The Trellis

by Larry Niven

  “It wasn't good. The marble was too stuck, and the topside arm broke, and I didn't get out. That was when I called Suriyah.” Lark was quiet, then she said, “There's a big vine blocking the door, Daddy. It's feeling around the edges, but the heat leakage has it stopped. But I can't even go EVA to cut myself free.” There was a tremor in her voice.

  “We'll figure it out. Henry and Suriyah and Paul are working on something right now.”

  Kyle paced. Suriyah had shooed the others out, so only the four of them, and Lark's frozen face, remained. Kyle talked to Lark off and on, encouraging. She was getting impatient. Kyle felt lost. This wasn't fair—they were supposed to be having a party. His fists clenched as he kept pacing, nervous. What was taking so long? Why wasn't Lark already on her way home?

  The remote camera was in place, its feed playing on one large wall. As the camera flew closer around Shooter , the damage to two of the arms was clear. One was missing half its length. Shooter was so enmeshed in creeper it looked like it was purposely tied down.

  After two hours, Henry keyed Lark, and said, “Okay, we're ready to go. Turn on your video.”

  Lark's frozen image had looked angry. The animated face that replaced it in the live feed looked calmer, serious. The whites of her dark eyes were red. Lark didn't show any hesitation as she followed Henry's advice, setting the small directional thrusters to given angles and strapping herself in. There was a limited amount of propellant for the little thrusters; the antimatter was confined for use in the main engine.

  Kyle's eyes stayed on the camera feed. There was a puff of propellant release, the burn of the thrusters, and the little marble pushed forward, rotating, pulling the sheet of creeper forest slightly; a tug of war. The tangle of ship and creepers moved. Lark yelped.

  She'd turned off the thrusters.

  Her voice was quivery, scared. “It didn't sound right. The arm ... the bottom-side arm sounded like it might rip off right below my feet!”

  “Damn.” Henry swore. “All right. Don't crack the bubble. Damn engineers should've designed the arms to be released from inside.”

  Kyle had never heard Henry cuss. He closed his eyes briefly. “They'll all be retired by now. Can we try again?”

  “Sure, but something else.” Henry directed the camera feed, again, to almost circle the knot of creeper.

  * * *

  Three more hours, two more failures.

  A blast of the main motor fried a path through the vines, but the arms weren't positioned to push the marble backward. Lark's wriggling had put the marble almost on its side, but how could that change the position of the arms? And the vines were growing back into the charred path.

  If an arm tore loose, if the shell was breached, Lark still had a pressure suit. That, they decided, wasn't the problem. The problem was shrapnel, if the base of an arm spanged loose under high tension.

  By the last try, the room was full again. Christy Base was in on it, engineers and pilots tossing out and rejecting ideas. Paul had been hauled off to bed by his parents, Kate and Jason, and they had come back to watch. Suriyah was crying. “Quit forcing it. That girl is in an egg—don't break it open. She's got time—no need to kill her now. Go eat,” she said to Kyle and Henry. “Tell Lark to sleep. Food and rest will help you all think.”

  Kyle didn't want to go, but Suriyah ignored his protests and Henry showed Kate and Jason the log of everything they'd tried, and asked them to look for other ideas.

  Kyle couldn't sleep. He checked on Lark, who was sleeping. He wandered the halls, lost and tired. Finally, he climbed the ladder to the telescope platform on top of the base. The scope was almost useless since the cloud cover had increased over the past five years, but he remembered showing Lark her first view of the Earth from here.

  Right now, the sky was unusually clear. Charon was dead overhead, a great black shield still showing details of landscape in the sunlight reflected from Pluto. The Styx rose like Jack's beanstalk...

  They still couldn't build a beanstalk, an orbital tower, on Earth. Their materials weren't strong enough. But Charon and Pluto were mutually tidally locked—unique within the known Universe—and light enough that a Hoytether had been strung between them. A Hoytether was an array of strands, some left looser than others to take up the slack if nearby strands broke. It already looked like a trellis. And then the games those students were playing with plant DNA paid off, and Styx was born.

  * * *

  Kyle found the bubble in the scope. It hung motionless, huge in the viewfinder, like a soap bubble caught in a white rose bush. Unreachable. His daughter.

  He must have dozed. Henry's hand poking him startled him. “Jason said you were up. I thought you'd be here.”

  “This isn't going to work, is it?”

  Henry climbed the rest of the way up the ladder and slowly sat down on the observatory floor next to Kyle. The only light shone up from the door where the ladder came in, and the semi-darkness somehow made Henry look even older than usual.

  “Did you find her with the scope?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “I'm afraid to force her free. It's wasting power, and I don't trust that little marble.”

  Kyle pictured Lark dying slowly over days, alone, knowing she was dying. “When this happened, I thought it meant she'd be late for her party. I thought she was irresponsible.” He twisted his hands together, stretching his long fingers, fidgeting. “Can we cut her free from here somehow? Do we have any remotes that could do that? Can we make one?”

  Henry pursed his lips. “She's all tangled up. Good chance of cutting her free and having her float off into space, unable to steer.”

  “There's no way to repair the other marble? You're sure?” Kyle asked.

  “I'm sure.”

  “Can we try?”

  Henry looked at him gently. “We can try something—I just don't know what yet. Keep thinking.”

  “She can't climb down to us.”

  Kyle jumped up and started pacing again. “Can I climb to her? Cut her loose?”

  “It's a hundred sixty klicks and a bit.” Henry cocked an eyebrow. Both men were quiet for long moments. “We have ten days.”

  “Damn. No, it won't work. She'll run out of air on the way down.”

  “She can plug into the vines. She just can't do that with the suit she's wearing. We'll have to modify a suit and bring it to her.”

  It had stopped sounding impossible. A hundred sixty kilometers straight up, in low and dwindling gravity...

  “It will be a hard climb. I'll go.”

  “We'll both go,” Henry said.

  Climbing with Henry would be slow . “Can you to stay in communications and direct the climb?”

  “Jason can direct. I'm going.” Henry stared up at the huge telescope. “I still pass my physical every year. I know more about what might work out there than you do. You need me. So does Lark. And two people have a better chance of getting there than one. What if you get out there alone and you get tired or hurt?”

  “I'm in good shape!” Kyle protested. “I work out every day.” He'd be fifty in ten weeks.

  “It's going to take more than physical conditioning to save Lark.” Henry didn't have to say she was more likely to listen to him than to Kyle.

  “It's going to be one hell of a climb. It will take endurance.”

  “And brains.”

  Kyle sighed. “Okay. So I have endurance, and you have brains. Is that it?”

  “No, I have more experience in the Styx.”

  “I'm in better shape.”

  Henry didn't even seem to hear him—he was looking up through an observatory window, where the interworld forest floated above them.

  * * *

  Suriyah fought them, convinced both men were crazy. “You will die out there! Find another way. That vine is alive—I tell you it's alive. It suffers us to study it, but it will not let you climb it.” She stood over the little altar she kept in a corner of the galley and recited a prayer to Kali and
burned sandalwood incense. Afterwards, she refused to talk to them for hours.

  Lark was silent when Kyle said he was coming to get her. “I'm bringing Henry,” he added.

  “See you in a few days.” She turned off the video abruptly, freezing her picture with a blank expression on her face. He couldn't tell if she was happy he was coming for her, or what she thought about Henry coming along.

  Kyle turned off the frozen picture.

  Preparing took two long days, and many conversations back and forth between Little Siberia and Christy Base. Kyle was tired and frustrated. Lark was quiet for hours at a time. Since the video was almost never on, he couldn't really tell how she was doing.

  “There's more damn gadgets in this suit than any sane engineer would've designed,” Henry complained.

  Kyle stepped back to check the way the suit fit on Henry. It was an Adventurer class suit, left behind after the initial run of programs broadcast from Pluto had lost ratings in favor of faster and more deadly endeavors. Originally made for someone with wider shoulders than Henry's, it fit well otherwise. The ankles were baggy. Considering the work they did, the suits were a miracle. But they were still two inches thick everywhere, full of sensors and smart chips and wires and air tubes. Henry looked bulky and awkward.

  “It'll do. You might be grateful for the help.”

  “I will not .” Henry hated using the adventure suits. “Damn parasites. People who won't go into the world on their own want to ride our dangers. Let ‘em make their own dangers.”

  It had been Paul's idea.

  Kyle had been fetching something for Henry when he passed Paul in a hallway. The boy had looked up and said, “You're using the Tourist-class suits, right? Let's broadcast it! It'll be like Real Space Dangers when they saved the crew of the Orpheus . You'll be heroes!”

  Kyle remembered the river rafting show where Han Davidson had been sucked into a sinkhole. Endless views of dark, swirling water while Davidson drowned. Kyle mumbled something noncommittal and kept right on going to find the saw blade he was looking for.

  Paul interpreted that as assent, and arranged for network coverage before Kyle had a chance to talk to Henry. They would have taken the tourist equipment anyway. The suits had pockets and belts and straps to let the men take their fill of tools, and they had been designed for a thin atmosphere. They were flexible, versatile. The equipment was outdated compared to current adventure suits, and of course there were too many readouts and controls, but far better for this venture than the standard surface suits.

  Audience thirst for real adventure shows was high; live rescue of a lost maiden would be popular. Now that the networks knew about the rescue, and the suits, they threatened to refuse access to the communications gear if they didn't get to broadcast. Henry wanted to take the suits anyway, and let the networks sue them. Kyle pointed out that he needed to publish to survive, and he needed the networks for that. Besides, money from the networks beat a lawsuit. Jason had the common sense to improve Paul's original wide-open offer and bargain real money for Henry, Lark, and Kyle, as well as support pay for the other people living in Little Siberia.

  “When we get back, Paul gets assigned kitchen duty for three years,” Henry said.

  “He won't be here for three years. His family is leaving on the next ship with us. So give up and focus.”

  After a final suit-check, Kyle and Henry stepped into the lock, towing nets of gear behind them. They sweated inside the slick suits. The outside temperature was -235C. It took twenty minutes for the base computers to decide the suits had adjusted enough to open the door. They were still sweating when they stepped out onto the sea of ice surrounding Little Siberia. To their right, solid and clear methane crystals the size of houses were half-covered with blown ices and snows. Paths to the left led to Creeper Fields.

  Henry followed Kyle a half-klick to where the Styx met Pluto.

  Vines overflowed from the sky to add layers of dying material to the methane and nitrogen ices that covered Pluto. Creepers dug in, and ran along the ground like frozen spaghetti. They piled up onto each other, dying together. Methane snow crystals danced in the air around the wide white leaves. Wherever the leaves or flowers made contact with the surface they turned brittle and broke as the men stepped on them. Here and there a vine twisted near the surface, not yet trapped and frozen, as if the Styx harbored snakes.

  The base team had guided some of the vines to supply the base. Water and oxygen were needed, and plant broth made good fertilizer for more palatable crops. Years ago they had turned most of the vines back onto the trellis, so that the jungle was growing back into itself, back toward Charon, thicker every year.

  Vines and stems fanned out across the trellis as they neared Pluto, and stray vines still piled up on the ice. Kyle wondered if the plants were seeking trace elements. Any such would be buried deep; these surface snows had rained out of the sky, over and over during Pluto's 247.7-year cycles, plating over anything that resembled soil. The plants would have to dig deep.

  They walked and tested and checked, looking up to see how the vines tangled amongst each other. They selected a medium-thickness vine, wide as their thighs, and well anchored in the ice. It had no leaves for at least the first few hundred meters.

  They tested their siphons. There was pressure in the vines. Kyle and Henry could get liquid oxygen, water and plant broth into the suits using modified siphons Henry had jury-rigged from insulated pipes. It was slow. The siphons used tiny valves and bladders to deal with pressure differences. Liquid slipped through chambers to reach reservoirs in the suits.

  The Styx fed on solar wind, on water from Charon, and on itself. Oxygen and carbon dioxide swirled through the leaves. Parasite bacteria covered the leaves, turning oxygen to carbon dioxide. The creepers ate the CO2and replenished the oxygen. Sunlight became sugar for broth.

  The suits moved all the time. What was doing that? All those tiny cameras, IR and UV and radar, zoom and fisheye, pressure sensors and medical readouts and who knew what. The sensation was unsettling.

  Jason and Paul lumbered across the ice in a small drive-all, and watched Henry and Kyle load supplies into a closed basket that would carry the supplies up, buoyed by a circle of remote-controlled probes. The probes weren't designed to carry any weight at all. Twelve harnessed together could manage thirty kilograms and still maneuver. Every kilo over that was a trade-off in risk vs. material. The basket contained an extra suit with attached color-coded siphons for Lark, a long knife, a single shared habitat to sleep in, extra rope, and a med-kit. There was just enough rope that the basket massed just under thirty kilograms. To save power, the basket would follow them at the end of each day's hike.

  “Suriyah's right,” Jason said. “You're both crazy. I love you for it. Get that girl home so we can celebrate her being sixteen.” He touched them both—the suited version of a hug—and said, “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” both men answered in unison. Paul waved and made a ‘camera rolling’ gesture. The adventure suits were broadcasting.

  Kyle responded to Paul's cue, saying “Welcome, audience. Jason and Paul just wished us luck. Luck would make a nice change.” He thought he sounded stupid and campy.

  Calvin Paulie was taking the first turn monitoring and splicing the feed from Christy Base on Charon. Watchers were tuning in from the near parts of the outer system, and an edited version was scheduled for consumption by sunward planets and moons and bases. “Good luck to our adventurers, Kyle and Henry,” Calvin rumbled, “as they take off to climb the mysterious and dangerous creepers of Pluto and rescue Kyle's daughter, Lark.”

  Unexpectedly, it seemed like private pain was being made too public. Kyle winced and stepped back. He gestured to Henry. The slower man would set the pace.

  Henry reached for a stem with both hands and tugged on it. As Henry put his weight on the creeper, it demonstrated elasticity, pooling at his boots. “So far, so good,” Henry mumbled, and took another handful of the thick stem. He pulled
hand over hand until the creeper took his weight. Now he was actually a half-meter above Pluto's surface. Finally, the creeper seemed willing to let the men climb.

  “Henry,” said Kyle, “remember not to grab the trellis itself, ever. It's too strong. It might cut your suit.”

  “It's also pretty close to invisible,” Henry puffed.

  A fifty-foot insulated Kevlar rope separated the two climbers. Kyle waited. When Henry was near the end of the rope, Kyle grabbed a handful of stem and succeeded in pulling Henry halfway down. Calvin's voiceover played in Kyle's radio. “Looks like a rocky start,” he said, “Or a ropy one. We're wishing you well.” Kyle ignored him, reaching for another boot hold. The vine only compressed a little under his hands; it was hard to grip. It grew as he held it. The wrong direction. Down. The Styx grew almost a kilometer a day. Of course, Lark and Shooter would be moving the same direction. It was like trying to climb a cross between a down escalator and a living boa constrictor.