Girl on Mars

by Jack McDonald Burnett

  “I’m just glad the portal on the moon still worked,” Persisting said. “Wasn’t destroyed. Some calamity drove hundreds of Pelorians out to the shipyard at one point.”

  “How about the one on Mars?” Conn said. “Now that the Sidereals know it works . . .”

  “Jeffrey will guard it with his life,” Izzy said. “He said as much, and it makes sense that he would.”

  Conn was grateful, but felt guilty that so many had died while she had lived. Why couldn’t all eight hundred thousand Pelorians have friends like Persisting and Izzy?

  “Izzy, I can’t thank you enough—”

  “Yes,” Persisting said. “Thank you, Izzy.”

  “My pleasure. Now I’m going to try to get some more sleep.”

  Conn joined her in a nap.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Sentence

  December 18 - 27, 2039

  It was ten days before they heard from the Aphelials.

  It was ten days in which public opinion in favor of the Pelorians posthumously soared, and the public became far more worried about the Aphelials.

  It was ten days in which most of the feeds wondered aloud whether Conn and Yongpo had brought the Aphelials to Earth’s moon, and maybe Earth next. Conn had made it clear in interviews that she had encountered an Aphelial in Saturn’s orbit, and that it was safe to assume the Aphelials already knew about humans of Earth.

  “They knew about Earth because they chased the Pelorians here!” exclaimed one interviewer on an unfriendly feed.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Conn said. “The Pelorians were here for fifteen years before the Aphelials showed up to destroy them.” They had come to the moon ten years before making contact with humans. “They weren’t exactly hot on the Pelorians’ trail.”

  “Then it was you! It had to be you! You show up in their neighborhood, you’re coming from this system, you go back to this system, they say, well there’s a new spacefaring race, we’d better do something about it, let’s follow them—”

  “We’re going in circles. They were already here. That’s why we went to Mizar and Alcor.”

  “We weren’t on their radar!”

  And on like that. Conn couldn’t shake the accusation entirely. She was glad to find that she did have support. A polling organization named her the “most admired woman in the world” for the second time, after 2036. Her moon and Mars landings had made a protective sheen around her that obnoxious talking heads couldn’t penetrate. They tried anyway.

  Conn woke every night from nightmares about the extermination of the Pelorians. She seemed to be taking it harder than Persisting, who was sleeping on her couch.

  “We were on arks that had everything we needed, we were mobile, and we were staying a step ahead of the Aphelials,” he said. “The moment we decided to build a permanent home is the moment we were lost.”

  “Persisting, I’ve never understood. Why make a permanent home on the moon?”

  “A complicated series of events and decisions, Conn. We arrived here with the intention of taking the Earth from you. You were not technologically sophisticated, and if the Aphelials knew about you already, they would know you posed no threat. We hoped they wouldn’t come looking anymore.

  “But you were more advanced than we thought. Technologically, for sure, but also politically. Our gambit for Earth failed. Faced with having to find a similar planet and study it for ten years, we went to plan B: burrow underground and put up this amazing, impenetrable force field. But Conn, plan B wasn’t supposed to happen literally next door to a race that would soon be attracting the interest of the Aphelials. Unfortunately, that was where we were, and the point of going to plan B was to not move.”

  Persisting seemed to sense her thoughts. “I was against it all along, Conn. All of it. Especially the plan of using Russia’s nukes against the US. Yes, that was the plan. I wanted no part of it. If it were up to me, once we found out you had sent spacecraft to the moon, we would have left immediately. As it is my mother died for his convictions.”

  “What about the Sidereals? Why do you suppose they settled on Mars?”

  “Our plan was a copy of the Sidereals’. When the Sidereals got here, humans were as backward as could be, at least technologically. As far as the human race is concerned, technological advance is rapid. But with other races it’s usually not. The Sidereals settled in a system they thought was safe from the Aphelials, too. If you observed North America in the 1700s you might have come to the same conclusion.”

  December twenty-third, Persisting’s two other avatars showed up at Conn’s door. They were delighted to be right, having speculated that their brother would be with Conn. The three of them raised beer bottles to the Pelorian race, likely extinct. Conn was present, but did not join the toast. It was awful, the violent annihilation of an entire civilization, but they meant human beings harm. She was allowed to have nightmares during the night and find herself hating them during the day.

  That hatred never extended to Persisting, of course. She was glad that his other two avatars were doing well—they were pieces of her friend that remained alive and well. The two avatars had lives to return to, so they left the next day.

  “Didn’t they enter into human society to advance a Pelorian agenda?” Conn said. “What’s the point anymore?”

  “I decided to stay on the moon. It was the right choice for me. Whatever reason they had to assume human lives, that’s what they’re living. Earth is home to them.” And it wasn’t to her friend. His was lost.

  # # #

  The morning of December twenty-seventh, which was pleasingly mild in northern California, the Aphelials hacked the satellites that delivered most of the major feeds. They appeared on millions of screens in the US, and millions more in China, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

  Three Aphelials appeared abreast, all with their full bodies in view. They had the long hair, mostly-bare torso, kilt, bare feet, and staffs Conn had come to expect. They looked like gods—green-gray, splotchy gods. If they were supposed to look intimidating, it worked. They spoke their native language.

  “We are Aphelials of Cradle (as Conn would translate it for the world minutes later). We are the Superiors of this sector. You have challenged our Superiority. Challenges to Superiority are met with violence. The punishment is death. You have no presence on other worlds, therefore the manner of death is chemical. By law we must inform you that, as no one on Earth understands what I am saying—” here, the Aphelial beside the speaker reacts, possibly with the equivalent of not-quite-stifled laughter “—language exchange is available in orbit, on our administrative spacecraft.” End of message.

  Panic gripped the world, a pervasive fear of chemical attack. Nobody wanted to drink the water. Nobody wanted to breathe the air. In the coming days, food sales would be drastically down overall; canned goods, canned before the Aphelials’ arrival, would sell out. Tens of millions would find God; hundreds of thousands would decide He must not exist. Great for churches, on balance. There would be hoarding, price gouging, and not many people going to work or school. The world economy would grind to a halt.

  “What does that mean, the means of death is chemical?” Conn asked Persisting.

  “I have no idea,” the Pelorian told her.

  Conn and Yongpo were flown to Washington to meet with the president. Before and after, they were on the feeds constantly. Conn had delivered the message to humankind that it was going to die. Everyone wanted her to tell them what it meant, as if she were a oncologist who had just broken bad news about cancer. How long did they have to live? How exactly would they die? Would it be painful? Was there anything they could do about it?

  Billions of people saw Conn on one feed or another, more than had been watching when she stepped onto the moon.

  Only the president seemed to have had a busier twelve hours. He was twenty-five minutes late and harried when he appeared. The secretaries of state, defense and homeland security trailed him, as did Janus Gordon.
They had all come from the same place. The fabled situation room?

  While the president collected himself and murmured to his secretary of defense, Secretary of State Graham began quizzing Conn. What could she tell them about the meaning behind the message?

  “As I said on the fone, and have been saying on the feeds, almost nothing,” she said, a little irritated. The president and his cabinet could have learned as much from Conn and Yongpo by watching the feeds as they could by having them in the same room. “I don’t know what chemical means.”

  “How sure are you of your translation?”

  “She’s absolutely right,” Yongpo said. “I had it as supremacy instead of superiority, but I’ve changed my mind.”

  “How about you, Ms. Garrow? Anything you can change your mind on, if you think about it harder?”

  Conn felt herself reddening. “Nothing,” she said.

  “We’re particularly concerned about the word death,” Janus Gordon said. “How sure are you of that?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “No chance that they really said violence, not death?”

  “They have a different word for violence, which they use in the fourth sentence,” Yongpo said.

  “You two are starting a company together,” Gordon said. Of course he knew that. “All this isn’t you trying to turn a little attention on yourself?”

  Conn made sure her response was measured. “Mr. Gordon, I’m not exactly starved for attention. I’m the most admired woman in the world. I’ve walked on the moon, I made first contact with an alien race, and I was the first person on Mars. Everybody knows who I am. If they didn’t say death, or if I was even a tiny bit unsure of my translation, I would say so.”

  “Does she know what they mean by chemical?” the president wanted to know.

  “Let’s talk about how these two brought these things to Earth,” the secretary of homeland security said.

  “Ease up, Todd,” the president said. “They said no one on Earth knew what they were saying. If Ms. Garrow and Mr. Luan had been the reason they came to Earth, surely they would know that they were fluent in their language. Might even have asked for them by name. Let’s discuss this message.”

  As reasonable as that sounded, for twenty minutes the president and his advisers grilled Conn and Yongpo, looking for any sign the two of them were making it all up, or exaggerating it.

  Exhausted, Conn finally decided to take the initiative. “Mister President, do you know what the most important part of the message is?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The part where they say there’s a spacecraft in orbit, and we’re invited to it.”

  PART THREE

  I am part of the sea and stars

  And the winds of the South and North,

  Of mountains and moon and Mars,

  And the ages sent me forth!

  —Edward H.S. Terry, “Kinship”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Orbit

  December 27 - 30, 2039

  It was a miracle—and therefore, to many in the know, a good omen—that Dyna-Tech could put together a crewed rocket ride to low-Earth orbit in seventy-two hours. They had a few rockets that had been scheduled for missions to take astronauts to the space station. They didn’t need them anymore because astronauts could now walk to the space station from Sunnyvale or Houston. A mission that was supposed to have taken three people to the space station on December fifteenth was simply resurrected. Now it would carry three people to the Aphelials’ administrative spacecraft on December thirtieth. All the calculations were made, all the equipment was ready. It was almost the case that all they had to do was move the rocket onto the launch pad.

  The capsule that carried the three into orbit would also need to bring them back to Earth. The capsules were designed for re-entry. When there got to be too many capsules docked at the space station, workers who called themselves dunkers would ride them back into the ocean, where they would be retrieved by Dyna-Tech, or whoever owned them.

  Conn was qualified to operate an SSEV, but had never attempted an ocean landing in a capsule. She had simulated it, in case of emergency, quite a bit. Yongpo had splashed down before, but in Chinese vehicles, which were in many ways different from Dyna-Tech’s. The third body on the flight, the secretary of state, had never flown anything in his life. He had also never used a portal, and over Conn’s, Yongpo’s, and the president’s objections, refused to use one to get to or from the space station.

  “Do you know how it works?” the secretary asked Yongpo.

  “I know the basics of the physics behind it—”

  “We knew the basics of the physics behind that Pelorian spaceship that was supposed to go to Sirius, too.”

  “This is different.”

  But the secretary could not be convinced. They would launch from and splash down on Earth.

  The president asked Yongpo to hole himself up at Dyna-Tech for three days simulating returning the capsule to Earth safely. Conn was at once relieved and a little miffed: she had simulated splashdowns in Dyna-Tech capsules, and had been to space several times since Yongpo had last. She got the impression from interacting with the president and his advisers that the president was sexist, at least under pressure. He seemed more comfortable with a man doing the work, if there were a choice. But maybe it was her imagination. Yongpo had four splashdowns on his resume; Conn had only simmed.

  The Chinese would send a contingent to the Aphelial spacecraft four days later. The US wouldn’t wait that long, or rely on the Chinese to share the Aphelials’ answers to their questions. China requested that instead, one of its representatives be taken on the Dyna-Tech flight. The US was already thumbing its nose at China by sending Yongpo, who had defected from China four years earlier, as one of its own envoys. The president nonetheless declined the Chinese request.

  Conn spent parts of three days simming the Dyna-Tech capsule she would pilot to the Aphelial vessel. She had flown in Dyna-Tech rockets twice and though she had never had to pilot the capsule by herself, she had simmed to the point where she would never forget how for the rest of her life. (This was probably true of splashing down as well, but whatever.) After her trip to Mars in non-Dyna-Tech vehicles, her muscles thought everything was in the wrong place, but she picked it up again in short order. She spent the rest of each day on the feeds, even though she had little new to say. One producer told her she was a calming influence on people. Conn didn’t know if that was true, but she hoped so. She was contributing, doing something even as she waited to depart for low-Earth orbit.

  Come Friday the thirtieth, she was almost glad to be leaving a planet whose basic institutions were breaking down, where sales on credit were increasingly turned down and the banks were failing, where she feared break-ins at home. And all this after three short days. She would only be gone a brief time, but maybe she would come back with answers that would make things better in some measure.

  # # #

  Conn rocked her flight suit. Years before, she had treated herself to a custom suit that was orange with much more white trim than the usual and was a better, more flattering fit. She’d worn it when she left for Mars, and she got noticed by the fashion feeds. She’d worn it when she walked on Mars, in a T-field, unlike the bulky, now-old-fashioned astronaut pressure suit she’d worn on the moon. It made her feel like a sexy spacewoman.

  But that was her flight suit. Unfortunately, today she was wearing a standard-issue Dyna-Tech flight suit, all orange, baggy, showing off none of her very fit body. She didn’t want to stand out from Yongpo or especially the secretary of state, who would do most of the talking once the Aphelial language was uploaded into his brain. She thought they should all dress the same, so they did.

  The Brownsville, Texas air was close, its heat pressing upon them. Conn was sweating even twenty feet from the top of the rocket. It smelled like the sea.

  This quick trip to orbit and back was getting more feed coverage than her historic moon and Mars flig
hts. Even Secretary Graham was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, all the fones in his face every time he so much as walked from one spot to another.

  That all ended when the three ascended into the capsule atop a Strummer I-IV designated Lola, for being the twelfth rocket Dyna-Tech had put into operation—they were named like hurricanes, Abigail to (currently) Steve. For the mission, the capsule was called Hope, named by the president’s media people. The three were to strap themselves in; Conn discreetly lagged so she could help Secretary Graham.

  Yongpo looked as nervous as Conn had ever seen him. He had explained that he always got nervous before liftoff on a rocket. Usually, he had to vomit. He apologized in advance. Graham looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be terrified or exhilarated. Whatever the case, his eyes were wide enough to pop out. Once Conn was strapped into the pilot’s seat, she couldn’t see Graham anymore.

  When the countdown reached zero, the Strummer I-IV pressed them into their seats and carried them up into a precise arc. Conn had been worried that something would happen to the rocket on liftoff, as astronauts always are; now she worried about Graham. The gravitational force involved in achieving escape velocity was going to be well beyond anything he was physically prepared for. It was an ordeal for Conn. Her eyesight grayed out along the edges, the breath was flattened out of her lungs, her heart struggled to pump. She worried about giving Graham a heart attack.

  The first stage of the rocket, the recoverable part, separated, bound for a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. The three were slammed back into their seats even harder as the second stage engines took hold. Conn asked Graham if he was still with them. “I think so,” he croaked.