“It was not a hard decision,” he said. “Ever since you landed, we knew that a confrontation was inevitable. I took this opportunity to initiate it, so it would be on our terms. I couldn’t know that Carmen would catch this thing, which you call a disease, and bring it back home with her.”
“You don’t call it a disease?” one of the scientists asked.
“No...I guess in your terms it might be called a ‘phase,’ a developmental phase. You go from being a young child to being an older child. For us, it’s unpleasant but not life-threatening.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” the xenologist Howard Jain said. “It’s like a human teenager who has acne, transmitting it to a trout. Or even more extreme than that—the trout at least has DNA.”
“And you and the trout have a common ancestor,” Robin Hood said. “We have no idea what we might have evolved from.”
“Did you get the idea of evolution from us?” he asked.
“No, not as a practical matter. We’ve been cross-breeding plants for a long time. But Darwinism, yes, from you. From your television programs back in the twentieth century.”
“Wait,” my father said. “How did you build a television receiver in the first place?”
There was a pause, and then Red spoke: “We didn’t. It’s always been there.”
“What?”
“It’s a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century...”
“Those like me remembered them all,” Fly in Amber said, “though they were just noises at first.”
“...and we knew the signals were from Earth, because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in mid-century, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions.”
“How long is ‘always’?” Howard Jain asked. “How far back does your history go?”
“We don’t have history in your sense,” Fly in Amber said. “Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking.”
“You have explored Mars more than we have,” Robin Hood said, “with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that’s why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone.”
“Some of us have a theory,” Red said, “that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don’t know you can’t tell.”
“You can’t erase a memory,” Fly in Amber said.
“We can’t. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can’t do.”
“You are not a memory expert. I am.”
Red’s complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started.”
“You’re that old!” Jain said.
“Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War.”
“You have told us this before,” Robin Hood said. “Not all of us agree.”
Red pushed on. “The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time, if Russian bombers were on their way.” He paused. “I think that’s what we are.”
“Warning whom?” Jain said.
“Whoever put us here. We’re on Mars instead of Earth because they didn’t want you to know about us until you had space flight.”
“Until we posed a threat to them,” Dad said.
“That’s a very human thought.” Red paused. “Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn’t want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point.”
“We wouldn’t be any threat to them,” Jain said. “If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, it’s hard to imagine what they could do now.”
The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. “They’re done now. It looks like all the kids are okay.” She looked around at all the serious faces. “I said they’re okay. Crisis over.”
Actually, it had just begun.
~ * ~
12. THE MARS GIRL
Which is how I became an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn’t evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?
Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.
On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions they were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I was taken back there with Red and three other Martians, along with Howard Jain, who would be coordinating research.
Nobody wanted to bring them all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn’t improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.
So I’m sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I’m also an ambassador, the human sidekick for Red and the others. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it’s obviously more about fear than brotherhood. When the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.
That will be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they’ve figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit. I’m pretty confident they have. So I might meet them.
A couple of days a week, the Elevator comes up and I meet all kinds of presidents and secretariats and so forth, though there’s always a pane of glass between us. More interesting is talking with the scientists and other thinkers who vie for one-week residences here, in the five Spartan rooms the Mars Institute maintains. Sometimes rich people come over from the Hilton to gawk. They pay.
The rest of the time, I spend with Red and the others, trying to learn their language—me, who chickened out of French—and teach them about humans. Meanwhile exercise two hours a day in the thin cold air and Martian gravity, and study for my degrees in xenology. I’ll be writing the book some day. Not “a” book. The book.
Every now and then some silly tabloid magazine or show will do the “poor little Mars Girl” routine, about how isolated I am in this goldfish bowl hovering over the Earth, never to have anything like a normal life.
But everybody on Mars is under the same quarantine as I am; everybody who’s been exposed to the Martians. I could go back some day and kick Dargo Solingen out of office. Marry some old space pilot.
Who wants a normal life, anyhow?
~ * ~
INTRODUCTION TO “SLEEPING DOGS”
I think it was Paul Simon who said that if you asked him to write a song about a woman in a red dress sitting alone smoking in a bar, he could do it right away, but if you asked him to just write a song, he’d be stuck.
So that was my problem: “just write a story.” Elizabeth Anne Hull asked me to contribute an original story for Gateways, a festschrift in honor of Frederik Pohl. Just a science fiction story; no other restrictions except that it should of course be wonderful.
So starting with just a blank sheet of paper, I began free-associating in a circle, and filled a large page with thoughts and quotes.
I threw away easily 95 percent of the meandering diagram, but one quotation gave me the core of my story—”Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey
land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.” That’s the first line of Siegfried Sassoon’s great poem “Dreamers.”
Perhaps it’s a literary crime of some significance, to take a dramatic statement of thirteen words, which pound home like nails into a soldier’s coffin—and expand it into a science-fiction novella. I think Sassoon would forgive me for making a living.
SLEEPING DOGS
T
he cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.
Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.
Six identical buildings on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederatión Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.
It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.
“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.
“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”
He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”
“I’m Irish,” I said. “I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”
He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”
“Both, I think.”
“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. Then he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.
He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them off-planet, in a political situation that’s...impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer.”
“So I was told. I’m not here for comfort, though.” There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.
He nodded slowly as he selected two forms from a drawer. “So what does a ‘thanatopic counselor’ do?”
“I prepare people for dying.” For living completely, actually, before they leave.
“Curious.” He smiled. “It pays well?”
“Adequately.”
He handed me the forms. “I’ve never seen a poor person come through that door. Take these down the hall to Immunization.”
“I’ve had all the shots.”
“All that the Confederación requires. Seca has a couple of special tests for returning veterans. Of the Consolidation War.”
“Of course. The nanobiota. But I was tested before they let me return to Earth.”
He shrugged. “Rules. What do you tell them?”
“Tell?”
“The people who are going to die. We just sort of let it catch up with us. Avoid it as long as possible, but…”
“That’s a way.” I took the forms. “Not the only way.”
I had the door partly open when he cleared his throat. “Dr. Spivey? If you don’t have any plans, I would be pleased to have midmeal with you.”
Interesting. “Sure. I don’t know how long this will take...”
“Ten minims, fifteen. I’ll call us a floater, so we don’t have to endure the road.”
The blood and saliva samples took less time than filling out the forms. When I went back outside, the floater was humming down and Braz Nitian was watching it land from the walkway.
It was a fast two-minute hop to the center of town, the last thirty seconds disconcerting free fall. The place he’d chosen was Kaffee Rembrandt, a rough-hewn place with a low ceiling and guttering oil lamps in pursuit of a 16th-century ambience, somewhat diluted by the fact that the dozens of Rembrandt reproductions glowed with apparently sourceless illumination.
A busty waitress in period flounce showed us to a small table, dwarfed by a large self-portrait of the artist posed as “Prodigal Son with a Whore.”
I’d never seen an actual flagon, a metal container with a hinged top. It appeared to hold enough wine to support a meal and some conversation.
I ordered a plate of braised vegetables, following conservative dietary advice—the odd proteins in Seca’s animals and fish might lay me low with a xeno-allergy. Among the things I didn’t remember about my previous time here was whether our rations had included any native flesh or fish. But even if I’d safely eaten them thirty years ago, the Hartford doctor said, I could have a protein allergy now, since an older digestive system might not completely break down those alien proteins into safe amino acids.
Braz had gone to college on Earth, UCLA, an expensive proposition that obligated him to work for the government for ten years (which would be fourteen Earth years). He had degrees in mathematics and macroeconomics, neither of which he used in his office job. He taught three nights a week and wrote papers that nine or ten people read and disagreed with.
“So how did you become a thanatopic counselor? Something you always wanted to be when you grew up?”
“Yeah, after cowboy and pirate.”
He smiled. “I never saw a cowboy on Earth.”
“Pirates tracked them down and made them walk the plank. Actually, I was an accountant when I joined the military, and then started out in pre-med after I was discharged, but switched over to psychology and moved into studying veterans.”
“Natural enough. Know thyself.”
“Literally.” Find thyself, I thought. “You get a lot of us coming through?”
“Well, not so many, not from Earth or other foreign planets. Being a veteran doesn’t correlate well with wealth.”
“That’s for sure.” And a trip from Earth to Seca and back costs as much as a big house.
“I imagine that treating veterans doesn’t generate a lot of money, either.” Eyebrows lifting.
“A life of crime does.” I smiled and he laughed politely. “But most of the veterans I do see are well off. Almost nobody with a normal life span needs my services. They’re mostly for people who’ve lived some centuries, and you couldn’t do that without wealth.”
“They get tired of life?”
“Not the way you or I could become tired of a game, or a relationship. It’s something deeper than running out of novelty. People with that little imagination don’t need me. They can stop existing for the price of a bullet or a rope—or a painless prescription, where I come from.”
“Not legal here,” he said neutrally.
“I know. I’m not enthusiastic about it, myself.”
“You’d have more customers?”
I shrugged. “You never know.” The waitress brought us our first plates, grilled fungi on a stick for me. Braz had a bowl of small animals with tails, deep-fried. Finger food; you hold them by the tail and dip them into a pungent yellow sauce.
It was much better than I’d expected; the fungi were threaded onto a stick of some aromatic wood like laurel; she brought a small glass of a lavender-colored drink, tasting like dry sherry, to go with them.
“So it’s not about getting bored?” he asked. “That’s how you normally see it. In books, on the cube..
“Maybe the reality isn’t dramatic enough. Or too complicated to tell as a simple drama.
“You live a few hundred years, at least on Earth, you slowly leave your native culture behind. You’re an immortal—
culturally true if not literally— and your non-immortal friends and family and business associates die off. The longer you live, the deeper you go into the immortal community.”
“There must be some nonconformists.”
“‘Mavericks,’ the cowboys used to say.”
“Before the pirates did them in.”
“Right. There aren’t many mavericks past their first century of life extension. The people you grew up with are either fellow immortals or dead. Together, the survivors form a society that’s unusually cohesive. So when someone decides to leave, decides to stop living, the arrangements are complex and may involve hundreds of people.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 60
