Marsbound (25 page)

"An areologist,” Oz said. “Quite seriously. We have Terry and Joan on Mars right now, nosing around your city, trying to date it. What if there's nothing that's more than a few thousand ares old? A few hundred?"

Red clasped himself with all four arms, which usually meant he was thinking. “It's not impossible. I have direct evidence, written communication, with only three previous leaders, with mention of a fourth. Less than a thousand ares.” He turned to Moonboy. “Have Joan and Terry found anything older?"

"I don't think so. But they're still doing preliminary work, being pretty cautious."

"We must have them try. Dig down for things to date. This is fascinating!"

What I myself found fascinating was the way Red had changed the subject away from “Have I ever lied to you?"

* * * *

8. Signal-to-noise ratio

Red wrote out the message that the Other had transmitted after its English one, and it was as innocuous and plain as the earlier secret one had been threatening and complex. Basically, “I want to cooperate, but you must let me go at my own slow pace."

I searched my room for a microphone but found exactly what I'd expected: nothing. You can buy one at Cube Shack not much bigger than a flea.

Red asked everyone on our side and most of the people on Earth side whether they had questions or messages for the Other. I knew he wanted a long transmission so that his own part would be hidden in the volume generated by others.

News came that my mother and father were coming on the next shuttle from Mars, which pleased me, though I had to admit I hadn't missed Dad. So Card would be informally adopted by the Westlings, which no doubt made him one happy boy. Barry got away with murder, which happens when your mother is a novelist and your father is a crazy inventor, no matter what their job titles claimed.

Over the next two days, I had eight more VR interviews. The most trivial was one from my old high school, and the most interesting was with a panel of “xenopsychologists” convened at Harvard. The weirdest was the last one, from the Church of Christ Revealed, who thought the whole thing, from the Space Elevator on, was a hoax the government was perpetrating for its own obscure purpose. I told them they could go out and watch the Space Elevator work; they could aim an antenna at Mars and intercept the signals that emanated from there whenever the right side was facing Earth. The interviewers smiled conspiratorially, saying “Yes, that's what we're
supposed
to believe,” or “It's all explained in the Bible, and it isn't like your people say."

After putting up with that, I went back to my place feeling sort of like the most dispensable member of the team, and what should greet me but a message from Dargo: “Please come see me at your earliest convenience."

I put on my exercise clothes and went up to row and jog. Moonboy was on the rowing machine, so I jogged for a while on the treadmill watching Earth news. So little of it seemed important.

So my “earliest convenience” was after 250 calories of running and a mile on the oars. I didn't shower, but went sweatily down to Dargo's office.

Her nose wrinkled when I stepped in and closed the door behind me. Without preamble, she said, “Have you ever heard of S2N?"

"No ... a sulfur and nitrogen compound?” Even my dim recall of valences told me that couldn't be it.

"It's a research tool I just found. It dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio in a collection of audio data."

Her ubiquitous clipboard was on the desk. She stabbed a button on it, and my voice clearly said, “That's a kind of insect?” Then Red started the mayfly analogy, Bach a faint whisper in the background. She switched it off.

"I have it all,” she said. “The super-slow Others, the faster one on Triton, the rationale for Red's secret language. Our mayfly helplessness in the face of their ancient wisdom."

"So. Now you know everything I do. You still can't—"

"Maybe I know a little
more
than you do. You accept what your Martian friend says as the pure truth. I do not."

I didn't trust myself to say anything and just nodded.

"There's nothing like all that even implied in the actual communications that everybody's seen and heard from Triton. I think Red made it all up."

"Made it up? Why would he do that?"

"It's simple, really. His power over his tribe, and now his usefulness to us, is dependent on the uniqueness of his supposed language. What if it's just another Martian dialect? Our linguists are cataloguing similarities among the other three. With a large enough sample, I'm sure Red's will fall into line."

She didn't know what she was talking about! They weren't “dialects,” any more than Chinese is a dialect of Turkish. And no linguist was yet able to utter “two plus two is four” in any of the tricky languages. That they had sounds in common was not very mysterious.

"I'm sure that could be true,” I heard myself saying, “in theory. But I'd need more than supposition."

"Of course you would. And I know you consider him a friend and wouldn't ask you to betray him. Just try to listen to what he has to say objectively—with my ears as well as yours. Try to entertain the possibility."

"All right.” Among the possibilities I could entertain was that Dargo had finally popped her cork. “But what if he
is
telling the truth? We don't dare go public with your thesis. The Other might learn of it and push the button."

"Absolutely. Utmost caution and secrecy."

I left with my head sort of spinning, trying to figure out exactly what kind of game Dargo was playing.

I couldn't believe she'd had a change of heart about me, trusting me enough to enlist my aid in her scheming. But she did have me in a perfect trap—I couldn't report her eavesdropping without revealing Red's deadly secret.

Could she be right, though? The “deadly secret” a sham, part of an elaborate hoax?

No. That would require advance collusion with the Other.

Maybe she was setting me up for a double-double-cross, having me spy on Red and then telling Red, to destroy his trust in me. I couldn't say anything to him or Paul, now, without the risk of being overheard.

But I could write. I didn't want to trust e-mail or anything else electronic, but I could afford a little paper.

Paul first. Before I even went to the shower, I wrote down everything I could remember about Dargo's convoluted scheme, in small print on both sides of a half sheet of paper, and folded it up small.

We met in the hall as I was coming back from the shower, and when we kissed hello I slipped it into his pocket. He gave me a little nod.

I spent a couple of hours trying to extract something useful from a structural-linguistic approach to the Martian consensus language, by an Earth researcher who'd done a lot of work with cetacean communication. I think she was hiding her lack of actual results with a lot of pretty charts and weak analogy. Both creatures do communicate with repeating patterns of noises. But the dolphins are mainly saying “Follow me to fish,” or “Let's fuck.” The Martians apparently indulge in abstractions.

Paul wasn't at late dinner. I ate with Oz and Meryl. She brought up the subject of Dargo. “It's strange. With all this exciting new stuff happening, she seems angry rather than interested."

Oz said that Dargo will be Dargo. “She's an administrator at heart, not a scientist. Administrators don't like the unexpected."

I could have given them both a couple of data points, but had to refrain.

When I got back to my place, there was a humorously pornographic love note on my screen. I brushed my teeth and went over to Paul's.

For the first time in my life, I felt the foreplay went on too long. I could see my note and his answer on his desk.

He fell asleep, or acted as if he had, right afterward. I padded over to his desk and read the note, a page of small neat capital letters.

SHE HAS YOU IN A DIFFICULT POSITION. ME, TOO, ASSUMING SHE ALSO RECORDED OUR “CONVERSATION” WHILE MAKING LOVE. OF COURSE I'LL PRETEND THAT I DON'T KNOW SHE KNOWS, AT LEAST UNTIL SHE REVEALS IT TO ME.

YOU THINK SHE HAS EITHER LOST IT OR HAS SOME NEFARIOUS PLAN IN MIND. LET ME SUGGEST A THIRD ALTERNATIVE: THAT SHE IS RIGHT.

WE ONLY HAVE THE MARTIANS’ WORD FOR THE STORY THAT THEY DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE BEING ON TRITON. WHAT IF IT HAD CONTACTED THEM YEARS AGO—DOZENS OR HUNDREDS—AND SWORE THEM TO SECRECY?

OUR SCIENTISTS HAVE NO IDEA HOW THOSE RADIO/TV/CUBE RECEIVERS WORK. THE OTHER COULD HAVE CONTACTED THEM RIGHT AFTER THE FIRST RADIO SIGNALS FROM EARTH AND SAID, “THE ALIENS (HUMANS) ARE COMING, AND THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO."

MOST OF THEM SEEM STRAIGHTFORWARD AND HONEST, BUT THEY'VE HAD A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS TO STUDY HUMAN BEHAVIOR, WATCHING US LIE TO EACH OTHER REPEATEDLY—AND BESIDES, HOW COULD YOU TELL IF ONE WAS LYING? THAT SHIFTY LOOK IN ITS FIFTY EYES?

AS YOU SAY, RED REQUIRED YOU TO MISREPRESENT THE TRUTH ABOUT THE OTHER, AND THEN VOLUNTEERED TO LIE HIMSELF, TO MISLEAD DARGO ABOUT THE HIDDEN MESSAGE.

I WOULD SAY IT'S MORE LIKELY THAT THE MARTIANS HAVE BEEN STRAIGHT WITH US. BUT WE OUGHT TO KEEP THE OTHER POSSIBILITY IN MIND.

YOU MIGHT USE DARGO'S DEVIOUS MIND. SHE MIGHT COME UP WITH A WAY TO TEST RED WITHOUT HIM NOTICING.

I HATE LIKE HELL THE THOUGHT THAT SHE MIGHT BE RIGHT.

* * * *

I couldn't sleep. I kissed Paul goodnight and silently went back to my place, where I memorized his note and then destroyed it, tearing it into small pieces and rolling them up like pills, then swallowing them with sips of water. Carmen Dula, human shredder.

When Dargo had said it, it sounded like paranoia. From Paul, it sounded almost reasonable. I had to consider, reconsider, the argument on its own merits.

Go back to the beginning:

1. Red did not initiate contact. He showed up only when it was necessary to save my life, an event he couldn't have predicted. (But that situation would have presented itself sooner or later, with somebody.)

2. The Martians didn't know that I'd get the lung crap—which required their life-saving intervention. (But maybe they did know—Red certainly didn't waste any time responding—and maybe they're lying about every Martian getting it. Maybe it was genetically tailored for humans.)

3. The effect of the ruby laser on the yellow family proved that they didn't know about the Other beforehand. (Or that they were good actors.)

4. They don't know how their technology works, themselves. It's self-repairing, eternal. (Or so they say.)

5. For a deception to work would require the whole Martian population to live a lie, all the time. (Or maybe just the dozen or so we're in constant contact with—and they were chosen by the Martians, not at random.)

It
would
have to be all of them, eventually, since as far as I know there were no restrictions on human investigators like Terry and Joan.

I did finally sleep, and had a disturbing dream. I was at a party on Earth, a formal one like a gallery opening. I moved through it like a ghost, glass in hand. No one paid any attention to me.

Except a large handsome man with red hair and a red tie. He studied me intently. But when I went toward him he receded somehow, dream logic, and disappeared.

* * * *

No one on our side was, strictly speaking, a linguist, but Josie spoke Chinese and Spanish as well as English, and had been hammering away at consensus Martian. Oz had Latin and Greek as well as Norwegian. I made a “drinks” date with them, to get their angle on the Martian languages, just before my next tete-a-tete with Red.

Our diets in New Mars were controlled about 10 percent by our own input, and 90 percent by the Mars Corporation experts, who weren't about to send us up a bottle of Jack Daniels whenever we felt the need. But we did have a carboy of ethyl alcohol with a computer-controlled tap. You showed it your retina and it dispensed a shot or two of “vodka,” which was pure ethyl alcohol distilled from Hilton garbage, with a little lime flavoring, cut with fifty percent absolutely pure water from Hilton sewage. You could mix it with various things. I chose grape juice concentrate and another tumbler of water, to make it resemble wine.

Oz took two ice cubes and a drop of “bourbon concentrate.” Josie tipped hers into a glass of orange juice.

"No human will ever be able to really speak a Martian language,” she said, “without mechanical help. Ten or twelve of the phonemes, you'd have to be a cricket or a garbage disposal to make.” Phonemes are the elementary sounds that make up a language.

"And they have lots of them? Phonemes?"

"Around seventy. As opposed to forty-some for English. Some human languages have more than a hundred."

"But you can pronounce them all.” He somehow made a noise in his throat like a champagne cork coming out of a bottle, beginning the sentence, “Xhosa can be a challenge."

"There's remarkably little repetition,” Josie continued. “Human languages have words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ that keep cropping up. If Martian has them, they're pretty well hidden."

"It's worse than that,” Oz said. “You know about those Poles in Earthside?” I didn't. “They're just analyzing sounds, taking every recording of Martian speech we have and pushing it through a computer routine that counts phonemes. Or at least sounds that repeat.

"There are eight related sounds, like throat clearing, that occur more often than others. The other seventy-some kinds of sound seem to be evenly distributed—one sound is as frequent as any other."

"If you edit out the throat clearings,” Josie said, “it sounds weirdly like Hawaiian."

"Wannalottanookie,” Oz growled.

"Tell me about it. And you've been following the dictionary saga?"

"Last I heard, they were still on square one."

"Yeah, square zero. Like they never say a given phrase the same way twice. But they understand each other. And they can't explain
why
because they never have to
learn
their own languages."

"Except for Red."

"Who presents his own set of problems,” Oz said. “He was born knowing all the other languages, but then had to learn his own, which nobody else is allowed to learn—including us."