Starbound

by Joe Haldeman

1 May 2088

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Or the strongest minority.

  4

  WEIGHTY MATTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5

  SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No. I vaguely remember it.”

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

  “Not really.”

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

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

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

  “Okay. So what are you worried about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  6

  PRIVATE PARTS

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

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

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

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

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