Starbound

1 YEAR THREE

8 May 2091

This is the end of the third Earth year of our voyage to Wolf 25, to meet with the Others and learn our fate. Humans being superstitious about anniversaries, they asked that we each write up a summarizing statement for these occasions.

For me it’s pointless, since I recall everything whether it is important or not. But I will do it. (Snowbird is more intimately involved with the humans than I am. That’s natural; the white family is more social, even among Martians. We yellows are better observers.)

The most interesting thing about the year to come is that we’re approaching the midpoint, turnaround time. The past year has been more or less uneventful for Martians, though it could have been our ending. The brown pyatyur fungus almost stopped growing, which would eventually have been fatal for us, but Meryl and Carmen figured out what was wrong. It was lacking nitrates—that is, the pseudo-Martian ecosystem was not properly recycling nitrates. We only need trace quantities, so the lack wasn’t obvious. Human agriculture needs large amounts, though, and they are full of it. A day’s production of human urine gives us a year’s worth.

Snowbird continued working with Meryl and Carmen on their language lessons, and I sometimes participated, though it has become steadily more difficult. We seem to have covered all of the easy vocabulary, and it’s hard to explore the more difficult words and phrases without Moonboy’s synthesizer. They can’t even approximate many of the sounds. Moonboy could do well within the range of his hearing.

(I think he might be able to help us more if the other humans weren’t so afraid of him. Snowbird says that some of that fear is reflected fear of their own potential for not-sane behavior. Moonboy scares them, and he knows he’s scaring them, which reinforces the behavior. Meryl explained this to Snowbird, but being able to explain it is not the same as coping with it.)

Namir and I have been playing chess, a variation of the game called Kriegspieler, where neither player is allowed to look at the board; you have to keep the positions of the pieces in your memory as you play. That requires no effort on my part, of course; like any other yellow Martian, one glance will fix the board in my memory for the rest of my life. Namir makes up for his occasional memory lapse by what he calls “killer instinct,” and he wins almost every time. (I think it’s less killer instinct than the fact that his moves are sometimes based on a board that doesn’t exist, and so are impossible for me to anticipate.)

Kriegspieler is normally played with a third person, a referee who keeps track of the progress of the game with a physical board, out of sight. The referee tells you whether a move is impossible (blocked by another piece) or whether you’ve successfully captured a piece. We started out with Carmen as a referee, but I pointed out that she was supernumerary. I could tell Namir if a move was not possible or had been successful, and of course would not lie.

Snowbird plays a board game with the humans, too, a word game called Scrabble, which Meryl had brought along as part of her weight allowance, indicating that the game is important to her, and she is skilled at it. Carmen also plays, and they have a list of Martian words that may be used, and count double. I have played the game but find it maddeningly slow.

Badminton, on the other hand, is plenty fast enough for us in this gravity. Snowbird enjoys it, and I do not. Jumping around like that is ungraceful and painful. But a certain amount of exercise is necessary, as is the appearance of working with the humans as a team.

Whose side will we be on when we get to Wolf 25? The Others did make us, and (speaking as an individual) I can’t pretend to be a free agent, independent of their will. I had absolutely no control over myself the one time the Others needed me to do their bidding, when I suddenly parroted their message in 2079. There could be a large variety of complex behaviors they are able to trigger with a word. Or just a particular beam of light, as happened then.

Suppose they ordered me to open the air-lock door?

But I suspect the fact that we haven’t yet been obliterated means that the Others know where we are and what we’re doing. The humans’ efforts to keep the mission secret probably amuse them.

If they are capable of being amused. There are so many basic things we don’t know about them, or have just inferred from incomplete data.

One thing that does seem inescapable is their lack of concern for human life, and probably Martian life as well. When we meet them, we will need to come up with some reason for their allowing us to live—something that doesn’t have to do with the immorality or injustice of exterminating us.

What is important to them? Is there anything we can do that would make them happy? Whatever “happy” means. Maybe destroying planets is the only thing that pleases them.

We inhabit a different world of time. They seem glacially slow to us, and we must seem like annoying insects to them—buzzing around with our inconsequential lives, our tiny and evanescent concerns. (That was the way Namir put it. There are no glaciers as such on Mars, and no insects other than the ones that humans brought along for agriculture.)

In a few months, the charade will be over. No sense in trying to hide our existence once we’ve pointed our matter-annihilation jet directly at the Others. Prior to our turnaround, a small fast probe will broadcast a description of what we’re planning to do.

Though it’s not much of a plan. “Please don’t kill us before you hear what we have to say.”

As if we could really understand each other.

2 TURNAROUND

Paul has been at loose ends ever since he finished his dissertation—and it really was “finished” more completely than most scientific theses, since he couldn’t make new measurements or read current research on the topic, which was Data Granulation in Surveys of Gravitational Lensing in Globular Clusters, 2002-2085.

So the approach of turnaround was a great outlet for his stalled energies. He had a checklist with nearly a thousand items, compiled before we left, and he added a few himself. The original list didn’t say anything about making sure the balalaikas were secured.

We will be in zero gee for a little over two days, while our dirty iceberg slowly turns to point its jet toward the Others. The Martians will love it. I’m looking forward to the novelty myself. Good memories.

Taking care of the plants won’t be the big project it was before we took off. Just keep everything damp. Try not to crash into anything while cruising from place to place.

I do have one big irrational worry. Nobody has ever stopped and restarted a huge engine like this one—the test vehicle was hardly a thousandth this mass. What if it doesn’t start? Nobody really knows what makes it work, anyhow.

Maybe they do by now, on Earth. But if it didn’t restart, and we radioed “What do we do now?” it would be more than twenty-four years before we got the answer. “Slam the doors and try again.”

Even Fly-in-Amber, who wouldn’t blink at the Second Coming, seemed a little excited about turnaround. Well, it will be the journey’s midpoint, as well as a brief respite from the burden of Earth-style gravity. He was not happy that we had to drain their makeshift pool (and Paul was not happy about having to recycle the water separately, to keep all their germs and cooties in their own ecosystem). Our own pool came with a watertight cover.

We had the furniture secured and the plants taken care of a couple of hours before Paul was to shut down the engine. Namir prepared a luxury feast, lamb chops baked with rehydrated fruit and Middle Eastern spices, served over couscous. We opened one of the few bottles of actual wine.

After a pastry dessert, Paul checked his wrist and got up from the table. “Forty-eight minutes,” he said. “I’ll turn it off at 2200 sharp. No need for a countdown?”

We all agreed. “I’ll go remind the Martians,” Namir said. “When will you start the rotation?”

“After a general systems check, maybe an hour. Don’t think we’ll feel anything. Six degrees per hour.” Two small steering jets on opposite sides of the iceball’s equator would get us slowly spinning, then stop us twenty-eight hours later.

I had a queasy feeling that maybe I should have dined on soda crackers and water instead, Paul’s reassurances notwithstanding. It was a little more than waiting for the other shoe to drop. I went back to the bathroom and found a stomach pill.

It didn’t help that Moonboy sat there with his drugged smile, listening to the music of the spheres. When Meryl told him what was about to happen, he typed out LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. NOISE MIGHT STOP. Sure, if life support stops.

To distract myself, I went to the bicycle machine and took a VR ride through downtown Paris, trying to hit every man with a mustache.

At about five minutes to the hour, I joined the others in the compromise lounge. Everyone had filled squeeze bottles with water and other things to drink in zero gee, good idea. I went to the storeroom and drew six liters of water in a plastic cow, and concentrate for two liters of wine, which made a red light blink next to my name. Paul’s light wasn’t blinking, so I drew a couple of liters for him, too. He must have been too busy, hovering over the OFF switch.

I returned to the lounge with my armloads of water and wine. “You are ready for a party,” Snowbird said. I croaked out a catchphrase that meant something like “I wish the same state for you.” She clapped lightly with her small hands.

We were all sort of braced for it when 2200 came, but of course it wasn’t like slamming on the brakes. Gravity just stopped. I pushed off gently and floated toward the ceiling. Namir and Snowbird followed.

“I guess nothing went wrong,” Meryl said, rotating by in a slow somersault.

Moonboy hadn’t moved. He took off the earphones and listened intently for a couple of seconds. “Still there.” He put them back on, hovering a foot off the couch.

Elza floated up to join Namir, clasping him with her arms and legs. Well, he wouldn’t be able to shoot pool; have to do something for two days.

Paul came out of the control room walking on the floor with his gecko slippers. He had a strange expression. My stomach fell as he spoke: “Something’s screwy.” He shook his head. “The proximity—”

There was a faint metallic sound. Then three more.

“The air lock,” Namir said.

Surprise, then terror. Inappropriately, I laughed, and so did Meryl.

“Has to be the Others,” Paul said.

“Might as well let them in,” Namir said, “before they just blow it open.”

The people who designed the ship should have put a camera out there. But we hadn’t expected callers.

We all followed Paul, all of us but Moonboy, floating various trajectories toward the air lock. Paul opened the control box and pushed the OPEN SEQUENCE button. A pump hammered for less than a minute, fading as the air was sucked out of the lock.

The outer door opened onto total darkness. There was a moment of terrible suspense. Then a man in a conventional white space suit used a navigating jet to float in and stopped by touching the inner door window.

“I’ll be damned,” Dustin said. “They caught up with us this soon?” We’d talked about the possibility of Earth’s inventing a speedier spacecraft, which would catch up with us. Turnaround would be a logical place to meet, when our engine was turned off.

“No,” Paul said, “if they were from Earth, they would have radioed.” He pushed the CLOSE SEQUENCE button, and the outer door closed and air sighed back into the little sealed room. The inner door opened and the stranger floated out toward us.

He or she or it undid the helmet clasps and let the helmet float away. A male in his twenties or thirties, no obvious ethnicity.

“Good for you. You didn’t try to kill me.”

“You’re an Other?” Paul said.

“No, of course not.” It wasn’t looking at Paul, just studying each of us in turn. “They couldn’t speak to you in real time. Your lives are trivially short and swift. I’m an artificial biological construct, like you two Martians, created to mimic a human rate of perception and reaction.

“I’m a tool made by a tool. The one who communicated with you from Triton—”

“Who tried to destroy the Earth,” Paul said.

“Only the life on Earth, yes. I was made in case you survived that. As I believe you know, the one who made me lives slower and longer than humans or Martians, but is still a mayfly compared to the Others.”

“It left Triton, though,” Paul said, “just before the explosion.”

“Yes. It is here now, in a small habitat near your air lock. Fastened to the iceberg by now. We’ve been nearby for some time, within a few million miles, but of course did not physically connect until your engine stopped.”

“Why are you here?” I asked. “To keep an eye on us?”

“That, yes. And to help decide whether you should be allowed near the Others’ home planet.”

“Then you’re set up to destroy us, as Red was?”

“Not at all. It’s not necessary.” His expression revealed nothing. It was not neutral, exactly, but more controlled than the serving robots at McDonald’s.

“Because the Others themselves won’t let us get close enough to hurt them,” Namir said.

“That’s correct. We have already begun sending them information. I think the more you let me know, the better your chances will be.”

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“No. You may call me whatever you please.”

“Spy,” Namir said.

“Considering the source,” it said, “I am honored.”

“You know a lot about us?” I said.

“Only what has been public knowledge on Earth. Namir, Elza, Paul, Carmen, Dustin, Meryl, Snowbird, Fly- in-Amber.” It pointed. “That would be Moonboy.”

He was facing away from us, floating halfway to the kitchen, listening to music. “Yes,” Meryl said. “He’s not feeling well.”

“Perhaps none of you are.” It looked around. “I will be as small a burden as possible. I will spend most of my time in my quarters, with the Other. Conversation necessarily takes a long time. Once we have deceleration, I can walk back and forth at will. The external air-lock control is simple; I didn’t use it this time because I didn’t want to frighten you with an alarm.”

“That was neighborly,” I said. “Can I offer you something to eat or drink?”

“Oh, no. I don’t want to burden your life support; I can take care of that in my own ship. Like the Martians, I consume very little.”

“We were made by intelligent design,” Snowbird said, “not haphazard evolution.” She had been studying the history of human science. But it was correct; Martians needed only a third of the life-support mass humans required. (Being indifferent to what you eat or drink is a factor, too—if we were willing to live on hardtack biscuits and water, we could save a lot of reaction mass.)

“You took a chance coming over here,” Paul said. “One course correction, and you’d be adrift.”

“I’m replaceable. How often do you do that?”

“Every few days.” Enough to keep us from going outside.

“A reasonable risk.” It looked around. “I would like to have a tour of your ship, if you don’t mind. Then you may tour ours.”

Paul nodded slowly. “We have nothing to hide.”

“I can speak consensus Martian,” it said, turning to Fly- in-Amber. “Would you guide me?”

Fly-in-Amber trilled a “yes” sound, and they headed off toward the Martian rooms. A logical starting place, but both Paul and Namir looked unhappy. “Wish it had chosen you,” Paul said to Snowbird.

“I wish that as well,” she said. “I’m curious.”

And more communicative, I didn’t bother to add. Fly-in-Amber might remember every detail, but we’d have to drag it out of him if he didn’t feel like talking.

“Well… come into the control room,” Paul said. “We’ll see what their ship looks like.”

I put on my gecko slippers and followed him. We waited at the door for the others.

“General,” he said as he walked in, and the control surfaces morphed to that configuration, a lot more dials and knobs and switches than the set he’d been using. He strapped himself into the swivel seat, and said, “Outside view.”

There was a flatscreen a meter square in front of him, and it darkened to a velvet blackness with a thousand sparks. He twiddled a joystick, and the angle veered around dizzyingly until it came to rest on a familiar view of the iceberg surface, with a decidedly unfamiliar visitor.

It didn’t look like a spaceship; it didn’t look like a machine at all. It looked kind of like a starfish with seven legs, pebbly skin that was mottled red and black, with filaments like cilia or antennae wiggling on ribs that ran down each leg. It would have looked right at home on the ocean floor if it were hand-sized. But it was easily half as big as the ad Astra landing craft.

“I wonder what makes it tick,” Namir said. “It can’t be carrying enough reaction mass for interstellar travel.”

“Well, if it’s the same thing that left Triton, it took off at twenty-five gees,” Paul said. “That argues for something more exotic than we’ve got. Spy says they’ve been following us, for who knows how long… so I guess it went out far enough to be undetectable, then just watched and waited. Then tailed us at its leisure.” He cranked up the magnification and slowly examined the thing. No obvious portholes or gunports or wheels or grommets. I suppose if you examined a starfish with a magnifying glass, you would see about the same thing.

“Maybe it’s alive, too,” Meryl said, “the way Martians are, and Spy claims to be. Grown for a specific purpose.”

“I would vote for that,” Snowbird said.

“Looks like a relative?” Dustin said.

“In a way. If the Others have an aesthetic, and our design reflects it, so does the vehicle’s design. Don’t you think?”

“See what you mean,” I said. Though “aesthetic” isn’t the word I would have chosen. It was almost ugly—but then so were the Martians until you got used to them.

I went back to my workstation and considered the pictures of the ship, thinking of it in terms of a living organism. I’d studied Terran invertebrates, of course, and remembered a seven-legged starfish. I clicked around and found the one I remembered, a pretty British creature, nicely symmetrical and less than a foot wide. There was also a seven-legged one from New Zealand waters, almost a yard wide, that looked octopoid and menacing, and in fact a footnote warned that if it grabbed your wet suit, it was almost impossible to pry loose. But it was the slender British one, Luidia ciliaris, that resembled the starship.

Nothing but its shape was relevant, of course. The only other creature I could find with seven legs, other than sadly mutated spiders, was the extinct Hallucigenia sparsa, a tiny but mean-looking fossil.

The only picture we had of the Others was a simple diagram they sent that we interpreted as having six legs and a tail. Maybe they did have seven legs, instead. So built a starship in their own image.

It was an odd shape for a vehicle, counterintuitive, but maybe my intuitions would be different if I had a seven-based number system.

Zero gee isn’t conducive to abstract thinking, which may be one reason space pilots have not distinguished themselves as philosophers. Another reason may be that they are basically jocks with fast reflexes. I pinged my pilot and said I was going to nap for a while, and he joined me in the bedroom for a few minutes of not napping. Then we did doze together, floating in midair with a sweat-damp sheet wrapped around us. I dreamed of monsters.

3 THE GRAND TOUR

The humans of course wanted to interrogate me as soon as Spy went back to its ship. But I hadn’t learned all that much about the creature. It asked all the questions.

We first went to the Martian quarters. It already knew the basic principles of our recirculating ecology; in fact, it knew more about some of the science and engineering than I did. It appears to have a memory like mine, perfect, but it had studied Martian physiology, for instance, with more depth than I was ever exposed to.

Part of what we discussed there is not translatable, because it has to do with an intimacy between Snowbird and me that has no human counterpart. To answer the obvious (to humans) question, it is not a sexual relationship, nor does it have anything to do with emotional bonding. It is a practical matter that has to do with being ready to die.

The pool that you built for us interested it; it wanted to know what humans gained by this demonstration of friendship. Altruism was difficult to explain, but it understood about doing favors in expectation of eventual return.

Then I took it around to all the crops. This took the most time, because for some reason it needed to know details about the propagation and maintenance of every species.

(I would call this a hopeful sign. Why would the Others need this information other than to help humans survive after some life-support mishap?)

Similarly, I took it through the warehouse area, which is mostly human food storage. It was interested in Namir’s homemade musical instruments. Music seems not as mysterious to them as it is to Martians; it asked me some questions that I could not answer; I said to ask Namir.

It also asked questions about the shop area that I could not answer, mostly about the weapons that obviously could be made there. They can’t be thinking that we will be making swords and pistols to attack them. I expressed this thought, and Spy said of course I was right. But I assume the situation is more complex than that and recommend that Paul or Namir, with their experience as warriors, engage him on this topic, to reassure them.

(I did not say anything, of course, about our conversation, our group meeting, on 8 May 2085, where we discussed the possibility of a kamikaze attack, using all of ad Astra as a high-velocity bomb. I assume that is no longer a possibility, so there was no need to discuss it.)

It was very interested in the swimming and exercise area, with the virtual-reality escape masks, or helmets. It looked at the exercise log carefully, perhaps to have a picture of each person’s physical strength. There was a long and odd discussion about the physical differences between humans and Martians, which covered things it must already have known. I think it was examining my attitudes (or mine and Snowbird’s) toward you humans.

I think that when we arrive at Wolf 25, the Others will want to exploit the difference between the two races and take advantage of the fact that we are, in some abstract essence, their children. As you know, from several conversations over these past three years, our allegiance is with you. Of course, that is exactly what I would say if I were lying, especially if I were on its side.

It wanted to investigate some private quarters. Since I am closest to Namir, I prevailed upon him. I explained to Spy about the sexual relationship among him and Dustin and Elza, as well as I can understand it, and how that mandates the arrangement of the sleeping area of each.

Of course, Namir’s bedroom is small (as is Dustin’s, since they are just for sleeping), and its walls are a constantly changing art gallery, thousands of reproductions from the great museums of Earth. Spy had difficulty understanding this, as do I. One thing Martians and humans have in common is a preference for darkness and quiet when we sleep. So what does it matter what’s on the walls? Dustin’s room is plain, with only an abstract picture he calls a mandala on one wall.

In Elza’s bedroom there is a large cube for showing movies, which usually are depictions of humans mating in various ways, which Namir explained as being an aid in their own mating, or I should say “fucking,” since I understand that Elza, like the other females, has suspended her reproductive function for the duration of the flight.

Of course Spy knew enough about human nature not to be surprised by that, as it was not surprised when we then visited the kitchen, where Namir pleases himself and the rest of you by preparing your food in various original ways. Neither we nor the Others see the point in changing the appearance and flavor of fuel.

I think we shared a thing like humor over your counterproductive need for variety in these commonplace aspects of life. I don’t think its motives regarding me are friendly, though, or simple; it seemed to be testing me. Perhaps it will do the same with you humans at a later date.

We heard Namir and Dustin making noise down by the swimming area, and backtracked to watch. They couldn’t play pool in zero gee, so they had improvised a three-dimensional variant, more gentle and slow than the original. I could not quite understand the rules, which amused them. Dustin said they had to make up the rules as the game progressed, since nobody had ever played it before.

This may be important: Spy revealed that the Others have a similar activity. Much of their time, like yours, goes to individual contests that have only a symbolic relation to real events. The compact way it described those contests did not reveal much, except that the physical actions are not accomplished by individual Others; they are done by beings like Spy, biological constructs that are autonomous but obedient. And the point of the game is not to win, but to discover the rules.

We completed the circuit by investigating the lounge and work areas, where most humans spend the waking hours that are not given over to strictly biological activities.

When Spy began to put on its helmet, Paul came over to operate the air lock. One person can do it alone, but it’s simpler to have someone outside the lock pushing the buttons. He told Spy he would start to fire the steering jets at 0230; best to be inside by then.

Before the outer door was even open, Carmen and the others were bearing down on me with questions.

4 OTHER-NESS

Fly-in-Amber let us grill him for exactly one hour. Then he said he would submit a written report tomorrow and went off to rest.

Namir wondered aloud how he would do that. Lying down is irrelevant in zero gee, but they never actually lie down, anyhow. Hard to sort out all the legs.

Having a conversation was odd, too, without a physical up and down. By convention, most people tried to stay upright, but if you didn’t hang on to something, you could start to drift. Paul let himself go every which way, I supposed to demonstrate how natural the state was to an old space hand.

We were in the compromise lounge, and it was cold. I told Snowbird we had to move into the dining area. She said she would come along for a little while.

Namir had put a collection of ration bars in a plastic bag with a drawstring. I took a peanut butter one and passed the bag around.

Snowbird bounced gently off the refrigerator and grabbed onto the dining-room table with three arms. “You were not too pleased with what Fly-in-Amber remembered?” she said to me.

“We could wish for more. But we’ll have years.”

“The next time it visits, we’ll have plenty of questions,” Paul said.

“Can you establish a radio link?” Meryl asked. “Or would it be better not to?”

“No reason not to,” Namir said. He looked around with a stony expression. “It’s a good thing we have nothing to hide. They’re probably hearing every word we say.”

“Through vacuum?” I said.

“Any Earth spook could do it. Spy could have dropped a microtrans-mitter in here while it was walking around, but you could be even more direct than that—attach a sensor to the hull and have it transmit the vibrations it picks up.

“I don’t think that would work once the main drive starts up again,” Paul said. “The vibrations would overwhelm your signal.”

“Maybe so.” His expression didn’t change.

“They’d have something like S2N,” I said. It’s a spook program to coax out data that’s buried in noise.

That brought a little smile. “How on earth do you know about S2N?”

“I haven’t been on Earth since ’72,” I kidded him, “but you can learn a thing or two in orbit.” It was an unpleasant memory. Dargo Solingen had used S2N to spy on Paul and Red and me, overhearing our whispered conferences under loud music. A day later, our secrets were headlines on Earth, and the Others decided it was time for us all to die. Sort of a turning point in one’s life.

“What it said about the Others playing games,” Dustin said, “to find out the rules. I want to know more about that.”

“They might view us as contestants?” I said.

“Or pieces,” Namir said. “Pawns.”

“Anything but rivals,” Meryl said. “If they perceive us as a danger, we won’t even get close to them.”

I nodded. “No matter what Spy says, we have to assume it can destroy us if it thinks we present a danger to the Others.”

“We ought to figure out a way to talk to its buddy,” Paul said. “The speeded-up Other.”

“Hard to visualize a conversation,” I said. “Eight minutes passing for us, for every minute it experiences.”

“Say something, play a round of poker, then listen and respond,” Dustin said. “Spy will always be our intermediary anyhow.”

Namir nodded. “We could do something like that. We just have to find a way to present it so it appears to give them an advantage.”

“Home team?” Dustin said. “We agree to go over there to talk?”

“That would be our advantage,” Namir said. “Get a look inside their ship.”

“Wait,” I said. “We’re not fighting them. It’s the opposite. We want them to feel safe, cooperating with us.”

Namir laughed. “Like a mouse negotiating with a python.”

“She’s right,” Meryl said. “We can’t see it as a contest. We already know what the result would be, in a contest of strength, or will.”

“I don’t know about will,” Namir said.

Elza snorted. “Spoken like a true man. You have balls, darling, but they’re no advantage here.”

There was a loud ping from the control room. Paul launched himself in that direction, somersaulting in midair, and slipped through the door. I could hear him saying a few words, responding to the radio.

He walked back, with his gecko slippers, looking thoughtful. “Interesting coincidence. We have an invitation from ‘Other-prime.’ To come over for an audience with His Nibs.”

“All of us?” I asked.

“Just four. You and me and Namir, and Fly-in-Amber.”

“Any danger?”

“Well, we’ll want to be tethered down on the way over and back, in case of a course correction blip. I can fix that easily with a guideline. Once we’re over there…” He shrugged. “We’ll be at their mercy. Exactly as we are here.”

Paul put off the turnaround rotation, even though it probably would make little difference. He got a roll of cable and a couple of pitons, ice spikes, out of the workshop, and I went along as fetch- and-carry. It was the first time either of us had been outside in over three years; we’d all done it as a safety drill before the engine started. You wouldn’t want to do it during acceleration. Like being perched on top of a rocket. One misstep, and you’d slide off and drop forever.

Hammering in a piton wasn’t simple in zero gee. There was nothing to hold him to the “ground,” so after each swing, he would rotate away from the spike. He’d foreseen this, of course, and brought along a hand drill to make a preliminary hole.

I held a light for him but looked away from it to preserve my night vision. The sky was beautiful, the stars brighter than on Earth, the Milky Way a glowing billow across the darkness. I wished I knew the constellations well enough to tell whether they were different. Orion looked about the same. Paul pointed out where our Sun was. A bright yellow star, but there were brighter ones.

We had safety tethers attached to the air lock. After the piton was secured, Paul jetted across first, unreeling the guideline behind him. I followed him hand over hand, trying not to tangle the three lines.

The air lock on the starfish-shaped craft was a barely visible lip. Paul drilled and hammered a piton right in front of it. He secured the guideline to give it about three or four feet of slack; if you held on to it, you could walk, after a fashion, from one air lock to the other.

We returned to our own ship to relax for a few minutes and ensure we’d be going over with full air tanks and empty bladders. There was no strategy to discuss; we’d just keep our eyes and minds open.

Fly-in-Amber went over between us, moving with characteristic caution. I didn’t mind going slowly. It was a long way down.

When we got to the air-lock lip, Paul opened the radio circuit—I heard a slight click—but before he could say anything, Spy’s voice said, “Come in,” too loud and too clear. The lips parted to reveal a red glow.

“Returning to the womb,” I said. We went in, and the lips closed behind us. The small red light inside my helmet, an air warning, glowed green.

“Is this safe to breathe?” Paul asked on the radio.

“If I wanted to kill you,” Spy said, “I wouldn’t have to go to this much trouble. This is exactly the same pressure and composition as you breathe over there.” He stepped in out of the gloom and made a circle with one hand. “Paul, get your feet under you. I’m going to turn on some gravity.” As the light increased, so did the feeling of weight. It was very feeble, though; much less than Mars.

“What kind of gravity?” Paul asked.

“Triton. About one-twelfth Earth’s gravity; less than a third that of Mars.”

The room was organic in a mildly disgusting way. I had to take a colonoscopy before they would let me go to Mars, but they did let me watch, and the walls here looked like the inside of my large intestine then, pink and slippery. That gave me a whole new attitude toward the air lock. There was no furniture in the room, no windows except for two portholes, one on each side of the air-lock lips. Not a sound.

“I will introduce you to the Other- prime, though of course it cannot respond directly.” He touched the wall, and a dark oval appeared, like wet glass. We stepped forward.

I’m afraid I made a little noise of alarm. It was, in a word, a monster. A word that shouldn’t be in a xenobiologist’s vocabulary, but there you have it.

The creature was all chitin and claws, hard shiny brown with yellow streaks and blobs. Six smaller claws, about the size of human arms, circled the thorax. A seventh one, twice as big, curled over the top like a scorpion’s tail. A powerful serrated vise.

The biologist in me immediately wondered what was in its environment that required such armor and strength. “How big is it?”

“About twice human size,” Spy said. “It won’t hurt you, though. Too warm out here for it to survive.

“It is looking at you through me and wants to say something. I will relay the message in a few minutes.”

I studied the creature while we waited. It looked more like a huge crab than any other terrestrial animal. No crabs on Earth were that big, I thought, except maybe the long spindly ones that live on the bottom of the ocean, spider crabs. This guy could eat them alive.

Which again raises the question, why? None of our speculations about its environment, living in liquid nitrogen, considered the possibility of strong, fast predators.

Of course, it couldn’t react fast, which would explain the armor.

Maybe our assumptions about body chemistry were wrong. Temperature chauvinism. The fact that this species is slow doesn’t mean that all nitrogen-based cryogenic life-forms are slow.

So that’s the next question. If the environment has swift, strong predators, what did the Others evolve from, when a snail could run circles around them? Well, just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’re at the top of the food chain. There are plenty of environments on Earth where the crown of creation would be lunch.

It would be fascinating to investigate the Others’ planet and see whether it was biologically as complex as Earth. Mars never had been, or at least we’ve never found any fossils you could see without a magnifying glass.

Maybe the Others’ planet had a whole phylum of smaller and less complex crablike creatures, culminating in this beautiful example.

It was beautiful, in its way.

“It wants to congratulate you,” Spy said, “on having made it halfway. The odds are good you will continue on to Wolf 25 and arrive intact.

“It currently has no interest in destroying you. It reminds you of the obvious, though: this ship you are in has an autonomous intelligence that thinks faster than you can and won’t hesitate to destroy you, and us, whenever that might be necessary for the protection of our home planet.

“You are here on our sufferance. We are curious about you and wish to study you.”

“Why should you let us live?” Namir said. “You’ve already tried to destroy us once—why should we expect you will let us survive now?”

“Is that a question you wish me to ask Other-prime?”

“Yes,” Namir and Paul said simultaneously.

I wasn’t sure about that, and started to say, “Wait.” But it was too late when my lips formed the word.

What if it said, “You’re right,” and we all were simply doomed? It could flick us away like a speck.

Fly-in-Amber expressed my misgivings: “Perhaps that was not wise. We should preserve our options and not compel it to make a decision.”

“Now or later,” Namir said. “It will be easier to work with it if we know we have a chance of surviving.”

It occurred to me that the room had no smell of its own. Standing next to Paul, I could smell the peanuts on his breath. But there was nothing from the ambient environment. Martian rooms had a characteristic smell, like damp earth; nothing like that here. It was like a VR background with the smell turned off.

Other-prime answered in less than a minute. Probably a prepared response; the question was no surprise. “That is fair. We do not think the same way as you, but let me try to put this in human terms.

“You averted worldwide catastrophe by moving our device to where it could not harm you. There were other things that you could have done, but that was sufficient. If you wish, you may think of that as a test that your species has passed. Contacting me here would be the second test.

“How many tests might be necessary for your assurance, I cannot say. The home planet does not yet know anything, of course; it will be more than a decade before my last communication from your solar system reaches them.

“I can say that other races have attained this degree of rapport with us, and many of them were allowed to go on their way. Some were not.

“None who resorted to aggression were allowed to survive. You must have deduced this already.”

“That’s all?” Paul said after a few seconds.

“Yes.”

“I showed you around our facilities,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Will you reciprocate?”

“Not now. I will discuss this with Other-prime. Right now it is resting.”

“It takes a lot of energy for it to communicate with us?” I said.

“That is not something you need to know at this time. Be careful when you leave. There is no gravity on the other side of the air lock.”

Paul snorted. “ ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’ ”

“It will not do that,” Spy said. Fly-in-Amber nodded. Two species with but a single sense of humor.

5 TURNAROUND

I sat (or hovered) with Carmen, Paul, and Fly-in-Amber for an hour, with most of the others looking on, and we recorded all of our impressions from the half hour we were in the alien spacecraft. Of course we had all of the conversation in there recorded, too.

It was pretty straightforward. Even my Elza was a little optimistic. “It could have been a lot worse,” she said. “Even an ultimatum is a kind of communication.”

Paul, floating upside down, put on his slippers and did a gymnast’s tuck to land feetfirst. “I guess we’re safe as long as we remain interesting,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t anybody be boring.” He went back to the control room to start turnaround.

One of us did become less boring. Moonboy joined us and took off his earphones.

“Has the noise stopped?” Elza said.

He shook his head. “I’ve been sort of listening since the Spy one appeared. Are we in more danger now, or less?”

“Less, in a way,” she said. “I mean, they were always out there. They didn’t have to reveal themselves.”

“Why not reveal yourself to a specimen you’re studying?” I said.

He nodded slowly, looking at the space between me and Elza, not quite focusing, drifting slightly.

“Are you feeling better, Moonboy?” Carmen asked.

“I’m feeling more sane. For what that’s worth.” He looked directly at her, then away. “I’m sorry I’ve been…”

“You’ve been sick,” Elza said. Did she not see how transparently he was trying to manipulate her and Carmen? I wanted to tell him to put his earphones back on and go sit someplace out of the way. There’s a time and a place for everything, and for this it was months ago and billions of miles away.

Meryl gazed at her newly talkative mate in stunned silence. It was clearly time to leave them alone. “Good you’re feeling better.” I excused myself and geckoed over to the kitchen. From the pantry I got a tube of reconstituted gorgonzola paste and some crackers, tucked a squeeze bottle of wine under my arm, and stepped into the warmer human lounge. I asked it for quiet random Mozart and hovered near the bookcase, extracting the large book of Vermeer prints.

There’s a kind of art to situating yourself in weightlessness. The cheese, crackers, wine, and book were all hovering within an arm’s length. As long as I was careful in picking things up and replacing them, I wouldn’t have to chase them down. Carmen and Paul did it automatically, with months of experience, but I still had to think things through and move with caution.

While I hovered contemplating this and Vermeer’s faces, I gently collided with the bookcase. The cheese and wine and book all inched toward me. I was disoriented for a moment, then realized that Paul had begun turning the iceberg around. My satellite objects and I weren’t attached to anything, but our frame of reference was moving fast enough to go through a half circle in, what, thirty hours? This seemed faster than that. I’d ask the notebook later.

The cheese wasn’t bad, considering. The “wine” was pure plonk, but better than nothing.

So we were one- quarter of the way to the next wine shop or liquor store. That put the trip into a certain perspective. Or maybe halfway to dying, which put it into another.

“Penny for your thoughts.” Carmen had drifted up behind me, stopped herself with a toe to the wall. “We’ve started moving,” she said, her face at my level but sideways.

“Just noticed.” I handed her the wine bottle, and she squeezed a dash of it into her mouth, from an impressive distance.

“Owe you one. What about our silent partner?”

I looked over toward the other lounge, and he wasn’t there anymore. “I’ll wait and see. One swallow does not make a spring.”

I offered her the cheese and crackers, but she waved them away. “I gain weight in zero gee just thinking about food.”

That made me smile. “Weight?”

“Mass, inertia, whatever. Turns into weight.” She looked back to where Moonboy had been. “You’re not… not too sympathetic.”

“Aside from the fact that he broke my wife’s nose? That he’s acting like a sullen child?” She made a helpless shrug. I tried to choose my words carefully. “His madness, or behavior, is not his fault; I understand and agree with that. He was treated abominably as a child, and I wish his father could be punished for that.”

“Stepfather.”

“If this were a military operation, he would no longer be part of it. We can’t leave him behind or send him back—”

“Or kill him,” she said quietly.

“No. But we could lock him up. Take him out of the equation.”

“That would destroy him, Namir.”

“I believe it would. But his is one life versus billions.”

She shook her head. “If I could wave a magic wand and make him disappear, I would. But imprisoning him would affect us as well as him.”

“You don’t think it affects us to have him moping around like some demented…” She flinched, and I lowered my voice. “He’s already wearing us down. Three more years?”

We’d had this argument before, from various angles. Her response surprised me. “It could be a long three years. Let’s see how he acts when we have gravity again. See whether this recovery lasts.”

“I’m glad you can see it that way.”

She smiled and touched my shoulder. “Don’t want two crazy men aboard.” She kicked off from the bookcase and floated toward the kitchen.

6 ADJUSTMENTS

I was jangled but way behind on sleep, despite the sweet nap with Paul, so I took a half pill and went zombie for about eight hours. When I woke up, Paul was snoring upside down in a corner, naked. Zero gee can do funny things to a penis, but I decided his need for sleep trumped my curiosity. And he might be low on energy. I closed the door quietly and drifted toward the gym, where Moonboy was tumbling.

It may have been weightlessness as much as the appearance of Spy that had shaken Moonboy out of his sullen isolation, into impressive gymnastics. He’s Paul’s age, but was bouncing around like a kid.

Well, not exactly like a kid. There was an element of grim determination in his constant motion, getting a maximum of exercise while honing his zero-gee gymnastic skills. I had seen him studying Paul, then trying to duplicate the ways he got from place to place. He was never as graceful but became almost as fast and accurate.

Not a particularly useful life skill, unless he planned a midlife career as a laborer in orbit. But I was hoping all the jumping around was a kind of transition back to a normal life. Or “normal,” in quotation marks.

Meryl was watching him from a distance as he practiced floor-to-ceiling, ceiling-to-floor rolls. I floated over to join her.

“He’s getting good,” I said.

“That he is.” She didn’t look at me.

“Have you talked?”

“Said hello.” She took a breath and let it out. “What should I say to him? I mean really.”

“Welcome back?”

“I don’t know that he is back. I’m not sure where he’s been.” There were beads of tears on her eyelashes. She rubbed her eyes and left wet spots on her cheeks.

“Maybe you want to wait until the gravity comes back.”

“Maybe.” Our thighs touched, and she put a hand on my knee. “You’re so lucky with Paul.”

“Yes. But Elza will get him, too, sooner or later.” Why did I say that?

She smiled. “Probably. She’ll be fucking Spy before we get to the planet.”

“A milestone for Homo sapiens.”

“What’s hard, one thing that’s hard, is not having a place for us to go back to. While he was shut away in his own box, I could handle that. But are we supposed to pretend that it’s over now; he got it out of his system?”

“No, of course not. I think you have to get him to talk about it.”

“Get him to talk about anything, first. Then I could work it around to ‘say, are you still crazy?’ ”

“You can’t… it’s a pity you can’t have Elza mediate.”

She smiled, a tight line. “She’s the only one with a degree. But it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“He might hit her again.”

“I might ask him to.” She grinned. “Just as therapy. For both of us.”

I was feeling hungry and instinctively checked my wrist. The tattoo had showed the wrong time since we passed the orbit of Jupiter, but habits die hard.

“It’s eight,” Meryl said. “Had dinner?”

We put on slippers and walked, like grown-ups, to the kitchen. Microwaved packets of empañadas and supposedly Mexican vegetables. I went back to the middle of the garden and picked a sweet red pepper and chopped it up, feeling like Namir. Master zero-gee chef, not losing a single piece of pepper or finger.

“I’d kill for a cup of coffee,” she said. “Hot coffee.” The drink bags and squeeze bottles all had DO NOT MICROWAVE on them. So far nobody had put that to the test. Better keep an eye on Moonboy.

“So all he’s said is hello?”

“Some politenesses. He said he was better, and we could talk later. It is later, though, and he’s…” She laughed a little snort. “He’s graduated from village idiot to whirling dervish.”

She opened the seam on her vegetables a bit and squirted in some hot sauce. She held it out to me, but I declined, knowing its potentiating effect. If I could hold off shitting until we had gravity, I would be a much happier space tourist, and I probably wasn’t alone. You can get used to those things, but you also get un-used to them.

(I had a sudden flashback of the day we’d learned to go in, or into, a zero-gee toilet, with its helpful little eye-in-the-bowl. Not a part of myself I’d ever expected to observe in action.)

“Gravity might help him.” Repeating myself.

“Or it might put him back in his cocoon.” She was using chopsticks, and they worked better than my spoon, which tended to launch bits of food into my face or beyond. There would be some cleaning up when we restarted.

After we began eating, the object of our discussion headed our way, perhaps having heard the Pavlovian microwave bell. He bounced from the recycler wall to the bean trellis, off the side of the Martian quarters, and through both lounges, arriving at a reasonable speed surrounded by a nimbus of male sweat, not too unpleasant.

“Mexican!” He went to the fridge and started to rummage.

“In the pantry,” Meryl said. “Under E, for empañadas.”

“Sí, sí; muchas gracias.” He found the packet and put it in the microwave, and floated in front of it upside down. “I’m not interrupting?”

“Just getting a bite,” she said, “but you can’t eat with us unless your feet are in the right direction.”

“Comprendo.” When the food was ready, he brought it over with a slow reverse roll. We were eating at the table, even though there was no reason to actually set the food down on it.

He sprayed hot sauce into the packet and speared the empañadas with a fork, more efficient than either of us. Without preamble, he said, “Have you thought about Spy not being what he claims to be?”

That was not a big stretch. “In what way?”

“Maybe he’s not an alien at all, hmm? Maybe he’s always been here, waiting for turnaround. To test us.”

“Who?” Meryl said. “Who’s testing us?”

“Earth. Testing our loyalty.”

That sounded bizarre enough. “I don’t get it. How could anybody be disloyal?”

“Be in the pay of the Others?” Meryl offered.

“Well, you know. Not pay.”

“No, I don’t know. What?”

He finished chewing, swallowed, and set his food packet floating just over the table. He folded his hands over his chest. “I’ll spell it out.”

“I’m all ears,” she said.

“First, how possible is it that they could chase us eleven light-years, constantly accelerating, and wind up right here at the exact right time—with no evidence of having used any fuel? Without our detecting them?”

We did detect something, I thought; Paul had mentioned an anomaly in the proximity circuits. But I let it be.

“How much more likely is it that they’ve been here all along? That the supposed ‘alien’ was already installed before we got to the iceberg? Tell me it couldn’t be done.”

“Okay,” she said. “It couldn’t be done.”

“Even if it could, why would they bother?”

“Like I say, to test our loyalty.”

“That’s…” She didn’t say crazy. “That makes no sense.”

“It seems awfully elaborate,” I said. “They built this alien-looking spaceship, and Spy, and a convincing Other, and kept them hidden for years, to trot them out at turnaround, to see how we react?”

“You’ve got it. That’s it exactly.”

“Moonboy.” Meryl’s voice quavered.

“Where did they hide them for three years?” I persisted.

“Out in plain sight. No one’s gone out to look till now.”

“But Paul can look outside anytime he wants. Or anyone who goes into the control room.”

“Oh, Carmen, don’t be naive. It’s not like looking out a window. Paul sees an electronic image that’s supposed to match what’s out there. They could fix it so he wouldn’t see the ship until the time was right.”

“And they’d do all that just to check our loyalty? Who is this ‘they’ anyhow?”

“Earth!” He was suddenly even more intense. “They never have trusted the four of us from Mars.”

“They chose us for this,” Meryl said.

“And sent along three spies!” He glared at Meryl, then at me. “Could it be more plain?”

I stared right back. “Something’s pretty plain.”

“Three spies. One seduces me and tries to play with my head, my memories of childhood. One attacks me physically, unprovoked. The third has worked himself into a position of authority, from which he can poison your minds against me. Is any of that not true?”

“Listen to me.” I took his hand in both of mine. “Elza tries to seduce everybody; that’s her nature. Dustin hit you because you fucked his wife, then broke her nose. Namir is a career diplomat and a natural leader, and I don’t think he’s ever tried to influence my opinion of you.”

“Considering that you also fucked his wife,” Meryl said, “and broke her nose, I’d say he’s been a model of objectivity.”

He jerked his hand away. “You’ve both bought it. Bought the whole thing. Or you’re in on it, too.” He kicked away from the table so hard he hit his head on the ceiling with a thump. He drifted back to the fridge and kicked off from it, to drift away over the crops.

After a bit, Meryl picked up his lunch. “Want some of this?”

“Too much hot sauce.”

She nodded but reached into it with her chopsticks. “Guess you can get used to anything.”

7 ABOUT TIME

Humans are always talking about heaven, even if they claim not to believe such a place exists. I have the feeling that it’s not just metaphor or semantic shorthand, but rather an internal state that they are forever grasping for but never attain.

I have come close to heaven, for a Martian, these past few days—free of the ship’s constant crushing acceleration. This morning it began again, and while I wait for the pool to fill up with water, I will distract myself with writing these notes.

Let go of the stylus and it falls to the floor. Depressing. But I will enjoy the water.

The next time we are weightless will be when we come to the planet of the Others. I wish there were some way we could just be there now. What good is science if it can’t do a simple thing like that?

Of course, that day might be the last day of our lives. But if so, then let it be. Whatever death is, it won’t include gravity. Or acceleration.

I could tell that the humans were disappointed, that I seemed to have learned so little about Spy and the Other-prime. Not everything I learned can be expressed in human terms, though. Can we trust them? Yes and no. Do they understand humans? Not as well as I do—but better than I do, in some large way.

Language is a hindrance. Having to write this down means leaving out much of what is important. There is nothing close to a one-to-one correspondence between my natural perceptions and this written thing, forced through the filter of human language. There are no human words, literally, for much of what Spy expressed while it was investigating ad Astra. Some basic assumptions about time and causality, for instance—I don’t know whether they are “actual,” from a human point of view, or just an alien (to them) way of expressing commonplace observations.

How could something as basic to reality as time be different for two different races? The dissimilarity must be just in the perception, or maybe expression, of reality. Time must be, independent of the creature experiencing it.

It was curious about details of your social and personal relationships. I complained that it should have been talking to Snowbird about such things; it said that it would, eventually, but it wanted to “triangulate,” a human term it had to explain to me, between its observations and mine.

This is clear now: it knows more about humans, and human nature, than I do after living side by side with you for years. The Other-prime has been observing you remotely for tens of thousands of years, though like us has only been monitoring human communication since the invention of radio.

I didn’t know this when I led Spy through the ship when it first contacted me, and if I were human I would feel embarrassed at the naive answers I gave to its calculated questions. I suppose it was satisfying its curiosity about Martians as well as humans.

Snowbird says the water is deep enough.

8 LOOSE CANNON

Am I the only creature aboard this boat that’s glad to have gravity back? Maybe the Jew in me needs to suffer.

I suppose one reason I like it is the aging athlete’s anxiety about keeping in shape, not slipping back. I can use the treadmill harness in zero gee and work up a sweat, pretending to run, but my legs tell me they haven’t really worked. Which is probably unscientific nonsense.

Once we started decelerating, Moonboy settled into black depression again, no surprise, and again stopped communicating. Most of us are probably relieved. He was not a wellspring of light banter during zero gee. Unless you’re amused by paranoia.

He hasn’t taken any meals since we started decelerating, though I set a place for him. He may be raiding the pantry odd hours, but Elza thinks not. She’s afraid for his mental state. Anorexia can precede suicide.

He sits plugged into his keyboard, and every now and then touches the silent keys. Carmen says she doesn’t think he’s actually composing; she glanced at the screen while he was working, and the page number hasn’t changed in two weeks.

I am not so much concerned for his well-being as I am afraid that he might fly off the handle and do some kind of irreversible damage. Paul has similar misgivings. When I broached the subject, he confided that the control room is kept locked now, and will not respond to Moonboy’s thumbprint. I would be inclined to go further and keep him sequestered in his room. Drugs could keep him from becoming suicidally depressed, and might even give him a measure of happiness—which I think he will never attain otherwise.

If we put it to a vote—shall we lock Moonboy up?—it would be a tie, along gender lines. Elza would be against it because it would be admitting clinical defeat (and because she can’t deny her role in precipitating his crisis); Carmen is by nature too humane, and Meryl, alone, loves him and wants to think he will grow, or snap, out of it. Dustin and Paul and I see him as a loose cannon that needs to be tied down, for everyone’s protection. I think Fly-in-Amber would agree with us, though I’m not sure about Snowbird.

So I suppose nothing will be done until Moonboy himself forces the issue. I’m not quite Machiavellian enough to set him up, but if he strays too close to the edge I might give him a nudge.

When I was in school, the consensus among medical people seemed to be that all mental illness would eventually be treatable by drugs, that psychiatry would be reduced to a systematic analysis of symptoms—identify the syndrome and prescribe its nostrum. In a way, I’m glad that the species has turned out to be more complex than that. Though I would not mind having a pill that could take Moonboy’s stepfather out of his life. And whatever else it is that’s turned him into such a liability. (I remember at first thinking that he was the one of the four that I would like, since he was unpredictable and amusing.)

Although we are in actuality going slower each day, it feels emotionally like we’re rolling downhill. Committed now, in a way we weren’t before turnaround. Wolf 25 or bust.

What do we mean by “now,” really? It’s odd to be compelled to think in relativistic terms. At this moment, the creatures on Wolf 25 (the planet circling its dark companion, technically) are unaware of our existence. We’re twelve light-years away, so in twelve years they will be able to observe the raging matter/antimatter beacon of our braking engine.

If things have gone according to plan—you could also say “if things are going to be going according to plan”—our prerecorded explanation of what we are attempting to do will have preceded the beacon by exactly one hundred days.

Their response to our pacifistic message might be to blow us out of their sky as soon as the beacon appears. If they did that, when would it happen? How long do we have before we know they haven’t killed us?

If we take the worst possible case, that they attack the instant they see us, their response can’t come faster than the speed of light. So, if my notebook is right, we will meet our doom no sooner than three years and some weeks.

Unless they figure out a way around the speed of light. Then we could be doomed any old time. As we could, supposedly, any time Other-prime decides the universe would be better off without us.

So it’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. I can do something about the eat and drink part. Tonight it will be meat loaf without meat, served with wine that’s not wine, all washed down with water distilled from our various body wastes. Be merry.

9 RELATIVITY IS RELATIVE?

On Spy’s fourth trip into ad Astra, it dropped a bombshell. For some reason it chose me to tell it to, not exactly the most technically sophisticated woman aboard.

Spy had said it wanted to talk to us one at a time, so we were sitting on the floor in “the onion field,” the part of the garden where we cultivated scallions and garlic.

We’d been talking about human history and customs, and as always, I was trying to extract information about the Others in return. I asked it about the voyage out here with Other-prime. Did they have anything like a social relationship? What did they do to pass the time?

“Carmen, there was no actual ‘time’ to pass. We knew in what part of space-time you would be turning around, and we just went there. Went here, approximately.”

“Wait. You just went here? Without traveling the twelve light- years in between?”

“Of course we traveled the distance. We got here. But there was no reason for the journey to have any duration, so it didn’t.”

“You were on Triton one instant, and here the next?”

“That’s what it feels like, but of course time isn’t shut down; there’s no way around relativity. But time is not the same thing as duration. This universe is twelve years closer to its end. But we didn’t have to experience the passage of the years.”

“You mean… your spaceship is some kind of time machine as well?”

“No, not really.” He seemed cross, exasperated. “This is like trying to explain to a bird how an elevator works. This is the way we go to the top of a building. We don’t have to flap our wings.

“Your own spaceship is a time machine; you compressed twelve years into less than four. What we do is no more magical than that. We just have better control over it; we’re more economical and efficient.”

I was completely out of my depth here. “Let me get Paul. I don’t understand—”

“Paul wouldn’t understand better. Like you, like any other human, he misunderstands the nature of time. His mathematics just compounds the error, because it’s already wrong before ‘one plus one equals two.’

“It’s time I had a talk with all of you, or perhaps all except Moonboy. Can you arrange that in about one hour?”

“Sure. It wouldn’t take an hour.”

“I want to spend an hour looking at your library, the paper printed books. This may be my last chance.”

“What? What’s going to happen?”

“I said ‘may,’ not ‘will.’ Shall we say 15:21 in the compromise lounge? I want to talk to the Martians, as well.”

“Okay… what should I say you want to talk about? Our ignorant mathematics?”

“Partly. Partly your survival.” He turned, and walked toward the lounge, presumably the “library” corner.

I sat for a minute, collecting my thoughts. Then I pinged Paul and told him what was going on. He said he’d make a general announcement and asked what I thought Spy was up to. “That’s as close as they’ve come to an actual threat.”

“I know.” My voice cracked. I wiped cold sweat from my palms. “See you there.”

I made a cup of tea and took it back to our room. I’d just begun a letter to my mother but couldn’t think of anything to say. Dear Mom, my survival was just threatened by a robot from another planet. What have you done when that happens?

I wondered what Spy meant by “our” survival. The people on this ship or humanity in general? Dear Mom, you may have only twelve years to live. Unfortunately, I wrote this twelve years ago.

Jacket and scarf and knitted socks. Might as well be nice and toasty for the occasion. I went over at precisely 15:20 and sat on the couch next to Paul.

Everybody but Moonboy was there, including both Martians. Rare to see them together outside of their tub. I guess if you bathed with someone twenty hours a day, you might avoid him the rest of the time.

Spy came in exactly on time and stood in the door. He was wearing his space suit, holding the helmet. “Other-prime has decided that we should precede you to Wolf 25. We have learned enough about you to help the Others there deal with the problem. So we will leave this iceberg and speed on to our mutual destination. We should arrive about eight months before you.”

I didn’t know whether to feel relieved. We wouldn’t have them looking over our shoulders, but then we wouldn’t learn anything more about them, either.

“We are going to impose something upon you that may be unpleasant, but Other-prime feels it is necessary. Your group is unstable in various ways, and there is a real possibility that not all of you, or perhaps none of you, will survive the rest of your trip.

“To keep this from happening, we will cause you to travel the way we do. The time it takes you to go the twelve light-years will not be affected, but the duration of the trip will be negligible. I just explained this to Carmen.”

“You did, but it made no sense.”

“Do you remember about the elevator and the bird?”

I looked around at everybody and shook my head. “You said that describing it would be like telling a bird how an elevator works.”

“Yes. How you can get to the top of a building without flapping wings. It would never understand. But that would not affect reality.”

“Of course not.”

“What would happen if you put the bird into the elevator and took it to the roof?”

“It wouldn’t like it,” Paul said.

“No,” Spy said, still looking at me. “But it would get to the rooftop.”

It turned to Paul. “It will happen tomorrow morning. I will call you a half hour ahead of time. People should be strapped in, including Moonboy.”

“Will I be shutting the engine down?”

“Not for another twelve years. Objective time. That would be about three years and three months in your decelerating frame of reference. Seconds, in your new one. It will all be clear.”

Clear to whom, I wondered. To Paul? “Spy, I don’t understand. You and I were sitting down in the garden, talking about, I don’t know, marriage…”

“Social connections. Friendships.”

“And now suddenly we’re going to be the birds in your elevator, flapping around and going crazy, I assume. What happened?”

“The Other-prime contacted me and said it was ready.”

“What if we aren’t ready?” Paul said, tense. “This is a pretty big deal.”

“Just have them strapped in, Paul. You will find it an interesting ride.”

“Wait,” Namir said, and it was like a command. “Suppose we don’t want to take your shortcut? Maybe we’d rather continue as planned and have those years to prepare for meeting your people.”

“They aren’t mine, and they aren’t people,” Spy said. “If all of you would prefer the old slow way, tell me now. I will ask the Other-prime.”

Meryl spoke up first. “Not me. The sooner the better.”

Dustin nodded slowly. “Me, too.”

“Paul?” I said.

He tugged on his ear, a sign that he was conflicted. “Spy… we know our technology has worked this far. I can understand Namir’s reluctance to try something new and untested. Just on your say-so.”

“I won’t argue with you.” It was looking at Namir. “But technology is not involved at all. It’s just that the way you experience time is connected to the way you think about time, and that is flawed.”

“And you can change that?” I said. “The way we think about time?”

“No, no, no. The bird does not have to build the elevator to ride in it.”

He moved his gaze to Paul. “What it is… Let me put this as simply as possible. We are—or you and the Other-prime are—here together in a definite place in space and time. In a simple Einsteinian way. Twelve years from now, you will again share a place in the space-time continuum. Share a point. So what connects those two points?”

I remembered that from school. “A geodesic,” I said, simultaneously with Paul and Namir.

“Exactly,” it said, and looked at the two Martians. “A geodesic in space-time is something like a line drawn between two points on a map.”

Fly-in-Amber sketched a line with his finger. “The shortest natural distance.”

Spy nodded. “True and not true. There’s only one shortest line between the two points, but there are many geodesics. It gets complicated if you have gravity and acceleration.”

“But there’s no magic wand,” Paul said. “You’re talking about going from here to there, a really long distance, with no time elapsing. That’s not possible, no matter how fast you go.”

I think that was the only time I ever saw Spy laugh. “Tell that to a photon. Or tell it to me tomorrow. Which will be twelve years from now, after a trip of no duration.”

“Unless we refuse your offer,” Namir said.

“Like the bird refusing to enter the elevator? I’m afraid you’re already in the net. As I said, I could ask the Other-prime to set you free, but at least two of you do want to take the shortcut. How about you, Carmen?”

“Wait. What if something goes wrong en route? The hydroponics spring a leak or the ship’s guidance system lets a pebble through? We won’t be able to deal with it.”

“Nothing will happen—literally nothing, because with no duration there are no events. If there were two independent events, there would be a measurable time between them.”

My head was spinning. “There’s no hurry, is there? I want to hear Paul’s take on it, and Namir’s.”

“Paul’s argument is based on ignorance and Namir’s is just fear of losing control. But no, there is no hurry. Just let me know when you’ve made up your mind.”

“Whereupon you will do whatever you want,” Namir said. Spy smiled and turned to go. “Won’t you?”

“Just let me know,” Spy repeated. Paul followed him, to operate the air lock, and nobody spoke until he came back.

“Spy’s wrong,” Namir said. “It’s not about control. It’s just about understanding what’s going on.”

“Which is apparently impossible for mere humans,” I said.

“What do you think, Paul?” Meryl said.

He sat down heavily and picked up his drink and stared into it. “I think we’d better get ready for an elevator ride.”

Ultimately, even Namir agreed that going along with Spy and the Other-prime would be the wisest course, not only to maximize our own chances for survival, but also to establish a record of cooperation before we met the Others. And abandoned ourselves to their mercy.

We went through the habitat getting things ready for zero gee; Spy had warned us that we would be in orbit, not accelerating, when the “elevator ride” was over.

Paul led us through the seldom- used corridor that connected the lander to the rest of ad Astra, basically two air locks with a silver corridor in between. A handy metaphor for any number of things—birth, rebirth, death. Perhaps robotic excretion, the life-support system that had sustained us for years expelling us with relief.

We got all strapped in and sat in a stew of collective anxiety, thick enough to walk on. Paul fussed with his controls and came back to crouch next to me, holding hands, for a couple of minutes. He was able to smile, but then he’s an official hero figure, and has to.

He returned to his place and strapped in, and in a few minutes said over the intercom, “We should be about a minute away.” Then, “Let’s count down the last ten seconds together. Ten, nine, eight…”

We never got to seven. The ship was suddenly flooded with sunlight, from the right—and on the left, my porthole was filled with a nearby planet, resembling Mars but more gray.

I felt gray.

There was no physical sensation as such. Only what you had to describe as deep loss, or longing, or sorrow. Some people were weeping. I bit my lips and kept tears away, and tried to sort out what was happening.

I unbuckled the harness and looked back down the aisle. Familiar faces contorted with all-consuming grief.

Except for two. Moonboy’s expression was blank, catatonia.

So was Namir’s.

10 RAMPAGE

Elza’s face kept swimming out of darkness, into focus, then I would fade back to Tel Aviv, reliving the worst time of my life in every dreadful detail. It seemed like weeks of nightmares, but it was less than a day.

I was in my room, surrounded by images from the Louvre. Watteau’s Jupiter and Antiope, Regnault’s The Three Graces, Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, and Gericault’s terrible The Raft of the Medusa. That one persisted, all the dead and dying.

Elza had just given me a shot, and she was cutting away a tape that bound my left wrist. My right one was sore.

“You’ll be all right now?”

“What’s… the wrists?”

“You were hurting yourself. Pulling out hair.”

My hand went to my head. Almost bald, sore in places.

“All that loose hair in zero gravity. It was a mess; I used the vacuum razor. You’re a little bit tranquilized. I didn’t think you wanted to sleep anymore, though.”

“No. Please.” I felt my head. “The razor with the vacuum attachment?”

“It looks nice. Evened up.”

“Was everybody… no. Other people can’t have been affected as strongly as I was.”

“Nobody. Well, you can’t tell about Moonboy. But nobody else passed out. It could be your age.” She caressed my head. “Spy supposedly didn’t know what caused it, but it wasn’t just a human thing. Both the Martians were uncomfortable.”

I took a squeeze from her water bottle. “Memories. I felt trapped inside memories.”

“You have some sad ones. Worse than the rest of us.”

“Not sadness.” I had to be honest with her, of all people. “It was guilt. Murder.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You mustn’t feel guilt for being a soldier. We’ve gone over that pretty well.”

“Not that. Long after that. I… never told you.” I hesitated, aware that the drugs were loosening my tongue. Then it came out in a rush.

“It was right after Gehenna; right after I found my mother dead. I raced back into Tel Aviv, putting a list together in my mind.

“My Working Group Seven had been formed in response to a persistent rumor that a large-scale act of terrorism was imminent, one that couldn’t be traced to a single political or geographical entity because it was not centralized at all. We had a couple of chemically induced confessions that indicated the group was large but divided into small independent cells.

“Anti-Semitism doesn’t have borders, and in fact some of the people we were looking at were Jews themselves, with strong opposition to the current power structure. Current at that time, liberal.

“I privately suspected that two or even three of the people in my office were moles, making sure that we were distracted by false leads. The one woman in whom I had confided this was the first person I saw die, a few minutes after we heard the bombs that were the second phase of the poisoning.

“As I raced down alleys and bumped across playgrounds and parks—none of the regular roads were passable—I was making a list of people I had to talk to that day.

“Because anyone who was not stunned that day was guilty. Ipso facto. And… there were so many dead bodies lying around that a few more would not raise any suspicions.”

She was behind me, rubbing my shoulders. “How many, Namir?”

“Eleven that day. I tracked them down one by one, along with seven or eight I looked at and spared.”

“You just shot them in cold blood?”

“No. Bullets would look suspicious. I got them alone and strangled them. Then they looked pretty much like all the other corpses.”

“There were more than those eleven? Other days?”

“Six had flown out that morning, including three from my office. To London, Cairo, and New York. In London and Cairo I used my hands. The ones in New York I did shoot, with a pickup gun I’d had for years. Then tossed it in the Hudson.”

“Like the .357 in the shoe box at home?”

“Yeah, behind the drywall. You are such a snoop.”

“It’s in the job description.” Holding on to my shoulder, she floated around in front of me. “Cold-blooded murder isn’t.”

“My blood was not cold that day. Those days.”

“Do you still think they were guilty?”

“I think now that two, at least, were not. But since we have never been able to pin down the organization responsible, I can’t ever know for sure.”

I closed my eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you, burdened you with it. I’ve never told anyone before.”

“Not even Dustin?”

“No. He knows I’ve done some wet work that was not formally sanctioned. He doesn’t know how many, or the fact that I was on a rampage.”

“I won’t tell him. Or anyone. They killed your mother. And four million others. Including the seventeen they killed using you as an intermediary.”

“That’s about the way I rationalize it. But it is a rationalization. Deep down, I know I’ve committed the one sin that can’t be reversed. Or forgiven.”

“God would forgive you. If there were a God.”

I smiled at her. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”

She held me to her softness for a warm moment, her cheek against mine. “There’s another problem,” she whispered. “We seem to be at the wrong planet.”

“Wrong what?”

“Show you.” She pushed away from me gently and floated down to the bed, as I rose to the ceiling. She pushed a couple of buttons on the wall there, and the paintings faded, replaced by a huge dun circle, a planet that resembled Mars. Clear atmosphere, a wisp of cloud here and there. No obvious craters, though; I wasn’t sure what that meant scientifically. Weathering, I supposed.

“We aren’t at Wolf 25?”

“We are, apparently—just not at the planet of the Others. Another one in the same system. Much closer in.”

“Why?”

“Spy said we’re going down tomorrow. Until then, we’re free to speculate.”

11 DEAD WORLD

Some of the humans, like Paul and Namir, were disappointed or apprehensive when they learned that we were not going down to the planet’s surface in our own lander, carried twenty-four light-years for that purpose, but instead were to go down in Spy’s “starfish” spaceship. I was relieved. Going to and from a planetary surface in a rocket is unpleasant and dangerous, even if it is “the devil we know,” as Carmen put it. We had no idea how the starfish worked, but the Others had probably been using them for a long time.

We had to cross over to their ship holding on to a cable, as before, and Snowbird did not enjoy the experience any more than I had the first time. This wasn’t in cool starlight, either. We had the huge disc of the ashen planet looming beneath us and the brilliant glare of Wolf 25 moving overhead.

Moonboy was not able to cross by himself. Paul and Namir carried him over like a deadweight.

Spy had told us that we couldn’t pronounce the name of the planet in any Martian or human languages, but that it translated to “Earth” pretty accurately. We might call it “Home” to reduce confusion.

“Whose home?” Carmen asked.

“Allow me to be mysterious,” Spy said, though the answer was obvious, if the details were not.

The air inside the ship was oppressively hot and humid, probably comfortable for humans. When we took off, though, the gravity was light, about normal for Mars.

It was not acceleration-induced “gravity,” either. It didn’t change direction or strength when the ship took off.

A circle opened in the floor of the craft, like a large window. We got an interesting view of the engine side of the iceberg/asteroid, which seemed to have diminished by about a third, in regular concentric grooves where the automatic ice- mining machines had gnawed their way around.

The landing was as smooth as the humans say their space elevator is, no lurching or vibration. As we approached the ground, though, the gravity increased to about that of Earth. Spy apologized to the two of us but said there was no way around it.

We approached the ground very fast. Snowbird and a few others reacted, but I assumed the Others hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to smash us into a planet. It was too fast, though, to get a good idea of what surrounded the landing site. Just a hint of regular architectural structure, and we were on the ground, and the floor window irised shut.

“The abrupt landing was necessary because of the physics involved,” Spy said. “We will observe from low altitude later.”

It had warned us that we would have to “suit up” before we left the ship, so Snowbird and I had not removed our footgear, and it was only a matter of donning four gloves and letting the protective cloaks form around our bodies. So we were the first two out the air lock, the human crew following by a few minutes.

Carmen would later say that it was “beautiful in a horrible tragic way,” which juxtaposes three contradictory ideas in what I realize is a standard human ironic frame. About beauty I have no opinion, and horribleness and tragedy are just dramatic observations about the fact that the universe runs downhill.

This is what I saw: on a plain that extended to the horizon in every direction, there were regularly spaced objects that we were told had once been space vehicles. The outer shells had mostly been eroded or corroded away; a lacy framework of some more durable metal remained, a gleaming cage for more corrosion within.

I wondered whether everybody else was thinking what I was thinking: The fleet that humans were building to protect the Earth might as well be paper airplanes.

“This was an invasion fleet,” Spy said. “It was poised to attack the planet of the Others.”

“How long ago?” Paul asked.

“It was about thirty thousand of your years ago. The planet was more hospitable to you then, more like Earth than Mars. A world with plentiful liquid water and oxygen; you could have survived here without protection.”

“We couldn’t now?” Carmen said.

“That’s correct. All the plant life died. Things oxidized and dried out.”

“And how did that happen?” Namir asked.

“Things got very hot for a short time. When it cooled down, it left mostly ash and carbon dioxide.”

“The Others fried the planet,” Namir said.

“I think ‘baked’ would be more accurate. They raised the surface temperature, as I said. I think for only a few minutes.”

“Enough to kill everybody,” Namir said.

“Every thing, I think. There is nothing alive now.”

“This is what they wanted to do to Earth,” Carmen said.

“Not quite as extreme. Though few humans would have survived.”

“The ones on Mars would have,” I said.

“The Others knew that,” Spy said. “And eventually they might have wound up coming here.”

“And met the same fate,” Namir said.

“Who can say? Let’s return to the ship.”

“Wait,” Paul said. “Can’t we look around for a while?”

“First I want you to see something else. Rather, the Others want you to. They suggested that before you meet with them, you have the proper context.”

“If they want to convince us that they can destroy us all, here and on Earth, it isn’t necessary,” Paul said. “We knew that before the plans for ad Astra were drawn up.”

“I’m not sure exactly what they want to do. Our communications are necessarily slow and indirect. I do know what they directed me to show you. You may have time for exploration later.”

We filed back through the air lock into the starfish, and it rose slowly and hovered. The engine made noise, a barely audible rushing sound. It had been silent, dropping from orbit.

We rose high enough for the horizon to show a slight curve. The humans all gasped at the sight, though it was not surprising. Thousands of the ruined ships stood in precise ranks. It was an impressive display of destruction, though I was more impressed by the idea that they could raise the temperature of an entire planet enough to cause this to happen.

Before we sped away, I counted 4,983 of the relics, though presumably there were more over the horizon.

“These creatures were of course intelligent,” Spy said, “and they knew that aggression against the Others might result in their extinction. So they left a record nearby.” As it spoke, we descended toward a glittering golden dome.

“One index of their mastery over the physical universe is this hemisphere of absolutely pure gold, more than a meter thick and almost five hundred meters in diameter. Its roundness is mathematically perfect to within a millionth of a meter.”

“I wonder why they would bother to do that,” Paul said.

“To show that they could,” Namir said.

“That’s probably true,” Spy said. “It also gives the structure some resistance to certain weapons. What’s inside is more interesting, though.”

The ship floated down to rest next to the dome, the window closing as we approached the ground. The humans had been told not to remove anything but their helmets, so they put them back on, and we were through the air lock in minutes. They left Moonboy resting behind.

We picked our way over an expanse of weathered rubble. Whatever else had been here was made of less durable stuff than gold.

The dome did not have an air lock; just a door. There were unambiguous symbols incised in the metal, lines of dark dots that pointed toward a dark square. When we approached it, the square opened.

I was second to enter, after Spy, so I knew that it had been dark inside, and lights glowed on as we entered. The light was bright and warm, the same spectrum as Wolf 25.

It was a display, like a museum. There were no words, written or spoken. It was obviously designed for any audience capable of getting here and standing at the door.

In the center was a large globe of a planet that resembled Earth—more water than land, with polar caps and clouds.

“This is what the planet used to look like?” I said unnecessarily. Spy nodded and led us to the first display case.

This must have been the race that built the fleet of spaceships. The exhibits showed what they looked like, inside and out, and demonstrated various aspects of their lives.

They looked very much like us, with four legs, but only two arms, which at first made them uncomfortable to look at. They also had tails, which made them morphologically similar to the Other-prime, and presumably all the Others.

The first display was kinetic, disassembling a model of the creature, then reassembling it one organ group at a time, which was also uncomfortable to watch but no doubt educational. Likewise, the next display showed mating and budding, processes almost exactly like ours, but strange to watch.

Then it moved from the strictly biological into social, showing a thing like a playground, or the humans’ creche on Mars. Lots of immature ones living together under the supervision of two adults.

This was followed by six similar play scenes, with different details, like the background scenery or the level of technology in the rooms. In two of them the creatures were colored reddish or blue, rather than black.

Carmen figured it out. “They’re different cultures,” she said. “They’re showing the different ways their young are handled, around the planet.” That interpretation was reinforced by the next seven displays, which showed the same different cultures, or races, having meals. Then there were seven showing what appeared to be social gatherings, or perhaps religious meetings. Then seven that appeared to be athletic competitions. This brought us back around to the door.

“Seven different cultures,” I said, “but one species. They’re Martians, aren’t they? Despite having only two arms.”

There was no doubt in my mind that these creatures were our ancestors. And the Others killed them all.

Spy did not respond directly. “Be ready,” he said. “One of you is about to learn a lot.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed, overloaded with information. My legs buckled, and I collapsed, knowing that this was what I was here for, and not liking it.

12 NO SURVIVORS

I first met Fly-in-Amber back when I was “The Mars Girl,” before we knew, or thought we knew, what the different colors of Martians did. I just observed that they wore different colors and seemed to group together by color.

Five years later, we thought it was all sorted out, and his yellow family seemed to be the one that had the most obvious and easy-to-understand function. Absolute memory freaks, who never forgot anything they saw or heard.

Then, in 2079, we found out they had another job—in fact, the primary job of the entire manufactured Martian race: to serve as intermediaries between the Others and Earth’s human race. The Others couldn’t predict with any certainty when, if ever, the humans would develop spaceflight, so they created the Martians and put them on the planet that came closest to the Earth. When a member of the yellow family was taken to Earth orbit, he went into a trance and recited a complex message in a language he couldn’t understand; a language only comprehensible to the Martians’ leader, whom we called Red. He had been studying the language since childhood, knowing, like all his predecessors, that it might be extremely important but not knowing why.

The Others’ message to Red was ambiguous and disturbing. They had the ability to destroy life on Earth but might not do it. Depending on various factors.

Red was supposed to keep this threat to himself, but wound up passing it on to me, and I told Paul. We were overheard, and everything unraveled.

So here we were again, with Fly-in-Amber speaking in a mysterious tongue, but instead of Red, we had Spy to decipher it for us.

Fly-in-Amber had babbled on for about ten minutes, Spy paying close attention. Then the Martian shook himself all over and groggily got to his feet.

“Did I do it again?” he said. “Talk in the leader language?”

Spy confirmed that he had. It was all recorded, and he could hear it back in the relative comfort of the starfish, whenever Fly-in-Amber felt strong enough to move. “Two minutes,” he said, and did some kind of breathing ritual or exercise routine. Then we made our way across the uneven ground, Snowbird shuffling alongside Fly-in-Amber, supporting him.

The interior of the starfish had been reconfigured. There were enough comfortable couches for all of us and, amazingly, a deep pool of water for the Martians. They stripped with comical haste and slid into it. We helped one another out of our suits, too.

There was a table with pitchers of water and plates of what looked like cubes of cheese. Namir picked one up and sniffed it.

“It is food,” Spy said. “Rather bland, I suppose.”

Namir bit into it and shrugged. “Won’t kill us. How long?”

“That partly depends on the message, and your reaction to it.” It sat on the couch nearest to the Martians. “Sit down if you want.”

I ate a couple of the cubes. They had the texture of tofu but less flavor. I wished for salt. And wine. Maybe a whole bottle of wine, and a big steak.

Spy waited until everyone was seated. “As you may have deduced, this planet is where the Others came from, and the people, or creatures, you saw in the displays are their ancestors, in a manner of speaking.”

“The Others didn’t evolve from them,” I said. You didn’t have to be a xenobiologist to see that.

“Not in any biological sense. About thirty thousand years ago there was a profound disagreement, what you might call a philosophical schism. It was about the fundamental nature of life, and the necessity for, or desirability of… its ending. Whether thinking creatures should die.”

“They had a way around it?” Namir said. “Not just longevity, but immortality?”

Spy nodded, but said, “No. Not exactly.

“It’s difficult to put this into terms that have universal meaning. That would mean the same thing, for instance, to humans and Martians.”

“But we can agree about what life is,” I said, “and that death is the cessation of life.”

“I don’t think so,” Snowbird said. “That has always been a problem.”

“Don’t get all spiritual,” Elza said. “As a doctor, I can assure you that dead people are much less responsive than living ones. They also start to smell.”

Snowbird held her head with both large hands, a laughter expression. “But the individual was alive in the genetic material of its ancestors, and also will be alive in the ones that follow after the organism dies.”

“Not me. I don’t have any children and don’t expect any.”

“But it’s not limited to that,” Snowbird said. “Before the individual was born, it was alive in the teachings that would eventually form it. Everyone you meet changes you, at least a little, and so becomes a kind of parent. As you yourself become a parent to anybody’s life you touch. It’s the only way, for instance, that humans and Martians can be related. Many of us feel closely related to some of you. Fly-in-Amber and I are closer to you humans here than we are to many Martians.” And I had been closer to Red, I realized, than I’d ever been to my own father.

“I’ll grant that’s true in a certain sense,” Elza said, “but it’s not as physically real as a genetic connection.”

“You claim your brain is not physically changed by accepting new information? I think that it is.”

“This is good,” Spy said. “It’s one aspect of the disagreement between the Others and you people. But only one aspect.

“Over the centuries, the ones who would become the Others physically isolated themselves, first on an island, then in an orbiting settlement, which grew by accretion. The separation became more complete as the ones on the planet encouraged belief systems that were inward-looking, antagonistic to space travel.

“The Others also pursued research into longevity, which most of the ones on the planet came to consider blasphemous.”

“Let me guess,” Namir said. “There was a war.”

“Several, in fact. Or you could see it as one ongoing war with phases that were decades apart. Centuries.

“The Others moved farther and farther out, for their own protection. Meanwhile, their individual life spans increased, up to what seemed to be a natural limit. They couldn’t push it far beyond about eight hundred years, with half of that life span in reduced circumstances… basically, alive and alert, but maintained by machines. You see where this would lead?”

It was asking the question of me. “They would… devalue what we would call ‘normal’ life? In favor of life partnered with machines? There’s something like that going on on Earth, even now.”

“Really? The Others might want to get in touch with them.”

“That would be fun,” Elza said. “Some of them are halfway aliens already.”

Spy looked at her with an unreadable expression. “Most of this I knew from Other-prime. But Fly-in-Amber added a turning point, a missing link.

“The final separation between the two groups came about when the Others discovered free power, the ability to bleed energy from an adjacent universe.”

“The same as our source of power,” Fly-in-Amber said.

“That’s right. You got it from them, though I take it that neither Martians nor humans really understand how it works.”

“Only how to use it,” Paul said.

Spy nodded. “This discovery allowed the Others to put a safe distance between themselves and the enemy, to move out to Wolf 25’s dark companion.

“They thought that this would make their physical separation complete. At almost the same time, they took total control of their life processes and abandoned their carbon-based form in favor of the virtually immortal bodies they have now.”

“So they downloaded their minds,” Paul said, “into artificial creatures with low-temperature body chemistry.” The Others had told us that their version of organic chemistry was cryogenic, based on silicon and liquid nitrogen.

“It wasn’t as simple as transferring information. Each individual had to die, and hope to be literally reborn in its new body.”

“They had no choice?” I said.

“Apparently they did. But the ones who didn’t change died out long ago.”

“Probably helped along by their successors,” Namir said.

“That could be. I don’t know.

“What I do know is that the ones left behind on this planet grew fearful. So they began building this huge invasion fleet.”

“Why on the ground, I wonder,” Paul said. “If they’d put them together in orbit, the ships wouldn’t have to be streamlined. And the net energy saving would be huge.”

Namir laughed. “They wouldn’t have to worry about that. They couldn’t have done this if they didn’t also have the free-energy thing.”

“And that was really what doomed them,” Spy said. “Even without the huge fleet, their discovery of the power source put them essentially next door to the Others.”

Unlike us, I hoped to think.

“Maybe if they’d remained in friendly contact, there might have been some accommodation. But there was no commerce or even communication between the races. So the Others hit them with one overwhelming blow.”

“As they attempted to do with us,” Paul said.

“No, not at all.” Spy shook its head slowly back and forth. “You have to stop thinking that way. The Others posed a problem for you, and you successfully solved it. This Home planet was too close for them to risk that.”

“If there were no survivors.” Fly- in-Amber said, “where did we come from?”

“There’s no direct line of succession. You were modeled after these Home creatures but independently manufactured. There are various anatomical differences.”

“I’m glad we have the extra hands,” Snowbird said, wiggling fingers.

“And you’re organized differently,” Spy said. “Each one of you is born into a specialty, born with its appropriate language and vocabulary. These Home ones were born dumb, like humans, and had to learn language.”

“But they had freedom to do whatever they wanted?” I asked.

“That isn’t known,” Spy said. “The Others left Home before you humans parted company with the Neanderthals.” There was a barely audible scraping sound. “We’re back.”

“Back where?” There hadn’t been any sensation of movement.

“In orbit, on your iceberg.” I moved to where I could see the ports by the air-lock lips. They showed our lander with the transfer cable.

Namir stepped over and looked out. “So. We go on now? To meet the Others?”

The expression on its face was close to embarrassment. “Actually, not all of you. We discussed this, Other-prime and I, with the Others. All of them.”

“Just now?” Meryl said.

“No, we had time to talk with the Others for about a month before we left to meet you here. They discussed various possible courses of action.

“This one is best. Of course, they can’t have a conversation with you in any sense. So they worked out every probable combination of relevant factors and allowed me, with Other-prime, to make the final evaluation and speak for them. Other-prime gave me a final piece of input a few minutes ago.”

“Telepathy?” Dustin said.

It tapped its ear. “More like radio. We won’t kill you all, which was an option much discussed, and still favored by a minority.”

“But you will kill some of us,” Namir said, almost a whisper.

“No, not killing, not like murder. We must take two of you, a human and a Martian, back to the planet of the Others.”

“For how long?” I asked.

It paused, I think not for drama. “It would be forever. You would be joining the Others, physically.”

“Frozen solid?” Elza said.

“You would have nitrogen, a liquid, in your veins.”

“The Martian would have to be me,” Fly-in-Amber said.

“That’s right,” Spy said. “The human…”

There was a lengthy silence. Paul half raised his hand. “I—”

“You’re the pilot,” Namir said, “and not expendable. I’m the oldest”—he looked at his spouses—“and, among the military people, I have the highest rank. The honor will be mine.”

“No!” I said. “Namir, be practical.”

“It can’t be Moonboy,” he said. “He’s not competent. Did you want to volunteer?” He was smiling, rueful rather than mocking.

“With all respect,” Dustin said, “this is not a job for an espionage specialist. You want a philosopher.”

“A doctor,” Elza said. “I know more about human beings than both of you combined.”

“We should do it by lot,” I said. “Excluding Paul and Moonboy.” When I said it, my stomach dropped. I looked at Meryl, and she nodded, looking grim.

“This is fascinating,” Spy said, “and I’m tempted to let you keep fighting it out. But what makes you think the choice is yours to make?

“The fact that Moonboy has been unconscious since arriving here makes him the most attractive of you, to the Others.”

“What?” Namir said. “He’s mentally incompetent.”

“Your mental competence is not an issue. The most intelligent of you, which would be Dustin, is still only human. What’s more interesting about Moonboy is that he’s immune to any consensus the rest of you might have arrived at since coming here. He is a tabula rasa with regard to the Others, and therefore will be easier to work with.”

“What makes you think you can wake him up?” Elza said.

“He won’t be awake when he joins the Others. He won’t even be alive, technically.”

“So the human race is going to be represented by a somewhat dead lunatic,” Namir said.

Spy paused, as if deciding whether to make a joke of that. “His individual characteristics and experiences are not particularly important. His recent experiences are, though; the less he knows about the Others, the better.”

“I think I understand,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Like positive feedback in a circuit. Interfering with the signal because of its similarity.”

That was the most science I’d ever heard from Fly-in-Amber. “You aren’t upset about this, yourself? Being kidnapped and killed and stored in a deep freeze?”

He clasped his head in appreciation of humor, a gesture he rarely used. “Another way of saying it is that it’s a chance at literal immortality, representing my race among the Others. How many foreign races would I be joining, Spy?”

“Two hundred forty-eight. Though more than half of them would be so different from you that communication would be unlikely.”

“You see, Carmen? As Namir said, it’s an honor.”

“I was not being literal, Fly- in-Amber. My feelings are more like Carmen’s.”

“I think Moonboy’s would be, too,” Meryl said, her voice thick and shaking. “We should try to revive him.”

“Shock him out of it?” Elza said. “And tell him ‘Prepare to die’?”

“That is what it would be,” Spy said. “If his comfort or happiness is at issue, I think your course is clear.”

Meryl crossed her arms over her chest, holding herself. “My course is not clear. It’s euthanasia to treat mental illness. For my husband of twenty-three years.”

“One of you is headed there.” Spy stepped toward her, and his voice lowered. “An objective observer would see that he is giving up the least. You can’t say that’s not true.”

“You’re not going to be able to care for him. He needs constant medical attention.”

Not if he’s going to die, I thought.

“In terms of duration,” Spy said, “he will spend less time going there than you will spend returning to ad Astra from here. Minutes.”

“It might be a kindness,” Dustin said. It was clear that Meryl was struggling with it—it would be a kindness to her, as well, of course.

“Take me, too?” she said.

“No. We don’t have two of any race. Not possible.”

She sat down and stared at nothing.

“I wonder if it would be possible for me to kill you,” Namir said quietly.

“It’s an interesting thought,” Spy said. “How would you propose to do it?”

“Physical force. I’ve done it to bigger and stronger creatures.”

“It wouldn’t be smart,” Paul said.

“We’re running out of smart.” Only his lips moved, and his eyes. But the quality of his poise changed. He was gathering himself, ready.

“Don’t,” I said. “They can kill you with a thought.”

“We could,” Spy said, “but might not. Go ahead and try.”

After the longest second in my life, Namir said, “It was a hypothetical question. You’ve answered it,” and relaxed, turning his back. Spy looked at each of us in turn, perhaps recording our reactions.

“So. We just go back to Earth?” Paul said. “How will that work?”

“You set up the flight as you normally would. You will begin to accelerate, then, after a period of no duration, stop. That will be at the turnaround point. You spend thirty hours or so there, turning around again, then you complete the journey, also with no duration. Almost twenty-five years will pass, of course, while you travel the twenty- four light-years.”

“Will we be seeing you again?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps you’d better hope not.”

13 END OF A WORLD

So we left Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber to the tender mercies of the Others and made our weightless way along the cable back to ad Astra. Before we got to the air lock, the starfish rose and sped away. Namir stood still and watched it depart. I wished I could have seen his face.

Once inside, I stayed close to Meryl, but she didn’t want to talk about it. We all raided the pantry for human food, however uninspiring.

“I’ll need a day or two to consolidate the data we have about the planet; make sure all of it’s mapped,” Paul said. “Though we could spend years mapping and measuring, and scientists on Earth would still want more. The first detailed observation of an Earth-like exoplanet.”

“It probably won’t be the first,” Dustin noted. “They’ll have had fifty years to explore nearer Earth.”

Paul laughed. “I hope you’re right. There ought to be robot probes all over the place.”

I pulled gecko slippers out of the rack by the air lock and followed Snowbird into the Martian quarters. Not too cold for a short visit.

She was inspecting the racks of mushroomlike plants. “Hello, Carmen.”

“Hello, Snowbird.” I didn’t know what to say. “You will be lonely?”

“Only for a short while, if what Spy said is true. I may be on Mars soon.”

“That will be a comfort.”

“Neither Fly-in-Amber nor I ever expected to see it again.”

“I will miss him,” I said. “Though there hasn’t been time for it to sink in, him or Moonboy.”

“Don’t feel sorry for Fly-in-Amber. This is the best possible outcome for him. He was extremely happy when we left.” She turned slightly, to face me. “We will never know about Moonboy, I suppose. He may never know what’s happened to him but just die.”

“Probably.” Though what his chill reincarnation might be like, we could only guess. No worse than dying, we could hope.

I shivered. “You’re cold,” she said. “I’ll see you later, in the compromise lounge. I’m sure there will be a meeting.”

“There always is,” I said.

I went back to our room and changed clothes. Funny to think that the old ones would sit there for a quarter century before being cleaned. My mother would just shake her head and say “typical.”

Would she be alive still? She was born in 2035 (three years older than Namir) and we would be back in 2138. She has good heredity for long life, but did I really expect to see her at 103? Did I want to?

Well, who knows. With a half century of progress in cosmetic science, she might look my age. Younger. That would be too creepy.

Paul came in over the intercom and asked for a meeting in a half hour, in the compromise lounge. Snowbird would smile, if she had a human mouth.

I got there a bit early, which was fortunate. Namir had found a jar of Iranian caviar, which we cautiously slurped with two spoons, and some dexterity in midair retrieval.

Paul joined us in time to help scrape the bottom of the jar. He’d also had the foresight to put some alcohol in the freezer, half and half with water, so we could wash the fish eggs down with ersatz vodka.

Meryl came out, dressed in a pretty plaid shift with a peasant blouse, mincing along gecko style. “Is that booze?”

Namir tossed it slowly. “Cheap vodka. Pretty cold.”

I’d never seen her drink anything stronger than wine, and not much of that. She squirted a big blast of the vodka into her mouth, and on her face, and immediately had a coughing fit. She started to laugh, then sneezed, with enough force to free her slippers and start her in a slow pinwheel. The skirt billowing around was quite pretty, in an abstract way, though the performance might have been more dignified with underwear. She wound up laughing and crying, not a bad combination under the circumstances.

After we were settled down, Paul said, “I just wanted to make sure everybody has everything sorted out. I’m planning to go into the lander tomorrow at noon. Push the button and see what happens.”

“Do you want us up there, too?” Namir said.

Paul paused, probably remembering Namir’s reaction last time. “Strapping in wouldn’t be necessary. But maybe we should all be in the same place.”

The diffuse feeling of grief, of loss. Elza took Namir’s hand. “We should,” she said.

“I would like that, too,” Snowbird said. “Even with the heat.”

“We don’t know anything about the process,” Dustin said. “The emotional impact may be less, now that we’re expecting it. Or it may be of a different nature. Joy, perhaps.”

“Or anger,” Namir said. “Perhaps we should all be restrained. All but one, who has the key.”

“Sometimes you scare me,” I said, smiling, but meaning it.

“Then you should hold the key.” He shook his head. “Actually, it was only Moonboy and I who had severe reactions last time. Maybe in lieu of a straitjacket, I should have Elza give me a sedative.”

“And anyone else who wants one,” she said. “Except the pilot. Snowbird, I wouldn’t know what to give you.”

“There is a food that prepares one for the unexpected. It worked well enough last time.”

“Wish they made it for humans.” Paul said. “I’m going to assume that with no time elapsed, or no duration, we don’t have to do anything special with the plants. Just everybody complete the maintenance roster before noon tomorrow.” He shrugged. “I know you would anyway. Guess I’m just at a loss for anything constructive to say or do.” He passed around a handwritten note:

Don’t say anything of a sensitive nature to anyone until we know we’re at turnaround. The walls have ears etc.

“Can’t play badminton in zero gee,” I said.

“Namir,” Meryl said, “could you get your balalaika and do me a song or two?”

“Yes,” Dustin said, with no sarcasm in his voice: “I would like that, too.”

“The end of the world is at hand,” said Elza.

14 PREDICTIONS

I woke up slowly from the sedation Elza had given me. I remembered having had dreams. They hadn’t been as intense or persistent as the first time, but they left behind the same malaise, guilt and self-loathing.

If the process had driven Moonboy back into that childhood closet, bound and gagged and strangling in the darkness, I could only hope for his sake that he was truly dead now. Memory is a prison from which there is no other escape.

But there are distractions. I found my slippers and went out into the hall, and rip-ripped my way along the tomato vines toward the exercise machines, which I could hear ticking along.

A tomato was floating free, so I ate it like an apple. Not quite ripe, a little sour. My stomach gave a warning growl, so I saved most of it to finish with some bread.

No need for parsimony anymore, of course. We probably had two hundred times the amount of food we could consume between here and Earth.

Carmen and Paul were working out on the walking and bicycling machines, their VR helmets in tandem. I could hear her soft voice, not quite understandable over the noise of the machines, as they chatted.

She was wearing a white skinsuit, translucent with sweat. Perhaps I was studying her too intently.

“Nice view,” Dustin said in a whisper, behind me. “How are you doing?”

“Not quite awake yet.” I held up the tomato. “Eating in my sleep.”

“Dreams?”

“Not as bad this time. Seen Elza?”

“In the library with Meryl. Looked kind of deep. Get some chow?”

“Sure.” We took the long way around to the kitchen, avoiding the library. I settled for cheese and crackers to go with my tomato; Dustin zapped a steak sandwich. I got a squeeze bag of cold tea out of the fridge; he opted for wine.

“Paul verified that we’re where we’re supposed to be and got the rotation started.” He checked his watch. “It’s 1340 now. We’ve got, um, twenty hours, twenty minutes, till we point ’er toward Earth and go. Away from Earth.”

I set my watch. “I slept late.”

“Last one up.”

“Let me guess: Paul wants a meeting.”

He smiled. “Good guess. He said 1500 if you were up.”

Couple of hours to kill. Normally, this time of day, I’d ping Fly- in-Amber and see whether he wanted to practice some Japanese. Not that he ever needed to practice old vocabulary, since he never forgot.

My only Martian friend, dead now six years.

“New game?” Dustin said.

It took me a second to sort that out. “Sure. I believe you’re white?”

“Pawn to K-4.”

“God, you sneaky bastard.”

We bundled up and met in the compromise lounge.

“So what are we going to find on Earth, fifty years in the future?” Paul said. “Worst case, Namir?”

I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.

“The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”

“Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.

“You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”

“It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”

And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”

“Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”

“Not yet,” Elza said.

“It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”

That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes… energy.

“None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”

I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”

“Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”

Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”

“Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.

“It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.

“This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”

“You’re products of their intelligence.”

She nodded, bobbing. “It’s like a human play, or novel. Öedipus Rex or King Lear—the children can misunderstand their parents in ways that nobody else can.”

“Good examples,” Dustin said. “Happy endings.”

15 CHANGES

Paul and I twice tried to make love during turnaround, but we were too nervous and distracted. Doom-ridden, perhaps.

A couple of hours before we filed into the shuttle, we all together made a long transmission to Earth, explaining everything as well as we could and hoping for the best for all of us. If Spy’s description of the process was accurate, they would get the message less than a year before we arrived.

It might come just after the Others had blown humanity into elementary particles. There was no need to say anything about that.

We weren’t sure exactly where we would arrive. When we went from turnaround to Wolf 25, we were deposited in orbit around the wrong planet, technically, since we’d planned to go to the moon of the gas giant where the Others lived.

So now, we presumably would go wherever in the solar system the Others wanted us to stop. If it was back where the iceberg started, past Mars orbit, we’d have a longish trip back to Earth.

Or maybe Mars, if Earth wasn’t there anymore.

Paul followed the rest of us into the shuttle and helped Snowbird with her harness. Then he floated up the aisle and strapped himself in. He swiveled around partway and looked down at us.

“Does anybody pray?”

After a long silence, Namir whispered, “Shalom.”

“Yeah.” Paul’s finger hovered over a red switch. “Good luck to all of us.”

We were all ready for the transition’s emotional blow, but most of us cried out, anyhow. And then a gasp of relief.

The blue ball of Earth was below us, the Pacific hemisphere. To my left, the Space Elevator, with the Hilton and Little Mars, Little Earth, and several new structures, including three smaller elevators.

I could faintly hear a burst of radio chatter from Paul’s direction.

“One at a time!” he shouted. “This is Paul Collins, pilot of ad Astra. We are safe.” He looked back at us with a grin. “I should have thought up something historic to say.”

“One long trip for a man,” Elza intoned; “one ambiguous stumble for mankind.”

We were quickly surrounded by identical small spaceships that were obviously warcraft. No streamlining, just a jumble of weaponry on top of a drive system, with a little house in between. Probably called a “life-support module,” or something equally homey.

Earth was in a panic because we had inexorably approached, decelerating full blast, without answering any queries or attempting to communicate.

“The explanation is both simple and complicated,” Paul said, echoing what Snowbird had said a couple of days, or six years, ago. “I think it’s reasonable that I start with the highest possible authority.”

The battalion commander identified herself and demanded an explanation. “Of course we know what you are. But we’ve been alongside you for weeks and have gotten no cooperation.”

“I am not under your command,” he pointed out. “This is not anybody’s military expedition. Is there still a United Nations?”

“Not as such, captain. But all nations are united.”

“Well, let me talk to whoever’s in charge. With some science types listening in.”

“This is completely against protocol. You—”

“I don’t think you have a protocol covering how to deal with a half-century-old spaceship returning from a mission to save the planet from destruction. Or does it happen all the time?”

“We have been expecting you, sir, since your message arrived last month. But when the ship did not respond as it approached Earth, we had to expect the worst.”

“The worst did not happen. Now I’m going to break contact and will talk only when I can talk to someone who outranks everyone who outranks you. Out for now.” He cut off the battalion commander in midbluster and spun half around. “Drink?”

I tossed him the squeeze bag of ersatz Bordeaux. “Holding out for champagne, myself. In gravity.”

He took a long drink, two swallows, and passed it to Namir, who had been sitting silent.

“Suit yourself,” Namir said to me, his voice husky. “It might be a long wait.”

I unstrapped and swam up front to visit with Paul and watch the monitor. The wait was less than a minute.

An elderly man with a seamed dark face and white full beard came into the monitor as it pinged. A voice said, “Mervyn Gold, president of the United Americas.”

“Paul?” the old man said. “ ‘Crash’ Collins?”

Paul stabbed a finger at the camera button. “Professor Gold!”

He smiled broadly. “We’ve both come up in the world, Paul.”

Paul laughed, and said to me, “He was my history prof at Boulder. You met him.”

Subtract fifty years and the beard. He’d come to Little Earth with some government agency and talked with Paul for hours through the quarantine window.

“Amazing,” Gold said. “You don’t look a day older. You’ll be hearing that a lot, I suppose.”

And from really old people, I thought.

“The Others did some trick with time.”

The old man nodded. “I saw your transmission from turnaround. Some people thought it was all a trick, you know. If they’d prevailed, you wouldn’t have made it to Earth.”

I hadn’t thought of that possibility. Just as well.

“I’m glad you didn’t listen to them.”

“Oh, I listen to everyone; comes with the job. But I don’t have to obey anyone.” He shuffled some papers, an everyday gesture that we hadn’t seen in some time. “First, let me tell you that you will come to Earth, not New Mars. The quarantine was lifted, oh, about twelve years ago.”

“That’ll be great.”

How many years since I’d actually been on Earth? I was not quite nineteen when I stepped aboard the Space Elevator. Thirty- four when ad Astra left. Fifteen years plus about four, subjective, that we spent going to the Others’ Home and back.

Exactly half my life—thirty-eight actual years. Whatever “actual” means.

The president and Paul were chatting about our return. “We could take you down on the Space Elevator, which would be more comfortable than using the lander. But the lander, an actual landing, would be really good for public morale.”

“Propaganda.” Paul said.

“I wouldn’t deny it. Do you think it would be safe?”

“Well, it’s never been used, so it’s brand-new in a way. It’s been sitting around for years, which isn’t good for any machine. But that is what it was designed to do.”

I wished telepathy would work. Space Elevator Space Elevator Space Elevator. I’d had my fill of atmospheric braking.

“If you’re uncertain,” the president said, “we have two qualified pilots waiting at the Hilton.”

I guess you don’t get to be president without a knack for psychology. “Oh, there’s no question I can do it. No question at all. I’ve done seven Mars landings and a hundred on Earth, in flight training.”

“And one on the Moon, I recall.” The one that saved the Earth. Paul smiled. Score one for the prez.

“So when do you want me to bring her down? Where?”

“They still have the landing strip in the Mojave Desert. Um…” He looked to his right. “They say they have the old software to guide you in, but want to test it out with a duplicate. Anytime tomorrow would be fine. Daylight, California time?”

“No problem. We came on board with one suitcase apiece. Won’t take us long to pack.”

“Good, good. Will you accept our hospitality at the White House?” Another glance to the right. “Once the medics let you loose, that is.”

“An honor, sir. Professor.”

“See you tomorrow in California.” He looked at his watch. “Would you mind debriefing with my science and policy advisors, say, an hour from now?”

“No problem, sir.” He let out a big breath after the cube went dark. “Let’s move this circus back downstairs. Get Snowbird out of the heat.”

“Paul,” Namir said, “be careful what you say to them.”

“Sure. Careful.”

“If they don’t like what they hear… if they don’t want the public to hear what we say… this is their last and best chance to silence us.” He looked around at everybody. “There could be a tragic accident.”

“That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said.

He nodded, smiling. “You know us spies. We come by it naturally.”

The cabinet members who talked with us were urbane and friendly, not at all threatening. If they were planning to have us all murdered, they hid it pretty well. They mostly worked from a transcript of our long transmission from turnaround, asking us to clarify and broaden various things.

I actually knew one of them, Media Minister Davie Lewitt, now a dignified white-haired lady. She had been the brassy cube commentator who gave me the name “The Mars Girl.” She remembered and apologized to me for that.

After the cabinet people thanked us and signed off, they were replaced by a couple who introduced themselves as Dor and Sam, both pretty old and probably female. Dor was muscular and outdoorsy and had about a half inch of trim white hair. Sam was feminine and had beautiful long hair dyed lavender.

“We wanted to help you prepare for returning to Earth,” Dor said. “We were both in our early thirties when you left, so we were born about the same time as most of you.”

“Twenty years after me,” Namir said. “I suppose the first thing most of us would like to know is whether we have living family. I doubt that I do; my father would be over 140.”

“Rare, but possible,” Sam said. She unrolled what looked like a featureless sheet of metal, obviously a notebook, and ran her fingers over it. “No, I’m afraid he died a few years after you left.” She stroked her neck, an odd gesture. “I think it would be best if we mailed this information to each of you privately?”

I nodded, curious but patient. I looked around and nobody objected.

“Which brings up a big thing,” Dor said. “This is kind of like the Others, or like your poor friend Moonboy. We do have people, many thousands, whose legal status is ambiguous, because it is not clear whether they are dead or alive.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Dor,” Sam said. “This was just starting back when you were alive—shit! I mean before you left, sorry.”

“No offense taken,” Dustin said. “We really are like ghosts from the dead past.”

“Cranach versus the State of California, 2112,” Dor said. “Cranach was a lawyer. He was dying, and needed more and more profound life-support equipment, which in his case—he was very wealthy—eventually included a complete computer backup for his brain and associated nervous system.

“Because of the way California defined ‘brain death,’ Cranach deliberately let his body die, but first essentially willed everything to himself—the computer image of his brain, which was technically indistinguishable from the original organic one.”

“When his body died,” Sam said, “nobody noticed for weeks, because the computer image had long been in complete charge of his complex business affairs and investments. And it was a person; it had a corporate identity independent of Cranach himself.

“What you’re saying,” Paul said, “is that this guy Cranach, dead as a doornail, could be legally immortal, at least in California, as long as his brain is not brain-dead. Even though it’s a machine.”

“Exactly,” Dor said. “And people like him, like it, are only the most extreme examples of, well, they call themselves ‘realists’ in North America.”

“As opposed to ‘humanists,’ ” Sam said. “It had started when we, and you, were young, in the mid-twenty-first. People who spent most of their waking hours in virtual reality.”

“Robonerds,” Meryl said. “Some of them even worked there, jobs piped in from the outside world.”

“We didn’t have much of that on Mars,” I said. “Except for school.”

“There still isn’t,” Sam said. “Mars is a hotbed of humanists.”

“But even on Earth,” Dor said, “most people are somewhere in the middle, using VR sometimes at play or work or study. Depends on where you live, too—lots of realists in Japan and China; lots of humanists in Latin America and Africa.”

Paul scratched his head. “They give the name ‘realist’ to people who escape normal life in VR?”

“Well, it is a higher reality,” Dor said. “The VR you have on your ship is antique. It’s a lot more… convincing now.”

Sam smiled broadly. “Yeah. You can tell when you’re unplugged because everything’s boring.”

“Guess who’s the realist here.” Dor patted her on the knee.

“Not really. I don’t spend even half my time plugged.”

“I’m curious about politics,” Paul said. “Mervyn Gold is president of what? What is this United Americas?”

“Let me see.” Sam moved her hands over the notebook. “It’s most of your old United States, except Florida and Cuba, which now are part of Caribbea, and South Texas (which is its own country) and Hawaii, which is the capital of Pacifica. The United Americas otherwise runs from Alaska down through English Canada, the old U.S., most of Mexico, and most of Spanish-speaking Central and South America down to the tip of Argentina. Not Costa Rica; not Baja California.”

“Thank God for that,” Dor said. “Baja’s such another world.”

“The United Americas are really not that united.” Sam continued. “It’s an economic coalition, like Common Europe and Cercle Socialisme.

“The smallest country in the world is the one we’re citizens of, Elevator.”

“The smallest country but the longest,” Dor said. “The Space Elevator Corporation declared sovereignty back when there was still a United Nations.”

“And now?” Namir said. “Instead of the UN?”

“All nations are united,” Sam said, echoing the commander. Her expression was a tight-lipped blandness.

United against the Others, I realized, through the fleet, which they couldn’t mention in public. Everyone else was probably thinking the same thing.

“I wonder who will pay my UN pension,” Namir muttered.

Sam overheard him. “You have all been well taken care of. The world is wealthy and grateful.”

For what, I didn’t want to say. We took a long trip to talk with the enemy, and they sent us back without even saying a word. But at least the Earth wasn’t destroyed. Something to be grateful for.

So we were each given fifty million dollars to spend, in a world where Namir’s New York City penthouse could be bought for ten million.

The only thing I really wanted was a hamburger.

My mother and father were dead, no surprise, though she had made it to 101, waiting for me, and left behind a brave, wistful note that made me cry.

My children were still on Mars as well, but were not speaking to each other, the girl a total humanist and the boy a total nerd realist. I spent over an hour in difficult conversation with both of them, difficult for the twelve-minute delay as well as emotional factors. I signed off promising to visit both of them as soon as I could get to Mars. Though with the realist I’d have to communicate electronically, no matter what planet I was on. He’d sold his organic body for parts.

That gave me a flash of irrational anger, but it passed. He actually only had half of one cell of mine.

My brother, Card, was also a realist, but he had not yet become bodiless. He lived on Earth now, in Los Angeles, and promised he’d put on his formal body (he had three) and come see me when we landed. I waited while he made a few calls, then called back and said he’d gotten all the vouchers and permissions to make the trip.

I wondered how free the Land of the Free was nowadays. But I guessed I could always go back to Mars.

16 MOONBOY SPEAKS

I put the two balalaikas in the padded boxes I’d made for them, and set the Vermeer book, and the Shakespeare and Amachai and cummings poems, into the titanium suitcase. I’d done a laundry in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and padded the books with clean folded clothes I would never want to wear again.

What were the actual odds that we were about to become dead heroes rather than inconvenient witnesses? Small but finite, as a mathematician would say. We really knew nothing about current politics. When President Gold had been Professor Gold, Paul said he taught medieval history—Machiavelli and the Medici. The Borgias. He could make them seem like current events, Paul said. Maybe current events, then and now, were not so far removed from those good old days.

We hadn’t been publicly interviewed yet. That was disturbing. But they had let us talk to relatives. So they couldn’t be claiming that we didn’t make it back.

(Assuming people did talk to their relatives, and not to VR constructions. Cesare Borgia would have liked that little tool.)

Well, they couldn’t really claim the ad Astra hadn’t returned. What’s left of our iceberg is still bigger than the Hilton, and you can see that in the sky all over the Pacific, brighter than the Pole Star.

Of course, when we got off the lander, we’d go straight into biological isolation. No telling what kind of bug we might be bringing back from the Others. Though a bug that thrived in liquid nitrogen might find human body temperature a little too warm. And there had been nothing alive on the planet Home to infect us. If Spy had told the truth.

We might have been infected with something accidentally or on purpose. Spy was an artificial organism designed to interface with humans. But then so were the Martians, and they had carried the pathogen for the juvenile pulmonary cysts that gave the colonists such trouble.

I should have asked about Israel—find out whether the country I worked for all my life still exists. My notebook didn’t pull any new information about anything, which was not necessarily suspicious. Fifty-year-old hardware and software. But it would be nice to find out some information about the world that hadn’t been handed to us by handlers.

I should be grateful for a few more hours of blissful ignorance and obscurity. The idea of celebrity is not compatible with my choice of career, and thus with my personality. Not that I will ever be a spy again, whatever Israel is or is not today.

Maybe I’ll take up music seriously. Practice several hours a day. That would keep Dustin out of the house.

My notebook pinged in my personal tone. Funny, the only people with that number were close enough to come knock.

I thumbed it, though—and an image of Moonboy appeared!

“I trust I have your attention.”

“Moonboy?”

“Yes and no.” There was a short transmission delay. “This signal is coming from the Moon, but Moonboy is not there. This is a sentient cartoon. The signal is an encrypted and filtered tightbeam that only you, Namir, can receive and decode.”

“Okay. What’s up?”

“This cartoon has detected that you are not on Earth.”

“That’s right. We’re in orbit, near—”

“You must land on Earth as soon as possible. Leave space by midnight, Greenwich time, April 23. Tell no one that I talked to you.”

“Not even other—”

“Midnight, April 23.”

The screen went blank. I asked it for the source, and it said LUNA NEAR CLAVIUS.

Midnight on the 23 would be 7 P.M. April 22 in New York; 4 P.M. in the Mojave Desert. We’d be landing that morning, if things went according to plan.

Best make sure things do go according to plan. There was no way to interpret that message other than ominously.

I could use a drink, maybe something stronger than wine. I opened the door, pulled myself up the trellis, and floated over the arbor toward the warehouse.

Paul and Carmen were already there. They turned and looked at me without saying anything.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You just got a message that you’re not supposed to share.”

“From a person who died twenty- five years ago.” Paul tossed me a squeeze bottle with brown liquid. “I think we better do as he says.”

Scotch flavor, pretty harsh. “Yeah.” I coughed. “Almost a day to spare.”

“If the lander works, and Earth doesn’t screw things up.”

I wished there were some way to pour a drink over ice in zero gee. “What if they say they can’t be ready by that time?”

“Hm. I’ve landed these things on gravel beds on Mars and the lunar regolith, with no ground support. If it’s working, I can find someplace flat. But then we’d have to explain why we left early.”

“Life-support emergency,” Carmen said, “or a medical emergency. Hard to fake.”

Snowbird drifted over. “A Martian medical emergency. There is probably no one on Earth who could say I wasn’t sick.” Upside down, she bumped against the couch and righted herself. “In fact, I probably will be, with all the gravity and oxygen. California heat.”

At turnaround we’d suggested leaving her on Little Mars, and it was the closest we’d ever seen her come to losing her temper. She was going to be the first Martian to swim in an ocean, or die trying!

Dustin and Elza joined us, then Meryl.

“Maybe we should tell people,” Meryl said. “They’re obviously planning something dramatically destructive, in space.”

Carmen disagreed vigorously. “The last time we broke a promise of secrecy, the Others almost destroyed the planet in retribution. And we’ve seen what they did to their own Home, because it posed a threat.”

“Putting two and two together,” I said, “or one and one… I assume they’ve learned about the fleet, and are going to destroy it. Within Moonboy’s time frame.”

“We could save some of them,” Meryl said.

Paul pointed out that we had no idea of how many they were. “If they actually did build the fleet up to the planned thousand strong, and they’re in a defensive array between the Earth and the Moon…”

“If they all suddenly withdraw,” I said, “the Others will know we betrayed them. And strike immediately.” If the fleet are warriors, I did not say, warriors have to be ready to die.

Paul shook his head slowly. “The logistical problem. Landing a thousand ships would be impossible if you had a week. Twenty hours?”

“And I wonder how many people are in orbit who aren’t in fleet ships,” Carmen said. “Little Mars, Little Earth, the Hilton, all those new structures. Surely hundreds, at least.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t be in danger,” Meryl said. “Not being part of the fleet.”

“He didn’t say anything about that,” Paul said. “ ‘Leave space’ and ‘go to Earth’—that doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. And even if you warned the people here, in Little Mars and so forth, what could they do? You might be able to cram a hundred into all the Space Elevators, but in twenty hours they wouldn’t be anywhere close to Earth. They’d still be in space.”

I wondered where Spy would draw the line between space and not-space. Never in all my unpleasant space experiences had I so fervently wanted to have my feet on solid ground.

17 CLOCK-WATCHING

We put on our gecko slippers and lined up at the air lock. I turned around for one last look at the cave in the ice that had been our home for almost four years.

It would have been twelve without the Others’ gift of time compression. Hard to imagine eight more years’ confinement here. We’d all be crazy as Moonboy.

I knew every square centimeter of it better than anyplace I’d ever lived before, but there was no sadness in parting. I hoped never to see it again.

A robot crew was coming aboard to maintain it as a historical artifact. It would become a museum, eventually. But first it could see service for other starflights, to places nearer than Wolf 25, before its fuel ran out.

If it survived whatever was happening tomorrow.

“Here you go, girl.” Elza smoothed a patch on the back of my hand. I immediately felt calmer. She gave them to everybody else but Paul and Namir. And Snowbird had her own resources.

We secured our luggage in the back, the stern I suppose, and came forward to strap in. I was right behind Paul, and so had the dubious privilege of being able to watch us land, if my eyes weren’t squeezed shut.

Namir was in the copilot chair, though he’d only flown light planes. More than the rest of us, though I didn’t know how much good that experience would be. Paul cheerfully told me it was like landing a slightly streamlined brick.

He had been talking quietly over the radio, I assumed to the control people on Earth. He switched on the intercom, and said, “Brace yourselves. We’re gonna kiss this rock good-bye.”

The steering jets made a low rumble and a sharp hiss. In the forward viewscreen, the rock-strewn ice fell away. Then a gentle acceleration pressed me back into the soft seat.

I half dozed for an hour or so as we approached the atmosphere. Then the ship started to vibrate and shake. Then buck alarmingly, with serious-sounding creaks and pops.

It had been more than six years since I last went through atmospheric braking, landing on Mars. Earth is more violent, but shorter. And when the red glow faded away, I was looking down at blue ocean!

We banked around and started falling toward the desert, which was not at all like home. Too much vegetation and high mountains everywhere. Maybe hills, technically. Mountains to me.

I knew the approach angle was going to be steep. But it felt way too much like a vertical drop. I shut my eyes so hard I saw stars, and didn’t open them until the huge thump and then jittery scraping as Paul executed a somewhat controlled slide toward some buildings on the horizon.

We stopped in a cloud of dust, which rapidly blew away. A vehicle almost large enough to be called a building lurched toward us on tracks.

Paul swiveled half around. “There’s a decontamination unit coming toward us. They say it will only take an hour or so, with, quote, ‘a minimum of discomfort.’ At least for the humans. Snowbird, they have to take you to another place.”

“I’m on Earth, Paul. It’s all another place.”

We all unstrapped and did some stretches. I felt a little weak and had twinges in both knees, but the gravity wasn’t too oppressive. It was good to be on solid ground.

My wrist tattoo was working again, and it had set itself to the right time zone, 10:32 A.M. So we had about five and a half hours before something impressive happened.

“Should we say anything?” Meryl said. “About—”

“No,” Paul said. “What would we say? What would be safe?”

Namir nodded. “Some of the pilots and crew might be able to take measures to protect themselves. From whatever it is. But then our Others get pissed and fry the Earth. Or bake it, as Spy suggested. Or cover it with sulfuric acid. Too big a gamble.”

The decontamination team hooked their vehicle onto the lander with a crinkled metal tube like the one we used in space. They came on the viewscreen and asked for me and the other women first.

I went through two air locks into a white room, where three female techs were waiting, clad in heavy protective suits. Meryl and Elza went into other rooms.

They asked me to disrobe and filed all my clothing into individually sealed plastic bags. Then they vacuumed me, an experience that could be full of erotic possibilities, depending on who was doing it to you.

Then the internal part: they gave me a glass of what they called a “super-nano-laxative,” and warned me not to drink it until I was seated on a toilet. It had a pleasant lime flavor and a less pleasant explosive effect. A businesslike enema completed the charming sequence. All of this internal fortune duly cataloged and sealed away.

I was ready for a shower then, and got the most thorough one of my life, three strong women scrubbing away where angels fear to tread.

When I was finally able to dress, they had some fancy and futuristic clothes waiting. Formfitting but also form-altering, with smart fabrics that applied light pressure here and there. Very flattering. Hundreds of tiny bright strings hung from the fabric, revealing and concealing. Men who never gave me a second look back then… well, they’d be too old to do anything but look now.

They gave me a bowl of vanilla ice cream and put me in a darkened room with a couch and suggested I might want to rest for an hour or so. I got a light turned on but couldn’t find anything to read. No flatscreen or cube obvious; no controls. But I said “space news” out loud and a cube appeared, no projection frame, with a picture of us landing, with this big crawler in the foreground.

Then it showed the president, beaming over his beard, congratulating us and saying that he would be out in California for the landing and the debriefing.

The station noted that live coverage would begin at 7:00, Eastern time. They might have a bigger story than they bargained for.

I did doze for a little while. It was after three when a big blond tech (whose name I didn’t know but who knew parts of me better than Paul did) woke me with the news that I’d been pronounced clean and was wanted at the Green Room.

She stopped me just before I got to the door. “Oh, you wouldn’t know this. The president’s from Kentucky, and he’ll offer you his favorite bourbon. It’s a hundred proof; you shouldn’t refuse, but you might not want too much of it.” Doubly true since all I’d had to eat on this planet was a bowl of ice cream. But hell… I could knock back a couple of shots and ask Professor Gold if he’d like to play some Texas Hold-’em.

A lot of famous people do seem larger than life when you meet them. I knew Gold had been a large man from his visit with Paul a half century ago. But now he was an old shaggy bear, moving with slow sureness, glowing with charisma, a man obviously happy with the world he’d helped to make. The world that had twenty- five minutes to go.

His hand was warm and dry, a measured fraction of large strength. “Paul tells me you don’t care for spirits,” he said. “So instead of a tot of Blanton’s, perhaps you’d like a glass of champagne? A big glass?”

An assistant came up with the biggest champagne flute I’d ever seen, and I took my place at a round table. There was only one other empty place—no space for Martians?—and Namir came in, accepted a glass of bourbon, and sat down. He spooned an ice cube from his water glass and put it in the whiskey.

“Should I address you as ‘General’?” the president said.

“We have no rank together, sir. Only Namir.”

He nodded and leaned back in a chair that was slightly larger than ours, slightly higher. “I exercised my right as Grand Inquisitor of this honky-tonk, and asked the scientists whether I might talk with you first. They acted like a bunch of folks who do have a sense of rank, Namir, not to mention tenure. So they agreed.”

I think our response was appropriate, for six people who were trying to behave like a proper audience while actually wanting to scream. Twenty minutes.

“What I’d like to do, before we go on camera and do all the cube-ops, is ask each of you, if it’s possible, to sum up your feelings in a line or two.” He smiled a wry curve. “Something I can misquote in an off-the-cuff speech. Namir, you’re oldest.”

“May we speak without fear of being exactly quoted? Let alone misquoted. No one will like what I have to say, and I would as soon have it not be ‘on the record.’ ”

“There are no recording instruments in this room. You have my word on that.”

Namir took a sip and his brow furrowed. “It’s not complicated. Never trust them, not one iota; not on the most trivial thing. But never forget that we have to live with them.” He set the glass down and smiled. “The lone Israeli speaks. I got that with my mother’s matzo.”

Meryl was next. “I think we should find a way to disconnect from them. Even if it means giving up free energy; even if it means giving up space. They’re too powerful and too unpredictable.”

Gold chuckled. “Watch out, Meryl. That attitude could get you elected in thirty states. Elza?”

“I think we’re in a position like a child with a toxic, abusive parent… who is also extremely rich. So our problem is twofold: Can we live without the wealth? And can we leave it somehow without the parent exacting revenge.”

“I disagree with you both,” Dustin said.

“Your turn.”

“We can’t maneuver our way out of this, Mr. President. They’re too powerful, and they’ve said outright that they’re testing us. We have to pass the tests. Channel all our energy right there. Maybe they’ll give us an A and leave us alone.”

“And if we fail the tests?”

The air shimmered and a holo of Snowbird appeared between the two men. “I have been listening; sorry for not appearing.

“If you fail the tests, then you cease to be. If you were Martians, then that would be of little consequence.”

“So if we were Martians,” Gold said, “the problem would disappear. Along with us.”

Her image pressed her head. “You are a humorist, Mr. Gold.”

“That’s a nonanswer,” Dustin said.

“Wait,” the president said, and touched his ear. “Oh my God.”

I looked at my wrist. It was 1600:22.

“Pipe it in here.” He shook his head angrily. “Jesus Christ! They don’t need clearance to see the fucking moon!”

An auditorium-sized cube suddenly filled a third of the room. It was London, the Thames at midnight, ancient Ferris wheel lighting up the darkness, the full moon’s reflection a rippling ladder up the river.

The moon suddenly changed. It became much brighter, and the markings on its face faded to an even glow. It grew to double its size, triple… and then it faded into a fuzzy round cloud, glowing dimmer as it grew.

“Was that the Others?” the president said, unnecessarily. “They actually blew up the moon?”

It could be a lot worse, I thought. Still could be.

“They sent a message. Just before it happened.” The weird night landscape faded, to be replaced by a huge face, all too familiar: Spy.

“You lied to us,” it said. “You sent emissaries, machine and man, to say that you were pacifistic. In return for our aggressiveness, you said, you sent a plea for peace and understanding.

“All the while, for fifty years, you were building a gigantic fleet of warships. Hidden from us.”

“Not for invasion!” the president cried, as if the image could hear. “Just to protect Earth!”

“Those thousand ships are about to be destroyed,” it said. “We are going to disassemble your Moon and use it for ammunition, from gravel-sized pebbles up to huge boulders.

“High-speed projectiles will target every warship, and all their support. Other rocks will destroy every smallest satellite structure. Your Space Elevators will have fallen by dawn.

“All of the space between the Earth and what is now the Moon’s orbit will be filled with gravel. Any spaceship you attempt to launch will be a sieve before it leaves cislunar space.

“We do this with a spirit of charity and generosity. You must realize that we could easily drop mountains on the Earth, and humans would go the way of the dinosaurs. But we do want to give you another chance and see what you do with it. This is your last test.

“I am speaking to you from the crater Clavius. In a few moments, it will cease to exist.”

The face disappeared. The Thames was dark except for the blinking lights of emergency hovercraft. A brilliant meteor lanced through the sky, then two more, then another pair.

We sat in stunned silence.

I would never see Mars again?

18 RESPONSES

The president had delayed flying for a day. All civilian flights were canceled as well, until the danger from the constant meteor shower could be assessed.

At night they fell like brilliant snowflakes, with occasional bright crawling fireballs. But those were mostly grains of sand, or dust. Every now and then one would be large enough to make it to the ground, but most of those were man-made, the debris of thousands of satellites. (Ad Astra no doubt was pelted, but the iceberg had so much mass it stayed put in orbit.)

There were no casualties on Earth that first day, though seven thousand did die in space, mostly in the first few minutes. Worldwide havoc had been expected, especially from the Space Elevators, unraveling and lashing the surface of the Earth like huge bullwhips fifty thousand miles long—but they had been engineered with the possibility of disaster in mind, and the cables disintegrated into harmless dust as they fell. Two passenger carriers flamed into the land and sea, their human cargos ash.

So there was no danger to atmospheric craft, but the peril to spacecraft was real. Every cubic centimeter of space between Earth and where the Moon had been held a piece of gravel.

Eventually, in tens or hundreds or thousands of centuries, all that cloud of rock and gravel would settle into rings, like Saturn’s, very pretty and easy for a spaceship to avoid.

That was longer than Paul wanted to wait. And with us on Air Force One was a man who thought he wouldn’t have to: U.S. Air Force General Gil Ballard, the president’s defense secretary.

Namir coldly excused himself and went back to the press side of the huge plane. He later told me he had read the man’s remarks about our mission and left before he could make a scene in what looked like a ceremonial meeting.

I wished he had stayed. It might not have changed things, but it would have been good theater.

The meeting room in the middle of Air Force One was extravagantly massive, a projection of masculine power—heavy woods, fragrant leather, deep carpeting. General Ballard, a large, intense man, maybe sixty, blazing eyes and shaved bullet head, fit the room perfectly. He sat next to the president, facing us across the table.

“It’s just a different scale from what you did with ad Astra,” the general argued. We had used powerful lasers to vaporize things the size of grains of sand, and maneuvered out of the way of larger obstacles. “Same principle. Just going slower and dealing with more interference.”

I had mixed feelings. I wanted Paul to be happy, and he’d always said he could never be happy without space. But having space hardly seemed possible anymore. Or smart.

And after mourning for Mars, I started to feel a kind of long-repressed relief. I’ve spent half my life off Earth and was ready to try living here again. Imagine, oxygen and water and food that you didn’t have to recycle endlessly through yourself. Just let the planet do the recycling for you.

We might even try raising actual children, maybe even making them the old-fashioned way. I was ready to start ovulating and being difficult once a month.

Paul’s reaction pulled me out of my reverie. “No way it’s the same, General. Much more seat-of-the-pants.” They both smiled, jet jocks imagining a situation that would have a normal person quivering in fear.

“And you’d want a lot of physical shielding,” Ballard said, “which wouldn’t help the handling characteristics.”

“It would be a job and a half,” Paul said.

The general laced his fingers together on the table and looked Paul straight in the eye. “You’d need the best pilot in the world.”

The president hadn’t said a word. He looked at Paul expectantly.

Paul’s expression was blank, but I could read him pretty well. He was choosing his words.

“If the best pilot in the world… were also a lunatic, he might say yes. But no.”

“We could do any number of practice runs in VR,” the general said. “You wouldn’t have to go up physically until you were sure.”

“We wouldn’t want to lose you,” the president said.

“But what else might we lose?” Paul shook his head. “It’s not the danger, the physical danger. It’s what the Others might do in reaction.”

“They said it was a test,” the general said. “This is the most direct response.” What?

“I respectfully disagree, sir. They’re not testing our ability to solve a tactical problem.”

“It was a warning!” I blurted out. “I thought that was pretty clear.”

The general looked at me. He tried without much success to keep condescension out of his voice: “He did use the word ‘test,’ Dr. Dula.” My father’s name. “It might be a warning at the same time, but against aggression, not simple space travel.”

Dustin came to my defense. “General, that’s like saying someone who puts a high fence around his property doesn’t care whether people break in.”

Elza added, “Nothing we learned at Wolf 25 indicated that they have anything like subtlety or patience. That was a punishment and a warning.”

The president stood up. “Thank you all. This is all very valuable. We’ll talk more later… I have to go get camera- ready for the landing. General?”

The general also stood and thanked us, and followed the president into the inner sanctum.

“I sure feel valuable,” Elza said. “How do you feel?”

“Doomed,” Dustin said. Paul nodded agreement.

19 INFALL

All sorts of festivities had been planned for us hearty heroes, but their execution was somewhat muted by doom and gloom and the regular infall of meteors. A lot of expensive liquor was spilled at a congressional reception when a boulder the size of a grand piano redesigned a shopping mall in nearby Maryland, a town improbably named Rockville.

By the time the sound reached us, it had attenuated to where it was only as loud as a land mine going off in the next room. I dove under a table and found two younger people had beaten me there; so much for combat reflexes. A good place to be when the chandeliers are raining glass, though, and the girl I had landed on was agreeably soft.

Of course all the congratulatory speeches had to be rewritten with appropriate funereality, and I came to dread the cognitive dissonance that united them all in clumsiness. As if good things and bad things couldn’t happen at the same time. I suppose that if one is to stay sane as a soldier, that incongruent congruence always has to be there in some part of your mind: no matter how terrible are the things you have seen and done, in another country there is room for happiness and friendship, beauty and love.

American soldiers in their war against Vietnam had a bleak catchphrase for when the worst happened: “Don’t mean nothin’.” I heard about that when I was a teenaged soldier generations later, and knew exactly what it meant. Nihilism is the soldier’s ultimate armor.

Soldiering and the memory of Gehenna might have made it easier for me to accept the huge cataclysm of the Others’ revenge, easier not to surrender to anger. Don’t mean nothin’.

There was a huge amount of anger in the air, understandably, and frustration—a profoundly powerful enemy who is absolutely beyond reach, now and for any foreseeable future.

If the moon’s destruction had only deprived us of spaceflight, most people wouldn’t see it as a tragedy. For many people, space is just an expensive playground for scientists and the military. Keep that money and brainpower at home.

But modern civilization needs satellites. Most communication and entertainment goes by optical fiber, with the satellites a backup except in primitive countries. But GPS devices are in the heart of every car and plane. Big-city traffic, dependent on computer control, froze solid. Nonessential flights were grounded. Computers died.

Of course, we get some fallout from that. Even among the sophisticated government and news workers who are our daily companions, there is the undercurrent of blame, and it’s not undeserved, if someone does have to be blamed. We were the only people who could have done something, out where the Others live, and all we did was deliver the message, the lie, that precipitated this disaster.

The plain fact that we could have been the aggressors—the kamikaze option—is generally known and widely discussed. From one very understandable point of view, we should not have considered any other course of action.

It’s interesting that among our crew, only the Martians thought the kamikaze option was a reasonable idea, but to them death is an unremarkable event. It’s not as if we humans couldn’t do the math and apply the logic. What if we had all been Shinto or fundamentalist Moslem or Christian extremists? We might have just as universally discarded the idea of negotiation and blasted full speed ahead toward the enemy planet.

That might be alien to our culture, but it’s not alien to human nature. In the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, suicide attacks have often been used as a practical response to an imbalance in technology. There were uneven results—the handful of suicide pilots in America’s 9/11 had a stupendous kill ratio, but the five thousand Japanese kamikazes only sank thirty-six ships. In both cases, though, it was an understandable military sacrifice, when the enemy’s technological base made them unbeatable by conventional methods.

And their situations were nothing compared to the technological imbalance between the human race and the Others. Should we feel guilty for not making the ultimate sacrifice? Do we deserve to be condemned as cowards? Having been there at the time, I’d say no. Those with the benefit of hindsight may feel differently.

There have been threats on our lives. Our public appearances have two cadres of bodyguards, I found out—armed soldiers in uniform surrounding us, but twice as many in civilian clothes circulating in the audience.

So I was relieved when the celebrations were abruptly canceled after two days. We didn’t get to return on Air Force One—would never see the president again—but took a spartan private jet back to California, where we’d left Snowbird.

She was more or less hidden for the time being. As unpopular as the six of us were with the angry populace, we could only imagine how they would react to a Martian. Alien tools of the Others.

She would eventually be moved to a sanctuary in Siberia, where conditions were more Mars-like. A foundation had been set up there when the quarantine was lifted, and now it would support as well as study the five or six Martians marooned on Earth. She would find edible Martian food growing there, and the company of her own kind. But she wanted to say good-bye to us first, and take a swim in the ocean.

She would get that, but not much more.

20 THE LONGEST JOURNEY BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP

The last person I talked to on Mars was my good old mentor Oz, who said he was not quite 64 years old now—that’s in Martian years, though, which comes to about 120 on Earth. He didn’t look a day over a hundred, though. Wizened and wrinkled, but still with a wry intelligent look and a sparkle in his eye.

We were in the space communications room at Armstrong Space Force Base, where we’d landed from orbit. It was a bright clean room that felt old, too many coats of paint. Paul exchanged pleasantries with Oz, then left after the twelve-minute lag.

“How bad is it, Oz? Can the colony survive without support from Earth?”

Following the same protocol as we’d used fifty years before, Oz’s image froze on the screen when he hit the SEND button. I’d brought the Washington Post to read while the signals crawled back and forth.

The only story about us was on page 14, and it wasn’t complimentary.

Oz came back smiling. “We’re completely self-sufficient, Carmen; have been for more than twenty years. Human population’s over three thousand, a third of them native-born. Our living and farming space is probably twenty times what it was when you left.

“The big debate over here is whether we should stay out of space; whether the Others meant to include us in their warning. There were no Martian ships in the fleet.

“A majority says stay home. We have a Space Elevator, and they didn’t blow it down, but its only real function was as a terminal for the shuttle to and from Earth.

“Personally, I think that Earth can go to hell in its own way. My big regret is that now you and Paul can’t come home. You could have a natural baby or two now; they solved the lung problem and recycled the mother machine for scrap.

“And you’re still young enough. In-fucking-credible.

“Look, I have to go off to the old folks’ dinner. Can you call me again tomorrow”—he looked offscreen—“about 1600 your time?”

“Definitely at 1600,” I said. “If you have new art, bring some to show me.”

It wasn’t going to happen.

I heard Paul in the next room, one loud bad word. Went through the door and found him staring at a flatscreen monitor.

“Shit,” he said. “Would you look at this?” It was a picture of a human newsie, male and handsome, standing in front of a familiar background: here. The Armstrong Space Force Base.

“We on the news?”

“Not really.” He picked up the chaser and ran it back a minute or two. There was an obviously simulated picture of a lander like ours taking off tail first, the way they did spaceflight before the Elevator.

“Back to old-fashioned ways,” the newsie said. “Our Space Force is sending a rocket up into the cloud of rocks that now surrounds our planet, to get some close-up observations—and perhaps work its way through. Blasting the little obstacles with the powerful laser in its nose and maneuvering around the larger ones.

“The Space Force confirms that they don’t believe this first try will actually penetrate the millions of miles of debris, but it will be a good start. And no human pilot will be endangered; all the flight controlled by virtual-reality interfacing. Rumor has it that the VR pilot will be none other than Paul ‘Crash’ Collins, back on Earth, still young through the magic of general relativity!”

“Rumor has its head up its ass,” Paul said. “Nobody’s said anything to me.”

“Could you do it? Would you?”

“No, and no way in hell. I never trained for that kind of launch off Earth; only from Mars, where it’s a lot simpler. But more, it’s… it’s thumbing our nose at the Others. Are they insane?”

Maybe they all are, I thought; the culture. “Maybe they have a more complicated plan. Looks like propaganda, doesn’t it?”

He calmed down a little. “Might be. Shoot up an empty rocket that they know won’t make it through. Just to show that they’re doing something. But I won’t be in on it with them.”

“Best we all stay out of it. Those crowds in Washington.” I leaned on a bookshelf and looked out the window at the dry brown hills. “Let’s get away, Paul. Just disappear from the public eye for a while. We have plenty of money.”

He nodded. “The government would be glad to see us go. Let’s talk it over with everybody tonight. Have to arrange for Snowbird to get to that Siberia place safely.”

“The swim first. That’s important to her.”

We talked it over with the Space Force press people and came up with a workable plan. There was a beach to the north of the base, closed to the public, which would afford a good view of the launch. Snowbird could get her swim, and they would get publicity shots of us watching the launch. (With Paul “regrettably” declining the VR pilot’s seat; too tired and out of practice.) Then we could fade out of sight, to the relief of all concerned.

Namir and Elza and Dustin wanted to go back to New York City. That didn’t sound smart to me. Elza thought with hair dye and a dab of makeup, they’d regain their former anonymity, lost in the crowd. I thought Namir was too handsome for that, and Dustin too weird-looking, his hair in spikes, but I kept it to myself.

We had a last family dinner in the mess hall, Namir ecstatic at having actual steaks to grill. Real potatoes and fresh asparagus. Bottles of good California wine.

I didn’t sleep well, and neither did Paul. Crazy days.

Just at dawn, we all piled into Space Force vans and went down a bumpy gravel road to the beach. There was a hard beauty in the dusty, persistent plants.

The ocean a churning, eternal miracle. Snowbird was awestruck, speechless.

Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”

We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.

The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.

I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.

It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the replicas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.

It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.

Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.

“You don’t listen, do you?”

The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.

“I suppose we have to be less subtle.”

The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.

“All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.

A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.

The camera crew were shouting into their phones.

A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.

I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.

Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.

“Idiots,” Paul said.

“Surprise,” Dustin said.

Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”

For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.

“I think we better start walking.”