I wish he had lived long enough to discuss the truth of what the Others had told him through us. His replacement will be able to, but she won’t be old enough to have mastered the language for many ares.
So we go off to meet our mortal enemies, and most of what we know about them is from the pack of lies they told our leader just before they murdered him.
5
SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE
Paul and I looked at the various cabin configurations and decided to put both beds together in my cabin and open a sliding door between the two spaces, while closing off the exterior door to what was now the bedroom. So in his cabin, now our living room, there was a worktable with two chairs facing each other, and a lounging chair that reclines. One VR helmet, but we could always borrow another from the gym or lounge.
I didn’t have to tell him that I liked the arrangement because he sometimes tosses and turns in his sleep so much he wakes me up. This way, I’ll have a place to tiptoe off to, to lie down in peace.
We put both windows on the wall by the worktable. Set them for adjacent views of the Maine woods, an environment we often use for biking or running.
Once we had everything the way we liked it, we celebrated our new nest the obvious way. We started with him on top, but he was too heavy—it was like fucking in the exercise room on Little Mars, which we never felt the need to try. I guess we’ll get used to the gravity before too long. But for now it’s doggy style, arf arf.
(I want my Mars gravity back so I can be a Hindu goddess again, holding on to him lightly with my arms and legs while he rises to the occasion.)
We panted for a while with the unaccustomed exertion—we’d never made love except in zero gee and Mars-normal gravity—and giggled over the new canine aspect of our relationship, and how superhuman our parents had been, to conceive us.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I never want to think about that again.”
We pulled the covers up and rearranged the pillows facing each other, trying to recline comfortably in this gravity. “I do want to think about something else, though,” he said. “Our spy buddies.”
“So you’ve got a hard-on for Elza. Go on; she’ll eat you alive.”
“Yeah, right. Did you see Namir and Dustin practicing martial arts yesterday?”
“I saw a little of it—I was in the study and heard them throwing each other around. He’s not bad for an old guy.”
“He’s not bad for anybody. Dustin is almost as good, but Namir is stronger and quicker—I did kapkido at the Academy for two years.” He shook his head. “Either one of those guys could kill me. I mean literally. In a split second.”
“So you better not offer to… Oh.” I saw what he meant. “Literally.”
“Maybe that’s their mission. They could kill all of us in seconds, without weapons. Remember? We talked about this right after we met them.”
“Yeah, vaguely… in VR, exercising. So why on earth would they want to?”
“On Earth, they wouldn’t have any reason. But you read that thing in Namir’s New York Times, the two-page debate about ad Astra.”
“Sure. The idiots wanted us to just floor it and ram the planet like a doomsday bomb. As if the Others would just sit there and let us do it.”
“That wasn’t the part that worried me. It was the business about surrender. Something like ‘We’re not going to all that trouble and expense just to have them kneel down and grovel.’ Did you see who signed that?”
“No. I vaguely remember it.”
“It was a four-star American general, Mark Spinoza. Ring a bell?”
“Not really.”
“He’s on the Committee. Liaison to the American military. Who, incidentally, had a big part in designing and building this machine… and choosing the crew.”
“But he couldn’t order them to do that. Namir’s not even under his authority.”
“Neither are Dustin and Elza, technically. They all had to suspend their commissions, remember? Nobody can give them orders, in theory, any more than they can give the rest of us orders.”
“Okay. So what are you worried about?”
“Just that they might agree with him. And do it on their own.”
“No. They’re not right-wing loonies. They’re not killers, either, even though they’re soldiers, ex-soldiers.”
“I know Namir has killed, at least as a young man in wartime. And we don’t really know anything about their politics. They seem reasonable, but they could just be following a script—and it wouldn’t have to be from General Spinoza or the Corporation or anybody. They’ve lived together as men and wife for five or six years. They might have devised their own plan.”
“Which would include killing us in case of cowardice. I don’t think so.”
“Or just overpowering and confining us. Then using the ship to try to destroy the Others.”
I turned his head and held his chin between thumb and forefinger and stared. “I never really know when you’re kidding.”
“What would you say if I asked you to take Namir to bed and coax the truth out of him?”
“I would say ‘I never really know when you’re kidding.’ ”
He kissed me suddenly, a soft peck on the lips. “The secret of an exciting marriage.” He turned onto his side and stretched out, readying for sleep. “Keep ’em guessing.”
6
PRIVATE PARTS
The first room configuration we tried was to leave Elza’s cabin the same size but move an extra bed into it. Then we almost doubled the size of the middle cabin, as a common room, with the third cabin the smallest possible bedroom, for whoever was the odd man out. The common room had all three windows together in one panorama, currently the beach at Cannes at the height of the tourist season.
As sexy as that scene was, I felt no real inspiration when I joined Elza in the double bed. I’d sparred for an hour with Dustin and then swum at six knots for an hour. When I got out I sympathized with the poor Martians in all this gravity. I felt like a large animal that had been run into the ground when I fell into bed. Elza seemed tired, too. Maybe that was why she asked for me, the first night with gravity.
“I’ve never seen you swim so much in a gym,” she said sleepily.
“Set the thing for an hour. I was about to get out early, then Carmen came over. I offered to let her have it, but she said no, no, finish your hour. So I was kind of stuck.”
“Stuck showing off your bare ass to a pretty girl.”
“She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”
“Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”
“Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”
“Is that what they call it now?”
I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”
“I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.
Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.