Snowbird was totally still, absorbing it. “Can you translate?” Dustin said.
“Not exactly… no. But I could try to say part of it.”
Fly-in-Amber put his small hands together and made a slight bow, perhaps a parody of human gesture.
“It’s about the social function of humor in both races. As if humans were one culture.” Fly- in-Amber barked, and Snowbird answered with a series of clicks. “He points out that you are essentially one culture, in Mars.
“From the first time we communicated—with Carmen, after we decided to let her know we spoke human languages—it’s been obvious that humor both unites and separates the two species. Martian humor is almost always about helplessness, about fate and irony. Humans also recognize this, but most of your humor is about suffering—about pain, loss, death. To us… that preference itself is beautifully funny, and is even funnier as you think about it. Like a hall of mirrors, the images fading off into infinity.
“I’m not saying this well. But for most of us, humor is absolutely necessary for survival—if you lived in a small hole in the ground, and knew there would never be anything else, you would perhaps feel the same way.”
“Sort of like what we call ‘gallows’ humor,” Dustin said.
“ ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ ” Fly-in-Amber quoted, “ ‘and you will find me a grave man.’ ” He said it with a British acting voice. “That was a BBC radio production of Romeo and Juliet in 1951. Very Martian humor. Mercutio has been stabbed, and he jokes about dying. Most human humor is not so clear to me.”
“Nor as funny,” Snowbird said. “So many jokes about people falling down, which is hardly possible with four legs. Sex jokes aren’t funny because we have to figure out what the people are doing, and why that’s more funny than what they normally do.” She turned to Fly-in-Amber and made the thumping laughter sound. “Only two people! Only two!”
“Some of us don’t think that’s funny,” Fly-in-Amber said. “They can’t help the way they’re made.”
“Do you tell jokes about Martian sex?” Dustin asked.
Snowbird pantomimed scratching her head, which was kind of funny, avoiding all the eyes up there. “No… no fate or irony or helplessness there. What is there to laugh about?”
“Trust me,” he said. “Humans find Martian sex pretty entertaining.”
“But it’s so plain and innocent, compared to human sex. We don’t hide away and do it in private, and kill people if they do it with the wrong person.”
“You’d never have a Shakespeare,” I said.
“I think we do have individuals like Shakespeare,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Though it would be difficult to explain, to translate, what I mean by that.”
“I should think so. Since you don’t seem to have anything like drama.”
“Nothing dramatic used to happen to us, before you came. I suppose we’re going to need drama now.”
“And psychoanalysis,” Dustin said. “Social workers. Police and jails.”
“We look forward to evolving.”
PART 2
THE PLANT
1
GRAVITY SUCKS
On Earth we’d seen pictures of the iceberg, and so didn’t expect it to look like an iceberg, glistening and pure. I was once stationed in Greenland in the winter; it looked something like that, cold and dirty. Elza said it reminded her of North Dakota in the winter—windstorms drive dark topsoil to mix with blizzard snow to make a black substance they call “snirt,” neither snow nor dirt.
It was the fossil nucleus of an ancient comet. Billions of years ago, Mars had bent the thing’s orbit around, turning it into a small asteroid of ice and impurities, never to be warm enough to have its day in the sun and grow a magnificent tail.
So it was a huge dirty snowball, somewhat out of round. White splashes where engineers and their robots had blasted and drilled to turn it into a huge fuel tank. It provided reaction mass for the main drive and an array of small steering jets, mainly for turning us around at midpoint—and evading rocks, if it came to that.
Everything had been tested out; the main drive fired for several days, stopped, turned around, and fired again. Now we coasted in to meet it.
It was a death trap in several ways. The sheer amount of energy blowing out behind was like a continual thermonuclear explosion, and although stars do that for millennia on end, no machine has ever done it before—let alone for thirteen years. And it wasn’t as straightforward as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation; it was just the magic Martian energy sources stacked up, or nested, for a multiplicative effect. I didn’t have the faintest idea why it worked, and its designers were only a couple of baby steps ahead of me. All we knew for sure was that the scale model had worked, going out a hundredth of a light- year and back, with one pilot/passenger.
It was like successfully testing a motorboat, and saying, okay, launch the Titanic.
Which brings up another actuarial disaster waiting to happen: what if we hit something on the way?
It wouldn’t have to be another iceberg, real or metaphorical. Going at 0.95 the speed of light, a fist- sized rock would be like a nuclear bomb. We did have an electromagnetic repeller to keep interstellar dust from grinding us down to a sliver. But it wouldn’t work on anything as big as a marble.
Bigger things we could sense at a distance, and avoid with a quick blip from the steering jets, which explains our lack of fine glassware and china. Though if our cosmological models were right, such encounters would be rare. If we were wrong, it would be a bumpy ride.
There had been no serious problems with the test run. But we were going twenty-four hundred times farther.
Four engineers were still living on the iceberg. They would get us screwed down tight into the ice and connect our habitat with the storage area, where they’d been living the past ten months. Have to check the caviar and vodka supplies. (Actually, the modifications that allowed them to live there made the storage building a de facto alternate living area, if something made ad Astra uninhabitable, and if we somehow survived that event.)
We’d been talking with them for days, via line-of-sight laser modulation, and were glad to be able to aid them in a small conspiracy.
The plan was supposed to be that we not make physical contact with them, because they were all from Earth, and we were all quarantined because of exposure to Mars and Martians. They’d been talking it over, though, and decided to come say hello and be contaminated. Then they’d go back to Little Mars instead of Earth and wait for a chance to hitch a ride on to Mars. Which seemed like a better prospect than their home planet.
All four of our resident semi-Martians thought they’d be welcome, thumbing their collective nose at Earth. Of course, the two actual Martians didn’t understand why anyone would want to live on Earth in the first place. All that gravity. Humans everywhere.
Paul brought us in smoothly, a couple of small bumps. The comet didn’t have any appreciable gravity, of course, so it was more a docking maneuver than a landing.
The robots had carved out a rectangular hole in the ice, two meters deeper than the habitat was tall. Paul nudged us in there, and the robots slid blocks of ice and dirt in place over us, a kind of ablative protective layer. He detached the small lander and inched it onto the surface. A flexible crawl tube connected the ship’s air lock with ours.