Moonboy spends an hour or two a day on the piano, composing silently, and sometimes plays all night, haggard but happy in the morning. I don’t read music too well, but noticed the other day that Composition 3: Approach/Retreat is thirty-five pages long.
Paul spends most of the mornings drinking coffee and cranking out equations, which he sometimes tries to explain to me. He won’t be through coursework on the doctorate for another year and a half. Then he’ll write a dissertation and send it off to Earth. So maybe in fifty years he’ll get a doctorate in Quaint Astrophysics from Stanford, if there still is a Stanford.
Namir is working on another balalaika, a long one with low notes, and is slowly carving a bust of Elza, which is at a creepy stage—half of it still a block of wood and half a mostly finished sculpture, as if she were being pulled out of the material. Straight on, I think her expression is one of stoic acceptance; from another angle, her lips slightly apart, she looks like she’s on the verge of an orgasm. He knows her better than any of us, of course. Maybe that’s what she looks like all the time, to him.
I’ve taken up drawing again, using the texts Oz recommended when I was first on Mars. No paper, but it was a lifetime ago when I last had paper to spare. I can adjust the stylus and notebook to simulate pencil, ink, or wash. I’m copying some faces from the actual book that Namir brought along, all of Vermeer. His The Geographer looks a lot like Moonboy, though his hair isn’t white.
Our brand-new spaceship is getting a little worn around the edges. The air recycler started making a noise like a person whistling through her teeth, barely audible. Paul described it to the auto- repair algorithm, and the noise stopped for a few days, then came back. Meryl did it a slightly different way, and it stayed quiet. But it was a scary time. Can’t send out for parts.
The Martians’ swimming pool has to be continuously recaulked. Long hours of immersion—totally unnatural, of course, for Martians—must do something with the chemistry of their skin, which makes the water react with the caulking compound. Try to get those two out of the water, though.
Along with Meryl and Moonboy, I’m chipping away at the Martian language. Snowbird is more helpful than Fly-in-Amber, but even so it’s a frustrating experience.
Moonboy is developing a good ear for using the synthesizer to simulate Martian sounds, and in a real sense he’s the only one of us who can “speak” Martian with anything like a useful vocabulary. With merely human larynx and vocal cords, I can do about three hundred words that Snowbird can recognize consistently, but many of those, like “swimming,” are neologisms derived from human sounds.
Moonboy can play more than ten times my number of words, but a similar problem is emerging: we can only talk about experiences that humans and Martians share. Most of what they do and think is hidden from us.
Some may even be hidden on purpose. We have no idea what their secret agenda might be. They might not even know.
When the lone Other communicated to us from Neptune’s satellite Triton, it did so at first through a long rote message that Fly-in-Amber and other members of his family recited after a hypnotic stimulus. They translated it for us, but how complete was the translation? How honest?
We must always keep in mind that the Martians were created by the Others for the sole purpose of contacting us after we developed the ability to go to Mars. We were no danger to them until then.
This is the only thing that lone Other said to us in a human language, in response to our first message:
Peace is a good sentiment.
Your assumption about my body chemistry is clever but wrong. I will tell you more later.
At this time I do not wish to tell you where my people live.
I have been watching your development for a long time, mostly through radio and television. If you take an objective view of human behavior since the early twentieth century, you can understand why I must approach you with caution.
I apologize for having destroyed your Triton probe back in 2044. I didn’t want you to know exactly where I am on this world.
If you send another probe, I will do the same thing, again with apologies.
For reasons that may become apparent soon, I don’t wish to communicate with you directly. The biological constructs that live below the surface of Mars were created thousands of years ago, with the sole purpose of eventually talking to you and, at the right time, serving as a conduit through which I could reveal my existence.
“Our” existence, actually, since we have millions of individuals elsewhere. On our home planet and watching other planets, like yours.
This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red.
When the Other sent this message to us, it must have known that within a few days the delayed-action bomb within Red would go off and destroy all higher forms of life on Earth.
So why did it bother?
Most of us think it was hedging its bets in case, as did happen, the human race figured out a way around the doomsday bomb. Namir believes it assumed we would solve the puzzle and survive, a subtle difference.
Red might have figured it out before he died. He had talked with the Other, or at least listened to it, and on his way to the Moon and doom, he talked nonstop about it for almost twenty hours. Every word was recorded, but it hasn’t yet been translated—only one Martian, his successor, will be able to comprehend it, and when we left she was still studying the language.
(The long transition period between one leader’s death and the education of the succeeding leader was never a problem before humans came along. Martian daily life was simple and predictable, and if something came up in the dozen or two ares while they were leaderless, it would just have to wait.)
We had dessert in the compromise lounge, so the Martians could comfortably join us, even though the human “year” is irrelevant to their calendar.
We had taken a plastic bottle of tej, Ethiopian honey wine, out of the luxury stores. It went well with the coffee-and-honey cake recipe Namir remembered from his childhood, some Jewish tradition.
Either would be poison to the Martians, of course, but they brought out some special purple fungus and what looked and smelled like sulfurous swamp water.
I held up my glass to them and croaked out a greeting that was traditional for such occasions, which roughly translates as “Well, another year.” Snowbird and Namir exchanged toasts in Japanese and bowed, which in the case of the Martian looked weirdly like a horse in dressage. Plastic glasses were clicked all around.
The cake was sinfully excellent. “We should have this every day,” Elza said. “In five years, we’ll be bigger than the Martians.”
“That would be attractive,” Fly- in-Amber admitted, “but I don’t think you have that much honey.”
You can never tell when they’re joking. They have the same complaint about us.
Moonboy had his small synth keyboard, and he played a few words for Snowbird, who responded with a thrumming, crackling sound, then the thump of laughter.
“I told her she was looking slim,” he said, “and she answered that the food here was lousy.”
That was actually a pretty subtle joke. Martians don’t much care what they eat, but she knew about that attitude from humans.
After we finished the cake and tej, we switched to regular wine and other alcohol, and Snowbird asked whether Namir would bring out his balalaika and do a duet with Moonboy. Namir asked Dustin whether he could stand it, and he said that once a year wouldn’t kill him.