Marsbound

1 GUARDIAN ANGEL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t speak English, do you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I touched my chest and said “Carmen.” Then I pointed at his chest, if that’s what it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green was carrying a plastic bag with things inside that clicked softly together. She set the bag down carefully and exchanged a few noises with Red.

First she took out a dish that looked like pottery, and from a plastic bag shook out something that looked like an herb, or pot. It started smoking immediately, and she thrust it toward me. I sniffed it; it was pleasant, like mint or menthol. She made a gesture with her two small hands, a kind of shooing motion, that I interpreted to mean “breathe more deeply,” and I did.

She took the dish away and brought two transparent disks, like big lenses, out of the bag and handed one to me. While I held it, she pressed the other one against my forehead, then chest, then the side of my leg. She gently lifted up the foot with the broken ankle, and pressed it against the sole. Then she did the other foot. She put the lenses back in her bag and stood motionless, staring at me like a doctor or scientist.

I thought, okay, this is where the alien sticks a tube up your ass, but she must have left her tube back at the office.

She and Red conferred for a while, making gestures with their small arms while they made noises like porpoises and machinery. Then she reached into the bag and pulled out a small metal tube, which caused me to cringe away, but she gave it a snap with her wrist and it ratcheted out to about six feet long. She mimicked using it as a cane, which looked really strange, like a spider missing four legs, and handed it to me, saying “Harn.”

Guess that was my name now. The stick felt lighter than aluminum, but when I used it to lever myself up, it was rigid and strong.

She reached into her bag of tricks and brought out a thing like her tunic, somewhat thicker and softer and colored gray. There was a hole in it for my head, but no sleeves or other complications. I put it on gratefully and draped it around so I could use the stick. It was agreeably warm.

Red stepped ahead, and with a rippling gesture of all four hands, indicated, Follow me. I did, with Green coming behind me.

It was a strange sensation, going through the slits in those plastic sheets, or whatever they were. It was like they were alive, millions of feathery fingers clasping you, then letting go all at once, to close behind you with a snap.

When I went through the first one, it was noticeably cooler, and cooler still after the second one, and my ears popped. After the fourth one, it felt close to freezing, though the floor was still warm, and the air was noticeably thin; I was almost panting, and could see my breath.

We stepped into a huge dark cavern. Rows of dim lights at about knee level marked off paths. The lights were all blue, but each path had its own kind of blue, different in shade or intensity. Meet me at the corner of bright turquoise and dim aquamarine.

I tried to remember our route, left at this shade of blue, then right at this one, but I was not sure how useful the knowledge would be. What, I was going to escape? Hold my breath and run back to the colony?

We went through a single sheet into a large area, at least as well lit as my hospital room, and almost as warm. It had a kind of barn-yard smell, not unpleasant. There were things that had to be plants all around, like broccoli but brown and gray with some yellow, sitting in water that you could hear was flowing. A little mist hung near the ground, and my face felt damp. It was a hydroponic farm like ours, but without greens or the bright colors of tomatoes and peppers and citrus fruits.

Green leaned over and picked something that looked like a cigar, or something even less appetizing, and offered it to me. I waved it away; she broke it in two and gave half to Red.

I couldn’t tell how big the place was, probably acres. So where were all the people it was set up to feed? All the Martians.

I got a partial answer when we passed through another sheet, into a brighter room about the size of the new pod we’d brought. There were about twenty of the aliens arranged along two walls, standing at tables or in front of things like data screens, but made of metal rather than plastic. There weren’t any chairs; I supposed quadrupeds don’t need them.

They all began to move toward me, making strange noises, of course. If I’d brought one of them into a room, humans would have done the same thing, but nevertheless I felt frightened and helpless. When I shrank back, Red put a protective arm in front of me and said a couple of bullfrog syllables. They all stopped about ten feet away.

Green talked to them more softly, gesturing toward me. Then they stepped forward in an orderly way, by colors—two in yellow-tan, three in green, two in blue, and so forth—each standing quietly in front of me for a few seconds. I wondered if the color signified rank. None of the others wore red, and none were as big as Big Red. Maybe he was the alpha male, or the only female, like bees.

What were they doing? Just getting a closer look, or taking turns trying to destroy me with thought waves?

After that presentation, Red gestured for me to come over and look at the largest metal screen.

Interesting. It was a panorama of our greenhouse and the other parts of the colony that were above ground. The picture might have been from the top of Telegraph Hill. Just as I noticed that there were a lot of people standing around—too many for a normal work party—the John Carter came sliding into view, a rooster tail of red dust fountaining out behind her. A lot of the people jumped up and down and waved.

Then the screen went black for a few seconds, and a red rectangle opened slowly… it was the air-lock light at night, as the door slid open. I was looking at myself, just a little while ago, coming out and pulling the dog behind me.

The camera must have been like those flying bugs that Homeland Security spies use. I certainly hadn’t seen anything.

When the door closed, the picture changed to a ghostly blue, like moonlight on Earth. It followed me for a minute or so. Stumbling and then staring at the ground as I walked more cautiously.

Then it switched to another location, and I knew what was coming. The ground collapsed and the dog and I disappeared in a shower of dust, which the wind swept away in an instant.

The bug, or whatever it was, drifted down through the hole to hover over me as I writhed around in pain. A row of glowing symbols appeared at the bottom of the screen. There was a burst of white light when I found the dog and switched it on.

Then Big Red floated down—this was obviously the speeded-up version—wearing several layers of that wall plastic, it seemed; riding a thing that looked like a metal sawhorse with two sidecars. He put me in one and the dog in the other. Then he floated back up.

Then they skipped all the way to me lying on that pillow, naked and unlovely, in an embarrassing posture—I blushed, as if any of them cared—and then moved in close to my ankle, which was blue and swollen. Then a solid holo of a human skeleton, obviously mine, in the same position. The image moved in the same way as before. The fracture line glowed red, and then my foot, below the break, shifted slightly. The line glowed blue and disappeared.

Just then I noticed it wasn’t hurting anymore.

Green stepped over and gently took the staff away from me. I put weight on the foot, and it felt as good as new.

“How could you do that?” I said, not expecting an answer. No matter how good they were at healing themselves, how could they apply that to a human skeleton?

Well, a human vet could treat a broken bone in an animal she’d never seen before. But it wouldn’t heal in a matter of hours.

Two of the amber ones brought out my skinsuit and Mars suit, and put them at my feet.

Red pointed at me, then tapped on the screen, which again showed the surface parts of the colony. You could hardly see them for the dust, though; there was a strong storm blowing.

He made an up-and-down gesture with his small arms, then his large ones, obviously meaning “Get dressed.”

So with about a million potato eyes watching, I took off the tunic and got into the skinsuit. The diaper was missing, which made it feel kind of baggy. They must have thrown it away—or analyzed it, ugh.

The creatures stared in silence while I zipped that up, then climbed and wiggled into the Mars suit. I secured the boots and gloves and clamped the helmet into place, and automatically chinned the switch for an oxygen and power readout, but of course it was still broken. I guess that would be asking too much—you fixed my ankle, but you can’t fix a simple space suit? What kind of Martians are you?

It was obvious I wasn’t getting any air from the backpack, though. I’d need the dog’s backup supply.

I unshipped the helmet and faced Green, and made an exaggerated pantomime of breathing in and out. She didn’t react. Hell, they probably breathed by osmosis or something.

I turned to Red and crouched over, patting the air at the level of the dog. “Dog,” I said, and pointed back the way we’d come.

He leaned over and mimicked my gesture, and said, “Nog.” Pretty close. Then he turned to the crowd and croaked out a speech, which I think had both “Harn” and “nog” in it.

He must have understood, at least partly, because he made that four-armed “come along” motion at me, and went back to the place where we’d entered. I went through the plastic and looked back. Green was leading four others, it looked like one of each color, following us.

Red in the lead, we all went back by what seemed the same path we’d come. I counted my steps, so that when I told people about it I’d have at least one actual concrete number. The hydroponics room, or at least the part we cut through, was 185 steps wide; then it was another 204 steps from there to the “hospital” room. I get about 70 centimeters to a step, so the trip covered about 270 meters, allowing for a little dogleg in the middle. Of course it might go on for miles in every direction, but at least it was no smaller than that.

We went into the little room and they watched while I unreeled the dog’s umbilical and plugged it in. The cool air coming through the neck fitting was more than a relief. I put my helmet back on. Green stepped forward and did a pretty good imitation of my breathing pantomime.

I sort of didn’t want to go. I was looking forward to coming back and learning how to communicate with Red and Green. We had other people more qualified, though. I should have listened to Mother when she got after me to take a language in school. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have taken Chinese and Latin and Body Noises.

The others stood away from the plastic, and Red gestured for me to follow. I pulled the dog along through the four plastic layers; this time we turned sharply to the right and started walking up a gently sloping ramp.

After a few minutes I could look down and get a sense of how large this place was. There was the edge of a lake—an immense amount of water even if it was only a few inches deep. From above, the buildings looked like domes of clay, or just dirt, with no windows, just the pale blue light that filtered through the door layers.

There were squares of different sizes and shades that were probably crops like the mushrooms and cigars, and one large square had trees that looked like six-foot-tall broccoli, which could explain the wooden splints.

We came to a level place, brightly lit, that had shelves full of bundles of the plastic stuff. Red walked straight to one shelf and pulled off a bundle. It was his Mars suit. Bending over at a strange angle, bobbing, he slid his feet into four opaque things like thick socks. His two large arms went into sleeves, ending in mittens. Then the whole thing seemed to come alive and ripple up and over him, sealing together, then inflating. It didn’t have anything that looked like an oxygen tank, but air was coming from somewhere.

He gestured for me to follow, and we went toward a dark corner. He hesitated there, and held out his hand to me. I took it, and we staggered slowly through dozens of layers of the stuff, toward a dim light.

It was obviously like a gradual air lock. We stopped at another flat area, which had one of the blue lights, and rested for a few minutes. Then he led me through another long series of layers, where it became completely dark—without him leading me, I might have gotten turned around—and then it lightened slightly, the light glowing pink this time.

When we came out, we were on the floor of a cave; the light was coming from a circle of Martian sky. When my eyes adjusted, I could see there was a smooth ramp leading uphill to the cave entrance.

I’d never seen the sky that color. We were looking up through a serious dust storm.

Red pulled a dust-covered sheet off his sawhorse-shaped vehicle. I helped him put the dog into one of the bowl-like sidecars, and I got in the other. There were two things like stubby handlebars in front, but no other controls that I could see.

He backed onto the thing, straddling it, and we rose off the ground a foot or so, and smoothly started forward.

The glide up the ramp was smooth. I expected to be buffeted around by the dust storm, but as impressive as it looked, it didn’t have much power. My umbilical tube did flap around in the wind, which made me nervous. If it snapped, a fail-safe would close off the tube so I wouldn’t immediately die. But I’d use up the air in the suit pretty fast.

I couldn’t see more than ten or twenty feet in any direction, but Red, I hoped, could see farther. He was moving very fast. Of course, he was unlikely to hit another vehicle, or a tree.

I settled down into the bowl—there wasn’t anything to see—and was fairly comfortable. I amused myself by imagining the reaction of Dargo Solingen and Mother and Dad when I showed up with an actual Martian.

It felt like an hour or more before he slowed down, and we hit the ground and skidded to a stop. He got off his perch laboriously and came around to the dog’s side. I got out to help him lift it and was knocked off balance by a gust. Four legs were a definite advantage here.

He watched while I got the umbilical untangled, then pointed me in the direction we were headed. Then he made a shooing motion.

“You have to come with me,” I said, uselessly, and tried to translate it into arm motions. He pointed and shooed again, and then backed onto the sawhorse and took off in a slow U-turn.

I started to panic. What if I went in the wrong direction? I could miss the base by twenty feet and just keep walking on into the desert.

And maybe I wasn’t even near the base. Maybe Red had left me in the middle of nowhere, for some obscure Martian reason.

That wouldn’t make sense. Human sense, anyhow.

I stood alone in the swirling dust and felt helplessness turning into terror.

2 HOMECOMING

I took a few deep breaths. The dog was pointed in the right direction. I picked up its handle and looked straight ahead as far as I could see, through the swirling gloom. I saw a rock, directly ahead, and walked to it. Then another rock, maybe ten feet away. After the fourth rock, I looked up and saw I’d almost run into the air-lock door. I leaned on the big red button and the door slid open immediately. It closed behind the dog and the red light on the ceiling started blinking. It turned green and the inside door opened on a wide-eyed Emily.

“Carmen! You found your way back!”

“Well, um… not really…”

“Got to call the search party!” She bounded down the stairs, yelling for Howard.

I wondered how long they’d been searching for me. I would be in shit up to my chin.

I put the dog back in its place—there was only one other parked there, so three were out looking for me. Or my body.

Card came running in when I was half out of my skinsuit. “Sis!” He grabbed me and hugged me, which was moderately embarrassing. “We thought you were—”

“Yeah, okay. Let me get dressed? Before the shit hits the fan?” He let me turn around and step out of the skinsuit and into my coverall.

“What, you went out for a walk and got lost in that dust storm?”

For a long moment, I thought of saying yes. Who was going to believe my story? I looked at the clock and saw that it was 1900. If it was the same day, seventeen hours had passed. I could have wandered around that long without running out of air, using up the dog reserves.

“How long have I been gone?”

“You can’t remember? All foogly day, man. Were you derilious?”

“Delerious.” I kneaded my brow and rubbed my face hard with both hands. “Let me wait and tell it all when Mother and Dad get here.”

“That’ll be hours! They’re out looking for you.”

“Oh, that’s great. Who else?”

“I think it was Paul the pilot.”

“Well,” said a voice behind me. “You decided to come back after all.”

It was Dargo Solingen, of course. There was a quaver of emotion in her voice that I’d never heard. I think rage.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I don’t think you were thinking at all. You were being a foolish girl, and you put more lives than your own into danger.”

About a dozen people were behind her. “Dargo,” Dr. Jefferson said. “She’s back; she’s alive. Let’s give her a little rest.”

“Has she given us any rest?” she barked.

“I’m sorry! I’ll do anything—”

“You will? Isn’t that pretty. What do you propose to do?”

Dr. Estrada put a hand on her shoulder. “Please let me talk to her.” Oh, good, a shrink. I needed a xenologist. But she would listen better than Solingen.

“Oh… do what you want. I’ll deal with her later.” She turned and walked through the small crowd.

Some people gathered around me, and I tried not to cry. I wouldn’t want her to think she had made me cry. But there were plenty of shoulders and arms for me to hide my eyes in.

“Carmen.” Dr. Estrada touched my forearm. “We ought to talk before your parents get back.”

“Okay.” A dress rehearsal. I followed her down to the middle of A.

She had a large room to herself, but it was her office as well as quarters. “Lie down here”—she indicated her single bunk—“and just try to relax. Begin at the beginning.”

“The beginning isn’t very interesting. Dargo Solingen embarrassed me in front of everybody. Not the first time, either. Sometimes I feel like I’m her little project. Let’s drive Carmen crazy.”

“So in going outside like that, you were getting back at her? Getting even in some way?”

“I didn’t think of it that way. I just had to get out, and that was the only way.”

“Maybe not, Carmen. We can work on ways to get away without physically leaving.”

“Like Dad’s zen thing, okay. But what I did, or why, isn’t really important. It’s what I found!”

“So what did you find?”

“Life. Intelligent life. They saved me.” I could hear my voice, and even I didn’t believe it.

“Hmm,” she said. “Go on.”

“I’d walked four kilometers or so and was about to turn around and go back. But I stepped on a place that wouldn’t support my weight. Me and the dog. We fell through. At least ten meters, maybe twenty.”

“And you weren’t hurt?”

“I was! I heard my ankle break. I broke a rib, maybe more than one, here.”

She pressed the area, gently. “But you’re walking.”

“They fixed… I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“So you fell through and broke your ankle?”

“Then I spent a long time finding the dog. My suit light went out when I hit the ground. But finally I found it, found the dog, and got my umbilical plugged in.”

“So you had plenty of oxygen.”

“But I was freezing. The circuit to my gloves and boots wasn’t working. I really thought that was it.”

“But you survived.”

“I was rescued. I was passing out and this, uh, this Martian came floating down, I saw him in the dog’s light. Then everything went black, and I woke up—”

“Carmen! You have to see that this was a dream. A hallucination.”

“Then how did I get here?”

Her mouth set in a stubborn line. “You were very lucky. You wandered around in the storm and came back here.”

“But there was no storm when I left! Just a little wind. The storm came up while I was… well, I was underground. Where the Martians live.”

“You’ve been through so much, Carmen…”

“This was not a dream!” I tried to stay calm. “Look. You can check the air left in the tanks. My suit and the dog. There will be hours unaccounted for. I was breathing the Martians’ air.”

“Carmen… be reasonable…”

“No, you be reasonable. I’m not saying anything more until—” There was one knock on the door, and Mother burst in, followed by Dad.

“My baby,” she said. When did she ever call me that? She hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. “You found your way back.”

“Mother… I was just telling Dr. Estrada… I didn’t find my way back. I was brought.”

“She had a dream about Martians. A hallucination.”

“No! Would you just listen?”

Dad sat down cross-legged, looking up at me. “Start at the beginning, honey.”

I did. I took a deep breath and started with taking the suit and the dog and going out to be alone. Falling and breaking my ankle. Waking up in the little hospital room. Red and Green and the others. Seeing the base on their screen. Being healed and brought back.

There was an uncomfortable silence after I finished. “If it wasn’t for the dust storm,” Dad said, “it would be easy to verify your… your account. Nobody could see you from here, though, and the satellites won’t show anything, either.”

“Maybe that’s why he was in a rush to bring me back. If they’d waited for the storm to clear, they’d be exposed.”

“Why would they be afraid of that?” Dr. Estrada asked.

“Well, I don’t know. But I guess it’s obvious that they don’t want anything to do with us—”

“Except to rescue a lost girl,” Mother said.

“Is that so hard to believe? I mean, I couldn’t say three words to them, but they seemed to be friendly and good-hearted.”

“It just sounds so fantastic,” Dad said. “How would you feel in our position? By far the easiest explanation is that you were under extreme stress and—”

“No! Dad, do you really think I would do that? Come up with some elaborate lie?” I could see on his face that he did indeed. Maybe not a lie, but a fantasy. “There’s objective proof. Look at the dog. It has a huge dent where it hit the ground in the cave.”

“Maybe so; I haven’t seen it,” he said. “But being devil’s advocate, aren’t there many other ways that could have happened?”

“What about the air? The air in the dog! I didn’t use enough of it to have been out so long.”

He nodded. “That would be compelling. Did you dock it?”

Oh hell. “Yes. I wasn’t thinking I’d have to prove anything.” When you dock the dog it automatically starts to refill air and power.“There must be a record. How much oxygen a dog takes on when it recharges.”

They all looked at each other. “Not that I know of,” Dad said. “But you don’t need that. Let’s just do an MRI of your ankle. That’ll tell if it was recently broken.”

“But they fixed it. The break might not show.”

“It will show,” Dr. Estrada said. “Unless there was some kind of… magic involved.”

Mother’s face was getting red. “Would you both leave? I need to talk to Carmen alone.” They both nodded and went out.

Mother watched the door close. “I know you aren’t lying. You’ve never been good at that.”

“Thanks,” I said. Thanks for nothing.

“But it was a stupid thing to do, going off like that, and you know it.”

“I do, I do! And I’m sorry for all the trouble I—”

“But look. I’m a scientist, and so is your dad, after a fashion, and so is almost everybody else who’s going to hear this story today. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, I think so. They’re going to be skeptical.”

“Of course they are. They don’t get paid for believing things. They get paid for questioning them.”

“And you, Mother. Do you believe me?”

She stared at me with a fierce intensity I’d never seen before in my life. “Look. Whatever happened to you, I believe one hundred percent that you’re telling the truth. You’re telling the truth about what you remember, what you believe happened.”

“But I might be nuts.”

“Well, wouldn’t you say so? If I came in with your story? You’d say ‘Mom’s getting old.’ Wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, maybe I would.”

“And to prove that I wasn’t crazy, I would take you out and show you something that couldn’t be explained any other way. You know what they say about extraordinary claims?”

“They require extraordinary evidence.”

“That’s right. Once the storm calms down, you and I are going out to where you say… to where you fell through to the cave.” She put her hand on the back of my head and rubbed my hair. “I so much want to believe you. For my sake as well as yours. To find life here.”

3 THE DRAGON LADY

Paul was so sweet when he came in from his search. He hugged me so hard I cried out, from the rib, and then laughed. I’ll always remember that. Me laughing and him crying, with his big grin.

For hours he had pictured me out there dead. Prepared himself for finding my body.

It was his for the asking. At least that hadn’t changed.

Mother wanted to call a general assembly, so I could tell everybody the complete story, all at once, but Dargo Solingen wouldn’t allow it. She said that children do stunts like this to draw attention to themselves, and she wasn’t going to reward me with an audience. Of course she’s an expert about children, never having had any herself. Good thing. They’d be monsters.

So it was like the whisper game, where you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence to the person next to you, and she whispers it to the next, and so on. When it gets back to you, it’s all wrong, sometimes in a funny way.

This was not particularly funny. People would ask if I was really going around on the surface without a Mars suit, or think the Martians stripped me naked and interrogated me, or they broke my ankle on purpose. I put a detailed account on my Web site, but a lot of people would rather talk than read.

The MRI didn’t help much, except for people who wanted to believe I was lying. Dr. Jefferson said it looked like an old childhood injury, long ago healed. Mother was with me at the time, and she told him she was absolutely sure I’d never broken that ankle. To people like Dargo Solingen that was a big shrug; so I’d lied about that, too. I think we won Dr. Jefferson over, though he was inclined to believe me anyhow. So did most of the people who came over on the John Carter with us. They were willing to believe in Martians before they’d believe I would make up something like that.

Dad didn’t want to talk about it, but Mother was fascinated. I went to talk with her at the lab after dinner, where she and two others were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on an experiment.

“I don’t see how they could be actual Martians,” she said, “in the sense that we’re Earthlings. I mean, if they evolved here as oxygen-water creatures similar to us, then that was three billion years ago. And, as you said, a large animal isn’t going to evolve alone, without any other animals. Nor will it suddenly appear, without smaller, simpler animals preceding it. So they must be like us.”

“From Earth?”

She laughed. “I don’t think so. None of the eight-limbed creatures on Earth has very high technology. I think they have to have come from yet another planet. Unless we’re completely wrong about areology, about the history of conditions on this planet, they can’t have come from here.”

“What if they used to live on the surface?” I said. “Then moved underground as the planet dried up and lost its air?”

She shook her head. “The time scale. No species more complicated than a bacterium has survived for billions of years.”

“None on Earth,” I said.

“Touché,” she laughed. A bell chimed, and she went to the other side of the room and looked inside an aquarium, or terrarium. Or ares-arium, here, I suppose. She looked at the things growing inside and typed some numbers onto her clipboard.

“So they went underground three billion years ago with the technology to duplicate what sounds like a high-altitude Earth environment. And stayed that way for three billion years.” She shook her head. “The record in Earth creatures is a bacterium that’s symbiotic with aphids. Genome hasn’t changed in fifty million years.”

She laughed. “This would be sixty times longer? For such a complex organism? And I still want to know where the fossils are. Maybe they dug them all up and destroyed them, just to confuse us?”

“But it’s not like we’ve looked everywhere. Paul says it may be that life wasn’t distributed uniformly, and we just haven’t found any of the islands where things lived. The dinosaurs or whatever.”

“Well, you know it didn’t work that way on Earth. Fossils everywhere, from the bottom of the sea to the top of the Himalayas. Crocodile fossils in Antarctica.”

“Okay. That’s Earth.”

“It’s all we have. Coffee?” I said no, and she poured herself half a cup. “You’re right that it’s weak to generalize from one example. Paul could very well be right, too; there’s no evidence one way or the other.

“But look. We know all about one form of life on Mars: you and me and the others. We have to live in an artificial bubble that contains an alien environment, maintained by high technology, because we are the aliens here. So you stumble on eight-legged potato people who also live in a bubble that contains an alien environment, evidently maintained by high technology. The simplest explanation is that they’re aliens, too. Alien to Mars.”

“Yeah, I don’t disagree. I know about Occam’s razor.”

She smiled at that. “What’s fascinating to me, one of many things, is that you spent hours in that environment and felt no ill effects. Their planet’s very Earth-like.”

“What if it was Earth?”

That stopped her. “Wouldn’t we have noticed?”

“I mean a long time ago. What if they lived only on mountain-tops, and developed high technology thousands and thousands of years ago. Then they all left.”

“It’s an idea,” she said. “But it’s hard to believe that every one of them would be willing and able to leave—and that there would be no trace of their civilization, ten or even a hundred thousand years later. And where are their genetic precursors? The eight-legged equivalent of apes?”

“You don’t really believe me.”

“Well, I do; I do,” she said seriously. “I just don’t think there’s an easy explanation.”

“Like Dargo Solingen’s? The Figment of Imagination Theory?”

“Especially that. People don’t have complex consistent hallucinations; they’re called hallucinations because they’re fantastic, dream-like.

“Besides, I saw the dog; you couldn’t have put that dent in it with a lead-lined baseball bat. And she can’t explain the damage to your Mars suit, either, without positing that you leaped off the side of a cliff just to give yourself an alibi.” She was getting worked up. “And I’m your mother, even if I’m not a model one. I would goddamn remember if you had ever broken your ankle! That healed hairline fracture is enough proof for me—and for Dr. Jefferson and Dr. Milius and anybody else in this goddamned hole who didn’t convict you before you opened your mouth.”

“You’ve been a good mother,” I said.

She suddenly sat up and awkwardly hugged me across the table. “Not so good. Or you wouldn’t have done this.”

She sat down and rubbed my hand. “But if you hadn’t done it”— she laughed—“how long would it have been before we stumbled on these aliens? They’re watching us, but don’t seem eager to have us see them.”

The window on the wall was a greenboard of differential equations. She clicked on her clipboard and it became a real-time window. The storm was still blowing, but it had thinned out enough so I could see a vague outline of Telegraph Hill.

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll be able to go out and take a look. If Paul’s free, he’d probably like to come along; nobody knows the local real estate better than him.”

I stood up. “I can hardly wait. But I will wait, promise.”

“Good. Once is enough.” She smiled up at me. “Get some rest. Probably a long day tomorrow.”

Actually, I was up past midnight catching up on schoolwork, or not quite catching up. My brain wouldn’t settle down enough to worry about Kant and his Categorical Imperative. Not with aliens out there waiting to be contacted.

4 BAD COUGH

Paul was free until 1400, so right after breakfast we suited up and equipped a dog with extra oxygen and climbing gear. He’d done a lot of climbing and caving on both Earth and Mars. If we found the hole—when we found the hole—he was going to approach it roped up, so if he broke through the way I had, he wouldn’t fall far or fast.

I’d awakened early with a slight cough, but felt okay. I got some cough-suppressant pills from the first-aid locker, chewed one, and put two in my helmet’s tongue-operated pill cache.

We went through the air lock and weren’t surprised to see that the storm had covered all my tracks, and everyone else’s—including Red’s; I was hoping that his sawhorse thing might have gouged out a distinctive mark when it stopped.

We still had a good chance of finding the hole, thanks to the MPS built into the suit and its inertial compass. I’d started counting steps, going west, when I set out from Telegraph Hill, and was close to five thousand when I fell through. That’s about four kilometers, maybe an hour’s walk in the daytime.

“So we’re probably being watched,” Mother said, and waved to the invisible camera. “Hey there, Mr. Red! Hello, Dr. Green! We’re bringing back your patient with the insurance forms.”

I waved, too, both arms. Paul put up both his hands palm out, showing he wasn’t armed. Though what it would mean to a four-armed creature, I wasn’t sure.

No welcoming party appeared, so we went to the right of Telegraph Hill and started walking and counting. A lot of the terrain looked familiar. Several times I had us move to the left or right when I was sure I had been closer to a given formation.

We walked a half kilometer or so past Paul’s wrecked dumbo. I hadn’t seen it in the dark.

Suddenly I noticed something. “Wait! Paul! I think it’s just ahead of you.” I hadn’t realized it, walking in the dark, but what seemed to be a simple rise in the ground was actually rounded, like an overturned shallow bowl.

“Like a little lava dome, maybe,” he said. “That’s where you fell through.” He pointed at something I couldn’t quite see from my angle and height. “Big enough for you and the dog, anyhow.”

He unloaded his mountaineering stuff from the dog, then took a hammer and pounded into the ground a long piton, which is like a spearpoint with a hole for the rope. Then he did another one about a foot away. He passed an end of the rope through both of them and tied it off.

He pulled on the rope with all his weight. “Carmen, Laura, help me test this.” We did, and it still held. He looped most of the rope over his shoulder and took a couple of turns under his arms, and then clamped it through a metal thing he called a crab. It’s supposed to keep you from falling too fast, even if you let go.

“This probably isn’t all necessary,” he said, “since I’m just taking a look down. But better safe than dead.” He backed up the slight incline, checking over his shoulder, then got on his knees to approach the hole.

I held my breath as he took out a big flashlight and leaned over the edge. I didn’t hear Mother breathing, either.

“Okay!” he said. “There’s the side reflector that broke off your dog. I’ve got a good picture.”

“Good,” I tried to say, but it came out as a cough. Then another cough, and then several, harder and harder. I felt faint and sat down and tried to stay calm. Eyes closed, shallow breathing.

When I opened my eyes, I saw specks of blood on the inside of my helmet. I could taste it inside my mouth and on my lips. “Mother, I’m sick.”

She saw the blood and knelt down next to me. “Breathe. Can you breathe?”

“Yes. I don’t think it’s the suit.” She was checking the oxygen fitting and meter on the back.

“How long have you felt sick?”

“Not long… well, now I do. I had a little cough this morning.”

“And didn’t tell anybody.”

“No, I took a pill and it was all right.”

“I can see how all right it was. Do you think you can stand?”

I nodded and got to my feet, wobbling a little. She held on to my arm. Then Paul came up and held the other.

“I can just see the antenna on Telegraph Hill,” he said. “I’ll call for the jeep.”

“No, don’t,” I pleaded. “I don’t want to give the Dragon the satisfaction.”

Mother gave a nervous laugh. “This is way beyond that, sweetheart. Blood in your lungs? What if I let you walk back, and you dropped dead?”

“I’m not going to die.” But saying that gave me a horrible chill. Then I coughed a bright red string onto my faceplate. Mother eased me back down, and awkwardly sat with my helmet in her lap while Paul shouted “Mayday!” over the radio.

“Where did they come up with that word?” I asked Mother.

“Easy to understand on a radio, I guess. ‘Mo dough’ would work just as well.” I heard the click as her glove touched my helmet. Trying to smooth my hair.

I didn’t cry. Embarrassing to admit, but I guess I felt kind of important, dying and all. Dargo Solingen would feel like shit for doubting me. Though the cause-and-effect link there wasn’t too clear.

I lay there trying not to cough for maybe twenty minutes before the jeep pulled up, driven by Dad. One big happy family. He and Mother lifted me into the back, and Paul took over the driving, leaving the dog and his climbing stuff behind.

It was a fast and rough ride back. I got into another coughing spasm and spattered more blood and goop on the faceplate.

Mother and Dad carried me into the air lock like a sack of grain, and then were all over each other trying to get me out of the Mars suit. At least they left the skinsuit on while they hurried me through the corridor and mess area to Dr. Jefferson’s aid station.

He asked my parents to step outside, set me on the examination table, and stripped off the top of the skinsuit, to listen to my breathing with a stethoscope. He shook his head.

“Carmen, it sure sounds as if you’ve got something in your lungs. But when I heard you were coming in with this, I looked at the whole-body MRI we took yesterday, and there’s nothing there.” He clicked on his clipboard and asked the window for my MRI, and there I was in all my transparent glory.

“Better take another one.” He pulled the top up over my shoulders. “You don’t have to take anything off; just lie down here.” The act of lying down made me cough sharply, but I caught it in my palm.

He took a tissue and gently wiped my hand, and looked at the blood. “Damn,” he said quietly. “You aren’t a smoker. I mean on Earth.”

“Just twice. Once tobacco and once pot. Just one time each.”

He nodded. “Now take a really deep breath and try to hold it.” He took the MRI wand and passed it back and forth over my upper body. “Okay. You can breathe now.

“New picture,” he said to the window. Then he was quiet for too long.

“Oh my. What… what could that be?”

I looked, and there were black shapes in both of my lungs, about the size of golf balls. “What is… what are they?”

He shook his head. “Not cancer, not an infection, this fast. Bronchitiswouldn’t show up black, anyhow. Better call Earth.” He looked at me with concern and something else, maybe puzzlement. “Let’s get you into bed in the next room, and I’ll give you a sedative. Stop the coughing. And then maybe I’ll take a look inside.”

“Inside?”

“Brachioscopy, put a little camera down there. You won’t feel anything.”

In fact, I didn’t feel anything until I woke up several hours later. Mother was sitting by the bed, her hand on my forehead.

“My nose… the inside of my nose feels funny.”

“That’s where the tube went in. The brachioscope.”

“Oh, yuck. Did he find anything?”

She hesitated. “It’s… not from Earth. They snipped off some of it and took it to the lab. It’s not… it doesn’t have DNA.”

“I’ve got a Martian disease?”

“Mars, or wherever your potato people are from. Not Earth, anyhow; everything alive on Earth has DNA.”

I prodded where it ached, under my ribs. “It’s not organic?”

“Well, it is. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur—it has amino acids and proteins and even something like RNA. But that’s as far as it goes.”

That sounded bad enough. “So they’re going to have to operate? On both of my lungs?”

She made a little noise and I looked up and saw her wiping her eyes. “What is it? Mother?”

“It’s not that simple. The little piece they snipped off, it had to go straight into the glove box, the environmental isolation unit. That’s the procedure we have for any Martian life we discover, because we don’t know what effect it might have on human life. In your case…”

“In my case, it’s already attacked a human.”

“That’s right. And they can’t operate on you in the glove box.”

“So they’re just going to leave it there?”

“No. But Dr. Jefferson can’t operate until he can work in a place that’s environmentally isolated from the rest of the base. They’re working on it now, turning the far end of Unit B into a little self-contained hospital. You’ll move in there tomorrow or the next day, and he’ll take out the stuff. Two operations.”

“Two?”

“The first lung has to be working before he opens the second. On Earth, he could put you on a heart-lung machine, I guess, and work on both. But not here.”

I felt suddenly cold and clammy, and I must have turned pale. “It’s not that bad,” Mother said quickly. “He doesn’t have to open you up; he’ll be working through a small hole in your side. It’s called thorascopy. Like when I had my knee operated on, and I was just in and out. And he’ll have the best surgeons on Earth looking over his shoulder, advising him.”

With a half-hour delay, I thought. What if their advice was “No—don’t do that!” Oops.

I thought of an old bad joke: Politicians cover their mistakes with money; cooks cover their mistakes with mayonnaise; doctors cover theirs with dirt. I could be the first person ever buried on Mars, what an honor.

“Wait,” I said. “Maybe they could help.”

“The Earth doctors? Sure—”

“No! I mean the aliens.”

“Honey, they couldn’t—”

“They fixed my ankle just like that, didn’t they?”

“Well, evidently they did. But that’s sort of a mechanical thing. They wouldn’t have to know any internal medicine…”

“But it wasn’t medicine at all, not like we know it. Those big lenses, the smoking herbs. It was kind of mumbo-jumbo, but it worked!”

There was one loud rap on the door, and Dr. Jefferson opened it and stepped inside, looking agitated. “Laura, Carmen—things have gone from bad to worse. The Parienza kids started coughing blood; they’ve got it. So I put my boy through the MRI, and he’s got a mass in one of his lungs, too.

“Look, I have to operate on the Parienzas first; they’re young, and this is hitting them harder…”

“That’s okay,” I said. By all means, get some practice on someone else first.

“Laura, I want you to assist me in the surgery along with Selene.” Dr. Milius. “So far, this is only infecting the children. If it gets into the general population, if I get it—”

“Alf! I’m not a surgeon—I’m not even a doctor!”

“If Selene and I get this and die, you are a doctor. You are the doctor. You at least know how to use a scalpel.”

“Cutting up animals that are already dead!”

“Just… calm down. The machine’s not that complicated. It’s a standard waldo interface, and you have real-time MRI to show you where you’re going.”

“Can you hear yourself talking, Alphonzo? I’m just a biologist.”

There was a long moment of silence while he looked at her. “Just come and pay attention. You might have to do Carmen.”

“All right,” Mother said. She looked grim. “Now?”

He nodded. “Selene’s preparing them. I’m going to operate on Murray while she watches and assists; then she’ll do Roberta while I observe. Maybe an hour and a half each.”

“What can I do?” I said.

“Just stay put and try to rest,” he said. “We’ll get to you in three or four hours. Don’t worry… you won’t feel anything.” Then he and Mother were gone.

Won’t feel anything? I was already feeling pretty crappy. I get pissed off and go for a walk and bring back the Plague from Outer Space?

I touched the window, and said “Window outside.” It was almost completely dark, just a faint line of red showing the horizon. The dust storm was over.

The whole plan crystallized then. I guess I’d been thinking of parts of it since I knew I’d be alone for a while.

I just zipped up my skinsuit and walked. The main corridor was almost deserted, people running along on urgent errands. Nobody was thinking of going outside—no one but me.

If the aliens had had a picture of me leaving the base at two in the morning, before, then they probably were watching us all the time. I could signal them. Send a message to Red.

I searched around for a pencil to disable the air-lock buzzer. Even while I was doing it, I wondered whether I was acting sanely. Was I just trying to escape being operated on? Mother used to say “Do something, even if it’s wrong.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to do other than sit around and watch the situation deteriorate.

If the aliens were watching, I could make Red understand how serious it was. Whether he and Green could do anything, I didn’t know. But what else was there? Things were happening too fast.

I didn’t run into anyone until I was almost there. Then I nearly collided with Card as he stepped out of the mess-hall bathroom.

“What you doing over here?” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be in sick bay.”

“No, I’m just—” Of course I started coughing. “Let me by, all right?”

“No! What are you up to?”

“Look, microbe. I don’t have time to explain.” I pushed by him. “Every second counts.”

“You’re going outside again! What are you, crazy?”

“Look, look, look—for once in your life, don’t be a…” I had a moment of desperate inspiration, and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Card, listen. I need you. You have to trust me.”

“What, this is about your crazy Martian story?”

“I can prove it’s not crazy, but you have to come help me.”

“Help you with what?”

“Just suit up and step outside with me. I think they’ll come, the Martians, if I signal them, and they might be able to help us.”

He was hesitant. I knew he only half believed me—but at least he did half believe me. “What? What do you want me to do outside?”

“I just want you to stand in the door, so the air lock can’t close. That way the Dragon can’t come out and froog the deal.”

That did make him smile. “So what you want is for me to be in as deep shit as you are.”

“Exactly! Are you up for it?”

“You are so easy to see through, you know? You could be a window.”

“Yeah, yeah. Are you with me?”

He glanced toward the changing room, then back down the hall. “Let’s go.”

We must have gotten me into my suit in ninety seconds flat. It took him an extra minute because he had to strip and wiggle into the skinsuit first. I kept my eye on the changing-room door, but I didn’t have any idea what I would say if someone walked in. Just a little incest?

My faceplate was still spattered with dried blood, which was part of the vague plan: I assumed they would know that the blood meant trouble, and their bug camera, or whatever it was, would be on me as soon as I stepped outside. I had a powerful flashlight, and would turn that on my face, with no other lights. Then wave my arms, jump around, whatever.

We rushed through the safety check, and I put two fresh oxygen bottles into the dog I’d bashed up. Disabled the buzzer, and we crowded into the air lock, closed it, and cycled it.

We’d agreed not to use the radio. Card signaled for me to touch helmets. “How long?”

“An hour, anyhow.” I could walk past Telegraph Hill by then.

“Okay. Watch where you step, clumsy.” I hit his arm.

The door opened and I stepped out into the darkness. There was a little light, actually; the sun had just gone down.

Card put one foot out on the sand and leaned back against the door. He pantomimed looking at his watch.

I closed my eyes and pointed the light at my face. Bright red through my eyelids; I knew I’d be dazzled blind for a while after I stopped. So after I’d given them a minute of the bloody faceplate, I just stood in one place and shined the light out over the plain, waving it around in fast circles, which I hoped would mean “Help!”

I wasn’t sure how long it had taken Red to bring me from their habitat level to the cave where he was parked, and then on to here. Maybe two hours? I hadn’t been tracking too well. Without a dust storm it might be faster. I pulled on the dog and headed toward the right of Telegraph Hill.

The last thing I expected to happen was this: I hadn’t walked twenty yards when Red came zooming up on his weird vehicle and stopped in a great spray of dust, which sparkled in the last light of dusk.

Card broke radio silence with a justifiable “Holy shit!”

Red helped me put the dog on one side, and I got into the other, and we were off. I looked back and waved at Card, and he waved back. The base shrank really fast and slipped under the horizon.

I looked forward for a moment, then turned away. It was just a little too scary, screaming along a few inches over the ground, missing boulders by a hair. The steering must have been automatic. Or maybe Red had inhuman reflexes. Nothing else about him was all that human.

Except the need to come back and help. He must have been waiting nearby.

It seemed no more than ten or twelve minutes before the thing slowed down and drifted into the slanted cave I remembered. Maybe he had taken a roundabout way before, to hide the fact that they were so close.

We got out the dog and I followed him back down the way we had come a couple of days before. I had to stop twice with coughing fits, and by the time we got to the place where he shed his Mars suit, there was a scary amount of blood.

An odd thing to think, but I wondered whether he would take my body back if I died here. Why should I care?

We went on down, and at the level where the lake was visible, Green was waiting, along with two small ones dressed in white. We went together down to the dark floor and followed blue lines back to what seemed to be the same hospital room where I’d first awakened after the accident.

I slumped down on the pillow, feeling completely drained and about to barf. I unshipped my helmet and took a cautious breath. It smelled like a cold mushroom farm, exactly what I expected.

Red handed me a glass of water and I took it gratefully. Then he picked up my helmet with his two large arms and did a curiously human thing with a small one: he wiped a bit of blood off the inside with one finger, and then lifted it to his mouth to taste it.

“Wait!” I said. “That could be poison to you!”

He set the helmet down. “How nice of you to be concerned,” he said, in a voice like a British cube actor.

I just shook my head. After a few seconds I was able to squeak, “What?”

“Many of us can speak English,” Green said, “or other of your languages. We’ve been listening to your radio, television, and cube for two hundred years.”

“But… before… you… .”

“That was to protect ourselves,” Red said. “When we saw you had hurt yourself, and I had to bring you here, it was decided that no one would speak a human language in your presence. We were not ready to make contact with humans. You are a dangerous, violent race that tends to destroy what it doesn’t understand.”

“Not all of us,” I said.

“We know that. We were considering various courses of action when we found out you were ill.”

“We monitor your colony’s communications with Earth,” one of the white ones said, “and saw immediately what was happening to you. We all have that breathing fungus soon after we’re born. But with us it isn’t serious. We have an herb that cures it permanently.”

“So… you can fix it?”

Red spread out all four hands. “We are so different from you, in chemistry and biology. The treatment might help you. It might kill you.”

“But this crap is sure to kill me if we don’t do anything!”

The other white-clad one spoke up. “We don’t know. I am called Rezlan, and I am… of a class that studies your people. A scientist, or philosopher.

“The fungus would certainly kill you if it continued to grow. It would fill up your lungs, and you couldn’t breathe. But we don’t know; it never happens to us. Your body may learn to adapt to it, and it would be… illegal? Immoral, improper… for us to experiment on you. If you were to die… I don’t know how to say it. Impossible.”

“The cure for your cheville? Your… ankle was different,” Green said. “There was no risk à sa vie… to your life.”

I coughed and stared at the spatter of blood on my palm. “But if you don’t treat me, and I die? Won’t that be the same thing?”

All four of them made a strange buzzing sound. Red patted my shoulder. “Carmen, that’s a wonderful joke. ‘The same thing.’ ” He buzzed again, and so did the others.

“Wait,” I said, “I’m going to die, and it’s funny?”

“No no non,” Green said. “Dying itself isn’t funny.” Red put his large hands on his potato head and waggled it back and forth, and the others buzzed.

Red tapped his head three times, which set them off again. A natural comedian. “If you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny.”

I started to cry, and he took my hand in his small scaly one and patted it. “We are so different. What is funny… is how we here are caught. We don’t have a choice. We have to treat you even though we don’t know what the outcome will be.” He buzzed softly. “But that’s not funny to you.”

“No!” I tried not to wail. “I can see this part. There’s a paradox. You might kill me, trying to help me.”

“And that’s not funny to you?”

“No, not really. Not at all, really.”

“Would it be funny if it was somebody else?”

“Funny? No!”

“What if it was your worst enemy? Would that make you smile?”

“No. I don’t have any enemies that bad.” Maybe one.

He said something that made the others buzz. I gritted my teeth and tried not to cry. My whole chest hurt, like both lungs held a burning ton of crud, and here I was trying not to barf in front of a bunch of potato-head aliens. “Red. Even if I don’t get the joke. Could you do the treatment before I foogly die?”

“Oh, Carmen. It’s being prepared. This is… it’s a way of dealing with difficult things. We joke. You would say laughing instead of crying.” He turned around, evidently looking back the way we had come, though it’s hard to tell which way a potato is looking. “It is taking too long, which is part of why we have to laugh. When we have children, it’s all at one time, and so they all need the treatment at the same time, a few hundred days later, after they bud. We’re trying to grow… it’s like trying to find a vegetable out of season? We have to make it grow when it doesn’t want to. And make enough for the other younglings in your colony.”

“The adults don’t get it?”

He did a kind of shrug. “We don’t. Or rather, we only get it once, as children. Do you know about mumps and measles?”

“You-sels?”

“Measles and mumps used to be diseases humans got as children. Before your parents’ parents were born. We heard about them on the radio, and they reminded us of this.”

A new green-clad small one came through the plastic sheets, holding a stone bowl. She and Red exchanged a few whistles and scrapes. “If you are like us when we are small,” he said, “this will make you excrete in every way. So you may want to undress.”

How wonderful. Here comes Carmen, the stark naked shitting pissing farting burping barfing human sideshow. Don’t forget snot and earwax. I got out of the Mars suit and unzipped the skinsuit and stepped out of that. I was cold, and every orifice clenched up tight. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Red held my right arm with his two large ones, and Green did the same on the left. Not a good sign. The new green one spit into the bowl and it started to smoke.

She brought the smoking herb under my nose and I tried to get away, but Red and Green held me fast. It was the worst-smelling crap you could ever imagine. I barfed through mouth and nose and then started retching and coughing explosively, horribly, like a cat with a hairball. It did bring up the two fungus things, like small furry rotten fruit. I would’ve barfed again if there had been anything left in my stomach, but I decided to pass out instead.

5 INVASION FROM EARTH

I half woke up, I don’t know how much later, with Red tugging gently on my arm. “Carmen,” he said, “do you live now? There is a problem.”

I grunted something that meant yes, I am alive, but no, I’m not sure I want to be. My throat felt like someone had pulled something scratchy and dead up through it. “Sleep,” I said, but he picked me up and started carrying me like a child.

“There are humans from the colony here,” he said, speeding up to a run. “They do not understand. They’re wrecking everything.” He blew through the plastic sheets into the dark hall.

“Red… it’s hard to breathe here.” He didn’t respond, just ran faster, a rippling horse gait. His own breath was coming hard, like sheets of paper being ripped. “Red. I need… suit. Oxygen.”

“As we do.” We were suddenly in the middle of a crowd—hundreds of them in various sizes and colors—surging up the ramp toward the surface. He said three short words over and over, very loud, and the crowd stopped moving and parted to let us through.

When we went through the next set of doors I could hear air whistling out. On the other side my ears popped with a painful crack, and I felt cold, colder than I ever had been. “What’s happening?”

“Your… humans… have a… thing.” He was wheezing before each word. “A tool… that… tears… through.”

He set me down gently on the cold rock floor. I shuddered out of control, teeth chattering. No air. Lungs full of nothing but pain. The world was going white. I was starting to die but instead of praying or something I just noticed that the hairs in my nose had frozen and were making a crinkly sound when I tried to breathe.

Red was putting on the plastic layers that made up his Mars suit. He picked me up and I cried out in startled pain—the skin on my right forearm and breast and hip had frozen to the rock—and he held me close with three arms while the fourth did something to seal the plastic. Then he held me with all four arms and crooned something reassuring to weird creatures from another planet. He smelled like a mushroom you wouldn’t eat, but I could breathe again.

I was bleeding some from the ripped skin and my lungs and throat still didn’t want to work, and I was being hugged to death by a nightmarish singing monster, so rather than put up with it all, my body just passed out again.

I woke up to my lover fighting with Red, with me in between. Red was trying to hold on to me with his small arms while Paul was going after him with some sort of pipe, and he was defending himself with the large arms. “No!” I screamed. “Paul! No!”

Of course he couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum, but I guess anyone can lip-read the word “no.” He stepped back with an expression on his face that I had never seen. Anguish, I suppose, or rage. Well, here was his lover, naked and bleeding, in the many arms of a gruesome alien, looking way too much like a movie poster from a century ago.

Taka Wu and Mike Silverman were carrying a spalling laser. “Red,” I said, “watch out for the guys with the machine.”

“I know,” he said. “We’ve seen you use it underground. That’s how they tore up the first set of doors. We can’t let them use it again.”

It was an interesting standoff. Four pretty big aliens in their plastic-wrap suits. Paul and my father and mother and nine other humans in Mars suits, armed with tomato stakes and shovels and one laser, the humans looking kind of pissed off and frightened. The Martians probably were, too. A good thing we hadn’t brought any guns to this planet.

Red whispered. “Can you make them leave the machine and follow us?”

“I don’t know… they’re scared.” I mouthed, “Mother, Dad,” and pointed back the way we had come. “Fol-low us,” I said with slow exaggeration. Confined as I was, I couldn’t make any sweeping gestures, but I jabbed one forefinger back the way we had come.

Dad stepped forward slowly, his hands palm out. Mother started to follow him. Red shifted me around and held out his hand, and my father took it, and held his other one out for Mother. She took it and we went crabwise through the dark layers of the second air lock. Then the third and the fourth, and we were on the slope overlooking the lake.

The crowd of aliens we’d left behind was still there, perhaps a daunting sight for Mother and Dad. But they held on, and the crowd parted to let us through.

I noticed ice was forming on the edge of the lake. Were we going to kill them all?

“Pardon,” Red muttered, and held me so hard I couldn’t breathe, while he wiggled out of his suit and left it on the ground, then set me down gently.

It was like walking on ice—on dry ice—and my breath came out in plumes. But he and I walked together along the blue line paths, followed by my parents, down to the sanctuary of the white room. Green was waiting there with my skinsuit. I gratefully pulled it on and zipped up. “Boots?”

“Boots,” she said, and went back the way we’d come.

“Are you all right?” Red asked.

My father had his helmet off. “These things speak English?”

Red sort of shrugged. “And Chinese, in my case. We’ve been eavesdropping on you since you discovered radio.”

My father fainted dead away.

Green produced this thing that looked like a gray cabbage and held it by Dad’s face. I had a vague memory of it being used on me, sort of like an oxygen source. He came around in a minute or so.

“Are you actually Martians?” Mother said. “You can’t be.”

Red nodded in a jerky way. “We are Martians only the same way you are. We live here. But we came from somewhere else.”

“Where?” Dad croaked.

“No time for that. You have to talk to your people. We’re losing air and heat, and have to repair the door. Then we have to treat your children. Carmen was near death.”

Dad got to his knees and stood up, then stooped to pick up his helmet. “You know how to fix it? The laser damage.”

“It knows how to repair itself. But it’s like a wound in the body. We have to use stitches or glue to close the hole. Then it grows back.”

“So you just need for us to not interfere.”

“And help, by showing where the damage is.”

He started to put his helmet on. “What about Carmen?”

“Yeah. Where’s my suit?”

Red faced me. I realized you could tell that by the little black mouth slit. “You’re very weak. You should stay here.”

“But—”

“No time to argue. Stay here till we return.” All of them but Green went bustling through the air lock.

“So,” I said to her. “I guess I’m a hostage.”

“My English is not good,” she said. “Parlez-vous français?” I said no. “Nihongo de hanashimasu ka?”

Probably Japanese, or maybe Martian. “No, sorry.” I sat down and waited for the air to run out.

6 ZEN FOR MORONS

Green put a kind of black fibrous poultice on the places where my skin had burned off from the icy ground, and the pain stopped immediately. That raised a big question I couldn’t ask, having neglected both French and Japanese in school. But help was on its way.

While I was getting dressed after Green had finished her poulticing, another green one showed up.

“Hello,” it said. “I was asked here because I know English. Some English.”

“I—I’m glad to meet you. I’m Carmen.”

“I know. And you want me to say my name. But you couldn’t say it yourself. So give me a name.”

“Um… Robin Hood?”

“I am Robin Hood, then. I am pleased to meet you.”

I couldn’t think of any pleasantries, so I dove right in: “How come your medicine works for us? My mother says we’re unrelated at the most basic level, DNA.”

“Am I ‘DNA’ now? I thought I was Robin Hood.”

This was not going to be easy. “No. Yes. You’re Robin Hood. Why does your medicine work on humans?”

“I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t it? It’s medicine.”

So much for the Enigmatic Superior Aliens theory. “Look. You know what a molecule is?”

“I know the word. Very small. Too small to see.” He took his big head in two large-arm hands and wiggled it, the way Red did when he was agitated. “Forgive me. Science is not my… there is no word. I can’t know science. I don’t think any of us can, really. But especially not me.”

I gestured at everything. “Then where did this all come from? It didn’t just happen.”

“That’s right. It didn’t happen. It’s always been this way.”

I needed a scientist, and they sent me a philosopher. Not too bright, either. “Can you ask her?” I pointed to Green. “How can her medicine work when we’re chemically so different?”

“She’s not a ‘her.’ Sometimes she is, and sometimes she’s a ‘he.’ Right now she’s a ‘what.’ ”

“Okay. Would you please ask it?”

They exchanged a long series of wheedly-poot-rasp sounds.

“It’s something like this,” Robin Hood said. “Curing takes intelligence. With Earth humans, the intelligence comes along with the doctor, or scientists. With us, it’s in the medicine.” He touched the stuff on my breast, which made me jump. “It knows you are different, and works on you differently. It works on the very smallest level.”

“Nanotechnology,” I said.

“Maybe smaller than that,” he said. “As small as chemistry. Intelligent molecules.”

“You do know about nanotechnology?”

“Only from TV and the cube.” He spidered over to the bed.

“Please sit. You make me nervous, balanced there on two legs.” I obliged him. “This is how different we are, Carmen. You know when nanotechnology was discovered.”

“End of the twentieth century sometime.”

“There’s no such knowledge for us. This medicine has always been. Like the living doors that keep the air in. Like the things that make the air, concentrate the oxygen. Somebody made them, but that was so long ago, it was before history. Before we came to Mars.”

“Where did you come from? When?”

“We would call it Earth, though it’s not your Earth, of course. Really far away, really long ago.” He paused. “More than ten thousand ares.”

A hundred centuries before the Pyramids. “But that’s not long enough ago for Mars to be inhabitable. Mars was Mars a million ares ago.”

He made an almost human gesture, all four hands palms up. “It could be much longer. At ten thousand ares, history becomes mystery. Our faraway Earth could be a myth, and the Others who created us. There aren’t any spaceships lying around.

“What deepens the mystery is that we could never live on Mars, on the surface, but we could live on Earth, your Earth. So why did the Others bring us many light-years just to leave us on the wrong planet?”

I thought about what Red had said. “Maybe because we’re too dangerous.”

“That’s a theory. Or it might have been the dinosaurs. They looked pretty dangerous.”

Dinosaurs. I took a deep breath. “Robin Hood. Have you, have your people, actually been on Mars that long? I mean, dinosaurs were on Earth a long time before people.”

He wiggled his head again, with his big hands. “I don’t know! You have to ask the story family, the history family. The yellow people?”

I remembered the two dressed in amber in that room where I was taken for inspection. “Okay. I’ll ask a yellow person. So what do green people do? Are you doctors?”

“Oh, no.” He pointed at the other. “It’s green, and it’s a doctor. But why would you think that all of us greens are doctors? Every human I ever saw wears white, but I don’t think therefore that you all have the same function.”

Good grief. Was I the first cross-species racist? “I’m sorry. What is it that you do, then?”

He shuffled forward and back like a nervous spider. “I’m not a ‘do’ ” He put a small hand on my knee. “I’m more a ‘be.’ You humans…” He touched his head with both large hands but didn’t wiggle it. “You are all about what you do. Like, what do you do, Carmen?”

“I’m a student. I study things.”

“But that’s not a ‘do’ at all! That’s a be, like me.”

I was either out of my depth or into a profound shallowness. “So while you’re… being, what do you… be? What do you be that’s different from what others be?”

“You see? You see?” He emitted a sound like a thumbnail scraping across a comb. “ ‘What do you be’—you can’t even say it!”

“Robin Hood. Look. I’m both a do and a be—my ‘be’ is I’m a human being, female, American, whatever—it’s what I am when I’m just standing here. But then I can go do something, like get a drink of water, and that doesn’t change my be at all.”

“But it does! It always does. Don’t you see?”

Ontology, meet linguistics. Go to your corners and come out swinging. “You’re right, Robin. You’re absolutely right. We just don’t put things quite that way.”

“Put things?”

“We don’t say it quite that way.” I took a deep breath. “Tell me about these Others. They lived very far away?”

“Yes, very far. We used to call it something like the ‘heaven’ some humans talk about, but since we got TV and the cube, we know it’s just really far away. Some other star.”

“But you don’t know which one.”

“No, not which and not how long ago. But very far and very long. The story family says it was a time before time had meaning. The builder family says it must be so far away that light takes ares to get from that star to here. Because there are no stars any closer.”

“That’s interesting. You don’t have telescopes and things, but you figured that out?”

“We don’t need telescopes. We get that kind of knowledge from you humans, from the cube.”

“Before the cube, though. They were up in heaven?”

“I guess so. We also learned about gods from you. The Others are sort of gods; they created us. But they actually exist.”

Red suddenly appeared to rescue me from Sunday school. “Carmen, if you feel able, we’d like to have you up where we’re working. The humans are not understanding us too well.”

My experience with Robin Hood didn’t make me too hopeful. But I could do “pick this up and put it there.” I stepped into my suit and chinned the heat up all the way, and followed him up to the cold.

7 SUFFER THE LITTLE CHlLDREN

The damage from the laser was repaired in a few hours, and I was bundled back to the colony to be rayed and poked and prodded and interviewed by doctors and scientists. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, human or alien in origin.

“The treatment they gave you sounds like primitive arm-waving,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The fact that they don’t know why it works is scary.”

“They don’t know why anything works over there. It sounds like it’s all hand-me-down science from thousands of years ago. Ares.”

He nodded and frowned. “You’re the only data point we have. If the disease were less serious, I’d try to introduce it to the kids one at a time, and monitor their progress. But there’s no time. And everyone may have it already.”

Rather than try to take a bunch of sick children over there, they invited the Martians to come to us. It was Red and Green, logically, with Robin Hood and an amber one following closely behind. I was outside, waiting for them, and escorted Red through the air lock.

Half the adults in the colony seemed crowded into the changing room for a first look at the aliens. There was a lot of whispered conversation while Red worked his way out of his suit.

“It’s hot,” he said. “The oxygen makes me dizzy. This is less than Earth, though?”

“Slightly less,” Dr. Jefferson said. He was in the front of the crowd. “Like living on a mountain.”

“It smells strange. But not bad. I can smell your hydroponics.”

“Where are les enfantes?” Green said as soon as she was out of the suit. “No time talk.” She held out her bag of herbs and chemicals and shook it.

The children had been prepared with the idea that these “Martians” were our friends, and had a way to cure them. There were pictures of them and their cave. But a picture of an eight-legged potato-head monstrosity isn’t nearly as distressing as the real thing—especially to a room full of children who are terribly ill with something no one can explain but which they know is Martian in origin. So their reaction when Dr. Jefferson walked in with Dargo Solingen and Green was predictable—screaming and crying and, from the ambulatory ones, escape attempts. Of course the doors were locked, with people like me spying in through the windows, looking in on the chaos.

Everybody loves Dr. Jefferson, and almost everybody is afraid of Dargo Solingen, and eventually the combination worked. Green just quietly stood there like Exhibit A, which helped. It takes a while not to think of giant spiders when you see them walk.

They had talked about the possibility of sedating the children, to make the experience less traumatic, but the only data they had about the treatment was my description, and they were afraid that if the children were too relaxed, they wouldn’t cough forcefully enough to expel all the crap. Without sedation, the experience might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but at least they would have lives.

They wanted to keep the children isolated, and both adults would have to stay in there for a while after the treatment, to make sure they hadn’t caught it, the Martians’ assurances notwithstanding.

So the only thing between the child who was being treated and the ones who were waiting for it was a sheet suspended from the ceiling, and after the first one, they all had heard what they were in for. It was done in age order, youngest to oldest, and at first there was some undignified running around, grabbing the victims and dragging them to behind the sheet, where they volubly did the hairball performance.

But the children all seemed to sleep peacefully after the thing was over, which calmed most of the others—if they were like me, they hadn’t been sleeping much. Card, one of the oldest, who had to wait the longest, pretended to be unconcerned and sleep before the treatment. I know how brave that was of him; he doesn’t handle being sick well. As if I did.

The rest of us were mostly crowded into the mess hall, talking with Red and Robin Hood. The other one asked that we call him Fly-in-Amber, and said that it was his job to remember, so he wouldn’t be saying much.

Red said that his job, his function, was hard to describe in human terms. He was sort of like a mayor, a local leader or organizer. He also did things that called for a lot of muscular strength.

Robin Hood said he was being modest; for 140 ares he had been a respected leader. When their surveillance device showed that I was in danger of dying, they all looked to Red to make the decision, then act on it.

“It was not a hard decision,” he said. “Ever since humans landed, we knew that a confrontation was inevitable. I took this opportunity to initiate it, so it would be on our terms. I couldn’t know that Carmen would catch this thing, which you call a disease, and bring it back home with her.”

“You don’t call it a disease?” one of the scientists asked.

“No… I guess in your terms it might be called a ‘phase,’ a developmental phase. You go from being a young child to being an older child. For us, it’s unpleasant but not life-threatening.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” the xenologist Howard Jain said. “It’s like a human teenager who has acne, transmitting it to a trout. Or even more extreme than that—the trout at least has DNA.”

“And you and the trout have a common ancestor,” Robin Hood said. “We have no idea what we might have evolved from.”

“Did you get the idea of evolution from us?” he asked.

“No, not as a practical matter. We’ve been crossbreeding plants and fungi for a long time. But Darwinism, yes, from you. From your television programs back in the twentieth century.”

“Wait,” my father said. “How did you build a television receiver in the first place?”

There was a pause, and then Red spoke: “We didn’t. It’s always been there.”

“What?”

“It’s a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century—”

“Those like me remembered them all,” Fly-in-Amber said, “though they were just noises at first.”

“—and we knew the signals were from Earth because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in midcentury, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions.”

“Always been there… How long is ‘always’?” Howard Jain asked. “How far back does your history go?”

“We don’t have history in your sense,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking.”

“You have explored more of Mars than we have,” Robin Hood said, “with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that’s why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone.”

“Some of us have a theory,” Red said, “that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don’t know you can’t tell.”

“You can’t erase a memory,” Fly-in-Amber said.

“We can’t. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can’t do.”

“You are not a memory expert. I am.”

Red’s complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started.”

“You’re that old!” Jain said.

“Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War.”

“You have told us this tale before,” Robin Hood said. “Not all of us agree.”

Red pushed on. “The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time, if Russian bombers were on their way.” He paused. “I think that’s what we are.”

“Warning whom?” Jain said.

“Whoever put us here. We call them the Others. We’re on Mars instead of Earth because the Others didn’t want you to know about us until you had spaceflight.”

“Until we posed a threat to them,” Dad said.

“That’s a very human thought.” Red paused. “Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn’t want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point.”

“We wouldn’t be any threat to them,” Jain said. “If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, light-years from home, it’s hard to imagine what they could do now. What they could do to us.”

The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. “They’re done now. It looks like all the kids are okay.” She looked around at all the serious faces. “I said they’re okay. Crisis over.”

Actually, it had just begun.

8 AMBASSADOR

Which is how I would become an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn’t evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?

Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.

On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions the aliens were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I would be sent back there with Red and Green, along with four friends, who would be coordinating research, and Dargo Solingen, I guess because she was the only bureaucrat available on Mars.

Nobody wanted to bring the Martians all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn’t improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.

So as well as an ambassador, I became sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I’m also the main human sidekick for Red and Green. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it’s obviously more about fear than brotherhood. If and when the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.

We thought that would be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they had figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit.

Or unless they were closer.