by Joe Haldeman
“Yes,” Namir and Paul said simultaneously.
I wasn’t sure about that, and started to say, “Wait.” But it was too late when my lips formed the word.
What if it said, “You’re right,” and we all were simply doomed? It could flick us away like a speck.
Fly-in-Amber expressed my misgivings: “Perhaps that was not wise. We should preserve our options and not compel it to make a decision.”
“Now or later,” Namir said. “It will be easier to work with it if we know we have a chance of surviving.”
It occurred to me that the room had no smell of its own. Standing next to Paul, I could smell the peanuts on his breath. But there was nothing from the ambient environment. Martian rooms had a characteristic smell, like damp earth; nothing like that here. It was like a VR background with the smell turned off.
Other-prime answered in less than a minute. Probably a prepared response; the question was no surprise. “That is fair. We do not think the same way as you, but let me try to put this in human terms.
“You averted worldwide catastrophe by moving our device to where it could not harm you. There were other things that you could have done, but that was sufficient. If you wish, you may think of that as a test that your species has passed. Contacting me here would be the second test.
“How many tests might be necessary for your assurance, I cannot say. The home planet does not yet know anything, of course; it will be more than a decade before my last communication from your solar system reaches them.
“I can say that other races have attained this degree of rapport with us, and many of them were allowed to go on their way. Some were not.
“None who resorted to aggression were allowed to survive. You must have deduced this already.”
“That’s all?” Paul said after a few seconds.
“Yes.”
“I showed you around our facilities,” Fly-in-Amber said. “Will you reciprocate?”
“Not now. I will discuss this with Other-prime. Right now it is resting.”
“It takes a lot of energy for it to communicate with us?” I said.
“That is not something you need to know at this time. Be careful when you leave. There is no gravity on the other side of the air lock.”
Paul snorted. “ ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’ ”
“It will not do that,” Spy said. Fly-in-Amber nodded. Two species with but a single sense of humor.
5
TURNAROUND
I sat (or hovered) with Carmen, Paul, and Fly-in-Amber for an hour, with most of the others looking on, and we recorded all of our impressions from the half hour we were in the alien spacecraft. Of course we had all of the conversation in there recorded, too.
It was pretty straightforward. Even my Elza was a little optimistic. “It could have been a lot worse,” she said. “Even an ultimatum is a kind of communication.”
Paul, floating upside down, put on his slippers and did a gymnast’s tuck to land feetfirst. “I guess we’re safe as long as we remain interesting,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t anybody be boring.” He went back to the control room to start turnaround.
One of us did become less boring. Moonboy joined us and took off his earphones.
“Has the noise stopped?” Elza said.
He shook his head. “I’ve been sort of listening since the Spy one appeared. Are we in more danger now, or less?”
“Less, in a way,” she said. “I mean, they were always out there. They didn’t have to reveal themselves.”
“Why not reveal yourself to a specimen you’re studying?” I said.
He nodded slowly, looking at the space between me and Elza, not quite focusing, drifting slightly.
“Are you feeling better, Moonboy?” Carmen asked.
“I’m feeling more sane. For what that’s worth.” He looked directly at her, then away. “I’m sorry I’ve been . . .”
“You’ve been sick,” Elza said. Did she not see how transparently he was trying to manipulate her and Carmen? I wanted to tell him to put his earphones back on and go sit someplace out of the way. There’s a time and a place for everything, and for this it was months ago and billions of miles away.
Meryl gazed at her newly talkative mate in stunned silence. It was clearly time to leave them alone. “Good you’re feeling better.” I excused myself and geckoed over to the kitchen. From the pantry I got a tube of reconstituted gorgonzola paste and some crackers, tucked a squeeze bottle of wine under my arm, and stepped into the warmer human lounge. I asked it for quiet random Mozart and hovered near the bookcase, extracting the large book of Vermeer prints.
There’s a kind of art to situating yourself in weightlessness. The cheese, crackers, wine, and book were all hovering within an arm’s length. As long as I was careful in picking things up and replacing them, I wouldn’t have to chase them down. Carmen and Paul did it automatically, with months of experience, but I still had to think things through and move with caution.
While I hovered contemplating this and Vermeer’s faces, I gently collided with the bookcase. The cheese and wine and book all inched toward me. I was disoriented for a moment, then realized that Paul had begun turning the iceberg around. My satellite objects and I weren’t attached to anything, but our frame of reference was moving fast enough to go through a half circle in, what, thirty hours? This seemed faster than that. I’d ask the notebook later.
The cheese wasn’t bad, considering. The “wine” was pure plonk, but better than nothing.
So we were one- quarter of the way to the next wine shop or liquor store. That put the trip into a certain perspective. Or maybe halfway to dying, which put it into another.
“Penny for your thoughts.” Carmen had drifted up behind me, stopped herself with a toe to the wall. “We’ve started moving,” she said, her face at my level but sideways.
“Just noticed.” I handed her the wine bottle, and she squeezed a dash of it into her mouth, from an impressive distance.
“Owe you one. What about our silent partner?”
I looked over toward the other lounge, and he wasn’t there anymore. “I’ll wait and see. One swallow does not make a spring.”
I offered her the cheese and crackers, but she waved them away. “I gain weight in zero gee just thinking about food.”
That made me smile. “Weight?”
“Mass, inertia, whatever. Turns into weight.” She looked back to where Moonboy had been. “You’re not . . . not too sympathetic.”
“Aside from the fact that he broke my wife’s nose? That he’s acting like a sullen child?” She made a helpless shrug. I tried to choose my words carefully. “His madness, or behavior, is not his fault; I understand and agree with that. He was treated abominably as a child, and I wish his father could be punished for that.”
“Stepfather.”
“If this were a military operation, he would no longer be part of it. We can’t leave him behind or send him back—”
“Or kill him,” she said quietly.
“No. But we could lock him up. Take him out of the equation.”
“That would destroy him, Namir.”
“I believe it would. But his is one life versus billions.”
She shook her head. “If I could wave a magic wand and make him disappear, I would. But imprisoning him would affect us as well as him.”
“You don’t think it affects us to have him moping around like some demented . . .” She flinched, and I lowered my voice. “He’s already wearing us down. Three more years?”
We’d had this argument before, from various angles. Her response surprised me. “It could be a long three years. Let’s see how he acts when we have gravity again. See whether this recovery lasts.”
“I’m glad you can see it that way.”
She smiled and touched my shoulder. “Don’t want two crazy men aboard.” She kicked off from the bookcase and floated toward the kitchen.
6
ADJUSTMENTS<
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I was jangled but way behind on sleep, despite the sweet nap with Paul, so I took a half pill and went zombie for about eight hours. When I woke up, Paul was snoring upside down in a corner, naked. Zero gee can do funny things to a penis, but I decided his need for sleep trumped my curiosity. And he might be low on energy. I closed the door quietly and drifted toward the gym, where Moonboy was tumbling.
It may have been weightlessness as much as the appearance of Spy that had shaken Moonboy out of his sullen isolation, into impressive gymnastics. He’s Paul’s age, but was bouncing around like a kid.
Well, not exactly like a kid. There was an element of grim determination in his constant motion, getting a maximum of exercise while honing his zero-gee gymnastic skills. I had seen him studying Paul, then trying to duplicate the ways he got from place to place. He was never as graceful but became almost as fast and accurate.
Not a particularly useful life skill, unless he planned a midlife career as a laborer in orbit. But I was hoping all the jumping around was a kind of transition back to a normal life. Or “normal,” in quotation marks.
Meryl was watching him from a distance as he practiced floor-to-ceiling, ceiling-to-floor rolls. I floated over to join her.
“He’s getting good,” I said.
“That he is.” She didn’t look at me.
“Have you talked?”
“Said hello.” She took a breath and let it out. “What should I say to him? I mean really.”
“Welcome back?”
“I don’t know that he is back. I’m not sure where he’s been.” There were beads of tears on her eyelashes. She rubbed her eyes and left wet spots on her cheeks.
“Maybe you want to wait until the gravity comes back.”
“Maybe.” Our thighs touched, and she put a hand on my knee. “You’re so lucky with Paul.”
“Yes. But Elza will get him, too, sooner or later.” Why did I say that?
She smiled. “Probably. She’ll be fucking Spy before we get to the planet.”
“A milestone for Homo sapiens.”
“What’s hard, one thing that’s hard, is not having a place for us to go back to. While he was shut away in his own box, I could handle that. But are we supposed to pretend that it’s over now; he got it out of his system?”
“No, of course not. I think you have to get him to talk about it.”
“Get him to talk about anything, first. Then I could work it around to ‘say, are you still crazy?’ ”
“You can’t . . . it’s a pity you can’t have Elza mediate.”
She smiled, a tight line. “She’s the only one with a degree. But it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
“He might hit her again.”
“I might ask him to.” She grinned. “Just as therapy. For both of us.”
I was feeling hungry and instinctively checked my wrist. The tattoo had showed the wrong time since we passed the orbit of Jupiter, but habits die hard.
“It’s eight,” Meryl said. “Had dinner?”
We put on slippers and walked, like grown-ups, to the kitchen. Microwaved packets of empañadas and supposedly Mexican vegetables. I went back to the middle of the garden and picked a sweet red pepper and chopped it up, feeling like Namir. Master zero-gee chef, not losing a single piece of pepper or finger.
“I’d kill for a cup of coffee,” she said. “Hot coffee.” The drink bags and squeeze bottles all had DO NOT MICROWAVE on them. So far nobody had put that to the test. Better keep an eye on Moonboy.
“So all he’s said is hello?”
“Some politenesses. He said he was better, and we could talk later. It is later, though, and he’s . . .” She laughed a little snort. “He’s graduated from village idiot to whirling dervish.”
She opened the seam on her vegetables a bit and squirted in some hot sauce. She held it out to me, but I declined, knowing its potentiating effect. If I could hold off shitting until we had gravity, I would be a much happier space tourist, and I probably wasn’t alone. You can get used to those things, but you also get un-used to them.
(I had a sudden flashback of the day we’d learned to go in, or into, a zero-gee toilet, with its helpful little eye-in-the-bowl. Not a part of myself I’d ever expected to observe in action.)
“Gravity might help him.” Repeating myself.
“Or it might put him back in his cocoon.” She was using chopsticks, and they worked better than my spoon, which tended to launch bits of food into my face or beyond. There would be some cleaning up when we restarted.
After we began eating, the object of our discussion headed our way, perhaps having heard the Pavlovian microwave bell. He bounced from the recycler wall to the bean trellis, off the side of the Martian quarters, and through both lounges, arriving at a reasonable speed surrounded by a nimbus of male sweat, not too unpleasant.
“Mexican!” He went to the fridge and started to rummage.
“In the pantry,” Meryl said. “Under E, for empañadas.”
“Sí, sí; muchas gracias.” He found the packet and put it in the microwave, and floated in front of it upside down. “I’m not interrupting?”
“Just getting a bite,” she said, “but you can’t eat with us unless your feet are in the right direction.”
“Comprendo.” When the food was ready, he brought it over with a slow reverse roll. We were eating at the table, even though there was no reason to actually set the food down on it.
He sprayed hot sauce into the packet and speared the empañadas with a fork, more efficient than either of us. Without preamble, he said, “Have you thought about Spy not being what he claims to be?”
That was not a big stretch. “In what way?”
“Maybe he’s not an alien at all, hmm? Maybe he’s always been here, waiting for turnaround. To test us.”
“Who?” Meryl said. “Who’s testing us?”
“Earth. Testing our loyalty.”
That sounded bizarre enough. “I don’t get it. How could anybody be disloyal?”
“Be in the pay of the Others?” Meryl offered.
“Well, you know. Not pay.”
“No, I don’t know. What?”
He finished chewing, swallowed, and set his food packet floating just over the table. He folded his hands over his chest. “I’ll spell it out.”
“I’m all ears,” she said.
“First, how possible is it that they could chase us eleven light-years, constantly accelerating, and wind up right here at the exact right time—with no evidence of having used any fuel? Without our detecting them?”
We did detect something, I thought; Paul had mentioned an anomaly in the proximity circuits. But I let it be.
“How much more likely is it that they’ve been here all along? That the supposed ‘alien’ was already installed before we got to the iceberg? Tell me it couldn’t be done.”
“Okay,” she said. “It couldn’t be done.”
“Even if it could, why would they bother?”
“Like I say, to test our loyalty.”
“That’s . . .” She didn’t say crazy. “That makes no sense.”
“It seems awfully elaborate,” I said. “They built this alien-looking spaceship, and Spy, and a convincing Other, and kept them hidden for years, to trot them out at turnaround, to see how we react?”
“You’ve got it. That’s it exactly.”
“Moonboy.” Meryl’s voice quavered.
“Where did they hide them for three years?” I persisted.
“Out in plain sight. No one’s gone out to look till now.”
“But Paul can look outside anytime he wants. Or anyone who goes into the control room.”
“Oh, Carmen, don’t be naive. It’s not like looking out a window. Paul sees an electronic image that’s supposed to match what’s out there. They could fix it so he wouldn’t see the ship until the time was right.”
“And they’d do all that just to check our loyalty? Who is this ‘they’ anyhow?”
“Earth!” He was suddenly even more intense. “They never have trusted the four of us from Mars.”
“They chose us for this,” Meryl said.
“And sent along three spies!” He glared at Meryl, then at me. “Could it be more plain?”
I stared right back. “Something’s pretty plain.”
“Three spies. One seduces me and tries to play with my head, my memories of childhood. One attacks me physically, unprovoked. The third has worked himself into a position of authority, from which he can poison your minds against me. Is any of that not true?”
“Listen to me.” I took his hand in both of mine. “Elza tries to seduce everybody; that’s her nature. Dustin hit you because you fucked his wife, then broke her nose. Namir is a career diplomat and a natural leader, and I don’t think he’s ever tried to influence my opinion of you.”
“Considering that you also fucked his wife,” Meryl said, “and broke her nose, I’d say he’s been a model of objectivity.”
He jerked his hand away. “You’ve both bought it. Bought the whole thing. Or you’re in on it, too.” He kicked away from the table so hard he hit his head on the ceiling with a thump. He drifted back to the fridge and kicked off from it, to drift away over the crops.
After a bit, Meryl picked up his lunch. “Want some of this?”
“Too much hot sauce.”
She nodded but reached into it with her chopsticks. “Guess you can get used to anything.”
7
ABOUT TIME
Humans are always talking about heaven, even if they claim not to believe such a place exists. I have the feeling that it’s not just metaphor or semantic shorthand, but rather an internal state that they are forever grasping for but never attain.
I have come close to heaven, for a Martian, these past few days—free of the ship’s constant crushing acceleration. This morning it began again, and while I wait for the pool to fill up with water, I will distract myself with writing these notes.
Let go of the stylus and it falls to the floor. Depressing. But I will enjoy the water.
