Rainbow Mars (25 page)

“Nothing about Martians?”

“Martians?”

“Tree dwellers?”

“Legends. Fire giants, frost giants. If they were real, they've been extinct since … oh, before serious telescopes. Those were
Martians?
”

Willy Gorky looked at Ra Chen before he spoke. “I'd like to rescue some Martians. Did you have any contact with them?”

“Mostly hostile.” Svetz saw body language he half understood. He asked, “Tell me about merging History Bureau and Bureau of the Sky Domains.”

Willy said, briskly and without rancor, “Right, it's all History now. Victor Four likes strange animals, just like his brother. He's financed a Heavy Lift Extension Cage.”

“We fulfilled our mission,” Svetz said a bit belligerently. “We went to Mars for the seeds to grow
that,
” and he gestured southeast. Far around the curve of the world, the Hangtree still owned the sky. “We didn't just grow seeds, we brought back the tree itself. With that we can own the sky!”

Willy Gorky said, “Not under Victor Four, I think.
Mars?
What's it like?”

Svetz swept up their plastic cups and went to the dispenser for refills. He came back cradling five cups, and set them down without spilling. He'd bought himself a few seconds to think.

The dispenser had only two settings: water and carbonated water. That seemed important.

He said, “Willy, we had a Martian too, but she's gone back up the tree—”

Bong.

Miya demanded, “What the futz was
that?
” But Svetz and Zeera were running toward the Guide Pit, and the Heads were just behind them.

“Talker,” Svetz called back.

“But we can
see
all three extension cages!” Ra Chen shoved into the Guide Pit. He tapped the virtual display. “Head! Talk to me.”

An inhuman voice spoke with the sound of a sustained belch.

“Translator!” Willy Gorky demanded.

Zeera beat them to the draw. “Let me
set
it, sir.
This
is Portuguese.
That's
Martian.”

Ra Chen made way for Gorky. “Talk to me,” Gorky said.

Syllables burbled. The UN translator said, “Such is our intent. Is Miya within sound of my voice, or Svetz, or Zeera?”

Miya pushed past. “Miya, here and now, 1109 AE. Thaxir?”

“Yes.”

A tech was trying to fine-tune the talker, but Gorky was tending to that himself. Softly he asked, “Zeera, could this be
your
talker? The setting's changed. How badly—”

“It was
ruined!
”

Miya had been talking rapidly with the voice at the other end of time. She said over her shoulder, “Thaxir says—tell them yourself, Thaxir.”

“I took the ruin of your talker. We studied that until we could build one ourselves. What you said of probabilities made sense to us, Miya. The love of adventure may take some of us to future Earth instead of the stars. What must we do?”

Ra Chen asked, “How many want to come?”

“Thaxir—?”

“We have travelers from all of the five races.” The martian voice gave numbers. Four green giants, fourteen red humanoids, twenty Softfingers, three of the great crabs and six of their humanoid symbiotes. Of the Pious Ones, only the Smiths had settled on the tree; eleven would try Earth. “If you can give us low gravity, I will come too. I am too old to reach the stars, even if the tree would go, and I laid my last egg long since.”

“Sir, I have the new setting,” Hillary Weng-Fa said.

Gorky demanded, “We can call back? And get thence with the small X-cage?”

“Yes. They're calling from plus-eleven AE—”

“Miya, tell her we'll call back,” Ra Chen said.

“Thaxir, we're switching off now, but we'll switch on again before you can draw breath. I know how strange that sounds, but it's true.” Miya switched off. “They want rescue!”

“Svetz—”

Svetz had been adding it up. “One load in the large X-cage, but they'll be crowded. Setting up a cage in the Viv— … Bestiary is no problem. Whale's got all the room he needs. That many Martians will too. We can set shelves at different levels, and give them material to make houses—”

“The mission,” Ra Chen said gently, “was to retrieve a
squirrel.
”

Willy Gorky asked, “Just what kind of promise did you make, Miya?”

“Rescue as many as want to go. That was our mission, Willy! You wanted a Beanstalk, but Waldemar the Eleventh—”

“Miya,” Willy said gently.

Walls have ears. Victor the Fourth was the Secretary-General, the
only
Secretary-General. “—wanted Martians,” Miya said anyway.

“Willy,” said Ra Chen, “we never really get used to the way time changes things around—”

“Martians,” Willy Gorky said. “Ra Chen, does it strike you that Martians on the World Tree would know a lot about the squirrel? They've
lived
with it. If we can get the Martians first, we'll have their help in retrieving the squirrel.”

“
Two
trips for the large extension cage. Twice the cost.”

“Right. Absolutely. What settings are you using for his cage?”

“I—”

“Batatosk. What does he eat? Nuts the size of this dome? No, that can't be it, because if one of those ever fell, anytime in human history, we'd have records. So we don't know what to feed him. Don't know how much room he actually needs. It might be thousands of klicks. He might want a vertical treadmill with variable gravity, but I'm guessing there. If we take time to study him to see what he needs in the way of a cage environment, he'll probably die.” Willy Gorky glared into Ra Chen's eyes at close range. “If only we had somebody to
ask!
”

“Point
taken,
Willy.”

“There's lots of Martians. We can house
them.
We'll get readings for archaic Mars right out of the
Minim.
But we only get one shot at Batatosk. If
he
dies—”

“Yes.”

Not liking it, Svetz asked, “Wouldn't we be giving the squirrel's cage to the Martians?”

Ra Chen brushed it off. “We built
six
of the big cages, when Waldemar Ten was SecGen and we had the funding. Whale in one, Roc in another—”

“
Roc
survived?”

“Used to be Ostrich? Anyway, Batatosk would have gone in one. If we ever get the Heavy Lift X-cage running we'll go after the Midgard Serpent, and if we can ever reach back far enough we can house a Brontosaur and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Separately. No, housing's not a problem, and … yes, drown it, we'll get the Martians. Get 'em back for me, Miya.”

37

UN officials were beaming the
Minim
's records from Root Town to the Institute for Temporal Research in Angels City. It was a slow process.

“If you're near the tree, you can relay from the mirror sails, but we're not close enough for that. There are only a few orbital windows such that a relay satellite won't crash into the tree,” Willy Gorky said. “You'd think geosynchronous orbit would be safe, but the mass of the tree only allows you two stable points, Lagrange Four and Five, just like the Moon. You can do twelve-hour pole-to-pole orbits. Not near the tree, of course.”

“That must take lots of delta-V,” Svetz said, and sipped his water. He'd barely heard the word, but he knew it was a measure of fuel consumption. Low Earth equatorial orbits were the easiest to reach.

“You're drowning right. You need so much delta-V for either set of orbits that you might as well go to the Moon for anything but weather satellites and signal relays. All these stations are too high. You lose signal definition.” Willy's fist clenched on his glass. “Svetz?
You
could put anything you wanted in low Earth orbit without smashing into the World Tree. Right?”

“We could, right.”

“Drown me! Even men?”

“Right.”

“When?”

“First man went into orbit in plus sixteen AE.”

“
Drown
me!
We
had to go straight to the Moon.”

“Is that bad?”

“In the reign of Chaka Third, between plus one eighty and two hundred AE, we put a dozen men on the Moon, brought 'em back, and never went again for thirty years! The world had already used up too many resources. Svetz, without the tree we could have had a Moon colony by fifty AE! Our space program is a pitiable thing.”

“You said that.”

Willy looked up. “To you?”

“Wait.” Svetz thought. “That was then. That was the other you, when the first man stepped on the Moon in 24 AE.
That
Willy wanted a Beanstalk!”

Aghast, Willy asked, “Why?”

Pitiable, Svetz thought. “Our idea,” he said, “was to run elevators up the tree, or a linear accelerator. Get to orbit and beyond for whatever the electricity costs. Drop asteroid mining ships from the upper end.” He drank the last few drops of water. Water was expensive; he hadn't noticed yesterday. “Nobody thought we'd have to fight seven kinds of Martians to do it.”

“Vic Four wouldn't support it anyway.”

“Willy, I'm starting to think that nobody really tries to get the stars for his grandchildren. Anyone who wants the stars must want them
now.
For eleven and a half centuries—”

“Sir.” A tech was trying to get Willy Gorky's attention. Willy turned as if glad to escape.

“Sir. We have numbers for archaic Mars, air comp, temp, gravity and so forth—”

“We need to rework the large X-cage and furnish a cage in the Bestiary. Six hours, Svetz. Entertain yourself.”

*   *   *

The dole yeast dispenser was empty.

Svetz brought Miya a cup of water. Miya had been talking to Martians for hours.

“The first invasion from Mars was a Softfinger fleet,” she told him, “in minus fifty AE. We saw one of their walkers. Almost nobody came back. The Martians on the tree thought it was some disease of Earth that killed them all. We think it was gravity.

“Thaxir says the rebuilt talker has been ready for centuries. Nobody wanted to use it. All these centuries, the peoples of the tree must have thought they could invade Earth any time the tree failed them.

“When the first few atomic bombs went off in Year Zero, the Softfingers tried some reconnaissance missions. They were sure we'd use the bomb on the tree if they didn't hit us first. They wanted to know where the bombs were. Most of their wok ships never even set down, but when they got home, the pilots were dying. Earth's gravity breaks their internal membranes. I've been trying to tell Thaxir how antigravity in the Zoo works—”

“Make room.” Svetz slid into place and said, “Svetz at 1109 AE calling Thaxir. Are you thence?”

“I am hence, Svetz.”

“The antigravity the Sky Domains uses is expensive. We don't use that in the Zoo—which they seem to call the Bestiary now, Miya. Thaxir, we use a magnetic field that acts on the magnetic moment of hydrogen. We can float organic material. I saw them float a half-million-ton bubble of seawater into Whale's cage, then move Whale in without hurting him. Believe me, putting martian gravity in a Mars environment cage is the easy part.”

“I will convey. Svetz, Miya tells me that there are none of us on the tree in your future.”

“Our past. Your future. They tell me the same. They tell me some tremendous animal—”

“Yes, Miya spoke of that. A squirrel is a beast that runs up and down trees? And your first telescopes saw something large running up and down the tree? Svetz, I have consulted with our storytellers. Long ago, red Martians invaded Crab territory during a border dispute. We think your Ole Romer saw their heavy war lift while they were ferrying troops and armaments.”

The Secretary-General wasn't going to like that, Svetz thought. He said, “Get yourselves into place. When you're ready to be picked up, and not before, smash the talker. That brings us. We can't hold the large X-cage in the past for very long at all.”

“Yes, Miya told me. Svetz, I need rest. I don't have your human stamina.” And the ready light went out.

Miya looked exhausted, gaunt and drooping. Svetz told her, “
You
need sleep.”

“And something to eat, and a bath. We both … all need baths, and nobody's offered us one.”

“Let's check it out. Find Zeera too?”

“Good.”

“Miya, it's present time. Do I still look good to you?”

She smiled, took his hands and squeezed hard. “You look like me, I bet. Tired. Half starved. Let's get something to eat and then bathe each other.”

*   *   *

The large X-cage loomed over the middle of the dome. An extension arm behind it ran into the same metal housing from which a smaller arm led to the small X-cage, to the right of the Guide Pit.

Strangers were at work in the Pit, writing in the specs that had come from the
Minim.
More strangers were gluing a bin the size of a bungalow to the upper curve of the X-cage. Wilt Miller was supervising. He hailed them.

Svetz was relieved. Most techs were total strangers who had known him for years. That was disconcerting. Wilt was an exception, and easy to spot: skin that was always sunburn red, and flame-red hair.

Wilt gestured at a pile of hardware two men high. “Look it over. What part of this is garbage? What are you going to need for this mission?”

They discussed it.

Pressure suits, of course. They'd fill the X-cage with a Mars-style atmosphere and wear pressure suits themselves. No telling if refugees would bring enough oxygen. They'd want Gorky's special filter helmets for breathing Mars atmosphere.