Earthbound

6

“It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.

“So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”

“He was a lot older than you?”

“Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”

“I can see.”

How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”

“Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”

“That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.

“Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.

“But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.

“I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”

“Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”

“One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”

“Of course I know about him.”

“Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.

“It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”

“They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.

“Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”

“Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”

“Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”

“The Martian lung crap, yeah.”

“That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”

“So Red showed up with the cure.”

“In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.

“Well, the Martians had been studying us for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.

“They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.”

“And then you found out it was literally true.”

“That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow, specialized in memory, and they swore that the memory of the Others was real. It was vague and patchy because it was tens of thousands of years old, but it wasn’t a myth.

“Then, in 2079, the Others proved it. A signal that triggered strange behavior in the yellow family. They started babbling weird nonsense—but they each said the same nonsense over and over. Turned out to be a binary code that basically told us who the Others were and what their body chemistry was, nitrogen and silicon. They lived in liquid nitrogen, and this one—there was only one in the solar system—lived in a liquid-nitrogen sea on Triton, Neptune’s moon. It had lived there for twenty-seven thousand years.

“Once we cracked the code and tried to communicate with it, we found out that it spoke English. And Chinese and German and whatever.”

“But they couldn’t just call and say hello?”

“No. It was like a series of tests, to see how sophisticated we could be. The first test was contact with the Martians, and in fact was why the Martians were there.”

“I understand that one. It was like a signal to the Others that we had gone to another planet. Which woke up the one on Triton. But it woke up knowing how to speak Chinese and all?”

“We don’t think so. We think it absorbed a huge amount of information from the yellow family as soon as it woke up. At least that’s what the Martians say.

“The last test was playing for keeps. We were in Earth orbit, and Red found out that he was essentially a time bomb. In a couple of days, he would explode, giving out more energy than the Sun. The seas underneath us would boil; the air would be blown away. I guess you know what happened then.”

She nodded gravely. “Paul took Red to the other side of the Moon, so when he blew up, the earth wasn’t hurt.”

“That’s right, and perhaps if we had left it at that, everything would be fine. The Other that had been on Triton blew it up and went home to Wolf 25, almost twenty-five light-years from here.”

“But we had to follow it.”

“There were various opinions. A lot of people wanted to build a war fleet and go after the bastards, which was not really possible, even with free energy.”

“It’s always been free for me,” Alba said. I hadn’t thought of that. “Go on?”

“Well, at the other extreme were people who just wanted to say ‘good riddance,’ and get on with life. I have a lot of sympathy for that idea.

“There was a lot of arguing that eventually wound up with the compromise that started, I guess, before your parents were born.”

“My mother was born in 2090.”

“Two years after we launched. Well, the bright idea was to build one starship, and send it off to Wolf 25 on a peace mission.”

“But then they also built a fleet here in orbit, supposedly to protect the earth.”

“Or at least to mollify the hawks,” I said, “the ones who demanded a military response. But it was gnats versus an elephant.”

“I know a lot of people who thought it was a bad idea,” Alba said. “Almost all my teachers in school.”

“I can imagine. We had a kind of meeting with one of the Others, who showed us evidence of what they could do, as if a further demonstration was necessary. Did you hear what they did to their own home planet?”

“Yeah, I saw that on the cube. How they used to be, well, not human but sort of. But they evolved themselves into these ice-cold monsters who lived on a frozen moon. So they came back and destroyed their own home planet?”

“In self-defense, they pointed out. They showed us the remains of the fleet that the home planet had been building to attack them. Sort of like our fleet here, but a thousand times closer.

“So we came back and, in essence, brought the eyes and ears of the Others with us. That was the human-looking avatar that was on the cube.

“And so they blew up the Moon to keep us out of space. We tried anyhow, and so they pulled the plug on civilization.”

She nodded, thoughtful. “They could have just killed us.”

“I’m sure they still have that option. You have to remember that this was all preplanned. The Others can’t beat the speed of light; it will be almost twenty-five years before they actually know of the fleet, and twenty-five more before they could come back and do something about it. So all of their actions—blowing up the Moon, turning off the free power—have been in place for a long time.”

“Like booby traps, waiting for us to set them off.”

“That’s right. And who’s to say they don’t have another one, waiting to blow us off the face of the earth if we misbehave?”

“Or put everything back the way it was, if we don’t.”

I laughed. “They’re not putting the Moon back together.”

“You don’t know. Maybe they could.”

I started to say something about increasing entropy, but let it go. Hell, maybe they could track down all the pieces and rebuild the Moon. And then turn it into green cheese.