by Joe Haldeman
“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 towar
d 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.”