Rainbow Mars (30 page)

“Ra Chen, I still have it. Hillary?—drown me, they've all gone home! I don't blame them.” Willy raised his voice. “Who knows how to work the holo projector? I want just that first bit back.”

“I can do that,” Miya said.

*   *   *

Light blazed fiercely from the World Tree. Fog haloed the heat ray, and then the top of the World Tree ripped free. Thirty thousand klicks of severed end rose at escape velocity. Sap sprayed at the stars—

And again. Miya had looped the record. “This is what I meant,” Willy Gorky said excitedly, and pointed with his laser. A red dot traced the flow of fluid and steam. “I need to show this to the Martians,
all
the Martians—”

“Tomorrow, Willy,” Ra Chen said gently.

Willy sagged. This was the World Tree's Willy Gorky, half starved in a starving world, the Willy Gorky whose Bureau of the Sky Domains had been eaten by the Institute for Temporal Research. In this spacetime he was master, but he was tired.

“Go home,” he said, “find beds. Tomorrow. If only I had a time machine!”

*   *   *

They set the holo projector up in the Vivarium, outside the cage that held five martian civilizations in miniature. Martians watched them, and discussed what they were seeing.

There were sound pickups in the Mars cage, as in all the cages—the sounds an animal made might be of interest—but no speakers. Techs linked speakers to UN translators programmed with what Svetz's translator had learned of Mars. Wilt Miller mounted them inside the Mars cage. Five varieties of Martian watched them do it.

As soon as they were out, the froglike Martians—the Smiths—swarmed over the devices and took them apart before Gorky could begin speaking.

Willy Gorky waited with amazing patience. They waited with Willy, until Zeera lost patience and went four cages down to tend Horse. The rest stayed.

Horse seemed glad of the attention.

In present time, one need not credit a children's story.

But Svetz knew that they had lost the Zeera of the baths, the Zeera who turned a conquistador into gold,
that
Zeera who had stayed with
that
Ra Chen in another time line so that they could destroy it.
That
Zeera would not be petting Horse.

When the Smiths had reassembled the translators, Willy Gorky told them, “I can restore your planet.”

No Martian spoke. Svetz's eye found Thaxir among the green giants. He was relieved: she sat dignified and straight among her kin.

Willy said, “What I need from you is transportation. I know you didn't bring any kind of spacecraft, but you
know
things. I want to know how your wok ships work. I need to know how to make a gas lighter than nothing. Anything that helps me reach the planets is worth having.

“Think about it. Tonight I will show you
how.
”

*   *   *

Daylight would have washed out Willy Gorky's hologram recordings. They had to wait for night.

Zeera still had seeds: heavy golden spheres hardened against reentry. It took jeweler's equipment to open them. Inside they were built like pomes. The laboratory's first attempt at a DNA scan failed. It must be some other genetic molecule that reproduced a Beanstalk anchor tree. They'd find it.

Willy worked with the Bureau of the Sky Domains' astronomers. They knew what to look for now. The world's telescopes were turned on Europa. Data began flowing back.

*   *   *

The Vivarium, nightfall:

The severed ends of the World Tree came apart, trailing oceans of water in a wide frosty comet tail. The blood of the tree sprayed across the sky.

Willy Gorky spoke for the translators in the Martians' housing. “It goes on and on. Gigatons of sap, mostly water infused with oxygen and some interesting nutrients—I zapped it with a laser to get a spectroanalysis—”

An elderly Smith had come forward. “Our world's water,” he said. “Other species stayed to share the fate of our dying world. The tree was our destiny.”

Willy didn't miss a beat. “Our fate too, but we side-stepped. Your world's water, yes. Now I'll show you how to get it back.”

And he showed them.

*   *   *

A sapling left at Mars fifteen hundred years ago had sucked away that world's remaining life. What it sensed of its parent's fate was unknowable. How do trees communicate? But on
this
time line, the Hangtree had been chopped down and killed at Earth.

When its sapling child had as much water as Mars had to give, it had moved, still feeble,
outward.

The sapling was at Europa. Given that the ancient Mariner probe had found no Hangtree at Mars, it must have been at Europa for at least a thousand years.

In the holo view it was a mere silver thread, as thin as imagination, but it was long. Its center of mass stood well out from Europa, in the stable L2 point made by Europa and Jupiter.

“Did you learn
anything
about guiding the Hangtree?” Willy looked hopefully up at the rows of alien faces. “Europa is a water ocean under a shell of ice. That thing is sucking it up. All we need to do is guide it back to Mars. Then chop away the root and bleed its veins dry, let the sap drain into the old canals and ocean beds. Oceans of water. Sugar and nutrients for fertilizer. You'll have a world again.”

Willy's voice rang. “But we can't get there from here. Earth's gravity is greater, our space program is a pitiable thing, our rockets can barely lift themselves. But with those and your antigravity dirigibles or your wok ships to lift them free of Earth's gravity, we can get there. We can get anywhere.

“We'll make Mars live again. Will you help me?”

He had them. Without being able to read alien faces, Svetz still knew: he had them.

*   *   *

“It's not what I really wanted,” Willy Gorky admitted later. “It's a thousand years too late. I wanted to take the planets while the Earth was still rich.”

Ra Chen had formed his attitude long ago.
Thou shalt not change the past. Not by accident, not deliberately. Disaster and chaos will result.

He said, “Willy, you'd have roughly ten productive years if you marooned yourself in the twentieth century. No conspicuous technology means no modern medicine and no UN translators. We could train you in their language, but you'll still have an accent nobody can define—”

“Like Werner Von Braun!” Willy said.

“Whatever. And now you think you can talk an insular and defensive agency of an ancient government into doing your will? And still compete with any other branch that might want their funding?”

Willy Gorky didn't answer.

“Willy, it's just a fantasy.”

“I know that, Ra Chen. We'll
still
have the stars. The past is dead. I'll build from here. From now.”

THE REFERENCE DIRECTOR SPEAKS:

The humanoids and green giants and their cultures, guns and swords and negative-gravity dirigibles, all derive from Edgar Rice Burroughs, except for the houses and stoves, which belong to Ray Bradbury, and those slender towers that probably belong to Robert Heinlein more than anyone. The crabs, and the headless near-humanoid servants that carry them, are also from Burroughs.

Schiapareli and Lowell and a host of other astronomers of the early twentieth century saw and described the canals.

The flightless bird (Tweel) is from Stanley Weinbaum's “A Martian Odyssey.” So is the pyramid builder.

Of the C. S. Lewis Martians, Fishers and High Folk (observers, called High Folk because they live on the heights, turf nobody else wants) and Smiths, only the Smiths left Mars for the tree. They liked the challenge. Yellow-faced, hairless, pointed, shabby-looking, built like a frog.

Lewis'
eldils
are missing, and so are Heinlein's Martians and many others, because they were more powerful than the author.

The sailcar came from Flash Gordon Sunday comics.

The Hangtree or Beanstalk, in its earliest form, was the creation of a schoolteacher who served the Czar. A host of fine minds have elaborated the original concept of an orbital tether.

The tentacled astronomers derive (loosely) from H. G. Wells,
The War of the Worlds.
One appeared
as
an astronomer in “Old Faithful,” by Gallun. Their lens-shaped craft were a familiar sight over the Midwest in the 1950s.

The Tanker module—which carries a nuclear reactor and six tonnes of liquid hydrogen, to make ninety-six tonnes of methane and liquid oxygen from the martian atmosphere, was evolved from plans outlined in
Mars Direct,
by Robert Zubrin.

Ole Romer, Danish astronomer, was brought to France by Christiaen Huygens. He invented the transit instrument. He measured the speed of light using eclipses of Jupiter and the timing of Jovian lunar orbits. On the Hangtree time line, he'd have had a telescope and an excellent view of Yggdrasil.

SVETZ'S TIME LINE

The first story of Svetz of the ITR is set in + 1100 Atomic Era (AE) and –750 AE. Horse was intended for the SecGen's twenty-eighth birthday.

The picture book of animals dates, from 10 AE = 1955.

1108 AE June: death of the Secretary-General, Waldemar the Tenth.

+ 1108 AE November: back in time to

–550 AE = + 1395 AD: missiles to Mars carrying probes. Interrupt takes them to

–545 AE: retrieve data, return to

+ 1108 AE November. Process data. First sight of the Mars Beanstalk. Mount the second expedition to

–545AE= + 1400 AD: send new orders to the Mars probes. Interrupt takes the X-cage to

–543AE= + 1402 AD: Collect the results. Return to

+ 1108 AE November. Involve the SecGen. Mount third expedition.

–543 AE= + 1402 AD: the rescue aspect is abandoned in the search for skyhook tree seeds.

Ten months pass in the present, and the Coronation takes place without announcements regarding Mars, while
Minim
spacecraft and support systems are prepared and Zeera is trained as pilot. Subsequent talker contact is with

+ 1109 AE September.

–541 AE= + 1404 AD: arrival at Mars using Fast Forward. Exploration of Mars and the Beanstalk/ Hangtree ends with the
Minim
moored to the Mars Beanstalk in flight. Engage Fast Forward …

–375 AE= + 1570 AD: the Mars Beanstalk settles into Earth orbit. The
Minim
lands in northern Brazil.

–375 to –374 AE: Svetz and company witness the Portuguese encroachment in jumps, using the FFD. Everything subsequent is seen in longer jumps.

–48 AE = + 1897 AD: Svetz hits the interrupt because something massive buzzes him in the X-cage. He's picked up some serious energy discharges: pods making hard landings, dropping from the tree: the H. G. Wells invasion.

∼+10 AE = ∼+1955 AD: Softfinger ships over the American Midwest.

+ 1109 AE October: HOME. Successful mission. But the tree is on the horizon, grown huge. Everybody is getting very thirsty, very desiccated. RETURN TO

—374 AE= + 1572 AD: Chop down the tree. Brave the havoc and go home to + 1109 AE.

THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE

The year was 750AA (AnteAtomic) or 1200 AD (Anno Domini), approximately. Hanville Svetz stepped out of the extension cage and looked about him.

To Svetz the atomic bomb was eleven hundred years old and the horse was a thousand years dead. It was his first trip into the past. His training didn't count; it had not included actual time travel, which cost several million commercials a shot. Svetz was groggy from the peculiar gravitational side effects of time travel. He was high on pre–Industrial Age air, and drunk on his own sense of destiny; while at the same time he was not really convinced that he had
gone
anywhere. Or anywhen. Trade joke.

He was not carrying the anaesthetic rifle. He had come to get a horse; he had not expected to meet one at the door. How big was a horse? Where were horses found? Consider what the Institute had had to go on: a few pictures in a salvaged children's book, and an old legend, not to be trusted, that the horse had once been used as a kind of animated vehicle!

In an empty land beneath an overcast sky, Svetz braced himself with one hand on the curved flank of the extension cage. His head was spinning. It took him several seconds to realize that he was looking at a horse.

It stood fifteen yards away, regarding Svetz with large intelligent brown eyes. It was much larger than he had expected. Further, the horse in the picture book had had a glossy brown pelt with a short mane, while the beast now facing Svetz was pure white, with a mane that flowed like a woman's long hair. There were other differences … but no matter, the beast matched the book too well to be anything but a horse.

To Svetz it seemed that the horse watched him, waited for him to realize what was happening. Then, while Svetz wasted more time wondering why he wasn't holding a rifle, the horse laughed, turned, and departed. It disappeared with astonishing speed.

Svetz began to shiver. Nobody had warned him that the horse might have been sentient! Yet the beast's mocking laugh had sounded far too human.

Now he knew. He was deep, deep in the past.

Not even the horse was as convincing as the emptiness the horse had left behind. No reaching apartment towers clawed the horizon. No contrails scratched the sky. The world was trees and flowers and rolling grassland, innocent of men.

The silence—It was as if Svetz had gone deaf. He had heard no sound since the laughter of the horse. In the year 1100 PostAtomic, such silence could have been found nowhere on Earth. Listening, Svetz knew at last that he had reached the British Isles before the coming of civilization. He had traveled in time.

*   *   *

The extension cage was the part of the time machine that did the traveling. It had its own air supply, and needed it while being pushed through time. But not here. Not before civilization's dawn; not when the air had never been polluted by fission wastes and the combustion of coal, hydrocarbons, tobaccos, wood, et al.