Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven Page A

there. Hope we see seeds. Zeera, are you reading us?”
    The shadow of dawn had crept down the trunk to its base. Half of Mars was alight, and all of the skyhook tree. Svetz squinted down into a coruscation of blinking lights. Sunlight and mirrors: Mars was talking back to the tree. But stare into the blaze and you saw more.
    Aircraft too high to be aircraft.
    He zoomed his faceplate, and saw thousands of flying vehicles around the base of the tree. Higher up, mere hundreds, all (it seemed) trying to dock against the trunk. But that high, they must be in vacuum!
    The Pilgrim probes had videotaped what seemed to be hard-shelled dirigibles. Could Mars have a lighter-than-vacuum gas? What was he up against here?
    Some of the sparkling was weaponry: puffs of fire and a glitter of projectiles falling short. But some of the weaponry wasn’t aimed at them. The natives were fighting each other.
    Miya said, “Zeera’s over the horizon, and the Orbiter doesn’t seem to be in position to relay. Still with us, Hanny?”
    â€œStill intact and on course for the bottom of the forest. Miya, I may have used flight sticks as often as you have. Just not in Mars gravity while trying to move inside a sausage skin.”
    â€œVery good. Anything goes wrong, yell for me. Don’t think it over first.”

18
    Jacob’s ladder. Typifies a soul’s approach to perfection. A universal axis or World Tree. Equates with Ama-no-Hashidate, the Beanstalk, Lugh’s chain, stem of Jesse, Yggdrasil.
    â€”Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, by Gertrude Jobes
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    A flyer ruptured and began to sink in a scattered cloud of men.
    Mars still pulled like a planet. The flight stick was lifting at maximum, but Svetz’s belly still thought he was sliding down a smooth glass hill. But the treescape slowed, slowed … until the black forest was a world-sized bulge above him and he was starting to float back up.
    Miya drifted alongside. Below them the trunk was infested.
    Svetz had barely heard of termites. He had to picture something like Von Neumann nanotech machines turning living wood into more of themselves until there was nothing left but the machines. It looked like that, just a haze of motion, until he turned up the zoom.
    He had not anticipated that the wealth and power of Mars, five hundred and fifty years before Earth’s first atomic bomb, could match the wealth of the United Nations of 1108 AE. But armor and manpower of that order was crawling up the tree at them.
    The twinkling wasn’t all mirrors. Close below them, slender man-shapes were fighting green-clad six-limbed giants. Faceplates winked like silver mirrors. Here and there were twinkling blades. Stick-figure shapes, improbably tall, moved about the trunk undisturbed, observing the fighting like hundreds of wandering referees.
    Svetz said, speculating, “It’s a technology race, like the First Cold War. Somebody saw us using tools that no Martian has. They can’t let anyone else get to us first. We came to rob them. They’re all swarming up the tree to be first to rob us. ”
    One of the factions was getting too close. Svetz saw puffs of gunfire. Swords or not, they still had kinetic projectiles.
    â€œLet’s get into cover,” Miya said. The forest flared briefly and left a charred tunnel. Miya jetted into it. Svetz fired rockets and followed.
    It was soft, cushiony. Wriggle through, wriggle down. “That’s me behind you, so don’t shoot.”
    â€œGood. I don’t see any parasites,” Miya said. “Or seeds.”
    Even seeds of Earth could take any shape. Pinecones, spiky peach pits, smooth almonds, great melons with tiny seeds, avocados, acorns, sesame.
    Whatever their form, skyhook seeds would look all alike. They might be armored against reentry heat. Otherwise Svetz had no idea what to look for, and Miya of Space Bureau had even less. He was seeing nothing but