Starbound

1 NATIVITY SCENE

An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.

You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.

(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)

But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.

“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.

“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.

“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.

It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.

Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.

A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.

Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.

Paul and I had won the gamete lottery, along with four other couples. For all of us, the sperm and ova came from frozen samples we’d left on Earth, away from the radiation bath of Mars.

I felt a curious and unpleasant lightness in my breasts, which were now officially just ornaments. None of the new children would be breast-fed. None of them would suffer birth trauma, either, at least in the sense of being rammed through a wet tunnel smaller than a baby’s head. There might be some trauma in suddenly having to breathe for oneself, but so far none of them had cried. That was a little eerie.

They wouldn’t have a mother; I wouldn’t be a mother, in any traditional sense. Only genetically. They’d be raised by the colony, one big extended family, though most of the individual attention they got would be from Alphonzo Jefferson and Barbara Manchester, trained to run the “creche,” about to more than double in population.

My wine was too warm and too strong, made with wine concentrate, alcohol, and water. “They look okay. But I can’t help feeling cheated.”

Josie snorted. “Don’t. It’s like passing a loaf of hard bread.”

“Not so much the birth itself, as being pregnant. Is that weird?”

“Sounds weird to me,” Paul said. “Sick all the time, carrying all that extra weight.”

“I liked it,” Josie said. “The sickness is just part of the routine. I never felt more alive.” She was already 50 percent more alive than a normal person, a lean, large athlete. “But that was on Earth,” she conceded.

“Oh, hell.” I slid my drink over to Paul. “I have to take a walk.”

Nobody said anything. I went down to the dressing room and stripped, put on a skinsuit, then clamped on the Mars suit piece by piece, my mind a blank as I went through the rote safety procedure. When I was tight, I started the air and clomped up to Air Lock One. I hesitated with my thumb on the button.

This was how it all began.

2 HISTORY LESSON

Carmen Dula never set out to become the first human ambassador to an alien race. Nor did she aspire to become one of the most hated people on Earth—or off Earth, technically—but which of us has control over our destiny?

Most of us do have more control. It was Carmen’s impulsiveness that brought her both distinctions.

Her parents dragged her off to Mars when she was eighteen, along with her younger brother Card. The small outpost there, which some called a colony, had decided to invite a shipload of families.

A shitload of trouble, some people said. None of the kids were under ten, though, and most of the seventy- five people living there, in inflated bubbles under the Martian surface, enjoyed the infusion of new blood, of young blood.

On the way over from Earth, about halfway through the eight-month voyage, Carmen had a brief affair with the pilot, Paul Collins. It was brief because the powers-that-be on Mars found out about it immediately, and suggested that at thirty-two, Paul shouldn’t be dallying with an impressionable teenaged girl. Carmen was insulted, feeling that at nineteen she was not a “girl” and was the only one in charge of her body.

The first day they were on Mars, before they even settled into their cramped quarters, Carmen found out that the “powers”-that-be were one single dour power, administrator Dargo Solingen. She obviously resented Carmen on various levels and proceeded to make the Earth girl her little project.

It came to a head when Dargo discovered Carmen swimming, skinny-dipping, after midnight in a new water tank. She was the oldest of the six naked swimmers, and so took the brunt of the punishment. Among other things, she was forbidden to visit the surface, which was their main recreation and escape, for two months.

She rankled under this, and rebelled in an obvious way: when everyone was asleep, she suited up and went outside alone, which broke the First Commandment of life on Mars, at the time: Never go outside without a buddy.

She’d planned to go straight out a few kilometers, and straight back, and slip back into her bunk before anyone knew she was gone. It was not to be.

She fell through a thin shell of crust, which had never happened before, plummeted a couple of dozen meters, and broke an ankle and a rib. She was doomed. Out of radio contact, running out of air, and about to freeze solid.

But she was rescued by a Martian.

3 GERM THEORY

Humans call me Fly-in-Amber, and I am the “Martian” best qualified to tell the story of how we made contact with humans.

I will put Martian in quotation marks only once. We know we are not from Mars, though we live here. Some of the humans who live here also call themselves Martians, which is confusing and ludicrous.

We had observed human robot probes landing on Mars, or orbiting it, for decades before they started to build their outpost, uncomfortably close to where we live, attracted by the same subterranean (or subarean) source of water as those who placed us here, the Others.

With more than a century to prepare for the inevitable meeting, we had time to plan various responses. Violence was discussed and discarded. We had no experience with it other than in observation of human activities on radio, television, and cube. You would kick our asses, if we had them, but we are four-legged and excrete mainly through hundreds of pores in our feet.

The only actual plan was to feign ignorance. Not admit (at first) that we understood many human languages. You would eventually find out we were listening to you, of course, but you would understand our need for caution.

We are not good at planning, since our lives used to be safe and predictable, but in any case we could not have planned on Carmen Dula. She walked over the top of a lava bubble that had been worn thin, and fell through.

She was obviously injured and in grave danger. Our choices were to contact the colony and tell them what had happened or rescue her ourselves. The former course had too many variables—explaining who we were and what we knew and all; she would probably run out of air long before they could find her. So our leader flew out to retrieve her.

(We have one absolute leader at a time; when he/she/it dies, another is born. More intelligent, larger, stronger, and faster than the rest of us, and usually long-lived. Unless humans interfere, it turns out.)

The leader, whom Carmen christened Red, took a floater out and picked up Carmen and her idiot robot companion, called a dog, and brought them back to us. Our medicine cured her broken bones and frostbite.

We are not sure why it worked on her, but we don’t know how it works on us, either. It always has.

We agreed not to speak to her, for the time being. We only spoke our native languages, which the human vocal apparatus can’t reproduce. Humans can’t even hear the high-pitched part.

So Red took her back to the colony the next night, taking advantage of a sandstorm to remain hidden. Left her at the air-lock door, with no explanation.

It was very amusing to monitor what happened afterward—we do listen to all communications traffic between Earth and Mars. Nobody wanted to believe her fantastic story, since Martians do not and could not exist, but no one could explain how she had survived so long. They even found evidence of the broken bones we healed but assumed they were old injuries she had forgotten about, or was lying about.

We could have had years of entertainment, following their tortuous logic, but illness forced our hand.

All of us Martians go through a phase, roughly corresponding to the transition between infancy and childhood, when for a short period our bodies clean themselves out and start over. It isn’t pleasant, but neither is it frightening, since it happens to everybody at the same time of life.

Somehow, Carmen “caught” it from us, which is medically impossible. Our biologies aren’t remotely related; we don’t even have DNA. Nevertheless, she did have the transition “sickness,” and we brought her back to our home and treated her the way we would a Martian child, having her breathe an unpleasant mixture of smoldering herbs. She expelled everything, especially the two large cysts that had grown in her lungs. She was fine the next day, though, and went home—which was when the real trouble started.

She had apparently infected all the other youngsters in the colony—everyone under the age of twenty or so.

It was all sorted out eventually. Our leader Red and a healer Martian went over to the human colony and treated all the children the way they had Carmen, not pleasant but not dangerous. Unfortunately, no one could explain how the “disease” could have been transmitted from us to Carmen and from Carmen to the children. Human scientists were mystified, and, of course, we don’t have scientists as such.

The children seemed to be all right. But people were afraid that something worse might happen, and so the humans on Earth put all of Mars under quarantine, where it remains to this day, although there have been no other incidents. People who come to Mars do so in the knowledge that they may never see Earth again.

There is still no shortage of volunteers, which makes me think that Earth must be a very unpleasant place.

4 NO ORDINARY HERO

I had to name the boy Red, after my friend who gave his life to save us all. Paul and I tried on various names for our daughter, and settled on Nadia, Russian for “hope.” Which we need now. (They both had the middle name Mayfly, sort of a joke between me and the memory of Red.)

There were probably a good number of human boys and girls named after that particular Martian. You couldn’t say the name in Martian, a series of clacks and creaks and whistles that means “Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader.” He saved me from dying of exposure, or stupidity, and a few years later, he saved the world by putting himself on the other side of the Moon when he realized he’d become a planet-destroying time bomb. Not something that happens to ordinary heroes.

The Martians had told us about the “Others” early on—the other alien race that supposedly had brought the Martians to Mars, tens of thousands of years ago. At first we wondered whether they were myth, or metaphor, but the memory family (those who always wore yellow, like Fly-in-Amber) insisted that the Others were actual history, though from so far ago the memory was all but lost.

They were as real as dirt, as real as death.

The memory family didn’t know that they had another function, besides using their eidetic memories to keep track of things. They also retained a coded message, generation after generation, that would be transmitted to humans when the time was right.

The decoded message seemed innocuous. By means of a checkerboard digital picture, a “Drake diagram,” we learned that the Others were a silicon-nitrogen form of life; they evidently lived immersed in the liquid nitrogen seas of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

Various mysteries began to come together after the Others revealed their existence, like the paradoxical combination of high technology and scientific ignorance in the Martian city. (They apparently lived only in one huge underground complex, about the size of a large city on Earth, but with more than half of it covered with creepy fungoid agriculture.) The Others had built the city and populated it with thousands of bioengineered Martians, evidently for the purpose of keeping an eye on Earth, an eye on humanity.

The city had no obvious power source, but they had apparently limitless power from somewhere. Human scientists eventually figured it out, which gave us unlimited power as well, evidently bled off from some “adjacent” universe. I wonder what we’ll do if they show up with a bill.

The Other that lived on Triton—many other Others were light-years away—gave us ample demonstration of what unlimited power can do.

It nearly destroyed the satellite Triton in one tremendous explosion. An instant before the explosion, it escaped, or something did, in a spaceship that screamed away at more than twenty gravities’ acceleration. Its apparent destination was a small star called Wolf 25, about twenty-four light-years away.

Before the Other made its spectacular exit, it prepared an equally spectacular exit for the human race. The head Martian, my friend Red, was unknowingly a direct conduit to the otherworldly source of energy that powered the Martian civilization, and when he died, that connection would open up, with world-destroying intensity.

The world it destroyed would not be Mars. The Other had contrived to send Red to Earth before the time bomb was triggered.

Red knew he didn’t have long. He asked my husband Paul, who is a pilot, to take him to the other side of the Moon to die. There was no way of knowing exactly how large the explosion was going to be, but presumably the Moon had enough mass to block it.

It did. Red’s funeral pyre was bright enough to be seen light-years away, but only a few gamma rays leaked through.

Would the Others see the flare and assume that their little problem—the existence of the human race—had been solved?

That was not likely. We had to go to them.

5 LOGICS

Magic trumps science for most people, and wishful thinking drives a lot of decision-making. So a large and vocal fraction of the human race thought the best way to deal with the Others would be to lie low.

If we didn’t try to contact them and didn’t broadcast any signals into space—who needs to, since everybody has cable?—then the Others would think that their plan had worked, and so would leave us alone.

Of course there’s no cable between Earth and Mars, but the idea of abandoning Mars actually sounded pretty attractive to some, since without Mars none of this would have happened.

Then there was also the problem that we didn’t think to turn off all the transmitters right after the big explosion on the other side of the Moon, so it would be like closing the barn door long after the horse had trotted off to Wolf 25.

A different kind of logic asserted that we had better start building a defense against the Others right now. Assuming that the ship that left Triton couldn’t go faster than the speed of light, it would be more than twenty-four years before they got back home and found out Earth had survived, and a similar time before they came back.

A half century can be a long time in the evolution of weapons. Fifty years before Hiroshima, soldiers were still killing each other with bayonets and single-shot bolt-action rifles.

With unlimited energy, we could make our own planet- buster. And a starship to take it to them.

A lot of humans (and all Martians) thought that was a really bad idea. There was no reason to assume that what they did on Triton and the Moon represented the pinnacle of the Others’ ability to do damage. If we got them angry, they might flip a switch and blow up the Sun. They might send us all off to wherever the energy was coming from. Or some other place from which there would be no returning.

Meanwhile, the Earth’s various economic and political systems were trying to deal with the mixed blessing of free energy. It wasn’t quite literally free, since someone had to pay for the manufacture of an outlet. But there were dozens of factories, then hundreds, then one on every block, popping them out for pocket change. A black box with a knob and a place to plug in, for alternating current, or a couple of terminals, for DC. There were other ways to access different kinds of power—like the direct matter-to-energy inferno that would power ad Astra.

The consortium that had built the Space Elevator, which put things in orbit cheaply and made endeavors like the Martian colony possible, had grown into an enterprise that had an annual cash flow greater than all but the two wealthiest countries. It had a lot of influence on matters like whether or not to build a fleet of starships and go kick some alien butt. It could have made the largest profit in the history of commerce if it had decided to encourage that, but a version of sanity prevailed: it would only make a small fleet of warships, and leave it here in the solar system. And before it did anything aggressive, it would send a peace-seeking delegation to Wolf 25. Sacrificial lambs, some said, and of course its best- known public representative, “The Mars Girl” Carmen Dula, would be one of them. She was not thrilled by the idea.

6 EARTH AND MARS AND IN BETWEEN

None of us who had set foot in Mars was allowed to return to Earth. The logic was clear: until we knew why everyone of my generation and younger simultaneously came down with the Martian lung crap, there was no telling what other strange bugs we might harbor. So we’re all Typhoid Marys, until proven otherwise.

We could live in Earth orbit, though, inside a quarantined satellite, Little Mars. I commuted back and forth, Little Mars to Mars, on the one-gee shuttle, which (without spending months in free fall) took between two and five days. I was happier in Mars, and would have settled down there if the Corporation would have left me alone. See my kids often enough for them to remember my face.

In Little Mars, I could don a virtual-reality avatar and electronically walk around on Earth without infecting anyone. Usually my avatar looked like a twelve-year-old girl in shiny white tights who staggered a lot and ran into things, with my face and voice, kind of. When I visited Starhope, though, the spaceship factory, for some reason they gave me a male avatar. Six feet tall, broad-shouldered, glossy black. Still clumsy and a little dangerous to be around.

It was even more clumsy than the girlish avatar I was used to, because everything I did and said went through a censoring delay, in case I inadvertently said, “Hey, how are those warships coming along? The ones we’re going to use against the Others?”

It was a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the mostly symbolic completion of ad Astra, the ship we were eventually going to take to Wolf 25. All that was really complete, though, was the habitat, the living and working quarters for the crew of seven humans and two Martians. The ship itself was being built out in space, attached to the huge iceball that would provide enough reaction mass to go twenty-some light-years and back.

A miniature version of it was already well past the Oort Cloud, the theoretical edge of the solar system. It had more spartan quarters and the modest goal of going a hundredth of a light-year and back without exploding or otherwise wasting its test pilot.

Our ship would be reasonably comfortable, bigger than the John Carter, which had taken twenty-seven of us on an eight- month journey to Mars. We’d been weightless then, though; on our trip to the presumed home of the Others, we would be traveling at one-gee acceleration, once the ship got up to speed. Then turn around at the midway point and decelerate at the same rate.

Scattered among the merely real humans at the ceremony were eight avatars identical to mine, I guess standard issue at Starhope. One of them was Paul and two would be Moonboy and Meryl, the other two xenologists who were going with us. Maybe three of the others were the Corporation/UN team, who couldn’t be in Little Mars—no place to hide—but might have been in orbit somewhere. Or just in the next room, for that matter, their identities hidden.

(We’d never met face-to-face, but we had exchanged letters. Nice enough people, but a married threesome, two men and a woman, seemed odd to me. One man is hard enough to handle.)

I missed some of the oratory. It’s easy to fall into a drowse when you’re standing motionless in VR. If I missed something important, I could trivo it back.

Our mission was so vague I would be hard- pressed to write a speech about it more than a minute or two long—or shorter than a book. Go to the planet we think the Other went to, just to demonstrate that we could. Then react to whatever they do. If “whatever they do” includes vaporizing us, which doesn’t seem unlikely, then the fact that we didn’t try to harm them first will have been our default mission. Aren’t you sorry you killed us?

As soon as the ceremony was over, they started taking the habitat apart. It broke down into modules small enough to be lifted by the Space Elevator.

Once the habitat was delivered, Starhope would settle down into what would be its regular business for the next forty years: building warships.

It was a really stupid idea, since the Others had already demonstrated how easy it would be for them to destroy the Earth. Why aggravate them?

Of course, the warship fleet’s actual function was more about keeping the peace on Earth than carrying war into space. It gave the illusion that something was being done; we weren’t just a passive target. It also provided employment for a large fraction of the Earth’s population, who might otherwise be fighting each other.

The fleet was never mentioned in any broadcast medium; people used euphemisms like “space industrialization” to keep the armament project secret from the Others. I supposed it could work if the Others weren’t listening too hard or were abysmally stupid.

It was good to get out of VR and shower and change. When I was finished, there was a message from Paul saying he was down in the galley with fresh coffee and news.

The coffee was a new batch from Jamaica. He let me take one sip and gave me the news: the Earth triad was coming up to get to know us, ahead of schedule.

“No idea why,” he said. “Maybe Earth is too exciting.”

“Probably just scheduling. Once they start shipping up the pieces of ad Astra, it’s going to be hard to find a seat on the Elevator.” But it was odd.

7 INTRODUCTIONS

I had thought about this moment for some time, often with dread. Now that the moment had come, I just felt resignation, with an overlay of hope. On the other side of this air- lock door was exile from humanity, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Until the Mars quarantine was lifted.

I looked at my mates, Elza and Dustin. “I feel as if someone should make a speech. Or something.”

“How about this?” Dustin said. “ ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’ ”

“My words exactly,” Elza said. “Or approximately.”

We were floating in a sterile white anteroom, the hub of Little Mars. There were two elevator doors, facing one another, slowly rotating around us: EARTH SIDE and MARS SIDE. People could come and go from the Earth side. The Mars side was one-way.

I pushed the button. The door, which was the elevator’s ceiling, slid open. We clambered and somersaulted so that our feet were touching the nominal floor. I said “close,” and the ceiling did slide shut, though it might have been automatic rather than obedient.

As it moved “down” toward the rim of the torus, the slight perception of artificial gravity increased until it was Mars- normal, very light to us. An air- lock hatch opened in our floor, and we climbed down a ladder. The hatch closed above us with a loud final-sounding clunk. A door opened into the supposed contamination of Little Mars.

I’d expected the typical spaceship smell, too many people living in too small a volume, but there was a lot more air here than they needed. It smelled neutral, with a faint whiff of mushroom, probably the Martians’ agriculture.

I recognized the woman standing there, of course, one of the most famous faces in the world, or off the world. “Carmen Dula.” I offered my hand.

She took it and inclined her head slightly. “General Zahari.”

“Just Namir, please.” I introduced my mates, Elza Guadalupe and Dustin Beckner, ignoring rank. They were both colonels in American intelligence, nominally the Space Force. Israeli for me, but we spooks all inhabit the same haunted house.

She introduced her husband, Paul Collins, even more famous, who would be piloting the huge ship, and the other two xenologists, Moonboy and Meryl. We would meet the Martians later.

We followed them down to the galley. Walking was strange, both for the lightness and a momentary dizziness if you turned your head or nodded too quickly—Coriolis force acting on the inner ear, which I remembered from military space stations. It doesn’t bother you after a few minutes.

Dustin stumbled over a floor seam as we went into the galley, and Carmen caught him by the arm and smiled. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days. Myself, I’ve come to prefer it. Sort of dreading going back to one gee.”

The ad Astra would accelerate all the way at one gee. “How long have you lived with Martian gravity?”

“Since April ’73,” she said. “Zero gee there and back, of course, in those days. I’ve been back and forth a couple of times on the one-gee shuttle. I didn’t like it much.”

“We’ll get used to it fast,” Paul said. “I split my time between Earth and Mars in the old days, and it wasn’t a big problem.”

“You were an athlete back then,” she said, with a little friendly mocking in her voice. “Flyboy.”

Terms change. For most of my life the old days meant before Gehenna. Now it means before Triton. And a flyboy used to fly airplanes.

“Nice place,” Dustin said. Comfortable padded chairs and a wooden table, holos of serious paintings on the walls, some unfamiliar and strange. Rich coffee smell. They had a pressure-brewer that I saw did tea as well.

“Pity we can’t take it with us,” Paul said. “Best not get too used to Jamaican coffee.”

There was room around the table for all of us. We all got coffee or water or juice and sat down.

“We wondered why you came early,” Moonboy said. “If you don’t mind my being direct.” He had a pleasant, unlined face in a halo of unruly gray hair.

“Of course not, never,” I said, and, as often happens, when I paused Elza leaped in to complete my thought.

“It’s about the possibility that we, or one of us, might find the prospect impossible,” she said. “They want us to think this is all cast in stone, and they’re sure from psychological profiles that we’ll all get along fine—and at any rate, we have no choice; there’s only one flight, and we have to be on it.”

Moonboy nodded. “And that’s not true?”

“It can’t be, absolutely. What do you think would happen if one of us seven were to die? Would they cancel the mission?”

“I see your point…”

“I’m sure they have a contingency plan, a list of replacements. So what if the problem is not somebody’s dying, but rather somebody’s realizing that before the thirteen years is up, some one or two of the other people are going to drive him or her absolutely insane?”

“Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laughed, perhaps nervously.

“Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”

“Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”

“It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.

“It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”

It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?

Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?

“I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.

“What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.

A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”

Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”

She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.

“How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”

“Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.

She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and… distant? Even to the other Martians.”

I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.

When the signal came, nine eventful years ago, Fly-in-Amber had been here, in Little Mars. He went into a coma and started spouting gibberish that was decoded pretty easily. The Other was announcing its existence and location and the fact that it had a silicon- nitrogen metabolism, and little else. It didn’t mention the fact that it was about to try to destroy the world.

“I’m sort of like the soldier boys,” Paul said. “I hadn’t thought about there being an option.”

Carmen laughed. “For you, forget it. You have to fly the boat.” Actually, it was so automated and autonomous that it didn’t need a pilot. Paul would oversee it and take over if something went wrong. But that was beyond problematic. Nobody’d ever flown an iceberg close to the speed of light before.

I could sense people sorting one another out socially. The three of us and Paul all had military service, and, in most mixed populations, that is a primary difference. A pseudospeciation—you have killed, at least theoretically, or been given permission to, and so you are irrevocably different.

We comprised one slight majority. The ones who’d lived on Mars comprised another, more basic. But I could see Paul being an instinctive ally in some situations.

Meryl got up and opened the refrigerator. “Anybody hungry?” A few assents, including my own. “Disgustingly healthy, of course.” She took out a tray with white lumps on it, slid it into the cooker, and pressed a series of buttons, probably microwave and radiant heat together.

“Piloting this thing is a scary proposition.” Paul looked down at the table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “No matter who does it—especially when we’re light-months or light-years away from technical help.”

Not that technical help would do much good if the Martian power source gave out. We might as well burn incense and pray.

“No use worrying about it till Test One gets back,” Meryl said. She took the tray of buns out of the cooker and put them on the table.

“You check on him today?” Carmen asked Paul.

He nodded and took a notebook out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “He’s about two and a half days from turnaround. Sixty-two hours.” Test One was the miniature of ad Astra that was going out a hundredth of a light-year and back. “No problem.”

The pastry was warm and slightly almond- flavored. I didn’t want to speculate on where that came from. Not almonds.

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“Not since yesterday. Don’t want to nag.” He looked at me. “I should be jealous. Another pilot in her life.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I’ll ask him whether he wants to come into quarantine for a big sloppy kiss.”

“Test One isn’t from Mars side?” I hadn’t known that.

“No, they want to use it for local exploration. Don’t want to give us lepers a monopoly on the solar system.”

It made sense. The Moon was closed to people who’d been exposed to Mars, and it would probably be the same for the new outposts planned for Ceres and the satellites of the outer planets.

My heart stopped when a monster stepped through the door. Then restarted. Just a Martian.

“Hi, Snowbird,” Moonboy said, and followed that with a string of nonhuman sounds. I didn’t know you could whistle and belch at the same time.

“Good morning,” it said in Moonboy’s voice. “Your accent is improving. But no, thank you, I don’t want to eat a skillet.”

“Have to work on my vocabulary.”

It turned to us. “Welcome to Little Mars, General. And Colonel and Colonel.”

“Glad to be here,” I said, and immediately felt foolish.

“I hope you’re being polite and not insane. Happy to join an expedition that will probably result in your death? I hope not.” It moved with a smooth rippling gait, four legs rolling, and put an arm around Meryl. Three arms left over.

I’d seen thousands of pictures of them, and studied them extensively, but that was nothing like being in the same room. They’re only a little taller than us but seem huge and solid, like a horse. Slight smell of tuna. The head very much like an old potato, including eyes. Two large hands and two small, four fingers each, articulated in such a way that any could serve as thumb. Four legs.

This one was wearing a white smock, scuffed with gray. When she spoke she “faced” the person she was speaking to, though there was nothing like an actual face. Just a mouth, with fat black teeth. The potato eyes were really eyes, bundles of something like optical fiber. They looked in all directions at once and saw mostly in infrared.

“You’re Snowbird?” my wife asked.

She faced her. “I am.”

“So you’ll be dying with us.”

“I suppose. More than likely.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A human might sit down or lean against something. Snowbird stood still, and was silent for a long moment. “Death is not the same for us. Not as important. We die as completely, but will be replaced—as you are. But we’re more closely replicated.”

“A white dies and a white is born,” I said.

“Yes, but more than that. The new one has a kind of memory of the old. Actual, not metaphorical.”

“Even if you die twenty-four light-years away?” Meryl asked.

“We’ve talked about that, Fly-in-Amber and I. It will be an interesting experiment.”

They don’t reproduce at all like humans. It’s sort of like a wrestling match, with several of them rolling around together, their sweat containing genetic material. The one who wins the match gets to be the mother, breaking out in pods over the next few days. One for each of the recent dead, so the population of each family remains approximately constant.

“You weren’t on the Space Elevator roster,” Carmen said, “and we didn’t expect you until the message just before you got here. Is that a spook thing?”

All human eyes were on me, and probably a few Martian ones. “Yes, but not so much with Elza and Dustin. We all have ties to the intelligence community, but I’m the only one who’s supposed to move in secret. Of course, when we’re traveling together, they stay invisible, too.”

“The secrecy,” Snowbird said. “That’s because you’re an Israeli? A Jew?”

I nodded to her. Difficult to look someone in the eye when there are so many. “I was born in Israel,” I said, as always trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I have no religion.”

That caused a predictable awkward silence, which Carmen eventually broke.

“A friend of mine’s parents knew you in Israel, after Gehenna. Elspeth Feldman.”

It took me a moment. “The Feldmans, yes, Americans. Life sciences. Max and… A-something.”

“Akhila. You approved them for Israeli citizenship,” she said.

“Them and a thousand others, mostly involved in the cleanup. The country had a real population shortage.” I turned back to Snowbird. “You know about Gehenna.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is not the same as understanding. How did you survive it?”

“I was in New York all of 2060, a junior attaché at the UN. That’s when the first part of the poison went into the water supply at Tel Aviv and Hefa.”

“Anyone who drank it died,” Carmen said.

“If they were in Tel Aviv or Hefa a year later,” I said, “when car bombs released the second part of the poison. An aerosol.

“It wasn’t immediately obvious, where I was. In an office full of foreigners. And it was a Jewish holiday, Passover.

“We had the news on, cube and radio—one of the car bombs had gone off two blocks away.

“Five or six people started having trouble breathing. All of them dead in a couple of minutes. They could breathe in, but couldn’t exhale.

“We called 9-9-9 but of course got nothing. Went down to the street and…” Elza put her hand on my knee, under the table; I covered it with mine.

“Millions died all at once,” Snowbird said.

“Within a few minutes. When we got outside, cars were still crashing. Alarms going off all over the city. Dead people everywhere, of course; a few still dying. Some had jumped or fallen from balconies and lay crushed on the street and sidewalks.”

Snowbird spread all four hands. “I’m sorry. This causes you pain.”

“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “Twenty- one. To tell the truth, sometimes it feels like it didn’t happen to me at all. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s told me the story over and over.”

“It did happen to someone else,” Elza said. “It happened to whoever you were before.” Her fingers moved lightly.

“You probably know the numbers,” I said to the Martian. “Almost 70 percent of the country dead in less than ten minutes.”

“They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.

“No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”

“So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”

“I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had… people like us.”

“Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”

“No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”

Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”

I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”

“I read what you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”

“International Affairs, the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”

She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”

“I read it, too,” Paul said. “ ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable.’ Carmen showed it to me.”

“Trying to understand why I was, why we were, selected?”

“Why military people were selected,” she said. “The pressure for that was obvious, but frankly I was surprised they gave in to it. There’s no way we can threaten the Others.”

She was holding back resentment that I don’t think was personal. “You’d rather have three more xenobiologists than three… political appointees? We’re not really soldiers.”

“You were, once.”

“As a teenager, yes. Everyone in Israel was, at that time. But I’ve been a professional peacekeeper ever since.”

“And a spook,” Elza said. “If I were Carmen, that would bother me.”

Carmen made a placating gesture. “We probably have enough xenobiologists, and really can only guess what else might be useful. Your M.D. and clinical experience is as obviously useful to us, personally, as Namir’s life as a diplomat is, to our mission. But we don’t know. Dustin’s doctorate in philosophy might turn out to be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.

“I won’t pretend it didn’t annoy me when I found out the Earth committee had chosen an all- military bunch—and then spooks on top of that! But of course I can see the logic. And it’s reasonable in terms of social dynamic, a secure triad joining two secure pairs.”

That dynamic is interesting in various ways. The committee wanted no more than three military people, so the civilians would outnumber us, but they didn’t want to upset the social balance by sending up single, unattached people—so our family had a large natural advantage.

But how stable is it, really? Everybody’s married, but Carmen and Dustin and Elza are all under thirty, and the rest of us are not exactly nuns and monks.

In the first hour all of us were together, I suppose there was a lot of automatic and unconscious evaluation and categorizing—who might bond to whom in the winepress of years that we faced? At fifty, I was old enough to be Carmen’s father, but my initial feelings toward her were not at all paternal.

I could tell that the attraction was not mutual; she had me pigeonholed, the older generation. But my wife was her age, actually a few months younger. She must have known that as a statistic.

Was I just rationalizing, being the pathetic middle-aged male? Assuming that a woman must be attracted to me just because I was instantly attracted to her?

And I was, though I wouldn’t have predicted it, not “The Mars Girl.” As a diplomat, I’ve dealt with far too many famous people. Carmen had none of the automatic assumption of importance that I find so tiresome. She was almost aggressively normal, this least ordinary of all women. Ambassador to another species, a fulcrum of history.

She was not physically the kind of woman I would normally find attractive, either; so slender as to be almost boyish, her features sharp, inquisitive. Her eyes were green, or hazel, which I had never noticed in photographs. Hair cut close for space, like all of us. There wouldn’t be any need for that tradition on the long trail to Wolf 25.

Meryl was closer to my age and physically attractive, almost voluptuous. Olive skin and black hair, she looked like most of the girls and women I grew up with.

None of whom were still alive. I could not look at her without feeling that.

8 FAMILY MATTERS

I didn’t expect to like Namir, but I did immediately. You might expect a professional diplomat to be likable, though in my “Mars Girl” experience that hasn’t been the case. Of course, those meetings have always been public and strained, physical contact limited to rubber-glove virtual reality.

How odd-feeling and pleasant to actually shake someone’s hand. Namir’s constrained physical strength. His face was strong, too, chiseled but with warm laugh lines around his eyes.

Our three spooks were the first new people we’d met, physically, in years. So I was immediately aware of their physicality. Dustin and Elza were my age, Elza athletic and assertive but Dustin more a quiet scholarly type.

Namir had a barely contained charisma, an air of authority that had nothing to do with rank. Probably born with it, bossing around adults from the crib. I wondered whether Paul would have trouble with that.

I wondered whether I would. We hadn’t planned on a hierarchy. Paul would make the pilot decisions. If there were medical decisions, Elza would make them, and otherwise we’d just talk things out and go with the consensus. When we got to Wolf and met the Others, I saw myself as a spokesperson, but in fact we had no idea of what the situation would be—maybe they would only talk with the Martians, and Fly-in-Amber would be the logical choice. The rest of us just baggage, perhaps disposable.

That first meeting with the Earth people was cordial and reassuring. Moonboy, in his direct way, found out how they wound up a triune. Namir and Elza married in a conventional civil ceremony six years ago, in her last year of medical school. The American Space Force had paid her tuition, and she was commissioned as soon as she got her M.D. Namir pulled some strings, and she wound up working with him at the UN—which is where she met and fell in love with Dustin. At Namir’s suggestion they expanded their union to include him, which was legal in New York and (I was surprised to learn) not particularly uncommon there nowadays.

I could only guess what their sleeping arrangements had been on Earth; on both Little Mars and ad Astra, each person had individual sleeping quarters. The bunks were large enough for two people to sleep together if they didn’t mind touching. Unless they were both large. In our population, that would only be Namir and Paul, which I didn’t see happening.

In ad Astra everything would be modular. They might choose to have one big bed in one big room. Hamster pile, as they say in college.

Of the three of them, only Namir had a little experience of living in space, but only a little. Of we other four, I had the least, but I’d been off Earth the past eleven years, which incidentally was close to the length of time we seven would be spending together, on the way to Wolf and hopefully back. About six and a half years there, and the same to return.

We would have to become a family of sorts if we were to survive. Tolstoi famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The old Russian didn’t consider triune marriages, though, or families with two nonhuman members—we could presumably be unhappy in ways that he couldn’t have begun to describe. At least none of us was likely to throw herself in front of a train.

For those of us used to life in the Martian colony or this satellite, the living space in ad Astra wouldn’t be too confining. The combination of being isolated from the human race at large, while living in close contact with a few others, was not a novelty.

Our spooks were used to traveling around the world, constantly facing the challenge and attraction of new environments, new people. How well would they get along with this, a sardine tin that also had aspects of a goldfish bowl?

VR would help preserve our sanity, sometimes by providing alternatives to sanity. Both Moonboy and Meryl liked to go random places with the kaleidoscope filter, which provided a controlled degree of synesthesia, the data meant for one sense being interpreted as another. You could do it one sense at a time, or just spin the wheel and hang on. I might do more of it myself, with time on my hands. And on my eyes and nose and so forth.

But I liked the almost endless array of straightforward virtual travelogues, and often did them in tandem with Paul, as a way of getting away from the others. Usually nothing spectacular or culturally interesting, which of course made up most of the library. We’d just stroll down a country lane talking, or sit on a beach or in some woods. A pity we didn’t have the complex porn interfaces, so we could do more than hold hands and talk, but that would be a little hard to get through the Corporation budget review.

Along those lines I had to admit a certain prurient curiosity about our new sister and brothers. If they did all hop into bed together, who did what to whom and with what? It could make for a crowded bed, though I supposed we could jury-rig something. Or just agree to stay out of the galley periodically and let them do it on the table.

I wasn’t really drawn to either of the men in that way, although they were both likable and attractive. It was hard to believe that Namir was fifty. From the moment of our first meeting, I sensed a real physical attraction, though he may project the same kind of interest to any female not too young or old to make a sexual union possible. I know that degree of sexual indiscrimination passes for gallantry with some men in some cultures.

Actually, he didn’t seem to project the same warmth toward Meryl, and she is prettier and sexier than me. Older, but still a decade younger than him.

Who knows? After a few years, we may be swapping partners like minks. Or not be speaking to one another.

Who will be the first to be thrown out of the air lock? Or leave voluntarily?

9 SECRETS

Carmen doesn’t really know how completely she’s being lied to—only by omission, but nevertheless lies. She really has no idea how bad things are on Earth right now, and what a nightmare we’ve been through.

We accept the necessity of total monitoring and censoring of all communication into space, since the Others can receive anything broadcast from Earth, assuming they’re interested.

Maybe it’s silly. A sufficiently weak signal would be so attenuated in twenty-four light-years’ distance that no manner of superscience could separate it from cosmic background noise. But what is “sufficiently weak”? And how badly do you need the signal? If it were important to me as a spook, I could take any smallest signal—a man’s heartbeat through a hotel window a mile away—and amplify and refine it, then pump it through a laser to another spook, or an Other spook, twenty-four light-years away.

So what could the Others do? Maybe they read all our mail. Maybe all our thoughts.

Whatever the reality, the controlling principle is that everything broadcast into space might be overheard by the Others, so everyone who lives in orbit or on Mars will have a systematically distorted view of life on Earth. Carmen was aware of that in regard to defense—she never mentioned the fleet and didn’t expect any reports about it—but when we first talked, I realized that her image of life on Earth was no more realistic than a cube drama.

I caught her alone the second morning, by the sneaky expedient of checking the exercise schedule. At 0400 she was in VR, biking, so I took up the rowing machine and watched her pedal through the streets of a Paris that no longer existed.

We showered separately and met down at the mess for coffee. She brought up Paris, how she remembered it from the year she spent in Europe as a girl.

“I guess the VR crystal’s pretty old,” she said. “They hadn’t started rebuilding the Eiffel Tower, but it was finished when I was there in ’66.”

“Still there,” I said, “but it was damaged in the ’81 riots, a piece of the base melted. They’ve left it that way, closed to the public.”

“There were riots in ’81?”

“Not just in Paris. Though hundreds died there, in the Champ du Mars.”

“Hundreds.” She sat absolutely still. “In the States, too?”

“All over. The States were… worse than most of Europe and the Middle East. Los Angeles and Chicago were especially bad.”

“The East Coast?”

“New York and Washington were already under martial law when Paris exploded. There wasn’t much loss of life.”

“How long did it go on?”

“Well… technically…”

Her eyes got wide. “Still?”

I had an intense desire for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked since Gehenna. “In a way, it is still going on. Not martial law, but a kind of pervasive police state. Which doesn’t call itself that.”

“It’s what they’re calling internationalism?”

“Basically. One big happy police-state family.”

She walked across the room and looked out at the image of the Earth. “Paul and I were talking about that the other day. The picture they project is too perfect; we’ve all known that. But a police state, all over the world?”

“Maybe I’m exaggerating. Many people do just see it as international solidarity against a common enemy. Everybody does have to sacrifice a certain amount of time, a certain amount of comfort. And freedom.”

“For the future of humanity,” she said in a broadcaster’s voice. “Does everyone buy that?”

“Not at all. A significant fraction believes the business out at Triton and the explosion on the other side of the Moon were just pyrotechnics to make us believe the bullshit about the Others—the whole thing is an elaborate hoax to rob normal people of their rights and hand over their money to the rich.

“If you don’t know anything about science, or about economics, a case can be made. But even then, you have to enlist the Martians in the conspiracy, or believe that they don’t really exist.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“Well, no one’s allowed to go near one, unless they’re part of the conspiracy themselves. Hollywood’s been cooking up convincing aliens for more than a century, they say. Whoever’s behind the conspiracy could afford a few dozen of the finest.

“If you start with that as a premise—everything about Mars is a hoax—then most of it falls into place. The Others? A perfect enemy, all-powerful, unreachable. You and Paul are part of the conspiracy, of course. The Girl from Mars married to the Man Who Saved the Earth? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t know it was true.”

“But… who’s supposed to benefit from all that?”

“The rich people. The white people. The Jews—speaking as an unofficial Jew myself, I know we’re capable of anything. The military-industrial complex, to use an antique term. This gives them a black hole to throw money into for the next fifty years.”

She slumped into the chair across from me and studied me. “This is where I say, ‘Namir, you have learned too much. Now you have to die.’ ”

That actually gave me a little chill. “The more convincing explanation, I think, is that the Others are behind the whole thing. But they look just like humans and have infiltrated every aspect of government and industry.”

She smiled. “It’s like all the paranoiac explanations for Gehenna. Some people still believe it was a leftist takeover.”

I snorted. “Which explains how liberal our government is now. If you call it a government. Maybe the Others took over Israel first, as an experiment.”

She leaned forward, serious. “So… to what extent do ordinary people know what’s going on—people who don’t stalk the corridors of power, like you guys?”

“Most people do, people who can read. Newspapers have become a big industry again, print ones. Nobody reads the e-sheets for actual news. People who aren’t literate have to make do with word of mouth or put up with the same version of reality the Others are being fed.”

“The Others and us,” she said, trying to control the anger in her voice. “Most of the people I know are on Mars, but I’m in touch with people on Earth all the time—”

“Who would risk the death penalty if they discussed reality. Everything’s monitored.” She was shaking her head, hard. “Look, even I assumed you were in on it. Self-censorship is so automatic. Nobody’s going to call or write, and say ‘They’ll kill me for saying this, but—’ ”

“But it’s so stupid! The Others aren’t going to be fooled.”

“There’s no way to know. It might just take one slip.”

“Maybe.” The angry set of her mouth softened. “It never occurred to me to ask for a paper copy of a newspaper. I mean, who ever sees one?”

“Everybody, nowadays.” Was some bureaucrat controlling the information they got, or was it an unintended consequence of draconian broadcast security? “You should ask for a Sunday New York Times—or I will. Say that I’m homesick. See whether they print up a special version with the news sanitized for us. I could tell.”

I asked, and eventually the newspaper did appear—it takes a week for anything to come up. It did seem to be the same paper I read every week. Significantly, it had Jude Coulter’s column, summarizing the past week’s news that had been suppressed from the Others. And people in orbit or on Mars, incidentally.

The first two ships of the fleet are nearing completion; both are already crewed, awaiting weapons systems. They’re somewhat bigger than the projected standard for the other 998, but cruder, rushed into construction in case the Other that left Triton five years ago left behind some belated surprise.

I think the fleet is a tactical travesty from inception to its present and future reality. Gnats attacking an elephant. If you want to protect the future of the human race from the Other menace, those resources should go toward moving breeding populations out far from Earth. Because Earth is unlikely to survive the first second of hostilities from the Others. A diffuse population hidden around the solar system might have a chance.

Or not.

10 NEW WORLD

Namir’s newspaper reassured us a little bit. There wasn’t a huge conspiracy trying to insulate us from reality. It was just a secondary effect of the fanatic security effort. So now we were to get the Times and one other newspaper every week. Delivered to your air-lock door.

Not a conspiracy, but certainly a pervasive bureaucratic mind-set. You don’t learn anything unless you have an official “need to know.”

It was probably an empty gesture anyhow, presuming to fool the Others with smoke and mirrors. Namir agreed. They had to know us too well for that to work.

What might have worked, if there had been enough advance warning, would have been to shut Earth down electronically, completely, the instant of the Moon explosion.

Even that would only have worked if the Others were just listening to broadcast emissions and not spying on Earth any other way. And it would have been impossible to build ad Astra and the fleet without electronic communication.

The half of our satellite that’s not under Martian quarantine, Little Earth or, to us, “earthside,” serves as a conduit for communicating between the fleet and Earth. There’s a lot of radio and image transmission that can be disguised as innocuous space industrialization—but the part that can’t be disguised is written down or photographed and sent to Little Earth via “transfer pods,” which guide themselves into a net and are sent down the Space Elevator to an Earth address. Messages that can’t wait that long are de-orbited and dropped to Earth by parachute. I wonder how many of them actually make it to the final address.

It’s a fragile house of cards, and we could collapse it just by a minute of frank broadband discussion. I talked with Paul about doing just that. What could they do, fire us?

“No,” he said, “but we could have a tragic accident.” We were talking in VR, walking and bicycling slowly down a country road in Cape Cod, Indian summer, cranberry bogs vivid red with floating berries and the smells of woodsmoke and autumn leaves powerful but relaxing. Squirrels scattered out of our way, and geese honked overhead, swifting south.

“You think they would go that far?”

“Well, I don’t think we’re indispensable,” he said, braking the bike into a short downhill. “They could even manufacture avatar duplicates. They do it all the time with politicians.”

I nodded. “Like that French nonassassination.” The president’s limousine was blown up in a visit to Algeria, and it turned out that neither president nor driver was actually there, actually human.

“My God.” He stopped pedaling but his bicycle stayed upright; VR couldn’t topple the exercise machine outside our illusion. “Could that be why they sent three soldiers?”

“To kill us if we broke the rules? That’s ridiculous.”

“In this brave new world? I don’t know.”

“Be realistic, Paul. If they wanted us dead, this powerful ‘they,’ they wouldn’t have to send three assassins up into orbit. They could push a button and blow all the air out of Mars side.”

He started pedaling again. “That’s why I love you, Carmen. You’re such a ray of sunshine.”

I was sweating a little from the exercise, but a new patch of cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck:

What if we were twenty- four light-years away and decided to do something subversive, like surrender to the Others? The Earth couldn’t do a thing to stop us.

But Namir and Dustin and Elza, for all their quiet and civilized manners, had once been trained to kill. And were presumably loyal to Earth.

What were their orders?

We weren’t headed out to the iceberg for a couple of weeks, but ad Astra itself—the habitat we’d be living in on the way to Wolf and back—was up and running, and we wanted to live in it in Earth orbit for a while. If something went wrong, we could always send out for a plumber.

Speaking of plumbing, we did have a week or so of roll- up-your-sleeves work before we took off. The large crew who’d set up ad Astra had the hydroponics working as they would in the normal one-gee environment, on the way to Wolf. But it would take at least a week of zero gee before we hooked up with the iceberg, and of course you can’t have standing pools of water in zero gee. They turn into floating blobs. So we had plant-by-plant instructions as to what had to be done to keep root systems and everything moist en route.

(Good practice. We’d be doing it again at the halfway point, since we’d be in zero gee while the iceberg slowly rotated around to start braking.)

Quarantine rules made the transfer into the Space Elevator a little complicated. Every area had to be sterilized after we passed through—from Mars side through the air lock to the hub, then down the extension tube to where the Space Elevator was waiting. It took three trips, awkward in zero gee, especially for our spook pals, who didn’t have a lot of experience. Finding handholds when your hands are full.

It wasn’t too hard to say good-bye to Little Mars, as much time as I’d spent there. It was actual Mars, the Mars colony, that felt like home. Florida was a distant memory. Another world.

We spent four and a half days in the Space Elevator, first at zero gee, but with increasing gravity as we moved out to the end of the Elevator’s tether.

About halfway, I started feeling heavy and depressed. For years, I’d been used to exercising an hour or more a day in Earth gravity, but it was always a relief to get back to Mars- normal. I’d get used to it in time. But it felt like carrying around a knapsack full of rocks, permanently attached.

There wasn’t much to see of ad Astra as we approached, but we didn’t expect anything dramatic. A big flat white box with a shuttle rocket attached. The rocket would maneuver us into rendezvous with the iceberg, then shut down till we got to Wolf, where it would be a landing craft. If the Others let us land.

Going from the Elevator into ad Astra was simple. They coupled automatically, and we walked through two air locks into our new home.

It was stunning. It was huge, at least to my eyes. The line of sight was about fifty meters, over the gym and swimming pool and hydroponics garden. I had trouble focusing that far away, and it made me grin.

Namir, Elza, and Dustin were not smiling. By Earth standards, this was not a big place to be locked up in for a large part of your life. The rest of your life, perhaps.

We stacked our boxes and suitcases there by the air lock, next to the life-support/recycling station, and sent the Space Elevator back down, to pick up our Martians. We went off together to explore.

The hydroponics garden was technically a luxury. There was enough dehydrated food in storage to keep us alive for twenty boring years, and plenty of oxygen from electrolysis. But fresh fruit and vegetables would mean more than just variety in the diet. The routines of growing, harvesting, propagation, and recycling had helped keep us sane in Mars, where we had fifteen times as many people, and more than fifteen times as much living space. Plus the chance to take a walk outdoors, which on ad Astra would be a short walk. Then light-years long. Eternity.

Everything was in a sort of early-spring mode, still a month or more from the earliest harvest. Grape tomatoes and spring onions, from a first look. They smelled so good—nostalgia not for Earth, where I never gardened, but for the Martian garden, where I’d worked a couple of hours a week.

The central space was larger than all the rest put together. There was a padded track for jogging or running around its hundred- meter perimeter. On the “southern” end of it (we decided to call the control room “north”) there was a small Japanese- style hot bath and a narrow rectangular swimming pool, which could maintain a decent current to swim against.

South of that were the exercise and VR machines, similar to what we had in Little Mars, with a relatively large lavatory and an actual shower, and the infirmary, with an optimistic single bed. The lavatory had a zero- gee toilet exactly like the one on the Space Elevator, for the few days we’d be weightless.

Farthest south was the large and rather forbidding Life- Support/ Recycling area, a bright room full of machines. Every metal surface was inscribed with maintenance instructions, I supposed in case the computer system failed. So we could stay alive until we died.

That was an interesting prospect if something did go wrong, and we went merrily blasting away for years, leaving Wolf 25 far behind. Paul said that if we just kept going in a straight line, without turning around midway to slow down, we had enough reaction mass to go more than a hundred thousand light- years. At which point, we’d be twelve years older, while the unimaginably distant Earth would have aged a thousand centuries.

Our seven cabins were in a north-south line along the hydroponics garden. We checked a couple of them, apparently all the same, but very malleable, with moveable walls and modular furniture. The wall that separated them from the hydroponics area was semipermanent, a lattice for vines.

The kitchen and dining room were twice the size of their Little Mars counterparts, where we did little actual cooking. Elza volunteered that Namir was an excellent cook, which was good news. I can just about flip a burger or scramble eggs, and we wouldn’t have either of those.

There was a lounge next to the dining room, with a pool table and keyboard and various places to sit or, I suppose, lounge. I hadn’t touched a piano keyboard in a dozen years. Would boredom drive me back to it?

Between the lounge and the Martian area was a meeting place that would be maintained at a compromise ambience—a little too cool and dark for humans; a little warm for Martians.

At the northernmost area, the lounge led into a library and study, with workstations but also wooden panel walls and real paintings. Then there was another air lock and Paul’s control room. He sat down at the console and ran his hands over the knobs and dials, smiling, in his element.

The spies looked kind of grim. It was understandable. They were losing a whole planet, one the rest of us had written off a long time ago. I did feel sorry for them, especially Namir, shut off from his complex history.

Which he was also bringing with him.

11 GOOD-BYES

After our final briefing in New York, and before we flew out to the Space Elevator, Elza and Dustin and I had been given a few days to settle our affairs on Earth.

We didn’t have to empty out our New York City apartment. Elza had made a clever deal with Columbia University, where they assumed the mortgage and will maintain the place for the half century we’ll be gone. If we don’t come back, it will be a unique small museum. In the unlikely event that we do return, we can either step back into the old place or leave it as a museum and negotiate an alternative—probably more comfortable—living space with the university.

I had to go say good-bye to my father, which I could no longer put off. He has two rooms in a Jewish assisted-living complex in Yonkers, which offers free room and board for people in his situation: he was in Israel for the first stage of the Gehenna attack, and so his body is suffused with the nanomachines that comprise half the poison. The second half could await him anyplace in Israel. People die every year when they return and open an old closet or something. I knew a man who went back and lived for years, then, for a reunion, put on his old army uniform and stopped breathing.

Father had been in New York, staying in my apartment, when the bombs went off in Tel Aviv. I was going to bring my mother back to join him for a tour of the American West.

Instead I brought her ashes, months later.

We have had few words since then, and none in Hebrew. When I greeted him with Shalom, he stared at me for a long moment and said, “You should come in. It’s raining.”

He made a pot of horrible tea, boiling it Australian style, and we sat on the porch and watched the rain come down.

When I told him what I was about to do, he crept away and came back with a dusty bottle of brandy and tipped a half inch into our tea-cups, which was an improvement.

“So you come to say good- bye, actually. God is too kind to give me another fifty years of this.”

“You may outlive me. God can be cruel in his benevolence.”

“So now you believe in God. Wonders will never cease.”

“No more than you do. Unless living here has weakened your mind.”

“Living here has weakened my stomach. A constant assault of bad kosher cooking. A good son would have brought a ham sandwich.”

“I’ll bring one if I come back. At 142, you’ll need it even more.”

He closed his eyes. “Oh, please. You really think those alien bastards will kill you?”

“They haven’t been well-disposed toward humans in the past. You did see the moon thing?”

“Two nights running, yes. Some people here thought it was staged, a hoax.”

He sipped his tea, made a face, and added more brandy. “I know bubkes about science. I couldn’t see how they’d fake that, though.”

“No.” They could have faked the halo of dust, I supposed, but not the rain of gamma radiation. Orbiting monitors had pictures of the explosion, too, from farther out in the solar system. “It’s real, and it demands a response.”

“Maybe. But why you?”

I shrugged. “I’m a diplomat.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a spy. A spy for a country that hardly exists anymore.”

“They needed three military people in the crew. Our triune was perfect because we wouldn’t upset the social balance—two other married couples.”

“Your shiksa wife could upset some marriages. Your husband… I’ve never understood any of that.”

I decided not to rise to that bait. “They got a diplomat, a doctor, and a philosopher.”

“They got three spies, Namir. Or didn’t they know that?”

“We’re all military intelligence, Father. Soldiers, not spies.”

He rolled his eyes at that. “It’s a new world,” I said, I hoped reasonably. “The American army has more officers in intelligence than in the infantry.”

“I suppose the Israeli army, too. That did a lot of good with Gehenna.”

“In fact, we did know something was about to happen. That’s why I was called back to Tel Aviv.”

“ ‘Something’ had already happened. If I recall correctly.” His face was a stone mask.

Maybe love could get through that. But I’d known for years that I’d never loved him, and it was mutual.

He wasn’t a bad man. But he’d never wanted to be a father and did his best to ignore me and Naomi when we were growing up. I think I’m enough of a man to understand him, and forgive. But love doesn’t come from the brain, from understanding.

I so didn’t want to be there, and he released me.

“Look. I can see you have a million things to do. I will take all my pills and try to be here when you come back. Okay?” He stood and held out his arms.

I clasped his fragile body. “Shalom,” he finally said into my shoulder. “I know you will do well.”

I took the skyway across to the Port Authority and walked a mile through the rain back to our apartment. Saying good-bye to the city, more home to me than Tel Aviv or any other place.

Life without restaurants. Walking by so many favorites, the Asian ones especially. But it was less about missing them than it was all the ones I’d been curious about and put off trying. I read that you could eat at a different restaurant for every meal in New York City and never eat at all of them. Does that mean that three new places were opened every day?

A holo I recognized as James Joyce abjured me to come into a new place, Finnegans Wake, and have a pint of Guinness. I checked my watch and went in for a small one. A quartet was holding forth around the piano, with more spirit than talent, but it was pleasant. When I left, the rain was more forceful, but it wasn’t cold, and I had a hat. I rather liked it.

Eleven years eating computer-generated healthy recycled shit. Well, I’d survived on army rations for some years. How bad could it be?

When Elza came home, we’d have to decide where to go for dinner, the last one in this city. Maybe we should just walk until we got hungry and take whatever appeared.

I was going to miss the noise and the crowds. And the odd pockets of quiet, like the postage-stamp park behind our apartment, two benches and a birdbath, running over as I took my last look.

Neither Elza nor Dustin was home. The place felt large without them. About twelve hundred square feet. In ad Astra, we’d have three cabins, each less than a hundred square feet.

Wrong comparison. How many square feet did I have aboard the Golda Meir? A hot hammock, shared with two other guys.

We were allowed to take fifteen kilograms of “personal items including clothing,” though we’d be supplied utility clothing and one formal uniform. What would that look like? Tailor-made to impress creatures who live forever in liquid nitrogen. They probably dress up all the time. “Dress warmly, son; it’s only going up to minus 253.”

Books. I immediately picked out the slim leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets my first wife gave me, the only Passover we shared. I took a small drawing of her out of its frame and trimmed it with scissors so it would fit inside the book.

I took some comfortable worn jeans out of the closet, but then traded them for some newer ones—they will have to last thirteen years, or at least six and a half. A chamois shirt from L.L. Bean. Army exercise outfit. Comfortable leather moccasins.

There were hundreds of books I would have enjoyed having, but of course the ship would have all of them in its memory. Likewise movies and feelies.

I should take a few books I could read over and over, in case the library malfunctioned. A volume of Amachai, one of cummings. A large slim book with all of Vermeer.

I hesitated over the balalaika. It gave me pleasure, but the others probably wouldn’t like it much even if I were talented. No one in the world except Elza thought that I was. It would probably wind up going out the air lock, and maybe me with it.

Three blocks of fine-grained koa wood and two carving knives, with a sharpening stone.

The bathroom scale said eight kilograms. I decided to leave it at that and let Elza make up the difference with clothes. That would benefit all three of us. She would never admit it, but she liked dressing up a little and was easier to get along with if she felt she looked attractive. To me, she would look fine in a potato sack.

I sat down at my writing desk, opened the right- hand drawer, and lifted out the 10.5- mm Glock, with all its reassuring and troubling weight. Illegal in New York City despite the state and federal permits clipped to the side of its shoulder holster. It would be a central exhibit in the apartment-museum. “With this weapon, Namir Zahari killed four looters who attacked him in the ruins of Tel Aviv.” And no others, of course. No Others, certainly. It would not be that kind of diplomacy.

I wiped it clean with an oil-impregnated cloth. The breech smelled of cold metal and faraway fire. I’d last used it at a pistol range in New Jersey, first week of January. Elza’d been with me, with her little .32. An annual family custom that would not be welcome on ad Astra.

Putting it away, I had a familiar specific feeling of memento mori. Two of our team in the Gehenna cleanup committed suicide, both with Israeli-issued pistols like this one.

I used to wonder how much horror and sadness I could absorb before that kind of exit seemed attractive, or necessary. I’m fairly sure now it couldn’t happen; I’m not set up that way. I’ll keep plugging along until my luck runs out; my time runs out. Along with eight billion others, perhaps, at the same instant.

Though what does “at the same instant” mean in our situation? Twenty-four years later? Or perhaps the Others have a way around Einsteinian simultaneity.

My phone pinged, and it was Dustin. He was landing at Towers in a few minutes. He’d already talked to Elza, and they’d decided to meet for dinner at the Four Seasons, okay? I said I’d make an early reservation, for seven. An hour away, plenty of time to walk.

The rain was over and not programmed to resume until tomorrow. I put on evening clothes and left the Glock in the drawer. Strapped the little .289 Browning to my right ankle. Called Security and told them the route I’d be walking. There was already someone on duty down the block, they said; the same one who’d followed me back from New Jersey. I walked the stairs to the basement and went out through the service entrance of the apartment building next door. No one in the alley.

It had been years since the tail had caught anyone, but that one time saved my life. I recognized this one, a small black man, as I passed him at the first intersection, but of course we didn’t acknowledge one another.

That would be one nice thing about leaving the Earth behind. I wouldn’t have to worry about bodyguards. Though I’d never faced a more dangerous adversary.

So much for my romantic stroll with Elza (and our usually invisible companion), ending in a random restaurant. I’d thought Dustin was going to be in Houston till the next morning.

“I was a fifth wheel down there anyhow,” he explained as I sat down at the elegant table. “My two projects put on hold for half a century. They’ll be political curiosities when I come back.”

“We’re political curiosities already,” I said. “What’s a spook without a country?” He politely didn’t say that I should know.

We talked shop for a few minutes. I’d worked out of Houston for a year sometime back and made friends there.

When Elza showed up, I nodded to the human waiter, and he poured us each a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé and returned the bottle to ice.

I held up a glass. “To getting back alive.”

“To getting there alive,” she said, and we all touched glasses. “You wrote to Carmen Dula and the others?”

“It went up on the Elevator day before yesterday.” Since ad Astra was technically part of the fleet, we weren’t allowed to contact it electronically. So I sent a paper note telling them we’d be on the next Elevator.

“It’s too strange,” Dustin said. “We’re going to spend thirteen years with these people, and we can’t even chat beforehand.”

“Worse for them. We can at least look up their bios and news stories—millions of words, for her and Paul Collins. But they shouldn’t be able to find a single word about us.”

“You enjoy being a man of mystery,” she said. “Poor little Mars Girl won’t have a chance.”

“You doctors are all about sex. It hadn’t crossed my mind.”

Elza looked at me over her glass. “She’s an old hag anyhow.”

“Eight months older than you. But you knew that.”

“Maybe we should have just snuck up on them,” Dustin said. “This way, they’ll have plenty of time to get dressed and put away the sex toys.”

“Dream on,” Elza said.

The maître d’ came over, and we negotiated the complex combination of food- ration credits, legitimate currency, and hard cash that dinner would cost. Maybe by the time we got back, they’d have that mess straightened out. Meanwhile, it cost the same no matter what your entrée was, so I had pheasant under glass, very very good.

With the coffee and dessert, we mostly talked about what we were leaving behind.

We’d all been visiting family, Elza in Kansas and Dustin in California. I told them about the uncomfortable meeting with my father. Elza’d had a warm family reunion all weekend, but Dustin’s parents were even worse than mine. They’re old anarchists and have hardly spoken to him since he joined the service. Now they’re deniers, convinced that the whole thing is a government conspiracy. They live in an Earthlove commune, surrounded by like- minded zealots. Dustin fled when he turned eighteen, eleven years ago.

“They claim to be self- sufficient,” he said of the commune, “trading organic dairy goods for things they can’t raise on the farm. But even when I was a kid, I could tell something was fishy. We all lived too well; there was money coming in from somewhere.”

“Now who’s paranoid?” Elza said.

“You could have them investigated,” I said. “Section E audit.”

“Well, they were, of course, back when I joined the Farce. I’ve read the file, but it doesn’t go beyond a few background checks, my parents and the commune’s leaders. All harmless nuts.”

“You want them to be more interesting than that.”

“Dad was always hinting that the commune was part of something big. When I was old enough, I’d be brought into the inner circle.”

I’d heard the story. “But you ran away anyhow.”

“Along with most of my generation. Not many people under fifty there now.” He tasted his coffee and added more hot. “That’s typical of cults, once the charismatic leader dies or leaves. That was Randy Miles Brewer; he was pretty senile when I left.”

“Dead now?” Elza said.

He shrugged. “Technically not. He’s composting away in some LX center in San Francisco.” The Life Extension centers could keep you going past legal brain death, in some states, as long as blood or some equivalent fluid kept circulating. “So tell me, who pays for that? It’d be a lot of eggs and cheese.”

“You could subpoena their records,” I said.

He waved it away. “Don’t want to cause my parents any grief. In fifty years, it’ll all be in some dusty file in Washington, or Sacramento. I’ll look it up then.”

“They might still be alive.”

“Not with natural medicine. Your dad has a better chance at, what, ninety?”

“Ninety-two. He says he’ll try to wait it out, but I don’t think he’ll try hard. That age, if you don’t really enjoy life, you won’t get much more of it.”

“It feels strange,” Elza said, her voice a little husky. “Saying good-bye to my granddad and g- ma. If I were staying on Earth, I might have twenty more years with them.”

“Think of it as being social pioneers,” Dustin said. “The social protocols of relativity. When you come back, you’ll be thirteen years older. But your parents and grandparents…”

She broke the moment of silence by laughing, with an edge of hysteria. “Like it’ll make any difference. Chances are… chances are we’re not…”

“Elza,” I said, “sweetheart—we ought to make it a rule: We don’t talk about the end until it’s near. There’s no use plowing the same field over and over.”

“I don’t think that’s healthy,” Dustin said. “Ignoring reality. When you were in combat, you guys never talked about dying?”

I tried to be honest. “In the Faith War, no, not much. But we were all eighteen and nineteen, and felt immortal. When someone got killed, it was like a supernatural visitation.

“Gehenna was totally different. I mean, there were bodies everywhere you looked, so after a while they were just part of the scenery. It was more dangerous, I guess, with all the loonies and looters. But the corpses, they were like a dream landscape, a nightmare. They weren’t individuals; you didn’t see yourself becoming one of them.” They nodded, as if they hadn’t heard all this before. Turning points in life bring out the same old stories. Even among relativity pioneers.

This was the wrong place. It was becoming a fashionable hour for the rich and famous; the Four Seasons was filling up and getting loud with background chatter, people wanting to be noticed. We three, arguably the most-talked-about people here, definitely didn’t want to be noticed.

Our identities hadn’t been revealed, and wouldn’t be, as long as friends and relatives cooperated, until we were safely in orbit.

We took the Fifth Avenue and SoHo slidewalks back, less for the time saved than from a desire to be part of a crowd. We dawdled at the entrance and transfer point so my bodyguard could catch up. When we got to the condo door, I gave him the good-bye signal, stroking an eyebrow twice.

“Same old signal,” Dustin said as he palmed the night lock.

“Yeah. I’d change it if I thought someone might actually be after me. If somebody really wanted my ass, they’d have it by now.”

“So you’re wearing flared trousers for the look,” Elza said.

“Force of habit.” Once we were in the elevator, I pulled the ankle holster off.

“A .289,” she said. “Not with legal rounds, I hope.”

“Neuros.” I’d never fired one at a person, but they were impressive on a dummy. Smart round that finds an eye and blows a small shaped charge across the frontal lobes.

“Jesus,” Dustin said. “You got them where?”

I laughed, thumbing the door open. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”

“Boys and toys.” Elza went by me, flopped down on the couch, and slipped her shoes off. “So I get to take an extra seven kilos of clothes?”

“Only sexy ones,” Dustin said.

“I don’t have seven kilos of the kind you like. That’d be about a hundred outfits.”

I sat in the easy chair and picked up the balalaika and plucked an arpeggio.

“Say you’re not taking the banjo?” Dustin said, with hope in his voice.

“No. I’ll be in my sixties when we get back. Take it up seriously then, as a retirement project.”

Elza laughed. “You’ll retire about a year after you’re dead.”

I had a sudden impulse to throw the instrument against the wall, just to do something unpredictable. Instead, I set it gently against the bookcase. “I don’t know. In a way, this is early retirement. Cleaned out my desk to embark on a new life of travel and adventure.”

“Or stay in one room for thirteen years, trying not to go mad,” Dustin said.

“There is that. I wonder whether they’ve packed enough straitjackets.”

Elza got up and went to the refrigerator. “Wine?” She poured two glasses of white wine and a small glass of vermouth for herself. Bunched them together in two hands and brought them over to the coffee table. “I’m kind of torn,” she said. “Maybe go out to the Galápagos early, do some snorkeling.”

Dustin held his glass up to her. “I’ll catch up with you. Say good-bye to London and Paris, maybe Kyoto. Come from the other direction.”

“City boy.”

“Don’t care much for the water. Fish fuck in it.”

She arched an eyebrow. “People do, too.”

“I’ll wait for zero gee.” He looked at me. “You’ve been there.”

“It was all men. None of them appealed to me.”

“I mean the Galápagos. Diving.”

“Wasn’t recreational. Bomb threat to the Elevator.”

“I remember. The note said something about Gehenna.”

“Someone in Personnel must have sat down and entered Gehenna/ skindive/license to kill.”

Elza sighed. “And I’m still on my learners’ permit.”

“Well, you’ve got four days. I could get you a quick transfer to the Zone. You’d get more experience in four days than I’ve had in twenty years.”

“I’ll think about it. Did you see many fish there?”

“Not so many pretty ones. You want to go into the shallows, the reefs near the shore, unless you’re after big sharks.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“They’re protected. If one bites you and gets sick, there’s a huge fine.”

“But you were there before,” Dustin said.

“Twenty-five years ago, first wife. I could hardly get her out of the water, sharks and all.”

“You think of her a lot,” she said.

I tried to be accurate. “Her image comes to me often. I don’t sit and dwell on the memory of her.”

“I know that. I guess that’s what I meant.” She shook her head. “Crazy time.”

“We’re all dwelling on the past these days,” Dustin said. “Leaving everything behind.”

There was so much I didn’t want to say. She gave me the Shakespeare book in the morning; at noon, she took one breath and died. Was it more or less horrible that it happened to so many at the same time?

“You’re the philosopher,” I said. “I’m more an engineer, cause and effect.” Elza was watching me closely. I don’t think I’d ever raised this directly with her before. “We were crazy in love, like schoolkids, and although I know it was all blood chemistry boiling away, brain chemistry… still, we were addicted to each other, the sight and sound and smell of each other, like a heroin addict to his junk…”

“Been there,” Elza said.

“But you never lost anyone the way I lost her. Like a sudden traumatic amputation—worse, because you can buy a new arm or leg, and it will do.”

“So that’s what I am? Your—”

“No. It’s not simple.”

She picked at a nail, concentrating. “I had a friend lost a leg before she was twenty, AP mine in Liberia. She said the new one did everything she asked it to. But it was never really part of her. Just an accessory.” She stood up. “I better pack some clothes.” She put her glass in the refrigerator and went into the bedroom.

“For a diplomat,” Dustin said softly, “you don’t have an awful lot of tact.”

“I don’t have to be a diplomat with you and her. Do I?”

“Of course not.” He got up and went to the fridge. “Cheese?”

“I just ate a whole bird.”

“A little one.” He set out five chunks of cheese, including half a wheel of Brie, and put them on a platter with some bread and a knife. “They won’t have cows in ad Astra.”

I sliced off a piece of something blue. “Not going to keep for fifty years,” he said.

“Not much will.” I was still seeing her. “Gehenna will just be a history lesson to most people.”

He broke the lengthening silence. “Her name was Mira?”

“Moira. My father approved of her, nice Jewish girl. I think he’s a little scared of Elza.”

“Who wouldn’t be?”

“I’ll give you something to be scared of,” she said from the bedroom, bantering, the hurt gone from her voice.

“Best offer I’ve had today,” he said.

I didn’t hear her walking up behind me, barefoot. She put both hands lightly on my head and tangled my hair with her fingers. “I’ll sleep with Namir tonight.”

“Okay by me,” I said.

“We have to talk.” She rubbed my temples. “You can love her. You will love her, always. But you have to leave her here. Here on Earth.”

“I think that’s already done.” Literally, anyhow.

“We’ll talk about it.” She went back to the large bedroom.

I joined her there an hour later and we did talk. Moira was my generation, a year older than me, but forever young to Elza, and not much I could do about that.

She wanted to know what Moira and I had done that I didn’t do with her, and I tried not to think of it as an invasion of privacy. Of course the big thing she couldn’t do was have me as a twenty-five-year-old lad, and there was another thing I didn’t mention, to preserve the woman’s dead dignity. But I did describe a trick Moira would do with her breasts, and we were both happy and relieved when she made it work. Elza’s a little self-conscious about her small breasts, as Moira was about her large ones. I decided not to bring that up.

While we lay there entwined, the diplomat in me affirmed that I could leave Moira here on Earth. I didn’t say that part of me would stay with her, too; neither of us buried, neither dead.

I pretended to be asleep, as always, when she slipped away to join Dustin. Thinking furiously about the lies that grace our lives.

12 GROWING THINGS

The Martians came up a week after we did. We helped them unload their few packages. Earth-normal weight was oppressive to them, and they clumped around with exaggerated care. Well, it wasn’t exaggeration. Like having to carry around a weight one and a half times as heavy as you are. Carry it for thirteen years with no relief.

Snowbird didn’t complain, but her voice was unnaturally high and reedy. I doubt that they spoke much English on the way up.

I put my arm gently around her shoulders. “It’s very hard, isn’t it?”

“Hard for you, too, Carmen. You haven’t been to Earth in a long time.”

“I exercise in Earth gravity every day.”

“I should do that,” she said. “Become Earth-strong. By the time we return, the quarantine may be lifted.”

Fly-in-Amber, behind us, made a dismal noise. “I have a better idea. Let’s just go home. We can’t live this way.”

She gave him a long blast and high-pitched growl in consensus Martian, and he squawked and clattered back.

She turned back to me. “Perhaps we should rest in Mars territory for a while.” They plodded off, muttering.

“Before long, they’ll be in zero gravity,” Paul said. “He’ll complain about that, too.”

The last thing we would have to do before Paul cut us loose was to tape things down, mostly chairs. When we were flung away from the Space Elevator, we’d be in free fall, like someone jumping out of an airplane. But we would plummet for eleven days. Jostled every now and then by steering jets. That would be tomorrow.

The habitat didn’t have any independent propulsion, of course, but it was firmly attached to the ship that would eventually be our landing vessel, much smaller. It would fly away like an eagle clutching an elephant.

Before that, we had to water the plants. We’d spent six days following the directions the hydroponic engineers had left behind, making sure all the root structures could be kept moist without water surrounding them. There was a water-absorbent granular medium held inside a fine-mesh net for each plant or group of plants. There was no automation in this temporary arrangement, of course. Every morning we’d spend an hour giving each plant a measured shot of water from a portable hydrator, a water pump with a hose and syringe.

The first morning, still in gravity, I split the chore with Dustin. It was interesting to get him alone; he usually deferred to Namir or Elza.

I had to ask him about his weird family, growing up. “I never gave it much thought,” I said, “but isn’t it strange that a person who winds up in espionage should have grown up in a commune, with anarchist parents?”

He laughed. “Not so odd. Like a kid whose parents are lawyers or cops might want to escape and become a bohemian artist.

“I didn’t want to be a spy, anyhow. A philosophy degree doesn’t open many doors, though. The Space Force paid through my doctorate in exchange for four years’ service, which I thought was going to be in communications. You go where they send you, though. They needed engineers for communication.”

“And philosophers for spookery?”

“It’s a grab bag, intelligence. Not that they’d ever admit it, but it’s where you go if you have education but no useful skills. The personnel database says there are three other philosophy Ph.D.s in intelligence. We ought to get together. Form a cabal.”

“Namir says there are more officers in intelligence than any other part of the military.”

He nodded amiably. “As if that were a good thing? It’s been that way for a long time.”

“I’ve never known a philosopher before. If it wasn’t for the Space Force, what would you be doing?”

“Staying out of harm’s way! You know, sit around, think deep thoughts. Beg for scraps.”

“And teach, I suppose.”

“And write papers that two or three people will read.” The bush he was watering had tiny white flowers with a penetrating sweet smell. He bent down and breathed deeply, and read the label. “Martian?”

“Martian miniature limes. They tweaked the genes so it wouldn’t be all branch, growing tall in Martian gravity. We’ll see what it does in one gee.”

“The past year and a half, I’ve been assigned to a think tank in Washington. All the services, multidisciplinary. The Ethics of Military Intervention.”

“Any conclusions?”

He made a sound I’d come to recognize, a puff of air through his nose: amusement, contempt, maybe patience. “Under the present conditions… it’s hard to justify most wars, anyhow, that aren’t a purely defensive reaction to invasion. But now, with the Others threatening the whole human race with casual destruction? How does anyone justify a war against any human enemy?”

“Is that a question I’m supposed to answer?”

“No.” He growled a string of foreign syllables. “That’s Farsi: ‘There is some shit a man does not have to eat.’ Adapted from American English, I think, though the principle is widely spread.”

“But it implies there’s another kind of shit that a man does have to eat. Glad I’m a woman.”

He smiled at me. “See? You’re a philosopher already.” He sniffed the lime flowers again. “Though living on recycled shit is something I tried to become philosophical about, before we came up.”

“Hunger helps.” It dominated the menu in Little Mars. The pantry machine broke up all organic waste, and some inorganic, and put it back together to make amino acids, then protein. Mixed in with measured amounts of carbohydrates and fiber and fat, some trace elements, it could produce blocks of edible stuff in programmed colors, textures, and flavors. “Elza said that Namir is a good cook. I wonder what he can do with pseudobeef and pseudochicken.”

“Make pseudo-Beef Stroganoff and pseudo-Chicken Florentine, I guess.” He sighed and leaned back against the lattice that would be supporting bean vines. “Carmen, what do you think our chances really are? Are we just wasting our time? Intuition, I mean, not science.”

“I don’t think you can do science without data. I do have an intuition, though, or an optimistic delusion.” I sat down on the edge of the tank. “Do you know the story of the lucky chicken?”

“Tell me.”

“Well, suppose you had a flat of fertilized chicken eggs—that’s one hundred and forty-four—and you dropped the flat from waist height or shoulder height. Some eggs would break. Discard them and do it again, and again, until finally you have just one egg.”

“The lucky egg.”

“You’re getting it. You hatch it and collect its fertilized eggs—”

“Unless it’s a rooster.”

“Then you have to start over, I guess. But you do the same thing, dropping them over and over until one survives. Then you wait for it to mature and collect its eggs. And again and again.”

“I see,” he said.

“Eventually, you will produce the luckiest chicken in the world. The version I heard, the benefactor was the pope. He put the chicken in a fancy papal chicken basket, and it never left his side. So nothing bad ever happened to him.”

“This is not the last pope we’re talking about, then.”

“Not a real pope. Me, actually. I’m the lucky chicken.”

“They dropped your mother from a great height?”

He was so much like Paul I could smack him. “Not that I know of. But ever since I got to Mars, I’ve had the most incredible luck. All ‘The Mars Girl’ crap. All kinds of trouble, and I always seem to come out on top. So maybe my main qualification for this job is as a talisman. Stay close to me, the way the pope stayed close to his lucky chicken.”

He was nodding, looking serious. “You do believe in luck?”

“Well, at some level I suppose I do. Not in lucky charms, talismans. But just as an observation, sure. Some people seem to be lucky all the time, while others seem to be born losers.”

“That’s true enough. Something that statistics would predict.”

“I suppose you could pretend to be scientific, and put the whole population on a bell curve, just like you would for height or weight. Normal people bulking up in the middle, the unlucky ones off to the left, the luckiest trailing off on the right.”

“Ah ha!” He grinned and rubbed his beard. “There’s your fallacy. You can only do it with dead people.”

“What? Dead people have all run out of luck.”

“No, I mean, all you can say of someone is after the fact: ‘he was lucky all his life’ or ‘she was unlucky’—but a living, breathing person always has tomorrow to worry about. You could be the luckiest person in the world, in two worlds, in the whole universe. But some tomorrow, like the day you meet the Others, boom. Your ‘luck’ runs out, like a gambler’s winning streak. And in that particular case, so does everybody else’s.”

“Are you always such an optimist?”

He picked up his hydrator, and we moved on to the next patch. “By Earth standards, America anyhow, I really am an optimist. You can define that as ‘anyone who isn’t suicidally depressed.’ There may be free energy, but that doesn’t translate into universal prosperity. Most people work at unsatisfying jobs with ambiguous or worthless goals and low pay, and anyhow, they’re just marking time until the end of the world. Namir and Elza and I, like you guys, are in the unique position of being able to do something about it.”

I was still living in a kind of double-vision world, the sanitized version that was broadcast (and which I sort of believed for years) versus the grim reality that was in Namir’s newspaper. And America was far from being the worst off. The front-page picture in the last paper showed the Ganges, a clot of corpses from shore to shore. A block-wide funeral pyre in Kuala Lumpur, within sight of the proud old Twin Towers.

These were beets, four small plants per net bag, 50 ccs water each. I wouldn’t touch beets as a girl, but in Mars I came to love them. Red planet and all. I mentioned that to Dustin.

He laughed. “I grew up in a vegetarian family. Beets were the closest thing I had to meat until I got off the commune.”

“Bothers you to go back to veggies?”

“No, I just eat to fuel up. Pseudo-hot dogs with fake mustard, yum. Elza’s about the same. Namir might go crazy, though.”

“He likes his meat?”

“Fish, actually. He doesn’t like to be far from the sea.”

“He better take a good last look.”

“On Mars, you had actual fish.”

We said “in Mars,” usually. “A pool of tilapia.” They lived on plant waste.

“He was hoping.”

“Guess we’re not a big enough biome. It was marginal on Mars, a luxury, and we didn’t have to deal with water at zero gee.” I clicked on the notebook. “Twenty kilos of dried fish in the storeroom.” The storeroom was already in place on the iceberg. It had five hundred kilos of luxury food. Including fifty liters of two- hundred-proof alcohol, more than enough for each of us to have two drinks a day.

“He can do something with dried fish, Spanish. Some kind of fritters.”

His smile was interesting. “You really like him. I mean, apart from…”

“There’s no ‘apart from,’ but yes. We’re closer than I ever was with any of my natural family.”

I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. I wanted prurient details. “You knew Elza first, though.”

“By a few weeks, maybe a month. By then it was obviously a package deal or no deal.

“I’d heard of Namir professionally, and was curious anyhow. We first met without her, very American, shooting pool.”

“You beat the pants off him.”

“Not a chance. He’s a shark. Shows no mercy.”

“You knew about him and Gehenna.”

“In what way?” he said without inflection.

“That he missed the first part, and so survived the second.”

“Oh, sure. He was about the highest-ranking officer of the Mossad in Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, who survived.”

That was interesting. “I wonder why he didn’t press his advantage with that.”

“How so?”

“He’s still with the UN, isn’t he? If he’d stayed in Israel—”

He laughed. “Smartest thing he ever did was go back to New York. Lots of ruthless people jockeying for position in the Mossad, with three-quarters of them suddenly gone. His turf in New York was safe. Besides, it’s the place he loves best.”

We moved on to the delicate celery plants. “There’s an odd chain of circumstance that winds up putting the three of us here. As if we’re collectively a lucky chicken—or an unlucky one.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Like this… the Corporation wound up agreeing that they needed no more or less than three military people on the mission. So they sent the computers out sniffing for three military people who could live together in close quarters for thirteen years, getting along with four civilians at the same time, people who had a certain amount of academic training and professional accomplishment. They didn’t want three men or three women, so as not to have one gender dominate on ad Astra.”

“And they had to be spies, of course. Don’t forget that.”

“In fact, the probability that they’d come from intelligence was high. A person who’d spent his professional life shooting down planes or disarming bombs wouldn’t be too useful. They wanted one of the three to be a medical doctor, too, who’d done general practice.”

“We all agreed on that. Someone who could work without consultation.”

“That may be what happened. The computer pulled out Elza, and she dragged me and Namir along.”

“That could be it,” I said. But computers have to be programmed, and it would be easy to start out with Namir and his mates and make sure they would be the ones the program selected. “I’d hold them like this.” He was picking up the plant by its stalk; I slid my hand under the ball of medium and lifted it out.

“Right,” he said. “Have to be careful with the babies.”

“Were you going to have any?” I asked. “Before you got orders to waltz off into outer space and tilt with monsters?”

“Well, neither Elza nor Namir wanted any children. They’re not that optimistic about the future. Immediate or distant. If it were up to me, yes, I’d like to watch one grow up. Help it grow up.”

“Sort of a social experiment? A philosophical one?”

“Cold-blooded, I know. You have two?”

“Technically. They were born ex utero, though, for which my ‘utero’ is grateful. And they’re being raised by the community, in Mars. Which I don’t like much.”

“You’re so right. Speaking as someone who was raised by a commune. With my mother and father warned not to bond too closely.”

“You didn’t have a mother figure or father figure at all?”

“No. There was a couple in charge of children. But it was obvious we were just a chore. They were pretty harsh.”

“That must have been rough. The two in charge of our kids are nice people; I’ve known them for years.”

“Good luck. Ours were nice to adults.”

We moved on to the carrots, frilly and delicate. “Working in Washington, did you commute every day?”

“No, I had a little flat in Georgetown. Go back to New York on Thursday night or Friday. Sometimes bring Elza back to DC if our schedules allowed. Sometimes I’d just go up overnight; it’s only an hour and a half on the Metro.”

“Best of both worlds.”

“Started out that way. Washington’s falling apart. Both the cities, actually. Less comfortable, more dangerous.”

“Did you go armed?”

“No, I’m fatalistic about that. Elza had a gun, but I don’t think she carried it normally. Namir usually did, and he had a bodyguard as well. But he was threatened all the time, and attacked once.”

“In the city?”

“Oh, yeah, right downtown. Stepped off the Broadway slidewalk and a woman shot him point-blank in the chest. Somehow she missed his heart. She turned to run away, and the bodyguard killed her.” He shook his head. “He got hell for that, the bodyguard. No idea who she might have been working for. No fingerprints or eyeprints. DNA finally tracked her down to Amsterdam; she’d been a sex worker there twenty years before.”

“No connection with Gehenna?”

He shook his head. “And Namir says he’s never used the services of a ‘sex worker,’ not even in Amsterdam. Men lie about that, but I’m inclined to believe him.”

“Point-blank in the chest. That must have laid him low for a long time.”

“Had to grow a new lung. Takes weeks, and it’s no fun.”

Another bit of mystery for the mystery man. “He’s made other enemies, obviously, since Gehenna. Being a peacekeeper.”

“Mostly in Africa. Very few pale beautiful blondes.”

“It’s not my field. But I assume you could hire one.”

“Yes and no. In New York, you could rent a beautiful blond hit woman and probably specify right- or left-handed. But you can’t hire someone so totally off the grid, not in America. If she ordered a meal in a restaurant, she’d get a cop along with the check, asking what planet she just dropped in from.”

“It’s gotten that bad?”

“Since Triton, yeah. But even then, a couple of years before that, America was… more cautious than most places.”

“A police state, my mother said. She calls herself a radical, though.”

He laughed. “She’s no more radical than I am. From her dossier.”

“You’ve read my mother’s dossier?”

“Oh, sorry. You thought I was a lepidopterist.”

“No, but… I assumed you’d read mine and everybody’s…”

“I’m just nosy. And seven days is a long time to kill on the Space Elevator.”

“So what about my father? Was he banging his secretary?”

“Nothing personal. Just blow jobs.” He smiled at my reaction. “Bad joke, Carmen, sorry. Sometimes my mouth gets into gear a little ahead of my brain.”

“I like that in a spy,” I said, not sure whether I did. “Not so Earl Carradine.”

“You see the last one?” he said. “Where he solves your little problem with the Others?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure. What, he takes his Swiss Army knife and turns a bicycle into a starship?”

“No, he discovers the whole thing is a hoax, from a corrupt cabal of capitalists.”

“Oh, good. We can go home now.”

“It actually was a little clever this time. Not so much gadgets and gunplay.”

I had to laugh. “Unlike real life. Where a beautiful blond mystery woman nails the spy as he steps off the Broadway slidewalk. For God’s sake!”

“What can I say?” He injected the last carrot bunch. “Life does imitate art sometimes.”

We could’ve just stayed in the habitat for launch, which might have been fun. Suddenly detached from the Space Elevator, we’d be flung toward the iceberg at a great rate of speed, but the sensation to us would be “oops—someone turned off the gravity.”

For safety’s sake, though, all of us climbed through the connecting tube into the spaceship ad Astra. (We should come up with a separate name for the habitat. San Quentin, maybe, or Alcatraz.)

We helped the Martians get strapped into their hobbyhorse restraints—with all those arms, they still can’t reach their backs—and then got into our own couches, overengineered with lots of padding and buckles. But that was for the landing, 6.4 years from now, at least. Paul didn’t expect any violent maneuvers on the way to the iceberg. There were two course corrections planned right after launch, and unpredictable “refinements” as we approached the iceberg.

Paul had said to expect a loud bang, and indeed it was about the loudest thing I had ever heard. No noise in space, of course, but the eight explosive bolts that separated the habitat from the Elevator made the whole structure reverberate.

“Stay strapped in for a few minutes,” he said, and counted down from five seconds. The attitude jets hissed faintly for a minute and stuttered. Then the main drive blasted for a few minutes, loud, but not as deafening as the bolts had been. I suppose it was a quarter of a gee or so, not quite Martian gravity.

“That should do it. Put on your slippers and let’s go check for damage.”

Our gecko slippers would allow us to walk, as if there were weak glue on our soles, down the ship’s corridor, and through most of the habitat. The sticky patches on the walls and floor and ceiling were beige circles big enough for one foot. (You could squeeze both feet into one if you liked the sensation of being a bug stuck in a spiderweb.)

Those of us used to zero gee just sailed through the tube into the habitat, the others picking their way along behind us. Namir was game for floating through but banged his shoulder on the air lock badly enough to leave a bruise. He’d had a little experience before, in the military and of course getting from the Elevator to Little Mars, perhaps just enough to make him too confident.

My immediate concern was the plants. A small apple tree had gone off exploring and made it almost to the galley, and a couple of tomato plants had gotten loose. Meryl unshipped the hand vacuum and was chasing down the floating particles of medium before we had a chance to ingest them. I returned the apple tree to its proper place and replanted the tomato vines.

The three spooks were doing the various things people do when they’re getting used to zero gee—except barfing, fortunately. They practiced pushing off from surfaces and trying to control spinning. Once you get the hang of it, it’s not hard to eyeball the distance to wherever you’re going, and do a half turn, or one-and-a-half turn, to land feetfirst. You can also “swim” short distances, but nobody needs that much exercise.

There was a very distinct look in Dustin’s eye, and Elza returned it. I hoped it worked for them better than it does for most. (Paul and I first had sex in zero gee, and it worked all right. My first time with anybody, whatever the gravity, so it was a double miracle for me.)

Snowbird and Fly- in-Amber were clumsy in zero gee. The gecko slippers were less effective with them, since they had more inertia than humans—if I’m moving slowly and put my foot down onto a beige spot, it will stop me. Snowbird has four times my mass, though, and will rip off and keep going.

I went into Mars territory with her to check their garden, since it was easier for me to move around and manipulate things. It was dark and cold, as it was supposed to be. Their garden was simpler than ours; Martian tastes didn’t run to a lot of variety.

Trays of stuff that resembled fungi and a few stubby trees. As on our side, one of the trees had come loose, but it was easy to retrieve and fix with duct tape.

A screen all along one whole wall was a panorama of their underground city, which was almost all of her planet she had ever seen. Though Mars wasn’t “her” planet the way Earth was ours.

They had known for thousands of years that Mars was not their natural home. They only learned recently that they were put on Mars as a sort of warning system for the Others: when humans had advanced enough technologically to come in contact with the Martians, they were advanced enough to present a danger to the Others, even light-years away. Which led to the Others’ attempt to destroy us, thwarted by Paul and the Martian leader Red. The cataclysmic explosion that was supposed to sterilize Earth only rearranged the farside of the Moon. Killing Red in the process.

So from one point of view, the Martians were humanity’s saviors. Another point of view, more widely held, says that it was all the Martians’ fault. (And since I was the first to come into contact with them, I shared the blame.)

After taking care of the garden, we went into the “compromise” lounge, not quite as dark and cold. There was a bench for humans to sit on, not of much utility in zero gee, and a skillful mural of the above-ground part of our Mars colony, a mosaic of pebbles from both Earth and Mars. It was special to me, made by Oz, Dr. Oswald Penninger, who had been my mentor when I first came to Mars.

I told Snowbird about it. “I met Dr. Oswald,” she said. “I breathed for him.” Oz had spent some time in the Martian city, measuring the metabolism of the various families.

“I miss him,” I said. “He was one of my closest friends.” He and Josie might have been on this expedition if the Corporation hadn’t been pressured into taking three military people.

“It is difficult for us to gauge human personality. But I can understand why you would like Dr. Oz. He is interested in everything. Or should I say ‘was,’ as you did? He will not live long enough to see us again.”

“I should have said ‘is.’ As long as the person is alive.”

“He told me about Norway,” she said, “where he studied art. I’d like to go there someday. It sounds a little like Mars.”

“Maybe they’ll do something about the gravity by then.”

“I hope so. This is nice.” She pushed up gently, rose to the ceiling, and floated back down. “But you are joking.”

“Yes. Gravity’s like death and taxes. Always with us.”

“Not always. There’s no gravity here, nor death, nor taxes. Not for some time. And when we take off for Wolf 25, it will be the ship’s acceleration that presses us to the floor.”

“Homemade gravity. You can’t tell it from the real thing.”

“Ha-ha. Dr. Einstein’s Principle of Equivalence. A good joke.”

Was it I who had made the joke, or Einstein? I decided not to pursue it.

Dustin came into the lounge, sideways and a little fast. He crashed into a wall with a modicum of grace.

“Good aim,” I said. “You want to work on the speed.”

He brushed himself off, rotating toward the center of the room. “Good aim if I’d been aiming for this door,” he said. “Good afternoon, Snowbird. What’s up?”

“Carmen helped us with a tree. Now we are discussing general relativity.”

That raised his eyebrows a few millimeters. “A little beyond me. The math, anyhow. Tensor calculus?”

I had to come clean. “Don’t ask me. I’m just sitting around being impressed. What is tensor calculus?”

“To me, it was a big ‘stop’ sign. I withdrew from the course and changed my major to philosophy. From physics.”

“Pretty drastic.”

“I try to be philosophical about it. Snowbird, your family is both, right? Science and philosophy?”

“Not in the sense of being scientists and philosophers, no. We don’t experiment, traditionally. Not on things and not on ideas. I am in a small group that wants to change that. Which I think is why the others were glad to see me go.

“Traditionally, you know, we learn by rote. It’s not like human physics and chemistry and biology. Things and processes are described in great detail, but those descriptions aren’t tested, and the underlying relationships aren’t studied.”

“We’d call that Aristotelianism, in a way. If you had an Aristotle.”

“I know. It was studying the ways you classify different methods of thinking that made some of us want to change the ways we think.”

“Some of us who are not completely grown yet.” Fly- in-Amber came drifting out of Mars territory. “Not completely sane…” He gently collided with me, as I put my other foot down on the beige spot to anchor us.

“Thank you. Snowbird was not yet two when you humans came. The novelty of it made a huge impression on her unformed mind.”

“You will never win this argument, or lose it,” Snowbird said. “I know you’re wrong, and you know I’m wrong.”

“And since you are wrong, that settles it.” Fly-in-Amber crossed all four arms in a human-looking gesture. “That’s logic.”

Dustin stayed out of it, but I didn’t. “Why does it have to be one or the other, Fly-in-Amber? Your science was fine in the old days, but it wouldn’t get you off Mars.”

“And to the planet of the Others, where we’ll be destroyed along with everybody on Earth, and perhaps in Mars as well? That’s not progress, Carmen.”

“Not the example I would choose,” Snowbird said.

“But it’s relevant,” I insisted. “Human science explained everything pretty well until we met you, and found you had this energy-out-of-nowhere thing. Now we have to fit you into our universe, just as you have to fit us into yours.”

“How can you say that? If you hadn’t stumbled onto us, we could have happily gone on for an eternity, or at least until the cows came home. If we had cows.”

“Was that a joke, Fly-in-Amber?”

“Of course not. I am only trying to adapt to your idiom.”

“He pretends not to have a sense of humor,” Snowbird said, “which makes him even funnier.”

“Idiom,” Fly-in-Amber repeated. “Idiom is not humor.”

“What does the philosopher say about that?”

He grinned. “I have enough for a monograph already.”

“Humans do not understand this, and neither does Snowbird.” Fly-in-Amber made a complex gesture that started him rotating. I reached out and stabilized him. “Thank you. It’s not a concept that I can express in English, or any human language.” He rattled off about thirty seconds of noises in the Martian consensus language. I recognized three clear repeated sounds—one for negation, one for “human,” and one that signals an “if… then” statement.

Snowbird was totally still, absorbing it. “Can you translate?” Dustin said.

“Not exactly… no. But I could try to say part of it.”

Fly-in-Amber put his small hands together and made a slight bow, perhaps a parody of human gesture.

“It’s about the social function of humor in both races. As if humans were one culture.” Fly- in-Amber barked, and Snowbird answered with a series of clicks. “He points out that you are essentially one culture, in Mars.

“From the first time we communicated—with Carmen, after we decided to let her know we spoke human languages—it’s been obvious that humor both unites and separates the two species. Martian humor is almost always about helplessness, about fate and irony. Humans also recognize this, but most of your humor is about suffering—about pain, loss, death. To us… that preference itself is beautifully funny, and is even funnier as you think about it. Like a hall of mirrors, the images fading off into infinity.

“I’m not saying this well. But for most of us, humor is absolutely necessary for survival—if you lived in a small hole in the ground, and knew there would never be anything else, you would perhaps feel the same way.”

“Sort of like what we call ‘gallows’ humor,” Dustin said.

“ ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ ” Fly-in-Amber quoted, “ ‘and you will find me a grave man.’ ” He said it with a British acting voice. “That was a BBC radio production of Romeo and Juliet in 1951. Very Martian humor. Mercutio has been stabbed, and he jokes about dying. Most human humor is not so clear to me.”

“Nor as funny,” Snowbird said. “So many jokes about people falling down, which is hardly possible with four legs. Sex jokes aren’t funny because we have to figure out what the people are doing, and why that’s more funny than what they normally do.” She turned to Fly-in-Amber and made the thumping laughter sound. “Only two people! Only two!”

“Some of us don’t think that’s funny,” Fly-in-Amber said. “They can’t help the way they’re made.”

“Do you tell jokes about Martian sex?” Dustin asked.

Snowbird pantomimed scratching her head, which was kind of funny, avoiding all the eyes up there. “No… no fate or irony or helplessness there. What is there to laugh about?”

“Trust me,” he said. “Humans find Martian sex pretty entertaining.”

“But it’s so plain and innocent, compared to human sex. We don’t hide away and do it in private, and kill people if they do it with the wrong person.”

“You’d never have a Shakespeare,” I said.

“I think we do have individuals like Shakespeare,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Though it would be difficult to explain, to translate, what I mean by that.”

“I should think so. Since you don’t seem to have anything like drama.”

“Nothing dramatic used to happen to us, before you came. I suppose we’re going to need drama now.”

“And psychoanalysis,” Dustin said. “Social workers. Police and jails.”

“We look forward to evolving.”