Rainbow Mars (29 page)

Creepy. The voice of a quantized, uncertain future. He switched off.

Thaxir spoke Softfinger sounds. The translator said, “See, they trust me.” Then she called in green giant speech, apparently addressing another green giant, “Miya, go and look at the cannon!”

That individual's eyes swiveled, then came back, puzzled.

Svetz said, “You go, Miya. I'd better stay at the controls.”

Miya held Svetz's eyes but asked Thaxir, “What shall I look for?”

“Look like you do not expect help from any Martian!”

The Hangtree had grown broad as a freeway, even in the stretched and slender form that had crossed interplanetary space to Earth. Svetz tried to keep the X-cage near it without crashing into it. Altitude: 60,000 klicks. A trace of gravity had returned, with a vast Earth overhead. The control chair was inverted.

Miya wedged her head and shoulders into the cannon's cockpit. It was too small for anything human. Svetz was tempted to laugh. She looked very awkward. She pulled and pushed and touched, and if she set something off they'd all be dead. Softfingers and other Martians were paying her considerable attention; two or three Smiths were either shouting instructions or cursing.

The phone rang.

That wasn't the intertemporal talker! It was the remote in the small extension cage. Svetz punched in and said, “Willy?”

“Futz of a ride,
yes!
Hello, Svetz. Are we still on track?”

“No showstoppers yet. Where are you? And why aren't you on your way home?”

“Svetz, I've getting great pictures. I suppose I'm pacing you, but you're too small, I haven't even glimpsed you. If you can bring this off, I want a record. I want to
watch!
If you can't … well … there won't be anything to go back to.”

They talked further. Svetz was glad of the company.

At 90,000 klicks the tree had narrowed as much as it was going to, its diameter no more than a city block. Thirty thousand klicks farther out, he could see how the tree swelled into a knob. It looked like … If he could cut into that, would he find an encysted asteroid, swallowed for ballast?

No telling, ever.

He brought the rising X-cage to a stop. Now he had only about four minutes to play with. “Thaxir,” he asked, “do you know how to work the cannon?”

Thaxir said, “Yes. Do you know better than to fire it against a closed door?”

Svetz didn't move. “Yes. What now?”

“Wait. Are you armed with your sleep-thing?”

He didn't reach or look. “Yes, both of us. Miya, are you tracking this?”

“Ready, Hanny.”

Thaxir shouted a single syllable.

It galvanized the Martians. They began screwing down helmets and zipping zippers and placing stickstrips on themselves, their elders and children. The translator was saying, “Close your outer skin or burst—” Svetz pulled his own helmet closed and saw Miya do the same. He tapped the icon that would suck away the air in the shell.

A beam of white heat missed his forearm and plunged deep into the controls.

Svetz threw himself backward. A fireball blasted back out of the hole and somehow missed fusing his helmet as it puffed across the diameter of the X-cage. Svetz fired in the direction the beam had come from. Miya was firing too. Their sonics swept the Softfinger gunman and several others.

Elsewhere, another Softfinger loosed itself at Thaxir with a leap that spun it like a buzz saw. Its spin caressed the net-bound Thaxir, and Svetz held his aim and waited—dared not put Thaxir to sleep!—waited, and fired. The pinwheel octopoid spun away, slack and senseless. A knife spun free.

Thaxir lifted herself free of the slashed net. “If you can still open the door,” she said, “do it.” She closed her helmet.

The gunman's aim had been precise. The heat beam had put a hole in the left branch of the horseshoe control board. That array controlled air composition and pressure, lights, recorded warnings, and of course, the door.

Thaxir joined Miya at the trigger housing. The translator picked up her speech. “I persuaded some among the Softfingers that if they cut me loose, I could fire the cannon while the door was closed. We would die. The Earth would die. The tree would survive to carry the rest of our races to the stars, if we could change the future and survive the tree itself. In any case they would have their vengeance.”

In the quantum-randomized future, Ra Chen was dead or never born; but his urgency (
Advise me, Svetz!
) lived on in Svetz's mind. (
Think!
)

“They revealed to me what weapons they still have,” Thaxir said. “A knife to free me, a heat gun to ruin your door lock, both swallowed in sealed bags—”

“Swallowed?”

“To be disgorged at need, Miya. I alerted you and trusted your reactions. The rest was up to you.”

There was vacuum inside and out. Martians of every description were shouting at each other in silence. The large X-cage had sucked the air back into its tanks.

Good enough. Svetz touched the remote. “Willy!”

Nothing. He remembered to plug the jack into his suit mike. “Willy!”

“How's it going?”

“Willy, you need to use the remote controls to open the door in the large extension cage. Do it now. Right now.”

“Hanny, nobody showed me how.”

“Don't panic. I've used these myself. Now, right in front of you, you should see…” He talked Willy through it.
We are the masters of time
 …

The door opened like a flower.

More Softfingers had cut themselves free. Svetz shot them with sonics as they moved.

A thread of light burst from the cannon's mouth. It was searing-bright until it impacted the tree four or five klicks away. Then the intensity became intolerable.

Miya and Thaxir seemed to have the cannon under control. A halo of gas and particles surrounded the tree now, illuminating the plasma beam.

The tree tore apart.

The severed end was rising. Sap sprayed into space, boiling and freezing into a vast white plume. Nothing much seemed to be happening to the main body of the tree. “Turn it off,” Svetz said into his suit mike.

“Hanny, we don't have instructions for that. Thaxir says that wasn't supposed to be needed.”

“Well, if you don't turn it off we can't close the door, and then we can't go home, and the energy buildup will blow the Institute off the map, and us too. But we did it. We won. There will be a future.”

The beam went off. “Got it,” Miya said.

“Willy, are you still on? Close the door for us. Willy, stop filming and close the door on the large X-cage. Willy!”

The door closed. Willy Gorky said, “Patience is an underrated—” But Svetz pushed the go-home and the voice went away.

41

PHAETHON n. Class. Myth,
a son of Helios who borrowed the chariot of the sun for one day and drove it so dangerously close to earth that Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt to save the world from catching fire.

—
Random House Dictionary of the English Language

 

The main dome was crowded to the teeth. Every face showed triumph … until they looked into the large X-cage.

Ra Chen barely flinched, but Svetz caught it. A few techs looked bewildered; a few were frightened; some gaped, then laughed. Of sixty or seventy present, half were wearing United Nations Security uniforms, and they showed no emotion at all.

Body language told Svetz what man was the Secretary-General. He and his guards were off to one side, and Ra Chen with him.

The Secretary-General was no bigger than Svetz. The crown of his head was bald. Otherwise he bore thick brown hair, eyebrows and beard. At sight of a crowd of Martians he started forward, wild with delight.

Security blocked him. Any attack on the SecGen would take Ra Chen too. An attack from the large X-cage would fall upon guards and techs first. The large extension cage had last come here as an act of war, but UN Security didn't know
that.
They were only being prudent.

And of course everyone was waiting for Svetz to open the door.

The noise the Martians were making died a little. They were fainting in Earth's gravity. Svetz and Miya set about cutting the nets.

The small extension cage faded into view. Svetz saw rage flash in Ra Chen's expression, but he covered by moving briskly to help Willy Gorky out.

Willy delayed for a moment at the controls.

The door unfolded like a great flower.
Thank you, Willy!
A door big enough to pass Whale allowed a dozen techs to swarm in. They came out carrying Martians.

Ra Chen must have assembled every lifter platform in the UN Research Complex. As quickly as they could, they got the Martians into low gravity, stripping them of weapons where they could. No doubt the Softfingers kept a few swallowed. Svetz and Miya helped, trying to keep species separate, setting infants in bubbles among their own folk. The techs didn't seem to think that was important, but it might be worth Thaxir's life.

The Secretary-General was bubbling with questions. The guards wouldn't let him near the Martians yet, so he made do with the Heads. Willy Gorky was just a bit diffident with the SecGen
and
Ra Chen. Ra Chen was cordial and brisk and gave way to both.

My time line, and it's really Waldemar the Eleventh,
Svetz decided,
but the World Tree's Willy Gorky.
A dominance dance between the two Heads should be fun to watch, given that they
each
thought they'd lost to the other. Now Willy was pulling heavy golden spheres from a pouch and handing them ceremoniously to the Secretary-General. UN guards intercepted the seeds.

The last of the Martians, a six-generation family of reds, was being floated away.

Ra Chen eased free of the others. “Excellent work, Svetz! Those seeds will look really good in the Palace. Maybe we can grow a few trees.” Ra Chen's grip closed like iron on Svetz's forearm. “We need to talk.”

“Set guards for Thaxir, Boss,” Svetz murmured, smiling. He was being pulled outside, through the front. “Guard the Martians. They'll kill our source if we just turn them loose in a Vivarium cage. Thaxir's one of the older green—”

“First things first, Svetz. How did you and Willy Gorky change places? And why?”

“What?”

The wonderful, elaborate drinks dispenser was back. Ra Chen pulled him past it and outside.

“We sent you back in the small X-cage. We needed to know if any of the Martians were setting us up for something. Willy Gorky just
had
to go back and rescue sixty Martians himself. His first trip through time, and nobody had the least idea what these creatures really have in mind. If anything happens to the Head of Sky Domains, we're finished,” Ra Chen said. “And now you're back, but the Head of Sky Domains is in the small X-cage and you're in the big one! Svetz, is this another one of
those?
”

The reflecting pool was back too.

Svetz said, “Changes in the past. Other time lines. Those,
yes,
Boss, but let's just deal with the martian refugees first. Then I've got a great story and Willy's got visual aids to back us up.”

*   *   *

The severed treetop rose like a comet, spraying a tremendous frosty comet-tail lit by raw sunlight. Long after the treetop itself was out of view, the trail of frost continued to expand.

Gorky had most of the tree in view in a wraparound shot that filled the display wall. Svetz could see it all.

At first the tree seemed unchanged. But its center of mass was below geosynchronous orbit. Left to itself it would have moved in a closer, faster orbit; but it couldn't. It was anchored. The mass pulled ahead of the rotating Earth, and the Earth pulled back, slowing it, lowering its orbit farther.

The bottom of the tree, the root, was still anchored to the earth more than an hour after Miya and Thaxir had severed the top. The Tree tilted forward, arcing toward horizontal. Then, deep in the bedrock of Brazil, roots ripped free. The tree pulled away, carrying away a disintegrating black clot of anchor grove.

Now tidal forces began to swing it back to vertical. The lower end dropped until the Hangtree's torn bottom was ripping through the atmosphere, blazing like the sun.

The bottom of the tree was a meteor trailing flame and smoke all around the Earth. Prairies and forests blazed in its wake, a noose of fire circling the planet. Above the atmosphere, Yggdrasil's mass pulled it along. The tree was burning at the bottom as it sank toward the Earth.

“The legend of Phaeton,” Miya breathed.

“No, that happened way earlier,” said Svetz.

“Why, Hanny, don't you believe in time travel?”

Futz.

No wonder the medieval world was afraid of comets. If such a mass had fallen all at once, at or near orbital speed … well, legends would have told that tale too.

Gorky, Ra Chen and the Secretary-General engaged in intense discussion within a horseshoe of guards.

They summoned Miya. Talk continued.

A UN guard went for refreshments, not to the ITR dispenser but to the limousines. They summoned Zeera. Svetz bought and ate a carton of dole yeast, then another.

They summoned Svetz.

He told the tale as if they hadn't heard it twice already. Prompted, he spoke of Martians left behind, the furred High Ones, the big birds who wore tool belts.

The Secretary-General didn't leave until midnight.

Then Svetz dared to eat what had been sitting untouched. He and Miya snatched food they didn't bother to identify, in a scrambling of hands. They fed each other bits of anything interesting, laughing at each other's greed, and belatedly thought to bring Zeera into the circle. But Zeera shied away.

Ra Chen was talking genially to Gorky. “You had your Beanstalk. You had the solar system. Wasn't as useful as you thought, was it, Head?”