Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven

small. They sought shapes that repeated as seeds would. When the command came, they crawled out of the muck to beam their findings to the Orbiter for relay to a point above the Earth.
    Miya and Svetz ran through the murky footage. Many hours later Miya said, “This is boring.”
    Svetz stopped the display and lifted tired eyes. He said, “Best duty I’ve ever had.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œI’ve been chewed. I’ve been scorched. I’ve been almost eaten, almost fried, almost perforated, over and over. I go alone, because there has to be room for whatever I bring back. There’s never been anyone to guard me or rescue me, or talk to, or love.” There, he’d said it. “Every other trip, I’ve been hunting something with teeth. I hate  … used to hate animals. Wrona seems to have talked me out of that. I am having a wonderful time.”
    Miya sighed and went back to work
    The X-cage had come to meet itself. Now it hovered above the same fat blue-and-white crescent they’d left behind two trips running. Only the pattern of stars had shifted. The cage was hovering, after all; it wasn’t in an orbit.
    Svetz picked out an orange spark among the stars of Taurus near the western horizon. That was a world. He couldn’t see it as more than a point.
    If the Pilgrims couldn’t find seeds, someone would have to go to Mars and look.
    Miya pointed into the projection from Pilgrim One. “Look, Hanny, we keep seeing this shape. It’s pottery, isn’t it?”
    Sunlight rippled across it: it was near the surface of the canal. “Vase. You can see the pattern. This symbol, it’s that ten-legged toothy thing that tried to chew up Pilgrim Four.”
    â€œNot quite the same. A bigger relative. Hanny, I’m tired.” Miya curled up in the curve of the floor.
    Svetz called the Center. Hillary Weng-Fa answered. She went to wake Ra Chen.
    â€œNo seeds,” Svetz said.
    â€œHow sure are you?”
    â€œWe get pottery, we get eggs. Bones look like each other, so the Pilgrims show us a lot of those. Once we got a mob of Reds in battle gear. They all looked alike. They were even walking in some kind of regular array. Pilgrim Six went right up to examine them. We’ve lost Pilgrim Six.”
    â€œBetter tell Willy.”
    No telling how much time had passed in the present. Here, only an instant passed while the phone went dead, then live. He heard, “Miya?”
    â€œSleeping, Willy.”
    â€œChairman Ra Chen tells me you can’t find anything like a seed.”
    â€œWe’ve typed fifteen styles of pottery. We find broken furniture. Not much garbage. Maybe there’s a famine. We did find a heap of spiky seeds, fist-sized, but we searched through the rotten fruit around it, which wasn’t pleasant, Willy, and it had more of the same seeds in it. There are skeletons of at least three biped species. Most of them look human. Some were wearing armor. The big four-armed ones grow their own. It’s not as if they have wars, more like they fight in the streets every night. We’ve found big eggs. They’re not seeds, they’re eggs, and in fact they’re humanoids’ eggs, red and pale and black, all a little different. Mars’s answer to population control. Willy, we’re both exhausted.”
    â€œGet some sleep. Call me when you wake up. We’re sending you to Mars.”
    â€œWilly—”
    â€œWe can refit a Moon Minim spacecraft and get it into the large X-cage. If it doesn’t fit, we’ll fit something. We’ll brief Zeera. I don’t see any way to get seeds off that tree except to go up it.”
    â€œWait wait wait! I’m not a cosmonaut!”
    Pause. “A chance to see Mars when it was alive? At United Nations expense?”
    â€œWilly, we spent fifteen hours searching for your seeds, and six Pilgrims spent a year gathering the data. If there were seeds,