Joe Haldeman: Starbound

I’d seen that in our briefings. The yellow ones were the smallest group, about one in twenty, and with their eidetic memory they served as historians and record-keepers. They also had been a pipeline to the one Other we’d had contact with—a sort of prerecorded message that all the yellow ones had carried around for millennia, supposedly, hidden waiting for a triggering signal.

When the signal came, nine eventful years ago, Fly-in-Amber had been here, in Little Mars. He went into a coma and started spouting gibberish that was decoded pretty easily. The Other was announcing its existence and location and the fact that it had a silicon- nitrogen metabolism, and little else. It didn’t mention the fact that it was about to try to destroy the world.

“I’m sort of like the soldier boys,” Paul said. “I hadn’t thought about there being an option.”

Carmen laughed. “For you, forget it. You have to fly the boat.” Actually, it was so automated and autonomous that it didn’t need a pilot. Paul would oversee it and take over if something went wrong. But that was beyond problematic. Nobody’d ever flown an iceberg close to the speed of light before.

I could sense people sorting one another out socially. The three of us and Paul all had military service, and, in most mixed populations, that is a primary difference. A pseudospeciation—you have killed, at least theoretically, or been given permission to, and so you are irrevocably different.

We comprised one slight majority. The ones who’d lived on Mars comprised another, more basic. But I could see Paul being an instinctive ally in some situations.

Meryl got up and opened the refrigerator. “Anybody hungry?” A few assents, including my own. “Disgustingly healthy, of course.” She took out a tray with white lumps on it, slid it into the cooker, and pressed a series of buttons, probably microwave and radiant heat together.

“Piloting this thing is a scary proposition.” Paul looked down at the table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “No matter who does it—especially when we’re light-months or light-years away from technical help.”

Not that technical help would do much good if the Martian power source gave out. We might as well burn incense and pray.

“No use worrying about it till Test One gets back,” Meryl said. She took the tray of buns out of the cooker and put them on the table.

“You check on him today?” Carmen asked Paul.

He nodded and took a notebook out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “He’s about two and a half days from turnaround. Sixty-two hours.” Test One was the miniature of ad Astra that was going out a hundredth of a light-year and back. “No problem.”

The pastry was warm and slightly almond- flavored. I didn’t want to speculate on where that came from. Not almonds.

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“Not since yesterday. Don’t want to nag.” He looked at me. “I should be jealous. Another pilot in her life.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I’ll ask him whether he wants to come into quarantine for a big sloppy kiss.”

“Test One isn’t from Mars side?” I hadn’t known that.

“No, they want to use it for local exploration. Don’t want to give us lepers a monopoly on the solar system.”

It made sense. The Moon was closed to people who’d been exposed to Mars, and it would probably be the same for the new outposts planned for Ceres and the satellites of the outer planets.

My heart stopped when a monster stepped through the door. Then restarted. Just a Martian.

“Hi, Snowbird,” Moonboy said, and followed that with a string of nonhuman sounds. I didn’t know you could whistle and belch at the same time.

“Good morning,” it said in Moonboy’s voice. “Your accent is improving. But no, thank you, I don’t want to eat a skillet.”

“Have to work on my vocabulary.”

It turned to us. “Welcome to Little Mars, General. And Colonel and Colonel.”

“Glad to be here,” I said, and immediately felt foolish.

“I hope you’re being polite and not insane. Happy to join an expedition that will probably result in your death? I hope not.” It moved with a smooth rippling gait, four legs rolling, and put an arm around Meryl. Three arms left over.

I’d seen thousands of pictures of them, and studied them extensively, but that was nothing like being in the same room. They’re only a little taller than us but seem huge and solid, like a horse. Slight smell of tuna. The head very much like an old potato, including eyes. Two large hands and two small, four fingers each, articulated in such a way that any could serve as thumb. Four legs.

This one was wearing a white smock, scuffed with gray. When she spoke she “faced” the person she was speaking to, though there was nothing like an actual face. Just a mouth, with fat black teeth. The potato eyes were really eyes, bundles of something like optical fiber. They looked in all directions at once and saw mostly in infrared.

“You’re Snowbird?” my wife asked.

She faced her. “I am.”

“So you’ll be dying with us.”

“I suppose. More than likely.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A human might sit down or lean against something. Snowbird stood still, and was silent for a long moment. “Death is not the same for us. Not as important. We die as completely, but will be replaced—as you are. But we’re more closely replicated.”

“A white dies and a white is born,” I said.

“Yes, but more than that. The new one has a kind of memory of the old. Actual, not metaphorical.”

“Even if you die twenty-four light-years away?” Meryl asked.

“We’ve talked about that, Fly-in-Amber and I. It will be an interesting experiment.”

They don’t reproduce at all like humans. It’s sort of like a wrestling match, with several of them rolling around together, their sweat containing genetic material. The one who wins the match gets to be the mother, breaking out in pods over the next few days. One for each of the recent dead, so the population of each family remains approximately constant.

“You weren’t on the Space Elevator roster,” Carmen said, “and we didn’t expect you until the message just before you got here. Is that a spook thing?”

All human eyes were on me, and probably a few Martian ones. “Yes, but not so much with Elza and Dustin. We all have ties to the intelligence community, but I’m the only one who’s supposed to move in secret. Of course, when we’re traveling together, they stay invisible, too.”

“The secrecy,” Snowbird said. “That’s because you’re an Israeli? A Jew?”

I nodded to her. Difficult to look someone in the eye when there are so many. “I was born in Israel,” I said, as always trying to keep emotion out of my voice. “I have no religion.”

That caused a predictable awkward silence, which Carmen eventually broke.

“A friend of mine’s parents knew you in Israel, after Gehenna. Elspeth Feldman.”

It took me a moment. “The Feldmans, yes, Americans. Life sciences. Max and… A-something.”

“Akhila. You approved them for Israeli citizenship,” she said.

“Them and a thousand others, mostly involved in the cleanup. The country had a real population shortage.” I turned back to Snowbird. “You know about Gehenna.”

“I know,” she said. “Which is not the same as understanding. How did you survive it?”

“I was in New York all of 2060, a junior attaché at the UN. That’s when the first part of the poison went into the water supply at Tel Aviv and Hefa.”

“Anyone who drank it died,” Carmen said.

“If they were in Tel Aviv or Hefa a year later,” I said, “when car bombs released the second part of the poison. An aerosol.