Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

fantasy?”
    â€œHard to picture Whale as a fantasy! He’s too big,” Miya said. “Too scarred, too detailed. When you pulled him in, wasn’t there a one-legged sailor still tangled in the lines and harpoons along his flank? That’s gritty realism, that is!”
    Svetz smiled. “Gila Monster would have charred me if I’d thought he was a fantasy. Horse tried to spear me like a wine cork.”
    â€œSo.”
    â€œYou’re an adolescent’s daydream,” he told Miya. She purred into his throat, and he said, “And here we are, but we’ve never made love after plus-thirty AE. Maybe you’re my fantasy.”
    â€œAm I? Great. Are you ticklish? Is this real? Is it?”
    *   *   *
    In the old days they had used the time machine to set a two-milligram test mass alongside itself. The experiment ate energy equivalent to the test mass times lightspeed squared. Bringing an X-cage to a spacetime it had already occupied would cause a surge in energy consumption. That was how it could return to its point of departure.
    The small X-cage emerged just too late to watch itself vanish.
    This mission would be cheap. They were only messengers, the messages already written.
    To the Orbiter module: a burn to put it in a higher orbit.
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œIt’s in low Mars orbit now, Hanny. We don’t want it hitting the tree. It’s only luck that hasn’t happened yet!” Miya kept working. “Of course the current Collector module won’t be able to fly that high. We’ll instruct the Orbiter to dive down and get it, and I hope somebody’s writing that program.”
    The Tanker was already fully fueled and awaiting the arrival of a loaded Collector. No message needed.
    To the Pilgrims: converge on the skyhook tree at twenty-seven degrees two minutes longitude, zero latitude. Pan up and down. Focus every instrument on the tree.
    To the Collector: follow the Pilgrims. Where they converge, find a high point and watch them. Defend against molesters.
    â€œWe’ve already lost four Pilgrims. We can afford that, but we can’t lose the Collector. All right, Hanny. Jump us by a year and we’ll collect what they get.”
    Svetz dipped them into time, watched, tripped the interrupt. They’d jumped over two years. Miya sent the instructions. “Mars is close. Only about eighteen minutes this time,” she said.
    â€œMiya, doesn’t Mars have two moons? Why haven’t they chewed up the tree?”
    Miya chewed her underlip. She turned to the control board.
    â€œMiya?”
    â€œI’m looking! The top of the tree doesn’t taper off; it ends in a knob. Deimos is further out than that, but Phobos … Phobos is below synchronous orbit, it has to be, it goes around more than twice a day! Orbit’s a little skewed, but it crosses the equator. It can’t just keep missing!”
    â€œDoesn’t sound like your space elevator has been in place very long at all.”
    Miya said, “Yesss. Hanny, you have a knack for … ah, penetrating fantasies. It would have had to grow very fast, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œOr arrive already grown.”
    *   *   *
    Message bursts from archaic Mars were streaming in. Miya checked to see that they were recording, and then Svetz set them moving forward through time to the present.

11
    Lugh’s chain. The Milky Way, chain by which Lugh raised men to heaven … Equated with Bifrost, Jacob’s ladder, the stem of Jesse, Watling Street.
    â€”Celtic mythology, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, by Gertrude Jobes
    Â 
    1108 AE. It’s a tree. In proportion it’s as slender as an ash tree—no, more! But near the ground it bifurcates and spreads. Scores of near-vertical roots sink deep. The sixty-fingered hand covers the green breadth of a canal and a square klick of ochre desert on each side.