Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound
Author: Joe Haldeman
Date: 2013-08-22 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Space Opera; Angels; Adventure; Human-alien encounters; Martians; Mars (Planet); Space Colonies; Married people; Interplanetary voyages; Fiction; Science Fiction; Science fiction; American; G
Description: From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to Joe Haldeman, one of SF's most decorated authors. Haldeman is best known for the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning The Forever War, a novel which draws on his experience as a combat engineer in Vietnam, where he was wounded and earned a Purple Heart. This omnibus collects the Carmen Dula sequence comprising Marsbound, Starbound and Earthbound, which chart humanity's response to the challenge of alien contact.
Publisher: Orion
Rights: Copyrights as per source stories

Marsbound

Carmen Dula has embarked on the adventure of a lifetime – she and her family are colonists on Mars! But then an accident in the bleak Martian landscape takes her to the edge of death and she is saved by an angel. An angel with too many arms and legs – and a message for the newly arrived inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.

Starbound

After six years negotiating a truce with the mysterious ‘Others’, Carmen Dula returns to Earth – where fifty years have passed and a flotilla of warships stands ready to defend Earth against the Others. But the Others have more power than anyone could imagine – and they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race.

Earthbound

First Contact has not gone well. Carmen Dula and her colleagues must now rally humanity's forces and attempt to reclaim the future – or face being Earthbound for ever . . .

Also by Joe Haldeman

Forever War

1. The Forever War (1974)
2. Forever Peace (1997)
3. Forever Free (1999)
Worlds

1. Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981)
2. Worlds Apart (1983)
3. Worlds Enough and Time (1992)
Marsbound
1. Marsbound (2008)
2. Starbound (2010)
3. Earthbound (2011)
Novels

Mindbridge (1976)

Tool of the Trade (1987)

The Long Habit of Living (1989) (aka Buying Time)

The Hemingway Hoax (1990)
The Coming (2000)
Guardian (2002)
Camouflage (2004)
Old Twentieth (2005)
The Accidental Time Machine (2007)
Collections

All My Sins Remembered (1977)
Infinite Dreams (1978)
Dealing in Futures (1985)

Joe Haldeman

SF GATEWAY OMNIBUS

MARSBOUND
STARBOUND
EARTHBOUND

GOLLANCZ

LONDON

CONTENTS

Cover
Also by Joe Haldeman
Title Page

Introduction from the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction

Marsbound
Starbound
Earthbound
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright

ENTER THE SF GATEWAY . . .

Towards the end of 2011, in conjunction with the celebration of fifty years of coherent, continuous science fiction and fantasy publishing, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway.

Over a decade after launching the landmark SF Masterworks series, we realised that the realities of commercial publishing are such that even the Masterworks could only ever scratch the surface of an author's career. Vast troves of classic SF & fantasy were almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of those books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing changed that paradigm for ever.

Embracing the future even as we honour the past, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway with a view to utilising the technology that now exists to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan, at its simplest, was – and still is! – to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

The SF Gateway was designed to be the new home of classic science fiction & fantasy – the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled. The programme has been extremely well received and we've been very happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we've decided to complete the circle and return a selection of our titles to print, in these omnibus editions.

We hope you enjoy this selection. And we hope that you'll want to explore more of the classic SF and fantasy we have available. These are wonderful books you're holding in your hand, but you'll find much, much more . . . through the SF Gateway.

www.sfgateway.com

INTRODUCTION

from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Joe Haldeman (1943 –) is a US writer who took a BSc in physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968–1969), where he was severely wounded, earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. This range of degrees was an early demonstration of the range of interests that have shaped the Hard SF with which he has sometimes been identified; his experiences in Vietnam have in fact marked everything he has written, including his first book, War Year(1972), a non-SF novel set there, and the concurrently drafted (though much delayed) 1968 (1994).

Haldeman began publishing SF with ‘Out of Phase’ for Galaxy in September 1969, and came to sudden prominence with the critical and popular success of his first SF novel, The Forever War (1974), opening the Forever series whose description of the life of soldiers in a Future War counterpoints and in some ways rebuts Robert A. Heinlein's vision inStarship Troopers (1959), clearly treating that difficult novel as a problematic precursor text throughout. In The Forever War interstellar travel is effected by ‘collapsar jumps’, which are subjectively instantaneous but which in fact take many years to accomplish, so that they work as a kind of one-way Time Travel; propelled by this cruel device to temporally distant battle theatres on planet after planet, soldiers are doomed to total alienation from the civilization for which they are fighting, and if they make too large a jump face the risk of coming into battle with antiquated weapons. Their deracination is savage, their camaraderie cynically manipulated. As a portrait of the experience of Vietnam the book is remarkable; as Military SF it is seminal. It won a Ditmar Award, a Nebula and a Hugo. ‘You Can Never Go Back’ (November 1975, Amazing), published as a kind of coda, is Haldeman's original version of one segment of the novel that had been regarded as too downbeat by Analog; this was reinstated in the 1991 edition.

Two further novels – Forever Peace (1997) and Forever Free (1999) – are linked to The Forever War, though the first of these does not share any other elements than its title. Forever Peace, which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Nebula and a Hugo, introduces, into what has since become a familiar twenty-first century world raddled by local conflicts, two transformative Technologies: cyberlinking of humans into collaborative networks so they can better operate semi-animate tank-like Mecha; and a huge advance in Nanotechnology – ‘nanoforges’ capable of transforming almost anything into usable goods. As cyberlinks make humans too empathic to kill one another, and as nanoforges quickly eliminate scarcity, peace becomes inevitable, and reigns. Forever Free, on the other hand, is a direct sequel to The Forever War, dealing with the now objectively ancient (but subjectively middle-aged) soldiers who return to Earth to find their species turned into Hive Minds; until they rebel, they are retained as warrants of the past, insuring against errors in Evolution.

Mindbridge (1976), a novel whose narrative techniques are suggested by its dedication to John Dos Passos (1896–1970) and John Brunner, is composed in alternating sequences of straight narration, reportage, excerpts from books (some written long after the events depicted), graphs and other devices. The underlying story itself is a relatively straightforward space epic, with Matter Transmission, Telepathy-inducing ‘toys’ – actually small aquatic animals – abandoned by an extinct race of godlike Aliens, with a chance of Uplift in the offing. All My Sins Remembered (1977) returns to the existential chaos of Earth, and introduces an enduring model of the Haldeman protagonist: a competent hero whose identity is threatened from without, by the Memory-Edit manipulations of worldly powers, and from within, by the need to make sense of an existence without ultimate meaning. In Haldeman's novels, making sense of things is itself an act of heroism. As his most typical books revolve around this task – and are resolved in its often ambiguous accomplishment – it is not surprising that when he has written sequels they tend to be loosely knit, and work most effectively as comprising linked approaches to thematic issues.

Forever Free aside, there are series to note, the first being the Worlds sequence comprising Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future (1981), Worlds Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time: The Conclusion of the Worlds Trilogy (1992). These books differ from his typical work in featuring a female protagonist, and are distinguished by the broad compass of their portrayal of a Near-Future Earth under the threat of nuclear Holocaust, which is soon realized. In the surviving Space Habitats – each a small world representative of a different kind of civilization – some sense must be made of the human enterprise: the relict planet itself must be preserved and, in the third volume, humanity must attempt to reach the stars. The later Carmen Dula sequence comprising Marsbound (2008), Starbound (2010) and Earthbound(2011), whose protagonist is also female, similarly confronts a Near-Future Earth with what may be a terminal challenge: the human exploration of Mars has triggered an alarm, and the Alien civilization monitoring Homo sapiens is only momentarily assuaged by human governments’ seemingly mature response to their presence. Indeed, after being gifted by the monitors with free energy, Earth becomes bellicose, defies the alien demand that we do not yet attempt to exploit space; and is duly quarantined, deprived of modern energy sources, and left to stew. The protagonists escape to Mars.

Haldeman's singletons of the 1980s are only intermittently successful.Tool of the Trade (1987), a Technothriller, repeats in a damagingly affectless manner the themes of earlier books; and Buying Time (1989) weakens a central tale about the purchasing of Immortality by a displeasing failure to address the kind of society in which this might be acceptable, or the kind of human who might pursue the goal. Later novels range through the SF repertoire. The Hemingway Hoax (1990), the magazine version of which won a Nebula as Best Novella, movingly entangles its typical Haldeman protagonist in a complex set of dilemmas (and Alternate Histories) which test to the utmost his capacity to retain moral choice, to remain even approximately whole. The Coming (2000) is a character-based meditation on First Contact; Camouflage (2004), which won the James Tiptree Jr Award and a Nebula, follows the Gender-shifting experiences-as-human of an Alien long stranded on Earth; in Old Twentieth (2005), Immortal time travellers from the future visit the twentieth century to taste its blood and savagery.

Throughout his career there has been a sense – not usual in American SF – that Haldeman thinks of his novels as necessary acts in a lifelong enterprise, a moral theatre whose meaning will be defined only when he finishes. It is perhaps for this reason that he is not good at repeating himself, that those books in which he attempts to do so can be less sparkling than his initial take on their central concerns, and that after two decades his readers continue to await each new title – each new act in the drama of his changing understanding of the world – with very substantial interest. In 2010 he received the SFWA Grand Master Award, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.

The release of the three novels here gathered together, Marsbound,Star-bound and Earthbound, puts at last into one volume the single sustained long story that Haldeman has spent much of the past half-decade writing, a tale which seems all the more powerful now that it can be read straight through. The plot twists, the tense cliff-hanger endings, the arousing ups and downs of the storytelling art, now seem directed to a single purpose: which is to take a cold clear look at Homo sapiens, to draw an action portrait of the species in a time of great crisis. (That crisis, Haldeman makes no bones about allowing us to see, is upon us now.) In the first volume, an ancient race is found on Mars, whose job it is to monitor us. They find our wares to be unsavoury, and tell us to go home. In the second volume, refusing to do so, a band of humans makes an interstellar journey to discover that the prohibition was just. In the third volume, the patience of our monitors has cracked, and planet Earth is quarantined, without access to any power sources. Through an elaborate SF series of revelations, Haldeman brings us to earth right here, in the very Near Future. Politicians continue to do what they have always done: to deny the truth. Patriots stare angrily at the closed sky. Eventually, Haldeman gives the reader some hope, in line with the ultimately hopeful tenor of his work for nearly half a century. It is a tribute to the power of this trilogy that not only do we learn a few lessons in species humility, but that we enjoy the trip.

For a more detailed version of the above, see Joe Haldeman's author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/haldeman_joe

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

MARSBOUND

JOE HALDEMAN

www.sfgateway.com

For Carmen and Catalin, our alien invaders

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

—Rabindranath Tagore

PART 1

LEAVETAKING

1

The Undead

It wasn't a lot of luggage for five years; for the longest journey anyone has ever taken. We each had an overnight bag and a small titanium suitcase.

We stepped out into the warm Florida night and carried our bags to the curb. I looked back at the house and didn't feel much. We'd only lived there two years and wouldn't be coming back. I'd be twenty-four then, and getting my own place anyhow.

Dad pointed out Jupiter and Mars, both near the horizon.

The cab hummed around the corner and stopped in front of us. “Are you the Dula party?” it said.

"No, we're just out for a walk,” Dad said. Mother gave him a look. “Of course we are. It's three in the god-damned morning."

"Your voice does not match the caller,” the cab said. “After midnight I need positive identification."

"I called,” my mother said. “Do you recognize this voice?"

"Please show me a debit card.” A tray slid out and Dad flipped a card onto it. “Voice and card."

The doors opened silently. “Do you require help with your luggage?"

"Stay put,” Dad said, instead of no. He's always testing them.

"No,” Mother said. The luggage handler stayed where it was and we put our small bags in the back, next to where it crouched. Its eyes followed us.

We got in, Mother and me facing Dad and Card, who was barely awake. “Verify destination,” it said. “Where are you going, please?"

"Mars,” Dad said.

"I don't understand that."

Mother sighed. “The airport. Terminal B."

"The undead,” Card said in his zombie voice.

"What are you mumbling about?"

"This thing you humans call a cab.” His eyes were closed and his lips barely moved. “It does not live, but it is not dead. It speaks."

"Go back to sleep, Card. I'll wake you up when we get to Mars."

2

Good-bye, Cool World

It's the only elevator in the world with barf bags. My brother pointed that out. He notices things like that; I noticed the bathroom. One bathroom, for twenty people. Locked in an elevator for two weeks. It's not as big as it looks in the advertisements.

You don't call it "the elevator" once you're in it; the thing you ride in is just the climber. The Space Elevator, always capitalized, is two of these climbers plus 50,000 miles of cable that rises straight up into space. At the other end is the spaceship that will take my family to Mars. That one will have two bathrooms (for thirty people) but no barf bags, presumably. If you're not used to zero-gee by then, maybe they'll leave you behind.

This whole thing started two years ago, when I was young and stupid, or at least sixteen and naive. My mother wanted to get into the lottery for the Mars Project, and Dad was okay with the idea. My brother Card thought it was wonderful, and I'll admit I thought it was spec, too, at the time. So Card and I got to spend a year of Saturday mornings training to take the test—just us; there was no test for parents. Adults make it or they don't, depending on education and social adaptability. Our parents have enough education for any four people but otherwise are crushingly normal.

These tests were basically to make us, Card and me, seem normal, or at least normal enough not to go detroit locked up in a sardine can with twenty-nine other people for six months.

So here's the billion-dollar question: Did any of the kids aboard pass the tests just because they actually were normal? Or did all of them also give up a year of Saturdays so they could learn how to hide their homicidal tendencies from the testers? "Remember, we don't say anything about having sex with little Fido."

We flew into Puerto Villamil, a little town on a little island in the Galapagos chain, off the coast of South America. They picked it because it's on the equator and doesn't get a lot of lightning, which could give you pause if you were sitting at the bottom of a lightning rod long enough to go around the Earth twice.

The town is kind of a tourist trap for the Space Elevator and the Galapagos in general. People take a ferry out to watch it take off and return, and then go to other islands for skin-diving or to gawk at exotic animals. The islands have lots of bizarre birds and lizards. Dad said we could spend a week or two exploring when we came back.

If we came back, he didn't say. It's not like we were just moving across town.

Mother and Dad both speak Spanish, so they chatted with the taxi driver who took us from the airport to the hotel where we would get a night's rest before ferrying out to the elevator platform. The taxi was different, an electric jeep long enough to seat a dozen people, with no windshield and a canvas sun canopy rather than a roof. I asked what happens if it rains, and the driver summoned up enough English to say, "Get wet."

Card and I had a separate room, so Mom and Dad could have one last night of privacy. I hoped they were taking precautions. Six months of zero-gravity morning sickness? I wondered what they would name the baby who caused that. "Clean up your room, Barf." "No, you can't have the car, Spew."

(After all, they named Card Card and me Carmen, after an opera that I can't stand. "Tor-e-ador, don't spit on the floor. Use the cuspidor; that's what it is for.")

We dumped our bags and went for a walk, Card one way and me the other. He went into town, so I headed for the beach. (The parentiosas might have assumed we were going to stay together, but they didn't give us any specific orders except to be back at the hotel by seven for dinner.)

My last day on Earth. I should do something special.

3

Captain, My Captain

The beach was less sand than rock, a jagged kind of black lava. The water swirled and splashed among the rocks and didn't look too great for wading, so I sat on a more or less smooth rock and enjoyed the sun and salt air. Real Earth air, breathe it while you can.

There was a big, gray iguana on a rock, maybe ten yards away, who ignored me. He didn't look real.

With the noise of the surf on the rocks I didn't hear the man come up behind me. "Carmen Dula?"

I jerked around, startled. He was a strange-looking older guy, maybe thirty, his skin white as chalk. With a closer look I saw it wasn't his skin; it really was something chalky, some kind of absolute sunblock. He was dressed in white, too, long pants and long sleeves and a broad-brimmed hat. Kind of good-looking aside from the clothes.

"Didn't mean to startle you." He offered his hand, dry and strong under the chalk. "I'm Paul Collins, your pilot. Recognized you from the passenger roster."

"The climber has a pilot?"

"No, just an attendant. What's to pilot?" He smiled, metal teeth. "I'm the pilot of the John Carter of Mars, this time out."

"Wow. You've done it before?"

He nodded. "Twice as pilot, once as copilot, there and back." He looked out over the ocean. "This'll be the last one. I'm staying on Mars."

"The whole five years?"

He shook his head. "Staying."

"For ... forever?"

"If I live forever." He squatted down and picked up a flat stone and spun it out over the water. It skipped once. The iguana blinked at it. "I have to stay on either Earth or Mars. I'm sort of maxed out on radiation."

"God, I'd stay on Earth." Was he crazy? "I mean, if I was worried about radiation."

"It's not so bad on Mars, underground," he said, and tried another stone. It just sank. "Go up to the surface once a week. And those limits are for people who want to have children. I don't."

"Me neither," I said, and he was tactful enough not to press for details. "That's why you're so protected? I mean the white stuff?"

"No, more thinking about sunburn than hard radiation." He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, what there was of it. It had obviously just been mowed, down to about a quarter inch except for a trim mohawk. "I haven't had a tan since I was ... just a little older than you?"

"Nineteen," I said, adding six weeks.

"Yeah, twenty-one. That's when I joined the Space Force. They don't encourage tans."

That was interesting. "I didn't know the military was in on the Mars project." Officially, anyhow.

"They aren't." He eased himself down, stiffly, to sit on the rocks. "I quit after five years. It was all air flying. One suborbital, big deal. My tour was up, and this sounded more interesting."

"But you only get to do it three or four times?"

"There's that," he admitted, and threw a pebble at the iguana, missing by a mile. "They're way too conservative. I'm trying to change their minds."

"You couldn't do that better here on Earth?" I sat down next to him.

"Well, yes and no. Right now, if I stay there I'll be the only pilot on Mars, in case something goes wrong and they need one." He threw another pebble at the lizard and missed by even more. "Can't throw worth a shit since I went to space."

I took aim and missed the creature only by inches. It glared at me for a long second and slid into the water.

"Not bad for a girl."

I decided he was joking, but you couldn't tell from his expression. "I've heard that spaceflight can be hard on the muscles."

"It is. Even though you exercise every day, you get weaker. I'm weak as a kitten in all this gravity."

Inanely, I said, "I left my cat behind. In Florida."

"How old was it? Is it."

"Nine." Half my age; I hadn't thought of that.

He nodded. "Not too old."

"Yeah, but she won't be my cat when we get back."

"Might be. They're funny creatures." He rubbed his fingers as if they hurt. "So you're out of school?"

I shook my head no. "Going to start university by correspondence in September. Meryland."

"That'll be interesting. Odd." He laughed. "I partied through my first year; almost flunked out. Guess you won't have to worry about that."

"There aren't any parties on Mars? I'm disappointed."

"Oh, you have people, you have parties. Not too wild. You can't exactly send out for pizza and tap a keg of beer."

I had a sudden empty feeling, not hunger for pizza. I tried to push it away. "What do you do for fun? Go out exploring?"

"Yeah, I do that, go up and collect rocks. I'm a geologist by training, before I became a flyboy. Areologist now."

I knew about that; Ares is Greek for Mars. "Ever discover anything new?"

"Sure, almost every time. But it's like being a kid in a candy store, or it would be if you could find a store where they kept bringing in new candy. It's not hard to find stuff that's never been classified. You into geology?"

"No, more like English and history. I had to take Earth and Planet Science, but it wasn't my ... favorite." My only C besides calculus, actually.

"You might learn to like it, once you have a new planet to explore." He wiggled a pebble out of the sand and looked at it, purple. Scratched it with his thumbnail. "Funny color for lava." He tossed it away. "I could show you around if you like. Mars."

Good grief, I thought, is the pilot hitting on me? Over thirty? "I don't want to be a bother. Just go out by myself and wander around."

"Nobody goes out alone," he said, suddenly serious. "Something goes wrong, you could be dead in a minute." He shrugged. "No ‘could’ about it, really. Mars is more dangerous than space, outer space. The air's so thin it might as well be a vacuum, for breathing."

"Yeah." It's not like I'd never seen a movie. "And then the sandstorms?"

"Well, they don't exactly sneak up on you. The main danger is getting careless. You've got ground and sky and gravity. It feels safer than space. But it's not." He looked at his watch and got up slowly. "Better get on with my exercise. See you tomorrow." He plodded off, obviously feeling the gravity.

I didn't ask whether he wanted company. Interesting guy, but we were going to be stuck in a room together for six months, and would see plenty of each other.

I didn't really feel like company at all. Maybe I could put up with the iguana. I picked my way out to the farthest place I could stand without getting my feet too wet, and watched the swirling, crashing water.

4

Last Meal

On the way back to the hotel, I ran into Paul again. He was sitting alone in the shade of a thatched-roof patio outside a shabby bar called the Yacht Club, drinking a draft beer that looked good. I sat down with him but asked for a Coke, out of a vague concern that Dad might come by. Drinking with a man, oh my. I didn't know the legal age, either; if I was carded he'd find out I wasn't really quite nineteen.

It was a short date, anyhow. We'd just exchanged "where you from?" formalities when his cell pinged and he had to go off to the Elevator office. I did learn that he was from New Jersey but didn't have time to ask about Mafia connections or how to breathe carbon monoxide.

It was not a pleasant place to sit alone and wonder what the hell I was doing. My friends back home were about evenly divided between being jealous and wondering whether I'd lost my mind, and I was leaning toward the latter group. The Coke tasted weird, too. Maybe it was drugged, and when I slumped unconscious they would drag me into the hold of a yacht and smuggle me off to Singapore for a rewarding career in white slavery. Or maybe it was made with sugar instead of corn syrup. I left it, just to be on the safe side, and went on to the hotel.

Speaking of Coke, that's what we weren't having for dinner, no matter how much Card and I might have liked it. Or a pizza or hamburger or even a cold can of beans. Of course it was going to be fancy, the last real family meal for five years.

"Fancy" in the Galapagos was not exactly Park Avenue fancy. They don't serve up the iguanas, fortunately, but there wasn't much you'd find on a normal menu.

The hotel restaurant, La Casa Dolores, served mostly Ecuadorian food, which was not a surprise. I had picadillo, a Cuban dish that sounded like hamburger over rice, and pretty much was, although it tasted strange, like Mexican but with a lot of lemon juice and a touch of soap. Mother said that taste came from a parsley-like herb, cilantro. I trust they won't be growing it on Mars. Or maybe it's their only green vegetable.

Dad, being Dad, ordered the most outrageous thing on the menu: tronquito, bull penis soup, along with goat stew. I refused to look at any of it, and propped a menu up between us so I wouldn't be able to see his plate. Mother got ceviche, raw fish, which came with popcorn. It actually looked pretty good (I like sushi all right) but, excuse me for being practical, I had visions of thirty-three people waiting in line for that one bathroom. I didn't want too much adventure on the first day.

(Card ordered a sausage with beans, but only ate the beans. Maybe the sausage looked too much like Dad's soup. I didn't want to know.)

Mother asked what we'd done all afternoon. Card had a detailed analysis of the island's game rooms. Why go to Mars when you can virtual yourself all over the universe, killing aliens and rescuing big-breasted babes? If we run into aliens on Mars we probably won't have a single ray gun.

I told them I'd met the pilot. "You think he's only thirty?" Mother asked.

"Well, I haven't done the math," I said. "He was in the Space Force for five years? So he was at least twenty-three when he got out. He's been to Mars three times after that and probably spent some time on Earth in between. Got a geology degree somewhere."

"Maybe in space," Dad said. "Passing the time. He looked thirtyish, though?"

He was still eating, so I didn't look at him. "He looked zombie-ish, actually. I guess he could have been older than thirty."

I explained about the sunblock, but didn't mention his offer to take me rock hunting. Dad was being a little too protective of me, where males were concerned, and thirty-some probably didn't sound old to him.

"It's pretty impressive," Mother said evenly, "that he recognized you and remembered your name. I wonder if he knows all thirty-three of the passengers’ faces. Or just the pretty girls."

"Please." I hate it when she makes me blush.

"Ooh, my pretty," Card said in his moron voice, and I kicked him under the table. He flinched but smiled.

"None of us are going to look all that great with no make-up," I said. Not allowed because of the air recycling. I wanted to get a lipstick tattoo when I heard about that, but neither parent would sign the under-eighteen permission form. It's not fair—Mother had a cheek tattoo done when she was not much older than me. It's way out of style now and she hates it, but that doesn't have anything to do with me. If you get tired of a lipstick tattoo, you can cover it with lipstick, brain.

"Levels the playing field," Dad said. "You'll be at an advantage with your beautiful skin."

"Daddy, don't." Mention the word "skin" and all of the acne molecules in my bloodstream get excited and rush to the surface. "I won't exactly be husband-hunting. Not with only five or six guys to choose from."

"It won't be quite that bad," Mother said.

"No, worse! Because most of them plan to stay on Mars, and I'm already looking forward to coming back!" I stood up and laid my napkin down and walked out of the restaurant as fast as dignity would allow. Mother said "Say excuseme," and I sort of did.

I managed not to start crying until I was up in the room. I was angry at myself as much as anything. If I didn't want to do this, why did I let myself be talked into it?

Part of it might have been the lack of boys where we were headed, but we'd talked that over. We'd also talked over the physical danger and the slight inconvenience of going to college a couple of hundred million miles off campus.

I stepped out onto the balcony to get some non-air-conditioned air and was startled to see the Space Elevator, a ruler-straight line of red light that dwindled away to be swallowed by the darkness. Maybe the first two miles of fifty thousand. I hadn't seen it in the daylight.

The stars and the Milky Way were brighter than we ever saw them at home. I could see two planets, but neither of them was Mars, which I knew didn't rise until morning. Dad had pointed it out to me on the way to the airport, which seemed like a long time ago. Mars was a lot dimmer than these two, and more yellow-orange than red. I guess "the Yellow Planet" didn't sound as dramatic as the red one.

I went back down to the restaurant in time to get some ice cream along with a sticky sponge cake full of nuts and fruit. Nobody said anything about my absence. Card had probably been threatened.

Dad treated me in his delicate girl-in-her-period way, which I definitely was not. I'd gotten a prescription for Delaze and wouldn't ovulate until after we got to Mars. The download for the Space Elevator had described the use of recyclable tampons in way too much detail. With luck, I'd never have to use them in zero-gee, on the John Carter. Vacuum sterilizes everything, I suppose, so it was silly to be squeamish about it. But you're allowed to be a little irrational about things that personal. I managed to push it out of my mind for long enough to finish dessert.

Card and I tried TV after dinner, but everything was in Spanish except for CNN and an Australian all-news program. There was a Japanese Game Boy module, but he couldn't make it work, which didn't bother me and my book at all.

The room had a little fridge with an interesting design. Every bottle and box was stuck in place with something like a magnet. If you plucked out a Coke or something, the price flashed in the upper right-hand corner of the TV screen, and a note said it had been added to your room bill.

The fridge knew we were underage, and wouldn't let go of the liquor bottles. But we were evidently old enough for beer—a sign said the age was eighteen, but the fridge wasn't smart enough to tell whether it was serving me or my brother. So I had two beers, which helped me get to sleep, but Card stayed awake long enough to build a pyramid of six cans. I guess I could have been a responsible older sister and cut him off, but there wasn't going to be a lot of beer out on the Martian desert.

5

Pizza Hunt

Our parents didn't say anything about the $52 added to our room bill for beer, but I suppose they took one look at Card and decided he had suffered enough. He'd told me he'd had beer "plenty of times" with his sag pals at school. Maybe it was the nonalcoholic variety. This was strong Dutch beer in big cans, and six had left a lasting effect. He was pale and quiet when we left the hotel and seemed to turn slightly green when we got aboard the boat, rocking in the choppy waves.

They didn't put the Earth end of the Space Elevator on dry land, because it had to be moveable in any direction. Typhoons come through once or twice a century, and they need to get out of the way. The platform it sits on can move more than two hundred miles in twenty-four hours, far enough to dodge the worst part of a storm. Or so they say; it's never been put to the test.

The ribbon cable that the carrier rides also has to move around in order to avoid trouble at the other end—dodging human-made space debris and the larger meteors, the ones big enough to track. (Small meteor holes are patched automatically by a little robot climber.)

The platform was about forty miles offshore, and the long, thin ribbon the elevator rides wasn't usually visible except for the bright strobe lights that warned fliers away. At just the right angle, the sun's reflection could blaze like a razor line drawn in fire; I saw that twice in the hour and a half it took us to cover the distance.

Paul Collins, the pilot, looked more handsome without the white war paint. He introduced himself to Card and my parents, proving that he could recognize passengers who weren't girls.

Before we got to the Space Elevator platform itself, we skirted around a much larger thing, the "light farm," a huge raft of solar power cells. They didn't get power directly from the Sun, but rather from an orbiting power station that turned sunlight into microwaves and beamed them down. Then it gets beamed right back up, in a way. The carrier's electric motors are powered by a big laser sitting on the platform; the laser's powered by the light farm. There's another light farm in the Ecuadorian mountains that beams power at the carrier when it's higher up.

The platform's like an old-fashioned floating oil rig, the size of an office building. The fragile-looking ribbon that the carrier rides spears straight up from the middle of it. The laser and the carrier take up most of the space, with a few huts and storage buildings here and there. It looked bigger from down on the water than the aerial pictures we'd seen.

We took an elevator to the Elevator. There was a floating dock moored to the platform. It was all very nautical feeling, ropes creaking as it moved with the waves, seagulls squawking, salt tang in the air.

Our boat rose and fell with the dock, but of course the open-air elevator didn't. It was a big metal cage that seemed to move up and down and sideways in a sort of menacing way as we bobbed with the waves. If you were sure-footed, you could time it right and just step from the dock onto the elevator. Like most people, I played it safe and jumped aboard as the floor fell away.

We all had identical little suitcases made of light titanium, with our ten kilograms of personal items. Twenty-two pounds didn't sound like very much, but we didn't have any of the stuff that you would normally pack for a trip, since we couldn't bring clothes or cosmetics. Three people had musical instruments too big to fit in the metal box.

The elevator clanked and growled all the way up. We clattered to a stop and got out onto a metal floor that felt like sandpaper, I guess some stuff to keep you from slipping. There was a guardrail, but I had a stomach flip-flop at the thought of falling back down the way we'd come. A hundred feet? Hitting the water would knock you out, at the very least.

Like we didn't have enough to worry about; let's worry about drowning.

To the salt air add a smell of oily grease and ozone tang, like a garage where they work on electric cars—and pizza? I'd have to check that out.

A guy in powder-blue coveralls, the uniform of the Space Elevator corporation, checked to make sure we were all there and there weren't any stowaways. We each picked up a fluffy towel and a folded stack of clothes. There was a sign reminding us that the clothes we were wearing would be donated to a local charity. Local? The Society for Naked Fish, I supposed.

I'd just had a shower at the hotel, but no such thing as too clean if you're going without for a couple of weeks. Or five years, if you mean a real shower.

The women's shower room only took six at a time, and I didn't particularly want to shower with Mom, so I left my stuff stacked by the wall and went off to explore, along with Card, who was looking a little more human.

The climber wasn't open yet, which was okay; we'd be spending plenty of time in it. It was a big white cylinder, about twenty feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, rounded on the top. Not a vast amount of room for forty people. Above it was a robot tug, all ugly machine. It would pull us up a few hundred feet, before the laser took over. It also served as a repair robot, if there was something wrong with the ribbon we were riding on.

"Big foogly laser," Card marveled, and I suppose it was the biggest I'd ever seen, though truthfully I expected something more impressive, more futuristic. The beam it shot out was more than twenty feet in diameter, I knew, and of course it carried enough power to lift the heavy carrier up out of the Earth's gravity well. But it was only the size of a big army tank, and in fact it looked sort of military and menacing. I was more impressed by the big shimmering mirror that would bounce the laser beam up to us, to the photocells on the base of the carrier. Very foogly big mirror.

Three other young people joined us, Davina and Elspeth Feldman, sisters from Tel Aviv, and Barry Westling from Orlando, just south of us. Elspeth looked a little older than me; the others were between me and Card, I figured. Barry was a head taller than him, but a real string bean.

Elspeth was kind of large—not fat, but "large boned," whatever that really means. You couldn't help but note that most of us future Martians were on the small side, for obvious reasons. Someone has to pay for every pound that goes to Mars. Mother spelled out the inescapable math—every day, you need twelve calories per pound to stay the same weight: someone who weighs fifty pounds more than you has to pig down everything you eat plus one Big Mac every day. Over the six-month flight, that's eighty-five extra pounds of food, on top of the extra fifty pounds of person. So small people have a better chance in the lottery.

(They call it a "lottery" to sound democratic, as if every family had an equal chance. If that were true, I wouldn't have lost a year of Saturdays to the cause.)

Thinking of food made me ask whether anyone had found out where the pizza smell was coming from. No one had, so we embarked on a quest.

The search led, unsurprisingly, to a shed with a machine that dispensed drinks and food, alongside a microwave in which someone had recently burned a slice of pizza. Elspeth produced a credit card and everyone but my brother tried a slice. He didn't miss much, but we were more after the idea of pizza than the actuality. We didn't know for sure that there wouldn't be any pizza on Mars, but it seemed likely.

Barry and Card went off to play catch with a Frisbee while the rest of us sat in the shade. Neither Elspeth nor Davina was born in Israel; their family moved there after the war. Like ours, their parents are both scientists, their father a biologist and mother in nanotech, both of them involved in detoxifying the battlefield after Gehenna. Davina started to cry, describing what they'd had to do, had to see, and Elspeth and I held her until it passed.

Maybe there wouldn't be pizza on Mars, but there wouldn't be that, either. What hate can do.

6

Fears

There was no privacy in the shower, and not much water—I mean, all you could see in any direction was water, but I guess the salt would froog up the plumbing. So you had to push a button for thirty seconds of lukewarm unsalted water, and then soap up, push the button again, and try to get the soap off in another thirty seconds. Then do it again for your hair, without conditioner. I was glad mine was short. Elspeth was going to have the frizzies for a long time.

She has quite a dramatic figure, narrow waist and big in the hips and breasts. Mother describes me as "boyish," which I think is motherspeak for "titless wonder." Women built like Elspeth are always complaining about their boobs bumping into things. Things like boys, I suppose.

I liked her, though. It could be a little awkward, the first thing you do when you meet somebody is cry together and then strip naked and jump in the shower, but Elspeth was funny and natural about the latter. In the desert kibbutz where she spent summers growing up, they didn't have individual showers, and the water was rationed almost as severely as here.

Light blue used to be one of my favorite colors, but it does lose some of its charm when everybody in sight is wearing it. We left our "civilian" clothes in the donation box and put on Space Elevator coveralls and slippers. Then we went to the media center for lunch and orientation.

Lunch was a white cardboard box containing a damp sandwich, a weird cookie, and an apple. A bottle of lukewarm water, or you could splurge a couple of bucks on a Coke or a beer out of the machine. I got a beer just to see Card's reaction. He pantomimed sticking a finger down his throat.

The media center was one room with a shallow cube screen taking up one end of it. There were about fifty folding chairs, most of them occupied by powder-blue people. With everyone in uniform, it took me a minute to sort out Mother and Dad. Card and I joined them near the front.

The lights dimmed and we saw a mercifully short history of space flight, with an unsurprising emphasis on how big and dangerous those early rockets had been. Lots of explosions, including the three space shuttle disasters that all but shut down the American space program.

Then some diagrams showing how the Space Elevator works, pretty much a repeat of what we saw at the lottery-winner orientation in Denver a few months ago. Even without that, I wonder if anybody actually ever got this far without knowing that the Space Elevator was—surprise!—an elevator that goes into space.

It was interesting enough, especially the stuff about how they put it up. They worked from the middle out both ways, or up and down, depending on your point of view: Starting at GEO, the spot that orbits the Earth in exactly one day, and so stays overhead in the same spot, they dropped stuff down to Earth and raised other stuff up into a higher orbit at the same time. That way the whole thing stayed in balance, like a seesaw stretching out both ways at the same time.

We were headed for that other end, where the John Carter and the other Mars ship had been built and would launch from.

They spent a little time talking about the dangers. Sort of like a regular elevator in that if the cable snaps, you lose. You just fall a lot farther before you go splat. (Well, it's not that simple—Earth elevators have failsafes, for one thing, and the space elevator wouldn't actually go splat unless we fell from a really low altitude. We'd burn up in the atmosphere if we started falling at less than 23,000 kilometers; above that, we'd go into orbit and could theoretically, eventually, be rescued. But if the cable snapped that high, on our way to where the John Carter is parked, we'd go flinging off into space. Then that theoretical rescue would really be just a theory. There aren't any spaceships yet that could take off and catch up with us in time.)

There's a lot of dangerous radiation in space, but the carrier has a force field, an electromagnetic shield, for most of that. There are huge solar flares that would get past the shielding, but they're rare and give a ninety-one-hour warning. That's long enough to get back to Earth or GEO. The Mars ships and GEO have hidey-holes where everybody can crowd in to wait out the storm.

I'd read about those dangers before we left home, as well as one they didn't mention: mechanical failure. If an elevator on Earth develops a problem, someone will come fix it. It's not likely to explode or fry you or expose you to vacuum. I guess they figured there was no reason to go over that at this late date.

When we left home, a lot of my friends asked me if I was scared, and to most of them I said no, not really. They have most of the bugs worked out. It's carried hundreds of passengers to the Hilton space station, and dozens up to the far end, for Mars launch.

But to my best friend, Carol, I admitted what I haven't said even to my family: I wake up terrified in the middle of the night. Every night.

This feels like jumping off a cliff and hoping you'll learn how to fly.

7

Canned Meat

We walked up a ramp, took a long last look at sea and sky and friendly Sun—it would not be our friend in space—and went inside.

The carrier had a "new car" smell, which you can buy in an aerosol can. In case you're trying to sell a used car or a slightly used Space Elevator.

There were two levels. The first level had twenty couches that were like old-fashioned La-Z-Boy chairs, plush black, with feet pointing out and heads toward the center. Each couch had a "window," a high-def shallow cube, all of which were tuned to look like actual windows for the time being. So there was still sun and sea and sky if you were willing to be fooled.

There was a little storage bin on the side of each couch, with a notebook and a couple of paper magazines. And that stack of barf bags.

Three exercise machines, for rowing, stair stepping, and biking, were grouped together where the ladder led up to the second level.

The woman who was our attendant, Dr. Porter, stood on the second rung of the ladder and talked into a lapel mic. "We have about sixty minutes till lift-off. Please find your area and be seated by then, strapped in, by one o'clock. That's 1300, for you scientists.

"I'll be upstairs if anyone has questions." She scampered lightly up the ladder.

I have a question, I didn't say. Could I just jump off and swim for it?

My information packet said I was 21A. I found the seat and sat down, half reclining. Card was next to me in 20A; Mother and Dad were upstairs in the B section.

Card took a vial out of his packet and looked at the five pills in it. "You nervous?" he said.

"Yeah. Thought I'd save the pills for later, though." They were doses of a sedative. The orientation show admitted that some people have trouble falling asleep at first. Can you imagine?

"Prob'ly smart." He looked pretty much like I felt.

The control console for the window came up out of the armrest and clicked into place over your lap. On one side it had a keyboard and various command buttons, but you could rotate it around and it was like an airplane tray table with a fuzzy gecko surface.

Card tapped away at the keyboard, which caused a ghostly message to cascade down the window in several languages: MONITOR LOCKED UNTIL AFTER LAUNCH. I touched one key on mine and got the same message, dim letters floating down in front of the fake seascape.

"They're just trying to make us feel comfortable," I said, but it was kind of disappointing. The window would normally be a clever illusion—you could play a game or read a book or whatever, but nobody could see what was on your monitor unless they were right in line with it. Sitting on your lap. From any other angle, it would look just like a window looking outside. It had something to do with polarization; the screen was actually showing two images, but you could only see one or the other.

With an hour to kill, I wasn't going to just sit and look through a fake window. I joined Barry and Elspeth in trying out the exercise machines, which were mainly for those of us going on to Mars. The others were just tourists going to the Hilton; they weren't going to be in space long enough for zero-gee to turn their bones to dry sticks and their muscles to mush.

Then we went upstairs and took a look at the zero-gee toilet. We'd sort of trained on it in Denver, in the Vomit Comet, the big ancient plane that gave us fifty seconds of zero-gee at a time—up and down, up and down, all day long. I was able to get my feet into the footholds and lower my butt into place, but that was it. I'd learn about the rest soon enough.

But not too soon. There was a regular toilet next to it, with a sign saying FOR USE UNTIL 0.25 G. So we had a few days.

The "personal hygiene" closet looked claustrophobic. Once a day you got a plastic bag with two washcloths wetted with something like rubbing alcohol. Get as clean as you can, then put the same clothes back on. It would be a little better on the John Carter, better but weirder—zip yourself up in a plastic bag?

The galley was on the opposite side of the room, just a microwave and a surprisingly small refrigerator, and a bunch of drawers of food and utensils. A fold-down worktable.

In the middle of both rooms, both levels, was a round table with eight seat-belted chairs, I guessed for socializing. Wouldn't it be smarter to have smaller, separate tables? Just in case there turned out to be somebody you couldn't stand the sight of?

After six months, that might be everybody, though, including the mirror.

Mustn't think negative thoughts, as Dad says. Only two weeks in this one, and then a change of scenery for five and a half months. Then a new planet.

"It's funny," I said quietly to Card, "on the boat over, I thought I could pretty well tell who were the rich people and who were the neo-Martians."

"Fancy clothes?"

"Or careful down-dressing. An ironed tee-shirt, that's a dead giveaway. With clean old jean shorts?"

"But here—"

"Yeah, and it's not just clothes. No makeup or jewelry. That has to rag them. It's going to be interesting."

"Some of the Martians are rich, too," Card said. "Barry's dad's an inventor, and he has all kinds of patents. They came out in their own plane."

"Couldn't afford a ticket?"

"Sure, right. He's got two planes, two motorcycles, two cars, just in case one breaks down. They live on the lake in Disney."

Billionaires, but still. It seemed kind of wasteful to have two of everything, even if money's not an issue. But I didn't say anything. "Barry seems like a nice enough guy."

Card shrugged. "Sure. I think he's a little scared of his dad."

"I wonder if his dad eats bull dick soup. That's scary." Card started giggling and so did I. Mother gave us a warning look, and that made it worse. We climbed back downstairs, snorting, and managed not to break any bones.

8

Stop

I guess there's something to be said for launching the old way, riding three thousand tons of high explosive on a tower of fire. Dangerous but dramatic. When we took off, it was sort of like an elevator ride.

We were all strapped into our seats, probably just to keep us from wandering around. The tug above us made a whiney little noise, and there was a slight bump, and the platform below us slowly fell away. In a few seconds, you could see the big energy farm. I strained at the seatbelt, but couldn't get close enough to the "window" to see the laser and the mirror—dumb of me. It wasn't really a window; if the camera wasn't pointed at the laser, I wouldn't see it.

The noise stopped and there was another bump. "Switching over," Dr. Porter said over the intercom. A woman of few words.

The main motors were much smoother. There was a slight press of acceleration and a low hum, and in a couple of minutes we were up to our cruising speed, about 250 miles per hour.

After a couple minutes more of going straight up, we were higher than most airplanes, and you could easily see the curvature of the Earth as the Galapagos came into sight. My ears started to pop and crackle with the air pressure dropping. Upstairs, a couple of the younger kids were crying. Ears or fears?

It wasn't really anything new; we'd sat through a twelve-hour test of it at the Denver orientation, thin air with beefed-up oxygen, and everybody managed to live with it. We'll be breathing something like this for the next five years. (The high oxygen content was why we couldn't bring regular clothes—everything has to be absolutely nonflammable. And smokers have to quit.)

Little numbers in the corner of the window showed how high we were and what the gravity was. At seven or eight miles, the edge of South America was coming into view. The sky was getting darker and darker blue, and by twenty-five miles it was almost black. You could see a few stars, at least on this side. I craned my neck to see the windows behind me; the ones facing the afternoon sun were dimmed.

Soon the sky was inky black, and I shivered involuntarily. For all practical purposes, we were in outer space. Outside the elevator, you wouldn't live a minute.

That would be true in an airplane, too. I told myself not to panic. I considered taking one of the pills, but instead just closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

When I opened my eyes, the gravity had fallen to 0.99. I'd lost a pound already, on the Space Elevator Diet. (Money back guarantee—in one week, your weight problem will be gone!)

That was one advantage we had over the old astronauts. They went straight from one gee to nothing, and about half of them got sick. We had a week to get used to it gradually. But we did have barf bags, too.

That made me glance down to the pocket on the side of the chair. I did not count the number of bags in the stack, but rather pulled out the magazines.

We didn't get paper magazines at home. These felt funny, kind of heavy and slippery. I guess that was like the clothes, nonflammable paper.

One was the Space Elevator News, with a sticker on it that said "take this copy home with you." Not to Mars, I think. The others were the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune, which I'd read back at the hotel (for the comics), Time,International Photography, and Seventeen.

"God, you're reading a magazine?" Card said. "Look, South America!"

"I saw it miles ago," I said. But Earth really was starting to look like a planet, and we were only thirty miles up. I'd thought it would take a lot longer than that.

"You're free to unbelt now and walk around the carrier," Dr. Porter said. "Sometime before six o'clock, check off your dinner preference, and I'll call for you when it's ready." Doctor, chef, and waitress all in one, impressive. Though I suspected there wouldn't be much chefing involved, and I was right.

Once you got over the novelty of seeing the Earth out there, it was kind of like watching grass grow. I mean, it wasn't like low Earth orbit, where the real estate rolls along underneath you, constantly changing. I figured I could check it out once an hour, and tried the keyboard.

It worked pretty much like the console at home. Bigger picture and more detail. Out of curiosity I typed in a request for porn, and got an alphabetical menu that was a little daunting. I knew that Card would get ACCESS DENIED, which made me feel mature and privileged. (He'd probably devise a workaround in a couple of hours, but he could have it. I don't really get porn. After the first couple of times, it sort of looks like biology.)

There were a couple of thousand video and virtual channels, but unlike home, the console didn't know what I liked; there was no SUGGEST button. But I could goowiki anything.

The word "menu" started blinking in the corner of the screen, so I clicked on it. There were twelve standard choices for dinner, mostly American and Italian, with one Chinese and one Indian. Then there were ten "premium" meals, with wine, which had surcharges from $40 to $250. Some of them were French things I'd never heard of.

I clicked on beef stew, safe enough, and wondered whether Dad was going to rack up a huge bill ordering French stuff made of unspeakable parts of various animals. Mother would probably rein him in, but they both liked wine. There goes the family fortune.

You could toggle and zoom the window. I put the crosshairs on Puerto Villamil and cranked it up to 250X, the maximum. The image wobbled and vibrated, but then cleared up. I could see our hotel, and people walking around, the size of ants. With careful toggling, I found the rocky beach where I'd spent my last time actually alone.

"Hey," said a voice behind me, "that's where we met?" It was the pilot, of course, Paul Collins, crouching down so he could see what was on my screen. Was that impolite?

"Yeah, where you nailed that iguana with a rock. Or am I imagining things?"

"No, your memory is perfect. I wondered if you wanted to play some cards. We're getting a game together before anyone else claims the table upstairs."

I was flattered and a little nervous, that he had come down to find me. "Sure, if I know the game."

"Poker. Just for pennies."

"Okay. I could do that." The kids in high school had stopped playing poker with me because I always won, and they couldn't figure out how I was cheating. I wouldn't tell them my secret, which was no secret: fold unless you have something good. Most of the other kids just stayed in the game, trusting their luck, hoping to improve their hands at the last minute. That's idiotic, my Uncle Bert taught me; only one person is going to win. Make it be you, or be gone.

I got my purse out of the little suitcase and glanced at Card. He was wrapped up in a game or something, virtual headset on. Mental note: that way nobody can sneak up behind you and see what you're doing.

Upstairs, there were five people at the table, including Dad. "Uh oh," he said. "Might as well just give her the money."

"Come on, Dad. I don't always win."

He laughed. "Just when I'm in the game." He actually was a pretty bad poker player, not too logical for an engineer. But he played for fun, not money.

We spent a pleasant couple of hours playing Texas hold ‘em and seven-card stud. I dealt five-card stud a couple of times, the purest game, but that wasn't enough action for most of them.

Dad was way ahead when I left, which was both satisfying and annoying. I learned that pilot Paul plays pretty much like me, close to the chest. If he stayed in, he had something—or he bluffed so well no one found out.

I went in with ten dollars and left with twenty. That's another thing Uncle Bert taught me: decide before you sit down how much you're going to win or lose, and stop playing at that point, no matter how long you've been in the game. You may not make any friends if you win the first two hands and leave. But poker's not about making friends, he said.

The gravity was down to 0.95 when I went back to my chair, and I could almost tell the difference. It was a funny feeling like "Where did I leave my purse?"

I could just see North America coming up over the edge of the world. Zoomed in on Mexico City, a huge sprawl of places you probably wouldn't like to visit without an armed guard.

Card was still in virtual, doing something with aliens or busty blondes. I put on the helmet myself and chinned through some of the menu. Nothing that really fascinated me. Curious, I spent a few minutes in "Roman Games: Caligula," but it was loud and gory beyond belief. Settled into "midnight warm ocean calm," and set the timer for six, then watched the southern sky, the beautiful Cross and Magellanic Clouds, roll left and right as the small boat bobbed in the current. I fell asleep for what seemed like about one second, and the chime went off.

I unlocked the helmet and instantly wished I was back on the calm sea. Someone had heard the dinner bell and puked. They couldn't wait for zero-gee? There went my appetite.

After a few minutes there was a double chime from the monitor and a little food icon, a plate with wavy lines of steam, started blinking in the corner. I went upstairs to get it, hoping I could eat up there.

I was the second person up the ladder, and there was a short line forming behind me. They said they would call ten people at a time for dinner, I guess at random.

There were ten white plastic boxes on the galley table, with our seat numbers. I grabbed mine and snagged a place at the center table, across from the rich kid, Barry.

He had the same thing I did, a plate with depressions for beef stew with a hard biscuit, a stack of small cooked carrots, and a pile of peas, all under plastic. Everything was hot in the middle and cool on the outside.

"I guess we can say good-bye to normal food," he said, and I wondered what dinner normally was to him. Linen and crystal, sumptuous gourmet food dished out by servants? "Water boils at 170 degrees, at this pressure," he continued. "It doesn't get hot enough to cook things properly."

"Yeah, I read about coffee and tea." All instant. The stew was kind of chewy and dry. The carrots glowed radioactively and the peas were a lurid bright green and tasted half raw.

Funny, the peas started to roll around on their own. A couple jumped off the plate. There was a low moan that seemed to come from everywhere.

"What the hell?" Barry said, and started to stand up.

"Please remain seated," Dr. Porter shouted over the sound. The floor and walls were vibrating. "If you're not in your assigned seat, don't return to it until the climber stops."

"Stops?" he said. "What are we stopping for?"

"Probably not to pick up new passengers," I said, but my voice cracked with fear.

Dr. Porter was standing with her feet in stirrup-like restraints, her head inside a VR helmet, her hands on controls.

"There isn't any danger," her muffled voice said. "The climber will stop for a short time while the ribbon repair vehicle separates to repair a micrometeorite hole." That was the squat machine on top of the climber. It separated with a clang and a lurch; we swayed a little.

I swallowed hard. So we were stuck here until that thing stitched up the hole in the tape. If it broke, we'd shortly become a meteorite ourselves. Or a meteor, technically, if we burned up before we hit the ground.

"I heard it happens about every third or fourth flight," Barry said.

I'd read that, too, but it hadn't occurred to me that it would be scary. Stop, repair the track, move on. I swallowed again and shook my head hard. Two children were crying and someone was retching.

"Are you all right?" Barry asked, a quaver in his voice.

"Will be," I said through clenched teeth.

"How about them Gators?"

"What? Are you insane?"

"You said you live in Gainesville," he said defensively.

"Don't follow football." An admission that could get me burned at the stake in some quarters.

"Me, neither." He paused. "You win at poker?"

"A thousand," I said. "I mean ten bucks. A thousand pennies."

"Might as well be dollars. Nothing to spend it on."

Interesting thing for him to say. "You could buy stuff when we stop at the Hilton."

"Yeah, but you couldn't carry it with you. Unless you have less than ten kilograms."

Maybe I should've saved a few ounces, bring back an Orbit Hilton T-shirt. Be the only one on the block.

The pilot Collins sat down next to Barry. "Thrills and chills," he said.

"Routine stuff, right?" Barry said.

He paused a moment, and said, "Sure."

"You've seen this happen before?" I said.

"In fact, no. But I haven't ridden the elevator that many times," He looked past me, to where Dr. Porter was doing mysterious things with the controls.

"Paul ... you're more scared than I am."

He settled back into the chair, as if trying to look relaxed. "I'm just not used to not being in control. This is routine," he said to Barry. "It's just not my routine. I'm sure Porter has everything under control."

His face said that he wasn't sure.

"You're free to walk around now," Dr. Porter said, her head still hidden. (I suppose pilots can walk around all they want.) "We'll be done here in less than an hour. You should be in your seats when we start up again."

Barry relaxed a little at that, and turned his attention back to dinner.

Paul didn't relax. He stood up slowly and took the vial of white pills from his pocket. He shook out two into his hand and headed for the galley, to pick up a squeeze-bottle of water. He took the pills and went back to his seat.

Barry hadn't seen that, his back to the galley. "You're not eating," he said.

"Yeah." I took a small bite of the beef, but it was like chewing on cardboard. Hard to swallow. "You know, I'm not all that hungry. I'll save it for later." I pressed the plastic back down over the top and went over to the galley.

The refrigerator wouldn't open—not keyed to my thumbprint—so I took the plate and a bottle of water back down to my seat.

Card was reading a magazine. "That food?"

"Mine, el Morono. Wait your turn." I slid it under my seat but kept the water bottle. The pilot had taken two pills; I took three.

"What, you scared?"

"Good time to take a nap." I resisted telling him that if the Mars pilot was scared, I could be scared, too, thank you very much.

I pulled the light blanket over me. It fastened automatically on the other side, a kind of loose cocoon for zero-gee.

I reached for the VR helmet, but it was locked, a little red light glowing. Making sure everyone could hear emergency announcements, I supposed. Like "The ribbon has broken; everybody take a deep breath and pray like hell."

After about a minute, the pills were starting to drag my eyelids down, even though the anxiety, adrenaline, was trying to keep me awake. Finally, the pills won.

9

Losing Weight

I slept about ten hours. When I woke up it was right at midnight; the elevator restarting hadn't awakened me. The window said we'd gone 2250 miles and we were at 0.41 gee. You could see the whole Earth as a big globe. I took the pen out of my pocket and dropped it experimentally. It seemed to hesitate before falling, and then drifted down in no hurry.

It's one thing to see that on the cube, but quite another to have it happening in your own world. We were in space, no doubt about it.

I unbuckled and pointed myself toward the john. Walking felt strange, as if I was full of helium or something. It was actually an odd combination of energy and light-headedness, not completely pleasant. Partly the gravity and partly the white pills, I supposed.

I went up the ladder with no effort, barely touching the rungs. You could learn to like this—though we knew what toll it eventually would take.

Probably the last time I'd sit on a regular toilet. I should ask the machine when we were due to hit a quarter-gee and switch to the gruesome one. Go join the line just before. Or not. I'd be living with the sucking thing for months; one day early or late wouldn't mean anything.

My parents were both zipped up, asleep. Several people were snoring; guess I'd have to get used to that.

There were four people I didn't know talking quietly at the table. Downstairs, two people were playing chess while two others watched. I took the copy of Seventeen from my chair and walked over to the bike machine. Might as well get started on saving my bones.

The machine was set on a hill-climbing program, but I really didn't want to be the first person aboard to work up a sweat. So I clicked it to "easy" and pedaled along while reading the magazine.

So little of it was going to be useful or even meaningful for the next five years. Hot fashion tips! ("Get used to blue jumpsuits.") Lose that winter flab! ("Don't eat the space crap they put in front of you.") How to communicate with your boyfriend! ("E-mail him from 250 million miles away.")

I hadn't really had a boyfriend since Sean, more than a year ago. Knowing that I was going to be on another planet for five years put a damper on that.

It wasn't that simple. The thing with Sean, the way he left, hurt me badly enough that the idea of leaving the planet was pretty attractive. No love life, none of that kind of pain.

Did that make me cold? I should have fallen helplessly in love with someone and pined away for him constantly, bursting into tears whenever I saw the Earth rise over the morning horizon. Or did I see that in a bad movie?

There weren't any obviously great prospects aboard the carrier. They might start to look better as the years stretched on.

I did start to cry a little and the tears just stayed in my eyes. Not enough gravity for them to roll down your cheek. After pedaling blind for a minute, I wiped my eyes on a nonabsorbent sleeve and cranked on. There was an article on Sal the Sal, a hot new cube star that everyone but me had heard of; I decided to read every word of that and then quit.

He was so sag beyond sag it was disgusting. Fascinating, too. Like if you can care little enough about everything you automatically become famous. You ask him for an autograph and he pulls out a rubber stamp, and everybody just comes because it's so sag. Forgive me for not joining in. I bet Card knows his birth date and favorite color.

Pedaling through all that responsible journalism did put me on the verge of sweating, so I quit and went back to my seat. Card had put aside the helmet and was doing a word puzzle.

"Card," I asked, "what's Sal the Sal's favorite color?"

He didn't even look up. "Everybody knows it's black. Makes him look 190 pounds instead of 200."

Fair enough. I handed him the magazine. "Article on him if you want to read it."

He grunted thanks. "Five letter word meaning ‘courage'? Second letter P, last letter K?"

I thought for a couple of seconds. "Spunk."

He frowned. "You sure?"

"It's old fashioned." Made me think of the pilot, who seemed to have "spunk," Space Force and all, but was scared by an elevator incident.

I sat down and buckled in and got scared all over again myself. He had a point, after all. Accidents could happen on the way to Mars, but nothing that would send us hurtling to a flaming death in Earth's atmosphere.

Don't be a drama queen, Dad would say. But the idea of dying that way made my eyes feel hot and dry.

10

Social Climbing

The fear faded as we fell into routine, climbing up toward the Hilton midpoint. We grew imperceptibly lighter every hour, obviously so day by day. By the sixth day, we'd lost 90 percent of our gravity. You could go upstairs without touching the ladder, or cross the room with a single step. There were a lot of collisions, getting used to that.

It was getting close to what we'd live with on the way to Mars. We wore gecko slippers that lightly stuck to the floor surface, and there were gray spots on the wall where they would also adhere.

The zero-gee toilet wasn't bad once you got used to it. It uses flowing air instead of water and you have to pee into a kind of funnel, which is different. The crapper is only four inches in diameter and it uses a little camera to make sure you're centered. A little less attractive than my yearbook picture.

I hope Dr. Porter gets paid really well. Some of the little ones didn't climb the learning curve too swiftly, and she had to clean up after them.

It didn't help the flavor of the food any to know where the water came from. Get used to the idea or starve, though. I found three meals on the menu I could eat without shuddering.

I mostly hung around with Elspeth and Barry and Kaimei, a Chinese girl a year younger than me. She was born in China but grew up, bilingual and sort of bicultural, in San Francisco. She was a dancer there, small and muscular, and you could tell by the way she moved in low gravity that she was going to love zero-gee.

The smaller kids were going detroit with the light gravity. Dr. Porter set hours for playtime and tried to enforce them by restraining offenders in their seats. Then, of course, they'd have to go to the bathroom, and wouldn't go quietly. She looked like she was going to be glad to send them on to Mars or leave them at the Hilton.

I would, too, in her place. Instead, I get to go along with them, at least the ones who were ten and older. After we left the tourists at the Hilton, we wouldn't have anybody under ten aboard—if there were any small children in the Mars colony, they'd have to be born there.

Luckily, the two worst offenders were brother brats who were getting off at the Hilton. Eighty grand seems like more than they were worth, and you'd think their parents would have had a better time without them. Maybe they couldn't find a babysitter for two weeks. (Hell, I'd do it for less than eighty grand. But only if they let me use handcuffs and gags.)

We weren't supposed to play any throwing and catching games, for obvious reasons, but Card had a rubber ball, and out of boredom we patted it back and forth in the short space between us. Of course it went in almost ruler-straight lines, how exciting, even when he tried to put English on it—he needed speed and a floor or wall to bounce off, and a little bit of space for the thing to bounce around in. But even he was smart enough not to try anything that would provoke Dr. Frankenstein's wrath.

Elspeth and I signed up for the exercise machines at the same time, and chatted and panted together. I was in slightly better shape, from fencing team and swimming three times a week. No swimming pools on Mars, this century. Probably no swords to fence with, either. (The John Carter fictional character the ship was named after used a sword, I guess when his ray gun ran out of batteries. Maybe we could start the solar system's first low-gravity fencing team. Then if the Martians did show up, we could fight them with something sharper than our wits.)

Actually, Elspeth was better than me on the stair-step machine, since in our flat Florida city you almost never encounter stairs. Ten minutes on that machine gave me pains in muscles I didn't know I owned. But I could pedal or row all day.

Then we took turns in the "privacy module," which they ought to just call a closet, next to the toilet, for our daily dry shower. Moist, actually; you had two throwaway towelettes moistened with something like rubbing alcohol—one of them for the "pits and naughty bits," as Elspeth said, and the other for your face and the rest of your body. Then a small reusable towel for rubdown. Meanwhile your jumpsuit is rolling around in a waterless washing machine, getting refreshed by hot air, ultrasound, and ultraviolet light. It comes out warm and soft and only smelling slightly of sweat. Not all of it your own, though that could be my imagination.

I fantasized about diving into the deep end of the city pool and holding my breath for as long as I could.

Six hours before we were due at the Hilton, we were asked to stick our heads into the helmets for "orientation," which was more of a sales job than anything else. Why? They already had everybody's money.

The Hilton had a large central area that stayed zero-gee, the "Space Room," with padded walls and a kind of oversized jungle gym. A pair of trampolines on opposite walls, so you could bounce back and forth, spinning, which looked like fun.

People didn't stay there, though; the actual rooms were in two doughnut-shaped structures that spun, for artificial gravity, around the zero-gee area. The two levels were 0.3g and 0.7g.

The orientation didn't mention it, but I knew that about half of the low-gee rooms housed permanent residents, rich old people whose hearts couldn't take Earth gravity anymore. All of the people in the presentation were young and energetic, and vaguely rich-looking in their tailored Hilton jumpsuits, I guess no different from ours except for the tailoring and choice of colors.

We would stop there for four hours, and could explore the hotel for two of them. We were all looking forward to the change of scenery.

"Don't use the Hilton bathrooms unless you absolutely have to," Dr. Porter said. "We want to keep that water in our system. Feel free to drink all of theirs you can hold."

The four hours went by pretty quickly. Basically seeing how rich folks live without too much gravity. Most of them looked pretty awful, cadaverous with bright smiles. We looked at the prices at Conrad's Café, and could see why they might not want to eat too much.

We did play around a bit in the weightless gym area. Elspeth and I played catch with her little sister Davina, who obediently curled into a ball. Spinning her gave us all the giggles, but we had to stop before she got totally dizzy. She looked a little green as she unfolded, but I think was happy for the small adventure and the attention.

I did a few bounces on the pair of trampolines, managing four before I got off-target and hit the wall. Card was good at it, but quit after eight or so, rather than hog it. I suppose two people could use it at once if they were really good. Only once if they weren't. Ouch.

The interesting thing about the jungle gym was gliding through it, rather than climbing on it. Launch yourself from the wall and try to wriggle your way through without touching the bars. The trick is starting slow and planning ahead—a demanding skill that will be oh-so-useful if I ever find myself having to thread through a jungle gym, running from Martians.

Dr. Porter had found a whistle somewhere. She called us to the corridor opening and counted noses, then told us to stay put while she went off in search of a missing couple. They were probably in Conrad's Café guzzling hundred-dollar martinis.

I mentioned that to Card and said there wouldn't be any vodka on Mars—and he bet me a hundred bucks there would be. I decided not to take the bet. Seventy-five engineers would find a way.

The missing duo appeared in the elevator and we crawled back home to wait in line for the john. The carrier seemed cramped.

The John Carter would be about three times as big, but nothing like the Hilton. After that, though, a whole planet to ourselves.

11

Up and Out

The trip from the Hilton out to the end of the tether was more subdued than the first leg. Half as many of us and all of us headed for Mars, except Dr. Porter.

We spent a lot of time sitting around in small groups talking, some about Mars but mostly about who we were and where we came from.

Most of us were from the States, Canada, and Great Britain, because the lottery was based on the amount of funding each country had put into the Mars Project. There were families from Russia and France. The flight following ours, in eighteen months, would have German, Australian, and Japanese families. A regular United Nations, except that everybody spoke English.

My mother talked to the French family in French, to stay in practice; I think some disapproved, as if it was a conspiracy. But they were fast friends by the time we got to the ship. The mother, Jac, was back-up pilot as well as a chemical engineer. I didn't have much to do with their boy Auguste, a little younger than Card. His dad Greg was amusing, though. He'd brought a small guitar along, which he played softly, expertly.

The Russians kept to themselves but were easy enough to get along with. The boy, Yuri, was also a musician. He had a folding keyboard but evidently was shy about playing for others. He would put on earphones and play for hours, from memory or improvising, or reading off the screen. Only a little younger than me, but not too social.

Our doctor on the way to Mars would be Alphonzo Jefferson, who was also a scientist specializing in the immune system; his wife Mary was also a life scientist. Their daughter Belle was about ten, son Oscar maybe two years older.

The Manchester family were from Toronto, the parents both areologists. The kids, Michael and Susan, were ten-year-old twins I hadn't gotten to know. I didn't know Murray and Roberta Parienza well, either, Californians about our age (Murray the younger) whose parents came from Mexico, an astronomer and a chemist.

So our little UN among the younger generation was two Latins, a Russian, two African-Americans, two Israelis, and a Chinese-American, slightly outnumbering us plain white-bread Americans.

We'd all be going to school via VR and e-mail during the six-month flight, though we started going on different days and of course would have class at different times, spread out over eleven time zones. If Yuri had a class at nine in the morning, that would be ten for Davina and Elspeth, eleven for Auguste, five in the afternoon for us Floridians, and eight at night for the Californians. It was going to make the social calendar a little complicated. As if there was anything to do.

Meanwhile, we could enjoy the extra elbow room we got from dumping off the nine tourists. I moved upstairs to sit next to Elspeth, which put Roberta on my right. Dr. Porter rolled her eyes at three teenage females in a row, and told us to keep the noise down or she'd split us up. That wasn't exactly fair, since the little kids were the real noisemakers, and besides, most of our parents were on the second level, too.

But you had to have some sympathy for her. The littlest ones were always testing her to see how far they could go before she applied the ultimate punishment: locked in the seat next to your parents with the VR turned off for X hours. She couldn't hit them—some parents wouldn't mind, but others would have a fit—and she couldn't exactly make them go outside to play, though if she did that once, the others might calm down.

(It was no small trick to get a recalcitrant child back to its place in zero-gee. They'd push off and fly away giggling while she stalked after them with her gecko slippers. Hard to corner somebody in a round room. The parents or other adults usually had to help.)

What finally worked was escalating punishment. Each time she had to strap a kid in, she added fifteen minutes’ VR deprivation to everyone's next punishment, no exceptions. At ten, they were old enough to do the math and started policing themselves—and behaving themselves, a small miracle.

We went a little faster on the second half, and it would've taken only four and a half days, except we had to stop again while the robot repaired a tear in the tape ahead.

I had a vague memory of watching the news when they started building the two Mars ships eleven years ago. They'd taken the fuel tanks from the old pre-Space Elevator cargo shuttles, cut them up, and rearranged the parts. The first one, the Carl Sagan, was assembled in Low Earth Orbit; the second up at GEO, where the Hilton is now. I guess the Elevator wasn't available for the first. Anyhow, they both took a long crawl up here, spiraling slowly up with some sort of solar power engine. The first one took off while they were still working on ours.

The Sagan had made two round trips, and was on its third, in orbit around Mars, now. Ours had only been once, but at least we knew that it worked.

Of course a spaceship doesn't have to be streamlined to work in outer space, with no air to resist, but the fuel tanks these were built from had gone through the atmosphere, and so they looked kind of like a hokey rocketship from an old twentieth century movie, though with funny-looking arms sticking out on the left and right, with the knobs we'd be living in.

We could see the John Carter a couple of hours before we got there, at least as a highly magnified blob. Slowly it took shape, the stubby rocketship with the two pods rotating around it, once each ten seconds.

The carrier slowed down for the last couple of minutes. Strapped in, we watched the spaceship draw closer and closer.

It wasn't too impressive, only ninety feet long, unpainted except for the white front quarter, the streamlined lander. We were going in through the side of that, a crawl tunnel like we'd used for the Hilton.

The carrier came to a stop and Dr. Porter and the pilot Paul put on space suits to go check things out. They came back in a few minutes and said things were fine, but a little cold. The air that came through the open airlock door was wintry—colder than it ever gets at home. Paul said not to worry; we'd warm it up.

They opened the storage area under the exercise machines, and we started carrying things over. Not as easy as it might seem, in zero-gee. Nothing had weight—if you let go of it, it wouldn't fall—but everything had inertia. If you wanted to move a piano, you'd have to get behind it (with your feet anchored) and shove.

We didn't have a piano, except for Yuri's little folding one, but we did have some pretty heavy boxes, a lot of it food and water for the trip. "Starter" water, which would be recycled. I'd almost gotten resigned to the fact that a little bit of every drink I took had gone through my brother at least once.

You could see your breath. I had goosebumps and my teeth started chattering. Barry and his parents were the same way, fellow Floridians. My parents and Card seemed to have some Eskimo blood.

A lot of the stuff we stored in the Mars lander, under Paul's supervision. Some of it went into A or B, the pods where we'd be living.

That was sort of like the Hilton in miniature. There was a relatively large zero-gee room, a cylinder twenty-two feet long by twenty-seven feet wide. On opposite sides there were two four-foot holes, A and B, with ladders going down. No elevators.

Of course we were all pretty good with zero-gee, though there were a few bumped heads.

I couldn't get warm. Fortunately, one of the things I delivered was a bundle of blankets for "Sleeping A." I was A-8, so I liberated one of the blankets and wrapped it around myself.

Saying good-bye to Dr. Porter was more emotional than I would have thought. Tears sticking like glue to your eyelashes. She hugged me and whispered, "Take care of Card. You'll love him soon enough."

She went back to the carrier and the airlock closed. Paul warned us we all had thirty minutes to use the toilet, and then we'd be strapped in for almost two hours. I didn't really need to go, but might as well be prudent, and I was mildly curious about what I'd be putting up with for the next three months. I got at the end of the line and asked my reader for a random story. It was an amusing thing from France a million years ago, about a necklace.

The zero-gee toilet was the same as the carrier's, but without the little camera. I didn't miss it, nor did I miss the target.

The Mars lander was set up sort of like an airplane, two rows of seats separated by an aisle, but with the pilot and all his gear up front. We strapped in and waited for twenty minutes or so. Then the engine grumbled and roared, and for six minutes we were heavier than we'd been on Earth. It was hard to breathe, and might have been scary if you didn't know how long it was going to last. But a clock counted down on the screen in front.

The blanket I'd wrapped around me had a crease that pressed into my back like a dull knife. I tried to pull it smooth, but my arms were like lead, and I gave up.

Most of the speed we needed for getting to Mars was "free"—when we left the high orbit at the end of the Space Elevator, we were like a stone thrown from an old-fashioned sling, or a bit of mud flung from a bicycle tire. Two weeks of relatively slow crawling up built up into one big boost, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars.

We had to stay strapped in because there would be course corrections, all automatic. The ship studied our progress and then pointed in different directions and made small bursts of thrust.

It was only a little more than an hour when Paul gave us the all-clear to go explore the ship and get a bite to eat.

Compared to the Space Elevator carrier, it was huge. From the lander, you go into the zero-gee room, which was about three times the size of our living room at home. The circular wall was all storage lockers that opened with the touch of a recessed button, no handles sticking out to snag you.

You climb backward down the ladder, in a four-foot-wide tunnel, to get to the living areas, A or B. Both pods were laid out the same. The first level, for sleeping, had the least gravity, close to what we'd have on Mars. Then there was the work/study area, basically one continuous desk around the wall, with moveable partitions and maybe twenty viewscreens. They were set up as fake windows, like the carrier's "default mode"—thankfully not spinning around six times a minute.

The bottom level was the galley and recreation area. I felt heavy there, after all the zero-gee, but it was only about half Earth's gravity, or 1.7 times what we'd have on Mars, the next five years.

It had a stationary bicycle and a rowing machine with sign-up rosters. You were supposed to do an hour a day on them. I took seven A.M., since eight and nine were already spoken for.

Elspeth and Davina found me down there, and we had the first of about two hundred lunches aboard the good ship John Carter. A tolerable chicken salad sandwich with hot peas and carrots. Card showed up and had the same. He made a face at the vegetables, but ate them. We'd been warned to eat everything in front of us. The ship wasn't carrying snacks. If you get hungry between meals, you just have to be hungry. (I suspected we'd find ways around that.)

It was a lot more roomy than you'd expect a spaceship to be, which was a provision for disaster. If something went wrong and one of the pods became uninhabitable, all thirty-three of us could move into the other pod. Then if something happened to it, I guess we could all move into the zero-gee room and the lander. I don't know what we'd eat, though. Each other. ("It's your turn now, Card. Be a good boy and take your pill.")

I sat down at one of the study stations and typed in my name and gave it a thumbprint. I had a few letters from friends and a big one from the University of Maryland. That was my "orientation package," though actual classes wouldn't start for another week.

It was very handy—advice about where to get a parking sticker, dormitory hours, location of emergency phones and all. More useful was a list of my class hours and their virtual-reality program numbers, so I could be in class after a fashion.

It was a little more complicated for me than for the kids actually on campus. Up in the right-hand corner of the screen were UT, universal time, and TL, time lag. The time lag now, the time it took for a signal to get from me to the classroom, was only 0.27 of a second. By the time we got to Mars, it could be as much as twenty-five minutes (or as little as seven, depending on the distance between the planets). So if I asked the professor a question at what was to me the beginning of the fifty-minute class, he'd already be halfway through, Earth time. He'd get my question while everybody else was packing up their books, and his answer would get to me twenty-five minutes after class was over.

Actually, it would be even more complicated once we were on Mars Time, since the day is forty minutes longer. But I didn't have to worry about that until we got halfway there, and switched.

Ship time was Universal Time, until we hit the halfway point, which put us on the same schedule as people living just up-river from London, which I guess had made sense when they were planning things on Earth. Why not go straight to Mars time? Whatever, I got a few pages into the college catalog and my body said sleep, even if it was only two, 1400, to the folks in Merrie Olde Englande. I dragged my blanket up to the light-gee sleeping floor and wrapped myself up in it, and slept till the dinner bell.

12

Trouble

The first week or two we were under way, I was asleep as much as awake, or more, which got Mother worried. She had me go talk to Dr. Jefferson, who asked me whether I felt depressed, and I'm afraid my response was a little loud and emotional. I mean, no, I wasn't depressed; I was just imprisoned and hurtling off to some uncertain future, probably to die before I was legally an adult, and I asked him aren't you depressed?

He smiled and nodded (maybe not "yes"), and gave me a light hug, the big black bear, which might have made me slightly telepathic. It wasn't so much the abstract danger. I was really upset at not being able to concentrate, falling asleep over my college prep work ... but what was that, compared to being the only doctor aboard, waiting for someone to need an appendix out, or even a brain tumor? Or just pulling a tooth or looking up someone's ass with an ass-o-scope. He only had to take care of thirty-two of us, but anything could happen, and he was responsible for our life or death.

He probably had a suitcase full of pills for depression, and said he'd give me some if I needed them, but first he wanted me to keep a personal record for a week—how many hours asleep and awake; when I lost my temper or felt like crying. After a week, we would talk about it.

He said he was no psychologist, but that seemed to work, maybe because I wanted to impress him, or reassure him. After a week I was sleeping eight hours and pretty much awake the rest of the time. And I was undramatically less sure that space wanted to kill us all, especially me.

All of us between ten and twenty had "jobs," which is to say chores. Mine was easy, cleaning the galley after meals, a lot less mess than the kitchen at home, with nothing actually cooked. Card had to clean the shower, which I suppose enriched his fantasy life.

Everybody spent thirty minutes a day learning about Mars. That was mostly boring reinforcement of stuff we already knew, or should have known. I tolerated the half-hour until regular classes started, and really just sort of thought about other things while it droned on. Nobody was testing me on Mars facts, but I had exams in history and math and philosophy.

Of course, Mars would test me on Mars. I knew that and didn't think about it.

School was absorbing but tiring. Part of it was that every professor was a kind of a star—I suppose every subject, every department, picked its most dramatic teacher for the VR classes, but the net result was almost like being yelled at—"This led to the Hundred Years War—how long do you think that war LASTED?" "Look where potassium and sodium are on the Periodic Table—what does THAT suggest to you?" Socrates and Plato getting it on, more than I wanted to know about student-teacher relationships. And could I have just one subject that's not supposed to be the most important thing in the world? I should've taken plumbing.

Actually, the stories and plays in the literature course all promise to be interesting, no surprise, since that has always been the most enjoyable part of school. It doesn't have any exams, either, just essays, which suits me.

I didn't want to major in lit, though. I couldn't see myself as a teacher, and I don't think anybody else gets paid to read the stuff for a living. I didn't have to choose a major for a couple of years. Maybe I could become the first Martian veterinarian. Wait for some animals to show up.

Something I would never have predicted was that the virtual-reality classrooms smelled more real than our real spaceship. If someone was chewing gum or eating peanuts near where you were "sitting," it was really intense. Our air on board the John Carter was thin and it circulated well. When you peeled the plastic off a meal, you could smell it for a few seconds, but then it was pretty much gone, and a lot of the flavor as well.

Roberta and Yuri were also starting college, though in Yuri's case it was more like a practical conservatory. Most of his courses were music. (I wondered how the time lag was going to affect that. When I suffered through piano lessons in fifth and sixth grade, I cringed in anticipation of the whack-whack-whack Ms. Varleman would make with her stick on the side of the piano whenever I lagged behind. I might have liked learning piano if the teacher was twenty-five minutes away!)

My life settled into a fairly busy routine. Classes and homework and chores and exercise periods. A blood test said I was losing calcium and so my forty-five-minute exercise requirement went up to ninety minutes; two hours if I could schedule it. Hard to beat the combination—what else is both tiring and boring for two hours?

Actually, I could read or do limited VR while I was biking or rowing. It's kind of fun to row down the streets of New York or Paris. You do get run over a lot, but you get used to it.

* * * *

Routine or no routine, the possibility of disaster is always in the back of your mind. But you always think in terms of something dramatic, like an explosion onboard or a huge meteoroid collision. When it did happen, nobody knew but the pilot.

We had sprung a leak. On the cube, that would be air shrieking out, or at least whistling or hissing. Which would be kind of nice, because then you could find it and put a piece of duct tape over it. Ours was seeping out silently, and we didn't have too long to find the problem.

Paul put a message up on every screen, a strobing red exclamation point followed by WE ARE LOSING AIR! That got almost everybody's attention.

We were losing about a half of one percent a day. We were still four months away from Mars, so the oxygen would be getting pretty thin if we didn't fix it.

It was easy enough to find the general area of the leak. Every part of the ship could be closed off in case of emergency, so Paul just had us close up each section of the ship, one at a time, for about two hours. That was long enough to tell whether the pressure was still dropping.

First we closed off Pod A, where I lived, and I was relieved to find it wasn't there. It wasn't in Pod B, either, nor the solar storm radiation shelter. It wasn't the zero-gee center room, which basically left the lander. That was bad news. As well as being the vehicle that would get us to the Martian surface, that was where all the pilot's instrumentation and controls were. We couldn't very well just close it off for the next three months and then refill it with air for the trip down.

In fact, though, we wound up doing a version of that. First Paul tried to find the leak with a "punk"—not like granddad's ancient music, but a stick of something that smoldered. The smoke should have led us to the leak. It didn't, though, which meant we didn't have a simple thing like a meteor ("micrometeoroid," technically) hole. A seam or something was leaking, maybe the port that the pilot looked through, or the airlock to the outside.

Of course there was also an inside airlock, between the lander and the rest of the ship, and that gave us the solution. Paul didn't have to live in the lander; he just checked things every now and then. In fact, he could monitor all the instruments with a laptop thing, from anywhere.

So although it made him nervous—not being able to run things from the pilot's chair—we closed off the lander and just let it leak. If Paul had to go in there every day or two, he could put on a spacesuit and go through the airlock.

It made some of us nervous, too, like being cargo in a ship without a rudder. Okay, that was irrational. But we'd already had one emergency. What if the next one called for immediate action, but Paul had to suit up, waiting for the airlock to cycle through? That took about two minutes.

In two minutes we covered almost a thousand miles. A lot could happen. And there weren't any spacesuits for the rest of us.

13

Virtual Friends and Foes

I was not the most popular girl in my classes—I wasn't in class at all, of course, except as a face in a cube. As the time delay grew longer, it became impossible for me to respond in real time to what was going on. So if I had questions to ask, I had to time it so I was asking them at the beginning of class the next day.

That's a prescription for making yourself a tiresome know-it-all bitch. I had all day to think about the questions and look stuff up. So I was always thoughtful and relevant and a tiresome know-it-all bitch. Of course it didn't help at all that I was younger than most and a brave pioneer headed for another planet. The novelty of that wore off real fast.

Card wasn't having any such problems. But he already knew most of his classmates, some of them since grade school, and was more social anyhow. I've usually been the youngest in class, and the brain.

I'm also a little behind my classmates socially, or a lot behind. I had male friends but didn't date much. Still a virgin, technically, and when I'm around couples who obviously aren't, I feel like I'm wearing a sign proclaiming that fact.

That raised an interesting possibility. I never could see myself still a virgin five years from now. I might wind up being the first girl to lose her virginity on Mars—or on any other planet at all. Maybe some day they'd put up a plaque: "In this storage room on such-and-such a date..."

But with whom? I couldn't imagine Yuri tearing himself away from the keyboard long enough to get involved. Oscar and Murray seemed like such kids, though once they're college age that may be different.

There would be plenty of older men on Mars, who I'm sure would be glad to overlook my personality defects and lack of prominent secondary sexual characteristics. But thinking of an older man that way made me cringe.

Well, the next two ships would also be made up of families. Maybe I'd meet some nice Aussie or a guy from Japan or China. We could settle down on Mars and raise a bunch of weird children who ate calcium like candy and grew to be eight feet tall. Well, maybe not for a few generations.

Nobody talked about it much, but the idea of putting a breeding population of young men and women on Mars gave this project some of its urgency. After Calcutta and Gehenna, any nightmare was possible.

The mind veers away from it, but how much more sophisticated would the warriors have to be, to make the whole world into Gehenna? How much crazier would they have to be to want it?

We got into that once on the climber, Dad doubting that it would be physically possible, at least for a long time, and also doubting that the most fanatical terrorist would be that crazy. To hate not just his enemies, but all of humanity, that much. Mother nodded, but she had her bland patient look: I could argue, but won't. Card was kind of bored, familiar as he was with playing doomsday scenarios. Sometimes I think that nothing is really real to him, so why should doomsday be any different?

Time started passing really fast once we were settled into school, and most of our parents into their various research projects. It was more comfortable than you would expect, with all of us crammed into a space the size of a poverty-level tenement—but the parents and kids seemed to be giving each other more respect, more space.

Even the little kids calmed down. Mary Jefferson taught all four grades at once, in a partitioned-off part of B galley, and when they weren't in school or exercising, they played down in the zero-gee room, pretty far from anyone's work area, and usually respected the no-screaming rule.

(The idea of "Spaceship Earth" is such an old cliché that Granddad makes a face at it. But being constantly aware that we were isolated, surrounded by space, did seem to make us more considerate of one another. So if Earth is just a bigger ship, why couldn't they learn to be as virtuous as we are? Maybe they don't choose their crew carefully enough.)

Roberta was having more trouble than I was, making the transition from high school to college. For one thing, she's very social, and used to studying together with other girls and boys. That wasn't really possible here, with us all going to different schools. Besides, she'd tested into advanced math and chemistry, while I was starting with lowly calculus and general physical science. We both had English lit and philosophy, but of course with different textbooks.

Mother sometimes worried about my tendency to be a loner, but it turns out to be an advantage, studying when your classmates are millions of miles away.

I did coordinate my study hours with Roberta, so we were both doing lit and philosophy homework at the same time, and she helped me over some humps in the math course. We also had exercise and meal hours together most of the time, along with Elspeth.

It was not much like anybody's picture of college life. No wicked fraternity parties, no experimenting with drugs and sex and finding out how much beer you can hold before overflowing. Maybe this whole Mars thing was a ruse my parents made up to keep me off campus. My education was going to be so incomplete!

That was actually a part of college I hadn't been looking forward to. Not "growing up too fast," as Mother repeatedly said, but looking foolish because I didn't know how to act when confronted with temptation. When do you politely decline and when should you be indignant?

And when should you say yes?

14

Midway

At the midpoint of our voyage, Mars was a bright yellow beacon in front of us, Earth a bright blue star behind. It was an occasion to party, and the Mars Corporation had actually allotted a few kilograms’ mass for a large plastic bottle of Remy Martin cognac for that purpose.

Since several of the adults didn't drink, it proved enough to get the rest of them about as intoxicated as they wanted to be, or perhaps a little more. Like me.

We joked about the drinking age between planets and my parents shrugged. Since there was no other alcohol aboard ship, I wasn't likely to become a drunkard. Which doesn't mean I couldn't get into trouble.

Paul had only one drink, mixed with water—the curse of being captain, he said wryly—but I had three before my parents went to bed, and maybe two afterward. It lowered my inhibitions, but I suppose I wanted them lowered.

The drinks were served in the galley, where there was gravity to keep the booze in the glasses, but some of us moved into the zero-gee area to dance. Pretty strange, dancing without a floor. It was all kind of free-style and rambunctious. We took turns asking the ship for music. A lot of it was old, jazz and ska and waterbug, or ancient like waltzes and rock, but there was plenty of city and sag.

Paul and I danced for a while, usually with each other, and I guess I started feeling glamorous, or at least sexy, dominating the captain's attentions. Not that there was much unmarried competition.

The zero-gee room goes to night-light from midnight till six, conserving power and giving people a reasonably private, or at least anonymous, place to have sex—or romance, but I don't think much of that was going on. There was no real privacy in the sleeping quarters, just a thin partition, which didn't prevent some people from embarrassing the rest of us. But most couples waited and met at one dark end or the other of the zero-gee room.

At midnight the only others in the zero-gee room were the Manchesters, who left us alone after a bit of obvious yawning and stretching.

Afterward, we agreed that we both had been sort of time bombs ticking, waiting for the midnight hour. If I hadn't wanted to be "seduced," I could have left while the lights were still on. But there was something desperate going on inside me, that wasn't just sexual desire or curiosity.

Our whispered conversation had gotten around to virginity, and my sort of in-between status, which I'd never told anyone about. But the booze loosened my tongue. When I was thirteen I was fooling around with a boy who had "borrowed" his sister's vibrator, and in the course of investigating how to use it, he was a little clumsy and popped me. It wasn't very painful, but it was the end of that relationship, right at the playing-doctor stage.

He didn't go to my school, so I didn't know whether any of the other boys knew about it, but I imagined they could all tell at a glance that I wasn't a virgin anymore. After about a year or so I realized that I still actually was.

I was unpopular and unattractive, or at least felt like it. Skipped a grade but then got it back after my parents took me out of school for a year to go overseas. They worked in London and Madrid and I went back and forth, learning about enough Spanish to order a Coke in a restaurant.

From not speaking Spanish it only took a few minutes for the conversation to get about to the difficulties of having sex in space, with lack of privacy being only one of several problems, with the conservation of momentum and angular momentum high on the list. Difficult to describe, so I asked him to demonstrate, with our clothes on, of course.

That stage didn't last too long. We explored another problem, that of getting at least partially undressed while both of you had to hold on to a handle or go spinning apart.

We did managed to get our bottoms mostly removed. He looked kind of large, if smaller than my friend's sister's vibrator, but he was slow and gentle. As soon as he got it all the way in, he ejaculated, but we stayed together and he recovered in a few minutes and did it again.

I'd been prepared for an ordeal, but in fact it was all pretty exciting and fun. I kept losing my grip and he'd swim after me, while I groped for one of the handles. We wound up floating in midair, though, holding each other's shoulders, rotating slowly, and then not slowly.

I didn't really have an orgasm until later, in the shower, but it was still overwhelming. Floating in space with Paul inside me, and me inside his arms. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, and I woke up with the feeling still fresh. His face in the twilight, eyes closed, concentrating, and then losing control. And me not a virgin anymore, not even technically.

* * * *

It was several days before we could find the privacy to talk about it. We both were in the galley for the last breakfast shift, and I killed some time cleaning up the microwave and prep area until the last people left.

He said it quickly, almost sotto voce: "Carmen, I'm sorry I took advantage of you."

"You didn't. I loved it."

"But you were drinking, and I really wasn't."

"Just to get up the courage." Not strictly true; I'm sure I would have had a couple no matter who was at the party. "Don't feel guilty." He was still sitting down; I leaned over and hugged him from behind. "Really, don't. You made me so happy."

I could tell he was trying not to squirm. "Made me happy too," he said in an unhappy voice.

I sat down across from him. "What? What is it? Age difference?"

"No. That's part of it, but no." He leaned back. "It's my being pilot, which is to say captain." He visibly struggled, trying to find words. "I want to show you how I feel, but I can't. I can't court you; I can't treat you differently from anybody else."

"Of course not. I wouldn't expect—"

"But I want to! That night meant as much to me, maybe more, and I want to treat you like a lover. I can't even wink at you, not really. Let alone hold your hand, or..."

Or do it again, I realized. Even if we manufactured an opportunity. "Do you really think it's a secret? The Manchesters pretty obviously left to give us some privacy."

"You haven't told anybody?"

"No." Not in so many words. But Elspeth and Kaimei gave me big grins that were pretty clear.

"That's important. The ship runs on rumor as much as hydrogen. People will whisper; they'll know, but as long as you and I keep it private, my ... my authority isn't compromised."

His authority. And a devilish part of me wanted to tell everybody. I'm a real woman—I'm fucking the captain. "I can see that."

Somebody was coming down the ladder. He stood up.

It was my mother, coffee cup in hand.

"Oh ... hello, Paul." Amazing how much she could communicate with two words.

"Morning, Laura. See you later, Carmen." He went up the ladder as soon as she let go.

She watched his retreating ass with a little smile. Then she got a spoonful of coffee and poured hot water on it. "I was younger than you," she said. "Seventeen, and no, it wasn't your father."

"You didn't meet until graduate school," I said inanely.

"He's eleven years older?"

"More like ten. He was born in February."

She put some sugar in the coffee, not normal for her. "Don't get too attached to him. He has a life on Mars, and he'll have to stay there."

"I might want to stay there, too." Even as I said the words, I couldn't believe they'd come out of my mouth.

"We all have the option, of course." She touched my shoulder. "He's a nice man. Don't forget there are a billion of them back on Earth."

She capped the coffee and swung up the ladder, back to her research station, without saying any motherly things like don't let him hurt you or don't let your father know, proving life is not a soap.

Of course Dad would know, along with everybody else. If the pilot had fucked any other innocent young thing, I suppose I would know by breakfast.

I didn't feel particularly young or innocent. If everyone knows, why not keep doing it? It wasn't as if I could get pregnant; with Delaze, I wouldn't start ovulating until after we'd landed on Mars, as he well knew. Even mighty space pilot sperm wouldn't live that long.

* * * *

After we reached the halfway mark, all of us young ones met our volunteer "Mars mentors," people who weren't teachers or parents, but wanted to help us with our transition to their world.

My guy was "Oz," Dr. Oswald Penninger, a life scientist like Mother. He had a big smile and a salt-and-pepper beard.

Conversation was awkward, with an eight-minute delay between "How are you?" and "Fine," but we got used to it. It was kind of like really slow instant messaging. You ask a question and then do something else for a while, and he answers and then does something else for a while. We didn't normally use visual, unless there was something to show.

He was like everybody's favorite uncle, acknowledging the difference in our ages but then treating me like an equal who didn't know quite as much. I grew to like him better than most of the people on board, which I suppose was predictable. He was sixty-three, an African-American from Georgia, exobiologist and artist. They didn't have paper for drawing, of course, but he did beautifully intricate work onscreen that galleries in Atlanta and Oslo printed and sold.

Should an artist's pictures match his personality? Oz was a jolly plump man, given to sly wordplay and funny stories. But his art was dark and disturbing. He'd studied art in Norway for two years, and said his stuff was positively cheerful compared to the other people's in his studio. I'd have to see that to believe it.

He zapped me the software that he uses for drawing, but I've never had much talent in that direction. He said he'll show me some tricks when we meet in person. Meanwhile, I've downloaded a beginner's text on cartooning, and will try to learn enough to surprise him.

Funny to have a friend you've never touched or actually seen. I wonder whether we'll like each other in person.

15

Sexual Disorder

About a week went by without Paul suggesting another tryst, if that's the right word. He seemed to be going out of his way to treat me like just another passenger, which was of course according to plan. But I was a little anxious because he was playing the part too well.

He wasn't avoiding me, but nobody on the ship was harder to get alone. I kept taking the last breakfast shift, and finally managed to corner him.

As I approached, he got a kind of resigned look, but reached out and took my hand. "I'm afraid I'm in trouble. With Mars."

"Because of me?"

He shrugged. "You're not in trouble. But somebody heard, and is whizzed at me for ‘seducing one of the Earth children.’"

"I'm not a child! I'm nineteen, going on thirty."

"As I pointed out. They still say it was immature and unprofessional of me. Maybe they're right."

"It's not fair. We didn't really do anything wrong."

"Somebody thinks otherwise. Somebody here, who told somebody there."

"Who? Someone who has it in for you, or me?"

"I'm pretty sure who it is on Mars, but I don't know about here. It didn't have to start out malicious; just a juicy scrap of gossip." He took a sip of coffee that was probably cold. "I hope your parents don't find out this way."

"Oh, they know. At least Mother does, and she's okay with it."

He nodded slowly. "That's good. But I guess we'd better put it on ice for awhile."

I tried to keep anger out of my voice. "I don't see why. What's done is done."

"The sexual part, yes. But now it would be insubordination as well. Which might be more serious. Would be."

"For your career."

"Not exactly. Nobody can fire me. But the colony's a small town, and I have to live there the rest of my life."

"If you..." I almost said something I would regret. "If you say so. But once we're on Mars?"

"Things will be different. People will get to know you and accept you as an adult."

"Eventually. Guess I'll be one of the kids from Earth for awhile."

"Not for long, I hope." He brightened. "Privacy isn't such an issue there, either, finding a time and place. My roommate wouldn't mind getting lost for a couple of hours, and you'll pick one you can trust."

Kaimei or Elspeth, for sure. "Unless they stick me with Card."

"They wouldn't be that cruel." He stood and hugged me and gave me a long kiss. "I'd better move along. You'll be okay?"

"Sure. I'm sorry. But I can wait." I didn't start crying until he was gone.

16

A New World

Someday, I thought, maybe before I'm dead, Mars will have its own space elevator, but until then people have to get down there the old-fashioned way, in space-shuttle mode. It's like the difference between taking an elevator from the top floor of a building and jumping off with an umbrella and a prayer. Fast and terrifying.

We'd lived with the lander as part of our home for weeks and then as a mysterious kind of threatening presence, airless and waiting. Most of us weren't eager to go into it.

Before we'd made our second orbit of Mars, Paul opened the inner door, prepared to crack the airlock, and said, "Let's go."

We'd been warned, so we were bundled up against the sudden temperature drop when the airlock opened, and were not surprised that our ears popped painfully. It warmed up for an hour, and then we had to take our little metal suitcases and float through the airlock to go strap into our assigned seats, and try not to shit while we dropped like a rock to our doom.

From my studies I knew that the lander loses velocity by essentially trading speed for heat—hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at a drastic angle so the ship heats up to cherry red. What the diagrams in the physical science book don't show is the tooth-rattling vibration, the bucking and gut-wrenching wobble. If I'm never that scared again in my life I'll be really happy.

All of the violence stopped abruptly when the lander decided to become a glider, I guess a few hundred miles from the landing strip. I wished we had windows like a regular airplane, but then realized that might be asking for a heart attack. It was scary enough just to squint at Paul's two-foot-wide screen as the ground rose up to meet us, too steep and fast to believe.

We landed on skis, grating and rumbling along the rocky ground. They'd moved all the big rocks out of our way, but we felt every one of the small ones. Paul had warned us to keep our tongues away from our teeth, which was a good thing. It could be awkward, starting out life on a new planet unable to speak because you've bitten off your tongue.

We hadn't put on the Mars suits for the flight down; they were too bulky to fit in the close-ranked seats—and I guess there wasn't any disaster scenario where we would still be alive and need them. So the first order of the day was to get dressed for our new planet.

We'd tested them several times, but Paul wanted to be super-cautious the first time they were actually exposed to the Martian near-vacuum. The airlock would only hold two people at once, so we went out one at a time, with Paul observing us, ready to toss us back inside if trouble developed.

We unpacked the suits from storage under the deck and sorted them out. One for each person and two blobby general purpose ones.

We were to leave in reverse alphabetical order, which was no fun, since it made our family dead last. The lander had never felt particularly claustrophobic before, but now it was like a tiny tin can, the sardines slowly exiting one by one.

At least we could see out, via the pilot's screen. He'd set the camera on the base, where all seventy-five people had gathered to watch us land, or crash. That led to some morbid speculation on Card's part. What if we'd crash-landed into them? I guess we'd be just as likely to crash into the base behind them. I'd rather be standing outside with a spacesuit on, too.

We'd seen pictures of the base a million times, not to mention endless diagrams and descriptions of how everything worked, but it was kind of exciting to see it in real time, to actually be here. The farm part looked bigger than I'd pictured it, I guess because the people standing around gave it scale. Of course the people lived underneath, because of radiation.

It was interesting to have actual gravity. I said it felt different and Mom agreed, with a scientific explanation. Residual centripetal blah blah blah. I'll just call it real gravity, as opposed to the manufactured kind. Organic gravity.

A lot of people undressed on the spot and got into their Mars suits. I didn't see any point in standing around for an hour in the thing. I'm also a little shy, in a selective way. Paul had touched me all over, but he'd never seen me without a top. I waited until he was on the other side of the airlock before I revealed my unvoluptuous figure and barely necessary bra. Which I'd have to take off anyhow, for the skinsuit part of the Mars suit.

That part was liked a lightweight body stocking. It fastened up the front with a gecko strip, and then you pushed a button on your wrist and something electrical happened and it clasped your body like a big rubber glove. It could be sexy looking, if your body was.

The outer part of the Mars suit was more like lightweight armor, kind of loose and clanky when you put it on, but it also did an electrical thing when you zipped up, and fit more closely. Then clumsy boots and gloves and a helmet, all airtight. The joints would sigh when you moved your arms or legs or bent at the waist.

Card's suit had a place for an extension at the waist, since he could grow as much as a foot taller while we were here. Mine didn't have any such refinement, though there was room to put on a little weight if I loved Mars cooking.

Since we did follow strict anti-alphabetical order, Card got the distinction of being the last one out, and I was next to last. I got in the airlock with Paul, and he checked my oxygen tanks and the seals on my helmet, gloves, and boots. Then he pumped most of the air out, watching the clock, and asked me to count even numbers backward from thirty. (I asked him whether he had an obsession with backward lists.) He smiled at me through the helmet and kept his hand on my shoulder as the rest of the air pumped out and the door silently swung open.

The sky was brighter than I'd expected, and the ground darker. "Welcome to Mars," Paul said on the suit radio, sounding clear but far away.

We walked down a metal ramp to the sandy, rock-strewn ground. I stepped onto another planet.

How many people had ever done that?

Everything was suddenly different. This was the most real thing I'd ever done.

They could talk until they were blue in the face about how special this was, brave new frontier, leaving the cradle of Earth, whatever, and it's finally just words. When I felt the crunch of Martian soil under my boot it was suddenly all very plain and wonderful. I remembered an old cube—a movie—of one of the first guys on the Moon, jumping around like a little kid, and I jumped myself, and again, way high.

"Careful!" came Paul's voice over the radio. "Get used to it first."

"Okay, okay." While I walked, feather light, toward the other airlock, I tried to figure out how many people had actually done it, set foot on another world. A little more than a hundred, in all of history. And me one of them, now.

There were six of them waiting at the airlock door; everyone else had gone inside. I looked around at the rusty desert and stifled the urge to run off and explore—I mean, for more than three months we hadn't been able to go more than a few dozen feet in any direction, and here was a whole new world. But there would be time. Soon!

Mother was blinking away tears, unable to touch her face behind the helmet, crying with happiness. The dream of her lifetime. I hugged her, which felt strange, both of us swaddled in insulation. Our helmets clicked together and for a moment I heard her muffled laugh.

While Paul went back to get Card, I just looked around. I'd spent hours there in virtual, of course, but that was fake. This was hard-edged and strange, even fearsome in a way. A desert with rocks. Yellow sky of air so thin it would kill you in a breath.

When Card got to the ground, he jumped higher than I had. Paul grabbed him by the arm and walked him over.

The airlock held four people. Paul and the two strangers gestured for us to go in when the door opened. It closed automatically behind us and a red light throbbed for about a minute. I could hear the muffled clicking of a pump. Then a green light and the inside door sighed open. "Home again," Paul said.

17

The Land of Oz

We stepped into the greenhouse, a dense couple of acres of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. The air was humid and smelled of dirt and blossoms. A woman in shorts and a T-shirt motioned for us to take off our helmets.

She introduced herself as Emily. "I keep track of the airlock and suits," she said. "Follow me and we'll get you square."

Feeling overdressed, we clanked down a metal spiral stair to a room full of shelves and boxes, the walls unpainted rock. One block of metal shelves was obviously for our crew, names written on bright new tape under shelves that held folded Mars suits and the titanium suitcases.

"Just come on through to the mess hall after you're dressed," she said. "Place isn't big enough to get lost. Not yet." They planned to more than double the underground living area while we were here.

I helped Mother out of her suit and she helped me. I needed a shower and some clean clothes. My jumpsuit was wrinkled and damp with old sweat, fear sweat from the landing. I didn't smell like a petunia myself. But we were all in the same boat.

Paul and the two other men in Mars suits were rattling down the stairs as we headed for the mess hall. The top half of the corridor was smooth plastic that radiated uniform dim light, like the tubes that had linked the Space Elevator to the Hilton and the John Carter. The bottom half was numbered storage drawers.

I knew what to expect of the mess hall and the other rooms; the colony was a series of inflated half-cylinders inside a large irregular tunnel, a natural pipe through an ancient lava flow. Someday the whole thing would be closed off and filled with air like the part we'd just left, but for the time being everyone lived and worked in the reinforced balloons.

We walked through a medical facility, bigger than anything we'd seen since the Hilton. No people, just a kind of medicated smell. Forty or fifty feet wide, it all seemed pretty huge after living in a spaceship. I don't suppose it would be that imposing if you went there directly from a town or a city on Earth.

The murmur of voices was pretty loud before we got to the mess hall. It sounded like a cocktail party, though the only thing to drink was water, and you don't dare spill a drop.

The mess hall was big enough for about two dozen people to eat at once, and now there were a hundred or so, sitting on the tables as well as the chairs, milling around saying hello. We twenty-three were the first new faces they'd seen in a year and a half—about one Martian year, one "are," pronounced air-ee. I'd better start thinking that way.

The room had two large false windows, like the ones on the ship, looking out onto the desert. I assumed they were real-time. Nothing was moving, but then all the life on the planet was presumably right here.

You could see our lander sitting at the end of a mile-long plowed groove. I wondered whether Paul had cut it too close, stopping a couple of hundred feet away. He'd said the landing was mostly automatic, but I didn't see him let go of the joystick.

I saw Oz immediately, and threaded my way over to him. We shook hands and then hugged. He was a little bit shorter than me, which was a surprise. He held me by both shoulders and looked at me with a bright smile, and then looked around the room. "It's pretty strange, isn't it? All these people."

Seventy-five new faces after seeing the same three dozen for months. "They look like a bunch of Martians."

He laughed. "Was the landing rough?"

"Pretty awful. But Paul seemed in control."

"He was my pilot, too. Good old ‘Crash’ Collins."

"'Crash'?"

"Ask him about it someday."

An Asian woman a little taller than Oz came over, and he put his arm around her waist. "Josie, this is Carmen."

We shook hands. "I've seen your picture," she said. Josie Tang, Oz's lover. "Welcome to our humble planet."

I tapped my foot on the metal plate. "Nice to have real gravity."

"The same no matter where you go," Oz said. "I'll give you a tour after the formalities."

When Paul and the other two came into the room, an older woman started tapping on a glass with a spoon. Like many of them, men and women, she was wearing a belted robe made of some filmy material. She was pale and bony.

"Welcome to Mars. Of course I've spoken with most of you. I'm Dargo Solingen, current general administrator.

"The first couple of sols"—Martian days—"you are here, just settle in and get used to your new home. Explore and ask questions. We've assigned temporary living and working spaces to everyone, a compromise between the wish list you sent a couple of weeks ago and ... reality." She shrugged. "It will be a little tight until the new modules are in place. We will start on that as soon as the ship is unloaded."

She almost smiled, though it looked like she didn't have much practice with it. "It is strange to see children. This will be an interesting social experiment."

"One you don't quite approve of?" Dr. Jefferson asked.

"You probably know that I don't. But I was not consulted."

"Dr. Solingen," a woman behind her said in a tone of warning.

"I guess none of you were," he said. "It was an Earth decision, the Corporation."

"That's right," Solingen said. "This is an outpost, not a colony. They don't have families on Moonbase or even Antarctica."

Oz cleared his throat. "We were polled. Most of us were very much in favor." And most of them did call it "the colony," rather than Mars Base One.

The woman who had cautioned Solingen continued. "A hundred percent of the permanent party. Those of us who are not returning to Earth." She was either pregnant or the only fat person in the room. Looking more carefully, I saw one other woman who appeared to be pregnant.

You'd think that would have been on the news. Maybe it was, and I missed it, not likely. Mother and I exchanged significant glances. Something was going on.

(It turned out to be nothing more mysterious than a desire for privacy on the women's part, and everybody's desire to keep Earth out of their hair. When the first child was born, the Earth press would be all over them. Until then, there was no need for anyone to know the blessed event was nigh. So they asked that we not mention the pregnancies when writing or talking to home.)

Solingen went on to talk about work and living schedules. For those of us in school, study schedules would continue as on the John Carter, and we'd be assigned light duties "appropriate to our abilities." Probably fetch-and-carry or galley slave, as we called kitchen work on ship.

Then she introduced each new arrival, stating where they were from, what their specialties were, and lists of honors and awards, all from memory. It was an impressive performance. She even knew about us youngsters—Mike Baker's national (Canadian) spelling bee, Yuri's solo with the St. Petersburg orchestra, and my swimming medal, an extremely useful skill on this planet.

The way she looked at me left no doubt who it was who forbade Paul from being with me. I would try to stay out of her way.

People got together with friends or coworkers—almost everybody had been working along with one of the Martian teams en route—and moved toward the workstations and labs to talk. Oz and Josie took me and Card for a guided tour.

We'd already walked through the "hospital," an aid station about three meters wide by ten long. It was connected to the changing room by an automated airlock; if there was an accident with the main airlock, it would seal off the whole colony.

That was the standard size for most of the buildings, three by ten meters, but most of them were divided into smaller sections. The mess hall where we all met was about two thirds that size, two-hundred square meters for a hundred not-too-crowded people, the rest of the space a very compressed kitchen and pantry.

About half of the overall floor space was "cabins," more like walk-in closets, where people slept. Most of them were two meters long by a meter wide, three meters high, with upper and lower bunks for two people who better be compatible. The bunks folded up to the wall, and desks for working or reading folded down. Four of the cabins were a half meter longer, for seven-footers.

The walls were colorful, in sometimes odd combinations. Each unit, twelve to thirty-two people, voted on a weekly color scheme. The walls glowed a comforting warm beige or cool blue most places, but there were bright yellows and moody purples and a Halloween orange.

We walked down the main corridor, about a meter wide, past six rows of cabins. The last bunch of sixteen had temporary partitions and improvised bunks, where most of us newcomer Earthlings will sleep. In normal times, that would be the recreation area, so people had real motivation to set up the new living areas we'd brought.

Then there were three large work areas, which besides labs and computer stations contained separate rooms for administration, power regulation, and environmental control—water, air, and heat. Finally, there was an airlock leading to the biosciences laboratory, where there were strict controls. We tried to be careful not to contaminate the Martian environment, and conversely, if there were dormant alien microorganisms in the rock and soil specimens, we didn't want to let even one of them into our air and water. The consensus was that it was unlikely Martian microbes could affect us, but who wants to put it to the test? The whole area was kept at a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the colony, discouraging leaks.

Here I was on a brand new world, making history, and my phone beeped to remind me that I had a history paper due tomorrow. I thumbed that it would be a day late, 10 percent grade reduction.

Oz invited Card and me back to the cabin he shared with Josie. The four of us could sit comfortably on the lower bunk. He showed me how the desk worked, folding down with retractable arms, revealing a small high-definition screen. The work surface was flat but had a virtual keyboard. The arms were a clever parallelogram construction that let you position the desk at various heights.

The walls were covered with pictures, only two his own work. From art history class I recognized Rembrandt, Pollack, and Wyeth paintings; the others were by Scandinavian artists I'd never heard of.

A public address system called all "new colonists" to dinner. It was fantastic, after months of ship rations. Salad with fresh greens and tomatoes, hot cornbread, fried tilapia.

After the meal, we were invited to come up and look at the farm. Those tilapia weren't the happiest-looking fish I'd ever seen, crowded into a small tank of murky water with agricultural waste (their food) floating on top.

Most of the crops had supplemental lights over their beds, Martian sunlight being pretty thin. It was easy to recognize stands of corn and apple trees, tomato plants, and beds of lettuce and cabbage. I didn't know what rice looked like, but it was probably different on Earth anyhow; not enough water here for paddies. Kaimei laughed when she saw it.

We went back down to get our assigned sleeping areas straight and get on the shower roster. There were two showers, and you could sign up for a twenty-minute interval for the female one. (The men only had fifteen minutes; there were more of them.) There was a complicated list of instructions in the small dressing room.

We were allowed 160 minutes per month, two showers a week. The twenty shower minutes you had included ten for undressing and dressing. The ten minutes you were actually in the shower included only five minutes of actual running water: get wet, then soap and shampoo, and then try to rinse off.

All of us newbies were penciled in for showers if we wanted them—if! I had one scheduled for 1720, and waited outside the door for ten minutes. Mrs. Washington came out, radiantly clean, and I slipped in to undress and wait for Kaimei to finish, behind the shower curtain. The dressing room was the same size as the shower, about a meter square, and unsurprisingly smelled like a girls’ locker room on Earth.

I chatted with Kaimei through the curtain when her water stopped and she switched to the dryer. No towels, just a hot-air machine. She came out, looking all new and shiny, and I moved my sweaty corpus in to be sluiced.

It was an odd sensation. The water that sprayed from the handheld nozzle was warm enough, but the rest of your body gets really cold, the water on your skin evaporating fast in the thin air.

The amber liquid that served as both soap and shampoo was watery and weak, probably formulated more for its recycling efficiency than its cleaning power. But I did get pretty clean, much cleaner than I'd ever felt on the ship. I used the last thirty seconds of rinse time letting the warm water roll down my tired back.

There was a fixed dryer about four feet off the ground, somewhat amiable, to get your back and butt dry, and a handheld thing like a powerful hair dryer for the rest. The heat was welcome, and I felt pretty wonderful when I pulled the curtain.

Dargo Solingen stood there naked, bony and parchment pale. She marched by me without a word. I managed "Hello?"

I dressed quickly and looked at the roster. There had been someone else's name after mine, someone unfamiliar, but now it was Dargo Solingen. I supposed she could butt in line any time she wanted, pulling rank. But it was an odd coincidence. Did she want to see the sexy body that seduced her pilot? As if you would have to be a great beauty to appeal to a guy who's been celibate for three months. I think "nominally female" would fill the bill.

18

Marswalk

I shared a small temporary space with Elspeth and Kaimei—an air mattress on the floor and a bunk bed. We agreed to rotate, so everyone would have a bed two thirds of the time.

No romantic trysts for a while. I could ask the girls to look the other way, but Paul might feel inhibited.

Hanging sheets for walls and only one desk, with a small screen and a clunky keyboard and an old VR helmet with a big dent on the side. The timing for that worked out okay, since Elspeth had classes seven hours before Eastern Time, and Kaimei three hours later. We drew up a chart and taped it over the desk. The only conflict was my physical science class versus Kaimei's History of Tao and Buddhism. Mine was mostly equations on the board, so I used the screen and let her have the helmet.

Our lives were pretty regimented the first couple of weeks, because we had to coordinate classes with the work roster here, and leave a little time for eating and sleeping.

Everybody was impatient to get the first new module set up, but it wasn't just a matter of unloading and inflating it. First there was a light exoskeleton of spindly metal rods that became rigid when they were all pulled together. Then floorboards to bear the weight of the things and people inside. Then the connection to the existing base, through an improvised airlock until they were sure the module wouldn't leak.

I enjoyed working on that, at first outdoors, unloading the ship and sorting and preassembling some parts; then later, down in the cave, attaching the new to the old. I got used to working in the Mars suit and using the "dog," a wheeled machine about the size of a large dog. It carried backup oxygen and power.

About half the time, though, my work roster put me inside, helping the younger ones do their lessons and avoid boredom. "Mentoring," they called it, to make it sound more important than babysitting.

I hardly ever saw Paul. It's as if whoever was in charge of the work details—guess who—took a special effort to keep us apart. One day, though, while I was just getting off work detail, he found me and asked whether I'd like to go exploring with him. What, skip math? I got fresh oxygen and helped him check out one of the dogs, and we went for a walk.

The surface of Mars might look pretty boring to an outsider, but it's not at all. It must be the same if you live in a desert on Earth: you pretty much have the space around your home memorized, every little mound and rock—and when you venture out it's, "Wow! A different rock!"

He took me off to the left of Telegraph Hill, walking at a pretty good pace. The base was below the horizon in less than ten minutes. We were still in radio contact as long as we could see the antenna on top of the hill, and if we wanted to go farther, the dog had a collapsible booster antenna that went up ten meters, which we could leave behind as a relay.

We didn't need it for that, but Paul clicked it up into place when we came to the edge of a somewhat deep crater he wanted to climb into.

"Be really careful," he said. "We have to leave the dog behind. If we both were to fall and be injured, we'd be in deep shit."

I followed him, watching carefully as we picked our way to the top. Once there, he turned around and pointed.

It's hard to say how strange the sight was. We weren't that high up, but you could see the curvature of the horizon. The dog behind us looked tiny but unnaturally clear, in the near vacuum. To the right of Telegraph Hill, the pad where the John Carter had been raised to stand on its tail, waiting for the synthesizer to slowly make fuel from the Martian air.

Paul was carrying a white bag, now a little rust-streaked from the dust. He pulled out a photomap of the crater, unfolded it, and showed it to me. There were twenty X's, with numbers from one to twenty, starting on the top of the crater rim, where we must have been standing, then down the incline, and across the crater floor to its central peak.

"Dust collecting," he said. "How's your oxygen?"

I chinned the readout button. "Three hours forty minutes."

"That should be plenty. Now you don't have to go down if you—"

"I do! Let's go!"

"Okay. Follow me." I didn't tell him that my impatience wasn't all excitement, but partly anxiety at having to talk and pee at the same time. Peeing standing up, into a diaper, trying desperately not to fart. "Funny as a fart in a spacesuit" probably goes back to the beginning of space flight, but there's nothing real funny about it in reality. I'd taken two anti-gas tablets before I came out, and they seemed to still be working.

Keeping your footing was a little harder, going downhill. And it had been some years since I'd walked with a wet diaper. I was out of practice.

Paul had the map folded over so it only showed the path down the crater wall; every thirty or forty steps he would fish through the bag and take out a pre-labeled plastic vial and scrape a sample of dirt into it.

On the floor of the crater I felt a little shiver of fear at our isolation. Looking back the way we'd come, though, I could see the tip of the dog's antenna.

The dust was deeper than I'd seen anyplace else, I guess because the crater walls kept out the wind. Paul took two samples as we walked toward the central peak.

"You better stay down here, Carmen. I won't be long." The peak was steep, and he scrambled up it like a monkey. I wanted to yell, "Be careful," but kept my mouth shut.

Looking up at him, the sun sinking under the crater's rim, I could see Earth gleaming blue in the ochre sky. How long had it been since I thought of Earth, other than "the place where school is"? I guess I hadn't been here long enough to feel homesickness. Nostalgia for Earth—crowded place with lots of gravity and heat.

It might be the first time I seriously thought about staying. In five years I'd be twenty-four and Paul would still be in his early thirties. I didn't feel as romantic about him as I had on the ship. But I liked him and he was funny. That would put us way ahead of a lot of marriages I'd observed.

But then how did I really feel about him? Up there being heroic and competent and, admit it, sexy.

Turn down the heat, girl. He's only twelve years younger than your father, Probably sterile from radiation, too. I didn't think I wanted children, but it would be nice to have the option.

Meanwhile, he would be fun to practice with.

He collected his samples and tossed the bag down. It drifted slowly, rotating, and landed about ten feet away. I was enough of a Martian to be surprised to hear a faint click when it landed, the soles of my boots picking the noise up, conducted through the rock of the crater floor.

He worked his way down slowly, which was a relief. I was holding the sample bag; he took it and made the hand signal for "turn off your communicator." I did and he stepped over close enough to touch helmets. His face close enough to kiss. He spoke, and his voice was a faraway whisper. "Can you come sleep with me tonight?"

"Yes! Oh, yes."

"My roommate's putting in an extra half shift, from 1800 to 2300. Are you free during that time?"

"Class till 1900, but then, sure."

He gave me an awkward squeeze. Hard to be intimate in a Mars suit, but I could feel his gloves on my shoulders, the welcome pressure of his chest.

He turned his comm back on and gave me a mischievous wink. I followed him back the way we had come.

At the top of the crater wall, he stopped and looked back. "Can't see it from here," he said. "I'll show you."

"What?"

"My greatest triumph," he said, and started down. "You'll be impressed."

He didn't offer any further explanation on the ground. He picked up the dog's handle and proceeded to walk around to the other side of the crater.

It was a dumbo, an unpiloted supply vehicle. Its rear end was tilted up, the nose down in a small crater.

"I brought her in like that. I was not the most popular man on Mars." As we approached it, I could see the ragged hole someone had cut in the side with a torch or a laser. "Landed it right on the cargo bay door, too."

So that was how he'd become "Crash" Collins. "Wow. I'm glad you weren't hurt."

He laughed. "It was remote control; I landed it from a console inside the base. Harder than being aboard, actually." We turned around and headed back to the base.

"It was a judgment call. There was a lot of variable wind, and it was yawing back and forth." He made a hand motion like a fish swimming. "I was sort of trying not to hit the base or Telegraph Hill. But I overdid it."

"People could understand that."

"Understanding isn't forgiving. Everybody had to stop their science and become pack animals." I could see the expression on Solingen's face, having to do labor, and smiled.

She really did have something against me. I had to do twice as much babysitting as Elspeth or Kaimei—and when I suggested that the boys ought to do it, too, she said the "personnel allocation" was her job, thank you. And when my person got allocated to an outside job, it would be something boring and repetitive, like taking inventory of supplies. (That was especially useful, in case there were actual Martians sneaking in at night to steal nuts and bolts.)

When we got back, I went straight to the john and recycled the diaper and used a couple of towelettes from my allotment. No shower for eighteen hours, but I was reasonably fresh, and Paul wouldn't be that critical.

At the console there was a blinking note from the Dragon herself, noting that I had missed math class, saying she wanted a copy of my homework. Did she monitor anybody else's VR attendance?

I'd had the class recorded, of course, the super-exciting chain rule for differentiation. I fell asleep twice, hard to do in VR, and had to start over. Then I had a problem set with fifty chains to differentiate. Wrap me in chains and throw me in the differential dungeon, but I had to get a nap before going over to Paul's. I set a beeper for 1530, ninety minutes, then got the air mattress partly inflated and flopped onto it without undressing.

* * * *

At 1800 I tried to concentrate on a physical science lecture about the conservation of angular momentum. Sexy dancers and skaters spinning around. The lecturer reminded me of Paul. Probably any male would have.

Went to the john and freshened up here and there. Then walked up to 4A—no way to be discreet about it—and tapped quietly on the door. Paul opened it and sort of pulled me in.

We hugged and kissed and undressed each other in a kind of two-person riot. He was extremely erect; I played with it for a minute, but he said that might prove counterproductive, and carried me to the bed and caressed me all over, and with his hands and tongue brought me to orgasm twice, my jaws clenched, trying not to make too much noise.

Then he showed me a picture of a frieze in India and I copied it, putting my arms around his neck and clasping his hips with my legs while he entered me. Probably a lot easier on Mars than in India. It was a pleasant sensation but odd, since he completely filled me, his penis bumping the top of my vagina with every thrust.

Maybe in the future there will be advertisements: Come to Mars and fuck like an Indian goddess. Maybe not.

I didn't have a third orgasm in me, but his was plenty for both of us. Then we lay in his narrow bunk, spoon fashion, dozing, until his erection came back and we did it again, in that position. Nicely intimate but not too stimulating, which he took care of afterwards with his fingers.

An hour or so of dreamless sleep and he woke me with a hand on my shoulder. He was fully dressed. "Jerry wouldn't mind walking in on you like this," he said, "but you might be startled."

I dressed quickly and kissed him good-night. There was nobody in his corridor, but I did pass a couple on the main way, including Jerry, who gave me an arched eyebrow and a little wave.

I slipped into our temporary room and undressed quietly without turning on the lights.

"So how was our pilot?" Kaimei murmured in the dark. When I didn't say anything, she continued. "A simple deduction, Sherlock. You don't exactly smell like you've been riding a bicycle."

"I'm sorry..."

"I didn't say I didn't like it. Sweet dreams."

In fact, my dream was odd and disturbing. I was trying to find a party, but every door opened onto an empty room. The last door opened onto the sea.

* * * *

Not delivering my homework like a good little girl got me into a special corner of Dargo Hell. I had to turn over my notes and homework in maths every day to Ana Sitral, who obviously didn't have time for checking it. She must have done something to piss off the Dragon herself.

Then I had to take on over half of the mentoring hours that Kaimei and Elspeth had been covering, and was not allowed any outside time. The extra babysitting time came out of my ag hours, working on the farm upstairs, which most of us considered a treat, as Dargo well knew.

I had been selfish, she said, tiring myself out on a silly lark, using up resources that might be needed for real work. So I had the temerity to suggest that part of my real work was getting to know Mars, and she really blew up about that. It was not up to me to make up my own training schedule.

Okay, part of it was that she didn't like young people. But part was also that she didn't like me, the sex kitten who'd distracted her pilot. She didn't bother to hide that from anybody. I complained to Mother and she didn't disagree, but said I had to learn to work with people like that. Especially here, where there wasn't much choice.

I didn't bother complaining to Dad. He would make a Growth Experience out of it. I should try to see the world her way. Sorry, Dad. If I saw the world her way and cast my weary eyes upon Carmen Dula, wouldn't that be self-loathing? That would not be a positive growth experience.

19

Fish Out of Water

After a month, I was able to put a Mars suit on again, but I didn't go up to the surface. There was plenty of work down below, inside the lava tube that protected the base from cosmic and solar radiation.

There's plenty of water on Mars, but most of it is in the wrong place. If it was ice on or near the surface, it had to be at the north or south pole. We couldn't put bases there, because they were in total darkness a lot of the time, and we needed solar power.

But there was a huge lake hidden a few hundred meters below the base. It was the easiest large one to get to on all of Mars, we learned from some kind of satellite radar, which was why the base was put here. One of the things we'd brought on the John Carter was a drilling system designed to tap it. (The drills that came with the first ship and the third broke, though, the famous Mars Luck.)

I worked with the team that set the drill up, nothing more challenging than fetch-and-carry, but a lot better than trying to mentor kids when you wanted to slap them instead.

For a while we could hear the drill through our boots, a faint sandpapery sound that was conducted through the rock. Then it was quiet, and most of us forgot about it. A few weeks later, though, it broke through. It was Sagan 12th, which from then on would be Water Day.

We put on Mars suits and then walked down between the wall of the lava tube and the base's exterior wall. It was kind of creepy, just suit lights, less than a meter between the cold rock and the inflated plastic you weren't supposed to touch.

Then there was light ahead, and we came out into swirling madness—it was a blizzard! The drill had struck ice and liquefied it and sent it up under pressure, dozens of liters a minute. When it hit the cold vacuum it exploded into snow.

It was ankle-deep in places, but of course it wouldn't last; the vacuum would evaporate it eventually. But people were already working with lengths of pipe, getting ready to fill the waiting tanks up in the hydroponics farm. One of them had already been dubbed the swimming pool. That's how the trouble started.

* * * *

I got on the work detail that hooked the water supply up to the new pump. That was to go in two stages: emergency and "maintenance."

The emergency stage worked on the reasonable assumption that the pump wasn't going to last very long. So we wanted to save every drop of water we could, while it still did work.

This was the "water boy" stage. We had collapsible insulated water containers that held fifty liters each. That's about 110 pounds on Earth, about my own weight, awkward but not too heavy to handle on Mars.

All ten of the older kids alternated a couple of hours on, a couple off, doing water boy. We had wheelbarrows, three of them, so it wasn't too tiring. You fill the thing with water, which takes eight minutes, then turn off the valve and get away fast, so not too much pressure builds up before the next person takes over. Then trundle the wheelbarrow up a ramp and around to the airlock, leave it there, and carry or drag the water bag inside and across the farm to the storage tanks. Dump in the water—a slurry of ice by then—and go back to the pump with your wheelbarrow and empty bag.

The work was boring as dust, and would drive you insane if you didn't have music. I started out being virtuous, listening to classical pieces that went along with my textbook on the history of music. But as the days droned by, I listened to more and more city and even sag.

You didn't have to be a math genius to see that it was going to take three weeks at this rate to fill the first tank, which was two meters tall and eight meters wide, bigger than some backyard pools in Florida.

The water didn't stay icy; they warmed it up to above room temperature. We all must have fantasized about diving in there and paddling around. Elspeth and Kaimei and I even planned for it.

There was no sense in asking permission from the Dragon. What we were going to do was coordinate our showers so we'd all be squeaky clean—so nobody could say we were contaminating the water supply—and come in the same time, off shift, and see whether we could get away with a little skinny-dip. Or see how long we could do it before somebody stopped us.

At two weeks, the engineers sort of forced our hand. They'd been working on a direct link from the pump to this tank and the other two.

Jordan Westling, Barry's inventor dad, seemed to be in charge of that team. We always got along pretty well. He was old but always had a twinkle in his eye.

He and I were alone by the tank while he fiddled with some tubing and gauges. I lifted the water bag with a groan and poured it in.

"This ought to be the last day you have to do that," he said. "We should be on line in a few hours."

"Wow." I stepped up on a box and looked at the water level. It was more than half full, with a little layer of red sediment at the bottom. "Dr. Westling ... what would happen if somebody went swimming in this?"

He didn't look up from the gauge. "I suppose if somebody washed up first and didn't pee in the pool, nobody would have to know. It's not exactly distilled water. Not that I would endorse such an activity."

When I went back to the water point I touched helmets with Kaimei—always assuming the suit radio was monitored—and we agreed we'd do it at 0215, just after the end of the next shift. She'd pass the word on to Elspeth, who came on at midnight. That would give her time to have a quick shower and smuggle a towel up to the tank.

I got off at ten and VR'ed a class on Spinoza, better than any sleeping pill. I barely stayed awake long enough to set the alarm for 1:30.

Two and a half hours’ sleep was plenty. I awoke with eager anticipation and, alone in the room, put on a robe and slippers and quietly made my way to the shower. The roster was almost empty at this hour.

Kaimei had already bathed, and was sitting outside the shower with a reader. I took my shower and, while I was drying, Elspeth came in from work, wearing skinsuit and socks.

After she showered, the three of us tiptoed past the work/study area—a couple of people were working there, but a hanging partition kept them from being distracted by passersby.

The mess hall was deserted. We went up through the changing room and the airlock foyer and slipped into the farm.

There were only dim maintenance lights at this hour. We padded our way to the swimming pool tank—and heard whispered voices!

Oscar Jefferson, Barry Westling, and my idiot brother had beat us to it!

"Hey girls," Oscar said. "Look—we're out of a job." A faucet in the side was gurgling out a narrow stream.

"My father said we could quit," Barry said, "so we thought we'd take a swim to celebrate."

"You didn't tell him," I said.

"Do we look like idiots?" No, they looked like naked boys. "Come on in. The water's not too cold."

I looked at the other two girls and they shrugged okay. Spaceships and Mars bases don't give you a lot of room for modesty.

I sort of liked the way Barry looked at me anyhow, when I stepped out of my robe and slippers. When Kaimei undressed his look might have been a little more intense.

I stepped up on the box and had one leg over the edge of the tank, not the most modest posture, when the lights snapped on full.

"Caught you!" Dargo Solingen marched down the aisle between the tomatoes and the squash. "I knew you'd do this." She looked at me, one foot on the box and the other dangling in space. "And I know exactly who the ringleader is."

She stood with her hands on her hips, studying. Elspeth was only half undressed, but the rest of us were obviously ready for some teenaged sex orgy. "Get out now. Get dressed and come to my office at 0800. We will have a disciplinary hearing." She stomped back to the door and snapped off the bright lights on her way out.

"I'll tell her it wasn't you," Card said. "We just kind of all decided when Barry's dad said the thing was working,"

"She won't believe you," I said, stepping down. "She's been after my ass all along."

"Who wouldn't be?" Barry said. He was a born romantic.

* * * *

All of our parents were crowded into the Dragon's office at 0800. That was not good. My parents both were working the shift from 2100 to 0400, and needed their sleep. The parents were on one side of the room, and we were on the other, with a large video screen in the middle.

Without any preamble, Dargo Solingen made the charge: "Last night your children went for a swim in the new Water Tank One. Tests on the water reveal traces of coliform bacteria, so it cannot be used for human consumption without boiling or some other form of sterilization."

"It was only going to be used for hydroponics," Dr. Westling said.

"You can't say that for certain. At any rate, it was an act of extreme irresponsibility, and one that you encouraged." She pointed a hand control at the video screen and clicked. I saw myself talking to him.

"What would happen if somebody went swimming in this?" He answered that nobody would have to know—not that he would endorse such a thing. He was restraining a smile.

"You're secretly recording me?" he said incredulously.

"Not you. Her."

"She didn't do it!" Card blurted out. "It was my idea."

"You will speak when spoken to," she said with ice in her voice. "Your loyalty to your sister is touching, but misplaced." She clicked again, and there was a picture of me and Kaimei at the water point, touching helmets.

"Tonight has to be skinny-dipping night. Dr. Westling says they'll be online in a few hours. Let's make it 0215, right after Elspeth gets off." You could hear Kaimei's faint agreement.

"You had my daughter's suit bugged?" my father said.

"Not really. I just disabled the OFF switch on her suit communicator."

"That is so ... so illegal. On Earth they'd throw you out of court and then—"

"This isn't Earth. And on Mars, there is nothing more important than water. As you would appreciate more if you had lived here longer." Oh, sure, like living in a spaceship doesn't count. I think you could last longer without water than without air.

"Besides, it was improper for the boys and girls to be together naked. Even if they hadn't planned any sexual misbehavior—"

"Oh, please," I said. "Excuse me for speaking out of turn, Dr. Solingen, but there was nothing like that. We didn't even know the boys would be there."

"Really. The timing was remarkable, then. And you weren't acting surprised about them when I turned on the lights. Nor modest." Card was squirming and put up his hand, but the Dragon ignored it. She turned to the parents. "I want to discuss with you what punishment might be appropriate."

"Twenty laps a day in the pool," Dr. Westling said, almost snarling. He didn't like her anyhow, I'd noticed, and spying on him apparently had been the straw that broke the camel's back. "They're just kids, for Chris'sake."

"You're going to say they didn't mean any harm. They have to learn that Mars doesn't recognize intent as an excuse.

"An appropriate punishment, I think, would start with not allowing them to bathe for a month. I would also reduce the amount of water they be allowed to drink, but that is difficult to control. And I wouldn't want to endanger their health." God, she was so All Heart.

"For that month, I would also deny them recreational use of the cube and VR, and no exploring on the surface. Double that for the instigator, Ms. Dula"—and she turned back to face us—"and her brother as well, if he insists on sharing the responsibility."

"I do!" he snapped.

"Very well. Two months for both of you."

"It seems harsh," Kaimei's father said. "Kaimei told me that the girls did take the precaution of showering before entering the water."

"Intent means nothing. The bacteria are there."

"Harmless to plants," Dr. Westling repeated. "Probably to people."

She looked at him for a long second. "Your dissent is noted. Are there any other objections to this punishment?"

"Not the punishment," my mother said, "but Dr. Dula and I both object to the means of acquiring evidence."

"I am perfectly willing to stand on review for that." The old-timers would probably go along with her. The new ones might still be infected by the Bill of Rights, or the laws of Russia and France.

There were no other objections, so she reminded the parents that they would be responsible for monitoring our VR and cube use, but even more, she would rely on our sense of honor.

What were we supposed to be "honoring," though? The now old-fashioned sanctity of water? Her right to spy on us? In fact, her unlimited authority?

I would find a way to get back at her.

20

Nightwalk

After one day of steaming over it, I'd had enough. I don't know when I made the decision, or whether it even was a decision, rather than a kind of sleepwalking. It was sometime before three in the morning. I was still feeling so angry and embarrassed I couldn't get to sleep.

So I got up and started down the corridor to the mess hall, nibble on something. But I walked on past.

It looked like no one else was up. Just dim safety lights. I wound up in the dressing room and realized what I was doing.

The airlock had a WARNING OVERRIDE button that you could press so the buzzer wouldn't go on and on if you had to keep the inner door open. Card had shown me how you could keep the button stuck down with the point of a pencil or a pen.

With the airlock buzzer disabled, a person could actually go outside alone, undetected. Card had done it with Barry for a few minutes early one morning, just to prove it could be done. So I could just be by myself for an hour or two, then sneak back in.

And did I ever want to be by myself.

I went through the dress-up procedure as quietly as possible. Then before I took a step toward the airlock, I visualized myself doing a safety check on another person and did it methodically on myself. It would be so pathetic to die out there, breaking the rules.

I went up the stairs silently as a thief. Well, I was a thief. What could they do, deport me?

For safety's sake, I decided to take a dog, even though it would slow me down a bit. I actually hesitated, and tested carrying two extra oxygen bottles by themselves, but that was awkward. Better safe than sorry, I said to myself in Mother's voice, and ground my teeth while saying it. But going out without a dog and dying would be pathetic. Arch-criminals are evil, not pathetic. I clicked the OVERRIDE button down and jammed it with the point of a penstick.

The evacuating pump sounded loud, though I knew you could hardly hear it in the changing room. It rattled off into silence, then the red light glowed green and the door swung open into darkness.

I stepped out, pulling the dog, and the door slid shut behind it.

I decided not to turn on the suit light, and stood there for several minutes while my eyes adjusted. Walking at night just by starlight—you couldn't do that any other place I've lived. It wouldn't be dangerous if I was careful. Besides, if I turned on a light, someone could see me from the mess hall window.

The nearby rocks gave me my bearings, and I started out toward Telegraph Hill. On the other side of the hill I'd be invisible from the base, and vice versa—alone for the first time in almost a year. Earth year.

Seeing the familiar rock field in this ghostly half-light brought back some of the mystery and excitement of the first couple of days. The landing and my first excursion with Paul.

If he knew I was doing this—well, he might approve, secretly. He wasn't much of a rule guy, except for safety.

Thinking that, my foot turned on a small rock and I staggered, getting my balance back. Keep your eyes on the ground while you're walking. It would be, what is the word I'm looking for, pathetic to trip and break your helmet out here.

It took me less than a half hour to get to the base of Telegraph Hill. It wasn't all that steep, but the dog's traction wasn't really up to it. A truly adventurous person would leave the dog behind and climb to the top with her suit air alone, and although I do like adventure, I'm also afflicted with pathetico-phobia. The dog and I could go around the mountain rather than over it. I decided to walk in a straight line for one hour, see how far I could get, and walk back, following the dog's track in the dust.

That was my big mistake. One of them, anyhow. If I'd just gone to the top, taken a picture, and headed straight back, I might have gotten away with the whole thing.

I wasn't totally stupid. I didn't go into the hill's "radio shadow," and I cranked the dog's radio antenna up all the way, since I was headed for the horizon, and knew that any small depression in the ground could hide me from the colony's radio transceiver.

The wind picked up a little. I couldn't feel or hear it, of course, but the sky showed it. Jupiter was just rising, and its bright pale yellow light had a halo and was slightly dimmed by the dust in the air. I remembered Dad pointing out Jupiter and then Mars the morning we left Florida, and had a delicious shiver at the thought that I was standing on that little point of light now.

The area immediately around the colony was as well explored as any place on Mars, but I knew from rock-hounding with Paul that you could find new stuff just a couple hundred meters from the airlock door. I went four or five kilometers, and found something really new.

I had been going for fifty-seven minutes, about to turn back, and was looking for a soft rock that I could mark with an X or something—maybe scratch "SURRENDER PUNY EARTHLINGS" on it, though I suspected people would figure out who had done it.

There was no noise. Just a suddenly weightless feeling, and I was falling through a hole in the ground—I'd broken through something like a thin sheet of ice. But there was nothing underneath it!

I was able to turn on the suit light as I tumbled down, but all I saw was a glimpse of the dog spinning around beside and then above me.

It seemed like a long time, but I guess I didn't fall for more than a few seconds. I hit hard on my left foot and heard the sickening sound of a bone cracking, just an instant before the pain hit me.

I lay still, bright red sparks fading from my vision while the pain amped up and up. Trying to think, not scream.

My ankle was probably broken, and at least one rib on the left side. I breathed deeply, listening—Paul told me about how he had broken a rib in a car wreck, and he could tell by the sound that it had punctured his lung. This did hurt, but didn't sound different—and then I realized I was lucky to be breathing at all. The helmet and suit were intact.

But would I be able to keep breathing long enough to be rescued?

The suit light was out. I clicked the switch over and over, and nothing happened. If I could find the dog, and if it was intact, I'd have an extra sixteen hours of oxygen. Otherwise, I probably had two, two and a half hours.

I didn't suppose the radio would do any good, underground, but I tried it anyway. Yelled into it for a minute and then listened. Nothing.

These suits ought to have some sort of beeper to trace people with. But then I guess nobody was supposed to wander off and disappear.

It was about four. How long before someone woke up and noticed I was gone? How long before someone got worried enough to check, and see that the suit and dog were missing?

I tried to stand and it wasn't possible. The pain was intolerable and the bone made an ominous sound. I couldn't help crying but stopped after a minute. Pathetic.

Had to find the dog, with its oxygen and power. I stretched out and patted the ground back and forth, and scrabbled around in a circle, feeling for it.

It wasn't anywhere nearby. But how far could it have rolled after it hit?

I had to be careful, not just crawl off in some random direction and get lost. I remembered feeling a large, kind of pointy, rock off to my left—good thing I hadn't landed on it—and could use it as a reference point.

I found it and moved up so my foot was touching it. Visualizing an old-fashioned clock with me as the hour hand, I went off in the 12:00 direction, measuring four body lengths inchworm style. Then crawled back to the pointy rock and did the same thing in the opposite, 6:00, direction. Nothing there, nor at 9:00 or 3:00, and I tried not to panic.

In my mind's eye I could see the areas where I hadn't been able to reach, the angles midway between 12:00 and 3:00, 3:00 and 6:00, and so on. I went back to the pointy rock and started over. On the second try, my hand touched one of the dog's wheels, and I smiled in spite of my situation.

It was lying on its side. I uprighted it and felt for the switch that would turn on its light. When it came on, I was looking straight into it and it dazzled me blind.

Facing away from it, after a couple of minutes I could see some of where I was. I'd fallen into a large underground cavern, maybe shaped like a dome, though I couldn't see as far as the top. I guessed it was part of a lava tube that was almost open to the surface, worn so thin that it couldn't support my weight.

Maybe it joined up with the lava tube that we lived in! But even if it did, and even if I knew which direction to go, I couldn't crawl the four kilometers back. I tried to ignore the pain and do the math, anyhow—sixteen hours of oxygen, four kilometers, that means creeping 250 meters per hour, dragging the dog along behind me ... no way. Better to hope they would track me down here.

What were the chances of that? Maybe the dog's tracks, or my boot prints? Only in dusty places, if the wind didn't cover them up before dawn.

If they searched at night, the dog's light might help. How close would a person have to come to the hole to see it? Close enough to crash through and join me?

And would the dog's power supply last long enough to shine all night and again tomorrow night? It wouldn't have to last any longer than that.

The ankle was hurting less, but that was because of numbness. My hands and feet were getting cold. Was that a suit malfunction, or just because I was stretched out on this cold cave floor? Where the sun had never shined.

With a start, I realized the coldness could mean that my suit was losing power—it should automatically warm up the gloves and boots. I opened my mouth wide and with my chin pressed the switch that ought to project a technical readout in front of my eyes, with "power remaining," and nothing came up.

Well, the dog obviously had power to spare. I unreeled the recharge cable and plugged its jack into my LSU.

Nothing happened.

I chinned the switch over and over. Nothing.

Maybe it was just the readout display that was broken; I was getting power but it wasn't registering. Trying not to panic, I wiggled the jack, unplugged and replugged it. Still nothing.

I was breathing, though; that part worked. I unrolled the umbilical hose from the dog and pushed the fitting into the bottom of the LSU. It made a loud pop and a sudden breeze of cold oxygen blew around my neck and chin.

So at least I wouldn't die of that. I would be frozen solid before I ran out of air; how comforting. Acid rush of panic in my throat; I choked it back and sucked on the water tube until the nausea was gone.

Which made me think about the other end, and I clamped up. I was not going to fill the suit's emergency diaper with shit and piss before I died. Though the people who deal with dead people probably have seen that before. And it would be frozen solid, so what's the difference. Inside the body or outside.

I stopped crying long enough to turn on the radio and say goodbye to people, and apologize for my stupidity. Though it's unlikely that anyone would ever hear it. Unless there was some kind of secret recorder in the suit, and someone stumbled on it years from now. If the Dragon had anything to say about it, there would be.

I wished I had Dad's zen. If Dad were in this situation he would just accept it, and wait to leave his body.

I tipped the dog up on end, so its light shone directly up toward the hole I'd fallen through, still too high up to see.

I couldn't feel my feet or hands anymore and was growing heavy-lidded. I'd read that freezing to death was the least painful way to go, and one of my last coherent thoughts was "Who came back to tell them?"

Then I hallucinated an angel, wearing red, surrounded by an ethereal bubble. He was incredibly ugly.

PART 2

FIRST CONTACT

1

Guardian Angel

woke up in some pain, ankle throbbing and hands and feet burning. I was lying on a huge inflated pillow. The air was thick and muggy and it was dark. A yellow light was bobbing toward me, growing brighter. I heard lots of feet.

It was a flashlight, or rather a lightstick like you wear, and the person holding it ... wasn't a person. It was the red angel from my dream.

Maybe I was still dreaming. I was naked, which sometimes happens in my dreams. The dog was sitting a few feet away. My broken ankle was splinted between two pieces of what felt like wood. On Mars?

This angel had too many legs, like four, sticking out from under the red tunic thing. His head, if that's what it was, looked like a potato that had gone really bad. Soft and wrinkled and covered with eyes. Maybe they were eyes, lots of them, or antennae. He was almost as big as a small horse. He seemed to have two regular-sized arms and two little ones. For an angel, he smelled a lot like tuna fish.

I should have been terrified, naked in front of this monster, but he definitely was the one who had saved me from freezing to death. Or he was dressed like that one.

"Are you real?" I said. "Or am I still dreaming, or dead?"

He made some kind of noise, sort of like a bullfrog with teeth chattering. Then he whistled and the lights came on, dim but enough to see around. The unreality of it made me dizzy.

I was taking it far too calmly, maybe because I couldn't think of a thing to do. Either I was in the middle of some complicated dream, or this is what happens to you after you die, or I was completely insane, or, least likely of all, I'd been rescued by a Martian.

But a Martian wouldn't breathe oxygen, not this thick. He wouldn't have wood for making splints. Though this one might know something about ankles, having so many of them.

"You don't speak English, do you?"

He responded with a long speech that sounded kind of threatening. Maybe it was about food animals not being allowed to talk.

I was in a circular room, a little too small for both me and Big Red, with a round wall that seemed to be several layers of plastic sheeting. He had come in through slits in the plastic. The polished stone floor was warm. The high ceiling looked like the floor, but there were four bluish lights embedded in it, that looked like cheap plastic decorations.

It felt like a hospital room, and maybe it was one. The pillow was big enough for one like him to lie down on it.

On a stone pedestal over by the dog was a pitcher and a glass made of something that looked like obsidian. He poured me a glass of something and brought it over.

His hand, also potato-brown, had four long fingers without nails, and lots of little joints. The fingers were all the same length and it looked like any one of them could be the thumb. The small hands were miniature versions of the big ones.

The stuff in the glass didn't smell like anything and tasted like water, so I drank it down in a couple of greedy gulps.

He took the glass back and refilled it. When he handed it to me, he pointed into it with a small hand, and said, "Ar." Sort of like a pirate.

I pointed and said, "Water?" He answered with a sound like "war," with a lot of extra R's.

He set down the glass and brought me a plate with something that looked remarkably like a mushroom. No, thanks. I read that story.

(For a mad moment I wondered whether that could be it—I had eaten, or ingested, something that caused all this, and it was one big dope dream. But the pain was too real.)

He picked the thing up delicately and a mouth opened up in his neck, broad black teeth set in grisly red. He took a small nibble and replaced it on the plate. I shook my head no, though that could mean yes in Martian. Or some mortal insult.

How long could I go without eating? A week, I supposed, but my stomach growled at the thought.

He heard the growling and pointed helpfully to a hole in the floor. That took care of one question, but not quite yet, pal. We've hardly been introduced, and I don't even let my brother watch me do that.

I touched my chest and said "Carmen." Then I pointed at his chest, if that's what it was.

He touched his chest and said "Harn." Well, that was a start.

"No." I took his hand—dry, raspy skin—and brought it over to touch my chest. "Car-men," I said slowly. Me Jane, you Tarzan. Or Mr. Potato Head.

"Harn," he repeated, which wasn't a bad Carmen if you couldn't pronounce C or M. Then he took my hand gently and placed it between his two small arms and made a sputtering sound no human could do, at least with the mouth. He let go, but I kept my hand there and said, "Red. I'll call you Red."

"Reh," he said, and repeated it. It gave me a shiver. I was communicating with an alien. Someone put up a plaque! But he turned abruptly and left.

I took advantage of being alone and hopped over to the hole and used it, not as easy as that sounds. I needed to find something to use as a crutch. This wasn't exactly Wal-Mart, though. I drank some water and hopped back to the pillow and flopped down.

My hands and feet hurt a little less. They were red, like bad sunburn, which I supposed was the first stage of frostbite. I could have lost some fingers and toes—not that it would matter much to me, with lungs full of ice.

I looked around. Was I inside of Mars or was this some kind of a spaceship? You wouldn't make a spaceship out of stone. We had to be underground, but this stone didn't look at all like the petrified lava of the colony's tunnel. And it was warm, which had to be electrical or something. The lights and plastic sheets looked pretty high-tech, but everything else was kind of basic—a hole in the floor? (I hoped it wasn't somebody else's ceiling!)

I mentally reviewed why there can't be higher forms of life on Mars, least of all technological life: No artifacts—we've mapped every inch of it, and anything that looked artificial turned out to be natural. Of course there's nothing to breathe, though I seemed to be breathing. Same thing with water. And temperature.

There are plenty of microscopic organisms living underground, but how could they evolve into big bozos like Red? What is there on Mars for a big animal to eat? Rocks?

Red was coming back with his lightstick, followed by someone only half his size, wearing bright lime green. Smoother skin, like a more fresh potato. I decided she was female and called her Green. Just for the time being; I might have it backwards. They had seen me naked, but I hadn't seen them—and wasn't eager to, actually. They were scary enough this way.

Green was carrying a plastic bag with things inside that clicked softly together. She set the bag down carefully and exchanged a few noises with Red.

First she took out a dish that looked like pottery, and from a plastic bag shook out something that looked like an herb, or pot. It started smoking immediately, and she thrust it toward me. I sniffed it; it was pleasant, like mint or menthol. She made a gesture with her two small hands, a kind of shooing motion, that I interpreted to mean, "breathe more deeply," and I did.

She took the dish away and brought two transparent disks, like big lenses, out of the bag and handed one to me. While I held it, she pressed the other one against my forehead, then chest, then the side of my leg. She gently lifted up the foot with the broken ankle and pressed it against the sole. Then she did the other foot. She put the lenses back in her bag and stood motionless, staring at me like a doctor or scientist.

I thought, okay, this is where the alien sticks a tube up your ass, but she must have left her tube back at the office.

She and Red conferred for a while, making gestures with their small arms while they made noises like porpoises and machinery. Then she reached into the bag and pulled out a small metal tube, which caused me to cringe away, but she gave it a snap with her wrist and it ratcheted out to about six feet long. She mimicked using it as a cane, which looked really strange, like a spider missing four legs, and handed it to me, saying "Harn."

Guess that was my name now. The stick felt lighter than aluminum, but when I used it to lever myself up, it was rigid and strong.

She reached into her bag of tricks and brought out a thing like her tunic, somewhat thicker and softer and colored gray. There was a hole in it for my head, but no sleeves or other complications. I put it on gratefully and draped it around so I could use the stick. It was agreeably warm.

Red stepped ahead and, with a rippling gesture of all four hands, indicated, "Follow me." I did, with Green coming behind me.

It was a strange sensation, going through the slits in those plastic sheets, or whatever they were. It was like they were alive, millions of feathery fingers clasping you and then letting go all at once, to close behind you with a snap.

When I went through the first one, it was noticeably cooler, and cooler still after the second one, and my ears popped. After the fourth one, it felt close to freezing, though the floor was still warm, and the air was noticeably thin; I was almost panting and could see my breath.

We stepped into a huge dark cavern. Rows of dim lights at about knee level marked off paths. The lights were all blue, but each path had its own kind of blue, different in shade or intensity. Meet me at the corner of bright turquoise and dim aquamarine.

I tried to remember our route, left at this shade of blue and then right at this one, but I was not sure how useful the knowledge would be. What, I was going to escape? Hold my breath and run back to the colony?

We went through a single sheet into a large area, at least as well lit as my hospital room and almost as warm. It had a kind of barnyard smell, not unpleasant. There were things that had to be plants all around, like broccoli but brown and gray with some yellow, sitting in water that you could hear was flowing. A little mist hung near the ground, and my face felt damp. It was a hydroponic farm like ours, but without greens or the bright colors of tomatoes and peppers and citrus fruits.

Green leaned over and picked something that looked like a cigar, or something even less appetizing, and offered it to me. I waved it away; she broke it in two and gave half to Red.

I couldn't tell how big the place was, probably acres. So where were all the people it was set up to feed? All the Martians.

I got a partial answer when we passed through another sheet, into a brighter room about the size of the new pod we'd brought. There were about twenty of the aliens arranged along two walls, standing at tables or in front of things like data screens, but made of metal rather than plastic. There weren't any chairs; I supposed quadrupeds don't need them.

They all began to move toward me, making strange noises, of course. If I'd brought one of them into a room, humans would have done the same thing, but nevertheless I felt frightened and helpless. When I shrank back, Red put a protective arm in front of me and said a couple of bullfrog syllables. They all stopped about ten feet away.

Green talked to them more softly, gesturing toward me. Then they stepped forward in an orderly way, by colors—two in tan, three in green, two in blue, and so forth—each standing quietly in front of me for a few seconds. I wondered if the color signified rank. None of the others wore red, and none were as big as Big Red. Maybe he was the alpha male, or the only female, like bees.

What were they doing? Just getting a closer look, or taking turns trying to destroy me with thought waves?

After that presentation, Red gestured for me to come over and look at the largest metal screen.

Interesting. It was a panorama of our greenhouse and the other parts of the colony that were above ground. The picture might have been from the top of Telegraph Hill. Just as I noticed that there were a lot of people standing around—too many for a normal work party—the John Carter came sliding into view, a rooster tail of red dust fountaining out behind her. A lot of the people jumped up and down and waved.

Then the screen went black for a few seconds, and a red rectangle opened slowly ... it was the airlock light at night, as the door slid open. I was looking at myself, just a little while ago, coming out and pulling the dog behind me.

The camera must have been like those flying bugs that Homeland Security spies use. I certainly hadn't seen anything.

When the door closed, the picture changed to a ghostly blue, like moonlight on Earth. It followed me for a minute or so, stumbling and then staring at the ground as I walked more cautiously.

Then it switched to another location, and I knew what was coming. The ground collapsed and the dog and I disappeared in a shower of dust, which the wind swept away in an instant.

The bug, or whatever it was, drifted down through the hole to hover over me as I writhed around in pain. A row of glowing symbols appeared at the bottom of the screen. There was a burst of white light when I found the dog and switched it on.

Then Big Red floated down—this was obviously the speeded-up version—wearing several layers of that wall plastic, it seemed; riding a thing that looked like a metal sawhorse with two sidecars. He put me in one and the dog in the other. Then he floated back up.

Then they skipped all the way to me lying on that pillow, naked and unlovely, in an embarrassing posture—I blushed, as if any of them cared—and then moved in close to my ankle, which was blue and swollen. Then a solid holo of a human skeleton, obviously mine, in the same position. The image moved in the same way as before. The fracture line glowed red, and then my foot, below the break, shifted slightly. The line glowed blue and disappeared.

Just then I noticed it wasn't hurting anymore.

Green stepped over and gently took the staff away from me. I put weight on the foot and it felt as good as new.

"How could you do that?" I said, not expecting an answer. No matter how good they were at healing themselves, how could they apply that to a human skeleton?

Well, a human vet could treat a broken bone in an animal she'd never seen before. But it wouldn't heal in a matter of hours.

Two of the amber ones brought out my skinsuit and Mars suit, and put them at my feet.

Red pointed at me and then tapped on the screen, which again showed the surface parts of the colony. You could hardly see them for the dust, though; there was a strong storm blowing.

He made an up-and-down gesture with his small arms, and then his large ones, obviously meaning, "Get dressed."

So with about a million potato eyes watching, I took off the tunic and got into the skinsuit. The diaper was missing, which made it feel kind of baggy. They must have thrown it away—or analyzed it, ugh.

The creatures stared in silence while I zipped that up and then climbed and wiggled into the Mars suit. I secured the boots and gloves and then clamped the helmet into place and automatically chinned the switch for an oxygen and power readout, but of course it was still broken. I guess that would be asking too much—you fixed my ankle, but you can't fix a simple spacesuit? What kind of Martians are you?

It was obvious I wasn't getting any air from the backpack, though. I'd need the dog's backup supply.

I unshipped the helmet and faced Green, making an exaggerated pantomime of breathing in and out. She didn't react. Hell, they probably breathed by osmosis or something.

I turned to Red and crouched over, patting the air at the level of the dog. "Dog," I said, and pointed back the way we'd come.

He leaned over and mimicked my gesture and said, "Nog." Pretty close. Then he turned to the crowd and croaked out a speech, which I think had both "harn" and "nog" in it.

He must have understood, at least partly, because he made that four-armed "come along" motion at me and went back to the place where we'd entered. I went through the plastic and looked back. Green was leading four others, it looked like one of each color, following us.

Red in the lead, we all went back in what seemed the same path we'd come. I counted my steps, so that when I told people about it I'd have at least one actual concrete number. The hydroponics room, or at least the part we cut through, was 185 steps wide; then it was another 204 steps from there to the "hospital" room. I get about seventy centimeters to a step, so the trip covered about 270 meters, allowing for a little dogleg in the middle. Of course it might go on for miles in every direction, but at least it was no smaller than that.

We went into the little room and they watched while I unreeled the dog's umbilical and plugged it in. The cool air coming through the neck fitting was more than a relief. I put my helmet back on. Green stepped forward and did a pretty good imitation of my breathing pantomime.

I sort of didn't want to go. I was looking forward to coming back and learning how to communicate with Red and Green. We had other people more qualified, though. I should have listened to Mother when she got after me to take a language in school. If I'd known this was going to happen, I would have taken Chinese and Latin and Body Noises.

The others stood away from the plastic and Red gestured for me to follow. I pulled the dog along through the four plastic layers; this time we turned sharply to the right and started walking up a gently sloping ramp.

After a few minutes I could look down and get a sense of how large this place was. There was the edge of a lake—an immense amount of water even if it was only a few inches deep. From above, the buildings looked like domes of clay, or just dirt, with no windows, just the pale blue light that filtered through the door layers.

There were squares of different sizes and shades that were probably crops like the mushrooms and cigars, and one large square had trees that looked like six-foot tall broccoli, which could explain the wooden splints.

We came to a level place, brightly lit, that had shelves full of bundles of the plastic stuff. Red walked straight to one shelf and pulled off a bundle. It was his Mars suit. Bending over at a strange angle, bobbing, he slid his feet into four opaque things like thick socks. His two large arms went into sleeves, ending in mittens. Then the whole thing seemed to come alive and ripple up and over him, sealing together and then inflating. It didn't have anything that looked like an oxygen tank, but air was coming from somewhere.

He gestured for me to follow and we went toward a dark corner. He hesitated there and held out his hand to me. I took it, and we staggered slowly through dozens of layers of the stuff, toward a dim light.

It was obviously like a gradual airlock. We stopped at another flat area, which had one of the blue lights, and rested for a few minutes. Then he led me through another long series of layers, where it became completely dark—without him leading me, I might have gotten turned around—and then it lightened slightly, the light glowing pink this time.

When we came out, we were on the floor of a cave; the light was coming from a circle of Martian sky. When my eyes adjusted, I could see there was a smooth ramp leading uphill to the cave entrance.

I'd never seen the sky that color. We were looking up through a serious dust storm.

Red pulled a dust-covered sheet off his sawhorse-shaped vehicle. I helped him put the dog into one of the bowl-like sidecars, and I got in the other. There were two things like stubby handlebars in front, but no other controls that I could see.

He backed onto the thing, straddling it, and we rose off the ground a foot or so and smoothly started forward.

The glide up the ramp was smooth. I expected to be buffeted around by the dust storm, but as impressive as it looked, it didn't have much power. My umbilical tube did flap around in the wind, which made me nervous. If it snapped, a failsafe would close off the tube so I wouldn't immediately die. But I'd use up the air in the suit pretty fast.

I couldn't see more than ten or twenty feet in any direction, but Red, I hoped, could see farther. He was moving very fast. Of course, he was unlikely to hit another vehicle or a tree.

I settled down into the bowl—there wasn't anything to see—and was fairly comfortable. I amused myself by imagining the reaction of Dargo Solingen and Mother and Dad when I showed up with an actual Martian.

It felt like an hour or more before he slowed down and we hit the ground and skidded to a stop. He got off his perch laboriously and came around to the dog's side. I got out to help him lift it and was knocked off balance by a gust. Four legs were a definite advantage here.

He watched while I got the umbilical untangled and then pointed me in the direction we were headed. Then he made a shooing motion.

"You have to come with me," I said, uselessly, and tried to translate it into arm motions. He pointed and shoo-ed again, and then backed on to the sawhorse and took off in a slow U-turn.

I started to panic. What if I went in the wrong direction? I could miss the base by twenty feet and just keep walking on into the desert.

And maybe I wasn't even near the base. Maybe Red had left me in the middle of nowhere, for some obscure Martian reason.

That wouldn't make sense. Human sense, anyhow.

I stood alone in the swirling dust and felt helplessness turning into terror.

2

Homecoming

I took a few deep breaths. The dog was pointed in the right direction. I picked up its handle and looked straight ahead as far as I could see, through the swirling gloom. I saw a rock, directly ahead, and walked to it. Then another rock, maybe ten feet away. After the fourth rock, I looked up and saw I'd almost run into the airlock door. I leaned on the big red button and the door slid open immediately. It closed behind the dog and the red light on the ceiling started blinking. It turned green and the inside door opened on a wide-eyed Emily.

"Carmen! You found your way back!"

"Well, um ... not really..."

"Got to call the search party!" She bounded down the stairs yelling for Howard.

I wondered how long they'd been searching for me. I would be in shit up to my chin.

I put the dog back in its place—there was only one other parked there, so three were out looking for me. Or my body.

Card came running in when I was half out of my skinsuit. "Sis!" He grabbed me and hugged me, which was moderately embarrassing. "We thought you were—"

"Yeah, okay. Let me get dressed? Before the shit hits the fan?" He let me turn around and step out of the skinsuit and into my coverall.

"What, you went out for a walk and got lost in that dust storm?"

For a long moment, I thought of saying yes. Who was going to believe my story? I looked at the clock and saw that it was 1900. If it was the same day, seventeen hours had passed. I could have wandered around that long without running out of air, using up the dog reserves.

"How long have I been gone?"

"You can't remember? All foogly day, man. Were you derilious?"

"Delirious." I kneaded my brow and rubbed my face hard with both hands. "Let me wait and tell it all when Mother and Dad get here."

"That'll be hours! They're out looking for you."

"Oh, that's great. Who else?"

"I think it was Paul the pilot."

"Well," said a voice behind me. "You decided to come back after all."

It was Dargo Solingen, of course. There was a quaver of emotion in her voice that I'd never heard. I think rage.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what I was thinking."

"I don't think you were thinking at all. You were being a foolish girl, and you put more lives than your own into danger."

About a dozen people were behind her. "Dargo," Dr. Jefferson said. "She's back, she's alive. Let's give her a little rest."

"Has she given us any rest?" she barked.

"I'm sorry! I'll do anything—"

"You will? Isn't that pretty. What do you propose to do?"

Dr. Estrada put a hand on her shoulder. "Please let me talk to her." Oh, good, a shrink. I needed a xenologist. But she would listen better than Solingen.

"Oh ... do what you want. I'll deal with her later." She turned and walked through the small crowd.

Some people gathered around me and I tried not to cry. I wouldn't want her to think she had made me cry. But there were plenty of shoulders and arms for me to hide my eyes in.

"Carmen." Dr. Estrada touched my forearm. "We ought to talk before your parents get back."

"Okay." A dress rehearsal. I followed her down to the middle of A.

She had a large room to herself, but it was her office as well as quarters. "Lie down here," she indicated her single bunk, "and just try to relax. Begin at the beginning."

"The beginning isn't very interesting. Dargo Solingen embarrassed me in front of everybody. Not the first time, either. Sometimes I feel like I'm her little project. Let's drive Carmen crazy."

"So in going outside like that, you were getting back at her? Getting even in some way?"

"I didn't think of it that way. I just had to get out, and that was the only way."

"Maybe not, Carmen. We can work on ways to get away without physically leaving."

"Like Dad's zen thing, okay. But what I did, or why, isn't really important. It's what I found!"

"So what did you find?"

"Life. Intelligent life. They saved me." I could hear my voice and even I didn't believe it.

"Hmm," she said. "Go on."

"I'd walked four kilometers or so and was about to turn around and go back. But I stepped on a place that wouldn't support my weight. Me and the dog. We fell through. At least ten meters, maybe twenty."

"And you weren't hurt?"

"I was! I heard my ankle break. I broke a rib, maybe more than one, here."

She pressed the area gently. "But you're walking."

"They fixed ... I'm getting ahead of myself."

"So you fell through and broke your ankle?"

"Then I spent a long time finding the dog. My suit light went out when I hit the ground. But finally I found it, found the dog, and got my umbilical plugged in."

"So you had plenty of oxygen."

"But I was freezing. The circuit to my gloves and boots wasn't working. I really thought that was it."

"But you survived."

"I was rescued. I was passing out and this, uh, this Martian came floating down. I saw him in the dog's light. Then everything went black and I woke up—"

"Carmen! You have to see that this was a dream. A hallucination."

"Then how did I get here?"

Her mouth set in a stubborn line. "You were very lucky. You wandered around in the storm and came back here."

"But there was no storm when I left! Just a little wind. The storm came up while I was ... well, I was underground. Where the Martians live."

"You've been through so much, Carmen..."

"This was not a dream!" I tried to stay calm. "Look. You can check the air left in the tanks. My suit and the dog. There will be hours unaccounted for. I was breathing the Martians’ air."

"Carmen ... be reasonable..."

"No, you be reasonable. I'm not saying anything more until—" There was one knock on the door and Mother burst in, followed by Dad.

"My baby," she said. When did she ever call me that? She hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. "You found your way back."

"Mother ... I was just telling Dr. Estrada ... I didn't find my way back. I was brought."

"She had a dream about Martians. A hallucination."

"No! Would you just listen?"

Dad sat down cross-legged, looking up at me. "Start at the beginning, honey."

I did. I took a deep breath and started with taking the suit and the dog and going out to be alone. Falling and breaking my ankle. Waking up in the little hospital room. Red and Green and the others. Seeing the base on their screen. Being healed and brought back.

There was an uncomfortable silence after I finished. "If it wasn't for the dust storm," Dad said, "it would be easy to verify your ... your account. Nobody could see you from here, though, and the satellites won't show anything, either."

"Maybe that's why he was in a rush to bring me back. If they'd waited for the storm to clear, they'd be exposed."

"Why would they be afraid of that?" Dr. Estrada asked.

"Well, I don't know. But I guess it's obvious that they don't want anything to do with us—"

"Except to rescue a lost girl," Mother said.

"Is that so hard to believe? I mean, I couldn't say three words to them, but they seemed to be friendly and good-hearted."

"It just sounds so fantastic," Dad said. "How would you feel in our position? By far the easiest explanation is that you were under extreme stress and—"

"No! Dad, do you really think I would do that? Come up with some elaborate lie?" I could see on his face that he did indeed. Maybe not a lie, but a fantasy. "There's objective proof. Look at the dog. It has a huge dent where it hit the ground in the cave."

"Maybe so; I haven't seen it," he said. "But being devil's advocate, aren't there many other ways that could have happened?"

"What about the air? The air in the dog! I didn't use enough of it to have been out so long."

He nodded. "That would be compelling. Did you dock it?"

Oh hell. "Yes. I wasn't thinking I'd have to prove anything." When you dock the dog it automatically starts to refill air and power. "There must be a record. How much oxygen a dog takes on when it recharges."

They all looked at each other. "Not that I know of," Dad said. "But you don't need that. Let's just do an MRI of your ankle. That'll tell if it was recently broken."

"But they fixed it. The break might not show."

"It will show," Dr. Estrada said. "Unless there was some kind of ... magic involved."

Mother's face was getting red. "Would you both leave? I need to talk to Carmen alone." They both nodded and went out.

Mother watched the door close. "I know you aren't lying. You've never been good at that."

"Thanks," I said. Thanks for nothing.

"But it was a stupid thing to do, going off like that, and you know it."

"I do, I do! And I'm sorry for all the trouble I—"

"But look. I'm a scientist, and so is your dad, after a fashion, and so is almost everybody else who's going to hear this story today. You see what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, I think so. They're going to be skeptical."

"Of course they are. They don't get paid for believing things. They get paid for questioning them."

"And you, Mother. Do you believe me?"

She stared at me with a fierce intensity I'd never seen before in my life. "Look. Whatever happened to you, I believe one hundred percent that you're telling the truth. You're telling the truth about what you remember, what you believe happened."

"But I might be nuts."

"Well, wouldn't you say so? If I came in with your story? You'd say ‘Mom's getting old.’ Wouldn't you?"

"Yeah, maybe I would."

"And to prove that I wasn't crazy, I would take you out and show you something that couldn't be explained any other way. You know what they say about extraordinary claims?"

"They require extraordinary evidence."

"That's right. Once the storm calms down, you and I are going out to where you say ... to where you fell through to the cave." She put her hand on the back of my head and rubbed my hair. "I so much want to believe you. For my sake as well as yours. To find life here."

3

The Dragon Lady

Paul was so sweet when he came in from his search. He hugged me so hard I cried out, from the rib, and then laughed. I'll always remember that. Me laughing and him crying, with his big grin.

For hours he had pictured me out there dead. Prepared himself for finding my body.

It was his for the asking. At least that hadn't changed.

Mother wanted to call a general assembly, so I could tell everybody the complete story, all at once, but Dargo Solingen wouldn't allow it. She said that children do stunts like this to draw attention to themselves, and she wasn't going to reward me with an audience. Of course she's an expert about children, never having had any herself. Good thing. They'd be monsters.

So it was like the whisper game, where you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence to the person next to you, and she whispers it to the next, and so on. When it gets back to you, it's all wrong, sometimes in a funny way.

This was not particularly funny. People would ask if I was really going around on the surface without a Mars suit, or think the Martians stripped me naked and interrogated me, or they broke my ankle on purpose. I put a detailed account on my website, but a lot of people would rather talk than read.

The MRI didn't help much, except for people who wanted to believe I was lying. Dr. Jefferson said it looked like an old childhood injury, long ago healed. Mother was with me at the time, and she told him she was absolutely sure I'd never broken that ankle. To people like Dargo Solingen that was a big shrug; so I'd lied about that, too. I think we won Dr. Jefferson over, though he was inclined to believe me, anyhow. So did most of the people who came over on the John Carter with us. They were willing to believe in Martians before they'd believe I would make up something like that.

Dad didn't want to talk about it, but Mother was fascinated. I went to talk with her at the lab after dinner, where she and two others were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on an experiment.

"I don't see how they could be actual Martians," she said, "in the sense that we're Earthlings. I mean, if they evolved here as oxygen-water creatures similar to us, then that was three billion years ago. And, as you said, a large animal isn't going to evolve alone, without any other animals. Nor will it suddenly appear, without smaller, simpler animals preceding it. So they must be like us."

"From Earth?"

She laughed. "I don't think so. None of the eight-limbed creatures on Earth have very high technology. I think they have to have come from yet another planet. Unless we're completely wrong about areology, about the history of conditions on this planet, they can't have come from here."

"What if they used to live on the surface?" I said. "Then moved underground as the planet dried up and lost its air?"

She shook her head. "The time scale. No species more complicated than a bacterium has survived for billions of years."

"None on Earth," I said.

"Touché," she laughed. A bell chimed and she went to the other side of the room and looked inside an aquarium, or terrarium. Or ares-arium, here, I suppose. She looked at the things growing inside and typed some numbers onto her clipboard.

"So they went underground three billion years ago with the technology to duplicate what sounds like a high-altitude Earth environment. And stayed that way for three billion years." She shook her head. "The record in Earth creatures is a bacterium that's symbiotic with aphids. Genome hasn't changed in fifty million years."

She laughed. "This would be sixty times longer? For such a complex organism? And I still want to know where the fossils are. Maybe they dug them all up and destroyed them, just to confuse us?"

"But it's not like we've looked everywhere. Paul says it may be that life wasn't distributed uniformly, and we just haven't found any of the islands where things lived. The dinosaurs or whatever."

"Well, you know it didn't work that way on Earth. Fossils everywhere, from the bottom of the sea to the top of the Himalayas. Crocodile fossils in Antarctica."

"Okay. That's Earth."

"It's all we have. Coffee?" I said no and she poured herself half a cup. "You're right that it's weak to generalize from one example. Paul could very well be right, too; there's no evidence one way or the other.

"But look. We know all about one form of life on Mars: you and me and the others. We have to live in an artificial bubble that contains an alien environment, maintained by high technology, because we are the aliens here. So you stumble on eight-legged potato people who also live in a bubble that contains an alien environment, evidently maintained by high technology. The simplest explanation is that they're aliens, too. Alien to Mars."

"Yeah, I don't disagree. I know about Occam's Razor."

She smiled at that. "What's fascinating to me, one of many things, is that you spent hours in that environment and felt no ill effects. Their planet's very Earthlike."

"What if it was Earth?"

That stopped her. "Wouldn't we have noticed?"

"I mean a long time ago. What if they lived only on mountaintops and developed high technology thousands and thousands of years ago. Then they all left."

"It's an idea," she said. "But it's hard to believe that every one of them would be willing and able to leave—and that there would be no trace of their civilization, ten or even a hundred thousand years later. And where are their genetic precursors? The eight-legged equivalent of apes?"

"You don't really believe me."

"Well, I do; I do," she said seriously. "I just don't think there's an easy explanation."

"Like Dargo Solingen's? The Figment of Imagination Theory?"

"Especially that. People don't have complex consistent hallucinations; they're called hallucinations because they're fantastic, dreamlike.

"Besides, I saw the dog; you couldn't have put that dent in it with a lead-lined baseball bat. And she can't explain the damage to your Mars suit, either, without positing that you leaped off the side of a cliff just to give yourself an alibi." She was getting worked up. "And I'm your mother, even if I'm not a model one. I would goddamn remember if you had ever broken your ankle! That healed hairline fracture is enough proof for me—and for Dr. Jefferson and Dr. Milius and anybody else in this goddamn hole who didn't convict you before you opened your mouth."

"You've been a good mother," I said.

She suddenly sat up and awkwardly hugged me across the table. "Not so good. Or you wouldn't have done this."

She sat down and rubbed my hand. "But if you hadn't done it—" She laughed. "—how long would it have been before we stumbled on these aliens? They're watching us, but don't seem eager to have us see them."

The window on the wall was a greenboard of differential equations. She clicked on her clipboard and it became a real-time window. The storm was still blowing, but it had thinned out enough so I could see a vague outline of Telegraph Hill.

"Maybe tomorrow we'll be able to go out and take a look. If Paul's free, he'd probably like to come along; nobody knows the local real estate better than him."

I stood up. "I can hardly wait. But I will wait, promise."

"Good. Once is enough." She smiled up at me. "Get some rest. Probably a long day tomorrow."

Actually, I was up past midnight catching up on schoolwork, or not quite catching up. My brain wouldn't settle down enough to worry about Kant and his Categorical Imperative. Not with aliens out there waiting to be contacted.

4

Bad Cough

Paul was free until 1400, so right after breakfast we suited up and equipped a dog with extra oxygen and climbing gear. He'd done a lot of climbing and caving on both Earth and Mars. If we found the hole—when we found the hole—he was going to approach it roped up, so if he broke through the way I had, he wouldn't fall far or fast.

I'd awakened early with a slight cough, but felt okay. I got some cough suppressant pills from the first-aid locker, chewed one, and put two in my helmet's tongue-operated pill cache.

We went through the airlock and weren't surprised to see that the storm had covered all my tracks, and everyone else's—including Red's; I was hoping that his sawhorse thing might have gouged out a distinctive mark when it stopped.

We still had a good chance of finding the hole, thanks to the MPS built into the suit and its inertial compass. I'd started counting steps, going west, when I set out from Telegraph Hill, and was close to five thousand when I fell through. That's about four kilometers, maybe an hour's walk in the daytime.

"So we're probably being watched," Mother said, and waved to the invisible camera. "Hey there, Mr. Red! Hello, Dr. Green! We're bringing back your patient with the insurance forms."

I waved, too, both arms. Paul put up both his hands palm out, showing he wasn't armed. Though what it would mean to a four-armed creature, I wasn't sure.

No welcoming party appeared, so we went to the right of Telegraph Hill and started walking and counting. A lot of the terrain looked familiar. Several times I had us move to the left or right when I was sure I had been closer to a given formation.

We walked a half kilometer or so past Paul's wrecked dumbo. I hadn't seen it in the dark.

Suddenly I noticed something. "Wait! Paul! I think it's just ahead of you." I hadn't realized it, walking in the dark, but what seemed to be a simple rise in the ground was actually rounded, like an overturned shallow bowl.

"Like a little lava dome, maybe," he said. "That's where you fell through." He pointed at something I couldn't quite see from my angle and height. "Big enough for you and the dog, anyhow."

He unloaded his mountaineering stuff from the dog, then took a hammer and pounded into the ground a long piton, which is like a spearpoint with a hole for the rope. Then he did another one about a foot away. He passed an end of the rope through both of them and tied it off.

He pulled on the rope with all his weight. "Carmen, Laura, help me test this." We did and it still held. He looped most of the rope over his shoulder and took a couple of turns under his arms and then clamped it through a metal thing he called a crab. It's supposed to keep you from falling too fast, even if you let go.

"This probably isn't all necessary," he said, "since I'm just taking a look down. But better safe than dead." He backed up the slight incline, checking over his shoulder, and then got on his knees to approach the hole.

I held my breath as he took out a big flashlight and leaned over the edge. I didn't hear Mother breathing, either.

"Okay!" he said. "There's the side reflector that broke off your dog. I've got a good picture."

"Good," I tried to say, but it came out as a cough. Then another cough, and then several, harder and harder. I felt faint and sat down and tried to stay calm. Eyes closed, shallow breathing.

When I opened my eyes, I saw specks of blood on the inside of my helmet. I could taste it inside my mouth and on my lips. "Mother, I'm sick."

She saw the blood and kneeled down next to me. "Breathe. Can you breathe?"

"Yes. I don't think it's the suit." She was checking the oxygen fitting and meter on the back.

"How long have you felt sick?"

"Not long ... well, now I do. I had a little cough this morning."

"And didn't tell anybody."

"No, I took a pill and it was all right."

"I can see how all right it was. Do you think you can stand?"

I nodded and got to my feet, wobbling a little. She held on to my arm. Then Paul came up and held the other.

"I can just see the antenna on Telegraph Hill," he said. "I'll call for the jeep."

"No, don't," I pleaded. "I don't want to give the Dragon the satisfaction."

Mother gave a nervous laugh. "This is way beyond that, sweetheart. Blood in your lungs? What if I let you walk back and you dropped dead?"

"I'm not going to die." But saying that gave me a horrible chill. Then I coughed a bright red string onto my faceplate. Mother eased me back down and awkwardly sat with my helmet in her lap while Paul shouted "Mayday!" over the radio.

"Where did they come up with that word?" I asked Mother.

"Easy to understand on a radio, I guess. ‘Mo’ dough’ would work just as well." I heard the click as her glove touched my helmet. Trying to smooth my hair.

I didn't cry. Embarrassing to admit, but I guess I felt kind of important, dying and all. Dargo Solingen would feel like shit for doubting me. Though the cause-and-effect link there wasn't too clear.

I lay there trying not to cough for maybe twenty minutes before the jeep pulled up, driven by Dad. One big happy family. He and mother lifted me into the back and Paul took over the driving, leaving the dog and his climbing stuff behind.

It was a fast and rough ride back. I got into another coughing spasm and spattered more blood and goop on the faceplate.

Mother and Dad carried me into the airlock like a sack of grain and then were all over each other trying to get me out of the Mars suit. At least they left the skinsuit on while they hurried me through the corridor and mess area to Dr. Jefferson's aid station.

He asked my parents to step outside, set me on the examination table, and stripped off the top of the skinsuit, to listen to my breathing with a stethoscope. He shook his head.

"Carmen, it sure sounds as if you've got something in your lungs. But when I heard you were coming in with this, I looked at the whole-body MRI we took yesterday, and there's nothing there." He clicked on his clipboard and asked the window for my MRI, and there I was in all my transparent glory.

"Better take another one." He pulled the top up over my shoulders. "You don't have to take anything off; just lie down here." The act of lying down made me cough sharply, but I caught it in my palm.

He took a tissue and gently wiped my hand, and looked at the blood. "Damn," he said quietly. "You aren't a smoker. I mean on Earth."

"Just twice. Once tobacco and once pot. Just one time each."

He nodded. "Now take a really deep breath and try to hold it." He took the MRI wand and passed it back and forth over my upper body. "Okay. You can breathe now.

"New picture," he said to the window. Then he was quiet for too long.

"Oh my. What ... what could that be?"

I looked, and there were black shapes in both of my lungs, about the size of golf balls. "What is ... what are they?"

He shook his head. "Not cancer, not an infection, this fast. Bronchitis wouldn't show up black, anyhow. Better call Earth." He looked at me with concern and something else, maybe puzzlement. "Let's get you into bed in the next room, and I'll give you a sedative. Stop the coughing. And then maybe I'll take a look inside."

"Inside?"

"Brachioscopy, put a little camera down there. You won't feel anything."

* * * *

In fact, I didn't feel anything until I woke up several hours later. Mother was sitting by the bed, her hand on my forehead.

"My nose ... the inside of my nose feels funny."

"That's where the tube went in. The brachioscope."

"Oh, yuck. Did he find anything?"

She hesitated. "It's ... not from Earth. They snipped off some of it and took it to the lab. It's not ... it doesn't have DNA."

"I've got a Martian disease?"

"Mars, or wherever your potato people are from. Not Earth, anyhow; everything alive on Earth has DNA."

I prodded where it ached, under my ribs. "It's not organic?"

"Well, it is. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur—it has amino acids and proteins and even something like RNA. But that's as far as it goes."

That sounded bad enough. "So they're going to have to operate? On both of my lungs?"

She made a little noise and I looked up and saw her wiping her eyes. "What is it? Mother?"

"It's not that simple. The little piece they snipped off, it had to go straight into the glove box, the environmental isolation unit. That's the procedure we have for any Martian life we discover, because we don't know what effect it might have on human life. In your case..."

"In my case, it's already attacked a human."

"That's right. And they can't operate on you in the glove box."

"So they're just going to leave it there?"

"No. But Dr. Jefferson can't operate until he can work in a place that's environmentally isolated from the rest of the base. They're working on it now, turning the far end of Unit B into a little self-contained hospital. You'll move in there tomorrow or the next day, and he'll take out the stuff. Two operations."

"Two?"

"The first lung has to be working before he opens the second. On Earth, he could put you on a heart/lung machine, I guess, and work on both. But not here."

I felt suddenly cold and clammy and I must have turned pale. "It's not that bad," Mother said quickly. "He doesn't have to open you up; he'll be working through a small hole in your side. It's called thorascopy. Like when I had my knee operated on, and I was just in and out. And he'll have the best surgeons on Earth looking over his shoulder, advising him."

With a half-hour delay, I thought. What if their advice was "No—don't do that!" Oops.

I thought of an old bad joke: Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt. I could be the first person ever buried on Mars, what an honor.

"Wait," I said. "Maybe they could help."

"The Earth doctors? Sure—"

"No! I mean the aliens."

"Honey, they couldn't—"

"They fixed my ankle just like that, didn't they?"

"Well, evidently they did. But that's sort of a mechanical thing. They wouldn't have to know any internal medicine..."

"But it wasn't medicine at all, not like we know it. Those big lenses, the smoking herbs. It was kind of mumbo-jumbo, but it worked!"

There was one loud rap on the door, and Dr. Jefferson opened it and stepped inside, looking agitated. "Laura, Carmen—things have gone from bad to worse. The Parienza kids started coughing blood; they've got it. So I put my boy through the MRI, and he's got a mass in one of his lungs, too.

"Look, I have to operate on the Parienzas first; they're young and this is hitting them harder..."

"That's okay," I said. By all means, get some practice on someone else first.

"Laura, I want you to assist me in the surgery along with Selene." Dr. Milius. "So far, this is only infecting the children. If it gets into the general population, if I get it—"

"Alf! I'm not a surgeon—I'm not even a doctor!"

"If Selene and I get this and die, you are a doctor. You are the doctor. You at least know how to use a scalpel."

"Cutting up animals that are already dead!"

"Just ... calm down. The machine's not that complicated. It's a standard waldo interface, and you have real-time MRI to show you where you're going."

"Can you hear yourself talking, Alphonzo? I'm just a biologist."

There was a long moment of silence while he looked at her. "Just come and pay attention. You might have to do Carmen."

"All right," Mother said. She looked grim. "Now?"

He nodded. "Selene's preparing them. I'm going to operate on Murray while she watches and assists; then she'll do Roberta while I observe. Maybe an hour and a half each."

"What can I do?" I said.

"Just stay put and try to rest," he said. "We'll get to you in three or four hours. Don't worry ... you won't feel anything." Then he and Mother were gone.

Won't feel anything? I was already feeling pretty crappy. I get pissed off and go for a walk and bring back the Plague from Outer Space?

I touched the window and said "Window outside." It was almost completely dark, just a faint line of red showing the horizon. The dust storm was over.

The whole plan crystallized then. I guess I'd been thinking of parts of it since I knew I'd be alone for a while.

I just zipped up my skinsuit and walked. The main corridor was almost deserted, people running along on urgent errands. Nobody was thinking of going outside—no one but me.

If the aliens had had a picture of me leaving the base at two in the morning, before, then they probably were watching us all the time. I could signal them. Send a message to Red.

I searched around for a pencil to disable the airlock buzzer. Even while I was doing it, I wondered whether I was acting sanely. Was I just trying to escape being operated on? Mother used to say "Do something, even if it's wrong." There didn't seem to be anything else to do other than sit around and watch the situation deteriorate.

If the aliens were watching, I could make Red understand how serious it was. Whether he and Green could do anything, I didn't know. But what else was there? Things were happening too fast.

I didn't run into anyone until I was almost there. Then I nearly collided with Card as he stepped out of the mess hall bathroom.

"What you doing over here?" he said. "I thought you were supposed to be in sick bay."

"No, I'm just—" Of course I started coughing. "Let me by, all right?"

"No! What are you up to?"

"Look, microbe. I don't have time to explain." I pushed by him. "Every second counts."

"You're going outside again! What are you, crazy?"

"Look, look, look—for once in your life, don't be a..." I had a moment of desperate inspiration and grabbed him by the shoulders. "Card, listen. I need you. You have to trust me."

"What, this is about your crazy Martian story?"

"I can prove it's not crazy, but you have to come help me."

"Help you with what?"

"Just suit up and step outside with me. I think they'll come, the Martians, if I signal them, and they might be able to help us."

He was hesitant. I knew he only half believed me—but at least he did half believe me. "What? What do you want me to do outside?"

"I just want you to stand in the door, so the airlock can't close. That way the Dragon can't come out and froog the deal."

That did make him smile. "So what you want is for me to be in as deep shit as you are."

"Exactly! Are you up for it?"

"You are so easy to see through, you know? You could be a window."

"Yeah, yeah. Are you with me?"

He glanced toward the changing room, and then back down the hall. "Let's go."

We must have gotten me into my suit in ninety seconds flat. It took him an extra minute because he had to strip and wiggle into the skinsuit first. I kept my eye on the changing room door, but I didn't have any idea what I would say if someone walked in. Just a little incest?

My face plate was still spattered with dried blood, which was part of the vague plan: I assumed they would know that the blood meant trouble, and their bug camera, or whatever it was, would be on me as soon as I stepped outside. I had a powerful flashlight and would turn that on my face, with no other lights, then wave my arms, jump around, whatever.

We rushed through the safety check and I put two fresh oxygen bottles into the dog I'd bashed up. Disabled the buzzer, and we crowded into the airlock, closed it, and cycled it.

We'd agreed not to use the radio. Card signaled for me to touch helmets. "How long?"

"An hour, anyhow." I could walk past Telegraph Hill by then.

"Okay. Watch where you step, clumsy." I hit his arm.

The door opened and I stepped out into the darkness. There was a little light, actually; the Sun had just gone down.

Card put one foot out on the sand and leaned back against the door. He pantomimed looking at his watch.

I closed my eyes and pointed the light at my face. Bright red through my eyelids; I knew I'd be dazzled blind for a while after I stopped. So after I'd given them a minute of the bloody faceplate I just stood in one place and shined the light out over the plain, waving it around in fast circles, which I hoped would mean, "Help!"

I wasn't sure how long it had taken Red to bring me from their habitat level to the cave where he was parked, and then on to here. Maybe two hours? I hadn't been tracking too well. Without a dust storm it might be faster. I pulled on the dog and headed toward the right of Telegraph Hill.

The last thing I expected to happen was this: I hadn't walked twenty yards when Red came zooming up on his weird vehicle and stopped in a great spray of dust, which sparkled in the last light of dusk.

Card broke radio silence with a justifiable "Holy shit!"

Red helped me put the dog on one side and I got into the other and we were off. I looked back and waved at Card, and he waved back. The base shrank really fast and slipped under the horizon.

I looked forward for a moment and then turned away. It was just a little too scary, screaming along a few inches over the ground, missing boulders by a hair. The steering must have been automatic. Or maybe Red had inhuman reflexes. Nothing else about him was all that human.

Except the need to come back and help. He must have been waiting nearby.

It seemed no more than ten or twelve minutes before the thing slowed down and drifted into the slanted cave I remembered. Maybe he had taken a roundabout way before, to hide the fact that they were so close.

We got out the dog and I followed him back down the way we had come a couple of days before. I had to stop twice with coughing fits, and by the time we got to the place where he shed his Mars suit, there was a scary amount of blood.

An odd thing to think, but I wondered whether he would take my body back if I died here. Why should I care?

We went on down, and at the level where the lake was visible, Green was waiting, along with two small ones dressed in white. We went together down to the dark floor and followed blue lines back to what seemed to be the same hospital room where I'd first awakened after the accident.

I slumped down on the pillow, feeling completely drained and about to barf. I unshipped my helmet and took a cautious breath. It smelled like a cold mushroom farm, exactly what I expected.

Red handed me a glass of water and I took it gratefully. Then he picked up my helmet with his two large arms and did a curiously human thing with a small one: he wiped a bit of blood off the inside with one finger, and then lifted it to his mouth to taste it.

"Wait!" I said. "That could be poison to you!"

He set the helmet down. "How nice of you to be concerned," he said, in a voice like a British cube actor.

I just shook my head. After a few seconds I was able to squeak, "What?"

"Many of us can speak English," Green said, "or other's of your languages. We've been listening to your radio, television, and cube for two hundred years."

"But ... before ... you..."

"That was to protect ourselves," Red said. "When we saw you had hurt yourself and I had to bring you here, it was decided that no one would speak a human language in your presence. We are not ready to make contact with humans. You are a dangerous violent race that tends to destroy what it doesn't understand."

"Not all of us," I said.

"We know that. We were considering various courses of action when we found out you were ill."

"We monitor your colony's communications with Earth," one of the white ones said, "and saw immediately what was happening to you. We all have that breathing fungus soon after we're born. But with us it isn't serious. We have an herb that cures it permanently."

"So ... you can fix it?"

Red spread out all four hands. "We are so different from you, in chemistry and biology. The treatment might help you. It might kill you."

"But this crap is sure to kill me if we don't do anything!"

The other white-clad one spoke up. "We don't know. I am called Rezlan, and I am ... of a class that studies your people. A scientist, or philosopher.

"The fungus would certainly kill you if it continued to grow. It would fill up your lungs and you couldn't breathe. But we don't know; it never happens to us. Your body may learn to adapt to it, and it would be ... illegal? Immoral, improper ... for us to experiment on you. If you were to die ... I don't know how to say it. Impossible."

"The cure for your cheville? Your ... ankle was different," Green said. "There was no risk to your life."

I coughed and stared at the spatter of blood on my palm. "But if you don't treat me, and I die? Won't that be the same thing?"

All four of them made a strange buzzing sound. Red patted my shoulder. "Carmen, that's a wonderful joke. ‘The same thing.'" He buzzed again, and so did the others.

"Wait," I said, "I'm going to die and it's funny?"

"No, no, non," Green said. "Dying itself isn't funny." Red put his large hands on his potato head and waggled it back and forth, and the others buzzed.

Red tapped his head three times, which set them off again. A natural comedian. "If you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny."

I started to cry, and he took my hand in his small scaly one and patted it. "We are so different. What is funny ... is how we here are caught. We don't have a choice. We have to treat you even though we don't know what the outcome will be." He buzzed softly. "But that's not funny to you."

"No!" I tried not to wail. "I can see this part. There's a paradox. You might kill me, trying to help me."

"And that's not funny to you?"

"No, not really. Not at all, really."

"Would it be funny if it was somebody else?"

"Funny? No!"

"What if it was your worst enemy? Would that make you smile?"

"No. I don't have any enemies that bad." Maybe one.

He said something that made the others buzz. I gritted my teeth and tried not to cry. My whole chest hurt, like both lungs held a burning ton of crud, and here I was trying not to barf in front of a bunch of potato-head aliens. "Red. Even if I don't get the joke. Could you do the treatment before I foogly die?"

"Oh, Carmen. It's being prepared. This is ... it's a way of dealing with difficult things. We joke. You would say laughing instead of crying." He turned around, evidently looking back the way we had come, though it's hard to tell which way a potato is looking. "It is taking too long, which is part of why we have to laugh. When we have children, it's all at one time, and so they all need the treatment at the same time, a few hundred days later, after they bud. We're trying to grow ... it's like trying to find a vegetable out of season? We have to make it grow when it doesn't want to. And make enough for the other younglings in your colony."

"The adults don't get it?"

He did a kind of shrug. "We don't. Or rather, we only get it once, as children. Do you know about whooping cough and measles?"

"What-sels?"

"Measles and whooping cough used to be diseases humans got as children. Before your parents’ parents were born. We heard about them on the radio, and they reminded us of this."

A new green-clad small one came through the plastic sheets, holding a stone bowl. She and Red exchanged a few whistles and scrapes. "If you are like us when we are small," he said, "this will make you excrete in every way. So you may want to undress."

How wonderful. Here comes Carmen, the shitting, pissing, farting, burping, barfing human sideshow. Don't forget snot and earwax. I got out of the Mars suit and unzipped the skinsuit and stepped out of that. I was cold, and every orifice clenched up tight. "Okay. Let's go."

Red held my right arm with his two large ones, and Green did the same on the left. Not a good sign. The new green one spit into the bowl and it started to smoke.

She brought the smoking herb under my nose and I tried to get away, but Red and Green held me fast. It was the worst smelling crap you could ever imagine. I barfed through mouth and nose and then started retching and coughing explosively, horribly, like a cat with a hairball. It did bring up the two fungus things, like furry rotten fruit. I would've barfed again if there had been anything left in my stomach, but I decided to pass out instead.

5

Invasion from Earth

I half woke up, I don't know how much later, with Red tugging gently on my arm. "Carmen," he said, "do you live now? There is a problem."

I grunted something that meant yes, I am alive, but no, I'm not sure I want to be. My throat felt like someone had pulled something scratchy and dead up through it. "Sleep," I said, but he picked me up and started carrying me like a child.

"There are humans from the colony here," he said, speeding up to a run. "They do not understand. They're wrecking everything." He blew through the plastic sheets into the dark hall.

"Red ... it's hard to breathe here." He didn't respond, just ran faster, a rippling horse gait. His own breath was coming hard, like sheets of paper being ripped. "Red. I need ... suit. Oxygen."

"As we do." We were suddenly in the middle of a crowd—hundreds of them in various sizes and colors—surging up the ramp toward the surface. He said three short words over and over, very loud, and the crowd stopped moving and parted to let us through.

When we went through the next set of doors I could hear air whistling out. On the other side my ears popped with a painful crack and I felt cold, colder than I ever had been. "What's happening?"

"Your ... humans ... have a ... thing." He was wheezing before each word. "A tool ... that ... tears ... through."

He set me down gently on the cold rock floor. I shuddered out of control, teeth chattering. No air. Lungs full of nothing but pain. The world was going white. I was starting to die, but instead of praying or something I just noticed that the hairs in my nose had frozen and were making a crinkly sound when I tried to breathe.

Red was putting on the plastic layers that made up his Mars suit. He picked me up and I cried out in startled pain—the skin on my right forearm and breast and hip had frozen to the rock—and he held me close with three arms while the fourth did something to seal the plastic. Then he held me with all four arms and crooned something reassuring to weird creatures from another planet. He smelled like a mushroom you wouldn't eat, but I could breathe again.

I was bleeding some from the ripped skin and my lungs and throat still didn't want to work, and I was being hugged to death by a nightmarish singing monster, so rather than put up with it all my body just passed out again.

I woke up to my lover fighting with Red, with me in between. Red was trying to hold on to me with his small arms while Paul was going after him with some sort of pipe, and he was defending himself with the large arms. "No!" I screamed. "Paul! No!"

Of course he couldn't hear anything in the vacuum, but I guess anyone can lip-read the word "no." He stepped back with an expression on his face that I had never seen. Anguish, I suppose, or rage. Well, here was his lover, naked and bleeding, in the many arms of a gruesome alien, looking way too much like a movie poster from a century ago.

Taka Wu and Mike Silverman were carrying a spalling laser. "Red," I said, "watch out for the guys with the machine."

"I know," he said, "We've seen you use it underground. That's how they tore up the first set of doors. We can't let them use it again."

It was an interesting standoff. Four big aliens in their plastic-wrap suits. Paul and my father and mother and nine other humans in Mars suits, armed with tomato stakes and shovels and one laser, the humans looking kind of pissed off and frightened. The Martians probably were, too. A good thing we hadn't brought any guns to this planet.

Red whispered. "Can you make them leave the machine and follow us?"

"I don't know ... they're scared." I mouthed "Mother, Dad," and pointed back the way we had come. "Fol-low us," I said with slow exaggeration. Confined as I was, I couldn't make any sweeping gestures, but I jabbed one forefinger back the way we had come.

Dad stepped forward slowly, his hands palm out. Mother started to follow him. Red shifted me around and held out his hand and my father took it and held his other one out for Mother. She took it and we went crabwise through the dark layers of the second airlock. Then the third and the fourth, and we were on the slope overlooking the lake.

The crowd of aliens we'd left behind was still there, perhaps a daunting sight for Mother and Dad. But they held on, and the crowd parted to let us through.

I noticed ice was forming on the edge of the lake. Were we going to kill them all?

"Pardon," Red muttered, and held me so hard I couldn't breathe, while he wiggled out of his suit and left it on the ground, then set me down gently.

It was like walking on ice—on dry ice—and my breath came out in plumes. But he and I walked together along the blue line paths, followed by my parents, down to the sanctuary of the white room. Green was waiting there with my skinsuit. I gratefully pulled it on and zipped up. "Boots?"

"Boots," she said, and went back the way we'd come.

"Are you all right?" Red asked.

My father had his helmet off. "These things speak English?"

Red sort of shrugged. "And Chinese, in my case. We've been eavesdropping on you since you discovered radio."

My father fainted dead away.

* * * *

Green produced this thing that looked like a gray cabbage and held it by Dad's face. I had a vague memory of it being used on me, sort of like an oxygen source. He came around in a minute or so.

"Are you actually Martians?" Mother said. "You can't be."

Red nodded in a jerky way. "We are Martians only the same way you are. We live here. But we came from somewhere else."

"Where?" Dad croaked.

"No time for that. You have to talk to your people. We're losing air and heat and have to repair the door. Then we have to treat your children. Carmen was near death."

Dad got to his knees and stood up, then stooped to pick up his helmet. "You know how to fix it? The laser damage."

"It knows how to repair itself. But it's like a wound in the body. We have to use stitches or glue to close the hole. Then it grows back."

"So you just need for us to not interfere."

"And help, by showing where the damage is."

He started to put his helmet on. "What about Carmen?"

"Yeah. Where's my suit?"

Red faced me. I realized you could tell that by the little black mouth slit. "You're very weak. You should stay here."

"But—"

"No time to argue. Stay here till we return." All of them but Green went bustling through the airlock.

"So," I said to her. "I guess I'm a hostage."

"My English is not good," she said. "Parlez-vous francais?" I said no. "Nihongo de hanashimasu ka?"

Probably Japanese, or maybe Martian. "No, sorry." I sat down and waited for the air to run out.

6

Zen for Morons

Green put a kind of black fibrous poultice on the places where my skin had burned off from the icy ground, and the pain stopped immediately. That raised a big question I couldn't ask, having neglected both French and Japanese in school. But help was on its way.

While I was getting dressed after Green had finished her poulticing, another green one showed up.

"Hello," it said. "I was asked here because I know English. Some English."

"I—I'm glad to meet you. I'm Carmen."

"I know. And you want me to say my name. But you couldn't say it yourself. So give me a name."

"Um ... Robin Hood?"

"I am Robin Hood, then. I am pleased to meet you."

I couldn't think of any pleasantries, so I dove right in: "How come your medicine works for us? My mother says we're unrelated at the most basic level, DNA."

"Am I ‘DNA’ now? I thought I was Robin Hood."

This was not going to be easy. "No. Yes. You're Robin Hood. Why does your medicine work on humans?"

"I don't understand. Why shouldn't it? It's medicine."

So much for the Enigmatic Superior Aliens theory. "Look. You know what a molecule is?"

"I know the word. Very small. Too small to see." He took his big head in two large-arm hands and wiggled it, the way Red did when he was agitated. "Forgive me. Science is not my ... there is no word. I can't know science. I don't think any of us can, really. But especially not me."

I gestured at everything. "Then where did this all come from? It didn't just happen."

"That's right. It didn't happen. It's always been this way."

I needed a scientist and they sent me a philosopher. Not too bright, either. "Can you ask her?" I pointed to Green. "How can her medicine work, when we're chemically so different?"

"She's not a ‘her.’ Sometimes she is, and sometimes she's a ‘he.’ Right now she's a ‘what.’"

"Okay. Would you please ask it?"

They exchanged a long series of wheedly-poot-rasp sounds.

"It's something like this," Robin Hood said. "Curing takes intelligence. With Earth humans, the intelligence comes along with the doctor, or scientists. With us, it's in the medicine." He touched the stuff on my breast, which made me jump. "It knows you are different and works on you differently. It works on the very smallest level."

"Nanotechnology," I said.

"Maybe smaller than that," he said. "As small as chemistry. Intelligent molecules."

"You do know about nanotechnology?"

"Only from TV and the cube." He spidered over to the bed. "Please sit. You make me nervous, balanced there on two legs."

I obliged him. "This is how different we are, Carmen. You know when nanotechnology was discovered."

"End of the twentieth century sometime."

"There's no such knowledge for us. This medicine has always been. Like the living doors that keep the air in. Like the things that make the air, concentrate the oxygen. Somebody made them, but that was so long ago, it was before history. Before we came to Mars."

"Where did you come from? When?"

"We would call it Earth, though it's not your Earth, of course. Really far away, really long ago." He paused. "More than ten thousand ares."

A hundred centuries before the Pyramids. "But that's not long enough ago for Mars to be inhabitable. Mars was Mars a million ares ago."

He made an almost human gesture, all four hands palms up. "It could be much longer. At ten thousand ares, history becomes mystery. Our far-away Earth could be a myth, and the Others who created us. There aren't any spaceships lying around.

"What deepens the mystery is that we could never live on Mars, on the surface, but we could live on Earth, your Earth. So why did the Others bring us many light years just to leave us on the wrong planet?"

I thought about what Red had said. "Maybe because we're too dangerous."

"That's a theory. Or it might have been the dinosaurs. They looked pretty dangerous."

Dinosaurs. I took a deep breath. "Robin Hood. Have you, have your people, actually been on Mars that long? I mean, dinosaurs were on Earth a long time before people."

He wiggled his head again, with his big hands. "I don't know! You have to ask the story family, the history family. The yellow people?"

I remembered the two dressed in amber in that room where I was taken for inspection. "Okay. I'll ask a yellow person. So what do green people do? Are you doctors?"

"Oh, no." He pointed at the other. "It's green and it's a doctor. But why would you think that all of us greens are doctors? Every human I ever saw wears white, but I don't think therefore that you all have the same function."

Good grief. Was I the first cross-species racist? "I'm sorry. What is it that you do, then?"

He shuffled forward and back like a nervous spider. "I'm not a ‘do'—" He put a small hand on my knee. "—I'm more a ‘be.’ You humans..." He touched his head with both large hands but didn't wiggle it. "You are all about what you do. Like, what do you do, Carmen?"

"I'm a student. I study things."

"But that's not a ‘do’ at all! That's a be, like me."

I was either out of my depth or into a profound shallowness. "So while you're ... being, what do you ... be? What do you be that's different from what others be?"

"You see? You see?" He emitted a sound like a thumbnail scraping across a comb. "'What do you be'—you can't even say it!"

"Robin Hood. Look. I'm both a do and a be—my ‘be’ is I'm a human being, female, American, whatever—it's what I am when I'm just standing here. But then I can go do something, like get a drink of water, and that doesn't change my be at all."

"But it does! It always does. Don't you see?"

Ontology, meet linguistics. Go to your corners and come out swinging. "You're right, Robin. You're absolutely right. We just don't put things quite that way."

"Put things?"

"We don't say it quite that way." I took a deep breath. "Tell me about these Others. They lived very far away?"

"Yes, very far. We used to call it something like the ‘heaven’ some humans talk about, but since we got TV and the cube, we know it's just really far away. Some other star."

"But you don't know which one."

"No, not which and not how long ago. But very far and very long. The story family says it was a time before time had meaning. The builder family says it must be so far away that light takes ares to get from that star to here. Because there are no stars any closer."

"That's interesting. You don't have telescopes and things, but you figured that out?"

"We don't need telescopes. We get that kind of knowledge from you humans, from the cube."

"Before the cube, though. They were up in heaven?"

"I guess so. We also learned about gods from you. The Others are sort of gods; they created us. But they actually exist."

Red suddenly appeared to rescue me from Sunday school. "Carmen, if you feel able, we'd like to have you up where we're working. The humans are not understanding us too well."

My experience with Robin Hood didn't make me too hopeful. But I could do "pick this up and put it there." I stepped into my suit and chinned the heat up all the way and followed him up to the cold.

7

Suffer the Little Children

The damage from the laser was repaired in a few hours, and I was bundled back to the colony to be rayed and poked and prodded and interviewed by doctors and scientists. They couldn't find anything wrong with me, human or alien in origin.

"The treatment they gave you sounds like primitive arm-waving," Dr. Jefferson said. "The fact that they don't know why it works is scary."

"They don't know why anything works over there. It sounds like it's all hand-me-down science from thousands of years ago. Ares."

He nodded and frowned. "You're the only data point we have. If the disease were less serious, I'd try to introduce it to the kids one at a time and monitor their progress. But there's no time. And everyone may have it already."

Rather than try to take a bunch of sick children over there, they invited the Martians to come to us. It was Red and Green, logically, with Robin Hood and an amber one following closely behind. I was outside, waiting for them, and escorted Red through the airlock.

Half the adults in the colony seemed crowded into the changing room for a first look at the aliens. There was a lot of whispered conversation while Red worked his way out of his suit.

"It's hot," he said. "The oxygen makes me dizzy. This is less than Earth, though?"

"Slightly less," Dr. Jefferson said. He was in the front of the crowd. "Like living on a mountain."

"It smells strange. But not bad. I can smell your hydroponics."

"Where are les enfantes?" Green said as soon as she was out of the suit. "No time talk." She held out her bag of herbs and chemicals and shook it.

The children had been prepared with the idea that these "Martians" were our friends and had a way to cure them. There were pictures of them and their cave. But a picture of an eight-legged potato-head monstrosity isn't nearly as distressing as the real thing—especially to a room full of children who are terribly ill with something no one can explain, but which they know is Martian in origin. So their reaction when Dr. Jefferson walked in with Dargo Solingen and Green was predictable—screaming and crying and, from the ambulatory ones, escape attempts. Of course the doors were locked, with people like me spying in through the windows, looking in on the chaos.

Everybody loves Dr. Jefferson, and almost everybody is afraid of Dargo Solingen, and eventually the combination worked. Green just quietly stood there like Exhibit A, which helped. It takes a while not to think of giant spiders when you see them walk.

They had talked about the possibility of sedating the children, to make the experience less traumatic, but the only data they had about the treatment was my description, and they were afraid that if the children were too relaxed, they wouldn't cough forcefully enough to expel all the crap. Without sedation, the experience might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but at least they would have lives.

They wanted to keep the children isolated, and both adults would have to stay in there for awhile after the treatment, to make sure they hadn't caught it, the Martians’ assurances notwithstanding.

So the only thing between the child who was being treated and the ones who were waiting for it was a sheet suspended from the ceiling, and after the first one, they all had heard what they were in for. It was done in age order, youngest to oldest, and at first there was some undignified running around, grabbing the victims and dragging them to behind the sheet, where they volubly did the hairball performance.

But the children all seemed to sleep peacefully after the thing was over, which calmed most of the others—if they were like me, they hadn't been sleeping much. Card, one of the oldest, who had to wait the longest, pretended to be unconcerned and sleep before the treatment. I know how brave that was of him; he doesn't handle being sick well. As if I did.

The rest of us were mostly crowded into the mess hall, talking with Red and Robin Hood. The other one asked that we call him Fly-in-Amber, and said that it was his job to remember, so he wouldn't be saying much.

Red said that his job, his function, was hard to describe in human terms. He was sort of like a mayor, a local leader or organizer. He also did things that called for a lot of muscular strength.

Robin Hood said he was being modest; for forty ares he had been a respected leader. When their surveillance device showed that I was in danger of dying, they all looked to Red to make the decision and then act on it.

"It was not a hard decision," he said. "Ever since you landed, we knew that a confrontation was inevitable. I took this opportunity to initiate it, so it would be on our terms. I couldn't know that Carmen would catch this thing, which you call a disease, and bring it back home with her."

"You don't call it a disease?" one of the scientists asked.

"No ... I guess in your terms it might be called a ‘phase,’ a developmental phase. You go from being a young child to being an older child. For us, it's unpleasant but not life threatening."

"It doesn't make sense," the xenologist Howard Jain said. "It's like a human teenager who has acne, transmitting it to a trout. Or even more extreme than that—the trout at least has DNA."

"And you and the trout have a common ancestor," Robin Hood said. "We have no idea what we might have evolved from."

"Did you get the idea of evolution from us?" he asked.

"No, not as a practical matter. We've been crossbreeding plants for a long time. But Darwinism, yes, from you. From your television programs back in the twentieth century."

"Wait," my father said. "How did you build a television receiver in the first place?"

There was a pause, and then Red spoke: "We didn't. It's always been there."

"What?"

"It's a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century—"

"Those like me remembered them all," Fly-in-Amber said, "though they were just noises at first."

"—and we knew the signals were from Earth, because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in mid-century, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions."

"Always been there ... how long is ‘always'?" Howard Jain asked. "How far back does your history go?"

"We don't have history in your sense," Fly-in-Amber said. "Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking."

"You have explored more of Mars than we have," Robin Hood said, "with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that's why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone."

"Some of us have a theory," Red said, "that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don't know you can't tell."

"You can't erase a memory," Fly-in-Amber said.

"We can't. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can't do."

"You are not a memory expert. I am."

Red's complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn't the first time they'd had this argument. "One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started."

"You're that old!" Jain said.

"Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War."

"You have told us this tale before," Robin Hood said. "Not all of us agree."

Red pushed on. "The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time if Russian bombers were on their way." He paused. "I think that's what we are."

"Warning whom?" Jain said.

"Whoever put us here. We call them the Others. We're on Mars instead of Earth because the Others didn't want you to know about us until you had space flight."

"Until we posed a threat to them," Dad said.

"That's a very human thought." Red paused. "Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn't want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point."

"We wouldn't be any threat to them," Jain said. "If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, light years from home, it's hard to imagine what they could do now. What they could do to us."

The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. "They're done now. It looks like all the kids are okay." She looked around at all the serious faces. "I said they're okay. Crisis over."

Actually, it had just begun.

8

Ambassador

Which is how I would become an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn't evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?

Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.

On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions they were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I would be sent back there with Red and Green, along with four friends, who would be coordinating research, and Dargo Solingen, I guess because she was the only bureaucrat available on Mars.

Nobody wanted to bring the Martians all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn't improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.

So as well as an ambassador, I became sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I'm also the main human sidekick for Red and Green. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it's obviously more about fear than brotherhood. When the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.

We thought that would be be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they had figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit.

Or unless they were closer.

PART 3

SECOND CONTACT

1

Setting the Stage

Red says that Americans in the middle of the twentieth century used to call this sort of thing a "crash program," which sounds ominous. Like when America had to build an atomic bomb to end World War II, or when Russia had to beat America into space to prove that communism worked.

Whatever, the effort to build Little Mars in orbit was the biggest and fastest piece of space engineering in this century, severely denting the economies of the eight countries and multinationals that banded together to get it done. It made the orbital Hilton look like a roadside motel.

The size and complexity were partly due to the ground rules driven by fear of contagion. The lung crap, Martian pulmonary cyst, proved that diseases could move from the Martians to us, through a mechanism that couldn't yet be explained. So for a period of some years, no one who had been exposed to the Martians could come in direct contact with humans who had not. Some said five years and some said ten, and a significant minority opted for forever.

The argument for forever was pretty strong. Our getting the lung crap from the Martians was less likely than getting Dutch Elm disease from a tree. More outlandish, actually, since I was part of the disease vector—it was like getting Dutch Elm disease from a person who had touched a tree that had once had the disease. But it had happened, and until scientists figured out how, anyone who had been exposed to the Martians had to be biologically isolated from the rest of the human race. That meant all of the 108 people who lived on Mars at the time of the Martian "invasion" of our living space—110, counting embryos—and especially the fourteen of us who'd been infected.

(I was not the most popular woman in the world, whether that world was Mars or Earth, since if I'd had the decency to die for disobeying orders, none of this would have happened. There were people on Earth who thought I should be imprisoned or even put to death for being a traitor to the human race. But we would have run into the Martians in a few years no matter what.)

So Little Mars was two space habitats physically joined, but biologically independent from one another. We had separate life support systems, with different environments.

It was as if you had two large houses filling a couple of acres of land, which had separate entrances and shared an interior wall with no doors and only two windows.

Their actual shape, viewed from space, was a pair of conventional toroids, like two doughnuts stuck together. They rotated fast enough to produce the illusion of normal Martian gravity. Two extensions, like pencils stuck on either side of the top doughnut, gave earth-normal gravity for our exercise rooms, and a little more oxygen. Otherwise, our toroid—the "Mars side"—matched the conditions in the Martians’ underground city.

I'd never been to the Earth side, and might never be allowed there, but I knew it was sort of like the Hilton, but bigger and more spartan. It might have as many as a hundred people, maybe thirty of them more or less permanent staff. The others were visiting scientists and scholars and dignitaries. Fewer dignitaries as the novelty wore off.

The Mars side was half farm, raising a selection of mushroom-y crops, tended mostly by the four Martians who eventually lived with us. Sometimes we'd pitch in and help with the planting and gathering, but that was largely a symbolic gesture. Their food practically grew itself, sort of like mold or mildew, and we weren't going to share it with them.

We humans lived on a combination of simple rations and the most expensive carry-out in history, box lunches from the Hilton, which floated less than a mile away, across from the Space Elevator.

The Mars side and the Earth side had only two panes of glass separating them, but they were literally worlds apart. Everything living in our little world came from Mars; all of theirs was an extension of Earth. And the twain would not meet for five or ten years, or ever.

The fact that going to Mars or to our side of Little Mars meant exile from Earth didn't stop people from volunteering. Lots of scientists were willing, or even eager, to make that sacrifice in order to study the Martians close up, here or on Mars. It gave our small population some variety, people staying with us for some months before going on to Mars.

Little Mars took three years to build, during which time I finished my bachelor's degree, a hodgepodge of course work and directed research and reading that added up to a triple degree in linguistics, literature, and philosophy, with a strong minor in xenology. My lack of facility with mathematics kept me from pursuing biology and xenobiology to any depth, but I took all the elementary courses I could.

The trip from Mars was interesting. The life support in both the lander and the zero-gee middle of the ship were adjusted to affect a compromise between human and Martian needs and comfort levels. The two living areas were kept warmer for the humans and colder for the Martians. They weren't closed by airlocks, just doors, so I could go visit Red at his home if I bundled up.

Getting to LMO, low Mars orbit, was a challenge. The Martians, mostly through Red and me, worked with engineers on Earth to develop modifications to the acceleration couches so they would work with four-legged creatures who can't actually sit down.

There was no easy way to estimate how much acceleration the Martians could handle. The return ship would normally reach 3.5 gees soon after blasting off from the Martian surface. That was more than nine times Martian gravity.

Humans can tolerate four to six gees without special equipment and training, but there was no reason to generalize from that observation—keeping the acceleration down to six times Martian gravity. Much less, though, and we wouldn't be able to make orbit.

We were learning a lot about their anatomy and physiology; they didn't mind being scanned and prodded. But we couldn't wave a magic wand and produce a centrifuge to test their tolerance for g-force.

Red wasn't worried. In the first place, he was physically one of the strongest Martians, and in the second place, he said if he died, he just died, and one would later be born to replace him.

(That was something we hadn't figured out and they couldn't explain—after fifty or sixty of them had died, about the same number became female and fertile, to give birth about a year later.)

So we went ahead with it, with some trepidation, as soon as Little Mars was up and running. We only took two Martians on the first flight, Red and Green, and six humans, Oz and Joan and me and a married pair of xenologists, Meryl Sokolow and "Moonboy" Levitus, and Dargo Solingen, I supposed for ballast. A lot of the mass going up was Martian food plus cuttings, seeds, and such, for getting crops established in their new home.

Paul was going to take us up to the new ship, the Tsiolkovski, waiting in orbit, and help transfer us and the luggage. Then he would take the John Carter back to the colony, and Jagrudi Pakrash would be our pilot for the seven-month trip back. She was pleasant and no doubt expert, but I did want my own personal pilot, with all his useful accessories.

My good-bye to Paul was a physical and emotional trial for both of us. The sex didn't work, no surprise, and there wasn't much to talk about that we hadn't gone over. Over and over. There was no getting around the fact that the radiation exposure limit kept him from ever coming to Earth again, and it would be many years before I could ever return to Mars. If ever.

Fortunately, we'd timed our tryst so I would leave early enough for him to get eight hours of sleep. I doubt that I got two. I stayed up late with my parents and Card, reminiscing about Earth.

It was hardest on Mother. We'd drawn ever closer since First Contact, when she seemed to be the only one who believed me. She was my protector and mentor, and in many ways my best friend.

Aristotle said that was a single soul dwelling in two bodies. But in physical fact we were one body, my part separated at birth.

It was not good-bye forever, or at least we were determined to maintain that illusion. I would be rotated back to Mars; she and any or all of them might eventually be assigned to Little Mars; we might all be allowed to go back to Earth, if contact with Martians proved to be safe.

That was a big "if." How many years of uneventful coexistence would be enough? If I were living on Earth, I might suggest a few hundred. Just to be on the safe side.

* * * *

As it turned out, the launch was easier on the Martians than the humans. Oz, Joan, Marly, and Moonboy had been on Mars for eight or ten ares, Dargo for twelve, and they nearly suffocated under 3.5 gees; I had some trouble myself. Red and Green said it was like carrying a heavy load, but both of them routinely carried more than their own weight, tending crops.

Red enjoyed it immensely, in fact, the experience of space travel. He was budded in 1922 and had watched the human space program from its infancy to its current adolescence. He knew more about it than I did.

He and a couple of dozen others were especially well prepared for dealing with humans. Ever since the Mars colony's planning stages, they'd known that contact was inevitable. Out of a natural sense of caution, they wanted to put it off for as long as possible, but they would come to that meeting well prepared. Even the charade of not being able to speak human languages had been rehearsed since before my father was born.

My accident moved the timetable up, but not by all that much. Our satellite radar had shown the presence of water in their location, so eventually it would have been explored.

Another thing the accident did was turn a human into a relative of a Martian. They have a thing called beghnim, or at least that's a rough transliteration. It's a relationship, but also the word for a person—I was Red's beghnim because he had saved my life, which gave him a responsibility for my future. He said there used to be a similar custom among humans in old Japan.

On the way to Little Mars, we spent a lot of time talking with Red and Green—the others more than me, since I was finishing up my last year at Maryland. In fact, I was in a kind of nonstop study mode; when I wasn't doing schoolwork I was going over the notes that the others made from their conversations with the Martians.

It was challenging but tiring, my schedule more regimented than it had ever been under Dargo's ministrations on Mars. Besides the schoolwork and colloquy with Red and Green, I kept in contact with Paul and my family. Paul was understanding and timed his calls around my schedule. As the time lag increased, our romantic conversations took on a surreal aspect. He would say something endearing and I would reply, then click open a textbook and study plant physiology for seven and a half minutes, then listen to his response and reply again, and go back to adenosine triphosphate decomposition for another seven and a half minutes—and of course he was doing something similar on his side. Not the most passionate situation.

There was also two hours of exercise a day, in one of the two one-gee extensions. One side rowing, one side cycling, both plus the resistance machine. It wasn't too unpleasant; my only time for light reading or casual VR. I think we all looked forward to the two hours’ guaranteed alone time.

The seven months’ transit went by pretty fast, a lot faster to me than going to Mars, four years before. (Two and a fraction ares. We decided to switch to Earth units at the halfway point.) I guess subjective distance is usually that way: when you take a trip to a new place, it feels longer than the return will seem. And we had plenty to occupy ourselves with.

I met twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in VR with the Mars Project Corporation Board of Trustees. That was pretty excruciating at first, with the time lag. When the lag was several minutes, it was less a conversation than an exchange of set speeches. Each of the four or five—there were twenty-four on the Board, but everybody didn't attend the meetings—would have his or her say, and I would respond. It was anything but spontaneous, since most of them e-mailed me their text hours before the meeting, for which I was grateful.

Sometimes Dargo joined in, which didn't help.

Red couldn't take part directly; it would be years before we knew enough about the Martians’ nervous system to attempt VR with them. So I'd normally go talk with him just before the meeting, even if there wasn't anything that directly needed his input.

I enjoyed talking with him, even in the dim fungoid chill of his quarters. (He said he didn't mind coming to my side, but he was much more expansive in his own environment.) In a curious way, he was more "human" to me than many of the board members and professors with whom I had regular contact, and even one of my fellow passengers.

More than an are before launch, we'd learned that Red was unique—in a sense, the only one of his family. He would live hundreds of ares, and when he died, another Red would be budded.

"I'm a Renaissance Martian," he said. "I'm supposed to know everything, be able to duplicate any other family's functions. The one who preceded me was the last who could actually do that. Contact with the human race, radio and television, made that impossible.

"Those like Fly-in-Amber remember everything, but they don't have to make sense of it. I do. Somewhere between Jack Benny and general relativity that became impossible." Jack Benny, I found out, was not a scientist.

He may have been obsolete, what with all that information overload, but he was still the logical one to go rescue the first alien they made contact with. He may not be the Renaissance Martian anymore, but he still was Einstein and Superman and the pope all rolled into one.

I asked him why, if the budding process could result in one individual like him every couple of centuries, why only one? Why didn't every Martian have his capabilities?

He said he didn't know: "That may be the one thing I can not know." He referred me to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which of course made everything crystal clear.

Red and I had a lot of dramatic shared history, but there was another level of connectedness that was almost human, as if he were a favorite uncle. We were halfway to Earth before it dawned on me that on his side it was necessarily planned and artificial—he'd been studying the human race for more than a century before we met, and he knew how to act, to form a familylike bond with me. When I confronted him with that, he was both amused and a little upset: it was true, but he thought I'd been aware of that all along and was doing the same thing with him. There was also the beghnim factor, which of course could not have been planned.

He and Green also felt a degree of beghnim toward the other thirteen young humans they'd cured of the lung cysts, although it was philosophically complicated, since Martians were the source of the problem as well as its solution.

Our friendship grew over the seven months, perhaps in ways that the other humans couldn't share, although the four researchers spent more time with him than I did.

Dargo never warmed to either of the Martians, but she was hardly a ray of sunshine with the humans either.

I couldn't believe it when I found out that she was going along. Maybe there really is a God and he was getting back at me. The colony administrators were a more likely target for blame, though. Paul was sure she was just getting kicked upstairs, promoted to get her out of the way.

You could make a good case for her qualifications objectively. She had more years of experience in administration than anyone else off Earth, with the exception of Conrad Hilton IV, who was really just an ancient figurehead, living in orbit to keep his heart thumping while others tended the store.

But I couldn't really see how running the Mars "outpost," which she wouldn't call a colony, made her that qualified for administering our odd mix of humans and Martians. Who decided our small group needed some kind of hierarchal structure anyhow? A chief who wasn't really one of the Indians.

I supposed there had to be some third party, someone who was not involved with the actual work with the Martians, to evaluate proposals and be the naysayer. If we tried to work on every proposal the Corporation generously approved, there wouldn't be time to eat or sleep. The argument was that decisions had to be made by someone who was not herself a specialist, so she wouldn't give preferential treatment to xenoanatomy or linguistics or whatever. Martian cuisine. I could agree in principle, but as a practical matter, I would rather trust Oz or Joan—or even Moonboy, odd as he was—to make objective choices.

Anyhow, a lot of people were not sorry to see her go, and many of the same ones were just as glad that I was leaving on the same boat. A kind of poetic justice that she should be locked up in orbit with her troublemaker nemesis.

* * * *

Our orbital elements had been manipulated so we would arrive at Little Mars on the Fourth of July, two cheers for the U.S.A. But it was convenient for me, because my last final exams were a month before that. So my life could be simplified for the last few weeks, before it became complicated in a different way.

In those last few weeks, Earth grew from a bright blue spark to a dot, to a button, and finally to the size of a classroom globe. We moved into the lander and strapped in, but matching orbits with Little Mars was agreeably gentle, almost boring.

We didn't know what boring was. We were about to find out.

2

Formalities

It wasn't just a matter of shaking hands with the president through a feelie glove. The president doesn't come up the Space Elevator without his staff filling up the rest of it. Then there were leaders of all the other seven countries and corporate entities who had built Little Mars, none of whom came up alone either, and the Corporation trustees, and another fifteen or so who had contributed to the Mars Project in some important way.

There were more people in orbit than at any other time in history. One hundred and fifteen were stuffed into the Earth side of Little Mars, and the Hilton was as crowded as a Bombay slum. Less interesting food, probably.

They all had to talk to us, and they all said the same things. After a while I could have used toothpicks to prop my eyes open, but settled for synthetic coffee and drugs. Red was very patient, though of course it was impossible to tell whether he was awake at any given time. That's an advantage to sleeping standing up and having eyes like a potato's.

The French delegation had a champagne reception that was pretty amusing, since there's no way you can open a bottle of champagne at our reduced air pressure without it spraying all over. They sent us a bottle, too, through the complicated biohazard airlock, and there was enough left after the initial fountain for us each to have a glass. The Martians use ethyl alcohol as a cleaning fluid, but it's toxic to them. Joan and Jagrudi don't drink, and Dargo declined, so we three had enough to get a little buzz.

Jag would be with us for six months, before piloting the next Mars shuttle, as it was now called. She was the first person to voluntarily enter the quarantine. She planned to do three and a half more round trips and then stay on Mars as a colonist, stuck by radiation limit as well as quarantine.

I was prematurely, or proactively, jealous of her, an unbeatable rival for Paul's affections. In the short time they'd been together in Mars orbit, they had been all business, but I suspected that would evolve into monkey business. She was pretty and well built—her figure reminded me of the idealized women on the erotic Indian frieze that Paul had shown me—and she was closer to Paul's age and would share his radiation-forced isolation.

The ceremonial silliness faded after about a week, and we settled down to business.

There were fifty-eight scientists and other investigators living in the Earth side, and after discussing it with Red and Green, we set up a simple schedule: they were both independently available for interview for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. I would be there with Red all the time, and Meryl (who was fluent in French) with Green. We let the Earth side people haggle among themselves as to how to split up those eight hours. If they wanted to be democratic, that was close to an hour a week apiece, even with every tenth day a holiday.

(Half of my tenth-day "holiday" was a trial, hooked up to a robot doctor who took obscene liberties with my body, though I was allowed to sleep through the worst, the brachioscopy. My reward for being the only one around who'd survived the lung cysts.)

The interviews went both ways, the Martians studying the humans as intensely as the humans were the Martians. It made the situation more interesting, more dynamic, as a question asked to a Martian could provoke an analogous question from the Martian, and vice versa. Hundreds of researchers on Earth were monitoring the whole exchange, of course, and sometimes their suggestions filtered up.

Red and Green worked hard. When they weren't dealing with the researchers on the other side of the glass, they had to deal with us, who could not only ask them questions but literally prod them for answers. Oz and Moonboy were trying to understand their anatomy and physiology; they also monitored us humans for signs of Dutch Elm disease.

Three of the people who would be going on to Mars with Jag came up early—Franz De Haven and Terry and Joan Magson. Terry and Joan were new to xenology. Coming out of successful careers in archeology and architecture, they had gotten permission to live in and study the Martian city. Franz was an expert on human immune response; he was going to Mars to study the human population.

It was interesting to have our own population almost double. Terry and Joan were an old married couple, Terry the famous one. Their status as a prominent lesbian pair might have helped their chances in the "lottery"—or maybe not; they weren't going to have any children without careful planning.

Franz was a darkly handsome man in his mid twenties. Jag was obviously interested in him, which stimulated in me a kind of primal jealousy—she would have him for seven months on the ship; I should be allowed to get in a lick or two, so to speak, while I was fifty percent of the available female population.

I mentioned that jokingly to Paul in my morning e-mail, and he responded with unexpected force: I should definitely do it while I had the chance; he never expected me to be a nun for five years, or seven or ten or forever. He even quoted Herrick to me, the romantic old areologist. Okay, I would gather my rosebud.

Men are not very mysterious when it comes to sex. A touch, a raised eyebrow, and there we were, wrestling in his cabin.

He was actually better at it than Paul, but that was just technique and maybe size. But I suppose it's better to have a clumsy man you love than an expert acquaintance. Or maybe I felt a little guilt in spite of Paul having giving permission. I didn't mention it in my letters until Franz was safely gone.

I was only getting half my rosebud's pollen, anyhow. Jag was kind enough to share.

I did talk about it with Red, who straightaway asked whether I was having sex with the new male. Was it that obvious, even to a centenarian potato-head? He pointed out that he'd seen thousands of movies and cubes, and the young girl falling for the dark stranger passing through town was a pretty common pattern.

Trying to be objective, I explained the difference between this and my relationship with Paul, and of course that was familiar to him as well, sometimes in the same movies and cubes.

He admitted to being jealous of humans for having that level of complexity in their daily lives. He had been fertile four times and successfully budded in three of them, but there were dozens of other individuals involved in the buddings, and no one of them had a relationship like lover or father of the bud. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" was an obscure joke to him.

Their reproduction did involve a combination of genetic materials, but it was sort of like a shower, or a fish swimming through milt. Six or more of them would engage in something that looked kind of like four-armed arm wrestling, and after all of them were exhausted, the one who had tested out strongest would become nominally female, and the others would sort of roll around with her, covering her with sweat-like secretions that contained genetic code. The female would grow up to four buds, all but one of which would die and be resorbed.

It was weird enough. In terran terms, Red was definitely an alpha male, a big strong natural leader—which meant that he was often pregnant.

* * * *

Terry and Joan were a lot of fun to talk with. I was used to the company of the colony's scientists and engineers, so it was a novelty to exchange ideas with an architect and an archeologist. They picked my brains for everything I could recall about the Martian city—their research had been exhaustive, but we were the first people they'd met who had actually been there.

They'd been together fifteen years. Joan, the famous architect, was forty five and Terry was thirty five, so they'd been about the same age as Paul and me when they'd started out. It was Terry who'd had the lifelong interest in xenology and Mars; when we "discovered" the Martians, they'd both bent their considerable energies toward qualifying for a ticket.

When I sent Dad a picture of them he said they were a real "Mutt and Jeff" couple, I guess from some old movie about homosexuals. Joan was short and dark; Terry was taller than me and blond. They bickered all the time, but it was obviously affectionate.

Selfishly, I was glad to have some rich and famous people on our side of the quarantine. That much more pressure to lower it when we came to the five-year or ten-year mark.

The three of us talked with Red a few times. Terry was fascinated and frustrated by their lack of actual history.

"There've been preliterate societies who didn't have a sense of history going back very far," she said after one such meeting. "People might memorize their genealogies, and they might have traditions about which tribes were friend or foe, but without writing, after a few generations memory merges into myth and legend. Like the Martians. But according to Red, they've been reading and writing for thousands of ares."

"No conflict, no history," Joan said. "Nobody owns anything or anybody. One generation is just like the previous one, so why bother keeping track of anything? At least until our radios started talking to them."

"They do record some things," I said. "Fly-in-Amber knew exactly when a meteorite had hit, over four thousand ares ago. But I asked him how many had died, and he just said new ones were born."

"If they were human, I'd say they were in a culture-wide state of denial about death," Terry said. "They obviously have individual personalities, individual identity, but they act as if there's no difference between existing and not existing. Even Red."

"But they know how we feel about death. Red could have left me to die when I had that accident. And they didn't have to volunteer to help our young people with the lung cysts."

We were talking in the galley. Dargo had come in to get a drink and listened silently for a minute.

"You're too anthropomorphic with them," she said. "I wouldn't be quick to assign them human motivation."

"You do have to wonder," Joan said. "Where would their altruism come from? In humans and some animals there's survival value in regarding the safety of the group over the individual's—but they don't have any natural enemies to band together against."

"Maybe they did have, in their prehistory," Terry said. "Their home planet might be full of predators."

"For which they would be ill prepared," said Dargo. "No natural armor, delicate hands with no claws."

"Unimpressive teeth, too," I said. "Something like humans." Dargo gave me a weary look.

"Both Red and Green are adamant, insisting they didn't evolve," Joan said. "That the Others created them ab initio."

"A lot of Americans still believe that of the human race," I said. "With only one Other, a lot more recent than the Martians’ master race."

It was interesting that otherwise the Martians didn't have anything like religion. Some of them studied human religions with intense curiosity, but so far none had expressed a desire to convert.

From my own skepticism I could see why religion would face an uphill battle trying to win converts among Martians. They were a race with no other races to fear, no concept of wealth or even ownership, no real family, and sex as impersonal as a trip down to the gene shop. Which of the Ten Commandments could they break?

And yet they seemed so weirdly human in so many ways. That was partly our seeing them through a human-colored filter, interpreting their actions and statements in anthropomorphic ways—give the devil her due—a fallacy long familiar to students of anthropology and animal behavior.

But we actually had changed them profoundly, if indirectly, in a human direction, over the past couple of hundred years. Red didn't think there were any Martians left alive who could remember life before the radio machines started talking. And although at first they couldn't understand the noises coming from them, individuals like Fly-in-Amber recorded them all. The noises were obviously important, and resembled speech.

There wasn't a single Rosetta Stone for understanding human language, but two things combined to make it possible. One was television, which allowed them to connect words with objects, and the other was SETI, the twentieth-century Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where scientists tried to communicate with aliens via binary-coded radio signals that started with simple arithmetic and moved up through mathematics, physics, and astronomy, and finally into biology, and human affairs.

The translation was easier for the Martians than it would be for someone farther away—they not only got the messages, but they could watch TV programs explaining about the messages in English.

We talked with Red about that. Maybe the Others had been listening to us, too, but if they were far away they'd be years behind the Martians in understanding us. He didn't think so, and gave a reasonable relativistic argument—if they were light-years away, traveling close to the speed of light, then as they approached the solar system, the information would pile up in an increasingly concentrated way, and of course by the time they got here, they'd be totally caught up. Assuming they were infinitely smart.

It turned out otherwise.

3

Speaking in Tongues

When Jagrudi took my rosebud Franz off to Mars, along with Terry and Joan and another twenty-three, she was also carrying a cargo of special interest to Paul, an experimental drug called Primo-L. If it worked, it could revolutionize space travel, as well as other aspects of modern life: it was an antidote to radiation poisoning, at least from the low-dose, long-term kind of exposure that grounded space pilots and killed people who lived too close to places like the ruins of Kolkata.

They wouldn't let him just take it, since there would be years of human trials before it could be approved. He volunteered to be one of the "lab rats," but they turned him down, since he wouldn't be taking it under clinically controlled conditions. They'd only sent it along in case an emergency arose that required him to drive the shuttle, if the other two pilots were unavailable.

It happened. A few months later, in November, Jagrudi was out on the surface, working on the Tsiolkovski prior to launch, and a piece flew off a power tool and ripped open her helmet. They got an emergency patch on it and had her down in the clinic in a few minutes, but she had pulmonary embolisms and both her eyes were damaged. She might be all right in a couple of months, but that was way past the launch window. The third pilot was in the Schiaparelli, four months out, so Paul got the job.

It was a course of ten shots over two weeks, and he admitted they caused a little nausea and dizziness, but said it went away after the tenth, so he took off with his payload of three Martians and a bunch of stuff from their city.

Scientists couldn't wait to get their hands on the Martian hovercraft and the communication sphere that had connected them to Earth. But those engineering marvels paled in significance compared to something the Martians didn't even know they were bringing.

* * * *

The engineering team came up three weeks before rendezvous, two of them joining us on the Mars side—a married couple who would eventually emigrate to Mars—and seven who joined the permanent party on Earth side.

Our couple, Elias and Fiona Goldstein, were practically bouncing off the walls with infectious enthusiasm. Only a little older than me, they both had fresh doctorates in mechanical engineering and systems theory, tailored for this mysterious job—analyzing self-repairing machines that had worked for centuries or millennia with no obvious source of power. Would they even work this far from Mars? If they didn't, Elias and Fiona were prepared to continue their investigations in the field, which is to say the Martians’ city.

They'd brought miniature tennis rackets and rubber balls with them, and we improvised a kind of anarchic racketball game up in Exercise A, scheduling it while no one was on the machines. It was great to work up a sweat doing something, rather than sitting there in VR, pedaling or rowing.

Of course, my own favorite way of working up a sweat was only weeks away and never far from my thoughts.

Planning for our reunion was fun. I had seven months and quite a bit of money, with a good salary and no living expenses.

Shipping nonessential goods on the Space Elevator came to about two hundred dollars per kilogram, and I tried to spend it wisely. I ordered fine sheets and pillows from Egypt, caviar from the Persian coalition, and wine from France. I could have bought it directly from the Hilton, but found that I could have more and better wine if I managed it myself. I wound up buying a mixed case of vintage Bordeaux, of which I took half, the other six bottles going to Oz and Joan, who in turn sold two to Meryl and Moonboy.

As the Tsiolkovski approached, there of course was less and less time delay, messaging, and Paul and I were able to converse almost in real time. We coordinated our schedules and made half-hour "dates" every day, just chatting, catching up on each other's lives over the past two years. I have to admit that his obvious eagerness to talk was a relief. A lot could happen during two years, but a lot more could happen to him—one of the few single young men on the planet.

He had admitted to a fling with Jag, which was about as surprising as gravity. But it didn't really work, partly because she was having reservations about living on Mars, which was rather less exciting than her native Seattle. If the quarantine was lifted before radiation kept her out of space, she probably would exercise her option to go back to the ground, the next time she returned to Earth orbit.

Paul was committed to Mars; it had been his planet since he signed up eight years ago. To him, the place where I lived was a suburb of Mars, though it happened to orbit another planet. That was my own attitude, though in my case it was more resignation than affirmation.

* * * *

I knew I wouldn't be able to just drag him off the ship and down to my room—but the look he gave me when he stepped out of the airlock said that was on his mind, too. But he had to supervise the unloading and disposition of his cargo, which took two hours, with Dargo breathing down his neck. Then say hello to Red and Green and get Fly-in-Amber and Sunrise established in the Martian quarters, and meet the new members of the Mars-side human team.

Dargo offered to introduce him to the people on Earth side, but he pled fatigue and let me guide him by the elbow on a tour of Mars side, which got as far as my room.

He didn't show any sign of fatigue over the next half hour, though at first he sweetly suppressed his own urgency to attend to mine. I did have the impression that it had been all carefully rehearsed in his mind, but what else was he going to do for seven months, locked up with a couple of Martians?

It was much better for me, for whatever reasons, than aboard the John Carter or in his shared room in the colony. My own territory, I guess, with my own lock on the door. Egyptian sheets and pillowcases didn't hurt.

The wine bottles had corks made of actual cork, which I should have foreseen. I quickly dressed and slipped down to the galley unobserved—almost everybody being over in the Martian environment with the new arrivals—and got a thin-bladed knife that served the purpose.

We had time for a half a glass of wine each and a shared cracker heaped with caviar. Sitting on the bed just looking at one another with goofy expressions, and the phone squawked.

It was the loud, penetrating emergency signal. I got it untangled from my pile of clothes and punched NO VISION.

Dargo's face, pale. "One of the new Martians is having some kind of seizure, in Mars side B. You'd better get over here. Bring Collins ... if you can find him," she added with no inflection.

We dressed hurriedly. "Were either of them sick on the way over?"

He shook his head. "Who's ever seen one sick? How could you tell?"

Mars side B was a conference room with Martian-city normal temperature and humidity, a little cold and dry for comfort. The wall was a three-dimensional representation of the Martians’ city from above, as seen from the curving ramp that led to the surface. The floor was a soft incongruous gray Astroturf, chosen by Red.

Four humans and two Martians were bunched around Fly-in-Amber, who was lying on the floor, twitching. It was an unnatural sight, even for people used to seeing Martians, since they didn't lie down to rest. I remembered seeing a picture of a cow that some pranksters had tipped over on its side; he looked as odd as that.

"How did he get like that?" I asked Red.

"I've never seen it before, except as a joke." He was sort of kneeling, bending one of Fly-in-Amber's legs. "It looked as if his two legs suddenly collapsed, and the other pair, at the same time, pushed hard, as if jumping." He said something in Martian, loudly, but Fly-in-Amber didn't respond.

"It isn't some kind of odd joke?" Oz asked. "A practical joke?"

"I don't think so. It's childish. Fly-in-Amber is too stiff for that. Dignified." Red faced Paul. "Did he act strangely during the crossing?"

"Forgive me, Red," Paul said, "but to me you all act strange, all the time."

He made his little buzz sound. "You should talk, Two-legs. I mean, did his behavior or conversation suddenly change?"

"He talked a lot more during the last couple of days, approaching Earth. But we were all excited, ready to get off the ship."

"Of course. You were eager to mate with Carmen. Did that happen yet?"

I had to smile. "It was fine, Red."

"That's good. Green has gone to Mars C, to send a message to the other healers at home. She'd never seen this either."

"Nor have I," said Sunrise, who was the same saffron color as Fly-in-Amber. "And I don't forget."

Red swiveled to regard him. "This is not something I would forget, either."

"Should we pull him back upright?" I asked.

"Not yet," Red and Sunrise said at the same time. "Wait until we hear from—"

Fly-in-Amber started talking, a quiet uninflected warble. Sunrise moved close to listen.

"Is this being recorded?" Paul said.

"Of course," Dargo Solingen snapped.

Red gestured at Sunrise. "Not really necessary. He'll have it all."

"What is he saying?" I asked.

"It sounds like nonsense to me." Red shook his head, ponderously, a gesture that he'd learned to copy from us. "Perhaps code? I've never heard anything like it."

"I have," Sunrise said. "Not me directly, but one of the first rememberers."

"Do you know—did he know what it was?" Oz said.

"No. Or if he did, that part is lost. It was a long time ago."

"Before the meteorite?" I asked. "Before 4,000 ares ago?"

"Oh, long before. Long, long. One of the first."

"Can you make any sense of it?"

"No, not yet. But it doesn't seem ... it isn't random. He is saying something."

Fly-in-Amber stopped with a noise like a sneeze. Then a long monotone, like a sung sigh. Sunrise said something in Martian, and after a pause Fly-in-Amber answered a couple of halting syllables.

He started to rise but hesitated. Red and Sunrise helped him to his feet, Red chattering away. He answered, obviously faltering. Red made an odd fluting sound I didn't think I'd heard before. "Can you tell them in English?"

Fly-in-Amber stepped around to face us. "I don't know what happened. Red says I fell down and spoke nonsense while my body shook.

"To me, I was blind, but I felt the floor." He gingerly patted his right arms with his main left hand. "Along here, that was strange. And I smelled things that have no name. At least that I've never smelled. And I felt cold, colder than home. Colder than Mars, outside.

"But I don't remember talking. Red says I talked and talked. I heard something, but it didn't make any sense."

"Maybe you heard what you were saying to us?" Sunrise said.

"No, it wasn't words; nothing like words. It was like a machine sound, but it was like music, too, human music. A musical machine?"

Dargo played back part of it. "Doesn't sound very musical."

Fly-in-Amber tilted his head back, as if searching the ceiling and walls with potato eyes. "I mean something like ‘feeling.’ When you say music has feeling."

"You mean emotion?" Oz said.

"Not really. I understand that you humans have emotions when events or thoughts cause chemical changes in your blood. In your brains. We are similar, as you know. This is not ... not that real?"

He swiveled toward me. "It's like when Carmen tried to tell me, at 20:17 last Sagan 20th, how she felt while reading the score of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. That seeing the dots on the screen made your brain remember the sound, and the feeling that the sound caused, even though you weren't hearing anything. Do you remember that?"

"I guess." If you say so, Dr. Memory.

"It was that kind of, what would you say, distance? What you said about reading the score was that it was like a diagram of an emotion, an emotional state, but one you didn't have a word for."

I did remember. "That's right. You can call it ‘joy’ or ‘hope’ or something, but nothing really precise."

"So if someone couldn't read music and didn't know anything about how music is written down, still, they might see the score and recognize patterns, symmetries, as having beauty, or at least significance, without connecting them to sound at all."

"I've seen something like that," Oz said. "A system of notation that dancers use to record a performance. There's no way you could tell what it was without knowing. But there was symmetry and motion in it. I guess you could say it had intrinsic beauty."

"Lebanotation," Red said. "I saw it on the cube."

Green had come back and listened silently for a minute. She let out a burst of rapid-fire French and then paused. "Fascinating. Save it for later. Fly-in-Amber is ill. I must take him away and look at him."

Red said something in Martian and she answered with a short noise that I recognized as affirmation. She put a pair of arms around her patient and led him off to their living quarters.

Red watched her go and made a human shrug. "She is the doctor, in a way. But I doubt that there is any treatment for this."

"She talked to Mars," I said, and checked my watch tattoo. "She might have heard by—" She came rushing immediately back, warbling and rasping at Red.

"She says the same thing has happened on Mars, evidently at the same time. Most of the memory family fell down and started talking this nonsense."

"It was temps du Mars 09:19 when it happened there. Seventeen Earth minutes after Fly-in-Amber."

"As if they caught it from him," I said.

"Or it came from Earth," Paul said.

"Or outer space" Red gestured down the hall. "Anywhere out there."

4

Puzzles

The memory family had seventy eight members, less than one percent of the total Martian population. They were oddballs, but curiously uniform in their eccentricity. In human terms, they were vain, scolding, obsessive, and humorless. The other Martians enjoyed a whole class of jokes about them and didn't take them too seriously, since history was not a traditionally useful pursuit. And then this odd thing happened.

In less than an hour, it became obvious that "odd" only began to describe it.

The people in New Mars would have decoded it soon, but they were beaten to the punch by a Chilean researcher, who idly fed a recording of the data through a reverse SETI algorithm—a program that looked for patterns like the ones we had been sending out for more than a century, trying to contact intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

The dot-and-dash digital message was slightly obscured because it was mixed into a far more complex one, like a radio signal that carried both amplitude and frequency modulation. Filtering out the frequency modulation gave an unambiguous pattern of dots and dashes. There were 551 of them, and the same pattern was repeated ten times.

The number 551 is interesting because it's the product of two prime numbers, 19 and 29. One of the most basic SETI maneuvers was to make up a message with (in this case) 551 ones and zeros, which you could transmit with dots and dashes, then represent them in a crossword-puzzle-style matrix, either 19 squares by 29 or 29 by 19, making a picture out of the black and white squares.

The signal went like this:

* * * *

11110000111010110011001000010000 010101100100000100101001111110 0000010101000100000000111010100011 00000000000000000000000000000000 0000010000000001001000000 0000000000100100001001011100001111000 00000000000100100001001000000100100000 0000000000000000000110001000000000000011 0000000000000000000000001000000000001 100000000000000000110000000100000000000 00000000010101000110000000001010100000000 0000001111101011010111011111111110000000000 0111110100000001110010101000000000001001010 10001011100010000010000101010001000111 000010101000000010100001011100000001110100

* * * *

The first time the Chilean astronomer tried, he used the 19 by 29 matrix, and got nothing coherent. The 29 by 19 gave an interesting picture....

Humans and Martians gathered together in front of the monitor as the Chilean's drawing came in.

"In English?" Oz said. "What the hell is ‘O Sin'?"

"I think it's some kind of human joke," Sunrise said. "They said it was 551 ones and zeros?"

"Correct," Dargo said.

"Unless it's a coincidence, unlikely, then it's a joke reference to the first example of trying to communicate this way. Frank Drake made it up in 1961, and it was widely broadcast. The O in the upper left corner would be the Sun, with the Solar System underneath it: four little planets, including yours and ours, then two big ones, and then two medium sized."

"So what about sin?" Oz said.

"I don't know," Sunrise said. "I don't really understand human jokes. That corner of Drake's picture was a symbolic representation of the atoms of carbon and oxygen. Necessary for life."

"Silicon and nitrogen," Paul said. "Si and N. They're a silicon-based life-form?"

"With six legs," Oz said, "or eight, two of them small. There's a square next to the Earth, with a line pointing to a man-shaped diagram. Another square next to Mars, and one over Neptune, with lines toward the diagram of an eight-legged creature."

"We don't look like that," Sunrise said. "We don't have eight legs."

"We have eight appendages." Red tapped the screen. "There is a solid line from Neptune to the creature, but only a dotted line from Mars to it. That might mean something."

"But hold it," Oz said. "Nothing could live on Neptune. Eight legs or nine or whatever. It's a cryogenic hell."

"No." Red shook his huge head. "Ha, ha. I mean, yes, humans and Martians would freeze solid there in a matter of seconds. But there could be something like organic chemistry with silicon and nitrogen—liquid nitrogen being a solute, like water in our chemistry. You could have compounds analogous to amino acids and proteins. So complex life chemistry could be theoretically possible."

"There's hardly any free nitrogen on Neptune," Paul said. "Hydrogen, helium, a little methane for color."

"Not Neptune itself." Red drummed the fingers of his small hands together. "Its largest moon, Triton."

Paul nodded slowly. "Yeah. Geysers of liquid nitrogen when it's warm enough."

"We don't know much about it, do we?" Oz said.

"Haven't been there since forever," Paul said. "A flyby in the nineteen-eighties?"

"In 1989," Red said. "The Chinese-Japanese Outer Planets Initiative was launched in 2027 but went silent when it arrived in 2044. But there's been a lot of study from various hubbles. There are probably a hundred specialists about to start bouncing off the walls."

"What about the number down in the corner?" I said.

"Ten to the seventh," Paul said; "ten million. And that looks like a ‘d’ after it. Ten million days?"

Red and Snowbird translated it simultaneously. "27,378 years." Snowbird added, "14,970 ares, in Martian sols."

"I wonder if that's how long you've been on Mars," I said. Red shrugged.

"It's how long human beings have been all human," Oz said, "in a manner of speaking. Interesting coincidence. The last Neanderthals died about 27,000 years ago. I guess Homo sapiens has been the dominant species ever since."

"Having killed off the Neanderthals?" Moonboy said.

Red gave his slightly maddening monotone laugh. "Ha ha. Nobody knows what became of them."

"Homo sapiens invited them over for lunch," Moonboy said, "and they turned out to be the main course." Dargo shot him a look.

Oz tapped the eight-legged figure. "These could be your Others. Who created you in their image, more or less."

"Living that close." Red shook his head. "And on so small a world? Triton isn't even as big as your Moon."

"They might be like you," I said. "You don't take up a lot of real estate."

There was a double-ping signal and a familiar face appeared, superimposed over the Drake diagram. Ishan Jhangiani, Science Coordinator on the Earth side. "This is interesting. Some of the Martians were watching the broadcast, but only the yellow ones were affected. And the nine yellow ones who were doing something else were not affected.

"I don't think we have any organs that discriminate between regular light and coherent light," Red said. "So how could that work?"

Ishan chewed his lip and nodded. "Well, just pursuing logic ... you would never encounter such a strong burst of coherent light in the normal course of things. So you, or rather the yellow ones, could have such an organ and never know it."

"But it wouldn't have any useful function," Oz said.

"Ha ha. But it would. It would make you fall down and speak in tongues whenever somebody on Neptune, or Triton, wanted you to."

That would turn out to be pretty accurate.

5

Unveiled Threat

After the excitement died down, most of us went back to the mess and zapped up a meal. Dargo went off somewhere to stick pins in dolls.

I traded the lump of rice in my chicken for the pile of mashed potatoes that came with Oz's meat loaf. He exercises as much as I do, as we all do, but he keeps putting on weight, while I lose it.

"I don't get it," Moonboy said. "If they wanted to send a dot-and-dash message, why be so roundabout? Why not just use the ruby laser itself?"

"For some reason they wanted the Martians involved," I said. "One Martian, at least. What I want to know is how Fly-in-Amber got all that information out of the red light." So far, all we'd gotten was on/off, on/off.

Oz nodded. "And what's different about Fly-in-Amber and those other yellow ones, that they were the only Martians affected by it? The anatomical scans we did on Mars didn't show any significant differences between the various families, except for Red. With all his extra brain and nervous system mass and complexity, I'd expect him to be the one singled out, if any."

"He said he didn't feel anything special," Meryl said. "But he only looked at it for a couple of seconds. Then he was worrying after Fly-in-Amber."

"I'll do a high-resolution PET scan of all their eyes and brains," Oz said. "See whether Fly-in-Amber has some anomaly."

There was a pause and Paul shook his head. "Triton? How could intelligent life evolve on Triton? How could anything complex?"

Oz studied his meat loaf for clues. "Well, it couldn't be like Earth. A large variety of species competing for ecological niches. At least intuitively that doesn't sound likely. If it's like Red suggested, a quasi-organic chemistry based on silicon and liquid nitrogen, think of how slow chemical reactions would be."

"And how little chemical variety," Moonboy said, "with so little solar energy pumping it."

"There's also energy from radioactivity," Paul pointed out, "and tidal friction from Neptune. I think that's what causes the liquid nitrogen geysers they see."

Moonboy persisted. "But it would never have anything like the variety and energy in the Earth's primordial soup."

"You're all barking up the wrong tree," I said. "If the signal really is coming from the Others, they didn't evolve on Triton. The Martians’ tradition is that they live light-years away. So this laser thing could just be an automated device. It isn't any more or less impossible than the Martian city. That was supposedly built by the Others, a zillion years ago."

"Or 27,000," Oz said. "You're right. But why did it start blinking exactly as soon as one of the yellow family reached Earth orbit? That would be some sophisticated automation."

That gave me a little chill. "In other words ... we're being watched?"

He stroked his beard. "Give me another explanation."

* * * *

Over the next several days, scientists on Earth as well as here analyzed the signal from Neptune, which had stopped eight hours and twenty minutes after Fly-in-Amber's condition had been broadcast to Earth. That was exactly twice the travel time of that broadcast to Neptune, which fact was an interesting piece of information in itself. Mission accomplished; turn it off.

The laser beam was apparently just that, a simple powerful beam of unmodulated coherent light, carrying no information other than the intriguing fact of its own existence.

There are some natural sources of cosmic radiation that produce coherent light, but nobody was pursuing that direction, since the timing of it would be an impossible coincidence. It was artificial, and in its way was as much a message as the Drake diagram that came out of the amplitude-modulation part of Fly-in-Amber's utterances. The amount of power it was pumping was part of the message, a scary part.

It could destroy an approaching space ship. Maybe it had, once.

The frequency-modulation part of the message resisted analysis. Each of the ten iterations of the signal had different and apparently random patterns. The Martians here and on Mars listened to them and agreed that they sounded like Martian speech, albeit in monotone, but made absolutely no sense. Fly-in-Amber found it quite maddening. He said, "It sounds like a human idiot going ‘la la la la’ over and over." Well, maybe. But sometimes the "la" became "la-a-a" or just "ll," and sometimes it sounded like a pencil sharpener trying to say "la."

Four or five days after the excitement, I was dragging my weary bones home after exercise and was surprised to meet Red at the end of the corridor. The Martians didn't often wander over this way.

"Carmen. We always meet at my place. Could I have a look at yours?"

"Sure, why not?" It was a mess, but I doubted that Red would care. He'd learn more.

I thumbed the lock. "I normally take a shower after working out."

"Your smell is not toxic." I guess you take your compliments where you can find them.

He looked large in my small room, and strange, hemmed in by undersized furniture he couldn't use. He wheeled the desk chair over in front of him.

"Could we have some music? Bach Concerto Number 1 in F Major?"

"Brandenburg, sure." Pretty loud. I asked the machine and it started.

"A little louder?" He gestured for me to sit in front of him. I did and he leaned forward and spoke in a barely audible whisper.

"Everything I do in my quarters is recorded for science. But this must be a secret between you and me. No other humans, no other Martians."

"All right. I promise."

"When I listened to the frequency modulation part, I understood it immediately. Only I could understand it."

"Only you ... it was in your private language? The leader language?"

He nodded. "Perhaps it is the real reason we have to learn the language. Because this was going to happen eventually."

His voice became even lower, and I strained to hear. "It told me that we Martians are biological machines, developed for this purpose: to communicate with humans if and when they developed to this point, a time when flight to the stars became possible."

"I thought it wasn't yet."

"Within a few human life spans. The Others work slowly."

"You mean the Others actually did evolve on Triton?"

"Not at all, no. They do come from a planet revolving around another star, some twenty light-years from here. It's a cold planet, ancient, and its cryogenic kind of life has been there for literally billions of years.

"The one individual on Triton was especially engineered for its task, as were all of us Martians. We're all here to keep an eye on you humans.

"The Others move very slowly; their metabolism is glacial. They think fast, faster than you and me, because their mental processes utilize superconductivity. But in physical manipulation of their environment ... you would have to study one for hours to see that it had moved.

"The one on Triton moves about sixty four times as fast as they do; we move about four times as fast as it does. To match you.

"They offer this as an analogy. Suppose you humans, for some reason, had to communicate with a mayfly."

"That's a kind of insect?"

"Yes. Though it lives most of its life as a variety of nymph. When it becomes an actual insect, it only lives for a day. How would you go about communicating with it?"

"You couldn't. It wouldn't have anything like a brain or language."

Red grabbed his head and shook it. "Ha ha. But this is analogy, not science. Suppose it had a quick squeaky language, and intelligence, and civilization, but it lived so fast that the span from birth to death was only one day. How would you communicate with it?"

"I see what you're driving at. We're the mayflies."

He grabbed his head again. "You gave away the ending. But suppose you did have to communicate with these intelligent mayflies. To them, you are slow as Sequoias. How do you get them to realize that you are also an intelligent form of life?"

"Build a machine? One that moves as fast as they do?"

"Yes, but not in one step. What the Others did was build a machine, a carbon-based biological one, that lived somewhat faster than they did—and which had the ability to build a machine faster than itself. And so on down the line."

"Until you had one that could talk to mayflies. Humans, in this case."

He nodded. "That's what we are. We Martians."

"Your only function is to communicate with us?

"I would say ‘destiny’ rather than function. We do have a life, a culture, independent of you. But humans are our reason for being."

"So why," I whispered, waving my hand at the music, "why all the secrecy?"

"Because I'm not supposed to be explaining this to you. To anybody."

"We're supposed to decode the message ourselves?"

"I don't think you could. I don't think even a Martian could, no matter how brilliant, unless he spent all his youth studying my language."

"Maybe not even then," I said. "Oz says your brain is immensely more complex than other Martians'. But why do the Others want to keep it secret?"

"I don't know the details yet. But they're afraid of you; of what you may become. Millions of years ago, they had trouble with a planet in a nearby system, somewhat like the Earth. Water-carbon-oxygen life. They're frightened by how fast you act. How fast you evolve."

"What kind of trouble did they have with this planet? A war?"

"I don't think that would be possible. I think it was what you would call a pre-emptive strike."

"So ... they destroyed them?"

Red nodded slowly. "After the young planet started sending out interstellar probes. The Others’ world was relatively near—their sun was maybe a hundred times the distance from here to Neptune—what we would call a wide double-star system—so of course the Others were their first interstellar destination."

"The young world was going to invade at that distance?"

"The Others didn't know. But there were wars on the oxygen planet, worldwide wars, for years before they had space travel, and the Others could observe them indirectly. As we, and they, have done with you."

"So the Others suddenly developed space travel themselves, and went off to do this ‘preemptive strike'?"

"Oh, no. They'd been exploring other planets with probes for many thousands of years. They'd been to this solar system, and others, with complex autonomous robots to gather information, deliver it, and self-destruct."

His voice grew even lower. "As we have observed, they have considerable talent, power, for manipulating things at great distances. The tools for the pre-emptive strike were in place long before they decided they had to be used."

"My god. Are they in place here on Earth, too?"

"That wasn't clear. Sometimes the message was allusive, metaphorical ... it was sort of ‘if it's true, it's too late for the humans to do anything about it; if not, nothing needs to be done.’"

"We might feel differently. We humans."

"It also said that for the humans’ sake, the threat ought to be kept secret. Not for its own protection, it emphasized. For your sake—I think so it wouldn't have to take action prematurely. Though my sense is the ‘action’ wouldn't be anything like an invasion or even a launched missile. It would be a small act, like turning on the laser beacon.

My heart was hammering. "Could it destroy the Earth just like that? So casually?"

"I doubt it. And it wouldn't want to, literally, destroy the Earth. It said that we could have the planet if you proved unsuitable. We Martians."

"Now that would go down really well on Earth."

"Don't worry. Who needs the gravity? The Others are aquatic, or whatever you call something that lives in liquid nitrogen. They don't think about gravity any more than fish do. They just float there."

I felt he was telling the truth. "You're on our side."

He nodded. "It can't see that. Even if I was not in beghnim with you, I would feel closer to you, to all humans, than to them. The Others may be our creators, but in terms of simple existence, we are much closer to you.

"They hardly live at all, on our time scale ... and technically, they never die."

"Never? How do they manage that?"

"An individual will stop moving, stop metabolizing, for a thousand years or more. Dead except for the information structures that make up its individuality. When it's needed again, it's kind of ... jump-started."

"I don't know that term."

"I was afraid you wouldn't. Basically, some other individual decides it's time and applies enough energy to get it metabolizing again. A process that might take ares.

"So in a sense, it's never really been dead. Though for a thousand ares or so, it's been no more alive than data stored in a machine."

"How many of them are out there, alive, at any given time?"

"It could be three or three trillion, I don't know. The only one we have to worry about is the speeded-up one on Triton. The others are thirty ares away from affecting us in response to anything we do. And it would take them ages to respond."

"If some people, a lot of people, knew what you've told me, they'd be declaring war on Triton. Which would do a lot of good, I know."

"A lot of expense for nothing. The best they could do would be to send a heavily armed and automated vessel out to find a small target beneath the surface of Triton and destroy it. But it's impossible."

"Not theoretically. Not if a majority wanted it badly enough."

"I meant practically. You realize how powerful that laser would be, close up?"

"Paul worked up some numbers. If it could be aimed and used like the American Star Wars lasers were supposed to, they would be able to vaporize any conventional space vehicle, long before it got to Triton."

"Ha ha." He nodded rapidly. "But think larger. Suppose this laser is far from being the pinnacle of their technology. Suppose they had one a thousand times more powerful. Suppose it was hidden on Earth's moon."

"It could do some real damage, even if they stopped it pretty quickly."

"It would be hard to stop, wouldn't it? And in less than one day it could destroy every city in the world and set fire to all the forests and plains. The smoke would persist long enough to stop agriculture."

"Did ... did the Other threaten to do something like that?"

"No, not in so many words. It did imply that the destruction would only take one day, and from that I extrapolated various possibilities. But it was not like a threat or a prediction." He paused for several seconds. "It's hard to translate the exact intent. It was presented as a theoretical possibility, almost an entertainment for the Other. Like a horror movie that could come true.

"I think I know the leaders’ written language well. But I've never heard anyone speak it. Doubtless there are nuances that I've missed."

"Only one day." We needed a scientist here. "I guess it could deflect a large enough asteroid to make a disaster like the dinosaur wipeout. Or release some kind of poison in the air. But wouldn't that take more than a day?"

"Unless it was released at thousands of places all at once. But the ‘one day’ was only an implication. It could just stand for a short period of time. Maybe a short time in comparison to how long it normally takes for a species to go extinct. As I say, it's hard to tell whether it's being direct or speaking in metaphor and symbol."

"Can you talk back to it?"

"I don't see why not, at least in terms of technology. You could probably talk to it. It seems to understand English. Just go on the 6:00 news and say ‘Please, Mr. Other, don't destroy us in one day.’ But that would sort of give away our secret."

"You could talk to it, though, in your secret language. I mean on the same news show. Without letting on that you'd talked to any human about what it said."

"I'll do something like that, eventually. But first I want to see how it reacts to the Drake diagram project. That should be ready in a day or so." The Earth-side scientists were arguing with a consortium on Earth—of course including the Chilean astronomer who'd "cracked the code," and was turning out to be a real pain in the ass—trying to agree on a 29 X 19 matrix message to send back to Triton via ruby laser.

"Maybe they should just send block letters. GOT YOUR MESSAGE. PLEASE DON'T KILL US."

6

Peace Offering

In fact, they did a variation of that. The top five rows were taken up with the word PEACE in big block letters. Then there was a symbolic representation of an amino acid, alongside the same for some silicon-nitrogen molecule that might be a similar building block for its form of life, and then a question mark.

A second message was a star map, looking down on the galactic plane, with Sirius at the center. (It would probably be the brightest star in their sky, too, if they came from nearby). The Sun's position was identified with a cross. Then there was another question mark.

I wasn't too sure about that one—I mean, "We told you how peaceful we are. We'd never invade you. So why not tell us where you live?"

The morning they were going to send the message, I got up at 5:00 and found a message that Dargo wanted to see me at 8:00.

That couldn't be good news. Unable to concentrate on work, I surfed around the news and entertainment. I almost went to wake up Paul, but figured he was going to be busy with the message transmission, more ceremony than science. He was scheduled for three hours of VR interview after it, so he could use his sleep.

I was, too, which is why I couldn't sleep. Dargo was probably going to tell me what I could and could not say. Good luck with that.

I dawdled over coffee and hard biscuits. At five after eight, her door was open.

"Please close it behind you. Please have a seat." She was studying a clipboard and didn't look up.

The chair was hard and low. She kept reading for a minute and looked up suddenly. "You had a Martian in your room day before yesterday."

"So?"

"So what was he doing there?"

"Well, I guess you got me. We were having sex."

"Carmen..."

"It's pretty wonderful, with all those fingers. You should try it."

"Carmen! This is serious."

"I've been in his room a hundred times. He was curious about what mine looked like. So?"

She just glared at me. She pushed a button on the clipboard and it started playing the first Brandenberg Concerto.

"You ... you were eavesdropping."

"You were committing treason. Against Earth. Against humanity."

"Talking with Red. I do that all the time."

"You've never whispered under music before."

I raised my eyebrows and didn't say anything.

"What were you two talking about?"

"You tell me. What does the recording say?"

She stared at me for a long seconds, her mouth set in an accusing line. I knew that tactic, but finally broke the silence. "You don't know what it says."

"I can't decipher much of it. But other people, specialists in sound spectroscopy, will be able to."

"So send it to them." I moved closer to her face. "And be prepared to explain how you got it."

"You can't threaten me. I have clear statements like this!" I heard my voice whisper "...got your message please don't kill us."

"You're pleading with the Others, aren't you? You can't negotiate on behalf of the whole human race!"

"You have it totally wrong." I stood up. "I have to talk to Red."

"You don't know what you're doing. He's not your friend. He's the enemy."

I paused at the door. "Do you have a favorite piece of music? Something loud?"

* * * *

We only had about an hour before the Drake diagram thing, and of course Red would have to be there, too. I called and asked him to drop by my place on the way.

I found an ancient Louis Armstrong composition with the Hot Sevens, which gave us a pretty constant level of loud interference.

After I'd told him about the meeting with Dargo, he folded all four arms and thought for a minute.

"I see three courses of action, and inaction, with different degrees of danger," he whispered.

"The easiest would be to just do nothing and hope that Dargo lets sleeping cows lie."

"Dogs. Sleeping dogs."

"Ah. Then there is the extreme other end: assume that the Other is bluffing and just broadcast the truth. That would be almost equally simple, but if the Other isn't bluffing, it might be the end of the human race—and perhaps Martians as well."

"But it said Earth could be yours."

"It would have no more need for us, if the humans were gone. We don't know whether it can lie. Like a sleeping dog, ha ha.

"As a middle course, we might enlist a confederate or two, for insight and perspective. On the Martian side, it would have to be Fly-in-Amber. On the human side, the logical choice would be Dargo Solingen."

"Out of the question."

"This is not about personality, Carmen. I don't get along with Fly-in-Amber, either.

"Your great military philosopher Sun Tzu said to ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ He had some experience with alien invasions."

"None that loll around in liquid nitrogen and zap you with killer lasers. What about Paul?"

"His engineering and science would be handy. But I suggested Dargo because she knows so much already. Making her an ally might buy her silence."

He made a gesture I'd never seen before, pushing down on his head with both large hands until it was almost level with the ground. Then he released it with a sigh. "It's a pity life is not a movie. In a movie we could just throw her out the airlock and go about our business."

"Making it look like an accident."

"Of course. But then the detective would figure us out and show up with handcuffs."

"Quite a few, in your case."

"Ha ha. There is an intermediate course. We appear to enlist Dargo's aid, but don't tell her everything."

"Lie to her."

"Perhaps a necessary evil." I suddenly wondered how much of what Red had told me was the truth.

"What would we keep from her?"

"The threat itself? I take it she doesn't know that I can understand the message. We could tell her that much and then claim it was something less disturbing."

"No ... she heard me say that we got the message, and ‘please don't kill us'—she can extrapolate a lot from that."

Red nodded. "Merely mortal danger."

I tried to keep my voice down. "The only thing we have on her is the fact that she broke the law making that recording."

"There is also the fact that she apparently has little beyond that one phrase."

I thought back to what she'd said. "True. Little enough. She didn't seem to know that you had decoded the FM message. ‘We got the message’ could refer to the Drake diagram thing. As far as she knows, we were conspiring to communicate with the enemy in English."

He paused. "Until we learn differently, then, let's make that a working hypothesis: she thinks we don't have any more data than anyone else. Meanwhile, we enlist Fly-in-Amber and Paul, swearing them to absolute secrecy.

"When the Other responds to Earth's overtures, we'll decide on our own course of action."

"And if it doesn't respond? How long do we wait before we try to contact it ourselves?"

"If it moves at one-eighth my speed, I'd say a week. Of course, it might have various responses prepared ahead of time."

"Like destroying everything?"

"No. If it were that simple, there would have been no need for the message it sent to Fly-in-Amber. We're safe for the time being."

"Which could be hundreds or thousands of years."

"Yes. As long as we don't do anything that threatens it or the Others back home. Or it could be hours or days." It made its humanlike shrug.

My timer's buzz was barely audible over the festive jazz, Dixieland gone to Chicago a couple of centuries ago. "That's the ten-minute warning. Guess we better go up and watch them push the button."

* * * *

Just about everybody, human and Martian, showed up for the ceremony. One wall of Earth A was a glass one shared by its counterpart on the other side of the quarantine. We had more room per person, or entity, but they had champagne.

After the short speeches and button pushing, the screen showed a roster for interviews at the two VR sites. Paul and I were scheduled first, though with two different interviewers. Paul had a guy from an MIT technical journal. I was stuck with Davie Lewitt, who was pretty and intense but not remarkably intelligent. She had interviewed me after the Great Hairball Orgy on Mars and pinned the name "The Mars Girl" on me. For a couple of years, it was ‘hey, Mars Girl,’ whenever someone wanted to annoy me.

I was only a little sarcastic with her during the hour, but Dargo, who had been watching, gave me an annoyed grimace when she took over the helmet. She used more disinfectant spray than was necessary. But Oz gave me a broad smile and a thumbs-up.

When Paul came out I touched his arm and cut my eyes in the direction of my room. He smiled, but wasn't going to get quite what he expected.

You don't use paper wastefully in space. But it's one way to write something down and know that no electronic snoop can sneak a copy. As soon as we entered my door, I handed him the folded-over sheet that started KEEP TALKING—DARGO'S LISTENING! Underneath that was a summary of everything Red had told me about the frequency-modulation message, and our tentative plan.

We chatted, mostly me talking, about our VR interviews. We undressed and I called for music, an obscure whining neo-romantic guitar/theremin collage by some Finnish group whose name I couldn't even read. But it was loud.

When he finished reading, we got into bed and made appropriate sounds while whispering under the music.

He nuzzled my ear. "So we do nothing until the Other responds. Then Red—and you and I and Fly-in-Amber—will send them back a message. In Red's language."

"Right. Can you build a radio transmitter?"

"We already have one that's rarely used. We could point it at Neptune and talk away."

"I don't think that would be safe."

"Probably not, if she's being fanatically thorough. But we don't have an electronics lab on this side. You can't build anything without parts.

"So couldn't the existing radio have a little accident? It's got all the parts."

"God, you're a devious woman."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes, of course. I'll study the wiring and be ready to disable it. In the course of testing the ‘repairs,’ I'll send this gibberish out toward Neptune.

"But there's one thing you and Red missed. Dargo doesn't have to be that afraid of punishment when she admits to having spied on you. What can they do—extradite her to Earth? Dock her pay? There's nothing to buy here, and we're already in a kind of prison."

"Well, Oz and probably the others would help us pressure to have her relieved of responsibilities. Deny computer access."

"That could work. Make her stare at the walls until she begs to be thrown out the airlock."

"I like the way you think." I straddled him. "The music's going to climax in about two minutes."

"Slave driver." But he managed a coda.

7

Language Barrier

Allowing for speed-of-light travel time, the Other took only twenty-some minutes to react to the Drake message—which meant that most of the response must have been prepared ahead of time, and it only had to choose which button to push.

If, that is, it had been honest with Red when it described its temporal limitations. It did occur to me that there was no compelling reason for it to tell us the truth.

Or to lie, if it was as powerful as it claimed.

The answer to the message came in spoken English, in an odd American accent, which Earth quickly identified as David Brinkley's, a newscaster from a century ago:

"Peace is a good sentiment.

"Your assumption about my body chemistry is clever but wrong. I will tell you more later.

"At this time I do not wish to tell you where my people live."

Then it began a speech in a slightly different tone, that could have been prepared years ahead of time:

"I have been watching your development for a long time, mostly through radio and television. If you take an objective view of human behavior since the early twentieth century, you can understand why I must approach you with caution.

"I apologize for having destroyed your Triton probe back in 2044. I didn't want you to know exactly where I am on this world.

"If you send another probe I will do the same thing, again with apologies.

"For reasons that may become apparent soon, I don't wish to communicate with you directly. The biological constructs that live below the surface of Mars were created thousands of years ago with the sole purpose of eventually talking to you and, at the right time, serving as a conduit through which I could reveal my existence.

"'Our’ existence, actually, since we have millions of individuals elsewhere. On our home planet and watching other planets, like yours."

Then it said something that simplified our lives, mine and Red's. "This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red." Then it went into about two minutes of low gravelly wheedly-rasp-poot and went silent.

"So what was that?" Dargo said.

Red favored her with a potato stare. "Please play it back for me."

He listened. "Can you speed it up by a factor of eight or so?"

"No problem," a voice said from the screen. "Just give me a minute. I can double the speed three times."

We waited, and then it came back sounding more like Martian.

"Not much in the way of information there. I can write it down for you, phrase by phrase. But it's mostly ceremonial—good-bye and a sort of blessing—and some technical information, which frequencies it will monitor for voice and for pictures. Though I think it probably monitors about everything."

"Why was the initial message so slow?" asked the screen.

"The Other said that it had spent days translating that English message and rendering it as American speech. It recorded it more than a year ago."

Red hesitated. "We talked, Oz and Carmen and Paul and I, about how slow their metabolism must be because of the low temperature of their body chemistry. They must move slowly." He wasn't going to say anything he'd learned from the still-secret message.

"Talking with them is not going to be anything like a conversation. But we are all accustomed to having a time lag between saying something and hearing the response, in talking with Mars."

"Why did it wait?" Dargo asked. "First there was all that indirect mumbo jumbo, hiding the Drake message in the strange oration that the yellow Martians had buried in their memories. Now we find out that it could have just contacted us directly. In English!"

"Dargo," Oz said quietly, "we don't know anything about their psychology. Who knows why it does anything?"

"It's protecting itself," Moonboy said. "Maybe even trying to confuse us."

"It does know our psychology pretty well," I pointed out, "after eavesdropping on us for a couple of hundred years."

"And it knows you," Red said. "Of you."

"Me personally?"

He nodded. "The Other knows of our special relationship and would like to exploit it, making you its primary human contact, through me." I wondered whether he'd just made that up.

"How could it know something like that?" Dargo snapped, for once mirroring my own thoughts.

"It has access to any public broadcast. Her relationship to me is well documented." He made what might have been a placating gesture. "Of course, Carmen will share what she hears with everyone, and we will take input from anyone."

"I don't like it. You or she could make up anything, as long as you're working in a language no one else can translate."

"I will tell the Other of your objection."

"And how will I know that you have?"

"Have I ever lied to you? Lying is sort of a human thing." Paul glanced at me and glanced away. We both knew that wasn't exactly true. Red had come up with the suggestion that we feed Dargo an innocuous, half-true translation.

"Even if you completely trusted Red," Oz said, "as I do, there's no reason to assume that the Other is being straight with him. As Dargo said, it could have communicated with us directly from the beginning, if it had wanted to."

Moonboy nodded. "It must have its own agenda, its strategy." To Red: "We still don't know how long this whatever, this hypnotic suggestion, has been part of the yellow family's makeup?"

"None of the family can tell us anything useful. They say it must have been there forever, ever since the Others created them. Which would be fine, except for the number."

"Ten to the seventh seconds," Moonboy said.

Red nodded. "It would require that the Others, or this Other, could predict 27,000 years ago, how long it would take for humans to get to Mars and bring a Martian back."

"A yellow one," I said.

"Wait," Oz said and laughed. "We don't have any reason to assume that the number is right. The Other isn't some sort of infallible god. That 27,000 years might have been its best estimate two thousand years ago, or ten thousand, or fifty—whenever you Martians were initially set up."

"At least 5,000 ares. We have reliable memories that far back—at least the memory family does."

"You think so." Oz was still smiling broadly. "But look. If the Other could program the yellow folk, the memory family, to flop down and deliver a pre-recorded message when they saw the red laser—then what else might it have programmed them with? Maybe five thousand ares of bogus history."

Red grabbed his head and buzzed loudly, laughing. "Oz! You could be right." He buzzed again. "Like your religious humans who claim God created the Earth six thousand years ago, with the fossils in place. Who can say you're wrong?"

"An areologist," Oz said. "Quite seriously. We have Terry and Joan on Mars right now, nosing around your city, trying to date it. What if there's nothing that's more than a few thousand ares old? A few hundred?"

Red clasped himself with all four arms, which usually meant he was thinking. "It's not impossible. I have direct evidence, written communication, with only three previous leaders, with mention of a fourth. Less than a thousand ares." He turned to Moonboy. "Have Joan and Terry found anything older?"

"I don't think so. But they're still doing preliminary work, being pretty cautious."

"We must have them try. Dig down for things to date. This is fascinating!"

What I myself found fascinating was the way Red had changed the subject away from "Have I ever lied to you?"

8

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Red wrote out the message that the Other had transmitted after its English one, and it was as innocuous and plain as the earlier secret one had been threatening and complex. Basically, "I want to cooperate, but you must let me go at my own slow pace."

I searched my room for a microphone but found exactly what I'd expected: nothing. You can buy one at Cube Shack not much bigger than a flea.

Red asked everyone on our side and most of the people on Earth side whether they had questions or messages for the Other. I knew he wanted a long transmission so that his own part would be hidden in the volume generated by others.

News came that my mother and father were coming on the next shuttle from Mars, which pleased me, though I had to admit I hadn't missed Dad. So Card would be informally adopted by the Westlings, which no doubt made him one happy boy. Barry got away with murder, which happens when your mother is a novelist and your father is a crazy inventor, no matter what their job titles claimed.

Over the next two days, I had eight more VR interviews. The most trivial was one from my old high school, and the most interesting was with a panel of "xenopsychologists" convened at Harvard. The weirdest was the last one, from the Church of Christ Revealed, who thought the whole thing, from the Space Elevator on, was a hoax the government was perpetrating for its own obscure purpose. I told them they could go out and watch the Space Elevator work; they could aim an antenna at Mars and intercept the signals that emanated from there whenever the right side was facing Earth. The interviewers smiled conspiratorially, saying "Yes, that's what we're supposed to believe," or "It's all explained in the Bible, and it isn't like your people say."

After putting up with that, I went back to my place feeling sort of like the most dispensable member of the team, and what should greet me but a message from Dargo: "Please come see me at your earliest convenience."

I put on my exercise clothes and went up to row and jog. Moonboy was on the rowing machine, so I jogged for a while on the treadmill watching Earth news. So little of it seemed important.

So my "earliest convenience" was after 250 calories of running and a mile on the oars. I didn't shower, but went sweatily down to Dargo's office.

Her nose wrinkled when I stepped in and closed the door behind me. Without preamble, she said, "Have you ever heard of S2N?"

"No ... a sulfur and nitrogen compound?" Even my dim recall of valences told me that couldn't be it.

"It's a research tool I just found. It dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio in a collection of audio data."

Her ubiquitous clipboard was on the desk. She stabbed a button on it, and my voice clearly said, "That's a kind of insect?" Then Red started the mayfly analogy, Bach a faint whisper in the background. She switched it off.

"I have it all," she said. "The super-slow Others, the faster one on Triton, the rationale for Red's secret language. Our mayfly helplessness in the face of their ancient wisdom."

"So. Now you know everything I do. You still can't—"

"Maybe I know a little more than you do. You accept what your Martian friend says as the pure truth. I do not."

I didn't trust myself to say anything and just nodded.

"There's nothing like all that even implied in the actual communications that everybody's seen and heard from Triton. I think Red made it all up."

"Made it up? Why would he do that?"

"It's simple, really. His power over his tribe, and now his usefulness to us, is dependent on the uniqueness of his supposed language. What if it's just another Martian dialect? Our linguists are cataloguing similarities among the other three. With a large enough sample, I'm sure Red's will fall into line."

She didn't know what she was talking about! They weren't "dialects," any more than Chinese is a dialect of Turkish. And no linguist was yet able to utter "two plus two is four" in any of the tricky languages. That they had sounds in common was not very mysterious.

"I'm sure that could be true," I heard myself saying, "in theory. But I'd need more than supposition."

"Of course you would. And I know you consider him a friend and wouldn't ask you to betray him. Just try to listen to what he has to say objectively—with my ears as well as yours. Try to entertain the possibility."

"All right." Among the possibilities I could entertain was that Dargo had finally popped her cork. "But what if he is telling the truth? We don't dare go public with your thesis. The Other might learn of it and push the button."

"Absolutely. Utmost caution and secrecy."

I left with my head sort of spinning, trying to figure out exactly what kind of game Dargo was playing.

I couldn't believe she'd had a change of heart about me, trusting me enough to enlist my aid in her scheming. But she did have me in a perfect trap—I couldn't report her eavesdropping without revealing Red's deadly secret.

Could she be right, though? The "deadly secret" a sham, part of an elaborate hoax?

No. That would require advance collusion with the Other.

Maybe she was setting me up for a double-double-cross, having me spy on Red and then telling Red, to destroy his trust in me. I couldn't say anything to him or Paul, now, without the risk of being overheard.

But I could write. I didn't want to trust e-mail or anything else electronic, but I could afford a little paper.

Paul first. Before I even went to the shower, I wrote down everything I could remember about Dargo's convoluted scheme, in small print on both sides of a half sheet of paper, and folded it up small.

We met in the hall as I was coming back from the shower, and when we kissed hello I slipped it into his pocket. He gave me a little nod.

I spent a couple of hours trying to extract something useful from a structural-linguistic approach to the Martian consensus language, by an Earth researcher who'd done a lot of work with cetacean communication. I think she was hiding her lack of actual results with a lot of pretty charts and weak analogy. Both creatures do communicate with repeating patterns of noises. But the dolphins are mainly saying "Follow me to fish," or "Let's fuck." The Martians apparently indulge in abstractions.

Paul wasn't at late dinner. I ate with Oz and Meryl. She brought up the subject of Dargo. "It's strange. With all this exciting new stuff happening, she seems angry rather than interested."

Oz said that Dargo will be Dargo. "She's an administrator at heart, not a scientist. Administrators don't like the unexpected."

I could have given them both a couple of data points, but had to refrain.

When I got back to my place, there was a humorously pornographic love note on my screen. I brushed my teeth and went over to Paul's.

For the first time in my life, I felt the foreplay went on too long. I could see my note and his answer on his desk.

He fell asleep, or acted as if he had, right afterward. I padded over to his desk and read the note, a page of small neat capital letters.

SHE HAS YOU IN A DIFFICULT POSITION. ME, TOO, ASSUMING SHE ALSO RECORDED OUR "CONVERSATION" WHILE MAKING LOVE. OF COURSE I'LL PRETEND THAT I DON'T KNOW SHE KNOWS, AT LEAST UNTIL SHE REVEALS IT TO ME.

YOU THINK SHE HAS EITHER LOST IT OR HAS SOME NEFARIOUS PLAN IN MIND. LET ME SUGGEST A THIRD ALTERNATIVE: THAT SHE IS RIGHT.

WE ONLY HAVE THE MARTIANS’ WORD FOR THE STORY THAT THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE BEING ON TRITON. WHAT IF IT HAD CONTACTED THEM YEARS AGO—DOZENS OR HUNDREDS—AND SWORE THEM TO SECRECY?

OUR SCIENTISTS HAVE NO IDEA HOW THOSE RADIO/TV/CUBE RECEIVERS WORK. THE OTHER COULD HAVE CONTACTED THEM RIGHT AFTER THE FIRST RADIO SIGNALS FROM EARTH AND SAID, "THE ALIENS (HUMANS) ARE COMING, AND THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO."

MOST OF THEM SEEM STRAIGHTFORWARD AND HONEST, BUT THEY'VE HAD A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS TO STUDY HUMAN BEHAVIOR, WATCHING US LIE TO EACH OTHER REPEATEDLY—AND BESIDES, HOW COULD YOU TELL IF ONE WAS LYING? THAT SHIFTY LOOK IN ITS FIFTY EYES?

AS YOU SAY, RED REQUIRED YOU TO MISREPRESENT THE TRUTH ABOUT THE OTHER, AND THEN VOLUNTEERED TO LIE HIMSELF, TO MISLEAD DARGO ABOUT THE HIDDEN MESSAGE.

I WOULD SAY IT'S MORE LIKELY THAT THE MARTIANS HAVE BEEN STRAIGHT WITH US. BUT WE OUGHT TO KEEP THE OTHER POSSIBILITY IN MIND.

YOU MIGHT USE DARGO'S DEVIOUS MIND. SHE MIGHT COME UP WITH A WAY TO TEST RED WITHOUT HIM NOTICING.

I HATE LIKE HELL THE THOUGHT THAT SHE MIGHT BE RIGHT.

* * * *

I couldn't sleep. I kissed Paul goodnight and silently went back to my place, where I memorized his note and then destroyed it, tearing it into small pieces and rolling them up like pills, then swallowing them with sips of water. Carmen Dula, human shredder.

When Dargo had said it, it sounded like paranoia. From Paul, it sounded almost reasonable. I had to consider, reconsider, the argument on its own merits.

Go back to the beginning:

1. Red did not initiate contact. He showed up only when it was necessary to save my life, an event he couldn't have predicted. (But that situation would have presented itself sooner or later, with somebody.)

2. The Martians didn't know that I'd get the lung crap—which required their life-saving intervention. (But maybe they did know—Red certainly didn't waste any time responding—and maybe they're lying about every Martian getting it. Maybe it was genetically tailored for humans.)

3. The effect of the ruby laser on the yellow family proved that they didn't know about the Other beforehand. (Or that they were good actors.)

4. They don't know how their technology works, themselves. It's self-repairing, eternal. (Or so they say.)

5. For a deception to work would require the whole Martian population to live a lie, all the time. (Or maybe just the dozen or so we're in constant contact with—and they were chosen by the Martians, not at random.)

It would have to be all of them, eventually, since as far as I know there were no restrictions on human investigators like Terry and Joan.

I did finally sleep, and had a disturbing dream. I was at a party on Earth, a formal one like a gallery opening. I moved through it like a ghost, glass in hand. No one paid any attention to me.

Except a large handsome man with red hair and a red tie. He studied me intently. But when I went toward him he receded somehow, dream logic, and disappeared.

* * * *

No one on our side was, strictly speaking, a linguist, but Josie spoke Chinese and Spanish as well as English, and had been hammering away at consensus Martian. Oz had Latin and Greek as well as Norwegian. I made a "drinks" date with them, to get their angle on the Martian languages, just before my next tete-a-tete with Red.

Our diets in New Mars were controlled about 10 percent by our own input, and 90 percent by the Mars Corporation experts, who weren't about to send us up a bottle of Jack Daniels whenever we felt the need. But we did have a carboy of ethyl alcohol with a computer-controlled tap. You showed it your retina and it dispensed a shot or two of "vodka," which was pure ethyl alcohol distilled from Hilton garbage, with a little lime flavoring, cut with fifty percent absolutely pure water from Hilton sewage. You could mix it with various things. I chose grape juice concentrate and another tumbler of water, to make it resemble wine.

Oz took two ice cubes and a drop of "bourbon concentrate." Josie tipped hers into a glass of orange juice.

"No human will ever be able to really speak a Martian language," she said, "without mechanical help. Ten or twelve of the phonemes, you'd have to be a cricket or a garbage disposal to make." Phonemes are the elementary sounds that make up a language.

"And they have lots of them? Phonemes?"

"Around seventy. As opposed to forty-some for English. Some human languages have more than a hundred."

"But you can pronounce them all." He somehow made a noise in his throat like a champagne cork coming out of a bottle, beginning the sentence, "Xhosa can be a challenge."

"There's remarkably little repetition," Josie continued. "Human languages have words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ that keep cropping up. If Martian has them, they're pretty well hidden."

"It's worse than that," Oz said. "You know about those Poles in Earthside?" I didn't. "They're just analyzing sounds, taking every recording of Martian speech we have and pushing it through a computer routine that counts phonemes. Or at least sounds that repeat.

"There are eight related sounds, like throat clearing, that occur more often than others. The other seventy-some kinds of sound seem to be evenly distributed—one sound is as frequent as any other."

"If you edit out the throat clearings," Josie said, "it sounds weirdly like Hawaiian."

"Wannalottanookie," Oz growled.

"Tell me about it. And you've been following the dictionary saga?"

"Last I heard, they were still on square one."

"Yeah, square zero. Like they never say a given phrase the same way twice. But they understand each other. And they can't explain why because they never have to learn their own languages."

"Except for Red."

"Who presents his own set of problems," Oz said. "He was born knowing all the other languages, but then had to learn his own, which nobody else is allowed to learn—including us."

"I wonder why," I said. "It's been a deep dark secret from the beginning."

"We do have that small sample, in the last message from Titan. The Polish guys analyzed it, and maybe it is significantly different. Too small a sample to say for sure?" He looked at Josie.

"Seven hundred thirty-eight syllables, forty-some of them the throat clearings, which I think are some kind of punctuation. The same phoneme-type sounds as the other languages, but it's nothing like an even distribution.

"The Poles did a breakdown, which I can send you. Some of those sounds only occur two or three times. About fifteen of them make up ninety percent of the message."

"So Red's language is more like a human one?" I said.

"It's also the only one that has a written form. If you asked him nice, do you think he'd give you a sample?"

"If you twisted his arm—or all four of them?"

"When I asked him back on Mars, he said it wasn't possible—not like ‘it's not done’ or ‘it's illegal,’ but just not possible, like walking on the ceiling."

"Not possible for you to read," Josie said, "or not possible for him to show to you?"

"Both. They weren't ‘his’ to show—even the records he wrote belong to his family, not himself—and if I did look at them I wouldn't see anything that looked like writing." I took a long sip of ersatz wine. "He just laughed when I tried to press him on it. I couldn't even get him to write a sample down, though he writes human languages well enough. You can't write it with a pencil or pen or brush, he said. And then laughed some more and changed the subject."

Paul came scrambling down the ladder. "Thought I might find you here." I'd left my phone in the room. "You were talking about Red?"

"Red and languages," Oz said.

"There's some news." He plopped into a chair. "Five or six minutes ago. The Martians are mating! Joan has a cube of all but the first few minutes."

"Martian porn?" I said.

"Whatever works for you. But what's interesting is the buds aren't being grown to replace dead Martians, but rather the ones that are here in New Mars."

"Wait. Not Red."

"Even Red." He shrugged. "In fact, it was apparently Red's idea. Can't wait to hear his side of it."

I checked my wrist. "I have an appointment with him in less than an hour. Come on along. You too," I lamely added to Oz and Josie.

"Too crowded," Oz said. "You can catch us up later." He stretched. "Think I'll take a little nap and sleep off all that booze."

"Me too," Josie said, and slid her half-full glass over to Paul. "If you don't mind my germs."

"Love your germs," he said.

9

Betrayed

I knew that Red was going to be busy with some Chinese xenobiologists up until our meeting at 1800, so I didn't check in early. I called on the hour, from outside his door, and said that Paul was with me. Red said he was welcome.

We'd dressed warmly, of course. Over his Corporation uniform, Paul wore a threadbare wool cardigan, souvenir of New Zealand, and a knitted wool cap with incongruous snowmen that he'd won in a poker game on Mars. I just had an extra shirt and wore jeans over my exercise shorts and had made a cap out of a bandana, the way Dad had taught me when I did Halloween as a pirate in the fourth grade.

The temperature dropped more than twenty degrees when we slipped into Red's quarters, closing the door quickly behind us.

It took a few moments to become accustomed to the low light. Red had the Martian equivalent of an indoor garden, trays of mushroomy things growing under dim bluish-gray light. The wall cube that he'd been using with the Chinese still had a slight glow.

There were cushions of various shapes and sizes, all a neutral gray, scattered in front of the cube, for human visitors. He gestured in that direction. "Carmen, Paul, it is good to see you. Please have a seat."

I wondered whether he ever considered the psychological advantage he had, always standing over his guests. Of course he did.

"We just heard about the blessed event," I said as we sat down, "on Mars."

"An interesting euphemism. So often otherwise, on Earth."

"You're requesting a replacement for yourself," Paul said. "Do you expect to die soon?"

He shrugged slowly. "Like you, I could die anytime. But the reason for me to rush my replacement is less philosophical than economic.

"I've come to realize that I will never go back to Mars, and nor will any of the other Martians here. It's expensive, in terms of redundant life support, and there is no way my leaving would profit the corporation. On the contrary. No one else can deal with the Other as efficiently as I can.

"And it's inconvenient for Mars, to have their leader so far away. Simple yes-or-no decisions can be delayed by more than a half hour."

"Used to be half a day," Paul said.

"Yes, I'm grateful for the repeater satellites. Still, the families should have a leader who is not absentee."

"What will your status be," I asked, "after he's matured?"

"'She,’ in this case. I suppose I'll play an advisory role for a while. But I'll probably be more involved with the Other than with Mars."

"This will be the first time there have been two Reds alive at the same time."

"Ha ha. It doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you."

"What I mean is, in all of your history you've only had one leader at a time."

"And that will be her, once she learns what she needs to know. Which might be twelve ares, like me, or a couple of ares less or more. And then I will just be the old guy who went to Earth."

"Who incidentally knows the secret language and speaks to creepy aliens and such."

"True enough. I won't forget the language. I don't know whether it's possible for us to forget a language."

A chime rang and Red made a kissing sound at the cube. A small square appeared in the middle with Dargo Solingen's face. The background showed that she was standing outside the door.

"What may I do for you, Dargo?"

"I just heard about the ... creation of your replacement and wondered if I could talk to you."

"Carmen Dula and Paul Collins are here."

"I know that. I have no objection."

Red inclined his head toward me and I shrugged.

She came in dressed in regular short-sleeved coveralls. At least she wouldn't be staying long.

She dove right in. "This may seem trivial, but some people have expressed concern about protocol. Does this ... budding mean you are no longer the leader of the Martian people?"

"That was always a simplification, as you know. And we aren't exactly people. But it's true that the formation of another individual with my characteristics makes it less simple. If a parallel were to be drawn with human history, I suppose I am a regent now, ha ha, as much as a leader. The new Red will take over when she knows enough and is strong enough."

"Physically strong?" she asked.

"She will be, but no. You would say ‘she has leadership qualities,’ though I think it's more definite with us. The things that she reads while learning her language, mine."

Dargo stared intently at him, perhaps deciding what to say. "I don't know whether Dula has told you. I was able to decipher the secret conversation you had with her."

"I hadn't gotten around to telling him yet."

Red was louder than usual. "You are allowed to do that?"

"No rules cover it. As no rules cover what kind of music you have in the background when you—"

"That's bullshit," Paul said. "Space law is an extension of international law. If we had a jail we could put you in it."

"I don't think you could, but it's moot." She looked at Red. "Your claims about what the Other could do to us ... I don't understand why you would entrust that knowledge to these two, but not to the authorities."

"Trust," Red said. "Your word. I should have trusted you?"

"Yes. If you had trusted me ... nothing would have happened."

The cold air got heavier. "So what happened?" I was almost whispering.

"To extract your actual conversation from my recording, I had access to tools that drew the attention of security authorities. They asked me to cooperate and presented a World Court subpoena for all the material on which I'd used those tools."

"We're not on the World, Dargo," I said.

"My god," Carl said. "What if it gets out? You may have killed us all."

"Don't be so dramatic," she snapped.

Red shook his head. "He may be right. I suppose it was only a matter of time, but I'd hoped it would be after my time.

"Did you stress the need for secrecy—I mean the possible consequences if the Other learned of this breach of confidence?"

"They have heard exactly what you said, including the fantastic threats."

"Here is a fantastic threat," he said, with a gesture I'd never seen: all four arms extended straight out and trembling. "Would you like to be the first human being to be killed by a Martian?"

He took one step toward her and she made for the door with unsurprising speed.

She left the door open. I closed it softly. "What should we do, Red?"

He hugged himself in thought. "I wish I knew more about the Other. We have ancient traditions about their nature. But about this particular individual, you know about as much as I do ... well, there is one thing. It's not reassuring."

"What?"

"You know the Others on their home planet are technically immortal. That is, actually, they spend most of their lives as dead as a rock. But they are revived every now and then. Do something and then return to the dormant state.

"This one is not that way, because it has to stay on the job until the job is done. The ten-to-the-seventh seconds figure, that's how long it has lived. Continuously, for 27,000 years.

"And it envies its relatives for their periodic rest."

In the dark cold, I broke into a sudden sweat. "It wants to die?"

"To die, or to return to where it can have its long rest. I'm not sure quite which state it was referring to. Or whether it feels there is much difference."

Maybe that was why Martians have such an ambiguous attitude toward death. It might reflect the attitude of their makers.

"Should you prepare it for the possibility of exposure?" Paul asked.

"As I say, I'm not sure. That might just make it push the button—or it might have been lying about that.

"Let's not take the chance," I said. "Let's hope her ‘authorities’ are more cautious than she was."

Paul nodded, but his expression told how little hope he held out for that.

10

Trojan Horse

It took less than half a day. Unable to sleep, I got up around four and occupied myself answering mail that had piled up from family and friends. I was writing a note to Card when the screen chimed and a red exclamation point started to strobe in the upper right-hand corner.

I asked for news but then toggled Life Today rather than the Times. Inch-high letters as red as the strobe: TRITON MONSTER THREATENS EARTH DOOM!! Martian Go-Between Reveals All!

I started to read the story, but it kept blurring. How could they do this?

The phone pinged and it was Paul. "Sorry to wake—"

"I'm awake. I saw."

"Jesus. What do we do now?"

"I think the question is what is it going to do now."

"Yeah. Damn. Meet me down at the coffee?"

"There'll be a run on it." I dressed in a hurry and pinned my hair out of the way.

He was waiting for me with a cup. I got one sip and both our phones went off simultaneously.

It was Ishan Jhangiani, the Earth side Science Coordinator. "This is a general announcement. I want everybody, human and Martian, to be at Earth A, on Mars side, or Assembly A, on this side, in forty five minutes, at 5:30. I'm afraid this is a matter of life and death."

The combination of tepid coffee on an empty stomach and bad news sent me rushing to the head. After I'd emptied that out I felt better, but my skin was cold and greasy and my hands were trembling.

Paul came out of the other head, and he didn't look much better than I felt.

I looked into my cup. "I'd like to have one cup of coffee that was actually hot before I die."

"Better do it now.’ He sat down heavily. "Sorry."

"Gallows humor's better than no humor at all." I looked at my wrist. "We've got forty minutes." I nodded at the ladder.

"No, I couldn't. Thanks, but I couldn't.

"Me, neither, actually." I rubbed tears away. "I could kill that bitch!"

"We should've grabbed her and thrown her to Red."

"Yeah." I laughed, but it didn't sound like a laugh. "Not that it would change anything.

Speak of the devil—my phone pinged and it was Red. "Carmen—comm says there's a message coming in from Triton. I think we should be at Earth A as close to now as possible."

"We're down at the mess," I said. "Beat you there." Paul nodded and stood and followed me up the ladder.

Only Oz and Moonboy were there before us. Oz gave me a wan smile. "Josie will be along. She takes a few minutes to wake up."

The cube was on, but it was a blank blue. "Red said they're getting some communication from Triton."

"Maybe it will be ‘Send me the head of Dargo Solingen.’"

"Wonder if she'll be here."

"No. Jhangiani invented ‘house arrest’ and put her under it. She's locked in her room with no contact with the outside world. Josie or I come by every three hours to take her to the head and give her bread and water."

"She'll sue. If any of us live through this."

"Let me be a character witness," Moonboy said. "I've been her special little project for about ten years." I wondered how many of us there were.

Ishan Jhangiani appeared on the cube and looked at us. "No Martians yet?"

"Red's on his way, Dr. Jhangiani. He said there was a message?"

He nodded. "It started five or six minutes ago. We're recording—" His image suddenly dissolved in a shower of static, and the room lights flickered.

Paul crouched instinctively. "Shit. What's that?"

"Hello?" Jhangiani's voice came out of the swirling white noise. Then his image returned. "That was..." He inclined his head and touched an ear. "Oh my god ... do we have a picture?"

The cube went black and then showed a familiar sight, the Hubble planetary camera's view of Neptune, an almost featureless blue ball accompanied by the tiny pale circle of Triton and specks of light that were Nereid and a couple of other small satellites.

Then Triton exploded.

The pale circle suddenly was a ball of intense white, that grew brighter and brighter, and then the screen went white with static.

It darkened again and an unfamiliar voice said, "This is real time."

The view was the same as before, but the dot of Triton was surrounded by a glowing circle, visibly expanding as we watched.

Red was standing in the door. "What's happening?"

"Maybe you can tell us," Paul said. "The Other evidently did something interesting."

Jhangiani came back into the cube. "That explosion reached a brightness of—27 magnitude. For a moment, it was slightly brighter than the Sun."

"Forty times as far away," Paul said. "So for a moment, it was putting out 1600 times as much energy as the Sun. How could it do that?"

"Perhaps Red can tell us," Jhangiani said. "This is the message it sent, a few words of English and then the slowed-down Martian." He nodded at someone. "We've sped up the Martian for you."

The David Brinkley voice again: "I monitor your news broadcasts, of course, and the most recent ones have forced me to make a decision. I am sorry. You already know too much." Then there was about two minutes of accelerated Martian. And then static.

Red didn't say anything. "What did it do?" Jhangiani asked.

"It ... went home." He hugged himself. "It may have literally returned to its home system. Or it died. The words could be the same. As if, if someone goes to Earth, he could be going to a planet or being buried.

"On going home, it destroyed every trace of its technology that was on Triton. It didn't want to risk humans finding it and copying it."

He paused and continued in a halting monotone. "It did this even in the knowledge that soon there will be no humans alive on Earth. The hundred on Mars will presumably live."

I swallowed back bile. "What's it going to do, Red?"

"It's already done." He rocked back and forth. "I'm sorry. I swear I didn't know." He shook his head.

"Didn't know what, Red?" Oz said. "Is there anything we can do?"

"I'm a time bomb. A Trojan Horse. The Other wanted me on Earth, or nearby, before it turned on the beacon that started all this. So that ... if things didn't work out, I could be forced to put an end to it."

"How can that be?" Paul said. "Even if all your mass was turned into an explosion—"

"I mass about a hundred kilograms. By em-cee-squared, that comes to nine times ten to the eighteenth joules. That's equivalent to twenty hundred-megaton nuclear weapons.

"Earth could survive that, since we're 22,000 miles away from the surface. But fusion doesn't begin to describe the forces involved. Could fusion have accounted for the Triton explosion?"

"I guess not?" Paul said. "No, of course not. Did it say how big ... how destructive you could be?"

"Enough to boil away the ocean on the side of the globe we're facing. Blow off a lot of the atmosphere."

"When?" I asked.

"Days." He shook his head. "Maybe two, maybe three.

"The energy doesn't come from here. It's bleeding off a thing like a black hole in an adjacent universe. We've been using it domestically since we first came to Mars."

"The mysterious power source for all the machines," Oz said. "The light for the hydroponics."

"I suppose. I knew nothing about it until today. But the Other says it had another thing like me on Triton, and it only drew off power for a couple of hours, concentrating it for the explosion. This will be orders of magnitude more."

"With all due respect, Red," Moonboy said, "we should lock you into the shuttle right now and fling you as far away as possible."

Red agreed. "That might be the most practical course. Or you could kill me, or I could kill myself, in case the collection process requires me to be alive.

"But the Other didn't say anything about either possibility. It could be that I would explode prematurely, automatically, if I died or left the vicinity of Little Mars."

"Which might be desirable," Sophie said, "if it caused an explosion with less force. We ... would die, but the Earth might be spared."

Red nodded. "I can't say, one way or the other."

I tried to listen with Dargo's skeptical ears. The Other might have been lying to him. Or Red might be lying to us. "It could just be a test," I said. "The Other observing to see how we react to this extremity."

"If it were a human or a Martian, I would say that was possible." Red shook his head. "Not the Other. I don't think we have any hope in that direction. Moonboy is right; I should be sent away. But I don't know that I can go far enough in two days."

"I have an idea," Paul said. He licked his lips and stared straight ahead. "Let's put Red on the other side of the Moon. Get three thousand kilometers of solid rock between Earth and the explosion."

"Ha ha. Perfect. I'll do it now."

"You're not doing it yourself. You need a pilot."

"Paul..."

"We don't need the whole shuttle; just the Mars lander. We'll compute the right time for a slingshot transfer and have it blow the separation bolts. We do the transfer and I come in ass-backwards, kill velocity, look for a place I can land with skis."

"It's suicide," Moonboy said.

"No, I can do it; plenty of smooth areas on Farside. I'll take a few weeks’ life support. If Red doesn't blow up, the Tsiolkovski will be coming in with a pilot next week. She can come get us."

"You don't have to be aboard," I said, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice. "You can pilot by VR."

"Afraid not. No repeater satellites. Once I'm on the other side of the Moon, I'm out of contact with here. It's seat of the pants, just look and do. I'm confident I can land it."

"And if you're wrong," Red said, "we'll just crash. That might set off the explosion, or it might prevent it."

"You're so cheerful," I snapped.

"We don't agree about death," he said. We had argued about that, on Mars and here. He invoked the human philosopher Seneca, saying that he had not existed for 13.7 billion years and apparently enjoyed that state. One spark of a couple of centuries’ life, and he'd be back to not existing for some trillions of years and would enjoy it as much as the previous billions.

"Which leads to a solution," he said. "Paul, if we just set up the thing to crash on the other side of the Moon, we won't need a pilot. I'll just be the cargo. Dying is not so important to me."

"Red, that's great! You don't have to be a fucking hero, Paul!"

Paul didn't look at me, but he wasn't looking at anybody. When he spoke, it was like a class recitation: "Red, I appreciate it, but it's not a simple computation. The Mars lander was not built for this, and it will be out of touch for the most crucial phases."

"So he crashes!" I said. "He just said—"

"No. With one kind of mistake he crashes, but with most others he stays in orbit. It's not like dropping a ball. Things in orbit tend to stay in orbit, at least in the short term. And whenever he was not directly behind the Moon, he'd be the doomsday machine for Earth."

"How long would the flight take?" Oz asked.

"I could get it down to a day and still have plenty of fuel for the landing maneuver."

"We'd better get busy."

"Can I ... could I come?"

His face was completely still. "No. Darling. Minimum life support, maximum maneuverability." He stepped toward me and took me in his arms.

He whispered, speaking slowly and carefully. Only I could hear: "You know I am not so far away from Red with the death thing. I love you and will regret the years we would have had together—do miss them already—but at worst, in one instant I'll only be back to where I spent most of forever.

"And we had a wonderful time while we had it. Better than most people get."

I was crying and didn't try to say anything other than the obvious.

11

Endings, Beginnings

In the last few hours neither Paul nor I brought up the possibility that nothing would happen and he would be back in a couple of weeks. As if talking about it might have jinxed us.

Red did drop a hint, though, obliquely. I was waiting by the airlock that led to the shuttle, and he came walking up with a bundle tucked under a large and small arm. It was the gauzy tent he wore when he ventured out onto the surface of Mars.

"Just for safety's sake," he said. "You never know." It would protect him for a couple of hours’ EVA or moonwalk, or keep him alive for a while if the shuttle's life support shut down.

Paul came out of the airlock looking like a Space Force recruiting cubeshot, gleaming white spacesuit. He had shaved his head and had feelie contacts pasted on his skull.

I was composed. Oz had given me a couple of slap-on tranquilizers, but I wanted to hold off on them until after the launch.

Paul put his helmet down and swept me up in an armored hug. That was not exactly the way I wanted to remember his body, hidden behind bulletproof plastic. But I could imagine what was underneath.

"You remember the day we met," I said, "throwing a pebble at the iguana?"

He smiled. "Yeah."

"Think you can manage to hit the Moon?"

"It's a lot bigger." He gave me a last hard kiss and stepped back. No good-bye or see you. Just a long intent look and then he picked up his helmet and went through the airlock.

When it closed, I put one of the patches on my wrist. When the reverberating bang meant they had launched, I slapped on the second.

We had saved one bottle of the imported Bordeaux for some future celebration. I held it for a long time, remembering. But then I put it back and went down to the mess and made a glass of grape juice laced with ethanol.

I carried the drink up to Earth A, where almost everyone else was gathered. I almost wished they had let Dargo out to watch the consequences of her judgment. But I would probably have said something or done something I'd later regret. If there was a later.

The Hubble showed the little ship drifting along in the bright sunlight, occasional background stars going by unhurriedly. Paul talked with technical people here and on Earth, and Red kept up a constant monologue. Fly-in-Amber said it was all apparently in Red's own language, a message for his successor. Or perhaps for the Others, eventually.

The alcohol and drugs made me very sleepy. I ate a hamburger because I knew I had to have something and then went up to my quarters and slept dreamlessly for twenty hours.

I awoke to my own timer, the phone, and the computer screen all buzzing and pinging. I turned them all off, knowing what they meant, and went to the head. Splashed water on my face and jerked a comb through my hair and went up to Earth A.

They weren't using the Hubble, because the Moon is too bright for it to focus on. Oz said it was a telescope in Hawaii. It showed the Mars lander as a small cylindrical shape, moving toward the limb of the Moon. I knew it would be decelerating, but you couldn't tell by looking.

Paul's voice was suddenly loud. "We'll be making planetfall, moonfall I guess, in about twenty-two minutes. Twenty-one. Lose radio contact in less than a minute."

The image of the ship and the Moon's limb were almost touching. "Hmm ... I don't have any last words. ‘Crash’ Collins signing off. Hope this works. Dargo, I'll see you in Hell. Darling ... darling ... good..."

Well, at least Dargo would get all of her message, even if mine required a little imagination. Josie came up and held me from one side, and Meryl from the other.

Meryl sobbed. "People won't know he already had the nickname."

The view shifted to earthside, the nearly full moon high over a placid ocean. Maybe it was from the Hawaiian mountaintop where the observatory was.

After what seemed a lot longer than twenty minutes, a voice from the cube said, "One minute to touchdown."

We held our breath for a minute. Then another minute. We didn't know what to expect.

After twenty minutes or so, people started drifting away, back to their quarters or down to the mess, or just to wander.

For some reason I kept staring at the moon, maybe wishing I was there in Hawaii, maybe not thinking anything much—whatever, I was one of the few people actually watching when it happened.

At first there was just a faint glow surrounding the moon, as if a wispy cloud had moved in front of it. Then it was suddenly dramatic.

People who have seen total solar eclipses say it was like that, but more so. A brilliant nimbus of pearly light spread across half the sky, the full moon suddenly a black circle in the middle, dark by contrast.

A crackle of static and a human voice. "Holy shit. That was close." Paul!

* * * *

It was Red who had suggested the plan, which was probably not something a sane space pilot would have come up with.

After touchdown, when he was careening along on skis trying not to live up to his nickname, he should look for an area that was locally "uphill." Try to stop with the lander pointed at least slightly skyward. Then Red would get off, stand clear, and Paul could hit full throttle—get over the horizon and try to make orbit. When he disappeared from sight, Red would measure off ten minutes and then open his suit and die. That would give Paul time to make orbit. But not so much time that he would go completely around and be over Red when he died.

The supposition that Red's death would trigger the explosion turned out to be a good guess.

It was a combination of luck and skill. He could steer to a certain extent with the skis, and so when he had almost slowed to nothing, he aimed for the slope of some small nameless crater. When he slid to a stop, he was pointing about fifteen degrees uphill, with nothing in the way.

Red was already wearing his gauzy suit. He cycled through the airlock and picked his way down the crater side. As soon as he said he was clear, Paul goosed it. Once over the horizon, he tweaked the attitude so he got into a low lunar orbit and waited.

When it blew he was almost blinded by sparkles in his eyes, gamma rays rushing through, and he had a sudden feverish heat all over his body. Behind him, he could see the glow of vaporized lunar material being blasted into the sky.

That little crater that saved him really earned the right to a name. But it had boiled completely away, along with everything else for hundreds of kilometers, and in its place was a perfectly circular hole bigger than Tsiolkovski, previously the largest crater.

I thought they should name it Crash.

* * * *

So every January first we present a petition for lifting the quarantine, and every year our case is not strong enough. But now there's a Space Elevator on Mars, so there's a lot of pretty cheap travel back and forth within the quarantine. After five years on New Mars we went back, and it was good to have a planet beneath your feet—and over your head as well.

Oz invented a Church of Holy Rational Weirdness so that he could marry me with Paul and not offend any of our sensibilities. I was pregnant and thought there were already too many bastards on Mars.

My first was a girl, and I named her after her grandmother, so I could see her smile. Her middle name is Mayfly, and I hope she lives forever. The second, with the same middle name, was a boy.

People who don't know us might wonder why a kid with jet-black hair would be named Red.

STARBOUND

JOE HALDEMAN

www.sfgateway.com

For Gay, Judith, and Susan: Muses, Graces

PART 1

THE SEED

1

NATIVITY SCENE

An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.

You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.

(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)

But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.

“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.

“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.

“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.

It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.

Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.

A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.

Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.

Paul and I had won the gamete lottery, along with four other couples. For all of us, the sperm and ova came from frozen samples we’d left on Earth, away from the radiation bath of Mars.

I felt a curious and unpleasant lightness in my breasts, which were now officially just ornaments. None of the new children would be breast-fed. None of them would suffer birth trauma, either, at least in the sense of being rammed through a wet tunnel smaller than a baby’s head. There might be some trauma in suddenly having to breathe for oneself, but so far none of them had cried. That was a little eerie.

They wouldn’t have a mother; I wouldn’t be a mother, in any traditional sense. Only genetically. They’d be raised by the colony, one big extended family, though most of the individual attention they got would be from Alphonzo Jefferson and Barbara Manchester, trained to run the “creche,” about to more than double in population.

My wine was too warm and too strong, made with wine concentrate, alcohol, and water. “They look okay. But I can’t help feeling cheated.”

Josie snorted. “Don’t. It’s like passing a loaf of hard bread.”

“Not so much the birth itself, as being pregnant. Is that weird?”

“Sounds weird to me,” Paul said. “Sick all the time, carrying all that extra weight.”

“I liked it,” Josie said. “The sickness is just part of the routine. I never felt more alive.” She was already 50 percent more alive than a normal person, a lean, large athlete. “But that was on Earth,” she conceded.

“Oh, hell.” I slid my drink over to Paul. “I have to take a walk.”

Nobody said anything. I went down to the dressing room and stripped, put on a skinsuit, then clamped on the Mars suit piece by piece, my mind a blank as I went through the rote safety procedure. When I was tight, I started the air and clomped up to Air Lock One. I hesitated with my thumb on the button.

This was how it all began.

2

HISTORY LESSON

Carmen Dula never set out to become the first human ambassador to an alien race. Nor did she aspire to become one of the most hated people on Earth—or off Earth, technically—but which of us has control over our destiny?

Most of us do have more control. It was Carmen’s impulsiveness that brought her both distinctions.

Her parents dragged her off to Mars when she was eighteen, along with her younger brother Card. The small outpost there, which some called a colony, had decided to invite a shipload of families.

A shitload of trouble, some people said. None of the kids were under ten, though, and most of the seventy- five people living there, in inflated bubbles under the Martian surface, enjoyed the infusion of new blood, of young blood.

On the way over from Earth, about halfway through the eight-month voyage, Carmen had a brief affair with the pilot, Paul Collins. It was brief because the powers-that-be on Mars found out about it immediately, and suggested that at thirty-two, Paul shouldn’t be dallying with an impressionable teenaged girl. Carmen was insulted, feeling that at nineteen she was not a “girl” and was the only one in charge of her body.

The first day they were on Mars, before they even settled into their cramped quarters, Carmen found out that the “powers”-that-be were one single dour power, administrator Dargo Solingen. She obviously resented Carmen on various levels and proceeded to make the Earth girl her little project.

It came to a head when Dargo discovered Carmen swimming, skinny-dipping, after midnight in a new water tank. She was the oldest of the six naked swimmers, and so took the brunt of the punishment. Among other things, she was forbidden to visit the surface, which was their main recreation and escape, for two months.

She rankled under this, and rebelled in an obvious way: when everyone was asleep, she suited up and went outside alone, which broke the First Commandment of life on Mars, at the time: Never go outside without a buddy.

She’d planned to go straight out a few kilometers, and straight back, and slip back into her bunk before anyone knew she was gone. It was not to be.

She fell through a thin shell of crust, which had never happened before, plummeted a couple of dozen meters, and broke an ankle and a rib. She was doomed. Out of radio contact, running out of air, and about to freeze solid.

But she was rescued by a Martian.

3

GERM THEORY

Humans call me Fly-in-Amber, and I am the “Martian” best qualified to tell the story of how we made contact with humans.

I will put Martian in quotation marks only once. We know we are not from Mars, though we live here. Some of the humans who live here also call themselves Martians, which is confusing and ludicrous.

We had observed human robot probes landing on Mars, or orbiting it, for decades before they started to build their outpost, uncomfortably close to where we live, attracted by the same subterranean (or subarean) source of water as those who placed us here, the Others.

With more than a century to prepare for the inevitable meeting, we had time to plan various responses. Violence was discussed and discarded. We had no experience with it other than in observation of human activities on radio, television, and cube. You would kick our asses, if we had them, but we are four-legged and excrete mainly through hundreds of pores in our feet.

The only actual plan was to feign ignorance. Not admit (at first) that we understood many human languages. You would eventually find out we were listening to you, of course, but you would understand our need for caution.

We are not good at planning, since our lives used to be safe and predictable, but in any case we could not have planned on Carmen Dula. She walked over the top of a lava bubble that had been worn thin, and fell through.

She was obviously injured and in grave danger. Our choices were to contact the colony and tell them what had happened or rescue her ourselves. The former course had too many variables—explaining who we were and what we knew and all; she would probably run out of air long before they could find her. So our leader flew out to retrieve her.

(We have one absolute leader at a time; when he/she/it dies, another is born. More intelligent, larger, stronger, and faster than the rest of us, and usually long-lived. Unless humans interfere, it turns out.)

The leader, whom Carmen christened Red, took a floater out and picked up Carmen and her idiot robot companion, called a dog, and brought them back to us. Our medicine cured her broken bones and frostbite.

We are not sure why it worked on her, but we don’t know how it works on us, either. It always has.

We agreed not to speak to her, for the time being. We only spoke our native languages, which the human vocal apparatus can’t reproduce. Humans can’t even hear the high-pitched part.

So Red took her back to the colony the next night, taking advantage of a sandstorm to remain hidden. Left her at the air-lock door, with no explanation.

It was very amusing to monitor what happened afterward—we do listen to all communications traffic between Earth and Mars. Nobody wanted to believe her fantastic story, since Martians do not and could not exist, but no one could explain how she had survived so long. They even found evidence of the broken bones we healed but assumed they were old injuries she had forgotten about, or was lying about.

We could have had years of entertainment, following their tortuous logic, but illness forced our hand.

All of us Martians go through a phase, roughly corresponding to the transition between infancy and childhood, when for a short period our bodies clean themselves out and start over. It isn’t pleasant, but neither is it frightening, since it happens to everybody at the same time of life.

Somehow, Carmen “caught” it from us, which is medically impossible. Our biologies aren’t remotely related; we don’t even have DNA. Nevertheless, she did have the transition “sickness,” and we brought her back to our home and treated her the way we would a Martian child, having her breathe an unpleasant mixture of smoldering herbs. She expelled everything, especially the two large cysts that had grown in her lungs. She was fine the next day, though, and went home—which was when the real trouble started.

She had apparently infected all the other youngsters in the colony—everyone under the age of twenty or so.

It was all sorted out eventually. Our leader Red and a healer Martian went over to the human colony and treated all the children the way they had Carmen, not pleasant but not dangerous. Unfortunately, no one could explain how the “disease” could have been transmitted from us to Carmen and from Carmen to the children. Human scientists were mystified, and, of course, we don’t have scientists as such.

The children seemed to be all right. But people were afraid that something worse might happen, and so the humans on Earth put all of Mars under quarantine, where it remains to this day, although there have been no other incidents. People who come to Mars do so in the knowledge that they may never see Earth again.

There is still no shortage of volunteers, which makes me think that Earth must be a very unpleasant place.

4

NO ORDINARY HERO

I had to name the boy Red, after my friend who gave his life to save us all. Paul and I tried on various names for our daughter, and settled on Nadia, Russian for “hope.” Which we need now. (They both had the middle name Mayfly, sort of a joke between me and the memory of Red.)

There were probably a good number of human boys and girls named after that particular Martian. You couldn’t say the name in Martian, a series of clacks and creaks and whistles that means “Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader.” He saved me from dying of exposure, or stupidity, and a few years later, he saved the world by putting himself on the other side of the Moon when he realized he’d become a planet-destroying time bomb. Not something that happens to ordinary heroes.

The Martians had told us about the “Others” early on—the other alien race that supposedly had brought the Martians to Mars, tens of thousands of years ago. At first we wondered whether they were myth, or metaphor, but the memory family (those who always wore yellow, like Fly-in-Amber) insisted that the Others were actual history, though from so far ago the memory was all but lost.

They were as real as dirt, as real as death.

The memory family didn’t know that they had another function, besides using their eidetic memories to keep track of things. They also retained a coded message, generation after generation, that would be transmitted to humans when the time was right.

The decoded message seemed innocuous. By means of a checkerboard digital picture, a “Drake diagram,” we learned that the Others were a silicon-nitrogen form of life; they evidently lived immersed in the liquid nitrogen seas of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

Various mysteries began to come together after the Others revealed their existence, like the paradoxical combination of high technology and scientific ignorance in the Martian city. (They apparently lived only in one huge underground complex, about the size of a large city on Earth, but with more than half of it covered with creepy fungoid agriculture.) The Others had built the city and populated it with thousands of bioengineered Martians, evidently for the purpose of keeping an eye on Earth, an eye on humanity.

The city had no obvious power source, but they had apparently limitless power from somewhere. Human scientists eventually figured it out, which gave us unlimited power as well, evidently bled off from some “adjacent” universe. I wonder what we’ll do if they show up with a bill.

The Other that lived on Triton—many other Others were light-years away—gave us ample demonstration of what unlimited power can do.

It nearly destroyed the satellite Triton in one tremendous explosion. An instant before the explosion, it escaped, or something did, in a spaceship that screamed away at more than twenty gravities’ acceleration. Its apparent destination was a small star called Wolf 25, about twenty-four light-years away.

Before the Other made its spectacular exit, it prepared an equally spectacular exit for the human race. The head Martian, my friend Red, was unknowingly a direct conduit to the otherworldly source of energy that powered the Martian civilization, and when he died, that connection would open up, with world-destroying intensity.

The world it destroyed would not be Mars. The Other had contrived to send Red to Earth before the time bomb was triggered.

Red knew he didn’t have long. He asked my husband Paul, who is a pilot, to take him to the other side of the Moon to die. There was no way of knowing exactly how large the explosion was going to be, but presumably the Moon had enough mass to block it.

It did. Red’s funeral pyre was bright enough to be seen light-years away, but only a few gamma rays leaked through.

Would the Others see the flare and assume that their little problem—the existence of the human race—had been solved?

That was not likely. We had to go to them.

5

LOGICS

Magic trumps science for most people, and wishful thinking drives a lot of decision-making. So a large and vocal fraction of the human race thought the best way to deal with the Others would be to lie low.

If we didn’t try to contact them and didn’t broadcast any signals into space—who needs to, since everybody has cable?—then the Others would think that their plan had worked, and so would leave us alone.

Of course there’s no cable between Earth and Mars, but the idea of abandoning Mars actually sounded pretty attractive to some, since without Mars none of this would have happened.

Then there was also the problem that we didn’t think to turn off all the transmitters right after the big explosion on the other side of the Moon, so it would be like closing the barn door long after the horse had trotted off to Wolf 25.

A different kind of logic asserted that we had better start building a defense against the Others right now. Assuming that the ship that left Triton couldn’t go faster than the speed of light, it would be more than twenty-four years before they got back home and found out Earth had survived, and a similar time before they came back.

A half century can be a long time in the evolution of weapons. Fifty years before Hiroshima, soldiers were still killing each other with bayonets and single-shot bolt-action rifles.

With unlimited energy, we could make our own planet- buster. And a starship to take it to them.

A lot of humans (and all Martians) thought that was a really bad idea. There was no reason to assume that what they did on Triton and the Moon represented the pinnacle of the Others’ ability to do damage. If we got them angry, they might flip a switch and blow up the Sun. They might send us all off to wherever the energy was coming from. Or some other place from which there would be no returning.

Meanwhile, the Earth’s various economic and political systems were trying to deal with the mixed blessing of free energy. It wasn’t quite literally free, since someone had to pay for the manufacture of an outlet. But there were dozens of factories, then hundreds, then one on every block, popping them out for pocket change. A black box with a knob and a place to plug in, for alternating current, or a couple of terminals, for DC. There were other ways to access different kinds of power—like the direct matter-to-energy inferno that would power ad Astra.

The consortium that had built the Space Elevator, which put things in orbit cheaply and made endeavors like the Martian colony possible, had grown into an enterprise that had an annual cash flow greater than all but the two wealthiest countries. It had a lot of influence on matters like whether or not to build a fleet of starships and go kick some alien butt. It could have made the largest profit in the history of commerce if it had decided to encourage that, but a version of sanity prevailed: it would only make a small fleet of warships, and leave it here in the solar system. And before it did anything aggressive, it would send a peace-seeking delegation to Wolf 25. Sacrificial lambs, some said, and of course its best- known public representative, “The Mars Girl” Carmen Dula, would be one of them. She was not thrilled by the idea.

6

EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN

None of us who had set foot in Mars was allowed to return to Earth. The logic was clear: until we knew why everyone of my generation and younger simultaneously came down with the Martian lung crap, there was no telling what other strange bugs we might harbor. So we’re all Typhoid Marys, until proven otherwise.

We could live in Earth orbit, though, inside a quarantined satellite, Little Mars. I commuted back and forth, Little Mars to Mars, on the one-gee shuttle, which (without spending months in free fall) took between two and five days. I was happier in Mars, and would have settled down there if the Corporation would have left me alone. See my kids often enough for them to remember my face.

In Little Mars, I could don a virtual-reality avatar and electronically walk around on Earth without infecting anyone. Usually my avatar looked like a twelve-year-old girl in shiny white tights who staggered a lot and ran into things, with my face and voice, kind of. When I visited Starhope, though, the spaceship factory, for some reason they gave me a male avatar. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, glossy black. Still clumsy and a little dangerous to be around.

It was even more clumsy than the girlish avatar I was used to, because everything I did and said went through a censoring delay, in case I inadvertently said, “Hey, how are those warships coming along? The ones we’re going to use against the Others?”

It was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the mostly symbolic completion of ad Astra, the ship we were eventually going to take to Wolf 25. All that was really complete, though, was the habitat, the living and working quarters for the crew of seven humans and two Martians. The ship itself was being built out in space, attached to the huge iceball that would provide enough reaction mass to go twenty-some light-years and back.

A miniature version of it was already well past the Oort Cloud, the theoretical edge of the solar system. It had more spartan quarters and the modest goal of going a hundredth of a light-year and back without exploding or otherwise wasting its test pilot.

Our ship would be reasonably comfortable, bigger than the John Carter, which had taken twenty-seven of us on an eight- month journey to Mars. We’d been weightless then, though; on our trip to the presumed home of the Others, we would be traveling at one-gee acceleration, once the ship got up to speed. Then turn around at the midway point and decelerate at the same rate.

Scattered among the merely real humans at the ceremony were eight avatars identical to mine, I guess standard issue at Starhope. One of them was Paul and two would be Moonboy and Meryl, the other two xenologists who were going with us. Maybe three of the others were the Corporation/UN team, who couldn’t be in Little Mars—no place to hide—but might have been in orbit somewhere. Or just in the next room, for that matter, their identities hidden.

(We’d never met face-to-face, but we had exchanged letters. Nice enough people, but a married threesome, two men and a woman, seemed odd to me. One man is hard enough to handle.)

I missed some of the oratory. It’s easy to fall into a drowse when you’re standing motionless in VR. If I missed something important, I could trivo it back.

Our mission was so vague I would be hard- pressed to write a speech about it more than a minute or two long—or shorter than a book. Go to the planet we think the Other went to, just to demonstrate that we could. Then react to whatever they do. If “whatever they do” includes vaporizing us, which doesn’t seem unlikely, then the fact that we didn’t try to harm them first will have been our default mission. Aren’t you sorry you killed us?

As soon as the ceremony was over, they started taking the habitat apart. It broke down into modules small enough to be lifted by the Space Elevator.

Once the habitat was delivered, Starhope would settle down into what would be its regular business for the next forty years: building warships.

It was a really stupid idea, since the Others had already demonstrated how easy it would be for them to destroy the Earth. Why aggravate them?

Of course, the warship fleet’s actual function was more about keeping the peace on Earth than carrying war into space. It gave the illusion that something was being done; we weren’t just a passive target. It also provided employment for a large fraction of the Earth’s population, who might otherwise be fighting each other.

The fleet was never mentioned in any broadcast medium; people used euphemisms like “space industrialization” to keep the armament project secret from the Others. I supposed it could work if the Others weren’t listening too hard or were abysmally stupid.

It was good to get out of VR and shower and change. When I was finished, there was a message from Paul saying he was down in the galley with fresh coffee and news.

The coffee was a new batch from Jamaica. He let me take one sip and gave me the news: the Earth triad was coming up to get to know us, ahead of schedule.

“No idea why,” he said. “Maybe Earth is too exciting.”

“Probably just scheduling. Once they start shipping up the pieces of ad Astra, it’s going to be hard to find a seat on the Elevator.” But it was odd.

7

INTRODUCTIONS

I had thought about this moment for some time, often with dread. Now that the moment had come, I just felt resignation, with an overlay of hope. On the other side of this air- lock door was exile from humanity, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Until the Mars quarantine was lifted.

I looked at my mates, Elza and Dustin. “I feel as if someone should make a speech. Or something.”

“How about this?” Dustin said. “ ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’ ”

“My words exactly,” Elza said. “Or approximately.”

We were floating in a sterile white anteroom, the hub of Little Mars. There were two elevator doors, facing one another, slowly rotating around us: EARTH SIDE and MARS SIDE. People could come and go from the Earth side. The Mars side was one-way.

I pushed the button. The door, which was the elevator’s ceiling, slid open. We clambered and somersaulted so that our feet were touching the nominal floor. I said “close,” and the ceiling did slide shut, though it might have been automatic rather than obedient.

As it moved “down” toward the rim of the torus, the slight perception of artificial gravity increased until it was Mars- normal, very light to us. An air- lock hatch opened in our floor, and we climbed down a ladder. The hatch closed above us with a loud final-sounding clunk. A door opened into the supposed contamination of Little Mars.

I’d expected the typical spaceship smell, too many people living in too small a volume, but there was a lot more air here than they needed. It smelled neutral, with a faint whiff of mushroom, probably the Martians’ agriculture.

I recognized the woman standing there, of course, one of the most famous faces in the world, or off the world. “Carmen Dula.” I offered my hand.

She took it and inclined her head slightly. “General Zahari.”

“Just Namir, please.” I introduced my mates, Elza Guadalupe and Dustin Beckner, ignoring rank. They were both colonels in American intelligence, nominally the Space Force. Israeli for me, but we spooks all inhabit the same haunted house.

She introduced her husband, Paul Collins, even more famous, who would be piloting the huge ship, and the other two xenologists, Moonboy and Meryl. We would meet the Martians later.

We followed them down to the galley. Walking was strange, both for the lightness and a momentary dizziness if you turned your head or nodded too quickly—Coriolis force acting on the inner ear, which I remembered from military space stations. It doesn’t bother you after a few minutes.

Dustin stumbled over a floor seam as we went into the galley, and Carmen caught him by the arm and smiled. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days. Myself, I’ve come to prefer it. Sort of dreading going back to one gee.”

The ad Astra would accelerate all the way at one gee. “How long have you lived with Martian gravity?”

“Since April ’73,” she said. “Zero gee there and back, of course, in those days. I’ve been back and forth a couple of times on the one-gee shuttle. I didn’t like it much.”

“We’ll get used to it fast,” Paul said. “I split my time between Earth and Mars in the old days, and it wasn’t a big problem.”

“You were an athlete back then,” she said, with a little friendly mocking in her voice. “Flyboy.”

Terms change. For most of my life the old days meant before Gehenna. Now it means before Triton. And a flyboy used to fly airplanes.

“Nice place,” Dustin said. Comfortable padded chairs and a wooden table, holos of serious paintings on the walls, some unfamiliar and strange. Rich coffee smell. They had a pressure-brewer that I saw did tea as well.

“Pity we can’t take it with us,” Paul said. “Best not get too used to Jamaican coffee.”

There was room around the table for all of us. We all got coffee or water or juice and sat down.

“We wondered why you came early,” Moonboy said. “If you don’t mind my being direct.” He had a pleasant, unlined face in a halo of unruly gray hair.

“Of course not, never,” I said, and, as often happens, when I paused Elza leaped in to complete my thought.

“It’s about the possibility that we, or one of us, might find the prospect impossible,” she said. “They want us to think this is all cast in stone, and they’re sure from psychological profiles that we’ll all get along fine—and at any rate, we have no choice; there’s only one flight, and we have to be on it.”

Moonboy nodded. “And that’s not true?”

“It can’t be, absolutely. What do you think would happen if one of us seven were to die? Would they cancel the mission?”

“I see your point . . .”

“I’m sure they have a contingency plan, a list of replacements. So what if the problem is not somebody’s dying, but rather somebody’s realizing that before the thirteen years is up, some one or two of the other people are going to drive him or her absolutely insane?”

“Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laughed, perhaps nervously.

“Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”

“Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”

“It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.

“It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”

It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?

Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?

“I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.

“What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.

A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”

Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”

She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.

“How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”

“Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.

She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and . . . distant? Even to the other Martians.”

I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.

When the signal came, nine eventful years ago, Fly-in-Amber had been here, in Little Mars. He went into a coma and started spouting gibberish that was decoded pretty easily. The Other was announcing its existence and location and the fact that it had a silicon- nitrogen metabolism, and little else. It didn’t mention the fact that it was about to try to destroy the world.

“I’m sort of like the soldier boys,” Paul said. “I hadn’t thought about there being an option.”

Carmen laughed. “For you, forget it. You have to fly the boat.” Actually, it was so automated and autonomous that it didn’t need a pilot. Paul would oversee it and take over if something went wrong. But that was beyond problematic. Nobody’d ever flown an iceberg close to the speed of light before.

I could sense people sorting one another out socially. The three of us and Paul all had military service, and, in most mixed populations, that is a primary difference. A pseudospeciation—you have killed, at least theoretically, or been given permission to, and so you are irrevocably different.

We comprised one slight majority. The ones who’d lived on Mars comprised another, more basic. But I could see Paul being an instinctive ally in some situations.

Meryl got up and opened the refrigerator. “Anybody hungry?” A few assents, including my own. “Disgustingly healthy, of course.” She took out a tray with white lumps on it, slid it into the cooker, and pressed a series of buttons, probably microwave and radiant heat together.

“Piloting this thing is a scary proposition.” Paul looked down at the table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “No matter who does it—especially when we’re light-months or light-years away from technical help.”

Not that technical help would do much good if the Martian power source gave out. We might as well burn incense and pray.

“No use worrying about it till Test One gets back,” Meryl said. She took the tray of buns out of the cooker and put them on the table.

“You check on him today?” Carmen asked Paul.

He nodded and took a notebook out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “He’s about two and a half days from turnaround. Sixty-two hours.” Test One was the miniature of ad Astra that was going out a hundredth of a light-year and back. “No problem.”

The pastry was warm and slightly almond- flavored. I didn’t want to speculate on where that came from. Not almonds.

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“Not since yesterday. Don’t want to nag.” He looked at me. “I should be jealous. Another pilot in her life.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I’ll ask him whether he wants to come into quarantine for a big sloppy kiss.”

“Test One isn’t from Mars side?” I hadn’t known that.

“No, they want to use it for local exploration. Don’t want to give us lepers a monopoly on the solar system.”

It made sense. The Moon was closed to people who’d been exposed to Mars, and it would probably be the same for the new outposts planned for Ceres and the satellites of the outer planets.

My heart stopped when a monster stepped through the door. Then restarted. Just a Martian.

“Hi, Snowbird,” Moonboy said, and followed that with a string of nonhuman sounds. I didn’t know you could whistle and belch at the same time.

“Good morning,” it said in Moonboy’s voice. “Your accent is improving. But no, thank you, I don’t want to eat a skillet.”

“Have to work on my vocabulary.”

It turned to us. “Welcome to Little Mars, General. And Colonel and Colonel.”

“Glad to be here,” I said, and immediately felt foolish.

“I hope you’re being polite and not insane. Happy to join an expedition that will probably result in your death? I hope not.” It moved with a smooth rippling gait, four legs rolling, and put an arm around Meryl. Three arms left over.

I’d seen thousands of pictures of them, and studied them extensively, but that was nothing like being in the same room. They’re only a little taller than us but seem huge and solid, like a horse. Slight smell of tuna. The head very much like an old potato, including eyes. Two large hands and two small, four fingers each, articulated in such a way that any could serve as thumb. Four legs.

This one was wearing a white smock, scuffed with gray. When she spoke she “faced” the person she was speaking to, though there was nothing like an actual face. Just a mouth, with fat black teeth. The potato eyes were really eyes, bundles of something like optical fiber. They looked in all directions at once and saw mostly in infrared.

“You’re Snowbird?” my wife asked.

She faced her. “I am.”

“So you’ll be dying with us.”

“I suppose. More than likely.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A human might sit down or lean against something. Snowbird stood still, and was silent for a long moment. “Death is not the same for us. Not as important. We die as completely, but will be replaced—as you are. But we’re more closely replicated.”

“A white dies and a white is born,” I said.

“Yes, but more than that. The new one has a kind of memory of the old. Actual, not metaphorical.”

“Even if you die twenty-four light-years away?” Meryl asked.

“We’ve talked about that, Fly-in-Amber and I. It will be an interesting experiment.”

They don’t reproduce at all like humans. It’s sort of like a wrestling match, with several of them rolling around together, their sweat containing genetic material. The one who wins the match gets to be the mother, breaking out in pods over the next few days. One for each of the recent dead, so the population of each family remains approximately constant.

“You weren’t on the Space Elevator roster,” Carmen said, “and we didn’t expect you until the message just before you got here. Is that a spook thing?”

All human eyes were on me, and probably a few Martian ones. “Yes, but not so much with Elza and Dustin. We all have ties to the intelligence community, but I’m the only one who’s supposed to move in secret. Of course, when we’re traveling together, they stay invisible, too.”

“The secrecy,” Snowbird said. “That’s because you’re an Israeli? A Jew?”

I nodded to her. Difficult to look someone in the eye when there are so many. “I was born in Israel,” I said, as always trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I have no religion.”

That caused a predictable awkward silence, which Carmen eventually broke.

“A friend of mine’s parents knew you in Israel, after Gehenna. Elspeth Feldman.”

It took me a moment. “The Feldmans, yes, Americans. Life sciences. Max and . . . A-something.”

“Akhila. You approved them for Israeli citizenship,” she said.

“Them and a thousand others, mostly involved in the cleanup. The country had a real population shortage.” I turned back to Snowbird. “You know about Gehenna.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is not the same as understanding. How did you survive it?”

“I was in New York all of 2060, a junior attaché at the UN. That’s when the first part of the poison went into the water supply at Tel Aviv and Hefa.”

“Anyone who drank it died,” Carmen said.

“If they were in Tel Aviv or Hefa a year later,” I said, “when car bombs released the second part of the poison. An aerosol.

“It wasn’t immediately obvious, where I was. In an office full of foreigners. And it was a Jewish holiday, Passover.

“We had the news on, cube and radio—one of the car bombs had gone off two blocks away.

“Five or six people started having trouble breathing. All of them dead in a couple of minutes. They could breathe in, but couldn’t exhale.

“We called 9-9-9 but of course got nothing. Went down to the street and . . .” Elza put her hand on my knee, under the table; I covered it with mine.

“Millions died all at once,” Snowbird said.

“Within a few minutes. When we got outside, cars were still crashing. Alarms going off all over the city. Dead people everywhere, of course; a few still dying. Some had jumped or fallen from balconies and lay crushed on the street and sidewalks.”

Snowbird spread all four hands. “I’m sorry. This causes you pain.”

“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “Twenty- one. To tell the truth, sometimes it feels like it didn’t happen to me at all. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s told me the story over and over.”

“It did happen to someone else,” Elza said. “It happened to whoever you were before.” Her fingers moved lightly.

“You probably know the numbers,” I said to the Martian. “Almost 70 percent of the country dead in less than ten minutes.”

“They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.

“No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”

“So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”

“I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had . . . people like us.”

“Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”

“No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”

Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”

I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”

“I read what you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”

“International Affairs, the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”

She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”

“I read it, too,” Paul said. “ ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable.’ Carmen showed it to me.”

“Trying to understand why I was, why we were, selected?”

“Why military people were selected,” she said. “The pressure for that was obvious, but frankly I was surprised they gave in to it. There’s no way we can threaten the Others.”

She was holding back resentment that I don’t think was personal. “You’d rather have three more xenobiologists than three . . . political appointees? We’re not really soldiers.”

“You were, once.”

“As a teenager, yes. Everyone in Israel was, at that time. But I’ve been a professional peacekeeper ever since.”

“And a spook,” Elza said. “If I were Carmen, that would bother me.”

Carmen made a placating gesture. “We probably have enough xenobiologists, and really can only guess what else might be useful. Your M.D. and clinical experience is as obviously useful to us, personally, as Namir’s life as a diplomat is, to our mission. But we don’t know. Dustin’s doctorate in philosophy might turn out to be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.

“I won’t pretend it didn’t annoy me when I found out the Earth committee had chosen an all- military bunch—and then spooks on top of that! But of course I can see the logic. And it’s reasonable in terms of social dynamic, a secure triad joining two secure pairs.”

That dynamic is interesting in various ways. The committee wanted no more than three military people, so the civilians would outnumber us, but they didn’t want to upset the social balance by sending up single, unattached people—so our family had a large natural advantage.

But how stable is it, really? Everybody’s married, but Carmen and Dustin and Elza are all under thirty, and the rest of us are not exactly nuns and monks.

In the first hour all of us were together, I suppose there was a lot of automatic and unconscious evaluation and categorizing—who might bond to whom in the winepress of years that we faced? At fifty, I was old enough to be Carmen’s father, but my initial feelings toward her were not at all paternal.

I could tell that the attraction was not mutual; she had me pigeonholed, the older generation. But my wife was her age, actually a few months younger. She must have known that as a statistic.

Was I just rationalizing, being the pathetic middle-aged male? Assuming that a woman must be attracted to me just because I was instantly attracted to her?

And I was, though I wouldn’t have predicted it, not “The Mars Girl.” As a diplomat, I’ve dealt with far too many famous people. Carmen had none of the automatic assumption of importance that I find so tiresome. She was almost aggressively normal, this least ordinary of all women. Ambassador to another species, a fulcrum of history.

She was not physically the kind of woman I would normally find attractive, either; so slender as to be almost boyish, her features sharp, inquisitive. Her eyes were green, or hazel, which I had never noticed in photographs. Hair cut close for space, like all of us. There wouldn’t be any need for that tradition on the long trail to Wolf 25.

Meryl was closer to my age and physically attractive, almost voluptuous. Olive skin and black hair, she looked like most of the girls and women I grew up with.

None of whom were still alive. I could not look at her without feeling that.

8

FAMILY MATTERS

I didn’t expect to like Namir, but I did immediately. You might expect a professional diplomat to be likable, though in my “Mars Girl” experience that hasn’t been the case. Of course, those meetings have always been public and strained, physical contact limited to rubber-glove virtual reality.

How odd-feeling and pleasant to actually shake someone’s hand. Namir’s constrained physical strength. His face was strong, too, chiseled but with warm laugh lines around his eyes.

Our three spooks were the first new people we’d met, physically, in years. So I was immediately aware of their physicality. Dustin and Elza were my age, Elza athletic and assertive but Dustin more a quiet scholarly type.

Namir had a barely contained charisma, an air of authority that had nothing to do with rank. Probably born with it, bossing around adults from the crib. I wondered whether Paul would have trouble with that.

I wondered whether I would. We hadn’t planned on a hierarchy. Paul would make the pilot decisions. If there were medical decisions, Elza would make them, and otherwise we’d just talk things out and go with the consensus. When we got to Wolf and met the Others, I saw myself as a spokesperson, but in fact we had no idea of what the situation would be—maybe they would only talk with the Martians, and Fly-in-Amber would be the logical choice. The rest of us just baggage, perhaps disposable.

That first meeting with the Earth people was cordial and reassuring. Moonboy, in his direct way, found out how they wound up a triune. Namir and Elza married in a conventional civil ceremony six years ago, in her last year of medical school. The American Space Force had paid her tuition, and she was commissioned as soon as she got her M.D. Namir pulled some strings, and she wound up working with him at the UN—which is where she met and fell in love with Dustin. At Namir’s suggestion they expanded their union to include him, which was legal in New York and (I was surprised to learn) not particularly uncommon there nowadays.

I could only guess what their sleeping arrangements had been on Earth; on both Little Mars and ad Astra, each person had individual sleeping quarters. The bunks were large enough for two people to sleep together if they didn’t mind touching. Unless they were both large. In our population, that would only be Namir and Paul, which I didn’t see happening.

In ad Astra everything would be modular. They might choose to have one big bed in one big room. Hamster pile, as they say in college.

Of the three of them, only Namir had a little experience of living in space, but only a little. Of we other four, I had the least, but I’d been off Earth the past eleven years, which incidentally was close to the length of time we seven would be spending together, on the way to Wolf and hopefully back. About six and a half years there, and the same to return.

We would have to become a family of sorts if we were to survive. Tolstoi famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The old Russian didn’t consider triune marriages, though, or families with two nonhuman members—we could presumably be unhappy in ways that he couldn’t have begun to describe. At least none of us was likely to throw herself in front of a train.

For those of us used to life in the Martian colony or this satellite, the living space in ad Astra wouldn’t be too confining. The combination of being isolated from the human race at large, while living in close contact with a few others, was not a novelty.

Our spooks were used to traveling around the world, constantly facing the challenge and attraction of new environments, new people. How well would they get along with this, a sardine tin that also had aspects of a goldfish bowl?

VR would help preserve our sanity, sometimes by providing alternatives to sanity. Both Moonboy and Meryl liked to go random places with the kaleidoscope filter, which provided a controlled degree of synesthesia, the data meant for one sense being interpreted as another. You could do it one sense at a time, or just spin the wheel and hang on. I might do more of it myself, with time on my hands. And on my eyes and nose and so forth.

But I liked the almost endless array of straightforward virtual travelogues, and often did them in tandem with Paul, as a way of getting away from the others. Usually nothing spectacular or culturally interesting, which of course made up most of the library. We’d just stroll down a country lane talking, or sit on a beach or in some woods. A pity we didn’t have the complex porn interfaces, so we could do more than hold hands and talk, but that would be a little hard to get through the Corporation budget review.

Along those lines I had to admit a certain prurient curiosity about our new sister and brothers. If they did all hop into bed together, who did what to whom and with what? It could make for a crowded bed, though I supposed we could jury-rig something. Or just agree to stay out of the galley periodically and let them do it on the table.

I wasn’t really drawn to either of the men in that way, although they were both likable and attractive. It was hard to believe that Namir was fifty. From the moment of our first meeting, I sensed a real physical attraction, though he may project the same kind of interest to any female not too young or old to make a sexual union possible. I know that degree of sexual indiscrimination passes for gallantry with some men in some cultures.

Actually, he didn’t seem to project the same warmth toward Meryl, and she is prettier and sexier than me. Older, but still a decade younger than him.

Who knows? After a few years, we may be swapping partners like minks. Or not be speaking to one another.

Who will be the first to be thrown out of the air lock? Or leave voluntarily?

9

SECRETS

Carmen doesn’t really know how completely she’s being lied to—only by omission, but nevertheless lies. She really has no idea how bad things are on Earth right now, and what a nightmare we’ve been through.

We accept the necessity of total monitoring and censoring of all communication into space, since the Others can receive anything broadcast from Earth, assuming they’re interested.

Maybe it’s silly. A sufficiently weak signal would be so attenuated in twenty-four light-years’ distance that no manner of superscience could separate it from cosmic background noise. But what is “sufficiently weak”? And how badly do you need the signal? If it were important to me as a spook, I could take any smallest signal—a man’s heartbeat through a hotel window a mile away—and amplify and refine it, then pump it through a laser to another spook, or an Other spook, twenty-four light-years away.

So what could the Others do? Maybe they read all our mail. Maybe all our thoughts.

Whatever the reality, the controlling principle is that everything broadcast into space might be overheard by the Others, so everyone who lives in orbit or on Mars will have a systematically distorted view of life on Earth. Carmen was aware of that in regard to defense—she never mentioned the fleet and didn’t expect any reports about it—but when we first talked, I realized that her image of life on Earth was no more realistic than a cube drama.

I caught her alone the second morning, by the sneaky expedient of checking the exercise schedule. At 0400 she was in VR, biking, so I took up the rowing machine and watched her pedal through the streets of a Paris that no longer existed.

We showered separately and met down at the mess for coffee. She brought up Paris, how she remembered it from the year she spent in Europe as a girl.

“I guess the VR crystal’s pretty old,” she said. “They hadn’t started rebuilding the Eiffel Tower, but it was finished when I was there in ’66.”

“Still there,” I said, “but it was damaged in the ’81 riots, a piece of the base melted. They’ve left it that way, closed to the public.”

“There were riots in ’81?”

“Not just in Paris. Though hundreds died there, in the Champ du Mars.”

“Hundreds.” She sat absolutely still. “In the States, too?”

“All over. The States were . . . worse than most of Europe and the Middle East. Los Angeles and Chicago were especially bad.”

“The East Coast?”

“New York and Washington were already under martial law when Paris exploded. There wasn’t much loss of life.”

“How long did it go on?”

“Well . . . technically . . .”

Her eyes got wide. “Still?”

I had an intense desire for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked since Gehenna. “In a way, it is still going on. Not martial law, but a kind of pervasive police state. Which doesn’t call itself that.”

“It’s what they’re calling internationalism?”

“Basically. One big happy police-state family.”

She walked across the room and looked out at the image of the Earth. “Paul and I were talking about that the other day. The picture they project is too perfect; we’ve all known that. But a police state, all over the world?”

“Maybe I’m exaggerating. Many people do just see it as international solidarity against a common enemy. Everybody does have to sacrifice a certain amount of time, a certain amount of comfort. And freedom.”

“For the future of humanity,” she said in a broadcaster’s voice. “Does everyone buy that?”

“Not at all. A significant fraction believes the business out at Triton and the explosion on the other side of the Moon were just pyrotechnics to make us believe the bullshit about the Others—the whole thing is an elaborate hoax to rob normal people of their rights and hand over their money to the rich.

“If you don’t know anything about science, or about economics, a case can be made. But even then, you have to enlist the Martians in the conspiracy, or believe that they don’t really exist.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Well, no one’s allowed to go near one, unless they’re part of the conspiracy themselves. Hollywood’s been cooking up convincing aliens for more than a century, they say. Whoever’s behind the conspiracy could afford a few dozen of the finest.

“If you start with that as a premise—everything about Mars is a hoax—then most of it falls into place. The Others? A perfect enemy, all-powerful, unreachable. You and Paul are part of the conspiracy, of course. The Girl from Mars married to the Man Who Saved the Earth? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t know it was true.”

“But . . . who’s supposed to benefit from all that?”

“The rich people. The white people. The Jews—speaking as an unofficial Jew myself, I know we’re capable of anything. The military-industrial complex, to use an antique term. This gives them a black hole to throw money into for the next fifty years.”

She slumped into the chair across from me and studied me. “This is where I say, ‘Namir, you have learned too much. Now you have to die.’ ”

That actually gave me a little chill. “The more convincing explanation, I think, is that the Others are behind the whole thing. But they look just like humans and have infiltrated every aspect of government and industry.”

She smiled. “It’s like all the paranoiac explanations for Gehenna. Some people still believe it was a leftist takeover.”

I snorted. “Which explains how liberal our government is now. If you call it a government. Maybe the Others took over Israel first, as an experiment.”

She leaned forward, serious. “So . . . to what extent do ordinary people know what’s going on—people who don’t stalk the corridors of power, like you guys?”

“Most people do, people who can read. Newspapers have become a big industry again, print ones. Nobody reads the e-sheets for actual news. People who aren’t literate have to make do with word of mouth or put up with the same version of reality the Others are being fed.”

“The Others and us,” she said, trying to control the anger in her voice. “Most of the people I know are on Mars, but I’m in touch with people on Earth all the time—”

“Who would risk the death penalty if they discussed reality. Everything’s monitored.” She was shaking her head, hard. “Look, even I assumed you were in on it. Self-censorship is so automatic. Nobody’s going to call or write, and say ‘They’ll kill me for saying this, but—’ ”

“But it’s so stupid! The Others aren’t going to be fooled.”

“There’s no way to know. It might just take one slip.”

“Maybe.” The angry set of her mouth softened. “It never occurred to me to ask for a paper copy of a newspaper. I mean, who ever sees one?”

“Everybody, nowadays.” Was some bureaucrat controlling the information they got, or was it an unintended consequence of draconian broadcast security? “You should ask for a Sunday New York Times—or I will. Say that I’m homesick. See whether they print up a special version with the news sanitized for us. I could tell.”

I asked, and eventually the newspaper did appear—it takes a week for anything to come up. It did seem to be the same paper I read every week. Significantly, it had Jude Coulter’s column, summarizing the past week’s news that had been suppressed from the Others. And people in orbit or on Mars, incidentally.

The first two ships of the fleet are nearing completion; both are already crewed, awaiting weapons systems. They’re somewhat bigger than the projected standard for the other 998, but cruder, rushed into construction in case the Other that left Triton five years ago left behind some belated surprise.

I think the fleet is a tactical travesty from inception to its present and future reality. Gnats attacking an elephant. If you want to protect the future of the human race from the Other menace, those resources should go toward moving breeding populations out far from Earth. Because Earth is unlikely to survive the first second of hostilities from the Others. A diffuse population hidden around the solar system might have a chance.

Or not.

10

NEW WORLD

Namir’s newspaper reassured us a little bit. There wasn’t a huge conspiracy trying to insulate us from reality. It was just a secondary effect of the fanatic security effort. So now we were to get the Times and one other newspaper every week. Delivered to your air-lock door.

Not a conspiracy, but certainly a pervasive bureaucratic mind-set. You don’t learn anything unless you have an official “need to know.”

It was probably an empty gesture anyhow, presuming to fool the Others with smoke and mirrors. Namir agreed. They had to know us too well for that to work.

What might have worked, if there had been enough advance warning, would have been to shut Earth down electronically, completely, the instant of the Moon explosion.

Even that would only have worked if the Others were just listening to broadcast emissions and not spying on Earth any other way. And it would have been impossible to build ad Astra and the fleet without electronic communication.

The half of our satellite that’s not under Martian quarantine, Little Earth or, to us, “earthside,” serves as a conduit for communicating between the fleet and Earth. There’s a lot of radio and image transmission that can be disguised as innocuous space industrialization—but the part that can’t be disguised is written down or photographed and sent to Little Earth via “transfer pods,” which guide themselves into a net and are sent down the Space Elevator to an Earth address. Messages that can’t wait that long are de-orbited and dropped to Earth by parachute. I wonder how many of them actually make it to the final address.

It’s a fragile house of cards, and we could collapse it just by a minute of frank broadband discussion. I talked with Paul about doing just that. What could they do, fire us?

“No,” he said, “but we could have a tragic accident.” We were talking in VR, walking and bicycling slowly down a country road in Cape Cod, Indian summer, cranberry bogs vivid red with floating berries and the smells of woodsmoke and autumn leaves powerful but relaxing. Squirrels scattered out of our way, and geese honked overhead, swifting south.

“You think they would go that far?”

“Well, I don’t think we’re indispensable,” he said, braking the bike into a short downhill. “They could even manufacture avatar duplicates. They do it all the time with politicians.”

I nodded. “Like that French nonassassination.” The president’s limousine was blown up in a visit to Algeria, and it turned out that neither president nor driver was actually there, actually human.

“My God.” He stopped pedaling but his bicycle stayed upright; VR couldn’t topple the exercise machine outside our illusion. “Could that be why they sent three soldiers?”

“To kill us if we broke the rules? That’s ridiculous.”

“In this brave new world? I don’t know.”

“Be realistic, Paul. If they wanted us dead, this powerful ‘they,’ they wouldn’t have to send three assassins up into orbit. They could push a button and blow all the air out of Mars side.”

He started pedaling again. “That’s why I love you, Carmen. You’re such a ray of sunshine.”

I was sweating a little from the exercise, but a new patch of cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck:

What if we were twenty- four light-years away and decided to do something subversive, like surrender to the Others? The Earth couldn’t do a thing to stop us.

But Namir and Dustin and Elza, for all their quiet and civilized manners, had once been trained to kill. And were presumably loyal to Earth.

What were their orders?

We weren’t headed out to the iceberg for a couple of weeks, but ad Astra itself—the habitat we’d be living in on the way to Wolf and back—was up and running, and we wanted to live in it in Earth orbit for a while. If something went wrong, we could always send out for a plumber.

Speaking of plumbing, we did have a week or so of roll- up-your-sleeves work before we took off. The large crew who’d set up ad Astra had the hydroponics working as they would in the normal one-gee environment, on the way to Wolf. But it would take at least a week of zero gee before we hooked up with the iceberg, and of course you can’t have standing pools of water in zero gee. They turn into floating blobs. So we had plant-by-plant instructions as to what had to be done to keep root systems and everything moist en route.

(Good practice. We’d be doing it again at the halfway point, since we’d be in zero gee while the iceberg slowly rotated around to start braking.)

Quarantine rules made the transfer into the Space Elevator a little complicated. Every area had to be sterilized after we passed through—from Mars side through the air lock to the hub, then down the extension tube to where the Space Elevator was waiting. It took three trips, awkward in zero gee, especially for our spook pals, who didn’t have a lot of experience. Finding handholds when your hands are full.

It wasn’t too hard to say good-bye to Little Mars, as much time as I’d spent there. It was actual Mars, the Mars colony, that felt like home. Florida was a distant memory. Another world.

We spent four and a half days in the Space Elevator, first at zero gee, but with increasing gravity as we moved out to the end of the Elevator’s tether.

About halfway, I started feeling heavy and depressed. For years, I’d been used to exercising an hour or more a day in Earth gravity, but it was always a relief to get back to Mars- normal. I’d get used to it in time. But it felt like carrying around a knapsack full of rocks, permanently attached.

There wasn’t much to see of ad Astra as we approached, but we didn’t expect anything dramatic. A big flat white box with a shuttle rocket attached. The rocket would maneuver us into rendezvous with the iceberg, then shut down till we got to Wolf, where it would be a landing craft. If the Others let us land.

Going from the Elevator into ad Astra was simple. They coupled automatically, and we walked through two air locks into our new home.

It was stunning. It was huge, at least to my eyes. The line of sight was about fifty meters, over the gym and swimming pool and hydroponics garden. I had trouble focusing that far away, and it made me grin.

Namir, Elza, and Dustin were not smiling. By Earth standards, this was not a big place to be locked up in for a large part of your life. The rest of your life, perhaps.

We stacked our boxes and suitcases there by the air lock, next to the life-support/recycling station, and sent the Space Elevator back down, to pick up our Martians. We went off together to explore.

The hydroponics garden was technically a luxury. There was enough dehydrated food in storage to keep us alive for twenty boring years, and plenty of oxygen from electrolysis. But fresh fruit and vegetables would mean more than just variety in the diet. The routines of growing, harvesting, propagation, and recycling had helped keep us sane in Mars, where we had fifteen times as many people, and more than fifteen times as much living space. Plus the chance to take a walk outdoors, which on ad Astra would be a short walk. Then light-years long. Eternity.

Everything was in a sort of early-spring mode, still a month or more from the earliest harvest. Grape tomatoes and spring onions, from a first look. They smelled so good—nostalgia not for Earth, where I never gardened, but for the Martian garden, where I’d worked a couple of hours a week.

The central space was larger than all the rest put together. There was a padded track for jogging or running around its hundred- meter perimeter. On the “southern” end of it (we decided to call the control room “north”) there was a small Japanese- style hot bath and a narrow rectangular swimming pool, which could maintain a decent current to swim against.

South of that were the exercise and VR machines, similar to what we had in Little Mars, with a relatively large lavatory and an actual shower, and the infirmary, with an optimistic single bed. The lavatory had a zero- gee toilet exactly like the one on the Space Elevator, for the few days we’d be weightless.

Farthest south was the large and rather forbidding Life- Support/ Recycling area, a bright room full of machines. Every metal surface was inscribed with maintenance instructions, I supposed in case the computer system failed. So we could stay alive until we died.

That was an interesting prospect if something did go wrong, and we went merrily blasting away for years, leaving Wolf 25 far behind. Paul said that if we just kept going in a straight line, without turning around midway to slow down, we had enough reaction mass to go more than a hundred thousand light- years. At which point, we’d be twelve years older, while the unimaginably distant Earth would have aged a thousand centuries.

Our seven cabins were in a north-south line along the hydroponics garden. We checked a couple of them, apparently all the same, but very malleable, with moveable walls and modular furniture. The wall that separated them from the hydroponics area was semipermanent, a lattice for vines.

The kitchen and dining room were twice the size of their Little Mars counterparts, where we did little actual cooking. Elza volunteered that Namir was an excellent cook, which was good news. I can just about flip a burger or scramble eggs, and we wouldn’t have either of those.

There was a lounge next to the dining room, with a pool table and keyboard and various places to sit or, I suppose, lounge. I hadn’t touched a piano keyboard in a dozen years. Would boredom drive me back to it?

Between the lounge and the Martian area was a meeting place that would be maintained at a compromise ambience—a little too cool and dark for humans; a little warm for Martians.

At the northernmost area, the lounge led into a library and study, with workstations but also wooden panel walls and real paintings. Then there was another air lock and Paul’s control room. He sat down at the console and ran his hands over the knobs and dials, smiling, in his element.

The spies looked kind of grim. It was understandable. They were losing a whole planet, one the rest of us had written off a long time ago. I did feel sorry for them, especially Namir, shut off from his complex history.

Which he was also bringing with him.

11

GOOD-BYES

After our final briefing in New York, and before we flew out to the Space Elevator, Elza and Dustin and I had been given a few days to settle our affairs on Earth.

We didn’t have to empty out our New York City apartment. Elza had made a clever deal with Columbia University, where they assumed the mortgage and will maintain the place for the half century we’ll be gone. If we don’t come back, it will be a unique small museum. In the unlikely event that we do return, we can either step back into the old place or leave it as a museum and negotiate an alternative—probably more comfortable—living space with the university.

I had to go say good-bye to my father, which I could no longer put off. He has two rooms in a Jewish assisted-living complex in Yonkers, which offers free room and board for people in his situation: he was in Israel for the first stage of the Gehenna attack, and so his body is suffused with the nanomachines that comprise half the poison. The second half could await him anyplace in Israel. People die every year when they return and open an old closet or something. I knew a man who went back and lived for years, then, for a reunion, put on his old army uniform and stopped breathing.

Father had been in New York, staying in my apartment, when the bombs went off in Tel Aviv. I was going to bring my mother back to join him for a tour of the American West.

Instead I brought her ashes, months later.

We have had few words since then, and none in Hebrew. When I greeted him with Shalom, he stared at me for a long moment and said, “You should come in. It’s raining.”

He made a pot of horrible tea, boiling it Australian style, and we sat on the porch and watched the rain come down.

When I told him what I was about to do, he crept away and came back with a dusty bottle of brandy and tipped a half inch into our tea-cups, which was an improvement.

“So you come to say good- bye, actually. God is too kind to give me another fifty years of this.”

“You may outlive me. God can be cruel in his benevolence.”

“So now you believe in God. Wonders will never cease.”

“No more than you do. Unless living here has weakened your mind.”

“Living here has weakened my stomach. A constant assault of bad kosher cooking. A good son would have brought a ham sandwich.”

“I’ll bring one if I come back. At 142, you’ll need it even more.”

He closed his eyes. “Oh, please. You really think those alien bastards will kill you?”

“They haven’t been well-disposed toward humans in the past. You did see the moon thing?”

“Two nights running, yes. Some people here thought it was staged, a hoax.”

He sipped his tea, made a face, and added more brandy. “I know bubkes about science. I couldn’t see how they’d fake that, though.”

“No.” They could have faked the halo of dust, I supposed, but not the rain of gamma radiation. Orbiting monitors had pictures of the explosion, too, from farther out in the solar system. “It’s real, and it demands a response.”

“Maybe. But why you?”

I shrugged. “I’m a diplomat.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a spy. A spy for a country that hardly exists anymore.”

“They needed three military people in the crew. Our triune was perfect because we wouldn’t upset the social balance—two other married couples.”

“Your shiksa wife could upset some marriages. Your husband . . . I’ve never understood any of that.”

I decided not to rise to that bait. “They got a diplomat, a doctor, and a philosopher.”

“They got three spies, Namir. Or didn’t they know that?”

“We’re all military intelligence, Father. Soldiers, not spies.”

He rolled his eyes at that. “It’s a new world,” I said, I hoped reasonably. “The American army has more officers in intelligence than in the infantry.”

“I suppose the Israeli army, too. That did a lot of good with Gehenna.”

“In fact, we did know something was about to happen. That’s why I was called back to Tel Aviv.”

“ ‘Something’ had already happened. If I recall correctly.” His face was a stone mask.

Maybe love could get through that. But I’d known for years that I’d never loved him, and it was mutual.

He wasn’t a bad man. But he’d never wanted to be a father and did his best to ignore me and Naomi when we were growing up. I think I’m enough of a man to understand him, and forgive. But love doesn’t come from the brain, from understanding.

I so didn’t want to be there, and he released me.

“Look. I can see you have a million things to do. I will take all my pills and try to be here when you come back. Okay?” He stood and held out his arms.

I clasped his fragile body. “Shalom,” he finally said into my shoulder. “I know you will do well.”

I took the skyway across to the Port Authority and walked a mile through the rain back to our apartment. Saying good-bye to the city, more home to me than Tel Aviv or any other place.

Life without restaurants. Walking by so many favorites, the Asian ones especially. But it was less about missing them than it was all the ones I’d been curious about and put off trying. I read that you could eat at a different restaurant for every meal in New York City and never eat at all of them. Does that mean that three new places were opened every day?

A holo I recognized as James Joyce abjured me to come into a new place, Finnegans Wake, and have a pint of Guinness. I checked my watch and went in for a small one. A quartet was holding forth around the piano, with more spirit than talent, but it was pleasant. When I left, the rain was more forceful, but it wasn’t cold, and I had a hat. I rather liked it.

Eleven years eating computer-generated healthy recycled shit. Well, I’d survived on army rations for some years. How bad could it be?

When Elza came home, we’d have to decide where to go for dinner, the last one in this city. Maybe we should just walk until we got hungry and take whatever appeared.

I was going to miss the noise and the crowds. And the odd pockets of quiet, like the postage-stamp park behind our apartment, two benches and a birdbath, running over as I took my last look.

Neither Elza nor Dustin was home. The place felt large without them. About twelve hundred square feet. In ad Astra, we’d have three cabins, each less than a hundred square feet.

Wrong comparison. How many square feet did I have aboard the Golda Meir? A hot hammock, shared with two other guys.

We were allowed to take fifteen kilograms of “personal items including clothing,” though we’d be supplied utility clothing and one formal uniform. What would that look like? Tailor-made to impress creatures who live forever in liquid nitrogen. They probably dress up all the time. “Dress warmly, son; it’s only going up to minus 253.”

Books. I immediately picked out the slim leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets my first wife gave me, the only Passover we shared. I took a small drawing of her out of its frame and trimmed it with scissors so it would fit inside the book.

I took some comfortable worn jeans out of the closet, but then traded them for some newer ones—they will have to last thirteen years, or at least six and a half. A chamois shirt from L.L. Bean. Army exercise outfit. Comfortable leather moccasins.

There were hundreds of books I would have enjoyed having, but of course the ship would have all of them in its memory. Likewise movies and feelies.

I should take a few books I could read over and over, in case the library malfunctioned. A volume of Amachai, one of cummings. A large slim book with all of Vermeer.

I hesitated over the balalaika. It gave me pleasure, but the others probably wouldn’t like it much even if I were talented. No one in the world except Elza thought that I was. It would probably wind up going out the air lock, and maybe me with it.

Three blocks of fine-grained koa wood and two carving knives, with a sharpening stone.

The bathroom scale said eight kilograms. I decided to leave it at that and let Elza make up the difference with clothes. That would benefit all three of us. She would never admit it, but she liked dressing up a little and was easier to get along with if she felt she looked attractive. To me, she would look fine in a potato sack.

I sat down at my writing desk, opened the right- hand drawer, and lifted out the 10.5- mm Glock, with all its reassuring and troubling weight. Illegal in New York City despite the state and federal permits clipped to the side of its shoulder holster. It would be a central exhibit in the apartment-museum. “With this weapon, Namir Zahari killed four looters who attacked him in the ruins of Tel Aviv.” And no others, of course. No Others, certainly. It would not be that kind of diplomacy.

I wiped it clean with an oil-impregnated cloth. The breech smelled of cold metal and faraway fire. I’d last used it at a pistol range in New Jersey, first week of January. Elza’d been with me, with her little .32. An annual family custom that would not be welcome on ad Astra.

Putting it away, I had a familiar specific feeling of memento mori. Two of our team in the Gehenna cleanup committed suicide, both with Israeli-issued pistols like this one.

I used to wonder how much horror and sadness I could absorb before that kind of exit seemed attractive, or necessary. I’m fairly sure now it couldn’t happen; I’m not set up that way. I’ll keep plugging along until my luck runs out; my time runs out. Along with eight billion others, perhaps, at the same instant.

Though what does “at the same instant” mean in our situation? Twenty-four years later? Or perhaps the Others have a way around Einsteinian simultaneity.

My phone pinged, and it was Dustin. He was landing at Towers in a few minutes. He’d already talked to Elza, and they’d decided to meet for dinner at the Four Seasons, okay? I said I’d make an early reservation, for seven. An hour away, plenty of time to walk.

The rain was over and not programmed to resume until tomorrow. I put on evening clothes and left the Glock in the drawer. Strapped the little .289 Browning to my right ankle. Called Security and told them the route I’d be walking. There was already someone on duty down the block, they said; the same one who’d followed me back from New Jersey. I walked the stairs to the basement and went out through the service entrance of the apartment building next door. No one in the alley.

It had been years since the tail had caught anyone, but that one time saved my life. I recognized this one, a small black man, as I passed him at the first intersection, but of course we didn’t acknowledge one another.

That would be one nice thing about leaving the Earth behind. I wouldn’t have to worry about bodyguards. Though I’d never faced a more dangerous adversary.

So much for my romantic stroll with Elza (and our usually invisible companion), ending in a random restaurant. I’d thought Dustin was going to be in Houston till the next morning.

“I was a fifth wheel down there anyhow,” he explained as I sat down at the elegant table. “My two projects put on hold for half a century. They’ll be political curiosities when I come back.”

“We’re political curiosities already,” I said. “What’s a spook without a country?” He politely didn’t say that I should know.

We talked shop for a few minutes. I’d worked out of Houston for a year sometime back and made friends there.

When Elza showed up, I nodded to the human waiter, and he poured us each a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé and returned the bottle to ice.

I held up a glass. “To getting back alive.”

“To getting there alive,” she said, and we all touched glasses. “You wrote to Carmen Dula and the others?”

“It went up on the Elevator day before yesterday.” Since ad Astra was technically part of the fleet, we weren’t allowed to contact it electronically. So I sent a paper note telling them we’d be on the next Elevator.

“It’s too strange,” Dustin said. “We’re going to spend thirteen years with these people, and we can’t even chat beforehand.”

“Worse for them. We can at least look up their bios and news stories—millions of words, for her and Paul Collins. But they shouldn’t be able to find a single word about us.”

“You enjoy being a man of mystery,” she said. “Poor little Mars Girl won’t have a chance.”

“You doctors are all about sex. It hadn’t crossed my mind.”

Elza looked at me over her glass. “She’s an old hag anyhow.”

“Eight months older than you. But you knew that.”

“Maybe we should have just snuck up on them,” Dustin said. “This way, they’ll have plenty of time to get dressed and put away the sex toys.”

“Dream on,” Elza said.

The maître d’ came over, and we negotiated the complex combination of food- ration credits, legitimate currency, and hard cash that dinner would cost. Maybe by the time we got back, they’d have that mess straightened out. Meanwhile, it cost the same no matter what your entrée was, so I had pheasant under glass, very very good.

With the coffee and dessert, we mostly talked about what we were leaving behind.

We’d all been visiting family, Elza in Kansas and Dustin in California. I told them about the uncomfortable meeting with my father. Elza’d had a warm family reunion all weekend, but Dustin’s parents were even worse than mine. They’re old anarchists and have hardly spoken to him since he joined the service. Now they’re deniers, convinced that the whole thing is a government conspiracy. They live in an Earthlove commune, surrounded by like- minded zealots. Dustin fled when he turned eighteen, eleven years ago.

“They claim to be self- sufficient,” he said of the commune, “trading organic dairy goods for things they can’t raise on the farm. But even when I was a kid, I could tell something was fishy. We all lived too well; there was money coming in from somewhere.”

“Now who’s paranoid?” Elza said.

“You could have them investigated,” I said. “Section E audit.”

“Well, they were, of course, back when I joined the Farce. I’ve read the file, but it doesn’t go beyond a few background checks, my parents and the commune’s leaders. All harmless nuts.”

“You want them to be more interesting than that.”

“Dad was always hinting that the commune was part of something big. When I was old enough, I’d be brought into the inner circle.”

I’d heard the story. “But you ran away anyhow.”

“Along with most of my generation. Not many people under fifty there now.” He tasted his coffee and added more hot. “That’s typical of cults, once the charismatic leader dies or leaves. That was Randy Miles Brewer; he was pretty senile when I left.”

“Dead now?” Elza said.

He shrugged. “Technically not. He’s composting away in some LX center in San Francisco.” The Life Extension centers could keep you going past legal brain death, in some states, as long as blood or some equivalent fluid kept circulating. “So tell me, who pays for that? It’d be a lot of eggs and cheese.”

“You could subpoena their records,” I said.

He waved it away. “Don’t want to cause my parents any grief. In fifty years, it’ll all be in some dusty file in Washington, or Sacramento. I’ll look it up then.”

“They might still be alive.”

“Not with natural medicine. Your dad has a better chance at, what, ninety?”

“Ninety-two. He says he’ll try to wait it out, but I don’t think he’ll try hard. That age, if you don’t really enjoy life, you won’t get much more of it.”

“It feels strange,” Elza said, her voice a little husky. “Saying good-bye to my granddad and g- ma. If I were staying on Earth, I might have twenty more years with them.”

“Think of it as being social pioneers,” Dustin said. “The social protocols of relativity. When you come back, you’ll be thirteen years older. But your parents and grandparents . . .”

She broke the moment of silence by laughing, with an edge of hysteria. “Like it’ll make any difference. Chances are . . . chances are we’re not . . .”

“Elza,” I said, “sweetheart—we ought to make it a rule: We don’t talk about the end until it’s near. There’s no use plowing the same field over and over.”

“I don’t think that’s healthy,” Dustin said. “Ignoring reality. When you were in combat, you guys never talked about dying?”

I tried to be honest. “In the Faith War, no, not much. But we were all eighteen and nineteen, and felt immortal. When someone got killed, it was like a supernatural visitation.

“Gehenna was totally different. I mean, there were bodies everywhere you looked, so after a while they were just part of the scenery. It was more dangerous, I guess, with all the loonies and looters. But the corpses, they were like a dream landscape, a nightmare. They weren’t individuals; you didn’t see yourself becoming one of them.” They nodded, as if they hadn’t heard all this before. Turning points in life bring out the same old stories. Even among relativity pioneers.

This was the wrong place. It was becoming a fashionable hour for the rich and famous; the Four Seasons was filling up and getting loud with background chatter, people wanting to be noticed. We three, arguably the most-talked-about people here, definitely didn’t want to be noticed.

Our identities hadn’t been revealed, and wouldn’t be, as long as friends and relatives cooperated, until we were safely in orbit.

We took the Fifth Avenue and SoHo slidewalks back, less for the time saved than from a desire to be part of a crowd. We dawdled at the entrance and transfer point so my bodyguard could catch up. When we got to the condo door, I gave him the good-bye signal, stroking an eyebrow twice.

“Same old signal,” Dustin said as he palmed the night lock.

“Yeah. I’d change it if I thought someone might actually be after me. If somebody really wanted my ass, they’d have it by now.”

“So you’re wearing flared trousers for the look,” Elza said.

“Force of habit.” Once we were in the elevator, I pulled the ankle holster off.

“A .289,” she said. “Not with legal rounds, I hope.”

“Neuros.” I’d never fired one at a person, but they were impressive on a dummy. Smart round that finds an eye and blows a small shaped charge across the frontal lobes.

“Jesus,” Dustin said. “You got them where?”

I laughed, thumbing the door open. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”

“Boys and toys.” Elza went by me, flopped down on the couch, and slipped her shoes off. “So I get to take an extra seven kilos of clothes?”

“Only sexy ones,” Dustin said.

“I don’t have seven kilos of the kind you like. That’d be about a hundred outfits.”

I sat in the easy chair and picked up the balalaika and plucked an arpeggio.

“Say you’re not taking the banjo?” Dustin said, with hope in his voice.

“No. I’ll be in my sixties when we get back. Take it up seriously then, as a retirement project.”

Elza laughed. “You’ll retire about a year after you’re dead.”

I had a sudden impulse to throw the instrument against the wall, just to do something unpredictable. Instead, I set it gently against the bookcase. “I don’t know. In a way, this is early retirement. Cleaned out my desk to embark on a new life of travel and adventure.”

“Or stay in one room for thirteen years, trying not to go mad,” Dustin said.

“There is that. I wonder whether they’ve packed enough straitjackets.”

Elza got up and went to the refrigerator. “Wine?” She poured two glasses of white wine and a small glass of vermouth for herself. Bunched them together in two hands and brought them over to the coffee table. “I’m kind of torn,” she said. “Maybe go out to the Galápagos early, do some snorkeling.”

Dustin held his glass up to her. “I’ll catch up with you. Say good-bye to London and Paris, maybe Kyoto. Come from the other direction.”

“City boy.”

“Don’t care much for the water. Fish fuck in it.”

She arched an eyebrow. “People do, too.”

“I’ll wait for zero gee.” He looked at me. “You’ve been there.”

“It was all men. None of them appealed to me.”

“I mean the Galápagos. Diving.”

“Wasn’t recreational. Bomb threat to the Elevator.”

“I remember. The note said something about Gehenna.”

“Someone in Personnel must have sat down and entered Gehenna/ skindive/license to kill.”

Elza sighed. “And I’m still on my learners’ permit.”

“Well, you’ve got four days. I could get you a quick transfer to the Zone. You’d get more experience in four days than I’ve had in twenty years.”

“I’ll think about it. Did you see many fish there?”

“Not so many pretty ones. You want to go into the shallows, the reefs near the shore, unless you’re after big sharks.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“They’re protected. If one bites you and gets sick, there’s a huge fine.”

“But you were there before,” Dustin said.

“Twenty-five years ago, first wife. I could hardly get her out of the water, sharks and all.”

“You think of her a lot,” she said.

I tried to be accurate. “Her image comes to me often. I don’t sit and dwell on the memory of her.”

“I know that. I guess that’s what I meant.” She shook her head. “Crazy time.”

“We’re all dwelling on the past these days,” Dustin said. “Leaving everything behind.”

There was so much I didn’t want to say. She gave me the Shakespeare book in the morning; at noon, she took one breath and died. Was it more or less horrible that it happened to so many at the same time?

“You’re the philosopher,” I said. “I’m more an engineer, cause and effect.” Elza was watching me closely. I don’t think I’d ever raised this directly with her before. “We were crazy in love, like schoolkids, and although I know it was all blood chemistry boiling away, brain chemistry . . . still, we were addicted to each other, the sight and sound and smell of each other, like a heroin addict to his junk . . .”

“Been there,” Elza said.

“But you never lost anyone the way I lost her. Like a sudden traumatic amputation—worse, because you can buy a new arm or leg, and it will do.”

“So that’s what I am? Your—”

“No. It’s not simple.”

She picked at a nail, concentrating. “I had a friend lost a leg before she was twenty, AP mine in Liberia. She said the new one did everything she asked it to. But it was never really part of her. Just an accessory.” She stood up. “I better pack some clothes.” She put her glass in the refrigerator and went into the bedroom.

“For a diplomat,” Dustin said softly, “you don’t have an awful lot of tact.”

“I don’t have to be a diplomat with you and her. Do I?”

“Of course not.” He got up and went to the fridge. “Cheese?”

“I just ate a whole bird.”

“A little one.” He set out five chunks of cheese, including half a wheel of Brie, and put them on a platter with some bread and a knife. “They won’t have cows in ad Astra.”

I sliced off a piece of something blue. “Not going to keep for fifty years,” he said.

“Not much will.” I was still seeing her. “Gehenna will just be a history lesson to most people.”

He broke the lengthening silence. “Her name was Mira?”

“Moira. My father approved of her, nice Jewish girl. I think he’s a little scared of Elza.”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“I’ll give you something to be scared of,” she said from the bedroom, bantering, the hurt gone from her voice.

“Best offer I’ve had today,” he said.

I didn’t hear her walking up behind me, barefoot. She put both hands lightly on my head and tangled my hair with her fingers. “I’ll sleep with Namir tonight.”

“Okay by me,” I said.

“We have to talk.” She rubbed my temples. “You can love her. You will love her, always. But you have to leave her here. Here on Earth.”

“I think that’s already done.” Literally, anyhow.

“We’ll talk about it.” She went back to the large bedroom.

I joined her there an hour later and we did talk. Moira was my generation, a year older than me, but forever young to Elza, and not much I could do about that.

She wanted to know what Moira and I had done that I didn’t do with her, and I tried not to think of it as an invasion of privacy. Of course the big thing she couldn’t do was have me as a twenty-five-year-old lad, and there was another thing I didn’t mention, to preserve the woman’s dead dignity. But I did describe a trick Moira would do with her breasts, and we were both happy and relieved when she made it work. Elza’s a little self-conscious about her small breasts, as Moira was about her large ones. I decided not to bring that up.

While we lay there entwined, the diplomat in me affirmed that I could leave Moira here on Earth. I didn’t say that part of me would stay with her, too; neither of us buried, neither dead.

I pretended to be asleep, as always, when she slipped away to join Dustin. Thinking furiously about the lies that grace our lives.

12

GROWING THINGS

The Martians came up a week after we did. We helped them unload their few packages. Earth-normal weight was oppressive to them, and they clumped around with exaggerated care. Well, it wasn’t exaggeration. Like having to carry around a weight one and a half times as heavy as you are. Carry it for thirteen years with no relief.

Snowbird didn’t complain, but her voice was unnaturally high and reedy. I doubt that they spoke much English on the way up.

I put my arm gently around her shoulders. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?”

“Hard for you, too, Carmen. You haven’t been to Earth in a long time.”

“I exercise in Earth gravity every day.”

“I should do that,” she said. “Become Earth-strong. By the time we return, the quarantine may be lifted.”

Fly-in-Amber, behind us, made a dismal noise. “I have a better idea. Let’s just go home. We can’t live this way.”

She gave him a long blast and high-pitched growl in consensus Martian, and he squawked and clattered back.

She turned back to me. “Perhaps we should rest in Mars territory for a while.” They plodded off, muttering.

“Before long, they’ll be in zero gravity,” Paul said. “He’ll complain about that, too.”

The last thing we would have to do before Paul cut us loose was to tape things down, mostly chairs. When we were flung away from the Space Elevator, we’d be in free fall, like someone jumping out of an airplane. But we would plummet for eleven days. Jostled every now and then by steering jets. That would be tomorrow.

The habitat didn’t have any independent propulsion, of course, but it was firmly attached to the ship that would eventually be our landing vessel, much smaller. It would fly away like an eagle clutching an elephant.

Before that, we had to water the plants. We’d spent six days following the directions the hydroponic engineers had left behind, making sure all the root structures could be kept moist without water surrounding them. There was a water-absorbent granular medium held inside a fine-mesh net for each plant or group of plants. There was no automation in this temporary arrangement, of course. Every morning we’d spend an hour giving each plant a measured shot of water from a portable hydrator, a water pump with a hose and syringe.

The first morning, still in gravity, I split the chore with Dustin. It was interesting to get him alone; he usually deferred to Namir or Elza.

I had to ask him about his weird family, growing up. “I never gave it much thought,” I said, “but isn’t it strange that a person who winds up in espionage should have grown up in a commune, with anarchist parents?”

He laughed. “Not so odd. Like a kid whose parents are lawyers or cops might want to escape and become a bohemian artist.

“I didn’t want to be a spy, anyhow. A philosophy degree doesn’t open many doors, though. The Space Force paid through my doctorate in exchange for four years’ service, which I thought was going to be in communications. You go where they send you, though. They needed engineers for communication.”

“And philosophers for spookery?”

“It’s a grab bag, intelligence. Not that they’d ever admit it, but it’s where you go if you have education but no useful skills. The personnel database says there are three other philosophy Ph.D.s in intelligence. We ought to get together. Form a cabal.”

“Namir says there are more officers in intelligence than any other part of the military.”

He nodded amiably. “As if that were a good thing? It’s been that way for a long time.”

“I’ve never known a philosopher before. If it wasn’t for the Space Force, what would you be doing?”

“Staying out of harm’s way! You know, sit around, think deep thoughts. Beg for scraps.”

“And teach, I suppose.”

“And write papers that two or three people will read.” The bush he was watering had tiny white flowers with a penetrating sweet smell. He bent down and breathed deeply, and read the label. “Martian?”

“Martian miniature limes. They tweaked the genes so it wouldn’t be all branch, growing tall in Martian gravity. We’ll see what it does in one gee.”

“The past year and a half, I’ve been assigned to a think tank in Washington. All the services, multidisciplinary. The Ethics of Military Intervention.”

“Any conclusions?”

He made a sound I’d come to recognize, a puff of air through his nose: amusement, contempt, maybe patience. “Under the present conditions . . . it’s hard to justify most wars, anyhow, that aren’t a purely defensive reaction to invasion. But now, with the Others threatening the whole human race with casual destruction? How does anyone justify a war against any human enemy?”

“Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”

“No.” He growled a string of foreign syllables. “That’s Farsi: ‘There is some shit a man does not have to eat.’ Adapted from American English, I think, though the principle is widely spread.”

“But it implies there’s another kind of shit that a man does have to eat. Glad I’m a woman.”

He smiled at me. “See? You’re a philosopher already.” He sniffed the lime flowers again. “Though living on recycled shit is something I tried to become philosophical about, before we came up.”

“Hunger helps.” It dominated the menu in Little Mars. The pantry machine broke up all organic waste, and some inorganic, and put it back together to make amino acids, then protein. Mixed in with measured amounts of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, some trace elements, it could produce blocks of edible stuff in programmed colors, textures, and flavors. “Elza said that Namir is a good cook. I wonder what he can do with pseudobeef and pseudochicken.”

“Make pseudo-Beef Stroganoff and pseudo-Chicken Florentine, I guess.” He sighed and leaned back against the lattice that would be supporting bean vines. “Carmen, what do you think our chances really are? Are we just wasting our time? Intuition, I mean, not science.”

“I don’t think you can do science without data. I do have an intuition, though, or an optimistic delusion.” I sat down on the edge of the tank. “Do you know the story of the lucky chicken?”

“Tell me.”

“Well, suppose you had a flat of fertilized chicken eggs—that’s one hundred and forty-four—and you dropped the flat from waist height or shoulder height. Some eggs would break. Discard them and do it again, and again, until finally you have just one egg.”

“The lucky egg.”

“You’re getting it. You hatch it and collect its fertilized eggs—”

“Unless it’s a rooster.”

“Then you have to start over, I guess. But you do the same thing, dropping them over and over until one survives. Then you wait for it to mature and collect its eggs. And again and again.”

“I see,” he said.

“Eventually, you will produce the luckiest chicken in the world. The version I heard, the benefactor was the pope. He put the chicken in a fancy papal chicken basket, and it never left his side. So nothing bad ever happened to him.”

“This is not the last pope we’re talking about, then.”

“Not a real pope. Me, actually. I’m the lucky chicken.”

“They dropped your mother from a great height?”

He was so much like Paul I could smack him. “Not that I know of. But ever since I got to Mars, I’ve had the most incredible luck. All ‘The Mars Girl’ crap. All kinds of trouble, and I always seem to come out on top. So maybe my main qualification for this job is as a talisman. Stay close to me, the way the pope stayed close to his lucky chicken.”

He was nodding, looking serious. “You do believe in luck?”

“Well, at some level I suppose I do. Not in lucky charms, talismans. But just as an observation, sure. Some people seem to be lucky all the time, while others seem to be born losers.”

“That’s true enough. Something that statistics would predict.”

“I suppose you could pretend to be scientific, and put the whole population on a bell curve, just like you would for height or weight. Normal people bulking up in the middle, the unlucky ones off to the left, the luckiest trailing off on the right.”

“Ah ha!” He grinned and rubbed his beard. “There’s your fallacy. You can only do it with dead people.”

“What? Dead people have all run out of luck.”

“No, I mean, all you can say of someone is after the fact: ‘he was lucky all his life’ or ‘she was unlucky’—but a living, breathing person always has tomorrow to worry about. You could be the luckiest person in the world, in two worlds, in the whole universe. But some tomorrow, like the day you meet the Others, boom. Your ‘luck’ runs out, like a gambler’s winning streak. And in that particular case, so does everybody else’s.”

“Are you always such an optimist?”

He picked up his hydrator, and we moved on to the next patch. “By Earth standards, America anyhow, I really am an optimist. You can define that as ‘anyone who isn’t suicidally depressed.’ There may be free energy, but that doesn’t translate into universal prosperity. Most people work at unsatisfying jobs with ambiguous or worthless goals and low pay, and anyhow, they’re just marking time until the end of the world. Namir and Elza and I, like you guys, are in the unique position of being able to do something about it.”

I was still living in a kind of double-vision world, the sanitized version that was broadcast (and which I sort of believed for years) versus the grim reality that was in Namir’s newspaper. And America was far from being the worst off. The front-page picture in the last paper showed the Ganges, a clot of corpses from shore to shore. A block-wide funeral pyre in Kuala Lumpur, within sight of the proud old Twin Towers.

These were beets, four small plants per net bag, 50 ccs water each. I wouldn’t touch beets as a girl, but in Mars I came to love them. Red planet and all. I mentioned that to Dustin.

He laughed. “I grew up in a vegetarian family. Beets were the closest thing I had to meat until I got off the commune.”

“Bothers you to go back to veggies?”

“No, I just eat to fuel up. Pseudo-hot dogs with fake mustard, yum. Elza’s about the same. Namir might go crazy, though.”

“He likes his meat?”

“Fish, actually. He doesn’t like to be far from the sea.”

“He better take a good last look.”

“On Mars, you had actual fish.”

We said “in Mars,” usually. “A pool of tilapia.” They lived on plant waste.

“He was hoping.”

“Guess we’re not a big enough biome. It was marginal on Mars, a luxury, and we didn’t have to deal with water at zero gee.” I clicked on the notebook. “Twenty kilos of dried fish in the storeroom.” The storeroom was already in place on the iceberg. It had five hundred kilos of luxury food. Including fifty liters of two- hundred-proof alcohol, more than enough for each of us to have two drinks a day.

“He can do something with dried fish, Spanish. Some kind of fritters.”

His smile was interesting. “You really like him. I mean, apart from . . .”

“There’s no ‘apart from,’ but yes. We’re closer than I ever was with any of my natural family.”

I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I wanted prurient details. “You knew Elza first, though.”

“By a few weeks, maybe a month. By then it was obviously a package deal or no deal.

“I’d heard of Namir professionally, and was curious anyhow. We first met without her, very American, shooting pool.”

“You beat the pants off him.”

“Not a chance. He’s a shark. Shows no mercy.”

“You knew about him and Gehenna.”

“In what way?” he said without inflection.

“That he missed the first part, and so survived the second.”

“Oh, sure. He was about the highest-ranking officer of the Mossad in Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, who survived.”

That was interesting. “I wonder why he didn’t press his advantage with that.”

“How so?”

“He’s still with the UN, isn’t he? If he’d stayed in Israel—”

He laughed. “Smartest thing he ever did was go back to New York. Lots of ruthless people jockeying for position in the Mossad, with three-quarters of them suddenly gone. His turf in New York was safe. Besides, it’s the place he loves best.”

We moved on to the delicate celery plants. “There’s an odd chain of circumstance that winds up putting the three of us here. As if we’re collectively a lucky chicken—or an unlucky one.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Like this . . . the Corporation wound up agreeing that they needed no more or less than three military people on the mission. So they sent the computers out sniffing for three military people who could live together in close quarters for thirteen years, getting along with four civilians at the same time, people who had a certain amount of academic training and professional accomplishment. They didn’t want three men or three women, so as not to have one gender dominate on ad Astra.”

“And they had to be spies, of course. Don’t forget that.”

“In fact, the probability that they’d come from intelligence was high. A person who’d spent his professional life shooting down planes or disarming bombs wouldn’t be too useful. They wanted one of the three to be a medical doctor, too, who’d done general practice.”

“We all agreed on that. Someone who could work without consultation.”

“That may be what happened. The computer pulled out Elza, and she dragged me and Namir along.”

“That could be it,” I said. But computers have to be programmed, and it would be easy to start out with Namir and his mates and make sure they would be the ones the program selected. “I’d hold them like this.” He was picking up the plant by its stalk; I slid my hand under the ball of medium and lifted it out.

“Right,” he said. “Have to be careful with the babies.”

“Were you going to have any?” I asked. “Before you got orders to waltz off into outer space and tilt with monsters?”

“Well, neither Elza nor Namir wanted any children. They’re not that optimistic about the future. Immediate or distant. If it were up to me, yes, I’d like to watch one grow up. Help it grow up.”

“Sort of a social experiment? A philosophical one?”

“Cold-blooded, I know. You have two?”

“Technically. They were born ex utero, though, for which my ‘utero’ is grateful. And they’re being raised by the community, in Mars. Which I don’t like much.”

“You’re so right. Speaking as someone who was raised by a commune. With my mother and father warned not to bond too closely.”

“You didn’t have a mother figure or father figure at all?”

“No. There was a couple in charge of children. But it was obvious we were just a chore. They were pretty harsh.”

“That must have been rough. The two in charge of our kids are nice people; I’ve known them for years.”

“Good luck. Ours were nice to adults.”

We moved on to the carrots, frilly and delicate. “Working in Washington, did you commute every day?”

“No, I had a little flat in Georgetown. Go back to New York on Thursday night or Friday. Sometimes bring Elza back to DC if our schedules allowed. Sometimes I’d just go up overnight; it’s only an hour and a half on the Metro.”

“Best of both worlds.”

“Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”

“Did you go armed?”

“No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”

“In the city?”

“Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”

“No connection with Gehenna?”

He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”

“Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”

Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”

“Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”

“It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”

“Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”

“It’s gotten that bad?”

“Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years before that, America was . . . more cautious than most places.”

“A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”

He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”

“You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”

“Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”

“No, but . . . I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s . . .”

“I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”

“So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”

“Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”

“I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”

“You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”

“No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”

“Oh, good. We can go home now.”

“It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”

I had to laugh. “Unlike real life. Where a beautiful blond mystery woman nails the spy as he steps off the Broadway slidewalk. For God’s sake!”

“What can I say?” He injected the last carrot bunch. “Life does imitate art sometimes.”

We could’ve just stayed in the habitat for launch, which might have been fun. Suddenly detached from the Space Elevator, we’d be flung toward the iceberg at a great rate of speed, but the sensation to us would be “oops—someone turned off the gravity.”

For safety’s sake, though, all of us climbed through the connecting tube into the spaceship ad Astra. (We should come up with a separate name for the habitat. San Quentin, maybe, or Alcatraz.)

We helped the Martians get strapped into their hobbyhorse restraints—with all those arms, they still can’t reach their backs—and then got into our own couches, overengineered with lots of padding and buckles. But that was for the landing, 6.4 years from now, at least. Paul didn’t expect any violent maneuvers on the way to the iceberg. There were two course corrections planned right after launch, and unpredictable “refinements” as we approached the iceberg.

Paul had said to expect a loud bang, and indeed it was about the loudest thing I had ever heard. No noise in space, of course, but the eight explosive bolts that separated the habitat from the Elevator made the whole structure reverberate.

“Stay strapped in for a few minutes,” he said, and counted down from five seconds. The attitude jets hissed faintly for a minute and stuttered. Then the main drive blasted for a few minutes, loud, but not as deafening as the bolts had been. I suppose it was a quarter of a gee or so, not quite Martian gravity.

“That should do it. Put on your slippers and let’s go check for damage.”

Our gecko slippers would allow us to walk, as if there were weak glue on our soles, down the ship’s corridor, and through most of the habitat. The sticky patches on the walls and floor and ceiling were beige circles big enough for one foot. (You could squeeze both feet into one if you liked the sensation of being a bug stuck in a spiderweb.)

Those of us used to zero gee just sailed through the tube into the habitat, the others picking their way along behind us. Namir was game for floating through but banged his shoulder on the air lock badly enough to leave a bruise. He’d had a little experience before, in the military and of course getting from the Elevator to Little Mars, perhaps just enough to make him too confident.

My immediate concern was the plants. A small apple tree had gone off exploring and made it almost to the galley, and a couple of tomato plants had gotten loose. Meryl unshipped the hand vacuum and was chasing down the floating particles of medium before we had a chance to ingest them. I returned the apple tree to its proper place and replanted the tomato vines.

The three spooks were doing the various things people do when they’re getting used to zero gee—except barfing, fortunately. They practiced pushing off from surfaces and trying to control spinning. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard to eyeball the distance to wherever you’re going, and do a half turn, or one-and-a-half turn, to land feetfirst. You can also “swim” short distances, but nobody needs that much exercise.

There was a very distinct look in Dustin’s eye, and Elza returned it. I hoped it worked for them better than it does for most. (Paul and I first had sex in zero gee, and it worked all right. My first time with anybody, whatever the gravity, so it was a double miracle for me.)

Snowbird and Fly- in-Amber were clumsy in zero gee. The gecko slippers were less effective with them, since they had more inertia than humans—if I’m moving slowly and put my foot down onto a beige spot, it will stop me. Snowbird has four times my mass, though, and will rip off and keep going.

I went into Mars territory with her to check their garden, since it was easier for me to move around and manipulate things. It was dark and cold, as it was supposed to be. Their garden was simpler than ours; Martian tastes didn’t run to a lot of variety.

Trays of stuff that resembled fungi and a few stubby trees. As on our side, one of the trees had come loose, but it was easy to retrieve and fix with duct tape.

A screen all along one whole wall was a panorama of their underground city, which was almost all of her planet she had ever seen. Though Mars wasn’t “her” planet the way Earth was ours.

They had known for thousands of years that Mars was not their natural home. They only learned recently that they were put on Mars as a sort of warning system for the Others: when humans had advanced enough technologically to come in contact with the Martians, they were advanced enough to present a danger to the Others, even light-years away. Which led to the Others’ attempt to destroy us, thwarted by Paul and the Martian leader Red. The cataclysmic explosion that was supposed to sterilize Earth only rearranged the farside of the Moon. Killing Red in the process.

So from one point of view, the Martians were humanity’s saviors. Another point of view, more widely held, says that it was all the Martians’ fault. (And since I was the first to come into contact with them, I shared the blame.)

After taking care of the garden, we went into the “compromise” lounge, not quite as dark and cold. There was a bench for humans to sit on, not of much utility in zero gee, and a skillful mural of the above-ground part of our Mars colony, a mosaic of pebbles from both Earth and Mars. It was special to me, made by Oz, Dr. Oswald Penninger, who had been my mentor when I first came to Mars.

I told Snowbird about it. “I met Dr. Oswald,” she said. “I breathed for him.” Oz had spent some time in the Martian city, measuring the metabolism of the various families.

“I miss him,” I said. “He was one of my closest friends.” He and Josie might have been on this expedition if the Corporation hadn’t been pressured into taking three military people.

“It is difficult for us to gauge human personality. But I can understand why you would like Dr. Oz. He is interested in everything. Or should I say ‘was,’ as you did? He will not live long enough to see us again.”

“I should have said ‘is.’ As long as the person is alive.”

“He told me about Norway,” she said, “where he studied art. I’d like to go there someday. It sounds a little like Mars.”

“Maybe they’ll do something about the gravity by then.”

“I hope so. This is nice.” She pushed up gently, rose to the ceiling, and floated back down. “But you are joking.”

“Yes. Gravity’s like death and taxes. Always with us.”

“Not always. There’s no gravity here, nor death, nor taxes. Not for some time. And when we take off for Wolf 25, it will be the ship’s acceleration that presses us to the floor.”

“Homemade gravity. You can’t tell it from the real thing.”

“Ha-ha. Dr. Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence. A good joke.”

Was it I who had made the joke, or Einstein? I decided not to pursue it.

Dustin came into the lounge, sideways and a little fast. He crashed into a wall with a modicum of grace.

“Good aim,” I said. “You want to work on the speed.”

He brushed himself off, rotating toward the center of the room. “Good aim if I’d been aiming for this door,” he said. “Good afternoon, Snowbird. What’s up?”

“Carmen helped us with a tree. Now we are discussing general relativity.”

That raised his eyebrows a few millimeters. “A little beyond me. The math, anyhow. Tensor calculus?”

I had to come clean. “Don’t ask me. I’m just sitting around being impressed. What is tensor calculus?”

“To me, it was a big ‘stop’ sign. I withdrew from the course and changed my major to philosophy. From physics.”

“Pretty drastic.”

“I try to be philosophical about it. Snowbird, your family is both, right? Science and philosophy?”

“Not in the sense of being scientists and philosophers, no. We don’t experiment, traditionally. Not on things and not on ideas. I am in a small group that wants to change that. Which I think is why the others were glad to see me go.

“Traditionally, you know, we learn by rote. It’s not like human physics and chemistry and biology. Things and processes are described in great detail, but those descriptions aren’t tested, and the underlying relationships aren’t studied.”

“We’d call that Aristotelianism, in a way. If you had an Aristotle.”

“I know. It was studying the ways you classify different methods of thinking that made some of us want to change the ways we think.”

“Some of us who are not completely grown yet.” Fly- in-Amber came drifting out of Mars territory. “Not completely sane . . .” He gently collided with me, as I put my other foot down on the beige spot to anchor us.

“Thank you. Snowbird was not yet two when you humans came. The novelty of it made a huge impression on her unformed mind.”

“You will never win this argument, or lose it,” Snowbird said. “I know you’re wrong, and you know I’m wrong.”

“And since you are wrong, that settles it.” Fly-in-Amber crossed all four arms in a human-looking gesture. “That’s logic.”

Dustin stayed out of it, but I didn’t. “Why does it have to be one or the other, Fly-in-Amber? Your science was fine in the old days, but it wouldn’t get you off Mars.”

“And to the planet of the Others, where we’ll be destroyed along with everybody on Earth, and perhaps in Mars as well? That’s not progress, Carmen.”

“Not the example I would choose,” Snowbird said.

“But it’s relevant,” I insisted. “Human science explained everything pretty well until we met you, and found you had this energy-out-of-nowhere thing. Now we have to fit you into our universe, just as you have to fit us into yours.”

“How can you say that? If you hadn’t stumbled onto us, we could have happily gone on for an eternity, or at least until the cows came home. If we had cows.”

“Was that a joke, Fly-in-Amber?”

“Of course not. I am only trying to adapt to your idiom.”

“He pretends not to have a sense of humor,” Snowbird said, “which makes him even funnier.”

“Idiom,” Fly-in-Amber repeated. “Idiom is not humor.”

“What does the philosopher say about that?”

He grinned. “I have enough for a monograph already.”

“Humans do not understand this, and neither does Snowbird.” Fly-in-Amber made a complex gesture that started him rotating. I reached out and stabilized him. “Thank you. It’s not a concept that I can express in English, or any human language.” He rattled off about thirty seconds of noises in the Martian consensus language. I recognized three clear repeated sounds—one for negation, one for “human,” and one that signals an “if . . . then” statement.

Snowbird was totally still, absorbing it. “Can you translate?” Dustin said.

“Not exactly . . . no. But I could try to say part of it.”

Fly-in-Amber put his small hands together and made a slight bow, perhaps a parody of human gesture.

“It’s about the social function of humor in both races. As if humans were one culture.” Fly- in-Amber barked, and Snowbird answered with a series of clicks. “He points out that you are essentially one culture, in Mars.

“From the first time we communicated—with Carmen, after we decided to let her know we spoke human languages—it’s been obvious that humor both unites and separates the two species. Martian humor is almost always about helplessness, about fate and irony. Humans also recognize this, but most of your humor is about suffering—about pain, loss, death. To us . . . that preference itself is beautifully funny, and is even funnier as you think about it. Like a hall of mirrors, the images fading off into infinity.

“I’m not saying this well. But for most of us, humor is absolutely necessary for survival—if you lived in a small hole in the ground, and knew there would never be anything else, you would perhaps feel the same way.”

“Sort of like what we call ‘gallows’ humor,” Dustin said.

“ ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ ” Fly-in-Amber quoted, “ ‘and you will find me a grave man.’ ” He said it with a British acting voice. “That was a BBC radio production of Romeo and Juliet in 1951. Very Martian humor. Mercutio has been stabbed, and he jokes about dying. Most human humor is not so clear to me.”

“Nor as funny,” Snowbird said. “So many jokes about people falling down, which is hardly possible with four legs. Sex jokes aren’t funny because we have to figure out what the people are doing, and why that’s more funny than what they normally do.” She turned to Fly-in-Amber and made the thumping laughter sound. “Only two people! Only two!”

“Some of us don’t think that’s funny,” Fly-in-Amber said. “They can’t help the way they’re made.”

“Do you tell jokes about Martian sex?” Dustin asked.

Snowbird pantomimed scratching her head, which was kind of funny, avoiding all the eyes up there. “No . . . no fate or irony or helplessness there. What is there to laugh about?”

“Trust me,” he said. “Humans find Martian sex pretty entertaining.”

“But it’s so plain and innocent, compared to human sex. We don’t hide away and do it in private, and kill people if they do it with the wrong person.”

“You’d never have a Shakespeare,” I said.

“I think we do have individuals like Shakespeare,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Though it would be difficult to explain, to translate, what I mean by that.”

“I should think so. Since you don’t seem to have anything like drama.”

“Nothing dramatic used to happen to us, before you came. I suppose we’re going to need drama now.”

“And psychoanalysis,” Dustin said. “Social workers. Police and jails.”

“We look forward to evolving.”

PART 2

THE PLANT

1

GRAVITY SUCKS

On Earth we’d seen pictures of the iceberg, and so didn’t expect it to look like an iceberg, glistening and pure. I was once stationed in Greenland in the winter; it looked something like that, cold and dirty. Elza said it reminded her of North Dakota in the winter—windstorms drive dark topsoil to mix with blizzard snow to make a black substance they call “snirt,” neither snow nor dirt.

It was the fossil nucleus of an ancient comet. Billions of years ago, Mars had bent the thing’s orbit around, turning it into a small asteroid of ice and impurities, never to be warm enough to have its day in the sun and grow a magnificent tail.

So it was a huge dirty snowball, somewhat out of round. White splashes where engineers and their robots had blasted and drilled to turn it into a huge fuel tank. It provided reaction mass for the main drive and an array of small steering jets, mainly for turning us around at midpoint—and evading rocks, if it came to that.

Everything had been tested out; the main drive fired for several days, stopped, turned around, and fired again. Now we coasted in to meet it.

It was a death trap in several ways. The sheer amount of energy blowing out behind was like a continual thermonuclear explosion, and although stars do that for millennia on end, no machine has ever done it before—let alone for thirteen years. And it wasn’t as straightforward as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation; it was just the magic Martian energy sources stacked up, or nested, for a multiplicative effect. I didn’t have the faintest idea why it worked, and its designers were only a couple of baby steps ahead of me. All we knew for sure was that the scale model had worked, going out a hundredth of a light- year and back, with one pilot/passenger.

It was like successfully testing a motorboat, and saying, okay, launch the Titanic.

Which brings up another actuarial disaster waiting to happen: what if we hit something on the way?

It wouldn’t have to be another iceberg, real or metaphorical. Going at 0.95 the speed of light, a fist- sized rock would be like a nuclear bomb. We did have an electromagnetic repeller to keep interstellar dust from grinding us down to a sliver. But it wouldn’t work on anything as big as a marble.

Bigger things we could sense at a distance, and avoid with a quick blip from the steering jets, which explains our lack of fine glassware and china. Though if our cosmological models were right, such encounters would be rare. If we were wrong, it would be a bumpy ride.

There had been no serious problems with the test run. But we were going twenty-four hundred times farther.

Four engineers were still living on the iceberg. They would get us screwed down tight into the ice and connect our habitat with the storage area, where they’d been living the past ten months. Have to check the caviar and vodka supplies. (Actually, the modifications that allowed them to live there made the storage building a de facto alternate living area, if something made ad Astra uninhabitable, and if we somehow survived that event.)

We’d been talking with them for days, via line-of-sight laser modulation, and were glad to be able to aid them in a small conspiracy.

The plan was supposed to be that we not make physical contact with them, because they were all from Earth, and we were all quarantined because of exposure to Mars and Martians. They’d been talking it over, though, and decided to come say hello and be contaminated. Then they’d go back to Little Mars instead of Earth and wait for a chance to hitch a ride on to Mars. Which seemed like a better prospect than their home planet.

All four of our resident semi-Martians thought they’d be welcome, thumbing their collective nose at Earth. Of course, the two actual Martians didn’t understand why anyone would want to live on Earth in the first place. All that gravity. Humans everywhere.

Paul brought us in smoothly, a couple of small bumps. The comet didn’t have any appreciable gravity, of course, so it was more a docking maneuver than a landing.

The robots had carved out a rectangular hole in the ice, two meters deeper than the habitat was tall. Paul nudged us in there, and the robots slid blocks of ice and dirt in place over us, a kind of ablative protective layer. He detached the small lander and inched it onto the surface. A flexible crawl tube connected the ship’s air lock with ours.

Paul swam through in a space suit, followed by the four engineers. We were all wearing our usual motley, so the five of them looked like an Invasion of the Space People movie.

They all popped out of their suits as quickly as possible, Carmen aiding Paul and the engineers unscrewing each other. They were two couples, Margit and Balasz from Hungary and Karin and Franz from Germany.

They were wearing skinsuits, of course. Margit filled hers in a spectacular way, but Karin was more attractive to me, compact and athletic like Elza. As if there were any scenario where that would make a difference. (“Oh, a Jew,” she says in my dreams, speaking German—“Let me make up for World War II.”)

Margit spread her arms and inhaled hugely, starting a slight rotation. “Ah! Martian air. I feel so deliciously contaminated.”

We shook hands all around and made introductions, though we’d met on-screen. Snowbird and Fly-in-Amber came floating tentatively out of the darkness.

The four newcomers were somewhat wide-eyed at the apparitions, but Balasz croaked and whistled a fair imitation of a greeting.

“The same to you and your family,” Snowbird said. “You are almost correct.”

“Not bad for a human,” Fly-in-Amber grumbled. High praise.

“This is so huge,” Karin said, apparently of the farm. “How many species?”

“About three dozen,” Meryl said, “with another dozen to be planted in a few months. And eight Martian varieties.”

“It will make it easier,” Franz said. “Playing with your food. The same meals over and over can drive you crazy.”

Paul laughed. “Make you do irrational things, like give up Earth for Mars.”

All four of them smiled. “Definitely,” Karin said. “Though it might depend where on Earth you call home.”

“I will miss New York,” I said. “Though it’s not exactly the simple life.”

“Mars has plenty,” Paul said. “Small-town life, but something new every day, every hour. Trade with you in a minute.”

Karin shook her head. “No, I’m not that great a pilot. You can keep your starship.”

“So when are you going to tell them?” Carmen said.

Karin and Franz exchanged glances. “Actually, we were waiting to get your opinion,” he said.

“A pity we aren’t a little farther out,” I said. The outer limit for line-of-sight transmission was set at four hundred million kilometers, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars, and we were still within that.

“It is,” Franz said. “They’ll know we’ve been withholding the fact.”

“You ought to wait until the last minute,” Carmen said. “Don’t give them time to round up a bunch of lawyers.”

“The worst they can do is shoot you down,” I said, “but I don’t think they can afford to waste a spaceship.”

Paul agreed. “They’ll fine you the expense of decontamination and the flight to Mars. But since there’s no money on Mars, all they could do is seize your assets on Earth.”

“Which aren’t much,” Karin said.

“None from us, of course,” Margit said. Hungary was part of the Cercle Socialisme.

“It would be courteous to give them enough warning, so they don’t send up an ‘uncontaminated’ Space Elevator.”

Moonboy held up a hand. He hadn’t spoken before. “Wait. You’re missing the obvious.” Everybody looked his way. “Just lie to them. Make up some story about how you were forced to come aboard ad Astra. Medical problem or something.”

“Of course,” Balasz said. “Once one was exposed to Martian- ness, we might as well all be, since we all have to go back together.”

“Could you cooperate with us in this ruse?” Margit said.

There was a general murmur of assent. “I cannot lie,” Fly- in-Amber said. “It is not a matter of choice for me. My function is to record things as they happen.”

“My function,” Snowbird said, “is to sit on you if you open your mouth. You have to record everything, but you don’t have to communicate it to everybody. Least of all to humans on Earth.”

“True enough.” He turned to the engineers. “I do not have lips. But my orifice is sealed.”

Snowbird turned to Carmen. “See? He doesn’t know.”

So we manufactured a credible medical crisis, choosing Karin because she was the pilot. We gave her severe bronchitis that didn’t respond to their ship’s primitive treatment, and so she had to spend a few days in our infirmary. Actually, she was outside most of the time, helping the other three finish battening down the hatches.

We took pleasure in their company for the eight days they remained on the iceberg, enjoying the last contact with people from outside our circle. I’m sure that Elza enjoyed more than social intercourse with Balasz, a warm and handsome man. Dustin and I exchanged a raised eyebrow or two over it. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if she had kept her hands to herself.

(Dustin, I think, had more than a passing interest in Margit, but would never initiate a liaison himself. I’ve told him that if Adam had waited for Eve to ask, none of us might be here. But he remains diffident.)

We said our good-byes, and they “cast off,” drifting a few kilometers behind the iceberg, well out of the line of fire. They were sending a record of our launch to Earth, and also to Paul—though if anything serious went wrong, I’m not sure what he could do.

It took all morning to secure the plants, some of which would be glad to have gravity again. Beans and peas were going totally schizophrenic in zero gee, with no up or down. Carrots had started growing beet-shaped.

After everything was secured and misted, we crawled and glided up into the ship and strapped in. I’d wanted to stay down in the habitat, taped into one of the chairs, but Paul talked me out of it with one pained expression. For the most daredevil pilot ever to elude a miniature supernova, he’s an extremely cautious man.

We were all nervous when he pushed the LAUNCH button; only a fool would not have been. If there was any noise or vibration, I didn’t sense it (though Snowbird said she did). Perhaps the sensation was too subtle compared to the sudden clasp of gravity. Acceleration, technically.

It seemed greater than one gee, though of course it wasn’t. It also seemed “different” from real gravity in some indefinable way, as if (which we knew to be true) the floor was aggressively pushing up at us. Relativistic heresy.

After about five minutes, Paul said “Seems safe,” and unbuckled. If something had gone wrong, we could theoretically have blasted off in this lander and left ad Astra behind. Go back to Earth and start over.

I undid my seat belt and levered myself up, trying not to groan. I’d been desultory on the exercise machines, which were awkward in zero gee. Time to pay the piper now.

Dustin did groan. “I’m going on a diet.”

“We don’t want to hear any Earth people complain,” Fly-in-Amber said, inching painfully toward the air lock. “You are built for this.”

“So are we,” Snowbird said. That was true; they were overengineered for Martian conditions. But then they would have inherited the Earth, if the Others’ grand plan had succeeded.

They had both been spending two hours a day in the Earth- normal exercise rooms in Little Mars, but that didn’t make the change welcome. In an open area, we can help them get along, offering an arm or a shoulder, but in the spaceship aisle and the tube connecting the air locks, they had to crawl along on their own.

“I’ll bet the Others have a way around this gravity,” Snowbird said. “We should have asked them while we had their attention.”

“We had our fill of their attention,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Besides, they live in liquid nitrogen, floating like fish in Earth’s water. They don’t care about gravity.”

I’d never thought of that. We didn’t really know what they looked like, so my image was of crystalline or metallic creatures lying almost inert under the cryogenic fluid.

“I want to go to Earth and see the water,” Snowbird said. “I want to wade in the sea.”

“Things go well, you probably will,” I said. “Surely the quarantine can’t last another fifty-some years.”

“For a spy, you’re a hopeless optimist,” Carmen said. “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man as well.”

“If the odds are right.”

“Then I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky—good single-malt Scotch whisky, bottled this year—that the quarantine will still be in place when we return. If we do.”

“A fifty-year-old bottle?” Maybe half a month’s pay. “I’ll accept the wager. Even against the Lucky Chicken—especially against her, so I can lose.”

“You lose, and everybody wins. Quarantined, but alive.”

After a few minutes of walking around, mostly checking plants for damage, all of us probably felt like lying down. I fought the impulse by going to the exercise machines. At least I could sit down on the stationary bicycle. Watch the water splashing into the pool. In a couple of hours, it would be full; I looked forward to cooling off in it.

I wondered whether the Martians would try it. Their underground lakes were shallow and muddy, and I couldn’t remember any reference to their using water recreationally. It was pretty rare stuff.

They didn’t wash for personal hygiene. They used flat scrapers, like ancient Roman athletes, the residue stirred into water that would be used for agriculture.

I got up and went back down the yellow corridor to the pantry, to see what I could put together for our first shipboard meal. (I hadn’t attempted cooking in zero gee.)

It was cold, maintained about ten degrees above freezing in the main area. Forty below in the “freezer,” which of course was heated up to that relatively balmy temperature, from the iceberg’s ambient coldness, about three degrees above absolute zero.

I’d spent hours studying the pantry’s organization and modifying it according to some logic and aesthetic that was arcane even to me. “This is the way I want it” was what it boiled down to. I would be the one spending the most time down here.

I took a basket and collected what I would need for a pasta dish that would resemble spaghetti and meatballs, comfort food, though there was no actual meat, and I assumed the spaghetti would have to be done in a pressure cooker. The air pressure was like Little Mars, about equivalent to nine thousand feet in altitude; boiling water wouldn’t cook fast.

I filled bottles with olive oil and wine concentrate, which I’d keep in the kitchen. No sense in making wine out of it for cooking; the alcohol would just boil off anyhow.

It would be a month before I had any fresh vegetables or herbs. But I did have dehydrated tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions in resealable jars, and flash-frozen green beans and corn for a side dish.

Moonboy came in with two-liter flasks for wine. They had lines marked for 130 ccs of alcohol and 50 ccs of concentrate; he chose Chianti when I told him what we were having. Some bureaucrat had set up the alcohol supply so you had to type in your initials and the quantity dispensed—or you could type in “communal,” as Moonboy did. Mr. Communal might wind up being quite a lush.

Nobody’d said anything about limits. Would you be cut off if the machine decided you were drinking too much for a pilot, or a doctor? For an out-of-work spy?

The wines we’d made in Little Mars that way weren’t too bad. The water has more oxygen dissolved in it than normal air would provide, and the theory was that it gave it a “brighter” taste. Whatever, I could live with it. I enjoy fine wine but will take any old plonk rather than nothing.

(In the desert, we boy soldiers made a horrible wine out of raisins and cut-up citrus, with bread- making yeast. I still can’t look at raisins.)

There was a lot of floor space beyond the pantry, which took up less than a quarter of the storage warehouse. The rest was a combination of replacements for things we knew would wear out, like clothes, and tools and raw materials for fabricating things we hadn’t predicted needing.

Like weapons, I supposed. We made a point of saying that the mission was peaceful and unarmed. But when I floated through the warehouse and its large semisentient machine shop, I saw that it wouldn’t take much inventiveness or skill to put together individual projectile and laser weapons and small bombs.

It was unlikely that any conventional weapon would have a non-trivial effect on the Others. But they might not be the only enemies out there. Sooner or later, we’d have to talk about that. I would just as soon not be the one to bring it up, though.

All that stuff waiting for something to go wrong made me wonder whether we might have traded in one of our xenologists, or even a spy, for a gifted tinkerer. We had engineers in a couple of flavors, and smart machines to do their bidding. But could any of those engineers take a blade to a piece of wood and carve a useful propeller out of it? An oar? I could, of course. But that’s not like having someone who would say, “You don’t need a propeller. This is what you need.”

I added a frozen cherry pie to the basket and a quart of something supposedly resembling ice cream. By the time I got to the kitchen, everybody was relaxing with a drink in the dining room or the study. Moonboy was intently playing the piano, silent with earphones, studying a projected score. Snowbird was standing by the small bookshelf, studying one of the few physical books we’d brought along.

Had to get used to their standing all the time. There are no social signals in their posture that I can recognize. When are they relaxing? Does the term have any meaning to them?

I set the stuff out in proper order on the work island, and put the pseudomeatballs in the microwave to thaw, then poured a glass of reconstituted Chianti. Not really bad. Asked the screen for pressure-cooking directions, and it said at this “altitude” I didn’t have to pressure-cook pasta; it just took longer. Okay; filled the pot three-quarters with water and added a little salt and oil, and put it on high.

My skin seemed to relax on my body, blood pressure coming down. I had so missed this plain thing. Whenever we were in a situation where it was possible, cooking was my main relaxant and restorer. Neither Elza nor Dustin did much cooking, though they had their specialties. Dustin’s Texas chili was a possibility here, but Elza’s skill with sushi was unlikely to be of use, unless we met some edible aliens. She could handle tentacles.

For two summers before I joined the kibbutz in Israel, my aunt Sophie hired me to do “dog work” in her New York restaurant, Five Flags. I did a lot of vegetable chopping and some simple sous-chef things, and was exposed to basic techniques in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese cooking. College and combat took me away from that world, and I never pursued it professionally, nor actually wanted to. That might make it too serious, no longer relaxing.

Meryl came over and refilled her glass. “Can I help?”

I measured some water into the dehydrated onions. “Nothing much to do, I’m afraid. I would love to have an onion to chop.”

“Not for a month or so.” She looked out over the hydroponic farm, more white plastic than greenery. “When we left Mars for Little Mars, I didn’t think I’d miss it, working with the plants.”

“No green thumb?”

“Well, no enthusiasm. I thought the ‘ag hours’ were somebody’s bright idea for morale. But I did grow to miss it, in Little Mars. One thing to look forward to, here.”

I nodded. “You’re not looking forward to six years of leisure? Or twelve?”

“Sure.” She retreated into thought, expression momentarily vacant. “I had an elaborate course of research planned, the thing we talked about the other day.”

I remembered. “Delphinic and cetacean pseudosyntax.”

“The more I think about it, the more futile it seems. No new data, no experimental subjects. I could work like a dog for twelve years while everybody else in the field is working for fifty. I come up with some brilliant insight and find it’s been old news for thirty years. People are having tea with whales and sex with dolphins.”

“Better than the other way around.”

“If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”

The meatballs dinged, and I took them out. “It seems to me your work would have value as methodology even if people on Earth came up with different results, with newer data.” I touched a couple, and they were thawed, still cool.

“Too abstract. I mean, you’re right, but eventually it would be old data pushed around by outdated methodology. Xenolinguistics is moving fast now that we have actual xenos.”

“None of us will be doing anything on the cutting edge.” I poured a little oil into a large pan and put it on to heat. “Can’t beat relativity.”

Even if communication with Earth were completely unrestricted, you couldn’t stay current with research. At turnaround, three years and a couple of months from now by ship time, twelve years would have passed on Earth. If you sent a message there to a colleague who answered immediately, the answer would get to Wolf 25 almost thirty-seven Earth years later. Not so much communication as historical record.

I shook the wet onion flakes into the oil, and they sizzled and popped. The cooking-onion smell was intense but faded in seconds in the thin air.

“Smells good.” She leaned back against the island and took a sip of wine, then sighed. “I just haven’t been admitting it to myself. I should table the cetacean stuff till I get back to Earth. Little Mars, anyhow. Join the crowd and study the Martian language.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“I resisted it back on Mars because I didn’t have any special talent for it. But neither did Carmen, and she’s making headway.”

“At least you’ll be carrying your research materials along with you.”

“If they cooperate. Fly-in-Amber isn’t happy about being source material, I can tell that already.”

I shrugged. “He’s studying us. Turnabout’s fair play.”

“I’ll point that out to him.”

I shook the onions around in the pan and slid the meatballs into it.

She laughed. “They’re subtle, the yellow ones. As he says, he can’t lie. But he’s very careful in the kinds of truth he shares.”

“You’ve known him awhile?”

“Sure, since he came to Little Mars, ’79. I’m not sure I know him any better than the day we met, though.”

“He acts as if he’s just a recording device.”

“Yeah, that’s his pose. But he’s a lot more complicated than that. Mysterious. Talk to Snowbird about him sometime. He’s more strange to her than we are.”

“Really.” I drew a liter of water and dumped the tomato and wine concentrates in it.

“That’s what she told me, in those words. All the yellow family . . . she says they act as if they’re the only ones who are really real. The rest of us, we’re just a dream.”

“They’re all delusional?”

“Maybe. Snowbird thinks it may be true.”

I smiled at that, but at the same time had a little twist of something like fear. “If you were a dream, would you be aware of it?”

She looked straight at me, not smiling. “Not if the dreamer knew his business.”

2

YEAR ZERO

The Corporation asked us all to keep daily diaries, and gave us a program guaranteed to keep them private until fifty years after the last one of us has died. Our privacy guarded, I suppose, by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

I’ll pretend they’re telling the truth, and anyhow I don’t have a lot to hide. I admit that I pick my nose when no one is looking. I don’t like my body very much. I prefer masturbation to sex with my husband. I’m jealous, and a little bit afraid, of Elza, and trust her not at all. She will have every man on this boat, then come after the women. But it’s not as if I don’t have fantasies about her men. One of them, anyhow.

I’ve started writing because the trip has officially begun. We started blasting today. What a verb, as if we were miners. But it’s accurate; we’re standing on top of a matter/antimatter bomb that will keep exploding for 12.8 years plus.

Trying to get used to Earth- strength gravity. I asked Paul how long it would take if we accelerated with Mars- normal gravity. He said he couldn’t do hypogolic cosines or something in his head, then fiddled with his notebook and said it wouldn’t work; it would take umpty-ump years to get there; umpty- less-ump, but long, in our time frame. But we might get there with our backs intact. I can’t find any way to stand that doesn’t make my back hurt.

Part of the problem is associative dissonance, how nice to have a college education and have names for everything. My body feels this gravity and thinks I should be in the gym in Little Mars; an hour of sweat, then back to normal. But this is normal; all through human history people put up with weighing this much. So settle down, back, and get used to it.

(later) I heard splashing; the pool finally filled. Took a towel over. Namir had the current on and was swimming in place.

I’d never seen him naked. He looks good for a man his age. Solid muscles and only a little paunch. A lot of hair. He’s circumcised, something I’d only seen in pictures. It makes him look vulnerable. It also makes his dick look longer, or maybe it just is longer. I’ll have to ask Paul. Or maybe not.

The timer rang, and he got out. I would like to report that his vulnerable penis sprang instantly erect when I stepped out of my robe, but alas it just sat there. Perhaps he’s seen a naked woman or two before. Maybe even one with tits.

The water was cold but felt good, and I warmed up fast with the current at six knots. Turned it down to one for the backstroke. Namir did glance at my frontal aspect, cunt-al, but then politely turned away. I had a wicked impulse to tease him but don’t feel that I know him well enough. Which is odd, after all these weeks. But he’s a formal, quiet man. He jokes and laughs when it’s appropriate; but when he’s by himself, he looks like he’s thinking about something sad.

Which of course he must be. He walked through Tel Aviv right after Gehenna, millions of his countrymen dead and rotting in the desert sun. What could anyone learn, or do, or believe, to get over that?

He told us that two of the men under his command killed themselves that first day. Shot themselves. He said that like he was describing the weather.

But I think his calm fatalism gives us all a kind of strength. We will probably die on this trip. The trick is to say that without being brave or dramatic. We will probably have powdered eggs for breakfast. We will probably die in five years and three months. Pass the salt, please.

Namir cooked his first dinner last night, and it was pretty good, considering the restrictions he’s working under. Spaghetti with meatless meatballs, with reconstituted vegetables that weren’t too mushy. Before long we’ll all be staring at the hydroponic garden chanting “grow, grow.”

Actually, we’ll all be doing something more or less constructive. We talked about that after dinner. Paul’s continuing his VR course work for a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, to complement his geology degrees. Elza is studying trauma medicine, and also does abstract needlepoint and God knows what kind of bizarre sex. Dustin says he doesn’t have to actually do anything. A philosopher by training, he might burst into thought at any moment. He’s also practicing trick shots on the pool table, though I don’t know how long that will last. Elza asked him to limit the noise to ten minutes at a time, preferably once a year.

Moonboy is a good pianist, huge hands, but he usually plays silently, with earphones. He’s writing a long composition that he began when he left Mars. He’s a xenologist, of course, like Meryl and me, so we have plenty to do, getting ready to meet the Others. Meryl also does word and number puzzles with grim seriousness. Taped to her wall she has a crossword puzzle that has ten thousand squares.

Namir does woodwork as well as cooking; he brought some fancy wood and knives from Earth. He also studies poetry, though he says he hasn’t written any since he was young. He works with formal poetry in Hebrew and Japanese as well as English; his job title at the UN before Gehenna was “cultural attaché.” I wonder how many people knew he was a spy. Maybe they all did. He even looks like a spy, muscular and handsome and dark. He moves with grace. I sort of want him and sort of don’t.

The Martians weren’t in on the after-dinner conversation; they rarely join us for meals. They don’t eat human food and perhaps they’re uncomfortable watching us consume it. But I’m pretty sure that their answer to “What do you plan to do for the next six and a half or thirteen years?” would be “Same as always.” They’re born into a specific social and intellectual function and don’t deviate much.

Fly-in-Amber’s yellow family are recorders; they simply remember everything that happens in their presence. They’re weirdly acute and comprehensive; I could fan a book’s pages in front of Fly- in-Amber and immediately afterward—or ten years after—he could recite the book back to me.

Snowbird’s white clan is harder to pin down. They classify things and visualize and articulate relationships. They’re naturally curious and seem to like humans. Unlike Fly-in-Amber’s family, I have to say.

Every kind of Martian has remarkable verbal memory. They’re born with a basic vocabulary, evidently different for each family, and add new words just by hearing them. They have no written language, though human linguists are making headway on that. Meryl and Moonboy and I are adding to an existing vocabulary of about five hundred words and wordlike noises, with help mainly from Snowbird. Meryl is best with it; she worked with porpoise and whale communication, inventing phonemelike symbols for repeated sounds.

We’ll never be able to speak it; it’s full of noises that people can’t make, at least not with the mouth. But Moonboy believes he can approximate it with a keyboard in synthesizer mode, with percussion, and fortunately Snowbird is fascinated by the idea and willing to work with him hour after hour, tweaking the synthesizer’s output.

This doesn’t read much like a diary. I remember my freshman year, on the way to Mars, studying the London journals of Pepys and Boswell. But Pepys was wandering around his ruined city, and Boswell had Dr. Johnson to write about, then going down to London Bridge for his whores. The professor said Boswell had a condom made of wood. That’s stranger than Martians.

We need a Boswell or a Pepys instead of, or along with, this ragtag bunch of scientists and spies. The huge tragedy of London’s collapsing under fire and plague is small, compared to eight billion human beings snuffed out for being human.

3

RECORD

1 May 2088

The sponsors of the Wolf 25 expedition required that each of us keeps a record of our experience, but left the form of that record up to the individual. Mine will be a note to you, my imaginary friend. You are very intelligent but don’t happen to know what I’m about to say, and so are eternally interested.

This is the record kept by General Namir Zahari, originally commissioned by the Mossad, an intelligence arm of the Israeli army. I am joined by American intelligence officers Colonel Dustin Beckner and Colonel Elza Guadalupe, to both of whom I am married.

There are no other military personnel on the mission. There are two native Martians, Snowbird (of the white clan) and Fly- in-Amber (of the yellow), and four humans with Martian citizenship. The pilot, Paul Collins, resigned a commission in the American Space Force in order to come to Mars. He is married to Carmen Dula, who was the first person to meet the Martians and is circumstantially responsible for the complications that ensued.

Though let me record here that any contact with humans would ultimately have resulted in the same unfortunate sequence of events; the Others apparently had the whole scenario planned for tens of thousands of years.

If you look at this as a military operation, which in a sense it is, it is the most ambitious “attack” ever launched. All of the energy expended in all of the wars in modern history wouldn’t propel this huge iceberg to Wolf 25 and back. Even with free energy, it’s more expensive than World War II.

If it’s the most expensive such project, it may also be the most ambiguous. We don’t have the slightest idea of what we will face there, or what we will do. By far the most probable outcome will be that the Others will destroy us long before we’re close enough to harm them.

But we cannot do nothing. Once they realize we thwarted their attempt to destroy humanity, they will simply do it again, even if it takes centuries.

The fact that the Others are so mind-numbingly slow does not really work to our advantage. Our experience with them in the Triton “demonstration”—and what the Martian leader Red found out about them—indicates that they plan ahead for many contingencies, and their machines react automatically when conditions are right. The concept of “Wait—hold your fire!” probably is not in their repertoire.

The small robot ship that precedes us may be our best hope. It will start broadcasting from right before turnaround, and so the message will get there long before we arrive. It will explain in detail what our situation is and plead that they let us approach and talk.

We hope they will not vaporize it as soon as it is detected.

We do know they understand and “speak” English, though there would be no such thing as a conversation between one of them and one of us. You could ask a yes-or-no question and would have to wait half an hour for a reply, unless they had a machine set up to interpret the question and deliver a prerecorded or cybernetically generated answer.

The last message we got from Triton was evidently one of those: “I am sorry. You already know too much.” Then Triton exploded with sixteen hundred times the energy output of the Sun, a fraction of a second after the Other sped back to Wolf 25 with tremendous acceleration. Then it tried to use Red in a delayed-action attempt to destroy life on Earth. But the Martian gave up his own life instead.

(It was not so great a sacrifice, in an absolute sense, since he would have died anyhow, along with life on Earth. But it’s touching and heartening that he would go against the will of his creators in our favor. He was able to defeat his own programming to make a moral choice, which gives us a small wedge of hope.)

Carmen is of the opinion that even if the Others destroy this vessel, the ad Astra, the fact that we came in peace could work in the human race’s favor. I didn’t publicly disagree with her, but that’s naively optimistic. The flag of truce is at best an admission of weakness. It can also be the first warning of a desperate attack, when your opponent has little strength and nothing to lose.

I think that if they allow us to approach their planet, or some surrogate planet, it will be to evaluate our strength. Probably just prior to destroying us.

But that’s a human soldier talking. Soldier, diplomat, and spy. I have no idea what action their godlike psychology might produce. Carmen could turn out to be the pessimist. They’ll apologize for trying to exterminate everybody—“What were we thinking?”—and send us back home laden with treasure and praise. And pigs will fly.

At any rate, they hold all the cards, and we don’t even know the name of the game. We have a little over five years to think about it and agree on a course of action. If we don’t agree, I suppose the majority will rule.

Or the strongest minority.

4

WEIGHTY MATTERS

The humans said I must keep a written diary of this expedition, which I complained was ridiculous, since all I am is a living, breathing diary. But what if I died? they asked. I never think in those terms, since when I die the nonredundant parts of my memory will be passed to my successor. But in fact I might be physically obliterated out here, something that has not happened to a member of my family for 4362 ares. A certain amount of knowledge was lost that day, unrecoverable. So I have to agree with them, and am writing this down, though it is unutterably slow and imprecise, and includes the labor of translation, since we have no written language.

English is their language, so I will use it, though French and Russian are easier for me to speak, since they have more sounds like our own.

Not speaking my own language depresses me. Snowbird is missing her “white” language, too, perhaps more than I miss mine; theirs is prettier, if less accurate. The consensus language we’re constrained to use lacks both qualities. And English is unspeakable. Namir, my favorite human here, can converse with me in Japanese, which is the most pleasant human language I know.

This is the first of May, 2088, the last day when our clocks and calendars will be the same as those on Earth and Mars. When we reach turnaround, halfway to our target, it will be August 13, 2091, on the ship, but back on Earth it will be July 2, 2100, almost nine years later. They say this is because of general relativity, though it makes no sense to me. They say our clocks run faster because we are moving, and although I know it’s true, it also makes no sense to me. Snowbird seems to understand it somewhat. She told me that little t, which is our time, is equal to c over a times the hyperbolic cosine of a over c times Earth time, which is big T. I suppose it’s true, but all I have to do is remember it. I think if I had to understand it, my brain would overheat and explode.

We have been accelerating for eight hours, and I think it will be eight years before I get used to it, if ever. It is like carrying more than your own weight on your back. The instant it started, I had to shit. That’s an impolite word, for some reason, but is the closest human word to what we do. I went as fast as I could, which was slowly, into our living area, to the patch of dirt we use for recycling our toxins. Snowbird was already there, being younger and stronger, but she respected my seniority and allowed me to step in first. The extra gravity did accelerate the process, which is the only good thing I can say about it.

I told the pilot, Paul, that I thought it was unfair, and asked him why we couldn’t accelerate at Mars gravity, so everyone would be comfortable. He said it would take us more than two years longer to get there. I said if we’re all going to die when we get there anyhow (as Namir says), then I should think he would want to take more time, not less. He laughed and said I was right, but he didn’t turn down the acceleration. Perhaps he can’t. It’s all very strange, but I have been dealing with humans almost from the beginning, and nothing surprises me anymore.

I should say something about the Others, toward whose planet we are recklessly speeding. They created us Martians, evidently twenty-seven thousand Earth years ago. We are biological machines, as are humans, but humans are not in agreement as to who designed them.

The Others had observed humans evolving into tool-using creatures, then fire-using, and thought it was only a matter of time before they had starships and would present a danger.

Often this is not a problem, the Others say, because when a race discovers nuclear energy, it usually destroys itself before it develops starflight.

I take it we Martians were a mistake, overall. We did fulfill our major function, which was to notify the Others that humans had developed the ability to go to a nearby planet. Then we, the yellow family, did as we had been programmed and delivered a coded message to the humans, which gave them the basic facts about the Others.

One individual Other had been waiting in the solar system for twenty-seven thousand years. His main function was to watch how the humans responded to this new knowledge and decide whether to let them live. He decided they should not live, but the automatic device that should have destroyed them didn’t work. Humans moved it to the farside of their Moon, and when it exploded, it hurt no one but the one Martian who was carrying it.

Then the humans studied us Martians. Among other things, they figured out how we tap free energy from another universe. No Martian understands how that works, and I don’t think any human actually does, either. But they can use it, and it gave them starflight, which I don’t think was in the Others’ plans.

The Others say they have either destroyed or spared hundreds of intelligent races in this part of the Galaxy, and have no record of having failed before. But I don’t know about that.

We of the yellow family specialize in memory, not original thinking, but I do have a theory about the Others: I think they’re lying. We do have evidence that they are capable of marvelous things, like inventing us and modifying a part of Mars so that we had a place to live before we inherited the Earth. We know they can make a small bomb powerful enough to eliminate life on Earth. But that doesn’t mean that everything they say is true.

We have three sources of information about the Others. The primary thing was the coded message, which was like an ancestral memory in the yellow family. But it was not a regular memory; we had no access to it until we looked at a triggering light that came from the Other who was watching us from Triton, the satellite of Neptune. I saw that light and fell down and started babbling, and so did every other yellow Martian who saw it. We all said the same thing; three separate recordings give exactly the same nonsense sounds.

A human researcher discovered that there were two simultaneous messages in our stream of nonsense. One was amplitude modulation, and it was like a pattern of ones and zeros, modeled after a method that humans had used, attempting to communicate with other stars, what they call a Drake diagram. It told the humans something about the Others—how long they had been in the solar system, the fact that they had a body chemistry based on silicon and nitrogen, and the fact that we were made by them.

But there was a much more complex message hidden in the frequency modulation, an extremely concentrated burst of information that was in the language of the red Martian family. There is only one red individual at a time, and he or she is our leader.

The red language is the most complex Martian language, the only one that has a written form. Our leader only had a couple of days to live—the bomb was inside him—and he had no time to analyze and write down the long message. But he had it in his memory, and translated most of it into our consensus language, talking constantly to Mars as he sped to the farside of the Moon to die.

I wish he had lived long enough to discuss the truth of what the Others had told him through us. His replacement will be able to, but she won’t be old enough to have mastered the language for many ares.

So we go off to meet our mortal enemies, and most of what we know about them is from the pack of lies they told our leader just before they murdered him.

5

SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

Paul and I looked at the various cabin configurations and decided to put both beds together in my cabin and open a sliding door between the two spaces, while closing off the exterior door to what was now the bedroom. So in his cabin, now our living room, there was a worktable with two chairs facing each other, and a lounging chair that reclines. One VR helmet, but we could always borrow another from the gym or lounge.

I didn’t have to tell him that I liked the arrangement because he sometimes tosses and turns in his sleep so much he wakes me up. This way, I’ll have a place to tiptoe off to, to lie down in peace.

We put both windows on the wall by the worktable. Set them for adjacent views of the Maine woods, an environment we often use for biking or running.

Once we had everything the way we liked it, we celebrated our new nest the obvious way. We started with him on top, but he was too heavy—it was like fucking in the exercise room on Little Mars, which we never felt the need to try. I guess we’ll get used to the gravity before too long. But for now it’s doggy style, arf arf.

(I want my Mars gravity back so I can be a Hindu goddess again, holding on to him lightly with my arms and legs while he rises to the occasion.)

We panted for a while with the unaccustomed exertion—we’d never made love except in zero gee and Mars-normal gravity—and giggled over the new canine aspect of our relationship, and how superhuman our parents had been, to conceive us.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I never want to think about that again.”

We pulled the covers up and rearranged the pillows facing each other, trying to recline comfortably in this gravity. “I do want to think about something else, though,” he said. “Our spy buddies.”

“So you’ve got a hard-on for Elza. Go on; she’ll eat you alive.”

“Yeah, right. Did you see Namir and Dustin practicing martial arts yesterday?”

“I saw a little of it—I was in the study and heard them throwing each other around. He’s not bad for an old guy.”

“He’s not bad for anybody. Dustin is almost as good, but Namir is stronger and quicker—I did kapkido at the Academy for two years.” He shook his head. “Either one of those guys could kill me. I mean literally. In a split second.”

“So you better not offer to . . . Oh.” I saw what he meant. “Literally.”

“Maybe that’s their mission. They could kill all of us in seconds, without weapons. Remember? We talked about this right after we met them.”

“Yeah, vaguely . . . in VR, exercising. So why on earth would they want to?”

“On Earth, they wouldn’t have any reason. But you read that thing in Namir’s New York Times, the two-page debate about ad Astra.”

“Sure. The idiots wanted us to just floor it and ram the planet like a doomsday bomb. As if the Others would just sit there and let us do it.”

“That wasn’t the part that worried me. It was the business about surrender. Something like ‘We’re not going to all that trouble and expense just to have them kneel down and grovel.’ Did you see who signed that?”

“No. I vaguely remember it.”

“It was a four-star American general, Mark Spinoza. Ring a bell?”

“Not really.”

“He’s on the Committee. Liaison to the American military. Who, incidentally, had a big part in designing and building this machine . . . and choosing the crew.”

“But he couldn’t order them to do that. Namir’s not even under his authority.”

“Neither are Dustin and Elza, technically. They all had to suspend their commissions, remember? Nobody can give them orders, in theory, any more than they can give the rest of us orders.”

“Okay. So what are you worried about?”

“Just that they might agree with him. And do it on their own.”

“No. They’re not right-wing loonies. They’re not killers, either, even though they’re soldiers, ex-soldiers.”

“I know Namir has killed, at least as a young man in wartime. And we don’t really know anything about their politics. They seem reasonable, but they could just be following a script—and it wouldn’t have to be from General Spinoza or the Corporation or anybody. They’ve lived together as men and wife for five or six years. They might have devised their own plan.”

“Which would include killing us in case of cowardice. I don’t think so.”

“Or just overpowering and confining us. Then using the ship to try to destroy the Others.”

I turned his head and held his chin between thumb and forefinger and stared. “I never really know when you’re kidding.”

“What would you say if I asked you to take Namir to bed and coax the truth out of him?”

“I would say ‘I never really know when you’re kidding.’ ”

He kissed me suddenly, a soft peck on the lips. “The secret of an exciting marriage.” He turned onto his side and stretched out, readying for sleep. “Keep ’em guessing.”

6

PRIVATE PARTS

The first room configuration we tried was to leave Elza’s cabin the same size but move an extra bed into it. Then we almost doubled the size of the middle cabin, as a common room, with the third cabin the smallest possible bedroom, for whoever was the odd man out. The common room had all three windows together in one panorama, currently the beach at Cannes at the height of the tourist season.

As sexy as that scene was, I felt no real inspiration when I joined Elza in the double bed. I’d sparred for an hour with Dustin and then swum at six knots for an hour. When I got out I sympathized with the poor Martians in all this gravity. I felt like a large animal that had been run into the ground when I fell into bed. Elza seemed tired, too. Maybe that was why she asked for me, the first night with gravity.

“I’ve never seen you swim so much in a gym,” she said sleepily.

“Set the thing for an hour. I was about to get out early, then Carmen came over. I offered to let her have it, but she said no, no, finish your hour. So I was kind of stuck.”

“Stuck showing off your bare ass to a pretty girl.”

“She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”

“Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”

“Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”

“Is that what they call it now?”

I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”

“I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.

Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.

Speaking of complex affairs. Trapped inside this small box together, we all know that the wise course would be to treat one another as friends and not let it go beyond that. But it probably would, even if the mission were prosaic, because it’s so damned long. Add the desperate knowledge that we will all probably die at Wolf 25, or before, and the impulse to be impulsive is hard to resist.

I’ve heard Carmen denigrate her body as unwomanly three times, which is too often for it to be a casual remark. But in fact her supposed shortcomings are what make her so alluring to a man like me. I suppose her slight, tomboyish body reminds me of the young schoolmates who were the first focus of my teenaged passions—who never said yes, but have never quite relinquished their hold on me. Maybe they never said yes because I never had the courage simply to come out and ask.

Odd to think that they’re old enough to be grandmothers now, those who lived past Gehenna. I’m sure that none of them remembers the plump Jewish boy whose hair wouldn’t stay put. Or maybe one of them is obsessed by plump Jewish boys and can’t figure out why.

Today was the first time I’ve seen her completely nude, and I looked away quickly so as not to make my interest too obvious. Then I got a glimpse as she turned around and swam on her back, as I was saying good-bye. No apparent tattoos except for the functional timepiece on her wrist. No obvious scars. Her pubic hair is shaped so as to accommodate a brief bathing suit, which is odd, since there are no bathing suits within a hundred million miles. In fact, she probably hasn’t worn one since she left Earth, twelve or thirteen years ago. Maybe it’s permanent. I’ll have to work it into a conversation somehow. “I couldn’t help but notice, as I was scrutinizing your pubic region . . .” Perhaps not. I shall be patient, and wait for a time and place when it will be natural to ask.

7

KAMIKAZE

8 May 2088

Instead of a regular diary entry, I’m going to put in part of a transcript of the meeting we just had.

Namir suggested that it would be a good time, starting the second week, for all the humans and Martians to get together and record a consensus of what we think we’re headed for. We met at 0900 in the “compromise” lounge, at the entrance to the Martian area.

Part of it became a little dramatic. My husband would have said “annoying.”

Namir: My proposal was that we record a kind of “baseline” report on what we expect to happen when we arrive at Wolf 25. Our ideas will change over the next six years, naturally.

Paul: One possibility is that there will be nothing there. The one on Triton said that’s where they live, and took off in that direction. But we lost track of him after a few minutes. He could have gone anywhere.

Snowbird: Why would they do that?

Paul: They may have misrepresented their strength, or rather their vulnerability. If we were to attack swiftly, they might not be able to react in time.

Namir: Possibly. Doesn’t seem likely. We have ample evidence of their strength.

Me: They had hundreds of centuries to plan ahead.

Paul: That’s what I mean. They don’t want to confront us in real time.

Fly-in-Amber: They have planned ahead for this. We will not surprise them.

Elza: We have to try.

Dustin: I’m not convinced that that is true. As you know, Elza.

Elza: Pacifist swine. (Note: said smiling.) Explain, for the record.

Dustin: This mission is predicated on two things: one, that they know they did not destroy us; and two, that they care. But we know almost nothing about their psychology. Maybe they are so confident they won’t bother to check, in which case, showing up on their doorstep may be a disaster. Or they might know they didn’t destroy us but feel the spectacular demonstration was enough to keep us out of their hair. So again, don’t go bother them.

Namir: Dustin, even if the mission is a mistake, we can’t turn around and go home. The die is cast.

Me: It’s still a good viewpoint to put in the mix, trying to predict what they’re going to do.

Paul: Let’s get a sense of the timing. From the Earth’s point of view, the Other left Triton in July of 2079. At its rate of acceleration, it will take only about twenty- four and a half years to get there, assuming it decelerates at the same rate. Say it gets there in January 2104.

In the worst-case scenario, they find out the Earth hasn’t been destroyed and turn around to finish the job. Which they do in the middle of 2128.

Namir: That’s not the worst case.

Paul: What is?

Namir: You assume that the Others have to obey the same speed limit as we do. Suppose they can go a lot faster than the speed of light and are due here tomorrow?

Paul: Relativity won’t let them. They’d be traveling into the past.

Namir: (Laughs.) And show up tomorrow. They’ve done other impossible things.

(Namir and Paul argue fruitlessly for a few minutes. Never argue science with a lawyer, I told Paul.)

Meryl: Let’s assume there’s no magic superscience involved, all right? (She looks at her notebook.) If they go straight to Wolf 25, they’ll get there around 2104, by the Earth calendar. We won’t be there until eight years later. And they’ll have our “ready or not, here we come” message months before that. Which I was so enthusiastic about.

Can we agree that the probability they won’t be ready for us is almost exactly zero? (General agreement.) And at any rate, if we did surprise them, there’s not much we can do about it. Short of using the ad Astra as a huge kamikaze bomb?

Snowbird: What is that?

Fly-in-Amber: It’s a Japanese word meaning a suicide airplane.

Snowbird: Oh. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’re expecting to die anyhow.

Fly-in-Amber: Most humans won’t do that. Not if they have a chance of living.

Snowbird: But they don’t live that long anyhow.

Namir: I’m glad you brought that up, Snowbird. We ought to consider it.

Elza: I’m not sure I can. We would be murdering a whole planet, besides ourselves.

Meryl: That’s right.

Namir: Which is what they tried to do to us.

Dustin: He wants you to think like a soldier, love, not a doctor.

Moonboy: What if we had to do it to save the human race? What if we got a message like “Fuck you and the planet you came from”?

Paul: We never could save the human race, if they decided to destroy it. We could never catch them. We could only take revenge, after the fact.

Namir: I could do that.

Dustin: You would. Definitely.

Moonboy: I would, too. It’s not as if they were human.

Me: Namir, it would be like Gehenna. There could be innocent races on that planet. For all we know, the one who attacked us was a lone lunatic, who claimed to represent the Others but actually did not.

Namir: With due respect, Carmen, I have been there, and you have not. Genocide is not murder. You can forgive a murder and go on with life. But if we had found a country responsible for Gehenna, we would have had no mercy. We would have leveled it, in retribution. Which is not the same thing as revenge.

(There was a long silence.)

Paul: The kamikaze thing is not going to happen. I’m the only one who could do that, and I won’t. Besides, if our intent had been to launch a huge relativistic bomb, there would be no need for a crew. One kamikaze pilot, perhaps.

Dustin: (Laughs.) Now that does make me nervous. You would need a crew, if only to keep that pilot from going mad during six years of isolation. But of course the crew wouldn’t know they were all going to die.

Paul: Are you a philosopher or a story writer?

Dustin: Sometimes the difference is moot. Are you lying? Don’t answer; we covered that one in freshman logic.

Fly-in-Amber: Are you two joking? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when humans are serious.

Dustin: Sometimes jokes are serious, Fly in-Amber.

Paul: Not this time. He’s just playing games.

Dustin: One of us is.

Snowbird: This is making my brain hurt. I have to leave.

So everyone laughed, and talked Snowbird into staying, promising that they would keep things straight. And the rest of it was pretty much a recital of what we already knew.

But no one here knows Paul as well as I do, and I know he has a deep reserve of seriousness, which sometimes frightens me. I’m a little frightened now.

A few days ago, out of the blue, before we went to sleep, he suggested that Namir, and perhaps the other two, were under orders to kill the rest of us if we tried to surrender, and use the ad Astra as a kind of 9/11 on the Others.

But a starship isn’t a jet plane. They wouldn’t know how to do it.

There’s only one person here who does.

8

WATER SPORTS

Last night when all the humans were in bed, I walked quietly out past the hydroponics to the gym. I touched the water in the pool—it was very warm—and decided to try floating in it. See whether it indeed would give Snowbird and me some relief from all this gravity/ acceleration.

There was no easy way for a four-legged person to get in. Humans just sit on the edge and slide in. We can’t quite bend that way.

In retrospect, I realized I should have waited until at least one human was around. But there is a dignity factor about clothing, and I was not sure how to interpret it across species.

They almost never appear without clothing in front of one another—like us, they take off their clothing in order to prepare one another for reproduction, and like us it is indecorous to look at another without clothing except under special circumstances. Swimming was one of those for them. Would they feel the same about us? I have only appeared unclothed before humans as part of a scientific investigation, and even that was uncomfortable. But they certainly don’t want people to go into their swimming pool with clothing on.

Finally, I took off my cloak and simply jumped in. It made more of a splash than I had expected. A light came on, and I heard human footsteps coming around the hydroponic trellises.

It was a most strange feeling. The water was only a little more than a meter deep, but it had splashed all over me. I had never been completely wet except in the process of being impregnated, so with the approaching footsteps I felt somewhat indecent, and was also embarrassed that I had splashed so much precious water out of the pool.

I did feel lighter, even though my feet were on the floor, which is to say the bottom of the pool. Then I moved sideways and tipped over—I was suddenly floating and had no weight at all! I inhaled some water and had a little coughing fit, but of course was in no danger, since my breathing spiracles are distributed evenly around my body surface. The noise did upset Carmen, though, who was the first human on the scene. She cried out my name and Snowbird’s—of course she couldn’t tell us apart without our clothing—and seized my head and pulled me upright.

She was yelling, asking if I was all right. The water was doing strange things with my hearing, and when I spoke, my voice sounded hugely amplified.

“I am all right, Carmen, and I am Fly-in Amber, and I’m sorry to waste water and make a mess.”

“Don’t worry about water; we’re riding a mountain of it. Did you have an accident?” Paul rushed up and said more or less the same thing.

“No, no. I just wanted to try floating, but didn’t want to bother any humans while they were using the pool.” In fact, although several could have stood in the pool with me, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to swim.

“Want to try it with the current?” Paul asked.

“Please, yes.” He stepped on a button and it was marvelous, like thousands of tiny fingers wiggling over your skin. It also felt deeply obscene. “That is very good.”

Snowbird appeared and addressed me in the consensus language, which we don’t normally use among humans. “Fly-in-Amber! You . . . I find you naked!”

“Speak English, Snowbird. Yes, I am naked, and so are humans when they do this. You should try it.”

“Not at the same time,” Paul said quickly. “You displace too much water.”

“I’ll get out, then, and let Snowbird—”

“I’m not ready to be naked in front of all these people! I have to think about it.”

“It doesn’t bother us,” Carmen said. “It’s proper, for being in the water.”

“But the whole idea—‘being in the water’! You can’t even say it in our language. It’s like ‘breathing in outer space.’ It should not be possible.”

Carmen gestured toward me. “You’d better come up with a word for it. I don’t think Fly-in-Amber wants to come out.”

“In fact,” I said, “I’m not sure how I’m going to get out. I can’t jump high in this gravity.”

Namir had come up. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll get a couple of planks.” He went off toward the storeroom. I wanted to tell him not to hurry.

“We’ll improvise a ramp,” Carmen said. She stepped out of her robe and slid into the water. Her body was strange, warmer than the water, and soft. “We should have made this bigger. We weren’t thinking about you guys.”

“We hadn’t thought of it either, Carmen. It’s such an odd idea.”

“Fly-in-Amber,” Snowbird said, “are you losing part of your skin?”

I had a moment of panic. There was an iridescent sheen on the water, evidently oil from my skin, and small floating particles, perhaps flakes of skin. Carmen was looking at the water with alarm.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” I bent over and looked at it closely. “It’s just been two days since I scraped.”

“Of course,” she said, though her smile did not look normal. She of all people might have reason to fear, since she had been the first human to catch a disease from us, and, of course, no human had ever bathed with us.

“Humans do catch skin diseases from other humans,” Snowbird explained, “like athletes’ foot and herpes. But we have never had skin diseases.”

“That’s, um, reassuring.”

“There would have been no reason for us to be designed with skin disease,” I said. “The difference between intelligent design and random evolution, I’m afraid.”

“We ought to build a special pool for you two,” Paul said. “Deeper, so you have maximum buoyancy. Not as wide, since you probably won’t be swimming.”

“That would be most kind of you. Perhaps with colder water?”

“If we put it in your area, it will be plenty cold.”

“That’s wonderful. Carmen, you could come over anytime and enjoy the cold.”

“Thank you, Fly-in-Amber, but we really prefer the warmer water.” She was shivering a little. “In fact, I think I’ll go take a nice hot shower right now.”

Going from a swim to a shower seemed redundant. But nothing about them surprised me.

Namir returned with the plastic boards then, and looked at her in what I think is a sexual way when she got out of the water. I wondered if they’d begun mating but had learned not to ask.

Over the next four days, they used boards like that to build us a big waterproof box, large enough for both of us to stand in, and improvised a pump that circulated the water and filtered it.

It will make the gravity so much more manageable. And Snowbird and I will be the cleanest Martians in history.

9

ADULTERY FOR ADULTS

1 June 2088

Gone for a month now. A real-time view to the stern shows the Sun as the brightest star in the sky; the Earth is of course invisible.

The only milestone of note, dear diary, is that Elza has apparently made her first sexual conquest—I say “apparently” because who knows? Though if it had been Paul, I think he would have told me, or politely asked me first.

It was Moonboy. Meryl told me after we finished an especially frustrating session with the Martians, tracking down their elusive and totally irregular verb forms.

We were alone at the coffee tap. “So do you know about Moonboy and Elza?”

“No, what?” I knew it wasn’t billiards, of course.

“Well, they got together yesterday. In the fucking sense, I mean.”

An odd choice, I thought, but she had to start somewhere. “Is it, um, I mean, is it a big deal to you?”

“More so than I let him know when he told me. It’s always been theoretically okay. But this is the first time . . . for him.”

“Not for you?” I pretended I didn’t know.

She smiled and shook her head. “Back on Mars.” I knew of two men, one of them married, some years ago. Mars is like a small village with no place to hide.

“Think it’s a one-time thing?”

“It was already a two-time thing when he told me.” She looked around. “It may be becoming a three-time thing as we speak. But no, I don’t think they’re going to get married and run off to the big city.”

“I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop myself,” I said. “The way Paul looks at her when he thinks I’m not watching.”

“But you’ve always been, what, open?”

“Sure, for years, he was in Mars and I was in Little Mars. We didn’t actually marry until we got the lottery and were going to have children. Before that, we both had considerable variety.”

“I bet you did.” She grinned. “Being famous and all.”

“Well, guys had long layovers on their way to Mars.”

“Layovers.”

“Probably half of them just wanted to be able to say ‘I fucked The Mars Girl.’ ”

“The price of fame. And Paul the most famous pilot in history? He was not exactly a monk, if I recall correctly.”

“But we’d talked it through before either of us was famous, long before we were married. I thought fidelity was a holdover from old times, when women were property.”

“Do you still?”

“Not as strongly. But yes.” It wasn’t something I’d put into words. “Things are different, now that we’ve had children, but really there’s no reason for that. Parenthood in Mars is so detached from biological reality.”

She nodded. “You don’t go through all the physical grief. And then you don’t raise them by hand.”

“Which I sort of regret. They have my genes, and Paul’s, but we’re more like an aunt and uncle who play with them now and then.” I had a cold feeling, deep. “Under the circumstances, of course, that’s for the best.”

“When you get back . . .”

“They’ll be older than me. Fifty years pass for them, twelve for us. In the unlikely possibility that we survive.”

“Yeah.” She leaned back and closed her eyes; she was dead tired. “I shouldn’t be so concerned about where Moonboy puts his weenie. Let him have whatever pleasure he can find.”

“For symmetry, you ought to go after Namir. He’s old, but not that old. And good-looking.”

“If good-looking was important to me, I wouldn’t have grabbed Moonboy. Besides, if Namir is interested in anyone aboard, it’s you.”

“Really.”

“Don’t act surprised. It’s pretty obvious.”

“We’ve liked each other from the beginning. But not that way.”

“Man, woman. It’s the basic way.”

“He’s never made any kind of . . . gesture.”

“I don’t think he ever would. He’s the kind of man who waits for you to ask.”

“Well, he’s got a long wait, then.” Or maybe not.

10

SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE

Elza was late coming to bed. I’d just turned off my book and the light when the door opened and closed and I heard her slip out of her clothing. I touched her shoulder as she eased into bed. Cool and damp with sweat.

“Exercising this late?”

“In a way. Moonboy.”

“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. “Meryl know?” They have both their beds together in one large suite.

“No. She was with the Martians.”

“A . . . sort of a milestone, I suppose.”

I could feel her smile in the darkness. “The first act of adultery outside of the solar system.”

“That presupposes an abundance of virtue on the part of extraterrestrials. We’ll put up a plaque anyhow.”

“You’re too sweet.”

There was a long pause. “So how was it?”

“It was Moonboy. Men don’t normally reveal hidden depths.”

“Or lengths?”

“Men.” She made a quarter turn and pressed her back into my chest, spoon fashion. “Get some sleep.”

“What, I don’t get sloppy seconds?”

“Thirds. Get some sleep.” I didn’t press the issue, though I found the situation curiously stimulating.

I hadn’t brought along my balalaika because I knew it annoyed Dustin, and it was unlikely that the four “Martian” humans would care for it. (Most of the actual Martians seemed indifferent to music; it was background noise to them, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.) But I hadn’t thought about all the room in the warehouse, where the four workers had lived before we arrived. It was a little cold, but large and totally isolated from our own living quarters. You could back up your balalaika with a brass band, and no one could hear you.

So I set out to make a thing like a balalaika. I could have just described it to the automatic shop machine, but there was no satisfaction in that.

No wood around to work with except the blocks of koa I brought for carving, so I asked the machine what it could simulate. My balalaika at home was made of rosewood, light and dark, and ebony. I found a picture of myself playing it, and so was able to measure it precisely from the image. I found instructions for making your own balalaika in Russian, no problem.

The three strings were easy, carbon fiber and nylon wires. The “wood” had the right color and density but wouldn’t fool a termite. The thinnest stock it could generate was two or three times too thick. So my first order of business was to take a strip of it and see whether I could plane it down.

No luck. No fibrous structure, so the hand plane would just bite out a chip at a time. But I blocked it in place and used a sander to bring it down to two millimeters’ thickness. It was still strong and stiff; I clamped it to the edge of the worktable and plucked it, and it made a satisfying twang.

I experimented with scrap and decided to forego tradition and cut the “wood” by laser, which left a more accurate, smooth edge than any saw in the shop. And with modern glues, I didn’t have to improvise the elaborate clamps that the Russian plans called for. I also cheated on the tuning pegs, bridge, and tailpiece, by describing them and letting the shop turn them out robotically. So it only took a couple of days, and a lot of that was learning. If I wanted to put together another one, I could probably do it in an afternoon. Give it to Dustin, so we could do duets.

It looked identical to mine at home except for the inlaid red star and “Souvenir of Soviet Olympics 1980,” which made mine a fairly valuable antique, in spite of being very ordinary in a musical way. A gift to my father on his tenth birthday. His parents had gone to the Olympics before he was born.

I was working on the finish when Fly-in-Amber came in and addressed me formally in Japanese. I set the instrument down and stood, and returned the greeting with a slight bow, which he had tried to do.

“Snowbird should be asking you this,” he said, “since human behavior is her area of expertise, but she was unsure about politeness.”

“And you don’t care.”

“Of course not. I am not human.”

I chose not to pursue the obvious there. “So what does Snowbird want to know?”

“Oh, I want to know as well. But my interest is not professional.”

“Fire away.”

“Pardon me?”

“Please ask the question.”

“It is more than one question.”

“All right. Ask them all.”

“It’s about your wife Elza mating with Meryl’s husband Moonboy.”

Good news travels fast. “Well, they weren’t mating. There was no possibility of offspring.”

“I know that. I was being polite. Should I say ‘fucking’?”

“With me, either one is fine. But your instinct is right.”

“Snowbird wanted me to talk to you in private, which is why I am bothering you here. She wants to know if this causes you pain, the adultery.”

“Not really. I’ve been expecting it.” I didn’t want to get into a definition of adultery.

“Is there symmetry? Are you going to mate with one of the other women?”

I had to smile. “Not immediately. It doesn’t always work that way.”

“Are you not attracted to any of them?”

“I’m attracted to all of them, in varying degrees. I just don’t act on that attraction as directly as Elza does.”

“Is that because you are old?”

“I’m not that old. It’s less youth on Elza’s part than impulsiveness. I want to know someone well before I am intimate with her.”

“Always ‘her’? You are not intimate with men?”

How honest do you have to be with a Martian? “Not in many years. Not since I was boy.”

“Not with Dustin Beckner?”

“No. Definitely not Dustin.”

“Yet you are married to him.”

“Yes, and I love him, but in a different way. You can love without mating.” He was silent for a moment, so I asked, “Do you feel love? Do you love Snowbird, for instance?”

“I don’t think so, in human terms. She says there was a word in ancient Greek, agape, that approximates the way Martians feel about one another.”

“You wouldn’t have erotic love.”

“No. That wouldn’t make sense. There is pleasure in mating, but you often don’t know ahead of time who will be involved, or how many. And, of course, you don’t know which of you will be the female until the contest is over. The female feels it more strongly.”

“Well, ‘erotic’ means more than that, if you go back to Snowbird’s ancient Greek. It’s an intense feeling one has for another, whether or not sex is involved.”

“Humans do that?”

“Some. Most.”

He hugged himself, which I knew signified thinking. “We are simpler, I think. I feel especially close to the other members of the yellow family. But they are the only ones I can speak to plainly, in the language I was born with.”

“Is that the same with all Martians?” I knew the yellow ones had a reputation for being standoffish, but I hadn’t met any Martians except our two.

“Oh, no. Blues cooperate with everybody; they were the example Snowbird used, to explain agape to me. My family is less open than the others, but that’s appropriate to our function.”

“Impartial observers.”

“Yes.” He switched to Japanese and apologized for the intrusion, and backed out.

He was often abrupt like that. As if he had some internal timer.

I finished polishing the balalaika and admired its strangeness. From a distance, it was a pretty close copy. The “wood” was exactly right in color, but it had no grain, close up, and it had the cool smoothness of ceramic.

The strings were not easy to mount, my big fingers clumsy with the knots. I almost called Elza but didn’t want to interrupt her at her needlepoint, a fractal pattern that apparently required intense concentration. Finally, I got all three in place and taut, but the two nylon strings (both tuned to the same E note) kept relaxing out of tune. Then I remembered a young folksinger in Tel Aviv, replacing a string in the middle of a performance. He pulled it dangerously taut and released it with a snap, over and over, flattening the tone, then tuning it up. After a couple of minutes doing that on both nylon strings, they were remarkably stable.

I played a few simple tunes from memory, and scales in the four keys I used, then some arpeggios, working through the left- hand pain until my joints agreed to loosen up.

As sometimes happens, I felt my audience before I saw her. I turned, and there was Elza, leaning in the doorway behind me. She was holding two glasses, a wineglass with red in it and a cup of clear liquid with ice. I must have subliminally heard it clinking.

“It sounds good,” she said. “I’ve missed it.”

“I hope you didn’t hear it inside.”

She set the wine down next to me. “You buy the next.” She folded into a graceful lotus, not spilling a drop of her vodka. “No, Fly-in-Amber told me you were almost done with it. I went into the pantry for a drink and heard you. Peeked and saw you didn’t have anything.”

I sipped the wine. “Mind reader.”

“So what were you talking to Old Yeller about?”

“Old Yeller?”

“It’s a Texas thing. Thang.”

“Gossip and biology. He wondered about you ‘mating’ with Moonboy.”

“For a Martian, he has a very dirty mind.”

“I don’t think that’s possible. Anyhow, I think he was asking on Snowbird’s behalf. She wasn’t sure what would be polite.”

“And he doesn’t care.”

“Well, he approached me in Japanese, with an apology. But that was for interrupting my work, not for asking about my wife’s extramarital affairs. Still, politeness.”

“I don’t suppose you told him it was none of his business.”

“Slapped him with a glove and said ‘lasers at dawn.’ It’s not personal with him, of course.”

“I know. So why didn’t he just ask me?”

“You don’t speak Japanese.” I set down the balalaika and picked up the wine. “I think he likes me. Or likes talking to me. Maybe being oldest male has something to do with it.”

“Did you tell him any gory details?”

“I don’t have any, dear. I’m not that close to Moonboy, and you haven’t shown me the feelie yet. Did he know something I don’t?”

She shrugged. “All men do. Have something no other man has. And I’m saving the feelie for our old age.”

“In case we have one?”

She nodded, silent for a few moments, looking at the floor. Then she knuckled her eyes. “Could you play me that silly love song? The first, the first time . . .”

“Sure.” I picked up the instrument and tuned up the flatted E strings, then plucked out the simple melody. “Shteyt a bocher, shteyt un tracht . . . tracht un tracht a gantze nacht . . .”

It’s a song about a man finding a smart woman to marry.

11

HEROES

Paul had always questioned the necessity for radio silence between Earth and ad Astra. It assumed the Others were so inattentive and stupid that they wouldn’t know we were on our way. Of course, our presence would be obvious after turnaround, with a gazillion- horsepower matter-annihilation engine blasting in their direction. The little probe that preceded us would deal with that by sending a warning and a message of peace well before we turned around and started blasting, decelerating.

What if they destroyed the probe before it delivered the message?

What if it delivered the message, and the Others destroyed us anyway?

What if they weren’t on a Wolf 25 planet after all?

We went along with the order and were resigned to not hearing from anyone on Earth for another 3.4 years. Paul kept the radio on, though, in case things changed.

On July 10, 2088, things did. A fifty-two-second message came from Earth. He called us all together in the lounge, Martians and humans, and played it back for us.

“This is Lazlo Motkin, just elected president of the world. One reason I was elected was that I wanted to change your mission and make it more in line with what the Earth’s people really want.

“You are the finest heroes in Earth’s history, hurtling into the unknown on a mission that will almost surely end with your deaths.

“We ask that you make this grim probability a glorious certainty. Rather than slowing down, we would ask you to continue accelerating. Going at almost the speed of light—and invisible until the last moment—you will strike the enemy planet with ten thousand times the force of the meteorite that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“Even the ungodly science of the Others cannot protect them from this apocalyptic assault. Please answer that you have heard and are willing to give your life in this noble enterprise.

“God bless you and keep you.”

We all just stared at each other. “Who is that guy?” I said. “Lazlo what?”

“Motkin,” Namir said. “He’s a cubevangelist.”

“Powerful signal,” Paul said. “Pretty tight laser.”

Namir shrugged. “He has lots of money, or did when money meant something, and a powerful broadcast site in the Atlantic, beyond the seven-mile limit. He could do it once.”

“Once?” Paul said.

“They’ll have people like me in the water in thirty minutes. Home-land Security. Unless Reverend Motkin really is president of the world, he’s about to have a serious accident.”

“Or had it about a week ago,” Paul said.

“It’s hard to get used to that. He was arrested or dead before that message was a tenth of the way here.”

“What if he really is king of the world,” Moonboy said, “or president or whatever. Some pretty loony people have made it to the top, even in normal times.”

“I still wouldn’t feel I had to kill myself on his behalf,” Dustin said.

“Besides, the order is stupid,” Paul said. “We don’t know for certain which planet in the Wolf 25 system is their home world.” There was a “cold Earth” planet that seemed likely, but also two gas giants with Triton-sized satellites.

“As we get closer, we might be able to tell which one it is,” Moonboy said.

“It probably would be the one with all the missiles rising up to greet us.”

“Maybe not,” Namir said. “If we stopped accelerating the last month or so, we’d be coming in cold. They might not detect us until it was too late to respond. We’d still be going at 99 percent the speed of light.”

“You’re not arguing in favor of this kamikaze scheme,” Elza said.

“Not this particular one. President of the world. But it’s always been a possible strategy.”

“As I said before,” Snowbird said, “if we’re going to die anyhow, we could still exercise some control over the situation that way.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. Besides, even if we knew what planet they were on, we don’t know who else might inhabit it. It might be like destroying Earth just to get Lazlo what’s- his-name.”

“Which might be happening even as we speak,” Namir said. “Or after however long it takes his message to be picked up by the Others.”

“Comforting prospect,” I said.

“And an interesting thought experiment,” Moonboy said. “If they did destroy the Earth, should we try to destroy them in turn? Or should we go someplace safe and try to restart the human race?”

“I’m a fearsome interstellar warrior,” Namir said. “I’m not changing diapers.”

“I don’t think we have any diapers aboard,” I said, “nor ovulating women.”

“I can fix the ovulation,” Elza said. “And we could improvise diapers and such. But really, where could we go, to play Adam and Eve, if we couldn’t go back to Earth?”

“Mars,” Fly-in-Amber said. “It’s a nicer place anyhow.”

We got the ersatz news broadcasts from Earth, but of course they weren’t beamed, and were too weak and distorted by noise to be worth everyday amplifying and cleaning up. Namir had some experience and expertise to apply to it, though, and eventually had decoded about six hours of broadcasts prior to noon of July 3, when Lazlo Motkin had made his imperial request. All we found were two small stories, one a pro forma announcement that Lazlo was going to run for president of the United States on a third-party ticket, and the other a human-interest story about how he and his wife formed the Free America party and, working through several religious denominations, got enough signatures and funding to put himself on the ballot in several Southern states.

So how to interpret the tight-beam message to us? Probably just a crazy rant. But suppose the rest of the news was sanitized, and there really had been a theocratic revolution in the United States?

Paul raised that possibility during dinner, rehydrated mushrooms fried with pretty convincing butter over corn cakes, with actual green onions from the farm, our first crop.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Dustin said, “unless it’s a very levelheaded theocracy. Why would they censor the news of their victory?”

“Maybe they’re not idiots,” Namir said. “Even theocrats might not want to invite the Others to their victory parade.”

“The real question is what our response should be,” Paul said. “I’m inclined to play it straight; tell them thanks, but no thanks. We’re going to stick with the original plan.”

“Which is to make it up as we go along,” I said.

“Or just don’t respond at all,” Namir said. “He sent that a week ago. He knows our answer would take a week or eight days. If he’s still in control of that powerful laser transponder a couple of weeks from now, that tells us something.”

Meryl shook her head. “You’re presupposing that the Earth authorities are aware that he’s done this. I think he’s just a rich fruitcake out in the middle of the ocean with his laser transponder and delusions of grandeur.”

“In which case,” I said, “we ought to send the message back to Earth and ask whether anyone can vouch for Mr. Lazlo.”

“We could do that,” Paul said, “but no matter what we hear back, we should stick to the original mission. If we’d wanted to just cannonball into the planet, there wouldn’t be any need for a human crew and all this lovely life support.” He held up a forkful of mushroom. “We could’ve just put an autonomous AI pilot on the iceberg and set it loose. But we are on board, and in charge, and we’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”

He looked around the table. “So I second Carmen’s idea—send the message back and see what the reaction is. But continue on regardless. Is everyone in favor of that?”

People nodded and shrugged. Moonboy said, “It’s not as if they could do anything to us, right? I mean, there’s no way they could set up another starship and have it overtake us before we got to Wolf 25.”

“No,” Paul said, “even if they had an identical iceberg in place, and all the people and resources. They couldn’t catch up with us. We’re already going two-tenths the speed of light.”

“They couldn’t catch us with a starship and crew,” Namir said. “But they could catch us with a probe. A bomb.”

“Always Mr. Sunshine,” his wife said.

12

MEDICAL HISTORY

1 September 2088

So Elza thinks Moonboy is a little crazy. Maybe more than a little. He’d been acting more odd than usual for a couple of weeks, I saw in retrospect, but it hadn’t made a big impression. He’d been moody as long as we’d known him; so now he was a little moodier, withdrawn.

I’m somewhat snoopy, but then that is what I’m paid to do. So when Elza said she was going down to the kitchen for a snack and set down her notebook without turning it off, I did what was natural for me and leaned over to take a look.

It was Moonboy’s medical file, open to a confidential psychological evaluation, eighteen years ago. It was in a folder labeled “Aptitude for long-term assignment, Mars Base.”

The box the psychiatrist had checked said “marginally acceptable,” with a scrawled “see attached” alongside. I tapped on it, and the document was fascinating. Disturbing.

Moonboy had had inpatient psychiatric treatment, on Earth, for assault and claustrophobia. When he was eleven, a stepfather had gotten angry with him for crying and taped his mouth shut, then bound his arms and legs in tape, too, and pushed him into a dark closet for punishment. He choked on vomit and died, but was revived on the way to the hospital. He never saw the stepfather again, but the damage was done.

“Pretty interesting?” I hadn’t heard Elza come back.

“I’m sorry. Compromising professional ethics.”

“Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, and Moonboy wouldn’t be my psychiatric patient anyhow. I really shouldn’t have had access to the file. But I saw a thread to it and just asked, and it opened. You could have done the same thing.”

“I’m surprised they accepted him for Mars.”

“Hmm. A married pair of xenologists probably looked like a good package deal, and Mars itself isn’t too bad for a claustrophobe. The base is big, and you can go outside. Unlike here.”

“There are other factors for his moodiness,” I said. “You’re sitting on one of them, I must point out.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But I should talk to him.” She picked up the notebook and tapped through a few pages. “Meryl’s okay with it. I talked it over with her. She hasn’t been a saint.”

“That’s not too relevant.”

“I know, I know.”

“Are you still . . .”

“No, not really. We haven’t closed any doors, but . . . yeah, I should talk to him.”

“Would it do any good for me to talk to him? Give my okay?”

“No. He knows you’re not bothered by it. Besides, you’re an authority figure to him.”

That was comforting. “Authority figures might be a problem, if one had tried to murder you at age eleven.”

“Didn’t just try. Though he doesn’t remember dying. He passed out, puking, and was revived. He still doesn’t know he died.” She shuddered. “What a bastard.”

“He does remember the incident up to that point?”

She tapped some more and shook her head. “Guy doesn’t say whether he learned that from Moonboy himself or from hospital records.” She put it down and leaned back, hands behind her head. “I ought to see whether I can get him to talk about his childhood.”

“As his doctor?”

She gave me a look. “I’m always his doctor. Yours, too. But no; I don’t want him to see me as a shrink.”

“What as?”

She looked back at the notebook. “Why don’t you and Dustin play some pool after dinner? A nice long game?”

13

TRAUMA DRAMA

I was headed for bed after watching a bad movie—Paul had given up halfway through—when the door to Elza’s suite burst open and Moonboy ran out, naked, carrying his clothes. That did get my attention. He hurried straight to his room, I think without seeing me.

Then Elza appeared, also naked, hand over her lower face, blood streaming from her nose, spattering her chest, a rivulet running between her breasts. I took her by the elbow and led her to the bathroom. Tried to seat her on the toilet, but she got up and inspected her face in the mirror, a mess, and gingerly touched her nose in a couple of places, wincing. “Broken,” she said, though it sounded like “progen.”

“What can I do? Get Namir?” He and Dustin were playing pool in the lounge.

“Just stay a minute.” She was carefully packing her nostrils with tissue, her head bent over. “Hurts. More than I would think.” She turned and got to one knee and spit blood into the toilet, and convulsed twice, holding back vomit. Then she sat on the floor, holding the scarlet wad of tissue over her nose.

“Moonboy?”

“Yeah. If you see him, would you pitch him out the air lock for me?”

“What happened?”

“We were just talking.” She dropped some tissues into the toilet, and I handed her fresh ones. “Well, we sort of fucked, I guess that’s obvious, and I was talking to him, reassuring him . . . and, I don’t know. I must have blinked. He was starting to sit up, and he whacked me a good one with his elbow. Said it was an accident, but no way. Had all his weight behind it.” She shuddered and rocked a couple of times. Another woman, I would have held, comforted. Elza wouldn’t like that.

“Glad my martial arts instructor isn’t here. She would slap the shit out of me.”

“Was it something you said?”

She looked up at me, ghastly but a little comical. “Yes. But I’m not sure what, exactly. I’ll talk with him after he’s . . . after we’ve both calmed down a little.”

“Maybe you should slap the shit out of him. I mean, just as therapy.”

She nodded. “Therapy for me, anyhow.”

Namir appeared in the doorway, galvanized. As if a silent lightning bolt had struck. “Blood,” he said. “What?”

“An accident,” Elza said, standing carefully. “Stupid accident. Get outa here and let us clean this mess up.”

“It’s broken,” he said. Dustin had come up behind him and was staring.

“No shit, it’s broken. But a doctor has already looked at it.”

“You were with—”

“An accident, Namir. Make yourself useful and get me some ice. And a drink, while you’re at it.” He backed away, and Dustin followed him.

I wet a handcloth with cold water and handed it to her. She dabbed and rubbed at the blood one-handed. The stream had pooled at her navel and gone on to mat her pubic hair. I gave her another cloth and rinsed the first one out.

“What are you going to tell them?”

She scrubbed her pubic hair unself-consciously. “They know I was with him. Namir, at least, knew I was going to raise some . . . delicate matters. For the time being, I’m going to stand behind doctor-patient confidentiality.” She threw the rag into the sink. “Help me get dressed?”

She pulled a brown shift out of a drawer and wriggled into it, switching arms to keep the wad of tissues in place. She went back into the bathroom and spit out a clot and retched.

“Ugh.” She sat heavily on an ottoman, elbows on her knees.

Meryl tapped on the doorjamb and stepped in. “Moonboy hit you? Elza?”

“Said it was an accident. Pretty well aimed.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t imagine a less violent man.”

“Wonder how often people say that. After ax murders and such.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“In bed.” They were set up with separate bedrooms currently and a small shared anteroom. “I haven’t talked to him. I was reading in the kitchen, and Namir came in.”

Elza peered up at her. “He’s never, um?”

“Never even raises his voice, no.”

“Well, he’s sitting on something. A powder keg.” She looked at the tissues and replaced them. “At least he didn’t break any teeth. ‘Dentist, heal thyself.’ ”

“I . . . I’m sorry,” Meryl said with an odd tone of voice, like “I’m kind of sorry my husband hit you while you were fucking, but not really.”

“Look,” Elza said, “it probably was an accident. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll talk to him after he’s rested.”

“I suppose accidents aren’t always accidents,” Meryl persisted. “Maybe it wasn’t you who was the actual target.”

“Maybe not.” She shook her head. “Probably not. But not you, either. Childhood thing.”

“He had a happy childhood. He adores his mother.”

“And his father died?”

“Left. But it was amicable, no-fault.”

“You might talk to him about that. Or no. Let me talk to him. It’s something we were . . . closing in on.”

Namir came in with a tall drink and a plastic bag of chipped ice. “Thanks. Carmen, do we have a clean washcloth left?”

“Sure.” I handed it to her and she wrapped it around the ice, dropping the bloody wad, and pressed the cold pack to her nose.

She sipped the cold drink, holding it at an awkward angle. “Thanks. Look. I don’t think he knows how badly he injured me. Let’s not make a big deal of it?”

Dustin shook his head. “No. He’s got to know he—”

“Trust me, no, darling. This is something I have to control, whether he knows it yet or not.”

“I could,” Namir began.

“No. You boys get back to your game. Please. Just be normal.”

Sure, a normal family full of Martians and spies, hurtling toward its doom a contracted quarter of a century away.

Paul stepped into the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and stared at the sight of all the blood. “What the fuck?”

“A reasonable question,” Elza said.

14

LOVE AND BLOOD

I lay in the dark holding a pack of tissues, listening to Elza’s ragged breathing as she went in and out of sleep. I passed her a tissue whenever a stoppage woke her. Then the pills would carry her back to sleep.

When people stopped falling out of the sky, the day of Gehenna, I took an embassy car and drove out to the suburb past Neve Tsedek, where my parents lived. Driving was difficult downtown, streets clotted with cars that had gone out of control as their drivers died. Some automatic cars were stalled, pushing against piles of metal and flesh. I tried not to drive over bodies, but it was impossible. I saw perhaps fifty people walking or standing in all of downtown Tel Aviv, sharing with me the inexplicable gift of life.

On the thruway there were long stretches of uninterrupted pavement, and then immense pileups, surrounded by empty undamaged cars. Of course people would stop, then open their doors and take one breath of unfiltered air.

My mother’s neighborhood looked unaffected, except for a few cars oddly parked in yards or in the middle of the street. There were no people about, but that could have been normal.

The front door was unlocked. I called for her, and, of course, there was no answer.

I found her in the kitchen, lying on her back in a tidal pool of blood. The door to the garden had been kicked down from the outside.

A nurse by training, combat nurse by politics, she had rushed to the knife rack and snatched a razor-sharp Toledo steel paring knife, a souvenir from Spain that she used daily and kept keen. A straw in her left hand, she had tried to give herself an emergency tracheotomy. Then nicked an artery, a carotid artery. Of course the tracheotomy wouldn’t have helped.

She wrote in blood on a white plastic cutting board CAN’T EXHALE, with a drying fingerprint apostrophe. She had always been careful about grammar.

Too much blood in this life.

15

SEX AND VIOLENCE

2 September 2088

This was a very interesting day for observing humans. I didn’t witness the precipitating incident last night but have reconstructed it from several accounts, including Snowbird’s interpretation. She is closer to Carmen than I am, and Carmen saw much of it.

Apparently Elza and Moonboy were mating (or “fucking,” to be more accurate), an intimacy outside their traditional pairing and tripling but not forbidden. Something went seriously wrong, and Moonboy struck Elza with such force that he caused a serious injury to her face. Then he went back to his own area, leaving Elza alone and bleeding.

Carmen saw that she was in trouble and came to her aid. Elza is a doctor, but perhaps with only two hands had trouble treating herself.

I heard the noise when other humans became involved and watched from a distance I hoped was polite. It was fascinating.

Much of human action is, of course, predicated on passion, but for all the indirect evidence I have of this from reading and cube, I had never before seen one person injure another out of emotion. He hit her face with his elbow, which makes me think they must have finished mating. In all the postures they use for mating, there are some where the female might surprise the male that way, but not vice versa. The elbow is not as complex as our joints; it is more or less a bony hinge that connects the upper and lower parts of the arm.

Evidently Carmen helped her give “first aid” to herself. Her two husbands showed up, and Dustin, at least, wanted to “discuss” the matter with Moonboy, which implied a desire to inflict reciprocal injury, a natural human trait. Elza insisted that he not do that.

Meryl, Moonboy’s wife, showed up and argued that he had never done anything like this before, which Elza accepted, but said it didn’t help her nose. Pilot Paul, who had been asleep next door, joined them, and so everything was explained again. So now every human knew what was going on, or at least part of it.

Namir and Dustin had been playing pool, and they obeyed their wife when she asked them to resume. The rest dispersed, Carmen staying behind to comfort Elza.

That is when the second phase began. Namir and Dustin were playing their game and talking when Moonboy came out of his room, staggering from the effects of alcohol, and asked them, or commanded them, to quiet down.

This seemed unreasonable to Dustin, at least, and he attacked Moonboy with the stick they use to propel the pool balls around. Namir moved in quickly to intervene, perhaps to prevent his spouse from murdering the young man. He is larger than either and was able to separate the two men and disarm Dustin and throw him into the swimming pool, which was probably wise. I know how calming that is.

Moonboy had sustained a wound to the top of his head, from the pool stick, which was bleeding even worse than Elza’s nose. I saw this. Blood covered his face and much of the front of his shirt. He fainted, and Namir carried him to the infirmary.

A comical scene ensued, which I suppose would be the third act of the play, in human terms. Moonboy’s wound had to be sewn up with stitches. Namir started the process, cleaning the wound and removing hair from around it, but before he could start stitching, his wife came in and took over. So she sewed the wound closed while Carmen held the ice pack to her nose, both of them laughing over the absurdity of the situation. Along with Namir and Meryl, they carried the patient back to his bed.

Then the three women moved into the kitchen and drank alcohol and laughed for some time. The men either weren’t invited or felt they wouldn’t be welcome.

Altogether, a complex display of interactions, which I could not pretend to understand. It will be interesting to record the changes this causes in attitudes and actions.

It’s a pity that we will probably not live to return to Mars and discuss all this. The starship is like a small laboratory, with us nine organisms sealed within. But there’s no scientist to peer at us from outside, and draw conclusions.

16

INJURIES

Namir suggested a meeting the morning after, while Moonboy was still under sedation. It was natural for Elza to lead the discussion.

“For me, it could have been a lot worse.” She touched her bruised nose gently. Both eyes were dark, too. One nostril was open, the other packed with gauze. “The break is simple, not ‘displaced.’ So it will heal without surgery. What’s broken inside Moonboy is not so easy to heal.”

“What do you know about his . . . condition?” Paul asked.

“More than I can say, ethically. It does involve anger that’s been suppressed for years, though. Unfortunately, it’s associated with claustrophobia.”

“But this starship is huge,” Snowbird said, gesturing with all four arms.

“Snowbird,” Paul said, “you’ve always lived inside a big room, a cave. Moonboy grew up in Kansas, a large flat state. You could look around and see forty kilometers in any direction.”

“I don’t know that that’s a factor,” Elza said. “This was a very small space, involuntary confinement.

“Anyhow, as well as the sedative, I’ve given him a mild antipsychotic medication. For his protection and ours.”

“Good,” Dustin said.

“I should give you one as well, darling. You have not been a model of rational behavior.”

“He came after me.”

“You could have fought him off with a pillow, not a pool cue. Try to leave your balls on the table next time. So to speak.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Obviously a familiar response.

“So do we have to keep him doped up for the duration?” Paul said. “Do we have enough drugs for that?”

“I can synthesize things that simple. I could keep us all doped to the gills for the whole mission. Which has crossed my mind.”

“That would not be practical,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Would you be able to eat, and drink, and excrete?”

“All in the same place,” Namir said.

“I’ve been to parties like that,” Dustin said.

“They’re kidding,” Elza said to the Martian. “So am I. Meryl, he’s never lost control like this before?”

“Not since we’ve been married; not on Mars.” She hesitated. “He got in trouble when he was a kid. That involved fighting, I remember. At the time, I thought how unlike him that was. But I never asked him for any details.”

“I’ll see if he wants to talk about it.”

“To you?”

“To a doctor. He ever say anything to you guys? About being a wild kid?”

The men all shook their heads. “I don’t remember him ever talking about his life on Earth,” Paul said. “Funny, now that I think of it. Everybody has Earth stories.”

“He’s odd that way,” Meryl said. “He talks about his mother, when he was little, and he talks about college, but not much in between.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I said. “Paul never talks about that time in his life. Do you?”

“Boring,” he said. “Dealing drugs, child prostitution, day in and day out.”

“Child prostitution?” Fly-in-Amber said.

“Kidding,” he said. “They were all over eighteen.”

“Paul . . .”

“I’m sorry, Fly-in-Amber. It’s disrespectful of me to kid you.”

“On the contrary,” the Martian said. “I learn from your humor. If you had actually been a bad boy, you wouldn’t joke about it. Your feelings are ambiguous, are they not? You wish you had been more bad?”

“Got me there,” he said. “Elza, you’re both victim and professional observer. What if it had happened to someone else—”

“Paul, that’s not relevant,” I said. “There are only two other women here.”

“It might be relevant,” Elza said, “on various levels.” She touched her nose and grimaced. “I’d just asked him about his father, sort of out of the blue.”

“What about his father?” Meryl said. “He never talks about him.”

Elza studied her for a moment. “I know some things I shouldn’t. Maybe because of my security clearance, I don’t know, I . . . I was given access to confidential psychiatric records.”

“About his father?” Meryl said.

“I’m on thin ice here,” she said.

After a pause, everyone started to talk at once. “Wait, wait.” Paul had the strongest voice. “Elza, you don’t have to violate your political principles . . .”

“Yes, she does,” Dustin said.

His wife smiled at him. “The philosopher speaks.”

“All right. The principle of doctor-patient confidentiality is a luxury we have to forego.”

“Like the luxury of anger?” she said, still smiling.

“We are seven people, or nine,” he plowed on, “who may have the fate of the entire human race, both races, depending on our thoughts and actions. Our freedom to think and act can’t be constrained by tradition. By law or superstition.”

“I think he’s right,” Namir said slowly. “At least in terms of information.”

Elza looked at him, then away. “Maybe so. Maybe so.” She sat up straight and spoke to the middle distance, as if reciting. “This is something Moonboy doesn’t remember, because it was repressed by court order: When he was eleven years old, his father killed him.”

“Tried to?” Dustin said.

“Killed him. Not on purpose. Tried to stop his crying by taping his mouth shut. Then bound his hands and feet with the tape and threw him in a dark closet.”

“Holy shit,” Dustin said.

“When his mother came home from work, probably a few minutes later, she asked where the kid was, and got into an argument with dear old dad. When she opened the closet, Moonboy was dead. He’d choked on vomit and stopped breathing.

“The rescue people got his heart and lungs going again. But what if his mother had not come home in time? He could have died permanently or suffered irreversible brain damage.”

“What happened to the father?” Namir asked.

“The record doesn’t say.”

“Moonboy thinks his parents got a no- fault divorce when he was eleven,” Meryl said, “and his father dropped out of his life. Probably into prison or some rehab program, judging from what you say. With an ironclad restraining order.” She shook her head. “It . . . explains some things. It’s a lot to assimilate.”

“The white hair?” I said. He had a tangled nimbus, like Einstein. “I know a person’s hair doesn’t turn white overnight.”

“Old wives’ tale,” Elza said. “But continual stress can cause premature graying.”

“Maybe that memory wasn’t completely erased,” Meryl said, “and he dwells on it at some level. His hair was almost completely white when we met. I think he was twenty-two.”

“Is that why he’s called Moonboy?” Namir asked.

I knew about that. “No, he was born during an eclipse, a total lunar eclipse.” I cringed at the memory of a cheap magazine article when I was famous, putting us together: Moonboy and Mars Girl.

“His mother’s an astrology nut,” Meryl said. “We don’t get along too well. He thinks she walks on water, though.”

Dustin laughed. “Well, she did bring him back from the dead. Even if he doesn’t know it, she does. It could make for an interesting relationship.”

Meryl nodded. “It does explain a lot.”

“His voice,” Elza said. It was a soft, hoarse rasp. “That could be damage to his vocal cords from stomach acid. As he lay there dead.”

Namir broke the silence. “We have to tell him. Now that we all know.”

“Not ‘we,’ ” Elza said. “I have to tell him. I started the whole damned thing, with my curiosity.”

That was a delicate way to put it, I thought. Her curiosity about Moonboy’s medical record came after her curiosity about his body. If that was what it was, her need for different men.

Of course the only man left now was mine.

17

THERAPY

I didn’t want my wife alone in a room with the man who had assaulted her. But she felt they had to talk one-on-one, and besides, she would have no trouble overpowering him under normal circumstances. As a compromise, she let me sit in an adjacent room and watch the interview on a notebook, ready to rush in and save her. It wasn’t necessary, as it turned out. But it was educational.

He knocked tentatively and walked in, looking sheepish and uncomfortable. She sat him down next to her desk and inspected his stitches, dabbing at them with an alcohol swab. He winced, and her expression was not one of empathy.

“You’ll live,” she said, and sat down facing him.

“I’m sorry, so sorry. Don’t know what got into me.” His speech was slightly slurred.

“That’s what we have to talk about.” She took a deep breath. “What happened yesterday started twenty-nine years ago. Do you know the acronym SPMD?”

He shook his head. “No. When I was eleven?”

“Yes. It’s Selective Precision Memory Dampening. Not done very often anymore; it’s controversial.”

“When I was in the hospital so long, with pneumonia?”

“Yes. But it was a lot more than pneumonia.”

For several minutes he didn’t speak, while she recounted in unsparing detail what his father had done and what happened afterward. When she was through, he just stared into space for a long moment.

“They could have told me,” he said in a flat, hurt voice. “Mother should have told me.” He hit the desk with his fist, hard enough to hurt.

“She should’ve,” Elza said. “I would have, at least when you were an adult.”

“What did you say,” he said slowly, “when we were in bed?”

“I asked you about your father.”

He leaned forward and spoke through clenched teeth. “You asked me whether I loved him.” I rose from the chair, ready to go next door.

“Let me see your hand.” She took it in one hand and, with the other hand, pressed the inside of his wrist.

He sat back slowly and looked at his wrist, and touched the small flesh-colored circle there. “What’s that?”

“It’s a relaxant.” She must have had it palmed. “It’ll wear off quickly.”

“I . . .” He looked at the wall. “I was upset because I couldn’t, I couldn’t come.”

“You did all right.”

“No—I mean it happens all the time. I thought with you, with a new sexy woman . . .”

“It’s all in the head,” she said gently. “It’s always all in the head. You were nervous.”

“When you said . . . that about my father, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I mean I tried, and it was like someone, someone was choking me. I must have lashed out. I don’t remember.”

“You got in a lucky shot.”

He smiled for the first time. “Thank you for not killing me. I’ve seen you throw Daniel and Namir around on the mat.”

“It took some restraint. How is the elbow?”

“Still hurts a bit.”

She stood. “Hmm. Take off your shirt and get up on the examination table.” He did, and she moved his arm around and palpated his elbow. “That doesn’t hurt?”

“Not really, no.”

She pressed behind his shoulder. “This does, though?”

“A little.”

She nodded and looked at him for a moment. “Take off your shoes and lie down on your back.” He did, while she watched and nodded.

“I want to check your reflexes,” she said, starting to unbuckle his belt. She stopped partway. “This wouldn’t be ethical on Earth. But we’re playing with starship rules.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling broadly. She unzipped his fly, and his reflexes appeared more than adequate.

I’ll have to ask her about that patch. I turned off the notebook. It was time to start dinner. Go pull some carrots.

18

ANNIVERSARY

8 May 2089

Namir is baking a cake. It’s everyone’s anniversary: we took off exactly one year ago, and everyone is still alive.

The notebook says that on Earth it’s 16 July 89, so relativity has shrunk about seventy days off our calendar.

It does feel like twelve months have gone by, though, rather than fourteen, so a time for taking stock. In one year:

Only the one day of violence, back in September, when Moonboy broke Elza’s nose, and Dustin parted his hair with a pool cue. For a long time now, Dustin and Moonboy have been civil with each other, and Elza has lost her nasal accent.

Elza also has fucked every man aboard except Paul (if he’s telling the truth), and Meryl as well, in a three-way with Moonboy, though that seems to have petered out.

The avocado tree has blossomed, but set no fruit in spite of assiduous pollination. We’ve asked Earth for advice, but they’re half a light-year away, so it will be a while.

Most of the other crops are thriving. We’ve almost doubled the floor space allotted to tomatoes, trimming the real estate from leafy greens and legumes. Namir needed more Italian plum tomatoes for sauces, and no one complained. I wish we’d brought more fruit trees, myself, or more acreage. Enough grapes to make our own wine; the idea of waiting for it to ferment is attractive; something to look forward to. Can’t have everything.

The planners were wise to design such a large hydroponic garden, even though we could survive without it. Having regular menial chores helps keep us sane; caring for living things promotes optimism. Even in our situation.

In the sports news, I’m now swimming two kilometers a day. There’s a new house rule in billiards: Namir has to shoot left- handed, or no one will play with him. He still wins, but not all the time anymore.

On Saturdays, we move all the lounge furniture to the walls, string a badminton net across the room, and work up a good sweat. The Martians come out and play for the first few minutes, one on each team, though they overheat quickly and are handicapped by the gravity, not to mention lacking the concept of “sport.” We compensate for their relative lack of mobility by letting them each use two racquets. They’re ambidextrous four ways.

Meryl’s wall-sized crossword puzzle is about a third finished. She’d better slow down. Elza put away her needlepoint for a while, but has started a new one, another fractal chromatic fantasy.

Moonboy spends an hour or two a day on the piano, composing silently, and sometimes plays all night, haggard but happy in the morning. I don’t read music too well, but noticed the other day that Composition 3: Approach/Retreat is thirty-five pages long.

Paul spends most of the mornings drinking coffee and cranking out equations, which he sometimes tries to explain to me. He won’t be through coursework on the doctorate for another year and a half. Then he’ll write a dissertation and send it off to Earth. So maybe in fifty years he’ll get a doctorate in Quaint Astrophysics from Stanford, if there still is a Stanford.

Namir is working on another balalaika, a long one with low notes, and is slowly carving a bust of Elza, which is at a creepy stage—half of it still a block of wood and half a mostly finished sculpture, as if she were being pulled out of the material. Straight on, I think her expression is one of stoic acceptance; from another angle, her lips slightly apart, she looks like she’s on the verge of an orgasm. He knows her better than any of us, of course. Maybe that’s what she looks like all the time, to him.

I’ve taken up drawing again, using the texts Oz recommended when I was first on Mars. No paper, but it was a lifetime ago when I last had paper to spare. I can adjust the stylus and notebook to simulate pencil, ink, or wash. I’m copying some faces from the actual book that Namir brought along, all of Vermeer. His The Geographer looks a lot like Moonboy, though his hair isn’t white.

Our brand-new spaceship is getting a little worn around the edges. The air recycler started making a noise like a person whistling through her teeth, barely audible. Paul described it to the auto- repair algorithm, and the noise stopped for a few days, then came back. Meryl did it a slightly different way, and it stayed quiet. But it was a scary time. Can’t send out for parts.

The Martians’ swimming pool has to be continuously recaulked. Long hours of immersion—totally unnatural, of course, for Martians—must do something with the chemistry of their skin, which makes the water react with the caulking compound. Try to get those two out of the water, though.

Along with Meryl and Moonboy, I’m chipping away at the Martian language. Snowbird is more helpful than Fly-in-Amber, but even so it’s a frustrating experience.

Moonboy is developing a good ear for using the synthesizer to simulate Martian sounds, and in a real sense he’s the only one of us who can “speak” Martian with anything like a useful vocabulary. With merely human larynx and vocal cords, I can do about three hundred words that Snowbird can recognize consistently, but many of those, like “swimming,” are neologisms derived from human sounds.

Moonboy can play more than ten times my number of words, but a similar problem is emerging: we can only talk about experiences that humans and Martians share. Most of what they do and think is hidden from us.

Some may even be hidden on purpose. We have no idea what their secret agenda might be. They might not even know.

When the lone Other communicated to us from Neptune’s satellite Triton, it did so at first through a long rote message that Fly-in-Amber and other members of his family recited after a hypnotic stimulus. They translated it for us, but how complete was the translation? How honest?

We must always keep in mind that the Martians were created by the Others for the sole purpose of contacting us after we developed the ability to go to Mars. We were no danger to them until then.

This is the only thing that lone Other said to us in a human language, in response to our first message:

Peace is a good sentiment.

Your assumption about my body chemistry is clever but wrong. I will tell you more later.

At this time I do not wish to tell you where my people live.

I have been watching your development for a long time, mostly through radio and television. If you take an objective view of human behavior since the early twentieth century, you can understand why I must approach you with caution.

I apologize for having destroyed your Triton probe back in 2044. I didn’t want you to know exactly where I am on this world.

If you send another probe, I will do the same thing, again with apologies.

For reasons that may become apparent soon, I don’t wish to communicate with you directly. The biological constructs that live below the surface of Mars were created thousands of years ago, with the sole purpose of eventually talking to you and, at the right time, serving as a conduit through which I could reveal my existence.

“Our” existence, actually, since we have millions of individuals elsewhere. On our home planet and watching other planets, like yours.

This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red.

When the Other sent this message to us, it must have known that within a few days the delayed-action bomb within Red would go off and destroy all higher forms of life on Earth.

So why did it bother?

Most of us think it was hedging its bets in case, as did happen, the human race figured out a way around the doomsday bomb. Namir believes it assumed we would solve the puzzle and survive, a subtle difference.

Red might have figured it out before he died. He had talked with the Other, or at least listened to it, and on his way to the Moon and doom, he talked nonstop about it for almost twenty hours. Every word was recorded, but it hasn’t yet been translated—only one Martian, his successor, will be able to comprehend it, and when we left she was still studying the language.

(The long transition period between one leader’s death and the education of the succeeding leader was never a problem before humans came along. Martian daily life was simple and predictable, and if something came up in the dozen or two ares while they were leaderless, it would just have to wait.)

We had dessert in the compromise lounge, so the Martians could comfortably join us, even though the human “year” is irrelevant to their calendar.

We had taken a plastic bottle of tej, Ethiopian honey wine, out of the luxury stores. It went well with the coffee-and-honey cake recipe Namir remembered from his childhood, some Jewish tradition.

Either would be poison to the Martians, of course, but they brought out some special purple fungus and what looked and smelled like sulfurous swamp water.

I held up my glass to them and croaked out a greeting that was traditional for such occasions, which roughly translates as “Well, another year.” Snowbird and Namir exchanged toasts in Japanese and bowed, which in the case of the Martian looked weirdly like a horse in dressage. Plastic glasses were clicked all around.

The cake was sinfully excellent. “We should have this every day,” Elza said. “In five years, we’ll be bigger than the Martians.”

“That would be attractive,” Fly- in-Amber admitted, “but I don’t think you have that much honey.”

You can never tell when they’re joking. They have the same complaint about us.

Moonboy had his small synth keyboard, and he played a few words for Snowbird, who responded with a thrumming, crackling sound, then the thump of laughter.

“I told her she was looking slim,” he said, “and she answered that the food here was lousy.”

That was actually a pretty subtle joke. Martians don’t much care what they eat, but she knew about that attitude from humans.

After we finished the cake and tej, we switched to regular wine and other alcohol, and Snowbird asked whether Namir would bring out his balalaika and do a duet with Moonboy. Namir asked Dustin whether he could stand it, and he said that once a year wouldn’t kill him.

By the time Namir had retrieved the balalaika from the workshop, Moonboy had figured out how to simulate a primitive accordion, and with his sensitive ear he had no trouble squeezing out chords that matched the Eastern European and Israeli tunes Namir knew, and did an occasional simulated-clarinet solo, what he called klezmer style. Most of it was new to me, and I was glad of the Martian request.

When we went to bed, Paul and I made love, even though it wasn’t Saturday (badminton brings out the beast in him).

Afterward, he was restless. “I’m the most useless pilot in history.” “I don’t know. The guy in charge of the Titanic didn’t exactly earn his paycheck.”

“This morning while you were gardening, I went up to the shuttle and put it through some simulations for landing.”

A few years premature. “Practice makes perfect?”

“I could do them in my sleep, which is the problem. There are really only four basic situations in the VR—Earth, Mars, Moon, and zero- gee rendezvous. I can fiddle with the parameters. But I’m not really learning anything.”

“Well, it’s not rocket science, as they used to say. Except that it is rocket science. And you’re the best. I read that somewhere.”

I could feel his smile in the dark, and he patted my hip. “The best within a half light-year, anyhow. But we should have thought to make up some weird simulations, like a dense, turbulent atmosphere. A dusty one. You’d never land in a dust storm if you had a chance. But I’ll have to take what I get.”

“Well, it’s just software, isn’t it? Describe what you need and tight-beam it to Earth. They could develop and test it, and send it to you after turnaround.”

He paused. “Sometimes you surprise me.”

I resisted the impulse to reach down and actually surprise him. It was already late, though, and I didn’t want to give him any more ideas.

19

YEAR TWO

8 May 2090

Our second year began with a smaller useful crew, and perhaps reduced efficiency from those of us who are left.

We’ve essentially lost Moonboy. Whenever he’s not in VR, he’s locked into earphones. He doesn’t even take them off to eat. If you ask him a question, he hands you a notebook; write down the query, and he’ll write a short response, or nod or shrug, usually.

It started with noise coming from the air-conditioning. At first it was a high-pitched whistle. We were able to program the self-repair algorithm and reduce it to bare audibility, but in the process introduced a varying frequency component: if you listen closely, it’s like someone whistling tunelessly in another room. I can hardly hear it at all, but Moonboy said it was going to drive him mad, and apparently it did.

We can still use him after a fashion, to try to translate if one of the Martians says something incomprehensible. But it’s hard to get his attention, and impossible to make him concentrate.

Elza says he’s apparently in a dissociative fugue. His medical history is dominated by dissociative amnesia, not being able to remember a murderous assault by his father when he was a boy.

Medication isn’t effective. A dose large enough to give him some peace knocks him out, and when he wakes up, the noise is still there, and he claps on the ’phones.

Meryl is of course, depressed, with Moonboy such a wreck, but everyone else seems stable, if not happy. Elza seems resigned to Paul’s obstinate monogamy. I should thank him.

Memo to the next people who staff a mission like this: make sure nobody in the crew is fucking crazy.

Of course, we may all be, in less dramatic ways.

Other than the noisy life-support system, the ship seems shipshape. In December I spent a couple of weeks in advanced menu planning—we’ve been too conservative in using the luxury stores. We could use more than half of them on the way to Wolf. If we do survive the encounter with the Others, we’ll probably be content with anything on the way back. Morale’s only a problem on the way there.

I talked with Paul about this, but not with the others. The last thing I need in the kitchen is a democracy.

I’m continuing my study of first-contact narratives in human history. Usually less destructive than the Others’ contact with us, though the ultimate result is often extinction, anyhow.

There aren’t really close analogies. Aboriginal societies didn’t send off diplomats to plead peace with their high-tech conquerors. What would have happened if the Maori, on learning where their invaders came from, had taken a war canoe and paddled around the Cape and up the Atlantic and the Thames to parley with Queen Victoria? She’s atypical, actually. Reports of Maori military performance led her to offer them at least symbolic equality in the governance of New Zealand. The Others would probably just have nuked them all. With the wave of a hand.

Of course, we don’t really know anything about their psychology or philosophy, other than the fact that they observed us, judged us, and tried to execute us all, with no discussion. When I was a boy, I watched my father spray a nest of wasps that had grown on the side of our house. You could see in their frantic paroxysms how painful an end that was, and my father laughed at me for crying. Maybe some few of the Others will mourn our necessary extinction.

In a way that I would hesitate to call mystical, life becomes more and more precious as we ply our way toward whatever awaits—and I mean that in the most prosaic sense; I wake up every morning eager for the day, even though I do little other than cook and read and talk. A little music, too little.

I swim almost every day, trying to reserve the pool for the half hour after Carmen swims. I can legitimately show up a few minutes early and look at her.

How do I really feel toward her? We talk about everything but that. If I were closer to her age, I might move toward romance, or at least sex, but I’m almost as old as her father. She brought that up early on, and I have no desire to appear foolish. Besides, I’m married to the only certified nymphomaniac within light-years. Another woman might be too much of a good thing.

But I do feel close to her, sometimes closer than I am to Elza, who will never let me or anyone else into her mysterious center—a place I think she herself never visits. Carmen seems totally open, American to the core, even if her passport says “Martian.”

I think my foreignness attracts her, but at some level frightens her as well. The opposite of Elza, in a way. The fact that I’ve been a professional killer thrills Elza, I think, though she would be less thrilled if she knew how many I’ve killed, and how, and why.

PART 3

THE FLOWER

1

YEAR THREE

8 May 2091

This is the end of the third Earth year of our voyage to Wolf 25, to meet with the Others and learn our fate. Humans being superstitious about anniversaries, they asked that we each write up a summarizing statement for these occasions.

For me it’s pointless, since I recall everything whether it is important or not. But I will do it. (Snowbird is more intimately involved with the humans than I am. That’s natural; the white family is more social, even among Martians. We yellows are better observers.)

The most interesting thing about the year to come is that we’re approaching the midpoint, turnaround time. The past year has been more or less uneventful for Martians, though it could have been our ending. The brown pyatyur fungus almost stopped growing, which would eventually have been fatal for us, but Meryl and Carmen figured out what was wrong. It was lacking nitrates—that is, the pseudo-Martian ecosystem was not properly recycling nitrates. We only need trace quantities, so the lack wasn’t obvious. Human agriculture needs large amounts, though, and they are full of it. A day’s production of human urine gives us a year’s worth.

Snowbird continued working with Meryl and Carmen on their language lessons, and I sometimes participated, though it has become steadily more difficult. We seem to have covered all of the easy vocabulary, and it’s hard to explore the more difficult words and phrases without Moonboy’s synthesizer. They can’t even approximate many of the sounds. Moonboy could do well within the range of his hearing.

(I think he might be able to help us more if the other humans weren’t so afraid of him. Snowbird says that some of that fear is reflected fear of their own potential for not-sane behavior. Moonboy scares them, and he knows he’s scaring them, which reinforces the behavior. Meryl explained this to Snowbird, but being able to explain it is not the same as coping with it.)

Namir and I have been playing chess, a variation of the game called Kriegspieler, where neither player is allowed to look at the board; you have to keep the positions of the pieces in your memory as you play. That requires no effort on my part, of course; like any other yellow Martian, one glance will fix the board in my memory for the rest of my life. Namir makes up for his occasional memory lapse by what he calls “killer instinct,” and he wins almost every time. (I think it’s less killer instinct than the fact that his moves are sometimes based on a board that doesn’t exist, and so are impossible for me to anticipate.)

Kriegspieler is normally played with a third person, a referee who keeps track of the progress of the game with a physical board, out of sight. The referee tells you whether a move is impossible (blocked by another piece) or whether you’ve successfully captured a piece. We started out with Carmen as a referee, but I pointed out that she was supernumerary. I could tell Namir if a move was not possible or had been successful, and of course would not lie.

Snowbird plays a board game with the humans, too, a word game called Scrabble, which Meryl had brought along as part of her weight allowance, indicating that the game is important to her, and she is skilled at it. Carmen also plays, and they have a list of Martian words that may be used, and count double. I have played the game but find it maddeningly slow.

Badminton, on the other hand, is plenty fast enough for us in this gravity. Snowbird enjoys it, and I do not. Jumping around like that is ungraceful and painful. But a certain amount of exercise is necessary, as is the appearance of working with the humans as a team.

Whose side will we be on when we get to Wolf 25? The Others did make us, and (speaking as an individual) I can’t pretend to be a free agent, independent of their will. I had absolutely no control over myself the one time the Others needed me to do their bidding, when I suddenly parroted their message in 2079. There could be a large variety of complex behaviors they are able to trigger with a word. Or just a particular beam of light, as happened then.

Suppose they ordered me to open the air-lock door?

But I suspect the fact that we haven’t yet been obliterated means that the Others know where we are and what we’re doing. The humans’ efforts to keep the mission secret probably amuse them.

If they are capable of being amused. There are so many basic things we don’t know about them, or have just inferred from incomplete data.

One thing that does seem inescapable is their lack of concern for human life, and probably Martian life as well. When we meet them, we will need to come up with some reason for their allowing us to live—something that doesn’t have to do with the immorality or injustice of exterminating us.

What is important to them? Is there anything we can do that would make them happy? Whatever “happy” means. Maybe destroying planets is the only thing that pleases them.

We inhabit a different world of time. They seem glacially slow to us, and we must seem like annoying insects to them—buzzing around with our inconsequential lives, our tiny and evanescent concerns. (That was the way Namir put it. There are no glaciers as such on Mars, and no insects other than the ones that humans brought along for agriculture.)

In a few months, the charade will be over. No sense in trying to hide our existence once we’ve pointed our matter-annihilation jet directly at the Others. Prior to our turnaround, a small fast probe will broadcast a description of what we’re planning to do.

Though it’s not much of a plan. “Please don’t kill us before you hear what we have to say.”

As if we could really understand each other.

2

TURNAROUND

Paul has been at loose ends ever since he finished his dissertation—and it really was “finished” more completely than most scientific theses, since he couldn’t make new measurements or read current research on the topic, which was Data Granulation in Surveys of Gravitational Lensing in Globular Clusters, 2002-2085.

So the approach of turnaround was a great outlet for his stalled energies. He had a checklist with nearly a thousand items, compiled before we left, and he added a few himself. The original list didn’t say anything about making sure the balalaikas were secured.

We will be in zero gee for a little over two days, while our dirty iceberg slowly turns to point its jet toward the Others. The Martians will love it. I’m looking forward to the novelty myself. Good memories.

Taking care of the plants won’t be the big project it was before we took off. Just keep everything damp. Try not to crash into anything while cruising from place to place.

I do have one big irrational worry. Nobody has ever stopped and restarted a huge engine like this one—the test vehicle was hardly a thousandth this mass. What if it doesn’t start? Nobody really knows what makes it work, anyhow.

Maybe they do by now, on Earth. But if it didn’t restart, and we radioed “What do we do now?” it would be more than twenty-four years before we got the answer. “Slam the doors and try again.”

Even Fly-in-Amber, who wouldn’t blink at the Second Coming, seemed a little excited about turnaround. Well, it will be the journey’s midpoint, as well as a brief respite from the burden of Earth-style gravity. He was not happy that we had to drain their makeshift pool (and Paul was not happy about having to recycle the water separately, to keep all their germs and cooties in their own ecosystem). Our own pool came with a watertight cover.

We had the furniture secured and the plants taken care of a couple of hours before Paul was to shut down the engine. Namir prepared a luxury feast, lamb chops baked with rehydrated fruit and Middle Eastern spices, served over couscous. We opened one of the few bottles of actual wine.

After a pastry dessert, Paul checked his wrist and got up from the table. “Forty-eight minutes,” he said. “I’ll turn it off at 2200 sharp. No need for a countdown?”

We all agreed. “I’ll go remind the Martians,” Namir said. “When will you start the rotation?”

“After a general systems check, maybe an hour. Don’t think we’ll feel anything. Six degrees per hour.” Two small steering jets on opposite sides of the iceball’s equator would get us slowly spinning, then stop us twenty-eight hours later.

I had a queasy feeling that maybe I should have dined on soda crackers and water instead, Paul’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was a little more than waiting for the other shoe to drop. I went back to the bathroom and found a stomach pill.

It didn’t help that Moonboy sat there with his drugged smile, listening to the music of the spheres. When Meryl told him what was about to happen, he typed out LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. NOISE MIGHT STOP. Sure, if life support stops.

To distract myself, I went to the bicycle machine and took a VR ride through downtown Paris, trying to hit every man with a mustache.

At about five minutes to the hour, I joined the others in the compromise lounge. Everyone had filled squeeze bottles with water and other things to drink in zero gee, good idea. I went to the storeroom and drew six liters of water in a plastic cow, and concentrate for two liters of wine, which made a red light blink next to my name. Paul’s light wasn’t blinking, so I drew a couple of liters for him, too. He must have been too busy, hovering over the OFF switch.

I returned to the lounge with my armloads of water and wine. “You are ready for a party,” Snowbird said. I croaked out a catchphrase that meant something like “I wish the same state for you.” She clapped lightly with her small hands.

We were all sort of braced for it when 2200 came, but of course it wasn’t like slamming on the brakes. Gravity just stopped. I pushed off gently and floated toward the ceiling. Namir and Snowbird followed.

“I guess nothing went wrong,” Meryl said, rotating by in a slow somersault.

Moonboy hadn’t moved. He took off the earphones and listened intently for a couple of seconds. “Still there.” He put them back on, hovering a foot off the couch.

Elza floated up to join Namir, clasping him with her arms and legs. Well, he wouldn’t be able to shoot pool; have to do something for two days.

Paul came out of the control room walking on the floor with his gecko slippers. He had a strange expression. My stomach fell as he spoke: “Something’s screwy.” He shook his head. “The proximity—”

There was a faint metallic sound. Then three more.

“The air lock,” Namir said.

Surprise, then terror. Inappropriately, I laughed, and so did Meryl.

“Has to be the Others,” Paul said.

“Might as well let them in,” Namir said, “before they just blow it open.”

The people who designed the ship should have put a camera out there. But we hadn’t expected callers.

We all followed Paul, all of us but Moonboy, floating various trajectories toward the air lock. Paul opened the control box and pushed the OPEN SEQUENCE button. A pump hammered for less than a minute, fading as the air was sucked out of the lock.

The outer door opened onto total darkness. There was a moment of terrible suspense. Then a man in a conventional white space suit used a navigating jet to float in and stopped by touching the inner door window.

“I’ll be damned,” Dustin said. “They caught up with us this soon?” We’d talked about the possibility of Earth’s inventing a speedier spacecraft, which would catch up with us. Turnaround would be a logical place to meet, when our engine was turned off.

“No,” Paul said, “if they were from Earth, they would have radioed.” He pushed the CLOSE SEQUENCE button, and the outer door closed and air sighed back into the little sealed room. The inner door opened and the stranger floated out toward us.

He or she or it undid the helmet clasps and let the helmet float away. A male in his twenties or thirties, no obvious ethnicity.

“Good for you. You didn’t try to kill me.”

“You’re an Other?” Paul said.

“No, of course not.” It wasn’t looking at Paul, just studying each of us in turn. “They couldn’t speak to you in real time. Your lives are trivially short and swift. I’m an artificial biological construct, like you two Martians, created to mimic a human rate of perception and reaction.

“I’m a tool made by a tool. The one who communicated with you from Triton—”

“Who tried to destroy the Earth,” Paul said.

“Only the life on Earth, yes. I was made in case you survived that. As I believe you know, the one who made me lives slower and longer than humans or Martians, but is still a mayfly compared to the Others.”

“It left Triton, though,” Paul said, “just before the explosion.”

“Yes. It is here now, in a small habitat near your air lock. Fastened to the iceberg by now. We’ve been nearby for some time, within a few million miles, but of course did not physically connect until your engine stopped.”

“Why are you here?” I asked. “To keep an eye on us?”

“That, yes. And to help decide whether you should be allowed near the Others’ home planet.”

“Then you’re set up to destroy us, as Red was?”

“Not at all. It’s not necessary.” His expression revealed nothing. It was not neutral, exactly, but more controlled than the serving robots at McDonald’s.

“Because the Others themselves won’t let us get close enough to hurt them,” Namir said.

“That’s correct. We have already begun sending them information. I think the more you let me know, the better your chances will be.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“No. You may call me whatever you please.”

“Spy,” Namir said.

“Considering the source,” it said, “I am honored.”

“You know a lot about us?” I said.

“Only what has been public knowledge on Earth. Namir, Elza, Paul, Carmen, Dustin, Meryl, Snowbird, Fly- in-Amber.” It pointed. “That would be Moonboy.”

He was facing away from us, floating halfway to the kitchen, listening to music. “Yes,” Meryl said. “He’s not feeling well.”

“Perhaps none of you are.” It looked around. “I will be as small a burden as possible. I will spend most of my time in my quarters, with the Other. Conversation necessarily takes a long time. Once we have deceleration, I can walk back and forth at will. The external air-lock control is simple; I didn’t use it this time because I didn’t want to frighten you with an alarm.”

“That was neighborly,” I said. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink?”

“Oh, no. I don’t want to burden your life support; I can take care of that in my own ship. Like the Martians, I consume very little.”

“We were made by intelligent design,” Snowbird said, “not haphazard evolution.” She had been studying the history of human science. But it was correct; Martians needed only a third of the life-support mass humans required. (Being indifferent to what you eat or drink is a factor, too—if we were willing to live on hardtack biscuits and water, we could save a lot of reaction mass.)

“You took a chance coming over here,” Paul said. “One course correction, and you’d be adrift.”

“I’m replaceable. How often do you do that?”

“Every few days.” Enough to keep us from going outside.

“A reasonable risk.” It looked around. “I would like to have a tour of your ship, if you don’t mind. Then you may tour ours.”

Paul nodded slowly. “We have nothing to hide.”

“I can speak consensus Martian,” it said, turning to Fly- in-Amber. “Would you guide me?”

Fly-in-Amber trilled a “yes” sound, and they headed off toward the Martian rooms. A logical starting place, but both Paul and Namir looked unhappy. “Wish it had chosen you,” Paul said to Snowbird.

“I wish that as well,” she said. “I’m curious.”

And more communicative, I didn’t bother to add. Fly-in-Amber might remember every detail, but we’d have to drag it out of him if he didn’t feel like talking.

“Well . . . come into the control room,” Paul said. “We’ll see what their ship looks like.”

I put on my gecko slippers and followed him. We waited at the door for the others.

“General,” he said as he walked in, and the control surfaces morphed to that configuration, a lot more dials and knobs and switches than the set he’d been using. He strapped himself into the swivel seat, and said, “Outside view.”

There was a flatscreen a meter square in front of him, and it darkened to a velvet blackness with a thousand sparks. He twiddled a joystick, and the angle veered around dizzyingly until it came to rest on a familiar view of the iceberg surface, with a decidedly unfamiliar visitor.

It didn’t look like a spaceship; it didn’t look like a machine at all. It looked kind of like a starfish with seven legs, pebbly skin that was mottled red and black, with filaments like cilia or antennae wiggling on ribs that ran down each leg. It would have looked right at home on the ocean floor if it were hand-sized. But it was easily half as big as the ad Astra landing craft.

“I wonder what makes it tick,” Namir said. “It can’t be carrying enough reaction mass for interstellar travel.”

“Well, if it’s the same thing that left Triton, it took off at twenty-five gees,” Paul said. “That argues for something more exotic than we’ve got. Spy says they’ve been following us, for who knows how long . . . so I guess it went out far enough to be undetectable, then just watched and waited. Then tailed us at its leisure.” He cranked up the magnification and slowly examined the thing. No obvious portholes or gunports or wheels or grommets. I suppose if you examined a starfish with a magnifying glass, you would see about the same thing.

“Maybe it’s alive, too,” Meryl said, “the way Martians are, and Spy claims to be. Grown for a specific purpose.”

“I would vote for that,” Snowbird said.

“Looks like a relative?” Dustin said.

“In a way. If the Others have an aesthetic, and our design reflects it, so does the vehicle’s design. Don’t you think?”

“See what you mean,” I said. Though “aesthetic” isn’t the word I would have chosen. It was almost ugly—but then so were the Martians until you got used to them.

I went back to my workstation and considered the pictures of the ship, thinking of it in terms of a living organism. I’d studied Terran invertebrates, of course, and remembered a seven-legged starfish. I clicked around and found the one I remembered, a pretty British creature, nicely symmetrical and less than a foot wide. There was also a seven-legged one from New Zealand waters, almost a yard wide, that looked octopoid and menacing, and in fact a footnote warned that if it grabbed your wet suit, it was almost impossible to pry loose. But it was the slender British one, Luidia ciliaris, that resembled the starship.

Nothing but its shape was relevant, of course. The only other creature I could find with seven legs, other than sadly mutated spiders, was the extinct Hallucigenia sparsa, a tiny but mean-looking fossil.

The only picture we had of the Others was a simple diagram they sent that we interpreted as having six legs and a tail. Maybe they did have seven legs, instead. So built a starship in their own image.

It was an odd shape for a vehicle, counterintuitive, but maybe my intuitions would be different if I had a seven-based number system.

Zero gee isn’t conducive to abstract thinking, which may be one reason space pilots have not distinguished themselves as philosophers. Another reason may be that they are basically jocks with fast reflexes. I pinged my pilot and said I was going to nap for a while, and he joined me in the bedroom for a few minutes of not napping. Then we did doze together, floating in midair with a sweat-damp sheet wrapped around us. I dreamed of monsters.

3

THE GRAND TOUR

The humans of course wanted to interrogate me as soon as Spy went back to its ship. But I hadn’t learned all that much about the creature. It asked all the questions.

We first went to the Martian quarters. It already knew the basic principles of our recirculating ecology; in fact, it knew more about some of the science and engineering than I did. It appears to have a memory like mine, perfect, but it had studied Martian physiology, for instance, with more depth than I was ever exposed to.

Part of what we discussed there is not translatable, because it has to do with an intimacy between Snowbird and me that has no human counterpart. To answer the obvious (to humans) question, it is not a sexual relationship, nor does it have anything to do with emotional bonding. It is a practical matter that has to do with being ready to die.

The pool that you built for us interested it; it wanted to know what humans gained by this demonstration of friendship. Altruism was difficult to explain, but it understood about doing favors in expectation of eventual return.

Then I took it around to all the crops. This took the most time, because for some reason it needed to know details about the propagation and maintenance of every species.

(I would call this a hopeful sign. Why would the Others need this information other than to help humans survive after some life-support mishap?)

Similarly, I took it through the warehouse area, which is mostly human food storage. It was interested in Namir’s homemade musical instruments. Music seems not as mysterious to them as it is to Martians; it asked me some questions that I could not answer; I said to ask Namir.

It also asked questions about the shop area that I could not answer, mostly about the weapons that obviously could be made there. They can’t be thinking that we will be making swords and pistols to attack them. I expressed this thought, and Spy said of course I was right. But I assume the situation is more complex than that and recommend that Paul or Namir, with their experience as warriors, engage him on this topic, to reassure them.

(I did not say anything, of course, about our conversation, our group meeting, on 8 May 2085, where we discussed the possibility of a kamikaze attack, using all of ad Astra as a high-velocity bomb. I assume that is no longer a possibility, so there was no need to discuss it.)

It was very interested in the swimming and exercise area, with the virtual-reality escape masks, or helmets. It looked at the exercise log carefully, perhaps to have a picture of each person’s physical strength. There was a long and odd discussion about the physical differences between humans and Martians, which covered things it must already have known. I think it was examining my attitudes (or mine and Snowbird’s) toward you humans.

I think that when we arrive at Wolf 25, the Others will want to exploit the difference between the two races and take advantage of the fact that we are, in some abstract essence, their children. As you know, from several conversations over these past three years, our allegiance is with you. Of course, that is exactly what I would say if I were lying, especially if I were on its side.

It wanted to investigate some private quarters. Since I am closest to Namir, I prevailed upon him. I explained to Spy about the sexual relationship among him and Dustin and Elza, as well as I can understand it, and how that mandates the arrangement of the sleeping area of each.

Of course, Namir’s bedroom is small (as is Dustin’s, since they are just for sleeping), and its walls are a constantly changing art gallery, thousands of reproductions from the great museums of Earth. Spy had difficulty understanding this, as do I. One thing Martians and humans have in common is a preference for darkness and quiet when we sleep. So what does it matter what’s on the walls? Dustin’s room is plain, with only an abstract picture he calls a mandala on one wall.

In Elza’s bedroom there is a large cube for showing movies, which usually are depictions of humans mating in various ways, which Namir explained as being an aid in their own mating, or I should say “fucking,” since I understand that Elza, like the other females, has suspended her reproductive function for the duration of the flight.

Of course Spy knew enough about human nature not to be surprised by that, as it was not surprised when we then visited the kitchen, where Namir pleases himself and the rest of you by preparing your food in various original ways. Neither we nor the Others see the point in changing the appearance and flavor of fuel.

I think we shared a thing like humor over your counterproductive need for variety in these commonplace aspects of life. I don’t think its motives regarding me are friendly, though, or simple; it seemed to be testing me. Perhaps it will do the same with you humans at a later date.

We heard Namir and Dustin making noise down by the swimming area, and backtracked to watch. They couldn’t play pool in zero gee, so they had improvised a three-dimensional variant, more gentle and slow than the original. I could not quite understand the rules, which amused them. Dustin said they had to make up the rules as the game progressed, since nobody had ever played it before.

This may be important: Spy revealed that the Others have a similar activity. Much of their time, like yours, goes to individual contests that have only a symbolic relation to real events. The compact way it described those contests did not reveal much, except that the physical actions are not accomplished by individual Others; they are done by beings like Spy, biological constructs that are autonomous but obedient. And the point of the game is not to win, but to discover the rules.

We completed the circuit by investigating the lounge and work areas, where most humans spend the waking hours that are not given over to strictly biological activities.

When Spy began to put on its helmet, Paul came over to operate the air lock. One person can do it alone, but it’s simpler to have someone outside the lock pushing the buttons. He told Spy he would start to fire the steering jets at 0230; best to be inside by then.

Before the outer door was even open, Carmen and the others were bearing down on me with questions.

4

OTHER-NESS

Fly-in-Amber let us grill him for exactly one hour. Then he said he would submit a written report tomorrow and went off to rest.

Namir wondered aloud how he would do that. Lying down is irrelevant in zero gee, but they never actually lie down, anyhow. Hard to sort out all the legs.

Having a conversation was odd, too, without a physical up and down. By convention, most people tried to stay upright, but if you didn’t hang on to something, you could start to drift. Paul let himself go every which way, I supposed to demonstrate how natural the state was to an old space hand.

We were in the compromise lounge, and it was cold. I told Snowbird we had to move into the dining area. She said she would come along for a little while.

Namir had put a collection of ration bars in a plastic bag with a drawstring. I took a peanut butter one and passed the bag around.

Snowbird bounced gently off the refrigerator and grabbed onto the dining-room table with three arms. “You were not too pleased with what Fly-in-Amber remembered?” she said to me.

“We could wish for more. But we’ll have years.”

“The next time it visits, we’ll have plenty of questions,” Paul said.

“Can you establish a radio link?” Meryl asked. “Or would it be better not to?”

“No reason not to,” Namir said. He looked around with a stony expression. “It’s a good thing we have nothing to hide. They’re probably hearing every word we say.”

“Through vacuum?” I said.

“Any Earth spook could do it. Spy could have dropped a microtrans-mitter in here while it was walking around, but you could be even more direct than that—attach a sensor to the hull and have it transmit the vibrations it picks up.

“I don’t think that would work once the main drive starts up again,” Paul said. “The vibrations would overwhelm your signal.”

“Maybe so.” His expression didn’t change.

“They’d have something like S2N,” I said. It’s a spook program to coax out data that’s buried in noise.

That brought a little smile. “How on earth do you know about S2N?”

“I haven’t been on Earth since ’72,” I kidded him, “but you can learn a thing or two in orbit.” It was an unpleasant memory. Dargo Solingen had used S2N to spy on Paul and Red and me, overhearing our whispered conferences under loud music. A day later, our secrets were headlines on Earth, and the Others decided it was time for us all to die. Sort of a turning point in one’s life.

“What it said about the Others playing games,” Dustin said, “to find out the rules. I want to know more about that.”

“They might view us as contestants?” I said.

“Or pieces,” Namir said. “Pawns.”

“Anything but rivals,” Meryl said. “If they perceive us as a danger, we won’t even get close to them.”

I nodded. “No matter what Spy says, we have to assume it can destroy us if it thinks we present a danger to the Others.”

“We ought to figure out a way to talk to its buddy,” Paul said. “The speeded-up Other.”

“Hard to visualize a conversation,” I said. “Eight minutes passing for us, for every minute it experiences.”

“Say something, play a round of poker, then listen and respond,” Dustin said. “Spy will always be our intermediary anyhow.”

Namir nodded. “We could do something like that. We just have to find a way to present it so it appears to give them an advantage.”

“Home team?” Dustin said. “We agree to go over there to talk?”

“That would be our advantage,” Namir said. “Get a look inside their ship.”

“Wait,” I said. “We’re not fighting them. It’s the opposite. We want them to feel safe, cooperating with us.”

Namir laughed. “Like a mouse negotiating with a python.”

“She’s right,” Meryl said. “We can’t see it as a contest. We already know what the result would be, in a contest of strength, or will.”

“I don’t know about will,” Namir said.

Elza snorted. “Spoken like a true man. You have balls, darling, but they’re no advantage here.”

There was a loud ping from the control room. Paul launched himself in that direction, somersaulting in midair, and slipped through the door. I could hear him saying a few words, responding to the radio.

He walked back, with his gecko slippers, looking thoughtful. “Interesting coincidence. We have an invitation from ‘Other-prime.’ To come over for an audience with His Nibs.”

“All of us?” I asked.

“Just four. You and me and Namir, and Fly-in-Amber.”

“Any danger?”

“Well, we’ll want to be tethered down on the way over and back, in case of a course correction blip. I can fix that easily with a guideline. Once we’re over there . . .” He shrugged. “We’ll be at their mercy. Exactly as we are here.”

Paul put off the turnaround rotation, even though it probably would make little difference. He got a roll of cable and a couple of pitons, ice spikes, out of the workshop, and I went along as fetch- and-carry. It was the first time either of us had been outside in over three years; we’d all done it as a safety drill before the engine started. You wouldn’t want to do it during acceleration. Like being perched on top of a rocket. One misstep, and you’d slide off and drop forever.

Hammering in a piton wasn’t simple in zero gee. There was nothing to hold him to the “ground,” so after each swing, he would rotate away from the spike. He’d foreseen this, of course, and brought along a hand drill to make a preliminary hole.

I held a light for him but looked away from it to preserve my night vision. The sky was beautiful, the stars brighter than on Earth, the Milky Way a glowing billow across the darkness. I wished I knew the constellations well enough to tell whether they were different. Orion looked about the same. Paul pointed out where our Sun was. A bright yellow star, but there were brighter ones.

We had safety tethers attached to the air lock. After the piton was secured, Paul jetted across first, unreeling the guideline behind him. I followed him hand over hand, trying not to tangle the three lines.

The air lock on the starfish-shaped craft was a barely visible lip. Paul drilled and hammered a piton right in front of it. He secured the guideline to give it about three or four feet of slack; if you held on to it, you could walk, after a fashion, from one air lock to the other.

We returned to our own ship to relax for a few minutes and ensure we’d be going over with full air tanks and empty bladders. There was no strategy to discuss; we’d just keep our eyes and minds open.

Fly-in-Amber went over between us, moving with characteristic caution. I didn’t mind going slowly. It was a long way down.

When we got to the air-lock lip, Paul opened the radio circuit—I heard a slight click—but before he could say anything, Spy’s voice said, “Come in,” too loud and too clear. The lips parted to reveal a red glow.

“Returning to the womb,” I said. We went in, and the lips closed behind us. The small red light inside my helmet, an air warning, glowed green.

“Is this safe to breathe?” Paul asked on the radio.

“If I wanted to kill you,” Spy said, “I wouldn’t have to go to this much trouble. This is exactly the same pressure and composition as you breathe over there.” He stepped in out of the gloom and made a circle with one hand. “Paul, get your feet under you. I’m going to turn on some gravity.” As the light increased, so did the feeling of weight. It was very feeble, though; much less than Mars.

“What kind of gravity?” Paul asked.

“Triton. About one-twelfth Earth’s gravity; less than a third that of Mars.”

The room was organic in a mildly disgusting way. I had to take a colonoscopy before they would let me go to Mars, but they did let me watch, and the walls here looked like the inside of my large intestine then, pink and slippery. That gave me a whole new attitude toward the air lock. There was no furniture in the room, no windows except for two portholes, one on each side of the air-lock lips. Not a sound.

“I will introduce you to the Other- prime, though of course it cannot respond directly.” He touched the wall, and a dark oval appeared, like wet glass. We stepped forward.

I’m afraid I made a little noise of alarm. It was, in a word, a monster. A word that shouldn’t be in a xenobiologist’s vocabulary, but there you have it.

The creature was all chitin and claws, hard shiny brown with yellow streaks and blobs. Six smaller claws, about the size of human arms, circled the thorax. A seventh one, twice as big, curled over the top like a scorpion’s tail. A powerful serrated vise.

The biologist in me immediately wondered what was in its environment that required such armor and strength. “How big is it?”

“About twice human size,” Spy said. “It won’t hurt you, though. Too warm out here for it to survive.

“It is looking at you through me and wants to say something. I will relay the message in a few minutes.”

I studied the creature while we waited. It looked more like a huge crab than any other terrestrial animal. No crabs on Earth were that big, I thought, except maybe the long spindly ones that live on the bottom of the ocean, spider crabs. This guy could eat them alive.

Which again raises the question, why? None of our speculations about its environment, living in liquid nitrogen, considered the possibility of strong, fast predators.

Of course, it couldn’t react fast, which would explain the armor.

Maybe our assumptions about body chemistry were wrong. Temperature chauvinism. The fact that this species is slow doesn’t mean that all nitrogen-based cryogenic life-forms are slow.

So that’s the next question. If the environment has swift, strong predators, what did the Others evolve from, when a snail could run circles around them? Well, just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’re at the top of the food chain. There are plenty of environments on Earth where the crown of creation would be lunch.

It would be fascinating to investigate the Others’ planet and see whether it was biologically as complex as Earth. Mars never had been, or at least we’ve never found any fossils you could see without a magnifying glass.

Maybe the Others’ planet had a whole phylum of smaller and less complex crablike creatures, culminating in this beautiful example.

It was beautiful, in its way.

“It wants to congratulate you,” Spy said, “on having made it halfway. The odds are good you will continue on to Wolf 25 and arrive intact.

“It currently has no interest in destroying you. It reminds you of the obvious, though: this ship you are in has an autonomous intelligence that thinks faster than you can and won’t hesitate to destroy you, and us, whenever that might be necessary for the protection of our home planet.

“You are here on our sufferance. We are curious about you and wish to study you.”

“Why should you let us live?” Namir said. “You’ve already tried to destroy us once—why should we expect you will let us survive now?”

“Is that a question you wish me to ask Other-prime?”

“Yes,” Namir and Paul said simultaneously.

I wasn’t sure about that, and started to say, “Wait.” But it was too late when my lips formed the word.

What if it said, “You’re right,” and we all were simply doomed? It could flick us away like a speck.

Fly-in-Amber expressed my misgivings: “Perhaps that was not wise. We should preserve our options and not compel it to make a decision.”

“Now or later,” Namir said. “It will be easier to work with it if we know we have a chance of surviving.”

It occurred to me that the room had no smell of its own. Standing next to Paul, I could smell the peanuts on his breath. But there was nothing from the ambient environment. Martian rooms had a characteristic smell, like damp earth; nothing like that here. It was like a VR background with the smell turned off.

Other-prime answered in less than a minute. Probably a prepared response; the question was no surprise. “That is fair. We do not think the same way as you, but let me try to put this in human terms.

“You averted worldwide catastrophe by moving our device to where it could not harm you. There were other things that you could have done, but that was sufficient. If you wish, you may think of that as a test that your species has passed. Contacting me here would be the second test.

“How many tests might be necessary for your assurance, I cannot say. The home planet does not yet know anything, of course; it will be more than a decade before my last communication from your solar system reaches them.

“I can say that other races have attained this degree of rapport with us, and many of them were allowed to go on their way. Some were not.

“None who resorted to aggression were allowed to survive. You must have deduced this already.”

“That’s all?” Paul said after a few seconds.

“Yes.”

“I showed you around our facilities,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Will you reciprocate?”

“Not now. I will discuss this with Other-prime. Right now it is resting.”

“It takes a lot of energy for it to communicate with us?” I said.

“That is not something you need to know at this time. Be careful when you leave. There is no gravity on the other side of the air lock.”

Paul snorted. “ ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’ ”

“It will not do that,” Spy said. Fly-in-Amber nodded. Two species with but a single sense of humor.

5

TURNAROUND

I sat (or hovered) with Carmen, Paul, and Fly-in-Amber for an hour, with most of the others looking on, and we recorded all of our impressions from the half hour we were in the alien spacecraft. Of course we had all of the conversation in there recorded, too.

It was pretty straightforward. Even my Elza was a little optimistic. “It could have been a lot worse,” she said. “Even an ultimatum is a kind of communication.”

Paul, floating upside down, put on his slippers and did a gymnast’s tuck to land feetfirst. “I guess we’re safe as long as we remain interesting,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t anybody be boring.” He went back to the control room to start turnaround.

One of us did become less boring. Moonboy joined us and took off his earphones.

“Has the noise stopped?” Elza said.

He shook his head. “I’ve been sort of listening since the Spy one appeared. Are we in more danger now, or less?”

“Less, in a way,” she said. “I mean, they were always out there. They didn’t have to reveal themselves.”

“Why not reveal yourself to a specimen you’re studying?” I said.

He nodded slowly, looking at the space between me and Elza, not quite focusing, drifting slightly.

“Are you feeling better, Moonboy?” Carmen asked.

“I’m feeling more sane. For what that’s worth.” He looked directly at her, then away. “I’m sorry I’ve been . . .”

“You’ve been sick,” Elza said. Did she not see how transparently he was trying to manipulate her and Carmen? I wanted to tell him to put his earphones back on and go sit someplace out of the way. There’s a time and a place for everything, and for this it was months ago and billions of miles away.

Meryl gazed at her newly talkative mate in stunned silence. It was clearly time to leave them alone. “Good you’re feeling better.” I excused myself and geckoed over to the kitchen. From the pantry I got a tube of reconstituted gorgonzola paste and some crackers, tucked a squeeze bottle of wine under my arm, and stepped into the warmer human lounge. I asked it for quiet random Mozart and hovered near the bookcase, extracting the large book of Vermeer prints.

There’s a kind of art to situating yourself in weightlessness. The cheese, crackers, wine, and book were all hovering within an arm’s length. As long as I was careful in picking things up and replacing them, I wouldn’t have to chase them down. Carmen and Paul did it automatically, with months of experience, but I still had to think things through and move with caution.

While I hovered contemplating this and Vermeer’s faces, I gently collided with the bookcase. The cheese and wine and book all inched toward me. I was disoriented for a moment, then realized that Paul had begun turning the iceberg around. My satellite objects and I weren’t attached to anything, but our frame of reference was moving fast enough to go through a half circle in, what, thirty hours? This seemed faster than that. I’d ask the notebook later.

The cheese wasn’t bad, considering. The “wine” was pure plonk, but better than nothing.

So we were one- quarter of the way to the next wine shop or liquor store. That put the trip into a certain perspective. Or maybe halfway to dying, which put it into another.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Carmen had drifted up behind me, stopped herself with a toe to the wall. “We’ve started moving,” she said, her face at my level but sideways.

“Just noticed.” I handed her the wine bottle, and she squeezed a dash of it into her mouth, from an impressive distance.

“Owe you one. What about our silent partner?”

I looked over toward the other lounge, and he wasn’t there anymore. “I’ll wait and see. One swallow does not make a spring.”

I offered her the cheese and crackers, but she waved them away. “I gain weight in zero gee just thinking about food.”

That made me smile. “Weight?”

“Mass, inertia, whatever. Turns into weight.” She looked back to where Moonboy had been. “You’re not . . . not too sympathetic.”

“Aside from the fact that he broke my wife’s nose? That he’s acting like a sullen child?” She made a helpless shrug. I tried to choose my words carefully. “His madness, or behavior, is not his fault; I understand and agree with that. He was treated abominably as a child, and I wish his father could be punished for that.”

“Stepfather.”

“If this were a military operation, he would no longer be part of it. We can’t leave him behind or send him back—”

“Or kill him,” she said quietly.

“No. But we could lock him up. Take him out of the equation.”

“That would destroy him, Namir.”

“I believe it would. But his is one life versus billions.”

She shook her head. “If I could wave a magic wand and make him disappear, I would. But imprisoning him would affect us as well as him.”

“You don’t think it affects us to have him moping around like some demented . . .” She flinched, and I lowered my voice. “He’s already wearing us down. Three more years?”

We’d had this argument before, from various angles. Her response surprised me. “It could be a long three years. Let’s see how he acts when we have gravity again. See whether this recovery lasts.”

“I’m glad you can see it that way.”

She smiled and touched my shoulder. “Don’t want two crazy men aboard.” She kicked off from the bookcase and floated toward the kitchen.

6

ADJUSTMENTS

I was jangled but way behind on sleep, despite the sweet nap with Paul, so I took a half pill and went zombie for about eight hours. When I woke up, Paul was snoring upside down in a corner, naked. Zero gee can do funny things to a penis, but I decided his need for sleep trumped my curiosity. And he might be low on energy. I closed the door quietly and drifted toward the gym, where Moonboy was tumbling.

It may have been weightlessness as much as the appearance of Spy that had shaken Moonboy out of his sullen isolation, into impressive gymnastics. He’s Paul’s age, but was bouncing around like a kid.

Well, not exactly like a kid. There was an element of grim determination in his constant motion, getting a maximum of exercise while honing his zero-gee gymnastic skills. I had seen him studying Paul, then trying to duplicate the ways he got from place to place. He was never as graceful but became almost as fast and accurate.

Not a particularly useful life skill, unless he planned a midlife career as a laborer in orbit. But I was hoping all the jumping around was a kind of transition back to a normal life. Or “normal,” in quotation marks.

Meryl was watching him from a distance as he practiced floor-to-ceiling, ceiling-to-floor rolls. I floated over to join her.

“He’s getting good,” I said.

“That he is.” She didn’t look at me.

“Have you talked?”

“Said hello.” She took a breath and let it out. “What should I say to him? I mean really.”

“Welcome back?”

“I don’t know that he is back. I’m not sure where he’s been.” There were beads of tears on her eyelashes. She rubbed her eyes and left wet spots on her cheeks.

“Maybe you want to wait until the gravity comes back.”

“Maybe.” Our thighs touched, and she put a hand on my knee. “You’re so lucky with Paul.”

“Yes. But Elza will get him, too, sooner or later.” Why did I say that?

She smiled. “Probably. She’ll be fucking Spy before we get to the planet.”

“A milestone for Homo sapiens.”

“What’s hard, one thing that’s hard, is not having a place for us to go back to. While he was shut away in his own box, I could handle that. But are we supposed to pretend that it’s over now; he got it out of his system?”

“No, of course not. I think you have to get him to talk about it.”

“Get him to talk about anything, first. Then I could work it around to ‘say, are you still crazy?’ ”

“You can’t . . . it’s a pity you can’t have Elza mediate.”

She smiled, a tight line. “She’s the only one with a degree. But it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“He might hit her again.”

“I might ask him to.” She grinned. “Just as therapy. For both of us.”

I was feeling hungry and instinctively checked my wrist. The tattoo had showed the wrong time since we passed the orbit of Jupiter, but habits die hard.

“It’s eight,” Meryl said. “Had dinner?”

We put on slippers and walked, like grown-ups, to the kitchen. Microwaved packets of empañadas and supposedly Mexican vegetables. I went back to the middle of the garden and picked a sweet red pepper and chopped it up, feeling like Namir. Master zero-gee chef, not losing a single piece of pepper or finger.

“I’d kill for a cup of coffee,” she said. “Hot coffee.” The drink bags and squeeze bottles all had DO NOT MICROWAVE on them. So far nobody had put that to the test. Better keep an eye on Moonboy.

“So all he’s said is hello?”

“Some politenesses. He said he was better, and we could talk later. It is later, though, and he’s . . .” She laughed a little snort. “He’s graduated from village idiot to whirling dervish.”

She opened the seam on her vegetables a bit and squirted in some hot sauce. She held it out to me, but I declined, knowing its potentiating effect. If I could hold off shitting until we had gravity, I would be a much happier space tourist, and I probably wasn’t alone. You can get used to those things, but you also get un-used to them.

(I had a sudden flashback of the day we’d learned to go in, or into, a zero-gee toilet, with its helpful little eye-in-the-bowl. Not a part of myself I’d ever expected to observe in action.)

“Gravity might help him.” Repeating myself.

“Or it might put him back in his cocoon.” She was using chopsticks, and they worked better than my spoon, which tended to launch bits of food into my face or beyond. There would be some cleaning up when we restarted.

After we began eating, the object of our discussion headed our way, perhaps having heard the Pavlovian microwave bell. He bounced from the recycler wall to the bean trellis, off the side of the Martian quarters, and through both lounges, arriving at a reasonable speed surrounded by a nimbus of male sweat, not too unpleasant.

“Mexican!” He went to the fridge and started to rummage.

“In the pantry,” Meryl said. “Under E, for empañadas.”

“Sí, sí; muchas gracias.” He found the packet and put it in the microwave, and floated in front of it upside down. “I’m not interrupting?”

“Just getting a bite,” she said, “but you can’t eat with us unless your feet are in the right direction.”

“Comprendo.” When the food was ready, he brought it over with a slow reverse roll. We were eating at the table, even though there was no reason to actually set the food down on it.

He sprayed hot sauce into the packet and speared the empañadas with a fork, more efficient than either of us. Without preamble, he said, “Have you thought about Spy not being what he claims to be?”

That was not a big stretch. “In what way?”

“Maybe he’s not an alien at all, hmm? Maybe he’s always been here, waiting for turnaround. To test us.”

“Who?” Meryl said. “Who’s testing us?”

“Earth. Testing our loyalty.”

That sounded bizarre enough. “I don’t get it. How could anybody be disloyal?”

“Be in the pay of the Others?” Meryl offered.

“Well, you know. Not pay.”

“No, I don’t know. What?”

He finished chewing, swallowed, and set his food packet floating just over the table. He folded his hands over his chest. “I’ll spell it out.”

“I’m all ears,” she said.

“First, how possible is it that they could chase us eleven light-years, constantly accelerating, and wind up right here at the exact right time—with no evidence of having used any fuel? Without our detecting them?”

We did detect something, I thought; Paul had mentioned an anomaly in the proximity circuits. But I let it be.

“How much more likely is it that they’ve been here all along? That the supposed ‘alien’ was already installed before we got to the iceberg? Tell me it couldn’t be done.”

“Okay,” she said. “It couldn’t be done.”

“Even if it could, why would they bother?”

“Like I say, to test our loyalty.”

“That’s . . .” She didn’t say crazy. “That makes no sense.”

“It seems awfully elaborate,” I said. “They built this alien-looking spaceship, and Spy, and a convincing Other, and kept them hidden for years, to trot them out at turnaround, to see how we react?”

“You’ve got it. That’s it exactly.”

“Moonboy.” Meryl’s voice quavered.

“Where did they hide them for three years?” I persisted.

“Out in plain sight. No one’s gone out to look till now.”

“But Paul can look outside anytime he wants. Or anyone who goes into the control room.”

“Oh, Carmen, don’t be naive. It’s not like looking out a window. Paul sees an electronic image that’s supposed to match what’s out there. They could fix it so he wouldn’t see the ship until the time was right.”

“And they’d do all that just to check our loyalty? Who is this ‘they’ anyhow?”

“Earth!” He was suddenly even more intense. “They never have trusted the four of us from Mars.”

“They chose us for this,” Meryl said.

“And sent along three spies!” He glared at Meryl, then at me. “Could it be more plain?”

I stared right back. “Something’s pretty plain.”

“Three spies. One seduces me and tries to play with my head, my memories of childhood. One attacks me physically, unprovoked. The third has worked himself into a position of authority, from which he can poison your minds against me. Is any of that not true?”

“Listen to me.” I took his hand in both of mine. “Elza tries to seduce everybody; that’s her nature. Dustin hit you because you fucked his wife, then broke her nose. Namir is a career diplomat and a natural leader, and I don’t think he’s ever tried to influence my opinion of you.”

“Considering that you also fucked his wife,” Meryl said, “and broke her nose, I’d say he’s been a model of objectivity.”

He jerked his hand away. “You’ve both bought it. Bought the whole thing. Or you’re in on it, too.” He kicked away from the table so hard he hit his head on the ceiling with a thump. He drifted back to the fridge and kicked off from it, to drift away over the crops.

After a bit, Meryl picked up his lunch. “Want some of this?”

“Too much hot sauce.”

She nodded but reached into it with her chopsticks. “Guess you can get used to anything.”

7

ABOUT TIME

Humans are always talking about heaven, even if they claim not to believe such a place exists. I have the feeling that it’s not just metaphor or semantic shorthand, but rather an internal state that they are forever grasping for but never attain.

I have come close to heaven, for a Martian, these past few days—free of the ship’s constant crushing acceleration. This morning it began again, and while I wait for the pool to fill up with water, I will distract myself with writing these notes.

Let go of the stylus and it falls to the floor. Depressing. But I will enjoy the water.

The next time we are weightless will be when we come to the planet of the Others. I wish there were some way we could just be there now. What good is science if it can’t do a simple thing like that?

Of course, that day might be the last day of our lives. But if so, then let it be. Whatever death is, it won’t include gravity. Or acceleration.

I could tell that the humans were disappointed, that I seemed to have learned so little about Spy and the Other-prime. Not everything I learned can be expressed in human terms, though. Can we trust them? Yes and no. Do they understand humans? Not as well as I do—but better than I do, in some large way.

Language is a hindrance. Having to write this down means leaving out much of what is important. There is nothing close to a one-to-one correspondence between my natural perceptions and this written thing, forced through the filter of human language. There are no human words, literally, for much of what Spy expressed while it was investigating ad Astra. Some basic assumptions about time and causality, for instance—I don’t know whether they are “actual,” from a human point of view, or just an alien (to them) way of expressing commonplace observations.

How could something as basic to reality as time be different for two different races? The dissimilarity must be just in the perception, or maybe expression, of reality. Time must be, independent of the creature experiencing it.

It was curious about details of your social and personal relationships. I complained that it should have been talking to Snowbird about such things; it said that it would, eventually, but it wanted to “triangulate,” a human term it had to explain to me, between its observations and mine.

This is clear now: it knows more about humans, and human nature, than I do after living side by side with you for years. The Other-prime has been observing you remotely for tens of thousands of years, though like us has only been monitoring human communication since the invention of radio.

I didn’t know this when I led Spy through the ship when it first contacted me, and if I were human I would feel embarrassed at the naive answers I gave to its calculated questions. I suppose it was satisfying its curiosity about Martians as well as humans.

Snowbird says the water is deep enough.

8

LOOSE CANNON

Am I the only creature aboard this boat that’s glad to have gravity back? Maybe the Jew in me needs to suffer.

I suppose one reason I like it is the aging athlete’s anxiety about keeping in shape, not slipping back. I can use the treadmill harness in zero gee and work up a sweat, pretending to run, but my legs tell me they haven’t really worked. Which is probably unscientific nonsense.

Once we started decelerating, Moonboy settled into black depression again, no surprise, and again stopped communicating. Most of us are probably relieved. He was not a wellspring of light banter during zero gee. Unless you’re amused by paranoia.

He hasn’t taken any meals since we started decelerating, though I set a place for him. He may be raiding the pantry odd hours, but Elza thinks not. She’s afraid for his mental state. Anorexia can precede suicide.

He sits plugged into his keyboard, and every now and then touches the silent keys. Carmen says she doesn’t think he’s actually composing; she glanced at the screen while he was working, and the page number hasn’t changed in two weeks.

I am not so much concerned for his well-being as I am afraid that he might fly off the handle and do some kind of irreversible damage. Paul has similar misgivings. When I broached the subject, he confided that the control room is kept locked now, and will not respond to Moonboy’s thumbprint. I would be inclined to go further and keep him sequestered in his room. Drugs could keep him from becoming suicidally depressed, and might even give him a measure of happiness—which I think he will never attain otherwise.

If we put it to a vote—shall we lock Moonboy up?—it would be a tie, along gender lines. Elza would be against it because it would be admitting clinical defeat (and because she can’t deny her role in precipitating his crisis); Carmen is by nature too humane, and Meryl, alone, loves him and wants to think he will grow, or snap, out of it. Dustin and Paul and I see him as a loose cannon that needs to be tied down, for everyone’s protection. I think Fly-in-Amber would agree with us, though I’m not sure about Snowbird.

So I suppose nothing will be done until Moonboy himself forces the issue. I’m not quite Machiavellian enough to set him up, but if he strays too close to the edge I might give him a nudge.

When I was in school, the consensus among medical people seemed to be that all mental illness would eventually be treatable by drugs, that psychiatry would be reduced to a systematic analysis of symptoms—identify the syndrome and prescribe its nostrum. In a way, I’m glad that the species has turned out to be more complex than that. Though I would not mind having a pill that could take Moonboy’s stepfather out of his life. And whatever else it is that’s turned him into such a liability. (I remember at first thinking that he was the one of the four that I would like, since he was unpredictable and amusing.)

Although we are in actuality going slower each day, it feels emotionally like we’re rolling downhill. Committed now, in a way we weren’t before turnaround. Wolf 25 or bust.

What do we mean by “now,” really? It’s odd to be compelled to think in relativistic terms. At this moment, the creatures on Wolf 25 (the planet circling its dark companion, technically) are unaware of our existence. We’re twelve light-years away, so in twelve years they will be able to observe the raging matter/antimatter beacon of our braking engine.

If things have gone according to plan—you could also say “if things are going to be going according to plan”—our prerecorded explanation of what we are attempting to do will have preceded the beacon by exactly one hundred days.

Their response to our pacifistic message might be to blow us out of their sky as soon as the beacon appears. If they did that, when would it happen? How long do we have before we know they haven’t killed us?

If we take the worst possible case, that they attack the instant they see us, their response can’t come faster than the speed of light. So, if my notebook is right, we will meet our doom no sooner than three years and some weeks.

Unless they figure out a way around the speed of light. Then we could be doomed any old time. As we could, supposedly, any time Other-prime decides the universe would be better off without us.

So it’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. I can do something about the eat and drink part. Tonight it will be meat loaf without meat, served with wine that’s not wine, all washed down with water distilled from our various body wastes. Be merry.

9

RELATIVITY IS RELATIVE?

On Spy’s fourth trip into ad Astra, it dropped a bombshell. For some reason it chose me to tell it to, not exactly the most technically sophisticated woman aboard.

Spy had said it wanted to talk to us one at a time, so we were sitting on the floor in “the onion field,” the part of the garden where we cultivated scallions and garlic.

We’d been talking about human history and customs, and as always, I was trying to extract information about the Others in return. I asked it about the voyage out here with Other-prime. Did they have anything like a social relationship? What did they do to pass the time?

“Carmen, there was no actual ‘time’ to pass. We knew in what part of space-time you would be turning around, and we just went there. Went here, approximately.”

“Wait. You just went here? Without traveling the twelve light- years in between?”

“Of course we traveled the distance. We got here. But there was no reason for the journey to have any duration, so it didn’t.”

“You were on Triton one instant, and here the next?”

“That’s what it feels like, but of course time isn’t shut down; there’s no way around relativity. But time is not the same thing as duration. This universe is twelve years closer to its end. But we didn’t have to experience the passage of the years.”

“You mean . . . your spaceship is some kind of time machine as well?”

“No, not really.” He seemed cross, exasperated. “This is like trying to explain to a bird how an elevator works. This is the way we go to the top of a building. We don’t have to flap our wings.

“Your own spaceship is a time machine; you compressed twelve years into less than four. What we do is no more magical than that. We just have better control over it; we’re more economical and efficient.”

I was completely out of my depth here. “Let me get Paul. I don’t understand—”

“Paul wouldn’t understand better. Like you, like any other human, he misunderstands the nature of time. His mathematics just compounds the error, because it’s already wrong before ‘one plus one equals two.’

“It’s time I had a talk with all of you, or perhaps all except Moonboy. Can you arrange that in about one hour?”

“Sure. It wouldn’t take an hour.”

“I want to spend an hour looking at your library, the paper printed books. This may be my last chance.”

“What? What’s going to happen?”

“I said ‘may,’ not ‘will.’ Shall we say 15:21 in the compromise lounge? I want to talk to the Martians, as well.”

“Okay . . . what should I say you want to talk about? Our ignorant mathematics?”

“Partly. Partly your survival.” He turned, and walked toward the lounge, presumably the “library” corner.

I sat for a minute, collecting my thoughts. Then I pinged Paul and told him what was going on. He said he’d make a general announcement and asked what I thought Spy was up to. “That’s as close as they’ve come to an actual threat.”

“I know.” My voice cracked. I wiped cold sweat from my palms. “See you there.”

I made a cup of tea and took it back to our room. I’d just begun a letter to my mother but couldn’t think of anything to say. Dear Mom, my survival was just threatened by a robot from another planet. What have you done when that happens?

I wondered what Spy meant by “our” survival. The people on this ship or humanity in general? Dear Mom, you may have only twelve years to live. Unfortunately, I wrote this twelve years ago.

Jacket and scarf and knitted socks. Might as well be nice and toasty for the occasion. I went over at precisely 15:20 and sat on the couch next to Paul.

Everybody but Moonboy was there, including both Martians. Rare to see them together outside of their tub. I guess if you bathed with someone twenty hours a day, you might avoid him the rest of the time.

Spy came in exactly on time and stood in the door. He was wearing his space suit, holding the helmet. “Other-prime has decided that we should precede you to Wolf 25. We have learned enough about you to help the Others there deal with the problem. So we will leave this iceberg and speed on to our mutual destination. We should arrive about eight months before you.”

I didn’t know whether to feel relieved. We wouldn’t have them looking over our shoulders, but then we wouldn’t learn anything more about them, either.

“We are going to impose something upon you that may be unpleasant, but Other-prime feels it is necessary. Your group is unstable in various ways, and there is a real possibility that not all of you, or perhaps none of you, will survive the rest of your trip.

“To keep this from happening, we will cause you to travel the way we do. The time it takes you to go the twelve light-years will not be affected, but the duration of the trip will be negligible. I just explained this to Carmen.”

“You did, but it made no sense.”

“Do you remember about the elevator and the bird?”

I looked around at everybody and shook my head. “You said that describing it would be like telling a bird how an elevator works.”

“Yes. How you can get to the top of a building without flapping wings. It would never understand. But that would not affect reality.”

“Of course not.”

“What would happen if you put the bird into the elevator and took it to the roof?”

“It wouldn’t like it,” Paul said.

“No,” Spy said, still looking at me. “But it would get to the rooftop.”

It turned to Paul. “It will happen tomorrow morning. I will call you a half hour ahead of time. People should be strapped in, including Moonboy.”

“Will I be shutting the engine down?”

“Not for another twelve years. Objective time. That would be about three years and three months in your decelerating frame of reference. Seconds, in your new one. It will all be clear.”

Clear to whom, I wondered. To Paul? “Spy, I don’t understand. You and I were sitting down in the garden, talking about, I don’t know, marriage . . .”

“Social connections. Friendships.”

“And now suddenly we’re going to be the birds in your elevator, flapping around and going crazy, I assume. What happened?”

“The Other-prime contacted me and said it was ready.”

“What if we aren’t ready?” Paul said, tense. “This is a pretty big deal.”

“Just have them strapped in, Paul. You will find it an interesting ride.”

“Wait,” Namir said, and it was like a command. “Suppose we don’t want to take your shortcut? Maybe we’d rather continue as planned and have those years to prepare for meeting your people.”

“They aren’t mine, and they aren’t people,” Spy said. “If all of you would prefer the old slow way, tell me now. I will ask the Other-prime.”

Meryl spoke up first. “Not me. The sooner the better.”

Dustin nodded slowly. “Me, too.”

“Paul?” I said.

He tugged on his ear, a sign that he was conflicted. “Spy . . . we know our technology has worked this far. I can understand Namir’s reluctance to try something new and untested. Just on your say-so.”

“I won’t argue with you.” It was looking at Namir. “But technology is not involved at all. It’s just that the way you experience time is connected to the way you think about time, and that is flawed.”

“And you can change that?” I said. “The way we think about time?”

“No, no, no. The bird does not have to build the elevator to ride in it.”

He moved his gaze to Paul. “What it is . . . Let me put this as simply as possible. We are—or you and the Other-prime are—here together in a definite place in space and time. In a simple Einsteinian way. Twelve years from now, you will again share a place in the space-time continuum. Share a point. So what connects those two points?”

I remembered that from school. “A geodesic,” I said, simultaneously with Paul and Namir.

“Exactly,” it said, and looked at the two Martians. “A geodesic in space-time is something like a line drawn between two points on a map.”

Fly-in-Amber sketched a line with his finger. “The shortest natural distance.”

Spy nodded. “True and not true. There’s only one shortest line between the two points, but there are many geodesics. It gets complicated if you have gravity and acceleration.”

“But there’s no magic wand,” Paul said. “You’re talking about going from here to there, a really long distance, with no time elapsing. That’s not possible, no matter how fast you go.”

I think that was the only time I ever saw Spy laugh. “Tell that to a photon. Or tell it to me tomorrow. Which will be twelve years from now, after a trip of no duration.”

“Unless we refuse your offer,” Namir said.

“Like the bird refusing to enter the elevator? I’m afraid you’re already in the net. As I said, I could ask the Other-prime to set you free, but at least two of you do want to take the shortcut. How about you, Carmen?”

“Wait. What if something goes wrong en route? The hydroponics spring a leak or the ship’s guidance system lets a pebble through? We won’t be able to deal with it.”

“Nothing will happen—literally nothing, because with no duration there are no events. If there were two independent events, there would be a measurable time between them.”

My head was spinning. “There’s no hurry, is there? I want to hear Paul’s take on it, and Namir’s.”

“Paul’s argument is based on ignorance and Namir’s is just fear of losing control. But no, there is no hurry. Just let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”

“Whereupon you will do whatever you want,” Namir said. Spy smiled and turned to go. “Won’t you?”

“Just let me know,” Spy repeated. Paul followed him, to operate the air lock, and nobody spoke until he came back.

“Spy’s wrong,” Namir said. “It’s not about control. It’s just about understanding what’s going on.”

“Which is apparently impossible for mere humans,” I said.

“What do you think, Paul?” Meryl said.

He sat down heavily and picked up his drink and stared into it. “I think we’d better get ready for an elevator ride.”

Ultimately, even Namir agreed that going along with Spy and the Other-prime would be the wisest course, not only to maximize our own chances for survival, but also to establish a record of cooperation before we met the Others. And abandoned ourselves to their mercy.

We went through the habitat getting things ready for zero gee; Spy had warned us that we would be in orbit, not accelerating, when the “elevator ride” was over.

Paul led us through the seldom- used corridor that connected the lander to the rest of ad Astra, basically two air locks with a silver corridor in between. A handy metaphor for any number of things—birth, rebirth, death. Perhaps robotic excretion, the life-support system that had sustained us for years expelling us with relief.

We got all strapped in and sat in a stew of collective anxiety, thick enough to walk on. Paul fussed with his controls and came back to crouch next to me, holding hands, for a couple of minutes. He was able to smile, but then he’s an official hero figure, and has to.

He returned to his place and strapped in, and in a few minutes said over the intercom, “We should be about a minute away.” Then, “Let’s count down the last ten seconds together. Ten, nine, eight . . .”

We never got to seven. The ship was suddenly flooded with sunlight, from the right—and on the left, my porthole was filled with a nearby planet, resembling Mars but more gray.

I felt gray.

There was no physical sensation as such. Only what you had to describe as deep loss, or longing, or sorrow. Some people were weeping. I bit my lips and kept tears away, and tried to sort out what was happening.

I unbuckled the harness and looked back down the aisle. Familiar faces contorted with all-consuming grief.

Except for two. Moonboy’s expression was blank, catatonia.

So was Namir’s.

10

RAMPAGE

Elza’s face kept swimming out of darkness, into focus, then I would fade back to Tel Aviv, reliving the worst time of my life in every dreadful detail. It seemed like weeks of nightmares, but it was less than a day.

I was in my room, surrounded by images from the Louvre. Watteau’s Jupiter and Antiope, Regnault’s The Three Graces, Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, and Gericault’s terrible The Raft of the Medusa. That one persisted, all the dead and dying.

Elza had just given me a shot, and she was cutting away a tape that bound my left wrist. My right one was sore.

“You’ll be all right now?”

“What’s . . . the wrists?”

“You were hurting yourself. Pulling out hair.”

My hand went to my head. Almost bald, sore in places.

“All that loose hair in zero gravity. It was a mess; I used the vacuum razor. You’re a little bit tranquilized. I didn’t think you wanted to sleep anymore, though.”

“No. Please.” I felt my head. “The razor with the vacuum attachment?”

“It looks nice. Evened up.”

“Was everybody . . . no. Other people can’t have been affected as strongly as I was.”

“Nobody. Well, you can’t tell about Moonboy. But nobody else passed out. It could be your age.” She caressed my head. “Spy supposedly didn’t know what caused it, but it wasn’t just a human thing. Both the Martians were uncomfortable.”

I took a squeeze from her water bottle. “Memories. I felt trapped inside memories.”

“You have some sad ones. Worse than the rest of us.”

“Not sadness.” I had to be honest with her, of all people. “It was guilt. Murder.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You mustn’t feel guilt for being a soldier. We’ve gone over that pretty well.”

“Not that. Long after that. I . . . never told you.” I hesitated, aware that the drugs were loosening my tongue. Then it came out in a rush.

“It was right after Gehenna; right after I found my mother dead. I raced back into Tel Aviv, putting a list together in my mind.

“My Working Group Seven had been formed in response to a persistent rumor that a large-scale act of terrorism was imminent, one that couldn’t be traced to a single political or geographical entity because it was not centralized at all. We had a couple of chemically induced confessions that indicated the group was large but divided into small independent cells.

“Anti-Semitism doesn’t have borders, and in fact some of the people we were looking at were Jews themselves, with strong opposition to the current power structure. Current at that time, liberal.

“I privately suspected that two or even three of the people in my office were moles, making sure that we were distracted by false leads. The one woman in whom I had confided this was the first person I saw die, a few minutes after we heard the bombs that were the second phase of the poisoning.

“As I raced down alleys and bumped across playgrounds and parks—none of the regular roads were passable—I was making a list of people I had to talk to that day.

“Because anyone who was not stunned that day was guilty. Ipso facto. And . . . there were so many dead bodies lying around that a few more would not raise any suspicions.”

She was behind me, rubbing my shoulders. “How many, Namir?”

“Eleven that day. I tracked them down one by one, along with seven or eight I looked at and spared.”

“You just shot them in cold blood?”

“No. Bullets would look suspicious. I got them alone and strangled them. Then they looked pretty much like all the other corpses.”

“There were more than those eleven? Other days?”

“Six had flown out that morning, including three from my office. To London, Cairo, and New York. In London and Cairo I used my hands. The ones in New York I did shoot, with a pickup gun I’d had for years. Then tossed it in the Hudson.”

“Like the .357 in the shoe box at home?”

“Yeah, behind the drywall. You are such a snoop.”

“It’s in the job description.” Holding on to my shoulder, she floated around in front of me. “Cold-blooded murder isn’t.”

“My blood was not cold that day. Those days.”

“Do you still think they were guilty?”

“I think now that two, at least, were not. But since we have never been able to pin down the organization responsible, I can’t ever know for sure.”

I closed my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you, burdened you with it. I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Not even Dustin?”

“No. He knows I’ve done some wet work that was not formally sanctioned. He doesn’t know how many, or the fact that I was on a rampage.”

“I won’t tell him. Or anyone. They killed your mother. And four million others. Including the seventeen they killed using you as an intermediary.”

“That’s about the way I rationalize it. But it is a rationalization. Deep down, I know I’ve committed the one sin that can’t be reversed. Or forgiven.”

“God would forgive you. If there were a God.”

I smiled at her. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”

She held me to her softness for a warm moment, her cheek against mine. “There’s another problem,” she whispered. “We seem to be at the wrong planet.”

“Wrong what?”

“Show you.” She pushed away from me gently and floated down to the bed, as I rose to the ceiling. She pushed a couple of buttons on the wall there, and the paintings faded, replaced by a huge dun circle, a planet that resembled Mars. Clear atmosphere, a wisp of cloud here and there. No obvious craters, though; I wasn’t sure what that meant scientifically. Weathering, I supposed.

“We aren’t at Wolf 25?”

“We are, apparently—just not at the planet of the Others. Another one in the same system. Much closer in.”

“Why?”

“Spy said we’re going down tomorrow. Until then, we’re free to speculate.”

11

DEAD WORLD

Some of the humans, like Paul and Namir, were disappointed or apprehensive when they learned that we were not going down to the planet’s surface in our own lander, carried twenty-four light-years for that purpose, but instead were to go down in Spy’s “starfish” spaceship. I was relieved. Going to and from a planetary surface in a rocket is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it is “the devil we know,” as Carmen put it. We had no idea how the starfish worked, but the Others had probably been using them for a long time.

We had to cross over to their ship holding on to a cable, as before, and Snowbird did not enjoy the experience any more than I had the first time. This wasn’t in cool starlight, either. We had the huge disc of the ashen planet looming beneath us and the brilliant glare of Wolf 25 moving overhead.

Moonboy was not able to cross by himself. Paul and Namir carried him over like a deadweight.

Spy had told us that we couldn’t pronounce the name of the planet in any Martian or human languages, but that it translated to “Earth” pretty accurately. We might call it “Home” to reduce confusion.

“Whose home?” Carmen asked.

“Allow me to be mysterious,” Spy said, though the answer was obvious, if the details were not.

The air inside the ship was oppressively hot and humid, probably comfortable for humans. When we took off, though, the gravity was light, about normal for Mars.

It was not acceleration-induced “gravity,” either. It didn’t change direction or strength when the ship took off.

A circle opened in the floor of the craft, like a large window. We got an interesting view of the engine side of the iceberg/asteroid, which seemed to have diminished by about a third, in regular concentric grooves where the automatic ice- mining machines had gnawed their way around.

The landing was as smooth as the humans say their space elevator is, no lurching or vibration. As we approached the ground, though, the gravity increased to about that of Earth. Spy apologized to the two of us but said there was no way around it.

We approached the ground very fast. Snowbird and a few others reacted, but I assumed the Others hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to smash us into a planet. It was too fast, though, to get a good idea of what surrounded the landing site. Just a hint of regular architectural structure, and we were on the ground, and the floor window irised shut.

“The abrupt landing was necessary because of the physics involved,” Spy said. “We will observe from low altitude later.”

It had warned us that we would have to “suit up” before we left the ship, so Snowbird and I had not removed our footgear, and it was only a matter of donning four gloves and letting the protective cloaks form around our bodies. So we were the first two out the air lock, the human crew following by a few minutes.

Carmen would later say that it was “beautiful in a horrible tragic way,” which juxtaposes three contradictory ideas in what I realize is a standard human ironic frame. About beauty I have no opinion, and horribleness and tragedy are just dramatic observations about the fact that the universe runs downhill.

This is what I saw: on a plain that extended to the horizon in every direction, there were regularly spaced objects that we were told had once been space vehicles. The outer shells had mostly been eroded or corroded away; a lacy framework of some more durable metal remained, a gleaming cage for more corrosion within.

I wondered whether everybody else was thinking what I was thinking: The fleet that humans were building to protect the Earth might as well be paper airplanes.

“This was an invasion fleet,” Spy said. “It was poised to attack the planet of the Others.”

“How long ago?” Paul asked.

“It was about thirty thousand of your years ago. The planet was more hospitable to you then, more like Earth than Mars. A world with plentiful liquid water and oxygen; you could have survived here without protection.”

“We couldn’t now?” Carmen said.

“That’s correct. All the plant life died. Things oxidized and dried out.”

“And how did that happen?” Namir asked.

“Things got very hot for a short time. When it cooled down, it left mostly ash and carbon dioxide.”

“The Others fried the planet,” Namir said.

“I think ‘baked’ would be more accurate. They raised the surface temperature, as I said. I think for only a few minutes.”

“Enough to kill everybody,” Namir said.

“Every thing, I think. There is nothing alive now.”

“This is what they wanted to do to Earth,” Carmen said.

“Not quite as extreme. Though few humans would have survived.”

“The ones on Mars would have,” I said.

“The Others knew that,” Spy said. “And eventually they might have wound up coming here.”

“And met the same fate,” Namir said.

“Who can say? Let’s return to the ship.”

“Wait,” Paul said. “Can’t we look around for a while?”

“First I want you to see something else. Rather, the Others want you to. They suggested that before you meet with them, you have the proper context.”

“If they want to convince us that they can destroy us all, here and on Earth, it isn’t necessary,” Paul said. “We knew that before the plans for ad Astra were drawn up.”

“I’m not sure exactly what they want to do. Our communications are necessarily slow and indirect. I do know what they directed me to show you. You may have time for exploration later.”

We filed back through the air lock into the starfish, and it rose slowly and hovered. The engine made noise, a barely audible rushing sound. It had been silent, dropping from orbit.

We rose high enough for the horizon to show a slight curve. The humans all gasped at the sight, though it was not surprising. Thousands of the ruined ships stood in precise ranks. It was an impressive display of destruction, though I was more impressed by the idea that they could raise the temperature of an entire planet enough to cause this to happen.

Before we sped away, I counted 4,983 of the relics, though presumably there were more over the horizon.

“These creatures were of course intelligent,” Spy said, “and they knew that aggression against the Others might result in their extinction. So they left a record nearby.” As it spoke, we descended toward a glittering golden dome.

“One index of their mastery over the physical universe is this hemisphere of absolutely pure gold, more than a meter thick and almost five hundred meters in diameter. Its roundness is mathematically perfect to within a millionth of a meter.”

“I wonder why they would bother to do that,” Paul said.

“To show that they could,” Namir said.

“That’s probably true,” Spy said. “It also gives the structure some resistance to certain weapons. What’s inside is more interesting, though.”

The ship floated down to rest next to the dome, the window closing as we approached the ground. The humans had been told not to remove anything but their helmets, so they put them back on, and we were through the air lock in minutes. They left Moonboy resting behind.

We picked our way over an expanse of weathered rubble. Whatever else had been here was made of less durable stuff than gold.

The dome did not have an air lock; just a door. There were unambiguous symbols incised in the metal, lines of dark dots that pointed toward a dark square. When we approached it, the square opened.

I was second to enter, after Spy, so I knew that it had been dark inside, and lights glowed on as we entered. The light was bright and warm, the same spectrum as Wolf 25.

It was a display, like a museum. There were no words, written or spoken. It was obviously designed for any audience capable of getting here and standing at the door.

In the center was a large globe of a planet that resembled Earth—more water than land, with polar caps and clouds.

“This is what the planet used to look like?” I said unnecessarily. Spy nodded and led us to the first display case.

This must have been the race that built the fleet of spaceships. The exhibits showed what they looked like, inside and out, and demonstrated various aspects of their lives.

They looked very much like us, with four legs, but only two arms, which at first made them uncomfortable to look at. They also had tails, which made them morphologically similar to the Other-prime, and presumably all the Others.

The first display was kinetic, disassembling a model of the creature, then reassembling it one organ group at a time, which was also uncomfortable to watch but no doubt educational. Likewise, the next display showed mating and budding, processes almost exactly like ours, but strange to watch.

Then it moved from the strictly biological into social, showing a thing like a playground, or the humans’ creche on Mars. Lots of immature ones living together under the supervision of two adults.

This was followed by six similar play scenes, with different details, like the background scenery or the level of technology in the rooms. In two of them the creatures were colored reddish or blue, rather than black.

Carmen figured it out. “They’re different cultures,” she said. “They’re showing the different ways their young are handled, around the planet.” That interpretation was reinforced by the next seven displays, which showed the same different cultures, or races, having meals. Then there were seven showing what appeared to be social gatherings, or perhaps religious meetings. Then seven that appeared to be athletic competitions. This brought us back around to the door.

“Seven different cultures,” I said, “but one species. They’re Martians, aren’t they? Despite having only two arms.”

There was no doubt in my mind that these creatures were our ancestors. And the Others killed them all.

Spy did not respond directly. “Be ready,” he said. “One of you is about to learn a lot.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed, overloaded with information. My legs buckled, and I collapsed, knowing that this was what I was here for, and not liking it.

12

NO SURVIVORS

I first met Fly-in-Amber back when I was “The Mars Girl,” before we knew, or thought we knew, what the different colors of Martians did. I just observed that they wore different colors and seemed to group together by color.

Five years later, we thought it was all sorted out, and his yellow family seemed to be the one that had the most obvious and easy-to-understand function. Absolute memory freaks, who never forgot anything they saw or heard.

Then, in 2079, we found out they had another job—in fact, the primary job of the entire manufactured Martian race: to serve as intermediaries between the Others and Earth’s human race. The Others couldn’t predict with any certainty when, if ever, the humans would develop spaceflight, so they created the Martians and put them on the planet that came closest to the Earth. When a member of the yellow family was taken to Earth orbit, he went into a trance and recited a complex message in a language he couldn’t understand; a language only comprehensible to the Martians’ leader, whom we called Red. He had been studying the language since childhood, knowing, like all his predecessors, that it might be extremely important but not knowing why.

The Others’ message to Red was ambiguous and disturbing. They had the ability to destroy life on Earth but might not do it. Depending on various factors.

Red was supposed to keep this threat to himself, but wound up passing it on to me, and I told Paul. We were overheard, and everything unraveled.

So here we were again, with Fly-in-Amber speaking in a mysterious tongue, but instead of Red, we had Spy to decipher it for us.

Fly-in-Amber had babbled on for about ten minutes, Spy paying close attention. Then the Martian shook himself all over and groggily got to his feet.

“Did I do it again?” he said. “Talk in the leader language?”

Spy confirmed that he had. It was all recorded, and he could hear it back in the relative comfort of the starfish, whenever Fly-in-Amber felt strong enough to move. “Two minutes,” he said, and did some kind of breathing ritual or exercise routine. Then we made our way across the uneven ground, Snowbird shuffling alongside Fly-in-Amber, supporting him.

The interior of the starfish had been reconfigured. There were enough comfortable couches for all of us and, amazingly, a deep pool of water for the Martians. They stripped with comical haste and slid into it. We helped one another out of our suits, too.

There was a table with pitchers of water and plates of what looked like cubes of cheese. Namir picked one up and sniffed it.

“It is food,” Spy said. “Rather bland, I suppose.”

Namir bit into it and shrugged. “Won’t kill us. How long?”

“That partly depends on the message, and your reaction to it.” It sat on the couch nearest to the Martians. “Sit down if you want.”

I ate a couple of the cubes. They had the texture of tofu but less flavor. I wished for salt. And wine. Maybe a whole bottle of wine, and a big steak.

Spy waited until everyone was seated. “As you may have deduced, this planet is where the Others came from, and the people, or creatures, you saw in the displays are their ancestors, in a manner of speaking.”

“The Others didn’t evolve from them,” I said. You didn’t have to be a xenobiologist to see that.

“Not in any biological sense. About thirty thousand years ago there was a profound disagreement, what you might call a philosophical schism. It was about the fundamental nature of life, and the necessity for, or desirability of . . . its ending. Whether thinking creatures should die.”

“They had a way around it?” Namir said. “Not just longevity, but immortality?”

Spy nodded, but said, “No. Not exactly.

“It’s difficult to put this into terms that have universal meaning. That would mean the same thing, for instance, to humans and Martians.”

“But we can agree about what life is,” I said, “and that death is the cessation of life.”

“I don’t think so,” Snowbird said. “That has always been a problem.”

“Don’t get all spiritual,” Elza said. “As a doctor, I can assure you that dead people are much less responsive than living ones. They also start to smell.”

Snowbird held her head with both large hands, a laughter expression. “But the individual was alive in the genetic material of its ancestors, and also will be alive in the ones that follow after the organism dies.”

“Not me. I don’t have any children and don’t expect any.”

“But it’s not limited to that,” Snowbird said. “Before the individual was born, it was alive in the teachings that would eventually form it. Everyone you meet changes you, at least a little, and so becomes a kind of parent. As you yourself become a parent to anybody’s life you touch. It’s the only way, for instance, that humans and Martians can be related. Many of us feel closely related to some of you. Fly-in-Amber and I are closer to you humans here than we are to many Martians.” And I had been closer to Red, I realized, than I’d ever been to my own father.

“I’ll grant that’s true in a certain sense,” Elza said, “but it’s not as physically real as a genetic connection.”

“You claim your brain is not physically changed by accepting new information? I think that it is.”

“This is good,” Spy said. “It’s one aspect of the disagreement between the Others and you people. But only one aspect.

“Over the centuries, the ones who would become the Others physically isolated themselves, first on an island, then in an orbiting settlement, which grew by accretion. The separation became more complete as the ones on the planet encouraged belief systems that were inward-looking, antagonistic to space travel.

“The Others also pursued research into longevity, which most of the ones on the planet came to consider blasphemous.”

“Let me guess,” Namir said. “There was a war.”

“Several, in fact. Or you could see it as one ongoing war with phases that were decades apart. Centuries.

“The Others moved farther and farther out, for their own protection. Meanwhile, their individual life spans increased, up to what seemed to be a natural limit. They couldn’t push it far beyond about eight hundred years, with half of that life span in reduced circumstances . . . basically, alive and alert, but maintained by machines. You see where this would lead?”

It was asking the question of me. “They would . . . devalue what we would call ‘normal’ life? In favor of life partnered with machines? There’s something like that going on on Earth, even now.”

“Really? The Others might want to get in touch with them.”

“That would be fun,” Elza said. “Some of them are halfway aliens already.”

Spy looked at her with an unreadable expression. “Most of this I knew from Other-prime. But Fly-in-Amber added a turning point, a missing link.

“The final separation between the two groups came about when the Others discovered free power, the ability to bleed energy from an adjacent universe.”

“The same as our source of power,” Fly-in-Amber said.

“That’s right. You got it from them, though I take it that neither Martians nor humans really understand how it works.”

“Only how to use it,” Paul said.

Spy nodded. “This discovery allowed the Others to put a safe distance between themselves and the enemy, to move out to Wolf 25’s dark companion.

“They thought that this would make their physical separation complete. At almost the same time, they took total control of their life processes and abandoned their carbon-based form in favor of the virtually immortal bodies they have now.”

“So they downloaded their minds,” Paul said, “into artificial creatures with low-temperature body chemistry.” The Others had told us that their version of organic chemistry was cryogenic, based on silicon and liquid nitrogen.

“It wasn’t as simple as transferring information. Each individual had to die, and hope to be literally reborn in its new body.”

“They had no choice?” I said.

“Apparently they did. But the ones who didn’t change died out long ago.”

“Probably helped along by their successors,” Namir said.

“That could be. I don’t know.

“What I do know is that the ones left behind on this planet grew fearful. So they began building this huge invasion fleet.”

“Why on the ground, I wonder,” Paul said. “If they’d put them together in orbit, the ships wouldn’t have to be streamlined. And the net energy saving would be huge.”

Namir laughed. “They wouldn’t have to worry about that. They couldn’t have done this if they didn’t also have the free-energy thing.”

“And that was really what doomed them,” Spy said. “Even without the huge fleet, their discovery of the power source put them essentially next door to the Others.”

Unlike us, I hoped to think.

“Maybe if they’d remained in friendly contact, there might have been some accommodation. But there was no commerce or even communication between the races. So the Others hit them with one overwhelming blow.”

“As they attempted to do with us,” Paul said.

“No, not at all.” Spy shook its head slowly back and forth. “You have to stop thinking that way. The Others posed a problem for you, and you successfully solved it. This Home planet was too close for them to risk that.”

“If there were no survivors.” Fly- in-Amber said, “where did we come from?”

“There’s no direct line of succession. You were modeled after these Home creatures but independently manufactured. There are various anatomical differences.”

“I’m glad we have the extra hands,” Snowbird said, wiggling fingers.

“And you’re organized differently,” Spy said. “Each one of you is born into a specialty, born with its appropriate language and vocabulary. These Home ones were born dumb, like humans, and had to learn language.”

“But they had freedom to do whatever they wanted?” I asked.

“That isn’t known,” Spy said. “The Others left Home before you humans parted company with the Neanderthals.” There was a barely audible scraping sound. “We’re back.”

“Back where?” There hadn’t been any sensation of movement.

“In orbit, on your iceberg.” I moved to where I could see the ports by the air-lock lips. They showed our lander with the transfer cable.

Namir stepped over and looked out. “So. We go on now? To meet the Others?”

The expression on its face was close to embarrassment. “Actually, not all of you. We discussed this, Other-prime and I, with the Others. All of them.”

“Just now?” Meryl said.

“No, we had time to talk with the Others for about a month before we left to meet you here. They discussed various possible courses of action.

“This one is best. Of course, they can’t have a conversation with you in any sense. So they worked out every probable combination of relevant factors and allowed me, with Other-prime, to make the final evaluation and speak for them. Other-prime gave me a final piece of input a few minutes ago.”

“Telepathy?” Dustin said.

It tapped its ear. “More like radio. We won’t kill you all, which was an option much discussed, and still favored by a minority.”

“But you will kill some of us,” Namir said, almost a whisper.

“No, not killing, not like murder. We must take two of you, a human and a Martian, back to the planet of the Others.”

“For how long?” I asked.

It paused, I think not for drama. “It would be forever. You would be joining the Others, physically.”

“Frozen solid?” Elza said.

“You would have nitrogen, a liquid, in your veins.”

“The Martian would have to be me,” Fly-in-Amber said.

“That’s right,” Spy said. “The human . . .”

There was a lengthy silence. Paul half raised his hand. “I—”

“You’re the pilot,” Namir said, “and not expendable. I’m the oldest”—he looked at his spouses—“and, among the military people, I have the highest rank. The honor will be mine.”

“No!” I said. “Namir, be practical.”

“It can’t be Moonboy,” he said. “He’s not competent. Did you want to volunteer?” He was smiling, rueful rather than mocking.

“With all respect,” Dustin said, “this is not a job for an espionage specialist. You want a philosopher.”

“A doctor,” Elza said. “I know more about human beings than both of you combined.”

“We should do it by lot,” I said. “Excluding Paul and Moonboy.” When I said it, my stomach dropped. I looked at Meryl, and she nodded, looking grim.

“This is fascinating,” Spy said, “and I’m tempted to let you keep fighting it out. But what makes you think the choice is yours to make?

“The fact that Moonboy has been unconscious since arriving here makes him the most attractive of you, to the Others.”

“What?” Namir said. “He’s mentally incompetent.”

“Your mental competence is not an issue. The most intelligent of you, which would be Dustin, is still only human. What’s more interesting about Moonboy is that he’s immune to any consensus the rest of you might have arrived at since coming here. He is a tabula rasa with regard to the Others, and therefore will be easier to work with.”

“What makes you think you can wake him up?” Elza said.

“He won’t be awake when he joins the Others. He won’t even be alive, technically.”

“So the human race is going to be represented by a somewhat dead lunatic,” Namir said.

Spy paused, as if deciding whether to make a joke of that. “His individual characteristics and experiences are not particularly important. His recent experiences are, though; the less he knows about the Others, the better.”

“I think I understand,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Like positive feedback in a circuit. Interfering with the signal because of its similarity.”

That was the most science I’d ever heard from Fly-in-Amber. “You aren’t upset about this, yourself? Being kidnapped and killed and stored in a deep freeze?”

He clasped his head in appreciation of humor, a gesture he rarely used. “Another way of saying it is that it’s a chance at literal immortality, representing my race among the Others. How many foreign races would I be joining, Spy?”

“Two hundred forty-eight. Though more than half of them would be so different from you that communication would be unlikely.”

“You see, Carmen? As Namir said, it’s an honor.”

“I was not being literal, Fly- in-Amber. My feelings are more like Carmen’s.”

“I think Moonboy’s would be, too,” Meryl said, her voice thick and shaking. “We should try to revive him.”

“Shock him out of it?” Elza said. “And tell him ‘Prepare to die’?”

“That is what it would be,” Spy said. “If his comfort or happiness is at issue, I think your course is clear.”

Meryl crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself. “My course is not clear. It’s euthanasia to treat mental illness. For my husband of twenty-three years.”

“One of you is headed there.” Spy stepped toward her, and his voice lowered. “An objective observer would see that he is giving up the least. You can’t say that’s not true.”

“You’re not going to be able to care for him. He needs constant medical attention.”

Not if he’s going to die, I thought.

“In terms of duration,” Spy said, “he will spend less time going there than you will spend returning to ad Astra from here. Minutes.”

“It might be a kindness,” Dustin said. It was clear that Meryl was struggling with it—it would be a kindness to her, as well, of course.

“Take me, too?” she said.

“No. We don’t have two of any race. Not possible.”

She sat down and stared at nothing.

“I wonder if it would be possible for me to kill you,” Namir said quietly.

“It’s an interesting thought,” Spy said. “How would you propose to do it?”

“Physical force. I’ve done it to bigger and stronger creatures.”

“It wouldn’t be smart,” Paul said.

“We’re running out of smart.” Only his lips moved, and his eyes. But the quality of his poise changed. He was gathering himself, ready.

“Don’t,” I said. “They can kill you with a thought.”

“We could,” Spy said, “but might not. Go ahead and try.”

After the longest second in my life, Namir said, “It was a hypothetical question. You’ve answered it,” and relaxed, turning his back. Spy looked at each of us in turn, perhaps recording our reactions.

“So. We just go back to Earth?” Paul said. “How will that work?”

“You set up the flight as you normally would. You will begin to accelerate, then, after a period of no duration, stop. That will be at the turnaround point. You spend thirty hours or so there, turning around again, then you complete the journey, also with no duration. Almost twenty-five years will pass, of course, while you travel the twenty- four light-years.”

“Will we be seeing you again?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps you’d better hope not.”

13

END OF A WORLD

So we left Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber to the tender mercies of the Others and made our weightless way along the cable back to ad Astra. Before we got to the air lock, the starfish rose and sped away. Namir stood still and watched it depart. I wished I could have seen his face.

Once inside, I stayed close to Meryl, but she didn’t want to talk about it. We all raided the pantry for human food, however uninspiring.

“I’ll need a day or two to consolidate the data we have about the planet; make sure all of it’s mapped,” Paul said. “Though we could spend years mapping and measuring, and scientists on Earth would still want more. The first detailed observation of an Earth-like exoplanet.”

“It probably won’t be the first,” Dustin noted. “They’ll have had fifty years to explore nearer Earth.”

Paul laughed. “I hope you’re right. There ought to be robot probes all over the place.”

I pulled gecko slippers out of the rack by the air lock and followed Snowbird into the Martian quarters. Not too cold for a short visit.

She was inspecting the racks of mushroomlike plants. “Hello, Carmen.”

“Hello, Snowbird.” I didn’t know what to say. “You will be lonely?”

“Only for a short while, if what Spy said is true. I may be on Mars soon.”

“That will be a comfort.”

“Neither Fly-in-Amber nor I ever expected to see it again.”

“I will miss him,” I said. “Though there hasn’t been time for it to sink in, him or Moonboy.”

“Don’t feel sorry for Fly-in-Amber. This is the best possible outcome for him. He was extremely happy when we left.” She turned slightly, to face me. “We will never know about Moonboy, I suppose. He may never know what’s happened to him but just die.”

“Probably.” Though what his chill reincarnation might be like, we could only guess. No worse than dying, we could hope.

I shivered. “You’re cold,” she said. “I’ll see you later, in the compromise lounge. I’m sure there will be a meeting.”

“There always is,” I said.

I went back to our room and changed clothes. Funny to think that the old ones would sit there for a quarter century before being cleaned. My mother would just shake her head and say “typical.”

Would she be alive still? She was born in 2035 (three years older than Namir) and we would be back in 2138. She has good heredity for long life, but did I really expect to see her at 103? Did I want to?

Well, who knows. With a half century of progress in cosmetic science, she might look my age. Younger. That would be too creepy.

Paul came in over the intercom and asked for a meeting in a half hour, in the compromise lounge. Snowbird would smile, if she had a human mouth.

I got there a bit early, which was fortunate. Namir had found a jar of Iranian caviar, which we cautiously slurped with two spoons, and some dexterity in midair retrieval.

Paul joined us in time to help scrape the bottom of the jar. He’d also had the foresight to put some alcohol in the freezer, half and half with water, so we could wash the fish eggs down with ersatz vodka.

Meryl came out, dressed in a pretty plaid shift with a peasant blouse, mincing along gecko style. “Is that booze?”

Namir tossed it slowly. “Cheap vodka. Pretty cold.”

I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than wine, and not much of that. She squirted a big blast of the vodka into her mouth, and on her face, and immediately had a coughing fit. She started to laugh, then sneezed, with enough force to free her slippers and start her in a slow pinwheel. The skirt billowing around was quite pretty, in an abstract way, though the performance might have been more dignified with underwear. She wound up laughing and crying, not a bad combination under the circumstances.

After we were settled down, Paul said, “I just wanted to make sure everybody has everything sorted out. I’m planning to go into the lander tomorrow at noon. Push the button and see what happens.”

“Do you want us up there, too?” Namir said.

Paul paused, probably remembering Namir’s reaction last time. “Strapping in wouldn’t be necessary. But maybe we should all be in the same place.”

The diffuse feeling of grief, of loss. Elza took Namir’s hand. “We should,” she said.

“I would like that, too,” Snowbird said. “Even with the heat.”

“We don’t know anything about the process,” Dustin said. “The emotional impact may be less, now that we’re expecting it. Or it may be of a different nature. Joy, perhaps.”

“Or anger,” Namir said. “Perhaps we should all be restrained. All but one, who has the key.”

“Sometimes you scare me,” I said, smiling, but meaning it.

“Then you should hold the key.” He shook his head. “Actually, it was only Moonboy and I who had severe reactions last time. Maybe in lieu of a straitjacket, I should have Elza give me a sedative.”

“And anyone else who wants one,” she said. “Except the pilot. Snowbird, I wouldn’t know what to give you.”

“There is a food that prepares one for the unexpected. It worked well enough last time.”

“Wish they made it for humans.” Paul said. “I’m going to assume that with no time elapsed, or no duration, we don’t have to do anything special with the plants. Just everybody complete the maintenance roster before noon tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I know you would anyway. Guess I’m just at a loss for anything constructive to say or do.” He passed around a handwritten note:

Don’t say anything of a sensitive nature to anyone until we know we’re at turnaround. The walls have ears etc.

“Can’t play badminton in zero gee,” I said.

“Namir,” Meryl said, “could you get your balalaika and do me a song or two?”

“Yes,” Dustin said, with no sarcasm in his voice: “I would like that, too.”

“The end of the world is at hand,” said Elza.

14

PREDICTIONS

I woke up slowly from the sedation Elza had given me. I remembered having had dreams. They hadn’t been as intense or persistent as the first time, but they left behind the same malaise, guilt and self-loathing.

If the process had driven Moonboy back into that childhood closet, bound and gagged and strangling in the darkness, I could only hope for his sake that he was truly dead now. Memory is a prison from which there is no other escape.

But there are distractions. I found my slippers and went out into the hall, and rip-ripped my way along the tomato vines toward the exercise machines, which I could hear ticking along.

A tomato was floating free, so I ate it like an apple. Not quite ripe, a little sour. My stomach gave a warning growl, so I saved most of it to finish with some bread.

No need for parsimony anymore, of course. We probably had two hundred times the amount of food we could consume between here and Earth.

Carmen and Paul were working out on the walking and bicycling machines, their VR helmets in tandem. I could hear her soft voice, not quite understandable over the noise of the machines, as they chatted.

She was wearing a white skinsuit, translucent with sweat. Perhaps I was studying her too intently.

“Nice view,” Dustin said in a whisper, behind me. “How are you doing?”

“Not quite awake yet.” I held up the tomato. “Eating in my sleep.”

“Dreams?”

“Not as bad this time. Seen Elza?”

“In the library with Meryl. Looked kind of deep. Get some chow?”

“Sure.” We took the long way around to the kitchen, avoiding the library. I settled for cheese and crackers to go with my tomato; Dustin zapped a steak sandwich. I got a squeeze bag of cold tea out of the fridge; he opted for wine.

“Paul verified that we’re where we’re supposed to be and got the rotation started.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1340 now. We’ve got, um, twenty hours, twenty minutes, till we point ’er toward Earth and go. Away from Earth.”

I set my watch. “I slept late.”

“Last one up.”

“Let me guess: Paul wants a meeting.”

He smiled. “Good guess. He said 1500 if you were up.”

Couple of hours to kill. Normally, this time of day, I’d ping Fly- in-Amber and see whether he wanted to practice some Japanese. Not that he ever needed to practice old vocabulary, since he never forgot.

My only Martian friend, dead now six years.

“New game?” Dustin said.

It took me a second to sort that out. “Sure. I believe you’re white?”

“Pawn to K-4.”

“God, you sneaky bastard.”

We bundled up and met in the compromise lounge.

“So what are we going to find on Earth, fifty years in the future?” Paul said. “Worst case, Namir?”

I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.

“The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”

“Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.

“You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”

“It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”

And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”

“Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”

“Not yet,” Elza said.

“It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”

That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes . . . energy.

“None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”

I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”

“Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”

Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”

“Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.

“It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.

“This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”

“You’re products of their intelligence.”

She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”

“Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”

15

CHANGES

Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.

A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.

It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.

We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.

So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.

Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.

Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.

“Does anybody pray?”

After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”

“Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”

We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.

The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.

I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.

“One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”

“One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”

We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.

Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.

“The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”

The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”

“I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”

“Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”

“Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”

“This is completely against protocol. You—”

“I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”

“We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”

“The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”

I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”

He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.

“Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”

I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.

An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”

“Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”

Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”

He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”

Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”

Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.

“Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”

And from really old people, I thought.

“The Others did some trick with time.”

The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”

I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.

“I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”

“Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”

“That’ll be great.”

How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.

Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.

The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”

“Propaganda.” Paul said.

“I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”

“Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”

I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.

“If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”

I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”

“And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.

“So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”

“They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um . . .” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”

“No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”

“Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”

“An honor, sir. Professor.”

“See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”

“No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”

“Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”

“Sure. Careful.”

“If they don’t like what they hear . . . if they don’t want the public to hear what we say . . . this is their last and best chance to silence us.” He looked around at everybody. “There could be a tragic accident.”

“That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said.

He nodded, smiling. “You know us spies. We come by it naturally.”

The cabinet members who talked with us were urbane and friendly, not at all threatening. If they were planning to have us all murdered, they hid it pretty well. They mostly worked from a transcript of our long transmission from turnaround, asking us to clarify and broaden various things.

I actually knew one of them, Media Minister Davie Lewitt, now a dignified white-haired lady. She had been the brassy cube commentator who gave me the name “The Mars Girl.” She remembered and apologized to me for that.

After the cabinet people thanked us and signed off, they were replaced by a couple who introduced themselves as Dor and Sam, both pretty old and probably female. Dor was muscular and outdoorsy and had about a half inch of trim white hair. Sam was feminine and had beautiful long hair dyed lavender.

“We wanted to help you prepare for returning to Earth,” Dor said. “We were both in our early thirties when you left, so we were born about the same time as most of you.”

“Twenty years after me,” Namir said. “I suppose the first thing most of us would like to know is whether we have living family. I doubt that I do; my father would be over 140.”

“Rare, but possible,” Sam said. She unrolled what looked like a featureless sheet of metal, obviously a notebook, and ran her fingers over it. “No, I’m afraid he died a few years after you left.” She stroked her neck, an odd gesture. “I think it would be best if we mailed this information to each of you privately?”

I nodded, curious but patient. I looked around and nobody objected.

“Which brings up a big thing,” Dor said. “This is kind of like the Others, or like your poor friend Moonboy. We do have people, many thousands, whose legal status is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether they are dead or alive.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dor,” Sam said. “This was just starting back when you were alive—shit! I mean before you left, sorry.”

“No offense taken,” Dustin said. “We really are like ghosts from the dead past.”

“Cranach versus the State of California, 2112,” Dor said. “Cranach was a lawyer. He was dying, and needed more and more profound life-support equipment, which in his case—he was very wealthy—eventually included a complete computer backup for his brain and associated nervous system.

“Because of the way California defined ‘brain death,’ Cranach deliberately let his body die, but first essentially willed everything to himself—the computer image of his brain, which was technically indistinguishable from the original organic one.”

“When his body died,” Sam said, “nobody noticed for weeks, because the computer image had long been in complete charge of his complex business affairs and investments. And it was a person; it had a corporate identity independent of Cranach himself.

“What you’re saying,” Paul said, “is that this guy Cranach, dead as a doornail, could be legally immortal, at least in California, as long as his brain is not brain-dead. Even though it’s a machine.”

“Exactly,” Dor said. “And people like him, like it, are only the most extreme examples of, well, they call themselves ‘realists’ in North America.”

“As opposed to ‘humanists,’ ” Sam said. “It had started when we, and you, were young, in the mid-twenty-first. People who spent most of their waking hours in virtual reality.”

“Robonerds,” Meryl said. “Some of them even worked there, jobs piped in from the outside world.”

“We didn’t have much of that on Mars,” I said. “Except for school.”

“There still isn’t,” Sam said. “Mars is a hotbed of humanists.”

“But even on Earth,” Dor said, “most people are somewhere in the middle, using VR sometimes at play or work or study. Depends on where you live, too—lots of realists in Japan and China; lots of humanists in Latin America and Africa.”

Paul scratched his head. “They give the name ‘realist’ to people who escape normal life in VR?”

“Well, it is a higher reality,” Dor said. “The VR you have on your ship is antique. It’s a lot more . . . convincing now.”

Sam smiled broadly. “Yeah. You can tell when you’re unplugged because everything’s boring.”

“Guess who’s the realist here.” Dor patted her on the knee.

“Not really. I don’t spend even half my time plugged.”

“I’m curious about politics,” Paul said. “Mervyn Gold is president of what? What is this United Americas?”

“Let me see.” Sam moved her hands over the notebook. “It’s most of your old United States, except Florida and Cuba, which now are part of Caribbea, and South Texas (which is its own country) and Hawaii, which is the capital of Pacifica. The United Americas otherwise runs from Alaska down through English Canada, the old U.S., most of Mexico, and most of Spanish-speaking Central and South America down to the tip of Argentina. Not Costa Rica; not Baja California.”

“Thank God for that,” Dor said. “Baja’s such another world.”

“The United Americas are really not that united.” Sam continued. “It’s an economic coalition, like Common Europe and Cercle Socialisme.

“The smallest country in the world is the one we’re citizens of, Elevator.”

“The smallest country but the longest,” Dor said. “The Space Elevator Corporation declared sovereignty back when there was still a United Nations.”

“And now?” Namir said. “Instead of the UN?”

“All nations are united,” Sam said, echoing the commander. Her expression was a tight-lipped blandness.

United against the Others, I realized, through the fleet, which they couldn’t mention in public. Everyone else was probably thinking the same thing.

“I wonder who will pay my UN pension,” Namir muttered.

Sam overheard him. “You have all been well taken care of. The world is wealthy and grateful.”

For what, I didn’t want to say. We took a long trip to talk with the enemy, and they sent us back without even saying a word. But at least the Earth wasn’t destroyed. Something to be grateful for.

So we were each given fifty million dollars to spend, in a world where Namir’s New York City penthouse could be bought for ten million.

The only thing I really wanted was a hamburger.

My mother and father were dead, no surprise, though she had made it to 101, waiting for me, and left behind a brave, wistful note that made me cry.

My children were still on Mars as well, but were not speaking to each other, the girl a total humanist and the boy a total nerd realist. I spent over an hour in difficult conversation with both of them, difficult for the twelve-minute delay as well as emotional factors. I signed off promising to visit both of them as soon as I could get to Mars. Though with the realist I’d have to communicate electronically, no matter what planet I was on. He’d sold his organic body for parts.

That gave me a flash of irrational anger, but it passed. He actually only had half of one cell of mine.

My brother, Card, was also a realist, but he had not yet become bodiless. He lived on Earth now, in Los Angeles, and promised he’d put on his formal body (he had three) and come see me when we landed. I waited while he made a few calls, then called back and said he’d gotten all the vouchers and permissions to make the trip.

I wondered how free the Land of the Free was nowadays. But I guessed I could always go back to Mars.

16

MOONBOY SPEAKS

I put the two balalaikas in the padded boxes I’d made for them, and set the Vermeer book, and the Shakespeare and Amachai and cummings poems, into the titanium suitcase. I’d done a laundry in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and padded the books with clean folded clothes I would never want to wear again.

What were the actual odds that we were about to become dead heroes rather than inconvenient witnesses? Small but finite, as a mathematician would say. We really knew nothing about current politics. When President Gold had been Professor Gold, Paul said he taught medieval history—Machiavelli and the Medici. The Borgias. He could make them seem like current events, Paul said. Maybe current events, then and now, were not so far removed from those good old days.

We hadn’t been publicly interviewed yet. That was disturbing. But they had let us talk to relatives. So they couldn’t be claiming that we didn’t make it back.

(Assuming people did talk to their relatives, and not to VR constructions. Cesare Borgia would have liked that little tool.)

Well, they couldn’t really claim the ad Astra hadn’t returned. What’s left of our iceberg is still bigger than the Hilton, and you can see that in the sky all over the Pacific, brighter than the Pole Star.

Of course, when we got off the lander, we’d go straight into biological isolation. No telling what kind of bug we might be bringing back from the Others. Though a bug that thrived in liquid nitrogen might find human body temperature a little too warm. And there had been nothing alive on the planet Home to infect us. If Spy had told the truth.

We might have been infected with something accidentally or on purpose. Spy was an artificial organism designed to interface with humans. But then so were the Martians, and they had carried the pathogen for the juvenile pulmonary cysts that gave the colonists such trouble.

I should have asked about Israel—find out whether the country I worked for all my life still exists. My notebook didn’t pull any new information about anything, which was not necessarily suspicious. Fifty-year-old hardware and software. But it would be nice to find out some information about the world that hadn’t been handed to us by handlers.

I should be grateful for a few more hours of blissful ignorance and obscurity. The idea of celebrity is not compatible with my choice of career, and thus with my personality. Not that I will ever be a spy again, whatever Israel is or is not today.

Maybe I’ll take up music seriously. Practice several hours a day. That would keep Dustin out of the house.

My notebook pinged in my personal tone. Funny, the only people with that number were close enough to come knock.

I thumbed it, though—and an image of Moonboy appeared!

“I trust I have your attention.”

“Moonboy?”

“Yes and no.” There was a short transmission delay. “This signal is coming from the Moon, but Moonboy is not there. This is a sentient cartoon. The signal is an encrypted and filtered tightbeam that only you, Namir, can receive and decode.”

“Okay. What’s up?”

“This cartoon has detected that you are not on Earth.”

“That’s right. We’re in orbit, near—”

“You must land on Earth as soon as possible. Leave space by midnight, Greenwich time, April 23. Tell no one that I talked to you.”

“Not even other—”

“Midnight, April 23.”

The screen went blank. I asked it for the source, and it said LUNA NEAR CLAVIUS.

Midnight on the 23 would be 7 P.M. April 22 in New York; 4 P.M. in the Mojave Desert. We’d be landing that morning, if things went according to plan.

Best make sure things do go according to plan. There was no way to interpret that message other than ominously.

I could use a drink, maybe something stronger than wine. I opened the door, pulled myself up the trellis, and floated over the arbor toward the warehouse.

Paul and Carmen were already there. They turned and looked at me without saying anything.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You just got a message that you’re not supposed to share.”

“From a person who died twenty- five years ago.” Paul tossed me a squeeze bottle with brown liquid. “I think we better do as he says.”

Scotch flavor, pretty harsh. “Yeah.” I coughed. “Almost a day to spare.”

“If the lander works, and Earth doesn’t screw things up.”

I wished there were some way to pour a drink over ice in zero gee. “What if they say they can’t be ready by that time?”

“Hm. I’ve landed these things on gravel beds on Mars and the lunar regolith, with no ground support. If it’s working, I can find someplace flat. But then we’d have to explain why we left early.”

“Life-support emergency,” Carmen said, “or a medical emergency. Hard to fake.”

Snowbird drifted over. “A Martian medical emergency. There is probably no one on Earth who could say I wasn’t sick.” Upside down, she bumped against the couch and righted herself. “In fact, I probably will be, with all the gravity and oxygen. California heat.”

At turnaround we’d suggested leaving her on Little Mars, and it was the closest we’d ever seen her come to losing her temper. She was going to be the first Martian to swim in an ocean, or die trying!

Dustin and Elza joined us, then Meryl.

“Maybe we should tell people,” Meryl said. “They’re obviously planning something dramatically destructive, in space.”

Carmen disagreed vigorously. “The last time we broke a promise of secrecy, the Others almost destroyed the planet in retribution. And we’ve seen what they did to their own Home, because it posed a threat.”

“Putting two and two together,” I said, “or one and one . . . I assume they’ve learned about the fleet, and are going to destroy it. Within Moonboy’s time frame.”

“We could save some of them,” Meryl said.

Paul pointed out that we had no idea of how many they were. “If they actually did build the fleet up to the planned thousand strong, and they’re in a defensive array between the Earth and the Moon . . .”

“If they all suddenly withdraw,” I said, “the Others will know we betrayed them. And strike immediately.” If the fleet are warriors, I did not say, warriors have to be ready to die.

Paul shook his head slowly. “The logistical problem. Landing a thousand ships would be impossible if you had a week. Twenty hours?”

“And I wonder how many people are in orbit who aren’t in fleet ships,” Carmen said. “Little Mars, Little Earth, the Hilton, all those new structures. Surely hundreds, at least.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t be in danger,” Meryl said. “Not being part of the fleet.”

“He didn’t say anything about that,” Paul said. “ ‘Leave space’ and ‘go to Earth’—that doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. And even if you warned the people here, in Little Mars and so forth, what could they do? You might be able to cram a hundred into all the Space Elevators, but in twenty hours they wouldn’t be anywhere close to Earth. They’d still be in space.”

I wondered where Spy would draw the line between space and not-space. Never in all my unpleasant space experiences had I so fervently wanted to have my feet on solid ground.

17

CLOCK-WATCHING

We put on our gecko slippers and lined up at the air lock. I turned around for one last look at the cave in the ice that had been our home for almost four years.

It would have been twelve without the Others’ gift of time compression. Hard to imagine eight more years’ confinement here. We’d all be crazy as Moonboy.

I knew every square centimeter of it better than anyplace I’d ever lived before, but there was no sadness in parting. I hoped never to see it again.

A robot crew was coming aboard to maintain it as a historical artifact. It would become a museum, eventually. But first it could see service for other starflights, to places nearer than Wolf 25, before its fuel ran out.

If it survived whatever was happening tomorrow.

“Here you go, girl.” Elza smoothed a patch on the back of my hand. I immediately felt calmer. She gave them to everybody else but Paul and Namir. And Snowbird had her own resources.

We secured our luggage in the back, the stern I suppose, and came forward to strap in. I was right behind Paul, and so had the dubious privilege of being able to watch us land, if my eyes weren’t squeezed shut.

Namir was in the copilot chair, though he’d only flown light planes. More than the rest of us, though I didn’t know how much good that experience would be. Paul cheerfully told me it was like landing a slightly streamlined brick.

He had been talking quietly over the radio, I assumed to the control people on Earth. He switched on the intercom, and said, “Brace yourselves. We’re gonna kiss this rock good-bye.”

The steering jets made a low rumble and a sharp hiss. In the forward viewscreen, the rock-strewn ice fell away. Then a gentle acceleration pressed me back into the soft seat.

I half dozed for an hour or so as we approached the atmosphere. Then the ship started to vibrate and shake. Then buck alarmingly, with serious-sounding creaks and pops.

It had been more than six years since I last went through atmospheric braking, landing on Mars. Earth is more violent, but shorter. And when the red glow faded away, I was looking down at blue ocean!

We banked around and started falling toward the desert, which was not at all like home. Too much vegetation and high mountains everywhere. Maybe hills, technically. Mountains to me.

I knew the approach angle was going to be steep. But it felt way too much like a vertical drop. I shut my eyes so hard I saw stars, and didn’t open them until the huge thump and then jittery scraping as Paul executed a somewhat controlled slide toward some buildings on the horizon.

We stopped in a cloud of dust, which rapidly blew away. A vehicle almost large enough to be called a building lurched toward us on tracks.

Paul swiveled half around. “There’s a decontamination unit coming toward us. They say it will only take an hour or so, with, quote, ‘a minimum of discomfort.’ At least for the humans. Snowbird, they have to take you to another place.”

“I’m on Earth, Paul. It’s all another place.”

We all unstrapped and did some stretches. I felt a little weak and had twinges in both knees, but the gravity wasn’t too oppressive. It was good to be on solid ground.

My wrist tattoo was working again, and it had set itself to the right time zone, 10:32 A.M. So we had about five and a half hours before something impressive happened.

“Should we say anything?” Meryl said. “About—”

“No,” Paul said. “What would we say? What would be safe?”

Namir nodded. “Some of the pilots and crew might be able to take measures to protect themselves. From whatever it is. But then our Others get pissed and fry the Earth. Or bake it, as Spy suggested. Or cover it with sulfuric acid. Too big a gamble.”

The decontamination team hooked their vehicle onto the lander with a crinkled metal tube like the one we used in space. They came on the viewscreen and asked for me and the other women first.

I went through two air locks into a white room, where three female techs were waiting, clad in heavy protective suits. Meryl and Elza went into other rooms.

They asked me to disrobe and filed all my clothing into individually sealed plastic bags. Then they vacuumed me, an experience that could be full of erotic possibilities, depending on who was doing it to you.

Then the internal part: they gave me a glass of what they called a “super-nano-laxative,” and warned me not to drink it until I was seated on a toilet. It had a pleasant lime flavor and a less pleasant explosive effect. A businesslike enema completed the charming sequence. All of this internal fortune duly cataloged and sealed away.

I was ready for a shower then, and got the most thorough one of my life, three strong women scrubbing away where angels fear to tread.

When I was finally able to dress, they had some fancy and futuristic clothes waiting. Formfitting but also form-altering, with smart fabrics that applied light pressure here and there. Very flattering. Hundreds of tiny bright strings hung from the fabric, revealing and concealing. Men who never gave me a second look back then . . . well, they’d be too old to do anything but look now.

They gave me a bowl of vanilla ice cream and put me in a darkened room with a couch and suggested I might want to rest for an hour or so. I got a light turned on but couldn’t find anything to read. No flatscreen or cube obvious; no controls. But I said “space news” out loud and a cube appeared, no projection frame, with a picture of us landing, with this big crawler in the foreground.

Then it showed the president, beaming over his beard, congratulating us and saying that he would be out in California for the landing and the debriefing.

The station noted that live coverage would begin at 7:00, Eastern time. They might have a bigger story than they bargained for.

I did doze for a little while. It was after three when a big blond tech (whose name I didn’t know but who knew parts of me better than Paul did) woke me with the news that I’d been pronounced clean and was wanted at the Green Room.

She stopped me just before I got to the door. “Oh, you wouldn’t know this. The president’s from Kentucky, and he’ll offer you his favorite bourbon. It’s a hundred proof; you shouldn’t refuse, but you might not want too much of it.” Doubly true since all I’d had to eat on this planet was a bowl of ice cream. But hell . . . I could knock back a couple of shots and ask Professor Gold if he’d like to play some Texas Hold-’em.

A lot of famous people do seem larger than life when you meet them. I knew Gold had been a large man from his visit with Paul a half century ago. But now he was an old shaggy bear, moving with slow sureness, glowing with charisma, a man obviously happy with the world he’d helped to make. The world that had twenty- five minutes to go.

His hand was warm and dry, a measured fraction of large strength. “Paul tells me you don’t care for spirits,” he said. “So instead of a tot of Blanton’s, perhaps you’d like a glass of champagne? A big glass?”

An assistant came up with the biggest champagne flute I’d ever seen, and I took my place at a round table. There was only one other empty place—no space for Martians?—and Namir came in, accepted a glass of bourbon, and sat down. He spooned an ice cube from his water glass and put it in the whiskey.

“Should I address you as ‘General’?” the president said.

“We have no rank together, sir. Only Namir.”

He nodded and leaned back in a chair that was slightly larger than ours, slightly higher. “I exercised my right as Grand Inquisitor of this honky-tonk, and asked the scientists whether I might talk with you first. They acted like a bunch of folks who do have a sense of rank, Namir, not to mention tenure. So they agreed.”

I think our response was appropriate, for six people who were trying to behave like a proper audience while actually wanting to scream. Twenty minutes.

“What I’d like to do, before we go on camera and do all the cube-ops, is ask each of you, if it’s possible, to sum up your feelings in a line or two.” He smiled a wry curve. “Something I can misquote in an off-the-cuff speech. Namir, you’re oldest.”

“May we speak without fear of being exactly quoted? Let alone misquoted. No one will like what I have to say, and I would as soon have it not be ‘on the record.’ ”

“There are no recording instruments in this room. You have my word on that.”

Namir took a sip and his brow furrowed. “It’s not complicated. Never trust them, not one iota; not on the most trivial thing. But never forget that we have to live with them.” He set the glass down and smiled. “The lone Israeli speaks. I got that with my mother’s matzo.”

Meryl was next. “I think we should find a way to disconnect from them. Even if it means giving up free energy; even if it means giving up space. They’re too powerful and too unpredictable.”

Gold chuckled. “Watch out, Meryl. That attitude could get you elected in thirty states. Elza?”

“I think we’re in a position like a child with a toxic, abusive parent . . . who is also extremely rich. So our problem is twofold: Can we live without the wealth? And can we leave it somehow without the parent exacting revenge.”

“I disagree with you both,” Dustin said.

“Your turn.”

“We can’t maneuver our way out of this, Mr. President. They’re too powerful, and they’ve said outright that they’re testing us. We have to pass the tests. Channel all our energy right there. Maybe they’ll give us an A and leave us alone.”

“And if we fail the tests?”

The air shimmered and a holo of Snowbird appeared between the two men. “I have been listening; sorry for not appearing.

“If you fail the tests, then you cease to be. If you were Martians, then that would be of little consequence.”

“So if we were Martians,” Gold said, “the problem would disappear. Along with us.”

Her image pressed her head. “You are a humorist, Mr. Gold.”

“That’s a nonanswer,” Dustin said.

“Wait,” the president said, and touched his ear. “Oh my God.”

I looked at my wrist. It was 1600:22.

“Pipe it in here.” He shook his head angrily. “Jesus Christ! They don’t need clearance to see the fucking moon!”

An auditorium-sized cube suddenly filled a third of the room. It was London, the Thames at midnight, ancient Ferris wheel lighting up the darkness, the full moon’s reflection a rippling ladder up the river.

The moon suddenly changed. It became much brighter, and the markings on its face faded to an even glow. It grew to double its size, triple . . . and then it faded into a fuzzy round cloud, glowing dimmer as it grew.

“Was that the Others?” the president said, unnecessarily. “They actually blew up the moon?”

It could be a lot worse, I thought. Still could be.

“They sent a message. Just before it happened.” The weird night landscape faded, to be replaced by a huge face, all too familiar: Spy.

“You lied to us,” it said. “You sent emissaries, machine and man, to say that you were pacifistic. In return for our aggressiveness, you said, you sent a plea for peace and understanding.

“All the while, for fifty years, you were building a gigantic fleet of warships. Hidden from us.”

“Not for invasion!” the president cried, as if the image could hear. “Just to protect Earth!”

“Those thousand ships are about to be destroyed,” it said. “We are going to disassemble your Moon and use it for ammunition, from gravel-sized pebbles up to huge boulders.

“High-speed projectiles will target every warship, and all their support. Other rocks will destroy every smallest satellite structure. Your Space Elevators will have fallen by dawn.

“All of the space between the Earth and what is now the Moon’s orbit will be filled with gravel. Any spaceship you attempt to launch will be a sieve before it leaves cislunar space.

“We do this with a spirit of charity and generosity. You must realize that we could easily drop mountains on the Earth, and humans would go the way of the dinosaurs. But we do want to give you another chance and see what you do with it. This is your last test.

“I am speaking to you from the crater Clavius. In a few moments, it will cease to exist.”

The face disappeared. The Thames was dark except for the blinking lights of emergency hovercraft. A brilliant meteor lanced through the sky, then two more, then another pair.

We sat in stunned silence.

I would never see Mars again?

18

RESPONSES

The president had delayed flying for a day. All civilian flights were canceled as well, until the danger from the constant meteor shower could be assessed.

At night they fell like brilliant snowflakes, with occasional bright crawling fireballs. But those were mostly grains of sand, or dust. Every now and then one would be large enough to make it to the ground, but most of those were man-made, the debris of thousands of satellites. (Ad Astra no doubt was pelted, but the iceberg had so much mass it stayed put in orbit.)

There were no casualties on Earth that first day, though seven thousand did die in space, mostly in the first few minutes. Worldwide havoc had been expected, especially from the Space Elevators, unraveling and lashing the surface of the Earth like huge bullwhips fifty thousand miles long—but they had been engineered with the possibility of disaster in mind, and the cables disintegrated into harmless dust as they fell. Two passenger carriers flamed into the land and sea, their human cargos ash.

So there was no danger to atmospheric craft, but the peril to spacecraft was real. Every cubic centimeter of space between Earth and where the Moon had been held a piece of gravel.

Eventually, in tens or hundreds or thousands of centuries, all that cloud of rock and gravel would settle into rings, like Saturn’s, very pretty and easy for a spaceship to avoid.

That was longer than Paul wanted to wait. And with us on Air Force One was a man who thought he wouldn’t have to: U.S. Air Force General Gil Ballard, the president’s defense secretary.

Namir coldly excused himself and went back to the press side of the huge plane. He later told me he had read the man’s remarks about our mission and left before he could make a scene in what looked like a ceremonial meeting.

I wished he had stayed. It might not have changed things, but it would have been good theater.

The meeting room in the middle of Air Force One was extravagantly massive, a projection of masculine power—heavy woods, fragrant leather, deep carpeting. General Ballard, a large, intense man, maybe sixty, blazing eyes and shaved bullet head, fit the room perfectly. He sat next to the president, facing us across the table.

“It’s just a different scale from what you did with ad Astra,” the general argued. We had used powerful lasers to vaporize things the size of grains of sand, and maneuvered out of the way of larger obstacles. “Same principle. Just going slower and dealing with more interference.”

I had mixed feelings. I wanted Paul to be happy, and he’d always said he could never be happy without space. But having space hardly seemed possible anymore. Or smart.

And after mourning for Mars, I started to feel a kind of long-repressed relief. I’ve spent half my life off Earth and was ready to try living here again. Imagine, oxygen and water and food that you didn’t have to recycle endlessly through yourself. Just let the planet do the recycling for you.

We might even try raising actual children, maybe even making them the old-fashioned way. I was ready to start ovulating and being difficult once a month.

Paul’s reaction pulled me out of my reverie. “No way it’s the same, General. Much more seat-of-the-pants.” They both smiled, jet jocks imagining a situation that would have a normal person quivering in fear.

“And you’d want a lot of physical shielding,” Ballard said, “which wouldn’t help the handling characteristics.”

“It would be a job and a half,” Paul said.

The general laced his fingers together on the table and looked Paul straight in the eye. “You’d need the best pilot in the world.”

The president hadn’t said a word. He looked at Paul expectantly.

Paul’s expression was blank, but I could read him pretty well. He was choosing his words.

“If the best pilot in the world . . . were also a lunatic, he might say yes. But no.”

“We could do any number of practice runs in VR,” the general said. “You wouldn’t have to go up physically until you were sure.”

“We wouldn’t want to lose you,” the president said.

“But what else might we lose?” Paul shook his head. “It’s not the danger, the physical danger. It’s what the Others might do in reaction.”

“They said it was a test,” the general said. “This is the most direct response.” What?

“I respectfully disagree, sir. They’re not testing our ability to solve a tactical problem.”

“It was a warning!” I blurted out. “I thought that was pretty clear.”

The general looked at me. He tried without much success to keep condescension out of his voice: “He did use the word ‘test,’ Dr. Dula.” My father’s name. “It might be a warning at the same time, but against aggression, not simple space travel.”

Dustin came to my defense. “General, that’s like saying someone who puts a high fence around his property doesn’t care whether people break in.”

Elza added, “Nothing we learned at Wolf 25 indicated that they have anything like subtlety or patience. That was a punishment and a warning.”

The president stood up. “Thank you all. This is all very valuable. We’ll talk more later . . . I have to go get camera- ready for the landing. General?”

The general also stood and thanked us, and followed the president into the inner sanctum.

“I sure feel valuable,” Elza said. “How do you feel?”

“Doomed,” Dustin said. Paul nodded agreement.

19

INFALL

All sorts of festivities had been planned for us hearty heroes, but their execution was somewhat muted by doom and gloom and the regular infall of meteors. A lot of expensive liquor was spilled at a congressional reception when a boulder the size of a grand piano redesigned a shopping mall in nearby Maryland, a town improbably named Rockville.

By the time the sound reached us, it had attenuated to where it was only as loud as a land mine going off in the next room. I dove under a table and found two younger people had beaten me there; so much for combat reflexes. A good place to be when the chandeliers are raining glass, though, and the girl I had landed on was agreeably soft.

Of course all the congratulatory speeches had to be rewritten with appropriate funereality, and I came to dread the cognitive dissonance that united them all in clumsiness. As if good things and bad things couldn’t happen at the same time. I suppose that if one is to stay sane as a soldier, that incongruent congruence always has to be there in some part of your mind: no matter how terrible are the things you have seen and done, in another country there is room for happiness and friendship, beauty and love.

American soldiers in their war against Vietnam had a bleak catchphrase for when the worst happened: “Don’t mean nothin’.” I heard about that when I was a teenaged soldier generations later, and knew exactly what it meant. Nihilism is the soldier’s ultimate armor.

Soldiering and the memory of Gehenna might have made it easier for me to accept the huge cataclysm of the Others’ revenge, easier not to surrender to anger. Don’t mean nothin’.

There was a huge amount of anger in the air, understandably, and frustration—a profoundly powerful enemy who is absolutely beyond reach, now and for any foreseeable future.

If the moon’s destruction had only deprived us of spaceflight, most people wouldn’t see it as a tragedy. For many people, space is just an expensive playground for scientists and the military. Keep that money and brainpower at home.

But modern civilization needs satellites. Most communication and entertainment goes by optical fiber, with the satellites a backup except in primitive countries. But GPS devices are in the heart of every car and plane. Big-city traffic, dependent on computer control, froze solid. Nonessential flights were grounded. Computers died.

Of course, we get some fallout from that. Even among the sophisticated government and news workers who are our daily companions, there is the undercurrent of blame, and it’s not undeserved, if someone does have to be blamed. We were the only people who could have done something, out where the Others live, and all we did was deliver the message, the lie, that precipitated this disaster.

The plain fact that we could have been the aggressors—the kamikaze option—is generally known and widely discussed. From one very understandable point of view, we should not have considered any other course of action.

It’s interesting that among our crew, only the Martians thought the kamikaze option was a reasonable idea, but to them death is an unremarkable event. It’s not as if we humans couldn’t do the math and apply the logic. What if we had all been Shinto or fundamentalist Moslem or Christian extremists? We might have just as universally discarded the idea of negotiation and blasted full speed ahead toward the enemy planet.

That might be alien to our culture, but it’s not alien to human nature. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, suicide attacks have often been used as a practical response to an imbalance in technology. There were uneven results—the handful of suicide pilots in America’s 9/11 had a stupendous kill ratio, but the five thousand Japanese kamikazes only sank thirty-six ships. In both cases, though, it was an understandable military sacrifice, when the enemy’s technological base made them unbeatable by conventional methods.

And their situations were nothing compared to the technological imbalance between the human race and the Others. Should we feel guilty for not making the ultimate sacrifice? Do we deserve to be condemned as cowards? Having been there at the time, I’d say no. Those with the benefit of hindsight may feel differently.

There have been threats on our lives. Our public appearances have two cadres of bodyguards, I found out—armed soldiers in uniform surrounding us, but twice as many in civilian clothes circulating in the audience.

So I was relieved when the celebrations were abruptly canceled after two days. We didn’t get to return on Air Force One—would never see the president again—but took a spartan private jet back to California, where we’d left Snowbird.

She was more or less hidden for the time being. As unpopular as the six of us were with the angry populace, we could only imagine how they would react to a Martian. Alien tools of the Others.

She would eventually be moved to a sanctuary in Siberia, where conditions were more Mars-like. A foundation had been set up there when the quarantine was lifted, and now it would support as well as study the five or six Martians marooned on Earth. She would find edible Martian food growing there, and the company of her own kind. But she wanted to say good-bye to us first, and take a swim in the ocean.

She would get that, but not much more.

20

THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

The last person I talked to on Mars was my good old mentor Oz, who said he was not quite 64 years old now—that’s in Martian years, though, which comes to about 120 on Earth. He didn’t look a day over a hundred, though. Wizened and wrinkled, but still with a wry intelligent look and a sparkle in his eye.

We were in the space communications room at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d landed from orbit. It was a bright clean room that felt old, too many coats of paint. Paul exchanged pleasantries with Oz, then left after the twelve-minute lag.

“How bad is it, Oz? Can the colony survive without support from Earth?”

Following the same protocol as we’d used fifty years before, Oz’s image froze on the screen when he hit the SEND button. I’d brought the Washington Post to read while the signals crawled back and forth.

The only story about us was on page 14, and it wasn’t complimentary.

Oz came back smiling. “We’re completely self-sufficient, Carmen; have been for more than twenty years. Human population’s over three thousand, a third of them native-born. Our living and farming space is probably twenty times what it was when you left.

“The big debate over here is whether we should stay out of space; whether the Others meant to include us in their warning. There were no Martian ships in the fleet.

“A majority says stay home. We have a Space Elevator, and they didn’t blow it down, but its only real function was as a terminal for the shuttle to and from Earth.

“Personally, I think that Earth can go to hell in its own way. My big regret is that now you and Paul can’t come home. You could have a natural baby or two now; they solved the lung problem and recycled the mother machine for scrap.

“And you’re still young enough. In-fucking-credible.

“Look, I have to go off to the old folks’ dinner. Can you call me again tomorrow”—he looked offscreen—“about 1600 your time?”

“Definitely at 1600,” I said. “If you have new art, bring some to show me.”

It wasn’t going to happen.

I heard Paul in the next room, one loud bad word. Went through the door and found him staring at a flatscreen monitor.

“Shit,” he said. “Would you look at this?” It was a picture of a human newsie, male and handsome, standing in front of a familiar background: here. The Armstrong Space Force Base.

“We on the news?”

“Not really.” He picked up the chaser and ran it back a minute or two. There was an obviously simulated picture of a lander like ours taking off tail first, the way they did spaceflight before the Elevator.

“Back to old-fashioned ways,” the newsie said. “Our Space Force is sending a rocket up into the cloud of rocks that now surrounds our planet, to get some close-up observations—and perhaps work its way through. Blasting the little obstacles with the powerful laser in its nose and maneuvering around the larger ones.

“The Space Force confirms that they don’t believe this first try will actually penetrate the millions of miles of debris, but it will be a good start. And no human pilot will be endangered; all the flight controlled by virtual-reality interfacing. Rumor has it that the VR pilot will be none other than Paul ‘Crash’ Collins, back on Earth, still young through the magic of general relativity!”

“Rumor has its head up its ass,” Paul said. “Nobody’s said anything to me.”

“Could you do it? Would you?”

“No, and no way in hell. I never trained for that kind of launch off Earth; only from Mars, where it’s a lot simpler. But more, it’s . . . it’s thumbing our nose at the Others. Are they insane?”

Maybe they all are, I thought; the culture. “Maybe they have a more complicated plan. Looks like propaganda, doesn’t it?”

He calmed down a little. “Might be. Shoot up an empty rocket that they know won’t make it through. Just to show that they’re doing something. But I won’t be in on it with them.”

“Best we all stay out of it. Those crowds in Washington.” I leaned on a bookshelf and looked out the window at the dry brown hills. “Let’s get away, Paul. Just disappear from the public eye for a while. We have plenty of money.”

He nodded. “The government would be glad to see us go. Let’s talk it over with everybody tonight. Have to arrange for Snowbird to get to that Siberia place safely.”

“The swim first. That’s important to her.”

We talked it over with the Space Force press people and came up with a workable plan. There was a beach to the north of the base, closed to the public, which would afford a good view of the launch. Snowbird could get her swim, and they would get publicity shots of us watching the launch. (With Paul “regrettably” declining the VR pilot’s seat; too tired and out of practice.) Then we could fade out of sight, to the relief of all concerned.

Namir and Elza and Dustin wanted to go back to New York City. That didn’t sound smart to me. Elza thought with hair dye and a dab of makeup, they’d regain their former anonymity, lost in the crowd. I thought Namir was too handsome for that, and Dustin too weird-looking, his hair in spikes, but I kept it to myself.

We had a last family dinner in the mess hall, Namir ecstatic at having actual steaks to grill. Real potatoes and fresh asparagus. Bottles of good California wine.

I didn’t sleep well, and neither did Paul. Crazy days.

Just at dawn, we all piled into Space Force vans and went down a bumpy gravel road to the beach. There was a hard beauty in the dusty, persistent plants.

The ocean a churning, eternal miracle. Snowbird was awestruck, speechless.

Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”

We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.

The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.

I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.

It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the replicas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.

It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.

Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.

“You don’t listen, do you?”

The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.

“I suppose we have to be less subtle.”

The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.

“All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.

A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.

The camera crew were shouting into their phones.

A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.

I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.

Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.

“Idiots,” Paul said.

“Surprise,” Dustin said.

Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”

For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.

“I think we better start walking.”

EARTHBOUND

JOE HALDEMAN

www.sfgateway.com

For Gay and Judith, only bound by gravity

1

I’d been off Earth for so long I didn’t recognize the sound of gunfire.

We were walking up a gravel road from the beach at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d just watched, I don’t know, the end of the world? People were checking phones, watches—nothing electronic was working. Even my wrist tattoo was stuck at 10:23. That’s when the rocket we were watching lift off sputtered out and fell into the Pacific.

It didn’t explode or anything. It just stopped. Like everything else.

Guns did seem to work, hence the merry popcorn-popping sound. “Get down, Carmen,” Namir said conversationally. “We don’t know who they’re shooting at.” Everybody was kneeling or lying on the road, below the level of the sand dunes on both sides. I joined them.

An older man in a white suit, clutching a sun hat to his head, fancy camera on a strap bumping against his chest, came running down the gravel, looking anxiously back at the gunfire.

“Card?” I wouldn’t have recognized my brother if he hadn’t called a couple of days earlier. He almost slipped on the gravel, but came to rest crouching next to me.

“Sister, love . . .” he was still looking back at the gunfire—“What the fuck is going on? Weren’t you supposed to be taking care of all this alien crap?”

“Didn’t quite work out,” I said. “It’s a long story. If we’re alive tomorrow, I’ll give you chapter and verse.”

There were a couple of especially loud bangs, I guessed from bombs or grenades. “Where did Namir go?”

“Back there,” his wife Elza said, jerking her thumb toward her other husband, Dustin, who pointed toward Snowbird, who pointed all four arms to the right.

I should note that we were a mixed group, not to say a menagerie: three humans from Earth, three from Mars, and one actual Martian. And now my brother, who was something in between.

Card waved at the Martian Snowbird and tried to croak “hello.” He’d stayed on Mars for the required five years, and then escaped back to Earth. Never could speak Martian well, as if anyone could.

“Hello, Card. I remember you much younger.”

“Fucking relativity,” he said. To me: “You used to be my older sister.”

“I guess we’ll sort it out somehow.” I was born eighty-four years ago, but figured I’d only lived thirty-seven of them. My bratty little brother was twice my age now, in a real sense. From acne to pattern baldness in one stroke.

Namir came clattering back with two automatic weapons under one arm and a holstered pistol in the other hand. He gave the pistol to Elza and a machine gun to Dustin.

That’s good. All the spies had guns.

Elza did something complicated with the pistol, inspecting it. “Tell me you found a gun shop behind some dune.”

“Didn’t kill anybody.”

“But somebody’s going to be looking for them,” Dustin said.

“Not for a while.” He looked at Card. “You must be Carmen’s brother.”

Card nodded. “You must be one of the spies.”

“Namir. We have to find someplace less exposed.”

“The last place we drove by, did it look like a motor pool?” Elza said.

“I remember, yes. Sandbag wall around it.”

“So maybe there’s no one there now. Since no vehicles seem to be working.”

“We can’t just walk up with guns,” I said.

“Right. So you go first.”

“Once the shooting stops.” Actually, I hadn’t heard any for a minute or so. “What direction was it coming from?” I asked Card.

“I guess the press and VIP area. They had bleachers set up. They were gonna leave me there even though I had a pass. I paid a guy to take me to the last checkpoint, a half mile from here.”

“Glad you found us,” I said, and stood up cautiously. The motor pool was about a block away. One low building and dozens of blue NASA trucks and carts. No people obvious. “Paul, let’s go.”

He got up, and Meryl followed him, and then my brother. “I can talk to the natives,” he said. “Lived in California thirty-five years.”

“Leave the armed guard with Snowbird,” Paul said. “Martians might not be too popular right now.”

“Don’t risk anybody’s life for me,” the Martian said. “I won’t live long in any case.”

“You don’t know that,” I said lamely.

“I can’t live on human food, and only have a few days’ worth of mine here. The only renewable source is in the Martian colony in Siberia. I can’t walk there—or I could, if I had time, and it might be pleasantly cold. But it would take a long time. I can’t live off the land.”

“The power could come back any time,” Namir said. “We still know nothing about how the Others’ minds work.”

“No need to comfort me, friend. I lived long enough to swim in the sea.”

Namir stared at her for a moment, nodding, and then looked toward me. “Okay, Carmen, go up to the motor pool and nose around. If the coast is clear, give us a signal.” He considered that and shook his head, smiling. “I mean, you stay here with the gun, and I’ll—”

“Don’t be such a man,” Elza said. “Carmen, do you know how to shoot?”

“Never learned, no.”

“So you guys go up unarmed and knock on the door. None of that shooting’s anywhere near us.”

“Okay.” Three unarmed space travelers versus God knows how many auto mechanics with wrenches and battery testers.

“Don’t try anything aggressive,” Namir said. “Just give us the signal, and we’ll come up behind the sandbags.”

“Or I could scream my lungs out,” I said. “Just kidding.”

We walked up the incline and then down the paved road. The last of the morning cool had baked off, and the motor pool shimmered in the heat.

“What is it about the power?” Card asked. “I saw the rocket sputter out and crash. But what does that have to do with cars?”

He might be the only person in America who didn’t know. Walking down this road, toward us, he couldn’t have been watching the cube when it happened.

“The Others pulled the plug,” Paul said. “When they disintegrated the moon and filled nearby space with gravel, that was supposed to turn Earth into a ‘no space flight’ zone.” Only last week.

“That seemed pretty obvious. But the rocket jocks had to try anyhow.” With heavy shielding and lasers to blast their way through the gravel.

“So they turned off all the free power?” Card said. “That’s serious. How long has it been since there were any actual power-generating plants?”

“It’s even more serious than that,” I said. “Your watch and your cell won’t work. It affects batteries; anything electrical.”

“Not everything,” Meryl said. “Our brains are electromagnetic, electrochemical.”

“Smokeless powder works in guns,” Paul said, “So I guess chemical energy is okay if it’s not making electricity.”

“They didn’t explain anything,” I said. “Just that the free energy we’ve been using came at the expense of some donor world. As punishment for defying them, we’re the donors now.”

“For how long?”

“Forever would be a good guess,” Paul said. “We’ve got a lot of adjusting to do.”

Card stopped walking and slapped his palm to his forehead. “Jesus. How many people died in the first few seconds?”

“Anyone with artificial organs,” Meryl said, “or on life support. Hell, just pacemakers. Tens of millions. Maybe hundreds?”

“People flying,” Paul said. “Unless the planes had pilots, and the pilots were able to glide in and land. Not many can do that, without computers. Even if they were near a runway.”

Card nodded. “A lot of people in cars. The LA freeways would be a moving junk pile. Everybody on autopilot, going 150.”

“Don’t cars have failsafes?” I said.

“Yeah, but they’re like the opposite of an electromagnet, engine braking. I don’t see how they could work without current flowing.” My kid brother was suddenly an engineer with a lifetime of experience.

We got to the door of the motor pool building. Paul knocked twice and pushed it open. “Hello? Anybody here?”

“We’re over here,” a voice reverberated in the gloom. “Who are you?”

“Space Force pilot,” he sort of lied. “We were down on the beach, watching the launch.”

“So were we.” Sound of footsteps coming our way. A man and a woman in blue NASA coveralls came out of the murk. “When we couldn’t raise anyone, we came back here. What was that gunfire?”

“We don’t know,” Paul said. “Came from the reviewing stand, sounds like.”

“Press Relations getting rid of witnesses,” the man said.

“Be serious, Wilbur. I’m Katie, this is Wilbur . . .” She pointed at Paul. “You’re the famous guy. And you’re the Mars Girl.”

“When I was a girl.” I introduced Meryl.

“You went off to the aliens, the Others.” She shook her head. “My grandmother was a girl then, she watched the take-off. Brightest star in the sky. But you’re not, she’s eighty-some . . . I guess that relativity does work.”

I had to smile. “Seems to work for me.”

The man cleared his throat. “The Others are behind this? The rocket failing and the power going off?”

“As punishment,” Paul said, and explained what we’d seen. Not everybody had been glued to the cube during the launch. How long would it take for the word to get around? Word of mouth and written message, carried by hand.

Two more bursts of automatic-weapons fire. Wilbur went to the door and peered out in that direction. “Hope that’s our guys.”

“Has to be, doesn’t it?” Katie said. “But who are they shooting at?”

“Probably just shooting in the air, crowd control. But I wish we had a weapon here, just in case.”

“We have a couple,” I said, and he looked at me sharply. “We didn’t want to look dangerous, walking up here. They’re back on the road to the beach, with the rest of us.”

“Better bring ’em up.”

I started to reach for my cell; how long would that reflex survive? Went to the door and waved both arms.

The four of them came out. “Holy shit!” he said. “Is that a Martian?”

No, it’s two ostriches sharing a potato costume. Elza and Dustin trotted toward us; Namir came slowly, covering Snowbird. She was wearing a dirty white smock the size of a tablecloth, dragging along on four legs made for Martian gravity. She liked humans and Earth as abstractions, but I think the reality was getting a little hard on her.

“We heard there was a Martian on the base,” Katie said.

“They’re not dangerous,” Wilbur said.

“Heavens, no.” Snowbird might hurt you if she fell on you.

“The three people look dangerous,” she said, “though it might be the guns.”

“Soldiers,” I said, simplifying. “They were with us on the starship.” I introduced Elza and Dustin as they sidled in, and then Snowbird and Namir.

“Keep a lookout, Dustin,” Namir said. “Thank you for sheltering us. We shouldn’t be here long.” He gestured toward a long lunch table. “Let’s sit.”

Namir sat at the head of the table and began disassembling and inspecting his weapon. “If this were a military operation—”

“Which it’s not,” Paul said quietly.

“We won’t forget that. But if it were, there’s a standard hierarchy of concern: first ammunition, then water, then food. Communication is in there, irrelevant now, and mobility, which seems to be shoe leather. First ammunition. You don’t have any here?”

“No guns,” Wilbur said. “Couple of signal-flare pistols in the locker with the life rafts.”

“Water, we have plenty of,” Katie said, “our own water tank. Not much in the way of food. A snack machine, some left-over bagels.”

“Food is going to be the long-term concern, with supply lines broken down. Dustin, tell them about the farm. Fruit Farm?” Namir slapped his gun back together and traded places with Dustin.

“Yeah, the family farm, the commune where I grew up. It’s only about a couple of hundred miles to the north.”

“I thought they disowned you,” I said.

“Well, they did. But that was like seventy years ago. The conservative bunch who ran things will all have died out by now.”

“Long walk,” Paul said.

“Moving at night,” Namir said. “Still, less than ten days.”

“How far would you have to walk before you get out of the desert?” I asked.

“Twelve miles,” Wilbur said. “Actually, 11.6, going straight west on the access road just north of here. Where is this farm?”

“Near Viva Lento,” Dustin said. “Up by the Oregon border.”

“Head north on 17,” Katie said.

“Good as any. No traffic.”

“What are you two going to do?” I asked. “Strength in numbers, if you want to come with us.”

“No, I’d better head home,” she said.

Wilbur nodded. “No disrespect, Ms. Snowbird, but I don’t think I want to be traveling with a Martian.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Snowbird said. You could never tell when they were being ironic, or just logical.

“All of us ought to ransack this place for provisions,” Namir said. “Could you show me those snack machines?”

We followed Wilbur through the gloom to the snack bar alcove. There were two machines full of snacks, behind glass, which turned out to be unbreakable plastic. We toppled them over with a crash, and Wilbur found a crowbar that allowed us to break the locks and pry the backs open. Satisfying in an obscure way.

The machines weren’t operated by money, but by ration card. So Wilbur or Katie could sit there and get a candy bar every four hours. We didn’t have cards, not having yet joined the 22nd century.

While the men ransacked the machines, I went with Katie on a fruitless search for something like knapsacks to carry the booty in. In the mail room, I found a metal cart, a frame that held an empty mail bag and rolled on four sturdy casters. We took it to the water rescue lockers, where I liberated two flare pistols with two belts of four flare rockets each.

Back at the snack bar alcove, we let Katie and Wilbur stuff their pockets and two bags, then arranged the rest into piles according to shelf life, so we could put the relatively perishable things on top. Fruit and sandwiches that had been refrigerated. A drink machine yielded ten liter bottles of water and a couple dozen less useful soft drinks and near beer.

My rolling cart would hold about a quarter of the bounty. Nobody turned up anything like knapsacks, but a storage room had a drawer full of random sizes of cloth bags. Together we could carry all of the water and most of the food. We could leave behind most of the soft drinks and near beer.

Snowbird insisted on carrying two light bags of snacks, though she couldn’t eat any of it. She refused water. “I can live a week or more without it. I come from a dry planet.” And she wasn’t going to last a week unless they turned the power back on.

Katie and Wilbur wished us luck and headed home, facing hours of walking. Neither had family to worry about, but Katie had cats and fish to feed.

“Might as well feed the fish to the cats,” Meryl said after they left. “Or fry them up.”

Namir was watching them go. “Seem to be nice people. But you never know. They might be back, with others.”

“Maybe we should start moving,” Dustin said.

“We don’t want to travel in daylight. Especially not loaded down with food and water. There will be plenty of people out there with neither, but with guns.”

“So let’s get some rest while we can,” Elza said. “Those of us with weapons stand guard, what, two hours at a time?” We made sure all the doors were locked. The windows were silvered for insulation, so nobody could see us if it was dark inside.

I found a cot in a back room but couldn’t sleep, my mind spinning. What if we made the two-week-long trek without incident, and Dustin’s family welcomed us into the fold? What about the other seven billion people in the equation?

There wouldn’t be seven billion after two weeks. Maybe not half that. I could hardly imagine what the crowded cities would be like. Even if the governments tried to provide food, water, and shelter for everyone, how could they do it without communication and transportation?

When I was in school, we were told that the world had only three or four months’ worth of food in reserve. I suppose that in America most of that was in grain silos, thousands of miles from the population centers on the coasts.

In an abstract sense, I supposed the very poor had the best chance of survival, used to living close to the bottom of the food chain. As if the rich would politely stay away, when the shelves were bare.

I wondered whether Dustin’s family had guns. If they were pacifist vegetarians, we might only find their bones.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, Meryl was shaking my shoulder, whispering, “We’ve got company.”

Namir and Elza and Dustin had their guns at the ready. Through the window you could see a ragtag crowd, maybe twenty, and someone was pounding on the door with something heavy and metallic.

None of the people in the crowd had guns visible, but we couldn’t see the ones who were pounding on the door.

No police or military uniforms. Most of them wore white name-tags.

“I think they’re newsies,” Card whispered. “And VIPs, from those bleachers where they put me first.”

After a minute, most of them moved on, by ones and twos. The one guy kept pounding on the door, rattling the lock. Then he left, too, carrying a metal pipe.

Paul returned from watching out the back windows. “Couple of guys tried to start vehicles. They’re gone now.”

“How could they start them without keys?”

“Like metal keys?” Card said. “They just have a code you punch into the dash. Those are all N-A-S-A, Wilbur told me.”

“What’s the firearms law like now, Card?” Namir asked. “Do people have guns at home?”

“California, you can have guns but you can’t carry one without a permit, and permits aren’t easy to get. That’s academic now, I guess.”

“Maybe. We’ll see how it shakes down. I wonder whether cops will report for duty, and try to enforce the law.”

“Where we’re headed,” Dustin said, “I don’t think there’ll be much law. Maybe in small towns and some big cities, where cops can work on foot.”

“Some people have really big gun collections,” Card said. “Dozens of working weapons. Most of them are electric pellet guns, though. Gunpowder and smokeless weapons are expensive, and ammunition is taxed like a hundred bucks a round. Plenty of military and police ammo around now, I guess.”

Namir looked at his clip. “I’ve got a double magazine, forty rounds, and Dustin, you’ve got a single one?” He nodded.

Elza held up the pistol. “Nine here.”

“So we’re not getting into any gunfights. We have to assume that any group we encounter with weapons will have more ammunition.”

“It’s not a war,” I said. “We shouldn’t even be thinking in those terms. It’s more like a natural disaster.”

“Unnatural,” Dustin said. “I wouldn’t wait around for the Red Cross to show up.”

“I have a radical thought,” Meryl said. “Instead of heading for the hills with guns, why don’t we try to find something like the Red Cross, and volunteer. Try to do something constructive.” That was so like Meryl, social worker to the core.

“It’s a good thought,” Paul said. “But where would you go; what would you do?”

“It would have to be a city of some size,” I said. “Where they might already have charitable organizations in place, with a substantial number of volunteers. With resources for emergency work.”

“Like a computer network and ambulances. Helicopters.” Namir shook his head. “More useful, they might have first-aid kits. I wouldn’t like to be the guy in charge of guarding them, though.”

“You think too much like a soldier.” Meryl sat down at the table across from him. “That may save our lives some day. But it’s not everything. If there’s going to be an alternative to chaos, to anarchy, we have to pursue it right away.”

“You do that. I’ll keep you covered, from behind something solid.”

“It’s not always about guns!”

“May I say something.” Snowbird had all four arms folded, a posture communicating thoughtfulness. “I do not have a dog in this fight, as I once heard a person say. My destiny will not be affected by your decision.

“Namir, your supply of ammunition is small. You have four seconds’ worth, and Dustin has two. When it’s gone, your weapons are dead weight.”

“You can shoot single-shot. And we can find ammunition.”

“But there will be people guarding it, who will kill to keep you from it. And how much can you carry? They won’t be making any more of it.”

“There’s probably a lot of it around. But I concede your point.”

“If you plan to survive more than weeks or months, violence is the wrong direction. When you run out of ammunition, what will you do?”

Elza did not surprise me: “My husband unarmed is more dangerous than any two men with guns.”

“A nice sentiment,” he said, “but I want to choose the two men.

“But Snowbird is right, in the long run. Card, walking north, what would be the nearest city?”

“Depends on what you would call a city. Custer City, technically. But don’t try to get a good meal there.”

“How far?”

“Twenty-five miles, I guess.”

“That’s about as far as we’re going to get on this amount of water.”

Card smiled. “Have you tried a tap?”

“What?”

“This isn’t a spaceship. You turn on a faucet anywhere, and water comes out.”

That caught me, too. Live on recycled pee for years, and you start to feel real personal about water.

A shed outside had armloads of empty plastic gallon jugs. We didn’t take the ones that smelled of solvent, and rinsed the others well—just by turning a tap and letting gravity do the work. How long that would last, of course, we had no way of telling. You could see the water tank a couple of blocks away. One stray bullet could empty it. Or an aimed one.

The sun would be up for a few more hours. Paul and Namir took binoculars up on the roof and didn’t see any gatherings of people: just a few individuals and pairs. Paul came down with a suggestion.

“We ought to go find out whether our celebrity is worth anything. Go back to that headquarters building and find out what’s happening, anyhow.” A reasonable suggestion that made my knees weak.

“I’ll come along as a guard,” Namir said.

“No; no guns. We’ll probably be safer without.” He looked at Meryl, who smiled and nodded.

I wasn’t so sure. We didn’t have a magic wand that would make other people’s guns disappear.

Elza held out her pistol, handle first. “Paul, at least take this. You must have had some training in the Space Force.”

He took it and stared at it. “One afternoon, back in ’62. This is the safety?” She nodded, and he put the pistol in his waistband, out of sight under his shirt. “Thanks. Pray we don’t need it.”

I put two bottles of water and some snacks in a bag, and slung it over my shoulder. I’d lost my sun hat down on the beach, so pulled a faded NASA cap off a peg. Paul straightened it. “Now we’re official.”

“If you’re not back in two hours, we’ll come after you,” Namir said. I checked my wrist tat and it was still 10:23, for the rest of my life.

“Make it three,” Paul said, without suggesting how either of them could tell time—some secret military thing, no doubt. “Take us half an hour just to walk there.”

“Careful by the bleachers,” Card said, unnecessarily. Paul nodded and went out the door.

It was a relief to be alone with him, the first time since we’d left the billet at dawn. He took my hand and squeezed it. “You and me.”

“Me and you,” I said automatically. A song refrain from when I was eighteen. Paul an ancient man of twenty-nine.

We walked in silence for a minute. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“I’m still trying to sort it out.”

“Guess we’re all still in shock.” He laughed. “Except Snowbird. The only one who knows for sure she’s going to die.”

“Poor thing.”

“Poor us. Poor whole fucking human race. How many will be alive a year from now? A month from now?”

“In a month, they’ll still be eating groceries,” I said.

He nodded. “In a year, each other.”

“Save you for last.” I pinched his butt. “You always were a tough old bastard.”

We both laughed. Keeping that one monster at bay.

There was a lot of trash on the road, with no wind to blow it around. Press releases and promotion packets, as well as cups and food trash. And this wasn’t the main avenue out; people who lived in California would be going the other way. Assuming they were headed home.

A couple of hundred yards before we got to the bleachers, there were the first signs of violence. Dark spatters of blood, dried in the dust.

No bodies at first, but then Paul followed a trail of drops to a place behind a portable toilet. A woman in sexy silver shorts, who had been wounded in the abdomen. She’d held it in with her hands for a couple of dozen steps, and then collapsed. Her guts were a pile of glistening gray and blue, awash in blood. Paul checked her pulse while I usefully leaned the other way and vomited. He held my shoulders while I gagged and coughed the last of it, and handed me a water bottle.

“We don’t have to go any farther,” he said.

“We do,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak.

“It will probably get worse.” He started to pull out the pistol, and I leaned against him.

“Leave it hidden. Someone might be watching.”

“Of course.” He put his arm around me, and we continued up the road toward the HQ building.

“Look at the brass. Someone stood here and fired toward the bleachers.” A scatter of brass shell casings to our left.

“Or up in the air,” I said. “No more bodies.”

“That’s something.” He stopped. “This isn’t smart. Let’s go back to—”

We were maybe twenty yards from the entrance to the temporary building. A tall fat man stepped out onto the wooden deck, brandishing a weapon, and fired a burst into the air. “Y’all put up your hands?”

We did. He clumped down the three steps to the ground. “Look what we got, Jemmie. Y’all from that spaceship. The starship. Saw you on the cube last night.”

“We are,” Paul said.

Another person, presumably Jemmie, stepped out of the darkness. He was also holding a weapon, and binoculars with a strap dangling. “Been watchin’ you. You come up from the motor pool.”

They were both wearing NASA coveralls, spotless, with the fold lines still visible. Jemmie’s were a couple of sizes too large, the sleeves rolled up.

“You work for NASA?” I said.

“Guess we do now,” the fat one said. “You wanta help me launch my rocket?”

Paul tensed. Don’t! “We don’t mean you any harm,” I said.

“I bet you don’t.” The fat one stepped forward, his weapon on Paul, looking at me.

“You keep it in your pants, Howard. Bet they got that god-damn Martian back there.” He stepped down to join us. “Don’t you.”

“I don’t know who’s down there now,” Paul improvised. “You saw a Martian in the binoculars?”

“He was with you all on the cube this morning, before it got shut off.”

“And the other aliens did that,” Howard said.

“Time we did something back,” Jemmie said, pointing his weapon down the road. “Let’s us go have a talk with Mr. Martian.” He started walking. “Then we figure out what to do with you all.”

Howard came alongside me and put his big arm on my shoulder. “They say you was with all those men fifty years.” He grabbed my breast, hard. “Don’t seem possible—”

I was going to give him an elbow to the ribs, hesitated, and heard a tiny metallic click. Then there was a huge explosion and a shower of blood and gore in front of me.

Then some voices I could hardly hear, my ears ringing. At first I thought all the blood was mine; I was dead. But then Howard fell in front of me, hard, the top of his skull shattered, an artery still pulsing.

I turned around and saw the other man, Jemmie, trying to run backwards, both his hands out to protect himself from Paul’s pistol. Paul had the pistol gripped in both hands, but they were shaking so violently he probably couldn’t have hit the man if they were in a small room together.

I saw all this in a strange state of floating calm, realizing that the little sound I’d heard before I went deaf had been the safety on his pistol.

The man was running like a sprinter now. Paul fired once over the man’s head, and stooped to pick up the weapon he’d dropped or thrown down.

I looked back at the big man dying, his arms and legs moving feebly as the blood spurt slowed to a drizzle. He’d shit his new blue trousers. I leaned over and burped a little acid, and opening my mouth wide made my ears crackle, and some hearing came back.

Paul came up from behind and gathered me to him, still shaking hard, sharp sweat smell and gunsmoke. “Killed him. Jesus fucking Christ.”

I was still floating, stunned. “That’s the most religious thing you’ve ever said to me.”

From Rear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):

. . . there is no way to calculate how many people died in the first second, minute, or hour. A week later, when there was still food, perhaps one billion of the globe’s seven billion had perished. Failure of transportation systems and medical life support—which almost claimed this writer’s life—accounted for a large fraction of those deaths immediately. Most died in violence, though, after the total collapse of civil and military authority. As far as I know, no truly large city, more than ten million people, survived the initial crisis well, except perhaps for the religious police states in the Middle East and America’s new Confederacy. (But I don’t think either would last very long without supporting technology to keep the desert at bay; without wealth to trade for water.)

Civilization, in the broad social sense of the word, obviously has survived in smaller towns and cities around the world. This writer met a couple who had sailed from Australia to California, who said that life was reasonably comfortable and secure in a string of hundreds of fishing villages spread along Australia’s eastern and southeastern coasts, and in the Great Barrier Reef. Here in Oregon, we have had sailing visitors from as far south as Costa Rica, and as far north as the Aleutian Islands. No sailors have come from Europe, Africa, or the American east coast, which leads us to believe that the Panama Canal is not open.

A few individuals and small parties have made it here from the East Coast and Midwest by horseback or bicycle. I’ve heard of people who walked all the way, but haven’t met any, and would not be inclined to believe them. That would be a long walk in less than two years.

The tales these travelers bring are not usually happy. Most of the heavily populated parts of the East are burial grounds, or just boneyards. There are towns like this one, able to guard enough land to grow subsistence crops, and keep a moderately large population safe from marauders.

Of course these towns tend to be on rivers or lakes, in temperate or warmer climes. The surviving population of Florida is probably ten times that of New England.

(The people who originally settled this country from Europe did live in the north, and had to deal with killing winters. They wouldn’t have done so well, though, surrounded by millions of starving people with guns. Hard to get a farm going when people will kill for one ear of corn.)

Fortunately, ammunition is getting scarce . . .

2

I felt Paul wave and turned around to see Namir running toward us, his rifle pointed down at a slant. “We’re okay,” he said, too softly for Namir to hear.

Still holding me, he turned partway around, to look in the direction the man had been running. “I think he went back into the HQ building. Here.” He handed me the pistol. “Sit down behind me.”

He sat down cross-legged and planted his elbows on his knees, bringing the man’s rifle up to sight down the barrel. He clicked a switch, I guess a safety, several times.

The pistol was heavier than it looked. The barrel was warm. I kept my finger away from the trigger.

Namir ran up and hesitated, looking at the body, and then got down prone next to us and pointed his rifle in the same direction. “Somebody in there?”

“I think so. I’ve got his weapon.”

“Probably more in there. Come on!” He sprang across the road to where a panel truck was stalled sideways. “Get cover.” We followed him and crouched down behind it.

“So what happened?”

“Two guys wanted to go down to the motor pool and kill a Martian. They didn’t know we had Elza’s pistol.”

“That one grabbed me.” I pointed at the body. “Grabbed my breast.”

“And you shot him in the head. Remind me to mind my manners.”

“I shot him,” Paul said. “Had to. It was obvious they . . . they weren’t . . .” He swallowed hard.

“Weren’t going to let you live,” Namir said. “Good you thought fast.”

“I didn’t think at all.” He left the truck’s cover and walked over to the man he’d killed. He nudged the man’s body with his toe. “Fuck.” He kicked him. “Shit. Fuck.” Kicked him harder.

I ran over and held him, then pulled him so close I could feel his heart’s hammer in my own chest. Felt him kick again and again. “Fucking shit,” he sobbed.

My eyes stinging wet on his chest, I echoed him, fucking shit. Strong and meaningless words.

“Get back here,” Namir said. “Please! You’re sitting ducks.” He fired a short burst at the door.

Paul snapped out of it and hurried back, with me staggering in tow. “Sorry,” he said to Namir, as we got down next to him. “Never done that before.”

Namir squeezed his shoulder and nodded, not taking his eyes off the door.

A spot of white appeared in one corner of the door, a white cloth being waved. “Show yourself,” Namir shouted. “Hands up.”

He stepped into the light, blinking, still waving the white flag, which turned out to be underwear.

“Don’t shoot. I don’t have no gun.”

“Who else is in there?”

“Ain’t nobody now.” He started to gesture.

“Keep your hands showing!” To Paul he said quietly, “Stand up with the gun. Aim it at him but stay behind cover.” Then he stood and started walking toward the man.

“One move and you’re dead. If anyone else shows up, you die first.”

He got close enough to point the rifle right between the man’s eyes. “Now turn around, slowly.” He did.

“We’re going into that building. You’re certain there’s no one in there?”

“Nobody I know of.”

“If I see one person, I’ll blow your brains out.”

“One dead guy! There was one dead guy, maybe two.”

“If they’re still dead, you’re safe.” He tapped him on the back of the head with the rifle’s muzzle, and the man flinched. “Move it.”

“This doesn’t look smart,” I whispered to Paul. “How does he know he’s not walking into an ambush?”

“He’s the expert.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe he’s assuming that if there were someone armed in there, he would have fired at us while we were exposed. But he has to know for sure before we turn our backs on the building.”

“Maybe.” Or maybe, I thought, Namir was going to kill the man in cold blood, and didn’t want to do it in front of us.

They went inside the building, and I waited for the shot.

It didn’t come. They shuffled back out, and Namir said something to him, and he ran away at top speed. Namir kept the gun pointed in his direction but walked casually toward us.

“The place is a mess. A man and a woman dead, and it looks like someone sprayed around the whole control room with automatic fire. Nothing there for us.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

“No idea. That man, Jemmie, said it was like that when they came in. He’s probably lying, but I don’t think he or the other killed those two. They were shotgunned.”

“They might have used a shotgun and then discarded it,” Paul said.

Namir nodded and shrugged. “ ‘Every man shall die for his own sins.’ I had to either let him go or kill him.”

“We couldn’t take him with us,” I said, but didn’t like the idea of him being out there and brutally angry.

“Let’s go back to the motor pool,” Namir said. “Wait for darkness.”

“Or the U.S. Marines,” Paul said, “whichever comes first.”

Elza was waiting for us at the door. I handed her pistol back. “It works.”

“We saw, through the binoculars. Good thing you had it.”

“It was.” Though I’d been thinking of it more as a curse than a blessing.

“You should go talk to your brother. He’s not taking this well.”

“The shooting?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t see that. Just things in general.”

The end of civilization? How childish of him. “Where is he?”

“Snack room.”

He was sitting cross-legged under the skylight with six empty near-beer cans in a pyramid in front of him. Pretty fast work. Thirty minutes?

“Card—”

“I saw Paul kill that man.”

“Yeah; me too. See?” I turned to show him the speckles and spatters of blood and gore on my left shoulder.

He nodded, looking at it as if it were a shirt pattern. “I couldn’t be part of it anymore.”

“You’re not going through one tenth what Paul is.” Not to mention your sister. “He’s never killed before.”

“I know, I know. But you don’t understand.”

“I guess I don’t.”

He took the can off the top of the pyramid and sucked at it. “I have three physical identities. Had. The other two are completely, were completely, electronic. They could take external forms—rent-a-bodies—when it was convenient, but they didn’t have to.

“For most of my life, when this original body became uncomfortable, I could step out of it, and automatic repair nanosystems would take over, while I stayed in one of the other two bodies.”

“You mean if your brain makes you uncomfortable?”

“Brain, endocrine system, gonads. The parts that generate and mediate emotional states.”

“Well, welcome to reality.”

He had another drink and shook his head, wincing. “Just what I’d expect you to say, Carmen. But there are all kinds of reality. This one is shallow and painful and inescapable.”

“But this one is the real world.”

“Not to me. Not to billions of perfectly real people.”

We had talked about this a little on the cube two days ago. But I guess to me it was just a more vivid and time-consuming version of the VR games that had so dominated his time when he was a kid. To my great annoyance and our parents’ exasperation.

“Sorry I’m being such a Sal the Sal,” he said, dragging a long-dead pop star from our mutual childhood, an egotistical brat. “It’s almost an automatic reflex, switching over, and my body wonders why it’s alive and suffering.”

“You’re dead while it happens?”

“Sure, this body. You can’t be in two places at once.”

Creepy. “Well, I can see that it’s a terrible loss. Worse than your best friend dying.”

“They were both me! Dying. And I think this third me could die if I will it.”

“Don’t even think of it, Card. You’re all the family I have.”

“And your only native guide. It’s nice to feel wanted.”

3

Nice to have a native guide, but as darkness fell, I might have traded him for a map and a flashlight. A big box of kitchen matches wouldn’t hurt. Did they still have them in this future?

We had lined up all our gear by the door and opened it a crack to watch the light fade. The cloudless sky went from lemon to salmon to deepening gray.

It was no surprise, of course, to see meteors crisscrossing as the sky got darker; we’d been seeing that ever since the Others blew up the moon. Really bright ones rolled across the daytime sky so often that no one commented on them anymore. But there was a new feature that we hadn’t noticed while there was still power, and the lights of civilization: night would never be completely dark.

That cloud of debris that was the corpse of the moon was composed of trillions of pebbles and rocks that all reflected sunlight like tiny moons. The result was a dim haze that made enough light to see your hand a few feet away.

Paul was mortified that he hadn’t predicted it, with his graduate degree in astrophysics. Of course, we hadn’t seen a night sky without city lights since we had landed on Earth four days before.

Our plan to sneak up to the farm under cover of darkness was useless. There would be plenty of people on the road at night, avoiding the desert heat.

Snowbird gave voice to the obvious. “You have to leave me behind. I’m like a beacon, drawing trouble. And I slow you down.”

“We’re responsible for you,” Namir said.

“Not really. I would as soon die here as anywhere, and I would rather not take any of my friends with me.

“Perhaps I will just swim away until I tire out and sink. I would be the best Martian swimmer on Earth. Or anyplace.”

“Thank you for the generosity, but we can’t abandon you.” In the dim murk, I couldn’t read the others’ expressions. “Are we in agreement here?”

“No,” Dustin said. “Snowbird, I also appreciate your logic and selflessness. I really think I would make the same offer if I were in your shoes. In your position. Who is with me?”

There was some muttering and throat clearing, cut short by a loud thump that was the butt of Namir’s rifle hitting the floor. “We are not going to cast lots over whether to allow one of our number to die.

“The seven of us are alone here. We traveled fifty light-years together in constant danger and considerable discomfort. We faced a powerful and implacable enemy and survived. We watched our universe change drastically three separate times. Whatever is going to happen to us, we face it together.

“Snowbird, consider extending your logic and generosity. If some idiot kills you for being a Martian, you will be exactly as dead as if you had drowned. Meanwhile, you might be the most valuable member of this ragtag bunch.”

“You’re our wild card,” Paul said. “I think you’re the only Martian in the hemisphere. You’re closer to understanding the Others than any human can be, and they’re still the primary enemy, no matter how far away they are in space and time.”

Elza stood up in the darkness. “The enemy I’m worried about now are assholes like the ones you dealt with today. So what are we going to do now? I mean tonight. If we can’t benefit from darkness, maybe we should stay here until morning and start moving then, when no one can sneak up on us.”

“That’s right,” Namir said. “Another six or eight hours’ rest wouldn’t hurt us, either.”

“Leaving two of us on guard while the others sleep,” Elza said.

“One up on the roof, with the binoculars,” Paul said. “That should be me. I can use the stars to measure out two-hour shifts.”

“Show us how?” Namir said.

I saw Paul’s silhouette as he opened the door to look out. “Sure. It’s dark enough.” The brighter stars were visible through the sky glow.

We all filed out, including Snowbird—never can tell when reading the stars might come in handy, for a doomed Martian stranded in the Mojave Desert.

It was possible to come close to calculating the actual local time, if you knew the date and a few constellations. But none of us had appointments to meet, so he just showed us an easy way to approximate the passage of time. Your fist at arm’s length is about ten degrees. The sun or moon or a star moves about thirty degrees, three fists, in two hours.

(Meryl was able to use her xenology background—she knew better than the rest of us how the world looked to a Martian—and patiently translated what Paul had showed us into Snowbird’s anatomy. She did have a lot more fists to work with.)

I drew the first shift, with Paul on the roof, but Namir was out there, too, hidden behind a truck. Not tired enough to sleep, he said.

He had showed us all how to operate the rifles and pistol, and made us practice loading and unloading and safety procedures until we could do the whole drill with our eyes closed.

It didn’t make me too confident. The rifle was heavy and cold and greasy, and smelled of gunsmoke. My skin still crawled where the man’s blood and brains had spattered me.

I’d vomited twice again, mostly water and acid.

I was hungry but didn’t want to waste food by barfing.

So I tried to force myself into calm, but I couldn’t not think about the sudden explosion and gory splash.

Namir had asked whether I would like to be excused from the guard schedule because of the traumatic experience. I said no, that feeling as if I could protect myself would help. Maybe it would. Not yet.

I was next to the front door, behind a stack of sandbags scavenged from the wall. I could crouch behind them and shoot over the top of the stack, or lie down—“assume the prone position,” which sounds like a porn director’s command. Or I could curl up into a ball and weep.

There was a hole in the sky, which was interesting. I actually figured it out for myself before Paul had a chance to enlighten me: it was the Earth’s shadow, blocking off sunshine from the lunar debris. Sort of an anti-moon, a little bigger than the moon and moving much faster through the sky.

The constant meteor shower seemed to be slowing down, or maybe I was just getting used to it.

There was a quiet rustle behind me, and I started. But it was only Snowbird.

“I wondered whether you were ready to eat,” she said. She held out something that touched my arm.

“Thanks.” It was some kind of candy bar. I unwrapped it and was grateful for the creamy chocolate and unidentifiable nuts. “How are you doing?”

“I’m in a complex state, which is also simple. Preparing to die.”

“In Mars, I suppose it would be much different.” I knew a little about their death customs. “With your family.”

She shuffled in the dark. “Newsies called it telepathy, but it’s nothing so strange. More like a data transfer. We don’t quite understand how it works, but the result is clear. Experiences that are unique to the dying individual are transferred to a sort of family memory. Like adding to a scrapbook in a human family, but all in the head.”

“You would have a lot of those. Unique experiences.”

She made a two-click sound of agreement. “I don’t think anything will be transferred without physical contact, though.”

“The more reason for you not to give up.”

There was a long pause. “You really think the Others will turn the power back on?”

“Anybody’s guess. I don’t suppose it’s likely. Do you?”

“My instinct says no. They aren’t kindly.” That was an understatement. “But it’s hard to predict where their logic may have taken them.”

The Others think very fast, superconducting neurocircuits, but they live and move with glacial slowness, slithering through liquid nitrogen. Their dealings with species like ours are planned out years ahead of time, or even centuries or millennia. Their automata, who perceive and react at our speed or faster, observe us and decide which branch of the logic tree to follow. The decision to turn off the free power doomed a billion or more humans, but as far as we know it was just remorseless logic, a chain of events that started tens of thousands of years ago. If humans do this, then we will do this, in self-defense.

Many races on earthlike planets have been evaluated this way. They say that many were not destroyed.

As we weren’t, quite. Yet.

“They haven’t been unkind to you. To Martians.”

“No, but we aren’t competitors. It bothers me to think that we’re not particularly useful to them anymore. We were created for a purpose and have fulfilled it.”

The Others created the Martians, biological machines, and put them in an Earth-like bubble in Mars, to serve as an advance warning, in case the unpleasant denizens of Earth evolved into space flight.

It was illustrative of the Others’ slow, tortuous, logical method. When we finally were sophisticated enough to leave Earth, one of our first targets would be Mars. When we found the Martian underground city, that would trigger a signal to Neptune’s moon Triton, where an individual Other was resting in frigid nitrogen slush. It would evaluate the situation and choose among various pre-ordained courses of action.

It chose a scenario where humans and Martians had to work together to defuse a bomb that would destroy all advanced life on Earth. Then it went back to its home planet, almost twenty-five light-years away, to report.

One assumes that the Others were ready and waiting, when it came back with news of what it had done and learned. The one best course of action was chosen, and the tools for it sent back almost twenty-five light-years to the waiting Earth.

In the intervening fifty years, though, the Earth had built an interplanetary defense fleet, which was obviously not unexpected.

Those thousand defensive ships posed no real threat to the Others; their home was a million times farther away. But the ships represented a dangerous attitude, as many had feared, and the Others had a plan for that.

The Others didn’t destroy us all, though that would’ve been simple, but just pulverized the moon, scattering its material more or less evenly inside the former satellite’s orbit, which destroyed the fleet and sent an unambiguous message: stay on Earth. Our glorious leaders opted to ignore that, or defy it, which triggered another pre-ordained response, taking away not only their gift of free energy, but somehow all electrical power as well. Suddenly marooning us in the nineteenth century, surrounded by useless sophisticated hardware. Like flashlights.

“Someone’s coming,” Snowbird whispered. I couldn’t see anyone.

“Halt!” Paul shouted from the roof. “Put your hands up.” The binoculars would help him see.

“I’m not armed,” a scared voice said. A young woman or younger boy.

“I see her,” Namir said. “Carmen, she’s directly in front of you, maybe thirty feet away. Please leave your weapon and go search her. I have you covered.”

That does a lot of good, I thought. If something goes wrong, you can shoot in our general direction.

“I’m over here,” she said. “Over here, over here, over here. I don’t mean anybody any harm.” About halfway there, I could see her, a dark ghost in the dim sky light, dressed in black, her hands pale smudges over her head.

“Excuse me,” I said idiotically, and patted her the way they did in cop shows fifty and a hundred years ago. She was about my size, but muscular. If she had a weapon on her, it was stuck in a place I was reluctant to touch.

Her clothing was like satin, and it was a strangely strong erotic experience, caressing a person I’d never seen. Maybe with proper study I could become a lesbian.

“Okay. So who are you, and what are you doing here? All dressed in black.” Her skin was evidently dark, except for her palms.

“I’m Alba Larimer. Security officer here at Armstrong. I came to warn you—some people plan to ambush you and take the Martian.”

“What do they plan to do with her?” Namir asked. He was still behind the truck.

“They think the Other must be watching us, the one that was on the cube?” The one we knew as Spy. “They think if they threaten to kill her, the Other will show up and make a deal.”

“That is stupid on so many levels,” Namir said. “But thank you. My name is Namir. Do you know where the ambush would be?”

“Somewhere between here and the turnoff to Route 17. Probably a building. There are a couple of dozen, unfortunately. You’d probably be better off staying here, if you have guns. Let them approach a defended position.”

She was talking his language.

“Hm. How many of them?”

“Only two were talking. There might have been more outside.”

“And what is your stake in this?”

“My job,” she said, her voice shaking. “No one has relieved me of my responsibilities.”

I could almost see him nodding, assessing her. “Security. Do you have access to weapons and ammunition?”

“An assault rifle, a shotgun, and riot gear. In my car’s trunk, I’m afraid. Electronic lock.”

“We have an electronic crowbar,” Paul said from above. “How far away?”

“Less than a half mile; I was watching the launch.”

“What do you think?” Paul said.

I was not sure what to say, and then Namir answered. “I’ll go with her. Alba, can you find your car in this darkness?”

“Yes; it’s white. It’s exposed, though, by the side of the road.”

“Let’s move quickly, then. I’ll get the crowbar.”

Paul offered to come along as backup, and Namir said no, period. He didn’t have to explain. If she turned out to be a bad guy, we were only risking one man and one weapon. And she didn’t yet know how few people and weapons we had.

“Is there a central security building,” I asked, “where they keep all the guns and all?”

“I walked there first. It was a mess. At least three officers dead inside. I let myself in through the kitchen, and nobody saw me. That’s when I overheard the plot to kidnap the Martian.”

“So they’re armed to the teeth.”

“I don’t think so. The armory went into automatic lockdown when the power went off. I don’t think you can get in there without a heavy-duty laser or a cutting torch.”

“The lock would be mechanical,” Paul said, “I wonder if there’s a mechanical way around it . . . probably not. It wouldn’t have been designed with the idea that the power would go off forever.”

“Do you think it really is forever? I didn’t see the broadcast.”

“I don’t remember the exact wording,” I said. “It sounded pretty final.”

“They said we were to become a ‘donor planet,’ ” Paul said. “So some other world would be getting free power at the expense of our own potential for generating electricity. Or that’s how I interpret it.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“No. Used to be a rocket jock. Currently unemployed.”

I could feel her smile. “Aren’t we all, now.”

I heard a loud clank and muttered curse from inside. Namir had found the crowbar by knocking it over.

He was just visible, coming through the door. Rifle slung over his shoulder, crowbar held like a weapon in his right hand.

“Carmen, you move up to the edge of the wall. Take the safety off. If we draw any fire, shoot high in our direction. We’ll run back as fast as we can.”

“We’ll probably be okay,” Alba said. “I haven’t seen or heard anyone nearby.” She laughed. “Though I didn’t see or hear you, Namir, when I walked in.”

“Good. I’ve been trying to stay invisible. Let’s go.”

I followed them as far as the entrance, then settled in, leaning against the sandbags. Which smelled like the beach, plastic and hot sand.

Alba disappeared immediately into the murk, but I could still see Namir for a minute. Then he was gone.

I was straining to hear, and so jumped at the first loud noise. A good thing I didn’t have my finger on the trigger. It was just Namir attacking the car trunk with the crowbar. Then a loud pop, and a vague sound of metal things clicking against metal in the distance. Then several dull thuds, which I supposed were Namir trying to break into an unbreakable window.

This would be the dangerous time. People would be attracted by the noise and follow the sound.

It stopped, and I watched and listened anxiously for several minutes.

Then something moved on the road in front of me. “Namir?” I whispered.

“It’s me.”

“And Alba.” I couldn’t see her until they passed directly in front of me. An advantage to being black.

“Paul,” Namir stopped, and said to the roof, “is it two hours yet?”

“Just about.”

“I’ll send Elza up to relieve you.” He reached out and touched my arm. “You can get some rest now, Carmen. Give Dustin your rifle and send him back. I’ll bring Alba up to speed.”

I felt a momentary irrational twinge of jealousy. The black widow comes out of the night and claims our protector. But I really could use some sleep.

4

I woke to pale light and quiet conversation. Got up stiffly from the pile of laundered uniforms I’d used as bedding. Rubbed my face and dragged fingers through my hair and realized I would kill for a toothbrush. Found the rear sink and rinsed my mouth and splashed my face, and went toward the sound.

Alba was talking to Paul. Please let her be ugly.

Of course she was not. Regular features, intelligence in her eyes. A nice figure that I’d gotten to paw before Paul could even fantasize about it.

“You must be Carmen.”

“I don’t know. It’s early yet.” I took her hand. Able was I ere I saw Alba. “This is the stuff from your car?”

“Combined with your pistol, yes. Wish we had more ammunition. At least all the rifles use the same kind.” Two pistols and a new-looking rifle—our two must have been in use—and a mean-looking thing that I guessed was the “riot gun.” I picked it up carefully.

“Ten gauge,” she said. “It makes a hell of a noise, but we only have one box of shells for it. Can’t get them at Kmart.”

“Must kick like a mule.”

“No, it’s recoilless. The rounds are like little rockets. And nobody but me can fire it; it’s keyed to my thumbprint.”

“What will they think of next?”

“I’d like to ask Alba to join us,” Paul said. “She brings expertise and local knowledge as well as weapons.”

We looked at each other, and a certain understanding passed. She wasn’t a danger where Paul was concerned, at least not yet. “And a knapsack,” I said, looking down at the gear. “Tear gas grenades, two canteens. What are these?” I gingerly touched one of four things that looked like rubber balls painted green.

“Flash-bangs. You can temporarily blind and deafen an adversary without hurting him.” She pointed at one. “You click the red dot twice and throw; it’ll go off when it hits the ground.”

“Do they come with earplugs and dark glasses?”

She laughed. “Long gone. We have to improvise.”

There were four boxes of rifle ammunition, smaller than the box for the riot gun. Nothing that I could see for the pistol. “We’re not exactly ready for a war, are we?”

“In more ways than one, no.” She glanced at Paul. “Paul told me what happened to you both yesterday. I’ve never gone through anything like that. I mean, I trained for the eventuality, and thought it through, but I’ve never shot anybody or been shot at.”

“Does the prospect bother you?”

“It makes me sick. Ten percent excited and ninety percent sick.”

“Here comes the expert,” Paul said. Namir came in shirtless, rubbing his face with a towel. His muscles weren’t as well defined as they had been on the starship. No real exercise for a week.

“There’s a story that’s reinvented every war,” he said, “that goes back at least to the nineteenth century . . . someone asks a sniper what he feels when he takes aim and squeezes, and a man falls dead. He says ‘Recoil.’

“I did that when I was a boy, eighteen or nineteen. We had smart bullets; you kept them on target with a joystick. And there was a kind of joy when you hit the target, hand-slapping and thumbs-up—it was a group effort, and the guy you killed was just a grainy black-and-white image, like a pocket video game.

“But I’ve done the opposite extreme, too. After Gehenna, I killed a man with my bare hands. Tried to strangle him, but he resisted hard. Finally beat his head against the concrete floor until . . . until he died. I felt a different kind of joy then, fierce. But horror, too, like I could never get my hands clean again.”

“Gehenna,” she said quietly. “We studied it.”

“The bastards killed my mother. And almost everyone I worked with, in Mossad. Tel Aviv, what, seventy years ago?”

“Seventy-one,” she said, good student.

“And you’ve been shot, too,” I said.

He nodded. “New York City. I stepped off a slidewalk and a woman was waiting for me. One shot, point-blank in the chest.”

“Killed you?”

“Yeah, but I was back in a couple of minutes. A pro would’ve gone for the head.”

“Was she a spy like you?”

“Just a hire, we think. My bodyguard did go for the head—‘two in the chest, one in the head,’ as we were taught. So we couldn’t find out from her who she was, who she worked for. He got hell for that, demoted. Unfair.”

He picked up the new rifle and removed the magazine and the bolt, the way he’d showed us, and inspected the bolt minutely. “I’d thought that part of my life was long over.” He slid the top two rounds out of the magazine and put them back, testing the spring with his thumb, and then removed the top round again and set it on the table. “Better to have one less round than jam. Spring is old.”

He looked up. “Your name is Alba?”

“That’s right.”

“Scotland?”

“No, it means ‘dawn’ in Spanish.”

“Your father was . . .”

“Five cc’s of thawed-out Harvard sperm. Never met the guy.”

He nodded, looking off in the distance. “That must feel strange. Your father might have been dead when you were conceived.”

“I’ve thought about that myself. I was never curious enough to check.”

“Understandable.” He looked around. “Did we all lose fathers and mothers on this trip?”

Fifty years evaporated by relativity. “Meryl talked to her parents,” I said, “both of them. Don’t know whether they’d survive the power going off.”

He looked at the cartridge in his hand. “These aren’t smart rounds. Tracers?”

“Every fourth.”

“Mixed blessing.” I supposed because they made a line that pointed back to your own position.

“Are we going to stay here or leave?” I said.

“They know we’re here?” Namir asked Alba.

“Motor pool, yes.”

“I think we should wait for them. They’ll get impatient, today or tomorrow. How many?”

“Three I know of. The ones I overheard at HQ.”

Namir stood and stretched. “If I were them, I’d find sniper positions, separate ones, and wait. Pick us off one at a time. Who’s on the roof?”

“Dustin,” Paul said.

“I’ll go up and make sure he’s keeping his head down. Roof’s the obvious first target for a sniper.” He checked his wrist for the nonexistent watch, made a face, and went toward the stairs.

“Is he hard to live with?” Alba asked, after Namir had left.

“No. He’s very considerate and calm.”

“Controlled,” Paul said. “He’s been through enough to send anybody right ’round the bend. That one he talked about wasn’t the only person he’s killed.” He shook his head hard. “God. Now I’m one, too, a killer.”

“You had to do it, Paul.”

“So did he. So did he.”

“He’s stable, though,” Alba said. “Seems about as solid as anyone I’ve ever met.”

Paul laughed. “That’s what they always say in the newsie interviews. ‘Who would ever have thought a man that stable would kill his mother and eat her?’ But yeah. We lived together for years in that crowded starship, and I never saw him lose his temper.”

“Which is unnatural,” I had to point out. “The rest of us had our little moments.”

“Like Moonboy. A little assault and battery.”

“I heard about him, on the cube show about you. He went crazy, and the Others killed him?”

“Not really,” I said. “They took him, but he’s not dead, if they’re to be believed.”

“Not alive, either. A kind of suspended animation, which he’ll never leave. Close enough to being dead.”

Something I hadn’t thought of in a while. “Alive or dead or in between, he’s the only human they have in their possession, to study. The only one of us who cracked under the strain.”

“Of course they knew that,” Paul said. “And we were all glad. He was a real pain in the butt, as well as a lunatic.”

“Talking about my Moonboy?” Meryl said as she walked into the room, brushing her hair.

“Sorry,” we both said.

“Don’t be. He was a lunatic and a pain in the ass. Ask Elza.” He’d been in bed with Elza when he had his breakdown, and punched her hard enough to break her nose. Meryl was not surprised by the infidelity then, but she had been by the violence.

“We were all supposedly chosen because we could get along with others in close quarters,” I said.

“Some things you just can’t test for.” There was real pain behind her brusqueness. “So are we moving out now?” We told her about the new plan, or non-plan. She went into the kitchen to hard-boil all the eggs, for portability.

Namir came down and went around checking doors and windows. He came back with Snowbird. “Snowbird, this is Alba.”

She made a little curtsy, like a horse in dressage. “You are black.”

“Yeah, and you smell funny.”

“I apologize for catabolism. I have no food to metabolize.” In fact, she was starting to smell like marigolds. “I’ve not seen a black person since I left Mars, many years ago.”

“You’ve been stuck here since you got back?”

“Here on the base, yes, in protective custody.”

“Serious threats on her life,” I said. “Even before the shit hit the fan.”

“The what?”

“Old expression. One of my father’s favorites.”

“How much longer can you live,” Namir asked, “without new food?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never been hungry before.”

“You can’t eat any human food?” Alba asked.

“No. I can consume pure carbohydrates but get no nutrition from them. And the smallest amount of protein contamination would kill me.”

“They didn’t have food for you anywhere on this base?” I said.

“A few days’ worth, which I’ve eaten. More was coming, from Russia. Actually, if the power hadn’t gone out, I might have joined the other Martians there by now, or at least tomorrow—”

There was a sudden gunshot. Namir snatched the rifle off the table and hit the floor, hard. “Get away from the window!” Snowbird half galloped into the next room. I slumped myself down behind the table. They couldn’t see in, I thought irrelevantly. They could shoot in.

Elza came staggering into the room, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “What was—”

Paul grabbed her, and Namir shouted, “Down, Elza! Get down!” She did, and scuttled over to take one of the pistols.

A single answering bang came from the roof.

“Dustin’s a good shot,” Namir said. After a minute he stole up the stairs and cracked open the door to the roof. “Any luck?”

Dustin’s response was inaudible, where we were. Namir came back down, still keeping low. “Target’s not moving,” he relayed. “Dead or wounded or playing possum. I guess Dustin doesn’t want to use up a round, checking.”

“Might be good strategy to shoot a couple,” Paul said. “Make it look like we have ammo to spare.”

“Might be. But I think the time for that is past, now. I better check out back.”

“I’ll go,” Alba said. She had the riot gun. “Won’t use this unless they’re coming in the door.”

“Good. Take the other pistol, Carmen.” I did. It was the one Paul had used. Keep it in the family. I clicked the safety off, on, off again. A speck of red paint showed when it was off. Red equals fire, easy enough.

There was a long stammer of automatic fire, part of which crashed through the window. Only seven rounds of it, evidently; there were seven small holes letting daylight in. But the glass hadn’t shattered.

“He’s close,” Namir said in a hoarse whisper. “If Dustin can’t see him, he’s probably just behind the sandbags. Where you were on guard last night, Carmen.”

I was trying to swallow, but couldn’t. Most of those bullets hit the wall behind me. If I’d been standing up, I’d have been hit.

“Stay down,” he said unnecessarily. “He might try to shoot out—” There was a longer sustained roar of fire, glass splintering everywhere, which blew a hole in the picture window more than two feet wide.

Namir stood up quickly and sighted through the hole. He stood still as a photograph for two seconds and then fired a single shot, which reverberated like a gong in the closed room.

“Lucky shot.” He strode over to the front door, unbolted it, and opened it a couple of inches. He aimed down through the slit and fired once more.

“Okay. Paul, come check. Isn’t this the guy from yesterday?”

I stepped over to look. It looked like him, Jemmie, in NASA coveralls, but he was face-down on the sidewalk, blood and brains sprayed in a fan from the back of his head; Namir’s second shot. I swallowed bile.

He was still holding his weapon, a pistol not much bigger than mine, but with a large ammunition canister attached.

“Yeah,” Paul said. “One to go, maybe?”

“I want to go up and take a look around. You cover things down here?”

“Sure.” He didn’t sound so sure.

Where would the third one be? Would he or she continue the plan alone? If I were in that situation, with the two others gone, I would be hiding now. Sneak away after the sun goes down.

Paul had said something to me. “What?”

“I want you to cover me while I run out and get that guy’s gun. He has two magazines on his belt, too.”

“Cover you? You mean shoot back if someone shoots at you?”

“Yeah. Keep their heads down.”

“I only have five bullets in this thing.”

“Here, trade.” He set the rifle in front of me on the reception table, and took my pistol, ours.

He bounded out the door as I picked up the rifle. I barely had time to figure out the safety, when he came rushing back in with the weapon and its two magazines, and kicked the door shut with a slam behind him.

“Get down!” I was already crouching, but I flopped down, the rifle clattering under me, and there was a deafening explosion.

His face was about two feet from mine, and we stared at each other wild-eyed. “Grenade. Hand grenade.”

Namir came rattling down the stairs. “What the fuck was that?”

“He had a hand grenade. I went out to get his weapon and I guess his hand relaxed. The whatchamacallit sprang off—”

“The arming lever.”

“—and I just got back in time.”

“God. That’s why he shot out the hole in the window. To toss it in.”

“I wonder if they have more,” Paul said.

“I wonder why they had one!” Alba had crawled up with her shotgun. “Not exactly crowd control.”

“Namir!” Dustin’s voice from the door onto the roof. “Guy running away.”

“Armed?”

“Not obviously.”

He went up, taking two stairs at a time. I could hear them talking quietly, and then a single shot.

Namir came back down. “Shot over his head. Just let him know we saw him.”

“Wonder if that’s all of them,” Alba said, standing up.

“Maybe there’s one inside the building here,” came a voice from the shadows. My brother Card came forward. He was holding one of the flare pistols, aimed at Alba.

“For God’s sake, Card,” Paul said, “don’t shoot that thing indoors.”

Alba set the shotgun on the floor and raised both her hands. “Let him have his say.”

“You came out of the darkness with just what we needed. Guns, ammunition, information. You’re pretty and smart and have a convincing and useful uniform. Anybody who’s ever gamed knows that rule: If it seems to be too good to be true, it’s probably not true.”

“I have ID.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“It’s a NASA ID with a DNA spot.”

“Which means shit without electronics.”

“Card,” I said, “you’re being paranoid.”

“We all should be,” he said. “Alba, even if you do work for NASA, or did, how do we know you’re not one of them, now?”

Snowbird came up behind him. “I could speak to that,” she said, “just from observation.”

“What have you observed?” Card asked.

“This morning, when it became light, Alba could have taken the riot gun and killed everyone except the upstairs guard. And then, probably, killed the guard as soon as he opened the door. Her partners in this endeavor would be nearby—we know they were—and then the three of them would abduct me and get on with their plan.”

“An idiotic idea to begin with,” Alba said. “If, as you say, I’m smart, why would I team up with those idiots?”

“Good enough for me,” Namir said. “Card, your caution is commendable. But excessive in this case, I think.”

“I agree,” Paul said. “The same thing occurred to me last night, Card. But after we’d talked for a while, no. Besides, she had plenty of opportunities last night and, as Snowbird said, this morning, and we’re all still alive.”

I saw a tense look pass between Paul and Namir, and could read it well: Paul was closer, and Namir’s expression was saying, “You do it, and I’ll be right behind you.”

I opened my mouth to intervene, but then the totally unexpected happened.

“I’m sorry, Alba.” Card lowered the gun. “I’m way out of line here. Forgive me?”

“Um . . . sure, Card.” She slowly reached down and retrieved the shotgun.

“I’m used to spending most of my time in virtuality. Making my living in an imaginary world, and mostly living there. Without it, I suppose my imagination is a little out of control.”

“It isn’t a bad instinct,” Namir said carefully. “We need to think in different ways; need to look at problems from every angle.”

“Though we might stop short of pointing guns at each other,” Paul said.

I was just plain stunned. The Card I grew up with would not have apologized if he’d caused the London Fire and 9/11 combined. The fifty years had mellowed him.

“Okay,” Namir said. “If we’re going to stay here much longer, we have to bury what’s left of that poor bastard up front. He’ll be smelling pretty bad by evening.”

Something made the small hairs on the back of my neck stir. “Wait. Where’s Meryl?”

Namir looked around. “Wasn’t she with you?”

“Back in the kitchen, a minute ago.” I called her name twice.

Dustin trotted back toward the kitchen. “Oh, shit,” he said softly.

She was lying on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, her legs out straight, as if she were resting. There was a red stain the size of a playing card on the center of her chest and a large pool of blood under her back. The window over the sink had a bullet hole and blood spatter.

Dustin fell to his knees and tried to breathe life back into her.

I couldn’t find breath myself. Elza shook her head, and said “No.” She got down next to Dustin and grabbed his shoulders lightly. “That’s not . . . She’s too far gone.”

Dustin didn’t respond at first, but then eased the body back down. He wiped blood from his lips. “She didn’t make a sound.”

It was one of the bullets that had crashed through the living-room window. Paul and I found two spades in a shed out back. There was a patch of grass with some roses behind it. We all took turns standing guard and digging. After we buried her, Dustin said some words in Latin.

We washed up in the bathroom, avoiding the kitchen. The water from the tap was still warm.

I felt like part of me had died. I’d never been as close to Meryl as to the other five, but we had all lived through several different worlds together.

So we weren’t immortal. We weren’t even bulletproof.

“The hell with the body out front,” Paul said. “Let’s get our gear together and start pushing up to Fruit Farm.”

“Nothing here for us,” Namir said, then . . . “What the fuck?”

The lights had come back on.

From Rear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):

. . . were the Others just playing a sadistic game, when they restored power temporarily on 30 April that year? If my guess is as good as anybody’s, I’d say they were just temporarily changing the parameters of the experiment. Our physical comfort was of no concern to them, and our existential or psychological state was invisible, not even a variable.

My first area of study was animal behavior. We were reasonably enlightened in our treatment of test animals—any sign of cruelty or even lack of compassion would’ve resulted in student demonstrations and faculty censure.

But that was about animals who were cousins to humans. A lab rat shares more than our gross anatomical structure; it has more than hunger and thirst; it prefers one taste to another. Individual rats have individual personalities, even when they’re raised in robotic unison. Sacrificing them was a necessary chore, but I remember how I grated my teeth when I grabbed one by the tail and swung him down to smack his head against the lab table. Did the other rats know what was going on? I don’t remember them reacting; if they had, it would have upset me.

Perhaps a closer analogy would be in our study of microorganism cultures. A drop of nutrient doped with penicillin would create a clear circle that was the purposeful destruction of millions of creatures. And after their survivors had been measured and photographed, the whole small universe went into a red bio-waste bucket.

When the Others are done with us, will they leave us there on the table, to work out our individual and collective destinies?

Or will they be more fastidious than that . . .

5

We spread through the building, flipping light switches on and off. Suddenly, I heard a sustained musical note.

“What’s that?”

“A-440,” Namir said. “Like a tuning fork.” We followed the sound to the Women’s Lounge area, where a small cube had been left on.

“Same guy,” Alba said. The one we called Spy—it couldn’t be the same one literally; we’d left him twenty-five light-years away. Just a standard “human” interface for the Others.

He looked out of the cube, unblinking, for another minute or so. Then the tuning-fork sound ended, and he spoke:

“We have decided to give you power again, for one week, to see what happens.” The screen went blank.

“One week,” Paul said. “What do we do first?”

“Let’s see if the cars work,” Alba said. “One of those panel trucks, or a little bus.”

I followed her out to the lot, carrying my superfluous pistol. Card came out, too. The morning was pleasant, still cool, about nine o’clock.

She got into the first car and punched in N-A-S-A on the dash keyboard.

“Shit.” Faint numerals appeared on the windshield, OOH OOM. “They probably all drained out.”

We tried two others and got the same. Card found the recharging station and unreeled a cable out to a small bus. He plugged it into the rear.

“All right!” Alba called out from the driver’s seat. She hopped down. “Is there another cable?”

“Two more. Maybe do that panel truck?” She looked at me and rubbed her chin. “Do you know how to drive?”

“Umm . . . it’s been a while.” I had a license back in 2070, but moved to Mars in ’72. “Sixty-some years. I suppose cars are a lot different.”

“But you can,” she said to Card.

He shrugged. “I have a car, but I live in LA. Haven’t touched a steering wheel in years.”

“You may be about to.” She pointed to a stolid-looking blocky sedan. “Might as well charge that one up, too. We may want to look official.”

He went off to do that. “How long do they take to charge up?”

“An hour, maybe a couple of hours. Depends on the range, mainly. And whether they’re hooked up to free energy. You probably want to take the sedan to get the most miles.”

“Couldn’t fit Snowbird in there.”

“Well, the panel truck, then.” She pointed back at the building.

Paul was at the door. “Carmen,” he called, “we have a problem.”

“Only one,” Alba said. “How nice.”

I went to him. “Snowbird’s hurt. Another stray round hit her.”

“How bad?”

“Who can say? She didn’t even tell anybody about it; Dustin saw the hole.”

We walked back to the snack area, where the Martian was standing in a corner. That was normal; she even slept standing up.

“It’s a small thing, Carmen,” she said. “Just a small bullet, which didn’t hit any vital organs.”

“Let me see.” She turned around and showed me, a small black dot high on her back, about where a human shoulder would be. There was a little pink froth of blood.

“I can feel exactly where it is,” she said. “It’s not doing any harm.”

Paul was standing behind me. “Are there any doctors for Martians at that Russian place?”

“There are members of the blue family. They’re something like doctors.”

“We have to get you there anyhow, for food. This just makes it a little higher priority.”

“It’s too far,” she said.

“Not anymore,” he said. “I’m a pilot. We just have to dig up an airplane somewhere.”

“That would be a figure of speech?” Snowbird said. “They don’t bury airplanes?”

“Right . . . Damn, I threw away my cell. Do you still have yours?”

“Think I can find it.” I went into the next room, where we’d changed into NASA work clothes. My cell was in the corner where I’d tossed it, the power light a barely visible dull red. I plugged it into the wall and it went bright red, then yellow, then green. I took it in to Paul.

He punched a few numbers and shook his head. “Nothing’s up and working yet, I suppose. Do you speak any Russian?”

“No, nyet.”

“I do,” Snowbird said. “So does Namir. We used it sometimes on the starship.”

I recalled that Namir’s father had come from Russia. He’d gone back for some Olympics and brought home a souvenir balalaika, which was why our mysterious spy had such an odd instrument aboard a starship.

I took the phone from Namir and was looking at it, trying to decide what to do next, when it suddenly rang, the anonymous-caller tone. I punched the answer button, and a young woman’s face appeared.

“Carmen Dula?” she said. “You look just like your picture!”

“Um . . . most people do.”

“Sorry.” She covered her eyes with a hand and winced. “I am Wednesday Parkman, calling from the office of the president. At Camp David, Maryland.”

“Okay. What does the president want?”

“Well, I don’t know, really. I was told to call your number and Paul Collins’s until one of you answered. But you answered right away. So let me try to find the president?”

“Sure, and Paul’s here, too.”

“Hold on!” Her face left, and we saw the ceiling for a moment, and then a slow pan of Monet’s lilies, with a cello playing softly.

“I don’t guess she’s had this job for too long,” I said.

“How the hell did they get up to Camp David without power?” Paul said.

“You couldn’t walk there in a day,” I said.

The lilies dissolved, replaced by an important-looking man I recognized just as he said his name. “Dr. Dula, I’m Morris Chambers. We met briefly at the White House.”

“It seems like a long time ago.”

“Doesn’t it. The president is drawing together a committee to deal with the current”—he made a helpless gesture—“situation, and he’d like you to come here as soon as possible.”

“Washington,” Paul said, “or Camp David?”

“Washington is chaos,” he said. “Once you’re in the air, we’ll give you a code word that will allow you to land at Camp David.”

“Okay. So what do we get into the air with? We’re still on the Armstrong Space Force Base.”

“Let me check.” He got up from the desk, and we had another minute of Monet and strings. He appeared again.

“You were rated for multi-engine commercial a half century ago. Airplanes are simpler now, but there’s no GPS.” Of course not, no satellites.

“If there are charts and a compass, I can sort it out. It would have computers, even without GPS?”

He looked away from the phone and then nodded. “Navigation computers, yes. There is a subsonic twelve-passenger NASA plane waiting for you on Runway 4, South terminal. That’s the only secure terminal, they say, so go directly there. Security there wants your license-plate number.”

Alba was leaning in the door. “Government plate, 21D272,” she said. “It’s a little blue bus.” Paul repeated it.

“What will this committee be doing?” I asked. “What can they do in one week?”

“The key phrase is ‘maximum survival.’ We estimate that there are still about 300 million people alive in America after yesterday. We would like to have . . . a maximum still alive a year from now. Having learned how to live without technology.”

“It won’t be 300 million,” Paul said. “It won’t even be 100 million.”

The bureaucrat’s face didn’t change. “You understand what we’re facing. It will be a disaster of biblical scope no matter what we do. We do want to maximize the number who survive, but we also want to preserve a semblance of the American way of life.”

Paul nodded. “That will be interesting. I’ll call you next from the airplane.” He closed the phone and handed it back to me. “Cheeseburgers and idiotic television? I wonder what the American way of life is nowadays.”

“If they really want maximum survival,” Namir said, “they’re aiming for a totally protective welfare state that’s also a police state. Which identifies the ones chosen to survive, and lets the rest go find some way to die. Or is there some humane alternative?”

“We have plenty of time to talk about it en route. We’ll be in the air most of the day.”

“Slow plane?” Alba said.

Namir nodded slowly. “We’ll be going by way of Russia, of course. They’d never allow us to take Snowbird there if we went to Camp David first.”

“Of course. Over the Pole,” I said. Hoping the Others don’t decide to turn off the power prematurely.

We loaded the bus in a hurry, deciding to hold on to all the food and weapons. We could use up the perishables on the way to Camp David, and the rest might come in handy next week.

Alba did the driving; she knew the way, and nobody else but Card had driven during this century. Leaving the place, we passed a sight I could have lived without, a trio of buzzards tearing up the body on the sidewalk. Paul winced at the sight but didn’t say anything.

The guards at the airfield gate knew Alba, of course, and waved us through. There were a couple of dozen planes parked around, but she followed a line painted on the tarmac that led to Runway 4, where a woman was standing by a small passenger plane.

One problem was immediately manifest: you got into the plane by climbing a narrow set of stairs that led to a narrow door—not wide enough for a Martian. Fortunately, the baggage compartment was pressurized, and the bay was a couple of meters wide. The ramp going up to it was a conveyor belt; she gave a thumping Martian laugh as she rolled up.

Paul was talking to the woman while this was going on. She was a flight controller who also flew, but she’d never piloted one this big, and she’d never flown without GPS. Paul hadn’t either, in a real-life situation, but in Space Force training he’d flown everything from gliders to spaceships. By the seat of his pants, as they say.

They went up into the cockpit and checked out the emergency navigation system, which could work by compass headings and a VR cube that showed what the ground looked like from any altitude over any place on Earth. Goggles that could see through clouds.

It only took a few minutes to load up our provisions and weaponry. “Well,” Alba said, “I guess I’ll be leaving you now.”

“Not if you don’t want to,” Paul said, looking down the aisle of the plane. “This is an alien planet to us; you and Card are our native guides. You know modern weapons, and the riot gun doesn’t work for anyone else.”

Everybody murmured or nodded assent, even me. Though I didn’t care for the way he carefully didn’t look at her when he knew I was watching.

Well, we’ve always given each other that freedom. But neither of us had exercised it in some years. Not to mention light-years.

The plane started taxiing, and there was some discussion over the radio when Paul turned left. For some reason, they thought we were going east. We took off headed for the North Pole.

In retrospect, I suppose they had the ability and authority to shoot us down. I’m glad I didn’t think of that until later.

The ride was pretty bumpy and loud until we got to cruising altitude. Then it was just a mild vibration, with the noise from the wind and engine canceled out.

Alba came up the aisle and sat next to me, offering to share a packet of nuts and dried fruit.

“This may seem funny,” she said, “but I’m not quite clear on what you and Paul actually did. I mean, I was never good at history. That was like forty years before I was born.”

Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.

6

“It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.

“So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”

“He was a lot older than you?”

“Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”

“I can see.”

How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”

“Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”

“That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.

“Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.

“But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.

“I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”

“Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”

“One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”

“Of course I know about him.”

“Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.

“It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”

“They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.

“Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”

“Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”

“Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”

“The Martian lung crap, yeah.”

“That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”

“So Red showed up with the cure.”

“In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.

“Well, the Martians had been studying us for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.

“They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.”

“And then you found out it was literally true.”

“That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow, specialized in memory, and they swore that the memory of the Others was real. It was vague and patchy because it was tens of thousands of years old, but it wasn’t a myth.

“Then, in 2079, the Others proved it. A signal that triggered strange behavior in the yellow family. They started babbling weird nonsense—but they each said the same nonsense over and over. Turned out to be a binary code that basically told us who the Others were and what their body chemistry was, nitrogen and silicon. They lived in liquid nitrogen, and this one—there was only one in the solar system—lived in a liquid-nitrogen sea on Triton, Neptune’s moon. It had lived there for twenty-seven thousand years.

“Once we cracked the code and tried to communicate with it, we found out that it spoke English. And Chinese and German and whatever.”

“But they couldn’t just call and say hello?”

“No. It was like a series of tests, to see how sophisticated we could be. The first test was contact with the Martians, and in fact was why the Martians were there.”

“I understand that one. It was like a signal to the Others that we had gone to another planet. Which woke up the one on Triton. But it woke up knowing how to speak Chinese and all?”

“We don’t think so. We think it absorbed a huge amount of information from the yellow family as soon as it woke up. At least that’s what the Martians say.

“The last test was playing for keeps. We were in Earth orbit, and Red found out that he was essentially a time bomb. In a couple of days, he would explode, giving out more energy than the Sun. The seas underneath us would boil; the air would be blown away. I guess you know what happened then.”

She nodded gravely. “Paul took Red to the other side of the Moon, so when he blew up, the earth wasn’t hurt.”

“That’s right, and perhaps if we had left it at that, everything would be fine. The Other that had been on Triton blew it up and went home to Wolf 25, almost twenty-five light-years from here.”

“But we had to follow it.”

“There were various opinions. A lot of people wanted to build a war fleet and go after the bastards, which was not really possible, even with free energy.”

“It’s always been free for me,” Alba said. I hadn’t thought of that. “Go on?”

“Well, at the other extreme were people who just wanted to say ‘good riddance,’ and get on with life. I have a lot of sympathy for that idea.

“There was a lot of arguing that eventually wound up with the compromise that started, I guess, before your parents were born.”

“My mother was born in 2090.”

“Two years after we launched. Well, the bright idea was to build one starship, and send it off to Wolf 25 on a peace mission.”

“But then they also built a fleet here in orbit, supposedly to protect the earth.”

“Or at least to mollify the hawks,” I said, “the ones who demanded a military response. But it was gnats versus an elephant.”

“I know a lot of people who thought it was a bad idea,” Alba said. “Almost all my teachers in school.”

“I can imagine. We had a kind of meeting with one of the Others, who showed us evidence of what they could do, as if a further demonstration was necessary. Did you hear what they did to their own home planet?”

“Yeah, I saw that on the cube. How they used to be, well, not human but sort of. But they evolved themselves into these ice-cold monsters who lived on a frozen moon. So they came back and destroyed their own home planet?”

“In self-defense, they pointed out. They showed us the remains of the fleet that the home planet had been building to attack them. Sort of like our fleet here, but a thousand times closer.

“So we came back and, in essence, brought the eyes and ears of the Others with us. That was the human-looking avatar that was on the cube.

“And so they blew up the Moon to keep us out of space. We tried anyhow, and so they pulled the plug on civilization.”

She nodded, thoughtful. “They could have just killed us.”

“I’m sure they still have that option. You have to remember that this was all preplanned. The Others can’t beat the speed of light; it will be almost twenty-five years before they actually know of the fleet, and twenty-five more before they could come back and do something about it. So all of their actions—blowing up the Moon, turning off the free power—have been in place for a long time.”

“Like booby traps, waiting for us to set them off.”

“That’s right. And who’s to say they don’t have another one, waiting to blow us off the face of the earth if we misbehave?”

“Or put everything back the way it was, if we don’t.”

I laughed. “They’re not putting the Moon back together.”

“You don’t know. Maybe they could.”

I started to say something about increasing entropy, but let it go. Hell, maybe they could track down all the pieces and rebuild the Moon. And then turn it into green cheese.

7

The landing at Novosibirsk was delayed for an hour while they waited for the afternoon sun to melt the ice off the runway. When we got off the plane finally, there was a small crowd waiting, dozens of people and seven Martians. It wasn’t too cold, about noon, bright sun in a deep blue sky. We hurried inside anyhow.

Two of the Martians, the ones in blue, wanted to hustle Snowbird away and start working on her injury. She made them wait while she said good-bye and thanked us individually.

“When I first saw you,” she said to me, “you were also injured, stranded on an alien planet. I hope I do as well as you.” She gestured at one of the blue ones. “We even have the same doctor.”

The blue one nodded at me. “I fixed your ankle sixty-four years ago.”

“Don’t do everything he says,” I said to Snowbird. “He’s pretty old.” She favored me with a thumping laugh and was gone.

The Russians couldn’t let us go without eating. Namir answered their questions about what we knew about the rest of the world while they feasted us on thin pancakes rolled around sour cream and pungent caviar, washed down with icy vodka. The last such meal we would ever have, I assumed. When the power went back off, we would be stranded somewhere, presumably far from caviar.

We got back on the plane, and Paul tried to raise Camp David. A signal was coming through, but it was unintelligible. We charted a course over the Arctic and took off, slithering a bit on the slush that was forming on the runway.

While we flew south, Dustin took over a little study carrel in the rear of the plane and tried to find out what had happened to Fruit Farm, the Oregon commune where he’d grown up.

It was still there physically, if it had survived the Martian abdication. Maybe it was better off than most places, being totally independent of the power and communications grid.

More than a decade before the Martian free power (the year that Dustin’s family left the commune) they had declared total independence, and shut themselves off from the outside world. They had low-voltage solar power and two wind machines, and an environment that allowed year-round subsistence agriculture.

Recent satellite photos showed a tall stockade enclosing about eighty acres of orderly plats around a village of about a hundred people. Outside the stockade were fruit orchards and fields of grain.

One day a year, the vernal equinox, Fruit Farm was open to the public. They sold organic produce and gave tours of their utopian compound. At sundown, they closed the doors for another year. They did maintain an organic produce stand outside the stockade.

It wasn’t a totally hermetic existence. Individuals and families were allowed to join the commune if they had useful skills, and there always was a waiting list. Dustin’s family had spent eight years there, and he looked forward to visiting. If the place still existed, after the past week’s troubles.

The twelve passenger seats unfolded into lumpy beds, angled like chevrons. Some of us rested or napped. Paul took a pill. The plane was on autopilot, but if the Others turned off the power we’d be on a glider looking for a flat place to land.

We were over Hudson Bay, after about six hours, when we made contact with the president’s people. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I presumed they were livid. They gave us a plane and we hijacked it to Russia. Paul was grinning broadly as he gave them monosyllabic replies.

The Northeast was greener than I’d expected. Big cities and crowded exurbs, but a lot of forest, too. Broad superhighways with almost no traffic. Occasional knots of pileups, dozens or even hundreds of abandoned cars.

When we were a couple of hundred miles from Camp David, we were joined by a pair of military jets that moved in close enough to make eye contact. Paul waved and one of them waved back, and they banked off and sped away.

Namir noted that the day’s travel had reduced our fuel supply from 0.97 to 0.95. We could go around the world fifty times if we wanted to.

“Let’s hope this thing is productive,” I said, without high hopes. The president must have been the genius who had authorized the rocket launch through the meteor storm, which had so pissed off the Others. But he presumably was the best person to organize a nationwide response to prepare for the coming dark age.

We landed without incident, and Paul followed directions, taxiing us to a reviewing stand. A lot of people in suits, squinting into the morning sun. No brass band.

Spatters of applause as we stepped down in random order. Alba grinned broadly when the applause faltered. Who the hell was she?

We were seated on folding chairs, and a couple of soldiers armed with boxed lunches came out. Room-temperature tuna-salad sandwiches. Not caviar, but I was hungry.

I scanned the faces of the dignitaries and was a little disappointed not to see President Gold. Then someone introduced President Boyer. A gaunt man in his fifties approached the microphone.

“He was vice president,” Alba whispered. “Something must have happened to Gold.”

The new president greeted us and bloviated for a few minutes about the importance of our “mission.”

It was two-pronged: try to repair some of the damage done by the power outage and meanwhile try to tool up for a nineteenth-century life style. Either one clearly impossible in a week. But we had to do something.

Factories that could be converted were already cranking out carts and bicycles and hand plows and cargo wagons—a pity horses and oxen couldn’t be mass-produced. This brave new world would be largely powered by human muscle—from humans who had been free from the necessity of physical labor for generations.

A lot of time and effort were being spent, perhaps wasted, trying to figure out how to preserve a central government without modern communication. It seemed obvious that you couldn’t, given the size of the country and the time lag between decision and response. You weren’t going to have Ben Franklin closing up his print shop and taking off for the Continental Congress on foot. Or mule or whatever.

We followed the president and the seven others who had been on stage with him up a gravel path to a large rustic lodge, old log walls and a slate roof. There were other buildings around that looked equally old and homespun.

“This is the main lodge,” the president said as he went up the timber stairs to the porch. “It goes back almost two hundred years. Franklin Roosevelt in World War II.”

Pretty old for a wooden building, I thought, but there was probably a lot of technology embedded in its reassuring simplicity.

“Let’s go down to the planning room. You space travelers, I want to talk to you first. You have a unique point of view. President Gold, before he died, told me to take full advantage of that.” We followed them down a spiral staircase into a well-lit room that was twenty-second-century neo-Baroque.

The room was dominated by a heavy ornate round table of some gorgeous rare wood. There were about twenty overstuffed swivel chairs with twenty different colors of paisley upholstery. The latest thing, I supposed.

There were five of us “space travelers” and our two hangers-on, facing seven people who were presumably politicians.

An impressive back-lit Mercator projection of the world filled one wall. Namir gestured at it as we sat down. “Please bring us up to date . . . next week, that whole map is going to be of only academic interest. What are we doing to make people adjust to thinking and acting on a small scale? Local government and industry?”

“Right now we’re still dealing with panic. Rioting and wholesale looting.” That was Dali Spendor, who had been President Gold’s press secretary. “That requires local response, but it’s military and police work.”

“National Guard?” Paul said. Some of the others looked bewildered.

“There’s no such thing anymore,” General Ballard said. “It seemed obsolete, and was absorbed by the regular military before I was ever a soldier.”

“Regionalism in general has been on the wane.” A white-bearded man who introduced himself as Julian Remnick, president of Harvard University. “That’s been true for centuries. But facing a common enemy as terrifying as the Others, who represent the same danger to everyone from Nome to Key West, from London to Beijing, has unified the world more effectively than millennia of idealism.” He was obviously quoting himself. “That has its bad side now.”

“People will naturally expect a top-down response,” Spendor said. “Here, that would be Washington stepping in to deal with the problem. But as Namir says, that stops on Wednesday.”

“Or sooner,” I said. “There’s no reason to trust the Others’ word on anything.”

“Nothing we can do about that,” the president huffed. Except try to be flexible, I thought, which probably wasn’t his strong suit.

“We’ve started to make a little progress,” a tall plain woman said. “I’m Lorena Monel, governor of Maryland. Or former governor. As you say, units as large as a state will probably have little meaning.

“My committee on localization has gotten in touch with regional leaders in both major parties, and two other groups that represent significant numbers. Through them, we’ve made contact with thousands of community leaders and put them together in an information net—useless after the power goes off, but meanwhile they’re talking with people who will be within walking distance. Leaders with the same regional resources and problems.”

“In Wyoming,” a slender tanned fellow drawled, “ain’t nobody in walking distance of nobody else. Except in the cities, and they’re pretty well lost.”

“There won’t be anyone in Wyoming by the end of the week,” the president said. “No one but hermits. You going back?”

The man stared back at him. “Good a place to die as any.”

“Let’s get back on track,” the Maryland governor said. “We have this network for five days. How can we best use it?”

“Turn it into a cell system,” the Harvard president said. “Have each community establish a line of communication with every adjacent one, through Lorena’s committee. Have each of them figure out a way to stay in contact with their immediate neighbors without high technology.”

“Smoke signals,” the Wyoming man said.

“Possibly. Signal fires, anyhow. The ancient Greeks did that.”

“Horses and riders?” I said. “Are there enough people who still do that?”

“Wouldn’t work if they did,” a short black man said. “Jerry Fenene, deputy secretary of commerce. In a couple of weeks, a horse isn’t going to be transportation. It’s going to be a million calories on the hoof. You don’t want to ride it anywhere near a hungry person with a gun.”

“Bicycles are a near equivalent,” the president said (giving me a vision of someone eating a bicycle), “and we’re churning them out. Twenty-four-hour production in, I don’t know, a couple of hundred factories.”

“A hundred eighty-two registered,” Fenene said. “Some of them very small. They might turn out a hundred thousand bikes before the power goes.” He shook his head. “It’s not of much practical significance. There must be a hundred million bikes out there already.” He looked vaguely in our direction.

I wondered what they expected us to do, to help. We were public figures in a way, but most of the public associated us with getting into this disaster, not getting out.

We did have more experience with the Others, but in terms of actual contact, that was a matter of minutes, not much of it constructive. Lab rats probably knew more about humans than we knew about the Others. And had more in common with their captors.

“No matter what we do,” the president said, “it’s just a drop in a mighty big bucket. They give us a week, now less than six days.” He looked at me. “If that. Once we have your cell system, Lorena, what do we do with it?”

“I guess the next step would be to organize groups of cells. Into regions. How big would a region be?”

“Smaller than Wyoming,” I said, “if you want meetings.”

“You can bike across Wyoming,” the thin man said, “but you wouldn’t want to.”

“I don’t like this assumption that everybody’s going to cooperate,” Namir said. “Line up and form into counties and states. With no central authority, I’d put my money behind mob rule. Gangs, with the biggest bully at the top.”

“You’re always such a crazy optimist,” Paul said.

“So what would you bet on?”

He scratched his head. “Same.”

“So I should be the biggest bully?” the president said. “I probably have the biggest gang.”

“The only one with nukes and hellbombs,” Wyoming said, and some people laughed nervously. “You could just wait it out,” he continued. “Let the rest of the world go to hell first, and then come out when the smoke clears.”

“Give up on America?” the president said. “There’s no way I could do that.”

“That’s not America out there anymore.” Wyoming made a sweeping gesture. “When the power goes off again, it’s gonna be one big nut house, with the inmates armed and desperate—and in charge. Let them take care of each other.”

Namir spoke quietly into the silence: “How many troops do you have? I mean here at Camp David.”

The president looked at General Ballard. “The Secret Service right here, that might be sixty-some agents?” Ballard said. “The First Brigade of the 101st is attached to them, but I don’t think there were a hundred on duty in and around the White House when we . . . evacuated. My adjunct, Brigadier Akers, would have the exact number. Under two hundred total.”

“So we’re spread out pretty thin,” Namir said, “if a group of any size decides to attack us.”

The general laughed, a hoarse syllable. “We’re armed to the teeth, and those troops are the cream. No bunch of civilian rabble is going to breach our perimeter.”

“Armed to the teeth with modern weapons.” Namir shook his head. “You even have combat aircraft and tanks. Which all will be useless scrap after Wednesday. And we’ll have a ring of a hundred-some soldiers with rifle-clubs and knives. If they do have knives. Excuse me if I want to be someplace less conspicuous.”

“This is what it boils down to,” Wyoming said. “Eight billion people had enough to eat last week, but about seven billion need agribusiness and large-scale aquaculture to stay alive. Nothing you do is going to change those seven billion into small-scale farmers and fishers. Even if you could, the Earth wouldn’t support them. Long before winter comes, there won’t be any food on the shelves. No grain in the silos.”

“There’s no way around it,” Namir said, “if the Others pull the plug on agribusiness. So most of those seven billion have to die.”

“Some’ll be food themselves,” Wyoming said. “One adult has what, forty or fifty pounds of meat on him? Keep you goin’ for a month and a half.”

“If you had refrigeration,” Paul said.

“Or know how to make jerky,” Wyoming said, giving Paul a measuring stare. Probably two months’ worth.

“But it’s not like a lifeboat situation,” I said, “where you draw straws, or the strong eat the weak. At least in America, there’s plenty of room to hole up and wait.”

“We can impose order for a certain length of time,” the president said. “In most cities, food warehouses and supermarkets are under armed guard.”

“Unless the mobs have overpowered them,” Lorena said. “I know that it hasn’t worked in Baltimore, where my office is. The guard evaporated everywhere, and every crumb of food was gone by noon yesterday. When the power came back on, some people were ready. They used trucks to smash into stores and loot them wholesale. In a couple of cases, military units themselves did the looting, or at least joined the looters.”

“We should assume the worst,” Namir said, “and plan in terms of rebuilding from whatever ruins are left. Some countries have more experience in that than others.” There was always the echo of Gehenna in his voice, in his accent. All his family dead in minutes. Cities paved with instant corpses. Israel had rebuilt, after a fashion, but never recovered.

“A basic question,” Paul said to the president. “Are there federal reserves of food? Something that will still be there after the smoke clears?”

“In fact, there is.” He pursed his lips and paused, and then continued. “Not too far from here, in a natural limestone cave in West Virginia. The Congress is holed up there, along with I don’t know how many tons of cheese and freeze-dried milk and fruit and meat. Bought up in secret from individual states’ surpluses, back in the Marlowe administration. The soldiers who are guarding it don’t know what’s there; they think it’s a secret missile site. It can feed tens of thousands of people for decades—or could. With trucks to move it out.”

“That’s where you’ll go after Camp David dries up?” Namir asked. The president reddened and looked away.

“Won’t do much for the country in general,” Paul said, “or the world.”

“We’re still six months away from winter,” Namir said. Most of those billions will be dead by then. Unless they all move to Wyoming and start eating each other.

“The ones who survive the winter will provide the core for rebuilding the countries in the northern hemisphere. We should be working on what to do then. How to keep civilization going with those millions.”

“Civilization is what got us here,” Dustin said. “Maybe we should try something else.”

“This isn’t a philosophy problem, Professor.”

“Except that everything is. In the long run, we might find that civilization is incompatible with survival.”

“In the long run, that’ll take care of itself,” Wyoming said.

“It will not,” Dustin pressed on. “Look, I grew up in a small, isolated, agrarian community that was founded in opposition to commercialism. I do know what I’m talking about; I was perfectly happy, absent most of civilization’s overrated virtues.

“But it didn’t just happen, and it certainly can’t happen in the barbaric chaos you’re all accepting as inevitable.”

“You can’t beat the math, boy. Nobody’s gonna lay down and die so you and your pals can get naked and grow vegetables.”

“I know that. That’s why the organization initially has to come from here. We have some idea of where the food is and where the people are. For a few days, we can put that knowledge to use and maximize the number of people who live.”

“Tell everybody where the food is,” Namir said, “so they can loot more efficiently.”

“It’s a choice between triage and random survival,” Paul said. “Only a billion are going to survive, and all you’re really saying is that we might have some choice as to which billion.”

“No, I’m just saying we can maximize the number,” the president said. “There will be something like natural selection going on, but it won’t be a matter of brute force. Quite the opposite, I think. People who cooperate with one another.”

“People who obey the government.” Wyoming said gummint. “Sometimes I think you boys made this whole thing up, Boyer. Mr. President.”

The phone in front of General Ballard buzzed and he snatched it up. “Ballard, go.”

The president set down his knife and fork and looked at Ballard. They both seemed to have gone a little pale. It wouldn’t be a routine call—“How’s supper with the prez?”

Ballard said, “I’m coming,” and stood up. “Sir, there is, um, a disturbance on the east slope.” He tossed his napkin down.

“What kind of ‘disturbance’?”

“I don’t know. Gunfire, on the other side of the fence. A sniper, at least one, silent. If you’ll excuse me.” Two other military guys followed him.

The woman with the sergeant’s stripes and apron came out, armed with a wooden spoon. “Mr. President, shall I show people down to the basement?”

“Yes, thank you. Um . . . military people stay up here, of course, and you space folks?”

“Sure,” Paul said. “Half of us are some sort of military anyhow.”

“I’ll stay, too,” Card said to me. “You’ll need an innocent bystander.”

The cook-sergeant told the civilians to bring their plates and wineglasses if they wanted; they’d be hiding in the wine cellar. They were nervous but animated, a little jovial, as they filed out.

The president nodded and steepled his fingers under his chin. “There is a large safe room underneath the basement. Don’t think we need it yet. Jorge, go where the general’s going and send us a cube.” One of the waiters flung the folded napkin off his arm and hustled toward the door. A pistol appeared in his hand as he was leaving the room. “Uncle Charlie, stand by the dome?” The other waiter nodded and left.

“We’re pretty well protected here,” he said to the dinner table. “If we turn on the pressor dome, a fly couldn’t get in. Nor any missile. But we’d lose communication with outside, and probably fry everyone’s personal electronics.”

“And it would stop working on Wednesday,” Namir said.

“I assume so. I’m not a scientist.” I’m not either, but it did sound like a safe bet. Even if the pressor field wasn’t itself electronic—I didn’t know anything about it, but remembered that it was something like the “weak action force,” as basic as gravity. But it must have some parts that plug into the wall.

“Without the pressor field,” Namir said, “we’d still be safe downstairs?”

He nodded. “It goes back at least to the twenty-first. There was probably a shelter down there in Eisenhower’s day. They had nukes back then, too.”

“A wonder we’ve lasted this long,” Elza said. The president nodded, immune to sarcasm. Or maybe he knew something we didn’t. Some presidential secret, whispered down from one to the next for three-hundred-some years. Except for the assassinations.

“Maybe we ought to go down there,” I said.

“I don’t know.” The president used his napkin to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I’m afraid there are electronic locks on the exits. We couldn’t hide indefinitely.”

“Trapped in the darkness,” Dustin said. “Airless. No, thanks.”

A section of a book-lined wall rotated to reveal a large cube, about six feet square by two feet deep. The picture was bouncing; evidently Jorge was trying to image the scene as he ran toward it. Helmet cam, probably.

The image was pale green, with white flares when a couple of soldiers fired rifles.

“I wonder who they are,” I said. “The people attacking.”

“If they’re the ones we were expecting, it’s a bunch led by the Liberty Bell underground. They were trying to organize something down in Frederick, Maryland. We had a woman planted in their leadership, but we stopped hearing from her yesterday morning.”

“How many?” Namir said.

“Three hundred, maybe four.”

“Why don’t they wait till after Wednesday?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they know that most of the soldiers have electric guns?”

“Most of them do, too. Civilian hunting rifles. They’re probably holding their gunpowder weapons in reserve until after the power goes off.” There was the thunk-thunk sound of a heavy machine gun, and the cube showed it was on our side. “We should, too.”

“This probably isn’t the real attack,” Namir said thoughtfully. “May just be a probe, to test your reaction.”

“That’s what you’d do?”

“I wouldn’t attack a fortified position in any case, unless it had something I really wanted. Like the president.”

He laughed. “Fat lot of good I’ll be after the communications go out.”

“They want you before that.”

“Suppose so. Though I’m not sure what they’d do with me. Trade me for food?”

“Maybe they just want Camp David,” he said. “Easy to defend without electricity, and all that meadowland would be good for planting. A fortified farm like Dustin’s bunch.”

“My ‘bunch’ doesn’t have much winter,” Dustin pointed out. “This place probably gets a lot of snow.”

The president nodded. “Gold used to come up on weekends for cross-country skiing. That was a circus.”

There were three loud, evenly spaced impacts on the log wall, like heavy sledgehammer blows.

“What was that?” Namir said.

The president shrugged and looked at one of the guards. “Sir,” he said, “it sounds like a large-caliber air rifle, a sniper gun. No report because the ball goes slower than sound. I’d stay away from the windows, sirs.”

We all moved toward the wall in between the two west windows. This was where the Indians would start shooting flaming arrows. Ride in looping orbits until the inferno forced us out.

“Shit,” Paul said, “we shouldn’t have left the guns on the plane.”

“Some downstairs,” the president said. He strode over to a door in the corner and thumbed the lock open. “Backup weapons for the army, I guess. On a rifle rack in the hall.”

Namir jerked his head in that direction, and all five of us crept over, staying close to the wall. I didn’t care for the idea of joining the president’s army, but being an unarmed target was ridiculous.

As we clattered down the metal stairs, I felt panic rising, and a kind of helpless anger. A week ago, Earth was a beautiful blue marble floating in space, full of promise. The surface, it was nothing but fear and panic.

We used to joke about that. Most of my adult life has been in and on Mars, and her two moons were named fear and panic, Phobos and Diemos. When they rose or set together, we’d sometimes gather in the dome and watch. Drinking bad sweet Martian wine or worse brandy. It was a good place to live, toasting fear and panic. I hoped it still was. I had grandchildren there, old enough to vote.

I stood on the concrete floor numb, while Namir and Paul and Dustin smashed open the glass case and shouted about which weapons to take. It all seemed in slow motion. Great-grandchildren? My children, my twins, were born in ’84. They’d be fifty-four Earth years old by now, twenty-eight Martian ares. They could have married at ten, and yes, their children might have children. I hadn’t thought to ask.

Paul thrust a lightweight laser weapon into my arms, rather than a mewling infant, so my career as a great-grandmother was over after a second and a half.

I followed him up the stairs, almost tripping, because I was looking at the weapon rather than my feet. The safety was an on/off switch just above where your right thumb rested when your finger was on the trigger. A line of light on the top of the shoulder stock showed how much charge was left. Mine was halfway up, amber in color. Enough to fry an egg? A person?

Paul whispered, “I’ll go check the plane,” and slipped out the back door, before I could say anything. He had his rifle and two bandoliers of ammunition, but not even a hat against the rain.

The two guards were kneeling by both the windows. I sat down next to one of them, and we exchanged nods. “Anything?”

He shook his head no and squinted outside for a moment, then jerked back. Of course you wouldn’t want to stay silhouetted long enough for that sniper to aim at you.

Alba crouched next to the soldier. “Are you in contact with the ones outside?”

He tapped his ear. “Yeah, but radio silence,” he whispered. “They’re out past the wire.”

Alba’s weapon was the same as mine. She pushed a button on the end of the stock and a long silver fuel cell came out. She licked her thumb and rubbed both the terminals, and slid it back into place with a quiet click.

The president was sitting on a worn leather couch in the corner farthest away from doors and windows. Hiding inside a bulky bulletproof vest and a heavy military helmet, he looked kind of ridiculous, like a boy playing soldier. He was punching buttons on what looked like an oversized phone, perhaps dictating the fate of the Free World. Such of it as remained.

After a long time, I looked at the clock on the wall behind me. It was 1:45; maybe ten minutes had passed. How long were we going to sit here listening to the rain?

I remembered Namir’s refrain, “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.” Would soldiers wait patiently through old age and into dust while their leaders forgot about them? Not a sound from outside except the oscillating swish of rain being pushed by wind.

The soldier touched his throat. “Sitrep?” he whispered. “Tony?” He cupped a hand over his ear, and then shrugged at Alba. I guess I didn’t look military enough to shrug at.

The green picture on the cube shifted, sliding around about 180 degrees; Jorge looking back at us. The old lodge was a faint outline against the trees, our dark windows showing as light squares in the storm’s gloom. From heat, I suppose. Cold as it was in here.

There was some machine-gun fire, farther away, answered by the crackling of laser fire as it popped rain. “Maybe some of them are falling back,” the soldier said. “Or maybe it’s just a bluff, a diversion,” he stage-whispered to the other soldier. “What do you think, Boog?”

“I’m a sergeant,” he said. “They don’t pay me to think.”

“Give it a try.”

“I guess they figured to pop a few rounds to keep us awake all night. Then they go rest and come hit us when we’re tired.”

“That sounds right,” Namir said, sitting next to the soldier who had spoken. “That’s their big tactical advantage. Even if we outgun them, they control when and where we fight.”

“Unless we take it to them,” the first one said. “Maybe that’s what they’re doing now, chasing them.”

“Leaving us alone here? I don’t think so.”

Not alone, of course. We also have a relatively useless president and a handful of intrepid interstellar space explorers. What are a few hundred people with guns against six who’ve faced the Others and lived to tell the tale? And a seventh who was able to walk through darkness undetected? Plus a zombie brother who had lost two of his three lives. Who could blame the rabble for running?

“A lot depends on how many of their weapons are electrical,” Namir said. “They must know that the military have powder weapons.”

“They might also know that our powder ammunition would be used up after a few minutes of heavy fighting. They might’ve been stockpiling reloads for years.”

“What is a reload?” I asked.

“It’s a do-it-yourself recycling thing,” the other soldier said. “You save your empty cartridges and refill them with lead and powder. Tax on ammo is really high.” He looked at Namir. “Was there a lot of ammo down there?”

He shook his head slowly and bit his lip, thinking. “We emptied a green metal box that had, what, ten bandoliers, maybe twelve. There were three other boxes.” Like Paul, he had two bandoliers slung over his shoulders, across his chest, looking like a dangerous Mexican bandito.

“Bandolier’s got 240 rounds,” the soldier said, “twenty cartons. Hope there’s more.”

The back door swung open, and Paul clumped in, dripping. “Plane looks okay,” he said, pressing water from his hair. He cut a glance toward the kitchen door. “Coffee.”

I followed him into the kitchen; Namir and Elza followed me. Paul grabbed a tea towel to wipe off his rifle.

“Look, this is bad. The plane’s okay right now because you have to cross so much exposed ground to get to it. But once they flank this building, they can hit it with gunfire. One lucky shot would disable it.”

“So let’s get the hell out of here,” Namir said, “while the plane still works. They’re gonna rest up tomorrow, and then on Wednesday it’ll be Custer surrounded by the Sioux.” I didn’t quite know what that meant, but was sure it was nothing good.

“We should go right now,” Elza said. “Every minute we stay here—”

“Take me with you.” The president had slipped quietly into the kitchen behind us.

Paul looked at him. “Rather take two of the soldiers.”

“What?” He seemed surprised. “But I can be . . . I’m the president.”

“What did you do to Professor Gold?”

“Gold was an old man. The shock of the last few days, the Others . . . it was more than his heart could take.”

“Bullshit. I talked with him the day before he died. He was fine.”

“But old.”

“He swam a half mile a day to relax. He didn’t have a heart attack.”

“He did, though. I was there.”

Paul looked at him for a long moment. “Go tell the soldiers we’re going to take you to safety. Ask them to cover us. Then we’ll make a break for it.”

He shook his head. “What if . . .”

“I’ll go get the others,” I said, and walked by the president. His sweat was acrid. Was that the smell of fear? Or of lying.

Maybe he wasn’t lying when he said he was there, when Gold died. I wondered if anybody else was.

I went into the room and started toward Card, to whisper for him to get into the kitchen, but there was no need for secrecy. When everybody disappeared, the soldiers would figure it out, even if the president hadn’t told them.

“We’re gonna get out while the jet can still fly,” I said in a loud voice.

“That’s intelligent,” one of the soldiers said laconically. “Leave us some ammo, please.”

“You could bring the boxes up from downstairs,” the other said.

“Got it.” Dustin gestured for Card to follow him down.

“I should . . . I should stay and fight,” Alba said.

The older soldier studied her black uniform. “You’re just a cop, man. Save your skin.” He smiled. “Thanks anyhow. And you’re taking the vice president?”

“That’s the idea.”

He pursed his lips and nodded. I would’ve liked to have read his thoughts. “Boog, you hold down the fort here while I cover the escapees?”

“Gotcha. Try not to hit your commander in chief.”

“No promises.” He got up just as Boyer came through the door.

“Men,” he started, “we’ve decided—”

“The Mars girl told us, sir,” Duke said. “Gonna fly out of the rain.” He looked at me. “Know where you’re headed?”

“California, I think. A farm up in the north, where one of us grew up.”

“Good luck. Finding anyplace safe.”

“Good luck to you, too. Maybe if they know the president, the vice president, isn’t here?”

“Acting president,” Boyer said. “If only I were a better actor.”

“We’ll let them know,” the other said. “No reason for them to believe us, though. And they’d still want Camp David and all the stuff here.” A good reason to conspicuously leave, I thought. That would probably occur to them.

Would that constitute quitting one’s post before being properly relieved? Does the principle still apply if your commander in chief deserts first?

The boys brought up the metal boxes and left them under the windows. We said good-bye to the soldiers and went out into the rain, following Paul and the president.

On the other side of the tarmac runway, there was a small control shack with radar and satellite dishes. Two men in blue flight suits stood on the porch, watching. The pilots of the two jets, probably. They waved casually, and I waved back. Would they fly after us? Probably not.

Or maybe they didn’t want to hang around Camp David, either.

As we approached the NASA jet, a strip of fuselage swung down, becoming a staircase. No wide Martians to worry about.

The others hurried up the steps. Paul put a hand on Boyer’s shoulder. “Wait.”

“What for?”

“Just wait.” I stepped slowly past them as the president shook loose. “You can’t—”

“I think I can. This is my plane, and you’re not getting on it.”

“Don’t you dare. I can have you shot down.”

Paul looked at the assault rifle in his hands, and smiled. “Shall I pretend you didn’t say that?” He gestured for me to go up the steps and then he followed me, backwards, keeping his eye on Boyer.

“You think they won’t obey me.”

“Pretty sure they won’t. Go back and ask them.”

He looked around, back up to the lodge, then the control shack. The two pilots stared back.

Then he started walking. “I’m going to stand right behind your exhaust. If you start the jet, you’ll be a murderer.”

Paul stepped inside and slapped a red button by the door, and turned to look down on the president. “You do what you will,” he said as the stairs rose off the ground. “This thing doesn’t have a rear view mirror.”

I sat down and buckled up. “Is that true?”

He sat in the pilot seat and the harness clamped itself around him. “Well, sure. Where would you put a mirror?” A flatscreen blinked on and showed the black tarmac behind him.

The president stepped into view and planted his feet wide apart, standing with his hands on his hips.

“All this and stupid, too.” He tapped a sequence of keys.

“You’re going to—”

“Relax. The nozzle’s more than a meter above his head. I could roast him if I goosed it, but I’ll just bleed in a little fuel and creep away.” He put on a headset. “Control, this is NASA 1.” He paused. “Roger. We had to leave one behind for weight limitations. Taking off due north, into the wind? When we’re over the clouds I’ll take a heading of about 250°, destination Northern California.” He nodded. “Roger, thanks. Same to you guys. Over and out.”

The engine started with a loud pop, and I saw Boyer take off running. With a low whine, the plane inched forward.

“Everybody stay buckled in till I finish turning left above the weather. Then the flight attendant will come around with drinks.” He laughed. “Oh, hell. We left him behind.”

8

Nobody had said anything about drawing fire as we took off. I supposed whatever was going to happen would happen. Paul kept the plane low, treetop level, a minute or so after take-off, so I guess a person on the ground, with forest overhead, probably wouldn’t have time to aim at us and fire.

Then I was pressed back into the seat and the plane roared and rattled as it screamed for altitude. We suddenly broke out of the clouds into afternoon sun but kept accelerating, almost straight up. After a minute, he throttled down and leveled off, green rounded mountaintops drifting by underneath us, sticking out of the misty clouds.

The cabin became quiet. Paul turned around in his seat and spoke normally. “Sorry; should’ve warned you. I wanted to get out of range, in case they had heat-seekers.” He checked his watch. “It’ll take us about four hours to get to California. Landing sometime after three, Pacific time.”

“Want to fly over Fruit Farm on the way?” Dustin said.

“Yeah, see if anybody’s home.”

“See if we draw any small-arms fire,” Namir said. “That would help with our planning.”

I reclined and closed my eyes, but there was no way I could sleep. Too much adrenaline, and whatever chemical follows it. I’d be nervous even if I didn’t have anything to be nervous about.

Card and Alba and Dustin had rearranged the rear of the plane so it had seats around a table. Card had found a notebook made of sheets of paper. Each page had the presidential seal and Mervyn Gold’s name embossed (in gold) at the top. He was drawing a complicated geometrical doodle with a pencil, filling the page from the upper lefthand corner down. It was actually beautiful, in a rigid formal way.

I sat down next to him. “I didn’t know you had artistic talent.”

“I don’t; this ‘me’ doesn’t. Picked up some from my second avatar.”

Dustin looked up from his book. “Your different personae had different skill sets?”

“Yeah. Pity we don’t have the third one here. He was the negotiator, the businessman.”

“You learned from both of them?” I asked.

“It’s not like learning.” He shrugged. “Sort of ‘being,’ actually. There’s a quantum-chemistry explanation; they start out as perfect duplicates, but begin to diverge in a microsecond or so. Personality more than specific skills. You would have liked either of them more than the original.”

I squeezed his arm. “You’ll do.”

“The other two,” Dustin said, “did they have separate social lives? Different circles of friends?”

“Yes and no . . . we overlapped, and everyone we knew was aware that there were three of me. It’s not really complicated. Most of my friends have at least one avatar.”

“Feel lonely now?” Alba asked.

“Yeah. You never doubled?”

“Couldn’t afford it. Actually, it was pretty low on the list of stuff I wanted.”

He nodded. “Well, when you get older . . . if it’s ever possible again.”

He was starting to tremble. I stroked his arm and his smooth head when he faced me. “You got a sister back, anyhow.”

“A younger sister.” He smiled. “That’s stranger than my dupes.”

After a pause, Alba said, “Any way you can get them back?”

He grimaced. “Yes and no. The physical bodies are just . . . spoiled meat. Some version of their personalities ought to be hard-filed somewhere. Ought to be. I could sue if they’re not.”

“Carmen, you want to get me a bite?” Paul called back. “Better not leave the stick.” The autopilot would take us straight to Fruit Farm unless the power went out. Then it would be nice to have someone up there who knew how and where to point the plane.

I rummaged through the bag of stuff from the NASA vending machine and got him a cookie and some nuts, and a bottle of water. He gave me a peck on the cheek when I delivered the snacks.

There were two auxiliary screens on, one with some porn thing and the other with page 13 of Pride and Prejudice. He probably wanted me to comment, but I wouldn’t.

The top part of the windshield was darkened to blot out the sun. It was solid clouds underneath, as far as I could see. “I wonder how far the clouds go.”

“No telling. Feels funny, not having the weather.” His voice dropped. “How is your brother doing?”

“Hard to say. Trying to sort things out, I suppose.”

“He may be more help than Dustin, dealing with the commune.”

“Maybe. I’ll talk to them.”

“Ply him with peanuts,” he said, crunching down on a mouthful.

Maybe a near beer. I picked up a couple and put them on the table and sat down.

“Thanks. Are we on course?”

“Headed west, anyhow.” I watched him pop the can and take a drink. “What do you think these communists will be like?”

“Communists? Like people in the commune?”

“What would you call them, then?”

“Earthers. Most of them. Not sure what they call themselves.”

“You’ve never been up there?”

“God, no. It’s at the other end of the state. Long way to go for fresh vegetables. Wish I had, now.”

“Yeah; we don’t really know what to expect.”

Dustin put down his book. “Quietly crazy. That’s what I expect. Who knows, though, after seventy years.”

“Noisy and crazy,” Card said. “Trigger-happy hillbillies. That’s a cube cliché.”

That was interesting. “With a basis in fact?”

“Not Fruit Farm specifically. Back around the turn of the century, 2100, some communes in the East got together and raised some hell. They tried to secede from the United States, piecemeal. They were followers of that guy . . .”

“Lazlo Motkin,” Alba said.

“Yeah. They had a regular little war.”

“They weren’t even one geographical area,” Alba said. “Spread out over three or four states. They claimed there was an ‘existential border’ between them and us.”

“They had lawyers to prove it?”

“Lawyers and guns,” Card said. “What more do you need?”

“Anything come of it?” I asked.

Card shook his head. “All over in a couple of months. Some people jailed, some leaders executed. Lazlo Motkin himself died in a military action.”

“Which was embarrassing to America,” Alba said. “He was running for president at the time. He was just a rich crackpot until he died. Then he became a symbol of government oppression.”

I had a vague memory of him sending us a loony message on the starship. If we were good Americans, we would do a kamikaze strike on the Others’ home world.

“We ought to start out assuming they are nice rational people,” Elza said, “who have some nineteenth-century ideas about things like electricity.”

“Wonder if they’ll have power after Wednesday,” Alba said. “The only people in the whole country?”

“Not if the Others do the same thing as before,” Dustin said. “Everything stopped working, even batteries. Stuff like hydroelectric power and wind machines. Kept turning around, but without making any juice.

“The question is whether living with this archaic technology makes the Fruit Farmers better equipped for dealing with the brave new world that’s coming. We’re assuming so, but you can argue that their technological primitivism is only skin-deep. They’ve had electricity all along—home-made, but what’s the difference?”

Namir had gone to the head in back of the plane, and he emerged with a bottle of whisky and a stack of cups. “Let’s drink to NASA and their legendary foresight.”

I had a small glass of the stuff, smoky and smooth, and before I finished it, a curtain of fatigue fell over me like a sedative. I walked unsteadily back to my seat, reclined it, and was asleep before my head hit the plastic pillow.

9

I woke suddenly when the plane’s engine throttled down, and we banked sharply. I raised the curtain on my window and saw that we were angling down over some heavily forested hilly land. There was a small, meandering river.

“Should be only a few miles,” Paul said, his amplified voice flat and crackling. “I’m going down low and dead slow, and will cut the engine as we glide over the commune. Your flatscreens should be showing what’s directly under us.” I reached forward and tapped the screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Treetops rolled by underneath, slowly growing larger as we dropped.

They must hear us coming. Were people running for cover? Running to man the anti-aircraft lasers?

“They won’t have lasers.” Namir was reading my mind. “A shotgun could do some damage, though.”

“Why no lasers?”

“They could. But they aren’t getting megawatts out of twentieth-century solar cells and wind machines.”

The forest abruptly stopped, replaced by squares of pasture and fruit trees in neat lines. We were low enough that I could see cows looking up at us. The engine stuttered off, and we glided with a sound of rushing air.

A stockade wall and a glimpse of blue rectangle—a swimming pool where a half dozen naked people pointed at us. Two of them waved, much better than pointing guns.

Just past the pool was a large low building. “That’s the common,” Dustin said. “We used to go there to watch cube.” Past that were dozens of individual dwellings, I supposed multi-family. It looked as if they all started out with a basic octagonal shape, and grew in various directions.

People with clothes on looked up at us, shading their eyes from the low sun. At the entrance to the stockade, a man had a small assault rifle on a sling hanging from his shoulder. He watched us go over without raising the gun.

There were watchtowers at each corner of the stockade. From our angle you couldn’t see who or what was in them. There was a shed at the entrance to the place, probably where they sold to outsiders. Then a dirt road that cut through more pasture and fruit trees, before it plunged into the forest.

Paul turned the engine back on with a pop and a quiet roar, and we gained a little altitude. “Now let’s see how far we’ll have to walk,” he said.

We followed the winding river for a couple of minutes. A dirt path went alongside it, maybe adequate for a jepé, but not wide or straight enough for landing. Then the gray strip of an autoway slid by. Paul rose up in a banking curl, crossing over the river and then back again. He lined up perfectly with the middle lane, and eased the plane down. No sign of any auto traffic, but this probably wasn’t a busy road even under normal conditions.

The brakes chirped a couple of times, and we rolled to a halt just over the river, taking up all of the right-hand lane.

“Namir, you spies could earn your keep here. Take a look around?”

“Got it.” He and Dustin and Elza took weapons and bandoliers from the overhead compartments as the door swung down to become stairs. I was eager to get some fresh air myself, but Paul was right. Send the guns out first. The bridge might be guarded, or at least watched.

“I wonder how safe we are,” Card said. “If a car comes, it should brake automatically, but . . .”

“Trust to our luck,” I said. “So far so good.”

“That makes me feel so safe.”

“You probably couldn’t get onto the autoway if the failsafes weren’t working,” Alba said. “The power shuts down automatically.”

“Government intrusion,” he said. “Any zero can hotwire a car into manual.”

“Can you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I know how.” Yeah, like I know how a starship works.

Namir and Elza were pointing their guns up and down the road, while Dustin jogged to the side of the bridge. He looked over and then signaled with a shrug.

Namir came back up the steps. “I suggest Plan P,” he said. “We probably can’t make it to the farm before dark.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Did I sleep through something?”

“P stands for prudence,” Namir said. “The plane is too conspicuous a target to stay in. So we unload the essentials and hide nearby.”

“Like on the road here.”

“No, we’ll carry stuff back into the woods.” He looked at Paul. “Maybe down by the river?”

“Have to carry it down sooner or later.”

I slung a rifle cross-ways over my back and collected a couple of bags of food and stuff. When Dustin came aboard, I asked him whether the river water would be safe to drink. He counseled caution until we could ask a native. “I drank from it as a kid, but Dad gave me hell.”

After several minutes of no traffic, Card and Alba agreed that the autoway must be turned off. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t come screaming along on manual, but we could hear them coming and get off the roadway.

There was no actual path from the bridge down to the dirt road along the river. We picked our way down slippery gravel and through a thicket of brambles, the spies preceding us with their guns. After we got to solid ground, they left us with most of the artillery and went up for another load.

It was peaceful and pretty. The river was about ten meters wide, swift, and looked deep.

Card came and stood beside me, looking into the water. “Remember the Galápagos?”

“Sure.” We’d had a day there before we left for Mars on the space elevator. “You ever go back?”

“I did about twenty years ago. Diving and fishing.”

“You became a sportsman?”

“Kind of. Took a motorsled to the North Pole once; that was interesting.”

“Living off polar bears and penguins?”

“No penguins there. Mostly beers and hot dogs. I did see a polar bear, but it ran away.”

“Never went back to Mars?”

“Never really wanted to. Got out as soon as the quarantine lifted. So glad to get back here.” He took a drink of water from a plastic bottle and offered it to me. I took a drink even though I wasn’t thirsty.

“That’s Mars,” he said.

“I guess.” Impolite to refuse water.

“You liked it there.”

“It’s home. Became home.” I shook my head. “Was home. Never going back.”

“No one ever can. If you want to be philosophical.”

“Ever go back to Florida?”

“Yeah. The old house was still there, but with big condos all around it. One quaint old cottage with the rose bushes still there. Same pink gravel lawn. Surrounded by sky-highs.”

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“Must’ve been some zoning peculiarity.”

He laughed. “Carmen . . . it’s a fucking museum. It’s the last place on Earth where the Mars Girl lived.”

“Oh, shit.”

“You ought to go. Maybe they’d let you in for free.”

“I could wear my authentic Martian cuntsuit.” What adults called a skinsuit.

“In Florida? You’d be arrested.”

“They don’t seem too inhibited here. You see the people around the pool?”

“Yeah, California. Love it.”

Dustin and Elza were struggling down the slope with the NASA mail cart. We went up to help them through the brush.

“Paul’s making a list,” Elza said. “What we can leave on the plane.”

“Does it lock up?” Card asked.

“He says yes. But you could get in with a can opener.”

“Probably smart to take all the weapons and ammunition,” Elza said.

“Assuming the nice folks at Fruit Farm will feed us,” I said.

“If they don’t, we’ll be on our own in a couple of days anyhow,” Elza said unnecessarily.

Namir came out of the woods, kicking aside brambles. “Found a place where we can spend tonight.”

“A motel?” My brother said.

Namir ignored him. “Small clearing with plenty of overhead cover.”

“In case the prez sends his space force?” Elza said.

“Could happen. Or the folks at Fruit Farm might come down the road looking for us.”

“Armed with pitchforks and trowels,” Dustin said.

“They have weapons. We should be ready for anything.”

Of course. I gestured to Alba. “Let’s go up and get a load.”

We picked our way up and found that Paul had made a neat stack of stuff beside the plane.

I picked up one of the three laser rifles, I think the one I’d had at Camp David. Not much charge.

Paul came down the steps and answered my question before I could ask it. “It’ll be useless junk after Wednesday, but I didn’t want to leave them behind. Somebody could get them tonight or tomorrow and use them on us.”

“This one’s almost dry.”

“Still a potent psychological weapon, till Wednesday.” He set down the two bags he was carrying, food and the flare guns from the motor pool. “Or you could throw it in the river. Two’s probably enough.” We also had the powder weapons from Alba’s trunk, and the ones Namir had “found.”

“Take out the fuel cell before you throw it away,” Alba said. “I’ll carry it till Wednesday.” I extracted it and gave it to her, then tossed the thing spinning over the side. It hit the water with a quiet splash, bobbed up once, and sank.

Paul was balancing a flare pistol in his hand. “I could torch the plane,” he said. “Burn our bridges literally.” He shook his head. “We might need it if the farm doesn’t work out. Go find that island.”

“Native girls with bare boobs,” I said. “You have them here.”

We went down to Namir’s clearing and made a laughable kind of campsite out of it. If it rained, we would just have to get wet. But we got enough pine boughs to make a couple of large beds. Needed only be sleeping five at a time, two on guard.

It was getting cool as the sun went down, but we decided against making a fire.

I was on the first guard shift, seven till nine, hiding in some bushes between the road and the river. Sipped cold instant coffee and listened for anything that wasn’t water and wind. I had a laser rifle and one of the flare pistols. Elza had the same armament, hiding in the woods north of our camp. If we saw or heard something, we were supposed to close our eyes, to preserve dark vision, and shoot a flare straight up. Perhaps starting a forest fire.

At first I felt all crawly, but convinced myself it wasn’t bugs. Just skin crud. Dried sweat from crossing ten or twelve time zones. Maybe we could take a dip in the river before we left.

I thought about Snowbird and hoped she was happy and healing. Maybe they’d chip a hole in the ice so she could go swimming.

It was a cloudless night and so not completely dark, with the moonglow. My heart gave a jump when I distinctly heard steps, a quiet crunch and slide of gravel at the end of the overpass, but it was just a small deer, coming over to see what was on the other side. Fascinating to watch it picking its way down, cautious but not careful enough. If I’d been a hunter, she would’ve been venison.

I could smell her, a funny, musky odor. Which meant she couldn’t smell me, I suppose, the wind coming this way. All of my experience with animals was before I had turned nineteen. That deer was more exotic than a Martian.

Less strange than the Other that we glimpsed, though. My skin crawled a different way, remembering the chitinous monstrosity. Our absentee masters now. As slow and inexorable as the wheeling stars.

The stars were bright here. Bright everywhere, after Wednesday. I wondered whether Wolf 25, the Others’ home, was visible. It was pretty dim, twenty-five light-years away. Paul said it was in the constellation Pisces. That wasn’t one of the five or six I knew.

I’d spent years barreling through interstellar space, out among the lonely stars, but didn’t spend much time looking at them. No windows to stare out of.

Mars was unmistakable, a bright, orange, unblinking star. Why did they call it the Red Planet? Didn’t the ancients have a word for orange? Maybe red was more dramatic.

The deer caught a whiff of something and bounded away through the woods, its white tail a dim bouncing flag. Don’t shoot, Elza. She didn’t.

Paul’s watch glowed with old-fashioned hands and numerals, temporarily useful. I didn’t look at it for what I estimated to be an hour, which turned out to be thirty-two minutes.

I tried to concentrate on sights and sounds, almost unchanging. Every few minutes a bird would tweet or hoot. I watched a bright star crawl through the trees. It’s a good thing I wasn’t sleepy. Even so, I kept falling into a meditative state, perhaps encouraged by the rushing water.

The way smells changed was interesting. Subtle but sudden, as the breeze shifted, and some new blossom or bush dominated momentarily. I guess it happens in the city, too, but we’re too overloaded with stimuli to notice.

It occurred to me that we were downstream from the farm. If they knew or suspected we were near the overpass, they could float down silently on canoes or rafts. I gazed at the river for a bit, but realized that approaching us that way would be really conspicuous, even at night. A small stick floating along was easy to see, disrupting the moonglow’s reflection. So I went back to where I’d been, and sat down quietly between two low bushes.

My quietness was rewarded with another animal visitation, a masked raccoon that came down the same path the deer had used, but making no noise. When it got to the road, it beetled off the other way, investigating the darkness under the overpass. Maybe I should be hiding there. Along with the bugs and snakes, no thanks. The raccoon was probably after a meal, one that I wouldn’t find appealing.

Sooner than I’d expected, Card came across to relieve me. His white tropical tourist outfit made him a conspicuous ghost, moving in the moonglow. In another couple of weeks, the tunic would be dirty enough to use as camouflage.

“Anything?” he whispered.

“Two animals, a deer and a raccoon.” I passed him Paul’s watch and the rifle and flare pistol. “You know what to do with this?”

“Straight up, eyes closed.”

“You won’t have any trouble staying awake?”

“No. Haven’t slept yet.”

“Keep an eye on the river.”

“Yeah. They could have a navy.”

It was darker in the forest than I’d expected. I walked carefully, slowly picking my way uphill. If I came to the autoway, I’d missed them. I almost stepped on Paul, his NASA jumpsuit a deeper black against the shadow. Then someone started to snore a few yards away, I couldn’t tell who.

I knelt and patted the bed of pine boughs next to him, then crawled in not quite close enough to touch. I could smell his hair, though, along with the pine, and could hear his soft breath.

What a long day, quartering the planet and coming to ground in this dark wood. I closed my eyes and slept like a tired child.

10

After an energy-bar breakfast and cold coffee, we carried all our stuff down to the road and started walking, Namir in front and Dustin bringing up the rear, each of them armed with laser and pistol. It was a little too military for me, bad first impression, but I kept it to myself. We might be walking into an ambush.

The plane had measured a straight-line distance of 7.4 miles from the commune to the highway. That would probably come to about ten miles along the winding river road. So we should reach the commune by mid-day. My feet were a little tired and perhaps blistered. I felt every pebble in the road through my thin-soled shoes, but could avoid the big and sharp ones.

When we first started walking, we startled a deer drinking at the river’s edge. From then on the animals stayed away from us.

Better woodsmen might have suspected that the lack of wildlife meant that we weren’t alone. But our military contingent mainly knew the perils presented by city and desert. Namir did study the trees for snipers, I noticed, and scanned the ground, I supposed for trip wires and mines.

The semi-wild sylvan setting had been preserved, back in Dustin’s time here, by government edict. Thousands of acres had been gathered up and added to an existing federal parkland. Fruit Farm was “grandfathered in,” allowed to stay and operate as a private, non-mechanized cultural relic. We walked by what remained of the old mechanized farms, doomed by unprofitability to return to nature. Abandoned machinery turned into elaborate birdhouses, streaked with rust and guano. The vegetation that had replaced pasture and farmland, mostly scrub pine, was not as heavy and shadowy as the older forests, and it felt safer walking alongside it.

After about an hour and a half, we stopped under the shade of an old oak to rest, breaking out sandwiches from the NASA vending machines, welcome but starting to go a little stale.

Paul sorted through the stuff in the rolling mailbag. “We have food for two or three days, if they turn us away. What if we have to go back to the plane and find that it’s been vandalized—or just gone?”

“You said not many people could fly it,” Card said.

“Land it. It wouldn’t take much skill to take off, and then crash somewhere. I’m just wondering whether it might be towed away by some highway maintenance machine. Or pushed into the river to keep the road clear.”

“I’d guess not,” Card said. “I don’t think the maintenance robots are going anywhere without satellite communication and GPS.”

“Let’s worry about that when we have to,” Namir said. “How do we approach the commune? They’ll probably be expecting us.”

“They might be having lots of visitors,” Dustin said. “It’s going to be a popular place, once the power goes off permanently.”

“Sure,” Card said. “That accounts for the traffic jam all around us.” A butterfly wafted by in the quiet air. “This place would be in the middle of nowhere even if the autoway was working. You can’t just pull off the autoway and start hiking. People without airplanes would have to start wherever this road starts. And it’s probably not on maps.”

“Didn’t used to be,” Dustin said. “People who wanted our produce would make a day of it. Drive up this dusty old road with no signs.”

“Must’ve been pretty good vegetables,” I said.

“People are funny. We’d sell them stuff like elephant garlic, that we’d buy in bulk down in Sacramento. If it was odd, they would assume we grew it here.”

“Looked like a lot of crops when we flew over.”

“Bigger than when I was a kid, and we were more than self-sufficient then.”

“You said there were a couple of hundred back then,” I said. “Doesn’t look like that many now.”

“Hard to say, the hour we flew over. Lot of people resting up after morning chores and lunch.”

Namir sat down at the base of the oak and studied the scene with binoculars. He braced his elbow on his knee and turned the zoom lever all the way up, looking back down the road.

“See anything?” Elza said.

He shook his head slightly, still staring. “Feels like we’re being followed.”

“I had that feeling, too,” I said. “I thought it was just nerves.”

“Probably.” He lowered the binoculars, rubbed his eyes, and raised them to look again. Sharp intake of breath. “There.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Sun glint off something. Maybe metal, maybe a lens. Maybe a shiny leaf.”

“Sniper?” Paul said.

“No. I don’t think so. A rifle scope would be hooded, sniper or hunter. There it is again.”

I carefully didn’t look in that direction. “What should we do?”

“I’m tempted to wave and see if they wave back. If it’s a sniper with a gig laser, we’re all pot roast anyhow.”

“Like someone would carry that much weight into the woods,” Dustin said. “Even if the Earthers had one.”

Namir set down the binoculars and leaned back against the tree. He folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes. “Probably wouldn’t be your Earthers, anyhow. More likely someone like us, interlopers after all that good organic food.”

Something splashed in the river, and I jumped. “Should we do something?”

“Just relax. We’ll be back in the woods in a couple hundred meters. I’ll hide at the edge and see if anyone’s following us.”

“We’ll be at the farm in another hour and a half,” Paul said.

“I’ll catch up. Leave one of the cells with me.”

I handed him mine. “Punch number one for Paul.”

He smiled at Paul. “Does this mean we’re a couple now?”

“Oral only. I have standards.”

“Two condoms.” He put the phone in his shirt pocket. “I’ll call before I leave. Or if I see anything.”

We rested under the tree for a while and then walked on unhurriedly. When we came to the woods where the river curved, Namir silently stepped into the brush and disappeared.

Dustin walked past me to take Namir’s point position and looked toward where he’d gone. “I’m impressed,” he said sotto voce.

I wasn’t sure this was smart. Namir was the only one of us who actually looked dangerous. That might be important in a confrontation.

Paul and I were as recognizable as movie stars, and to a lot of people we were symbols of treason. Cooperating with the Martians, giving in to the Others. Dustin looked like a college kid and Elza, a fashion model. Alba was so small she looked like a girl wearing a cop costume, though the riot gun gave her a certain air of authority. Card looked like an overweight couch vegetable, which I guess he was.

Namir had something in his eyes that the rest of us lacked. Not arrogance, but a kind of physical confidence, certainty. Like he’d done everything, and most of it well. He’d told me, though, back at the motor pool last night, that Card was the kind of guy you’d watch out for in a bar fight. Heavy but not slow, and hard to knock down.

Of course, you could always go to a different class of bar.

I was always kind of curious about that aspect of Earth culture, American culture. I’d left before I was old enough to drink legally, most places, so my experience was limited to one beer joint in the Galápagos, the Orbit Hilton, and the dome in Mars. On Mars, actually, above the colony. No boisterous drunks anywhere, no fisticuffs, just the occasional voice raised in dispute over a Scrabble word. All the fun I’d missed. But I did know not to pick a fight with someone who looked like my brother.

I’d forgotten how good it was to be out walking—my body had forgotten. Dutifully treading on the treadmill on ad Astra, walking one day and jogging the next, was no substitute for the real thing, no matter how exact or exotic the VR surround was. Walking the Malibu beach or the skyways of Koala Lumpur, my body knew I was a hamster on a treadmill in an interstellar cage.

I walked along like that, in a reverie, for maybe an hour, everybody not talking and not bunching up. We were trying to be inconspicuous but not sneaky, in case someone was watching or trailing us.

Then a familiar sound, the toy-piano Mozart Paul used on his cell. He put it to his ear and whispered something, then gave it a shake and tried again.

“Could it be low?” I said.

“I don’t know. It got a flash charge at the motor pool. Should still be good.”

He shrugged and held it out to me. The ON button glowed green. I put it to my ear. “Namir? Hello?” Nothing but a white-noise sound.

“Could he have turned yours on accidentally?”

“Don’t see how.” I handed his back. “I mean, you might turn it on, but you wouldn’t punch up the number accidentally.”

“Give it to me,” Elza said. “Hush.” She listened to it, stopping her other ear. After a minute she shook her head and handed it back. “If it’s in his pocket, you ought to hear something when he moves.”

“Unless he’s not moving,” I said.

We all flinched at a sudden machine-gun sound. “Just a woodpecker,” Alba said. “Pileated.” It was a big thing, right over us, bright red head.

I held up the phone. “So should I just talk to him?”

Elza nodded, still staring at the bird. “Yeah. Tell him to turn it off.”

“Hello, Namir?” I repeated his name twice, louder. “Maybe he turned it on accidentally, and dropped it?”

“Or there’s something wrong with it,” Paul said. “So we either go back and check on him, or wait for him here, or move on.”

“Move on,” Elza said when he looked at her. Everybody seemed to agree, except perhaps me. That cell phone had done some screwy things, but I didn’t remember it making calls on its own.

A couple more curves in the river, and we were almost there. The stockade looked more formidable from the ground than it had from the plane.

We studied it from hiding, on the edge of the woods, over a long, empty parking lot. To the right and left were cornfields, regularly spaced plants two and three feet high. The produce stand was empty, with a hand-lettered sign saying ARMAGEDDON OUT OF BUSINESS SALE. No guards visible, but the two guard towers probably had people behind the dark aiming slots.

The road had a chain across it with a CLOSED sign. “We ought to just leave the weapons behind and walk up to the door,” Paul said.

“I don’t know,” Dustin said. “No ace in the hole? We should leave someone in reserve.”

“How about just the women?” Elza said. “Carmen and Alba and I walk up to them unarmed. Buck naked.”

“No way,” Alba said.

“In underwear?” She grinned.

“I don’t have underwear, and you know it,” I said. “Let’s go back to ‘no guns.’”

“I am naked without a gun,” Alba said. “But it makes sense.” She took off her cop jacket and I left behind the sweater I’d stolen from Camp David, under which I might have concealed something more dangerous than my natural endowments. Elza left behind the pistol she’d been carrying in her waistband, the one that Paul had killed with. Protecting me.

Alba checked her cell and it worked on Paul’s number. She left the phone turned on and we set off, trying to walk casually despite being stared at, presumably from both sides.

It was still a dirt road, but hard like asphalt. I asked Alba about it.

“It’s probably laser-fused,” she said. “A lot of country folks do driveways like that.”

“Nice to know they have big lasers,” Elza said.

“Might have been hired out.”

“Stop right there,” an amplified male voice said. “Put up your hands.”

We were only about halfway to the door, maybe fifty meters away. It opened slightly, and two people came out in thick body armor with assault rifles. One of them beckoned.

We kept our hands raised and walked toward them. They didn’t point guns at us, but kept them ready, what the boys called “port arms.”

“You’re from the plane,” one of them said, a man.

“That’s right,” Elza said.

“Where are the others?”

“God damn,” the other one said, a woman. “You’re the Mars Girl.”

“When I was a girl,” I said automatically.

“How many others, Mars Girl?” the man said. “You can put your hands down.”

“Four.” We hadn’t discussed whether to lie.

“Hiding in the woods? Watching us?” He was looking past me, at the tree line.

“That’s right.”

“I think you mean three.”

“We got the one you left back down the road,” the woman said.

“You got him? What did you do?”

“Come inside,” the man said. He tipped his weapon toward the door.

“He’s my husband,” Elza said. “What did you do to him?”

“Inside.”

We went through the door and found ourselves surrounded by forty or fifty staring people in a crowded semicircle. There were some children and even two babes in arms. Two dogs, no guns. More women than men.

“Is this all of you?” I said.

“You don’t need to know,” the man said, but a couple of people shook their heads no. Somebody whispered the “the Mars Girl.” The burden of fame.

A big white man, bald with a close-cropped gray beard, stepped forward. He looked at the armed and armored man. His voice was loud and harsh: “Where are the others?”

“Hiding back in the woods.”

“Still heavily armed, I assume.” He pointed at the cell on Alba’s belt. “You want to call them and tell them to come on in? Unarmed, like you.”

“No, sir. I can’t do that.”

“‘Sir,’ is it?” He reached to the small of his back and drew a small black pistol. He put his other hand out. “Give me the phone.”

She did, and he looked at the green light, nodded, and spoke into it: “You’ve got five minutes. Come on in without your weapons, or I’ll shoot the black woman. Five minutes more, I shoot the black-haired one. Five minutes after that, the Mars Girl goes to heaven.” He pointed the gun up and fired it, a loud bang that echoed off the walls, and looked at his watch. He turned off the phone and handed it back to Alba.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Oh, we’re always serious, here at Funny Farm.”

“I thought you were Fruit Farm,” I said.

“That was a joke, back when ‘fruit’ meant homosexual. It’s not funny anymore.”

“We meant to join you,” I said, “but if we’re not welcome, we can go on our way.”

“We’ll talk about that.” Alba’s phone beeped. “You can answer that.”

She did. “Hello . . . yes, he has.” She held up the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Your leader?” Alba shrugged. “If he wants to talk, he has to come here. He has four minutes and ten seconds.” He looked at his watch. “You have. Four minutes five seconds.”

“We have weapons,” Elza said, “but we never intended to use them on you. Only to add to the farm’s defenses.” Her voice was harsh and strained. Could he see that she was tensed to attack?

He stared at her. “What do you think they’ll do?”

“Why don’t you think, for a change, Rico?” A gray-haired woman walked out of the crowd. “This is not the way.”

She stood next to him with her hands on her hips. “I have a good idea. Let’s have the farm surrounded with a group of armed men, and then threaten to kill their women. Maybe they’ll leave their guns outside and come in for a chat.” She stepped closer to him. “Or maybe they’ll think with their balls, like some people I know, and come over the walls shooting, with nothing to lose.”

“I wasn’t really going to—”

“I know that, but what do they know?” She held out her hand to Alba. “Let me talk to them, quick.”

She took the phone. “Hello, hello? That ay-hole who just talked to you is not our leader.”

“Look, Roz—” She shot him a silencing look.

“Your people are free to leave,” she said into the cell, “and I wouldn’t blame them if they did. Or you could come join them, and we could talk.” She listened for a moment, nodding. “Okay. Which one of you is Carmen?”

I held out my hand, and she gave me the phone. It was Paul. “If it’s safe for us to come in, tell me where we first met.”

“Galápagos,” I said. “But wait.” I looked at the man with the gun. “What did you do to the man we left behind?”

“A tranquilizer dart. He’s still sleeping.”

“We want to see him, before this goes any further.”

“Easy enough,” the woman said. I followed her to the nearest building, which had a silver letter A over the door.

Namir was lying on a cot under a window, his shirt off and a white bandage around his neck. I felt above the bandage for a pulse. It was regular but shallow. “How did you get him past us?”

“GEV,” she said, ground-effect vehicle. “We took him around you, along the autoway.”

I asked Paul whether he’d gotten all that, and he had. “We’ll leave Card behind with most of the stuff.”

Roz and I went back outside. “So he’s not the leader. Are you?”

She laughed. “No one is, technically. It’s a paradise of democratic anarchy. But I was elected Primus this year, ‘first among equals.’ I get to listen to everybody and suggest who’s wrong.”

“Do you have any friends left?”

“A few. Life became simpler here when the whole world decided to join us in anarchy. We just chased all the strangers off and blew down two bridges. People can get to us, but it’s not easy.”

“That’s why there wasn’t anybody on the highway, the autoway?”

“Right. Takes a plane, and who knows how to fly one without satellites? You guys surprised us.”

“Glad you didn’t shoot us down.”

“Two people asked for permission. By the time I could respond, you were gone.”

“What would you have said?”

“Bring me their heads and save the bodies for the stewpot.” She smiled. “It was pretty obvious where you’d be landing. There was a lookout party in the woods with the GEV, so I called them and had them go take a look.”

“You’re pretty well-equipped for a bunch of Earthers.”

“Well, some of us are practical. But it’s back to nature for everybody Wednesday, right?”

“That’s what the Others say. Not like they’ve never lied.”

“Wait, now . . . the Mars Girl? You’ve actually met the Others?”

“Yes and no. They were behind glass, two-hundred-some degrees below zero. They talked to us through their intermediary, Spy, but it was like a pre-recorded message. Always is.”

“On the cube they look like big lobsters.”

“Kind of.” A lobster is a close cousin in comparison.

“Must’ve been terrifying.”

“We were scared.” But in a sense we weren’t, not in any familiar way. Helpless and in mortal danger, but it was so unreal that normal emotions were suspended, confused. I remembered smelling peanuts on Paul’s breath and wondering what the aliens would smell like, if we could smell them, but there was nothing else in the frosty air, just peanuts.

How can you tell when you’re kissing an elephant? went the joke when I was a girl. You can smell the peanuts on his breath.

“Do you have cube here, in case they send another message?” Elza said.

She nodded. “Somebody’s watching all the time. Fucking depressing, twenty-four-hour news. But nothing’s new.”

A young man walked over from the group at the door. “Two of them on their way, Roz.” We followed him back.

Paul and Dustin were carrying laser rifles. When they were about twenty feet away, they set them on the ground, and warily continued.

I stepped into the doorway, and Paul rushed to me. “You all right?”

“Fine. Namir seems okay, just sedated.”

“Police-issue tranquilizer dart,” Roz said from behind me, and held out her hand. “Oralee Roswell. They call me Roz.”

He looked through the door at all the people, nodding, counting. “So I guess it’s your move, Roz. What do we do now?”

She squinted up at the sun. “Too early for dinner. Come in for a drink?” The big gray-bearded guy, Rico, watched this exchange with a blank expression. He came along when we followed her, though.

The dining hall was a few decades past its prime, fading peeling green paint on warped plywood walls. It reminded me of the way the cafeteria smelled when I was a little girl. Layers of old stale food. We went through the dining hall, though, to a screened-in porch with clean blue plastic furniture and a nice rich farm smell from the pastures that surrounded it.

We made introductions on the way. It turned out that Dustin’s story was familiar to them; people at the Farm had been following our fortunes since we left the earth. The fact that his parents had left Fruit Farm as dissenting rebels had been forgotten. He was the Farm’s only famous alumnus.

Two other elders joined us, pulling together two of the plastic tables. One, probably male, was wraithlike, pale, tall, and thin, with a wispy halo of white hair.

“This building was new when we left,” Dustin said. “We kids helped paint the outside. It was dark red then, like a barn.”

“I remember it being red,” Rico said thoughtfully. “They painted it white when I was about ten.”

“Green after you left Earth,” the pale one said. “In the nineties sometime. Thanks, Analese.” A girl of about ten had brought in a tray of cups of steaming brown liquid with a mild aroma.

“We can’t grow coffee or tea here, of course, so we get used to this stuff. Yerba Buena.”

I tasted it. Maybe I wouldn’t get used to it. “You said you blew down two bridges what, yesterday?”

“A few hours after the power went out. We had some early-morning customers we had to escort out, first.”

“You just happened to have lots of high explosives lying around?” Dustin said, “And you knew how to use them?”

“We’ve been ready for a long time, since before I was born. The elders called it Code Red. It goes back to Lazlo’s Rebellion, when a total breakdown outside seemed possible, probable.”

“I was one of the bridge team,” Rico said. “Four of us trained by elders, where to set the charges and what to do. They’d been trained by their elders, and so on.”

“Lucky the charges still worked.”

“Yes. The alternative directions seemed more wishful thinking than sound engineering. But the antique explosives worked fine.”

“It was pretty loud even here,” Roz said.

Namir appeared at the door, walking unsteadily, a young woman supporting his elbow.

“The sleeper wakes,” Paul said.

“I walked right into a set-up,” he said. “As soon as you were out of sight, they popped me with a dart.”

“Our good luck and your bad,” the woman said. “I tried to aim for your shoulder, but you moved too fast. Wouldn’t hurt so much.”

He patted her on the back in mock affection. “My assailant, Miche Onadato. Glad you missed my eyes.”

I touched him. “You’re feeling all right now?”

He smiled at me. “Better than all right. What was in that shot you just gave me?”

“Epinephrine. You’ll feel great until you don’t.”

Roz brought over a chair for him. “So does your group have a plan?”

Dustin spoke first. “I guess our plan was to see whether you had a plan.”

Roz shook her head slowly. “It’s a farm. The calendar and the weather make our plans for us.”

“We know a lot about agriculture,” I said, “if you need help maintaining starship hydroponics.”

“You can grow a lot on twenty square meters, if you don’t have anything else to do,” Dustin said.

“When I was young, I did a lot of dirt farming on the kibbutz,” Namir said. “I could probably still control a shovel.”

Rico was studying him. “I think we’d rather have you on patrol, for the time being. You have military experience?”

“Of a kind.” Before he surrendered his commission, he was a colonel in the Mossad.

“Unlike us, he’s been shot at,” Dustin said. “Elza and I were intelligence officers, too, for the US. But I never shot at anything any more dangerous than a target.”

“Me neither,” Elza said, “until the other day.”

“I heard about that on the news,” Roz said. “You lost one of your number.”

“Stray round.” My voice caught. “She was just standing in the kitchen.”

Roz shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Probably be a lot of shooting,” Rico said, “before everybody runs out of ammo. Not many of us gonna be dying of old age.”

Roz gave him a tired look. “Maybe here.”

“You’ve been watching the news,” Elza said. “Is it all bad?”

Rico said yes, but Roz shook her head no. “There are other places like this, where they’re self-sufficient and well defended. Eugene, Oregon, is the closest.”

“You’re in contact with them?” I asked.

“Just by cell. Till Wednesday. I talked to their town manager, Benjie what’s-his-name?”

“Sweeney,” Rico supplied.

“Benjamin Sweeney.”

“We decided to have a meeting, a physical meeting, the first of every month. Starting a month from now, June first.”

“What were you going to meet about?” Paul asked.

She shrugged. “First off, a damage appraisal. See what we have and how we might help each other.”

“They have something you don’t?”

“Books, mainly. Non-electronic, printed paper books. Tens of thousands of them.”

“Why on Earth?” Elza said. “Is it a museum?”

“I guess it will be, and a library. Right now it’s a huge antique bookstore. There was a cube special about it, a couple of weeks ago. When it was just a curiosity.”

“Probably one in every big city,” Rico said. “Burned to the ground by now. So Eugene’s is special.”

I remembered Dad taking us to a huge paper bookstore in St. Petersburg, when I was little. Rare even then, I did a report on it for school. The owner had died of a mosquito bite in Africa, I suppose looking for books.

“Thought we’d talk to them about trading,” Roz said. “We have a lot of books, a couple of hundred. Not many of them useful, though.”

“Long walk?” I asked.

“A week or so. Depending on how straight a route we take.”

“You could fly,” Paul said. “I could get you there in twenty minutes.”

She cocked her head at him. “How big an operation would that be?”

“If the plane hasn’t been damaged, just have to turn it around. Five or six people. The autoway’s straight for more than a quarter mile there; I can take off easily. Eugene probably has an airport.”

“Lot of trouble to go look at some books,” Rico said.

“Might as well use the plane while we can,” Paul said. “Gonna be scrap metal in a few days.”

“You think it’s safe?” the pale elder said.

“No. But what is, nowadays?” He grinned at him. “As a plane, sure, it’s safe enough. It got us to Russia and back, by way of Maryland. It can make it to Oregon. If nobody shoots it down, and the Martian power keeps working.”

Her brow furrowed. “If the power went off, could you glide to a landing?”

“Maybe. There are emergency mechanical links to the control surfaces. But you have to find someplace flat, not too far away.” He looked around at the mountains surrounding us. “It would drop really fast.”

“So you would do it?” Rico said.

“Sure.” He said that a little too fast. What, me afraid?

“We might ought to use it for something more useful than books,” the other elder said.

“I could fly anywhere you want,” Paul said.

“Not much we need,” the pale one said. “Lead for bullets, primers, powder . . . all for reloads. You know of a place we could walk in and buy some. Or trade?”

“Not on this planet,” Roz said. “Same with other survival stuff. Even if you could find it, what would you use for money?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t fly anywhere,” Rico said. “Don’t remind people that we’re up here. Self-sufficient and comfortable.”

“For the time being,” the pale one said.

A little girl walked onto the porch, looking apprehensive. She silently raised her hand.

“What is it, Bits?” Roz said tiredly.

“Someone wants to talk to this lady.” She pointed at me. “The Mars lady?”

“Weren’t you told not to answer the phone?”

“He isn’t on the phone, Primus. He’s on the cube.”

“What does he look like?” I said.

“I think he’s a zombie. He don’t look real.”

“Doesn’t,” Roz said. She took the child by the hand, and we followed them through the cafeteria smells into a dark room with high windows and a central cube. In it, the image of Spy.

“Kid here says you look like a zombie,” Paul said.

“How perceptive. I’m not exactly alive.”

“You’re nearby,” I said. No lag in his reply.

“Close enough. Cable. Did you have a nice flight?”

“It was eventful. As you must know.”

He nodded. “You went to Russia and came back to the US, threatened to murder the president, and escaped to this bucolic paradise. Do you want to know whether the president’s security people are after you?”

“Would you tell us the truth?” Paul said.

“Ask Epimenides. They are not after you. Things are somewhat confused back at Camp David, not to mention Washington, but if you went back, they might give you a medal.”

“What about the president?” I said.

“Under house arrest, in a manner of speaking. The soldiers are negotiating via cell with their erstwhile enemies. It’s all very chummy, democracy in action.”

“Are we still going to lose power on Wednesday?” Roz said.

“As far as I know. Would you rather it be sooner?”

“Later would be nice,” I said. “Like not lose it at all. If there’s a lesson, we’ve learned it.”

“ ‘Don’t fuck with the aliens’? I suppose you have learned that. But I don’t think it’s actually a lesson. Someone wants to talk with you.”

His image faded and was replaced with one I didn’t at first recognize; he looked sort of like the pale elder, but with more hair, streaming in thick white Medusa locks. Then he spoke, without moving his lips: Moonboy, gaunt.

“You’re looking well,” he said.

While I was doing a sort of goldfish imitation, Namir found his voice: “Moonboy. You were frozen solid. You can’t be alive.”

The Others had chosen Moonboy to represent the human race in their deep-freeze zoo, even though he was not mentally or emotionally competent by our standards.

“I am more alive than any of you are, in terms of intellectual growth. I synapse faster, and my memory is not limited by organic considerations. I don’t lose my temper anymore.”

He still had a scar on his forehead from where Dustin had whacked him with a pool cue after Moonboy had broken his wife’s nose.

“How are you any different from Spy? You’re hooked up to the Others like him, and exist at their convenience.”

“Our shared history makes me different. Your group once had a person who loved me.”

“How do you feel about that?” Namir said. “The fact that Meryl is dead.”

His eyes blinked slowly. I don’t think he used them for seeing. “How could I feel things, Namir? As you pointed out, I’m long dead myself.”

Not as dead as Meryl, I thought. My palms still stung with blisters from the shovel we used for her grave.

“I’m not just a mouthpiece for the Others,” he said. “I can communicate with you in real time. When I’m speaking for them, I’ll hold my hand up, like this.”

He raised his right hand and left it up. “You present an interesting problem, the five of you whom we have met physically.”

“How nice that we’re interesting,” Namir said.

“Along with what I, Moonboy, remember, there is a context”—he shook his head, frowning—“a universe of discourse? Between humans and the Others. That is not simply predator and prey.”

“You can eat us?” Namir said. “That clears up a few things.”

“I know that is just humor. I caution you against using it. You don’t want me to misunderstand you.”

Moonboy put his hand back down. “I can say whatever I want to you, but of course they overhear. Do you have any questions?”

“An obvious one,” Paul said. “When the Others captured and froze you, we were all almost twenty-five light-years away from here. When they sent us back, it was as if no time had elapsed at all, but twenty-five years had passed on Earth.”

Moonboy nodded. “Twice twenty-five, there and back.”

“Was the transfer instantaneous to you? Or have you been thinking about things for a quarter of a century?”

“There is no plain answer. It did just take an instant, in the way you’re measuring time. But I thought a lot while that was going on, in a way that I perceive time. I’m sorry that’s not clear. Time itself is not what you think it is.”

Actually, that was about as clear as he had been when he was last alive. But he had started to lose it after a couple of years aboard ship. Then he broke Elza’s nose while they were having sex, and things went downhill fast from there.

In a way, that seemed like a couple of weeks ago. But I guess time is not what I think it is. “In what sense are the Others predators?” I asked. “How are we prey?”

“You offer the new,” he said. “Any new organism does. But social creatures, who can communicate about their surroundings, add another dimension.”

“So now the Others can leave us alone,” Namir said, “since we’re not new anymore.”

“How you react to what’s happening is always new. There is plenty left to happen.”

“And after they’ve learned enough?” I said.

“When you had biology in school, you dissected a cat.” I remembered talking with him about that, and nodded. “After you had learned enough about the cat, what did you do with it?”

“It wasn’t a cat anymore.”

“I suppose not.” He faded away.

“That was informative,” Namir said.

Spy appeared again. “This may not be the last time we want to talk to you. Please stay near a cube receiver, or carry a small one. It makes things simpler.”

“After the power goes out?” Namir’s fists were clenched.

“We can make do.” He flickered and disappeared.

“I wonder if that means they’ll eventually just go,” Paul said. “Once they learn enough.”

“Leaving us in pieces on the dissecting table,” Namir said.

We waited in the cube room for a few minutes, in case Spy had another afterthought. Then Paul and Namir went with two of the guys on GEVs, to clean up the jet, assuming it hadn’t already been plundered. Paul said he’d scavenge the portable cube from the plane, to carry in case Spy wanted to make a call.

Meanwhile, the rest of us worked on domestic arrangements. There was a cabin with only one couple in it, and they moved out with more grace than I would’ve displayed. We managed to fit in three pallets and two beds, each large enough for two people who didn’t mind touching. There was a rickety table with four chairs on the porch. The nearest toilet was a hundred meters away, but the room had a sink and three one-gallon jugs for carrying water. Rico found us an assortment of sheets, towels, and pillows.

We rested, waiting for the scavengers to return. I took a pallet on the floor, tired but not sleepy, glad to have a pillow.

Why had the Others contacted us? Just to make sure we knew they were watching? We would have been surprised if they weren’t. I went over the short exchange with Moonboy in my mind.

They were using us to collect new experiences. Had they ever told us that before? I wished Snowbird was still with us. Or one of the yellow family, ideally. They had more direct contact with the Others, though I wasn’t sure they understood them better.

We should call Snowbird, at Novisibirsk, and fill her in on everything that had happened. Wait until Namir comes back, to handle the Russian phone system.

Other than the stuff about collecting “the new,” what had we learned? Don’t joke with them; that was very useful. Moonboy claimed to experience time differently from us, but that’s probably true of all dead people.

Speaking directly for, or as, the Others, what had he said? With his hand up. That there is a “universe of discourse” connecting us and them. Things that we share. As predator and prey? Then he put his hand down, after warning Namir about joking. Did they say anything else through him?

Of course, there’s no reason to think Moonboy was telling the truth or, even if he was, it was for the purpose of helping us. Even before he died, it was hard to figure out what was going on in that unbalanced head.

I fell asleep and dreamed a memory of him on ad Astra, before he’d snapped. He was composing at the keyboard, which he’d always done silently, with earphones. In the dream he was playing out loud, the same four-note sequence over and over, a look of terrible Beethovenian concentration on his unlined face. The notes never varied in volume or phrasing. Someone once said that was a functional definition of insanity: doing the same thing time and again, always expecting a different outcome.

Dinner was a madhouse of cheerful disorganization. There was a big iron kettle of vegetable stew on an outdoor fire, and a smaller pot of deer-meat chili, peppery enough to make my eyes water. Plates of cornbread and biscuits.

Almost all of the eighty-nine people ate at the same time, mostly out on the porch or spilled onto the weedy lawn behind it. People drank yerba maté or a sugary drink with some citrus flavor. Everyone except the smallest children served themselves.

Eating with lots of people still made me nervous, after years on the cramped starship. But this rambunctious clan was easier than the formal dinners when we first returned, everybody staring at us and speculating.

Here, we were the invaders from outer space, and these folks rarely saw anyone outside their extended family. When the children stared, I just stared back.

I wondered about my own children—not the fifty-four-year-old twins I talked to through the Martian time-lag, just before we landed on Earth—but the youngsters who had grown up hardly knowing their mother. They’d been three and a half—not quite two ares—when I left on ad Astra. Their generation was all raised by professional parenters, so it wasn’t child desertion, no matter what it had felt like at the time to me. I watched these women here, scolding and playing with and fussing over their offspring, and felt an emptiness that couldn’t be there for Elza and Alba. No hole to fill.

But I wasn’t even a biological mother, just a gene donor who had occasionally played with the results. How much greater the lack would be for the woman who carried a person inside her for nine months, had it pulled from her body and then watched it, an actual piece of her own flesh, acquire a separate personality and go out into the world. That would leave a hole.

We would never talk again. Never even breathe the same air, feel the same gravity.

They could read all about Paul and me, and presumably had. Every clinical detail of our stressed hothouse lives aboard the starship was available for inspection. Maybe because anyone could read it, they would leave it alone.

At least I wouldn’t be entertaining observers with the interesting sexual geometries Elza and Meryl had experienced, assuming the public record was also a pubic record. But neither of them had children to be embarrassed by Mother’s example.

The scavengers came back during dinner with the happy news that the plane seemed not to have been touched; it was still locked up unharmed. They brought the rest of the weapons and powder ammunition. (The elder named “Wham-O” was in charge of recycling ammunition, but he had run out of primers, a little metal thing that’s pressed into the rear of the cartridge. Without that, the bullet won’t go anywhere, so primers were at the top of some theoretical wish list. Along with U-235 and the philosopher’s stone.)

Paul had the portable cube in a bright orange Sea Rescue knapsack. They also emptied out the jet’s liquor cabinet, mostly full bottles of whisky, rum, gin, and vodka. Some had obviously sampled a bit on the way home, but had managed not to wreck the floaters.

There was a raucous vote as to whether the devil’s brew ought to be saved, consumed on the spot, or destroyed. Some form of consensus wisdom prevailed, and they measured out one ounce apiece for each adult, and preserved an ounce for each child. The ones in their teens objected, but were somewhat mollified by the attraction of specialness: on their eighteenth birthdays, they would get something no one else could have.

I chose an ounce of rum, but gave it to Paul. Not that I didn’t sort of want it. But it wouldn’t relax me, and it did him.

Dustin had told us about a telescope that Wham-O maintained, an old thing they’d picked up at auction when Dustin was little. He had fond memories of looking through it at the stars and moon and planets. After dinner, we took candles out under the starry sky to the big shed where the machine was kept, on the other side of the cornfield.

The roof of the shed rolled off, squeaking into a rail frame, and there was the old machine, a long brass tube about a foot wide glittering in the candlelight. It was mounted on a heavy black cast-iron thing but was balanced exquisitely; you could move it around with a fingertip. We blew out all the candles, to preserve night vision.

Wham-O used a big brass key to wind a spring-driven clock mechanism that ticked and moved the tube so it would slowly track the stars.

He used a small telescope mounted on the side of the big one to point it. First we looked at Uranus, which he warned would not be too impressive, and that was an understatement. It was a little bluish green ball, shimmering in the dark, along with two faint stars he said were its brightest moons. Neptune wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t much to see there anyhow. Years ago, you could’ve seen its largest satellite, Triton, but the Others blew it up back in 2079. Warming up for the main act.

(Wham-O seemed personally offended that the Others had blown up Earth’s Moon. That deprived him of the telescope’s most impressive target.)

We looked at a couple of pairs of galaxies, faint, faraway ovals, and a brilliant double star, Gamma something. Then he pointed it to Mars.

I had to blink away tears. It wasn’t at all like the familiar sight of its globe from orbit—this fuzzy ball was too orange and indistinct. But it was clear enough, the white polar cap and the dark “continent” of Syrtis Major, and the broad Hellas desert, under which the Martians were living. Lying in wait, a trap, though neither they nor we had had any reason to suspect that.

I went back to stare at it some more after the others had looked. Probably the last time I would see my home planet.

I allowed myself to hope that we still had children and grandchildren there; that the Others had let them keep the technology they needed to live and breathe. They had not been humane with us, but not sadistic either, in spite of what the popular press claimed.

More mysterious than mean. If that made any difference to the outcome.

We looked at some more faint fuzzballs, distant galaxies less impressive than we’d seen earlier, and some wisps of interstellar cloud. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but the sky seemed full of bright stars that would be more interesting, and I wanted to see Mars again. I asked him about that, and he chuckled.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I want you all to be part of an experiment. I didn’t want you to look at anything bright for a few minutes.

“You know how to find Polaris?”

Paul had showed us that; I let Elza answer. Just draw a line from the two stars, the “pointers,” on the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl.

“Look there and tell me what you see.” Not much. Polaris was noticeably blue, but not very bright. The other stars in the Little Dipper were even dimmer, and hardly looked like a dipper at all.

Dustin noticed it first. “It’s darker.”

“That’s right,” Wham-O said. “Not a lot of stars around there. But what else?”

“No moonglow,” he said. “There’s . . . there’s not as much lunar debris in that direction?”

“Not much at all. If you look in that direction with the telescope, the sky is noticeably blacker. It’s been that way for a couple of days.

“Now look up there.” I could just see him pointing. “Up by Gemini and Taurus, the Pleiades.”

“It’s a lot brighter up there,” I said.

“Brighter than it used to be?”

“I’m certain of it,” he said.

“So the dust is moving away from the celestial pole,” Paul said, “toward the equator?”

“It looks that way to me.”

“So we’re going to wind up with a ring, like Saturn?” Dustin said.

“I don’t know that much about astronomy. I just know how to use the telescope.”

“Paul?” I said. He had a fresh Ph. D. in astrophysics.

“I didn’t study the solar system much. But my instinct says it would take a lot longer. Millions of years, at least.

“The Earth might have had rings when it was younger; might have had them and lost them several times. They weren’t gravitationally stable, not with the Sun and Moon pulling at them.”

“Saturn has moons with its ring,” Dustin said.

“But they’re not large compared to Saturn itself. The Moon was a quarter as big as the Earth.”

“So now that it’s not there,” Wham-O said, “maybe the Earth can have a ring?”

“Worth keeping an eye on.”

“So we could leave, right?” There was a spark of excitement in his voice. “Speaking as a space pilot . . . if all that crap was in a ring, you could just avoid it, couldn’t you?”

“I guess in theory you could just power in or out. Aim your spaceship somewhere and go there. But in fact, you can’t not be in Earth orbit. That orbit defines a plane that goes through the center of the Earth and would cut through the ring in two places.”

“Can’t you just, like, get on the North Pole and shoot straight up?”

“Sure, if you could get to the North Pole with a hell of a lot of fuel. Trade your horses and cows for some good sled dogs.”

“I’ll take it up with Roz.”

Paul was lost in thought for a minute. “You could do it, you know. Spaceports are near the equator for economy; use the planet’s rotation to add to launch speed. But if you had to launch from a pole, you could.”

“You’d want electricity, though.”

He shrugged. “Thought experiment. Big chemical fireworks, like Jules Verne. Besides, the power might come back.”

“Once the Others are through playing with us,” I said, which was the way a lot of conversations ended.

We lit a couple of the candles and walked back to the main house, quiet now with the children asleep. The adults were sitting around talking, drinking wine in the candlelight, rustic and romantic.

With a few unsubtle hints, Paul and I were allowed a bit of privacy in the cabin before the others came to bed.

I hadn’t had time to think about how much I missed that part of him, being alone with him. He felt that, too. We joke about men’s sexuality as if it were just stimulus and response and hydraulics. But Paul has always been gentle and sweet with me, maybe too gentle.

Not for the first time, I felt a little jealous of Elza, with her two men. Not so much Dustin—I guess I already have a philosopher. Namir was the big unknown, capable of who knows what. Strong, cabled arms; deep, troubled eyes.

11

The next morning, over breakfast of eggs and French-toast cornbread, Roz made a proposition. “First, I’ve asked around, and everybody’s in favor of asking you to join us.” The two elders with her nodded in unison, like white-plumed birds.

“Rico must’ve taken some arm-twisting,” I said.

“Not once he saw the riot gun. With the riot gun, he had to take you, Alba, and with you everybody else.”

“Nice to be useful,” she said.

“Speaking of useful . . . while the plane still flies, you have plans for it?”

“There are pluses and minuses for every possibility,” Paul said. “I’d like to reconnoiter a big city, like LA, but we’d be vulnerable to ground fire. And I wouldn’t want to leave it parked at an airport.”

“We were talking about using it for resupply,” Namir said. “Is there anything you have in abundance that you could trade in exchange for something you lack?”

“Most of the things we lack are luxuries, or rarities. Luxuries, forget it, but there are sophisticated medical supplies and equipment we would like to have on hand. If somebody wants to trade them for cider or jerky.”

“Maybe in a few months,” Namir said.

“We do have that strange offer,” she said, “for books. Printed paper books.”

“Far enough to fly?” Paul said.

“Eugene, Oregon. About 180 miles. I called them as part of this call-your-neighbor thing?”

“A long hike.”

“I talked to them again last night, and they got all excited about your being so close.

“There’s a funny guy there who has a big store called Lanny’s Lending Library. Thousands, tens of thousands of paper books. He lends them out or sells them. They’re suddenly worth a lot.”

“Priceless,” I said. How many books would just disappear once the cloud shut down?

“Lanny really wants to talk to you guys, about the Others and all. For an afternoon, with him, we can have all the books we can carry out. The seven of you and three of us.”

“Couple of hundred books,” Namir said. “Is it worth tying up the plane? When we could go raid a hospital or something?”

“The hospitals are probably all empty by now,” I said. “The ones that aren’t under armed guard.”

“Besides,” Alba said, “an old-fashioned medical book is going to be a lot more valuable than some diagnostic machine that has to be plugged in.”

Paul stood up. “Let’s just go do it. Before the plane’s a useless relic.” I was a little concerned about being up in the sky when it became a relic. But it wasn’t going to get any safer.

We took two floaters out to the plane. The elders stayed on the ground, in favor of a couple of men to carry lots of books, Rico and a big young fellow called Stack. Paul had them sit in the front and rear of the plane, for balance.

We turned the plane easily with the floaters, which we left there with the elders. The plane rolled a short way and took off into a slight breeze and rose smoothly through the mountain pass.

Paul followed the autoway system east and north, through a few wisps of cloud. The Earthers were transfixed by the scenery. Only Rico had flown before, and that had been as a boy.

We descended after about a half hour, Paul following directions first from the plane’s robot-voiced navigator and then from someone on the cell. He banked down toward a long green rectangle, a recreation area in the exurbs near Lanny’s library.

Coming in from the south, we passed just over our welcoming committee: three military trucks next to a flagpole that had the American flag flying upside-down. Paul landed and then turned around and taxied up to them.

There were two men and a woman in military fatigues, looking pretty dangerous. I saw Paul slip a pistol under his tunic when he got up and slapped the button that dropped the staircase. Namir carried a laser rifle.

The soldiers, if that’s what they were, welcomed us and helped us into the back of one of the trucks, which had two unpadded benches and a lot of dust.

There were spectators, maybe a hundred people on the other side of the fence. They were quiet and didn’t shoot at us.

The truck had a canvas top and thick metal walls, the steel back door open for ventilation. The woman who was our driver said that Lanny’s was only about ten minutes away. We took off between the two other trucks, which had gun turrets.

It was a bumpy fast ride, seven minutes on a straight road that turned twisty at the end.

Lanny’s was one of dozens of identical blocky buildings which looked futuristic to me, shimmering and windowless. Roz dismissed them as “turn-of-the-century.” Our destination had a big whitewashed wooden sign, with LLL stenciled on it in rainbow colors. A man who had to be Lanny was standing in the doorway, broad smile in a dark face framed with wild frizzy white hair. He half bowed and swept an arm to the open door. “Our visitors from outer space, welcome.”

The inside was a kaleidoscopic junk pile of old-fashioned printed books, seemingly stacked in no particular order, the floor actually just a series of cleared walkways among the stacks. Books were shelved floor to ceiling on the walls, serviced by tall ladders on rollers, which looked precarious. Those books had a semblance of order, similarly bound sets stacked together.

The study at Camp David had the lawyer’s obligatory wall-to-wall books, dusted but not opened from one generation to the next. Sometimes you saw the same thing in academic offices, back in my time, symbols of the continuity of scholarship rather than actual tools for learning.

Aboard ad Astra we had a short shelf of actual books, one of which Namir still carried with him, the volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets bound in leather. His new wife had given it to him just before she died in Gehenna.

A sense of order did emerge, in that one area would be dominated by history books, another by cookbooks, or by mathematics or novels. Between chemistry and poetry there was a coffee machine surrounded by upholstered chairs. We settled in.

“I probably don’t have much time to live,” Lanny said, easing into an overstuffed recliner. “I have a heart chip and started having angina pains soon after the power went off.” He waved that off like a mosquito. “But I’ve spent a life and fortune satisfying my curiosity about this and that, and don’t see any reason to stop now.”

An elderly white man in a tuxedo brought out a tray of cups and saucers and served each of us as Lanny talked. “I’m mainly curious about the Others, of course, and what direction you think this thing is going to go.” He was looking at Namir.

“Well, it’s the end of the world, no matter what they do. The old world is irretrievably gone. Even if they were to disappear and never come back.”

“Something we could never know for sure,” I said. “They can go away for ten thousand years, and come back to undo everything we’ve done. Anything we’ve done.”

“In the name of self-protection,” Paul said, “like this time. No defense against it.”

“So we live from day to day,” Lanny said, “as some of us have always done anyhow. Surviving to the next day will be more problematic soon. But that’s always been the human condition.”

“Yeah, but we used to be the masters of creation,” Dustin said. “The pinnacle of evolution, the top of the food chain. Philosophically, that’s the main difference the Others have made.”

“Philosophy may be our big weapon now, Dustin,” Namir said. “We’re counting on you.” And the doctorate he’d never used.

“Physical weapons just seem to annoy them,” Lanny said. “Or do you have any ideas along those lines?”

Namir and Paul exchanged glances. “We never know when we’re being listened to,” Paul said quietly. “Maybe all the time. So you couldn’t take them by surprise.”

“How could they listen to you here?” Lanny said.

“Homeland Security could do it back in our day,” Elza said, “from across the street, maybe from orbit. Bounce a coherent beam of light off the window and analyze the vibrations.”

“No windows here,” I said.

“Clear line of sight to the display window in front,” she said, “so it would just be a matter of getting a signal out of the noise.”

“They don’t even need that, though,” Paul said. “They want us to carry a cube everywhere.” He held up the bright orange knapsack. “It’s not supposed to be a transmitter, any more than the one at Funny Farm was. But they talked with us through that one.”

“And back at the NASA motor pool,” I said. “They managed to turn on a set without touching it. How do you do that?”

“Use a remote,” Card said. “I mean, the circuitry is there. It’s not magic.”

“From orbit? Pretty sophisticated engineering,” Paul said. “We don’t have any idea what their limits are.”

“Like, we know they can’t go faster than the speed of light,” Dustin said. “But they can handle time in ways we don’t understand.

“Our trip back from their planet seemed to take no time at all, though almost twenty-five years passed on Earth. And it wasn’t a subjective perception—the plants in our life-support system didn’t die. If you think of the plant’s physiology—or ours—as a slow clock, well, it barely ticked in those twenty-five years.”

“How do you explain that?” Lanny said.

“That is fucking magic,” Card said. “If you want an accurate name for it.”

Justin laughed. “It’ll be interesting to see what theoretical physicists do with it, mathematical physicists. They’ve only had a week to think about it, though. It might take another century.”

“So in a way, they do go faster than the speed of light,” Lanny said, “or you and your carrots and all did. You spent a quarter of a century and didn’t grow a single gray hair.”

“Maybe not ‘faster’ than light. Wish I’d paid closer attention in physics class,” Paul said. “It seems to me that the only way you can travel at the speed of light is to stop time, somehow.” He shrugged. “Photons don’t age.”

“And if you go faster than light,” Dustin said, “time goes backwards; effect precedes cause.”

“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Things happen before they start?”

“Hard to visualize,” he admitted. As if he could draw a picture if he only had a pencil.

“If they can do that, there’s no point in even trying to fight them,” Lanny said.

“Assume they can’t,” Namir said. “Or if they can . . . subvert causality, we know that they don’t use the power. Or haven’t yet.”

“Maybe they have,” Lanny said. “Have they ever made a mistake?”

“Sure,” I said. “They could have destroyed the whole human race, remember? If Paul hadn’t stopped them.”

“No disrespect, Paul, but there’s another way to look at that. You flew their cosmic time bomb to the other side of the Moon, and saved us from that. But then what happened to the Moon? What if they tried it again today?”

“Good point,” Paul conceded. “So they were testing us?”

“Or just scaring the shit out of us. Who knows why they do anything? It’s like asking ‘why did the earthquake hit San Francisco?’ With all those people there.”

“We have to assume they do things for a reason,” Namir said.

“What does that mean?” Lanny said. “We can say ‘the earthquake hit San Francisco because it was built on a fault line,’ or ‘God sent the earthquake to punish them for Chinese food,’ or it happened because of all the gold mining. The reason you prefer depends on the information and prejudices you bring to the question. How much actual information do you have about them?”

“Mostly inference,” Dustin said. “All they’ve actually said to us, you could put on a couple of screens. And some of that was deliberately misleading.”

“Spy is a key, obviously,” Paul said. “Assuming that, with all their powers, they can watch us anywhere, any time, then they don’t really need him for information.”

“He’s a temporal interface,” I said. “It’s convenient for them to talk to us in real time, our time.”

“You did converse with them once,” Lanny said. “When you were out at their star?”

“We had Spy then,” I said. “We’d say something and wait for several minutes while they answered, through him.”

“It would take them a couple of minutes to just say yes or no,” Dustin said. “The more complicated responses wouldn’t take much longer, but they apparently had billions of things pre-recorded, so it was just a matter of hitting the right billion switches.”

“A lot of bases to cover,” Lanny said.

“They think a lot faster than we do,” he said. “Faster than we can imagine thinking, Fly-in-Amber said. He was the other Martian with us when we went to meet them. The resident expert on the Others.”

“He knew next to nothing,” Paul said. “As opposed to nothing.”

“That was frustrating,” I said. “Like all the Martians in the yellow family, he was born with an ability to communicate with the Others—”

“Born with the knowledge of their language?”

“Weirder than that. More like being born with a sixth sense, which you’re unaware of until it’s triggered.” I tried to remember how he had described it. “He didn’t make any sense out of the Others’ message himself. He said it was like being able to speak the language perfectly, but only as a mimic. Like a parrot.”

“Are any of the Martians up in Russia in the yellow family?”

“None that we met,” I said, “and no way we can talk to them on Mars.”

I missed what anybody might have said then. My mind went a little haywire, realizing I could see Mars in the evening sky—could see light from the planet where my family and friends lived—and so could talk to them, in theory. But theory wasn’t practice; communications satellites were dust. They would all grow old and die without me.

Or might be dead already, along with all the Martians and other humans in Mars, if the Others had pulled the plug on them.

I should have asked Spy. And then wonder whether to believe his answer.

The white butler came back to refill our coffee, and produced a flask of brandy when Elza asked for something stronger. That led to some chat about living conditions aboard ad Astra, which reminded me to be grateful for gravity, and coffee that came from actual beans, made with water that had never passed through a kidney.

“Coffee may be more valuable than the books,” Lanny said. “I took delivery on two tons of roasted beans on 28 April, the day before they pulled the plug. The basement’s full.”

“Make everyone who buys a cup of coffee buy a book,” Dustin said.

“Paying with what?” Paul said.

Lanny shook his head. “Barter gets complicated fast. Especially with books. I can trade you one poem for another, or two small ones for a big one. But how many for a chicken, and where do I put the chicken?”

“In the first stanza,” Elza said. “Or maybe that’s the egg.”

He ignored that. “We’re pretty much on the barter system now, but it’s money-based. You bring in twenty dollars’ worth of books, and I’ll give you ten dollars’ worth in trade, or five dollars in cash. Phasing out the actual cash, but it’s still a unit of exchange.”

“What about California bucks?” Roz said, smiling.

“Useful for personal hygiene.” The governor of California had authorized the printing of paper money, backed in some arcane way by the state’s natural resources. None of it had made its way to Funny Farm.

Lanny pulled a wad of bills out of his front pocket and sorted through them. “I did take one yesterday; gave him ten cents on the dollar. Here.” It was greener than the others, labeled ONE HUNDRED CALIFORNIA DOLARS. There was a picture of a rugged-looking man in a cowboy hat, identified as Ron Reagan. Small print said it was legal tender anywhere in the universe.

“That will be handy,” Paul said, “once we have this business with the Others straightened out. California oranges in grocery stores all over the galaxy.”

“Governor was a fucking nut-case even before this all happened. Like I have to tell you guys.”

“He used to be the funniest thing on the cube,” Roz said. “He didn’t just want to secede from the States. He wanted to put California into orbit, and declare independence from Earth.”

“Not really?” I said.

“Science wasn’t his strong suit. His handlers said it was metaphor. Everybody knew better.”

We talked for a couple of hours, satisfying Lanny’s curiosity about our flight out to Wolf 25 and meeting with the Others. About half the time we just talked about our remote pasts, growing up in the last half of the twenty-first century.

The Others first made their presence known almost sixty years ago. There aren’t too many people around who remember everyday life as adults back then, without a Sword of Damocles hanging in the sky. Back when there was “everyday life,” uncomplicated by doom.

Lanny said that suicide had been the leading cause of death for as long as he could remember, for children as well as adults. He was born in 2068, right after Gehenna. His Jewish mother killed herself before he was one. He grew up with his father’s fierce atheism and had never been tempted away from it.

He led us around the store with a shopping cart. Roz had a scribbled list of all the titles in Funny Farm’s library.

Some choices were obvious, like medical manuals and a five-volume gold mine, the Foxfire Journals, a twentieth-century compendium of low-technology solutions to the problems of country living, from midwifing to burial. Chicken raising, building a smokehouse, foraging for wild plants, how to make a banjo. That got Namir’s interest. He’d made a balalaika to pass the time on the starship, but left it in orbit, to be sent to Earth later. Pulverized now.

Lanny unlocked a glass case and gave us a fat one-volume Medical Practices from 1889, before antibiotics. Some of the medicine seemed more superstition than science; the surgery, painful butchery.

How long would our anesthetics hold out? Long enough for me to die before needing them?

Paul chose a judicious assortment of books on science and engineering, and Lanny gave him a thing called a “slide rule,” along with a fragile yellowing folder of instructions. It was a foot-long slab of yellow metal with numbers printed all over it. Paul squinted at it and moved the middle bar around and told me the cube root of 100 was 4.64. I supposed that might come in handy some day.

By mutual consent, we all got to choose two books without argument. I got the fat old poetry book that had sustained me the year before my family moved to Mars, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and a one-volume complete Shakespeare in tiny print. Roz’s list already had a Shakespeare, but Rico said it was a simplified edition for children.

About half the cart was filled with children’s books, a mixture of schoolbooks and play. Raising kids without the cube was going to be a challenge. I had a disturbing vision of myself as an old lady, scaring children with stories around the campfire. Though they wouldn’t be so easy to scare by then.

One priceless find was a thirty-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica , from 2031. It had been a curiosity, not for sale, but when the cloud evaporated, it would be all we had. A finger-powered paper memory bank. I decided to read through it, five pages a day. That would be eighty-four hundred days, so when I finished I would be twenty-three years older and wiser.

There was a whole section of survival manuals, mostly earnest and useless, either painfully obvious or relying on technology we used to think was basic. There was a Girl Scout manual, Handbook for Girls, that had useful tips about getting along in the woods. For a fun week away from home.

What we really needed was a book about how to rebuild civilization from scratch, but if there was one, it was checked out.

Lanny had a good idea, a practical use for his printing press. Try to boil down everything that made Funny Farm work, and everything they’d done wrong, and print it on a single sheet of paper, both sides. Send copies up and down the coast, and out into the Plains, so that people wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

We sat down and, with Lanny’s help, made a chart covering the benefits civilization provided. He traced it on a three-foot flatscreen, drawing circles around words with his finger while a teenaged boy drew a copy on a piece of paper with a pencil. It did look odd, but paper was going to be it soon. We’d better be learning how to make the stuff.

After about twenty minutes, we all ran out of ideas and looked at the thing quietly. Something important was missing.

“Where is art?” I said.

Rico looked at me quizzically. “Who?”

“There’s no place there for art . . . or science.”

“Or philosophy,” Dustin said. “All that comes later.”

“She has a point,” Lanny said. “If all you do is plant crops and haul water and keep a roof over your head, and fight off the other savages, what are you?”

“Successful savages,” Namir said. “You’d rather be a cultured corpse?”

“To be realistic,” Roz said, “how much art and science did we get done at the farm?”

“How much did we need?” Rico said. “We aren’t exactly an art colony. And we had the cube to keep up with science.”

“Had,” Roz said. “Maybe art will take care of itself. People do draw and paint and make music. But science and technology . . . what will it be like a hundred years from now? When everybody who ever got a degree in science is dead?”

“I guess you want general textbooks about every discipline,” Lanny said, “and then be selective about advanced texts.”

“Civil engineering,” Dustin said, “which we used to call a contradiction in terms. Buildings, roads, sewers. Chemical engineering rather than pure chemistry. That kind of selectivity.”

“We can take all the time you need,” Lanny said.

“We’re not going to find paper books that are up-to-date on technology,” Paul said. “I didn’t have any when I got my degree back in ’63.”

“Same at the university here,” Lanny said. “If you want to look at a paper book in the library now, you have to go to the reserve room or Special Collections, and wear gloves. The only new paper books I see here are gift items or things that were printed for collectors.

“Library books are how I started this store. The university library was selling off books by the pound when they went paperless, back in ’21.”

“During the big depression,” the butler said.

“Yeah; my dad had made a fortune in real estate. When he died, I got this building and enough money to fill it with books.” He laughed. “It was 2121, and I had just turned forty-two. Not that I’m superstitious.”

I thought the world economy was under central control before 2121. Would there be an economics book printed later than that? A Child’s Garden of Macroeconomics?

Lanny led us around the store with the paper copy of the diagram and helped us choose old academic books that weren’t outdated or too fragile to be of use. There was a debate over electronics and computer science. Justin thought they were about as useful as a “how to wrap a mummy” book. But they compromised on a couple of general texts and a wall chart full of arcane symbols.

I have some sympathy for Paul’s side, the sciences, even though I’m a useless liberal-arts type myself. How could anybody decode all that stuff from scratch? Maybe the electricity would come back in a hundred years.

People might remember how to turn on the lights, or the machines, but who could repair or replace them?

A uniformed soldier came rushing in, and saluted Lanny. “Sir, California has . . . they bombed the border.”

Lanny was incredulous. “The Oregon border?”

“All of it, they said. Hellbombs, all along the state’s borders.”

Hellbombs gave off intense radiation for years, without causing any other damage.

“ ‘California for Californians,’ ” Lanny quoted. “Are they far enough away not to harm us?”

“You could detect it, sir, but just barely. We measured one or two milligrays. Ten times that wouldn’t hurt.”

“He threatened this during the last election,” Alba said, “but we thought it was just isolationist rhetoric.”

“Could he have enough bombs to actually do it?” Justin asked. “He’d need to drop one every five miles or so.”

“Their standard radius of effectiveness is about five miles,” Namir said, “so one every ten miles would do it.”

“You can fly above them?” Rico asked.

“No problem,” Paul said. “Hell, you could drive past one in a car, a mile or two away, if you were going fast enough.”

“And didn’t want to have children,” Namir said. “You’d get quite a sunburn, a mile away.”

“Nobody’s going to walk across the border,” Paul said, “or settle near it. I assume Fruit Farm is far enough away.”

“Unless he tossed one our way,” Rico said.

“Not likely,” Roz said. “He’s crazy, but he’s sort of our crazy. Back to basics and all.”

“With his mansion in Malibu,” Rico said. “I wonder if he bombed the border with the Pacific.”

“He didn’t, sir,” the soldier said. “Just the borders with other states and Mexico.”

“That’s great,” I said. “If the plane doesn’t work, we can hijack a boat.”

Paul was shaking his head. “Shit. What do we have? Roz, how badly do you guys want to go back?”

“You could make a good case for going anywhere else,” she admitted, “but no; it’s our home.” She looked at the other three and got dour nods. “I guess we’re at your mercy.”

“Oh, I’ll give you a ride. But what do the rest of us do? Stay stuck in California for years, or get out while we can?”

“Will the hellbombs still work after Wednesday?” I asked.

“Nothing electrical in them,” Namir said.

There was an awkward pause. “You couldn’t stay here,” Lanny said. “You’d more than double our population.”

“Funny Farm would probably be the best place for you,” Roz said, and pointed to the center of the diagram. “Food, water, and shelter.”

I felt a rising choking panic. Stuck on a few acres of farmland? After having two worlds and parsecs of space to roam in?

Paul gave me a look that I couldn’t read. What did he want—a life of kids and crops and chores?

“I think we ought to go,” he said slowly. “Let’s get these books on the ground, on the other side. Then decide whether to stay or go . . . someplace.”

My mind was spinning, or rather rattling around like a pebble in a can. Even if it was my choice, I wouldn’t know what to do. Return to the farm, stay in Eugene, head for the sea, the hills? Funny Farm was a haven and a trap. Hiding place and target.

Well, we did have to go there, Step One. Maybe then take off and head back east? Rather than stay locked up in a radioactive lunatic asylum.

Lanny helped us pack the books into cloth and plastic bags, with the store’s logo, RESERVED FOR VOLUME CUSTOMERS. We turned on the cube and saw the governor’s ranting speech while we loaded the truck and rolled off to the field.

The watching crowd was bigger. Some of them shouted at us as we slowed to go through the gate. But they weren’t armed, or at least weren’t shooting.

I couldn’t blame them for being resentful. But we weren’t actually escaping. Just hopping from one part of the frying pan into another.

We stacked the bags of books evenly into the overhead racks. The cargo area was pretty full with the weapons, ammunition, food, and water we’d brought. Even if we had carried it from the Farm and back for nothing, it had been reassuring.

When the door eased shut and cut off the crowd noise, I relaxed. The rush of the jet exhaust was comforting. We bumped along the soft ground for half a minute and then floated up into the air.

“Need to get some altitude,” Paul said over the intercom. “Like to be a few miles up when you go over the bombs.” He’d mentioned that on the way out. Hellbombs fall in such a way that their radiation isn’t wasted on the sky; most of it’s reflected to fan out horizontally. But it was still significant a mile or so up; besides, a bomb could land on a slant or tip over.

The plane didn’t have a radiation detector. If our skins started to blister, we’d know something was wrong.

Paul said we were at fifteen thousand feet, over four kilometers, when we approached the California border.

It was easy to see where the hellbombs had been dropped. A black spot that lightened to a brown circle, then yellow, fading into green.

The governor had given his citizens one hour of warning. Plenty of time to get away at a fast walk, unencumbered by possessions.

A couple of minutes after we crossed the border, the flatscreens on the chair backs blinked into life. Spy appeared, smiling wanly.

“The Others have decided that this phase of the experiment is over. You might start looking for a place to land.” It went blank, and at the same time, the jet’s engine stuttered and stopped.

Paul looked back down the aisle. “Belt in tight. Be ready to assume the crash position before we hit. I mean ‘land.’ ”

“ ‘Crash position’?” Rico said.

“Feet together, knees together.” He turned back to the controls and shouted, “Hands on your knees! Get your head down!”

“And kiss your ass goodbye,” Dustin said.

12

The plane went into a sickening bank, dropping at a steep angle, and then bobbed up with a lurch and glided on the level for a while. Not really level; I could see individual trees growing larger by the minute. The air shriek grew louder and deeper in pitch. I couldn’t see what Paul might be aiming for. It was all forest and rolling hills underneath me.

We later learned that Paul was aiming for the town of Holstock, which was the only urban area visible when Spy told us they were pulling the plug. It was a couple of miles too far away, though.

There was still no road visible when I saw the plane’s shadow rushing up to meet us, and obediently assumed the proper position, bent over with hands and eyes and anus clenched tight. He was aiming for a short bit of country road that ran straight for a fraction of a mile.

We hit the gravel road hard, with an explosion as both tires blew. Looking at the path later, you could see that we skidded spraying gravel for less than a hundred yards, and were still going pretty fast when the left wingtip hit a tree. We spun half around and the other wing dug into the ground, and the plane cartwheeled twice and crashed into a pine forest.

All I remember is my face hitting the viewscreen, which didn’t break. I think I was only unconscious for a minute or so. Woke up aching all over, blood trickling off my chin from a cut over the cheekbone. My mouth was full of blood; upper and lower incisors had ripped into my lips. My left eye was swollen shut, and blood trickled down from my left knee. I smelled pine. The plane ticked and squeaked.

Shoulders felt bad, but my hands worked. I opened the seat-belt clasp and tried to stand. The plane was canted over at about a thirty-degree angle. Behind me, I could see that a thick branch or small tree had punched through a window. That was Alba’s seat, and she was obviously dead. So was the man across from her, one of the Funny Farm volunteers, his head at a drastic angle, chin torn off.

I picked my way forward, bracing myself to find Paul dead. There was very little light up there, the windshield and side windows buried in green.

Paul was hanging from his straps, his face a mask of blood. But when I touched him he groaned.

“Paul? Paul, can you hear me?”

One eye blinked open, startling white against the red. He rubbed both hands over his face and stared at the blood. “What the fuck . . . Do we have casualties?”

“I don’t know—yes. Two, at least.”

“Help me here.” He was trying to undo the clasps on his harness, fingers slippery with blood. When they clicked open, he rolled half onto me.

He felt his head gingerly. “Where the fuck is my flight helmet?”

It was down by his feet. I handed it to him, and he twisted the microphone around. “Mayday. Mayday.” Then he shook his head, hard, and threw it away.

I helped him to his feet. “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, “not enough road.” We looked back down the aisle.

In the back, Namir was crunched over Dustin, giving him mouth-to-mouth. Roz lay unconscious or dead across the aisle. Card had a cut on the top of his head; Elza was dabbing at it with a tissue, her other arm hanging limp at her side.

“Where’s Rico?” Paul said.

“Under the seat up here,” Elza said. “He slid.”

“Tobogganed,” Paul muttered. I followed him up there and saw the body. He either hadn’t fastened in properly or the belt failed. His body had slid under the seat in front of him, but his chin caught on the bottom of the chair, and his head stayed behind.

He didn’t look real, and neither did the other man, Stack, his jaw taken away. His eyes were open but there was no life in them.

Paul was kneeling over Roz, his ear to her chest. “Heart’s beating. Find some water?” He crawled up to Namir and Dustin. I found a water bottle and broke the seal.

Tried to pour some into Roz’s mouth, but it just dribbled out. When I splashed some on her face, though, she reacted, wincing a little.

“Are you okay?” Brilliant question.

She opened one eye. “Yeah, but you look like shit.” She coughed and propped herself up on her elbow. “Think I broke a rib.” She coughed into her hand and looked at it. “Not too serious. How is Rico?”

“Dead. He’s dead.”

She shook her head. “God, Rico. Anybody else?”

“Stack, Alba, maybe Dustin.”

“Do we want to get out of this damn thing before it explodes?”

“Not a problem,” Paul said, not looking back. “Runs on helium.”

It was all Martian magic, of course; it could probably run on mushrooms. I made my way back to the cockpit area and hit the red door button several times. My knuckles were raw and bleeding on both hands. “The door doesn’t work.”

“See if you can pull the rubber strip off one of the windows. The one over the wing there.” Roz had longer fingernails, so she was able to pick it away. There was a red ribbon along the bottom that said PULL AND KICK in various languages. We both pulled on the ribbon and it made a click sound. I punched the window out with a single kick, and it whacked my shin on the way down.

“Get out there with a weapon,” Namir said, gasping. He’d just stopped giving Dustin mouth-to-mouth. “We’ll have company.”

“Is Dustin?” I said.

“He’s breathing,” Namir said, and slid an assault rifle down the aisle. I picked it up and painfully got my head and one shoulder through its strap. Got both legs through the window, dropped onto the broken wing, and slid to the ground. Managed not to poke the rifle barrel into the dirt.

Some bird chirped in a long, monotone scold, but otherwise there was only a sigh of wind in the pines and the wreck’s small metallic noises. Hot-metal smell and newly turned earth.

I stepped away a few paces and could see our path of destruction. Saplings snapped off, pointing this way. Three deep gouges in the forest loam. From this low angle, I couldn’t see the road Paul had aimed for.

Rico and Stack dead, maybe Dustin. Probably no medical help any closer than Funny Farm. More than fifty miles away, in some direction.

“Don’t shoot?” It was a woman’s voice, not far away.

“I won’t,” I said. “Where are you?”

A gray-haired woman in a brown shift stepped out from behind a dense bramble. “You have a plane wreck?”

No, this is the way we like to land. “The power went out. The Others turned it off a couple of days early.”

She looked at a watch on her wrist and nodded. “First the god damned governor and now the god damned aliens. Be an earthquake next. You from NASA?”

I still had the coveralls on, though they wouldn’t pass inspection, blood and all. “No. I was their guest.” That was inane, or at least inadequate.

“Other survivors on the plane?”

I nodded. “Some injured. Is there a hospital?”

“Town’s six, seven miles. Come up to the place, though. We have a cabin down the road here, get you cleaned up.” She stepped forward and offered her hand. “Germaine Lerner.”

I shook her hand and was relieved that she didn’t recognize my name. “Others who need more than just cleaning up. Help me with them?”

“See what we can do.” She was about my age—thirties, not eighties—and stout and muscular.

When we got back to the plane, Roz was resting at the base of the tree, and Namir was on the ground, helping Paul lower Dustin down the wing. Dustin was awake but pale.

“We think broken ribs and collarbone,” Namir said. “Hello?”

Germaine introduced herself. “We can make him a pallet on the floor. I’m afraid my husband has dibs on the bed. He’s doing poorly.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“He was coming back from town on a motorcycle when the bombs dropped. He didn’t wipe out, but he got burned by it.”

“How close was he?” Namir said. “To where it went off.”

“I don’t know. It’s not like they make an explosion. Close enough he felt the heat inside his body.”

He winced. “There might be some radiation medicine in the plane’s first-aid kit. He ought to go to a hospital, though.”

“Urgent care center’s closer. I suspect there’ll be a lot of people there.” She stepped up and put her arm around Dustin, guiding his arm around her shoulder. “Come on, now.”

Paul slid down the wing, pretty spry and looking a little better, most of the blood wiped off his face. Elza backed clumsily out of the window, her left arm in a sling improvised from a shirt.

“Card will be all right,” she said to me. “He’s dizzy, and I told him to rest for a bit.”

“I’ll come back for him,” I said. “Let’s follow Germaine to her place and take stock.”

“I’ll wait here,” Namir said, easing down against the wing, propping his machine gun in easy reach. “We’ll need a shovel if you have one.”

“Got two,” Germaine said. “Take care of the living first.” She walked off, easily supporting Dustin, following an invisible trail.

Their cabin was only a few minutes’ walk. It blended in well with the woods. Up close, you could see that the rough-hewn logs were fading plastic. Two three-wheeled motorcycles were parked in front, giving off an odd smell I remembered from childhood. “Those run on gasoline?”

“When we can find it. There’s a place in Yreka sometimes has it. Let me go in first.” I took Dustin from her. She pounded on the door three times and then opened it slightly. “Don’t shoot, it’s me. We got company.”

The man inside said something unintelligible. “That was a plane crash we heard.” She opened the door and stood in the doorway. “Some people hurt.”

He came out of the darkness and stood next to her, peering out, holding a shotgun. “You in the plane that dropped them bombs.”

“That wasn’t us,” Paul said.

“It was somebody, sure as hell.” The muzzle of the gun moved to point in our general direction.

“I’m a doctor,” Elza said. “I should look at those burns.”

“What burns?”

“The left side of your face. Germaine says you passed close to a hellbomb.”

“Nothing you can do about that.”

“Maybe I can.” She walked toward him, and he put the gun down inside the door. She held his hair aside and studied his skin. Put the back of her hand against his cheek. “Does this hurt?”

“No. A little.”

“Sick to your stomach?”

“A little.”

“You ought to lie down and rest.” To Germaine: “The care center should have oral marrow stimulant. Just to be on the safe side. Tell them he got close enough for a sunburn.”

She nodded. “God damn governor.”

The man muttered something about him being a good man anyhow, and she rolled her eyes. “Go lie down.”

“We’d better get to that care center ourselves,” Elza said. “Is that in Yreka?”

“No, just down the road in Holstock. I guess a couple hours, walking, though. Six or seven miles. Come in and get a drink first.”

We followed her in through the door. The cabin was a neat single room with two beds, two chairs, and a table. Boxes of food and dry goods, and a case of ammunition, opened.

“My grandfolks bought this place back in ’79, when the Martians first came.” She crossed to a sink and pumped a handle vigorously several times, and water gushed out. She filled the four glasses that were on the sink.

“So you were on NASA business in that plane?”

“We were trying to get to Funny Farm,” Roz said. “You know where that is?”

“Kind of. Never been there. Now that’s gonna be a walk.” She handed out the glasses.

“You know which way we go?” Paul took a sip and passed me his glass.

“I’ve been up that way,” the man said. “Give me the map.”

She got a plastic map from the table drawer and he unfolded it. He rubbed it for magnification, but, of course, nothing happened.

“Lucky it has a picture at all,” he muttered, and put a thick finger down in the middle of nowhere. “You follow the gravel road about three mile, where it makes a T with a two-lane. Go to the right, and it takes you into Holstock. Urgent care is there on the main street. Don’t know what you gonna pay with.”

“We’ll sort that out with them,” Roz said. “From there we go south?”

“Not unless you’re a bird. Crossroads in the middle of town, that’s County 2031. You might want to go north, to the left. Right would take you down to Yreka. I heard gunfire there and turned around.”

“But left goes up to the border.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to go that far.” He leaned close to the map, where he had his finger down. “Black dotted line here, that’s a fire road, gravel, won’t be marked. You follow it eight or ten mile, you get to the autoway, 241.”

“Which is where we took off from, this morning.” Paul studied it and pointed to where a blue line crossed 241. “That’s the river that goes by Funny Farm.” It was about an inch away. “What is that, fifty miles?”

“Forty, anyhow. Pretty hilly.”

“We have a lot of empty jugs,” I said. “Mind if we fill them up here?”

“Course,” she said. “You have food up at Funny Farm?”

“Eighty acres planted,” Roz said.

“Well, you can take some of ours to get there,” she said, “but you remember us, right? We might be knocking on your door one day.”

“We’ll remember,” Roz said. “I guess that’s the way of the world now.”

“The Lord helps them that helps themselves,” she said, staring at Roz. “But we are all His instruments.”

We emptied the plane wreck of everything that would be of value to us or our hosts. We pried out the executive folding bed from behind the cockpit for them; besides the water, they gave us a box of dehydrated emergency meals, enough to feed us all for several days. After that, I guess we’d have to shoot a deer or catch some fish. Germaine gave us some line; both Namir and Dustin knew something about fishing.

Paul insisted that I not help with the grave-digging, and I didn’t protest much. My palms were raw. Elza had snipped away the flaps of skin and dressed them with gauze.

I helped wrap Alba and Rico and Stack in blue NASA blankets, while the others used pick and shovel to carve holes out of the root-laced soil.

There was some grisly discussion of the riot gun and Alba’s thumb. For it to fire, it had to read her thumbprint on the pistol grip. We didn’t know whether the sensor would work without power. Namir studied it, though, and used a screwdriver and hex wrench to disable it. The thing would only fire single-shot, but how many shots would you need?

She had been Christian, so we improvised a cross marker and Germaine read from the Bible. Rico and Stack were atheists, but Roz quoted Buddha for them, for their journey.

Our own journey shouldn’t be long delayed, but we were all exhausted, and the sun was going down. Elza and Dustin, with their broken bones, got Germaine’s discarded bed. We gave Card the pallet Germaine had made for Dustin. Elza had managed to stitch up his head wound one-handed, with my help.

Card didn’t seem too badly hurt, but he hadn’t said two words, and he didn’t seem to follow conversations. Maybe he was dwelling on his other personalities, still as dead as Alba and Rico and Stack.

I took a cup of tea out to where he was sitting alone on the cabin porch. He didn’t respond when I set the tea down next to him.

“Almost too much to handle,” I said.

“Almost?” He made a ghastly smile, a grimace. “I thought that nothing I would ever do would be crazier than Mars. Maybe it wasn’t Mars, though—maybe it was you. I had a nice, quiet life until you came back into it. Now everything is completely fucked up and confusing and people are dying left and right!”

“Drink the tea, Card.”

“But it’s true! If you hadn’t stumbled on the Martians they’d still be hiding underground, and we wouldn’t have the Others fucking with every fucking thing.”

“They were right next door. If I hadn’t stumbled onto them, someone else would.”

“But someone else didn’t. You’re to blame for the whole fucking shooting match.”

It’s not as if I had never followed that line of reasoning myself. “So what do you suggest I do?”

He wiped away tears. “If you had a time machine, you could go back and kill yourself before it started.”

“Sure, that would work.”

“This might.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a revolver.

I jumped back. “Card!”

“Oh, don’t worry.” He put the muzzle of the gun to his temple and laughed. “Watch.” He pulled the trigger and it made a loud click.

“You should see your face.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say or do. He took out a box of bullets and fumbled six into the cylinder, dropping two but ignoring them. He put the gun back into his pocket and, tears streaming past a smile, started up the path toward the wreck and the graves.

For a couple of minutes I stood there on the edge, waiting for a single shot. Paul came out onto the porch.

“Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not his keeper.”

13

About halfway through my second watch, I saw something curious. At first I thought it was a bright, slow meteor among all the streaking lights. But it didn’t go out. It shone steadily until I lost it in the trees to the north. An old satellite?

Card didn’t come back that night or the next morning. I told people he’d seemed depressed, but didn’t elaborate. Paul obviously knew there was something more to it, but didn’t press me.

When Paul woke up, I mentioned the light I’d seen in the sky.

“Wouldn’t be a satellite,” he said. “It was going south to north?”

“I’m sure of it.” It was in the Big Dipper when it disappeared in the trees.

“Can’t be an artificial satellite; they’re all long gone. Maybe an Earth-grazing asteroid; they can have eccentric orbits.” He explained about the plane of the ecliptic, and I sort of understood. “More likely, it’s something that belongs to the Others. Something rocks bounce off, or protected by a force like a floater’s pressor field.”

“That would work, up in orbit?”

“Who knows? No way to get up and find out.”

“Maybe it came from Mars,” I said. “If the Others didn’t take their power away.”

Elza was listening. “Or maybe it’s from Heaven. Baby Jesus finally decided to step in and help us out.”

“If Mars had power and could send a ship to Earth,” Paul said, “why would it be over here? They’d send it to Washington or London or someplace.”

“We’re here,” I said. “Martians.”

“But there’s no way for them to know that,” Elza said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hoping.”

We waited until the sun cleared the mountains to the east. “Card knows where we’re going,” Namir said. “We mustn’t wait any longer.”

I wasn’t going to disagree, and after his scene at the wreck, I probably wasn’t alone in hoping we’d seen the last of him. And none of the others had last seen him down the barrel of a gun.

We still had the NASA mail cart, though it wasn’t very efficient on gravel. We had to cull through the books, leaving half of them with the Lerners. The ones we kept leaned heavily toward children’s books and general references like the Britannica set.

In exchange for all the books, they gave us one of the shovels, a folding campers’ model called an entrenching tool. I hoped we wouldn’t need it.

We did carry all the ammunition, and enough weapons so everyone had at least one. Namir carried the riot gun and a pistol. Elza, with only one arm functional, carried the other pistol and two bandoliers of machine-gun ammunition for Paul’s weapon. I had an assault rifle and a machete.

I hoped we looked too dangerous to attack. More dangerous than I felt. Besides the rifle strapped across my back and the machete bumping my leg, I had two gallons of water hanging front and back, and the encyclopedia from CAM to FRA, three volumes, in a cloth bag under my right arm. From CAMera to FRATERNITY I couldn’t be beaten, though in a gunfight I might be a little slow.

The cart made noise, crunching through the gravel, and it really took two people to haul it along efficiently. So we wound up moving it in shifts: two of us would stay with it, along with another guard, while the other three, plus Germaine, moved quietly forward. They would signal when the coast was clear, and we’d drag the load up to join them. Then switch teams, Germaine always in front, in case we met neighbors.

It actually wasn’t too inefficient, with everybody resting half the time and moving pretty fast otherwise.

We picked up speed when we reached the T and turned into a paved road. We made steady progress for about an hour, and then ran into people.

We saw each other from a long way off. They stopped and waited for us, nervous, outnumbered and outgunned.

Two men, two women, and a baby. One of the men was old and the other looked worse than Mr. Lerner, radiation burns on both bare arms and face. Haggard and ill-looking.

Paul spoke to them as we approached. “Hello. You were caught on the border?”

The older man was leaning on a rifle, perhaps trying to look casual. “The boy here was. He drove home, but now the car doesn’t work.”

“Where you headed?”

“Yreka. Place in Holstock said they didn’t have anything for radiation.”

“Going the long way,” Germaine said.

“They told us not to take 2031. You’d best not, either. Some gangers got the road blocked.” Good thing we were headed the other way.

“Goddamn Crips,” Germaine said. “Think they own the road.”

“Huh uh,” the young man said. “This is a car gang. If it was Crips I could walk through.” He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal an elaborate dragon tattoo on his chest.

That must have meant something to Germaine. She nodded. “No radiation meds in Holstock?”

“Sent us to Yreka.”

“I’ll come along, you don’t mind. My old man got burned, too.”

“I know you,” the man with the rifle said to me. “You’re that woman from Mars.”

I almost said yeah, people say I look like her, but the NASA clothes were kind of conspicuous.

“Does us a lot of good,” Paul said, facing the man.

He nodded slowly, perhaps taking in Paul’s munitions. “Sure, come on along,” he said to Germaine.

“Good luck getting home,” she said to Roz, and gave me a confused look. Woman from Mars? They walked away slowly, not looking back.

It took another hour and a half to get into Holstock. We encountered two other small groups, though others may have watched from hiding. Those two saw us and ran into the woods.

The residential area of the town was a few blocks of individual homes mixed with condos, along with hotels and guest houses. The commercial part of town began abruptly, stores with a curious uniformity of design and apparent age. Germaine said that was because about a generation ago, most of the town was consumed in a runaway forest fire.

There was a short line, five people, waiting outside the care center; six more on chairs inside. A nurse came out with a piece of paper taped to an otherwise useless notebook. She was a pretty girl in a white uniform, brightly clean, bisected by a thick belt holding up a heavy pistol in a low-slung holster.

She was not surprised that we didn’t have any California dollars, and accepted a box of dehydrated rice and Thai chicken as “symbolic down payment.” Roz signed a two-paragraph document that said, essentially, that she would pay after things settled down. There were dozens of signatures on the front and back of the sheet of paper.

I had a feeling that a blank sheet of paper was soon going to be worth more than one printed with a picture of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat.

Roz got into line, and we settled in for a leisurely lunch of crunchy chow mein. There was no way to boil water without breaking up furniture for a fire, and the food wouldn’t completely soften with cold water. But if you didn’t know where it came from, you might take it for some new exotic oriental dish.

There was a kind of flea market set up on the lawn outside the hospital, three folding tables covered with things of some or no value. An exquisite pearl-and-diamond necklace next to an almost-full box of .22 ammunition; the ammo worth more than the jewelry.

Elza traded a good Eterna writing stick for an odd kitchen implement—three small hourglasses mounted together, timing out three, four, and five minutes. A useful timepiece for standing guard watches.

After about an hour, the nurse came back and collected Elza; they were seeing patients in order of the severity of their problems. When she returned she was wearing a clear plastic cast and a dazed expression, still buzzing with painkillers. She claimed she was ready to move on, but agreed to rest in the shade until her eyes uncrossed.

They put on a stretchy sling that held Dustin’s left arm against his chest, and went under the other arm in a kind of figure eight. It reduced the pain from the broken collarbone but restricted his movements. Roz’s rib wasn’t broken, just a big bruise, and I was only worth a few dabs of antiseptic and plastiflesh. Felt funny on the inside of my lips.

If I’d been sitting two rows back, the tree that killed Stack would’ve hit me. Mother always said I was born lucky.

We still had a few hours of light, so chose not to spend the night in Holstock. There were plenty of empty houses, and no reason not to commandeer one, except that word would get around. Our weapons and ammunition were our only defense, but they were also a concentration of the only kind of wealth that had meaning in some circles.

We got all our gear together and started off going north on 2031, keeping an eye out for the gravel “fire road” that Mr. Lerner had described. It would only be a few miles, and Paul and Namir agreed that it would be better to spend the night on guard hidden out in the woods, as we had night before last, than be exposed on the side of the abandoned autoway.

I wasn’t so sure. Nobody could sneak up on us if we were out in the open. Of course, my judgment might have been affected by fatigue. I was tired of playing soldier and water boy. I wanted to find a piece of shade and collapse into it.

It was only about an hour, though, before we found the gravel road that plunged into the forest to the left. We followed it for a few hundred yards uphill and made camp before it started to go downhill again.

We settled in for the night in a little clearing that wasn’t visible from the fire road, leaving one person on guard by the road.

I had the fourth watch, roughly two till four. Staying awake was no trouble; some animal kept moving around somewhere out of sight.

Elza’s timer was easy to see in the moonglow. I counted out twenty-four five-minute turns and went to wake Dustin. The creature had stopped making noise, so I slept easily on my bed of fragrant branches, next to Paul but not touching. I could have used some contact, but he was sleeping soundly.

I woke to an unpleasant surprise: we had company. Spy, squatting at the base of a tree like an unholy white Buddha. His clothing was seamless, as if he had been dipped in plastic.

Elza had stood the last watch. She didn’t know when he had appeared; hadn’t said anything to him.

He stared at me with silent intensity. “So how long have you been here?”

“What makes you think I ever left?” He stood and brushed himself off. “The Others asked me to show myself.”

“Why?”

“They don’t explain why they do things. Maybe they wanted to introduce an irritant.”

Paul came up beside me. “Jesus. And no coffee.”

“Here.” Spy made a small motion with one hand, and two white china mugs appeared at our feet, steaming, aromatic.

Paul picked one up. “This isn’t real.”

“Try it.”

The mug was solid, hot. The coffee tasted good.

“I know it looks and feels real.”

A cup appeared in Spy’s hand and he sipped. “But you can’t make something out of nothing?”

“That’s part of it.”

“Do you know the story about the primitive savages who were shown their first movie? Twentieth century, film image projected on a screen.”

“Enlighten me.”

“They looked behind the screen, and there was nothing there. Subsequently, the image disappeared to them. Because it wasn’t real.”

“Is that true?” I said.

He smiled. “I read it in a book.”

I heard Roz come up behind me.

“Hello,” she said. “What the hell are you?”

“Hello, Roz. Think of me as a translator between you and the Others. We decided to call me Spy.”

“So what is your real name?”

“I don’t need a name. There’s only one of me.”

She sighed. “Is that coffee?”

Spy eventually conjured a cup of coffee for everyone who wanted it, and afterward sent all the cups back to wherever they’d come from. We had to come up with our own breakfast, though, adding water to boxes of scrambled eggs and refried beans. They heated up nicely but tasted a little plastic.

“It would be a friendly gesture,” Namir said to Spy, “if you agreed not to travel with us.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Spy agreed. “But I have my orders, so to speak.”

Paul pointed the riot gun in his direction. “I could blow you to pieces, and then chop up the pieces with the machete. But I guess that would be a waste of ammunition.”

“I don’t know. You’re welcome to try.”

He looked like he was considering it. “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

It was a storybook-beautiful morning, walking through the waking forest, but the gravel was starting to bother my feet. Get some sturdy walking shoes the next time we came to a store.

Spy walked in front with Paul, who didn’t say anything to him. I went up the line to ask Paul a question, but forgot it instantly. Three men stepped out of hiding with guns leveled. “Drop it!” one said to Namir, and then pointed his gun at me.

Paul carefully set down his weapon, and I did the same. I remembered him clipping a holster with one of the pistols under his shirt at the small of his back, but didn’t know whether it was still there. Everybody else put their guns down.

Two of the men were stocky and one slim, all of them white and shirtless, with identical Toyota tattoos on their chests. Their weapons were civilian, obviously expensive, more wood than metal, elaborately carved.

“Saw you on the cube, asshole,” the bigger one said. I braced myself, but he was talking to Spy. “You’re the mouthpiece for the aliens.”

“I am their avatar,” he said neutrally.

“I’ll give you a message.” He aimed the rifle at Spy’s chest and fired a burst of three or four shots at him.

He rocked back at the impact. But there was no blood, not a mark on him where the bullets had struck. “You missed,” he said.

He hadn’t, of course, but he stepped closer and fired four measured shots point-blank. Spy simply absorbed them.

“Hold it, Number One,” the slender one said. He shrugged out of the pack he was carrying and unsnapped a wicked-looking axe from it. “Let’s see you disappear this.” He hefted it with one hand and stepped forward to swing.

“Could work,” Spy said, and pointed a finger at him. There was a pop noise like a toy gun, and the top part of the man’s head, above the eyebrows, blew off. His determined expression didn’t change as he fell dead.

“Shit,” the leader said, and stepped back. Spy pointed the finger at him, and said “bang.” A stream of bullets chewed a hole out of the center of his chest. Daylight showed through before he fell.

The third one threw down his gun and ran back into the woods.

Namir picked up one of the weapons and inspected it, avoiding the bloody stock. It hinged open in the middle.

“Sportsmen,” he said, and shook one cartridge out. “One powder bullet, but if you miss, you can fry the beast with a laser.”

“One shot would be plenty,” Paul said, looking at the huge cartridge. “I don’t guess we need it, though.”

“Carry them a while and throw them away,” Namir said. “Throw the bullets away someplace else.” He slung the man’s assault rifle over his shoulder and looked around the bloody scene. “I suggest we not waste time burying this . . . human waste.”

“In the old days,” Roz said, “they’d hang them from the trees as a warning.”

“This will do,” Paul said. “Let’s move on.”

“I’ll search them first,” Namir said. He and Dustin started going through pockets. I gave the spray of blood and brains a wide berth, but did look through the skinny one’s pack. Half a loaf of hard bread and four tins of sardines. A plastic bag had three rounds for the big-game rifle and a handful of smaller cartridges.

There was an envelope with three detailed maps, one of them the whole state of California. A wallet full of useless money and a roll of California hundred-dollar bills, held together with a rubber band. A metal flask full of liquor.

One side pocket had a small silver pistol, and another held two boxes of ammunition for it, .25 caliber. Paul suggested I keep them, though they wouldn’t be much use in a “real” fight. I might get into an unreal one, I supposed.

He offered me a hand grenade with only a little blood on it. I demurred, and Roz stuck it in her purse.

The pack had plenty of room for the encyclopedia volumes and food I was carrying in the cloth bag. It only had two specks of blood, but did give me an uncomfortable, unclean feeling as I hoisted it onto my back and tightened the straps. A dead man’s chest, complete with a bottle of rum. But it was easier than carrying the heavy cloth bag. Paul snapped the small axe onto the side.

In case the noise of the encounter might have attracted unwelcome attention, Namir set us up hiding along the bluff that overlooked the road, to watch and wait for an hour. So I took the pack off again after wearing it for a few seconds.

Some kind of birds clattered down behind us to feed on the dead. They didn’t caw or cackle; there was no noise but the thud of their beaks and the tearing of cloth and flesh.

They were still playing with their food when Namir finally declared an hour had passed, and we set off into the still-cool morning.

We used the same pattern as the previous day, with an added precaution: whenever we stopped to rest, Dustin would sneak back to make sure we weren’t being followed.

People who would follow after what we left behind would be made of sturdy stuff. I got a glimpse of the buzzards’ banquet hall, ribs glistening out of two piles of red guts. The ripped remains of a face.

Though I supposed scenes like that would become common as sunsets in most the world. How many billion were left today? Five? With how many months of food? Four?

It was high noon by the time we reached the autoway. There was a tall fence topped with barbed wire, but the bottom of it had been burned open with a laser, the edges of the hole rounded beads of melt.

We went back to the shade of the forest to eat and have an hour of rest.

Spy was studying a web woven densely in the lower branches of a shrub.

“Looks like a caterpillar,” I said.

“Malacosoma californicum. Happily unaware of everything,”

“Is it going to die soon?”

“They don’t live very long.” He picked up a stick and gently probed the web.

“I mean ‘are the Others going to kill it, along with us and everything else?’ ”

He didn’t look at me. “I really don’t have the faintest idea. They don’t consult me. Though presumably they know what I’m doing and thinking.”

“What do you think, then? Is there any chance we’ll get our world back?”

“If I were a human,” he said to the web, “and thought like a human, I would ask myself how on Earth the Others might benefit from restoring my world. What answer would I come up with, thinking as a human?”

“But you aren’t a human,” I insisted. “What do you think?”

He did look at me, with eyes as realistic and expressionless as a department store dummy’s. “In so many ways, that is not a meaningful question. There is no me here to think with. You should know that by now.”

“When you killed the man who was coming at you with an axe—”

“It was like swatting a fly. His partner was another annoyance. The one who ran away was of no concern. I knew that his testimony would spare us further interruptions.”

As he said that, we had an interruption, not particularly dramatic. A girl of about twelve came through the fence hole, chattering in Spanish, crying. Namir talked to her for a minute, calming her down.

“Her parents had a general store north of here. They’ve disappeared, and the store was gutted by looters. She waited for two days, and when her parents didn’t come home, she set out looking for them.”

She wailed something and sat down on the ground, wiping her eyes.

“She’s afraid they’re dead,” he said. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

Tell her she’s right? Roz came over and spoke to her softly in halting Spanish.

“Her name’s Hermosa, and she has relatives in San Sebastian, the way we’re headed, maybe ten miles down the road. Take her there?”

“Sure,” Namir said. “How much can she eat in ten miles?”

Quite a lot, as it turned out; a growing girl who’d been hungry for a couple of days. She hadn’t made any preparation for travel—just fled when she heard voices in the middle of the night. She said she had hidden from roving gangs as big as a hundred people. Even allowing for a twelve-year-old’s imagination, we had better be prepared.

Paul and I would “guard” Spy and Hermosa—stay out of trouble, that is, being the ones least experienced with weapons and mayhem. Namir and Elza would sneak forward a half mile or so, and come back to get us if the coast was clear. Roz and Dustin would stay behind, hidden, long enough to make sure we weren’t being followed. So we moved like a sort of elastic inchworm, with four legs in front and four behind. Paul and I and the two supernumeraries bulging along in the belly of the beast.

Hermosa asked Spy one question, and he answered in crisp, rapid Spanish. She quieted and moved to put me and Paul between herself and him.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“She asked if I was a monster from space. I told her that all three of us were from space, and which of us were monsters depended on who you asked. Fair enough?”

“She seems to have figured it out,” Paul said, patting her on the shoulder. “Though actually, you’ve been more like an ally today. I don’t know what those clowns might’ve done to us.”

“That was fortunate for you,” he agreed. “I think it would have been a gun battle at close quarters. Many of you would have been hurt, perhaps killed.”

“The timing of your appearance was propitious.”

“As it often is. Would you care to commit a logical fallacy now?”

Paul frowned at him. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” I said, since Dustin wasn’t around to say it. “Just because B follows A, it doesn’t mean that A caused B.”

“Yeah, I got it. Don’t worry; I didn’t think you conjured up those gangers. If you or the Others wanted to threaten us, you could do it more directly.”

“But would we? Just to play the devil’s advocate. Maybe I want you to trust me, and so manufactured an incident that would inspire trust.”

“And then throw in a counter-argument,” I said, “just to keep us confused.”

“I like this game,” he said.

After a few minutes of silence, Paul said, “Why don’t bullets affect you? I mean, they do have some effect; I’ve seen you rock back when they hit you. But then, nothing happens.”

“Well, something does happen. I feel them touch and, as you say, I apparently absorb some of their momentum. Then I absorb the metal itself.”

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

“There’s some sensation. More like pleasure than pain, I think.

“I know it takes a lot of energy, or something like energy, to put me here and keep me here. I ‘absorb’ the kinetic energy of bullets and the chemical energy of food and the radiant energy from sunlight, and it all helps keep me here.”

“So if we locked you up in a light-tight box and didn’t feed you, you’d disappear?”

“You’re welcome to try. I think I’d just reappear outside, though. Or eat the box.”

Paul nodded, thoughtful. “Are you invulnerable, then?”

“I don’t think so. There must be limits. I could stand inside a burning house, for instance, but couldn’t maintain integrity inside a star. I’ve never tried it, but can’t imagine what could manufacture that kind of binding force.”

“Likewise a nuke.”

“Probably. But I think it would be a waste of time. The Others would just make another one of me.”

“I don’t suppose a hellbomb would do much,” I said.

“A constant blast of radiation? I’d love it! A banquet.” He looked up at the sky. “I can feel a little secondary warmth reflected off the atmosphere, from the one you flew over yesterday.”

“So radiation and bullets don’t bother you,” Paul said, “but you protected yourself from an axe.”

“That might’ve hurt. At any rate, it would have taken me time to rebuild, and during that time there would have been trouble.”

We walked along in silence for a bit, Paul frowning. “So whose side are you on, anyhow?”

He pointed a thumb at Paul’s assault rifle. “Whose side is that gun on?”

“It’s on the side of the person who owns it.”

“Really?” He reached over carefully and rubbed dirt from the rear end of the barrel, then scratched it with a thumbnail. He peered at what it revealed.

“According to the serial number, it’s an actual antique. In another year, it will be a hundred years old.

“It was manufactured in Argentina, for the Paraguayan armed forces, who at the time were fighting Uruguay and Cuba.”

“Cuba wasn’t a state anymore?” I said.

“Temporarily not. But you don’t own it, Paul, not really. I think it’s actually on the side of the person who pulls the trigger.”

“Okay. Splitting hairs.”

“You were asking whose side I am on. That weapon is obviously not on the side of Argentina or Paraguay or Uruguay or Cuba, even though people who identify with those places may have ‘owned’ it. Is it on your side now?”

“It’s an inanimate object.”

“That’s not exactly the answer. When that fellow with the Toyota tattoo stepped out of hiding and ordered you to drop this gun, why didn’t you shoot him?”

“That’s obvious.”

“He and the other two would have killed you. Because of the gun. Whose side would it be on, then?”

“That’s pretty tortuous.”

“Not really; not at all. You’re asking whose side I’m on. What if you ask me to do something that I know will result in your death? Or Carmen’s, or the whole group’s, or the country’s or the planet’s or the solar system’s?”

“Okay. So I ask you and you do it and trillions of people die. So it’s my fault?”

“Billions. But who said anything about ‘fault’? You asked whose side I am on. By all evidence, Paul, I’m on your side.”

“I’m honored, especially if you would murder billions of people on my behalf. But you’re manifestly not on my side. You’re on the side of the Others.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. I’m not sure it has any meaning. The Others don’t use tools, including organisms like you and me, the same way that humans do. To solve problems, to answer questions. That’s how different they are. As far as I can tell, they’re totally incurious.”

“I guess we would be, too,” I said, “if we already knew everything and could do anything.”

“They obviously fall short of that,” Paul said, “or we wouldn’t be fighting. They’d just crush us and move on.”

Spy nodded. “That’s part of the mystery. You might not have anything they need, or at least they’ve never taken anything from you.”

“A moon,” Paul said. “Jesus Christ, Spy!”

“They destroyed it, as they did Triton. But that’s not taking.

“They did make a tool out of the moon, so to speak—broke it up into rocks and gravel to surround the Earth with junk, to keep humans from leaving the planet.”

“Which worked so well,” I said.

“For two weeks,” he said. “That’s something I may not understand about them. Can they have been surprised that humans reacted by trying to get into space anyhow?”

“You wouldn’t be? Surprised.”

“Of course not. But it’s not as if they said ‘If you try to get into space, we’ll turn off the electricity.’ They presented you with a problem, and it’s human nature to step up and try to solve it.”

“Wait. Are you making excuses for us?”

“No; just trying to understand them. If I know that much about human nature, they must as well. So what’s the point in punishing you for being true to your nature?”

“Training us,” Paul said, “like some Old Testament God.”

“Not exactly. That God would say ‘Don’t look back at the city’ before he turned you into a pillar of salt. The difference isn’t subtle.”

“This god is an all-powerful infant,” I said, “throwing tantrums that blow up worlds. Kill millions. We should be training it.”

Spy gave me a strange look. “Maybe you are.”

14

Everybody was dead tired when we came to an overpass and Paul suggested we take one short break, out of the afternoon sun, and then press on till dark. We flopped down and I heard Paul and Namir agreeing that we shouldn’t take the state road that passed overhead. It followed a winding route to the sea in one direction and back to Oregon in the other.

Spy began to squat in his Buddha style, but then stood up straight. “Trouble,” he said, and disappeared with a pop.

“Hey, come back,” Roz said. My sentiment, too.

“Lock and load everything,” Namir said. I jacked a round into the chamber of my assault rifle and took the little pistol from my knapsack, cocked it, and stuck it in my belt. My hands started to shake, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Roz,” he said, “tell Hermosa to climb up to the road overhead and hide.”

“Might be too steep,” she said. I’d never make it myself. Not even when I was twelve. The little girl obediently scrambled up, but slid back.

She didn’t have time for a second try. There was a soft whirring sound, and from around the curve a line of black-clad men on bicycles rolled toward us. One in the middle blew a whistle, and they slowed to a stop, staying in line.

There were nine of them. Three had new-looking bikes with luminous CA HIWAY PATROL shields in front. The other six bikes looked random and stolen.

They all seemed to have pistols, and two of the three official bikes had rifle scabbards. They got off the bikes almost in unison and stood by them. The one with a silver whistle on a chain had a large automatic weapon in an awkward-looking holster. He left his bike parked and stepped forward with his hand on the butt of the weapon. “We’re the California—”

“We don’t care,” Namir snapped. “You have no authority over us, and we have you outgunned. Just pedal on, and there won’t be any trouble.” I’d never heard him use that tone before. Very military and alpha-male.

Even with Namir’s weapon pointed toward him, the leader stood his ground. “You don’t want to do this. You couldn’t take on nine men with body armor, even if you did have more guns.”

Namir raised his weapon higher and pointed it at the man’s face. “Turn around and go.”

“No son policía,” Hermosa said in a squeaky voice, and pointed past the leader. She said a couple of names.

I’m not sure quite what happened then, and in what order. One or two of them fired, and both Hermosa and Roz crumpled. The leader had his gun out of the holster and fired, I think into the ground, as a blast from Namir’s weapon tore half his head off. His helmet spun away, and before it hit the ground everyone was shooting.

I had the pistol out and held it the way they’d shown me, both hands, but I wasn’t aiming, just pulling the trigger as fast as I could, pointing at the black-clad men, most of whom had dived to the ground and were firing from a prone position. When the pistol was empty, I threw it down and raised the rifle.

Sharp sting in my left thigh and I fell down backwards, rifle clattering away. I curled into a ball, clutching the wound. There was a lot of blood, and I was peeing, too. I might have been screaming, but all I remember is gunfire and then a big explosion, and silence.

Roz was still alive, though she had a long wide wound to her face; she’d managed to dig that hand grenade out of her bag and throw it at the bikes.

Only one of the enemy was still standing, staggering, and Namir cut him down when he raised his rifle to aim. Or perhaps to surrender. The others were lying on the ground, still or writhing in pain. With her good arm, Elza took a pistol from the closest dead one and walked among them, shooting each one once in the head. The expression on her face was stony and terrible.

I kicked off my sandals and pulled down my pants, already sodden with blood. Blood from the wound was flowing freely but not spurting. The bullet had missed my vagina by two finger widths. A shallow rip about three inches long.

“Put this on it.” Dustin was holding out a thick white bandage with ribbons hanging from four corners. I pressed it to the wound while he laced the ribbons around and tied them tight. I should have made some sexual joke but was busy trying to keep my lunch down. He pressed an ampoule into my thigh below the wound.

“Okay. Lie back and rest, try to rest.”

“Where’s Paul?” I was starting to drift.

He shook his head. “Don’t know.” I got up on one elbow but it gave way. Dustin eased me back, and I blacked out.

When I woke it was cooler and growing dark. Elza was smoothing a patch onto the back of my hand, some sort of quick stim. Blood pounded in my ears, and I saw sparkles flare and dim.

“We have to move,” she said. “I’d like to let you sleep.”

“Paul?” I said.

She chewed her lower lip. “He’s alive, Carmen. Just.”

I felt light; insubstantial, like zero gee. Maybe like a ghost. I stood up and fought dizziness. I could feel stitches pulling on the wound in my thigh, and the grip of fleshtape, but it didn’t hurt. Just cold underneath the skin.

Elza stroked the back of my head, patting my short hair. It had grown out enough to make me look like a boy instead of a baldie. When had I last looked in a mirror?

There was a pile of black-clad bodies and a small grave. A shovel was stuck in the soft dirt. Waiting?

Dustin sat with crossed legs next to Paul, who was stretched out on a sheet of dark plastic lettered CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL. When I got closer I saw that the plastic was really light green. The darkness was blood, dried or clotting.

Paul was shirtless, a thick wad of bandage taped over his chest, and his right hand was hidden inside another blood-soaked wad. Forehead wrapped in fresh white gauze.

Only the whites of his eyes showed. His breathing was a quiet, labored rasp.

Namir came up beside me and stood close, not touching. “It’s a wonder he’s alive,” he whispered. “A bullet went completely through his chest and out the back.”

“The head wound?” I said, feeling horribly detached. The man I love is dying?

“Might be a skull fracture.” I couldn’t ask about the hand.

“Shall I try to wake him up?” Elza said.

“Let him rest,” I said. “If he’s going to die, let him go.” Words I didn’t want to say but couldn’t take back.

“We have to get out of the open,” Namir said. “Roz found a place a couple of hundred meters down the road.”

I looked around. Not a good place to spend the night, the road in a tight loop. People could sneak up from both sides and overhead.

The sun was setting in a brilliant swirl of scarlet and orange and purple. “Could I be with him for just a minute? Alone with him.”

The three of them moved quietly away. I heard someone gathering hardware.

The skin of his face was cold and wet, but his forehead was warm. I touched his eyelids but got no reaction. They stayed closed.

He made a noise in his throat, like an “R.” My name? I said his name, and he took a breath and made the sound again. He opened one eye and tipped his head slightly toward me. “Arm,” he whispered. “Be?”

That was a lot better than nothing. “You’ll be all right,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “We have to move you. Get out of the open.”

He nodded slightly and closed his eyes.

Namir and Dustin helped me carry him, using the plastic sheet as a floppy stretcher. We had to rest twice, but managed to haul him up the road and over a concrete berm, to where Elza was standing guard. Roz was asleep in the weedy grass, and didn’t wake up when we settled Paul next to her.

“Check your leg,” Dustin said. I took off my trousers, and he and Elza studied my crotch more carefully than anyone had done in a while.

“Not my best work,” Elza said, carefully tracing the line of the stitches. She licked her thumb and rubbed dried blood away. It was still numb. “Might have to be redone by a real doctor someday.” If someday ever comes.

The stim still had me tingling, though from the heaviness in my arms and legs I knew I was headed for a crash landing when it wore off. So Elza let me take over for the first guard watch, while I was still wide-eyed.

As soon as it was fully dark, I could hear scavengers of some kind down by the pile of bodies. I hoped all the fresh meat lying around would keep them from digging up the grave.

But did it really make any difference? Wolves above the ground or worms below. I tried to get that out of my mind.

That poor little girl, who came to us for protection. Welcome to the Carmen Dula good-luck streak. What had Card said? Maybe it wasn’t Mars . . . maybe you’re to blame for the whole fucking shooting match. Though it was starting to feel more like a shooting gallery than a match, the targets falling two by two.

My raw right hand still felt the pumping recoil of the pistol; the web of my thumb was skinned where the slide had rubbed over it.

I heard claws rattle on the pavement below me, then stop. A dog or a wolf was looking up at me in the darkness. I pushed the safety knob forward, and after that quiet click the claws moved on.

They knew we were here. But they weren’t hungry. Not yet.

Namir relieved me at ten o’clock. Paul was conscious and talking quietly, breathing without trouble. I slept straight through till Roz woke me at six. Like good little soldiers, we cleaned and inspected our weapons. Check the action but don’t carry a round in the chamber. Irrelevant to Namir himself, with his double-barreled shotgun always ready.

(When the bikers attacked, I hadn’t gone for my own assault rifle, strapped across my back. I had the pistol in my hand and just emptied it, and then stood there like a target while I fumbled with the rifle. The bullet that hit me might have saved my life, since it put me flat on the ground before Roz’s grenade went off. All the shrapnel went over my head.)

We dined on crunchy dried rations. There was a temporary toilet-paper crisis, solved by Ronald Reagan.

“Another perfect day in paradise,” Paul groaned when he woke, blinking up at the unbroken blue sky. “Have we decided who’s going, who’s staying?”

“Only Roz and I are comfortable with horses,” Namir said. Someone had to fetch a horse and cart from Funny Farm, to carry Paul.

“I guess you ought to go,” Paul said. “Dustin and the girls can protect me.”

“Girls,” I said. “We’ll bake him some fucking cookies.”

“Leave this with you,” Namir said, setting the riot gun down next to him. He rattled the box of shells. “Don’t spend them all in one place.”

Elza had the light machine gun and two short belts of ammunition. She held up a belt, and he shook his head, no. “Just a pistol. I’m not getting into any gun battles.” He hoped.

He looked at the sun. “Eight hours there, maybe three back, depending on the horse situation.”

“And whether you get lost,” Roz said. Without a native guide.

“Straightforward enough. I’ll stay close to the road.”

“Stop if it gets dark,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Be back before that,” he said without conviction. He pulled his rucksack straps tight and squeezed my arm. “Take care.”

He turned into the woods and disappeared.

We decided to keep the two-hour guard interval, with one of us standing watch at the top of the berm, looking down the road toward the bodies, and another hiding up the road in the other direction.

I did that one first, lying behind some thick brush that gave me a clear line of sight down to the road. Saw two squirrels and heard others arguing overhead. No birds. I passed the time making letters and even whole words out of the random lines presented by the clutter of stems and branches in front of me. THIT THIT, one area lisped, and I could but agree.

Roz eventually came to relieve me, her face looking a little better. She’d taken off the emergency fleshtape and cleaned the line of stitches and then re-applied new fleshtape more evenly. Still a bad rip from eye to chin, and she had to drink through a straw. She offered her thermos to me, a harsh mixture of tepid instant coffee and rum. Not my usual before-lunch pick-me-up, but memorable.

Dustin was stretched out on top of the berm, looking down over the machine-gun sights at the pile of bodies, which was not as orderly as it had been. When I got up to where he was, I could smell them, a slight whiff of rot.

“Wait till they’ve been in the sun all day,” he said. He handed me the hourglass contraption and adjusted the figure-eight sling, grimacing.

“Any of those wolves?”

“Dogs, I think, but no. Not since it got light.” He put his hand lightly on top of the gun. “I guess Namir told you, it’s a hair trigger. Just tap it and get off, that’ll be two or three shots.”

I looked at the two belts beside it. “And we only have, what, fifty?”

“Actually forty-eight. You could burn it all up in a few seconds.”

“I’ll be careful.” Namir had emphasized that it was mainly a psychological weapon, to make us seem more powerful than we were. “It’s cocked?”

“Ready to go. Don’t touch it till you can see the whites of their eyes.” I think that was some kind of a joke. But how close would that be? Besides, it’s California; the natives all wear sunglasses.

Maybe I would fire when they were close enough to hit.

I wondered whether I had killed anyone yesterday, blasting away at random. If it was important, I could go down and look at all the bodies. See if anyone had been felled by a single tiny shot.

That was a topic that had come up now and then on the starship. Namir was obviously bothered by it, having killed a carload of people as a young soldier, and more than a dozen more later in life. (He had never told me this, but had admitted it to Elza one drunken night. It was not official spy business for Mossad, but personal revenge just after Gehenna. In one day, he tracked down and killed eleven enemies with bare hands or a knife, and six more later.)

None of the rest of us had had anything like that experience, though Elza and Dustin were supposedly skilled in the art and craft of murder, and Paul had gone through basic training, and learned about bayonets and hand-to-hand fighting and all. Namir said a single killing changed you forever, separated you from the rest of the human race with a silent barrier. One time he wondered whether it was like motherhood—an experience that was common and yet so profound that having it or not divided the race into two species.

Our philosopher Dustin pointed out that both actions gave humans powers that normally are reserved for gods: giving life and taking it.

So was I a god yet? Or did it only count if you were sure you had done it, and what if you thought you had done it but hadn’t? At least that didn’t happen in childbirth. Did I leave a baby around here somewhere? Well, my own status as a mother was problematic.

The carrion birds who were feeding on the pile took off with a confused clash of heavy wings. I didn’t see anything. My finger moved closer to the hair trigger as I willed myself not to touch it, not yet.

Then I was touching. Just enough to feel the cold of it. I shifted slightly, so the barrel was lined up with the darkness under the underpass.

The shadow moved and a shape inched into the sun. Not a wolf, too big.

A bear, its brown fur coppery in the sun. It looked left and right, then waddled directly toward the pile of bodies. Then it—she—looked back toward the shadow, and two cubs came out in a line.

Feeding time at the zoo. She went to a body that was lying separate from the others, and flipped it over with one pat. It didn’t have much of a face, and its belly was open, guts trailing. She tore at the clothes and got the pants halfway down and ripped away at the meat. She ate a little, but mainly seemed to be flensing it for the cubs, pulling out strips of gray-and-red flesh. There wasn’t as much blood as you would expect.

The cubs rolled around, playing with their lunch, and would have been cute in another context. The mother left them, stepped up to the top of the pile of bodies, and looked around.

She looked straight at me.

I couldn’t breathe. Should I just shoot? How fast can a bear charge?

She growled, loud and scary, and shook her huge head, and turned to look at the cubs.

I heard someone creeping up behind me. If it was another bear, it was a little one.

“What the fuck?” Dustin whispered, philosophically. “Are there bears here?”

“Three, anyhow. You left Paul?”

“He’s awake. Has the riot gun.” He set his own rifle down silently, parallel to mine, and crouched low. “I don’t suppose they’re going anywhere soon.”

“Not unless something bigger comes along.”

His gun was a fancy sporting model with a big telescopic sight. He peered through it and clicked something twice, not electronic.

“Don’t shoot.”

“Won’t unless we have to. Try a head shot if we do.”

“Probably bounce off.” As if to demonstrate something, she closed her jaws around a body’s head, evidently trying to crack the skull. But he was wearing a hard plastic bike helmet, and she tossed him away. The next one cracked like a walnut.

“I guess we’re safe as long as she has all that food,” Dustin said, still peering through the sight.

I wasn’t so sure. “They’re predators, not scavengers. If she knew we were up here, she might attack.”

“Would she?”

“How the hell should I know? We didn’t have bears on Mars.”

“Didn’t used to have them here. Except on the flag.”

“What?” Stars and stripes and a bear?

“California state flag. I guess they were here in the old days.”

I had a chill. “Namir will be coming back this way, with the horse. He’ll be using the road.”

“That’s some time from now. Maybe they’ll eat their fill and move on.”

“Why should they?” How fastidious could they be? Momma, this one tastes bad. Shut up and clean your plate.

I shifted my weight and was rewarded with a sharp stab of pain in my thigh.

“What?”

“Painkiller’s wearing off. My leg.”

“Kit’s down by Paul. I’ll keep an eye on this.”

“Thanks.” I tried to inch away silently, but the underbrush made little scraping noises. When I was far enough down the berm, I stood up slowly. Dustin looked back and nodded.

My head spun and I lurched, limping, down to the first-aid kit. Paul had rolled onto one elbow, holding the shotgun up at an angle. He waved a salute. “What’s the commotion?”

“Bears down on the road. You’re feeling better?”

“Weak. Couldn’t outrun a bear.”

“Me, neither.” I found the box of Anodyne ampoules and read the instructions. Not more than two in one twenty-four-hour period. Unless you’re in a plane wreck and get shot by bicycle gangers. Then you can take all you want.

I sat down and wriggled out of my pants and popped the ampoule near the wound.

“Could I have some?” Paul said, and for a mad moment I thought he was talking about what I had just exposed.

“When did you last have one?”

He touched the head bandage gingerly. “Guess it’s too soon. How’s your leg?”

“Good thing I have two.” I pulled my pants back up and sat next to him, stroking his arm. “Should you be sitting up?”

“Yeah. Maybe not.” He flopped back down. I went over to the pack pile and picked up the extra assault rifle. It already had a round chambered, which would probably get me flogged in Namir’s army. Go ahead, I can take it. I get shot in the crotch and come back for more. Chew up the bullets with my—

“Hello, again.” Spy had materialized between me and Paul. This time he looked like he’d been dipped in dark green plastic, less conspicuous.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “Are you always going to disappear when we need you most?”

“I have no control over that. As I told you.”

“You know what happened while you were gone?”

“Yes. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help. I could have drawn their fire, at least, and returned it, like last time.”

“Do you know anything about bears?”

“Of course I do. You don’t have to worry about the ones on the road.”

“The big one looks pretty formidable.”

“Don’t worry about her.”

There was a sudden blast of gunfire, and I dove to the ground. Then another. It was coming from the berm where I’d just left Dustin.

Spy hadn’t moved. “Poor bear.”

I staggered back to my feet and limped up the berm, pulse hammering. Stringent powder smell.

Dustin was stretched out prone, rigid, sighting through the rifle-scope. A curl of blue smoke blew away from the muzzle.

The adult bear was lying inert on the slope coming up from the pavement. It had covered about half the distance before it fell.

The two cubs were sitting on the road, looking up at us.

“Don’t go down yet,” Dustin said without looking up.

“What happened?”

“She heard us or smelled us or something. Charged straight up the hill.”

“Spy knew it was going to happen.”

“I wasn’t surprised, myself.” He looked back at me. “What do you mean, ‘Spy’?”

He walked up next to me. “Hello, Dustin.”

“You just come and go as you please, don’t you?”

“No. As I was telling Carmen, I don’t have any control over it. I’m here, and then I’m nowhere for an instant, and then I’m back here, with something like a memory of what happened while I was away.”

“Not a ‘memory,’ ” I said. “Just ‘something like’ one.”

“Don’t I always speak carefully, Carmen? I can’t say the word exactly in English, or any other human language, but ‘memory’ is close.”

Dustin stood up with the rifle. “Better go check the bear.”

“Don’t worry. It’s dead.”

“You knew that before it happened,” I said.

“Not really. I suppose you might say ‘premonition.’ But really it’s no more supernatural than statistics. As we came closer in space-time to the bear’s death, it became more and more clear to me that the bear was going to die.”

I felt suddenly cold. “You knew back then. You disappeared at the overpass. Just before the gangers killed the little girl.”

“I did not know. Not exactly. Just before I went away, I had a feeling of certainty that death was on its way. Who or when, I didn’t know. Then I was gone.”

“Where?” Dustin said.

“I don’t know; everything goes dark for a while. I assume it’s like sleeping is for humans. But I’ve never slept.”

“You had this feeling,” I said, “but you didn’t say anything to us about it.”

“He did, though,” Dustin said. “You told us to watch out or something.”

“I said ‘trouble.’ Then everything went black. That’s when I disappeared, to you.”

“Like the Others wanted to get you out of harm’s way,” I said.

“That’s not it.” He gave me a peculiar searching look. “They don’t care any more about me than they do about you. Maybe less; if they lose me, they can make a new one.”

“Did you have a premonition back then?” Dustin said. “Like, ‘watch out; there’s a bunch of gangers on bikes headed this way’?”

“Not that specific. I did know . . . what I was about to say . . . was that danger was coming; death was coming. I knew it was an outside agency.”

“But the Others snatched you away before you could warn us,” I said.

“He did start to.”

“I wonder,” Spy said. “Another few seconds, and I might have realized we had to get off the road. We might have escaped their notice.”

He raised both hands in a human gesture, frustration or helplessness. “There are things I can’t know about the Others. It’s like . . . as if you made a human avatar, a robot, and gave it no sense of smell or taste . . . and then wired it so it couldn’t use the future tense, the subjunctive mood. That’s how handicapped I am, from their point of view. As if I knew that smell and taste existed, but had no experience of them and no vocabulary to describe them.”

“And the future-tense thing?” Dustin said.

“It’s not that they know the future, one hundred percent. But nothing ever surprises them, no matter how unlikely.”

“And you’re sort of like that,” I said.

He shrugged. “More so than you.”

“So what about tomorrow?” Dustin said. “We’ll make it to the farm?”

He shook his head and looked down the slope. The cubs were poking at their mother, trying to rouse her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know there would be bears.”

15

Namir didn’t come back before nightfall. We stayed clustered around Paul, at least one of us awake and on guard, on ninety-minute shifts. I hoped the others slept better than I did.

The cubs had left their mother’s body before dark. Where did they go? Would they lead other bears back?

The woods were full of small noises. I guess they always are if you’re listening.

Spy disappeared sometime around three or four, while I was sleeping. Elza said nothing special happened; she just noticed he was gone.

We all got cold. When the sky started to lighten, we built a small fire, twigs, to thaw out our hands and feet. We warmed some water in a metal cup and shared bad instant coffee.

An hour or so after dawn, Namir showed up, riding a horse and leading a mule with a cart. He brought a bag of hard-cooked eggs and a bottle of wine. We attacked the eggs but left the wine for later.

Namir took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it carefully. It had been handled quite a bit. “That fellow with the telescope, Wham-O. He saw something on Mars, and made a drawing.”

It was a smudged pencil sketch, clear enough.

“That’s Syrtis Major,” I said, pointing to a shape like a child’s drawing of Africa on an Earth globe. “But what’s that?

Off the southern tip of the mass was a circle surrounding a cross. Paul’s eyes were open, and I showed it to him. “What do you think?”

He squinted at it. “Earth.”

“No,” I said. “It’s Mars.”

“The circle with the cross. That means Earth.”

“Of course,” Namir said. “The astronomer’s symbol. Could they have drawn that in the desert sand?”

“Walking in a big circle?” Elza said.

“Not walking,” Paul said. “Take heavy equipment. Hundreds of miles.”

“Or the Others might have done it,” Namir said. “Not a very big project, compared to blowing up the Moon.”

“But why would they?” I said, which produced a couple of shrugs.

“I think we did it,” Paul said, “we Martians. A signal to Earth, saying we’re still alive.”

“Let’s assume that’s it,” Namir said, smiling. “If the Others wanted to impress us, they’d do something less subtle.”

The Farmers had put an old mattress in the cart, and a length of plastic webbing to strap Paul in securely.

He wasn’t complaining about pain, but he looked bad. Elza offered him an ampoule, and when he didn’t say no, gave it to him in the shoulder. He was asleep by the time we had him secured.

Namir checked the height of the sun; two and a half fists. “We’ll make it before dark, no problem. Early afternoon.”

I hoped I wouldn’t be the problem. My leg was supporting my weight all right, and with the cart and mule I didn’t have to carry anything but the rifle.

The mule seemed to like me well enough, so I led it, or at least accompanied it, while Namir trotted ahead a couple of hundred yards at a time. Elza followed a ways behind me, and Dustin was the rear guard, hiding in wait a few minutes before following.

We went along the paved road for about two hours, uphill and then down. In a valley—actually a “saddle,” I suppose—we turned off at a place marked by a faded orange tape stapled around a tree. It was not so much a trail as a path that had once been mowed. “Bush-hogged” is the verb I remembered from my Florida childhood. I always had the image of a hairy wild pig with tusks, but I suppose a bush-hog was a kind of mowing machine.

My mulish colleague didn’t care for the new trail; the cart didn’t roll smoothly and tugged and jerked on its harness. After a minute it stopped cold, and whacking its flank just gave me a sore hand.

Namir came back and dismounted. “It didn’t like this part coming up.” With his belt knife he cut a supple branch from a sapling, and shook it rattling in the mule’s face, muttering at it in Hebrew. It grunted and started moving.

He handed the switch to me. “It remembered. How sweet.” He remounted the horse in one smooth motion. Riding boots and a holstered pistol. All he needed was a big hat, and maybe a tobacco cigarette.

He was obviously enjoying it. They’d had a couple of horses on his kibbutz, as well as camels. He said as a boy he liked the camels more; they were more like pets, with personality. But he hadn’t ridden one in about a hundred years. He’d ridden horses in the States, back when he led the simple life of an Israeli diplomat and spy.

What different paths we had followed, to wind up so closely entwined. Before he went into space he’d had a full career in that cosmopolitan universe, now as dead as Babylon. New York, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv—all dark and cold now, some in ruins. But he’d lived that life.

What goes through his head? In what languages?

He was a UN diplomat when I was a teenager stepping aboard the Space Elevator for what I thought would be a five-year adventure. While he was going around the world learning and doing, I was stuck in a small town in a cave on Mars. Not even a small town. The same 105 people waging eternal war against dust and boredom.

It never occurred to me that one day I would long for boredom. That I would give anything to be back in that cave with those plain, brave people.

Namir is bullet-brave. But he would have done well in Mars, too. The starship we shared didn’t have one hundredth the floor space we enjoyed in Mars. But with one exception, we stayed away from each other’s throats. I wouldn’t have called it courage then.

The mule’s name was Jerry. I whispered endearments and scratched his rump with the stick when we had to pick up the pace. Namir’s horse waltzed nervously through the underbrush, but Jerry just plodded along, perhaps conserving strength, and kept up well enough.

We stopped before mid-day to rest and eat. Namir emptied all the cartridges out of one magazine, which had fallen into a stream. He cleaned and polished each round before thumbing it back into place.

Thirty rounds. So much of our world was numbers. Five magazines with thirty rounds each. A double-barreled shotgun with nine. I had twenty-seven left for my pistol and two twenty-round clips for the rifle. Two flare pistols. There were seven ampoules left in the first-aid kit, for three people in pain.

My leg was stiffening up, but I could walk. I hoped they had more ampoules back at Funny Farm, but didn’t want to ask. As an experiment, I took a stick of pain gum after we ate. It would probably work fine if I’d been shot in the mouth. It made my tongue disappear, but didn’t do much for the groin.

After about an hour, we got to the stream that fed the pool behind Funny Farm, but we didn’t follow it. It was a couple of miles shorter to cut through the woods, and it was a good thing we went that way. If we’d followed the stream, we might have been too late.

We were a little more than a mile from home when we heard the first crackle of gunfire. It echoed, but there was no mistaking which direction it was coming from.

Namir turned in the saddle and shouted at me: “Stay here with Paul! Get off the trail!” Good idea.

He snapped the shotgun closed. “Wait until the shooting stops,” he said. “If we don’t, if I don’t come back, Elza, you come check.”

“Maybe you should wait,” Dustin said.

“Yeah, maybe I should.” He nudged the horse hard with his heels, and it trotted forward.

“Good luck?” I said. Are soldiers supposed to wish each other luck? The horse was going pretty fast when they disappeared around the bend.

“We should get hidden,” Dustin said. He stroked the mule’s nose. “You’ll be quiet, won’t you?” It tilted its head toward him and wisely didn’t say anything. Neither did I.

The shooting continued as we worked the cart and mule through the brush. It was sporadic, not the steady firefight roar I remembered from Armstrong and Camp David. Bullets getting rare on both sides.

Jerry had always been whickering and grunting at me, but it was quiet as we struggled up a small hill. Dustin’s innate leadership abilities, or perhaps even a mule knows that when people are shooting guns, you don’t want to draw attention. When we got to the top of the rise, he put his big head on my shoulder and breathed hard, but otherwise stayed quiet.

“I’ll go up on the other side,” Dustin said. “Hold fire if I start shooting; I’ll try to draw them away.” He looked at me. “If you have to leave Paul, do it.”

“No,” I said.

“They won’t hurt him. They need him.”

“No. We don’t know who ‘they’ are.”

“If it was you in the cart,” Elza said, “we’d stay with you. So get the fuck over there and protect us.”

He started to say something but turned and went down the slope.

“So are two husbands twice as much trouble,” I whispered to her, “or four times?”

“Eight. These two.” She looked down at Paul. “Hope he’ll be all right.”

“Namir, too.”

She nodded. “He always comes out on top. ‘Always’ meaning so far.” Surprisingly, she knuckled away a tear. “We’re lucky to have them at all.”

“Yeah. What a week.”

She sat down heavily and looked at her weapon, propping it up on the cast. “Piece of shit,” she said neutrally, and pulled the slide back slowly twice, then fast three times. Five cartridges ejected.

The mule stirred restlessly at the sound.

“Maybe you should have swapped,” I said. Her gun had jammed during the melee with the cyclists, but I only found out later; she’d cleared it by whacking it with the cast, and emptied the rest of the clip at them. Then picked up a pistol and made sure the enemy were all dead. Meanwhile, I was distracted by trying not to bleed out.

“Yeah, maybe.” She picked up the loose rounds and wiped them off with her shirt tail and snicked them back into the magazine. “Devil you know. I was tempted by the fancy ones those bicycle assholes had. But I know this one, and we have ammo—”

In the distance, a sustained hammering of automatic fire. Two thumps that must have been a shotgun. Then rifles and pistols crackling.

“Sounds like he got there,” she said.

“Should we . . .”

“Hold our position, yeah.” Jerry made a chuckling noise, and I stroked his ears.

It was like overhearing an argument between machines, angry plosives with a whine now and then. A bullet ricocheting from metal? No, I’d heard it in the woods before.

We should’ve taken the bulletproof vest from the biker leader. It was all covered with blood and brains, though. So it hadn’t done him much good. But I had to think what an easy target Namir would present, riding slowly on horseback.

At least smart bullets wouldn’t work. Though they seemed to have plenty of dumb ones.

It was quiet for a minute, two minutes, three. “Maybe that’s it,” Elza said.

Whatever “it” was. I looked across the shallow draw and couldn’t see Dustin, which I supposed was good. “So we stay here?”

“Yeah. Stay ready.” I checked Paul, and there was no change; he’d slept through the excitement. It hadn’t been that loud.

I had to press down pretty hard to feel the pulse in his throat, but it was there. It worried me that he didn’t respond to the pressure. He was too pale and still. Did we give him too much painkiller? I resisted the impulse to shake him.

Another minute. “Shit,” she said quietly. “Something happen.”

“Maybe he’s safe inside now,” I said.

“That or dead. Or maybe he fell back under fire.”

My brain wasn’t working. “So we should wait to see if he comes back?”

“Maybe. Shit. I have to go.”

For an odd second I thought she was talking about a bowel movement. “Tell Dustin.”

She didn’t have to. He came out of the brush below us. “Let’s get up there. Set up a cross-fire.” He looked at me with bright intensity. “You stay here with Paul. We’ll be back before dark.”

“Stay off the road,” Elza added helpfully. She shouldered her bag, and they hustled off.

“Good-bye,” I said to their backs, and felt a sudden twist of new fear.

They had abandoned me. A rifle and a pistol and a mule versus how many armed lunatics?

Jerry shifted his weight and snuffled. I held the weapon away from him and put my arm around his neck. “You and me, mule,” I whispered. The supernumeraries. The expendables?

The aliens, Paul and me. Martian citizens, if born on Earth. Citizens of the galaxy, the title of a movie I saw as a child in Florida, back in the twenty-first century.

When we were chatting with Lanny in the bookstore, he mentioned there had been a strong movement, before the power went out, to reform the calendar. Why mark years from the disputed date of a minor prophet’s birth? That “minor” was Lanny’s own prejudice showing, of course. One out of three Americans had been practicing Christians when the lights went out.

That was another one of his jokes—if they had practiced a little harder, maybe they would’ve gotten it right. And all of this wouldn’t have happened.

But his point was interesting. Some people wanted to begin the calendar on the day, the moment, humans first stepped onto another world—the moon, back in 1969. We knew when that had happened, down to the nanosecond.

Paul had liked the idea but said it didn’t matter which nanosecond you started your calendar on, so long as everybody agreed on which nanosecond it was. He said it would make astronomical calculations easier if you started the calendar at the beginning of a Julian day, which I guess was the number of days since Julius Caesar was born. I remember resisting the impulse to argue that, after all, Caesar was born by Caesarian section, so at what nanosecond was he actually born? When they cut into his poor mother, or when his head came out of the wound, or his feet, or with his first breath, or when they cut the cord? This is science, after all.

My own children had been “born” the instant the mother machine shocked breath into them; their legal birth date was 23 Lowell 28, which translated into sometime in December, 2084, Earth style.

Maybe they should reform Earth’s calendar so year zero and day zero were the same as ours, the day humans first stepped onto Mars. Of course, the calendars and clocks would spin crazily out of synchrony after the first moment.

Computers don’t care, anyhow. It’s only humans who get confused.

Jerry made a protracted intestinal comment, to remind me that humans and computers weren’t everything.

So how did Elza and Dustin plan to keep from being shot by the good guys? Would the fact they were shooting at the bad guys protect them?

I tried to visualize the situation. They’d have to approach on this side of the river, east; it was too deep and fast to cross. But they wouldn’t just walk up this road alongside the river. Too exposed, even here.

They’d probably loop around farther east, and circle back behind the stockade. The orchard wouldn’t afford much cover, which probably meant the enemy wouldn’t be there.

Then what? Holler for someone to cover them while they rushed for the back door? If Namir was there, he could identify their voices. “Don’t shoot; they’re fellow spies from nonexistent governments.”

My degree in American Studies was woefully deficient in course work on staying alive at the end of the world. Find good boots. Count your ammo. Try to keep the mule from farting too loud.

I jumped at gunfire, but recognized it: the “burst of three” setting on the standard-issue army rifles that we were carrying. Two bursts on top of each other. Then one more. Then two more.

Didn’t mean it was them, of course. But it wasn’t the manic rattle we’d heard before. Had they had time to circle around? Depends on how thick the woods were; how cautious they were.

Jerry backed away from the noise. I patted him and told him it was all right. Lying to a mule, how pathetic.

Paul groaned, and I went around to check on him. No change.

I heard a noise, and crouched down behind the wagon. There was something or someone moving in the brush on the other side of the road, back where Dustin had been.

Thumbed the rifle selector straight up to B3, burst, and peered over it to the other side. It sounded like someone walking, not being careful. But then why not walk on the road?

The wagon was too well hidden; I couldn’t have seen anyone unless he was wearing bright clothes. Quietly I stepped around past Jerry, pressing his muzzle, and whispering, “Quiet.” He nodded, which was strange. I went down into a shallow ditch that would be a streamlet when it rained. I touched the extra magazines in my pockets, talismans, and crept down toward the road the way I’d been taught, the butt of the rifle stock firm under my arm, finger inside the trigger guard but not on the trigger.

The noise to my right grew louder. About halfway to the road I stopped and waited, hunkered behind a thick brown tangle of dead brush.

The noise stopped, too.

There was the slightest rustle, that could have been wind—but there was no wind. I swung the rifle in that direction and a wolf’s head appeared, or a dog like a German shepherd, teeth bared and ears flattened down. I fired and the burst went low, scattering dirt a couple of feet below the face, which disappeared.

Probably running away, though I couldn’t hear anything but cotton stillness and metallic ringing. Ear protectors dangled in a small plastic bag hanging from the rear sight, so you wouldn’t forget to use them.

Assuming he was scared away now, but everyone else within a mile knew where I was, I wasted no time getting back to the cart.

The water and supplies and extra weapons were as I’d left them, strapped to the sides. Jerry was restless but quiet. I looked in the wagon at Paul.

His eyes were open.

“Paul?” No reaction.

I touched his skin and it was cool and dry. He didn’t blink when I touched his eyes.

I closed them.

16

We had talked a couple of times about whether it was better to lose a loved one suddenly, without warning and with no emotional preparation, or go through the agony of watching them slip away slowly.

For yourself you want it to be sudden and unexpected. But perhaps for the ones you love, you want time to say good-bye.

I still had no clear answer. If the biker gang had killed Paul there by the underpass, I wouldn’t have had the hours of talking, or trying to talk, while he slipped away. And he would have been spared the agony of a lingering death. Physical and emotional.

I had stopped crying, and started digging, by the time they came back. Cursing the blunt entrenching tool and the coarse network of roots that resisted it. I only had a small hole when Dustin and Elza came up the slope, along with two men from Funny Farm, Wham-O and one who introduced himself as Judd when he took the entrenching tool from me with quiet insistence.

“I’m sorry,” Elza said. “How many years?”

“Actual? I was eighteen when we met and a few weeks older when we fell in love, or I did. Twenty-one real years?”

“Not enough.”

“No.” How many would be enough? We had moved back to the cart, and I stared down at him, at his body. I wanted to touch him, and I didn’t want to.

Judd had followed me up, holding the small shovel like a toy in his large hand.

“Ma’am, I’ll do whatever you say, but wouldn’t it be best if we buried him in the graveyard up at the farm? You’re part of the family now.”

“Of course,” I said, and did a bad imitation of smiling. “I wasn’t, I’m not thinking straight.”

The three men had no trouble convincing Jerry to back and fill and come back down to the path with them. As we made our way along, they told me what had happened.

The gunfire we’d heard had evidently been in the nature of a probe: two or three people with automatic weapons staged an attack on the stockade’s front entrance. They killed the man who was standing guard there.

The “farmers” responded with fire from two of the guardhouses on the corners of the stockade, but worried they might have used up too much ammunition in a show of force.

When Dustin and Namir came to their aid, giving flanking fire from the east, the attackers withdrew fast, leaving a blood trail but no bodies.

Other than that first casualty, none of the good guys was injured, but it was a prudent assumption that they hadn’t seen the end of it. And they wanted us inside the stockade as soon as possible.

I thanked them for coming to our rescue so quickly. Dustin pointed out that it wasn’t exactly charity. Out there, I could be captured and held hostage. Even if they weren’t smart enough to do that, weapons and ammunition and a vehicle that ran on grass were beyond price.

A phrase with no meaning. When would things have prices again?

It wasn’t just Dustin and Namir and Judd in the rescue party. They said that Namir had wanted to come up with the horse, but the farmers already had a squad organized and on alert, which was how they were able to come back so fast. I never saw more than two of them at a time, but there were eleven others along with Judd, moving through the woods alongside of us, ahead and behind.

We moved along at a pretty good rate, and after about twenty minutes turned up into the road that cuts through the wheat field to the stockade. Judd shouted an order and then stayed back in the woods with his scattered squad.

Jerry stopped for a moment when he saw the building, and then all but trotted toward it. The double door swung open, and Namir came out on horseback to meet us.

He looked in the cart and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Not unexpected,” I had to say, but my voice cracked.

He dismounted and walked alongside me. “You were with him,” he said.

“Yes and no. I went off to check on a noise—a dog or a wolf. When I came back he was, he was gone.”

“Hard on you.”

Yes and no, I thought. That chest wound would not have healed without surgery. Even if he had been sheltered and comfortable, he wouldn’t have lasted very long. He probably knew that as well as I did. When we could talk, we talked of other things.

Gunfire to our right, two single shots. The horse and mule both realized it was time for speed, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with them on the way to the door. It slammed shut behind me, but they eased it back open a few inches, a guard watching through the crack.

Not a job anyone would want, sniper bait.

The place didn’t seem much changed from before except that some people carried weapons. And there were more of them. Judd confirmed that they had taken in a few neighboring families, who brought food and munitions with them.

Did they turn away people who came empty-handed? I could ask later. There were other horses and mules inside the compound, in a corral improvised from scraps of old lumber. A couple of men held it open for the horse and unhitched Jerry. They both went straight for the pile of hay, and I had a sudden vision of how hard that was to come by now. Harvesting under armed guard, quickly. The same with the orchards and other crops, and nobody would be lazily fishing out of the stream. There were chickens underfoot everywhere, which I supposed had been cute for an hour.

When would it be safe to go back to normal living conditions? Would it ever be?

Namir and Dustin and Elza helped me carry our gear to the small cabin we were sharing with two other couples. Then we went to the rear of the place, to the cemetery garden just beyond the back door.

Four living people were keeping guard in foxholes while a burial party of four others worked fast with pick and shovel. A body lay beside them under a dirty sheet stained with new blood. The man who’d been shot at the beginning of the attack I’d heard from back in the woods.

They passed us the pick, and we started breaking ground for Paul’s grave. I did a short turn, the pick much more efficient than our entrenching tool, but almost too heavy for me to swing. After a long and heavy day.

When they finished burying the other man, we stopped digging. Roz came out with two women and two children, and they each said some words, the children crying though the women had finished.

I thought I was done with crying, too, but it started again when the four of us carried Paul’s body from the cart, using a blanket as a stretcher. We lowered him into the waist-deep hole and took the blanket out; no winding sheets when cloth was getting rare. I used Namir’s knife to cut a square of cloth off my shirt, to cover Paul’s face before the dirt fell.

I cried then, and so did Dustin and Elza. Perhaps Namir would have if he could. The only humans on this planet who had been to the stars. Come back to Earth to die.

He would not have wanted a prayer any more than I would. But I tried to remember something he had said to me about how marvelously complex man was in spite of his cosmic insignificance. A shifting assemblage of atoms, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, come together to “mimic and define” purpose in its beautiful stagger from cradle to grave.

He had been a beautiful man, full of humor and courage and love. I said that, too, after Dustin and Elza gave their farewells, and Namir said something in Hebrew. Then we each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and Elza led me away while Namir and Dustin did the heavy work.

17

Roz had called a meeting of all the adults, newcomers and old residents, outside the dining hall in last light. There were over a hundred, mostly sitting on the ground or leaning against buildings. She began without preamble.

“We’ve all heard the same rumors. Some are exaggerated. There isn’t a huge army gathering out there in the woods. But there is a large and growing number of people, not as many as we have here. They have weapons and ammunition and a dwindling amount of food.

“Some people who joined us today confirmed that they have leadership, a coalition of two biker gangs from San Francisco.”

The “biker gangs” were social clubs with two hundred years of history. They began as warring clans who roamed the old highway system on compact armed motorcycles, gasoline-powered until that became an expensive anachronism. They evolved into respected service organizations whose public appearance reflected their land-pirate origins. Mostly men, mostly fat and bearded, wearing leather clothing and tattoos. The leader would have an expensive loud antique gasoline motorcycle; the others, quiet electric scooters. They organized charity drives and always showed up in formation for parades and big games.

A few of the gangs had gone back to their violent origins years before the power went off. Then they junked their useless vehicles and took bicycles.

They knew which towns were not well defended, and raided their stores. The concentration of guns and ammunition at Funny Farm had protected them from individual gangs—but that concentration was also irreplaceable wealth in what had become a desperate firearm culture. So both large gangs had gotten together to plan a joint raid.

People who had come into the stockade for protection had wildly varying estimates of the size of the biker coalition, from a hundred to a thousand.

A hundred would be a manageable annoyance. A thousand would conquer the farm and take everything.

Namir knew how to conduct interrogations; that was his job description in a dark period of his life. Funny Farm didn’t have any of the advanced tools of the trade, but as Roz saw, he had full control of the basic ones: voice, manner, posture. A small room with one door and no windows.

She asked him to talk to each of the informers individually, alone. He didn’t raise a hand against them, or even his voice, but he got as much of the truth as they could give.

“The two gangs in charge,” Roz continued, “the Fangs and the Crips, have worked together before. They attacked compounds like ours—Bakersfield and Torrance—and left behind nothing but smoking ruins and corpses.

“The Fangs take female prisoners, for sex, but they don’t live long. When it comes to fighting, I want all of us women to remember that. Be fierce. There are”—she cleared her throat—“there are better ways to die. There are worse things than dying.

“We’re going to pull everyone inside the walls except for three scouts. They might be able to give us early warning; they might even infiltrate the enemy force and do some damage from inside. They don’t have specific orders.

“The rest of us stay inside the walls and hope they hold. The Crips have some military explosives, though they may have used them up cracking into Bakersfield. They had real walls there; it used to be a prison.

“They’ll probably attack sooner rather than later. They must be close to maximum force now, so have no reason to put it off.”

“They’ll wait until dark,” said a gray-bearded man leaning against the wall behind her. “While it’s light, they’re sittin’ ducks.”

She nodded. “Before dark we want to have all the weapons and ammunition sorted out. I don’t think they’ll likely attack from the front or rear, at least not at first, because there’s not much to hide behind.

“By Wham-O’s count, we have a basic armament of seventeen assault rifles, using the same military ammo, with only about sixty cartridges apiece, so we have to be prudent there. Likewise, Carmen brought a belt-fed machine gun, but with how many rounds?”

“Only ninety-seven,” I said. “Maybe thirty seconds’ worth.”

“We have three shotguns in different sizes, each with maybe a dozen shells. Namir has suggested that we not use them until the enemy is coming over the walls, or is inside.”

“We may lose a wall,” Namir said, “if they use explosives. So ‘inside’ becomes moot. Everybody tie a white cloth above your left biceps.” He had a pillowcase full of strips torn from a sheet. “At least at first, we’ll be able to tell friend from foe that way in the dark.

“I don’t suppose we have a strategy beyond the obvious. Fire from shelter, and don’t let them take shelter. Don’t shoot each other.

“The four of us from the starship will take care of the southeast tower,” he said, pointing. “Everybody else meet with Roz now in the dining hall. She has a chart with nighttime positions.” She nodded and led them away.

I watched them going with a rising sense of hopeless fear, panic. I wanted to run, and there was no place to go.

Elza and Dustin, holding hands, exchanged a wordless communication with Namir, and went off together for a little privacy. “Aren’t you ever afraid?” I said.

He gave me a troubled look and touched my arm, an electric tingle. “Always a little. We’ve gotten through worse things.”

But always with Paul, I thought. “So what should I do with these things?” I had the machine gun, as long as a rifle but heavier, and the plastic ammo box that weighed about ten pounds, as well as an assault rifle and a pistol.

“I’ll help you carry them up the tower. I guess Dustin should shoot the machine gun, unless you want to.”

“Oh, sure. As long as I don’t have to hit anything specific.” Or at all.

The rest of us could crowd in there with him, with rifles and the night glasses. That was what he called the big binoculars, which showed more at night, even without electronics. “Do the three-on, one-off shifts.” He smiled. “Two on, two off for now.”

I followed him across the compound to the tower, where we relieved a girl who did look relieved. She couldn’t have been fourteen, shorter than the old rifle she passed down.

There was a large wicker basket raised and lowered by a pulley, so you didn’t have to negotiate the ladder carrying things. Namir scrambled up as soon as the girl came down, and I passed up all the armaments and ammunition, along with two canteens and some bread. I got halfway up the ladder and realized I’d better go pee first, so did.

The tower was cozy but not too crowded, about six feet square. The outside walls were reinforced with thick logs, virtually bulletproof. A plank shelf, waist high, held all the ammunition, separated by type. Namir made sure I could locate them by touch.

We looked out over the wheat field and the approach road, with woods to our right. The foliage became thick a couple of dozen yards out.

“That’s the way they’ll come,” I said.

“If they hit this site at all. If they attack at all.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“No.” I could just see his face in the fading light, his lips pursing. “You try to get inside the enemy’s head. But there’s a limit to ‘what would I do in this situation?’—when you’d never be in this situation. The countryside is full of soft targets, where they could just walk in and wave some guns around and take what they want. So why attack a fortress?”

“Because it’s there?”

“Some version of that. The challenge.”

“Plunder,” I said.

“What?”

“They are pirates; you called them that. They want plunder, treasure. Funny Farm has the equivalent of gold and pieces of eight. Ammunition and food.”

“Alcohol and women,” he said. “And all this low technology, if they’ve thought that far. Lights and machinery that work without power.”

It had become too dark to see the shelf. I reached out and touched the rifle magazines, the box of pistol cartridges, the machine gun’s ammo box, with the long belt protruding. A short belt, nineteen rounds, was already locked and loaded.

He could tell what I was doing. “How do you feel about reloading the machine gun in the dark?”

“Rather you do it.”

“Okay.” He stepped around me and picked up the weapon and its plastic box. Propped it next to him and peered out into the gathering dark. “If they’re smart, they’re sleeping now. Rest up and hit us a few hours after midnight. Meanwhile, send out decoys now and then to keep us nervous and burn up our ammo.

“They could do that for days,” I said.

“And they might, if they were a well-organized army. I think they’re itching for action and their leaders, if they have leaders, know they’ll be losing people every day. They’ll hit tonight. The only question is how long will they wait?”

As if in answer, one shot on the other side. I faintly heard a male voice, maybe Wham-O, saying, “Don’t!” There was no return fire.

“Flash suppressor,” Namir said, and I checked mine, though I remembered sliding it into place.

“Don’t start without us,” Elza said from the ladder. She crawled up onto the floor, and Dustin handed up two rifles and followed her.

“What do you think?” he said, panting.

Another shot on the other side. “I think ‘lock and load.’” Sound of greased metal, rifles being cocked. I heard Namir move the machine gun around, rattle and sweep of its ammunition belt. “This machine gun, we’ll wait for clear targets. Every fourth round’s a tracer.” We knew that, of course. It would draw attention.

“Dustin, you do bursts of three. The rest of us go single-shot for the time being?” His voice was calm, except for an edge that wasn’t fear. He was looking forward to it, in his way.

He once told me that up to a certain point, every battle you survive makes the next one easier. But everyone had a limit. Once you’ve cracked, you are like a pot that has cracked. Not very useful.

Maybe some of us were different. Maybe we started out cracked.

Another shot, and then another. My mouth and throat went dry, and I concentrated on keeping my nether parts the same.

I heard Elza unscrew a bottle and smelled sweet wine. “Here, Carmen.” It helped my throat a little, but my stomach was a knot.

Just get on with it. Please just do it. I suddenly realized that the people in the woods must feel the same way. You may not want it to happen, but even more, you don’t want to wait any longer.

“Places,” Namir said. “Carmen, come up to my left.” For a panicked moment, I couldn’t remember which was which. “Dustin, Elza, magazines on the shelf at waist height. Five or six?”

They moved into place, and I could hear them counting with their hands. They murmured assent, and the wind brought the smell of powder.

There was a loud deep pound, a shotgun, and someone screamed in pain, “My hand! My hand!”

Then the gunfire started crackling, that dreadful popcorn sound. “Hold fire,” Namir said conversationally. “Let them waste it.”

There was a loud thump, and then three more, as bullets struck our walls. They were thick split logs on the sides that faced out. “Hope they don’t have anything bigger,” Dustin said. Thanks.

“Give me the pistol, Carmen,” Namir said. “Guy right down on the edge.” I should’ve thought to close my eyes. Under our roof it was darker than night. When the pistol went off, it was a bright blue flash, and I was blind except for the strobe image of Namir aiming down.

“Think I got him. Can you see, Carmen?”

“Not yet.”

“I can,” Dustin said, and I heard him shuffle over to Namir’s window.

“By the main door, the side facing us.”

“Yeah, I see. Not moving.” Someone fired a long burst in our direction; I felt Dustin duck as it stuttered on the walls. One round came through the slot and banged into the metal roof. “Shit,” he whispered. His head could’ve been there.

Or mine. The wine surged up and I swallowed it back, then drank half a canteen of water on top of it. Just don’t puke. Do, my body answered. I wasn’t going to stick my head out the window, but I made it to the door, and decorated the ladder.

“Thanks for waiting,” Dustin said. Elza handed me a towel that smelled of sweat, but I managed not to barf again. Sat back and picked up the heavy rifle and held the cold metal to my cheek for a moment, smell of gun oil and powder.

“I’ll be okay,” I said to no one, and no one believed me.

There was a loud explosion to the left and a sudden yellow glare. “Fire bomb, damn!” Namir said.

I scooted over on my butt and crouched up far enough to see the flames. The double door in the front was covered with some burning liquid. Someone downstairs yelled “Fire!” and a gong clanged three times.

They had a leg-powered pump, a converted bicycle, that brought water from the pond to the kitchen. I wondered whether its hose would reach that far.

“Targets,” Namir said quietly, and fired three spaced shots. Then he ducked down. The shotgun boomed, and a few pellets rattled against the roof.

“Almost out of range,” Dustin said.

“Like to get him anyhow.” Namir said. He put his cap on the muzzle of the rifle and lifted it up to draw fire, but the enemy weren’t fooled, or couldn’t see. Or were being frugal with ammunition.

“Namir,” came a hoarse shout from below. He stepped over to the ladder and nodded down at the man.

“We got to open the door to get the hose to it. Need you to keep their heads down.”

“We’ll try. In ten seconds?”

“Ten.” I heard steps running away and started counting.

At what I counted to be eight seconds, Namir’s machine gun started chattering. One long burst, then two short ones, and he ducked back behind the logs. I heard him slap open the top of the receiver and install the last belt.

He left the machine gun on the floor and stood up with a rifle. His face was plain in the light from the burning door. He stared for a second, then aimed and squeezed off one round. He ducked.

“Let’s not draw too much attention now. Take single shots, one person at a time.”

I stood up and pointed the rifle down at the trees. A lot of shooting but no obvious target. I pulled the trigger at nothing and crouched back down.

The shot had made me deaf in one ear, but I think Namir said, “Good.” Well, I didn’t shoot any of us.

“This place needs a periscope,” Elza said, standing up and aiming. She fired, maybe at random, and ducked back down. “Put it on the list.”

There was a new kind of explosion, a sound like whish-bang! “Rocket,” Namir said. Then a sudden bright blue flickering light.

Namir squinted into it. “Jesus! Everyone up and shoot!” He started firing fast single shots.

I jumped up next to him and aimed down. In the light of a guttering magnesium flare, I could see that they’d blown the double doors down and were charging en masse down the road and across the corn stubble. Dozens of people, maybe a hundred, most of them not shooting, intent on their charge.

A few people in front stopped long enough to kneel and fire over the smoldering door, into the stockade.

One of them was Card. Still wearing the dirty white tourist suit.

I aimed at him but couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead, I fired into the crowd behind him, and two men dropped. Or women or children. Fired twice more, trying to aim, and missed. When I looked for Card again, he was gone.

“That was Card!” I said. I don’t know whether anyone responded. There was an explosion under our feet, and suddenly flames everywhere in front.

Namir yelled something and pushed me roughly toward the ladder. I got halfway down and slipped.

Banged to my knee on the ladder and hurt both ankle and shoulder, somehow, when I hit the ground.

The rifle clattered down a few feet away. I went over to it and had the presence of mind to make sure it hadn’t landed nose first, then aimed it at the open door, where a little fire still flickered.

“Over here!” Namir was crouched behind one of the pilings that supported the lookout we’d just deserted. The side facing out was starting to burn.

Elza was next to him, helping set up the machine gun. Dustin hit the ground heavily between us and rolled toward me. He shook his head, dazed.

Namir called out again, and Dustin looked over dumbly and collapsed. I crawled by him, dragging my rifle.

“Anyone without an armband,” he said. Two or three people were already shooting over the fallen door. Two attackers almost got inside; sprawled dead or dying on the threshold.

“What, are they suicidal?” I said, aiming at the space.

“Desperate.” Another one appeared and was shot down, then three more. Namir was holding his fire.

Then someone hurled a fire bomb, gasoline or something, halfway to the center of the compound—and dozens boiled through the door, shooting and screaming.

Namir fired a burst, then a sustained chatter. They kept coming, though, crawling over the fallen, trying to run left and right.

Shooting back. Even over the machine-gun racket, I could hear bullets hissing by.

I mimicked Namir and lay prone, presenting as small a target as possible.

This had happened often enough that the physical sensation was almost familiar. Time crawled. My face and hands were greasy with cold sweat. All tight inside. Wiping away tears and snot.

“Shoot, goddamn it!” Dustin shouted. I’d fired one burst and still held the trigger down in a spastic clench. I pulled it again and again, firing in the direction of the crowd pushing through the door.

When I was young, I wondered about the expression “shooting fish in a barrel”—the image was so silly. Besides, you could just shoot a hole in the barrel and let the water drain out. That’s what this was, though. Or lemmings, another animal metaphor that had nothing to do with reality. Rushing through the door as if it were the edge of a cliff.

It couldn’t have taken long. Finally, two of them used the pile of bodies as a kind of shield, firing machine guns blindly toward us from behind their dead and dying comrades. The bullets went well over my head as I hugged the ground between Namir and Dustin. In less than a minute, someone shot the two from a rooftop, and all was quiet.

Relatively quiet. Someone was crying, and another groaned over and over. Namir ran to the pile of bodies and tossed away the rifles the two had been shooting. He studied the pile, I guess for signs of life. Then he peered out from behind the door for a few seconds and pulled his head back in.

Don’t do that, I almost yelled. Don’t push your luck. How many had held back from the charge?

A minute went by, then several, without a shot. Some people came out of the main cabin with candles and first-aid kits and began circulating.

One of them, a woman I hadn’t met, came over to us.

“Any wounded?”

My ankle hurt like hell, but it wasn’t broken. I remembered what that felt like, from the night I fell into a lava tube and was discovered by the Martians. When I was a frightened girl, studying to be a terrified woman.

“Check Dustin over there. I think he was knocked out.” I watched her in the candlelight. She felt for a pulse in his neck and wrist.

“He’s alive,” she said, and he reached up weakly and touched her face.

“There it is again,” Namir said. He was looking up.

The bright blue light, unblinking, moving slowly overhead. Some idiot fired a machine gun at it, tracers slowing and falling away. It shrank to a dim point and disappeared.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Let’s see whether they shoot back.”

They didn’t, and the incident was forgotten in the confused aftermath of the attack. Eight people had serious wounds. They rigged a fly for shelter on the side of the infirmary and put the wounded on makeshift pallets there, along with an operating table; there wasn’t enough light inside for surgery.

They were long out of glue, and had to stitch people up. Running out of everything else. Two of the enemy bled to death because the farm was rationing its supply of surrogate.

It would run out sooner or later, of course, along with everything else medical. Those medical books from the 1800s that we brought from Lanny’s would eventually save a lot of lives. But first a few people, a few million, would have to die from lack of everyday miracles, like nanotech and blood surrogate.

They did have a stretchy ankle bandage to keep me upright and working. I slept for a couple of fitful hours and then was up at dawn to work a grave-digging shift. There were individual graves for the dead farmers, but what I and five others were working on was a mass shallow grave for the eighteen enemy dead. It was a pyre as much as a grave, actually. Hip deep, twelve feet by six. We filled it with dry wood and kindling and stacked pine logs on that. And then the bodies.

I was glad to be excused from that part of it. There were plenty of enthusiastic volunteers.

A vocal minority wanted them stripped. Manufactured clothing would be rare soon. Okay, Roz said—you can take it, but you have to wear it yourself. No one did.

It was a horrible sight. Faces blackening and melting in the flames, restless dead limbs moving, insides boiling away and bursting, the fire bright and greasy with rendered human fat. Finally, it was only skeletons and separated bones momentarily glimpsed inside the roaring flames.

Part of me watched the process with numb detachment. I didn’t even notice when Namir left my side and then came back with a cup of wine, which he offered to me.

“No,” I said. “I’m still queasy.”

“Yes,” he said, and stared at the fire as he drank. He smiled, and I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

“Got some more for you,” Roz said, approaching with Jerry pulling the cart. Seven or eight bodies, all apparently men. “Let’s check all the pockets for ammo before they go into the fire.”

I reached for the top body and jumped back. It was Card.

“Sorry,” Roz said, recognizing him. “I’ll do it.”

His face was unaffected, calm. But the top of his head had been blown out of round by a bullet that hit him in the temple. On the other side, an exit wound the size of my fist.

“He didn’t feel anything,” I said.

“A pity.” She pulled him off the cart by his feet and dragged him partway to the fire. She turned out his pockets, found something, and held it out to me. “Yours if you want it.”

It was a keychain with two old-fashioned metal keys as well as modern stubs. It was attached to a little carving that I immediately recognized: a small sea tortoise carved from a tagera nut in the Galápagos—my parents had bought them as souvenirs for us before we got on the Space Elevator on the way to Mars.

Mine was still on Mars, in a box of personal effects I’d left behind.

“Thanks,” I said, and stared at it as she and two other women carried his body away. I turned my back toward them so as not to watch him consigned to the flames. There was no love between us, but a lot of history.

My last blood connection to the Earth. Parents long gone and both my children Martians. “Back in a minute,” I said to no one in particular, and headed for the latrine. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to sit and think, but if I spent enough time there, the next time I looked into the fire, I wouldn’t recognize anybody. And the heat from the flames suddenly felt monstrous.

18

By the next morning, the fire had burned all the way down, and there was nothing recognizably human on the surface of the ashes. Those of us who had dug the pits were given a morning of rest while different work crews filled them.

I volunteered to take some tea and cookies out to them, mid-morning, which was good fortune for me, if not for them. I dropped the tray. But I got to see the Martians land.

A huge floating disc, maybe half the size of the entire compound, floated swiftly down out of the sky and stopped, hovering a couple of feet off the ground. There was no sound except for the crash of my teapot and cups.

“Please do not shoot,” the disc said with an amplified American accent. “We’re unarmed; we mean no harm. Hello, Carmen.”

“Hello,” I said. “I know you?”

“No. But there are people aboard you do know.” There was a dome-shaped protrusion in the center of the disc. A wedge of door opened, facing us.

A Martian stepped out and rippled toward the edge of the disc, all of its arms out in greeting.

“Snowbird?”

“It’s good to see you, Carmen. Paul is not with you.”

“He died . . . he died a couple of days ago.”

“I am sorry we missed him. We could use another pilot. It’s a long way back home.”

“Siberia?”

“Back to Mars. Home.”

“It came from Russia to pick me up? Us?”

“They picked me up in Russia, Carmen. They came from Mars, of course.”

“We are trying to locate every surviving Martian on Earth,” the amplified voice said. “You and Paul appear to be the last.”

Namir had come up beside me. “Leaving . . . for good?” he said.

“We don’t know,” the voice said. “This is all native Martian technology, which is to say, it’s from the Others. It might last forever, it might crash today. All we know for sure is that we can’t touch the surface of the Earth. If we do that, the power dies.”

“We had to jump on board,” Snowbird said, “from a snow-covered roof.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much time,” the voice said. “In the absence of Paul, you could bring another. But you have to decide now.”

I turned to Namir. His eyes were wide. Elza stepped up next to him, without touching, her face a mask. “Go with her,” she said softly. “You have to.”

Dustin limped up and put his hand on her shoulder. “For both of us,” he said. “For all of us. Go.”

Namir embraced them both, and said something I couldn’t hear.

Then he turned his back on everything and held out his hand to me.

His hand was large and strong. The skin was rough. “Shall we?”

We took two steps together and leaped into space.

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EPILOGUE

It’s been a long time since dying was simple. When I returned to Mars, almost forty ares ago, two of the first people I met were my dead brother.

Before the Others pulled the plug on the Earth, back in 2138, there had been a constant data exchange between the two planets for most of a century. Absolutely total backup, which included the cybernetic copies of Card’s two reserve bodies, although they were physically destroyed along with Los Angeles.

Of course there are billions of such “people,” sitting around as passive records, whose physical bodies are long gone. Some of them even had citizenship, back on Earth, if they’d filed the right incorporation papers before they died. Card had. I guess he could still vote in California if anyone was running for office.

I talk to one or the other every now and then, but it’s creepy. The calendar peeps me when it would be their birthday on Earth. His birthday.

They’ve never asked me about the day that he died.

If only my parents had lived long enough to be duplicated; I’d love to talk to either of them. They might not have done it anyhow. I haven’t. It takes weeks of immersion, and a desire to outlive your body.

I may do it yet. Both universities are after me, so all this valuable history should not be lost.

But maybe it should be lost. It’s not as if they don’t make new history to take its place.

When my dear Namir died, after we’d been together almost thirty ares, he declined to leave a copy. He quoted Wordsworth to me: “The old order changeth, making place for new / And God fulfils himself in many ways.”

He didn’t believe in gods any more than I do. But it’s a convenient shorthand.

Twice in these forty ares we have seen signs of life, communications, from Earth. There’s a powerful telescope at the observatory that’s dedicated to that task, at least one person watching the Earth whenever it’s up.

During the second-most-recent opposition, a tiny cross burned in Siberia, the place where Martians last lived on Earth. Each arm of the cross was forty miles long, so it was quite an engineering feat with primitive tools. Twenty ares before, a fiery cross—or X—appeared in the desert of White Sands, New Mexico, and was visible as a black mark on Earth’s crescent for months.

They are still there. Still looking up.

Sometimes before dawn or just after sunset, I go up into the old dome and watch the blue spark of Earth rising or setting.

I did that this morning, for no special reason on the Martian calendar, but mine peeped and reminded me that on Earth I would be ninety years old today. Or my bones would be.

So I carried these old bones up and sat there alone, watching the Earth fade as the sky went from indigo to pale orange. Remembering the morning more than seventy years ago, waiting for a cab in the Florida dark. My father pointing out the bright unblinking red dot that we were about to visit. Saying we’d be back home in about five years.

But home was where we were going.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe Haldeman (1943 –) is a US writer who took a BSc in physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968–1969), where he was severely wounded, earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. This range of degrees was an early demonstration of the range of interests that have shaped the Hard SF with which he has sometimes been identified; his experiences in Vietnam have in fact marked everything he has written, including his first book,War Year(1972), a non-SF novel set there, and the concurrently drafted (though much delayed)1968 (1994).

Table of Contents

ENTER THE SF GATEWAY . . .

INTRODUCTION

MARSBOUND

- Dedication

- PART 1

- LEAVETAKING

- 1- The Undead
- 2- Good-bye, Cool World
- 3- Captain, My Captain
- 4- Last Meal
- 5- Pizza Hunt
- 6- Fears
- 7- Canned Meat
- 8- Stop
- 9- Losing Weight
- 10- Social Climbing
- 11- Up and Out
- 12- Trouble
- 13- Virtual Friends and Foes
- 14- Midway
- 15- Sexual Disorder
- 16- A New World
- 17- The Land of Oz
- 18- Marswalk
- 19- Fish Out of Water
- 20- Nightwalk

- PART 2

- FIRST CONTACT

- 1- Guardian Angel
- 2- Homecoming
- 3- The Dragon Lady
- 4- Bad Cough
- 5- Invasion from Earth
- 6- Zen for Morons
- 7- Suffer the Little Children
- 8- Ambassador

- PART 3

- SECOND CONTACT

- 1- Setting the Stage
- 2- Formalities
- 3- Speaking in Tongues
- 4- Puzzles
- 5- Unveiled Threat
- 6- Peace Offering
- 7- Language Barrier
- 8- Signal-to-Noise Ratio
- 9- Betrayed
- 10- Trojan Horse
- 11- Endings, Beginnings

STARBOUND

- Dedication

- PART 1

- THE SEED

- 1- NATIVITY SCENE
- 2- HISTORY LESSON
- 3- GERM THEORY
- 4- NO ORDINARY HERO
- 5- LOGICS
- 6- EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN
- 7- INTRODUCTIONS
- 8- FAMILY MATTERS
- 9- SECRETS
- 10- NEW WORLD
- 11- GOOD-BYES
- 12- GROWING THINGS

- PART 2

- THE PLANT

- 1- GRAVITY SUCKS
- 2- YEAR ZERO
- 3- RECORD
- 4- WEIGHTY MATTERS
- 5- SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE
- 6- PRIVATE PARTS
- 7- KAMIKAZE
- 8- WATER SPORTS
- 9- ADULTERY FOR ADULTS
- 10- SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE
- 11- HEROES
- 12- MEDICAL HISTORY
- 13- TRAUMA DRAMA
- 14- LOVE AND BLOOD
- 15- SEX AND VIOLENCE
- 16- INJURIES
- 17- THERAPY
- 18- ANNIVERSARY
- 19- YEAR TWO

- PART 3

- THE FLOWER

- 1- YEAR THREE
- 2- TURNAROUND
- 3- THE GRAND TOUR
- 4- OTHER-NESS
- 5- TURNAROUND
- 6- ADJUSTMENTS
- 7- ABOUT TIME
- 8- LOOSE CANNON
- 9- RELATIVITY IS RELATIVE?
- 10- RAMPAGE
- 11- DEAD WORLD
- 12- NO SURVIVORS
- 13- END OF A WORLD
- 14- PREDICTIONS
- 15- CHANGES
- 16- MOONBOY SPEAKS
- 17- CLOCK-WATCHING
- 18- RESPONSES
- 19- INFALL

- 20- THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

EARTHBOUND

- Dedication

- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18

EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT