Marsbound m-1

by Joe Haldeman

  “Right. Can you build a radio transmitter?”

  “We already have one that’s rarely used. We could point it at Neptune and talk away.”

  “I don’t think that would be safe.”

  “Probably not, if she’s being fanatically thorough. But we don’t have an electronics lab on this side. You can’t build anything without parts.”

  “So couldn’t the existing radio have a little accident? It’s got all the parts.”

  “God, you’re a devious woman.”

  “Is it possible?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll study the wiring and be ready to disable it. In the course of testing the ‘repairs,’ I’ll send this gibberish out toward Neptune.

  “But there’s one thing you and Red missed. Dargo doesn’t have to be that afraid of punishment, when she admits to having spied on you. What can they do—extradite her to Earth? Dock her pay? There’s nothing to buy here, and we’re already in a kind of prison.”

  “Well, Oz, and probably the others, would help us pressure to have her relieved of responsibilities. Deny computer access.”

  “That could work. Make her stare at the walls until she begs to be thrown out the air lock.”

  “I like the way you think.” I straddled him. “The music’s going to climax in about two minutes.”

  “Slave driver.” But he managed a coda.

  7

  LANGUAGE BARRIER

  Allowing for speed-of-light travel time, the Other took only twenty-some minutes to react to the Drake message—which meant that most of the response must have been prepared ahead of time, and it only had to choose which button to push.

  If, that is, it had been honest with Red when it described its temporal limitations. It did occur to me that there was no compelling reason for it to tell us the truth.

  Or to lie, if it was as powerful as it claimed.

  The answer to the message came in spoken English, in an odd American accent, which Earth quickly identified as David Brinkley’s, a newscaster from a century ago:

  “Peace is a good sentiment.

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

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

  Then it began a speech in a slightly different tone, a speech that could have been prepared years ahead of time:

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

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

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

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

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

  Then it said something that I thought would simplify our lives, at least mine and Red’s. “This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red.” Then it went into about two minutes of low, gravelly wheedly-rasp-poot, and went silent.

  “So what was that?” Dargo said.

  Red favored her with a potato stare. “Please play it back for me.”

  He listened. “Can you speed it up by a factor of eight or so?”

  “No problem,” a voice said from the screen. “Just give me a minute. I can double the speed three times.”

  We waited, and then it came back sounding more like Martian.

  “Not much in the way of information there. I can write it down for you, phrase by phrase. But it’s mostly ceremonial—good-bye and a sort of blessing—and some technical information, which frequencies it will monitor for voice and for pictures. Though I think it probably monitors about everything.”

  “Why was the initial message so slow?” asked the screen.

  “The Other said that it had spent days translating that English message and rendering it as American speech. It recorded it more than a year ago.”

  Red hesitated. “We talked, Oz and Carmen and Paul and I, about how slow their metabolism must be, because of the low temperature of their body chemistry. They must move slowly.” He wasn’t going to say anything he’d learned from the still-secret message.

  “Talking with them is not going to be anything like a conversation. But we are all accustomed to having a time lag between saying something and hearing the response, in talking with Mars.”

  “Why did it wait?” Dargo asked. “First there was all that indirect mumbo jumbo, hiding the Drake message in the strange oration that the yellow Martians had buried in their memories. Now we find out that it could have just contacted us directly. In English!”

  “Dargo,” Oz said quietly, “we don’t know anything about their psychology. Who knows why it does anything?”

  “It’s protecting itself,” Moonboy said. “Maybe even trying to confuse us.”

  “It does know our psychology pretty well,” I pointed out, “after eavesdropping on us for a couple of hundred years.”

  “And it knows you,” Red said. “Of you.”

  “Me personally?”

  He nodded. “The Other knows of our special relationship, and would like to exploit it, making you its primary human contact, through me.” I wondered whether he’d just made that up.

  “How could it know something like that?” Dargo snapped, for once mirroring my own thoughts.

  “It has access to any public broadcast. Her relationship to me is well documented.” He made what might have been a placating gesture. “Of course, Carmen will share what she hears with everyone, and we will take input from anyone.”

  “I don’t like it. You or she could make up anything, as long as you’re working in a language no one else can translate.”

  “I will tell the Other of your objection.”

  “And how will I know that you have?”

  “Have I ever lied to you? Lying is sort of a human thing.” Paul glanced at me and glanced away. We both knew that wasn’t exactly true. Red had come up with the suggestion that we feed Dargo an innocuous, half-true translation.

  “Even if you completely trusted Red,” Oz said, “as I do, there’s no reason to assume that the Other is being straight with him. As Dargo said, it could have communicated with us directly from the beginning if it had wanted to.”

  Moonboy nodded. “It must have its own agenda, its strategy.” To Red: “We still don’t know how long this whatever, this hypnotic suggestion, has been part of the yellow family’s makeup?”

  “None of the family can tell us anything useful. They say it must have been there forever, ever since the Others created them. Which would be fine, except for the number.”

  “Ten to the seventh seconds,” Moonboy said.

  Red nodded. “It would require that the Others, or this Other, could predict twenty-seven thousand years ago, how long it would take for humans to get to Mars and bring a Martian back.”

  “A yellow one,” I said.

  “Wait,” Oz said, and laughed. “We don’t have any reason to assume that the number is right. The Other isn’t some sort of infallible god. That twenty-seven thousand years might have been its best estimate two thousand years ago, or ten thousand, or fifty—whenever you Martians were initially set up.”

  “At least five thousand ares. We have reliable memories that far back—at le
ast the memory family does.”

  “You think so.” Oz was still smiling broadly. “But look. If the Other could program the yellow folk, the memory family, to flop down and deliver a prerecorded message when they saw the red laser—then what else might it have programmed them with? Maybe five thousand ares of bogus history.”

  Red grabbed his head and buzzed loudly, laughing. “Oz! You could be right.” He buzzed again. “Like your religious humans who claim God created the Earth six thousand years ago, with the fossils all in place. Who can say you’re wrong?”

  “An areologist,” Oz said. “Quite seriously. We have Terry and Joan on Mars right now, nosing around your city, trying to date it. What if there’s nothing that’s more than a few thousand ares old? A few hundred?”

  Red clasped himself with all four arms, which usually meant he was thinking. “It’s not impossible. I have direct evidence, written communication, with only three previous leaders, with mention of a fourth. Less than a thousand ares.” He turned to Moonboy. “Have Joan and Terry found anything older?”

  “I don’t think so. But they’re still doing preliminary work, being pretty cautious.”

  “We must have them try. Dig down for things to date. This is fascinating!”

  What I myself found fascinating was the way Red had changed the subject away from “Have I ever lied to you?”

  8

  SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO

  Red wrote out the message that the Other had transmitted after its English one, and it was as innocuous and plain as the earlier secret one had been threatening and complex. Basically, “I want to cooperate, but you must let me go at my own slow pace.”

  I searched my room for a microphone but found exactly what I’d expected: nothing. You can buy one at Cube Shack not much bigger than a flea.

  Red asked everyone on our side and most of the people on the Earth side whether they had questions or messages for the Other. I knew he wanted a long transmission so that his own part would be hidden in the volume generated by others.

  News came that my mother and father were coming on the next shuttle from Mars, which pleased me, though I had to admit I hadn’t missed Dad. So Card would be informally adopted by the Westlings, which no doubt made him one happy boy. Barry got away with murder, which happens when your mother is a novelist and your father is a crazy inventor, no matter what their job titles claimed.

  Over the next two days, I had eight more VR interviews. The most trivial was one from my old high school, and the most interesting was with a panel of “xenopsychologists” convened at Harvard. The weirdest was the last one, from the Church of Christ Revealed, who thought the whole thing, from the Space Elevator on, was a hoax the government was perpetrating for its own obscure purpose. I told them they could go out and watch the Space Elevator work; they could aim an antenna at Mars and intercept the signals that emanated from there whenever the right side was facing Earth. The interviewer smiled conspiratorially, saying “Yes, that’s what we’re supposed to believe” or “It’s all explained in the Bible, and it isn’t like your people say.”

  After putting up with that, I went back to my place feeling sort of like the most dispensable member of the team, and what should greet me but a message from Dargo: “Please come see me at your earliest convenience.”

  I put on my exercise clothes and went up to row and jog. Moonboy was on the rowing machine, so I jogged for a while on the treadmill watching Earth news. So little of it seemed important.

  So my “earliest convenience” was after 250 calories of running and a mile on the oars. I didn’t shower, but went sweatily down to Dargo’s office.

  Her nose wrinkled when I stepped in and closed the door behind me. Without preamble, she said, “Have you ever heard of ess-to-en?”

  “No… a sulfur-and-nitrogen compound?” Even my dim recall of valences told me that couldn’t be it.

  “It’s a research tool I just found. It dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio in a collection of audio data.”

  Her ubiquitous clipboard was on the desk. She stabbed a button on it, and my voice clearly said, “That’s a kind of insect?” Then Red started the mayfly analogy, Bach a faint whisper in the background. She switched it off.

  “I have it all,” she said. “The superslow Others, the faster one on Triton, the rationale for Red’s secret language. Our mayfly helplessness in the face of their ancient wisdom.”

  “So. Now you know everything I do. You still can’t—”

  “Maybe I know a little more than you do. You accept what your Martian friend says as the pure truth. I do not.”

  I didn’t trust myself to say anything, and just nodded.

  “There’s nothing like all that even implied in the actual communications that everybody’s seen and heard from Triton. I think Red made it all up.”

  “Made it up? Why would he do that?”

  “It’s simple, really. His power over his tribe, and now his usefulness to us, is dependent on the uniqueness of his supposed language. What if it’s just another Martian dialect? Our linguists are cataloging similarities among the other four. With a large enough sample, I’m sure Red’s will fall into line.”

  She didn’t know what she was talking about! They weren’t “dialects,” any more than Chinese is a dialect of Turkish. And no linguist was yet able to utter “two plus two is four” in any of the tricky languages. That they had sounds in common was not very mysterious.

  “I’m sure that could be true,” I heard myself saying, “in theory. But I’d need more than supposition.”

  “Of course you would. And I know you consider him a friend, and wouldn’t ask you to betray him. Just try to listen to what he has to say objectively—with my skeptic’s ears as well as your own. Try to entertain the possibility.”

  “All right.” Among the possibilities I could entertain was that Dargo had finally gone totally insane. “But what if he is telling the truth? We don’t dare go public with your thesis. The Other might learn of it and push the button.”

  “Absolutely. Utmost caution and secrecy.”

  I left with my head sort of spinning, trying to figure out exactly what kind of game Dargo was playing.

  I couldn’t believe she’d had a change of heart about me, trusting me enough to enlist my aid in her scheming. But she did have me in a perfect trap—I couldn’t report her eavesdropping without revealing Red’s deadly secret.

  Could she be right, though? The “deadly secret” a sham, part of an elaborate hoax?

  No. That would require advance collusion with the Other.

  Maybe Dargo was setting me up for a double double cross, having me spy on Red and then telling Red, to destroy his trust in me. I couldn’t say anything to him or Paul, now, without the risk of being overheard.

  But I could write. I didn’t want to trust e-mail or anything else electronic, but I could afford a little paper.

  Paul first. Before I even went to the shower, I wrote down everything I could remember about Dargo’s convoluted scheme, in small print on both sides of a half sheet of paper, and folded it up small.

  We met in the hall as I was coming back from the shower, and when we kissed hello I slipped it into his pocket. He gave me a little nod.

  I spent a couple of hours trying to extract something useful from a structural-linguistic approach to the Martian consensus language, by an Earth researcher who’d done a lot of work with cetacean communication. I think she was hiding her lack of actual results with a lot of pretty charts and weak analogy. Both creatures do communicate with repeating patterns of noises. But the dolphins are mainly saying “Follow me to fish” or “Let’s fuck.” The Martians apparently indulge in more abstract concepts.

  Paul wasn’t at late dinner. I ate with Oz and Meryl. She brought up the subject of Dargo. “It’s strange. With all this exciting new stuff happening, she seems angry rather than interested.”

  Oz said that Dargo will be Dargo. “She’s an administrator at heart, not a scientis
t. Administrators don’t like the unexpected.”

  I could have given them both a couple of data points, but had to refrain.

  When I got back to my place, there was a humorously pornographic love note on my screen. Bunnies. I brushed my teeth and went over to Paul’s.

  For the first time in my life, I felt the foreplay went on too long. Why couldn’t he be more like a bunny? I could see my note and his answer on his desk.

  He fell asleep, or acted as if he had, right afterward. I slipped off my narrow half of the bunk and padded over to his desk and read the note, a page of small neat capital letters.

  SHE HAS YOU IN A DIFFICULT POSITION. ME, TOO, ASSUMING SHE ALSO RECORDED OUR “CONVERSATION” WHILE MAKING LOVE. OF COURSE I’LL PRETEND THAT IDON’T KNOW SHE KNOWS, AT LEAST UNTIL SHE REVEALS IT TO ME.

  YOU THINK SHE HAS EITHER LOST IT OR HAS SOME NEFARIOUS PLAN IN MIND. LET ME SUGGEST A THIRD ALTERNATIVE: THAT SHE IS RIGHT.

  WE ONLY HAVE THE MARTIANS’ WORD FOR THE STORY THAT THEY DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE BEING ON TRITON. WHAT IF IT HAD CONTACTED THEM YEARS AGO—DOZENS OR HUNDREDS OF YEARS—AND SWORN THEM TO SECRECY?

  OUR SCIENTISTS HAVE NO IDEA HOW THOSE RADIO/TV/ CUBE RECEIVERS WORK. THE OTHER COULD HAVE CONTACTED THEM RIGHT AFTER THE FIRST RADIO SIGNALS FROM EARTH, AND SAID, “THE ALIENS (HUMANS) ARE COMING, AND THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.”

  MOST OF THEM SEEM STRAIGHTFORWARD AND HONEST, BUT THEY’VE HAD A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS TO STUDY HUMAN BEHAVIOR, WATCHING US LIE TO EACH OTHER REPEATEDLY—AND BESIDES, HOW COULD YOU TELL IF ONE WAS LYING? THAT SHIFTY LOOK IN ITS FIFTY EYES?

  AS YOU SAY, RED REQUIRED YOU TO MISREPRESENT THE TRUTH ABOUT THE OTHER, THEN VOLUNTEERED TO LIE HIMSELF, TO MISLEAD DARGO ABOUT THE HIDDEN MESSAGE.

  IWOULD SAY IT’S MORE LIKELY THAT THE MARTIANS HAVE BEEN STRAIGHT WITH US. BUT WE OUGHT TO KEEP THE OTHER POSSIBILITY IN MIND.

  YOU MIGHT USE DARGO’S DEVIOUS MIND. SHE MIGHT COME UP WITH A WAY TO TEST RED WITHOUT HIM NOTICING.

  IHATE LIKE HELL THE THOUGHT THAT SHE MIGHT BE RIGHT.