Rainbow Mars (11 page)

Lord Pfee asked, “Weapons?”

“I don't know what to look for. The ships all have little holes in front. The big ship has two, and there are tubes on deck that look like they can turn.”

Lord Pfee nodded. He barked rapid orders to Matth. Matth left.

Svetz asked, “Tell me how the Hangtree came.”

Lord Pfee peered at him suspiciously. “If I take this glass thing off you, you die?”

“Yes.” It might take an hour, but he'd be unconscious, unable to save himself.

“What you threw away, wasn't it to keep a secret from us?”

“I thought it might explode and kill me. Weren't you told?”

“Yes. What of this?” The rocket pack. “For flight on the tree?”

“Yes.” Svetz wobbled across deck to where they'd mounted it. He showed Lord Pfee how to work the rockets.

“And this?”

“Needle gun. These needle crystals dissolve in blood. It puts animals to sleep. Enemies too, but only from close.”

“Not a useful thing.”

“Tell me how the Hangtree came.”

“I do have a ship to fight, Svetz. Still … come.” Lord Pfee led him up a ladder to a railed balcony. “I can command from here. You can use your far-vision to keep me informed. What is your interest in the Hangtree?”

“We hope to lift vessels into the sky, to the other planets.”

“Yes, the Allied Peoples thought so too.…”

20

Lord Feshk ruled a city of many thousands where two canals crossed. “I was his fourth son out of fourteen,” Lord Pfee said. “Few of us are left.”

A city of a hundred thousand or more, Svetz decided as he listened, and hundreds of klicks of canals bordered by farming land. Lord Pfee wasn't counting slaves, children, women, elderly, or maimed: only men who could fight.

When Lord Pfee was three, peculiar black-headed plants were found growing around the edge of a canal.

Ten years later they were a mighty grove that partly blocked the canal. They threatened a bridge of great age and beauty. Lord Feshk ordered them cut down.

Beneath woody silver-brown bark, they were stronger than any metal made on Mars. Uprooting them would have involved digging out a canal. Lord Feshk didn't order that. He thought he had something valuable.

He built a fortress twenty manheights above the ground with the alien grove as his pillars.

When Lord Pfee was seven, a black string floated down from the sky. Children watched it wavering through the grove, blown by winds but always returning. “We chased it for days. I was still young enough to enjoy climbing.” Ultimately it got tangled in the black trees, and there it clung.

No man could see how high it led. Over years, the trees bowed inward, crumpling Lord Feshk's fortress, until the tops of every tree in the clump had grown into a single knot around the dangling string. That grew to a thick silver-gray vine. Children were told not to pull on it. They did that anyway, and it held their weight.

A century passed.

“Lord Pfee, do you mean a hundred martian years?”

“Yes. I was married and a landholder and had four girls by then.” And what had been a black string hanging from the sky grew thick and thicker, until it and the anchor grove merged into one vast trunk. The black tufts became a ragged black collar that rose to the edge of space with the growing of the anchor grove. More black foliage ran up the Hangtree's silver-brown flank.

Savants came from all over Mars to study the Hangtree. Lord Feshk didn't like them. He taxed those who came, and restricted their movements, until the races of Mars allied and attacked his city.

“We were killed or scattered, Lord Feshk's children. My sisters married. They're safe, and they know my secret. I and my few remaining brothers and our children rule homes buried in a desert.”

“But we found you on the tree. Did you join this Allied Peoples?”

Lord Pfee spoke with the reluctance of a criminal confessing. “We scavenged a city abandoned when its water source dried up. We found wealth to build a few airships and modify them for vacuum. We unburied their gate, marked in ancient runes whose meaning was madness. Green Cross, on a featureless desert! We scavenged the name too, and joined the Allied Peoples as Green Cross.

“But I wear Lord Feshk's face.” Lord Pfee tapped his silver mask, now tilted back on his head. “We all wear our ancestors' faces. We have not forgotten who killed our father. When word came that creatures had crossed from another world, we sensed opportunity—”

A man shouted. Lord Pfee left him abruptly.

There was a mast. Svetz zoomed on its peak to find an observer tending a mounted tube. Lord Pfee was bellowing thinly, gesturing widely at men tending a similar tube on a rigid mounting. They were playing with objects (
zoom
) feeding small pointed cylinders into a feed belt for the tube.

Lord Pfee returned and spoke as if they had never been interrupted. “Allied Peoples comprises five tool-building species including the insect giants, the Tunnel Crabs and their mindless symbiote carriers, the Smiths and the Soft-fingers and ourselves. Most of Mars accepts the prophecy that the world will dry and die. The High Folk counsel us to accept our fate. But the Allied Peoples would change that future. Some factions babble of settling Earth. Svetz, would you give them help or war?”

Svetz said, “It wouldn't matter. You couldn't stand or walk or fight under the pull of the Earth.”

“I've heard that too. And some babble of siphoning water from a large ice-shelled moon of”—the translator hiccuped—“Saturn. When I was a child we had no notion that that world had moons or rings!”

Miya broke in. “Europa is lighter than Mars. It's water under an ice shell. Hanny, you could position a tether with its center of mass in the second Lagrange point, with Europa between it and Jupiter. Europa's tide-locked, so you'd still have an orbital tower.”

Svetz relayed most of that. “And people of your world could move around there too.”

“Their plan is not mad?”

“No. I'm worried about your sky ships, though. How do you lift?”

“We use a gas that pulls up when irradiated with the sixth kind of light. Inert, the gas is still lighter than air.”

“That is weird,” Svetz said. “Bizarre! But if it works by lifting away from the mass of a planet, then you can't get to Europa. Between the worlds you'd be adrift.”

“The Softfingers use something else, something secret.”

“Rockets?”

“Do you mean like the recoil of a gun? Is that what you use? Can you teach us?”

Svetz said, “I can do that. Lord Pfee, is that one of the High Folk?” Indicating the skeletal giant on the mast.

“Yes. Ignore him. He is with
Skyrunner
but not of it, with the Allied Peoples but not of it. Man, when we fought to reach you on the Hangtree, we hoped for more from you than a weapon that puts animals to sleep if they're close enough! What would your people pay for your life?”

“Ransom?” He heard the gap: the translator didn't have that martian word.

Pfee spoke, and “Ransom,” the translator agreed. “Weapons or wealth or ideas, power to take back Hangtree City! We must command the Hangtree itself, I suppose, to hold the city. We might rule in tandem, my people and your men of Earth. But have you anything to offer?”

“Rockets, eventually, but maybe I can buy my way free now.” It might be worth his life. “Lord Pfee, give me some object you don't need anymore.”

Lord Pfee spoke to a warrior.

The enemy ships—“They're rising,” Svetz said.

Lord Pfee laughed. “Why, so they are!” And he went below deck.

What happened then looked like group madness. Twelve men boiled out from below deck, all wearing pressure suits like golden armor. They replaced men at various stations. Those disappeared below. The ship surged upward.

Smoke and fire puffed from the nose of one of the enemy ships. Railing along the leftward side of
Skyrunner
splintered. Then the other ships fired too. The big tubes made a guttural drumbeat
boom.
Some of the crew fired devices that were more like needle guns; Svetz heard their higher-pitched
snap,
and a flurry of
snaps
from oncoming ships. It all sounded distant, harmless. Near vacuum was eating the sound.

But impact weapons chewed the rails and the masts. The crewman who was carrying Svetz's needle gun sprayed red mist and screamed a
diminuendo
behind the calm of his silver mask.

The skeletal alien clung to a mast and watched.

Lord Pfee emerged with his mask closed. He shouted through it. “They're trying to get above
Skyrunner.
Fools! We can rise higher than they. We're stripped to leave the air entirely!” He handed Svetz a double handful of vertebrae as big as a man's. “A
terwheeel
was our dinner two days back. Will these do?”

Svetz ignored Lord Pfee's evident amusement. “Yes. You should not see what I do next.”

“It nibbles
my
mind that I should not leave you alone, Svetz!”

Svetz shrugged. “You'll have to fight your ship. Set me a guard you can trust with wealth.”

“I do not have even one man to spare,” Lord Pfee decided. He closed his silver mask and began moving about the sky ship, giving his commands in sign language. He stopped briefly beside the High Folk observer.

Svetz felt his suit contracting in near vacuum.

As for the following ships, two had fallen away. The largest was spraying vermilion. But a ship marked with yellow and red lifted to keep pace while its crew threw mass overboard, and one of the lens-shapes had come much nearer.

Svetz opened his trade kit, and suddenly realized that the observer was squatting beside him, all bones inside a heat-insulating fluff of tiny white feathers, its knees higher than its head. It made no signs and didn't try to speak.

As instructed, Svetz ignored him. He fished out the superconducting net and wrapped it around the bones from dinner and sealed the edge. He started the conversion sequence.

Skyrunner
tilted far forward. Svetz squealed and rescued the trade kit without releasing his scissors-lock on a mast.

Miya: “What was
that?
”

Svetz said, “We're in a battle. I'd better tie myself down.” He still had the net.

“I've been following your ship, Hanny, but you've gone way above me. Keep me posted.”

“Miya, they haven't briefed me on their plans!”

Skyrunner
's nose gun fired. The sound was almost lost to vacuum, but Svetz felt the deck jump. The ships below were firing, but their missiles were fighting gravity.
Sky-runner
fired again, and again. The big ship sprayed vermilion and sank.

A missile struck
Skyrunner
's side.

The trade kit had finished its work. Svetz took the altered vertebrae out and stowed the kit. Two ships below
Skyrunner
were both falling. Altitude was a major advantage here. But the red-and-yellow-marked ship was pacing
Skyrunner.
The lens had come in range too. It looked like two silver woks set edge to edge, with a small glass dome on the upper surface.

Skyrunner
rocked to another hit.

Sailor-Second Matth crossed the deck at a run-and-climb, making full use of every handhold. Matth stopped by Svetz. From his bellow the translator picked out, “Weapon … buy your life and freedom…?”

Svetz handed him an altered vertebra. It hadn't gained mass. It was porous gold now; it would melt down into a much smaller ingot.

“Gold.” Matth turned it in his hands; twisted it and broke it. “What shall we do with this? Push it down their throats?” He flipped the pieces overboard. “Mars has all the gold we need.” He was off at a half run, half climb, sprinting from handhold to handhold.

Svetz caught a flicker and turned in time to see what happened next.

The silver lens jetted a tight column of flame, very like Miya's blasters. Flame grazed the right side of
Skyrunner
and ripped it from bow to stern.
Skyrunner
shuddered and was the center of a luminous vermilion cloud. The lurch and roll caught Sailor-Second Matth off balance, and then Matth was in flight, flapping wildly.

“Miya, I'll be down shortly,” Svetz murmured. He felt the right side of the ship, his side, sink.

“No hurry.” Miya caught something in his voice. “Hanny?”

Once upon a time it had begun to bother him that all of the people he met in the past were
dead.
When he told Zeera his problem, her take was quite different. “They're not dead, Hanny. Nobody's dead. If you don't believe me, go back and talk to them!”

“Hanny! What's happening?”

He told her. He was hanging from a horizontal mast that projected from the vertical deck of a ship. The ship was falling toward noonday Mars with red desert below. One tank was still lifting. It wasn't enough. In a few minutes he was going to be dead.

The crackle of gunfire paused, then became a continuous rattle. The remaining sailors were those who had found handholds. Now they saw no reason to reserve ammunition.
Skyrunner
lurched to two quick impacts from the big guns of the red-and-yellow sky ship.

Skyrunner
was falling … and then it was
really
falling.

Svetz released the net that bound him and cast it as a line for climbing. Those hours on the tree were all the experience he'd had in free fall, and he'd better use them
now.
Too soon,
Skyrunner
would be in the winds.

Martian sailors watched him. Two, then three began crawling up the vertical deck.

Svetz reached his rocket pack.

The three didn't like that. They moved toward him a little less timidly, a little faster, as he wiggled into the harness.