Puzzled, Jamie sat at the comm desk in front of the main display screen. The six other screens flanking it showed views of the unloading chores going on outside. Vosnesensky stood behind Jamie like a policeman guarding a prisoner about to be interrogated.
"Dr. Li," said Jamie, still in his blue suit and helmet.
"Dr. Waterman."
"You wanted to speak to me?"
Li took in a silent breath, nostrils flaring as if in distaste. "I have just received a most unhappy transmission from Kaliningrad, which was relayed from Houston."
Jamie tried to keep his face as stiffly unemotional as the expedition commander’s.
"Your American mission controllers are quite upset that you did not speak the words they gave you for your first statement from the surface of Mars."
"Yes, I suppose they are." Of course they’d be upset. The Anglos in Washington always get upset when a red man doesn’t follow their script.
"Why did you say what you did? And what does it mean? Apparently it has caused a sensation in the media in the United States."
With a slight shake of his head Jamie replied, "I had no intention of causing a sensation. I didn’t know I was going to say that until I heard myself speaking. The words… they simply popped out of my mouth."
"What do they mean?"
"It’s an old Navaho greeting. Like ‘aloha’ among the Hawaiians or the Italians’ ‘ciao.’ Literally it means something like, ‘It is good.’ "
Li’s stiff shoulders relaxed visibly. The throbbing vein eased. "Your government people are very angry with you."
Jamie tried to shrug inside the hard suit and found that it could not be done. He said, "What can they do about it? Send me home?"
"They can instruct me to remove you from the ground team and bring you up here!" Li’s voice flared. "They can insist that I send Dr. O’Hara to the surface and keep you in orbit for the remainder of the mission!"
Jamie felt his guts lurch. "You wouldn’t do that!" It was more of a question than a statement.
"They have not ordered me to do so. Not yet."
Thank god, Jamie breathed silently.
"However, they want a clarification of your words: a written statement from you as to what they mean to you and why you said them instead of what you had been instructed to say."
It suddenly struck Jamie as ludicrous. Sitting inside a space suit on a world a hundred million kilometers from Earth, he was being told that he had to write an apology for three words he had blurted unthinkingly. Or be punished like a truant schoolboy.
"You will write such a statement?" Li prompted.
"If I don’t…?"
"They will insist on removing you from the ground team, I fear. You must recall that your assignment to the landing team at the last minute caused some anxious moments in Washington and elsewhere. Please do not jeopardize your position any further."
Jamie remembered that frantic weekend of hurried telephone conferences and impromptu visits with his family. And Edith saying good-bye to him.
The expedition commander seemed to draw himself up into a taller, calmer, more regal posture. "My advice, for what it is worth, is to write a brief statement that explains how you were overwhelmed with emotion upon stepping onto the surface of Mars and lapsed into the language of your ancestors. No one can fault you for that."
"It’s even the truth," Jamie said.
The Chinese allowed himself a fatherly smile. "You see? A soft answer turns away wrath."
Jamie nodded. "I see. Thank you."
DOSSIER: JAMES FOX WATERMAN
Jamie was nine years old the first time he was sent back to New Mexico to spend the summer with his grandfather Al. His mother did not like the idea, but she and her husband had a summer of foreign travel ahead of them, lectures and seminars that would take the two professors across the Pacific to Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. They had little desire to drag their nine-year-old with them, and no intention whatever of turning down the all-expenses-paid junket.
So for the first time since he had been in kindergarten Jamie returned to Santa Fe. He learned to fish and hunt and to love his grandfather Al, even though he actually spent most of his days in Al’s store on the plaza in Santa Fe. Al was a good grandfather but a better businessman. Anglo ladies cooed over the "little Indian boy" all summer long.
The very last week, while Jamie was already moping about his return to Berkeley, Al took him to one of the Navaho pueblos up in the mountains where he bought the pottery and carpets for which the Anglo tourists paid so dearly.
Most of Al’s business that day was conducted at the trading post, a combination bar and general store with uncarpeted creaking floorboards, worn old wooden counters, warped shelves half bare, and a big ceiling fan that hardly moved at all. A half dozen older men sat at the bar, silent and virtually motionless beneath their drooping broad-brimmed hats, while Al bargained patiently, interminably in Navaho with the pueblo’s head man. To Jamie the old men at the bar seemed as dusty and time ravaged as the room itself.
Bored with his grandfather’s endless low-pitched haggling in a language he did not understand, Jamie went outside and sat on the sagging wooden steps. The late afternoon sun felt hot as molten lava, coloring the whole land copper red.
A scrawny cat slinked past his feet, gray and silent. A pair of mangy, mean-eyed dogs lay panting in the dust on the other side of the street beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree. Jamie could count their ribs.
Across the way, on the shaded porch that fronted an adobe house badly in need of patching, a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, was playing with a puppy, a joyful bundle of wriggling fur. Jamie thought about going over to her, but he did not know how to speak Navaho. The girl cuddled the puppy, petted it, crooning to it in her language.
She put the puppy down briefly, then picked it up by its tail. The pup yelped and snapped at her. She dropped the puppy and jumped to her feet. Then, breaking into English, she cried, "You bad boy! Bad! You always want make trouble, always fighting! I send you to principal. Get out of this classroom! Go to principal! I tell your mother on you!"
Even though he was only nine, Jamie immediately recognized that the girl was imitating an Anglo school teacher.
Her mother called from the cool darkness of the house, through its open door, and spoke sternly in Navaho to her. Jamie realized his grandfather was standing beside him now, laughing at the scene.
Scrambling to his feet, Jamie asked, "What’d she say, Al?"
"Aw, she just told her daughter not to hurt the puppy." He laughed. "Then she told her not to make jokes about her teacher in front of a white man."
"A white man?"
"You, son!"
"But I’m not a white man."
"Guess you look like one to her," said Al.
The following week Jamie was sent back to Berkeley, where his parents expressed great pleasure that their son had not turned into "a wild Indian."
MARS ORBIT
It was damned annoying to be a sage.
Li Chengdu stared at the blank comm screen and still saw James Waterman’s stubborn face. An honest face, slightly square with broad cheekbones and just a hint of distant Asian ancestry in the shape of his eyes. Piercing black eyes that were an open pathway to the young man’s soul.
I should not have lost my temper with him, Li scolded himself. I was angry because he is down there on the planet and I am forced to ride in this celestial tin can without ever setting foot on Mars.