Starbound

1 GRAVITY SUCKS

On Earth we’d seen pictures of the iceberg, and so didn’t expect it to look like an iceberg, glistening and pure. I was once stationed in Greenland in the winter; it looked something like that, cold and dirty. Elza said it reminded her of North Dakota in the winter—windstorms drive dark topsoil to mix with blizzard snow to make a black substance they call “snirt,” neither snow nor dirt.

It was the fossil nucleus of an ancient comet. Billions of years ago, Mars had bent the thing’s orbit around, turning it into a small asteroid of ice and impurities, never to be warm enough to have its day in the sun and grow a magnificent tail.

So it was a huge dirty snowball, somewhat out of round. White splashes where engineers and their robots had blasted and drilled to turn it into a huge fuel tank. It provided reaction mass for the main drive and an array of small steering jets, mainly for turning us around at midpoint—and evading rocks, if it came to that.

Everything had been tested out; the main drive fired for several days, stopped, turned around, and fired again. Now we coasted in to meet it.

It was a death trap in several ways. The sheer amount of energy blowing out behind was like a continual thermonuclear explosion, and although stars do that for millennia on end, no machine has ever done it before—let alone for thirteen years. And it wasn’t as straightforward as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation; it was just the magic Martian energy sources stacked up, or nested, for a multiplicative effect. I didn’t have the faintest idea why it worked, and its designers were only a couple of baby steps ahead of me. All we knew for sure was that the scale model had worked, going out a hundredth of a light- year and back, with one pilot/passenger.

It was like successfully testing a motorboat, and saying, okay, launch the Titanic.

Which brings up another actuarial disaster waiting to happen: what if we hit something on the way?

It wouldn’t have to be another iceberg, real or metaphorical. Going at 0.95 the speed of light, a fist- sized rock would be like a nuclear bomb. We did have an electromagnetic repeller to keep interstellar dust from grinding us down to a sliver. But it wouldn’t work on anything as big as a marble.

Bigger things we could sense at a distance, and avoid with a quick blip from the steering jets, which explains our lack of fine glassware and china. Though if our cosmological models were right, such encounters would be rare. If we were wrong, it would be a bumpy ride.

There had been no serious problems with the test run. But we were going twenty-four hundred times farther.

Four engineers were still living on the iceberg. They would get us screwed down tight into the ice and connect our habitat with the storage area, where they’d been living the past ten months. Have to check the caviar and vodka supplies. (Actually, the modifications that allowed them to live there made the storage building a de facto alternate living area, if something made ad Astra uninhabitable, and if we somehow survived that event.)

We’d been talking with them for days, via line-of-sight laser modulation, and were glad to be able to aid them in a small conspiracy.

The plan was supposed to be that we not make physical contact with them, because they were all from Earth, and we were all quarantined because of exposure to Mars and Martians. They’d been talking it over, though, and decided to come say hello and be contaminated. Then they’d go back to Little Mars instead of Earth and wait for a chance to hitch a ride on to Mars. Which seemed like a better prospect than their home planet.

All four of our resident semi-Martians thought they’d be welcome, thumbing their collective nose at Earth. Of course, the two actual Martians didn’t understand why anyone would want to live on Earth in the first place. All that gravity. Humans everywhere.

Paul brought us in smoothly, a couple of small bumps. The comet didn’t have any appreciable gravity, of course, so it was more a docking maneuver than a landing.

The robots had carved out a rectangular hole in the ice, two meters deeper than the habitat was tall. Paul nudged us in there, and the robots slid blocks of ice and dirt in place over us, a kind of ablative protective layer. He detached the small lander and inched it onto the surface. A flexible crawl tube connected the ship’s air lock with ours.

Paul swam through in a space suit, followed by the four engineers. We were all wearing our usual motley, so the five of them looked like an Invasion of the Space People movie.

They all popped out of their suits as quickly as possible, Carmen aiding Paul and the engineers unscrewing each other. They were two couples, Margit and Balasz from Hungary and Karin and Franz from Germany.

They were wearing skinsuits, of course. Margit filled hers in a spectacular way, but Karin was more attractive to me, compact and athletic like Elza. As if there were any scenario where that would make a difference. (“Oh, a Jew,” she says in my dreams, speaking German—“Let me make up for World War II.”)

Margit spread her arms and inhaled hugely, starting a slight rotation. “Ah! Martian air. I feel so deliciously contaminated.”

We shook hands all around and made introductions, though we’d met on-screen. Snowbird and Fly-in-Amber came floating tentatively out of the darkness.

The four newcomers were somewhat wide-eyed at the apparitions, but Balasz croaked and whistled a fair imitation of a greeting.

“The same to you and your family,” Snowbird said. “You are almost correct.”

“Not bad for a human,” Fly-in-Amber grumbled. High praise.

“This is so huge,” Karin said, apparently of the farm. “How many species?”

“About three dozen,” Meryl said, “with another dozen to be planted in a few months. And eight Martian varieties.”

“It will make it easier,” Franz said. “Playing with your food. The same meals over and over can drive you crazy.”

Paul laughed. “Make you do irrational things, like give up Earth for Mars.”

All four of them smiled. “Definitely,” Karin said. “Though it might depend where on Earth you call home.”

“I will miss New York,” I said. “Though it’s not exactly the simple life.”

“Mars has plenty,” Paul said. “Small-town life, but something new every day, every hour. Trade with you in a minute.”

Karin shook her head. “No, I’m not that great a pilot. You can keep your starship.”

“So when are you going to tell them?” Carmen said.

Karin and Franz exchanged glances. “Actually, we were waiting to get your opinion,” he said.

“A pity we aren’t a little farther out,” I said. The outer limit for line-of-sight transmission was set at four hundred million kilometers, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars, and we were still within that.

“It is,” Franz said. “They’ll know we’ve been withholding the fact.”

“You ought to wait until the last minute,” Carmen said. “Don’t give them time to round up a bunch of lawyers.”

“The worst they can do is shoot you down,” I said, “but I don’t think they can afford to waste a spaceship.”

Paul agreed. “They’ll fine you the expense of decontamination and the flight to Mars. But since there’s no money on Mars, all they could do is seize your assets on Earth.”

“Which aren’t much,” Karin said.

“None from us, of course,” Margit said. Hungary was part of the Cercle Socialisme.

“It would be courteous to give them enough warning, so they don’t send up an ‘uncontaminated’ Space Elevator.”

Moonboy held up a hand. He hadn’t spoken before. “Wait. You’re missing the obvious.” Everybody looked his way. “Just lie to them. Make up some story about how you were forced to come aboard ad Astra. Medical problem or something.”

“Of course,” Balasz said. “Once one was exposed to Martian- ness, we might as well all be, since we all have to go back together.”

“Could you cooperate with us in this ruse?” Margit said.

There was a general murmur of assent. “I cannot lie,” Fly- in-Amber said. “It is not a matter of choice for me. My function is to record things as they happen.”

“My function,” Snowbird said, “is to sit on you if you open your mouth. You have to record everything, but you don’t have to communicate it to everybody. Least of all to humans on Earth.”

“True enough.” He turned to the engineers. “I do not have lips. But my orifice is sealed.”

Snowbird turned to Carmen. “See? He doesn’t know.”

So we manufactured a credible medical crisis, choosing Karin because she was the pilot. We gave her severe bronchitis that didn’t respond to their ship’s primitive treatment, and so she had to spend a few days in our infirmary. Actually, she was outside most of the time, helping the other three finish battening down the hatches.

We took pleasure in their company for the eight days they remained on the iceberg, enjoying the last contact with people from outside our circle. I’m sure that Elza enjoyed more than social intercourse with Balasz, a warm and handsome man. Dustin and I exchanged a raised eyebrow or two over it. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if she had kept her hands to herself.

(Dustin, I think, had more than a passing interest in Margit, but would never initiate a liaison himself. I’ve told him that if Adam had waited for Eve to ask, none of us might be here. But he remains diffident.)

We said our good-byes, and they “cast off,” drifting a few kilometers behind the iceberg, well out of the line of fire. They were sending a record of our launch to Earth, and also to Paul—though if anything serious went wrong, I’m not sure what he could do.

It took all morning to secure the plants, some of which would be glad to have gravity again. Beans and peas were going totally schizophrenic in zero gee, with no up or down. Carrots had started growing beet-shaped.

After everything was secured and misted, we crawled and glided up into the ship and strapped in. I’d wanted to stay down in the habitat, taped into one of the chairs, but Paul talked me out of it with one pained expression. For the most daredevil pilot ever to elude a miniature supernova, he’s an extremely cautious man.

We were all nervous when he pushed the LAUNCH button; only a fool would not have been. If there was any noise or vibration, I didn’t sense it (though Snowbird said she did). Perhaps the sensation was too subtle compared to the sudden clasp of gravity. Acceleration, technically.

It seemed greater than one gee, though of course it wasn’t. It also seemed “different” from real gravity in some indefinable way, as if (which we knew to be true) the floor was aggressively pushing up at us. Relativistic heresy.

After about five minutes, Paul said “Seems safe,” and unbuckled. If something had gone wrong, we could theoretically have blasted off in this lander and left ad Astra behind. Go back to Earth and start over.

I undid my seat belt and levered myself up, trying not to groan. I’d been desultory on the exercise machines, which were awkward in zero gee. Time to pay the piper now.

Dustin did groan. “I’m going on a diet.”

“We don’t want to hear any Earth people complain,” Fly-in-Amber said, inching painfully toward the air lock. “You are built for this.”

“So are we,” Snowbird said. That was true; they were overengineered for Martian conditions. But then they would have inherited the Earth, if the Others’ grand plan had succeeded.

They had both been spending two hours a day in the Earth- normal exercise rooms in Little Mars, but that didn’t make the change welcome. In an open area, we can help them get along, offering an arm or a shoulder, but in the spaceship aisle and the tube connecting the air locks, they had to crawl along on their own.

“I’ll bet the Others have a way around this gravity,” Snowbird said. “We should have asked them while we had their attention.”

“We had our fill of their attention,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Besides, they live in liquid nitrogen, floating like fish in Earth’s water. They don’t care about gravity.”

I’d never thought of that. We didn’t really know what they looked like, so my image was of crystalline or metallic creatures lying almost inert under the cryogenic fluid.

“I want to go to Earth and see the water,” Snowbird said. “I want to wade in the sea.”

“Things go well, you probably will,” I said. “Surely the quarantine can’t last another fifty-some years.”

“For a spy, you’re a hopeless optimist,” Carmen said. “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man as well.”

“If the odds are right.”

“Then I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky—good single-malt Scotch whisky, bottled this year—that the quarantine will still be in place when we return. If we do.”

“A fifty-year-old bottle?” Maybe half a month’s pay. “I’ll accept the wager. Even against the Lucky Chicken—especially against her, so I can lose.”

“You lose, and everybody wins. Quarantined, but alive.”

After a few minutes of walking around, mostly checking plants for damage, all of us probably felt like lying down. I fought the impulse by going to the exercise machines. At least I could sit down on the stationary bicycle. Watch the water splashing into the pool. In a couple of hours, it would be full; I looked forward to cooling off in it.

I wondered whether the Martians would try it. Their underground lakes were shallow and muddy, and I couldn’t remember any reference to their using water recreationally. It was pretty rare stuff.

They didn’t wash for personal hygiene. They used flat scrapers, like ancient Roman athletes, the residue stirred into water that would be used for agriculture.

I got up and went back down the yellow corridor to the pantry, to see what I could put together for our first shipboard meal. (I hadn’t attempted cooking in zero gee.)

It was cold, maintained about ten degrees above freezing in the main area. Forty below in the “freezer,” which of course was heated up to that relatively balmy temperature, from the iceberg’s ambient coldness, about three degrees above absolute zero.

I’d spent hours studying the pantry’s organization and modifying it according to some logic and aesthetic that was arcane even to me. “This is the way I want it” was what it boiled down to. I would be the one spending the most time down here.

I took a basket and collected what I would need for a pasta dish that would resemble spaghetti and meatballs, comfort food, though there was no actual meat, and I assumed the spaghetti would have to be done in a pressure cooker. The air pressure was like Little Mars, about equivalent to nine thousand feet in altitude; boiling water wouldn’t cook fast.

I filled bottles with olive oil and wine concentrate, which I’d keep in the kitchen. No sense in making wine out of it for cooking; the alcohol would just boil off anyhow.

It would be a month before I had any fresh vegetables or herbs. But I did have dehydrated tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions in resealable jars, and flash-frozen green beans and corn for a side dish.

Moonboy came in with two-liter flasks for wine. They had lines marked for 130 ccs of alcohol and 50 ccs of concentrate; he chose Chianti when I told him what we were having. Some bureaucrat had set up the alcohol supply so you had to type in your initials and the quantity dispensed—or you could type in “communal,” as Moonboy did. Mr. Communal might wind up being quite a lush.

Nobody’d said anything about limits. Would you be cut off if the machine decided you were drinking too much for a pilot, or a doctor? For an out-of-work spy?

The wines we’d made in Little Mars that way weren’t too bad. The water has more oxygen dissolved in it than normal air would provide, and the theory was that it gave it a “brighter” taste. Whatever, I could live with it. I enjoy fine wine but will take any old plonk rather than nothing.

(In the desert, we boy soldiers made a horrible wine out of raisins and cut-up citrus, with bread- making yeast. I still can’t look at raisins.)

There was a lot of floor space beyond the pantry, which took up less than a quarter of the storage warehouse. The rest was a combination of replacements for things we knew would wear out, like clothes, and tools and raw materials for fabricating things we hadn’t predicted needing.

Like weapons, I supposed. We made a point of saying that the mission was peaceful and unarmed. But when I floated through the warehouse and its large semisentient machine shop, I saw that it wouldn’t take much inventiveness or skill to put together individual projectile and laser weapons and small bombs.

It was unlikely that any conventional weapon would have a non-trivial effect on the Others. But they might not be the only enemies out there. Sooner or later, we’d have to talk about that. I would just as soon not be the one to bring it up, though.

All that stuff waiting for something to go wrong made me wonder whether we might have traded in one of our xenologists, or even a spy, for a gifted tinkerer. We had engineers in a couple of flavors, and smart machines to do their bidding. But could any of those engineers take a blade to a piece of wood and carve a useful propeller out of it? An oar? I could, of course. But that’s not like having someone who would say, “You don’t need a propeller. This is what you need.”

I added a frozen cherry pie to the basket and a quart of something supposedly resembling ice cream. By the time I got to the kitchen, everybody was relaxing with a drink in the dining room or the study. Moonboy was intently playing the piano, silent with earphones, studying a projected score. Snowbird was standing by the small bookshelf, studying one of the few physical books we’d brought along.

Had to get used to their standing all the time. There are no social signals in their posture that I can recognize. When are they relaxing? Does the term have any meaning to them?

I set the stuff out in proper order on the work island, and put the pseudomeatballs in the microwave to thaw, then poured a glass of reconstituted Chianti. Not really bad. Asked the screen for pressure-cooking directions, and it said at this “altitude” I didn’t have to pressure-cook pasta; it just took longer. Okay; filled the pot three-quarters with water and added a little salt and oil, and put it on high.

My skin seemed to relax on my body, blood pressure coming down. I had so missed this plain thing. Whenever we were in a situation where it was possible, cooking was my main relaxant and restorer. Neither Elza nor Dustin did much cooking, though they had their specialties. Dustin’s Texas chili was a possibility here, but Elza’s skill with sushi was unlikely to be of use, unless we met some edible aliens. She could handle tentacles.

For two summers before I joined the kibbutz in Israel, my aunt Sophie hired me to do “dog work” in her New York restaurant, Five Flags. I did a lot of vegetable chopping and some simple sous-chef things, and was exposed to basic techniques in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese cooking. College and combat took me away from that world, and I never pursued it professionally, nor actually wanted to. That might make it too serious, no longer relaxing.

Meryl came over and refilled her glass. “Can I help?”

I measured some water into the dehydrated onions. “Nothing much to do, I’m afraid. I would love to have an onion to chop.”

“Not for a month or so.” She looked out over the hydroponic farm, more white plastic than greenery. “When we left Mars for Little Mars, I didn’t think I’d miss it, working with the plants.”

“No green thumb?”

“Well, no enthusiasm. I thought the ‘ag hours’ were somebody’s bright idea for morale. But I did grow to miss it, in Little Mars. One thing to look forward to, here.”

I nodded. “You’re not looking forward to six years of leisure? Or twelve?”

“Sure.” She retreated into thought, expression momentarily vacant. “I had an elaborate course of research planned, the thing we talked about the other day.”

I remembered. “Delphinic and cetacean pseudosyntax.”

“The more I think about it, the more futile it seems. No new data, no experimental subjects. I could work like a dog for twelve years while everybody else in the field is working for fifty. I come up with some brilliant insight and find it’s been old news for thirty years. People are having tea with whales and sex with dolphins.”

“Better than the other way around.”

“If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”

The meatballs dinged, and I took them out. “It seems to me your work would have value as methodology even if people on Earth came up with different results, with newer data.” I touched a couple, and they were thawed, still cool.

“Too abstract. I mean, you’re right, but eventually it would be old data pushed around by outdated methodology. Xenolinguistics is moving fast now that we have actual xenos.”

“None of us will be doing anything on the cutting edge.” I poured a little oil into a large pan and put it on to heat. “Can’t beat relativity.”

Even if communication with Earth were completely unrestricted, you couldn’t stay current with research. At turnaround, three years and a couple of months from now by ship time, twelve years would have passed on Earth. If you sent a message there to a colleague who answered immediately, the answer would get to Wolf 25 almost thirty-seven Earth years later. Not so much communication as historical record.

I shook the wet onion flakes into the oil, and they sizzled and popped. The cooking-onion smell was intense but faded in seconds in the thin air.

“Smells good.” She leaned back against the island and took a sip of wine, then sighed. “I just haven’t been admitting it to myself. I should table the cetacean stuff till I get back to Earth. Little Mars, anyhow. Join the crowd and study the Martian language.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“I resisted it back on Mars because I didn’t have any special talent for it. But neither did Carmen, and she’s making headway.”

“At least you’ll be carrying your research materials along with you.”

“If they cooperate. Fly-in-Amber isn’t happy about being source material, I can tell that already.”

I shrugged. “He’s studying us. Turnabout’s fair play.”

“I’ll point that out to him.”

I shook the onions around in the pan and slid the meatballs into it.

She laughed. “They’re subtle, the yellow ones. As he says, he can’t lie. But he’s very careful in the kinds of truth he shares.”

“You’ve known him awhile?”

“Sure, since he came to Little Mars, ’79. I’m not sure I know him any better than the day we met, though.”

“He acts as if he’s just a recording device.”

“Yeah, that’s his pose. But he’s a lot more complicated than that. Mysterious. Talk to Snowbird about him sometime. He’s more strange to her than we are.”

“Really.” I drew a liter of water and dumped the tomato and wine concentrates in it.

“That’s what she told me, in those words. All the yellow family… she says they act as if they’re the only ones who are really real. The rest of us, we’re just a dream.”

“They’re all delusional?”

“Maybe. Snowbird thinks it may be true.”

I smiled at that, but at the same time had a little twist of something like fear. “If you were a dream, would you be aware of it?”

She looked straight at me, not smiling. “Not if the dreamer knew his business.”

2 YEAR ZERO

The Corporation asked us all to keep daily diaries, and gave us a program guaranteed to keep them private until fifty years after the last one of us has died. Our privacy guarded, I suppose, by the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.

I’ll pretend they’re telling the truth, and anyhow I don’t have a lot to hide. I admit that I pick my nose when no one is looking. I don’t like my body very much. I prefer masturbation to sex with my husband. I’m jealous, and a little bit afraid, of Elza, and trust her not at all. She will have every man on this boat, then come after the women. But it’s not as if I don’t have fantasies about her men. One of them, anyhow.

I’ve started writing because the trip has officially begun. We started blasting today. What a verb, as if we were miners. But it’s accurate; we’re standing on top of a matter/antimatter bomb that will keep exploding for 12.8 years plus.

Trying to get used to Earth- strength gravity. I asked Paul how long it would take if we accelerated with Mars- normal gravity. He said he couldn’t do hypogolic cosines or something in his head, then fiddled with his notebook and said it wouldn’t work; it would take umpty-ump years to get there; umpty- less-ump, but long, in our time frame. But we might get there with our backs intact. I can’t find any way to stand that doesn’t make my back hurt.

Part of the problem is associative dissonance, how nice to have a college education and have names for everything. My body feels this gravity and thinks I should be in the gym in Little Mars; an hour of sweat, then back to normal. But this is normal; all through human history people put up with weighing this much. So settle down, back, and get used to it.

(later) I heard splashing; the pool finally filled. Took a towel over. Namir had the current on and was swimming in place.

I’d never seen him naked. He looks good for a man his age. Solid muscles and only a little paunch. A lot of hair. He’s circumcised, something I’d only seen in pictures. It makes him look vulnerable. It also makes his dick look longer, or maybe it just is longer. I’ll have to ask Paul. Or maybe not.

The timer rang, and he got out. I would like to report that his vulnerable penis sprang instantly erect when I stepped out of my robe, but alas it just sat there. Perhaps he’s seen a naked woman or two before. Maybe even one with tits.

The water was cold but felt good, and I warmed up fast with the current at six knots. Turned it down to one for the backstroke. Namir did glance at my frontal aspect, cunt-al, but then politely turned away. I had a wicked impulse to tease him but don’t feel that I know him well enough. Which is odd, after all these weeks. But he’s a formal, quiet man. He jokes and laughs when it’s appropriate; but when he’s by himself, he looks like he’s thinking about something sad.

Which of course he must be. He walked through Tel Aviv right after Gehenna, millions of his countrymen dead and rotting in the desert sun. What could anyone learn, or do, or believe, to get over that?

He told us that two of the men under his command killed themselves that first day. Shot themselves. He said that like he was describing the weather.

But I think his calm fatalism gives us all a kind of strength. We will probably die on this trip. The trick is to say that without being brave or dramatic. We will probably have powdered eggs for breakfast. We will probably die in five years and three months. Pass the salt, please.

Namir cooked his first dinner last night, and it was pretty good, considering the restrictions he’s working under. Spaghetti with meatless meatballs, with reconstituted vegetables that weren’t too mushy. Before long we’ll all be staring at the hydroponic garden chanting “grow, grow.”

Actually, we’ll all be doing something more or less constructive. We talked about that after dinner. Paul’s continuing his VR course work for a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, to complement his geology degrees. Elza is studying trauma medicine, and also does abstract needlepoint and God knows what kind of bizarre sex. Dustin says he doesn’t have to actually do anything. A philosopher by training, he might burst into thought at any moment. He’s also practicing trick shots on the pool table, though I don’t know how long that will last. Elza asked him to limit the noise to ten minutes at a time, preferably once a year.

Moonboy is a good pianist, huge hands, but he usually plays silently, with earphones. He’s writing a long composition that he began when he left Mars. He’s a xenologist, of course, like Meryl and me, so we have plenty to do, getting ready to meet the Others. Meryl also does word and number puzzles with grim seriousness. Taped to her wall she has a crossword puzzle that has ten thousand squares.

Namir does woodwork as well as cooking; he brought some fancy wood and knives from Earth. He also studies poetry, though he says he hasn’t written any since he was young. He works with formal poetry in Hebrew and Japanese as well as English; his job title at the UN before Gehenna was “cultural attaché.” I wonder how many people knew he was a spy. Maybe they all did. He even looks like a spy, muscular and handsome and dark. He moves with grace. I sort of want him and sort of don’t.

The Martians weren’t in on the after-dinner conversation; they rarely join us for meals. They don’t eat human food and perhaps they’re uncomfortable watching us consume it. But I’m pretty sure that their answer to “What do you plan to do for the next six and a half or thirteen years?” would be “Same as always.” They’re born into a specific social and intellectual function and don’t deviate much.

Fly-in-Amber’s yellow family are recorders; they simply remember everything that happens in their presence. They’re weirdly acute and comprehensive; I could fan a book’s pages in front of Fly- in-Amber and immediately afterward—or ten years after—he could recite the book back to me.

Snowbird’s white clan is harder to pin down. They classify things and visualize and articulate relationships. They’re naturally curious and seem to like humans. Unlike Fly-in-Amber’s family, I have to say.

Every kind of Martian has remarkable verbal memory. They’re born with a basic vocabulary, evidently different for each family, and add new words just by hearing them. They have no written language, though human linguists are making headway on that. Meryl and Moonboy and I are adding to an existing vocabulary of about five hundred words and wordlike noises, with help mainly from Snowbird. Meryl is best with it; she worked with porpoise and whale communication, inventing phonemelike symbols for repeated sounds.

We’ll never be able to speak it; it’s full of noises that people can’t make, at least not with the mouth. But Moonboy believes he can approximate it with a keyboard in synthesizer mode, with percussion, and fortunately Snowbird is fascinated by the idea and willing to work with him hour after hour, tweaking the synthesizer’s output.

This doesn’t read much like a diary. I remember my freshman year, on the way to Mars, studying the London journals of Pepys and Boswell. But Pepys was wandering around his ruined city, and Boswell had Dr. Johnson to write about, then going down to London Bridge for his whores. The professor said Boswell had a condom made of wood. That’s stranger than Martians.

We need a Boswell or a Pepys instead of, or along with, this ragtag bunch of scientists and spies. The huge tragedy of London’s collapsing under fire and plague is small, compared to eight billion human beings snuffed out for being human.

3 RECORD

1 May 2088

The sponsors of the Wolf 25 expedition required that each of us keeps a record of our experience, but left the form of that record up to the individual. Mine will be a note to you, my imaginary friend. You are very intelligent but don’t happen to know what I’m about to say, and so are eternally interested.

This is the record kept by General Namir Zahari, originally commissioned by the Mossad, an intelligence arm of the Israeli army. I am joined by American intelligence officers Colonel Dustin Beckner and Colonel Elza Guadalupe, to both of whom I am married.

There are no other military personnel on the mission. There are two native Martians, Snowbird (of the white clan) and Fly- in-Amber (of the yellow), and four humans with Martian citizenship. The pilot, Paul Collins, resigned a commission in the American Space Force in order to come to Mars. He is married to Carmen Dula, who was the first person to meet the Martians and is circumstantially responsible for the complications that ensued.

Though let me record here that any contact with humans would ultimately have resulted in the same unfortunate sequence of events; the Others apparently had the whole scenario planned for tens of thousands of years.

If you look at this as a military operation, which in a sense it is, it is the most ambitious “attack” ever launched. All of the energy expended in all of the wars in modern history wouldn’t propel this huge iceberg to Wolf 25 and back. Even with free energy, it’s more expensive than World War II.

If it’s the most expensive such project, it may also be the most ambiguous. We don’t have the slightest idea of what we will face there, or what we will do. By far the most probable outcome will be that the Others will destroy us long before we’re close enough to harm them.

But we cannot do nothing. Once they realize we thwarted their attempt to destroy humanity, they will simply do it again, even if it takes centuries.

The fact that the Others are so mind-numbingly slow does not really work to our advantage. Our experience with them in the Triton “demonstration”—and what the Martian leader Red found out about them—indicates that they plan ahead for many contingencies, and their machines react automatically when conditions are right. The concept of “Wait—hold your fire!” probably is not in their repertoire.

The small robot ship that precedes us may be our best hope. It will start broadcasting from right before turnaround, and so the message will get there long before we arrive. It will explain in detail what our situation is and plead that they let us approach and talk.

We hope they will not vaporize it as soon as it is detected.

We do know they understand and “speak” English, though there would be no such thing as a conversation between one of them and one of us. You could ask a yes-or-no question and would have to wait half an hour for a reply, unless they had a machine set up to interpret the question and deliver a prerecorded or cybernetically generated answer.

The last message we got from Triton was evidently one of those: “I am sorry. You already know too much.” Then Triton exploded with sixteen hundred times the energy output of the Sun, a fraction of a second after the Other sped back to Wolf 25 with tremendous acceleration. Then it tried to use Red in a delayed-action attempt to destroy life on Earth. But the Martian gave up his own life instead.

(It was not so great a sacrifice, in an absolute sense, since he would have died anyhow, along with life on Earth. But it’s touching and heartening that he would go against the will of his creators in our favor. He was able to defeat his own programming to make a moral choice, which gives us a small wedge of hope.)

Carmen is of the opinion that even if the Others destroy this vessel, the ad Astra, the fact that we came in peace could work in the human race’s favor. I didn’t publicly disagree with her, but that’s naively optimistic. The flag of truce is at best an admission of weakness. It can also be the first warning of a desperate attack, when your opponent has little strength and nothing to lose.

I think that if they allow us to approach their planet, or some surrogate planet, it will be to evaluate our strength. Probably just prior to destroying us.

But that’s a human soldier talking. Soldier, diplomat, and spy. I have no idea what action their godlike psychology might produce. Carmen could turn out to be the pessimist. They’ll apologize for trying to exterminate everybody—“What were we thinking?”—and send us back home laden with treasure and praise. And pigs will fly.

At any rate, they hold all the cards, and we don’t even know the name of the game. We have a little over five years to think about it and agree on a course of action. If we don’t agree, I suppose the majority will rule.

Or the strongest minority.

4 WEIGHTY MATTERS

The humans said I must keep a written diary of this expedition, which I complained was ridiculous, since all I am is a living, breathing diary. But what if I died? they asked. I never think in those terms, since when I die the nonredundant parts of my memory will be passed to my successor. But in fact I might be physically obliterated out here, something that has not happened to a member of my family for 4362 ares. A certain amount of knowledge was lost that day, unrecoverable. So I have to agree with them, and am writing this down, though it is unutterably slow and imprecise, and includes the labor of translation, since we have no written language.

English is their language, so I will use it, though French and Russian are easier for me to speak, since they have more sounds like our own.

Not speaking my own language depresses me. Snowbird is missing her “white” language, too, perhaps more than I miss mine; theirs is prettier, if less accurate. The consensus language we’re constrained to use lacks both qualities. And English is unspeakable. Namir, my favorite human here, can converse with me in Japanese, which is the most pleasant human language I know.

This is the first of May, 2088, the last day when our clocks and calendars will be the same as those on Earth and Mars. When we reach turnaround, halfway to our target, it will be August 13, 2091, on the ship, but back on Earth it will be July 2, 2100, almost nine years later. They say this is because of general relativity, though it makes no sense to me. They say our clocks run faster because we are moving, and although I know it’s true, it also makes no sense to me. Snowbird seems to understand it somewhat. She told me that little t, which is our time, is equal to c over a times the hyperbolic cosine of a over c times Earth time, which is big T. I suppose it’s true, but all I have to do is remember it. I think if I had to understand it, my brain would overheat and explode.

We have been accelerating for eight hours, and I think it will be eight years before I get used to it, if ever. It is like carrying more than your own weight on your back. The instant it started, I had to shit. That’s an impolite word, for some reason, but is the closest human word to what we do. I went as fast as I could, which was slowly, into our living area, to the patch of dirt we use for recycling our toxins. Snowbird was already there, being younger and stronger, but she respected my seniority and allowed me to step in first. The extra gravity did accelerate the process, which is the only good thing I can say about it.

I told the pilot, Paul, that I thought it was unfair, and asked him why we couldn’t accelerate at Mars gravity, so everyone would be comfortable. He said it would take us more than two years longer to get there. I said if we’re all going to die when we get there anyhow (as Namir says), then I should think he would want to take more time, not less. He laughed and said I was right, but he didn’t turn down the acceleration. Perhaps he can’t. It’s all very strange, but I have been dealing with humans almost from the beginning, and nothing surprises me anymore.

I should say something about the Others, toward whose planet we are recklessly speeding. They created us Martians, evidently twenty-seven thousand Earth years ago. We are biological machines, as are humans, but humans are not in agreement as to who designed them.

The Others had observed humans evolving into tool-using creatures, then fire-using, and thought it was only a matter of time before they had starships and would present a danger.

Often this is not a problem, the Others say, because when a race discovers nuclear energy, it usually destroys itself before it develops starflight.

I take it we Martians were a mistake, overall. We did fulfill our major function, which was to notify the Others that humans had developed the ability to go to a nearby planet. Then we, the yellow family, did as we had been programmed and delivered a coded message to the humans, which gave them the basic facts about the Others.

One individual Other had been waiting in the solar system for twenty-seven thousand years. His main function was to watch how the humans responded to this new knowledge and decide whether to let them live. He decided they should not live, but the automatic device that should have destroyed them didn’t work. Humans moved it to the farside of their Moon, and when it exploded, it hurt no one but the one Martian who was carrying it.

Then the humans studied us Martians. Among other things, they figured out how we tap free energy from another universe. No Martian understands how that works, and I don’t think any human actually does, either. But they can use it, and it gave them starflight, which I don’t think was in the Others’ plans.

The Others say they have either destroyed or spared hundreds of intelligent races in this part of the Galaxy, and have no record of having failed before. But I don’t know about that.

We of the yellow family specialize in memory, not original thinking, but I do have a theory about the Others: I think they’re lying. We do have evidence that they are capable of marvelous things, like inventing us and modifying a part of Mars so that we had a place to live before we inherited the Earth. We know they can make a small bomb powerful enough to eliminate life on Earth. But that doesn’t mean that everything they say is true.

We have three sources of information about the Others. The primary thing was the coded message, which was like an ancestral memory in the yellow family. But it was not a regular memory; we had no access to it until we looked at a triggering light that came from the Other who was watching us from Triton, the satellite of Neptune. I saw that light and fell down and started babbling, and so did every other yellow Martian who saw it. We all said the same thing; three separate recordings give exactly the same nonsense sounds.

A human researcher discovered that there were two simultaneous messages in our stream of nonsense. One was amplitude modulation, and it was like a pattern of ones and zeros, modeled after a method that humans had used, attempting to communicate with other stars, what they call a Drake diagram. It told the humans something about the Others—how long they had been in the solar system, the fact that they had a body chemistry based on silicon and nitrogen, and the fact that we were made by them.

But there was a much more complex message hidden in the frequency modulation, an extremely concentrated burst of information that was in the language of the red Martian family. There is only one red individual at a time, and he or she is our leader.

The red language is the most complex Martian language, the only one that has a written form. Our leader only had a couple of days to live—the bomb was inside him—and he had no time to analyze and write down the long message. But he had it in his memory, and translated most of it into our consensus language, talking constantly to Mars as he sped to the farside of the Moon to die.

I wish he had lived long enough to discuss the truth of what the Others had told him through us. His replacement will be able to, but she won’t be old enough to have mastered the language for many ares.

So we go off to meet our mortal enemies, and most of what we know about them is from the pack of lies they told our leader just before they murdered him.

5 SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

Paul and I looked at the various cabin configurations and decided to put both beds together in my cabin and open a sliding door between the two spaces, while closing off the exterior door to what was now the bedroom. So in his cabin, now our living room, there was a worktable with two chairs facing each other, and a lounging chair that reclines. One VR helmet, but we could always borrow another from the gym or lounge.

I didn’t have to tell him that I liked the arrangement because he sometimes tosses and turns in his sleep so much he wakes me up. This way, I’ll have a place to tiptoe off to, to lie down in peace.

We put both windows on the wall by the worktable. Set them for adjacent views of the Maine woods, an environment we often use for biking or running.

Once we had everything the way we liked it, we celebrated our new nest the obvious way. We started with him on top, but he was too heavy—it was like fucking in the exercise room on Little Mars, which we never felt the need to try. I guess we’ll get used to the gravity before too long. But for now it’s doggy style, arf arf.

(I want my Mars gravity back so I can be a Hindu goddess again, holding on to him lightly with my arms and legs while he rises to the occasion.)

We panted for a while with the unaccustomed exertion—we’d never made love except in zero gee and Mars-normal gravity—and giggled over the new canine aspect of our relationship, and how superhuman our parents had been, to conceive us.

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I never want to think about that again.”

We pulled the covers up and rearranged the pillows facing each other, trying to recline comfortably in this gravity. “I do want to think about something else, though,” he said. “Our spy buddies.”

“So you’ve got a hard-on for Elza. Go on; she’ll eat you alive.”

“Yeah, right. Did you see Namir and Dustin practicing martial arts yesterday?”

“I saw a little of it—I was in the study and heard them throwing each other around. He’s not bad for an old guy.”

“He’s not bad for anybody. Dustin is almost as good, but Namir is stronger and quicker—I did kapkido at the Academy for two years.” He shook his head. “Either one of those guys could kill me. I mean literally. In a split second.”

“So you better not offer to… Oh.” I saw what he meant. “Literally.”

“Maybe that’s their mission. They could kill all of us in seconds, without weapons. Remember? We talked about this right after we met them.”

“Yeah, vaguely… in VR, exercising. So why on earth would they want to?”

“On Earth, they wouldn’t have any reason. But you read that thing in Namir’s New York Times, the two-page debate about ad Astra.”

“Sure. The idiots wanted us to just floor it and ram the planet like a doomsday bomb. As if the Others would just sit there and let us do it.”

“That wasn’t the part that worried me. It was the business about surrender. Something like ‘We’re not going to all that trouble and expense just to have them kneel down and grovel.’ Did you see who signed that?”

“No. I vaguely remember it.”

“It was a four-star American general, Mark Spinoza. Ring a bell?”

“Not really.”

“He’s on the Committee. Liaison to the American military. Who, incidentally, had a big part in designing and building this machine… and choosing the crew.”

“But he couldn’t order them to do that. Namir’s not even under his authority.”

“Neither are Dustin and Elza, technically. They all had to suspend their commissions, remember? Nobody can give them orders, in theory, any more than they can give the rest of us orders.”

“Okay. So what are you worried about?”

“Just that they might agree with him. And do it on their own.”

“No. They’re not right-wing loonies. They’re not killers, either, even though they’re soldiers, ex-soldiers.”

“I know Namir has killed, at least as a young man in wartime. And we don’t really know anything about their politics. They seem reasonable, but they could just be following a script—and it wouldn’t have to be from General Spinoza or the Corporation or anybody. They’ve lived together as men and wife for five or six years. They might have devised their own plan.”

“Which would include killing us in case of cowardice. I don’t think so.”

“Or just overpowering and confining us. Then using the ship to try to destroy the Others.”

I turned his head and held his chin between thumb and forefinger and stared. “I never really know when you’re kidding.”

“What would you say if I asked you to take Namir to bed and coax the truth out of him?”

“I would say ‘I never really know when you’re kidding.’ ”

He kissed me suddenly, a soft peck on the lips. “The secret of an exciting marriage.” He turned onto his side and stretched out, readying for sleep. “Keep ’em guessing.”

6 PRIVATE PARTS

The first room configuration we tried was to leave Elza’s cabin the same size but move an extra bed into it. Then we almost doubled the size of the middle cabin, as a common room, with the third cabin the smallest possible bedroom, for whoever was the odd man out. The common room had all three windows together in one panorama, currently the beach at Cannes at the height of the tourist season.

As sexy as that scene was, I felt no real inspiration when I joined Elza in the double bed. I’d sparred for an hour with Dustin and then swum at six knots for an hour. When I got out I sympathized with the poor Martians in all this gravity. I felt like a large animal that had been run into the ground when I fell into bed. Elza seemed tired, too. Maybe that was why she asked for me, the first night with gravity.

“I’ve never seen you swim so much in a gym,” she said sleepily.

“Set the thing for an hour. I was about to get out early, then Carmen came over. I offered to let her have it, but she said no, no, finish your hour. So I was kind of stuck.”

“Stuck showing off your bare ass to a pretty girl.”

“She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”

“Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”

“Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”

“Is that what they call it now?”

I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”

“I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.

Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.

Speaking of complex affairs. Trapped inside this small box together, we all know that the wise course would be to treat one another as friends and not let it go beyond that. But it probably would, even if the mission were prosaic, because it’s so damned long. Add the desperate knowledge that we will all probably die at Wolf 25, or before, and the impulse to be impulsive is hard to resist.

I’ve heard Carmen denigrate her body as unwomanly three times, which is too often for it to be a casual remark. But in fact her supposed shortcomings are what make her so alluring to a man like me. I suppose her slight, tomboyish body reminds me of the young schoolmates who were the first focus of my teenaged passions—who never said yes, but have never quite relinquished their hold on me. Maybe they never said yes because I never had the courage simply to come out and ask.

Odd to think that they’re old enough to be grandmothers now, those who lived past Gehenna. I’m sure that none of them remembers the plump Jewish boy whose hair wouldn’t stay put. Or maybe one of them is obsessed by plump Jewish boys and can’t figure out why.

Today was the first time I’ve seen her completely nude, and I looked away quickly so as not to make my interest too obvious. Then I got a glimpse as she turned around and swam on her back, as I was saying good-bye. No apparent tattoos except for the functional timepiece on her wrist. No obvious scars. Her pubic hair is shaped so as to accommodate a brief bathing suit, which is odd, since there are no bathing suits within a hundred million miles. In fact, she probably hasn’t worn one since she left Earth, twelve or thirteen years ago. Maybe it’s permanent. I’ll have to work it into a conversation somehow. “I couldn’t help but notice, as I was scrutinizing your pubic region…” Perhaps not. I shall be patient, and wait for a time and place when it will be natural to ask.

7 KAMIKAZE

8 May 2088

Instead of a regular diary entry, I’m going to put in part of a transcript of the meeting we just had.

Namir suggested that it would be a good time, starting the second week, for all the humans and Martians to get together and record a consensus of what we think we’re headed for. We met at 0900 in the “compromise” lounge, at the entrance to the Martian area.

Part of it became a little dramatic. My husband would have said “annoying.”

(There was a long silence.)

So everyone laughed, and talked Snowbird into staying, promising that they would keep things straight. And the rest of it was pretty much a recital of what we already knew.

But no one here knows Paul as well as I do, and I know he has a deep reserve of seriousness, which sometimes frightens me. I’m a little frightened now.

A few days ago, out of the blue, before we went to sleep, he suggested that Namir, and perhaps the other two, were under orders to kill the rest of us if we tried to surrender, and use the ad Astra as a kind of 9/11 on the Others.

But a starship isn’t a jet plane. They wouldn’t know how to do it.

There’s only one person here who does.

8 WATER SPORTS

Last night when all the humans were in bed, I walked quietly out past the hydroponics to the gym. I touched the water in the pool—it was very warm—and decided to try floating in it. See whether it indeed would give Snowbird and me some relief from all this gravity/ acceleration.

There was no easy way for a four-legged person to get in. Humans just sit on the edge and slide in. We can’t quite bend that way.

In retrospect, I realized I should have waited until at least one human was around. But there is a dignity factor about clothing, and I was not sure how to interpret it across species.

They almost never appear without clothing in front of one another—like us, they take off their clothing in order to prepare one another for reproduction, and like us it is indecorous to look at another without clothing except under special circumstances. Swimming was one of those for them. Would they feel the same about us? I have only appeared unclothed before humans as part of a scientific investigation, and even that was uncomfortable. But they certainly don’t want people to go into their swimming pool with clothing on.

Finally, I took off my cloak and simply jumped in. It made more of a splash than I had expected. A light came on, and I heard human footsteps coming around the hydroponic trellises.

It was a most strange feeling. The water was only a little more than a meter deep, but it had splashed all over me. I had never been completely wet except in the process of being impregnated, so with the approaching footsteps I felt somewhat indecent, and was also embarrassed that I had splashed so much precious water out of the pool.

I did feel lighter, even though my feet were on the floor, which is to say the bottom of the pool. Then I moved sideways and tipped over—I was suddenly floating and had no weight at all! I inhaled some water and had a little coughing fit, but of course was in no danger, since my breathing spiracles are distributed evenly around my body surface. The noise did upset Carmen, though, who was the first human on the scene. She cried out my name and Snowbird’s—of course she couldn’t tell us apart without our clothing—and seized my head and pulled me upright.

She was yelling, asking if I was all right. The water was doing strange things with my hearing, and when I spoke, my voice sounded hugely amplified.

“I am all right, Carmen, and I am Fly-in Amber, and I’m sorry to waste water and make a mess.”

“Don’t worry about water; we’re riding a mountain of it. Did you have an accident?” Paul rushed up and said more or less the same thing.

“No, no. I just wanted to try floating, but didn’t want to bother any humans while they were using the pool.” In fact, although several could have stood in the pool with me, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to swim.

“Want to try it with the current?” Paul asked.

“Please, yes.” He stepped on a button and it was marvelous, like thousands of tiny fingers wiggling over your skin. It also felt deeply obscene. “That is very good.”

Snowbird appeared and addressed me in the consensus language, which we don’t normally use among humans. “Fly-in-Amber! You… I find you naked!”

“Speak English, Snowbird. Yes, I am naked, and so are humans when they do this. You should try it.”

“Not at the same time,” Paul said quickly. “You displace too much water.”

“I’ll get out, then, and let Snowbird—”

“I’m not ready to be naked in front of all these people! I have to think about it.”

“It doesn’t bother us,” Carmen said. “It’s proper, for being in the water.”

“But the whole idea—‘being in the water’! You can’t even say it in our language. It’s like ‘breathing in outer space.’ It should not be possible.”

Carmen gestured toward me. “You’d better come up with a word for it. I don’t think Fly-in-Amber wants to come out.”

“In fact,” I said, “I’m not sure how I’m going to get out. I can’t jump high in this gravity.”

Namir had come up. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll get a couple of planks.” He went off toward the storeroom. I wanted to tell him not to hurry.

“We’ll improvise a ramp,” Carmen said. She stepped out of her robe and slid into the water. Her body was strange, warmer than the water, and soft. “We should have made this bigger. We weren’t thinking about you guys.”

“We hadn’t thought of it either, Carmen. It’s such an odd idea.”

“Fly-in-Amber,” Snowbird said, “are you losing part of your skin?”

I had a moment of panic. There was an iridescent sheen on the water, evidently oil from my skin, and small floating particles, perhaps flakes of skin. Carmen was looking at the water with alarm.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.” I bent over and looked at it closely. “It’s just been two days since I scraped.”

“Of course,” she said, though her smile did not look normal. She of all people might have reason to fear, since she had been the first human to catch a disease from us, and, of course, no human had ever bathed with us.

“Humans do catch skin diseases from other humans,” Snowbird explained, “like athletes’ foot and herpes. But we have never had skin diseases.”

“That’s, um, reassuring.”

“There would have been no reason for us to be designed with skin disease,” I said. “The difference between intelligent design and random evolution, I’m afraid.”

“We ought to build a special pool for you two,” Paul said. “Deeper, so you have maximum buoyancy. Not as wide, since you probably won’t be swimming.”

“That would be most kind of you. Perhaps with colder water?”

“If we put it in your area, it will be plenty cold.”

“That’s wonderful. Carmen, you could come over anytime and enjoy the cold.”

“Thank you, Fly-in-Amber, but we really prefer the warmer water.” She was shivering a little. “In fact, I think I’ll go take a nice hot shower right now.”

Going from a swim to a shower seemed redundant. But nothing about them surprised me.

Namir returned with the plastic boards then, and looked at her in what I think is a sexual way when she got out of the water. I wondered if they’d begun mating but had learned not to ask.

Over the next four days, they used boards like that to build us a big waterproof box, large enough for both of us to stand in, and improvised a pump that circulated the water and filtered it.

It will make the gravity so much more manageable. And Snowbird and I will be the cleanest Martians in history.

9 ADULTERY FOR ADULTS

1 June 2088

Gone for a month now. A real-time view to the stern shows the Sun as the brightest star in the sky; the Earth is of course invisible.

The only milestone of note, dear diary, is that Elza has apparently made her first sexual conquest—I say “apparently” because who knows? Though if it had been Paul, I think he would have told me, or politely asked me first.

It was Moonboy. Meryl told me after we finished an especially frustrating session with the Martians, tracking down their elusive and totally irregular verb forms.

We were alone at the coffee tap. “So do you know about Moonboy and Elza?”

“No, what?” I knew it wasn’t billiards, of course.

“Well, they got together yesterday. In the fucking sense, I mean.”

An odd choice, I thought, but she had to start somewhere. “Is it, um, I mean, is it a big deal to you?”

“More so than I let him know when he told me. It’s always been theoretically okay. But this is the first time… for him.”

“Not for you?” I pretended I didn’t know.

She smiled and shook her head. “Back on Mars.” I knew of two men, one of them married, some years ago. Mars is like a small village with no place to hide.

“Think it’s a one-time thing?”

“It was already a two-time thing when he told me.” She looked around. “It may be becoming a three-time thing as we speak. But no, I don’t think they’re going to get married and run off to the big city.”

“I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop myself,” I said. “The way Paul looks at her when he thinks I’m not watching.”

“But you’ve always been, what, open?”

“Sure, for years, he was in Mars and I was in Little Mars. We didn’t actually marry until we got the lottery and were going to have children. Before that, we both had considerable variety.”

“I bet you did.” She grinned. “Being famous and all.”

“Well, guys had long layovers on their way to Mars.”

“Layovers.”

“Probably half of them just wanted to be able to say ‘I fucked The Mars Girl.’ ”

“The price of fame. And Paul the most famous pilot in history? He was not exactly a monk, if I recall correctly.”

“But we’d talked it through before either of us was famous, long before we were married. I thought fidelity was a holdover from old times, when women were property.”

“Do you still?”

“Not as strongly. But yes.” It wasn’t something I’d put into words. “Things are different, now that we’ve had children, but really there’s no reason for that. Parenthood in Mars is so detached from biological reality.”

She nodded. “You don’t go through all the physical grief. And then you don’t raise them by hand.”

“Which I sort of regret. They have my genes, and Paul’s, but we’re more like an aunt and uncle who play with them now and then.” I had a cold feeling, deep. “Under the circumstances, of course, that’s for the best.”

“When you get back…”

“They’ll be older than me. Fifty years pass for them, twelve for us. In the unlikely possibility that we survive.”

“Yeah.” She leaned back and closed her eyes; she was dead tired. “I shouldn’t be so concerned about where Moonboy puts his weenie. Let him have whatever pleasure he can find.”

“For symmetry, you ought to go after Namir. He’s old, but not that old. And good-looking.”

“If good-looking was important to me, I wouldn’t have grabbed Moonboy. Besides, if Namir is interested in anyone aboard, it’s you.”

“Really.”

“Don’t act surprised. It’s pretty obvious.”

“We’ve liked each other from the beginning. But not that way.”

“Man, woman. It’s the basic way.”

“He’s never made any kind of… gesture.”

“I don’t think he ever would. He’s the kind of man who waits for you to ask.”

“Well, he’s got a long wait, then.” Or maybe not.

10 SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE

Elza was late coming to bed. I’d just turned off my book and the light when the door opened and closed and I heard her slip out of her clothing. I touched her shoulder as she eased into bed. Cool and damp with sweat.

“Exercising this late?”

“In a way. Moonboy.”

“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. “Meryl know?” They have both their beds together in one large suite.

“No. She was with the Martians.”

“A… sort of a milestone, I suppose.”

I could feel her smile in the darkness. “The first act of adultery outside of the solar system.”

“That presupposes an abundance of virtue on the part of extraterrestrials. We’ll put up a plaque anyhow.”

“You’re too sweet.”

There was a long pause. “So how was it?”

“It was Moonboy. Men don’t normally reveal hidden depths.”

“Or lengths?”

“Men.” She made a quarter turn and pressed her back into my chest, spoon fashion. “Get some sleep.”

“What, I don’t get sloppy seconds?”

“Thirds. Get some sleep.” I didn’t press the issue, though I found the situation curiously stimulating.

I hadn’t brought along my balalaika because I knew it annoyed Dustin, and it was unlikely that the four “Martian” humans would care for it. (Most of the actual Martians seemed indifferent to music; it was background noise to them, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.) But I hadn’t thought about all the room in the warehouse, where the four workers had lived before we arrived. It was a little cold, but large and totally isolated from our own living quarters. You could back up your balalaika with a brass band, and no one could hear you.

So I set out to make a thing like a balalaika. I could have just described it to the automatic shop machine, but there was no satisfaction in that.

No wood around to work with except the blocks of koa I brought for carving, so I asked the machine what it could simulate. My balalaika at home was made of rosewood, light and dark, and ebony. I found a picture of myself playing it, and so was able to measure it precisely from the image. I found instructions for making your own balalaika in Russian, no problem.

The three strings were easy, carbon fiber and nylon wires. The “wood” had the right color and density but wouldn’t fool a termite. The thinnest stock it could generate was two or three times too thick. So my first order of business was to take a strip of it and see whether I could plane it down.

No luck. No fibrous structure, so the hand plane would just bite out a chip at a time. But I blocked it in place and used a sander to bring it down to two millimeters’ thickness. It was still strong and stiff; I clamped it to the edge of the worktable and plucked it, and it made a satisfying twang.

I experimented with scrap and decided to forego tradition and cut the “wood” by laser, which left a more accurate, smooth edge than any saw in the shop. And with modern glues, I didn’t have to improvise the elaborate clamps that the Russian plans called for. I also cheated on the tuning pegs, bridge, and tailpiece, by describing them and letting the shop turn them out robotically. So it only took a couple of days, and a lot of that was learning. If I wanted to put together another one, I could probably do it in an afternoon. Give it to Dustin, so we could do duets.

It looked identical to mine at home except for the inlaid red star and “Souvenir of Soviet Olympics 1980,” which made mine a fairly valuable antique, in spite of being very ordinary in a musical way. A gift to my father on his tenth birthday. His parents had gone to the Olympics before he was born.

I was working on the finish when Fly-in-Amber came in and addressed me formally in Japanese. I set the instrument down and stood, and returned the greeting with a slight bow, which he had tried to do.

“Snowbird should be asking you this,” he said, “since human behavior is her area of expertise, but she was unsure about politeness.”

“And you don’t care.”

“Of course not. I am not human.”

I chose not to pursue the obvious there. “So what does Snowbird want to know?”

“Oh, I want to know as well. But my interest is not professional.”

“Fire away.”

“Pardon me?”

“Please ask the question.”

“It is more than one question.”

“All right. Ask them all.”

“It’s about your wife Elza mating with Meryl’s husband Moonboy.”

Good news travels fast. “Well, they weren’t mating. There was no possibility of offspring.”

“I know that. I was being polite. Should I say ‘fucking’?”

“With me, either one is fine. But your instinct is right.”

“Snowbird wanted me to talk to you in private, which is why I am bothering you here. She wants to know if this causes you pain, the adultery.”

“Not really. I’ve been expecting it.” I didn’t want to get into a definition of adultery.

“Is there symmetry? Are you going to mate with one of the other women?”

I had to smile. “Not immediately. It doesn’t always work that way.”

“Are you not attracted to any of them?”

“I’m attracted to all of them, in varying degrees. I just don’t act on that attraction as directly as Elza does.”

“Is that because you are old?”

“I’m not that old. It’s less youth on Elza’s part than impulsiveness. I want to know someone well before I am intimate with her.”

“Always ‘her’? You are not intimate with men?”

How honest do you have to be with a Martian? “Not in many years. Not since I was boy.”

“Not with Dustin Beckner?”

“No. Definitely not Dustin.”

“Yet you are married to him.”

“Yes, and I love him, but in a different way. You can love without mating.” He was silent for a moment, so I asked, “Do you feel love? Do you love Snowbird, for instance?”

“I don’t think so, in human terms. She says there was a word in ancient Greek, agape, that approximates the way Martians feel about one another.”

“You wouldn’t have erotic love.”

“No. That wouldn’t make sense. There is pleasure in mating, but you often don’t know ahead of time who will be involved, or how many. And, of course, you don’t know which of you will be the female until the contest is over. The female feels it more strongly.”

“Well, ‘erotic’ means more than that, if you go back to Snowbird’s ancient Greek. It’s an intense feeling one has for another, whether or not sex is involved.”

“Humans do that?”

“Some. Most.”

He hugged himself, which I knew signified thinking. “We are simpler, I think. I feel especially close to the other members of the yellow family. But they are the only ones I can speak to plainly, in the language I was born with.”

“Is that the same with all Martians?” I knew the yellow ones had a reputation for being standoffish, but I hadn’t met any Martians except our two.

“Oh, no. Blues cooperate with everybody; they were the example Snowbird used, to explain agape to me. My family is less open than the others, but that’s appropriate to our function.”

“Impartial observers.”

“Yes.” He switched to Japanese and apologized for the intrusion, and backed out.

He was often abrupt like that. As if he had some internal timer.

I finished polishing the balalaika and admired its strangeness. From a distance, it was a pretty close copy. The “wood” was exactly right in color, but it had no grain, close up, and it had the cool smoothness of ceramic.

The strings were not easy to mount, my big fingers clumsy with the knots. I almost called Elza but didn’t want to interrupt her at her needlepoint, a fractal pattern that apparently required intense concentration. Finally, I got all three in place and taut, but the two nylon strings (both tuned to the same E note) kept relaxing out of tune. Then I remembered a young folksinger in Tel Aviv, replacing a string in the middle of a performance. He pulled it dangerously taut and released it with a snap, over and over, flattening the tone, then tuning it up. After a couple of minutes doing that on both nylon strings, they were remarkably stable.

I played a few simple tunes from memory, and scales in the four keys I used, then some arpeggios, working through the left- hand pain until my joints agreed to loosen up.

As sometimes happens, I felt my audience before I saw her. I turned, and there was Elza, leaning in the doorway behind me. She was holding two glasses, a wineglass with red in it and a cup of clear liquid with ice. I must have subliminally heard it clinking.

“It sounds good,” she said. “I’ve missed it.”

“I hope you didn’t hear it inside.”

She set the wine down next to me. “You buy the next.” She folded into a graceful lotus, not spilling a drop of her vodka. “No, Fly-in-Amber told me you were almost done with it. I went into the pantry for a drink and heard you. Peeked and saw you didn’t have anything.”

I sipped the wine. “Mind reader.”

“So what were you talking to Old Yeller about?”

“Old Yeller?”

“It’s a Texas thing. Thang.”

“Gossip and biology. He wondered about you ‘mating’ with Moonboy.”

“For a Martian, he has a very dirty mind.”

“I don’t think that’s possible. Anyhow, I think he was asking on Snowbird’s behalf. She wasn’t sure what would be polite.”

“And he doesn’t care.”

“Well, he approached me in Japanese, with an apology. But that was for interrupting my work, not for asking about my wife’s extramarital affairs. Still, politeness.”

“I don’t suppose you told him it was none of his business.”

“Slapped him with a glove and said ‘lasers at dawn.’ It’s not personal with him, of course.”

“I know. So why didn’t he just ask me?”

“You don’t speak Japanese.” I set down the balalaika and picked up the wine. “I think he likes me. Or likes talking to me. Maybe being oldest male has something to do with it.”

“Did you tell him any gory details?”

“I don’t have any, dear. I’m not that close to Moonboy, and you haven’t shown me the feelie yet. Did he know something I don’t?”

She shrugged. “All men do. Have something no other man has. And I’m saving the feelie for our old age.”

“In case we have one?”

She nodded, silent for a few moments, looking at the floor. Then she knuckled her eyes. “Could you play me that silly love song? The first, the first time…”

“Sure.” I picked up the instrument and tuned up the flatted E strings, then plucked out the simple melody. “Shteyt a bocher, shteyt un tracht… tracht un tracht a gantze nacht…”

It’s a song about a man finding a smart woman to marry.

11 HEROES

Paul had always questioned the necessity for radio silence between Earth and ad Astra. It assumed the Others were so inattentive and stupid that they wouldn’t know we were on our way. Of course, our presence would be obvious after turnaround, with a gazillion- horsepower matter-annihilation engine blasting in their direction. The little probe that preceded us would deal with that by sending a warning and a message of peace well before we turned around and started blasting, decelerating.

What if they destroyed the probe before it delivered the message?

What if it delivered the message, and the Others destroyed us anyway?

What if they weren’t on a Wolf 25 planet after all?

We went along with the order and were resigned to not hearing from anyone on Earth for another 3.4 years. Paul kept the radio on, though, in case things changed.

On July 10, 2088, things did. A fifty-two-second message came from Earth. He called us all together in the lounge, Martians and humans, and played it back for us.

“This is Lazlo Motkin, just elected president of the world. One reason I was elected was that I wanted to change your mission and make it more in line with what the Earth’s people really want.

“You are the finest heroes in Earth’s history, hurtling into the unknown on a mission that will almost surely end with your deaths.

“We ask that you make this grim probability a glorious certainty. Rather than slowing down, we would ask you to continue accelerating. Going at almost the speed of light—and invisible until the last moment—you will strike the enemy planet with ten thousand times the force of the meteorite that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“Even the ungodly science of the Others cannot protect them from this apocalyptic assault. Please answer that you have heard and are willing to give your life in this noble enterprise.

“God bless you and keep you.”

We all just stared at each other. “Who is that guy?” I said. “Lazlo what?”

“Motkin,” Namir said. “He’s a cubevangelist.”

“Powerful signal,” Paul said. “Pretty tight laser.”

Namir shrugged. “He has lots of money, or did when money meant something, and a powerful broadcast site in the Atlantic, beyond the seven-mile limit. He could do it once.”

“Once?” Paul said.

“They’ll have people like me in the water in thirty minutes. Home-land Security. Unless Reverend Motkin really is president of the world, he’s about to have a serious accident.”

“Or had it about a week ago,” Paul said.

“It’s hard to get used to that. He was arrested or dead before that message was a tenth of the way here.”

“What if he really is king of the world,” Moonboy said, “or president or whatever. Some pretty loony people have made it to the top, even in normal times.”

“I still wouldn’t feel I had to kill myself on his behalf,” Dustin said.

“Besides, the order is stupid,” Paul said. “We don’t know for certain which planet in the Wolf 25 system is their home world.” There was a “cold Earth” planet that seemed likely, but also two gas giants with Triton-sized satellites.

“As we get closer, we might be able to tell which one it is,” Moonboy said.

“It probably would be the one with all the missiles rising up to greet us.”

“Maybe not,” Namir said. “If we stopped accelerating the last month or so, we’d be coming in cold. They might not detect us until it was too late to respond. We’d still be going at 99 percent the speed of light.”

“You’re not arguing in favor of this kamikaze scheme,” Elza said.

“Not this particular one. President of the world. But it’s always been a possible strategy.”

“As I said before,” Snowbird said, “if we’re going to die anyhow, we could still exercise some control over the situation that way.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. Besides, even if we knew what planet they were on, we don’t know who else might inhabit it. It might be like destroying Earth just to get Lazlo what’s- his-name.”

“Which might be happening even as we speak,” Namir said. “Or after however long it takes his message to be picked up by the Others.”

“Comforting prospect,” I said.

“And an interesting thought experiment,” Moonboy said. “If they did destroy the Earth, should we try to destroy them in turn? Or should we go someplace safe and try to restart the human race?”

“I’m a fearsome interstellar warrior,” Namir said. “I’m not changing diapers.”

“I don’t think we have any diapers aboard,” I said, “nor ovulating women.”

“I can fix the ovulation,” Elza said. “And we could improvise diapers and such. But really, where could we go, to play Adam and Eve, if we couldn’t go back to Earth?”

“Mars,” Fly-in-Amber said. “It’s a nicer place anyhow.”

We got the ersatz news broadcasts from Earth, but of course they weren’t beamed, and were too weak and distorted by noise to be worth everyday amplifying and cleaning up. Namir had some experience and expertise to apply to it, though, and eventually had decoded about six hours of broadcasts prior to noon of July 3, when Lazlo Motkin had made his imperial request. All we found were two small stories, one a pro forma announcement that Lazlo was going to run for president of the United States on a third-party ticket, and the other a human-interest story about how he and his wife formed the Free America party and, working through several religious denominations, got enough signatures and funding to put himself on the ballot in several Southern states.

So how to interpret the tight-beam message to us? Probably just a crazy rant. But suppose the rest of the news was sanitized, and there really had been a theocratic revolution in the United States?

Paul raised that possibility during dinner, rehydrated mushrooms fried with pretty convincing butter over corn cakes, with actual green onions from the farm, our first crop.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Dustin said, “unless it’s a very levelheaded theocracy. Why would they censor the news of their victory?”

“Maybe they’re not idiots,” Namir said. “Even theocrats might not want to invite the Others to their victory parade.”

“The real question is what our response should be,” Paul said. “I’m inclined to play it straight; tell them thanks, but no thanks. We’re going to stick with the original plan.”

“Which is to make it up as we go along,” I said.

“Or just don’t respond at all,” Namir said. “He sent that a week ago. He knows our answer would take a week or eight days. If he’s still in control of that powerful laser transponder a couple of weeks from now, that tells us something.”

Meryl shook her head. “You’re presupposing that the Earth authorities are aware that he’s done this. I think he’s just a rich fruitcake out in the middle of the ocean with his laser transponder and delusions of grandeur.”

“In which case,” I said, “we ought to send the message back to Earth and ask whether anyone can vouch for Mr. Lazlo.”

“We could do that,” Paul said, “but no matter what we hear back, we should stick to the original mission. If we’d wanted to just cannonball into the planet, there wouldn’t be any need for a human crew and all this lovely life support.” He held up a forkful of mushroom. “We could’ve just put an autonomous AI pilot on the iceberg and set it loose. But we are on board, and in charge, and we’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”

He looked around the table. “So I second Carmen’s idea—send the message back and see what the reaction is. But continue on regardless. Is everyone in favor of that?”

People nodded and shrugged. Moonboy said, “It’s not as if they could do anything to us, right? I mean, there’s no way they could set up another starship and have it overtake us before we got to Wolf 25.”

“No,” Paul said, “even if they had an identical iceberg in place, and all the people and resources. They couldn’t catch up with us. We’re already going two-tenths the speed of light.”

“They couldn’t catch us with a starship and crew,” Namir said. “But they could catch us with a probe. A bomb.”

“Always Mr. Sunshine,” his wife said.

12 MEDICAL HISTORY

1 September 2088

So Elza thinks Moonboy is a little crazy. Maybe more than a little. He’d been acting more odd than usual for a couple of weeks, I saw in retrospect, but it hadn’t made a big impression. He’d been moody as long as we’d known him; so now he was a little moodier, withdrawn.

I’m somewhat snoopy, but then that is what I’m paid to do. So when Elza said she was going down to the kitchen for a snack and set down her notebook without turning it off, I did what was natural for me and leaned over to take a look.

It was Moonboy’s medical file, open to a confidential psychological evaluation, eighteen years ago. It was in a folder labeled “Aptitude for long-term assignment, Mars Base.”

The box the psychiatrist had checked said “marginally acceptable,” with a scrawled “see attached” alongside. I tapped on it, and the document was fascinating. Disturbing.

Moonboy had had inpatient psychiatric treatment, on Earth, for assault and claustrophobia. When he was eleven, a stepfather had gotten angry with him for crying and taped his mouth shut, then bound his arms and legs in tape, too, and pushed him into a dark closet for punishment. He choked on vomit and died, but was revived on the way to the hospital. He never saw the stepfather again, but the damage was done.

“Pretty interesting?” I hadn’t heard Elza come back.

“I’m sorry. Compromising professional ethics.”

“Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, and Moonboy wouldn’t be my psychiatric patient anyhow. I really shouldn’t have had access to the file. But I saw a thread to it and just asked, and it opened. You could have done the same thing.”

“I’m surprised they accepted him for Mars.”

“Hmm. A married pair of xenologists probably looked like a good package deal, and Mars itself isn’t too bad for a claustrophobe. The base is big, and you can go outside. Unlike here.”

“There are other factors for his moodiness,” I said. “You’re sitting on one of them, I must point out.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But I should talk to him.” She picked up the notebook and tapped through a few pages. “Meryl’s okay with it. I talked it over with her. She hasn’t been a saint.”

“That’s not too relevant.”

“I know, I know.”

“Are you still…”

“No, not really. We haven’t closed any doors, but… yeah, I should talk to him.”

“Would it do any good for me to talk to him? Give my okay?”

“No. He knows you’re not bothered by it. Besides, you’re an authority figure to him.”

That was comforting. “Authority figures might be a problem, if one had tried to murder you at age eleven.”

“Didn’t just try. Though he doesn’t remember dying. He passed out, puking, and was revived. He still doesn’t know he died.” She shuddered. “What a bastard.”

“He does remember the incident up to that point?”

She tapped some more and shook her head. “Guy doesn’t say whether he learned that from Moonboy himself or from hospital records.” She put it down and leaned back, hands behind her head. “I ought to see whether I can get him to talk about his childhood.”

“As his doctor?”

She gave me a look. “I’m always his doctor. Yours, too. But no; I don’t want him to see me as a shrink.”

“What as?”

She looked back at the notebook. “Why don’t you and Dustin play some pool after dinner? A nice long game?”

13 TRAUMA DRAMA

I was headed for bed after watching a bad movie—Paul had given up halfway through—when the door to Elza’s suite burst open and Moonboy ran out, naked, carrying his clothes. That did get my attention. He hurried straight to his room, I think without seeing me.

Then Elza appeared, also naked, hand over her lower face, blood streaming from her nose, spattering her chest, a rivulet running between her breasts. I took her by the elbow and led her to the bathroom. Tried to seat her on the toilet, but she got up and inspected her face in the mirror, a mess, and gingerly touched her nose in a couple of places, wincing. “Broken,” she said, though it sounded like “progen.”

“What can I do? Get Namir?” He and Dustin were playing pool in the lounge.

“Just stay a minute.” She was carefully packing her nostrils with tissue, her head bent over. “Hurts. More than I would think.” She turned and got to one knee and spit blood into the toilet, and convulsed twice, holding back vomit. Then she sat on the floor, holding the scarlet wad of tissue over her nose.

“Moonboy?”

“Yeah. If you see him, would you pitch him out the air lock for me?”

“What happened?”

“We were just talking.” She dropped some tissues into the toilet, and I handed her fresh ones. “Well, we sort of fucked, I guess that’s obvious, and I was talking to him, reassuring him… and, I don’t know. I must have blinked. He was starting to sit up, and he whacked me a good one with his elbow. Said it was an accident, but no way. Had all his weight behind it.” She shuddered and rocked a couple of times. Another woman, I would have held, comforted. Elza wouldn’t like that.

“Glad my martial arts instructor isn’t here. She would slap the shit out of me.”

“Was it something you said?”

She looked up at me, ghastly but a little comical. “Yes. But I’m not sure what, exactly. I’ll talk with him after he’s… after we’ve both calmed down a little.”

“Maybe you should slap the shit out of him. I mean, just as therapy.”

She nodded. “Therapy for me, anyhow.”

Namir appeared in the doorway, galvanized. As if a silent lightning bolt had struck. “Blood,” he said. “What?”

“An accident,” Elza said, standing carefully. “Stupid accident. Get outa here and let us clean this mess up.”

“It’s broken,” he said. Dustin had come up behind him and was staring.

“No shit, it’s broken. But a doctor has already looked at it.”

“You were with—”

“An accident, Namir. Make yourself useful and get me some ice. And a drink, while you’re at it.” He backed away, and Dustin followed him.

I wet a handcloth with cold water and handed it to her. She dabbed and rubbed at the blood one-handed. The stream had pooled at her navel and gone on to mat her pubic hair. I gave her another cloth and rinsed the first one out.

“What are you going to tell them?”

She scrubbed her pubic hair unself-consciously. “They know I was with him. Namir, at least, knew I was going to raise some… delicate matters. For the time being, I’m going to stand behind doctor-patient confidentiality.” She threw the rag into the sink. “Help me get dressed?”

She pulled a brown shift out of a drawer and wriggled into it, switching arms to keep the wad of tissues in place. She went back into the bathroom and spit out a clot and retched.

“Ugh.” She sat heavily on an ottoman, elbows on her knees.

Meryl tapped on the doorjamb and stepped in. “Moonboy hit you? Elza?”

“Said it was an accident. Pretty well aimed.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t imagine a less violent man.”

“Wonder how often people say that. After ax murders and such.”

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“In bed.” They were set up with separate bedrooms currently and a small shared anteroom. “I haven’t talked to him. I was reading in the kitchen, and Namir came in.”

Elza peered up at her. “He’s never, um?”

“Never even raises his voice, no.”

“Well, he’s sitting on something. A powder keg.” She looked at the tissues and replaced them. “At least he didn’t break any teeth. ‘Dentist, heal thyself.’ ”

“I… I’m sorry,” Meryl said with an odd tone of voice, like “I’m kind of sorry my husband hit you while you were fucking, but not really.”

“Look,” Elza said, “it probably was an accident. Let’s leave it at that. I’ll talk to him after he’s rested.”

“I suppose accidents aren’t always accidents,” Meryl persisted. “Maybe it wasn’t you who was the actual target.”

“Maybe not.” She shook her head. “Probably not. But not you, either. Childhood thing.”

“He had a happy childhood. He adores his mother.”

“And his father died?”

“Left. But it was amicable, no-fault.”

“You might talk to him about that. Or no. Let me talk to him. It’s something we were… closing in on.”

Namir came in with a tall drink and a plastic bag of chipped ice. “Thanks. Carmen, do we have a clean washcloth left?”

“Sure.” I handed it to her and she wrapped it around the ice, dropping the bloody wad, and pressed the cold pack to her nose.

She sipped the cold drink, holding it at an awkward angle. “Thanks. Look. I don’t think he knows how badly he injured me. Let’s not make a big deal of it?”

Dustin shook his head. “No. He’s got to know he—”

“Trust me, no, darling. This is something I have to control, whether he knows it yet or not.”

“I could,” Namir began.

“No. You boys get back to your game. Please. Just be normal.”

Sure, a normal family full of Martians and spies, hurtling toward its doom a contracted quarter of a century away.

Paul stepped into the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and stared at the sight of all the blood. “What the fuck?”

“A reasonable question,” Elza said.

14 LOVE AND BLOOD

I lay in the dark holding a pack of tissues, listening to Elza’s ragged breathing as she went in and out of sleep. I passed her a tissue whenever a stoppage woke her. Then the pills would carry her back to sleep.

When people stopped falling out of the sky, the day of Gehenna, I took an embassy car and drove out to the suburb past Neve Tsedek, where my parents lived. Driving was difficult downtown, streets clotted with cars that had gone out of control as their drivers died. Some automatic cars were stalled, pushing against piles of metal and flesh. I tried not to drive over bodies, but it was impossible. I saw perhaps fifty people walking or standing in all of downtown Tel Aviv, sharing with me the inexplicable gift of life.

On the thruway there were long stretches of uninterrupted pavement, and then immense pileups, surrounded by empty undamaged cars. Of course people would stop, then open their doors and take one breath of unfiltered air.

My mother’s neighborhood looked unaffected, except for a few cars oddly parked in yards or in the middle of the street. There were no people about, but that could have been normal.

The front door was unlocked. I called for her, and, of course, there was no answer.

I found her in the kitchen, lying on her back in a tidal pool of blood. The door to the garden had been kicked down from the outside.

A nurse by training, combat nurse by politics, she had rushed to the knife rack and snatched a razor-sharp Toledo steel paring knife, a souvenir from Spain that she used daily and kept keen. A straw in her left hand, she had tried to give herself an emergency tracheotomy. Then nicked an artery, a carotid artery. Of course the tracheotomy wouldn’t have helped.

She wrote in blood on a white plastic cutting board CAN’T EXHALE, with a drying fingerprint apostrophe. She had always been careful about grammar.

Too much blood in this life.

15 SEX AND VIOLENCE

2 September 2088

This was a very interesting day for observing humans. I didn’t witness the precipitating incident last night but have reconstructed it from several accounts, including Snowbird’s interpretation. She is closer to Carmen than I am, and Carmen saw much of it.

Apparently Elza and Moonboy were mating (or “fucking,” to be more accurate), an intimacy outside their traditional pairing and tripling but not forbidden. Something went seriously wrong, and Moonboy struck Elza with such force that he caused a serious injury to her face. Then he went back to his own area, leaving Elza alone and bleeding.

Carmen saw that she was in trouble and came to her aid. Elza is a doctor, but perhaps with only two hands had trouble treating herself.

I heard the noise when other humans became involved and watched from a distance I hoped was polite. It was fascinating.

Much of human action is, of course, predicated on passion, but for all the indirect evidence I have of this from reading and cube, I had never before seen one person injure another out of emotion. He hit her face with his elbow, which makes me think they must have finished mating. In all the postures they use for mating, there are some where the female might surprise the male that way, but not vice versa. The elbow is not as complex as our joints; it is more or less a bony hinge that connects the upper and lower parts of the arm.

Evidently Carmen helped her give “first aid” to herself. Her two husbands showed up, and Dustin, at least, wanted to “discuss” the matter with Moonboy, which implied a desire to inflict reciprocal injury, a natural human trait. Elza insisted that he not do that.

Meryl, Moonboy’s wife, showed up and argued that he had never done anything like this before, which Elza accepted, but said it didn’t help her nose. Pilot Paul, who had been asleep next door, joined them, and so everything was explained again. So now every human knew what was going on, or at least part of it.

Namir and Dustin had been playing pool, and they obeyed their wife when she asked them to resume. The rest dispersed, Carmen staying behind to comfort Elza.

That is when the second phase began. Namir and Dustin were playing their game and talking when Moonboy came out of his room, staggering from the effects of alcohol, and asked them, or commanded them, to quiet down.

This seemed unreasonable to Dustin, at least, and he attacked Moonboy with the stick they use to propel the pool balls around. Namir moved in quickly to intervene, perhaps to prevent his spouse from murdering the young man. He is larger than either and was able to separate the two men and disarm Dustin and throw him into the swimming pool, which was probably wise. I know how calming that is.

Moonboy had sustained a wound to the top of his head, from the pool stick, which was bleeding even worse than Elza’s nose. I saw this. Blood covered his face and much of the front of his shirt. He fainted, and Namir carried him to the infirmary.

A comical scene ensued, which I suppose would be the third act of the play, in human terms. Moonboy’s wound had to be sewn up with stitches. Namir started the process, cleaning the wound and removing hair from around it, but before he could start stitching, his wife came in and took over. So she sewed the wound closed while Carmen held the ice pack to her nose, both of them laughing over the absurdity of the situation. Along with Namir and Meryl, they carried the patient back to his bed.

Then the three women moved into the kitchen and drank alcohol and laughed for some time. The men either weren’t invited or felt they wouldn’t be welcome.

Altogether, a complex display of interactions, which I could not pretend to understand. It will be interesting to record the changes this causes in attitudes and actions.

It’s a pity that we will probably not live to return to Mars and discuss all this. The starship is like a small laboratory, with us nine organisms sealed within. But there’s no scientist to peer at us from outside, and draw conclusions.

16 INJURIES

Namir suggested a meeting the morning after, while Moonboy was still under sedation. It was natural for Elza to lead the discussion.

“For me, it could have been a lot worse.” She touched her bruised nose gently. Both eyes were dark, too. One nostril was open, the other packed with gauze. “The break is simple, not ‘displaced.’ So it will heal without surgery. What’s broken inside Moonboy is not so easy to heal.”

“What do you know about his… condition?” Paul asked.

“More than I can say, ethically. It does involve anger that’s been suppressed for years, though. Unfortunately, it’s associated with claustrophobia.”

“But this starship is huge,” Snowbird said, gesturing with all four arms.

“Snowbird,” Paul said, “you’ve always lived inside a big room, a cave. Moonboy grew up in Kansas, a large flat state. You could look around and see forty kilometers in any direction.”

“I don’t know that that’s a factor,” Elza said. “This was a very small space, involuntary confinement.

“Anyhow, as well as the sedative, I’ve given him a mild antipsychotic medication. For his protection and ours.”

“Good,” Dustin said.

“I should give you one as well, darling. You have not been a model of rational behavior.”

“He came after me.”

“You could have fought him off with a pillow, not a pool cue. Try to leave your balls on the table next time. So to speak.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Obviously a familiar response.

“So do we have to keep him doped up for the duration?” Paul said. “Do we have enough drugs for that?”

“I can synthesize things that simple. I could keep us all doped to the gills for the whole mission. Which has crossed my mind.”

“That would not be practical,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Would you be able to eat, and drink, and excrete?”

“All in the same place,” Namir said.

“I’ve been to parties like that,” Dustin said.

“They’re kidding,” Elza said to the Martian. “So am I. Meryl, he’s never lost control like this before?”

“Not since we’ve been married; not on Mars.” She hesitated. “He got in trouble when he was a kid. That involved fighting, I remember. At the time, I thought how unlike him that was. But I never asked him for any details.”

“I’ll see if he wants to talk about it.”

“To you?”

“To a doctor. He ever say anything to you guys? About being a wild kid?”

The men all shook their heads. “I don’t remember him ever talking about his life on Earth,” Paul said. “Funny, now that I think of it. Everybody has Earth stories.”

“He’s odd that way,” Meryl said. “He talks about his mother, when he was little, and he talks about college, but not much in between.”

“That’s not so unusual,” I said. “Paul never talks about that time in his life. Do you?”

“Boring,” he said. “Dealing drugs, child prostitution, day in and day out.”

“Child prostitution?” Fly-in-Amber said.

“Kidding,” he said. “They were all over eighteen.”

“Paul…”

“I’m sorry, Fly-in-Amber. It’s disrespectful of me to kid you.”

“On the contrary,” the Martian said. “I learn from your humor. If you had actually been a bad boy, you wouldn’t joke about it. Your feelings are ambiguous, are they not? You wish you had been more bad?”

“Got me there,” he said. “Elza, you’re both victim and professional observer. What if it had happened to someone else—”

“Paul, that’s not relevant,” I said. “There are only two other women here.”

“It might be relevant,” Elza said, “on various levels.” She touched her nose and grimaced. “I’d just asked him about his father, sort of out of the blue.”

“What about his father?” Meryl said. “He never talks about him.”

Elza studied her for a moment. “I know some things I shouldn’t. Maybe because of my security clearance, I don’t know, I… I was given access to confidential psychiatric records.”

“About his father?” Meryl said.

“I’m on thin ice here,” she said.

After a pause, everyone started to talk at once. “Wait, wait.” Paul had the strongest voice. “Elza, you don’t have to violate your political principles…”

“Yes, she does,” Dustin said.

His wife smiled at him. “The philosopher speaks.”

“All right. The principle of doctor-patient confidentiality is a luxury we have to forego.”

“Like the luxury of anger?” she said, still smiling.

“We are seven people, or nine,” he plowed on, “who may have the fate of the entire human race, both races, depending on our thoughts and actions. Our freedom to think and act can’t be constrained by tradition. By law or superstition.”

“I think he’s right,” Namir said slowly. “At least in terms of information.”

Elza looked at him, then away. “Maybe so. Maybe so.” She sat up straight and spoke to the middle distance, as if reciting. “This is something Moonboy doesn’t remember, because it was repressed by court order: When he was eleven years old, his father killed him.”

“Tried to?” Dustin said.

“Killed him. Not on purpose. Tried to stop his crying by taping his mouth shut. Then bound his hands and feet with the tape and threw him in a dark closet.”

“Holy shit,” Dustin said.

“When his mother came home from work, probably a few minutes later, she asked where the kid was, and got into an argument with dear old dad. When she opened the closet, Moonboy was dead. He’d choked on vomit and stopped breathing.

“The rescue people got his heart and lungs going again. But what if his mother had not come home in time? He could have died permanently or suffered irreversible brain damage.”

“What happened to the father?” Namir asked.

“The record doesn’t say.”

“Moonboy thinks his parents got a no- fault divorce when he was eleven,” Meryl said, “and his father dropped out of his life. Probably into prison or some rehab program, judging from what you say. With an ironclad restraining order.” She shook her head. “It… explains some things. It’s a lot to assimilate.”

“The white hair?” I said. He had a tangled nimbus, like Einstein. “I know a person’s hair doesn’t turn white overnight.”

“Old wives’ tale,” Elza said. “But continual stress can cause premature graying.”

“Maybe that memory wasn’t completely erased,” Meryl said, “and he dwells on it at some level. His hair was almost completely white when we met. I think he was twenty-two.”

“Is that why he’s called Moonboy?” Namir asked.

I knew about that. “No, he was born during an eclipse, a total lunar eclipse.” I cringed at the memory of a cheap magazine article when I was famous, putting us together: Moonboy and Mars Girl.

“His mother’s an astrology nut,” Meryl said. “We don’t get along too well. He thinks she walks on water, though.”

Dustin laughed. “Well, she did bring him back from the dead. Even if he doesn’t know it, she does. It could make for an interesting relationship.”

Meryl nodded. “It does explain a lot.”

“His voice,” Elza said. It was a soft, hoarse rasp. “That could be damage to his vocal cords from stomach acid. As he lay there dead.”

Namir broke the silence. “We have to tell him. Now that we all know.”

“Not ‘we,’ ” Elza said. “I have to tell him. I started the whole damned thing, with my curiosity.”

That was a delicate way to put it, I thought. Her curiosity about Moonboy’s medical record came after her curiosity about his body. If that was what it was, her need for different men.

Of course the only man left now was mine.

17 THERAPY

I didn’t want my wife alone in a room with the man who had assaulted her. But she felt they had to talk one-on-one, and besides, she would have no trouble overpowering him under normal circumstances. As a compromise, she let me sit in an adjacent room and watch the interview on a notebook, ready to rush in and save her. It wasn’t necessary, as it turned out. But it was educational.

He knocked tentatively and walked in, looking sheepish and uncomfortable. She sat him down next to her desk and inspected his stitches, dabbing at them with an alcohol swab. He winced, and her expression was not one of empathy.

“You’ll live,” she said, and sat down facing him.

“I’m sorry, so sorry. Don’t know what got into me.” His speech was slightly slurred.

“That’s what we have to talk about.” She took a deep breath. “What happened yesterday started twenty-nine years ago. Do you know the acronym SPMD?”

He shook his head. “No. When I was eleven?”

“Yes. It’s Selective Precision Memory Dampening. Not done very often anymore; it’s controversial.”

“When I was in the hospital so long, with pneumonia?”

“Yes. But it was a lot more than pneumonia.”

For several minutes he didn’t speak, while she recounted in unsparing detail what his father had done and what happened afterward. When she was through, he just stared into space for a long moment.

“They could have told me,” he said in a flat, hurt voice. “Mother should have told me.” He hit the desk with his fist, hard enough to hurt.

“She should’ve,” Elza said. “I would have, at least when you were an adult.”

“What did you say,” he said slowly, “when we were in bed?”

“I asked you about your father.”

He leaned forward and spoke through clenched teeth. “You asked me whether I loved him.” I rose from the chair, ready to go next door.

“Let me see your hand.” She took it in one hand and, with the other hand, pressed the inside of his wrist.

He sat back slowly and looked at his wrist, and touched the small flesh-colored circle there. “What’s that?”

“It’s a relaxant.” She must have had it palmed. “It’ll wear off quickly.”

“I…” He looked at the wall. “I was upset because I couldn’t, I couldn’t come.”

“You did all right.”

“No—I mean it happens all the time. I thought with you, with a new sexy woman…”

“It’s all in the head,” she said gently. “It’s always all in the head. You were nervous.”

“When you said… that about my father, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I mean I tried, and it was like someone, someone was choking me. I must have lashed out. I don’t remember.”

“You got in a lucky shot.”

He smiled for the first time. “Thank you for not killing me. I’ve seen you throw Daniel and Namir around on the mat.”

“It took some restraint. How is the elbow?”

“Still hurts a bit.”

She stood. “Hmm. Take off your shirt and get up on the examination table.” He did, and she moved his arm around and palpated his elbow. “That doesn’t hurt?”

“Not really, no.”

She pressed behind his shoulder. “This does, though?”

“A little.”

She nodded and looked at him for a moment. “Take off your shoes and lie down on your back.” He did, while she watched and nodded.

“I want to check your reflexes,” she said, starting to unbuckle his belt. She stopped partway. “This wouldn’t be ethical on Earth. But we’re playing with starship rules.”

“Okay,” he said, smiling broadly. She unzipped his fly, and his reflexes appeared more than adequate.

I’ll have to ask her about that patch. I turned off the notebook. It was time to start dinner. Go pull some carrots.

18 ANNIVERSARY

8 May 2089

Namir is baking a cake. It’s everyone’s anniversary: we took off exactly one year ago, and everyone is still alive.

The notebook says that on Earth it’s 16 July 89, so relativity has shrunk about seventy days off our calendar.

It does feel like twelve months have gone by, though, rather than fourteen, so a time for taking stock. In one year:

Only the one day of violence, back in September, when Moonboy broke Elza’s nose, and Dustin parted his hair with a pool cue. For a long time now, Dustin and Moonboy have been civil with each other, and Elza has lost her nasal accent.

Elza also has fucked every man aboard except Paul (if he’s telling the truth), and Meryl as well, in a three-way with Moonboy, though that seems to have petered out.

The avocado tree has blossomed, but set no fruit in spite of assiduous pollination. We’ve asked Earth for advice, but they’re half a light-year away, so it will be a while.

Most of the other crops are thriving. We’ve almost doubled the floor space allotted to tomatoes, trimming the real estate from leafy greens and legumes. Namir needed more Italian plum tomatoes for sauces, and no one complained. I wish we’d brought more fruit trees, myself, or more acreage. Enough grapes to make our own wine; the idea of waiting for it to ferment is attractive; something to look forward to. Can’t have everything.

The planners were wise to design such a large hydroponic garden, even though we could survive without it. Having regular menial chores helps keep us sane; caring for living things promotes optimism. Even in our situation.

In the sports news, I’m now swimming two kilometers a day. There’s a new house rule in billiards: Namir has to shoot left- handed, or no one will play with him. He still wins, but not all the time anymore.

On Saturdays, we move all the lounge furniture to the walls, string a badminton net across the room, and work up a good sweat. The Martians come out and play for the first few minutes, one on each team, though they overheat quickly and are handicapped by the gravity, not to mention lacking the concept of “sport.” We compensate for their relative lack of mobility by letting them each use two racquets. They’re ambidextrous four ways.

Meryl’s wall-sized crossword puzzle is about a third finished. She’d better slow down. Elza put away her needlepoint for a while, but has started a new one, another fractal chromatic fantasy.

Moonboy spends an hour or two a day on the piano, composing silently, and sometimes plays all night, haggard but happy in the morning. I don’t read music too well, but noticed the other day that Composition 3: Approach/Retreat is thirty-five pages long.

Paul spends most of the mornings drinking coffee and cranking out equations, which he sometimes tries to explain to me. He won’t be through coursework on the doctorate for another year and a half. Then he’ll write a dissertation and send it off to Earth. So maybe in fifty years he’ll get a doctorate in Quaint Astrophysics from Stanford, if there still is a Stanford.

Namir is working on another balalaika, a long one with low notes, and is slowly carving a bust of Elza, which is at a creepy stage—half of it still a block of wood and half a mostly finished sculpture, as if she were being pulled out of the material. Straight on, I think her expression is one of stoic acceptance; from another angle, her lips slightly apart, she looks like she’s on the verge of an orgasm. He knows her better than any of us, of course. Maybe that’s what she looks like all the time, to him.

I’ve taken up drawing again, using the texts Oz recommended when I was first on Mars. No paper, but it was a lifetime ago when I last had paper to spare. I can adjust the stylus and notebook to simulate pencil, ink, or wash. I’m copying some faces from the actual book that Namir brought along, all of Vermeer. His The Geographer looks a lot like Moonboy, though his hair isn’t white.

Our brand-new spaceship is getting a little worn around the edges. The air recycler started making a noise like a person whistling through her teeth, barely audible. Paul described it to the auto- repair algorithm, and the noise stopped for a few days, then came back. Meryl did it a slightly different way, and it stayed quiet. But it was a scary time. Can’t send out for parts.

The Martians’ swimming pool has to be continuously recaulked. Long hours of immersion—totally unnatural, of course, for Martians—must do something with the chemistry of their skin, which makes the water react with the caulking compound. Try to get those two out of the water, though.

Along with Meryl and Moonboy, I’m chipping away at the Martian language. Snowbird is more helpful than Fly-in-Amber, but even so it’s a frustrating experience.

Moonboy is developing a good ear for using the synthesizer to simulate Martian sounds, and in a real sense he’s the only one of us who can “speak” Martian with anything like a useful vocabulary. With merely human larynx and vocal cords, I can do about three hundred words that Snowbird can recognize consistently, but many of those, like “swimming,” are neologisms derived from human sounds.

Moonboy can play more than ten times my number of words, but a similar problem is emerging: we can only talk about experiences that humans and Martians share. Most of what they do and think is hidden from us.

Some may even be hidden on purpose. We have no idea what their secret agenda might be. They might not even know.

When the lone Other communicated to us from Neptune’s satellite Triton, it did so at first through a long rote message that Fly-in-Amber and other members of his family recited after a hypnotic stimulus. They translated it for us, but how complete was the translation? How honest?

We must always keep in mind that the Martians were created by the Others for the sole purpose of contacting us after we developed the ability to go to Mars. We were no danger to them until then.

This is the only thing that lone Other said to us in a human language, in response to our first message:

Peace is a good sentiment.

Your assumption about my body chemistry is clever but wrong. I will tell you more later.

At this time I do not wish to tell you where my people live.

I have been watching your development for a long time, mostly through radio and television. If you take an objective view of human behavior since the early twentieth century, you can understand why I must approach you with caution.

I apologize for having destroyed your Triton probe back in 2044. I didn’t want you to know exactly where I am on this world.

If you send another probe, I will do the same thing, again with apologies.

For reasons that may become apparent soon, I don’t wish to communicate with you directly. The biological constructs that live below the surface of Mars were created thousands of years ago, with the sole purpose of eventually talking to you and, at the right time, serving as a conduit through which I could reveal my existence.

“Our” existence, actually, since we have millions of individuals elsewhere. On our home planet and watching other planets, like yours.

This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red.

When the Other sent this message to us, it must have known that within a few days the delayed-action bomb within Red would go off and destroy all higher forms of life on Earth.

So why did it bother?

Most of us think it was hedging its bets in case, as did happen, the human race figured out a way around the doomsday bomb. Namir believes it assumed we would solve the puzzle and survive, a subtle difference.

Red might have figured it out before he died. He had talked with the Other, or at least listened to it, and on his way to the Moon and doom, he talked nonstop about it for almost twenty hours. Every word was recorded, but it hasn’t yet been translated—only one Martian, his successor, will be able to comprehend it, and when we left she was still studying the language.

(The long transition period between one leader’s death and the education of the succeeding leader was never a problem before humans came along. Martian daily life was simple and predictable, and if something came up in the dozen or two ares while they were leaderless, it would just have to wait.)

We had dessert in the compromise lounge, so the Martians could comfortably join us, even though the human “year” is irrelevant to their calendar.

We had taken a plastic bottle of tej, Ethiopian honey wine, out of the luxury stores. It went well with the coffee-and-honey cake recipe Namir remembered from his childhood, some Jewish tradition.

Either would be poison to the Martians, of course, but they brought out some special purple fungus and what looked and smelled like sulfurous swamp water.

I held up my glass to them and croaked out a greeting that was traditional for such occasions, which roughly translates as “Well, another year.” Snowbird and Namir exchanged toasts in Japanese and bowed, which in the case of the Martian looked weirdly like a horse in dressage. Plastic glasses were clicked all around.

The cake was sinfully excellent. “We should have this every day,” Elza said. “In five years, we’ll be bigger than the Martians.”

“That would be attractive,” Fly- in-Amber admitted, “but I don’t think you have that much honey.”

You can never tell when they’re joking. They have the same complaint about us.

Moonboy had his small synth keyboard, and he played a few words for Snowbird, who responded with a thrumming, crackling sound, then the thump of laughter.

“I told her she was looking slim,” he said, “and she answered that the food here was lousy.”

That was actually a pretty subtle joke. Martians don’t much care what they eat, but she knew about that attitude from humans.

After we finished the cake and tej, we switched to regular wine and other alcohol, and Snowbird asked whether Namir would bring out his balalaika and do a duet with Moonboy. Namir asked Dustin whether he could stand it, and he said that once a year wouldn’t kill him.

By the time Namir had retrieved the balalaika from the workshop, Moonboy had figured out how to simulate a primitive accordion, and with his sensitive ear he had no trouble squeezing out chords that matched the Eastern European and Israeli tunes Namir knew, and did an occasional simulated-clarinet solo, what he called klezmer style. Most of it was new to me, and I was glad of the Martian request.

When we went to bed, Paul and I made love, even though it wasn’t Saturday (badminton brings out the beast in him).

Afterward, he was restless. “I’m the most useless pilot in history.” “I don’t know. The guy in charge of the Titanic didn’t exactly earn his paycheck.”

“This morning while you were gardening, I went up to the shuttle and put it through some simulations for landing.”

A few years premature. “Practice makes perfect?”

“I could do them in my sleep, which is the problem. There are really only four basic situations in the VR—Earth, Mars, Moon, and zero- gee rendezvous. I can fiddle with the parameters. But I’m not really learning anything.”

“Well, it’s not rocket science, as they used to say. Except that it is rocket science. And you’re the best. I read that somewhere.”

I could feel his smile in the dark, and he patted my hip. “The best within a half light-year, anyhow. But we should have thought to make up some weird simulations, like a dense, turbulent atmosphere. A dusty one. You’d never land in a dust storm if you had a chance. But I’ll have to take what I get.”

“Well, it’s just software, isn’t it? Describe what you need and tight-beam it to Earth. They could develop and test it, and send it to you after turnaround.”

He paused. “Sometimes you surprise me.”

I resisted the impulse to reach down and actually surprise him. It was already late, though, and I didn’t want to give him any more ideas.

19 YEAR TWO

8 May 2090

Our second year began with a smaller useful crew, and perhaps reduced efficiency from those of us who are left.

We’ve essentially lost Moonboy. Whenever he’s not in VR, he’s locked into earphones. He doesn’t even take them off to eat. If you ask him a question, he hands you a notebook; write down the query, and he’ll write a short response, or nod or shrug, usually.

It started with noise coming from the air-conditioning. At first it was a high-pitched whistle. We were able to program the self-repair algorithm and reduce it to bare audibility, but in the process introduced a varying frequency component: if you listen closely, it’s like someone whistling tunelessly in another room. I can hardly hear it at all, but Moonboy said it was going to drive him mad, and apparently it did.

We can still use him after a fashion, to try to translate if one of the Martians says something incomprehensible. But it’s hard to get his attention, and impossible to make him concentrate.

Elza says he’s apparently in a dissociative fugue. His medical history is dominated by dissociative amnesia, not being able to remember a murderous assault by his father when he was a boy.

Medication isn’t effective. A dose large enough to give him some peace knocks him out, and when he wakes up, the noise is still there, and he claps on the ’phones.

Meryl is of course, depressed, with Moonboy such a wreck, but everyone else seems stable, if not happy. Elza seems resigned to Paul’s obstinate monogamy. I should thank him.

Memo to the next people who staff a mission like this: make sure nobody in the crew is fucking crazy.

Of course, we may all be, in less dramatic ways.

Other than the noisy life-support system, the ship seems shipshape. In December I spent a couple of weeks in advanced menu planning—we’ve been too conservative in using the luxury stores. We could use more than half of them on the way to Wolf. If we do survive the encounter with the Others, we’ll probably be content with anything on the way back. Morale’s only a problem on the way there.

I talked with Paul about this, but not with the others. The last thing I need in the kitchen is a democracy.

I’m continuing my study of first-contact narratives in human history. Usually less destructive than the Others’ contact with us, though the ultimate result is often extinction, anyhow.

There aren’t really close analogies. Aboriginal societies didn’t send off diplomats to plead peace with their high-tech conquerors. What would have happened if the Maori, on learning where their invaders came from, had taken a war canoe and paddled around the Cape and up the Atlantic and the Thames to parley with Queen Victoria? She’s atypical, actually. Reports of Maori military performance led her to offer them at least symbolic equality in the governance of New Zealand. The Others would probably just have nuked them all. With the wave of a hand.

Of course, we don’t really know anything about their psychology or philosophy, other than the fact that they observed us, judged us, and tried to execute us all, with no discussion. When I was a boy, I watched my father spray a nest of wasps that had grown on the side of our house. You could see in their frantic paroxysms how painful an end that was, and my father laughed at me for crying. Maybe some few of the Others will mourn our necessary extinction.

In a way that I would hesitate to call mystical, life becomes more and more precious as we ply our way toward whatever awaits—and I mean that in the most prosaic sense; I wake up every morning eager for the day, even though I do little other than cook and read and talk. A little music, too little.

I swim almost every day, trying to reserve the pool for the half hour after Carmen swims. I can legitimately show up a few minutes early and look at her.

How do I really feel toward her? We talk about everything but that. If I were closer to her age, I might move toward romance, or at least sex, but I’m almost as old as her father. She brought that up early on, and I have no desire to appear foolish. Besides, I’m married to the only certified nymphomaniac within light-years. Another woman might be too much of a good thing.

But I do feel close to her, sometimes closer than I am to Elza, who will never let me or anyone else into her mysterious center—a place I think she herself never visits. Carmen seems totally open, American to the core, even if her passport says “Martian.”

I think my foreignness attracts her, but at some level frightens her as well. The opposite of Elza, in a way. The fact that I’ve been a professional killer thrills Elza, I think, though she would be less thrilled if she knew how many I’ve killed, and how, and why.