He kissed me suddenly, a soft peck on the lips. “The secret of an exciting marriage.” He turned onto his side and stretched out, readying for sleep. “Keep ’em guessing.”
6
PRIVATE PARTS
The first room configuration we tried was to leave Elza’s cabin the same size but move an extra bed into it. Then we almost doubled the size of the middle cabin, as a common room, with the third cabin the smallest possible bedroom, for whoever was the odd man out. The common room had all three windows together in one panorama, currently the beach at Cannes at the height of the tourist season.
As sexy as that scene was, I felt no real inspiration when I joined Elza in the double bed. I’d sparred for an hour with Dustin and then swum at six knots for an hour. When I got out I sympathized with the poor Martians in all this gravity. I felt like a large animal that had been run into the ground when I fell into bed. Elza seemed tired, too. Maybe that was why she asked for me, the first night with gravity.
“I’ve never seen you swim so much in a gym,” she said sleepily.
“Set the thing for an hour. I was about to get out early, then Carmen came over. I offered to let her have it, but she said no, no, finish your hour. So I was kind of stuck.”
“Stuck showing off your bare ass to a pretty girl.”
“She’s not a girl, not particularly pretty, and I was doing a side-stroke.”
“Okay, showing off your bare side. To the most famous woman on two planets.”
“Well, you know me. I really wanted her autograph.”
“Is that what they call it now?”
I poked her in the ribs. “Where is that off switch?”
“I’ll be good.” She put her head against my shoulder and was asleep in a couple of minutes, her warm breath regular against my skin. So familiar and so unpredictable.
Her jibing made me think about Carmen. I was attracted to her, not because she was The Mars Girl. Probably not a smart course to follow, though I didn’t think it would bother Elza a lot. Carmen’s relationship with Paul was not monogamous on either side. Fly- in-Amber told me that when he was asking about our triune. She “mated” (his word) with several men who stayed in Little Mars waiting to go on to Mars, and he knew from talking with Carmen that it was with Paul’s blessing, and that Paul was casually involved with a couple of women on Mars. This was before the one-gee shuttle, so going between the two planets was a complex affair taking months of zero-gee coasting.
Speaking of complex affairs. Trapped inside this small box together, we all know that the wise course would be to treat one another as friends and not let it go beyond that. But it probably would, even if the mission were prosaic, because it’s so damned long. Add the desperate knowledge that we will all probably die at Wolf 25, or before, and the impulse to be impulsive is hard to resist.
I’ve heard Carmen denigrate her body as unwomanly three times, which is too often for it to be a casual remark. But in fact her supposed shortcomings are what make her so alluring to a man like me. I suppose her slight, tomboyish body reminds me of the young schoolmates who were the first focus of my teenaged passions—who never said yes, but have never quite relinquished their hold on me. Maybe they never said yes because I never had the courage simply to come out and ask.
Odd to think that they’re old enough to be grandmothers now, those who lived past Gehenna. I’m sure that none of them remembers the plump Jewish boy whose hair wouldn’t stay put. Or maybe one of them is obsessed by plump Jewish boys and can’t figure out why.
Today was the first time I’ve seen her completely nude, and I looked away quickly so as not to make my interest too obvious. Then I got a glimpse as she turned around and swam on her back, as I was saying good-bye. No apparent tattoos except for the functional timepiece on her wrist. No obvious scars. Her pubic hair is shaped so as to accommodate a brief bathing suit, which is odd, since there are no bathing suits within a hundred million miles. In fact, she probably hasn’t worn one since she left Earth, twelve or thirteen years ago. Maybe it’s permanent. I’ll have to work it into a conversation somehow. “I couldn’t help but notice, as I was scrutinizing your pubic region . . .” Perhaps not. I shall be patient, and wait for a time and place when it will be natural to ask.
7
KAMIKAZE
8 May 2088
Instead of a regular diary entry, I’m going to put in part of a transcript of the meeting we just had.
Namir suggested that it would be a good time, starting the second week, for all the humans and Martians to get together and record a consensus of what we think we’re headed for. We met at 0900 in the “compromise” lounge, at the entrance to the Martian area.
Part of it became a little dramatic. My husband would have said “annoying.”
Namir:
My proposal was that we record a kind of “baseline” report on what we expect to happen when we arrive at Wolf 25. Our ideas will change over the next six years, naturally.
Paul:
One possibility is that there will be nothing there. The one on Triton said that’s where they live, and took off in that direction. But we lost track of him after a few minutes. He could have gone anywhere.
Snowbird:
Why would they do that?
Paul:
They may have misrepresented their strength, or rather their vulnerability. If we were to attack swiftly, they might not be able to react in time.
Namir:
Possibly. Doesn’t seem likely. We have ample evidence of their strength.
Me:
They had hundreds of centuries to plan ahead.
Paul:
That’s what I mean. They don’t want to confront us in real time.
Fly-in-Amber:
They have planned ahead for this. We will not surprise them.
Elza:
We have to try.
Dustin:
I’m not convinced that that is true. As you know, Elza.
Elza:
Pacifist swine. (Note: said smiling.) Explain, for the record.
Dustin:
This mission is predicated on two things: one, that they know they did not destroy us; and two, that they care. But we know almost nothing about their psychology. Maybe they are so confident they won’t bother to check, in which case, showing up on their doorstep may be a disaster. Or they might know they didn’t destroy us but feel the spectacular demonstration was enough to keep us out of their hair. So again, don’t go bother them.
Namir:
Dustin, even if the mission
is
a mistake, we can’t turn around and go home. The die is cast.
Me:
It’s still a good viewpoint to put in the mix, trying to predict what they’re going to do.
Paul:
Let’s get a sense of the timing. From the Earth’s point of view, the Other left Triton in July of 2079. At its rate of acceleration, it will take only about twenty- four and a half years to get there, assuming it decelerates at the same rate. Say it gets there in January 2104.
In the worst-case scenario, they find out the Earth hasn’t been destroyed and turn around to finish the job. Which they do in the middle of 2128.
Namir:
That’s not the worst case.
Paul:
What is?
Namir:
You assume that the Others have to obey the same speed limit as we do. Suppose they can go a lot faster than the speed of light and are due here tomorrow?
Paul:
Relativity won’t let them. They’d be traveling into the past.
Namir:
(Laughs.) And show up tomorrow. They’ve done other impossible things.
(Namir and Paul argue fruitlessly for a few minutes. Never argue science with a lawyer, I told Paul.)
Meryl:
Let’s assume there’s no magic superscience involved, all right? (She looks at her notebook.) If they go straight to Wolf 25, they’ll get there around 2104, by the Earth calendar. We won’t be there until eight years later. And they’ll have our “ready or not, here we come” message months before that. Which I was so enthusiastic about.
Can we agree that the probability they won’t be ready for us is almost exactly zero? (General agreement.) And at any rate, if we did surprise them, there’s not much we can do about it. Short of using the
ad Astra
as a huge kamikaze bomb?
Snowbird:
What is that?
Fly-in-Amber:
It’s a Japanese word meaning a suicide airplane.
Snowbird:
Oh. Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? We’re expecting to die anyhow.
Fly-in-Amber:
Most humans won’t do that. Not if they have a chance of living.
Snowbird:
But they don’t live that long anyhow.
Namir:
I’m glad you brought that up, Snowbird. We ought to consider it.
Elza:
I’m not sure I can. We would be murdering a whole planet, besides ourselves.
Meryl:
That’s right.
Namir:
Which is what they tried to do to us.
Dustin:
He wants you to think like a soldier, love, not a doctor.
Moonboy:
What if we had to do it to save the human race? What if we got a message like “Fuck you and the planet you came from”?
Paul:
We never could save the human race, if they decided to destroy it. We could never catch them. We could only take revenge, after the fact.
Namir:
I could do that.
Dustin:
You would. Definitely.
Moonboy:
I would, too. It’s not as if they were human.
Me:
Namir, it would be like Gehenna. There could be innocent races on that planet. For all we know, the one who attacked us was a lone lunatic, who claimed to represent the Others but actually did not.
Namir:
With due respect, Carmen, I have been there, and you have not. Genocide is not murder. You can forgive a murder and go on with life. But if we had found a country responsible for Gehenna, we would have had no mercy. We would have leveled it, in retribution. Which is not the same thing as revenge.
(There was a long silence.)
Paul:
The kamikaze thing is not going to happen. I’m the only one who could do that, and I won’t. Besides, if our intent had been to launch a huge relativistic bomb, there would be no need for a crew. One kamikaze pilot, perhaps.
Dustin:
(Laughs.) Now that does make me nervous. You
would
need a crew, if only to keep that pilot from going mad during six years of isolation. But of course the crew wouldn’t know they were all going to die.
Paul:
Are you a philosopher or a story writer?
Dustin:
Sometimes the difference is moot. Are you lying? Don’t answer; we covered that one in freshman logic.
Fly-in-Amber:
Are you two joking? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when humans are serious.
Dustin:
Sometimes jokes are serious, Fly in-Amber.
Paul:
Not this time. He’s just playing games.
Dustin:
One of us is.
Snowbird:
This is making my brain hurt. I have to leave.
So everyone laughed, and talked Snowbird into staying, promising that they would keep things straight. And the rest of it was pretty much a recital of what we already knew.
But no one here knows Paul as well as I do, and I know he has a deep reserve of seriousness, which sometimes frightens me. I’m a little frightened now.
A few days ago, out of the blue, before we went to sleep, he suggested that Namir, and perhaps the other two, were under orders to kill the rest of us if we tried to surrender, and use the
ad Astra
as a kind of 9/11 on the Others.
But a starship isn’t a jet plane. They wouldn’t know how to do it.
There’s only one person here who does.
8
WATER SPORTS
Last night when all the humans were in bed, I walked quietly out past the hydroponics to the gym. I touched the water in the pool—it was very warm—and decided to try floating in it. See whether it indeed would give Snowbird and me some relief from all this gravity/ acceleration.
There was no easy way for a four-legged person to get in. Humans just sit on the edge and slide in. We can’t quite bend that way.
In retrospect, I realized I should have waited until at least one human was around. But there is a dignity factor about clothing, and I was not sure how to interpret it across species.
They almost never appear without clothing in front of one another—like us, they take off their clothing in order to prepare one another for reproduction, and like us it is indecorous to look at another without clothing except under special circumstances. Swimming was one of those for them. Would they feel the same about us? I have only appeared unclothed before humans as part of a scientific investigation, and even that was uncomfortable. But they certainly don’t want people to go into their swimming pool with clothing on.