Rainbow Mars

by Larry Niven

  39

  Svetz took the control chair. Miya tethered herself with the lines and fixpoints Zeera had abandoned. They watched Ra Chen and Zeera in the Guide Pit until all the colors went to chaos, and gravity shifted to the center of the shell.

  A rustling of stunned Martians followed them into the past. Svetz and Miya hung head down. Svetz had done this before, and it didn’t seem to bother Miya.

  The Martians had all settled into a ball. Miya sprayed a net over them and tethered it to the curve that had been the ceiling. Thaxir hung in a net near her. Miya had already sprayed a fine net over the cannon’s firing cockpit.

  Every Martian was wearing some kind of pressure envelope. Softfinger, green giant and red Martian pressure suits were no surprise: Svetz had seen them before. The big crabs with their ogre-human faces, and their mock human mounts, wore separate pressure envelopes with sockets to join them. Inflated bubbles with attached bottles held red Martian children, spindly six-limbed dark green children as tall as a man, grinning pointy-faced frogs festooned with tools, tiny ogre crabs and infant crab-mounts. Other such bubbles held animals and plants in what looked like terrariums. Thaxir hadn’t mentioned that.

  The child-bubbles remained closed; but all the adults had opened their helmets or zippers. Earth’s post-Industrial air couldn’t be good for them, despite the high carbon dioxide content. Svetz asked, “Shall we switch to martian air?”

  “I don’t want to close my helmet. Did you bring—?”

  Svetz held up a pair of clear bags: filter helmets labeled for Mars.

  “They act like they’re running out of air,” he said. “They took enough to board the X-cage and enough more for the children. They must think we still have pre-Industrial air. Or—”

  “What?”

  “Or they’re running out. What if the tree stopped giving them oxygen?”

  Miya asked, “Why would it do that?”

  “Parasite control? We can ask.”

  They donned filter helmets. Svetz adjusted the air monitors.

  Miya spoke to the elderly green giant. “Is that why you called us, Thaxir?”

  Thaxir couldn’t answer, assuming this was Thaxir. The green of her shell was yellowed. The plates of her face bore a wonderful array of fine, delicate carvings, and an old crack that Svetz’s blaster handle might have put there ages ago. She hung, twitching a bit.

  Svetz said, “I wish I really knew how sonics affect a Martian.”

  “I’m tired,” Miya said. “You?”

  “Wiped.”

  “From the moment we hit the target date, we have to keep going for twenty minutes,” Miya said. “That’s right, isn’t it? Then we can quit. We won or we didn’t.”

  “Right.”

  “Go easy with the sonics. Don’t knock them out again. They’ll all want to close their helmets when we open that big door.”

  She turned back to the green giant. “The Hangtree is killing the Earth. It killed Mars too. We need to chop it down when it’s young. I beg you to tell us how this weapon operates.”

  Thaxir twitched. Not just a tremor: she was trying to speak, and she was amused.

  While they waited, Svetz opened the talker. “Ra Chen? Boss?”

  “Problems?”

  “Smooth as silk.”

  “Then get off now. Call when you’re in place.” Click.

  He hadn’t realized. The talker was using up Ra Chen’s life span, and Zeera’s too. They might have only minutes.

  If a Martian got too restless, Miya stunned it on low. The species Svetz could recognize were men and women in equal numbers, a good many elders, a handful of older children. They had come as a colony even if their intent was conquest.

  Thaxir was stirring. While Svetz monitored the telltales, Miya talked to her, believing she could hear.

  Thaxir mumbled slurred martian gibberish. The UN translator adjusted in seconds. It said, “Wake cannon masters.”

  “Who?”

  “Cannon masters know.” They waited. Presently Thaxir said, “Softfingers made the cannon. Don’t put Softfingers to sleep.”

  Martians were stirring.

  Miya asked, “Which ones?”

  “Softfingers all look alike.” Chuf chuf chuf—a sound that came from Thaxir’s sides, her spiracles. Laughter. Then, “Let them all wake.”

  The large X-cage moved steadily into the past toward where the small X-cage had popped out. Svetz wasn’t needed at the controls. He let himself down on a tether to examine the weapon.

  It had to be a weapon, didn’t it? Svetz remembered that heat beams from a wok ship diverged more than a laser, and reflected less. Plasma gun! If they fired it inside the closed X-cage, they’d cremate everything in a moment.

  Thaxir had said that twenty Softfingers would come. There might have been that many, but they were a tangled mass of tentacles, indistinguishable even by gender. Twenty awake would … would what? Try another mutiny?

  He brushed a few wakeful Martians with the stunner on low. More and more were waking. Softfingers were stirring too. Svetz cut a hole in the net, pulled a Softfinger out—about his own weight, less than fifty kilograms now—lifted it to the shell and netted it in place. Then another, and another.

  Miya was saying, “If the tree dies, Earth lives. If Earth lives, we can make Mars live again. It might take a long time, but we can. Thaxir, do you have a problem with that?”

  “Trust me, Miya?”

  “I haven’t decided. What did you hope to gain at the Institute?”

  “Softfingers outnumbered us. Fools we all were, not to bring more of us. They took our weapons. If they have a plan, they did not tell me. But many joined them. The promise was of a time machine, with a chance to change old mistakes.”

  The green Martian was ten times Miya’s weight, and she was stirring again. Trust her? Miya had a stunner. So did Svetz.

  “Why did you run from us?”

  The Martian said, “Long time ago. You and the others told me this much, that your end of time and mine should talk. Told me more, but I believed that much. Then the landing smashed your talker. I knew that my people on the tree could build it again. I could not guess what else we would learn in learning how to do that. I did not know if you would share knowledge.

  “I carried out your wish as you told it, but I did it my way. When we are made slave, obligations bind us. But to be slave does not kill our minds. Obligation runs two ways.”

  Svetz said, “We don’t hold intelligent beings as property at all.”

  “Is that why you let me run?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wondered. I serve you, Miya, and Svetz and Zeera too. You seek to destroy what destroyed my people’s world. The scope of your ambition is a madness that excites my awe. The tree was our home, but you say it will destroy us, and I believe you.”

  “Thaxir? Why?”

  “The sap that runs through the veins of the tree holds dissolved oxygen. We sink pipes. Always we have our air that way, and water and sugar too. Galls grow around the ends of the pipes and close them so that more must be drilled. But now the tree learns to close the pipes much faster. Faster every year.”

  “Can you tell us how to work the cannon?”

  “No.” Chuf chuf chuf.

  “Can you tell us which Softfingers are the cannoneers?”

  “No. I can tell you some that are not.” Chuf chuf chuf. “Svetz, one you have chosen is gravid. It makes them clumsy. The cannoneers were not gravid.”

  Svetz had netted nine Softfingers in an arc around his control desk. It was heavy exercise. The inertial calendar read 160 AE, with no real accuracy, but the X-cage was halfway thence and nothing had burned out. He lowered the gravid Softfinger back to the net; moved her in, chose another—

  “Too old. No, not the injured one either.”

  —Chose another, sprayed the net closed. His captive wrestled with him sluggishly as he moved it into place.

  This mode of time travel was much faster than Fast Forwar
d. But Fast Forward would have given them a view! Now ten Softfingers, and Thaxir, wriggled restlessly against a chaotic rainbow.

  When would Thaxir ask to be freed?

  Miya asked her, “Can you talk to Softfingers?”

  “Yes. Miya, I remember how long it took for your device to learn my speech. Best if you let me translate.”

  “They have their own speech?”

  “Yes. But Softfingers will never agree to destroy the tree.”

  This sounded suspiciously like the end of all their hopes. Svetz climbed back up to where Miya and Thaxir hung. He asked, “What if we make them slaves?”

  “None are made slave except by agreement. Any may die if he will not be slave. Any may be silent if he will not speak to a captor. Any may refuse to act. Some are slaved by degrees. Do this, refrain from that, reveal knowledge, give up a weapon, justify details of living style to a lord’s servant, bit by bit until free has become slave. It may take centuries or generations. I have seen it again and again,” old Thaxir said. “Are you sure none of you are slave?”

  Svetz didn’t answer, nor did Miya.

  “I chose to be your slave. These will not. They will not tell you how to harm the tree.”

  “We’ll have to guess,” Svetz said.

  “Svetz, will you trust me? Miya?”

  “If you have something in mind, see if you can describe it.”

  Chuf chuf chuf. “I intend a dance of words, too chancy, too variable, too strange to reach through a speaking device into alien minds. If I can make this work, I will make legends, but you must trust me.”

  “We’ll trust you,” Miya said. “What do you need from us?”

  Thaxir said, “Leave your pressure suit helms thrown back. Move more Softfingers. Do not notice me.”

  Leathery bug-eyed octopuses, red-skinned humans, insectoid giants, froggy elves, near-headless humanoids and ogre crabs were all stirring in the net.

  Thaxir began talking to the nearest Softfingers.

  Miya and Svetz moved down the tethers to the wriggling mass of Martians. Most were conscious, and they wanted to talk. The UN translator knew Red Martian and Green Giant and was learning other speech too, and it tried to translate it all in a babble of white noise. Svetz turned his volume down. “Leave it this way,” he said to Miya.

  “We could get away from this—”

  “We can hear everything that goes on. I don’t know if Thaxir ever noticed that, but I don’t think we want the octopoids to. If they know we can listen, Thaxir may have trouble. You trust her? Why?”

  Miya shrugged. “We don’t have to, really. Let’s see what happens. Maybe Thaxir can get some instructions. We still have to guess if they’re right, or else guess how to work these funny controls. Either way, do you feel lucky?” She pointed. “That one.”

  They extracted a Softfingers. They moved that one and another and netted them.

  There was food and water in the storage bin. Not much. They ate ravenously, and talked of the past before they’d met, and watched the Martians.

  Their translators were speaking again. Svetz could barely hear. He chose not to raise the volume. The incomplete translation stuttered.

  “—from Earth. Destroyed the sky watch station on Highest Mountain—”

  “Horror! We are captive to these—?”

  “Think guile, plan revenge. They have not thought to close their pressure envelopes.”

  “Allies and infants would be left open to the empty. Must they die?”

  “Guile. These were shaped by Earth’s thick air. Shaped by Mars, we can live longer in the empty. But wait, a word makes them safe.” Thaxir lowered her voice further and spoke a single emphatic syllable. The translator gave it as, “Close your outer skin or burst like a sandgrape, witless child!”

  Miya said, “She told us to leave our suits open. Does she expect to open the door to vacuum?”

  “Not without warning, I guess.”

  “But you can’t lock the control board, right, Hanny?”

  “What for, when I only moved animals?” Svetz had sometimes wondered. Owl had claws to pull and turn knobs and a beak to punch keys.

  The light changed. Gravity changed. Martians wailed and peeped and gibbered as their net sagged toward the floor.

  Just as matters were becoming interesting, they were back among the conquistadors. Twenty minutes to Ragnarok.

  40

  Three hundred meters northeast of the anchor grove, a Portuguese army was converging on nothing, becoming braver as it became clear that there was no enemy. The shallow sea showed not a trace of the Minim spacecraft that must have disappeared fifteen minutes ago.

  Soldiers had finished reloading a cannon and, under the direction of a frantic officer, began inching its aim toward what must have been a puzzling target: a tight cloud of hundreds of human and alien shapes floating high above them, rising out of sight before anyone could quite be sure it was there.

  Svetz said, “Futz!”

  “What?”

  Svetz’s thumb was on the direction vector, pushing hard enough to break it. Up, up, up. “We should have had Willy go up the tree in the small X-cage! We could have met it there! He’s got twenty hours to play with. We only have twenty minutes. Futz!”

  The large X-cage ghosted through a layer of cotton-ball clouds and kept rising. Svetz zoomed his mag specs and found a silver stalk rising straight up from the black head of the clustered anchor trees. He’d follow it up.

  The man-shape on the stalk was Jack.

  A great yellow-green insectile shape was climbing up below him.

  Svetz was looking almost straight down along the root to the black tuft. He kept raising the magnification on his mag specs. He was tempted to delay, to see the end of it, but he dared not. The X-cage was rising fast, but it wasn’t a rocket: it wasn’t accelerating. The climb up the Hangtree was likely to eat most of their allotted time!

  Tiny Jack fled from a yellow-green ogre with tusks and too many limbs. He climbed with hysterical strength in the only possible direction: up. And he had lost. The monster reached from below and plucked him up in two forward limbs.

  Jack’s knife slashed twice across the green giant’s chest plates. Thaxir ignored it. With exquisite care she turned him around, then transferred Jack to her middle limbs, never losing her grip on the root nor on Jack.

  In that position he couldn’t reach the monster. He slashed at her pack. Something fell … and then young Thaxir set him against the stalk below her. Jack wrapped himself lovingly around the Hangtree root. Some glittering thing from Thaxir’s pack was falling, and Jack’s knife fell too.

  At maximum zoom Svetz still couldn’t see anymore. He called to Thaxir, “What was that?”

  Old Thaxir said, “My windstorm-minor, curse that thief! An heirloom I will never see again.”

  “Thaxir, you must have been killing yourself climbing in Earth gravity. What did you think you’d find?”

  “I expected that my folk would send the lift down as far as it could go. There, Svetz—”

  The Hangtree was swollen to tree trunk size. Suddenly there was a silver rail, and a barred box at the bottom, sixty klicks above the Earth.

  “Quite a climb.”

  “A record never to be matched. I was years recovering my strength.”

  “What if it hadn’t been there?”

  “It was.”

  * * *

  Altitude: 40,000 klicks. The large X-cage was already above geosynchronous orbit. Svetz was staying alongside the tree, so the X-cage, moving at orbital speed, was back in free fall.

  Svetz saw activity of some kind on the trunk as it sped past, but nothing flashed at them, nothing impacted. They were rising fast.

  … And Jack was going home with a golden harp, an alien shape of gold set with jewels, that made an alien song. What would they make of that in ancient Portugal? Golden harp and golden eggs and a bag of golden coins. Doubtless the King of Portugal would take it all … kings did that, Svetz thought
… unless Jack sailed into some foreign port, England maybe, and sold the loot there.

  Would he tell his tale? How could he not? His companions would know it by heart before they reached port. They might have trouble describing John’s absolute terror of a yellow-green four-armed monster with tusks who stands ten feet tall and swings a sword no man can pick up. As the legend spreads it might describe only a simple giant or ogre …

  Better phone home!

  Svetz activated the talker. “Boss? We are thence.”

  He heard a soft murmur that might have had words in it.

  Creepy. The voice of a quantized, uncertain future. He switched off.

  Thaxir spoke Softfinger sounds. The translator said, “See, they trust me.” Then she called in green giant speech, apparently addressing another green giant, “Miya, go and look at the cannon!”

  That individual’s eyes swiveled, then came back, puzzled.

  Svetz said, “You go, Miya. I’d better stay at the controls.”

  Miya held Svetz’s eyes but asked Thaxir, “What shall I look for?”

  “Look like you do not expect help from any Martian!”

  The Hangtree had grown broad as a freeway, even in the stretched and slender form that had crossed interplanetary space to Earth. Svetz tried to keep the X-cage near it without crashing into it. Altitude: 60,000 klicks. A trace of gravity had returned, with a vast Earth overhead. The control chair was inverted.

  Miya wedged her head and shoulders into the cannon’s cockpit. It was too small for anything human. Svetz was tempted to laugh. She looked very awkward. She pulled and pushed and touched, and if she set something off they’d all be dead. Softfingers and other Martians were paying her considerable attention; two or three Smiths were either shouting instructions or cursing.

  The phone rang.

  That wasn’t the intertemporal talker! It was the remote in the small extension cage. Svetz punched in and said, “Willy?”

  “Futz of a ride, yes! Hello, Svetz. Are we still on track?”

  “No showstoppers yet. Where are you? And why aren’t you on your way home?”

  “Svetz, I’ve getting great pictures. I suppose I’m pacing you, but you’re too small, I haven’t even glimpsed you. If you can bring this off, I want a record. I want to watch! If you can’t … well … there won’t be anything to go back to.”