravity, high spin, means the tree doesn’t have to be as long or as strong. It won’t find anything else that good in the solar system. It must have come from some other star, Hanny.”
“What’s its second-best choice?”
“Earth.” Miya began to run again.
* * *
The horizon was a symphony of reds. A vertical black line crossed a hot white point: the sun near setting.
They did not at first realize that they were running through a city. Nothing showed in the billows of sand and harder dirt beneath. But the path of least resistance was a lowlands that ran straight as an arrow. Then Miya’s foot plunged through the surface, past her knee, and her chest hit the ground hard.
Svetz settled. He would have leapt off the flight stick to help her, but he could barely move. “Miya?” Thinking of trap-door spiders, he worked the needle gun off his back.
She wiggled her leg loose; stretched it and bent it. Then she looked into the hole. “It’s eaten out under the surface,” she said. “Only water does that. Hanny, there was water here.” Her hand felt around in the hole, then came out with black refuse. “Feels like old dry leaves or moss.” She stamped. Again. Turf collapsed under her heel, and fine sand flowed in like oil, hiding all evidence.
He asked, “Want to fly for a while?”
“No, I’m fine.” She began to run again.
Svetz limped along on foot, leaning on the floating flight stick for support, not trying to keep up. His cramping began to ease up. He wasn’t trying to prove anything, just getting the feel of what was around him. It had worked for him in Earth’s past. Here, stuck in a sausage skin—
“Miya, how’s your recycler doing?”
“No problems.”
All in one motion, Svetz threw back his bubble helmet (poof!), took a limp transparent bag from an inner pocket and pulled it over his head. He sealed it around his neck, tasting of just the least whiff of alien air.
The filter helmet inflated. The air tasted fine, with proper traces of carbon oxides, nitrogen oxides and petrochemicals. Something martian was still seeping through the semipermeable membrane. Meteor dust, dust of alien plants, and aeons of time. A bit too heavy on the carbon compounds. Now he could hear a thin wind brushing over low dunes and crater rims: a lonely sound.
“You all right?” Miya asked.
“Fine.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Nothing lasts forever. I don’t know where the flaws are in these pressure suit recyclers. I trust a filter helmet.”
“Makes sense.” Miya imitated him. Now they walked with their bubble helmets thrown back.
Svetz’s footfalls jarred echoes from below him. He’d heard that sound a few minutes ago and not quite noticed. Now—“I think we’re walking on a roof,” he said.
“Is that what you were expecting?”
“Don’t know.”
Miya shrugged. She drew her blaster. Svetz backed up a dune slope to give her room.
At a touch of the trigger, sand exploded outward, then flowed into a conical hole. The dune flowed downhill into it. They backed away as the cone deepened. Then the flow eased, and yellow light was shining out of the sand.
Svetz wondered, “Troglodytes?”
“Clavius Base is like this. They could be human. Hold up,” Miya said.
They waited for angry Martians to come boiling out. When that didn’t happen, Svetz said, “I want a look.”
“Here, take the blaster. Wait, the backblast—”
“No. Needles.”
“Get your helmet up! It’ll stop a bullet.”
Svetz poked his helmet and needle gun into the hole. “Nobody home. The floor’s five meters down. I guess they didn’t like bumping their heads.” Some of the walls were transparent. He was near one of those. There was a silver pool below him, like quicksilver or molten silver, as big as a baby’s bassinet. “I don’t want to go straight down,”
he said. “You don’t either. Are you carrying line?”
“Yes. Here.”
He went in feet first with a line in his hand. He swung back and forth, then dropped onto bare floor between a pair of small couches.
22
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea …
—The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury, 1946
Their counters were clicking, but there weren’t enough rads to hurt them. Miya traced the radiation to lights that glowed in the walls and ceiling. She looked them over and said, “Hanny, there’s no way to replace these bulbs.”
He speculated. “They’re supposed to last as long as the house.”
Miya kicked a wall of pink stone. It was meters thick. “That could be forever! Look where the corners are rounded on the stairs … and the walls, there where people would brush against them. Futz, they weren’t ever expecting a new brand of lightbulb!”
Light gleamed off pink sand beyond a glass wall.
They climbed into a red stone tower via a spiral stair. Its peak was just above the sand. Tall, narrow windows around the top faced in seven directions. Time had etched the glass.
“Arrow slits. I don’t think they worried about lasers.”
They looked in vain for an escape tunnel or an airlock to keep sand out. The desert had come unexpectedly. Then again, there were no bones.
Miya took the temperature of the pool of silver lava: 190°C. “Hanny, it’s a stove! That’s a perfect cooking temperature!”
“And still hot? Check for rads.”
“It is radioactive. Stay clear.”
“Still think it’s a stove?”
“Cosmic rays and thinner air. Martians might not be afraid of radiation.”
“Wrap the food in foil—”
“Or just dip it and let the hot metal drip off. I don’t see any spatulas or forks. Would they just pick cooked food out of that with their fingers?”
* * *
Clearly there was no householder to attack them.
They never found anything like a toilet. Maybe the sand had buried an outhouse.
Opaque walls surrounded the back of the house. Here were two closet-sized rooms, doorless, separated by a mirror wall. In its center, a frieze of two spindly human shapes.… “Wrestling?”
