Rainbow Mars (42 page)

If he closed his fist, Reynolds would be dead. There was no muscle to protect his windpipe.

Svetz looked down.

The skeleton boy was sprawled beside a green bench, surrounded by boys and girls and small indeterminate beings. He looked dead. Svetz wasted some time trying to think of something to do. Then he moved two levers with his foot.

Gravity changed. Reynolds struggled furiously for a moment; and then Svetz's hand was empty. Something foggy seemed to be tugging at the Emergency Stop. Svetz watched it fade.

*   *   *

“But then he got away with it,” said Ra Chen.

Svetz shrugged. “I did my best to stop him.”

“You don't get it. He killed
himself.
He stopped himself from ever going back in time to stop the Short War.”

Svetz nodded.

“Then—we aren't real! The Short War happened, and Reynolds's line of history happened, and ours didn't! So how can you be here at all?”

“The time machine pulled me home. An extension cage can't get lost, not if it's anchored to its own present.”

Ra Chen's eyes were haunted. “But if Reynolds aborted our past, if we don't have a history anymore, then—”

“Metaphysics! What if we
aren't
real! What if we never
were
real! Sir, you feel real, don't you? So do I. We can always tell ourselves that Project Retake went ahead without Reynolds.”

“But—”

“Or maybe the boy lived. He had no hair and practically no scalp. If Reynolds shot him in the head, the anaesthetic crystal would just ricochet off his skull, right? And knock him out.”

“Um. I like that. If the kid was dead at age nine, Reynolds would have disappeared, right? Wrong, futz it!” Ra Chen snarled. “If he made himself unreal, he made you unreal too. Why shouldn't you go on seeing him?”

“Come here a minute.” Svetz pulled at Ra Chen's arm, without effect; but after a moment Ra Chen followed him voluntarily.

Beyond the glass wall that fronted the ITR building, half a dozen broken buildings surrounded the broken corpse of a bird. The bird was several blocks long and several weeks dead.

“Now, don't you have enough to worry about besides whether you're real or not?”

“Futz, yes. We've got to do something about that roc,” said Ra Chen. “There it lies, in full view of the United Nations Palace…”

AFTERWORD: SVETZ AND THE BEANSTALK

This book derives from events of more than thirty years ago. When I was still a novice, I had an insight that delighted me:

Time travel is fantasy.

But the only way to get fun out of it is to treat it as
Analog
–style science fiction. Keep it internally consistent. Lay out a set of rules and invite the reader to beat you to the consequences.

Hanville Svetz doesn't know that time travel is fantasy. He was born deep into a future polluted to match the sorriest predictions of Greenpeace. Most life-forms are extinct by Svetz's time. To Svetz the creatures of the past may be strange, dangerous, horrifying; anything but surprising. Svetz has the scientist's talent: he can wrap a theory around what he finds, rather than altering the evidence to fit a theory.

I dreamed up “The Flight of the Horse” one morning, spent the afternoon outlining it, and told it as a cocktail party story that night, without losing any listeners. You can't do that with every good story; but
when
you can do that, the story is
ready.

I sold “Leviathan!” to
Playboy
magazine. It's the only time I've ever managed that.
Playboy
was a joy to work with. Editorial work was minimalist, all changes explicitly described, and the money was good too. I sent them “Bird in the Hand” too, but they sent it back.

“There's a Wolf in My Time Machine!” was set in an altered version of the Haunted House ride at Disneyland. The characters are alternate-timeline versions of the Keeshond show dogs I grew up with.

Time travel is fantasy! And the universe of fantasy is large … but after “Death in a Cage” I decided the joke was played out.

*   *   *

In the 1970s, Carl Sagan persuaded Kip Thorne, a world-class mathematician, to design him a time machine for a science fiction novel. Tipler got interested in the challenge, and other mathematicians joined in.

The time machines that emerged are solid science fiction, if you'll accept that the Ringworld is. That is, they require exotic materials and construction techniques, and the engineers need nearly godlike powers. But give them these, and all the laws of physics hold except what has never been proven: the law of cause and effect.

These time machines look less like a Delorian automobile than a freeway. You can't ride on a freeway except where it's been built! That is, we won't be seeing time travelers because the freeway hasn't been built in our time. Time travelers will already have godlike powers before they can travel in time … unless we should chance to find somebody's abandoned freeway.…

But in any era previous to the 1970s, time travel is fantasy.

*   *   *

Worlds don't disappear on me.

A notion was kicking around in my head … and on my computer disks, once Jerry Pournelle talked me into switching from a typewriter. For a quarter of a century I would occasionally stumble across “Beans”: my file of disorganized notes comparing “Jack and the Beanstalk” to the orbital tower invented by Tsiolkovsky and later popularized in several stories including Arthur Clarke's
The Fountains of Paradise.

I knew by then that I wouldn't ever lack for story ideas. “We are the masters of time,” as Svetz says. “Svetz and the Beanstalk” could wait.

In 1990 a leaflet from Dangerous Visions, a bookstore in Van Nuys, alerted me that Terry Pratchett and Neal Gaiman would be in to autograph
Good Omens.
That sounded like fun. I'd barely discovered Neil Gaiman, but already I would buy anything by Terry Pratchett. I went to say Hi.

His flight had been delayed by six hours.

We went back to my place. I didn't know how that would work out, but Marilyn and I have one of the better art collections, and I have some computer games, or we could hike Mulholland.…

Nah.
We started talking collaboration and spent our whole time that way. I tossed in the notion of a Beanstalk that's a plant. We carved out a loose novel structure from there.

And I've got those notes around somewhere, but I've never looked at them since.

We live eight time zones apart. He admitted to a tendency to blitz: to start writing and never quit. These things might make a collaboration awkward. Unless I could get the jump on him, he'd wind up handing me completed text!

But we were both involved in other projects. The Beanstalk would wait.

*   *   *

My first published story, set on Mercury, was obsolete before it hit print. When the world was told the truth about Venus's surface temperature, I was just behind it with “Becalmed in Hell.” The astrophysicists kept changing Mars on me, and I wrote a string of stories to keep up.

Then I fell behind.

Now it's the nineties, and every hard science fiction writer has written a Mars story.
Red/Green/Blue Mars, Moving Mars, Mars Underground.
With competition like Robinson, Greg Bear, William Hartmann, how was I going to find anything
new
to say? If I wanted to write about Mars, I would need another approach.

*   *   *

Then it all came together.

*   *   *

When a story is ready to be told, I write.

I started
Svetz and the Beanstalk
on a portable computer aboard a cruise ship docked at Ensenada, Mexico. We'd already seen the Blowhole. Marilyn went off to shop. I set up my laptop computer in the lounge that sells cappuccino, and began writing.

I saw nothing impossible about writing two Beanstalk stories, the second with Terry Pratchett.…

Except that I never leave anything out. It was my first insight as a writer. Never hold anything back from the reader. It was basic to Robert Heinlein's style too. Take one idea and explore
every
implication.

Yggdrasil (and a lot of Norsemen) was one of Terry's suggestions. A lot of that six-hour conversation must have worked its way into the novel.

Worried and embarrassed. I E-mailed Terry and told him what had happened. His opinion matches mine: ideas are cheap, it's the writing that makes them golden. He tells me he's ready to write a Beanstalk novel too. But, set on the Diskworld, it's likely to follow wildly different physics.

*   *   *

Then there's Suzanne Gibson. I met her through her husband, Warren James, who runs
Hour 25,
a local radio show, on Friday nights. When I was deep into Svetz and time travel and Mars, Suzanne volunteered to do some of my research.

The chapter heads all came from her. It seems as if every separate branch of humanity has its own tower to Heaven. I found some wonderful quotes from South America too, but I lost them.

*   *   *

So this is my take on Mars, and Yggdrasil, and (again, God help me) the space program.

What came before doesn't count. We always build from
now.

TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

N-Space

Playgrounds of the Mind

Destiny's Road

Rainbow Mars

WITH STEVEN BARNES

Achilles' Choice

The Descent of Anansi

WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

Beowulf's Children

“A writer of supreme talent.”

—Tom Clancy

“Niven's masterly use of SF strategy hits every note, springing surprises and plot turns with dizzying pace. Niven … lifts the reader far from the conventional world—and does it with a dash.”

—
The Los Angeles Times

“Niven's sure hand with details opens the story up in unexpected directions.… I hope the inevitable sequel maintains this admirable balance.”

—
The New York Times

“A pure out, spine-tingling shot of the old-fashioned good stuff.… The real thing still packs a punch.”

—
Orlando Sentinel

“Niven has always been good at giving his worlds texture, but the high-tech high jinks of Known Space tend to obscure that part of his art. Here, with the space operatics turned way down, we hear that, by God, the man can really sing.”

—
Locus
on
Destiny's Road

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

RAINBOW MARS

Copyright © 1999 by Larry Niven

“Rainbow Mars,” copyright © 1999 by Larry Niven; “The Flight of the Horse,” copyright © 1969 by Mercury Press, Inc.; “Leviathan!” copyright © 1970 by
Playboy;
“Bird in the Hand,” copyright © 1970 by Mercury Press, Inc.; “There's a Wolf in My Time Machine,” copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc.; “Death in a Cage,” copyright © 1973 by Larry Niven.

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

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®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-56678-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-41613

First edition: March 1999

First mass market edition: May 2000

eISBN 9781466842779

First eBook edition: March 2013