by Joe Haldeman
“Did you get the idea of evolution from us?” he asked.
“No, not as a practical matter. We’ve been crossbreeding plants and fungi for a long time. But Darwinism, yes, from you. From your television programs back in the twentieth century.”
“Wait,” my father said. “How did you build a television receiver in the first place?”
There was a pause, and then Red spoke: “We didn’t. It’s always been there.”
“What?”
“It’s a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century—”
“Those like me remembered them all,” Fly-in-Amber said, “though they were just noises at first.”
“—and we knew the signals were from Earth because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in midcentury, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions.”
“Always been there… How long is ‘always’?” Howard Jain asked. “How far back does your history go?”
“We don’t have history in your sense,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking.”
“You have explored more of Mars than we have,” Robin Hood said, “with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that’s why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone.”
“Some of us have a theory,” Red said, “that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don’t know you can’t tell.”
“You can’t erase a memory,” Fly-in-Amber said.
“We can’t. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can’t do.”
“You are not a memory expert. I am.”
Red’s complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started.”
“You’re that old!” Jain said.
“Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War.”
“You have told us this tale before,” Robin Hood said. “Not all of us agree.”
Red pushed on. “The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time, if Russian bombers were on their way.” He paused. “I think that’s what we are.”
“Warning whom?” Jain said.
“Whoever put us here. We call them the Others. We’re on Mars instead of Earth because the Others didn’t want you to know about us until you had spaceflight.”
“Until we posed a threat to them,” Dad said.
“That’s a very human thought.” Red paused. “Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn’t want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point.”
“We wouldn’t be any threat to them,” Jain said. “If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, light-years from home, it’s hard to imagine what they could do now. What they could do to us.”
The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. “They’re done now. It looks like all the kids are okay.” She looked around at all the serious faces. “I said they’re okay. Crisis over.”
Actually, it had just begun.
8
AMBASSADOR
Which is how I would become an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn’t evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?
Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.
On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions the aliens were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I would be sent back there with Red and Green, along with four friends, who would be coordinating research, and Dargo Solingen, I guess because she was the only bureaucrat available on Mars.
Nobody wanted to bring the Martians all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn’t improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.
So as well as an ambassador, I became sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I’m also the main human sidekick for Red and Green. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it’s obviously more about fear than brotherhood. If and when the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.
We thought that would be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they had figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit.
Or unless they were closer.
PART 3
SECOND CONTACT
1
SETTING THE STAGE
Red says that Americans in the middle of the twentieth century used to call this sort of thing a “crash program,” which sounds ominous. Like when America had to build an atomic bomb to end World War II, or when Russia had to beat America into space, to prove that communism worked.
Whatever, the effort to build Little Mars in orbit was the biggest and fastest piece of space engineering in this century, severely denting the economies of the eight countries and multinationals who banded together to get it done. It made the orbital Hilton look like a roadside motel.
The size and complexity were partly due to the ground rules driven by fear of contagion. The lung crap, Martian pulmonary cyst, proved that diseases could move from the Martians to us, through a mechanism that couldn’t yet be explained. So for a period of some years, no one who had been exposed to the Martians could come in direct contact with humans who had not. Some said five years, and some said ten, and a significant minority opted for forever.
I had to admit that the argument for forever was pretty strong. Our getting the lung cysts from the Martians was less likely than getting Dutch Elm disease from a tree. More outlandish, actually, since I was part of the disease vector—it was like getting Dutch Elm disease from a person who had touched a tree that had once had the disease. But it had happened, and until scientists figured out how, anyone who had been exposed to the Martians had to be biologically isolated from the rest of the human race. That meant all of the 101 people who lived on Mars at the time of the Martian “invasion” of our living space—103, counting the unborn—and especially the fourteen of us who’d been infected.
(I was not the most popular woman in the world, whether that world was Mars or Earth, since if I’d had the decency to die for disobeying orders, none of this would have happened. There were people on Earth who thought I should be imprisoned or even put to death for being a traitor to the human race. But we would have run into the Martians in a few years no matter what, and the lung cysts would have followed.)
So Little Mars was two orbiting space habitats, physically joined, but biologically independent from one another. We had separate life-support systems, with different environments.
It was as if you had two large houses filling a couple of acres of land, which had separate entrances and shared an interior wall with no doors and only two windows.
Their actual shape, viewed from space, was a pair of conventional toroids, like two doughnuts stuck together. They rotated fast enough to produce the illusion of normal Martian gravity. Two extensions, like pencils stuck on either side of t
he top doughnut, gave Earth-normal gravity for our exercise rooms, and a little more oxygen. Otherwise, our toroid—the “Mars side”—matched the conditions in the Martians’ underground city, though the humans’ rooms were kept warmer.
I’d never been to the Earth side, and might never be allowed there, but I knew it was sort of like the Hilton, but bigger and more spartan. It might have as many as a hundred people, maybe thirty of them more or less permanent staff. The others were visiting scientists and scholars and dignitaries. Fewer dignitaries as the novelty wore off.
The Mars side was half farm, raising a selection of mushroomy crops, tended mostly by the four Martians who eventually lived with us. Sometimes we’d pitch in and help with the planting and gathering, but that was largely a symbolic gesture. Their food practically grew itself, sort of like mold or mildew, and we weren’t going to share it with them.
We humans lived on a combination of simple rations and the most expensive carryout in history, box lunches from the Hilton, which floated less than a mile away, across from the Space Elevator.
The Mars side and the Earth side had only two panes of glass separating them, but they were literally worlds apart. Everything living in our little world came from Mars; all of theirs was an extension of Earth. And the twain would not meet for five or ten years, or ever.
The fact that going to Mars or to our side of Little Mars meant exile from Earth didn’t stop people from volunteering. Lots of scientists were willing, or even eager, to make that sacrifice in order to study the Martians close-up, here or on Mars. It gave our small population some variety, people staying with us for some months before going on to Mars.
Little Mars took three years to build, during which time I finished my bachelor’s degree, a hodgepodge of course work and directed research and reading that added up to a triple degree in linguistics, literature, and philosophy, with a strong minor in xenology. My lack of facility with mathematics kept me from pursuing biology and xenobiology to any depth, but I took all the elementary courses I could.
The trip from Mars was interesting. The life support in both the lander and the zero-gee middle of the ship was adjusted to effect a compromise between human and Martian needs and comfort levels. The two living areas were kept warmer for the humans and colder for the Martians. They weren’t closed by air locks, just doors, so I could go visit Red at his home if I bundled up.
Getting to LMO, Low Mars Orbit, had been a challenge. The Martians, mostly through Red and me, worked with engineers on Earth to develop modifications to the acceleration couches so they would work with four-legged creatures who can’t actually sit down.
There was no easy way to estimate how much acceleration the Martians could handle. The return ship would normally reach 3.5 gees soon after blasting off from the Martian surface. That was more than nine times Martian gravity.
Humans can tolerate four to six gees without special equipment and training, but there was no reason to generalize from that observation—keepingthe acceleration down to six times Martian gravity. Much less, though, and we wouldn’t be able to make orbit.
We were learning a lot about their anatomy and physiology; they didn’t mind being scanned and prodded. But we couldn’t wave a magic wand and produce a centrifuge, to test their tolerance for gee force.
Red wasn’t worried. In the first place, he was physically one of the strongest Martians, and in the second place, he said if he died, he just died, and one would later be born to replace him.
(That was something we hadn’t figured out, and they couldn’t explain—after fifty or sixty of them had died, about the same number became female and fertile, to give birth, or make buds, about a year later. The ones who were born would be in the same families as the ones who had died.)
So we went ahead with it, with some trepidation, as soon as Little Mars was up and running. We only took two Martians on the first flight, Red and Green, and six humans, Oz and Josie and me and a married pair of xenologists, Meryl Sokolow and “Moonboy” Levitus, and Dargo Solingen, I supposed for ballast. A lot of the mass going up was Martian food plus cuttings, seeds, and such, for getting crops established in their new home.
Paul was going to take us up to the new ship, the Tsiolkovski , waiting in orbit, and help transfer us and the luggage. Then he would take the John Carter back to the colony, and Jagrudi Pakrash would be our pilot for the eight-month trip back. She was pleasant and no doubt expert, but I did want my own personal pilot, with all his useful accessories.
My good-bye to Paul was a physical and emotional trial for both of us. The sex didn’t work, no surprise, and there wasn’t much to talk about that we hadn’t gone over. Over and over. There was no getting around the fact that the radiation exposure limit kept him from ever coming to Earth again, and it would be many years before I could ever return to Mars. If ever.
Fortunately, we’d timed our tryst so I would leave early enough for him to get eight hours of sleep. I doubt that I got two. I stayed up late with my parents and Card, reminiscing about Earth.
It was hardest on Mother. We’d drawn ever closer since First Contact, when she seemed to be the only one who believed me. She was my protector and mentor, and in many ways my best friend.
Aristotle said that was a single soul dwelling in two bodies. But in physical fact we were one body, my part separated at birth.
It was not good-bye forever, or at least we were determined to maintain that illusion. I would be rotated back to Mars; she and any or all of them might eventually be assigned to Little Mars; we might all be allowed to go back to Earth, if contact with Martians proved to be safe.
That was a big “if.” How many years of uneventful coexistence with the Martians would be enough? If I were living on Earth, I might suggest a few hundred. Just to be on the safe side.
As it turned out, the launch was easier on the Martians than the humans. Oz, Josie, Meryl, and Moonboy had been on Mars for eight or ten ares, Dargo for twelve, and they nearly suffocated under 3.5 gees; I had some trouble myself. Red and Green said it was like carrying a heavy load, but both of them routinely carried more than their own weight, tending crops.
Red enjoyed it immensely, in fact, the experience of space travel. He was budded in 1922, and had watched the human space program from its infancy to its current adolescence. He knew more about it than I did.
He and a couple of dozen others were especially well prepared for dealing with humans. Ever since the Mars colony’s planning stages, they’d known that contact was inevitable. Out of a natural sense of caution, they wanted to put it off for as long as possible, but they would come to that meeting well prepared. Even the charade of not being able to speak human languages had been rehearsed since before my father was born.
Human languages were easy to them, and not just because each one was already at least bilingual. The yellow, white, green, and blue families all had different languages—not dialects, but unique unrelated languages—and they all spoke a single communal language as well, to communicate across family lines.
But they didn’t have to learn those languages! They were born with innate ability and a pretty large vocabulary in both the consensus language and the family-oriented one. Red understood them all and, weirdly enough, his own language, which no other living Martian knew. He had spent much of his youth learning it, so he could read messages left by his predecessors, and so he could send advice up to the future, essentially in a secret “leader’s” code.
Red’s language was the only one with a written version. The others were all completely aural—why write things down if the yellows remember everything?—and so weirdly inflected that they defied translation into human languages.
My accident had moved up the Martians’ timetable for meeting humans, but not by all that much. Our satellite radar had shown the presence of water in their location, so eventually it would have been explored.
Another thing the accident did was turn a human into a relative of a Martian. They have a thing called be
ghnim, or at least that’s a rough transliteration. It’s a relationship, but also the word for a person—I was Red’s beghnim because he had saved my life, which gave him a responsibility for my future. He said there used to be a similar custom among humans, in old Japan.
On the way to Little Mars, we spent a lot of time talking with Red and Green—the others more than me, since I was finishing up my last year of graduate work at Maryland. In fact, I was in a kind of nonstop study mode; when I wasn’t doing schoolwork I was going over the notes that the others made from their conversations with the Martians. Moonboy was trying to study the general Martian language, and basic bits of the green one, but he hadn’t made much headway, and I didn’t try to follow his progress. Red’s written language was as complex as an opera score—words, music, and dynamics.
My own daily round was interesting but tiring, the scheduling more regimented than it had ever been under Dargo’s ministrations on Mars. Besides the schoolwork, and colloquy with Red and Green, I kept in contact with Paul and my family. Paul was understanding, and timed his calls around my schedule. As the time lag increased, our romantic conversations took on a surreal aspect. He would say something endearing and I would reply, then click open a textbook and study plant physiology for seven and a half minutes, then listen to his response and reply again, and go back to adenosine triphosphate decomposition for another seven and a half minutes—and of course he was doing something similar on his side. Not the most passionate situation.
There was also a period of two hours for exercise each day, in one of the two one-gee extensions. One side rowing, one side cycling, both plus the resistance machine. It wasn’t too unpleasant; my only time for light reading or casual VR. I think we all looked forward to the two hours’ guaranteed alone-time.
The eight months’ transit went by pretty fast, a lot faster to me than the six months going to Mars, four years before. (Two and a fraction ares. We decided to switch to Earth units at the halfway point.) I guess subjective distance is usually that way: when you take a trip to a new place, it feels longer than the return will seem. And we had plenty to occupy ourselves with.