I could tell that the attraction was not mutual; she had me pigeonholed, the older generation. But my wife was her age, actually a few months younger. She must have known that as a statistic.
Was I just rationalizing, being the pathetic middle-aged male? Assuming that a woman must be attracted to me just because I was instantly attracted to her?
And I was, though I wouldn’t have predicted it, not “The Mars Girl.” As a diplomat, I’ve dealt with far too many famous people. Carmen had none of the automatic assumption of importance that I find so tiresome. She was almost aggressively normal, this least ordinary of all women. Ambassador to another species, a fulcrum of history.
She was not physically the kind of woman I would normally find attractive, either; so slender as to be almost boyish, her features sharp, inquisitive. Her eyes were green, or hazel, which I had never noticed in photographs. Hair cut close for space, like all of us. There wouldn’t be any need for that tradition on the long trail to Wolf 25.
Meryl was closer to my age and physically attractive, almost voluptuous. Olive skin and black hair, she looked like most of the girls and women I grew up with.
None of whom were still alive. I could not look at her without feeling that.
8
FAMILY MATTERS
I didn’t expect to like Namir, but I did immediately. You might expect a professional diplomat to be likable, though in my “Mars Girl” experience that hasn’t been the case. Of course, those meetings have always been public and strained, physical contact limited to rubber-glove virtual reality.
How odd-feeling and pleasant to actually shake someone’s hand. Namir’s constrained physical strength. His face was strong, too, chiseled but with warm laugh lines around his eyes.
Our three spooks were the first new people we’d met, physically, in years. So I was immediately aware of their physicality. Dustin and Elza were my age, Elza athletic and assertive but Dustin more a quiet scholarly type.
Namir had a barely contained charisma, an air of authority that had nothing to do with rank. Probably born with it, bossing around adults from the crib. I wondered whether Paul would have trouble with that.
I wondered whether I would. We hadn’t planned on a hierarchy. Paul would make the pilot decisions. If there were medical decisions, Elza would make them, and otherwise we’d just talk things out and go with the consensus. When we got to Wolf and met the Others, I saw myself as a spokesperson, but in fact we had no idea of what the situation would be—maybe they would only talk with the Martians, and Fly-in-Amber would be the logical choice. The rest of us just baggage, perhaps disposable.
That first meeting with the Earth people was cordial and reassuring. Moonboy, in his direct way, found out how they wound up a triune. Namir and Elza married in a conventional civil ceremony six years ago, in her last year of medical school. The American Space Force had paid her tuition, and she was commissioned as soon as she got her M.D. Namir pulled some strings, and she wound up working with him at the UN—which is where she met and fell in love with Dustin. At Namir’s suggestion they expanded their union to include him, which was legal in New York and (I was surprised to learn) not particularly uncommon there nowadays.
I could only guess what their sleeping arrangements had been on Earth; on both Little Mars and ad Astra, each person had individual sleeping quarters. The bunks were large enough for two people to sleep together if they didn’t mind touching. Unless they were both large. In our population, that would only be Namir and Paul, which I didn’t see happening.
In ad Astra everything would be modular. They might choose to have one big bed in one big room. Hamster pile, as they say in college.
Of the three of them, only Namir had a little experience of living in space, but only a little. Of we other four, I had the least, but I’d been off Earth the past eleven years, which incidentally was close to the length of time we seven would be spending together, on the way to Wolf and hopefully back. About six and a half years there, and the same to return.
We would have to become a family of sorts if we were to survive. Tolstoi famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The old Russian didn’t consider triune marriages, though, or families with two nonhuman members—we could presumably be unhappy in ways that he couldn’t have begun to describe. At least none of us was likely to throw herself in front of a train.
For those of us used to life in the Martian colony or this satellite, the living space in ad Astra wouldn’t be too confining. The combination of being isolated from the human race at large, while living in close contact with a few others, was not a novelty.
Our spooks were used to traveling around the world, constantly facing the challenge and attraction of new environments, new people. How well would they get along with this, a sardine tin that also had aspects of a goldfish bowl?
VR would help preserve our sanity, sometimes by providing alternatives to sanity. Both Moonboy and Meryl liked to go random places with the kaleidoscope filter, which provided a controlled degree of synesthesia, the data meant for one sense being interpreted as another. You could do it one sense at a time, or just spin the wheel and hang on. I might do more of it myself, with time on my hands. And on my eyes and nose and so forth.
But I liked the almost endless array of straightforward virtual travelogues, and often did them in tandem with Paul, as a way of getting away from the others. Usually nothing spectacular or culturally interesting, which of course made up most of the library. We’d just stroll down a country lane talking, or sit on a beach or in some woods. A pity we didn’t have the complex porn interfaces, so we could do more than hold hands and talk, but that would be a little hard to get through the Corporation budget review.
Along those lines I had to admit a certain prurient curiosity about our new sister and brothers. If they did all hop into bed together, who did what to whom and with what? It could make for a crowded bed, though I supposed we could jury-rig something. Or just agree to stay out of the galley periodically and let them do it on the table.
I wasn’t really drawn to either of the men in that way, although they were both likable and attractive. It was hard to believe that Namir was fifty. From the moment of our first meeting, I sensed a real physical attraction, though he may project the same kind of interest to any female not too young or old to make a sexual union possible. I know that degree of sexual indiscrimination passes for gallantry with some men in some cultures.
Actually, he didn’t seem to project the same warmth toward Meryl, and she is prettier and sexier than me. Older, but still a decade younger than him.
Who knows? After a few years, we may be swapping partners like minks. Or not be speaking to one another.
Who will be the first to be thrown out of the air lock? Or leave voluntarily?
9
SECRETS
Carmen doesn’t really know how completely she’s being lied to—only by omission, but nevertheless lies. She really has no idea how bad things are on Earth right now, and what a nightmare we’ve been through.
We accept the necessity of total monitoring and censoring of all communication into space, since the Others can receive anything broadcast from Earth, assuming they’re interested.
Maybe it’s silly. A sufficiently weak signal would be so attenuated in twenty-four light-years’ distance that no manner of superscience could separate it from cosmic background noise. But what is “sufficiently weak”? And how badly do you need the signal? If it were important to me as a spook, I could take any smallest signal—a man’s heartbeat through a hotel window a mile away—and amplify and refine it, then pump it through a laser to another spook, or an Other spook, twenty-four light-years away.
So what could the Others do? Maybe they read all our mail. Maybe all our thoughts.
Whatever the reality, the controlling principle is that everything broadcast into space might be overheard by the Others, so everyone who lives in orbit or on Mars will ha
ve a systematically distorted view of life on Earth. Carmen was aware of that in regard to defense—she never mentioned the fleet and didn’t expect any reports about it—but when we first talked, I realized that her image of life on Earth was no more realistic than a cube drama.
I caught her alone the second morning, by the sneaky expedient of checking the exercise schedule. At 0400 she was in VR, biking, so I took up the rowing machine and watched her pedal through the streets of a Paris that no longer existed.
We showered separately and met down at the mess for coffee. She brought up Paris, how she remembered it from the year she spent in Europe as a girl.
“I guess the VR crystal’s pretty old,” she said. “They hadn’t started rebuilding the Eiffel Tower, but it was finished when I was there in ’66.”
“Still there,” I said, “but it was damaged in the ’81 riots, a piece of the base melted. They’ve left it that way, closed to the public.”
“There were riots in ’81?”
“Not just in Paris. Though hundreds died there, in the Champ du Mars.”
“Hundreds.” She sat absolutely still. “In the States, too?”
“All over. The States were . . . worse than most of Europe and the Middle East. Los Angeles and Chicago were especially bad.”
“The East Coast?”
“New York and Washington were already under martial law when Paris exploded. There wasn’t much loss of life.”
“How long did it go on?”
“Well . . . technically . . .”
Her eyes got wide. “Still?”
I had an intense desire for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked since Gehenna. “In a way, it is still going on. Not martial law, but a kind of pervasive police state. Which doesn’t call itself that.”
“It’s what they’re calling internationalism?”
“Basically. One big happy police-state family.”
She walked across the room and looked out at the image of the Earth. “Paul and I were talking about that the other day. The picture they project is too perfect; we’ve all known that. But a police state, all over the world?”
“Maybe I’m exaggerating. Many people do just see it as international solidarity against a common enemy. Everybody does have to sacrifice a certain amount of time, a certain amount of comfort. And freedom.”
“For the future of humanity,” she said in a broadcaster’s voice. “Does everyone buy that?”
“Not at all. A significant fraction believes the business out at Triton and the explosion on the other side of the Moon were just pyrotechnics to make us believe the bullshit about the Others—the whole thing is an elaborate hoax to rob normal people of their rights and hand over their money to the rich.
“If you don’t know anything about science, or about economics, a case can be made. But even then, you have to enlist the Martians in the conspiracy, or believe that they don’t really exist.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“Well, no one’s allowed to go near one, unless they’re part of the conspiracy themselves. Hollywood’s been cooking up convincing aliens for more than a century, they say. Whoever’s behind the conspiracy could afford a few dozen of the finest.
“If you start with that as a premise—everything about Mars is a hoax—then most of it falls into place. The Others? A perfect enemy, all-powerful, unreachable. You and Paul are part of the conspiracy, of course. The Girl from Mars married to the Man Who Saved the Earth? I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t know it was true.”
“But . . . who’s supposed to benefit from all that?”
“The rich people. The white people. The Jews—speaking as an unofficial Jew myself, I know we’re capable of anything. The military-industrial complex, to use an antique term. This gives them a black hole to throw money into for the next fifty years.”
She slumped into the chair across from me and studied me. “This is where I say, ‘Namir, you have learned too much. Now you have to die.’ ”
That actually gave me a little chill. “The more convincing explanation, I think, is that the Others are behind the whole thing. But they look just like humans and have infiltrated every aspect of government and industry.”
She smiled. “It’s like all the paranoiac explanations for Gehenna. Some people still believe it was a leftist takeover.”
I snorted. “Which explains how liberal our government is now. If you call it a government. Maybe the Others took over Israel first, as an experiment.”
She leaned forward, serious. “So . . . to what extent do ordinary people know what’s going on—people who don’t stalk the corridors of power, like you guys?”
“Most people do, people who can read. Newspapers have become a big industry again, print ones. Nobody reads the e-sheets for actual news. People who aren’t literate have to make do with word of mouth or put up with the same version of reality the Others are being fed.”
“The Others and us,” she said, trying to control the anger in her voice. “Most of the people I know are on Mars, but I’m in touch with people on Earth all the time—”
“Who would risk the death penalty if they discussed reality. Everything’s monitored.” She was shaking her head, hard. “Look, even I assumed you were in on it. Self-censorship is so automatic. Nobody’s going to call or write, and say ‘They’ll kill me for saying this, but—’ ”
“But it’s so stupid! The Others aren’t going to be fooled.”
“There’s no way to know. It might just take one slip.”
“Maybe.” The angry set of her mouth softened. “It never occurred to me to ask for a paper copy of a newspaper. I mean, who ever sees one?”
“Everybody, nowadays.” Was some bureaucrat controlling the information they got, or was it an unintended consequence of draconian broadcast security? “You should ask for a Sunday New York Times—or I will. Say that I’m homesick. See whether they print up a special version with the news sanitized for us. I could tell.”
I asked, and eventually the newspaper did appear—it takes a week for anything to come up. It did seem to be the same paper I read every week. Significantly, it had Jude Coulter’s column, summarizing the past week’s news that had been suppressed from the Others. And people in orbit or on Mars, incidentally.
The first two ships of the fleet are nearing completion; both are already crewed, awaiting weapons systems. They’re somewhat bigger than the projected standard for the other 998, but cruder, rushed into construction in case the Other that left Triton five years ago left behind some belated surprise.
I think the fleet is a tactical travesty from inception to its present and future reality. Gnats attacking an elephant. If you want to protect the future of the human race from the Other menace, those resources should go toward moving breeding populations out far from Earth. Because Earth is unlikely to survive the first second of hostilities from the Others. A diffuse population hidden around the solar system might have a chance.
Or not.
10
NEW WORLD
Namir’s newspaper reassured us a little bit. There wasn’t a huge conspiracy trying to insulate us from reality. It was just a secondary effect of the fanatic security effort. So now we were to get the Times and one other newspaper every week. Delivered to your air-lock door.
Not a conspiracy, but certainly a pervasive bureaucratic mind-set. You don’t learn anything unless you have an official “need to know.”
It was probably an empty gesture anyhow, presuming to fool the Others with smoke and mirrors. Namir agreed. They had to know us too well for that to work.
What might have worked, if there had been enough advance warning, would have been to shut Earth down electronically, completely, the instant of the Moon explosion.
Even that would only have worked if the Others were just listening to broadcast emissions and not spying on Earth any other way. And it would have been impossible to build ad Astra and the fleet without electronic communication.
The half of our
satellite that’s not under Martian quarantine, Little Earth or, to us, “earthside,” serves as a conduit for communicating between the fleet and Earth. There’s a lot of radio and image transmission that can be disguised as innocuous space industrialization—but the part that can’t be disguised is written down or photographed and sent to Little Earth via “transfer pods,” which guide themselves into a net and are sent down the Space Elevator to an Earth address. Messages that can’t wait that long are de-orbited and dropped to Earth by parachute. I wonder how many of them actually make it to the final address.
It’s a fragile house of cards, and we could collapse it just by a minute of frank broadband discussion. I talked with Paul about doing just that. What could they do, fire us?
“No,” he said, “but we could have a tragic accident.” We were talking in VR, walking and bicycling slowly down a country road in Cape Cod, Indian summer, cranberry bogs vivid red with floating berries and the smells of woodsmoke and autumn leaves powerful but relaxing. Squirrels scattered out of our way, and geese honked overhead, swifting south.
“You think they would go that far?”
“Well, I don’t think we’re indispensable,” he said, braking the bike into a short downhill. “They could even manufacture avatar duplicates. They do it all the time with politicians.”
I nodded. “Like that French nonassassination.” The president’s limousine was blown up in a visit to Algeria, and it turned out that neither president nor driver was actually there, actually human.
“My God.” He stopped pedaling but his bicycle stayed upright; VR couldn’t topple the exercise machine outside our illusion. “Could that be why they sent three soldiers?”
“To kill us if we broke the rules? That’s ridiculous.”