Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven Page A

grove that partly blocked the canal. They threatened a bridge of great age and beauty. Lord Feshk ordered them cut down.
    Beneath woody silver-brown bark, they were stronger than any metal made on Mars. Uprooting them would have involved digging out a canal. Lord Feshk didn’t order that. He thought he had something valuable.
    He built a fortress twenty manheights above the ground with the alien grove as his pillars.
    When Lord Pfee was seven, a black string floated down from the sky. Children watched it wavering through the grove, blown by winds but always returning. “We chased it for days. I was still young enough to enjoy climbing.” Ultimately it got tangled in the black trees, and there it clung.
    No man could see how high it led. Over years, the trees bowed inward, crumpling Lord Feshk’s fortress, until the tops of every tree in the clump had grown into a single knot around the dangling string. That grew to a thick silver-gray vine. Children were told not to pull on it. They did that anyway, and it held their weight.
    A century passed.
    â€œLord Pfee, do you mean a hundred martian years?”
    â€œYes. I was married and a landholder and had four girls by then.” And what had been a black string hanging from the sky grew thick and thicker, until it and the anchor grove merged into one vast trunk. The black tufts became a ragged black collar that rose to the edge of space with the growing of the anchor grove. More black foliage ran up the Hangtree’s silver-brown flank.
    Savants came from all over Mars to study the Hangtree. Lord Feshk didn’t like them. He taxed those who came, and restricted their movements, until the races of Mars allied and attacked his city.
    â€œWe were killed or scattered, Lord Feshk’s children. My sisters married. They’re safe, and they know my secret. I and my few remaining brothers and our children rule homes buried in a desert.”
    â€œBut we found you on the tree. Did you join this Allied Peoples?”
    Lord Pfee spoke with the reluctance of a criminal confessing. “We scavenged a city abandoned when its water source dried up. We found wealth to build a few airships and modify them for vacuum. We unburied their gate, marked in ancient runes whose meaning was madness. Green Cross, on a featureless desert! We scavenged the name too, and joined the Allied Peoples as Green Cross.
    â€œBut I wear Lord Feshk’s face.” Lord Pfee tapped his silver mask, now tilted back on his head. “We all wear our ancestors’ faces. We have not forgotten who killed our father. When word came that creatures had crossed from another world, we sensed opportunity—”
    A man shouted. Lord Pfee left him abruptly.
    There was a mast. Svetz zoomed on its peak to find an observer tending a mounted tube. Lord Pfee was bellowing thinly, gesturing widely at men tending a similar tube on a rigid mounting. They were playing with objects ( zoom ) feeding small pointed cylinders into a feed belt for the tube.
    Lord Pfee returned and spoke as if they had never been interrupted. “Allied Peoples comprises five tool-building species including the insect giants, the Tunnel Crabs and their mindless symbiote carriers, the Smiths and the Soft-fingers and ourselves. Most of Mars accepts the prophecy that the world will dry and die. The High Folk counsel us to accept our fate. But the Allied Peoples would change that future. Some factions babble of settling Earth. Svetz, would you give them help or war?”
    Svetz said, “It wouldn’t matter. You couldn’t stand or walk or fight under the pull of the Earth.”
    â€œI’ve heard that too. And some babble of siphoning water from a large ice-shelled moon of”—the translator hiccuped—“Saturn. When I was a child we had no notion that that world had moons or rings!”
    Miya broke in. “Europa is lighter than Mars. It’s water under an ice shell. Hanny, you