Free Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven Page B

He dropped alongside black foliage, sparse at first, then thick and dense.
    Miya: “I’m on. I’m inside. Yeee!”
    â€œMiya!”
    â€œSomething jumped at me. I had to shoot it. These blasters don’t leave much. Svetz, are you in?”
    â€œAt, not in.” Svetz hovered, looking into a wall of black forest. The fluffy surface looked no more substantial than a dandelion ready to blow. He had no real wish to go inside, and no way to avoid it. Something in there had tried to kill Miya.
    He fished out the blaster and fired into the black wall, angled down.
    Foliage flared white. There was no recoil. The blast speared straight through until the tunnel showed red Mars at its far end.
    Things swarmed out. Gravity and momentum pulled them away before he could see much of them.
    He tracked a lens-shaped creature as big as a bungalow, the last in a whole fleet. Maybe Zeera could get more detail from the recording.
    Coils of cable fell thrashing, then stretched out, klicks and klicks of it, reaching. Svetz used the zoom feature to track it. One end brushed the tree, dragged along it, caught more, loop after loop … thick cable marked with a black-on-milk diamond pattern … that was a wedge-shaped head.
    Yes indeed, there was more than one kind of snake.
    â€œI’ve fired a hole right through the forest. Things came out. Now I’m going straight in,” he reported.
    â€œFutz of a way to explore,” Miya said.
    â€œWe’re not exploring. We’re looking for seeds. Seeds on a thing this size ought to be immense. Unmistakable.”
    â€œWe can hope.”
    He coasted in. Coming out of the sun had him nearly blind despite his headlamp. When his eyes adjusted a bit, he jetted down the channel.
    Whatever might consider him edible must have died or fled. Twenty minutes later he let himself fall into sunlight.
    â€œMiya, I’m out. Have you moved?”
    â€œStill inside. I’m not finding anything.”
    â€œI’ll drop past your position by … oh, fifty klicks and go in again.” Svetz was already falling, his flight stick providing just a touch of lift.
    Miya sounded tired. “Hanny, it’s too big a job.”
    â€œI know. We’re missing something. We need to know where to look, but I just don’t see the right pattern yet. Zeera, are you with us?”
    No.
    â€œMiya, if you were a tree, you’d want to drop your seeds in water, wouldn’t you? The tree did that. Sank roots where two canals crossed.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œThis band of foliage ends, what, a hundred klicks up? If seeds dropped from the bottom, they’d fall at a slant. Coriolis effect would pull them … two or three klicks east?”
    â€œWe’ll look.”
    A twinkling overhead. The Martians’ lift cage was in view, much lower than it had been. It must be nearly falling, and it was flashing light.
    â€œMiya? They’re coming down.”
    â€œCan you find cover?”
    â€œI can put foliage between me and them. I’m falling faster than they are. We could talk to them if your translators worked in vacuum.”
    *   *   *
    Two hundred klicks lower, the fringe of black foliage had swollen to become a match for any forest still on Earth. Svetz charred out another tunnel.
    Again a swarm of creatures fled his blaster beam. A nightmare shape took an interest in Svetz. His blaster dissolved it, but he’d attracted attention. Four rippling silver sheets with eyes in the middle drifted near, studying him. Living light-sails: not the light-sail leaves that grew on the tree, but maybe part of the same evolutionary line.
    Svetz knew that if he fired on ambulatory mirrors, his own beam would come back at him. He jetted into the tunnel. They didn’t follow.
    He slowed midway to look around.
    Limbs became branches became little branches became twigs. Growth here was fractal, like a fern or a tree. He saw