Rainbow Mars (21 page)

The puffball material had some of the hampering effect of a martian “bed,” but not as bad. It cradled them, held them together. Cuddling afterward, they lifted their filter helmets to kiss, and Miya tasted Earth's air.

She was instantly in love with it. Svetz had to pull her filter helmet into place when she started to pass out.

Then, still tethered, Miya crawled down through the tuft to look through the underside. Svetz wasn't going to bother, but he heard Miya's radio whisper. “Come see this!”

Svetz swam through the foliage and stuck his head out of the bottom.

A man was on the beach, looking up at them. He was pale-skinned and dirty, shelled like a Green Martian, but in rusted metal.

Miya said, “We've found Ra Chen's conquistador.”

32

They didn't want to be seen flying. They locked their flight sticks, then dropped them to the ground and slid down the smooth trunk. They planted the flight sticks in a conspicuous green bush, the brush discharges sticking up like strange golden blossoms.

“Hold it, Hanny.”

“What?”

“When the sun's right behind you there's a ring of light around your head. It's the filter helmet. We don't want the sun behind us when we approach a local.”

*   *   *

The shelled man was no taller than Svetz or Miya. He looked pale and ill. He wore weapons, but he didn't try to reach them. Tilted against a supporting tree, he watched them descend as if they might be hallucinations.

Then he drew himself up before them in yoga tree position and said,
“Yo soy John de Castores del Camoes…”
and continued at some length.

“I am Jack,” said the translator.

In Earth gravity Jack wore armor around his torso and carried heavy baggage too. No wonder he seemed bowed beneath the weight. He looked amazingly dirty. His beard and hair were scraggly and matted and overgrown. He carried his helmet, and Svetz wondered if his overgrown hair would still fit into it.

The United Nations translator recognized the language: not Spanish, but Portuguese. It had that in storage. It learned the archaic forms much faster than it had learned martian speech.

Jack wanted food. He was here to fish, he explained. Beneath these very strange trees—?

Svetz said, “Orbital tether,” and heard the silence: the translator didn't have that term yet. “Hangtree roots. Beanstalk?”

The translator spoke. Jack thought that over, then said politely, “Beneath these beanstalk roots the fish and shellfish thrive. But Dinis and I, we are sick of fish!”

Miya offered him a dole yeast bar. Jack bit into it and looked dubious. Then he offered them a dark strip of … something.

Svetz took it because he couldn't guess how Miya would react. He lifted his filter helmet and caught a wave of smells. Some of that must be coming from Jack. He put the dark strip in his mouth. It was hard enough to break teeth.

Saliva softened it, and then it tasted like … strange, like … ancient messages crawling up from his primitive brain.
Corruption,
and
meat,
and
fire.

“Jerked meat,” the translator called it, “with these you locals call
chilis
for flavor.”

“Meat. From a beast?”

“From some local creature I do not know, which Dinis shot. But the animals become wary and our bullets run low. Sir, my companion Dinis is hurt. Do you know local herbs to help him?”

Before they could admit to knowing nothing of the locality—which Svetz had already decided not to do—Jack had spilled his pack on the sand.

Blanket. Knives. A bottle and a small bag, both made of something like Naugahyde. Gear for mending a boot. An ornate religious thing, cross-shaped. Jack showed them leaves and roots wrapped in cloth, half a dozen varieties. This root they had cooked and eaten and liked. This helped constipation. These leaves they had spread on Dinis' wound; it hadn't done much good—

“And your
do 'yeesbar.
God ordains that true medicine must have an evil taste, and truly I feel better. Where does it grow?”

“In another country.” Svetz handed Jack another bar, for he'd finished the first. “We must hoard them,” he said.

Miya picked up a small, heavy bag. “What's this?”

Jack took it quickly. “Silver coins. All I have. Would that they were gold. We hoped to find gold in this place, but—” He shrugged. “Will you come and look at my sick friend Dinis?”

*   *   *

Jack told his tale as he led them through the jungle.

The shipwreck had left twelve. Attacks by primitives out of jungle shadows, snakes bigger than a madman's nightmares, fever, starvation, rumors of gold, greed and madness among their officers, had winnowed them down to two.

The jungle had nearly strangled a small stepped pyramid built of huge stone blocks. Jack led them nearly to the top and through a great doorway.

The room wasn't large. Amid a junkyard of primitive tools and elegant stoneware, Dinis lay on a dais beside rusted armor. Dinis looked much like Jack; they even dressed alike. All the same, Dinis had been dead for hours.

Jack asked hopefully, “Is it possible…?”

Did he really expect dole yeast to restore a man to life? Svetz didn't laugh. He said, “We cannot help this man.”

“Were we fools to lodge in this alien temple? Ah, Dinis! But we had not strength to build shelter.”

Svetz said, “Jack, our mission leader tells us that nobody is ever truly dead.”

Go back and talk to them,
Zeera would have added—

Jack seemed to relax. “You are Christian!” he marveled. “And Svetz is your name? Russian?”

Svetz let that stand. “Jack, what is the year?”

“We left Portugal in the year of our Lord fifteen sixty. Since then I too have lost count. Two years, I think. In this place one cannot even guess when Christmas might come!”

Jack announced that he must bury his friend Dinis Alvares de Albuquerque y … another name of considerable length. Miya explained that they must report to their mission leader. Svetz saw Jack's disappointment before Jack turned away to dig in the earth with his blunted sword.

Miya was right: they
could not
help with Dinis' funeral. Jack would see that they didn't know the rites!

Still—

Translator
off,
suit radio
on.
“Zeera, people made coins out of gold, didn't they?”

“For a while. Then they went to paper and plastic.”

“If I found you a little silver, could you make wire?”

“Superconductor would be better … oh, all right, Svetz. Silver's ductile, I can pound it.”

Miya whispered, “Hanny—”

“Go on ahead, Miya. I'm right behind you.”

Svetz went back to where Jack was digging in the earth with his blunted sword. Translator
on.
“Jack, give me your silver for a few minutes and I'll give you gold coins back.”

Jack stared, then laughed. “Truly, I hear the sounds of my home! Why would you do this?”

“Because I need silver.”
Because I've evaded helping you with a friend's death rites.

Curiosity warred with distrust, and Jack handed Svetz his pouch.

Svetz went into the trees, out of sight. He took the largest coin out of the pouch, then dropped the pouch into the superconducting net of his trade kit. The conversion took a few minutes.

Svetz realized his mistake when he picked up the pouch. It too had become gold … and that would tell Jack more than Svetz wanted told. He fished out a zipped sample bag and poured the coins into that. He brought that to Jack.

Jack poured the coins from hand to hand, then bit one. “Where did you get these, Master Svetz? And
this?
”

The clear plastic pouch. Futz! Svetz said, “That's a secret, Jack.”

He took a coin and bit it, but it didn't have any taste at all.

*   *   *

The woman had taken the net off Thaxir. As Svetz watched, the green giant rolled over onto her side, then her belly, then lifted herself on all sixes. “Very good,” Miya said. “You'll stay healthier if you can exercise. Hello, Hanny.”

Careful of her balance, Thaxir slid a middle arm toward her pack. She saw Svetz go tense. “Hungry,” she said. She fished in the pack and came out with a lump wrapped in a patch of Hangtree mirror. What was inside might have been white cheese.

She ate half of it in two bites. Then, “Will you taste?”

Miya broke off a crumb and (ignoring Zeera's horror) put it in her mouth. “There's almost no taste,” she said. “Like tofu. Thaxir, I think you could eat dole yeast. Try this.”

Still on all sixes, Thaxir let Miya put a chunk of dole yeast in her mouth.

Her eyes squeezed shut. They heard her voice muffled. “Your food tastes like canal scum. My weight holds me paralyzed, and the tree hangs above us, taunting. So much for worlds. Miya, will you help me to lie down again? I don't want to fall.”

Svetz helped Miya ease the Martian down. He could feel Thaxir's strength. Her problem was fear.

He asked, “Do you eat meat?”

“Some meat. Most plants. To choose too carefully is to starve.”

“I'll find you something. Zeera—” He showed her Jack's silver coin.

“Counterfeit,” Zeera said after testing it. “Only part silver. Not very conductive at all.”

“Is gold conductive?”

“Why?
Oh!
Wait, now, Svetz, silver's ductile. I'll hammer this into shape and
then
we'll change it.”

“About the green giant,” Svetz said. “Why not put her in water? Let her float.”

Zeera took the charge out of a blaster and began to pound on the silver coin with the butt. “She's an alien, Svetz. What would salt water do to her? She might dissolve! Or anything! How did you get this?”

Svetz told her.

“This Jack knows you can make gold?”

“I handed him a bag of gold. He doesn't know where I got it. He's the last of his crew. Who would he tell? And what if he does? There were tales of people who could make gold. They were called alchemists. That's why we made the trade kit, Zeera!”

Zeera belly-laughed. “
You
might have started that story, right here!”

“Why not?” Svetz reclined his chair and went to sleep. His dreams were shaped by the tapping of a blaster butt on a silver coin, and Zeera's monotonous swearing.

*   *   *

The pounding stopped.

What Zeera had was a narrow little bar, not quite a wire, to replace a mere whisker of superconductor. “All right, Svetz, turn it into gold. Miya, we want to videotape straight up.”

And all of that was the work of a few minutes.

Miya went to help Thaxir roll over again. “Thaxir, do you understand all this? We're going into the future—”

“Where my companions and my consort-by-contract are all grown old or dead, but the tree is linked to Earth. Good.”

Zeera glared at them. “Last chance. Did any of you leave scraps of high tech underwear for some archaeologist?”

Miya made a show of patting herself. “Nope.”

“Anything conspicuous in some unlikely place?”

“Jack,” Svetz said. They were leaving an ally.

Miya shrugged. Zeera flipped the FDD switch. The sun dropped like a giant meteoroid and plunged them into the dark.

33

They shared a meal and took turns in the bath bag, and drifted through half a year, while the Hangtree drifted up into the sky. When Zeera judged it straight overhead, she turned off the FFD.

Night again. The tree loomed huge and weightless. Silver blossoms blazed down, but not so many as there had been. A tiny moon was tangled among the blossoms.

Miya said, “It's still not connected.”

“Well, it's in position,” Zeera said. “Hit it again.”

“We
do not
want to miss this.
Wait.
” Miya took her time, lolling in her reclined chair with her mag specs pointed straight up. She said, “I can see the taproot and it's still fifty klicks too high. Zeera, hit it.”

Day and night strobed. Svetz had found nothing, but he kept his mag specs pointed.
There
it was, thrashing like a string in a hurricane.

In real time, what was happening? A root descended through ferocious stratospheric winds. Weighted at the end? Light-sails unfurled to move the tree's position against the wind below, to drag the line along a strip of anchor grove until—

Miya hit the cutoff. The strobe ended just past dawn. They'd jumped by twenty days.

Harder to see now that it wasn't moving, a silver thread descended from heaven. Its end was tangled in the black tops of the anchor grove. The winds might still be vibrating it, but it was under tension now. The tree was in place; its light-sail leaves were furled; its mass was pulling
up.

“I want a better look at that,” Svetz said.

*   *   *

He and Miya drifted among the black treetops. A silver line no thicker than coarse wire rose from one of the tufts. It was tangled through the black cotton of this and two other anchor trees.

Miya collected vegetation for Thaxir to try. Black anchor-tree foliage; green leaves and stems and a dug-up root; lichen and mushrooms; seaweed.

Thaxir liked lichen and certain leaves.

They jumped the
Minim
four days.

*   *   *

Zeera was getting cabin fever. She and Svetz went out while Miya stayed with Thaxir.

Three anchor trees had merged. The root line reached straight out of the common tuft. All the other trees, that had once stood straight, now leaned toward the trees that had caught the dangling line.

Zeera was clumsy on a flight stick. She hovered above while Svetz drifted among the black treetops.