Joe Haldeman: Starbound

With more than a century to prepare for the inevitable meeting, we had time to plan various responses. Violence was discussed and discarded. We had no experience with it other than in observation of human activities on radio, television, and cube. You would kick our asses, if we had them, but we are four-legged and excrete mainly through hundreds of pores in our feet.

The only actual plan was to feign ignorance. Not admit (at first) that we understood many human languages. You would eventually find out we were listening to you, of course, but you would understand our need for caution.

We are not good at planning, since our lives used to be safe and predictable, but in any case we could not have planned on Carmen Dula. She walked over the top of a lava bubble that had been worn thin, and fell through.

She was obviously injured and in grave danger. Our choices were to contact the colony and tell them what had happened or rescue her ourselves. The former course had too many variables—explaining who we were and what we knew and all; she would probably run out of air long before they could find her. So our leader flew out to retrieve her.

(We have one absolute leader at a time; when he/she/it dies, another is born. More intelligent, larger, stronger, and faster than the rest of us, and usually long-lived. Unless humans interfere, it turns out.)

The leader, whom Carmen christened Red, took a floater out and picked up Carmen and her idiot robot companion, called a dog, and brought them back to us. Our medicine cured her broken bones and frostbite.

We are not sure why it worked on her, but we don’t know how it works on us, either. It always has.

We agreed not to speak to her, for the time being. We only spoke our native languages, which the human vocal apparatus can’t reproduce. Humans can’t even hear the high-pitched part.

So Red took her back to the colony the next night, taking advantage of a sandstorm to remain hidden. Left her at the air-lock door, with no explanation.

It was very amusing to monitor what happened afterward—we do listen to all communications traffic between Earth and Mars. Nobody wanted to believe her fantastic story, since Martians do not and could not exist, but no one could explain how she had survived so long. They even found evidence of the broken bones we healed but assumed they were old injuries she had forgotten about, or was lying about.

We could have had years of entertainment, following their tortuous logic, but illness forced our hand.

All of us Martians go through a phase, roughly corresponding to the transition between infancy and childhood, when for a short period our bodies clean themselves out and start over. It isn’t pleasant, but neither is it frightening, since it happens to everybody at the same time of life.

Somehow, Carmen “caught” it from us, which is medically impossible. Our biologies aren’t remotely related; we don’t even have DNA. Nevertheless, she did have the transition “sickness,” and we brought her back to our home and treated her the way we would a Martian child, having her breathe an unpleasant mixture of smoldering herbs. She expelled everything, especially the two large cysts that had grown in her lungs. She was fine the next day, though, and went home—which was when the real trouble started.

She had apparently infected all the other youngsters in the colony—everyone under the age of twenty or so.

It was all sorted out eventually. Our leader Red and a healer Martian went over to the human colony and treated all the children the way they had Carmen, not pleasant but not dangerous. Unfortunately, no one could explain how the “disease” could have been transmitted from us to Carmen and from Carmen to the children. Human scientists were mystified, and, of course, we don’t have scientists as such.

The children seemed to be all right. But people were afraid that something worse might happen, and so the humans on Earth put all of Mars under quarantine, where it remains to this day, although there have been no other incidents. People who come to Mars do so in the knowledge that they may never see Earth again.

There is still no shortage of volunteers, which makes me think that Earth must be a very unpleasant place.

I had to name the boy Red, after my friend who gave his life to save us all. Paul and I tried on various names for our daughter, and settled on Nadia, Russian for “hope.” Which we need now. (They both had the middle name Mayfly, sort of a joke between me and the memory of Red.)

There were probably a good number of human boys and girls named after that particular Martian. You couldn’t say the name in Martian, a series of clacks and creaks and whistles that means “Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader.” He saved me from dying of exposure, or stupidity, and a few years later, he saved the world by putting himself on the other side of the Moon when he realized he’d become a planet-destroying time bomb. Not something that happens to ordinary heroes.

The Martians had told us about the “Others” early on—the other alien race that supposedly had brought the Martians to Mars, tens of thousands of years ago. At first we wondered whether they were myth, or metaphor, but the memory family (those who always wore yellow, like Fly-in-Amber) insisted that the Others were actual history, though from so far ago the memory was all but lost.

They were as real as dirt, as real as death.

The memory family didn’t know that they had another function, besides using their eidetic memories to keep track of things. They also retained a coded message, generation after generation, that would be transmitted to humans when the time was right.

The decoded message seemed innocuous. By means of a checkerboard digital picture, a “Drake diagram,” we learned that the Others were a silicon-nitrogen form of life; they evidently lived immersed in the liquid nitrogen seas of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

Various mysteries began to come together after the Others revealed their existence, like the paradoxical combination of high technology and scientific ignorance in the Martian city. (They apparently lived only in one huge underground complex, about the size of a large city on Earth, but with more than half of it covered with creepy fungoid agriculture.) The Others had built the city and populated it with thousands of bioengineered Martians, evidently for the purpose of keeping an eye on Earth, an eye on humanity.

The city had no obvious power source, but they had apparently limitless power from somewhere. Human scientists eventually figured it out, which gave us unlimited power as well, evidently bled off from some “adjacent” universe. I wonder what we’ll do if they show up with a bill.

The Other that lived on Triton—many other Others were light-years away—gave us ample demonstration of what unlimited power can do.

It nearly destroyed the satellite Triton in one tremendous explosion. An instant before the explosion, it escaped, or something did, in a spaceship that screamed away at more than twenty gravities’ acceleration. Its apparent destination was a small star called Wolf 25, about twenty-four light-years away.

Before the Other made its spectacular exit, it prepared an equally spectacular exit for the human race. The head Martian, my friend Red, was unknowingly a direct conduit to the otherworldly source of energy that powered the Martian civilization, and when he died, that connection would open up, with world-destroying intensity.

The world it destroyed would not be Mars. The Other had contrived to send Red to Earth before the time bomb was triggered.

Red knew he didn’t have long. He asked my husband Paul, who is a pilot, to take him to the other side of the Moon to die. There was no way of knowing exactly how large the explosion was going to be, but presumably the Moon had enough mass to block it.