"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what I was thinking."
"I don't think you were thinking at all. You were being a foolish girl, and you put more lives than your own into danger."
About a dozen people were behind her. "Dargo," Dr. Jefferson said. "She's back, she's alive. Let's give her a little rest."
"Has she given us any rest?" she barked.
"I'm sorry! I'll do anything—"
"You will? Isn't that pretty. What do you propose to do?"
Dr. Estrada put a hand on her shoulder. "Please let me talk to her." Oh, good, a shrink. I needed a xenologist. But she would listen better than Solingen.
"Oh ... do what you want. I'll deal with her later." She turned and walked through the small crowd.
Some people gathered around me and I tried not to cry. I wouldn't want her to think she had made me cry. But there were plenty of shoulders and arms for me to hide my eyes in.
"Carmen." Dr. Estrada touched my forearm. "We ought to talk before your parents get back."
"Okay." A dress rehearsal. I followed her down to the middle of A.
She had a large room to herself, but it was her office as well as quarters. "Lie down here," she indicated her single bunk, "and just try to relax. Begin at the beginning."
"The beginning isn't very interesting. Dargo Solingen embarrassed me in front of everybody. Not the first time, either. Sometimes I feel like I'm her little project. Let's drive Carmen crazy."
"So in going outside like that, you were getting back at her? Getting even in some way?"
"I didn't think of it that way. I just had to get out, and that was the only way."
"Maybe not, Carmen. We can work on ways to get away without physically leaving."
"Like Dad's zen thing, okay. But what I did, or why, isn't really important. It's what I found!"
"So what did you find?"
"Life. Intelligent life. They saved me." I could hear my voice and even I didn't believe it.
"Hmm," she said. "Go on."
"I'd walked four kilometers or so and was about to turn around and go back. But I stepped on a place that wouldn't support my weight. Me and the dog. We fell through. At least ten meters, maybe twenty."
"And you weren't hurt?"
"I was! I heard my ankle break. I broke a rib, maybe more than one, here."
She pressed the area gently. "But you're walking."
"They fixed ... I'm getting ahead of myself."
"So you fell through and broke your ankle?"
"Then I spent a long time finding the dog. My suit light went out when I hit the ground. But finally I found it, found the dog, and got my umbilical plugged in."
"So you had plenty of oxygen."
"But I was freezing. The circuit to my gloves and boots wasn't working. I really thought that was it."
"But you survived."
"I was rescued. I was passing out and this, uh, this Martian came floating down. I saw him in the dog's light. Then everything went black and I woke up—"
"Carmen! You have to see that this was a dream. A hallucination."
"Then how did I get here?"
Her mouth set in a stubborn line. "You were very lucky. You wandered around in the storm and came back here."
"But there was no storm when I left! Just a little wind. The storm came up while I was ... well, I was underground. Where the Martians live."
"You've been through so much, Carmen..."
"This was not a dream!" I tried to stay calm. "Look. You can check the air left in the tanks. My suit and the dog. There will be hours unaccounted for. I was breathing the Martians’ air."
"Carmen ... be reasonable..."
"No, you be reasonable. I'm not saying anything more until—" There was one knock on the door and Mother burst in, followed by Dad.
"My baby," she said. When did she ever call me that? She hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. "You found your way back."
"Mother ... I was just telling Dr. Estrada ... I didn't find my way back. I was brought."
"She had a dream about Martians. A hallucination."
"No! Would you just listen?"
Dad sat down cross-legged, looking up at me. "Start at the beginning, honey."
I did. I took a deep breath and started with taking the suit and the dog and going out to be alone. Falling and breaking my ankle. Waking up in the little hospital room. Red and Green and the others. Seeing the base on their screen. Being healed and brought back.
There was an uncomfortable silence after I finished. "If it wasn't for the dust storm," Dad said, "it would be easy to verify your ... your account. Nobody could see you from here, though, and the satellites won't show anything, either."
"Maybe that's why he was in a rush to bring me back. If they'd waited for the storm to clear, they'd be exposed."
"Why would they be afraid of that?" Dr. Estrada asked.
"Well, I don't know. But I guess it's obvious that they don't want anything to do with us—"
"Except to rescue a lost girl," Mother said.
"Is that so hard to believe? I mean, I couldn't say three words to them, but they seemed to be friendly and good-hearted."
"It just sounds so fantastic," Dad said. "How would you feel in our position? By far the easiest explanation is that you were under extreme stress and—"
"No! Dad, do you really think I would do that? Come up with some elaborate lie?" I could see on his face that he did indeed. Maybe not a lie, but a fantasy. "There's objective proof. Look at the dog. It has a huge dent where it hit the ground in the cave."
"Maybe so; I haven't seen it," he said. "But being devil's advocate, aren't there many other ways that could have happened?"
"What about the air? The air in the dog! I didn't use enough of it to have been out so long."
He nodded. "That would be compelling. Did you dock it?"
Oh hell. "Yes. I wasn't thinking I'd have to prove anything." When you dock the dog it automatically starts to refill air and power. "There must be a record. How much oxygen a dog takes on when it recharges."
They all looked at each other. "Not that I know of," Dad said. "But you don't need that. Let's just do an MRI of your ankle. That'll tell if it was recently broken."
"But they fixed it. The break might not show."
"It will show," Dr. Estrada said. "Unless there was some kind of ... magic involved."
Mother's face was getting red. "Would you both leave? I need to talk to Carmen alone." They both nodded and went out.
Mother watched the door close. "I know you aren't lying. You've never been good at that."
"Thanks," I said. Thanks for nothing.
"But it was a stupid thing to do, going off like that, and you know it."
"I do, I do! And I'm sorry for all the trouble I—"
"But look. I'm a scientist, and so is your dad, after a fashion, and so is almost everybody else who's going to hear this story today. You see what I'm saying?"
"Yeah, I think so. They're going to be skeptical."
"Of course they are. They don't get paid for believing things. They get paid for questioning them."
"And you, Mother. Do you believe me?"
She stared at me with a fierce intensity I'd never seen before in my life. "Look. Whatever happened to you, I believe one hundred percent that you're telling the truth. You're telling the truth about what you remember, what you believe happened."
"But I might be nuts."
"Well, wouldn't you say so? If I came in with your story? You'd say ‘Mom's getting old.’ Wouldn't you?"
"Yeah, maybe I would."
"And to prove that I wasn't crazy, I would take you out and show you something that couldn't be explained any other way. You know what they say about extraordinary claims?"
"They require extraordinary evidence."
"That's right. Once the storm calms down, you and I are going out to where you say ... to where you fell through to the cave." She put her hand on the back of my head and rubbed my
hair. "I so much want to believe you. For my sake as well as yours. To find life here."
3
The Dragon Lady
Paul was so sweet when he came in from his search. He hugged me so hard I cried out, from the rib, and then laughed. I'll always remember that. Me laughing and him crying, with his big grin.
For hours he had pictured me out there dead. Prepared himself for finding my body.
It was his for the asking. At least that hadn't changed.
Mother wanted to call a general assembly, so I could tell everybody the complete story, all at once, but Dargo Solingen wouldn't allow it. She said that children do stunts like this to draw attention to themselves, and she wasn't going to reward me with an audience. Of course she's an expert about children, never having had any herself. Good thing. They'd be monsters.
So it was like the whisper game, where you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence to the person next to you, and she whispers it to the next, and so on. When it gets back to you, it's all wrong, sometimes in a funny way.
This was not particularly funny. People would ask if I was really going around on the surface without a Mars suit, or think the Martians stripped me naked and interrogated me, or they broke my ankle on purpose. I put a detailed account on my website, but a lot of people would rather talk than read.
The MRI didn't help much, except for people who wanted to believe I was lying. Dr. Jefferson said it looked like an old childhood injury, long ago healed. Mother was with me at the time, and she told him she was absolutely sure I'd never broken that ankle. To people like Dargo Solingen that was a big shrug; so I'd lied about that, too. I think we won Dr. Jefferson over, though he was inclined to believe me, anyhow. So did most of the people who came over on the John Carter with us. They were willing to believe in Martians before they'd believe I would make up something like that.
Dad didn't want to talk about it, but Mother was fascinated. I went to talk with her at the lab after dinner, where she and two others were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on an experiment.
"I don't see how they could be actual Martians," she said, "in the sense that we're Earthlings. I mean, if they evolved here as oxygen-water creatures similar to us, then that was three billion years ago. And, as you said, a large animal isn't going to evolve alone, without any other animals. Nor will it suddenly appear, without smaller, simpler animals preceding it. So they must be like us."
"From Earth?"
She laughed. "I don't think so. None of the eight-limbed creatures on Earth have very high technology. I think they have to have come from yet another planet. Unless we're completely wrong about areology, about the history of conditions on this planet, they can't have come from here."
"What if they used to live on the surface?" I said. "Then moved underground as the planet dried up and lost its air?"
She shook her head. "The time scale. No species more complicated than a bacterium has survived for billions of years."
"None on Earth," I said.
"Touché," she laughed. A bell chimed and she went to the other side of the room and looked inside an aquarium, or terrarium. Or ares-arium, here, I suppose. She looked at the things growing inside and typed some numbers onto her clipboard.
"So they went underground three billion years ago with the technology to duplicate what sounds like a high-altitude Earth environment. And stayed that way for three billion years." She shook her head. "The record in Earth creatures is a bacterium that's symbiotic with aphids. Genome hasn't changed in fifty million years."
She laughed. "This would be sixty times longer? For such a complex organism? And I still want to know where the fossils are. Maybe they dug them all up and destroyed them, just to confuse us?"
"But it's not like we've looked everywhere. Paul says it may be that life wasn't distributed uniformly, and we just haven't found any of the islands where things lived. The dinosaurs or whatever."
"Well, you know it didn't work that way on Earth. Fossils everywhere, from the bottom of the sea to the top of the Himalayas. Crocodile fossils in Antarctica."
"Okay. That's Earth."
"It's all we have. Coffee?" I said no and she poured herself half a cup. "You're right that it's weak to generalize from one example. Paul could very well be right, too; there's no evidence one way or the other.
"But look. We know all about one form of life on Mars: you and me and the others. We have to live in an artificial bubble that contains an alien environment, maintained by high technology, because we are the aliens here. So you stumble on eight-legged potato people who also live in a bubble that contains an alien environment, evidently maintained by high technology. The simplest explanation is that they're aliens, too. Alien to Mars."
"Yeah, I don't disagree. I know about Occam's Razor."
She smiled at that. "What's fascinating to me, one of many things, is that you spent hours in that environment and felt no ill effects. Their planet's very Earthlike."
"What if it was Earth?"
That stopped her. "Wouldn't we have noticed?"
"I mean a long time ago. What if they lived only on mountaintops and developed high technology thousands and thousands of years ago. Then they all left."
"It's an idea," she said. "But it's hard to believe that every one of them would be willing and able to leave—and that there would be no trace of their civilization, ten or even a hundred thousand years later. And where are their genetic precursors? The eight-legged equivalent of apes?"
"You don't really believe me."
"Well, I do; I do," she said seriously. "I just don't think there's an easy explanation."
"Like Dargo Solingen's? The Figment of Imagination Theory?"
"Especially that. People don't have complex consistent hallucinations; they're called hallucinations because they're fantastic, dreamlike.
"Besides, I saw the dog; you couldn't have put that dent in it with a lead-lined baseball bat. And she can't explain the damage to your Mars suit, either, without positing that you leaped off the side of a cliff just to give yourself an alibi." She was getting worked up. "And I'm your mother, even if I'm not a model one. I would goddamn remember if you had ever broken your ankle! That healed hairline fracture is enough proof for me—and for Dr. Jefferson and Dr. Milius and anybody else in this goddamn hole who didn't convict you before you opened your mouth."
"You've been a good mother," I said.
She suddenly sat up and awkwardly hugged me across the table. "Not so good. Or you wouldn't have done this."
She sat down and rubbed my hand. "But if you hadn't done it—" She laughed. "—how long would it have been before we stumbled on these aliens? They're watching us, but don't seem eager to have us see them."
The window on the wall was a greenboard of differential equations. She clicked on her clipboard and it became a real-time window. The storm was still blowing, but it had thinned out enough so I could see a vague outline of Telegraph Hill.
"Maybe tomorrow we'll be able to go out and take a look. If Paul's free, he'd probably like to come along; nobody knows the local real estate better than him."
I stood up. "I can hardly wait. But I will wait, promise."
"Good. Once is enough." She smiled up at me. "Get some rest. Probably a long day tomorrow."
Actually, I was up past midnight catching up on schoolwork, or not quite catching up. My brain wouldn't settle down enough to worry about Kant and his Categorical Imperative. Not with aliens out there waiting to be contacted.
4
Bad Cough
Paul was free until 1400, so right after breakfast we suited up and equipped a dog with extra oxygen and climbing gear. He'd done a lot of climbing and caving on both Earth and Mars. If we found the hole—when we found the hole—he was going to approach it roped up, so if he broke through the way I had, he wouldn't fall far or fast.
I'd awakened early with a slight cough, but felt okay. I got some cough suppressant pills from the first-aid locker, chewed one, and put two in my hel
met's tongue-operated pill cache.
We went through the airlock and weren't surprised to see that the storm had covered all my tracks, and everyone else's—including Red's; I was hoping that his sawhorse thing might have gouged out a distinctive mark when it stopped.
We still had a good chance of finding the hole, thanks to the MPS built into the suit and its inertial compass. I'd started counting steps, going west, when I set out from Telegraph Hill, and was close to five thousand when I fell through. That's about four kilometers, maybe an hour's walk in the daytime.
"So we're probably being watched," Mother said, and waved to the invisible camera. "Hey there, Mr. Red! Hello, Dr. Green! We're bringing back your patient with the insurance forms."
I waved, too, both arms. Paul put up both his hands palm out, showing he wasn't armed. Though what it would mean to a four-armed creature, I wasn't sure.
No welcoming party appeared, so we went to the right of Telegraph Hill and started walking and counting. A lot of the terrain looked familiar. Several times I had us move to the left or right when I was sure I had been closer to a given formation.
We walked a half kilometer or so past Paul's wrecked dumbo. I hadn't seen it in the dark.
Suddenly I noticed something. "Wait! Paul! I think it's just ahead of you." I hadn't realized it, walking in the dark, but what seemed to be a simple rise in the ground was actually rounded, like an overturned shallow bowl.
"Like a little lava dome, maybe," he said. "That's where you fell through." He pointed at something I couldn't quite see from my angle and height. "Big enough for you and the dog, anyhow."
He unloaded his mountaineering stuff from the dog, then took a hammer and pounded into the ground a long piton, which is like a spearpoint with a hole for the rope. Then he did another one about a foot away. He passed an end of the rope through both of them and tied it off.
He pulled on the rope with all his weight. "Carmen, Laura, help me test this." We did and it still held. He looped most of the rope over his shoulder and took a couple of turns under his arms and then clamped it through a metal thing he called a crab. It's supposed to keep you from falling too fast, even if you let go.