by Larry Niven
“Had you thought of transferring?”
“We could ask. X-cages don’t generally carry two crew. Me, I’m not a cosmonaut. But we could ask.”
She sighed.
He asked, “You want your hero’s reward anyway?”
“Sure.” She moved to kiss him through two filter helmets, and caught herself. She began opening zips instead.
Svetz watched her nakedness emerge while he dealt with his own. He didn’t know where the zips were on a skintight pressure suit. It slowed him. Miya opened a score of zippers in a few seconds’ time, then started helping Svetz with his. Suddenly she yelped, “It’s cold!”
Svetz grinned. “I wondered!”
“Well, how the futz—” She saw the only answer. She zipped, zipped, and pulled, and Svetz leapt naked into the sleeping room with Miya on his tail.
She was the only warmth in the world. The congealed gray fog wrapped itself partly around them and held some of their heat. “It’s still futzy cold,” she said.
“Well, try to remember why you slept in your pressure suit.”
“Oh, was that it? I thought I was too tired to take it off. Or maybe I just hadn’t decided, Hanny. But a thought finally plods across my sluggish mind. Zeera never saw you on a mission.”
“No, of course not.”
They had to keep the filter helmets. They still couldn’t kiss. The gray foam impeded their lovemaking. It tangled them. Svetz finally got enough of his arm free to reach a touch point. The fog softened to mist and seeped into the floor. Miya pulled them together in frantic reaction to the cold, and they connected.
And presently broke free and sprinted for the skintights.
“How the futz did Martians do this?” Miya asked, and went back into the room to look at the frieze. “Hanny—”
“Did it without the bed, didn’t they?”
“Right. Kneeling.”
“The bed’s only for sleeping, bet on it. If Martians had seen us they’d have laughed themselves sick.”
“Well.” They grinned at each other. Then … skintights weren’t good for coitus, but they were fine for cuddling.
“I was furious with you,” she said.
“That’s what I thought, but I couldn’t see why.”
“For letting me think you were dead.”
“Miya, I couldn’t tell the difference myself!”
“How are you feeling now?”
“Beaten. There are places where I don’t hurt. Miya, what’s your fantasy Hanville Svetz like? Is he taller? Brawnier?”
“Braver than Zeera thinks you are. Agile. Nonlinear thinker. Heals fast.”
“Does he negotiate or give orders?”
“Depends. You talk it out when there’s time. Hanny, I’m describing what I see.”
“If you see that when we get home—”
“If Wrona will have me.”
23
… across the gulf of space … intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes.…
—The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells
After she was gone, Svetz tried to guess how long the flight would take. Moving at high altitude through Mars’ already thin air, Miya could make a hundred and fifty klicks per hour. Mons Olympus was four thousand and a bit, far around the curve of the planet, but with no chance of getting lost. Mons Olympus would loom like a piece of the sky.
Twenty-five hours. Give them an hour to debrief. Twenty-five coming back.
* * *
He stayed in the Martian house, that first day. His injuries had stiffened up.
By noon of the second day he was beginning to starve.
The suit would conserve water—as the filter helmet would not—but it wouldn’t feed him. He had to distract himself somehow.
He went exploring. He stayed on the bare rock crest and kept his needle gun in his hands.
They might have been a pack of wild dogs, all hunger and teeth, in the moment he glimpsed them. They flowed up the rock slope in a surge that was like so many maglev trains. He fired carefully into their mouths. The nearest fell at his feet.
They were miniatures of the ten-legged killers, no taller than Wrona but three times as long. They were dead. The anesthetic had shut down their breathing.
He dragged two back to the house.
Svetz dissected one, talking his way through it for the record. He learned little. They had the wet red interiors of mammals. He could identify a single longitudinal lung. A stomach segued smoothly into an intestine that coiled neatly down the abdomen.
He cut up the second adolescent and dropped the legs into hot silver metal. He had read of this: that men and women had killed animals for food. He didn’t believe it until he lifted his filter helmet to free his mouth. Then the smell hit him. He did not decide to eat; he found himself tearing meat from the bone with his teeth.
It was good! He nearly broke a tooth, he had to learn to chew around the bone, and the meat was tough, but he was ravenous. He made himself stop, appalled at himself, and waited to see if he’d get sick. A hour later, he gorged.
He deep-fried the rest of the legs and several strips of what he thought was muscle, zipped it all into sample bags and set it outside where the martian cold would keep it.
* * *
Night. The Hangtree was below the horizon, not even a silver highlight now.
* * *
Noon of the third day: now he could begin to worry.
Miya didn’t answer the beam.
He waited through the fourth day.
* * *
In the afternoon there came a dust plume on the horizon. Svetz zoomed on a spidery crucifix moving across the desert. It resolved into a low-built vehicle.
The helmet said, “Hello, Hanny!”
“Is that you? West of me, on the ground?”
“Yes. I couldn’t get to Zeera. We’ve only got the one flight stick, but I found this.”
Miya was sailing along the dry canal. There was a wheel under the open cabin and four more wheels on long springy booms, and sails splayed on a mast and the booms.
He ran down to meet her.
“Get aboard,” she said. “I don’t want to stop in one spot. We might sink.”
Svetz tossed his burden in and climbed after it.
“What’s that?”
“You hungry?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Here.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Take the wheel.” She examined the leg briefly, then ate as he’d showed her, helmet back, filter helmet on. Lift the edge of the filter helmet, bite, close it.
“Just keep us pointed west. Stick to the canal,” she said. “It’s light enough, it won’t break through the crust. Hanny, this is good. Are you going to tell me—?”
He told her. She asked for more.
* * *
Zeera was pinned down with monsters all around her. Miya couldn’t get near her. They’d talked by beam.
“Is she hurt?”
“No,” Miya said, “but she’s given up. I had trouble getting her to talk at all.”
The crater in Mons Olympus was an observatory. Zeera had looked down into a vastness of telescope mirrors. Square klicks of mirrors and framework still didn’t fill much of that tremendous crater.
The Tanker was half hidden in a tangle of structures, two klicks northeast of the crater rim. A laboratory and army bivouac had grown up around the Tanker. When Zeera hove into view, they fired on her.
She flew out of their range and uphill before she brought the Minim down.
“Did they damage the Minim?”
“Not then and not after, but Zeera says they could, any time,” Miya said. “Now the Minim’s surrounded too. Zeera’s safe in the cabin, but they shot at me as soon as I got close.”
“Projectiles?”
“No, they’ve got blasters! Big heat beam projectors! Did you know the outer hull of the Minim is a heat superconductor? Makes ree
ntry easier, but it also means a blast of heat won’t melt holes in it.”
“Did you try your blaster on them?”
“Hanny, I thought I’d better get you first.”
Instead of leaving him four thousand klicks away, without air, food, water, or transport. “Good. I’m still catching up here. They’ve got a whole laboratory around the Tanker, right? And it’s been there for years? We’re lucky if they haven’t taken the Tanker apart. Did it look all right?”
After a long silence Miya asked, “Hanny, how the futz would I know if they drained the tank?”
Svetz said, “Get some sleep.”
Driving a sailcar was fun. He’d had days to grow used to the screaming wind; it lost force now because they were racing ahead of it. The car was rolling too fast to sink through the dried dust. The canal was so wide that he couldn’t see both rims at the same time. It would be hard to hit anything.
A line of big birds, needle-nosed and wingless, chased them for three or four klicks and never quite caught up. Svetz wondered if they were his dinner, then if they were chasing their own dinner. They looked to be just having fun. But the nearest one seemed to be wearing—
“Miya, give me a sanity check.”
She wriggled around to look where he was pointing. Zoomed her faceplate. “That thing is wearing a belt. Or maybe it’s a collar. With tools hanging on it.”
“Matth said there are five sapient species in their funny alliance, plus the observers. This would make seven intelligent species, right? How could this many all evolve together?”
“Can’t,” Miya said.
“They could evolve separately,” Svetz mused. “It’s another quantum mechanical thing.”
“I’m tired, Hanny. What are you talking about? Time lines merging?”
“Yes, just before everything ends for this whole world. Like virtual particles, no investigator is supposed to see this.”
“But we’re seeing it.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be here either.”
But Miya was asleep. In the morning she remembered nothing of big needle-nosed birds wearing tool belts.
* * *
Come night, Miya wanted to keep moving.
They mounted her flashlight on the roof, pointing straight up. She hovered above him on the flight stick, in the beam, while Svetz sailed.
At midnight they switched. Miya made him take the blaster. He showed her how to use the needle gun.
At dawn Miya slept again. She didn’t wake until near sunset. Svetz got an hour’s sleep before night fell, and then they both had to be awake to drive.
After two days of driving she was caught up on sleep.
Dawn. He flew above dark green canyons cutting through red desert. Far ahead was a row of … something repetitive. He took his time descending.
Pyramids. The row began above the canal, and the first was no bigger than a fist. Each that followed was larger, and each had been broken open. The row descended to the canal floor as if the architects had mindlessly followed the disappearing water.
The line continued. Built on the floor of what had been a canal, these last could hardly be ancient tombs. More like row houses.
The last was as big as a mansion, and the peak was missing. They gave it a wide and wary berth. They were already past when Svetz saw a skinny arm emerge from the pyramid with a rounded brick in its hand.
* * *
Midnight. Miya brought the flight stick down to the aft boom, tied it, walked forward. They traded places at the wheel. Svetz crawled back along the boom. He didn’t have Miya’s balance, and it was very dark.
Svetz flew high. The tiny flashlight on the sailcar was a bright pinprick on black land. A moon ghosted overhead, west to east: Phobos, a featureless pale lamp much larger than any tiny captured asteroid. Stratospheric ice crystals? Its light illuminated nothing until he’d flown for hours, until his night vision began to adjust.
Below, wide to the left and far aft, motion reflected the moonlight.
Svetz moved out of the sailcar’s flashlight beam. He could still see the light as a wobbly line of lesser darkness in his peripheral vision. An intruder in the sky was catching up with them, their paths slowly converging.
“Miya?”
“How you doing, Hanny?”
“We have company. Turn the flashlight off.” Already the intruder was an enemy. Strangers met during his trips to Earth’s past had usually been suspicious, jumpy, ready to kill a man who didn’t dress like they did.
He used his faceplate to zoom on the intruder. He got a jittery image of a smooth-surfaced silver lens. “One ship. Big, I think. Flying double-wok, rounded, with no decks. Not the same style as Skyrunner was. Some other race.”
What had Matth called them? Skyrunner had been destroyed by a ship like this, armed with a heat cannon.
The intruder was nearly alongside Svetz, but far to the left. Svetz dropped the zoom. At once he saw the second ship, flying even higher than Svetz and just above the larger ship, tending it.
He watched it for some time before he saw it swing right, abandoning its post for something more interesting. The second intruder had seen Miya.
Svetz saw the lens-ship tilt nearly to vertical. Saw an aperture open in the rim, and that was enough.
“It’s after you,” he said. He’d been keeping the blaster in a zipped pocket. He drew it carefully, knowing how much he didn’t want to drop it.
“Shoot it!” Miya demanded.
He fired. “Way ahead of you.”
The smaller ship rocked in the jet of flame. It fired a wild actinic jet of its own. Not a laser, it spread too much, but it didn’t spread like a rocket exhaust. Maybe a plasma jet held together by its own magnetic fields.
For an instant it held, and then the flying wok flared. Svetz saw the ship shred itself inside a dying fireball.
He lifted. He could do that by touch. There was nothing solid above him. Eyes aboard the large intruder might have seen him when he fired, as the point on a line of white plasma; but now he would be only a dark dot on the sky.
“Hanny, report! I saw—”
“I got the little ship. The big one had to have seen me. I’m lifting. They’ll try to chase me. There’s no chance they’ll find you until dawn if you’ll just turn off that futzy flashlight!”
“I did. Why not just shoot them down?”
“I blinded myself.”
She didn’t say anything.
“There’s nothing that can hurt me this high,” he said. “I’ll just wait for my sight to come back.”
“Good plan.” Miya sounded jittery. “Look, if you don’t find me then, just keep west to Mons Olympus. Get to the Minim.”
“Right.”
* * *
He couldn’t see. It was chilly without his cloak, but no worse than chilly. The flight stick flew on, altitude unknown.
Miya called not much later. “I saw where the wreck hit. I’m going to look it over.”
“Bad idea,” Svetz said.
“In and out quick, trust me.”
It felt like hours passed before she spoke again. “What did your rebels call them? Softfingers? I’ve found parts of at least four bodies. They look like dry-skinned octopuses. They’ve got ten arms with no bones in them. They’re bigger than men. Oversized heads with an external skull, and big bulging eyes.
“The undersurfaces of the tentacles are thick with callus right up to the … shoulder. The underside of the pressure suit is a curved plate, a skid. I pried one up. It’s covering the air supply. The mouth is on the bottom.” Pause. “Hanny, do you remember Gorky’s maps?”
From footage taken by the descending Tanker, Gorky had made maps of every size. They’d all studied them so that they could find the Tanker.
“Remember a white rock formation on Mons Olympus? It looked chopped, sculpted, but no special shape? Well, that was a Softfingers skull.”
“Charming.”
“Hanny, I found rolls of mirror cloth. It’s so
lar sail material harvested from the skyhook tree’s leaves.”
“An innocent cargo ship? They had one futz of an energy weapon.”
“Aye aye, but I sure hope we know what we’re doing.”
“Miya, get out of there before they come to bury their dead.”
“You don’t know they … right.”
* * *
Something blurred and bright floated in his sight. Joy flooded through him: his sight was returning. He watched it for a time, trying to guess its size and distance.
“Miya? Is it still night where you are?”
“Sure. How high are you?”
“I can see the curve of the planet.” An arc of light, without detail. “And I can see Mons Olympus.” The crater’s rim was aflame with dawn. No mistaking it now, though his sight was still blurry.
“Go for it.”
24
He said, “Zeera?” and waited.
These were the foothills of Mons Olympus. The mountain looked like a tilted continent from this close. Zeera should be in line of sight.
“Hanville Svetz calling Zeera Southworth for the Institute for Temporal Research. Zeera, answer.”
“Svetz?”
“Hi, Zeera. What’s happening?”
“They shoot at me when I try to take off. If I try to work the airlock, they shoot. Sometimes when I look out.”
“How many? Where are they? Can you see them?”
“They shoot at me when I look! They’ve got things like blasters, but big!”
“How much damage have you taken?”
“I can’t tell. Maybe none. The blaster only shoots heat beams, I think, and it recharges in ten minutes. There are two at least. The Minim’s hull superconducts heat, it can take that much energy and radiate it away before they can fire again, but my engines overheat and shut down and I fall about a meter! I did it twice more. I thought you’d need the data.”
“I’d need—?”
“You, Miya, somebody!”
He heard the edge of hysteria in her voice. She wanted rescue! He said, “Well, I’m here.”
“Just stay away. You’ll go like an ice cube in coffee.”
“I can’t leave things the way they are. We’ll starve. You’ve got all the food. Zeera, did the Tanker look ruptured?”