Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

by Marsbound (v1. 0) [lit]

  A hundred centuries before the Pyramids. “But that's not long enough ago for Mars to be inhabitable. Mars was Mars a million ares ago."

  He made an almost human gesture, all four hands palms up. “It could be much longer. At ten thousand ares, history becomes mystery. Our far-away Earth could be a myth, and the Others who created us. There aren't any spaceships lying around.

  "What deepens the mystery is that we could never live on Mars, on the surface, but we could live on Earth, your Earth. So why did the Others bring us many light years just to leave us on the wrong planet?"

  I thought about what Red had said. “Maybe because we're too dangerous."

  "That's a theory. Or it might have been the dinosaurs. They looked pretty dangerous."

  Dinosaurs. I took a deep breath. “Robin Hood. Have you, have your people, actually been on Mars that long? I mean, dinosaurs were on Earth a long time before people."

  He wiggled his head again, with his big hands. “I don't know! You have to ask the story family, the history family. The yellow people?"

  I remembered the two dressed in amber in that room where I was taken for inspection. “Okay. I'll ask a yellow person. So what do green people do? Are you doctors?"

  "Oh, no.” He pointed at the other. “It's green and it's a doctor. But why would you think that all of us greens are doctors? Every human I ever saw wears white, but I don't think therefore that you all have the same function."

  Good grief. Was I the first cross-species racist? “I'm sorry. What is it that you do, then?"

  He shuffled forward and back like a nervous spider. “I'm not a ‘do'—” He put a small hand on my knee. “—I'm more a ‘be.’ You humans...” He touched his head with both large hands but didn't wiggle it. “You are all about what you do. Like, what do you do, Carmen?"

  "I'm a student. I study things."

  "But that's not a ‘do’ at all! That's a be, like me."

  I was either out of my depth or into a profound shallowness. “So while you're ... being, what do you ... be? What do you be that's different from what others be?"

  "You see? You see?” He emitted a sound like a thumbnail scraping across a comb. “'What do you be'—you can't even say it!"

  "Robin Hood. Look. I'm both a do and a be—my ‘be’ is I'm a human being, female, American, whatever—it's what I am when I'm just standing here. But then I can go do something, like get a drink of water, and that doesn't change my be at all."

  "But it does! It always does. Don't you see?"

  Ontology, meet linguistics. Go to your corners and come out swinging. “You're right, Robin. You're absolutely right. We just don't put things quite that way."

  "Put things?"

  "We don't say it quite that way.” I took a deep breath. “Tell me about these Others. They lived very far away?"

  "Yes, very far. We used to call it something like the ‘heaven’ some humans talk about, but since we got TV and the cube, we know it's just really far away. Some other star."

  "But you don't know which one."

  "No, not which and not how long ago. But very far and very long. The story family says it was a time before time had meaning. The builder family says it must be so far away that light takes ares to get from that star to here. Because there are no stars any closer."

  "That's interesting. You don't have telescopes and things, but you figured that out?"

  "We don't need telescopes. We get that kind of knowledge from you humans, from the cube."

  "Before the cube, though. They were up in heaven?"

  "I guess so. We also learned about gods from you. The Others are sort of gods; they created us. But they actually exist."

  Red suddenly appeared to rescue me from Sunday school. “Carmen, if you feel able, we'd like to have you up where we're working. The humans are not understanding us too well."

  My experience with Robin Hood didn't make me too hopeful. But I could do “pick this up and put it there.” I stepped into my suit and chinned the heat up all the way and followed him up to the cold.

  * * * *

  7. Suffer the little children

  The damage from the laser was repaired in a few hours, and I was bundled back to the colony to be rayed and poked and prodded and interviewed by doctors and scientists. They couldn't find anything wrong with me, human or alien in origin.

  "The treatment they gave you sounds like primitive arm-waving,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The fact that they don't know why it works is scary."

  "They don't know why anything works over there. It sounds like it's all hand-me-down science from thousands of years ago. Ares."

  He nodded and frowned. “You're the only data point we have. If the disease were less serious, I'd try to introduce it to the kids one at a time and monitor their progress. But there's no time. And everyone may have it already."

  Rather than try to take a bunch of sick children over there, they invited the Martians to come to us. It was Red and Green, logically, with Robin Hood and an amber one following closely behind. I was outside, waiting for them, and escorted Red through the airlock.

  Half the adults in the colony seemed crowded into the changing room for a first look at the aliens. There was a lot of whispered conversation while Red worked his way out of his suit.

  "It's hot,” he said. “The oxygen makes me dizzy. This is less than Earth, though?"

  "Slightly less,” Dr. Jefferson said. He was in the front of the crowd. “Like living on a mountain."

  "It smells strange. But not bad. I can smell your hydroponics."

  "Where are les enfantes?" Green said as soon as she was out of the suit. “No time talk.” She held out her bag of herbs and chemicals and shook it.

  The children had been prepared with the idea that these “Martians” were our friends and had a way to cure them. There were pictures of them and their cave. But a picture of an eight-legged potato-head monstrosity isn't nearly as distressing as the real thing—especially to a room full of children who are terribly ill with something no one can explain, but which they know is Martian in origin. So their reaction when Dr. Jefferson walked in with Dargo Solingen and Green was predictable—screaming and crying and, from the ambulatory ones, escape attempts. Of course the doors were locked, with people like me spying in through the windows, looking in on the chaos.

  Everybody loves Dr. Jefferson, and almost everybody is afraid of Dargo Solingen, and eventually the combination worked. Green just quietly stood there like Exhibit A, which helped. It takes a while not to think of giant spiders when you see them walk.

  They had talked about the possibility of sedating the children, to make the experience less traumatic, but the only data they had about the treatment was my description, and they were afraid that if the children were too relaxed, they wouldn't cough forcefully enough to expel all the crap. Without sedation, the experience might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but at least they would have lives.

  They wanted to keep the children isolated, and both adults would have to stay in there for awhile after the treatment, to make sure they hadn't caught it, the Martians’ assurances notwithstanding.

  So the only thing between the child who was being treated and the ones who were waiting for it was a sheet suspended from the ceiling, and after the first one, they all had heard what they were in for. It was done in age order, youngest to oldest, and at first there was some undignified running around, grabbing the victims and dragging them to behind the sheet, where they volubly did the hairball performance.

  But the children all seemed to sleep peacefully after the thing was over, which calmed most of the others—if they were like me, they hadn't been sleeping much. Card, one of the oldest, who had to wait the longest, pretended to be unconcerned and sleep before the treatment. I know how brave that was of him; he doesn't handle being sick well. As if I did.

  The rest of us were mostly crowded into the mess hall, talking with Red and Robin Hood. The other one asked that we call him Fly-in-Amber, and said th
at it was his job to remember, so he wouldn't be saying much.

  Red said that his job, his function, was hard to describe in human terms. He was sort of like a mayor, a local leader or organizer. He also did things that called for a lot of muscular strength.

  Robin Hood said he was being modest; for forty ares he had been a respected leader. When their surveillance device showed that I was in danger of dying, they all looked to Red to make the decision and then act on it.

  "It was not a hard decision,” he said. “Ever since you landed, we knew that a confrontation was inevitable. I took this opportunity to initiate it, so it would be on our terms. I couldn't know that Carmen would catch this thing, which you call a disease, and bring it back home with her."

  "You don't call it a disease?” one of the scientists asked.

  "No ... I guess in your terms it might be called a ‘phase,’ a developmental phase. You go from being a young child to being an older child. For us, it's unpleasant but not life threatening."

  "It doesn't make sense,” the xenologist Howard Jain said. “It's like a human teenager who has acne, transmitting it to a trout. Or even more extreme than that—the trout at least has DNA."

  "And you and the trout have a common ancestor,” Robin Hood said. “We have no idea what we might have evolved from."

  "Did you get the idea of evolution from us?” he asked.

  "No, not as a practical matter. We've been crossbreeding plants 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 mid-century, 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 space flight."

  "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 they 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. When the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.

  We thought that would be 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.

  * * * *

  III. 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 that 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.

  The argument for forever was pretty strong. Our getting the lung crap 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 rac
e. That meant all of the 108 people who lived on Mars at the time of the Martian “invasion” of our living space—110, counting embryos—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.)

  So Little Mars was two 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 the 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.

  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 mushroom-y 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 carry-out in history, box lunches from the Hilton, which floated less than a mile away, across from the Space Elevator.