Rainbow Mars (19 page)

“
All
right, Hanny. You and Miya do that. I'll phone home.”

29

The spinning Earth jarred to a stop. Svetz went out first into a forest of mirrors. Yes, it was fun to squeeze in next to Miya, but they'd be too confined to fight!

He worked fast. Reality rippled bewilderingly, showing him an army of brilliant green bulb-headed lizards. Now came a forest of companions in a yellow pattern, and Miya was beside him, helping. Now came larger distorted shapes in silver-brown—

Svetz whirled and lashed out. He couldn't remember snatching out the heavy blaster. Blaster handle and fist whacked hard into protruding glass goggles in a bronze mask as big as his whole chest. Glass shattered and sprayed.

A meter of sharp silver lashed out. Svetz ducked under the backhand stroke as a long-barreled weapon spat fire past him. Then both weapons were wheeling through space while the intruder covered its face with both arms, trying to hold in the air. While Svetz gaped, a third appendage reached far out and closed like a vise around his leg.

If he'd seen the intruder first, he'd have frozen in terror. It was four meters long. It had six limbs like an insect, but no thorax or tail. And Miya was on its back, her fingers working to pull its upper arms loose.

Fog puffed out. The intruder went limp.

Svetz wriggled out of the loosening grip on his knee. He barked, “Zeera, did you cover all that? Do you see more of them?”

“Just the one, but
futz!
”

“I want to bring it in. Don't vent the air,
pump
it.” A live prisoner would be nice … vacuum doesn't kill instantly … but a corpse would do, and they'd
want
that air.

Miya disengaged herself from the monster and pulled it around to look at it. She couldn't have seen much inside the hard-shelled suit. She wrestled the helmet off. “Come see these eyes,” she said.

Svetz shuddered.

Had he disappointed her? She said, “I used to envy you. The weird, wild creatures you've seen and touched. Come on, Hanny. Look at the way the eyes are placed, so it can see to both sides at once. It could almost be an herbivore—”

He let her pull him close.

The skin was yellow-green. The eyes were closed under lids that might have been cut from tennis balls. They were too far apart, vulnerable-looking at the edges of a squarish head. The Martian would see forward too. Hands opened and closed reflexively at Miya's touch. The middle pair were thick and clumsy, with a callused heel.

The
Minim
's great cargo door opened to the sky in a trace of icy fog. Svetz and Miya pulled the creature inside.

“Some erg counter has me on
hold,
” Zeera said. “Shall I close up and pressurize?”

“Right,” said Miya.

They pulled a cargo net over the alien. The
Minim
had just become a lot smaller. Zeera said, “I wish we could bag that. When it starts to rot—”

Miya said, “We can look it over first.”

Svetz didn't want to be involved in
that.
“I'll finish up out there. I want us loose,” he told Miya. “No, wait.” He fished his blaster out and put it back on the wall. “If we'd fired these deathtraps in that house of mirrors, we'd be nothing but ash!”

“Oh, futz! But, Hanny, what if there are more?”

“It's a risk.”

*   *   *

Svetz took his time, methodically pulling tethers loose and coiling them and stowing them under hatches on the hull.

Any creature this big had to be something of a loner, just to find enough to eat! If a squad of green giants had found the
Minim,
they would hardly let Svetz smash their man's visor and kidnap him, would they? They couldn't be
that
different.

If these lines got tangled, the
Minim
couldn't reenter.

But, methodically pulling cables loose and stowing them, he kept spinning around to look for intruders.

Miya's radio voice said, “It's not breathing. How are you doing?”

“Near finished.”

“I've got its suit off. There's flexible tubing down the insides of the suit. It's got a backpack too.”

The
Minim
was free.

“There aren't any fingernails or toenails. Its ancestors may have had an exoskeleton, but there are only a few plates left, like it was born wearing armor. The tusks are bone, and there are bones and joints in the limbs … no ribs … still, a well-developed endoskeleton. That middle pair is legs and arms both. I can almost see how the shoulders rotate. Mph?”

“What?”

“Oh,
now
I see. Hanny, you're going to love this.”

“I'm coming in.”

Miya's arms were around the green giant, compressing its torso, releasing. “It still isn't breathing.”

Too much to hope for, wasn't it, that an alien captive would be built like Earth's life-forms? Still—“Insects don't have lungs. Check for openings along its sides.”

“That's what I
meant,
but spiracles still have to be pumped!”

Zeera shouted, “Futz it, will you both strap in? I might have to launch—”

The cheery voice of Willy Gorky barked, “Zeera! How's it going?”

Zeera's arms waved frantically, summoning Miya and Svetz to their seats. “That's a long story, Willy, but we've got everything you wanted.”

The voice from the other end of time said, “Great!”

They took turns talking. “We saw at least five kinds of tool user. I'm pretty sure they weren't all intelligent.”

“Miya's collected some seeds—”

“—big, heavy golden spheroids with a texture like foamed ceramic for a reentry shell. But those only make the anchor trees, Willy—”

“—we think.”

Descriptions of the last leg of the flight had to come from the women, while Svetz's eyes peered between the mirror blossoms, up and down the trunk.

“The tree still has some drift to it,” Miya said. “It's been dropping seeds. It prefers targets on the equator—”

“Strips of seeds fifty klicks long, generally crossing a shoreline.”

“You'll remember that the grove on Mars was partly on a canal.”

“Boss, we don't exactly know what to do
now.
The tree won't bud a sapling until it's ready to move on. If it locks to Earth and we leave it in place, will it still be here in present time?”

That was a serious question. Ra Chen and Gorky held rapid discussion with techs and time travelers, irritatingly half audible. Willy Gorky said, “We certainly want to watch the tree link up.”

“That could take years,” Svetz said.

“Not for us.”

“Willy!”

There was whispering at the other end of time. Then Willy Gorky said, “You've got the FFD, Zeera. Use it. And the Secretary-General wants to see some Martians. Have they made any attempt to contact you?”

“Yes and no—”

“We had a prisoner, sir, but we th—”

“It moved,” Svetz said.

Miya loosed herself and went to look.

Without the pressure suit it still looked armored. Dark green back, pale yellow face and belly. Jeweled ornaments were riveted to exoskeletal plates, and holsters for tools including tube weapons and knives. Nasty little spines of polished metal jutted from its mid-limb wrists. There were rows of holes along its flanks.

Thick eyelids suddenly rolled open. Bulging eyes wobbled independently as they scanned the
Minim,
making Svetz's own eyes hurt, then both centered on Miya.

The hull rattled. Svetz turned to see shapes like spindly frogs bounding among the mirrors. Tubes in their hands spat fire. He saw three six-limbed giants wrestling a much bigger tube into place. It poked out through the silver petals, looking straight at him, and he yelled, “Launch! Launch now!” Turned to scream, “Miya—”

Tether yourself!
died on his lips. Miya had been distracted. Six limbs wrapped themselves around her and pulled her close. Her fists and heels pounded against the creature's shell.

“Launching
now,
” Zeera said.

The intruder sighed and sagged limp under nearly Earth's gravity of thrust. Miya rolled clear.

Dead aft, the big tube was looking right at the
Minim.

“We have a live prisoner.” Zeera spoke crisply above the rocket's muted scream.

“Great!” said Willy Gorky. “But you launched? To Earth?
Of course
to Earth, sorry, I'm still catching up, but Zeera, we want those Martians! The SecGen—”

“They were firing on us!”

The burn ended. The big tube spat orange flame. Attitude jets puffed as the
Minim
slewed sideways: automatics avoiding a meteor. Something massive
tacked
the hull anyway.

The mid-trunk dwindled. It was still huge, a world in itself. Was it more slender than it had been at Mars? Earth's Hangtree must be longer because geosynchronous orbit was higher.
Of course
it must have grown longer year after year, and more slender too, and
that
was why the rails had ripped!

Miya still wasn't in her command chair. Svetz looked back. Miya was moored to the wall by sleeping tethers, just beyond the monster's reach. She was talking, the monster was talking, and the translator was talking too.

Svetz always hated learning a new language.

He said, “Willy, the only Martians
I
talked to did all their talking after I was a helpless prisoner. Maybe we've done exactly the right thing.”

From the other end of time Gorky said, “Ah … maybe. Where are you coming down?”

Zeera said, “South America, northern edge of what became Brazil, right on the equator and just at the shoreline. It's where the anchor trees seem to be having the most success.”

“Good luck.”

“Wait! Sir, how do you expect to get us back?”

Willy Gorky said, “We'll send the small X-cage for you. Call us when you get down and give us decent coordinates.”

“How?” Zeera cried. The inertial calendars on the X-cages weren't that accurate, the
Minim
didn't have one, and Willy Gorky didn't see the problem at all.

Ra Chen broke in. “You gave us your location in space. Brazil, equator, shoreline. Get there on foot if you have to, but get us a
date.
Ask a local.”

Gorky: “Would a primitive have a dating system?”

Ra Chen: “Mayans and Incas did, but … hmm … we couldn't read them. Zeera, what you really want is a Spanish invader. Look for metal armor. Get Christian dates.”

“We'll try that.”

30

On the night side of Earth was no trace of city light. The planet was
black.
Nearly uninhabited. Population … a few millions? And now they must search among savage locals for a savage Spaniard halfway round the world from Spain. For a Spanish
conquistador,
as likely as any Martian to kill a stranger on sight.

But
that
problem might never arise. “Zeera, these motors wouldn't even
lift
us. They weren't built to land on Earth.”

“Yes, Svetz, they were. Minims launch from Earth and refuel in orbit. This one was
re
built for Mars, heavier, with an expanded cabin, but it's pretty much the same. Most of the volume is tanks. We fall motors-down. What's under us is a fuel tank that's supposed to collapse if we hit too hard. It takes the shock. We don't.”

“You've been thinking about this too.”

“Oh, yes. And about that impact weapon that might have torn up our reentry shielding.”

From aft Miya called, “I've been telling Thaxir about Mars. About what's going to happen. She wants to talk to us.”

Thaxir?
She? Us?

*   *   *

“I was born on the tree,” the green giant said. “I know only what my mother told me of those days when the tree broke loose. We were royalty, and I am a princess in Memnonia. My age is near thirteen, I think. We have clocks to keep the time our ancestors kept by sun and dark.”

Really, Thaxir's speech was as interesting as what the translator was saying. Her mouth wasn't insectile, but the mouth and lips of a mammal, though tusks as long as Svetz's forearm would make her speech mushy even if it were shaped by lungs.

But Thaxir breathed through spiracles. Svetz saw what Miya was trying to tell him: tubes ran down the inside of her pressure suit to feed two rows of holes along her sides. She spoke in a prolonged belch, and swallowed air to keep it going.

The translator said, “Our nature is conquest, but the tree is too fragile for war. The Allied Peoples have not made war in thirty years. We live with the Hangtree and the Hangtree is our life. I have tried to learn why we should want to leave. Miya cannot tell me.”

“I told her about Mars,” Miya said to Svetz.

“The world was to dry and die. My parents knew the prophecy,” said Thaxir. “When the Hangtree broke loose, they could have gone home to their children and grandchildren. They chose the tree.”

“To their.…?”

Miya told Svetz, “They live a long time.”

Her parents already had grandchildren forty years ago, Mars time: seventy-five Earth years. “And you're under thirteen?” Twenty-four and a half in Earth years, among beings who might reach a thousand.

“Futz, Miya, we've kidnapped a little girl.”

“You have made me slave, and I remain slave,” Thaxir said with composure, “until my warriors can rescue me. But my heart is with the tree.”

“The tree's intent may not be the same as yours,” Miya told the Martian. “The Hangtree crosses between stars. It only stops at worlds to take nourishment, to make itself strong for the crossing.”