"I wasn't calm at all. Just trying not to embarrass myself."
"Introduced, after all, to a man from Mars…" She looked up at the sky, at the post-Spin stars in their frail, scattered constellations, dim in the glare from the wedding party. "What must you have expected?"
"I suppose, someone less human."
"Ah, but he was very human."
"Yes," I said.
Wun Ngo Wen had become something of a revered figure in rural India, Indonesia, southeast Asia. In Padang, Ina said, one sometimes saw his picture in people's homes, in a gilded frame like a watercolor saint or famous mullah. "There was," she said, "something extraordinarily attractive in his manner. A familiar way of speaking, even though we only heard him in translation. And when we saw photographs of his planet—all those cultivated fields—it looked so much more rural than urban. More Eastern than Western. The Earth visited by an ambassador from another world, and he was one of us! Or so it seemed. And he chastised the Americans in an enjoyable way."
"The last thing Wun meant to do was scold anyone."
"No doubt the legend outpaces the reality. Didn't you have a thousand questions, the day you were introduced to him?"
"Of course. But I figured he'd been answering the obvious questions ever since he arrived. I thought he might be tired of it."
"Was he reluctant to talk about his home?"
"Not at all. He loved to talk about it. He just didn't like being interrogated."
"My manners aren't as polished as yours. I'm sure I would have offended him with countless questions. Suppose, Tyler, you had been able to ask him anything at all, that first day: what would it have been?"
That was easy. I knew exactly what question I had been suppressing the first time I met Wun Ngo Wen. "I would have asked him about the Spin. About the Hypotheticals. Whether his people had learned anything we didn't already know."
"And did you ever discuss that with him?"
"Yes."
"And did he have much to say?"
"Much."
I glanced at the stage. A new saluang group had come on. One of them was playing a rabab, a stringed instrument. The musician hammered his bow against the belly of the rabab and grinned. Another lewd wedding song.
"I'm afraid I may have been interrogating you" Ina said.
"I'm sorry. I'm still a little tired."
"Then you should go home and sleep. Doctor's orders. With a little luck you'll see Ibu Diane again tomorrow."
She walked with me down the loud street, away from the festivities. The music went on until nearly five the next morning. I slept soundly in spite of it.
* * * * *
The ambulance driver was a skinny, taciturn man in Red Crescent whites. His name was Nijon, and he shook my hand with exaggerated deference and kept his large eyes on Ibu Ina when he spoke to me. I asked if he was nervous about the drive to Padang. Ina translated his answer: "He says he's done more dangerous things for less compelling reasons. He says he's pleased to meet a friend of Wun Ngo Wen. He adds that we should get underway as soon as possible."
So we climbed into the back end of the ambulance. Along one wall was a horizontal steel locker where equipment was usually stored. It doubled as a bench. Nijon had emptied the locker, and we established that it was possible for me to cram myself inside by bending my legs at hip and knee and tucking my head into my shoulder. The locker smelled of antiseptic and latex and was about as comfortable as a monkey coffin, but there I would lie, should we be stopped at a checkpoint, with Ina on the bench in her clinic gown and En laid out on a stretcher doing his best impression of a CVWS infectee. In the hot morning light the plan seemed more than slightly ridiculous.
Nijon had shimmed the lid of the locker to allow some air to circulate inside, so I probably wouldn't suffocate, but I didn't relish the prospect of spending time in what was essentially a hot, dark metal box. Fortunately—once we had established that I fit—I didn't have to, at least not yet. All the police activity, Ina said, had been on the new highway between Bukik Tinggi and Padang, and because we were traveling in a loose convoy with other villagers we ought to have plenty of warning before we were pulled over. So for the time being I sat next to Ina while she taped a saline drip (sealed, no needle, a prop) to the crook of En's elbow. En was enthusiastic about the role and began rehearsing his cough, a deep-lung hack that provoked an equally theatrical frown from Ina: "You've been stealing your brother's clove cigarettes?"
En blushed. It was for the sake of realism, he said.
"Oh? Well, be careful you don't act yourself into an early grave."
Nijon slammed the rear doors and climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine and we began the bumpy drive to Padang. Ina told En to close his eyes. "Pretend to be asleep. Apply your theatrical skills." Before long his breathing settled into gentle snorts.
"He was awake all night with the music," Ina explained.
"I'm amazed he can sleep, even so."
"One of the advantages of childhood. Or the First Age, as the Martians call it—is that correct?"
I nodded.
"They have four, I understand? Four Ages to our three?"
Yes, as Ina undoubtedly knew. Of all the folkways in Wun Ngo Wen's Five Republics, this was the one that had most fascinated the terrestrial public.
Human cultures generally recognize two or three stages of life—childhood and adulthood; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Some reserve special status for old age. But the Martian custom was unique and depended on their centuries-long mastery of biochemistry and genetics. The Martians counted human lives in four installments, marked by biochemically mediated events. Birth to puberty was childhood. Puberty to the end of physical growth and the beginning of metabolic equilibrium was adolescence. Equilibrium to decline, death, or radical change was adulthood.
And beyond adulthood, the elective age: the Fourth.
Centuries ago, Martian biochemists had devised a means to prolong human life by sixty or seventy years on average. But the discovery wasn't an unmixed blessing. Mars was a radically constrained ecosystem, ruled by the scarcity of water and nitrogen. The cultivated land that had looked so familiar to Ibu Ina was a triumph of subtle, sophisticated bioengineering. Human reproduction had been regulated for centuries, pegged to sustainability estimates. Another seventy years tacked onto the average life span was a population crisis in the making.
Nor was the longevity treatment itself simple or pleasant. It was a deep cellular reconstruction. A cocktail of highly engineered viral and bacterial entities was injected into the body. Tailored viruses performed a sort of systemic update, patching or revising DNA sequences, restoring telomeres, resetting the genetic clock, while lab-grown bacterial phages flushed out toxic metals and plaques and repaired obvious physical damage.
The immune system resisted. The treatment was, at best, equivalent to a six-week course of some debilitating influenza—fevers, joint and muscle pain, weakness. Certain organs went into a kind of reproductive overdrive. Skin cells died and were replaced in fierce succession; nervous tissue regenerated spontaneously and rapidly.
The process was debilitating, painful, and there were potential negative side effects. Most subjects reported at least some long-term memory loss. Rare cases suffered temporary dementia and nonrecoverable amnesia. The brain, restored and rewired, became a subtly different organ. And its owner became a subtly different human being.
"They conquered death."
"Not quite."
"You would think," Ina said, "with all their wisdom, they could have made it a less unpleasant experience."
Certainly they could have relieved the superficial discomfort of the transition to Fourth. But they had chosen not to. Martian culture had incorporated the Fourth Age into its folkways, pain and alclass="underline" pain was one of the limiting conditions, a tutelary discomfort. Not everyone chose to become a Fourth. Not only was the transition difficult, stiff social penalties had been written into their longevity laws. Any Martian citizen was entitled to undergo the treatment, free of charge and without prejudice. But Fourths were forbidden to reproduce; reproduction was a privilege reserved for adults. (For the last two hundred years the longevity cocktail had included drugs that produced irreversible sterilization in both sexes.) Fourths weren't allowed to vote in council elections—no one wanted a planet run by venerable ancients for their own benefit. But each of the Five Republics had a sort of judicial review body, the equivalent of a Supreme Court, elected solely by Fourths. Fourths were both more and less than adults, as adults are both more and less than children. More powerful, less playful; freer and less free.