The Best of Joe Haldeman (77 page)

“The adults don’t get it?”

He did a kind of shrug. “We don’t. Or rather, we only get it once, as children. Do you know about whooping cough and measles?” “What-sels?”

“Measels and whooping cough used to be diseases humans got as children. Before your parents’ parents were born. We heard about them on the radio, and they reminded us of this.”

A new green-clad small one came through the plastic sheets, holding a stone bowl. She and Red exchanged a few whistles and scrapes. “If you are like us when we are small,” he said, “this will make you excrete in every way. So you may want to undress.”

How wonderful. Here comes Carmen, the shitting pissing farting burping barfing human sideshow. Don’t forget snot and earwax. I got out of the Mars suit and unzipped the skinsuit and stepped out of that. I was cold, and every orifice clenched up tight. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Red held my right arm with his two large ones, and Green did the same on the left. Not a good sign. The new green one spit into the bowl, and it started to smoke.

She brought the smoking herb under my nose and I tried to get away, but Red and Green held me fast. It was the worst-smelling crap you could ever imagine. I barfed through mouth and nose and then started retching and coughing explosively, horribly, like a cat with a hair ball. It did bring up the two fungus things, like furry rotten fruit. I would’ve barfed again if there had been anything left in my stomach, but I decided to pass out instead.

~ * ~

9. INVASION FROM EARTH

I half woke up, I don’t know how much later, with Red tugging gently on my arm. “Carmen,” he said, “do you live now? There is a problem.”

I grunted something that meant yes, I am alive, but no, I’m not sure I want to be. My throat felt like someone had pulled something scratchy and dead up through it. “Sleep,” I said, but he picked me up and started carrying me like a child.

“There are humans from Earth here,” he said, speeding up to a run. “They do not understand. They’re wrecking everything.” He blew through the plastic sheets into the dark hall.

“Red...it’s hard to breathe here.” He didn’t respond, just ran faster, a rippling horse gait. His own breath was coming hard, like sheets of paper being ripped. “Red. I need...suit. Oxygen.”

“As we do.” We were suddenly in the middle of a crowd—hundreds of them in various sizes and colors—surging up the ramp toward the surface. He said three short words over and over, very loud, and the crowd stopped moving and parted to let us through.

When we went through the next set of doors I could hear air whistling out. On the other side my ears popped with a painful
crack
and I felt cold, colder than I ever had been. “What’s happening?”

“Your...humans...have a...thing.” He was wheezing before each word. “A tool...that...tears...through.”

He set me down gently on the cold rock floor. I shuddered out of control, teeth chattering. No air. Lungs full of nothing but pain. The world was going white. I was starting to die but instead of praying or something I just noticed that the hairs in my nose had frozen and were making a crinkly sound when I tried to breathe.

Red was putting on the plastic layers that made up his Mars suit. He picked me up and I cried out in startled pain—the skin on my right forearm and breast and hip had frozen to the rock—and he held me close with three arms while the fourth did something to seal the plastic. Then he held me with all four arms and crooned something reassuring to weird creatures from another planet. He smelled like a mushroom you wouldn’t eat, but I could breathe again.

I was bleeding some from the ripped skin and my lungs and throat still didn’t want to work, and I was being hugged to death by a nightmarish singing monster, so rather than put up with it all my body just passed out again.

I woke up to my father fighting with Red, with me in between. Red was trying to hold on to me with his small arms while my father was going after him with some sort of pipe, and he was defending himself with the large arms. “No!” I screamed. “Dad! No!”

Of course he couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum, but I guess anyone can lip-read the word “no.” He stepped back with an expression on his face that I had never seen. Anguish, I suppose, or rage. Well, here was his daughter, naked and bleeding, in the many arms of a gruesome alien, looking way too much like a movie poster from a century ago.

Taka Wu and Mike Silverman were carrying a spalling laser. “Red,” I said, “watch out for the guys with the machine.”

“I know,” he said, “We’ve seen you use it underground. That’s how they tore up the first set of doors. We can’t let them use it again.”

It was an interesting standoff. Four big aliens in their plasticwrap suits. My father and mother and nine other humans in Mars suits, armed with tomato stakes and shovels and one laser, the humans looking kind of pissed off and frightened. The Martians probably were, too. A good thing we hadn’t brought any guns to this planet.

Red whispered. “Can you make them leave the machine and follow us?”

“I don’t know...they’re scared.” I mouthed “Mother, Dad,” and pointed back the way we had come. “Fol-low us,” I said with slow exaggeration. Confined as I was, I couldn’t make any sweeping gestures, but I jabbed one forefinger back the way we had come.

Dad stepped forward slowly, his hands palm out. Mother started to follow him. Red shifted me around and held out his hand and my father took it, and held his other one out for mother. She took it and we went crabwise through the dark layers of the second airlock. Then the third and the fourth, and we were on the slope overlooking the lake.

The crowd of aliens we’d left behind was still there, perhaps a daunting sight for mother and Dad. But they held on, and the crowd parted to let us through.

I noticed ice was forming on the edge of the lake. Were we going to kill them all?

“Pardon,” Red muttered, and held me so hard I couldn’t breathe, while he wiggled out of his suit and left it on the ground, then set me down gently.

It was like walking on ice—on
dry
ice—and my breath came out in plumes. But he and I walked together along the blue line paths, followed by my parents, down to the sanctuary of the white room. Green was waiting there with my skinsuit. I gratefully pulled it on and zipped up. “Boots?”

“Boots,” she said, and went back the way we’d come.

“Are you all right?” Red asked.

My father had his helmet off. “These things speak English?”

Red sort of shrugged. “And Chinese, in my case. We’ve been eavesdropping on you since you discovered radio.”

My father fainted dead away.

~ * ~

Green produced this thing that looked like a gray cabbage and held it by Dad’s face. I had a vague memory of it being used on me, sort of like an oxygen source. He came around in a minute or so.

“Are you actually Martians?” Mother said. “You can’t be.”

Red nodded in a jerky way. “We are Martians only the same way you are. We live here. But we came from somewhere else.”

“Where?” Dad croaked.

“No time for that. You have to talk to your people. We’re losing air and heat, and have to repair the door. Then we have to treat your children. Carmen was near death.”

Dad got to his knees and stood up, then stooped to pick up his helmet. “You know how to fix it? The laser damage.”

“It knows how to repair itself. But it’s like a wound in the body. We have to use stitches or glue to close the hole. Then it grows back.”

“So you just need for us to not interfere.”

“And help, by showing where the damage is.”

He started to put his helmet on. “What about Carmen?”

“Yeah. Where’s my suit?”

Red faced me. I realized you could tell that by the little black mouth slit. “You’re very weak. You should stay here.”

“But—”

“No time to argue. Stay here till we return.” All of them but Green went bustling through the airlock.

“So,” I said to her. “I guess I’m a hostage.”

“My English no good,” she said. “Parlez-vous Français?” I said no. “Nihongo hanasu koto ga dekimasu?”

Probably Japanese, or maybe Martian. “No, sorry.” I sat down and waited for the air to run out.

~ * ~

10. ZEN FOR MORONS

Green put a kind of black fibrous poultice on the places where my skin had burned off from the icy ground, and the pain stopped immediately. That raised a big question I couldn’t ask, having neglected both French and Japanese in school. But help was on its way.

While I was getting dressed after Green had finished her poulticing, another green one showed up.

“Hello,” it said. “I was asked here because I know English. Some English.”

“I—I’m glad to meet you. I’m Carmen.”

“I know. And you want me to say my name. But you couldn’t say it yourself. So give me a name.”

“Um...Robin Hood?”

“I am Robin Hood, then. I am pleased to meet you.”

I couldn’t think of any pleasantries, so I dove right in: “How come your medicine works for us? My mother says we’re unrelated at the most basic level, DNA.”

“Am I ‘DNA’ now? I thought I was Robin Hood.”

This was not going to be easy. “No. Yes. You’re Robin Hood. Why does your medicine work on humans?”

“I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t it? It’s medicine.”

So much for the Enigmatic Superior Aliens theory. “Look. You know what a molecule is?”

“I know the word. Very small. Too small to see.” He took his big head in two large-arm hands and wiggled it, the way Red did when he was agitated. “Forgive me. Science is not my...there is no word. I can’t know science. I don’t think any of us can, really. But especially not me.”

I gestured at everything. “Then where did
this
all come from? It didn’t just
happen.”

“That’s right. It didn’t happen. It’s always been this way.”

I needed a scientist and they sent me a philosopher. Not too bright, either. “Can you ask her?” I pointed to Green. “How can her medicine work, when we’re chemically so different?”

“She’s not a ‘her.’ Sometimes she is, and sometimes she’s a ‘he.’ Right now she’s a ‘what.’”

“Okay. Would you please ask it?”

They exchanged a long series of wheedly-poot-rasp sounds.

“It’s something like this,” Robin Hood said. “Curing takes intelligence. With Earth humans, the intelligence comes along with the doctor, or scientists. With us, it’s in the medicine.” He touched the stuff on my breast, which made me jump. “It knows you are different, and works on you differently. It works on the very smallest level.”

“Nanotechnology,” I said.

“Maybe smaller than that,” he said. “As small as chemistry. Intelligent molecules.”

“You do know about nanotechnology?”

“Only from TV and the cube.” He spidered over to the bed. “Please sit. You make me nervous, balanced there on two legs.”

I obliged him. “This is how different we are, Carmen. You know when nanotechnology was discovered.”

“End of the twentieth century sometime.”

“There’s no such knowledge for us. This medicine has always been. Like the living doors that keep the air in. Like the things that make the air, concentrate the oxygen. Somebody made them, but that was so long ago, it was before history. Before we came to Mars.”

“Where
did
you come from? When?”

“We would call it Earth, though it’s not your Earth, of course. Really far away, really long ago.” He paused. “More than ten thousand ares.”

A hundred centuries before the Pyramids. “But that’s not long enough ago for Mars to be inhabitable. Mars was Mars a million ares ago.”

He made an almost human gesture, all four hands palms up. “It could be much longer. At ten thousand ares, history becomes mystery. Our faraway Earth could be a myth. There aren’t any space ships lying around.

“What deepens the mystery is that we could never live on Mars, on the surface, but we
could
live on Earth, your Earth. So why were we brought many light years and left on the wrong planet?”

I thought about what Red had said. “Maybe because we’re too dangerous.”

“That’s a theory. Or it might have been dinosaurs. They looked pretty dangerous.”

~ * ~

11. SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

The damage from the laser was repaired in a few hours, and I was bundled back to the colony to be rayed and poked and prodded and interviewed by doctors and scientists. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me, human or alien in origin.

“The treatment they gave you sounds like primitive armwaving,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The fact that they don’t know why it works is scary.”

“They don’t know why
anything
works over there. It sounds like it’s all hand-me-down science from thousands of years ago.”

He nodded and frowned. “You’re the only data point we have. If the disease were less serious, I’d introduce it to the kids one at a time, and monitor their progress. But there’s no time.”

Rather than try to take a bunch of sick children over there, they invited the aliens to come to us. It was Red and Green, logically, with Robin Hood and an amber one following closely behind. I was outside, waiting for them, and escorted Red through the airlock.