No luck. No fibrous structure, so the hand plane would just bite out a chip at a time. But I blocked it in place and used a sander to bring it down to two millimeters’ thickness. It was still strong and stiff; I clamped it to the edge of the worktable and plucked it, and it made a satisfying twang.
I experimented with scrap and decided to forego tradition and cut the “wood” by laser, which left a more accurate, smooth edge than any saw in the shop. And with modern glues, I didn’t have to improvise the elaborate clamps that the Russian plans called for. I also cheated on the tuning pegs, bridge, and tailpiece, by describing them and letting the shop turn them out robotically. So it only took a couple of days, and a lot of that was learning. If I wanted to put together another one, I could probably do it in an afternoon. Give it to Dustin, so we could do duets.
It looked identical to mine at home except for the inlaid red star and “Souvenir of Soviet Olympics 1980,” which made mine a fairly valuable antique, in spite of being very ordinary in a musical way. A gift to my father on his tenth birthday. His parents had gone to the Olympics before he was born.
I was working on the finish when Fly-in-Amber came in and addressed me formally in Japanese. I set the instrument down and stood, and returned the greeting with a slight bow, which he had tried to do.
“Snowbird should be asking you this,” he said, “since human behavior is her area of expertise, but she was unsure about politeness.”
“And you don’t care.”
“Of course not. I am not human.”
I chose not to pursue the obvious there. “So what does Snowbird want to know?”
“Oh, I want to know as well. But my interest is not professional.”
“Fire away.”
“Pardon me?”
“Please ask the question.”
“It is more than one question.”
“All right. Ask them all.”
“It’s about your wife Elza mating with Meryl’s husband Moonboy.”
Good news travels fast. “Well, they weren’t mating. There was no possibility of offspring.”
“I know that. I was being polite. Should I say ‘fucking’?”
“With me, either one is fine. But your instinct is right.”
“Snowbird wanted me to talk to you in private, which is why I am bothering you here. She wants to know if this causes you pain, the adultery.”
“Not really. I’ve been expecting it.” I didn’t want to get into a definition of adultery.
“Is there symmetry? Are you going to mate with one of the other women?”
I had to smile. “Not immediately. It doesn’t always work that way.”
“Are you not attracted to any of them?”
“I’m attracted to all of them, in varying degrees. I just don’t act on that attraction as directly as Elza does.”
“Is that because you are old?”
“I’m not
that
old. It’s less youth on Elza’s part than impulsiveness. I want to know someone well before I am intimate with her.”
“Always ‘her’? You are not intimate with men?”
How honest do you have to be with a Martian? “Not in many years. Not since I was boy.”
“Not with Dustin Beckner?”
“No. Definitely not Dustin.”
“Yet you are married to him.”
“Yes, and I love him, but in a different way. You can love without mating.” He was silent for a moment, so I asked, “Do you feel love? Do you love Snowbird, for instance?”
“I don’t think so, in human terms. She says there was a word in ancient Greek,
agape
, that approximates the way Martians feel about one another.”
“You wouldn’t have erotic love.”
“No. That wouldn’t make sense. There is pleasure in mating, but you often don’t know ahead of time who will be involved, or how many. And, of course, you don’t know which of you will be the female until the contest is over. The female feels it more strongly.”
“Well, ‘erotic’ means more than that, if you go back to Snowbird’s ancient Greek. It’s an intense feeling one has for another, whether or not sex is involved.”
“Humans do that?”
“Some. Most.”
He hugged himself, which I knew signified thinking. “We are simpler, I think. I feel especially close to the other members of the yellow family. But they are the only ones I can speak to plainly, in the language I was born with.”
“Is that the same with all Martians?” I knew the yellow ones had a reputation for being standoffish, but I hadn’t met any Martians except our two.
“Oh, no. Blues cooperate with everybody; they were the example Snowbird used, to explain
agape
to me. My family is less open than the others, but that’s appropriate to our function.”
“Impartial observers.”
“Yes.” He switched to Japanese and apologized for the intrusion, and backed out.
He was often abrupt like that. As if he had some internal timer.
I finished polishing the balalaika and admired its strangeness. From a distance, it was a pretty close copy. The “wood” was exactly right in color, but it had no grain, close up, and it had the cool smoothness of ceramic.
The strings were not easy to mount, my big fingers clumsy with the knots. I almost called Elza but didn’t want to interrupt her at her needlepoint, a fractal pattern that apparently required intense concentration. Finally, I got all three in place and taut, but the two nylon strings (both tuned to the same E note) kept relaxing out of tune. Then I remembered a young folksinger in Tel Aviv, replacing a string in the middle of a performance. He pulled it dangerously taut and released it with a snap, over and over, flattening the tone, then tuning it up. After a couple of minutes doing that on both nylon strings, they were remarkably stable.
I played a few simple tunes from memory, and scales in the four keys I used, then some arpeggios, working through the left- hand pain until my joints agreed to loosen up.
As sometimes happens, I felt my audience before I saw her. I turned, and there was Elza, leaning in the doorway behind me. She was holding two glasses, a wineglass with red in it and a cup of clear liquid with ice. I must have subliminally heard it clinking.
“It sounds good,” she said. “I’ve missed it.”
“I hope you didn’t hear it inside.”
She set the wine down next to me. “You buy the next.” She folded into a graceful lotus, not spilling a drop of her vodka. “No, Fly-in-Amber told me you were almost done with it. I went into the pantry for a drink and heard you. Peeked and saw you didn’t have anything.”
I sipped the wine. “Mind reader.”
“So what were you talking to Old Yeller about?”
“Old Yeller?”
“It’s a Texas thing. Thang.”
“Gossip and biology. He wondered about you ‘mating’ with Moonboy.”
“For a Martian, he has a very dirty mind.”
“I don’t think that’s possible. Anyhow, I think he was asking on Snowbird’s behalf. She wasn’t sure what would be polite.”
“And he doesn’t care.”
“Well, he approached me in Japanese, with an apology. But that was for interrupting my work, not for asking about my wife’s extramarital affairs. Still, politeness.”
“I don’t suppose you told him it was none of his business.”
“Slapped him with a glove and said ‘lasers at dawn.’ It’s not personal with him, of course.”
“I know. So why didn’t he just ask me?”
“You don’t speak Japanese.” I set down the balalaika and picked up the wine. “I think he likes me. Or likes talking to me. Maybe being oldest male has something to do with it.”
“Did you tell him any gory details?”
“I don’t
have
any, dear. I’m not that close to Moonboy, and you haven’t shown me the feelie yet. Did he know something I don’t?”
She shrugged. “All men do. Have something no other man has. And I’m saving the feelie for our old age.”
“In case we have one?”
She nodded, silent for a few moments, looking at the floor. Then she knuckled her eyes. “Could you play me that silly love song? The first, the first time . . .”
“Sure.” I picked up the instrument and tuned up the flatted E strings, then plucked out the simple melody.
“Shteyt a bocher, shteyt un tracht . . . tracht un tracht a gantze nacht . . .”
It’s a song about a man finding a smart woman to marry.
11
HEROES
Paul had always questioned the necessity for radio silence between Earth and
ad Astra
. It assumed the Others were so inattentive and stupid that they wouldn’t know we were on our way. Of course, our presence would be obvious after turnaround, with a gazillion- horsepower matter-annihilation engine blasting in their direction. The little probe that preceded us would deal with that by sending a warning and a message of peace well before we turned around and started blasting, decelerating.
What if they destroyed the probe before it delivered the message?
What if it delivered the message, and the Others destroyed us anyway?
What if they weren’t on a Wolf 25 planet after all?
We went along with the order and were resigned to not hearing from anyone on Earth for another 3.4 years. Paul kept the radio on, though, in case things changed.
On July 10, 2088, things did. A fifty-two-second message came from Earth. He called us all together in the lounge, Martians and humans, and played it back for us.
“This is Lazlo Motkin, just elected president of the world. One reason I was elected was that I wanted to change your mission and make it more in line with what the Earth’s people really want.
“You are the finest heroes in Earth’s history, hurtling into the unknown on a mission that will almost surely end with your deaths.
“We ask that you make this grim probability a glorious certainty. Rather than slowing down, we would ask you to continue accelerating. Going at almost the speed of light—and invisible until the last moment—you will strike the enemy planet with ten thousand times the force of the meteorite that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“Even the ungodly science of the Others cannot protect them from this apocalyptic assault. Please answer that you have heard and are willing to give your life in this noble enterprise.
“God bless you and keep you.”
We all just stared at each other. “Who is that guy?” I said. “Lazlo what?”
“Motkin,” Namir said. “He’s a cubevangelist.”
“Powerful signal,” Paul said. “Pretty tight laser.”
Namir shrugged. “He has lots of money, or did when money meant something, and a powerful broadcast site in the Atlantic, beyond the seven-mile limit. He could do it once.”
“Once?” Paul said.
“They’ll have people like me in the water in thirty minutes. Home-land Security. Unless Reverend Motkin really is president of the world, he’s about to have a serious accident.”
“Or had it about a week ago,” Paul said.
“It’s hard to get used to that. He was arrested or dead before that message was a tenth of the way here.”
“What if he really is king of the world,” Moonboy said, “or president or whatever. Some pretty loony people have made it to the top, even in normal times.”
“I still wouldn’t feel I had to kill myself on his behalf,” Dustin said.
“Besides, the order is stupid,” Paul said. “We don’t know for certain which planet in the Wolf 25 system is their home world.” There was a “cold Earth” planet that seemed likely, but also two gas giants with Triton-sized satellites.
“As we get closer, we might be able to tell which one it is,” Moonboy said.
“It probably would be the one with all the missiles rising up to greet us.”
“Maybe not,” Namir said. “If we stopped accelerating the last month or so, we’d be coming in cold. They might not detect us until it was too late to respond. We’d still be going at 99 percent the speed of light.”
“You’re not arguing in favor of this kamikaze scheme,” Elza said.
“Not this particular one. President of the world. But it’s always been a possible strategy.”
“As I said before,” Snowbird said, “if we’re going to die anyhow, we could still exercise some control over the situation that way.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. Besides, even if we knew what planet they were on, we don’t know who else might inhabit it. It might be like destroying Earth just to get Lazlo what’s- his-name.”
“Which might be happening even as we speak,” Namir said. “Or after however long it takes his message to be picked up by the Others.”
“Comforting prospect,” I said.
“And an interesting thought experiment,” Moonboy said. “If they did destroy the Earth, should we try to destroy them in turn? Or should we go someplace safe and try to restart the human race?”