The Secretary-General said, “This is hurting my eyes.”
Svetz’s eyes tried to twist as he followed Pilgrim One’s viewpoint. Odd perspective here—
“The trunk gets thicker as you go higher,” Gorky said in haste. “We were expecting that. Your normal tree is wider near the base. It wants compression strength, you see? It doesn’t hang. This skyhook tree is tapered so that less weight is hanging below any given cross-section. That makes it stronger.”
It looked infinitely tall.
The Pilgrim probes were close, near the roots and among them. Pilgrim One’s viewpoint zoomed up along the pale brown line of the tree, into a dark fringe that began almost at the edge of sight, scores of klicks high. A ragged collar of foliage, already above the atmosphere, continued up the trunk as a vertical fringe, like the mane on Horse. Hard to see anything at all in there. Not dark green. Black!
The SecGen asked, “You wanted seeds?”
The Heads took it as an invitation. “If there are seeds, I’d expect them to fall into the canal,” Ra Chen speculated.
“From that high up, they’d come down like little meteors,” Gorky said, “shielded against reentry. Punch their way through the weed surface into the canal. We can’t go there, Ra Chen.”
“We could.”
“There’s a town built up where the canals intersect. The skyhook tree is in it. You’re not thinking of a full-scale invasion of Mars, are you?”
“No, just send Pilgrims to search underwater.”
“Oh. Good. Give me some time to study these records. I want to know if there are seeds higher up the tree. I’d like to search the black fringe.”
“You didn’t design the Collector to climb trees, did you, Willy?”
Miya leaned forward in the near dark, jaw set, her nails sinking into Svetz’s shoulder. He asked, softly, “What?”
She whispered, “They’ll have to use cosmonauts!”
* * *
Willy Gorky himself briefed them the next day.
“Ra Chen and I can’t work out how to tell a computer program what a skyhook seed looks like. We don’t know ourselves. Miya, Svetz, you’ll send instructions as usual, then pick up return signals from the Mars Pilgrims. We’ll send six Pilgrims underwater. They should be safe from the locals, at any rate.”
Ra Chen said, “We’ll mount a viewer in the small X-cage so you can scan whatever they find. We should have done that a year ago! Svetz, you’ve seen every kind of tree, you must have seen every kind of seed.” He overrode Svetz’s attempt to interrupt. “Our best hope is that you’ll know a seed when you see it. Then tell the Collector module to go get it.”
12
Eleven hundred years of development had shaped the Rovers. Early versions had explored Mars and the Moon. They had become smaller, lighter, cheaper, more clever. Later models roved the surfaces of every interesting body in the solar system. Some climbed like spiders. Some rolled as spheres with unbalanced weights in them. On worlds with no surface at all, Rovers floated or sank.
On archaic Mars, six Rovers (Pilgrim model) explored beneath the black waters of a canal. They found soft mud, and organic substances subsiding into softness, and things that tried to eat them. They had been told little. They examined discreet solid objects and discarded things that were too large or too small. They sought shapes that repeated as seeds would. When the command came, they crawled out of the muck to beam their findings to the Orbiter for relay to a point above the Earth.
Miya and Svetz ran through the murky footage. Many hours later Miya said, “This is boring.”
Svetz stopped the display and lifted tired eyes. He said, “Best duty I’ve ever had.”
“Really?”
“I’ve been chewed. I’ve been scorched. I’ve been almost eaten, almost fried, almost perforated, over and over. I go alone, because there has to be room for whatever I bring back. There’s never been anyone to guard me or rescue me, or talk to, or love.” There, he’d said it. “Every other trip, I’ve been hunting something with teeth. I hate … used to hate animals. Wrona seems to have talked me out of that. I am having a wonderful time.”
Miya sighed and went back to work
The X-cage had come to meet itself. Now it hovered above the same fat blue-and-white crescent they’d left behind two trips running. Only the pattern of stars had shifted. The cage was hovering, after all; it wasn’t in an orbit.
Svetz picked out an orange spark among the stars of Taurus near the western horizon. That was a world. He couldn’t see it as more than a point.
If the Pilgrims couldn’t find seeds, someone would have to go to Mars and look.
Miya pointed into the projection from Pilgrim One. “Look, Hanny, we keep seeing this shape. It’s pottery, isn’t it?”
Sunlight rippled across it: it was near the surface of the canal. “Vase. You can see the pattern. This symbol, it’s that ten-legged toothy thing that tried to chew up Pilgrim Four.”
“Not quite the same. A bigger relative. Hanny, I’m tired.” Miya curled up in the curve of the floor.
Svetz called the Center. Hillary Weng-Fa answered. She went to wake Ra Chen.
“No seeds,” Svetz said.
“How sure are you?”
“We get pottery, we get eggs. Bones look like each other, so the Pilgrims show us a lot of those. Once we got a mob of Reds in battle gear. They all looked alike. They were even walking in some kind of regular array. Pilgrim Six went right up to examine them. We’ve lost Pilgrim Six.”
“Better tell Willy.”
No telling how much time had passed in the present. Here, only an instant passed while the phone went dead, then live. He heard, “Miya?”
“Sleeping, Willy.”
“Chairman Ra Chen tells me you can’t find anything like a seed.”
“We’ve typed fifteen styles of pottery. We find broken furniture. Not much garbage. Maybe there’s a famine. We did find a heap of spiky seeds, fist-sized, but we searched through the rotten fruit around it, which wasn’t pleasant, Willy, and it had more of the same seeds in it. There are skeletons of at least three biped species. Most of them look human. Some were wearing armor. The big four-armed ones grow their own. It’s not as if they have wars, more like they fight in the streets every night. We’ve found big eggs. They’re not seeds, they’re eggs, and in fact they’re humanoids’ eggs, red and pale and black, all a little different. Mars’s answer to population control. Willy, we’re both exhausted.”
“Get some sleep. Call me when you wake up. We’re sending you to Mars.”
“Willy—”
“We can refit a Moon Minim spacecraft and get it into the large X-cage. If it doesn’t fit, we’ll fit something. We’ll brief Zeera. I don’t see any way to get seeds off that tree except to go up it.”
“Wait wait wait! I’m not a cosmonaut!”
Pause. “A chance to see Mars when it was alive? At United Nations expense?”
“Willy, we spent fifteen hours searching for your seeds, and six Pilgrims spent a year gathering the data. If there were seeds, they’d have fallen. If they’d fallen, we’d have found them. This tree is sterile, and aside from all that, I, Hanville Svetz, am not a cosmonaut!”
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.”