The Best of Joe Haldeman (78 page)

Half the adults in the colony seemed crowded into the changing room for a first look at the aliens. There was a lot of whispered conversation while Red worked his way out of his suit.

“It’s hot,” he said. “The oxygen makes me dizzy. This is less than Earth, though?”

“Slightly less,” Dr. Jefferson said. He was in the front of the crowd. “Like living on a mountain.”

“It smells strange. But not bad. I can smell your hydroponics.”

“Where are children?” Green said as soon as she was out of the suit. “No time talk.” She held out her bag of herbs and chemicals and shook it.

The children had been prepared with the idea that these “Martians” were our friends, and had a way to cure them. There were pictures of them and their cave. But a picture of an eightlegged potato-head monstrosity isn’t nearly as distressing as the real thing—especially to a room full of children who are terribly ill with something no one can explain (but which they suspect is Martian in origin). So their reaction when Dr. Jefferson walked in with Dargo Solingen and Green was predictable— screaming and crying and, from the ambulatory ones, escape attempts. Of course the doors were locked, with people like me spying in through the windows, looking in on the chaos.

Everybody loves Dr. Jefferson, and almost everybody is afraid of Dargo Solingen, and eventually the combination worked. Green just quietly stood there like Exhibit A, which helped. It takes a while not to think of giant spiders when you see them walk.

They had talked about the possibility of sedating the children, to make the experience less traumatic, but the only data they had about the treatment was my description, and they were afraid that if the children were too relaxed, they wouldn’t cough forcefully enough to expel all the crap. Without sedation, the experience might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but at least they would
have
lives.

They wanted to keep the children isolated, and both adults would have to stay in there for a while after the treatment, to make sure they hadn’t caught it, unlikely as that seemed.

So the only thing between the child being treated and the ones who were waiting for it was a sheet suspended from the ceiling, and after the first one, they all had heard what they were in for. It was done in age order, youngest to oldest, and at first there was some undignified running around, grabbing the victims and dragging them behind the sheet, where they volubly did the hairball performance.

But the children all seemed to sleep peacefully after the thing was over, which calmed most of the others—if they were like me, they hadn’t been sleeping much. Card, one of the oldest, who had to wait the longest, pretended to be unconcerned and sleep before the treatment. I know how brave that was of him; he doesn’t handle being sick well. As if I did.

The rest of us were mostly crowded into the mess hall, talking with Red and Robin Hood. The other one asked that we call him Fly in Amber, and said that it was his job to remember, so he wouldn’t be saying much.

Red said that his job, his function, was hard to describe in human terms. He was sort of like a mayor, a local leader or organizer. He also did things that called for a lot of strength.

Robin Hood said he was being modest; for forty ares he had been a respected leader. When their surveillance device showed that I was in danger of dying, they all looked to Red to make the decision and then act on it.

“It was not a hard decision,” he said. “Ever since you landed, we knew that a confrontation was inevitable. I took this opportunity to initiate it, so it would be on our terms. I couldn’t know that Carmen would catch this thing, which you call a disease, and bring it back home with her.”

“You don’t call it a disease?” one of the scientists asked.

“No...I guess in your terms it might be called a ‘phase,’ a developmental phase. You go from being a young child to being an older child. For us, it’s unpleasant but not life-threatening.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” the xenologist Howard Jain said. “It’s like a human teenager who has acne, transmitting it to a trout. Or even more extreme than that—the trout at least has DNA.”

“And you and the trout have a common ancestor,” Robin Hood said. “We have no idea what we might have evolved from.”

“Did you get the idea of evolution from us?” he asked.

“No, not as a practical matter. We’ve been cross-breeding plants for a long time. But Darwinism, yes, from you. From your television programs back in the twentieth century.”

“Wait,” my father said. “How did you build a television receiver in the first place?”

There was a pause, and then Red spoke: “We didn’t. It’s always been there.”

“What?”

“It’s a room full of metal spheres, about as tall as I am. They started making noises in the early twentieth century...”

“Those like me remembered them all,” Fly in Amber said, “though they were just noises at first.”

“...and we knew the signals were from Earth, because we only got them when Earth was in the sky. Then the spheres started showing pictures in mid-century, which gave us visual clues for decoding human language. Then when the cube was developed, they started displaying in three dimensions.”

“How long is ‘always’?” Howard Jain asked. “How far back does your history go?”

“We don’t have history in your sense,” Fly in Amber said. “Your history is a record of conflict and change. We have neither, in the normal course of things. A meteorite damaged an outlying area of our home 4,359 ares ago. Otherwise, not much has happened until your radio started talking.”

“You have explored Mars more than we have,” Robin Hood said, “with your satellites and rovers, and much of what we know about the planet, we got from you. You put your base in this area because of the large frozen lake underground; we assume that’s why we were put here, too. But that memory is long gone.”

“Some of us have a theory,” Red said, “that the memory was somehow suppressed, deliberately erased. What you don’t know you can’t tell.”

“You can’t erase a memory,” Fly in Amber said.

“
We
can’t. The ones who put us here obviously could do many things we can’t do.”

“You are not a memory expert. I am.”

Red’s complexion changed slightly, darkening. It probably wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument. “One thing I do remember is the 1950s, when television started.”

“You’re that old!” Jain said.

“Yes, though I was young then. That was during the war between Russia and the United States, the Cold War.”

“You have told us this before,” Robin Hood said. “Not all of us agree.”

Red pushed on. “The United States had an electronic network it called the ‘Distant Early Warning System,’ set up so they would know ahead of time, if Russian bombers were on their way.” He paused. “I think that’s what we are.”

“Warning whom?” Jain said.

“Whoever put us here. We’re on Mars instead of Earth because they didn’t want you to know about us until you had space flight.”

“Until we posed a threat to them,” Dad said.

“That’s a very human thought.” Red paused. “Not to be insulting. But it could also be that they didn’t want to influence your development too early. Or it could be that there was no profit in contacting you until you had evolved to this point.”

“We wouldn’t be any threat to them,” Jain said. “If they could come here and set up the underground city we saw, thousands and thousands of years ago, it’s hard to imagine what they could do now.”

The uncomfortable silence was broken by Maria Rodriguez, who came down from the quarantine area. “They’re done now. It looks like all the kids are okay.” She looked around at all the serious faces. “I said they’re okay. Crisis over.”

Actually, it had just begun.

~ * ~

12. THE MARS GIRL

Which is how I became an ambassador to the Martians. Everybody knows they didn’t evolve on Mars, but what else are you going to call them?

Red, whose real name is Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader, suggested that I would be a natural choice as a go-between. I was the first human to meet them, and the fact that they risked exposure by saving my life would help humans accept their good intentions.

On Earth, there was a crash program to orbit a space station, Little Mars, that duplicated the living conditions they were used to. Before my five-year residence on Mars was over, I was taken back there with Red and three other Martians, along with Howard Jain, who would be coordinating research.

Nobody wanted to bring them all the way down to Earth quite yet. A worldwide epidemic of the lung crap wouldn’t improve relations, and nobody could say whether they might harbor something even more unpleasant.

So I’m sort of a lab animal, under quarantine and constant medical monitoring, maybe for life. But I’m also an ambassador, the human sidekick for Red and the others. Leaders come up from Earth to make symbolic gestures of friendship, even though it’s obviously more about fear than brotherhood. When the Others show up, we want to have a good report card from the Martians.

That will be decades or centuries or even millennia—unless they’ve figured a way around the speed-of-light speed limit. I’m pretty confident they have. So I might meet them.

A couple of days a week, the Elevator comes up and I meet all kinds of presidents and secretariats and so forth, though there’s always a pane of glass between us. More interesting is talking with the scientists and other thinkers who vie for one-week residences here, in the five Spartan rooms the Mars Institute maintains. Sometimes rich people come over from the Hilton to gawk. They pay.

The rest of the time, I spend with Red and the others, trying to learn their language—me, who chickened out of French—and teach them about humans. Meanwhile exercise two hours a day in the thin cold air and Martian gravity, and study for my degrees in xenology. I’ll be writing the book some day. Not “a” book. The book.

Every now and then some silly tabloid magazine or show will do the “poor little Mars Girl” routine, about how isolated I am in this goldfish bowl hovering over the Earth, never to have anything like a normal life.

But everybody on Mars is under the same quarantine as I am; everybody who’s been exposed to the Martians. I could go back some day and kick Dargo Solingen out of office. Marry some old space pilot.

Who wants a normal life, anyhow?

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “SLEEPING DOGS”

I think it was Paul Simon who said that if you asked him to write a song about a woman in a red dress sitting alone smoking in a bar, he could do it right away, but if you asked him to just write a song, he’d be stuck.

So that was my problem: “just write a story.” Elizabeth Anne Hull asked me to contribute an original story for
Gateways,
a festschrift in honor of Frederik Pohl. Just a science fiction story; no other restrictions except that it should of course be wonderful.

So starting with just a blank sheet of paper, I began free-associating in a circle, and filled a large page with thoughts and quotes.

I threw away easily 95 percent of the meandering diagram, but one quotation gave me the core of my story—”Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.” That’s the first line of Siegfried Sassoon’s great poem “Dreamers.”