Rainbow Mars (7 page)

There was a brief pause … and Miya was watching him.

Willy Gorky said, “Twenty years ago I'd have killed you to steal your seat on that ship.”

Ra Chen's voice: “Never mind, Svetz. Drop it, Willy. We'll send Miya and Zeera. You come home in the small X-cage.”

Miya's eyes closed. Svetz curled up next to her and let it all drift away.

13

He woke to Miya's voice.

He was looking at a bullet-shaped spacecraft backlit against dark Earth and marked with riding lights. He knew what to look for: a faint halo around the ship, fading into nothing at one rim, was the shell of the large X-cage.

“You're awake? Good.” Miya was already wearing a skintight in brilliant yellow patterns. “Svetz, this is a pressure suit. The helmet unlocks and flops back if you're where you can breathe. Flops forward to close,
lock it
or it's explosive decompression. Unzip everything before you get in. No, wait, strip first.…”

She watched, clinically detached, as Svetz zipped himself into the pressure suit. Stickstrips held it open against the wall, and it was still difficult. Limb by limb, then torso; lock each zip. From shoulder to waist, the back of the suit was a shell ten centimeters thick: enough to enclose circuitry and an air and water recycler. The bubble helmet locked against it when open. The rest of the suit was very flexible, very thin. It fitted him like skin on a dieter, just a little loose. He smoothed out some wrinkles. He pulled the big bubble down over his head, wiggled it into lock, and set the air going.

Miya guided his fingers to sensors under his chin. “This is your voicelink,” her voice boomed, receded. “This zooms your helmet.” Miya's face expanded enormously. “The other way—” The room pulled in around her. “Fisheye.”

Looking down at himself he saw the patterns of a brilliant green lizard. Miya's skintight was yellow and orange flames, like a bird he'd once glimpsed and lost. Waldemar Ten would have loved it, but he'd asked for a spotted owl .…

Above Earth's black night side, a half-seen circle opened like a flower and puffed a haze of ice crystals. Spacecraft and circle separated. In a haze of frost a tiny pressure suit moved toward them.

Stickstrips held an elastic belt twenty centimeters wide, with Space Bureau insignia on an even wider buckle, and a hooded silver cloak. Svetz left the cloak but donned the belt. Miya nodded and reached for a handle.

Svetz was used to changing gravity. He had a grip on the chair before the hatch opened. Air roared out; Svetz stayed put. The suit shrank in vacuum. Now it fitted him like skin on a sausage.

Vacuum outside, pressure in his helmet. The suit put pressure on his skin, but air still
pulled
itself into his lungs. He had to pull the belt tight around his belly before he could exhale.

Miya had placed herself near the hatch to catch him, but only now did she look back. His heart leapt. The skintight had shrunk around her. She seemed to be wearing nothing but yellow and orange paint.

Zeera Southworth pulled herself inside and moored her flight stick. Zeera in a zebra-striped skintight was a marvelous sight. Her gaze brushed his crotch, which may have showed signs of his interest, and he saw a swallowed laugh. “Svetz. Want to see a rocket ship?”

“Yes.”

“Take the cloak,” Miya advised him.

A flight stick was lift field generator and power source built into a meter and a half of pole, with a control ring at one end and a brush discharge at the other. Spinoff from Space Bureau, of course. The women bracketed him as they crossed to the large extension cage. They needn't have worried. Svetz knew flight sticks … though this one felt underpowered. A lift field wasn't a rocket. The Earth it pushed against was too far below.

He wrapped the cloak around himself. The Earth had rotated into somebody else's midnight as it turned beneath the hovering X-cages. Mars and the stars of Taurus hadn't moved.

They flew alongside a spacecraft like a bullet standing upright, and took their turns in the airlock. Lifted by antigravity beamers on the large X-cage, Svetz entered free fall.

14

The Minim was big. Three reclined chairs faced up into a transparent nose cone. Behind those was considerable cargo space. Svetz noted a rolled-up net, and a door in the hull big enough to admit a van.

“Roomy,” he said.

Zeera said, “We don't really know what kind of seeds a tree this size makes—”

“They've got to stand up to reentry,” Miya said, “at worlds maybe bigger than Earth—”

“A seed
could
be as big as that door,” Zeera said. “If it's bigger, we'll have to strap it to the hull.”

Tools were mounted around the cylinder wall. Svetz noted stickstrips for three pressure skintights and three flight sticks. He waved at devices mounted in sleeves—

Zeera pointed. “Sonic stunners. Long-range blasters. Translators.”

Three of everything. Wide stickstrips along the wall, to tether three crew for sleep.
We can refit a Moon Minim spacecraft,
Ra Chen had said. Svetz had refused to go to Mars, and
then
they'd built for three.

Miya had heard his refusal. He could lose her! Willy Gorky was manipulating him, but it wasn't as if he had a choice.

“Zeera, can this ship talk to the Center?”

Zeera tapped a device like the talker in the small X-cage. “Get me either chairman,” she ordered.

“Wait one,” a tech said.

Gorky's voice. “Ready?”

“Zeera Southworth here. No showstoppers. Hanny Svetz wants to talk.”

Svetz said, “Willy, this ship will clearly support three. I want to go to Mars, if it's all right with Chairman Ra Chen.”

Silence crawled. Then Ra Chen asked, “Svetz, are you in free fall now?”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel?”

“No problems.” No motion sickness.

Gorky's voice. “I don't know what the small X-cage will do. Can we pull it back without a pilot?”

Ra Chen: “Yes.”

Gorky: “Glad to have you, Hanny.”

Miya broke in. “Willy, that changes the ship's mass by…?” Her eyes questioned him.

“Sixty-one kilos,” Svetz told her.

“Miya, you oppose this?”

Miya locked eyes with him and said, “No, Willy, I'm for it, but rewrite the instructions for boost.”

Gorky: “Have to pull the cage back anyway. Our twenty minutes are up.”

The large X-cage blinked, gone and back again. Miya snapped, “Seat webs
now!
” and didn't watch Svetz's initial clumsiness. A ruddy dot above the Earth's limb waited.

He felt no thrust. The large X-cage shrank out of sight. A few minutes later the Earth was flowing past and the daylit crescent was narrowing.

Zeera watched her instruments. “Willy's pulled back the large X-cage again,” she said. “Boost One accomplished. We're in orbit at eight KPS.”

Svetz said, “Orbit? I thought we were on our way.”

“We'll close-approach the Earth. Then the X-cage pops back and the antigravity beamers hit us again. This ship's too heavy to get into Mars intercept in one boost.”

Miya nodded as if she understood, so Svetz did too. He moved about the cabin, testing his agility. He looked over the gear that hung on stickstrips along the cylinder wall. “Zeera? A translator for
Martian?
”

Miya answered. “Hanny, these have been used in United Nations sessions for near a thousand years. They can translate thieves' cant and old recordings of dolphin and whale song.”

“We have a
live
whale!”

“Yes … hadn't occurred to me. Anyway, these things certainly don't have Martian on file. You and the Martians will have to talk until the translator can correlate some of your words.”

Svetz unrolled a screen to cover the cylinder wall. Now it was just another floor.

The Earth turned full.

It came to him that being trapped in a tiny spacecraft with Miya Thorsven for two years wouldn't be half bad. Two more years returning, if Mars didn't kill them. He looked around the cabin, wondering how they could get privacy. Zeera had never shown interest in any man or woman … which reminded him. “Zeera. How's Wrona?”

“I brought her to the Center. She can go home with Hillary if the mission lasts overnight.”

Overnight?… Oh. “Zeera, do you like Space better than Time?”

“I never told you, did I? When I was a little girl I wanted to
live
with Martians. We should've merged the two Bureaus then instead of waiting.”

“Another fantasy fulfilled?”

Miya snapped, “Oh, get off that, Hanny!”

“Here's another,” he said. “Marooned with two beautiful women, millions of klicks from planet Earth, for … four years, Zeera?”

She laughed. “Four years without Wrona, doesn't that bother you?”

“It's not four years for
her.
”

“Won't bother us either. Have a look at this.” She showed him what Ra Chen had built into what would have been storage space for provisions. “It's an advance on the temporal interrupt that we've been using to stop the X-cages. We call it Fast Forward or FFD.”

15

Eight klicks per second is fast. Svetz never saw the large X-cage return. Telltales in front of Zeera told him when it came, how hard it pushed, and when it was gone. He only saw the Earth shrinking behind, and Mars like a glowing heart in Taurus.

Zeera said, “Miya, you'll appreciate this next move.” She engaged the Fast Forward.

Svetz trusted the machines of the Institute for Temporal Research without understanding them. He simply enjoyed the show.

The slowly dwindling Earth shrank abruptly to a bright point. The sun itself was shrinking. The pink pinpoint that was Mars grew brighter … grew conspicuous.…

“I wondered where all the provisions were,” Miya said lightly, but she had a death grip on her armrests. “This is time travel too, isn't it?”

“Minimally. We have to put ourselves in the right path before we engage, and then the vehicle just follows the path, the geodesic. We can't change course or dodge, or fight either, I suppose, but we're hard to hurt. The Heads say that if we hit an asteroid, it's good odds we'll go right through it.”

Svetz asked, “Which Head?”

“Both. Grinning like fools,” said Zeera. She was working at the keyboard. Pictures scrolled across one of the displays. “Svetz, have you seen these?”

In the display screen, Mars came up fast. An edge of horizon became a shield volcano of awesome size.

“It's the view from the Tanker?”

“Yeah. Watch.”

The viewpoint dropped toward a vast crater, its bottom a glittering asterisk of mirrors; dropped past the rim, slowed above a rocky ledge … but lines and tiny numbers overlay everything he saw. Zeera said, “The Tanker, the Pilgrims, all the pictures that came back, Ra Chen and Gorky have been turning it all into maps. We can't get lost.”

She wasn't looking at him. Svetz realized he was missing the view.

The bright orange point had become a disk. Not a disk now: a whirling sphere expanding much too fast. “That's close enough,” Zeera said, and Mars jarred to a stop, as large as a full Earth seen from the Moon.

Thus far the trip had cost them forty minutes ship time.

“We still have to match orbit with Mars. Anything threatens us, we just go past. We've got fuel to abort and return. Miya, take the copilot slot.” Zeera sounded edgy, and well she might. They were rubbing up against an alien civilization. They had examined little more than its garbage, but all the corpses wore wounds.

*   *   *

The
Minim
slowed at a tenth of a gee, spiraling in toward Mars. The planet waned to a shrinking crescent, then a great black hole in the stars.

They were moving inward of Deimos' orbit, and Mars was a spreading crescent, when Svetz found the tree.

It was foreshortened, pointing almost at the ship. The orbital tower looked like a giant's club. They were passing just above the massive, rounded upper end.

“Interestingly phallic,” Miya said. “Or is that just me?
Hanny!
” as a diseased potato thirty klicks long came straight at them. Zeera screamed.

The hurtling moon missed them by … Watching it recede made it seem that Deimos had missed by two klicks or more, still much too close for comfort.

Miya came out from behind her arms. She looked at Svetz for a heartbeat, her face too pale. Then she turned her attention to the planet.

Mars was still distant by hundreds of klicks, but the
Minim
's zoom display was good. Mars' crescent grew gibbous, then full. Canal patterns laced the deserts, knotted into cities at the intersections. There was a wide white northern ice cap. Miya swore monotonously. “That region has to be Syrtis Major, but there's nothing left of the shape! Valles Marineris is all gray-green … there, where all those minor canals converge. Zeera, every feature I know has changed. I'm feeling very lost. Wait, that's Mons Olympus, with greenery crawling up the sides. That's Aeolis coming over the horizon, and the tree growing out of it.”

Craters thickened east of Aeolis. Canals crossed a few of those, the ones that held water. Mars covered half the sky. Features raced beneath the
Minim,
expanding. “Aeria,” Miya said, “I think.”

“Better be,” Zeera said.

Svetz asked, “Zeera, are you going to land us?”

“No. Aerobrake.”

“What's it mean?”

“You'll love it. Are you webbed in?”

The hull began to sing. A landscape of mottled ochre desert and ragged canyons and narrow gray-green lines hurled itself directly at his face, close enough to touch. Svetz clutched the arms of his chair and felt heat radiating from the window. He never thought to look at his companions. He heard Miya murmur, “Xanthe,” and saw a monstrous crater pass beneath them.