Larry Niven - The Trellis

Suriyah and Paul were drawing in the corner, looking at the stilled video images and working on a slate. Their whispering was distracting. Kyle moved closer to the mike. “Okay, honey, but how'd you get stuck?” He winced. She hated it when he called her “honey.” Sixteen-year-old girls were touchy.

To her credit she ignored the slight. “I ... I don't know. The arm must have broken free. I got too close. Anyway, a pretty thin leaf-vine got stuck in it, and I wasn't going very fast, but it jerked the marble and shifted my course. That's when the real problem came with the arm; anyway, that's when I could tell it was dangling freely, and since I was still moving it caught more stuff, and then slammed me into a big vine. I tried to use the topside arm, and I ... I... just got it tangled, too. So I decided I'd try and thrust out of here, and I put it at full power.”

Lark sounded defensive; she wasn't supposed to use full power in the creepers. “You didn't have a choice, honey.” Damn it—there was that word again. What was wrong with him? “It was a good choice, Lark.”

“It wasn't good. The marble was too stuck, and the topside arm broke, and I didn't get out. That was when I called Suriyah.” Lark was quiet, then she said, “There's a big vine blocking the door, Daddy. It's feeling around the edges, but the heat leakage has it stopped. But I can't even go EVA to cut myself free.” There was a tremor in her voice.

“We'll figure it out. Henry and Suriyah and Paul are working on something right now.”

Kyle paced. Suriyah had shooed the others out, so only the four of them, and Lark's frozen face, remained. Kyle talked to Lark off and on, encouraging. She was getting impatient. Kyle felt lost. This wasn't fair—they were supposed to be having a party. His fists clenched as he kept pacing, nervous. What was taking so long? Why wasn't Lark already on her way home?

The remote camera was in place, its feed playing on one large wall. As the camera flew closer around Shooter , the damage to two of the arms was clear. One was missing half its length. Shooter was so enmeshed in creeper it looked like it was purposely tied down.

After two hours, Henry keyed Lark, and said, “Okay, we're ready to go. Turn on your video.”

Lark's frozen image had looked angry. The animated face that replaced it in the live feed looked calmer, serious. The whites of her dark eyes were red. Lark didn't show any hesitation as she followed Henry's advice, setting the small directional thrusters to given angles and strapping herself in. There was a limited amount of propellant for the little thrusters; the antimatter was confined for use in the main engine.

Kyle's eyes stayed on the camera feed. There was a puff of propellant release, the burn of the thrusters, and the little marble pushed forward, rotating, pulling the sheet of creeper forest slightly; a tug of war. The tangle of ship and creepers moved. Lark yelped.

She'd turned off the thrusters.

Her voice was quivery, scared. “It didn't sound right. The arm ... the bottom-side arm sounded like it might rip off right below my feet!”

“Damn.” Henry swore. “All right. Don't crack the bubble. Damn engineers should've designed the arms to be released from inside.”

Kyle had never heard Henry cuss. He closed his eyes briefly. “They'll all be retired by now. Can we try again?”

“Sure, but something else.” Henry directed the camera feed, again, to almost circle the knot of creeper.

* * *

Three more hours, two more failures.

A blast of the main motor fried a path through the vines, but the arms weren't positioned to push the marble backward. Lark's wriggling had put the marble almost on its side, but how could that change the position of the arms? And the vines were growing back into the charred path.

If an arm tore loose, if the shell was breached, Lark still had a pressure suit. That, they decided, wasn't the problem. The problem was shrapnel, if the base of an arm spanged loose under high tension.

By the last try, the room was full again. Christy Base was in on it, engineers and pilots tossing out and rejecting ideas. Paul had been hauled off to bed by his parents, Kate and Jason, and they had come back to watch. Suriyah was crying. “Quit forcing it. That girl is in an egg—don't break it open. She's got time—no need to kill her now. Go eat,” she said to Kyle and Henry. “Tell Lark to sleep. Food and rest will help you all think.”

Kyle didn't want to go, but Suriyah ignored his protests and Henry showed Kate and Jason the log of everything they'd tried, and asked them to look for other ideas.

Kyle couldn't sleep. He checked on Lark, who was sleeping. He wandered the halls, lost and tired. Finally, he climbed the ladder to the telescope platform on top of the base. The scope was almost useless since the cloud cover had increased over the past five years, but he remembered showing Lark her first view of the Earth from here.

Right now, the sky was unusually clear. Charon was dead overhead, a great black shield still showing details of landscape in the sunlight reflected from Pluto. The Styx rose like Jack's beanstalk...

They still couldn't build a beanstalk, an orbital tower, on Earth. Their materials weren't strong enough. But Charon and Pluto were mutually tidally locked—unique within the known Universe—and light enough that a Hoytether had been strung between them. A Hoytether was an array of strands, some left looser than others to take up the slack if nearby strands broke. It already looked like a trellis. And then the games those students were playing with plant DNA paid off, and Styx was born.

* * *

Kyle found the bubble in the scope. It hung motionless, huge in the viewfinder, like a soap bubble caught in a white rose bush. Unreachable. His daughter.

He must have dozed. Henry's hand poking him startled him. “Jason said you were up. I thought you'd be here.”

“This isn't going to work, is it?”

Henry climbed the rest of the way up the ladder and slowly sat down on the observatory floor next to Kyle. The only light shone up from the door where the ladder came in, and the semi-darkness somehow made Henry look even older than usual.

“Did you find her with the scope?”

Kyle nodded.

“I'm afraid to force her free. It's wasting power, and I don't trust that little marble.”

Kyle pictured Lark dying slowly over days, alone, knowing she was dying. “When this happened, I thought it meant she'd be late for her party. I thought she was irresponsible.” He twisted his hands together, stretching his long fingers, fidgeting. “Can we cut her free from here somehow? Do we have any remotes that could do that? Can we make one?”

Henry pursed his lips. “She's all tangled up. Good chance of cutting her free and having her float off into space, unable to steer.”

“There's no way to repair the other marble? You're sure?” Kyle asked.

“I'm sure.”

“Can we try?”

Henry looked at him gently. “We can try something—I just don't know what yet. Keep thinking.”

“She can't climb down to us.”

Kyle jumped up and started pacing again. “Can I climb to her? Cut her loose?”

“It's a hundred sixty klicks and a bit.” Henry cocked an eyebrow. Both men were quiet for long moments. “We have ten days.”

“Damn. No, it won't work. She'll run out of air on the way down.”

“She can plug into the vines. She just can't do that with the suit she's wearing. We'll have to modify a suit and bring it to her.”

It had stopped sounding impossible. A hundred sixty kilometers straight up, in low and dwindling gravity...

“It will be a hard climb. I'll go.”

“We'll both go,” Henry said.

Climbing with Henry would be slow . “Can you to stay in communications and direct the climb?”