* * * *
As it turned out, the launch was easier on the Martians than the humans. Oz, Joan, Marly, and Moonboy had been on Mars for eight or ten ares, Dargo for twelve, and they nearly suffocated under 3.5 gees; I had some trouble myself. Red and Green said it was like carrying a heavy load, but both of them routinely carried more than their own weight, tending crops.
Red enjoyed it immensely, in fact, the experience of space travel. He was budded in 1922 and had watched the human space program from its infancy to its current adolescence. He knew more about it than I did.
He and a couple of dozen others were especially well prepared for dealing with humans. Ever since the Mars colony's planning stages, they'd known that contact was inevitable. Out of a natural sense of caution, they wanted to put it off for as long as possible, but they would come to that meeting well prepared. Even the charade of not being able to speak human languages had been rehearsed since before my father was born.
My accident moved the timetable up, but not by all that much. Our satellite radar had shown the presence of water in their location, so eventually it would have been explored.
Another thing the accident did was turn a human into a relative of a Martian. They have a thing called beghnim, or at least that's a rough transliteration. It's a relationship, but also the word for a person—I was Red's beghnim because he had saved my life, which gave him a responsibility for my future. He said there used to be a similar custom among humans in old Japan.
On the way to Little Mars, we spent a lot of time talking with Red and Green—the others more than me, since I was finishing up my last year at Maryland. In fact, I was in a kind of nonstop study mode; when I wasn't doing schoolwork I was going over the notes that the others made from their conversations with the Martians.
It was challenging but tiring, my schedule more regimented than it had ever been under Dargo's ministrations on Mars. Besides the schoolwork and colloquy with Red and Green, I kept in contact with Paul and my family. Paul was understanding and timed his calls around my schedule. As the time lag increased, our romantic conversations took on a surreal aspect. He would say something endearing and I would reply, then click open a textbook and study plant physiology for seven and a half minutes, then listen to his response and reply again, and go back to adenosine triphosphate decomposition for another seven and a half minutes—and of course he was doing something similar on his side. Not the most passionate situation.
There was also two hours of exercise a day, in one of the two one-gee extensions. One side rowing, one side cycling, both plus the resistance machine. It wasn't too unpleasant; my only time for light reading or casual VR. I think we all looked forward to the two hours’ guaranteed alone time.
The seven months’ transit went by pretty fast, a lot faster to me than going to Mars, four years before. (Two and a fraction ares. We decided to switch to Earth units at the halfway point.) I guess subjective distance is usually that way: when you take a trip to a new place, it feels longer than the return will seem. And we had plenty to occupy ourselves with.
I met twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in VR with the Mars Project Corporation Board of Trustees. That was pretty excruciating at first, with the time lag. When the lag was several minutes, it was less a conversation than an exchange of set speeches. Each of the four or five—there were twenty-four on the Board, but everybody didn't attend the meetings—would have his or her say, and I would respond. It was anything but spontaneous, since most of them e-mailed me their text hours before the meeting, for which I was grateful.
Sometimes Dargo joined in, which didn't help.
Red couldn't take part directly; it would be years before we knew enough about the Martians’ nervous system to attempt VR with them. So I'd normally go talk with him just before the meeting, even if there wasn't anything that directly needed his input.
I enjoyed talking with him, even in the dim fungoid chill of his quarters. (He said he didn't mind coming to my side, but he was much more expansive in his own environment.) In a curious way, he was more "human" to me than many of the board members and professors with whom I had regular contact, and even one of my fellow passengers.
More than an are before launch, we'd learned that Red was unique—in a sense, the only one of his family. He would live hundreds of ares, and when he died, another Red would be budded.
"I'm a Renaissance Martian," he said. "I'm supposed to know everything, be able to duplicate any other family's functions. The one who preceded me was the last who could actually do that. Contact with the human race, radio and television, made that impossible.
"Those like Fly-in-Amber remember everything, but they don't have to make sense of it. I do. Somewhere between Jack Benny and general relativity that became impossible." Jack Benny, I found out, was not a scientist.
He may have been obsolete, what with all that information overload, but he was still the logical one to go rescue the first alien they made contact with. He may not be the Renaissance Martian anymore, but he still was Einstein and Superman and the pope all rolled into one.
I asked him why, if the budding process could result in one individual like him every couple of centuries, why only one? Why didn't every Martian have his capabilities?
He said he didn't know: "That may be the one thing I can not know." He referred me to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which of course made everything crystal clear.
Red and I had a lot of dramatic shared history, but there was another level of connectedness that was almost human, as if he were a favorite uncle. We were halfway to Earth before it dawned on me that on his side it was necessarily planned and artificial—he'd been studying the human race for more than a century before we met, and he knew how to act, to form a familylike bond with me. When I confronted him with that, he was both amused and a little upset: it was true, but he thought I'd been aware of that all along and was doing the same thing with him. There was also the beghnim factor, which of course could not have been planned.
He and Green also felt a degree of beghnim toward the other thirteen young humans they'd cured of the lung cysts, although it was philosophically complicated, since Martians were the source of the problem as well as its solution.
Our friendship grew over the seven months, perhaps in ways that the other humans couldn't share, although the four researchers spent more time with him than I did.
Dargo never warmed to either of the Martians, but she was hardly a ray of sunshine with the humans either.
I couldn't believe it when I found out that she was going along. Maybe there really is a God and he was getting back at me. The colony administrators were a more likely target for blame, though. Paul was sure she was just getting kicked upstairs, promoted to get her out of the way.
You could make a good case for her qualifications objectively. She had more years of experience in administration than anyone else off Earth, with the exception of Conrad Hilton IV, who was really just an ancient figurehead, living in orbit to keep his heart thumping while others tended the store.
But I couldn't really see how running the Mars "outpost," which she wouldn't call a colony, made her that qualified for administering our odd mix of humans and Martians. Who decided our small group needed some kind of hierarchal structure anyhow? A chief who wasn't really one of the Indians.
I supposed there had to be some third party, someone who was not involved with the actual work with the Martians, to evaluate proposals and be the naysayer. If we tried to work on every proposal the Corporation generously approved, there wouldn't be time to eat or sleep. The argument was that decisions had to be made by someone who was not herself a specialist, so she wouldn't give preferential treatment to xenoanatomy or linguistics or whatever. Martian cuisine. I could agree in principle, but as a practical matter, I would rather trust Oz or Joan—or even Moonboy, odd as he was—to make objective choices.
Anyhow, a lot of people were not sorry to see her go, and many of the same ones were just as glad that I wa
s leaving on the same boat. A kind of poetic justice that she should be locked up in orbit with her troublemaker nemesis.
* * * *
Our orbital elements had been manipulated so we would arrive at Little Mars on the Fourth of July, two cheers for the U.S.A. But it was convenient for me, because my last final exams were a month before that. So my life could be simplified for the last few weeks, before it became complicated in a different way.
In those last few weeks, Earth grew from a bright blue spark to a dot, to a button, and finally to the size of a classroom globe. We moved into the lander and strapped in, but matching orbits with Little Mars was agreeably gentle, almost boring.
We didn't know what boring was. We were about to find out.
2
Formalities
It wasn't just a matter of shaking hands with the president through a feelie glove. The president doesn't come up the Space Elevator without his staff filling up the rest of it. Then there were leaders of all the other seven countries and corporate entities who had built Little Mars, none of whom came up alone either, and the Corporation trustees, and another fifteen or so who had contributed to the Mars Project in some important way.
There were more people in orbit than at any other time in history. One hundred and fifteen were stuffed into the Earth side of Little Mars, and the Hilton was as crowded as a Bombay slum. Less interesting food, probably.
They all had to talk to us, and they all said the same things. After a while I could have used toothpicks to prop my eyes open, but settled for synthetic coffee and drugs. Red was very patient, though of course it was impossible to tell whether he was awake at any given time. That's an advantage to sleeping standing up and having eyes like a potato's.
The French delegation had a champagne reception that was pretty amusing, since there's no way you can open a bottle of champagne at our reduced air pressure without it spraying all over. They sent us a bottle, too, through the complicated biohazard airlock, and there was enough left after the initial fountain for us each to have a glass. The Martians use ethyl alcohol as a cleaning fluid, but it's toxic to them. Joan and Jagrudi don't drink, and Dargo declined, so we three had enough to get a little buzz.
Jag would be with us for six months, before piloting the next Mars shuttle, as it was now called. She was the first person to voluntarily enter the quarantine. She planned to do three and a half more round trips and then stay on Mars as a colonist, stuck by radiation limit as well as quarantine.
I was prematurely, or proactively, jealous of her, an unbeatable rival for Paul's affections. In the short time they'd been together in Mars orbit, they had been all business, but I suspected that would evolve into monkey business. She was pretty and well built—her figure reminded me of the idealized women on the erotic Indian frieze that Paul had shown me—and she was closer to Paul's age and would share his radiation-forced isolation.
The ceremonial silliness faded after about a week, and we settled down to business.
There were fifty-eight scientists and other investigators living in the Earth side, and after discussing it with Red and Green, we set up a simple schedule: they were both independently available for interview for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. I would be there with Red all the time, and Meryl (who was fluent in French) with Green. We let the Earth side people haggle among themselves as to how to split up those eight hours. If they wanted to be democratic, that was close to an hour a week apiece, even with every tenth day a holiday.
(Half of my tenth-day "holiday" was a trial, hooked up to a robot doctor who took obscene liberties with my body, though I was allowed to sleep through the worst, the brachioscopy. My reward for being the only one around who'd survived the lung cysts.)
The interviews went both ways, the Martians studying the humans as intensely as the humans were the Martians. It made the situation more interesting, more dynamic, as a question asked to a Martian could provoke an analogous question from the Martian, and vice versa. Hundreds of researchers on Earth were monitoring the whole exchange, of course, and sometimes their suggestions filtered up.
Red and Green worked hard. When they weren't dealing with the researchers on the other side of the glass, they had to deal with us, who could not only ask them questions but literally prod them for answers. Oz and Moonboy were trying to understand their anatomy and physiology; they also monitored us humans for signs of Dutch Elm disease.
Three of the people who would be going on to Mars with Jag came up early—Franz De Haven and Terry and Joan Magson. Terry and Joan were new to xenology. Coming out of successful careers in archeology and architecture, they had gotten permission to live in and study the Martian city. Franz was an expert on human immune response; he was going to Mars to study the human population.
It was interesting to have our own population almost double. Terry and Joan were an old married couple, Terry the famous one. Their status as a prominent lesbian pair might have helped their chances in the "lottery"—or maybe not; they weren't going to have any children without careful planning.
Franz was a darkly handsome man in his mid twenties. Jag was obviously interested in him, which stimulated in me a kind of primal jealousy—she would have him for seven months on the ship; I should be allowed to get in a lick or two, so to speak, while I was fifty percent of the available female population.
I mentioned that jokingly to Paul in my morning e-mail, and he responded with unexpected force: I should definitely do it while I had the chance; he never expected me to be a nun for five years, or seven or ten or forever. He even quoted Herrick to me, the romantic old areologist. Okay, I would gather my rosebud.
Men are not very mysterious when it comes to sex. A touch, a raised eyebrow, and there we were, wrestling in his cabin.
He was actually better at it than Paul, but that was just technique and maybe size. But I suppose it's better to have a clumsy man you love than an expert acquaintance. Or maybe I felt a little guilt in spite of Paul having giving permission. I didn't mention it in my letters until Franz was safely gone.
I was only getting half my rosebud's pollen, anyhow. Jag was kind enough to share.
I did talk about it with Red, who straightaway asked whether I was having sex with the new male. Was it that obvious, even to a centenarian potato-head? He pointed out that he'd seen thousands of movies and cubes, and the young girl falling for the dark stranger passing through town was a pretty common pattern.
Trying to be objective, I explained the difference between this and my relationship with Paul, and of course that was familiar to him as well, sometimes in the same movies and cubes.
He admitted to being jealous of humans for having that level of complexity in their daily lives. He had been fertile four times and successfully budded in three of them, but there were dozens of other individuals involved in the buddings, and no one of them had a relationship like lover or father of the bud. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" was an obscure joke to him.
Their reproduction did involve a combination of genetic materials, but it was sort of like a shower, or a fish swimming through milt. Six or more of them would engage in something that looked kind of like four-armed arm wrestling, and after all of them were exhausted, the one who had tested out strongest would become nominally female, and the others would sort of roll around with her, covering her with sweat-like secretions that contained genetic code. The female would grow up to four buds, all but one of which would die and be resorbed.
It was weird enough. In terran terms, Red was definitely an alpha male, a big strong natural leader—which meant that he was often pregnant.
* * * *
Terry and Joan were a lot of fun to talk with. I was used to the company of the colony's scientists and engineers, so it was a novelty to exchange ideas with an architect and an archeologist. They picked my brains for everything I could recall about the Martian city—their research had been exhaustive, but we were the first people they'd met who had actually been there
.
They'd been together fifteen years. Joan, the famous architect, was forty five and Terry was thirty five, so they'd been about the same age as Paul and me when they'd started out. It was Terry who'd had the lifelong interest in xenology and Mars; when we "discovered" the Martians, they'd both bent their considerable energies toward qualifying for a ticket.
When I sent Dad a picture of them he said they were a real "Mutt and Jeff" couple, I guess from some old movie about homosexuals. Joan was short and dark; Terry was taller than me and blond. They bickered all the time, but it was obviously affectionate.
Selfishly, I was glad to have some rich and famous people on our side of the quarantine. That much more pressure to lower it when we came to the five-year or ten-year mark.
The three of us talked with Red a few times. Terry was fascinated and frustrated by their lack of actual history.
"There've been preliterate societies who didn't have a sense of history going back very far," she said after one such meeting. "People might memorize their genealogies, and they might have traditions about which tribes were friend or foe, but without writing, after a few generations memory merges into myth and legend. Like the Martians. But according to Red, they've been reading and writing for thousands of ares."
"No conflict, no history," Joan said. "Nobody owns anything or anybody. One generation is just like the previous one, so why bother keeping track of anything? At least until our radios started talking to them."
"They do record some things," I said. "Fly-in-Amber knew exactly when a meteorite had hit, over four thousand ares ago. But I asked him how many had died, and he just said new ones were born."
"If they were human, I'd say they were in a culture-wide state of denial about death," Terry said. "They obviously have individual personalities, individual identity, but they act as if there's no difference between existing and not existing. Even Red."
"But they know how we feel about death. Red could have left me to die when I had that accident. And they didn't have to volunteer to help our young people with the lung cysts."