by Jack Dann
I didn’t run into anyone' until I was almost there. Then I nearly collided with Card as he stepped out of the Pod A bathroom.
“What you doing over here?” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be in sick bay.”
“No, I’m just—” Of course I started coughing. “Let me by, all right?”
“No! What are you up to?” .
“Look, microbe. I don’t have time to explain.” I pushed by him. “Every second counts.” '
“You’re going outside again! What are you, crazy?”
“Look, look, look—for once in your life, don’t be a . . .” I had a moment of desperate inspiration, and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Card, listen. I need you. You have to trust me.”
“What, this is about your crazy Martian story?”
“I can prove it’s not crazy, but you have to come help me.”
“Help you with what?”
“Just suit up and step outside with me. I think they’ll come if I signal them, and they might be able to help us.”
He was hesitant. I knew he only half believed me—but at least he did half believe me. “What? What do you want me to do outside?”
“I just want you to stand in the door, so the airlock can’t close. That way no grown-up can come out and froog the deal.”
That did make him smile. “So what you want is for me to be in as deep shit as you are.”
“Exactly! Are you up for it?”
“You are so easy to see through, you know? You could be a window. ”
“Yeah, yeah. Are you with me?”
He glanced toward the changing room, and then back down the hall. “Let’s go.”
We must have gotten me into my suit in ninety seconds flat. It took him an extra minute because he had to strip and wiggle into the skinsuit first. I kept my eye on the changing room door, but I didn’t have any idea what I would say if someone walked in. We’re playing doctor?
My faceplate was still spattered with dried blood, which was part of the vague plan: I assumed they would know that the blood meant trouble, and their bug camera, or whatever it was, would be on me as soon as I stepped outside. I had a powerful flashlight, and would turn that on my face, with no other lights. Then wave my arms, jump around, whatever.
We rushed through the safety check and I put two fresh oxygen bottles into the dog I’d bashed up. Disabled the buzzer, and we crowded into the airlock, closed it and cycled it.
We’d agreed not to use the radio. Card signaled for me to touch helmets. “How long?”
“An hour, anyhow.” I could walk past Telegraph Hill by then.
“Okay. Watch where you step, clumsy.” I hit his arm.
The door opened and I stepped out into the darkness. Card put one foot out on the sand and leaned back against the door. He pantomimed looking at his watch.
I closed my eyes and pointed the light at my face. Bright red through my eyelids; I knew I’d be dazzled blind for a while after I stopped. So after I’d given them a minute of the bloody faceplate I just stood in one place and shined the light out over the plain, waving it around in fast circles, which I hoped would mean “Help!”
I wasn’t sure how long it had taken Red to bring me from their habitat level to the cave where he was parked, and then on to here. Maybe two hours? I hadn’t been tracking too well. Without a dust storm it might be faster. I pulled on the dog and headed toward the right of Telegraph Hill.
The last thing I expected to happen was this: I hadn’t walked twenty yards when Red came zooming up on his weird vehicle and stopped in a great spray of dust.
Card broke radio silence with a justifiable “Holy shit!”
Red helped me put the dog on one side and I got into the other and we were off. I looked back and waved at Card, and he waved back. The base shrank really fast and slipped under the horizon.
I looked forward for a moment and then turned away. It was just a little too scary, screaming along a few inches over the ground, missing boulders by a hair. The steering must have been automatic. Or maybe Red' had inhuman reflexes. Nothing else about him was all that human.
Except the need to come back and help. He must have been waiting nearby.
It seemed no more than ten or twelve minutes before the thing slowed down and drifted into the slanted cave I remembered. Maybe he had taken a roundabout way before, to hide the fact that they were so close.
We got out the dog and I followed him back down the way we had come a couple of days before. I had to stop twice with coughing fits, and by the time we got to the place where he shed his Mars suit, there was a scary amount of blood.
An odd thing to think, but I wondered whether he would take my body back if I died here. Why should I care?
. We went on down, and at the level where the lake was visible, Green was waiting, along with two small ones dressed in white. We went together down to the dark floor and followed blue lines back to what seemed to be the same hospital room where I’d first awakened after the accident.
I slumped down on the pillow, feeling completely drained and about to barf. I unshipped my helmet and took a cautious breath. It smelled like a cold mushroom farm, exactly what I expected.
Red handed me a glass of water and I took it gratefully. Then he picked up my helmet with his two large arms and did a curiously human thing with a small one: he wiped a bit of blood off the inside with one finger, and then lifted it to his mouth to taste it.
“Wait!” I said. “That could be poison to you!”
He set the helmet down. “How nice of you to be concerned,” he said, in a voice like a British cube actor.
I just shook my head. After a few seconds I was able to say “What?”
“Many of us can speak English,” Green said, “or other of your languages. We’ve been listening to your radio, television, and cube for two hundred years.”
“But. . . before . . . you ...”
“That was to protect ourselves,” Red said. “When we saw you had hurt yourself and I had to bring you here, it was decided that no one would speak a human language in your presence. We are not ready to make contact with humans. You are a dangerous violent race that tends to destroy what it doesn’t understand.”
“Not all of us,” I said.
“We know that. We were considering various courses of action when we found out you were ill.”
“We monitor your colony’s communications with Earth,” one of the white ones said, “and saw immediately what was happening to you. We all have that breathing fungus soon after we’re born. But with us it isn’t serious. We have an herb that cures it permanently. ”
“So . . . you can fix it?”
Red spread out all four hands. “We are so different from you, in chemistry and biology. The treatment might help you. It might kill you.”
“But this crap is sure to kill me if we don’t do anything!”
The other white-clad one spoke up. “We don’t know. I am called Rezlan, and I am ... of a class that studies your people. A scientist, or philosopher.
“The fungus would certainly kill you if it continued to grow. It would fill up your lungs and you couldn’t breathe. But we don’t know; it never happens to us. Your body may learn to adapt to it, and it would be . . . illegal? Immoral, improper . . . for us to experiment on you. If you were to die ... I don’t know how to say it. Impossible.”
“The cure for your ankle was different,” Green said. “There was no risk to your life.”
I coughed and stared at the spatter of blood on my palm. “But if you don’t treat me, and I die? Won’t that be the same thing?”
All four of them made a strange buzzing sound. Red patted my shoulder. “Carmen, that’s a wonderful joke. ‘The same thing.’ ” He buzzed again, and so did the others.
“Wait,” I said, “I’m going to die and it’s funny?”
“No no no,” Green said. “Dying itself isn’t funny.” Red put his large hands on his potato head and waggled it back and forth, and the others buzzed. ’
>
Red tapped his head three times, which set them off again. A natural comedian. “If you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny.”
I started to cry, and he took my hand in his small scaly one and patted it. “We are so different. What is funny ... is how we here are caught. We don’t have a choice. We have to treat you even though we don’t know what the outcome will be.” He buzzed softly. “But that’s not funny to you.”
“No!” I tried not to wail./“I can see this part. There’s a paradox. You might kill me, trying to help me.”
“And that’s not funny to you?”
“No, not really. Not at all, really.”
“Would it be funny if it was somebody else?”
“Funny? No!”
“What if it was your worst enemy. Would that make you smile?”
“No. I don’t have any enemies that bad.”
He said something that made the others buzz. I gritted my teeth and tried not to cry. My whole chest hurt, like both lungs held a burning ton of crud, and here I was trying not to barf in front of a bunch of potato-head aliens. “Red. Even if I don’t get the joke. Could you do the treatment before I foogly die?”
“Oh, Carmen. It’s being prepared. This is . . . it’s a way of dealing with difficult things. We joke. You would say laughing instead of crying.” He turned around, evidently looking back the way we had come, though it’s hard to tell which way a potato is looking. “It is taking too long, which is part of why we have to laugh. When we have children, it’s all at one time, and so they all need the treatment at the same time, a few hundred days later, after they bud. We’re trying to grow . . . it’s like trying to find a vegetable out of season? We have to make it grow when it doesn’t want to. And make enough for the other younglings in your colony. ”
“The adults don’t get it?”
He did a kind of shrug. “We don’t. Or rather, we only get it once, as children. Do you know about whooping cough and measles?”
“What-sels?”
“Measels and whooping cough used to be diseases humans got as children. Before your parents’ parents were born. We heard about them on the radio, and they reminded us of this.”
A new green-clad small one came through the plastic sheets, holding a stone bowl. She and Red exchanged a few whistles and scrapes. “If you are like us when we are small,” he said, “this will make you excrete in every way. So you may want to undress.”
How wonderful. Here comes Carmen, the shitting pissing farting burping barfing human sideshow. Don’t forget snot and earwax. I got out of the Mars suit and unzipped the skinsuit and stepped out of that. I was cold, and every orifice clenched up tight. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Red held my right arm with his two large ones, and Green did the same on the left. Not a good sign. The new green one spit into the bowl, and it started to smoke.
She brought the smoking herb under my nose and I tried to get away, but Red and Green held me fast. It was the worst-smelling crap you could ever imagine. I barfed through mouth and nose and then started retching and coughing explosively, horribly, like a cat with a hairball. It did bring up the two fungus things, like furry rotten fruit. I would’ve barfed again if there had been anything left in my stomach, but I decided to pass out instead.
9. INVASION FROM EARTH
I half woke up, I don’t know how much later, with Red tugging gently on my arm. “Carmen,” he said, “do you live now? There is a problem.”
I grunted something that meant yes, I am alive, but no, I’m not sure I want to be. My throat felt like someone had pulled something scratchy and dead up through it. “Sleep,” I said, but he picked me up and started carrying me like a child.
“There are humans from Earth here,” he said, speeding up to a run. “They do not understand. They’re wrecking everything.” He blew through the plastic sheets into the dark hall.
“Red . . . it’s hard to breathe here.” He didn’t respond, just ran faster, a rippling horse gait. His own breath was coming hard, like sheets of paper being ripped. “Red. I need . . . suit. Oxygen.”
“As we do.” We were suddenly in the middle of a crowd— hundreds of them in various sizes and colors—surging up the ramp toward the surface. He said three short words over and over, very loud, and the crowd stopped moving and parted to let us through.
When we went through the next set of doors I could hear air whistling out. On the other side my ears popped with a painful crack and I felt cold, colder than I ever had been. “What’s happening?”
“Your . . . humans . . . have a . . . thing.” He was wheezing before each word. “A tool . . . that. . . tears . . . through.”
He set me down gently on the cold rock floor. I shuddered out of control, teeth chattering. No air. Lungs full of nothing but pain. The world was going white. I was starting to die but instead of praying or something I just noticed that the hairs in my nose had frozen and were making a crinkly sound when I tried to breathe.
Red was putting on the plastic layers that made up his Mars suit. He picked me up and I cried out in startled pain—the skin on my right forearm and breast and hip had frozen to the rock— and he held me close with three arms while the fourth did something to seal the plastic. Then he held me with all four arms and crooned something reassuring to weird creatures from another planet. He smelled like a mushroom you wouldn’t eat, but I could breathe again.
I was bleeding some from the ripped skin and my lungs and throat still didn’t want to work, and I was being hugged to death by a nightmarish singing monster, so rather than put up with it all my body just passed out again.
I woke up to my father fighting with Red, with me in between. Red was trying to hold on to me with his small arms while my father was going after him with some sort of pipe, and he was defending himself with the large arms. “No!” I screamed. “Dad! No!”
Of course he couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum, but I guess anyone can lip-read the word “no.” He stepped back with an expression on his face that I had never seen. Anguish, I suppose, or rage. Well, here was his daughter, naked and bleeding, in the many arms of a gruesome alien, looking way too much like a movie poster from a century ago.
Taka Wu and Mike Silverman were carrying a spalling laser. “Red,” I said, “watch out for the guys with the machine.”
“I know,” he said, “We’ve seen you use it underground. That’s how they tore up the first set of doors. We can’t let them use it again.”
It was an interesting standoff. Four big aliens in their plasticwrap suits. My father and mother and nine other humans in Mars suits, armed with tomato stakes and shovels and one laser, the humans looking kind of pissed off and frightened. The Martians probably were, too. A good thing we hadn’t brought any guns to this planet.
Red whispered. “Can you make them leave the machine and follow us?”
“I don’t know... they’re scared.” I mouthed “Mother, Dad,” and pointed back the way we had come. “Fol-low us,” I said with slow exaggeration. Confined as I was, I couldn’t make any sweeping gestures, but I jabbed one forefinger back the way we had come.
Dad stepped forward slowly, his hands palm out. Mother started to follow him. Red shifted me around and held out his hand and my father took it, and held his other one out for mother. She took it and we went crabwise through the dark layers of the second airlock. Then the third and the fourth, and we were on the slope overlooking the lake.
The crowd of aliens we’d left behind was still there, perhaps a daunting sight for mother and Dad. But they held on, and the crowd parted to let us through.
I noticed ice was forming on the edge of the lake. Were we going to kill them all?
“Pardon,” Red muttered, and held me so hard I couldn’t breathe, while he wiggled out of his suit and left it on the ground, then set me down gently.
It was like walking on ice-^-on dry ice—and my breath came out in plumes. But he and I walked together along the blue line paths, followed by my parents, down
to the sanctuary of the white room. Green was waiting there with my skinsuit. I gratefully pulled it on and zipped up. “Boots?”
“Boots,” she said, and went back the way we’d come.
“Are you all right?” Red asked.
My father had his helmet off. “These things speak English?”
Red sort of shrugged. “And Chinese, in my case. We’ve been eavesdropping on you since you discovered radio.”
My father fainted dead away.
***
Green produced this thing that looked like a gray cabbage and held it by Dad’s face. I had a vague memory of it being used on me, sort of like an oxygen source. He came around in a minute or so.
“Are you actually Martians?” Mother said. “You can’t be.”
Red nodded in a jerky way. “We are Martians only the same way you are. We live here. But we came from somewhere else.”
“Where?” Dad croaked.
“No time for that. You have to talk to your people. We’re losing air and heat, and have to repair the door. Then we have to treat your children. Carmen was near death.”
Dad got to his knees and stood up, then stooped to pick up his helmet. “You know how to fix it? The laser damage.”
“It knows how to repair itself. But it’s like a wound in the body. We have to use stitches or glue to close the hole. Then it grows back.”
“So you just need for us to not interfere.”
“And help, by showing where the damage is.”
He started to put his helmet on. “What about Carmen?”
“Yeah. Where’s my suit?”
Red faced me. I realized you could tell that by the little black mouth slit. “You’re very weak. You should stay here.”
“But—”
“No time to argue. Stay here till we return.” All of them but Green went bustling through the airlock.
“So,” I said to her. “I guess I’m a hostage.”
“My English no good,” she said. “Parlez-vous Francais?” I said no. “Nihongo hanasu koto ga dekimasu?”
Probably Japanese, or maybe Martian. “No, sorry.” I sat down and waited for the air to run out.
