I thanked him but raised the obvious objection: he wasn't a doctor, and Martian physiology was conspicuously unusual—even if he found a suitable therapy, would it work in Jason's case?
"We're not as different as you might think. One of the first things your people did was to sequence my genome. It's indistinguishable from your own."
"I didn't mean to give offense."
"I'm not offended. One hundred thousand years is a long separation, long enough for what biologists call a speciation event. As it happens, however, your people and mine are fully interfertile. The obvious differences between us are superficial adaptations to a cooler, drier environment."
He spoke with an authority that belied his size. His voice was pitched higher than an average adult's but there was nothing juvenile about it; it was lilting, almost feminine, but always statesmanlike.
"Even so," I said, "there are potential legal problems if we're talking about a therapy that hasn't gone through the FDA approval process."
"I'm sure Jason would be willing to wait for official approval. His disease might not be so patient." Here Wun raised his hand to forestall further objections. "Let me read what you brought me. Then we'll discuss it again."
Then, the immediate business discharged, he asked me to stay and talk. I was flattered. Despite his strangeness there was something comforting about Wun's presence, a communicable ease. He sat back in his oversized wicker chair, feet dangling, and listened with apparent fascination to a quick sketch of my life. He asked a couple of questions about Diane ("Jason doesn't speak much about his family") and more about med school (the concept of dissecting cadavers was new to him; he flinched when I described it… most people do).
And when I asked him about his own life he reached into the small gray satchel he carried with him and produced a series of printed images, photographs he had brought with him as digital files. Four pictures of Mars.
"Just four?"
He shrugged. "No number is large enough to substitute for memory. And of course there is much more visual material in the official archives. These are mine. Personal. Would you care to see them?"
"Yes, certainly."
He handed them to me.
Photo 1: A house. It was obviously a human dwelling place despite the odd techno/retro architecture, low and rounded, like a porcelain model of a sod hut. The sky behind it was a brilliant turquoise, or at least that's how the printer had rendered it. The horizon was strangely close but geometrically flat, divided into receding rectangles of cultivated green, a crop I couldn't identify but which was too fleshy to be wheat or corn and too tall to be lettuce or kale. In the foreground were two adult Martians, male and female, with comically stern expressions. Martian Gothic. All it needed was a pitchfork and a Grant Wood signature.
"My mother and father," Wun said simply.
Photo 2: "Myself as a child."
This one was startling. The prodigiously wrinkled Martian skin, Wun explained, develops at puberty. Wun at roughly seven terrestrial years was smooth-faced and smiling. He looked like any Earthly child, though you couldn't place the ethnicity—blond hair, coffee-colored skin, narrow nose and generous lips. He stood in what looked at first glance like an eccentric theme park but was, Wun said, a Martian city. A marketplace. Food stalls and shops, the buildings made of the same porcelainlike material as the farmhouse, in gaudy primary colors. The street behind him was crowded with light machinery and foot traffic. Only a patch of sky was visible between the tallest buildings, and even there some sort of vehicle had been caught in passing, whirligig blades blurred into a pale oval.
"You look happy," I said.
"The city is called Voy Voyud. We came from the countryside to shop on this day. Because it was springtime my parents let me buy murkuds. Small animals. Like frogs, for pets. In the bag I'm holding—see?"
Wun clutched a white cloth bag containing mysterious lumps. Murkuds.
"They only live a few weeks," he said. "But their eggs are delicious."
Photo 3: This one was a panoramic view. In the near ground: another Martian house, a woman in a multicolored kaftan (Wun's wife, he explained) and two smooth-skinned, pretty young girls in sacklike amber dresses (his daughters). The photograph had been taken from high ground. Beyond the house, an entire semirural landscape was visible. Green marshy fields basked under another turquoise sky. The agricultural land was divided by elevated roadways on which a few boxy vehicles traveled, and there were agricultural machines among the crops, graceful black harvesters. And on the horizon where the roads converged was a city, the same city, Wun said, where he had bought murkuds as a child, Voy Voyud, the capital of Kirioloj Province, its low-g towers tall and intricately terraced.
"You can see most of the delta of the Kirioloj in this picture." The river was a blue band feeding a lake the color of the sky. The city of Voy Voyud had been built on higher ground, the eroded rim of an ancient impact crater, Wun said, though it looked like an ordinary line of low hills to me. Black dots on the distant lake might have been boats or barges.
"It's a beautiful place," I said.
"Yes."
"The landscape, but your family, too."
"Yes." His eyes met mine. "They're dead."
"Ah—I'm sorry to hear that."
"They died in a massive flood several years ago. The last photograph, do you see? It's the same view, but taken just after the disaster."
A freakish storm had dumped record rainfall on the slopes of the Solitary Mountains at the end of a long dry season. Most of that rain had been funneled into the parched tributaries of the Kirioloj. The terraformed Mars was in some ways still a young world, still establishing its hydrological cycles, its landscapes evolving rapidly as ancient dust and regolith were rearranged by circulating water. The result of the sudden extreme rain was a slurry of oxide-red mud that had roared down the Kirioloj and into the agricultural delta like a fluid freight train.
Photo 4: The aftermath. Of Wun's house, only the foundation and a single wall remained, standing like shards of pottery in a chaotic plain of mud, rubble, and rocks. The distant city on the hill was untouched but the fertile farmland had been buried. Except for a glint of brown water from the lake this was Mars returned almost to its virgin condition, a lifeless regolith. Several aircraft hovered overhead, presumably searching for survivors.
"I had spent a day in the foothills with friends and came home to this. A great many lives were lost, not just my family. So I keep these four photographs to remind me of where I came from. And why I can't go back."
"It must have been unbearable."
"I've made peace with it. As much as one can. By the time I left Mars the delta had been restored. Not the way it used to be, of course. But fertile, alive, productive."
Which was as much as he seemed to want to say about it.
I looked back at the earlier images, reminded myself what I was seeing. Not some fanciful CGI effect but ordinary photographs. Photographs of another world. Of Mars, a planet long freighted with our own reckless imagination. "It's not Burroughs, certainly not Wells, maybe a little Bradbury…"
Wun furrowed his already densely furrowed brow. "I'm sorry—I don't know those words."
"They're writers. Writers of fiction, who wrote about your planet."
Once I had communicated the idea—that certain authors had imagined a living Mars long before its actual terraforming—Wun was fascinated. "Would it be possible for me to read these books? And discuss them the next time you visit?"
"I'm flattered. Are you sure you can spare the time? There must be heads of state who would very much like to talk to you."
"I'm sure there are. But they can wait."