Starbound (16 page)

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Authors: Joe Haldeman

BOOK: Starbound
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Finally, I took off my cloak and simply jumped in. It made more of a splash than I had expected. A light came on, and I heard human footsteps coming around the hydroponic trellises.
It was a most strange feeling. The water was only a little more than a meter deep, but it had splashed all over me. I had never been completely wet except in the process of being impregnated, so with the approaching footsteps I felt somewhat indecent, and was also embarrassed that I had splashed so much precious water out of the pool.
I did feel lighter, even though my feet were on the floor, which is to say the bottom of the pool. Then I moved sideways and tipped over—I was suddenly floating and had no weight at all! I inhaled some water and had a little coughing fit, but of course was in no danger, since my breathing spiracles are distributed evenly around my body surface. The noise did upset Carmen, though, who was the first human on the scene. She cried out my name and Snowbird’s—of course she couldn’t tell us apart without our clothing—and seized my head and pulled me upright.
She was yelling, asking if I was all right. The water was doing strange things with my hearing, and when I spoke, my voice sounded hugely amplified.
“I am all right, Carmen, and I am Fly-in Amber, and I’m sorry to waste water and make a mess.”
“Don’t worry about water; we’re riding a mountain of it. Did you have an accident?” Paul rushed up and said more or less the same thing.
“No, no. I just wanted to try floating, but didn’t want to bother any humans while they were using the pool.” In fact, although several could have stood in the pool with me, there wouldn’t be room for anyone to swim.
“Want to try it with the current?” Paul asked.
“Please, yes.” He stepped on a button and it was marvelous, like thousands of tiny fingers wiggling over your skin. It also felt deeply obscene. “That is very good.”
Snowbird appeared and addressed me in the consensus language, which we don’t normally use among humans. “Fly-in-Amber! You . . . I find you naked!”
“Speak English, Snowbird. Yes, I am naked, and so are humans when they do this. You should try it.”
“Not at the same time,” Paul said quickly. “You displace too much water.”
“I’ll get out, then, and let Snowbird—”
“I’m not ready to be naked in front of all these people! I have to think about it.”
“It doesn’t bother us,” Carmen said. “It’s proper, for being in the water.”
“But the whole idea—‘being in the water’! You can’t even say it in our language. It’s like ‘breathing in outer space.’ It should not be possible.”
Carmen gestured toward me. “You’d better come up with a word for it. I don’t think Fly-in-Amber wants to come out.”
“In fact,” I said, “I’m not sure
how
I’m going to get out. I can’t jump high in this gravity.”
Namir had come up. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll get a couple of planks.” He went off toward the storeroom. I wanted to tell him not to hurry.
“We’ll improvise a ramp,” Carmen said. She stepped out of her robe and slid into the water. Her body was strange, warmer than the water, and soft. “We should have made this bigger. We weren’t thinking about you guys.”
“We hadn’t thought of it either, Carmen. It’s such an odd idea.”
“Fly-in-Amber,” Snowbird said, “are you losing part of your skin?”
I had a moment of panic. There was an iridescent sheen on the water, evidently oil from my skin, and small floating particles, perhaps flakes of skin. Carmen was looking at the water with alarm.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” I bent over and looked at it closely. “It’s just been two days since I scraped.”
“Of course,” she said, though her smile did not look normal. She of all people might have reason to fear, since she had been the first human to catch a disease from us, and, of course, no human had ever bathed with us.
“Humans do catch skin diseases from other humans,” Snowbird explained, “like athletes’ foot and herpes. But we have never had skin diseases.”
“That’s, um, reassuring.”
“There would have been no reason for us to be designed with skin disease,” I said. “The difference between intelligent design and random evolution, I’m afraid.”
“We ought to build a special pool for you two,” Paul said. “Deeper, so you have maximum buoyancy. Not as wide, since you probably won’t be swimming.”
“That would be most kind of you. Perhaps with colder water?”
“If we put it in your area, it will be plenty cold.”
“That’s wonderful. Carmen, you could come over anytime and enjoy the cold.”
“Thank you, Fly-in-Amber, but we really prefer the warmer water.” She was shivering a little. “In fact, I think I’ll go take a nice hot shower right now.”
Going from a swim to a shower seemed redundant. But nothing about them surprised me.
Namir returned with the plastic boards then, and looked at her in what I think is a sexual way when she got out of the water. I wondered if they’d begun mating but had learned not to ask.
Over the next four days, they used boards like that to build us a big waterproof box, large enough for both of us to stand in, and improvised a pump that circulated the water and filtered it.
It will make the gravity so much more manageable. And Snowbird and I will be the cleanest Martians in history.
9
ADULTERY FOR ADULTS
1 June 2088
Gone for a month now. A real-time view to the stern shows the Sun as the brightest star in the sky; the Earth is of course invisible.
The only milestone of note, dear diary, is that Elza has apparently made her first sexual conquest—I say “apparently” because who knows? Though if it had been Paul, I think he would have told me, or politely asked me first.
It was Moonboy. Meryl told me after we finished an especially frustrating session with the Martians, tracking down their elusive and totally irregular verb forms.
We were alone at the coffee tap. “So do you know about Moonboy and Elza?”
“No, what?” I knew it wasn’t billiards, of course.
“Well, they got together yesterday. In the fucking sense, I mean.”
An odd choice, I thought, but she had to start somewhere. “Is it, um, I mean, is it a big deal to you?”
“More so than I let him know when he told me. It’s always been theoretically okay. But this is the first time . . . for him.”
“Not for you?” I pretended I didn’t know.
She smiled and shook her head. “Back on Mars.” I knew of two men, one of them married, some years ago. Mars is like a small village with no place to hide.
“Think it’s a one-time thing?”
“It was already a two-time thing when he told me.” She looked around. “It may be becoming a three-time thing as we speak. But no, I don’t think they’re going to get married and run off to the big city.”
“I’ve been waiting for that shoe to drop myself,” I said. “The way Paul looks at her when he thinks I’m not watching.”
“But you’ve always been, what, open?”
“Sure, for years, he was in Mars and I was in Little Mars. We didn’t actually marry until we got the lottery and were going to have children. Before that, we both had considerable variety.”
“I bet you did.” She grinned. “Being famous and all.”
“Well, guys had long layovers on their way to Mars.”
“Layovers.”
“Probably half of them just wanted to be able to say ‘I fucked The Mars Girl.’ ”
“The price of fame. And Paul the most famous pilot in history? He was not exactly a monk, if I recall correctly.”
“But we’d talked it through before either of us was famous, long before we were married. I thought fidelity was a holdover from old times, when women were property.”
“Do you still?”
“Not as strongly. But yes.” It wasn’t something I’d put into words. “Things are different, now that we’ve had children, but really there’s no reason for that. Parenthood in Mars is so detached from biological reality.”
She nodded. “You don’t go through all the physical grief. And then you don’t raise them by hand.”
“Which I sort of regret. They have my genes, and Paul’s, but we’re more like an aunt and uncle who play with them now and then.” I had a cold feeling, deep. “Under the circumstances, of course, that’s for the best.”
“When you get back . . .”
“They’ll be older than me. Fifty years pass for them, twelve for us. In the unlikely possibility that we survive.”
“Yeah.” She leaned back and closed her eyes; she was dead tired. “I shouldn’t be so concerned about where Moonboy puts his weenie. Let him have whatever pleasure he can find.”
“For symmetry, you ought to go after Namir. He’s old, but not
that
old. And good-looking.”
“If good-looking was important to me, I wouldn’t have grabbed Moonboy. Besides, if Namir is interested in anyone aboard, it’s you.”
“Really.”
“Don’t act surprised. It’s pretty obvious.”
“We’ve liked each other from the beginning. But not that way.”
“Man, woman. It’s the basic way.”
“He’s never made any kind of . . . gesture.”
“I don’t think he ever would. He’s the kind of man who waits for you to ask.”
“Well, he’s got a long wait, then.” Or maybe not.
10
SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE
Elza was late coming to bed. I’d just turned off my book and the light when the door opened and closed and I heard her slip out of her clothing. I touched her shoulder as she eased into bed. Cool and damp with sweat.
“Exercising this late?”
“In a way. Moonboy.”
“Ah.” I didn’t know what to say. “Meryl know?” They have both their beds together in one large suite.
“No. She was with the Martians.”
“A . . . sort of a milestone, I suppose.”
I could feel her smile in the darkness. “The first act of adultery outside of the solar system.”
“That presupposes an abundance of virtue on the part of extraterrestrials. We’ll put up a plaque anyhow.”
“You’re too sweet.”
There was a long pause. “So how was it?”
“It was Moonboy. Men don’t normally reveal hidden depths.”
“Or lengths?”
“Men.” She made a quarter turn and pressed her back into my chest, spoon fashion. “Get some sleep.”
“What, I don’t get sloppy seconds?”
“Thirds. Get some sleep.” I didn’t press the issue, though I found the situation curiously stimulating.
I hadn’t brought along my balalaika because I knew it annoyed Dustin, and it was unlikely that the four “Martian” humans would care for it. (Most of the actual Martians seemed indifferent to music; it was background noise to them, neither pleasant nor unpleasant.) But I hadn’t thought about all the room in the warehouse, where the four workers had lived before we arrived. It was a little cold, but large and totally isolated from our own living quarters. You could back up your balalaika with a brass band, and no one could hear you.
So I set out to make a thing like a balalaika. I could have just described it to the automatic shop machine, but there was no satisfaction in that.
No wood around to work with except the blocks of koa I brought for carving, so I asked the machine what it could simulate. My balalaika at home was made of rosewood, light and dark, and ebony. I found a picture of myself playing it, and so was able to measure it precisely from the image. I found instructions for making your own balalaika in Russian, no problem.
The three strings were easy, carbon fiber and nylon wires. The “wood” had the right color and density but wouldn’t fool a termite. The thinnest stock it could generate was two or three times too thick. So my first order of business was to take a strip of it and see whether I could plane it down.

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