“What happened to the father?” Namir asked.
“The record doesn’t say.”
“Moonboy thinks his parents got a no- fault divorce when he was eleven,” Meryl said, “and his father dropped out of his life. Probably into prison or some rehab program, judging from what you say. With an ironclad restraining order.” She shook her head. “It . . . explains some things. It’s a lot to assimilate.”
“The white hair?” I said. He had a tangled nimbus, like Einstein. “I know a person’s hair doesn’t turn white overnight.”
“Old wives’ tale,” Elza said. “But continual stress can cause premature graying.”
“Maybe that memory wasn’t completely erased,” Meryl said, “and he dwells on it at some level. His hair was almost completely white when we met. I think he was twenty-two.”
“Is that why he’s called Moonboy?” Namir asked.
I knew about that. “No, he was born during an eclipse, a total lunar eclipse.” I cringed at the memory of a cheap magazine article when I was famous, putting us together: Moonboy and Mars Girl.
“His mother’s an astrology nut,” Meryl said. “We don’t get along too well.
He
thinks she walks on water, though.”
Dustin laughed. “Well, she did bring him back from the dead. Even if he doesn’t know it, she does. It could make for an interesting relationship.”
Meryl nodded. “It does explain a lot.”
“His voice,” Elza said. It was a soft, hoarse rasp. “That could be damage to his vocal cords from stomach acid. As he lay there dead.”
Namir broke the silence. “We have to tell him. Now that we all know.”
“Not ‘we,’ ” Elza said. “I have to tell him. I started the whole damned thing, with my curiosity.”
That was a delicate way to put it, I thought. Her curiosity about Moonboy’s medical record came after her curiosity about his body. If that was what it was, her need for different men.
Of course the only man left now was mine.
17
THERAPY
I didn’t want my wife alone in a room with the man who had assaulted her. But she felt they had to talk one-on-one, and besides, she would have no trouble overpowering him under normal circumstances. As a compromise, she let me sit in an adjacent room and watch the interview on a notebook, ready to rush in and save her. It wasn’t necessary, as it turned out. But it was educational.
He knocked tentatively and walked in, looking sheepish and uncomfortable. She sat him down next to her desk and inspected his stitches, dabbing at them with an alcohol swab. He winced, and her expression was not one of empathy.
“You’ll live,” she said, and sat down facing him.
“I’m sorry, so sorry. Don’t know what got into me.” His speech was slightly slurred.
“That’s what we have to talk about.” She took a deep breath. “What happened yesterday started twenty-nine years ago. Do you know the acronym SPMD?”
He shook his head. “No. When I was eleven?”
“Yes. It’s Selective Precision Memory Dampening. Not done very often anymore; it’s controversial.”
“When I was in the hospital so long, with pneumonia?”
“Yes. But it was a lot more than pneumonia.”
For several minutes he didn’t speak, while she recounted in unsparing detail what his father had done and what happened afterward. When she was through, he just stared into space for a long moment.
“They could have told me,” he said in a flat, hurt voice. “Mother should have told me.” He hit the desk with his fist, hard enough to hurt.
“She should’ve,” Elza said. “I would have, at least when you were an adult.”
“What did you say,” he said slowly, “when we were in bed?”
“I asked you about your father.”
He leaned forward and spoke through clenched teeth. “You asked me whether I loved him.” I rose from the chair, ready to go next door.
“Let me see your hand.” She took it in one hand and, with the other hand, pressed the inside of his wrist.
He sat back slowly and looked at his wrist, and touched the small flesh-colored circle there. “What’s that?”
“It’s a relaxant.” She must have had it palmed. “It’ll wear off quickly.”
“I . . .” He looked at the wall. “I was upset because I couldn’t, I couldn’t come.”
“You did all right.”
“No—I mean it happens all the time. I thought with you, with a new sexy woman . . .”
“It’s all in the head,” she said gently. “It’s always all in the head. You were nervous.”
“When you said . . . that about my father, I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I mean I tried, and it was like someone, someone was
choking
me. I must have lashed out. I don’t remember.”
“You got in a lucky shot.”
He smiled for the first time. “Thank you for not killing me. I’ve seen you throw Daniel and Namir around on the mat.”
“It took some restraint. How is the elbow?”
“Still hurts a bit.”
She stood. “Hmm. Take off your shirt and get up on the examination table.” He did, and she moved his arm around and palpated his elbow. “That doesn’t hurt?”
“Not really, no.”
She pressed behind his shoulder. “This does, though?”
“A little.”
She nodded and looked at him for a moment. “Take off your shoes and lie down on your back.” He did, while she watched and nodded.
“I want to check your reflexes,” she said, starting to unbuckle his belt. She stopped partway. “This wouldn’t be ethical on Earth. But we’re playing with starship rules.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling broadly. She unzipped his fly, and his reflexes appeared more than adequate.
I’ll have to ask her about that patch. I turned off the notebook. It was time to start dinner. Go pull some carrots.
18
ANNIVERSARY
8 May 2089
Namir is baking a cake. It’s everyone’s anniversary: we took off exactly one year ago, and everyone is still alive.
The notebook says that on Earth it’s 16 July 89, so relativity has shrunk about seventy days off our calendar.
It does feel like twelve months have gone by, though, rather than fourteen, so a time for taking stock. In one year:
Only the one day of violence, back in September, when Moonboy broke Elza’s nose, and Dustin parted his hair with a pool cue. For a long time now, Dustin and Moonboy have been civil with each other, and Elza has lost her nasal accent.
Elza also has fucked every man aboard except Paul (if he’s telling the truth), and Meryl as well, in a three-way with Moonboy, though that seems to have petered out.
The avocado tree has blossomed, but set no fruit in spite of assiduous pollination. We’ve asked Earth for advice, but they’re half a light-year away, so it will be a while.
Most of the other crops are thriving. We’ve almost doubled the floor space allotted to tomatoes, trimming the real estate from leafy greens and legumes. Namir needed more Italian plum tomatoes for sauces, and no one complained. I wish we’d brought more fruit trees, myself, or more acreage. Enough grapes to make our own wine; the idea of waiting for it to ferment is attractive; something to look forward to. Can’t have everything.
The planners were wise to design such a large hydroponic garden, even though we could survive without it. Having regular menial chores helps keep us sane; caring for living things promotes optimism. Even in our situation.
In the sports news, I’m now swimming two kilometers a day. There’s a new house rule in billiards: Namir has to shoot left- handed, or no one will play with him. He still wins, but not all the time anymore.
On Saturdays, we move all the lounge furniture to the walls, string a badminton net across the room, and work up a good sweat. The Martians come out and play for the first few minutes, one on each team, though they overheat quickly and are handicapped by the gravity, not to mention lacking the concept of “sport.” We compensate for their relative lack of mobility by letting them each use two racquets. They’re ambidextrous four ways.
Meryl’s wall-sized crossword puzzle is about a third finished. She’d better slow down. Elza put away her needlepoint for a while, but has started a new one, another fractal chromatic fantasy.
Moonboy spends an hour or two a day on the piano, composing silently, and sometimes plays all night, haggard but happy in the morning. I don’t read music too well, but noticed the other day that
Composition 3: Approach/Retreat
is thirty-five pages long.
Paul spends most of the mornings drinking coffee and cranking out equations, which he sometimes tries to explain to me. He won’t be through coursework on the doctorate for another year and a half. Then he’ll write a dissertation and send it off to Earth. So maybe in fifty years he’ll get a doctorate in Quaint Astrophysics from Stanford, if there still is a Stanford.
Namir is working on another balalaika, a long one with low notes, and is slowly carving a bust of Elza, which is at a creepy stage—half of it still a block of wood and half a mostly finished sculpture, as if she were being pulled out of the material. Straight on, I think her expression is one of stoic acceptance; from another angle, her lips slightly apart, she looks like she’s on the verge of an orgasm. He knows her better than any of us, of course. Maybe that’s what she looks like all the time, to him.
I’ve taken up drawing again, using the texts Oz recommended when I was first on Mars. No paper, but it was a lifetime ago when I last had paper to spare. I can adjust the stylus and notebook to simulate pencil, ink, or wash. I’m copying some faces from the actual book that Namir brought along, all of Vermeer. His
The Geographer
looks a lot like Moonboy, though his hair isn’t white.
Our brand-new spaceship is getting a little worn around the edges. The air recycler started making a noise like a person whistling through her teeth, barely audible. Paul described it to the auto- repair algorithm, and the noise stopped for a few days, then came back. Meryl did it a slightly different way, and it stayed quiet. But it was a scary time. Can’t send out for parts.
The Martians’ swimming pool has to be continuously recaulked. Long hours of immersion—totally unnatural, of course, for Martians—must do something with the chemistry of their skin, which makes the water react with the caulking compound. Try to get those two out of the water, though.
Along with Meryl and Moonboy, I’m chipping away at the Martian language. Snowbird is more helpful than Fly-in-Amber, but even so it’s a frustrating experience.
Moonboy is developing a good ear for using the synthesizer to simulate Martian sounds, and in a real sense he’s the only one of us who can “speak” Martian with anything like a useful vocabulary. With merely human larynx and vocal cords, I can do about three hundred words that Snowbird can recognize consistently, but many of those, like “swimming,” are neologisms derived from human sounds.
Moonboy can play more than ten times my number of words, but a similar problem is emerging: we can only talk about experiences that humans and Martians share. Most of what they do and think is hidden from us.
Some may even be hidden on purpose. We have no idea what their secret agenda might be.
They
might not even know.
When the lone Other communicated to us from Neptune’s satellite Triton, it did so at first through a long rote message that Fly-in-Amber and other members of his family recited after a hypnotic stimulus. They translated it for us, but how complete was the translation? How honest?
We must always keep in mind that the Martians were created by the Others for the sole purpose of contacting us after we developed the ability to go to Mars. We were no danger to them until then.
This is the only thing that lone Other said to us in a human language, in response to our first message:
Peace is a good sentiment.
Your assumption about my body chemistry is clever but wrong. I will tell you more later.
At this time I do not wish to tell you where my people live.
I have been watching your development for a long time, mostly through radio and television. If you take an objective view of human behavior since the early twentieth century, you can understand why I must approach you with caution.
I apologize for having destroyed your Triton probe back in 2044. I didn’t want you to know exactly where I am on this world.
If you send another probe, I will do the same thing, again with apologies.
For reasons that may become apparent soon, I don’t wish to communicate with you directly. The biological constructs that live below the surface of Mars were created thousands of years ago, with the sole purpose of eventually talking to you and, at the right time, serving as a conduit through which I could reveal my existence.
“Our” existence, actually, since we have millions of individuals elsewhere. On our home planet and watching other planets, like yours.
This is a clumsy and limited language for me, as are all human languages. The Martian ones were created for communication between you and me, and from now on I would like to utilize the most complex of those Martian languages, which is used by only one individual, the leader you call Red.