As it moved “down” toward the rim of the torus, the slight perception of artificial gravity increased until it was Mars- normal, very light to us. An air- lock hatch opened in our floor, and we climbed down a ladder. The hatch closed above us with a loud final-sounding clunk. A door opened into the supposed contamination of Little Mars.
I’d expected the typical spaceship smell, too many people living in too small a volume, but there was a lot more air here than they needed. It smelled neutral, with a faint whiff of mushroom, probably the Martians’ agriculture.
I recognized the woman standing there, of course, one of the most famous faces in the world, or off the world. “Carmen Dula.” I offered my hand.
She took it and inclined her head slightly. “General Zahari.”
“Just Namir, please.” I introduced my mates, Elza Guadalupe and Dustin Beckner, ignoring rank. They were both colonels in American intelligence, nominally the Space Force. Israeli for me, but we spooks all inhabit the same haunted house.
She introduced her husband, Paul Collins, even more famous, who would be piloting the huge ship, and the other two xenologists, Moonboy and Meryl. We would meet the Martians later.
We followed them down to the galley. Walking was strange, both for the lightness and a momentary dizziness if you turned your head or nodded too quickly—Coriolis force acting on the inner ear, which I remembered from military space stations. It doesn’t bother you after a few minutes.
Dustin stumbled over a floor seam as we went into the galley, and Carmen caught him by the arm and smiled. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days. Myself, I’ve come to prefer it. Sort of dreading going back to one gee.”
The ad Astra would accelerate all the way at one gee. “How long have you lived with Martian gravity?”
“Since April ’73,” she said. “Zero gee there and back, of course, in those days. I’ve been back and forth a couple of times on the one-gee shuttle. I didn’t like it much.”
“We’ll get used to it fast,” Paul said. “I split my time between Earth and Mars in the old days, and it wasn’t a big problem.”
“You were an athlete back then,” she said, with a little friendly mocking in her voice. “Flyboy.”
Terms change. For most of my life the old days meant before Gehenna. Now it means before Triton. And a flyboy used to fly airplanes.
“Nice place,” Dustin said. Comfortable padded chairs and a wooden table, holos of serious paintings on the walls, some unfamiliar and strange. Rich coffee smell. They had a pressure-brewer that I saw did tea as well.
“Pity we can’t take it with us,” Paul said. “Best not get too used to Jamaican coffee.”
There was room around the table for all of us. We all got coffee or water or juice and sat down.
“We wondered why you came early,” Moonboy said. “If you don’t mind my being direct.” He had a pleasant, unlined face in a halo of unruly gray hair.
“Of course not, never,” I said, and, as often happens, when I paused Elza leaped in to complete my thought.
“It’s about the possibility that we, or one of us, might find the prospect impossible,” she said. “They want us to think this is all cast in stone, and they’re sure from psychological profiles that we’ll all get along fine—and at any rate, we have no choice; there’s only one flight, and we have to be on it.”
Moonboy nodded. “And that’s not true?”
“It can’t be, absolutely. What do you think would happen if one of us seven were to die? Would they cancel the mission?”
“I see your point . . .”
“I’m sure they have a contingency plan, a list of replacements. So what if the problem is not somebody’s dying, but rather somebody’s realizing that before the thirteen years is up, some one or two of the other people are going to drive him or her absolutely insane?”
“Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laughed, perhaps nervously.
“Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”
“Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”
“It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.
“It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”
It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?
Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?
“I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.
“What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.
A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”
Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”
She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.
“How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”
“Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.
She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and . . . distant? Even to the other Martians.”
I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.
When the signal came, nine eventful years ago, Fly-in-Amber had been here, in Little Mars. He went into a coma and started spouting gibberish that was decoded pretty easily. The Other was announcing its existence and location and the fact that it had a silicon- nitrogen metabolism, and little else. It didn’t mention the fact that it was about to try to destroy the world.
“I’m sort of like the soldier boys,” Paul said. “I hadn’t thought about there being an option.”
Carmen laughed. “For you, forget it. You have to fly the boat.” Actually, it was so automated and autonomous that it didn’t need a pilot. Paul would oversee it and take over if something went wrong. But that was beyond problematic. Nobody’d ever flown an iceberg close to the speed of light before.
I could sense people sorting one another out socially. The three of us and Paul all had military service, and, in most mixed populations, that is a primary difference. A pseudospeciation—you have killed, at least theoretically, or been given permission to, and so you are irrevocably different.
We comprised one slight majority. The ones who’d lived on Mars comprised another, more basic. But I could see Paul being an instinctive ally in some situations.
Meryl got up and opened the refrigerator. “Anybody hungry?” A few assents, including my own. “Disgustingly healthy, of course.” She took out a tray with white lumps on it, slid it into the cooker, and pressed a series of buttons, probably microwave and radiant heat together.
“Piloting this thing is a scary proposition.” Paul looked down at the table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “No matter who does it—especially when we’re light-months or light-years away from technical help.”
Not that technical help would do much good if the Martian power source gave out. We might as well burn incense and pray.
“No use worrying about it till Test One gets back,” Meryl said. She took the tray of buns out of the cooker and put them on the table.
“You check on him today?” Carmen asked Paul.
He nodded and took a notebook out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “He’s about two
and a half days from turnaround. Sixty-two hours.” Test One was the miniature of ad Astra that was going out a hundredth of a light-year and back. “No problem.”
The pastry was warm and slightly almond- flavored. I didn’t want to speculate on where that came from. Not almonds.
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“Not since yesterday. Don’t want to nag.” He looked at me. “I should be jealous. Another pilot in her life.”
She laughed. “Yeah. I’ll ask him whether he wants to come into quarantine for a big sloppy kiss.”
“Test One isn’t from Mars side?” I hadn’t known that.
“No, they want to use it for local exploration. Don’t want to give us lepers a monopoly on the solar system.”
It made sense. The Moon was closed to people who’d been exposed to Mars, and it would probably be the same for the new outposts planned for Ceres and the satellites of the outer planets.
My heart stopped when a monster stepped through the door. Then restarted. Just a Martian.
“Hi, Snowbird,” Moonboy said, and followed that with a string of nonhuman sounds. I didn’t know you could whistle and belch at the same time.
“Good morning,” it said in Moonboy’s voice. “Your accent is improving. But no, thank you, I don’t want to eat a skillet.”
“Have to work on my vocabulary.”
It turned to us. “Welcome to Little Mars, General. And Colonel and Colonel.”
“Glad to be here,” I said, and immediately felt foolish.
“I hope you’re being polite and not insane. Happy to join an expedition that will probably result in your death? I hope not.” It moved with a smooth rippling gait, four legs rolling, and put an arm around Meryl. Three arms left over.
I’d seen thousands of pictures of them, and studied them extensively, but that was nothing like being in the same room. They’re only a little taller than us but seem huge and solid, like a horse. Slight smell of tuna. The head very much like an old potato, including eyes. Two large hands and two small, four fingers each, articulated in such a way that any could serve as thumb. Four legs.
This one was wearing a white smock, scuffed with gray. When she spoke she “faced” the person she was speaking to, though there was nothing like an actual face. Just a mouth, with fat black teeth. The potato eyes were really eyes, bundles of something like optical fiber. They looked in all directions at once and saw mostly in infrared.
“You’re Snowbird?” my wife asked.
She faced her. “I am.”
“So you’ll be dying with us.”
“I suppose. More than likely.”
“How do you feel about that?”
A human might sit down or lean against something. Snowbird stood still, and was silent for a long moment. “Death is not the same for us. Not as important. We die as completely, but will be replaced—as you are. But we’re more closely replicated.”
“A white dies and a white is born,” I said.
“Yes, but more than that. The new one has a kind of memory of the old. Actual, not metaphorical.”
“Even if you die twenty-four light-years away?” Meryl asked.
“We’ve talked about that, Fly-in-Amber and I. It will be an interesting experiment.”
They don’t reproduce at all like humans. It’s sort of like a wrestling match, with several of them rolling around together, their sweat containing genetic material. The one who wins the match gets to be the mother, breaking out in pods over the next few days. One for each of the recent dead, so the population of each family remains approximately constant.
“You weren’t on the Space Elevator roster,” Carmen said, “and we didn’t expect you until the message just before you got here. Is that a spook thing?”
All human eyes were on me, and probably a few Martian ones. “Yes, but not so much with Elza and Dustin. We all have ties to the intelligence community, but I’m the only one who’s supposed to move in secret. Of course, when we’re traveling together, they stay invisible, too.”
“The secrecy,” Snowbird said. “That’s because you’re an Israeli? A Jew?”
I nodded to her. Difficult to look someone in the eye when there are so many. “I was born in Israel,” I said, as always trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I have no religion.”
That caused a predictable awkward silence, which Carmen eventually broke.
“A friend of mine’s parents knew you in Israel, after Gehenna. Elspeth Feldman.”
It took me a moment. “The Feldmans, yes, Americans. Life sciences. Max and . . . A-something.”
“Akhila. You approved them for Israeli citizenship,” she said.
“Them and a thousand others, mostly involved in the cleanup. The country had a real population shortage.” I turned back to Snowbird. “You know about Gehenna.”
“I know,” she said. “Which is not the same as understanding. How did you survive it?”
“I was in New York all of 2060, a junior attaché at the UN. That’s when the first part of the poison went into the water supply at Tel Aviv and Hefa.”
“Anyone who drank it died,” Carmen said.
“If they were in Tel Aviv or Hefa a year later,” I said, “when car bombs released the second part of the poison. An aerosol.
“It wasn’t immediately obvious, where I was. In an office full of foreigners. And it was a Jewish holiday, Passover.
“We had the news on, cube and radio—one of the car bombs had gone off two blocks away.
“Five or six people started having trouble breathing. All of them dead in a couple of minutes. They could breathe in, but couldn’t exhale.
“We called 9-9-9 but of course got nothing. Went down to the street and . . .” Elza put her hand on my knee, under the table; I covered it with mine.
“Millions died all at once,” Snowbird said.
“Within a few minutes. When we got outside, cars were still crashing. Alarms going off all over the city. Dead people everywhere, of course; a few still dying. Some had jumped or fallen from balconies and lay crushed on the street and sidewalks.”
Snowbird spread all four hands. “I’m sorry. This causes you pain.”
“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “Twenty- one. To tell the truth, sometimes it feels like it didn’t happen to me at all. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s told me the story over and over.”
“It did happen to someone else,” Elza said. “It happened to whoever you were before.” Her fingers moved lightly.
“You probably know the numbers,” I said to the Martian. “Almost 70 percent of the country dead in less than ten minutes.”
“They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.
“No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”
“So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”
“I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had . . . people like us.”
“Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”
“No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”
Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”
I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”
“I read wha
t you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”
“International Affairs, the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”
She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”
“I read it, too,” Paul said. “ ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable.’ Carmen showed it to me.”
“Trying to understand why I was, why we were, selected?”
“Why military people were selected,” she said. “The pressure for that was obvious, but frankly I was surprised they gave in to it. There’s no way we can threaten the Others.”
She was holding back resentment that I don’t think was personal. “You’d rather have three more xenobiologists than three . . . political appointees? We’re not really soldiers.”
“You were, once.”
“As a teenager, yes. Everyone in Israel was, at that time. But I’ve been a professional peacekeeper ever since.”
“And a spook,” Elza said. “If I were Carmen, that would bother me.”
Carmen made a placating gesture. “We probably have enough xenobiologists, and really can only guess what else might be useful. Your M.D. and clinical experience is as obviously useful to us, personally, as Namir’s life as a diplomat is, to our mission. But we don’t know. Dustin’s doctorate in philosophy might turn out to be the most powerful weapon in our arsenal.
“I won’t pretend it didn’t annoy me when I found out the Earth committee had chosen an all- military bunch—and then spooks on top of that! But of course I can see the logic. And it’s reasonable in terms of social dynamic, a secure triad joining two secure pairs.”
That dynamic is interesting in various ways. The committee wanted no more than three military people, so the civilians would outnumber us, but they didn’t want to upset the social balance by sending up single, unattached people—so our family had a large natural advantage.
But how stable is it, really? Everybody’s married, but Carmen and Dustin and Elza are all under thirty, and the rest of us are not exactly nuns and monks.
In the first hour all of us were together, I suppose there was a lot of automatic and unconscious evaluation and categorizing—who might bond to whom in the winepress of years that we faced? At fifty, I was old enough to be Carmen’s father, but my initial feelings toward her were not at all paternal.