Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound (40 page)

(later) I heard splashing; the pool finally filled. Took a towel over. Namir had the current on and was swimming in place.

I’d never seen him naked. He looks good for a man his age. Solid muscles and only a little paunch. A lot of hair. He’s circumcised, something I’d only seen in pictures. It makes him look vulnerable. It also makes his dick look longer, or maybe it just is longer. I’ll have to ask Paul. Or maybe not.

The timer rang, and he got out. I would like to report that his vulnerable penis sprang instantly erect when I stepped out of my robe, but alas it just sat there. Perhaps he’s seen a naked woman or two before. Maybe even one with tits.

The water was cold but felt good, and I warmed up fast with the current at six knots. Turned it down to one for the backstroke. Namir did glance at my frontal aspect, cunt-al, but then politely turned away. I had a wicked impulse to tease him but don’t feel that I know him well enough. Which is odd, after all these weeks. But he’s a formal, quiet man. He jokes and laughs when it’s appropriate; but when he’s by himself, he looks like he’s thinking about something sad.

Which of course he must be. He walked through Tel Aviv right after Gehenna, millions of his countrymen dead and rotting in the desert sun. What could anyone learn, or do, or believe, to get over that?

He told us that two of the men under his command killed themselves that first day. Shot themselves. He said that like he was describing the weather.

But I think his calm fatalism gives us all a kind of strength. We will probably die on this trip. The trick is to say that without being brave or dramatic. We will probably have powdered eggs for breakfast. We will probably die in five years and three months. Pass the salt, please.

Namir cooked his first dinner last night, and it was pretty good, considering the restrictions he’s working under. Spaghetti with meatless meatballs, with reconstituted vegetables that weren’t too mushy. Before long we’ll all be staring at the hydroponic garden chanting “grow, grow.”

Actually, we’ll all be doing something more or less constructive. We talked about that after dinner. Paul’s continuing his VR course work for a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics, to complement his geology degrees. Elza is studying trauma medicine, and also does abstract needlepoint and God knows what kind of bizarre sex. Dustin says he doesn’t have to actually
do
anything. A philosopher by training, he might burst into thought at any moment. He’s also practicing trick shots on the pool table, though I don’t know how long that will last. Elza asked him to limit the noise to ten minutes at a time, preferably once a year.

Moonboy is a good pianist, huge hands, but he usually plays silently, with earphones. He’s writing a long composition that he began when he left Mars. He’s a xenologist, of course, like Meryl and me, so we have plenty to do, getting ready to meet the Others. Meryl also does word and number puzzles with grim seriousness. Taped to her wall she has a crossword puzzle that has ten thousand squares.

Namir does woodwork as well as cooking; he brought some fancy wood and knives from Earth. He also studies poetry, though he says he hasn’t written any since he was young. He works with formal poetry in Hebrew and Japanese as well as English; his job title at the UN before Gehenna was “cultural attaché.” I wonder how many people knew he was a spy. Maybe they all did. He even looks like a spy, muscular and handsome and dark. He moves with grace. I sort of want him and sort of don’t.

The Martians weren’t in on the after-dinner conversation; they rarely join us for meals. They don’t eat human food and perhaps they’re uncomfortable watching us consume it. But I’m pretty sure that their answer to “What do you plan to do for the next six and a half or thirteen years?” would be “Same as always.” They’re born into a specific social and intellectual function and don’t deviate much.

Fly-in-Amber’s yellow family are recorders; they simply remember everything that happens in their presence. They’re weirdly acute and comprehensive; I could fan a book’s pages in front of Fly- in-Amber and immediately afterward—or ten years after—he could recite the book back to me.

Snowbird’s white clan is harder to pin down. They classify things and visualize and articulate relationships. They’re naturally curious and seem to like humans. Unlike Fly-in-Amber’s family, I have to say.

Every kind of Martian has remarkable verbal memory. They’re born with a basic vocabulary, evidently different for each family, and add new words just by hearing them. They have no written language, though human linguists are making headway on that. Meryl and Moonboy and I are adding to an existing vocabulary of about five hundred words and wordlike noises, with help mainly from Snowbird. Meryl is best with it; she worked with porpoise and whale communication, inventing phonemelike symbols for repeated sounds.

We’ll never be able to speak it; it’s full of noises that people can’t make, at least not with the mouth. But Moonboy believes he can approximate it with a keyboard in synthesizer mode, with percussion, and fortunately Snowbird is fascinated by the idea and willing to work with him hour after hour, tweaking the synthesizer’s output.

This doesn’t read much like a diary. I remember my freshman year, on the way to Mars, studying the London journals of Pepys and Boswell. But Pepys was wandering around his ruined city, and Boswell had Dr. Johnson to write about, then going down to London Bridge for his whores. The professor said Boswell had a condom made of wood. That’s stranger than Martians.

We need a Boswell or a Pepys instead of, or along with, this ragtag bunch of scientists and spies. The huge tragedy of London’s collapsing under fire and plague is small, compared to eight billion human beings snuffed out for being human.

1 May 2088

The sponsors of the Wolf 25 expedition required that each of us keeps a record of our experience, but left the form of that record up to the individual. Mine will be a note to you, my imaginary friend. You are very intelligent but don’t happen to know what I’m about to say, and so are eternally interested.

This is the record kept by General Namir Zahari, originally commissioned by the Mossad, an intelligence arm of the Israeli army. I am joined by American intelligence officers Colonel Dustin Beckner and Colonel Elza Guadalupe, to both of whom I am married.

There are no other military personnel on the mission. There are two native Martians, Snowbird (of the white clan) and Fly- in-Amber (of the yellow), and four humans with Martian citizenship. The pilot, Paul Collins, resigned a commission in the American Space Force in order to come to Mars. He is married to Carmen Dula, who was the first person to meet the Martians and is circumstantially responsible for the complications that ensued.

Though let me record here that any contact with humans would ultimately have resulted in the same unfortunate sequence of events; the Others apparently had the whole scenario planned for tens of thousands of years.

If you look at this as a military operation, which in a sense it is, it is the most ambitious “attack” ever launched. All of the energy expended in all of the wars in modern history wouldn’t propel this huge iceberg to Wolf 25 and back. Even with free energy, it’s more expensive than World War II.

If it’s the most expensive such project, it may also be the most ambiguous. We don’t have the slightest idea of what we will face there, or what we will do. By far the most probable outcome will be that the Others will destroy us long before we’re close enough to harm them.

But we cannot do nothing. Once they realize we thwarted their attempt to destroy humanity, they will simply do it again, even if it takes centuries.

The fact that the Others are so mind-numbingly slow does not really work to our advantage. Our experience with them in the Triton “demonstration”—and what the Martian leader Red found out about them—indicates that they plan ahead for many contingencies, and their machines react automatically when conditions are right. The concept of “Wait—hold your fire!” probably is not in their repertoire.

The small robot ship that precedes us may be our best hope. It will start broadcasting from right before turnaround, and so the message will get there long before we arrive. It will explain in detail what our situation is and plead that they let us approach and talk.

We hope they will not vaporize it as soon as it is detected.

We do know they understand and “speak” English, though there would be no such thing as a conversation between one of them and one of us. You could ask a yes-or-no question and would have to wait half an hour for a reply, unless they had a machine set up to interpret the question and deliver a prerecorded or cybernetically generated answer.

The last message we got from Triton was evidently one of those: “I am sorry. You already know too much.” Then Triton exploded with sixteen hundred times the energy output of the Sun, a fraction of a second after the Other sped back to Wolf 25 with tremendous acceleration. Then it tried to use Red in a delayed-action attempt to destroy life on Earth. But the Martian gave up his own life instead.

(It was not so great a sacrifice, in an absolute sense, since he would have died anyhow, along with life on Earth. But it’s touching and heartening that he would go against the will of his creators in our favor. He was able to defeat his own programming to make a moral choice, which gives us a small wedge of hope.)

Carmen is of the opinion that even if the Others destroy this vessel, the
ad Astra
, the fact that we came in peace could work in the human race’s favor. I didn’t publicly disagree with her, but that’s naively optimistic. The flag of truce is at best an admission of weakness. It can also be the first warning of a desperate attack, when your opponent has little strength and nothing to lose.

I think that if they allow us to approach their planet, or some surrogate planet, it will be to evaluate our strength. Probably just prior to destroying us.

But that’s a human soldier talking. Soldier, diplomat, and spy. I have no idea what action their godlike psychology might produce. Carmen could turn out to be the pessimist. They’ll apologize for trying to exterminate everybody—“What were we thinking?”—and send us back home laden with treasure and praise. And pigs will fly.

At any rate, they hold all the cards, and we don’t even know the name of the game. We have a little over five years to think about it and agree on a course of action. If we don’t agree, I suppose the majority will rule.

Or the strongest minority.

The humans said I must keep a written diary of this expedition, which I complained was ridiculous, since all I am is a living, breathing diary. But what if I died? they asked. I never think in those terms, since when I die the nonredundant parts of my memory will be passed to my successor. But in fact I might be physically obliterated out here, something that has not happened to a member of my family for 4362 ares. A certain amount of knowledge was lost that day, unrecoverable. So I have to agree with them, and am writing this down, though it is unutterably slow and imprecise, and includes the labor of translation, since we have no written language.

English is their language, so I will use it, though French and Russian are easier for me to speak, since they have more sounds like our own.

Not speaking my own language depresses me. Snowbird is missing her “white” language, too, perhaps more than I miss mine; theirs is prettier, if less accurate. The consensus language we’re constrained to use lacks both qualities. And English is unspeakable. Namir, my favorite human here, can converse with me in Japanese, which is the most pleasant human language I know.

This is the first of May, 2088, the last day when our clocks and calendars will be the same as those on Earth and Mars. When we reach turnaround, halfway to our target, it will be August 13, 2091, on the ship, but back on Earth it will be July 2, 2100, almost nine years later. They say this is because of general relativity, though it makes no sense to me. They say our clocks run faster because we are moving, and although I know it’s true, it also makes no sense to me. Snowbird seems to understand it somewhat. She told me that little t, which is our time, is equal to c over a times the hyperbolic cosine of a over c times Earth time, which is big T. I suppose it’s true, but all I have to do is remember it. I think if I had to understand it, my brain would overheat and explode.

We have been accelerating for eight hours, and I think it will be eight
years
before I get used to it, if ever. It is like carrying more than your own weight on your back. The instant it started, I had to shit. That’s an impolite word, for some reason, but is the closest human word to what we do. I went as fast as I could, which was slowly, into our living area, to the patch of dirt we use for recycling our toxins. Snowbird was already there, being younger and stronger, but she respected my seniority and allowed me to step in first. The extra gravity did accelerate the process, which is the only good thing I can say about it.

I told the pilot, Paul, that I thought it was unfair, and asked him why we couldn’t accelerate at Mars gravity, so everyone would be comfortable. He said it would take us more than two years longer to get there. I said if we’re all going to die when we get there anyhow (as Namir says), then I should think he would want to take more time, not less. He laughed and said I was right, but he didn’t turn down the acceleration. Perhaps he can’t. It’s all very strange, but I have been dealing with humans almost from the beginning, and nothing surprises me anymore.

I should say something about the Others, toward whose planet we are recklessly speeding. They created us Martians, evidently twenty-seven thousand Earth years ago. We are biological machines, as are humans, but humans are not in agreement as to who designed them.

The Others had observed humans evolving into tool-using creatures, then fire-using, and thought it was only a matter of time before they had starships and would present a danger.