By the time Namir had retrieved the balalaika from the workshop, Moonboy had figured out how to simulate a primitive accordion, and with his sensitive ear he had no trouble squeezing out chords that matched the Eastern European and Israeli tunes Namir knew, and did an occasional simulated-clarinet solo, what he called klezmer style. Most of it was new to me, and I was glad of the Martian request.
When we went to bed, Paul and I made love, even though it wasn’t Saturday (badminton brings out the beast in him).
Afterward, he was restless. “I’m the most useless pilot in history.” “I don’t know. The guy in charge of the Titanic didn’t exactly earn his paycheck.”
“This morning while you were gardening, I went up to the shuttle and put it through some simulations for landing.”
A few years premature. “Practice makes perfect?”
“I could do them in my sleep, which is the problem. There are really only four basic situations in the VR—Earth, Mars, Moon, and zero- gee rendezvous. I can fiddle with the parameters. But I’m not really learning anything.”
“Well, it’s not rocket science, as they used to say. Except that it is rocket science. And you’re the best. I read that somewhere.”
I could feel his smile in the dark, and he patted my hip. “The best within a half light-year, anyhow. But we should have thought to make up some weird simulations, like a dense, turbulent atmosphere. A dusty one. You’d never land in a dust storm if you had a chance. But I’ll have to take what I get.”
“Well, it’s just software, isn’t it? Describe what you need and tight-beam it to Earth. They could develop and test it, and send it to you after turnaround.”
He paused. “Sometimes you surprise me.”
I resisted the impulse to reach down and actually surprise him. It was already late, though, and I didn’t want to give him any more ideas.
19
YEAR TWO
8 May 2090
Our second year began with a smaller useful crew, and perhaps reduced efficiency from those of us who are left.
We’ve essentially lost Moonboy. Whenever he’s not in VR, he’s locked into earphones. He doesn’t even take them off to eat. If you ask him a question, he hands you a notebook; write down the query, and he’ll write a short response, or nod or shrug, usually.
It started with noise coming from the air-conditioning. At first it was a high-pitched whistle. We were able to program the self-repair algorithm and reduce it to bare audibility, but in the process introduced a varying frequency component: if you listen closely, it’s like someone whistling tunelessly in another room. I can hardly hear it at all, but Moonboy said it was going to drive him mad, and apparently it did.
We can still use him after a fashion, to try to translate if one of the Martians says something incomprehensible. But it’s hard to get his attention, and impossible to make him concentrate.
Elza says he’s apparently in a dissociative fugue. His medical history is dominated by dissociative amnesia, not being able to remember a murderous assault by his father when he was a boy.
Medication isn’t effective. A dose large enough to give him some peace knocks him out, and when he wakes up, the noise is still there, and he claps on the ’phones.
Meryl is of course, depressed, with Moonboy such a wreck, but everyone else seems stable, if not happy. Elza seems resigned to Paul’s obstinate monogamy. I should thank him.
Memo to the next people who staff a mission like this: make sure nobody in the crew is fucking crazy.
Of course, we may all be, in less dramatic ways.
Other than the noisy life-support system, the ship seems shipshape. In December I spent a couple of weeks in advanced menu planning—we’ve been too conservative in using the luxury stores. We could use more than half of them on the way to Wolf. If we do survive the encounter with the Others, we’ll probably be content with anything on the way back. Morale’s only a problem on the way there.
I talked with Paul about this, but not with the others. The last thing I need in the kitchen is a democracy.
I’m continuing my study of first-contact narratives in human history. Usually less destructive than the Others’ contact with us, though the ultimate result is often extinction, anyhow.
There aren’t really close analogies. Aboriginal societies didn’t send off diplomats to plead peace with their high-tech conquerors. What would have happened if the Maori, on learning where their invaders came from, had taken a war canoe and paddled around the Cape and up the Atlantic and the Thames to parley with Queen Victoria? She’s atypical, actually. Reports of Maori military performance led her to offer them at least symbolic equality in the governance of New Zealand. The Others would probably just have nuked them all. With the wave of a hand.
Of course, we don’t really know anything about their psychology or philosophy, other than the fact that they observed us, judged us, and tried to execute us all, with no discussion. When I was a boy, I watched my father spray a nest of wasps that had grown on the side of our house. You could see in their frantic paroxysms how painful an end that was, and my father laughed at me for crying. Maybe some few of the Others will mourn our necessary extinction.
In a way that I would hesitate to call mystical, life becomes more and more precious as we ply our way toward whatever awaits—and I mean that in the most prosaic sense; I wake up every morning eager for the day, even though I do little other than cook and read and talk. A little music, too little.
I swim almost every day, trying to reserve the pool for the half hour after Carmen swims. I can legitimately show up a few minutes early and look at her.
How do I really feel toward her? We talk about everything but that. If I were closer to her age, I might move toward romance, or at least sex, but I’m almost as old as her father. She brought that up early on, and I have no desire to appear foolish. Besides, I’m married to the only certified nymphomaniac within light-years. Another woman might be too much of a good thing.
But I do feel close to her, sometimes closer than I am to Elza, who will never let me or anyone else into her mysterious center—a place I think she herself never visits. Carmen seems totally open, American to the core, even if her passport says “Martian.”
I think my foreignness attracts her, but at some level frightens her as well. The opposite of Elza, in a way. The fact that I’ve been a professional killer thrills Elza, I think, though she would be less thrilled if she knew how many I’ve killed, and how, and why.
PART 3
THE FLOWER
1
YEAR THREE
8 May 2091
This is the end of the third Earth year of our voyage to Wolf 25, to meet with the Others and learn our fate. Humans being superstitious about anniversaries, they asked that we each write up a summarizing statement for these occasions.
For me it’s pointless, since I recall everything whether it is important or not. But I will do it. (Snowbird is more intimately involved with the humans than I am. That’s natural; the white family is more social, even among Martians. We yellows are better observers.)
The most interesting thing about the year to come is that we’re approaching the midpoint, turnaround time. The past year has been more or less uneventful for Martians, though it could have been our ending. The brown pyatyur fungus almost stopped growing, which would eventually have been fatal for us, but Meryl and Carmen figured out what was wrong. It was lacking nitrates—that is, the pseudo-Martian ecosystem was not properly recycling nitrates. We only need trace quantities, so the lack wasn’t obvious. Human agriculture needs large amounts, though, and they are full of it. A day’s production of human urine gives us a year’s worth.