Marsbound

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 who 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.

I had to admit that the argument for forever was pretty strong. Our getting the lung cysts 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 101 people who lived on Mars at the time of the Martian “invasion” of our living space—103, counting the unborn—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, and the lung cysts would have followed.)

So Little Mars was two orbiting 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, though the humans’ rooms were kept warmer.

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 mushroomy 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 carryout 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 was adjusted to effect 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 air locks, just doors, so I could go visit Red at his home if I bundled up.

Getting to LMO, Low Mars Orbit, had been 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—keepingthe 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 gee 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, or make buds, about a year later. The ones who were born would be in the same families as the ones who had died.)

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 Josie 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 eight-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 with the Martians 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, Josie, Meryl, 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.

Human languages were easy to them, and not just because each one was already at least bilingual. The yellow, white, green, and blue families all had different languages—not dialects, but unique unrelated languages—and they all spoke a single communal language as well, to communicate across family lines.

But they didn’t have to learn those languages! They were born with innate ability and a pretty large vocabulary in both the consensus language and the family-oriented one. Red understood them all and, weirdly enough, his own language, which no other living Martian knew. He had spent much of his youth learning it, so he could read messages left by his predecessors, and so he could send advice up to the future, essentially in a secret “leader’s” code.

Red’s language was the only one with a written version. The others were all completely aural—why write things down if the yellows remember everything?—and so weirdly inflected that they defied translation into human languages.

My accident had moved up the Martians’ timetable for meeting humans, 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 of graduate work 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. Moonboy was trying to study the general Martian language, and basic bits of the green one, but he hadn’t made much headway, and I didn’t try to follow his progress. Red’s written language was as complex as an opera score—words, music, and dynamics.

My own daily round was interesting but tiring, the scheduling 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 a period of two hours for exercise each 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 eight months’ transit went by pretty fast, a lot faster to me than the six months 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 not everybody attended 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 could know 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, that would precipitate the fertilization frenzy, and 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; understand all of their languages. The one who preceded me was the last who could literally know everything, though. 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 general relativity and Jack Benny, that became impossible.” Jack Benny, I found out, was not a scientist.

He might have been obsolete, what with all that information overload, but he was still the logical one to go rescue the first Earthling alien they made contact with. He might not have been the Renaissance Martian anymore, but he still was Hawking and Superman and the pope all rolled into one.

I asked him why, if the budding process could result in one individuallike 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 it is impossible for me to know.” He referred me to Gödel’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 family-like bond with someone like 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 eight 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 for my disbelief, 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, very literally; 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 Josie—or even Moonboy, odd as he was—to make objective choices.

But then I was hardly objective about Dargo.

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 master’s 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 dark glasses to hide my dropping eyes, 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 air lock, 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. Josie 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 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 in orbit who’d survived expelling 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 Meryl were trying to understand their anatomy and physiology; they also monitored us humans for signs of Dutch Elm disease. While Moonboy tried to decode the logic and illogic of their language. He said it was like trying to climb a Teflon wall.

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, Joan 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 to add to the Martian population boom, without outside help.

Franz was a darkly handsome man in his midtwenties. 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 50 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 given 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 had 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 read bushels of novels and 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 books and 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” would be 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 sweatlike secretions that contained genetic code. The female would bud to replace all the ones who had recently died.

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 noveltyto exchange ideas with an architect and an archeologist. They picked my brains for everything I could recall about the Martians’ 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. Though the Martians claim incredible memory power.” It wasn’t just a claim— they were born with language ability and most of the vocabulary they would naturally use.

“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 were quick 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 carelessly 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 the Martians 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 was sure there weren’t 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, by making diagrams, 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 toward us at 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 her eyes and ears 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 two 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 to Little Mars 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 the 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 racquetball 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 eight 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 $200 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 financed by Oz and Josie, 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 life over the past couple of years. I have to admit that his obvious eagerness to talk was a relief. A lot could have happened to either of us during two and a half years, but a lot more could have happened to him—one of the few single young men on a whole planet.

He had admitted to a fling with Jag, which was about as surprisingas 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. The scary accident made her even less enthusiastic about staying.

Paul was committed to Mars; it had been his planet since he signed up 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 leer he gave me when he stepped out of the air lock said that was on his mind, too. 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 Snowbird 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 the Earth side, but he pled fatigue and let me guide him by the elbow on a tour of the 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 eight 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 might have helped.

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 was over in the Martian environment with the new arrivals—and got a thin-bladed knife that served the purpose.

I undressed when I got back, because it would be silly to drink wine with a naked man otherwise. The wine was amazing, bottled the year I was born. The caviar was kind of like salty fish eggs to me, but Paul went crazy for it. Well, after years of Martian food and ship rations, anything different would be ambrosia.

He said it tasted something like me, which made me feel oh-so-feminine and scaly.

We each had a couple of glasses, which left me light-headed and giggly, and him, light-headed and horny. We got out of bed and did it that Indian way, my arms around his neck and legs clasping him, and it was even more intense than the first time.

We collapsed on the bunk and held each other tightly for a while. I think it was the first time I’d ever produced actual tears of joy. I hadn’t been able to admit to myself how much I’d missed him and how much I feared losing him.

Of course, I’d been missing it, too, ever since Jag took Franz away.

We eased into sleep intertwined, Egyptian cotton wicking away our sweat while French wine weighed down our eyelids. A most international coma, and interplanetary, the man from Mars holding the girl from Florida.

My phone started pinging, and after about four pings I managed to pry one eye open, then sort through the pile of clothes for the pinger. One problem with living inside a tin can is that you can’t ignore the phone and then say “I was out,” like taking a stroll through the afternoon vacuum.

It was Oz. I pushed NO VISION, and then remembered that my standby picture this week was a little movie of pandas copulating.

“What’s up, Oz?” I said quietly.

“I don’t suppose Paul is there.”

“He’s sleeping. It was a long trip.”

“I guess it can wait. When he gets up, tell him he’s not the biggest news story anymore.”

“Hey, Oz.” Paul was up on one elbow, blinking. “What do you mean?”

“It’s weird, Paul. The timing. Just about the same time you docked here, astronomers in Hawaii recorded a strong blinking beam of coherent light from Neptune. Apparently a laser, blinking on and off.”

“I don’t understand. We don’t have anything out there, do we?”

“Nope. They’re falling over each other, trying to find a natural explanation. Lased light aimed toward Earth? It’s brighter than the planet itself.”

“Maybe China? They can do some weird shit.”

“Come on, Paul. That’d cost more than Little Mars and the Hilton combined. Get a big laser out there.

“Anyhow, there’s a news conference at 1900. We’ll all be watching it over at Earth A.”

“Okay, we’ll be there.”

“Bye… Loverboy.”

He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “I do believe Dr. Oswald is jealous.”

“E-ew. That would almost be incest.”

“Like incest doesn’t happen. How much time we have?”

I checked my wrist tattoo. “Forty-two minutes.” He got out of bed and stretched. He was becoming erect again. “Oh, put that thing away and let’s go get a cup of coffee.” He pouted, so I amused him for a few minutes. We did have time to go by the galley and get a cup on the way to Earth A.

Earth A was the largest room on the Mars side; it was where we met, or “met,” various presidents and prime ministers and CEOs, pressing palms through a feelie glove. The room had enough seating for twice our human population, and a raised platform behind that was big enough for a dozen Martians.

All four of them were there—Red, Green, Fly-in-Amber, and Snowbird—chattering and chirping and buzzing. Red raised a large arm and waved hello.

Most of the humans were already in place, in the first two rows of theater-style seats. Paul and I sat alone in the third row.

The walls were an intense blue. “The color of Neptune,” Paul said.

“Did they name it Neptune because it was the color of the sea?”

“I don’t know. Sounds logical.”

Some weird music started. “Holst, of course,” I said.

“What?”

“Didn’t you ever take music appreciation?”

“I was an engineer, sweetheart. Did you take Fourier transforms?”

“Don’t give me any trouble.” I pinched his leg. “Gustav Holst wrote a suite called The Planets, which had eight parts. This is the last one, Neptune. It’s kind of famous because it was the first orchestral piece written that ends by fading to silence.” I put a hand over my mouth. “Chattering. Sorry.”

“Chatter anytime,” he said softly.

A face appeared in the cube, vaguely familiar. “Who’s that?”

“Raymo Sebastian. He’s the default science explainer for BBC/ Fox.”

“Good evening,” he said, in round announcer tones. He was famous enough that he didn’t have to identify himself. “This is a special brief report—brief because so little is yet known—about the strange phenomenon astronomers noticed a few hours ago in the vicinity of Neptune.”

His image faded to the image of a blue ball with faint dark markings and a white smear. Just next to it, a red light was blinking regularly, five or six times a second. It was so bright it made me squint.

“The red light is coherent,” Sebastian said off camera, “and its wavelength suggests—it almost requires—a ruby laser. The same kind used for commercial scanning since the last century, but trillionsof times more powerful. Viewed from Earth, it’s as bright as the planet itself.”

Behind us, there was a thud, and a quiet susurrus of Martian talking. I turned and saw that Fly-in-Amber had fallen over and was twitching. Paul and I ran up the aisle to their raised platform.

Green was going out the door. Red and Snowbird were kneeling by 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 on Earth that some pranksters had tipped over on its side; he looked as odd as that.

“What happened?” I asked Red.

“I’ve never seen it before, except as a joke.” He was gently bending one of Fly-in-Amber’s legs. “It looked as if these 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.

Most of the other humans were right behind us. “Maybe it is some kind of odd joke?” Moonboy asked. “A practical joke?”

“I don’t think so. It’s childish. Fly-in-Amber is too stiff for that. Yellow is a dignified family.” 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 Snowbird. “Nor have I heard of it, ever, except children playing. It’s painful.”

“Should we pull him back upright?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Red and Snowbird said at the same time. “Wait until we hear from—”

Fly-in-Amber started talking, a quiet uninflected warble. Snowbird moved close to listen.

“Is this being recorded?” Paul said.

“Of course,” Dargo Solingen snapped.

“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.”

“You can’t make any sense of it?”

“No, not yet. But it doesn’t seem… It isn’t random. He is saying something, and repeating it.”

Fly-in-Amber stopped with a noise like a sneeze. Then a long monotone, like a sung sigh. Snowbird 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 Snowbird 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, faltering, 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. Cold like 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?” Snowbird 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, 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, a large and a small one, 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 about the same time. Most of the memory family fell down and started talking this nonsense.”

“It was temps du Mars 09:19,” she said, “when it happened there. Seventeen Earth minutes after Fly-in-Amber.”

“As if they caught it from him,” I said. “At the speed of light.”

“Or it came from Earth,” Paul said.

“Or outer space.” Red gestured down the hall. “Neptune’s out there. ”

4 PUZZLES

The memory family had seventy-eight members, less than 1 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 only members of the memory family that had acted like Fly-in-Amber were the ones who had been watching the show about the light coming from Neptune. It was obviously some kind of trigger.

All of the ones affected did exactly the same thing as Fly-in-Amber.They fell over and emitted the same long string of nonsense sounds ten times. It had to be some kind of message.

The scientists in Little Mars would have decoded it soon, but we had broadcast it to Earth, and 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. He hit the jackpot.

The dot-and-dash digital message had been 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 in SETI terms 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:

The first time the Chilean astronomer tried, he used the 19 by 29 matrix, and got nothing coherent. The 29 by 19 gave this interesting picture. Humans and Martians gathered together in front of the monitor as the Chilean’s diagram came in.

“Is that English?” Oz said. “What the hell is ’O Sin’?”

“I think it’s some kind of human joke,” Snowbird 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, three of my generations ago. Frank Drake made it up in 1961, with 551 ones and zeros, and it was widely broadcast. The square 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, Jupiter and Saturn, and then two medium-sized, Uranus and Neptune.”

“So what about sin?” Oz said.

“I don’t know,” Snowbird 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 and a tail,” 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 this diagram of an eight-legged creature, with a tail.”

“We don’t look at all like that,” Snowbird 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 is 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 fly-by in the 1980s.”

“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. “Twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy-eight years.” Snowbird added, “Fourteen thousand nine hundred and seventy 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 twenty-seventy thousand 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 over 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 twenty-seven thousand,” 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 spaceship. 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 millions 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 preemptive 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 preemptive 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.”

“It’s old-fashioned. 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 leader 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 twenty-nine-by-nineteen 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, followed by 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 eight.

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 Brandenburg 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 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 air lock 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 yet know that I can understand the message. We could tell her that much, 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.” Red made his 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 glass and 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 neoromantic guitar/theramin 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 air lock.”

“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, a speech 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 I thought would simplify our lives, at least 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 twenty-seven thousand 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 twenty-seven thousand 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 five thousand 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 prerecorded 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 all 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 the 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 interviewer 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 ess-to-en?”

“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 superslow 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 cataloging similarities among the other four. 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 skeptic’s ears as well as your own. Try to entertain the possibility.”

“All right.” Among the possibilities I could entertain was that Dargo had finally gone totally insane. “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 Dargo 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 more abstract concepts.

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. Bunnies. 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. Why couldn’t he be more like a bunny? I could see my note and his answer on his desk.

He fell asleep, or acted as if he had, right afterward. I slipped off my narrow half of the bunk and padded over to his desk and read the note, a page of small neat capital letters.

I couldn’t sleep. Kissed Paul good night 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 plan to initiate contact with humans. 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 lifesaving 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 young 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 themselves, 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 tête-à-tête with Red.

Our diets in Little 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 Daniel’s 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 50 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, though.”

“But you can pronounce them all without a chain saw.” 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 on the Earth side?” 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 sounds 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 Triton. 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 himself 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.”

I had to laugh. “Martian porn?”

“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 Little 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,” she 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; he 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’d ever considered the psychological advantage he had, always standing over his guests. Of course he had.

“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 she, 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,” Paul 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 twenty-seven thousand 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 had such a curious 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 the Mars side, or Assembly A, on this side, in forty-five minutes, at 5:30. I’m afraid this may be 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, toward my room.

“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 early. 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 go 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, 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 a woman’s voice said, “This is real time now.” It took a moment for those words to make sense. Real time, not recorded.

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. “Your Other evidently did something interesting.”

Jhangiani came back into the cube. “That explosion reached a brightness of minus twenty-seven 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 sixteen hundred 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 you say someone has returned 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. I didn’t suspect.” He shook his head.

“Didn’t know what, Red?” Oz said. “Is there anything we can do?”

“I am 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 twenty-two thousand 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. The other side would perish, too.”

“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,” Josie 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 use the shuttle, but 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 at that instant. We do the transfer, and I come in ass backward, 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, they can fuel up the Lowell lander and 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 didn’t mind 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.”

Relief washed over 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: “We had a wonderful time while we had it. Better than most people ever get.” The last word whistled as his voice cracked.

“You know I am not so far away from Red with the dying thing. I love you so and, if it has to end, 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 will spend most of forever anyhow.”

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 few days. As if talking about it might have jinxed us.

Red did drop a hint, though, obliquely. I was waiting by the air lock 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 air lock looking like a Space Force recruiting cubeshot, gleaming white space suit. 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 air lock.

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 was 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, 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 air lock and picked his way down the crater side. As soon as he signaled 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 1st 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 Little 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 going to have twins and thought there were already too many bastards on Mars.

We named the girl Nadia, for “hope.” Her middle name is Mayfly, and I hope she lives forever. The boy has the same middle name.

People who don’t know us might wonder why a kid with jet-black hair would be named Red.