Rainbow Mars (6 page)

“Like Yggdrasil! Like the world-tree from Norse legend!”

“But no tree could be strong enough!
Steel
wouldn't be strong enough—”

“No, Hanny, hold on. An orbital tower has to be strong, right? If you build it around Mars, you get high rotation
and
a lower mass, much lower, so it doesn't have to be
as
long or
as
strong. Picture it a hundred thousand klicks long, and the only thing strong enough is still carbon crystal fibers or fullerine tubules, and those are carbon too.

“I think you were right. We can't make such a thing, we don't have anything to make it
out
of, so why can't it be a tree? Life is carbon based. Trees are
good
at manipulating carbon. And if we had
seeds,
we would go to the planets for nothing more than electricity!”

Svetz, Miya, Zeera, and most of the techs slept on air cots in the Center while a composite team of Sky Domains and History Bureau wrote instructions for the probes on archaic Mars.

In the morning they were back in the small extension cage.

*   *   *

Gravity shifted. They floated toward each other, bumped skewed, and pulled themselves around. The clothing they stripped off kept floating back like intrusive ghosts. They made a game of batting garments away.

“Hanny! How many times do we have to do this before I'm a virgin again?”

Svetz laughed. “I've never gotten less hungry on any trip.”

And later he asked, “Are we going for a record this time?”

“Mmm. Duration? Number? Intensity?”

“Not unless I get some rest.”

“Someday I'm going to get you in a bed.”

Svetz didn't answer. Miya asked, “What's the matter?”

“I had this notion once. Miya, we're going back to before time travel was even a concept. Once it was fantasy, fairy-tale stuff. In the late Industrial Age, Thorne and Tipler and some other top mathematicians showed that time travel was
theoretically
possible and did some designs. The Institute for Temporal Research came out of those. What if everything we collect from before plus-thirty Atomic Era is fantasy?”

“Hard to picture Whale as a fantasy! He's too big,” Miya said. “Too scarred, too detailed. When you pulled him in, wasn't there a one-legged sailor still tangled in the lines and harpoons along his flank? That's gritty realism, that is!”

Svetz smiled. “Gila Monster would have
charred
me if I'd thought he was a fantasy. Horse tried to spear me like a wine cork.”

“So.”

“You're an adolescent's daydream,” he told Miya. She purred into his throat, and he said, “And here we are, but we've never made love after plus-thirty AE. Maybe you're
my
fantasy.”

“Am I? Great. Are you ticklish? Is
this
real? Is it?”

*   *   *

In the old days they had used the time machine to set a two-milligram test mass alongside itself. The experiment ate energy equivalent to the test mass times lightspeed squared. Bringing an X-cage to a spacetime it had already occupied would cause a surge in energy consumption. That was how it could return to its point of departure.

The small X-cage emerged just too late to watch itself vanish.

This mission would be cheap. They were only messengers, the messages already written.

To the Orbiter module: a burn to put it in a higher orbit.

“Excuse me?”

“It's in low Mars orbit now, Hanny. We don't want it hitting the tree. It's only luck that hasn't happened yet!” Miya kept working. “Of course the current Collector module won't be able to fly that high. We'll instruct the Orbiter to dive down and get it, and I hope somebody's writing
that
program.”

The Tanker was already fully fueled and awaiting the arrival of a loaded Collector. No message needed.

To the Pilgrims:
converge on the skyhook tree at twenty-seven degrees two minutes longitude, zero latitude. Pan up and down. Focus every instrument on the tree.

To the Collector:
follow the Pilgrims. Where they converge, find a high point and watch them. Defend against molesters.

“We've already lost four Pilgrims. We can afford that, but we can't lose the Collector. All right, Hanny. Jump us by a year and we'll collect what they get.”

Svetz dipped them into time, watched, tripped the interrupt. They'd jumped over two years. Miya sent the instructions. “Mars is close. Only about eighteen minutes this time,” she said.

“Miya, doesn't Mars have two moons? Why haven't they chewed up the tree?”

Miya chewed her underlip. She turned to the control board.

“Miya?”

“I'm looking! The top of the tree doesn't taper off; it ends in a knob. Deimos is further out than that, but Phobos … Phobos is
below
synchronous orbit, it has to be, it goes around more than twice a day! Orbit's a little skewed, but it crosses the equator. It
can't
just keep missing!”

“Doesn't sound like your space elevator has been in place very long at all.”

Miya said, “Yesss. Hanny, you have a knack for … ah, penetrating fantasies. It would have had to grow very fast, wouldn't it?”

“Or arrive already grown.”

*   *   *

Message bursts from archaic Mars were streaming in. Miya checked to see that they were recording, and then Svetz set them moving forward through time to the present.

11

Lugh's chain.
The Milky Way, chain by which Lugh raised men to heaven … Equated with Bifrost, Jacob's ladder, the stem of Jesse, Watling Street.

—Celtic mythology,
Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols,
by Gertrude Jobes

 

1108 AE.
It's a tree. In proportion it's as slender as an ash tree—no, more! But near the ground it bifurcates and spreads. Scores of near-vertical roots sink deep. The sixty-fingered hand covers the green breadth of a canal and a square klick of ochre desert on each side. Wreckage of a bridge rides high in the tangle of roots. Other, newer bridges in slender martian style stretch around and between other roots.

Wait now, that wrecked bridge was
lifted,
as if the tree's roots rose from the ground. How could a tree grow from the ground to orbit? Nothing could be
that
strong!

Paired silver lines rise along a vertical root and far up along the trunk. Look up: the tree rises out of sight. Silver lines continue as far as the eye can see.

The Secretary-General said, “This is hurting my eyes.”

Svetz's eyes tried to twist as he followed Pilgrim One's viewpoint. Odd perspective here—

“The trunk gets thicker as you go higher,” Gorky said in haste. “We were expecting that. Your normal tree is wider near the base. It wants compression strength, you see? It doesn't
hang.
This skyhook tree is tapered so that less weight is hanging below any given cross-section. That makes it stronger.”

It looked infinitely tall.

The Pilgrim probes were close, near the roots and among them. Pilgrim One's viewpoint zoomed up along the pale brown line of the tree, into a dark fringe that began almost at the edge of sight, scores of klicks high. A ragged collar of foliage, already above the atmosphere, continued up the trunk as a vertical fringe, like the mane on Horse. Hard to see anything at all in there. Not dark green. Black!

The SecGen asked, “You wanted seeds?”

The Heads took it as an invitation. “If there are seeds, I'd expect them to fall into the canal,” Ra Chen speculated.

“From that high up, they'd come down like little meteors,” Gorky said, “shielded against reentry. Punch their way through the weed surface into the canal. We can't go there, Ra Chen.”

“We could.”

“There's a
town
built up where the canals intersect. The skyhook tree is
in
it. You're not thinking of a full-scale invasion of Mars, are you?”

“No, just send Pilgrims to search underwater.”

“Oh. Good. Give me some time to study these records. I want to know if there are seeds higher up the tree. I'd like to search the black fringe.”

“You didn't design the Collector to climb trees, did you, Willy?”

Miya leaned forward in the near dark, jaw set, her nails sinking into Svetz's shoulder. He asked, softly, “What?”

She whispered, “They'll have to use cosmonauts!”

*   *   *

Willy Gorky himself briefed them the next day.

“Ra Chen and I can't work out how to tell a computer program what a skyhook seed looks like. We don't know ourselves. Miya, Svetz, you'll send instructions as usual, then pick up return signals from the Mars Pilgrims. We'll send six Pilgrims underwater. They should be safe from the locals, at any rate.”

Ra Chen said, “We'll mount a viewer in the small X-cage so you can scan whatever they find. We should have done that a year ago! Svetz, you've seen every kind of tree, you must have seen every kind of seed.” He overrode Svetz's attempt to interrupt. “Our best hope is that you'll know a seed when you see it. Then tell the Collector module to go get it.”

12

Eleven hundred years of development had shaped the Rovers. Early versions had explored Mars and the Moon. They had become smaller, lighter, cheaper, more clever. Later models roved the surfaces of every interesting body in the solar system. Some climbed like spiders. Some rolled as spheres with unbalanced weights in them. On worlds with no surface at all, Rovers floated or sank.

On archaic Mars, six Rovers (Pilgrim model) explored beneath the black waters of a canal. They found soft mud, and organic substances subsiding into softness, and things that tried to eat them. They had been told little. They examined discreet solid objects and discarded things that were too large or too small. They sought shapes that repeated as seeds would. When the command came, they crawled out of the muck to beam their findings to the Orbiter for relay to a point above the Earth.

Miya and Svetz ran through the murky footage. Many hours later Miya said, “This is boring.”

Svetz stopped the display and lifted tired eyes. He said, “Best duty I've ever had.”

“Really?”

“I've been chewed. I've been scorched. I've been almost eaten, almost fried, almost perforated, over and over. I go alone, because there has to be room for whatever I bring back. There's never been anyone to guard me or rescue me, or talk to, or love.” There, he'd said it. “Every other trip, I've been hunting something with teeth. I
hate
 … used to hate animals. Wrona seems to have talked me out of that. I am having a wonderful time.”

Miya sighed and went back to work

The X-cage had come to meet itself. Now it hovered above the same fat blue-and-white crescent they'd left behind two trips running. Only the pattern of stars had shifted. The cage was hovering, after all; it wasn't in an orbit.

Svetz picked out an orange spark among the stars of Taurus near the western horizon. That was a
world.
He couldn't see it as more than a point.

If the Pilgrims couldn't find seeds, someone would have to go to Mars and look.

Miya pointed into the projection from Pilgrim One. “Look, Hanny, we keep seeing this shape. It's pottery, isn't it?”

Sunlight rippled across it: it was near the surface of the canal. “Vase. You can see the pattern. This symbol, it's that ten-legged toothy thing that tried to chew up Pilgrim Four.”

“Not quite the same. A bigger relative. Hanny, I'm tired.” Miya curled up in the curve of the floor.

Svetz called the Center. Hillary Weng-Fa answered. She went to wake Ra Chen.

“No seeds,” Svetz said.

“How sure are you?”

“We get pottery, we get eggs. Bones look like each other, so the Pilgrims show us a lot of those. Once we got a mob of Reds in battle gear. They all looked alike. They were even walking in some kind of regular array. Pilgrim Six went right up to examine them. We've lost Pilgrim Six.”

“Better tell Willy.”

No telling how much time had passed in the present. Here, only an instant passed while the phone went dead, then live. He heard, “Miya?”

“Sleeping, Willy.”

“Chairman Ra Chen tells me you can't find anything like a seed.”

“We've typed fifteen styles of pottery. We find broken furniture. Not much garbage. Maybe there's a famine. We
did
find a heap of spiky seeds, fist-sized, but we searched through the rotten fruit around it, which wasn't pleasant, Willy, and it had more of the same seeds in it. There are skeletons of at least three biped species. Most of them look human. Some were wearing armor. The big four-armed ones grow their own. It's not as if they have wars, more like they fight in the streets every night. We've found big eggs. They're not seeds, they're eggs, and in fact they're humanoids' eggs, red and pale and black, all a little different. Mars's answer to population control. Willy, we're both exhausted.”

“Get some sleep. Call me when you wake up. We're sending you to Mars.”

“Willy—”

“We can refit a Moon Minim spacecraft and get it into the large X-cage. If it doesn't fit, we'll fit
something.
We'll brief Zeera. I don't see any way to get seeds off that tree except to go up it.”

“Wait wait wait! I'm not a cosmonaut!”

Pause. “A chance to see Mars when it was alive? At United Nations expense?”

“Willy, we spent fifteen hours searching for your seeds, and six Pilgrims spent a year gathering the data. If there were seeds, they'd have fallen. If they'd fallen, we'd have found them. This tree is sterile, and aside from all that, I, Hanville Svetz, am not a cosmonaut!”