by Larry Niven
Ra Chen broke in. “You gave us your location in space. Brazil, equator, shoreline. Get there on foot if you have to, but get us a date. Ask a local.”
Gorky: “Would a primitive have a dating system?”
Ra Chen: “Mayans and Incas did, but … hmm … we couldn’t read them. Zeera, what you really want is a Spanish invader. Look for metal armor. Get Christian dates.”
“We’ll try that.”
30
On the night side of Earth was no trace of city light. The planet was black. Nearly uninhabited. Population … a few millions? And now they must search among savage locals for a savage Spaniard halfway round the world from Spain. For a Spanish conquistador, as likely as any Martian to kill a stranger on sight.
But that problem might never arise. “Zeera, these motors wouldn’t even lift us. They weren’t built to land on Earth.”
“Yes, Svetz, they were. Minims launch from Earth and refuel in orbit. This one was rebuilt for Mars, heavier, with an expanded cabin, but it’s pretty much the same. Most of the volume is tanks. We fall motors-down. What’s under us is a fuel tank that’s supposed to collapse if we hit too hard. It takes the shock. We don’t.”
“You’ve been thinking about this too.”
“Oh, yes. And about that impact weapon that might have torn up our reentry shielding.”
From aft Miya called, “I’ve been telling Thaxir about Mars. About what’s going to happen. She wants to talk to us.”
Thaxir? She? Us?
* * *
“I was born on the tree,” the green giant said. “I know only what my mother told me of those days when the tree broke loose. We were royalty, and I am a princess in Memnonia. My age is near thirteen, I think. We have clocks to keep the time our ancestors kept by sun and dark.”
Really, Thaxir’s speech was as interesting as what the translator was saying. Her mouth wasn’t insectile, but the mouth and lips of a mammal, though tusks as long as Svetz’s forearm would make her speech mushy even if it were shaped by lungs.
But Thaxir breathed through spiracles. Svetz saw what Miya was trying to tell him: tubes ran down the inside of her pressure suit to feed two rows of holes along her sides. She spoke in a prolonged belch, and swallowed air to keep it going.
The translator said, “Our nature is conquest, but the tree is too fragile for war. The Allied Peoples have not made war in thirty years. We live with the Hangtree and the Hangtree is our life. I have tried to learn why we should want to leave. Miya cannot tell me.”
“I told her about Mars,” Miya said to Svetz.
“The world was to dry and die. My parents knew the prophecy,” said Thaxir. “When the Hangtree broke loose, they could have gone home to their children and grandchildren. They chose the tree.”
“To their.…?”
Miya told Svetz, “They live a long time.”
Her parents already had grandchildren forty years ago, Mars time: seventy-five Earth years. “And you’re under thirteen?” Twenty-four and a half in Earth years, among beings who might reach a thousand.
“Futz, Miya, we’ve kidnapped a little girl.”
“You have made me slave, and I remain slave,” Thaxir said with composure, “until my warriors can rescue me. But my heart is with the tree.”
“The tree’s intent may not be the same as yours,” Miya told the Martian. “The Hangtree crosses between stars. It only stops at worlds to take nourishment, to make itself strong for the crossing.”
The green giant’s lips pulled back from her tusks: a terrifying sight. “Another star! Yes, we hoped.”
“You won’t have a sun for thousands of years. Understand? The bark of the tree, you know how thick it is. It’s insulation! The core of the tree won’t freeze, only the outside. Only you and your people.”
Thaxir snorted. “We survive! Vacuum sucks air and water from our bodies, but we build pressure tents and then walls. Other kinds attack us for our position on the tree. We fight them until they must make peace. The tree stretches and tears our rails, locks each group of us away from what we need elsewhere, but we build again. If the sun is distant, we will use solar mirrors to gather the light. Have we survived vacuum and starvation and war to be stopped by cold?”
Miya considered. She asked, “You don’t live together, all of your species, do you?”
“No. Mother says we are distributed by what we can defend. There was more of fighting for turf before the Hangtree settled in above this cloudy world. My father died in the war. Now—” Thaxir stopped talking.
Miya asked, “Secrets?”
“I cannot tell you how we defend ourselves! You may not demand. There are laws for treatment of slaves!”
“We’re going down to Earth. Our vessel won’t lift again. We have no way at all to attack any part of the Hangtree.”
Thaxir thought that over. “No way to return me? Even for high ransom?”
“If we find a way, we’ll return you. You can carry our message. Some of you must want to leave the tree before it freezes you.”
A stubborn silence … though Thaxir’s face was hard to read. Where her nose would have been was a flat plate with a stylized pictograph carved into it.
Miya asked, “What do you eat?”
“The tree bears bountiful life. There is fungus. We make a paste from the starchy roots of a parasitic plant. There are animal forms big enough to feed an army for a week.” She wriggled. “If I may reach my pack?”
Miya reached through the net to release the little pack on the green giant’s back and moved it around to her arms. Thaxir pulled out a flask, then a big shapeless lump of something wrapped in mirror leaf, then a beautiful golden arch set with gems, the frame for a score of taut parallel strings.
Svetz asked, “Musical instrument?”
“Yes, a windstorm-minor. Listen.” Thaxir played a tune of strange intervals, all sharps and flats. It seemed to Svetz that she was trying to duplicate some pattern already known … like a computer … yet there was charm in the moment’s uniqueness.
Miya spoke, unaware that she interrupted. “A crossing between stars would take thousands of years. There won’t be sunlight. No source of energy for anything that lives on the bark. It will all die, and so will all of you, and even if you could survive, you, Thaxir, would never live to see another star.”
The pack had disgorged a slate and stick, and Thaxir was drawing. She said, “After all, what choice have we?”
“Some of you who want to accept our offer could gather at the tree midpoint, where there is no gravity. We’ll send you the large extension cage. We’d like some from each of the Allied Peoples if possible. The large cage would hold—Hanny?”
Svetz thought it over. Going forward in time, gravity would plate them across the interior of the shell. “You could lay them out around the whole inner surface. Twenty of these green giants, or a hundred Softfingers or eighty red humanoids … I never saw the crab things close up.”
Miya asked, “There are more of you than that, aren’t there?”
“Of the species from the south, the Fishers and High Folk stayed to share the planet’s fate. Only the Smiths chose to ride the Tree. Five kinds. A million warriors.”
It didn’t matter if Thaxir was inflating the numbers. Miya said, “So we can’t take you all. Think, now. If some of you stay and some go with us, it’s much more likely you won’t all die.”
“You argue as a gambler?” Thaxir was amused.
“Probabilities.”
“It may be some mathematicians will go with you.”
“Do your people live at the Hangtree’s midpoint?”
“Softfingers hold that region. They’re all arms, you know. Freely falling, they are more dexterous than we. We”—the translator hiccuped, then—“green giants, we hold the tree from its far end to forty thousand klicks inward. There we have nearly the same weight as on Mars. It’s the best part of the tree.”
The translator helped them get their measurements straightened
out. Reds held a stretch along the inner branch, from 18,000 to 23,000 klicks altitude. That was roughly martian gravity: they could fight species that were less strong but more dexterous. Thaxir was not reluctant to describe the locations of rival species, but she avoided any mention of their defenses.
What was she doing in Softfinger turf? “We repay a debt. Eleven of us lend our muscle to help the Softfingers extend their city. Other species are involved too. I thought to use the sunflower stalks as anchor points for some preliminary construction. And there you were. And you”—looking at Svetz—“you smashed my face before I could so much as scream.”
“I was frightened,” Svetz said.
“Is there such a thing as a mirror in this place?”
Miya said, “No. Thaxir, your face is fine. The carvings, they aren’t touched.”
“What is that whistling?”
“Earth’s air, slowing us. Don’t be frightened.” Miya plucked the netting around the green giant. It was taut. She pushed the windstorm-minor under it. “You’ll be fine. Hanny, we should strap down.”
She and Svetz made their way forward. The sun was a sudden flame ahead of them, bisected by a flat black horizon. The sound of a harp joined the thin wailing. Air screamed around heat shielding intended for Mars, not Earth, and Thaxir was playing a weird and lovely counterpoint.
Through the flame colors Svetz couldn’t tell what was below them. He wouldn’t have known the geography anyway. The hull’s scream had a warble in it now, and Zeera, who knew this ship better than Svetz, wasn’t looking happy at all.
Wisps of cirrus went past. Svetz could make himself believe they were slowing. His weight was easing. The Minim was falling almost vertically, and what was below was hard to make out, but … “Zeera?”
“Let the computer handle it, Svetz. Look, those trees off there must be the anchor grove. Ten, fifteen klicks away. We came pretty close.”
“That’s water, isn’t it?”
Miya said, “Cosmonauts always fire too early. It costs fuel. We learned to just let the program handle it.”
The motors fired. The Minim tilted hard over. Ocean below, shoreline where the nose pointed, and slender trees tipped with black.
There wasn’t enough thrust. They’d known that, and now the motors were firing horizontally, not slowing their fall.
The Minim tilted to vertical, then a bit farther. Svetz heard the hull rattle and hoped it was landing legs deploying.
The ground came up much too fast.
31
Baba Yaga or Baba Jaga. A female supernatural of Russian folklore … a cannibalistic ogress.… Her abode is a little hut constantly spinning around on fowls’ legs in a clearing in the distant forest; this is surrounded by a picket fence topped with skulls. The Baba Yaga rides through the air in an iron kettle stirring up tempests, or in a mortar which she moves by a pestle as she sweeps her traces from the air with a broom …
—Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend
Svetz cautiously tested his neck—not broken—and his back, before he looked around. “Is everyone alive?”
“Fine,” Miya said dubiously.
Zeera said, “Svetz, it wasn’t that bad a landing, considering we came down on two legs!”
Svetz asked, “Didn’t that used to be there?”
The intertemporal speaking device, torn from its mounting, lay next to the Martian’s head. They scrambled down to look.
The green giant lay as if dead, but air was going in and out of her spiracles. The talker had missed her head. It looked partly crushed. There was nothing to try: it only had one switch.
“Futz! The talker’s dead. Look at it! We’re cut off.”
Svetz pulled a filter helmet over his head and went out.
He came back in much faster, pulling it off, gasping, “Zeera! Have we got filter helmets for Earth atmosphere?”
“Yes, Svetz. Ra Chen won’t let us go into the past without them. He made sure the drawers are labeled, see, so if you can read the ITR logo—”
“Thank you, Zeera. We all get one. Miya, you can’t breathe what’s out there—”
“You told me, Hanny.” She was cautiously prodding Thaxir. “Nothing broken, I think, unless it’s under one of these plates. Gravity’s going to bother her, and I can’t guess what she eats.”
* * *
The outer door was now a horizontal platform. The sand was twelve meters down. There should have been a ladder. There was only a pulley system, not yet deployed.
Svetz and Miya rose on flight sticks and circled the Minim.
It was hot! And humid! They were wearing loose ship’s clothing cinched at wrists and ankles. In seconds they were soaked through.
Two of the Minim’s legs were still retracted. The remaining pair had plunged through a meter of water, deep into sand. If the Minim hadn’t come down hard, it would have toppled over. The tide had withdrawn now.
The Minim stood upright on two slender legs. The burned gouge along its flank ran almost through into the oxygen tank.
“Company,” Zeera said softly.
“I don’t see—”
“In the trees onshore. Use infrared.”
Trees as slender as wands stood just offshore, growing out of the sea, tufted with black: the anchor grove. A forest of tangled greenery and shadows grew densely inland: the opposing life of Earth. Svetz turned a pair of mag specs on those.
Mag specs were almost as good as a pressure suit’s fishbowl. By infrared Svetz picked out hot spots five feet tall. Now he could zoom them in normal light: a dozen or more short dark people standing perfectly still within the shade of the Earthly forest. Men and women both, though they looked so odd—poor diet?—that Svetz identified the women only by their breasts.
Zeera said, “I’d say they don’t want to talk.”
“Fine by me,” Svetz said.
“Let’s talk about our orders,” Miya said. “The talker’s dead. That makes it moot whether we need a Spaniard to tell us what time it is. Do we still want to watch the Hangtree link up?”
East of them the Hangtree hung above the ocean, almost fading into the blue sky. Hard to judge how far away it was, but at least several hundred klicks, several degrees of the Earth’s circumference. The bottom faded into horizon haze.
Svetz said, “Maybe it is linked up.”
Miya gave him a look of disgust.
“The Fast Forward,” Zeera’s radio voice reported, “is futzed.”
“That too? How bad?”
“Ten centimeters of superconducting wire would fix what I can see. I just can’t seem to find it. I’m looking where it should have been packed.”
Svetz knew better than to try to help Zeera find something, and she’d packed the Minim. He said, “Miya, let’s look around.”
“What’s the point?” Then Miya said, “Yes, Hanny. We’re in no real hurry, are we, Zeera?”
Zeera sounded distracted. “Not until I find—well, and food! Sooner or later we’ll need a way to feed ourselves. Hold up … we’ve got dole bricks for a long time, two months anyway. No, no hurry.”
They went back in and came out wearing only shorts. Shoes would have had to come off the pressure suits: big bulky things they both rejected.
* * *
They flew among anchor trees no thicker than Miya’s waist but scores of meters tall. The tip of the tallest was a black puffball five or six meters through. Miya hovered close up against it. “Notice anything interesting, Hanny?”
“No. It’s fluffy, like black cotton.”
“Cotton?”
She was drifting down the slender length of the anchor tree, and Svetz followed. He said, “It’s a plant. People used to wear it.”
“So we’re looking around where we don’t even know what the questions are. You need curiosity to solve puzzles, you told me that, and there are always puzzles to solve, because all of your missions go wrong, right, Hanny?”
The water was wonderfully clear.
The slender trunks went straight down through the water and into the sand. Any roots must have begun spreading out far beneath the sand, reaching into bedrock, forming a network to anchor what would presently attach itself: a mass greater than any mountain, pulling up.
Svetz said a bit defensively, “We accomplished the mission this time, didn’t we? But landing a Mars Minim on Earth wasn’t part of any plan I helped make.”
Miya let him see her turn off the radio link to the Minim. “That black cotton looked very soft and cushiony. Would you like to make love in a tree from the stars?”
“Well, futz. I didn’t plan that either.”
They drifted back up. They’d be hidden from the Minim … but a fall from this height would kill them. Svetz suggested, “Let’s moor some lines.”
Miya swam into the foliage; Svetz stayed aloft. He’d catch her if …
“There’s branches all through this. I can anchor us. Come on in.”
The puffball material had some of the hampering effect of a martian “bed,” but not as bad. It cradled them, held them together. Cuddling afterward, they lifted their filter helmets to kiss, and Miya tasted Earth’s air.
She was instantly in love with it. Svetz had to pull her filter helmet into place when she started to pass out.
Then, still tethered, Miya crawled down through the tuft to look through the underside. Svetz wasn’t going to bother, but he heard Miya’s radio whisper. “Come see this!”
Svetz swam through the foliage and stuck his head out of the bottom.
A man was on the beach, looking up at them. He was pale-skinned and dirty, shelled like a Green Martian, but in rusted metal.
Miya said, “We’ve found Ra Chen’s conquistador.”
32
They didn’t want to be seen flying. They locked their flight sticks, then dropped them to the ground and slid down the smooth trunk. They planted the flight sticks in a conspicuous green bush, the brush discharges sticking up like strange golden blossoms.
“Hold it, Hanny.”
“What?”
“When the sun’s right behind you there’s a ring of light around your head. It’s the filter helmet. We don’t want the sun behind us when we approach a local.”