Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound (29 page)

At first there was just a faint glow surrounding the moon, as if a wispy cloud had moved in front of it. Then it was suddenly dramatic.

People who have seen total solar eclipses say it was like that, but more so. A brilliant nimbus of pearly light spread across half the sky, the full moon suddenly a black circle in the middle, dark by contrast.

A crackle of static and a human voice. "Holy shit. That was close." Paul!

* * * *

It was Red who had suggested the plan, which was probably not something a sane space pilot would have come up with.

After touchdown, when he was careening along on skis trying not to live up to his nickname, he should look for an area that was locally "uphill." Try to stop with the lander pointed at least slightly skyward. Then Red would get off, stand clear, and Paul could hit full throttle—get over the horizon and try to make orbit. When he disappeared from sight, Red would measure off ten minutes and then open his suit and die. That would give Paul time to make orbit. But not so much time that he would go completely around and be over Red when he died.

The supposition that Red's death would trigger the explosion turned out to be a good guess.

It was a combination of luck and skill. He could steer to a certain extent with the skis, and so when he had almost slowed to nothing, he aimed for the slope of some small nameless crater. When he slid to a stop, he was pointing about fifteen degrees uphill, with nothing in the way.

Red was already wearing his gauzy suit. He cycled through the airlock and picked his way down the crater side. As soon as he said he was clear, Paul goosed it. Once over the horizon, he tweaked the attitude so he got into a low lunar orbit and waited.

When it blew he was almost blinded by sparkles in his eyes, gamma rays rushing through, and he had a sudden feverish heat all over his body. Behind him, he could see the glow of vaporized lunar material being blasted into the sky.

That little crater that saved him really earned the right to a name. But it had boiled completely away, along with everything else for hundreds of kilometers, and in its place was a perfectly circular hole bigger than Tsiolkovski, previously the largest crater.

I thought they should name it Crash.

* * * *

So every January first we present a petition for lifting the quarantine, and every year our case is not strong enough. But now there's a Space Elevator on Mars, so there's a lot of pretty cheap travel back and forth within the quarantine. After five years on New Mars we went back, and it was good to have a planet beneath your feet—and over your head as well.

Oz invented a Church of Holy Rational Weirdness so that he could marry me with Paul and not offend any of our sensibilities. I was pregnant and thought there were already too many bastards on Mars.

My first was a girl, and I named her after her grandmother, so I could see her smile. Her middle name is Mayfly, and I hope she lives forever. The second, with the same middle name, was a boy.

People who don't know us might wonder why a kid with jet-black hair would be named Red.

STARBOUND

An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.

You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.

(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)

But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.

“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.

“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.

“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.

It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.

Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.

A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.

Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.

Paul and I had won the gamete lottery, along with four other couples. For all of us, the sperm and ova came from frozen samples we’d left on Earth, away from the radiation bath of Mars.

I felt a curious and unpleasant lightness in my breasts, which were now officially just ornaments. None of the new children would be breast-fed. None of them would suffer birth trauma, either, at least in the sense of being rammed through a wet tunnel smaller than a baby’s head. There might be some trauma in suddenly having to breathe for oneself, but so far none of them had cried. That was a little eerie.

They wouldn’t have a mother; I wouldn’t
be
a mother, in any traditional sense. Only genetically. They’d be raised by the colony, one big extended family, though most of the individual attention they got would be from Alphonzo Jefferson and Barbara Manchester, trained to run the “creche,” about to more than double in population.

My wine was too warm and too strong, made with wine concentrate, alcohol, and water. “They look okay. But I can’t help feeling cheated.”

Josie snorted. “Don’t. It’s like passing a loaf of hard bread.”

“Not so much the birth itself, as being pregnant. Is that weird?”

“Sounds weird to me,” Paul said. “Sick all the time, carrying all that extra weight.”

“I liked it,” Josie said. “The sickness is just part of the routine. I never felt more alive.” She was already 50 percent more alive than a normal person, a lean, large athlete. “But that was on Earth,” she conceded.

“Oh, hell.” I slid my drink over to Paul. “I have to take a walk.”

Nobody said anything. I went down to the dressing room and stripped, put on a skinsuit, then clamped on the Mars suit piece by piece, my mind a blank as I went through the rote safety procedure. When I was tight, I started the air and clomped up to Air Lock One. I hesitated with my thumb on the button.

This was how it all began.

Carmen Dula never set out to become the first human ambassador to an alien race. Nor did she aspire to become one of the most hated people on Earth—or off Earth, technically—but which of us has control over our destiny?

Most of us do have more control. It was Carmen’s impulsiveness that brought her both distinctions.

Her parents dragged her off to Mars when she was eighteen, along with her younger brother Card. The small outpost there, which some called a colony, had decided to invite a shipload of families.

A shitload of trouble, some people said. None of the kids were under ten, though, and most of the seventy- five people living there, in inflated bubbles under the Martian surface, enjoyed the infusion of new blood, of young blood.

On the way over from Earth, about halfway through the eight-month voyage, Carmen had a brief affair with the pilot, Paul Collins. It was brief because the powers-that-be on Mars found out about it immediately, and suggested that at thirty-two, Paul shouldn’t be dallying with an impressionable teenaged girl. Carmen was insulted, feeling that at nineteen she was not a “girl” and was the only one in charge of her body.

The first day they were on Mars, before they even settled into their cramped quarters, Carmen found out that the “powers”-that-be were one single dour power, administrator Dargo Solingen. She obviously resented Carmen on various levels and proceeded to make the Earth girl her little project.

It came to a head when Dargo discovered Carmen swimming, skinny-dipping, after midnight in a new water tank. She was the oldest of the six naked swimmers, and so took the brunt of the punishment. Among other things, she was forbidden to visit the surface, which was their main recreation and escape, for two months.

She rankled under this, and rebelled in an obvious way: when everyone was asleep, she suited up and went outside alone, which broke the First Commandment of life on Mars, at the time: Never go outside without a buddy.

She’d planned to go straight out a few kilometers, and straight back, and slip back into her bunk before anyone knew she was gone. It was not to be.

She fell through a thin shell of crust, which had never happened before, plummeted a couple of dozen meters, and broke an ankle and a rib. She was doomed. Out of radio contact, running out of air, and about to freeze solid.

But she was rescued by a Martian.

Humans call me Fly-in-Amber, and I am the “Martian” best qualified to tell the story of how we made contact with humans.

I will put Martian in quotation marks only once. We know we are not from Mars, though we live here. Some of the humans who live here also call themselves Martians, which is confusing and ludicrous.

We had observed human robot probes landing on Mars, or orbiting it, for decades before they started to build their outpost, uncomfortably close to where we live, attracted by the same subterranean (or subarean) source of water as those who placed us here, the Others.

With more than a century to prepare for the inevitable meeting, we had time to plan various responses. Violence was discussed and discarded. We had no experience with it other than in observation of human activities on radio, television, and cube. You would kick our asses, if we had them, but we are four-legged and excrete mainly through hundreds of pores in our feet.

The only actual plan was to feign ignorance. Not admit (at first) that we understood many human languages. You would eventually find out we were listening to you, of course, but you would understand our need for caution.

We are not good at planning, since our lives used to be safe and predictable, but in any case we could not have planned on Carmen Dula. She walked over the top of a lava bubble that had been worn thin, and fell through.

She was obviously injured and in grave danger. Our choices were to contact the colony and tell them what had happened or rescue her ourselves. The former course had too many variables—explaining who we were and what we knew and all; she would probably run out of air long before they could find her. So our leader flew out to retrieve her.

(We have one absolute leader at a time; when he/she/it dies, another is born. More intelligent, larger, stronger, and faster than the rest of us, and usually long-lived. Unless humans interfere, it turns out.)

The leader, whom Carmen christened Red, took a floater out and picked up Carmen and her idiot robot companion, called a dog, and brought them back to us. Our medicine cured her broken bones and frostbite.

We are not sure why it worked on her, but we don’t know how it works on us, either. It always has.

We agreed not to speak to her, for the time being. We only spoke our native languages, which the human vocal apparatus can’t reproduce. Humans can’t even hear the high-pitched part.

So Red took her back to the colony the next night, taking advantage of a sandstorm to remain hidden. Left her at the air-lock door, with no explanation.

It was very amusing to monitor what happened afterward—we do listen to all communications traffic between Earth and Mars. Nobody wanted to believe her fantastic story, since Martians do not and could not exist, but no one could explain how she had survived so long. They even found evidence of the broken bones we healed but assumed they were old injuries she had forgotten about, or was lying about.

We could have had years of entertainment, following their tortuous logic, but illness forced our hand.

All of us Martians go through a phase, roughly corresponding to the transition between infancy and childhood, when for a short period our bodies clean themselves out and start over. It isn’t pleasant, but neither is it frightening, since it happens to everybody at the same time of life.