The fleet was never mentioned in any broadcast medium; people used euphemisms like “space industrialization” to keep the armament project secret from the Others. I supposed it could work if the Others weren’t listening too hard or were abysmally stupid.
It was good to get out of VR and shower and change. When I was finished, there was a message from Paul saying he was down in the galley with fresh coffee and news.
The coffee was a new batch from Jamaica. He let me take one sip and gave me the news: the Earth triad was coming up to get to know us, ahead of schedule.
“No idea why,” he said. “Maybe Earth is too exciting.”
“Probably just scheduling. Once they start shipping up the pieces of ad Astra, it’s going to be hard to find a seat on the Elevator.” But it was odd.
7
INTRODUCTIONS
I had thought about this moment for some time, often with dread. Now that the moment had come, I just felt resignation, with an overlay of hope. On the other side of this air- lock door was exile from humanity, perhaps for the rest of our lives. Until the Mars quarantine was lifted.
I looked at my mates, Elza and Dustin. “I feel as if someone should make a speech. Or something.”
“How about this?” Dustin said. “ ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’ ”
“My words exactly,” Elza said. “Or approximately.”
We were floating in a sterile white anteroom, the hub of Little Mars. There were two elevator doors, facing one another, slowly rotating around us: EARTH SIDE and MARS SIDE. People could come and go from the Earth side. The Mars side was one-way.
I pushed the button. The door, which was the elevator’s ceiling, slid open. We clambered and somersaulted so that our feet were touching the nominal floor. I said “close,” and the ceiling did slide shut, though it might have been automatic rather than obedient.
As it moved “down” toward the rim of the torus, the slight perception of artificial gravity increased until it was Mars- normal, very light to us. An air- lock hatch opened in our floor, and we climbed down a ladder. The hatch closed above us with a loud final-sounding clunk. A door opened into the supposed contamination of Little Mars.
I’d expected the typical spaceship smell, too many people living in too small a volume, but there was a lot more air here than they needed. It smelled neutral, with a faint whiff of mushroom, probably the Martians’ agriculture.
I recognized the woman standing there, of course, one of the most famous faces in the world, or off the world. “Carmen Dula.” I offered my hand.
She took it and inclined her head slightly. “General Zahari.”
“Just Namir, please.” I introduced my mates, Elza Guadalupe and Dustin Beckner, ignoring rank. They were both colonels in American intelligence, nominally the Space Force. Israeli for me, but we spooks all inhabit the same haunted house.
She introduced her husband, Paul Collins, even more famous, who would be piloting the huge ship, and the other two xenologists, Moonboy and Meryl. We would meet the Martians later.
We followed them down to the galley. Walking was strange, both for the lightness and a momentary dizziness if you turned your head or nodded too quickly—Coriolis force acting on the inner ear, which I remembered from military space stations. It doesn’t bother you after a few minutes.
Dustin stumbled over a floor seam as we went into the galley, and Carmen caught him by the arm and smiled. “You’ll get used to it in a couple of days. Myself, I’ve come to prefer it. Sort of dreading going back to one gee.”
The ad Astra would accelerate all the way at one gee. “How long have you lived with Martian gravity?”
“Since April ’73,” she said. “Zero gee there and back, of course, in those days. I’ve been back and forth a couple of times on the one-gee shuttle. I didn’t like it much.”
“We’ll get used to it fast,” Paul said. “I split my time between Earth and Mars in the old days, and it wasn’t a big problem.”
“You were an athlete back then,” she said, with a little friendly mocking in her voice. “Flyboy.”
Terms change. For most of my life the old days meant before Gehenna. Now it means before Triton. And a flyboy used to fly airplanes.
“Nice place,” Dustin said. Comfortable padded chairs and a wooden table, holos of serious paintings on the walls, some unfamiliar and strange. Rich coffee smell. They had a pressure-brewer that I saw did tea as well.
“Pity we can’t take it with us,” Paul said. “Best not get too used to Jamaican coffee.”
There was room around the table for all of us. We all got coffee or water or juice and sat down.
“We wondered why you came early,” Moonboy said. “If you don’t mind my being direct.” He had a pleasant, unlined face in a halo of unruly gray hair.
“Of course not, never,” I said, and, as often happens, when I paused Elza leaped in to complete my thought.
“It’s about the possibility that we, or one of us, might find the prospect impossible,” she said. “They want us to think this is all cast in stone, and they’re sure from psychological profiles that we’ll all get along fine—and at any rate, we have no choice; there’s only one flight, and we have to be on it.”
Moonboy nodded. “And that’s not true?”
“It can’t be, absolutely. What do you think would happen if one of us seven were to die? Would they cancel the mission?”
“I see your point…”
“I’m sure they have a contingency plan, a list of replacements. So what if the problem is not somebody’s dying, but rather somebody’s realizing that before the thirteen years is up, some one or two of the other people are going to drive him or her absolutely insane?”
“Don’t forget the Martians,” Meryl said. “If anybody here is going to drive me fucking insane, it will be Fly-in-Amber.” The other three laughed, perhaps nervously.
“Walking through that air lock did trap you,” Paul said. “There’s no going back.”
“Not to Earth, granted. But one could stay here, or go on to Mars,” I said, looking at my wife. “You’ve never said anything about this.”
“It just came into my head,” she said, with an innocent look that I knew. Happy to have surprised me.
“It’s a good point,” Paul said. “A couple of days out, we’re past the point of no return. Let’s all have our nervous breakdowns before then.”
It did cause me to reflect. Am I being too much of a soldier? Orders are orders?
Thirty-five years ago, in the basic training kibbutz, a sergeant would wake me up, his face inches from mine, screaming, What is the first general rule?
“I will not quit my post until properly relieved,” I would mumble. Much more powerful than I will obey orders.
“What is the first general rule?” I asked her softly.
A furrow creased her brow. “What is the first what?”
Dustin cleared his throat. “I will not quit my post until properly relieved.”
She smiled. “My soldier boys. We need a better first rule.” She looked at Carmen and raised her eyebrows.
“How about ‘Don’t piss off the aliens’?”
“Except Fly-in-Amber?” I said to Meryl.
She gave a good- natured grimace. “He’s no worse than the other ones in the yellow tribe. They’re all kind of stuck-up and… distant? Even to the other Martians.”
I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.