Rainbow Mars (26 page)

“Lines. Hanny, you'll be maneuvering near sixty refugees in vacuum and free fall,” Miya said. “You'll need stickstrips and fixpoints and lines. I'll get those from Space Bureau, Wilt. Give me a man and a floater cart.”

Bottled water. Medical equipment: what kind of accidents were likely to hurt or kill Martians during a rescue? Svetz listened, nodded, advised.

Then he asked Wilt about baths and showers.

Bath? Well, that was awkward. Gorky wanted the large X-cage off in five hours. Everyone was busy, so the bath was available, yes. The problem (Wilt was explaining as Miya returned) was in finding enough people to take a bath!

“Zeera won't like the conditions,” Svetz told Miya.

“She'll be pissed if we don't invite her. Won't she?”

“Sure.”

The lock on the bathroom was a guard program. They typed in an appointment, then went looking for a quorum.

They found Zeera and Ra Chen on cots in the sleep area. Ra Chen was snoring like a machine with a bad bearing. Zeera was awake. “Too hungry to sleep anymore,” she said. “What's up?”

Svetz tried to explain what was going on. “The guard program isn't corruptible, or else I don't know the codes. There's a big double door. It won't let in less than eight or more than twelve. One tub, lots of towels, and a sonic for cleaning those.”

“They're short of water,” Zeera said.

“We noticed. Are you in?”

“I'm in.” Zeera sounded tired. “I'd bathe with Elephant. I'd bathe with Gila Monster. Futz, why not, he could dry me with his breath. So I guess I'll bathe with you two.”

Hillary Weng-Fa and Zat Forsman were loose, or else they took pity on three bewildered time travelers, and they brought three strangers. Eight was enough.

The bathroom was roomy. The tub was luxurious, finely carved and ergonomically shaped, equipped with water jets and bubbles. But it wasn't big.

Eight bathers sudsed each other before they took turns entering the tub. They rinsed each other, dried each other, and drifted into communal sex so easily that Svetz never had a chance to be startled.

Water was to be celebrated.

He was deeply involved with Hillary and trying to think of a polite way to break loose until he saw Miya with Zat. That was a relief of sorts. Sometime during all this he looked at Zeera—up near the ceiling where the sauna heating was, laughing down at them, naked as he had never seen her, dark and gaunt as a wraith.

Zeera called down, “How important is Horse?”

Horse? “Why?”

“Svetz, even your weird fantasy theories don't claim that our unique horned horse needs a virgin attendant
in 1109 AE.
”

She'd been reading the old stories. “You're right. So?”

She said,
“Mart!”

Mart Torgeson, a total stranger until today, was lolling in the tub. He looked up brightly. “Change your mind? Azeera, I've been chasing you so long—”

Azeera?

“And now you think it's going to be easy?” Zeera slid into the tiny tub and whispered in his ear, and he jumped. And accepted the challenge.

Svetz watched in awe and unease.
Zeera must think that the end of the world is coming.

Most of them needed the tub again after all that activity. The water was
black.
They'd certainly burned up an hour and a half when a tech poked his head in and called, “If you're a time traveler, you're wanted.”

*   *   *

They'd finished loading and programming the large X-cage. Willy Gorky and Wilt Miller waited. Willy said, “We've tagged Wilt to go back for the refugees on the tree, but we also want to send someone who's talked to a Martian. Zeera, you got some sleep, didn't you? If you're up to it—”

Zeera breezed past Svetz and Miya. “I'm in, Boss.”

“Look it over.
All
of you. We may have missed something. We launch in ten minutes.”

Wilt Miller, with his ruddy skin, might pass for a red Martian if he'd dyed his hair black and had cosmetic surgery to soften the line of his jaw. Maybe that was why the Heads had chosen him.

Ra Chen came to join them.

Zeera and Wilt climbed into pressure suits and entered. They were lost inside the volume of the large X-cage. It would run on remote control from the small cage, but there was also a chair and horseshoe of controls. Zeera took the chair. Wilt set some fixpoints and anchored himself to them. Svetz closed the hatch on them and stepped back.

The sphere faded in an instant. The extension arm behind it faded away in a direction no human eye could follow. Now only instruments could record its progress toward the past.

Svetz was inclined to monitor.

He was thwarted. Ra Chen said, “Drown me! Willy, where are you going to put them?”

“Sir, I have men working on a cage in the Bestiary.”

“Ah. Good. Willy, I'll take care of the mission here. Time is my turf, Mars is yours. Take Svetz and Miya along and look over that cage! Someone might have missed something.”

They walked toward the entrance with Willy Gorky. “Hang on a second,” Svetz said, and looked for the water dispenser.

There were the tables, left of the Armory, but where—? “Willy, I'm lost. Where's the water dispenser?”

“The what? Come on, Svetz, you're not any thirstier than anyone else.”

38

Once there must have been a thousand kinds of cactus. Svetz hadn't known that, but he couldn't doubt it while surrounded by scores of surviving varieties. It bothered him that many of them seemed to be dying.

Miya whispered, “Hanny, the chairs and tables were there, but there's
nothing
between the Armory door and the Pit. What happened to the drinks dispenser?”

“I thought it was over. I thought we could adapt. The world. Our species,” Svetz said. “All we had to do was wait.”

“The drinks dispenser?”

Willy had left them behind. He waited impatiently at the bridge that led through the World Globe. He didn't look that strong, that energetic, until Svetz looked at Miya and then down at himself. The flesh hung on their bones. Their stomachs bulged with starvation.

He asked, “Willy, what happened to Victor's brother?”

“Waldemar? I liked him, Svetz. I tried to teach him about the stars. He died in childhood,” Willy said, and coughed. “Lung troubles.” And Willy led them into the World Globe.

Miya stopped in the middle. Svetz stopped too. There was no need to speak.

Again it was as if the skin of a world had been inverted, and they stood at the center. But this world was not their own. The oceans were small blue patches on a world gone mostly red. The continental shelves were dry land. A blue worm wriggled the length of the valley that had been the Mediterranean Sea.

Willy turned back. Misunderstanding, he pointed out a ridge that stood up from what had been the seabed of the Atlantic Ocean. “Are you familiar with Atlantis? Some saltland farmers found the ruins in Waldemar Four's time. On your time line—”

“We didn't have technology to look that deep,” Miya told him.

“Well, come on.” Willy forged ahead.

Miya lingered. “Hanny, did you see? They've got canals.”

Blue threads wriggled over the Earth. The largest followed the old rivers and the beds of the Baltic, Black, Caspian, and Red Seas, and the sites of the Great Lakes; but rectilinear networks branched out from tiny cubistic pumping stations on the old natural curves. Cities crowded around the remaining seas, hundreds of klicks below what had been coastlines.

Antarctica was a diminished ice cap on a greatly expanded continent. Highways wide enough to see from orbit led across dry seabeds to Australia, Africa, South America. Svetz pictured trucks as big as tanker ships laden with freshwater ice.…

They caught up to Willy Gorky near Whale's cage, which was more properly an aquarium. He shared it with crabs and a seaweed forest. Whale held Svetz's eye.
You made us extinct. Now it's your turn.

“This is why we have to guard the Bestiary,” Gorky told them. “Every so often someone tries to break in. All that water! They must think it's fresh, of course, but there's enough fresh water in the Bestiary to … to…”

Svetz turned around when Willy trailed off. Willy was on the ground. He looked dead.

Svetz said, “These locks are beyond me. Miya—” Miya looked dead too, an angry and desperate ghost. They must all be seconds from death. “Willy? Sir! Do you know a code to get us into the cages?”

Willy stirred. “Cages. Why?”

“We need water!”

“Ra Chen told me some of the codes. Which cage?”

Svetz looked about him. The door to Whale's cage was up a stairway. He didn't want salt water anyway. Snake's head lifted from his coils … Horse came to his feet, horn poised for murder … Rabbit seemed to be hiding, but Owl, housed in the same cage, watched from an artificial tree branch. Dog—

“Dog.”

“Woof. State your name first.” Willy's head flopped back.

They picked up Willy, one under each shoulder. Willy didn't weigh much.

Dogs crowded around the door, waiting eagerly to greet them, panting, laughing. They were of various sizes, colors, and breed mixtures. Miya shied back a bit, but Svetz felt no fear. He said, “Hanville Svetz. Woof!”

The double door unlocked and they went in. Three dogs swarmed him, and one was Wrona. Another was sniffing Miya, unsure. They walked Willy inside and set him down.

The air smelled
wet.
You could taste it on your skin:
wet.
A big dish of water stood half full and open to the air.

They scooped water with their hands until their thirst was quieted. Then they dribbled water into Willy's mouth, into his hair, into the collar of his shirt. He smiled and opened his eyes.

Sitting with a dog under each arm, Svetz asked, “Willy, have you any idea what Wrona is doing in
here?
”

“Dogs need water.” Willy's voice was a bit slurred. “She has to be protected. What did you think, we'd send her home with you?”

Svetz scratched Wrona's ears. “We'll fix it,” he said. She looked up at him in perfect confidence. “Willy, we're dying. Right?”

“We're holding on,” Willy said. “The Antarctic ice isn't gone yet.”

“But we changed the past, Willy. The change shock is still coming down the line. I thought fifteen hundred years of intense natural selection would have shaped us for the dryness, but it isn't going to be like that. When the time line adjusts, the human race will have been extinct for hundreds of years.”

“Svetz … what did you
do?
”

“We brought the World Tree to Earth,” he said. “It must have sucked up most of the water on Mars already. We busted it loose from Mars. It left a sapling behind in orbit. The sapling must have finished draining Mars. Meanwhile the Hangtree came to Earth and drained us.”

“Wouldn't it have come anyway?”

Svetz was jolted. “Miya? Is he right?”

“I don't
know.
” Miya was starting to cry. “Of course that's what a Hangtree would want, but … it wasn't finished. Didn't have
all
the water. On our time line the Hangtree must have waited too long at Mars. Something happened.”

“What?”

“Oh … Phobos? I wondered if the Hangtree's trunk could oscillate in a harmonic rhythm with the inner moon's orbit. Every time the moon comes past, the trunk would be off to one side. Hanny, it would be easy to disturb such a system. Close approach from an asteroid, or a solar flare pushing on the mirror sails, or just chaos in action. Leaving Mars, it would have to be dodging
both
moons. But I'm guessing, Hanny. Another possibility—”

“Miya, Svetz,” Willy Gorky said, “the question is what to do
now.
”

“Chop down the tree,” Svetz said.

“That?”
Willy gestured southeast. Though the World Tree couldn't be seen from Dog's cage, it was there in their minds. To think of destroying such a thing was ludicrous. In Norse myth, Yggdrasil wasn't a part of the Earth. The world of mortals was a part of Yggdrasil.

“Earlier.” Stubbornly Svetz went on. “When it first linked up, the trailing root wasn't any thicker than my finger. If only we had a
time machine!
”

Miya said, “Hanny, if you chop through the link, the tree's still in geosynch orbit. It dropped
lots
of anchor groves. It'll just link up again.”

Svetz's mind began to run in little panicky circles.
When the Tree reached Earth it was already too late. We have to chop it before then, at Mars. Wait now, we
did
that. It came here. We can't get to Mars anyway, an X-cage won't reach that far, the
Minim
can't lift from Earth.…
Wrona's fur under his fingers, the perfect trust in her eyes, were anchors to reality; but whatever reality might be, he was losing it.

Willy said, “Chop off the top?”

Miya said, “Ah.”

“Right, then. Chop it with what?”

Svetz said, “Wait. Would that work?” His mental mapping caught up and he said, “Of course it would
work,
you just have to chop off
enough.
Yes!”

“Let's have a look in the Armory,” Miya suggested.

That got a quizzical look from Gorky, but Svetz felt he had his balance back. He said, “Of course all of this has to be done at a dead run. What's out there is not much different from current Mars. Too dry for humans.”

Wrona held off the other dogs somehow while they drank deeply and splashed their collars and shirts and hair. The dogs didn't much like intruders at their water dish.

Willy asked, “What about the Martians on the tree?”