at history. That was like forty years before I was born.”
Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.
6
“It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.
“So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”
“He was a lot older than you?”
“Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”
“I can see.”
How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”
“Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”
“That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.
“Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.
“But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.
“I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”
“Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”
“One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”
“Of course I know about him.”
“Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.
“It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”
“They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.
“Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”
“Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”
“Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”
“The Martian lung crap, yeah.”
“That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”
“So Red showed up with the cure.”
“In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.
“Well, the Martians had been studying us for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.
“They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.”
“And then you found out it was literally true.”
“That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow,
Fair enough. What did I know about 2014, forty years before I was born? Had they started building the space elevator yet? I’d have to look it up.
6
“It kind of started with the space elevator. Our family—Card and me and our parents—won a sort of lottery. There was a small colony on Mars, mostly single scientists, that wanted to start accepting families.
“So we took the space elevator up to orbit—two pretty boring weeks—and then got on an old-fashioned spaceship to Mars. That was most of a year, but it wasn’t boring. I started college, VR to the University of Maryland, and met Paul, and we fell in love.”
“He was a lot older than you?”
“Well, yeah, I’d just turned nineteen and he was thirty-one. But it worked out.”
“I can see.”
How sweet. “Well, it caused no end of trouble with the administration of Mars, namely one walking disaster, Dargo Solingen. She clearly disapproved, and did everything she could to keep us apart.”
“Which had the opposite effect, I suppose.”
“That’s for sure. Well, we’d been in Mars, as they say, for little more than a year, and she caught me in an unforgivable situation, swimming with a bunch of other kids in a new water tank. Since I was the oldest, she rained all kinds of shit on me. Including barring me from the surface.
“Well, that didn’t last. I snuck out after midnight, planning to walk a couple of kilometers and come straight back—Card had figured out how to disable the alarm on the air lock.
“But I had an accident. Crossed a place where the crust was eggshell-thin and fell some distance to the floor of a lava tube.
“I broke my ankle, and that should’ve been the end of it. Nobody knew where I was, and the radio didn’t work.”
“Which was when the Martians came to the rescue. I remember that.”
“One Martian, anyhow, the one we called Red. They all look pretty much the same, at least to us, but they wear different colors according to their family. Red was the only one who wore red.”
“Of course I know about him.”
“Everyone should. Anyhow, he collected me and flew me back to their underground city, where they used some kind of mumbo-jumbo medical science to fix my ankle.
“It did occur to me to wonder why these weird-looking aliens should be living in an earthlike environment in a huge pressurized cave under the Martian surface. I asked Red, and he said he didn’t know, and at the time I wondered whether he was holding something back. He wasn’t; it was a mystery to them as well.”
“They didn’t know they’d been built by the Others,” Alba said.
“Yes and no. They had a tradition, almost mystical, that the Others had created them and brought them from someplace unimaginably far away. When they first told us about that, it sounded like a creation myth. But it was literally true, and explained a lot.”
“Like how they had this high-tech life but knew nothing about science.”
“Right. You know about the Martian pulmonary cysts?”
“The Martian lung crap, yeah.”
“That’s what brought us together, Martians and humans. Nobody believed my story about these Martians living in a cave—well, my mother almost believed—but then everybody under about the age of twenty caught the lung crap. I’d brought the spores back with me.”
“So Red showed up with the cure.”
“In essence, yes. And the humans and Martians started studying each other.
“Well, the Martians had been studying us for a century and a half, listening to our radio broadcasts and watching flatscreen and cube. They’d learned ten or twelve human languages over the years.
“They told us about the Others, but we dismissed it as myth-making, a kind of religion—you know, these almighty beings gave birth to us a jillion years ago.”
“And then you found out it was literally true.”
“That’s right.” The yellow family, the ones who wore only yellow,
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