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I've been to the moon. No-one's been to the moon, you say. And I won't contradict what you believe, because you're right. I just want you to know that I've been there, and even if I'm the only one who knows it, it's still true. I've also been to Mars. You're naturally curious, so I'll tell you. It really is red. Red sand stretching to a bleak, red horizon under a red sky, with black rocks for coloured landmarks. And there are no martians. Or at least, alien martians. There is, or was-- or would have been-- a large human colony. Utopia Nova had twenty million miners, scientists, artists, politicians, advocates, the whole menagerie. It was planted on Mars long before I was born. Yes, that's right. Long before I was born. Ah, you say, then you're from the future, like in those horrible pulp-fiction stories. Well, that's partially true. I think that one day there will be a colony on Mars. I know something of what the future will be. So in a sense I bring messages from the future. But the Mars colony won't be anything like the one I remember. Now, even the skankiest bars in New Saskatoon have sentimental value for me. Tam would laugh at my self-indulgence. Your Utopia will probably be called New Ixtapan or Guasili or something. You've never heard of Old Saskatoon, or Toronto, or Havanna or Virginia or even San Fran. To you, Vancouver is a London park and Los Angeles never existed. I digress. As I was saying, I was a pilot. I flew a Runner-class freighter, a charter on the routines between colonies. I was even a belter for a while. I made occasional stopovers on Earth, where my family lived. My husband left me four years ago for one of my former schoolmates. Well, I shouldn't complain because we were together for over nine years and that's a long time in the business. My two children died in a civil war in a country that's never existed, and never will. It's hard to relate to, now. So I dumped all the hard memories and decided to join one a deep-space probes. I dropped into freeze for two hundred years. We went to Alpha Centauri. Astronomers and biologists always said there's probably extrasolarian life. We talk about it in the IssueZones, but you never really think you'll come across non-Solar life. Even pilots don't consider it, and we live in space. Well, Tam and I found aliens. And we killed them. But we didn't know that at first. What do you do when you meet aliens? We pulled out the Contact Manual the Admin gave us. I'm not sure if they thought we'd need it, but they always think (or thought-- would think?) of everything. We tried to open communications with their ship. Eventually our System told us the alien spaceship was only operating on its own System, on automatic, or something to that effect. At first we thought everyone was in freeze, maybe in hiding or more probably just as surprised as us. We didn't want our first contact with non-Solar aliens to be a disaster, like the first Jovian contact, so we waited there above Alpha Centauri's largest planet for two weeks. We did everything short of line dancing-- decoding sequences, mathematical vocabulary transfers, mental map imagery. Well, to spare you the details, we boarded the ship and found our stellar neighbours dead. Sad little pools of slime covered the floor. It took a while for the System to work out that they were actually dead aliens. We ended up sloshing through several. Their ship's fluidic atmosphere was very acidic, so we couldn't spend a lot of time investigating. When we realized that we'd killed them all-- at the very least thirty thousand-- we didn't know what to do. We thought of sending a message to their homeworld, but seeing as we didn't know where that was, or even how to send a message, it presented a pretty difficult problem. Their communication system wouldn't respond to us and we were running out of replacement spacesuit parts. Their ship eventually shut down, after a long bout of sulking, so it couldn't help us either. The System's analysis confirmed what we suspected by then. Our decelleration ejector fried the aliens. We were responsible for their deaths, so we felt it necessary to do something with the remains. By this time they weren't much more than degenerating puddles of polychlorinated muck. We put them in the alien ship's morgue. It could, I later realized, have been their larder. Unfortunate. So we took whatever portable bits of their ship we could find and left. I assumed that Tam and I would just continue on our mission, but he became obsessed with the aliens. They had a very different technology, but what was really fascinating were the similarities given their radically different biology and mental mechanics. Ultimately, we realized they had an energy science well and beyond ours. Tam wanted to harness their power source, to get us back to Earth with the news. Tam was a certifiable genius-- or maybe just certifiable-- but I seriously doubted he could do it. I played along until he tried to link one of the alien objects he'd been studying into the power core. I tried to stop him. I really did. I could have done more, but he was so insistent. We were both a little stretched, two centuries from home and depressed to boot. We went weeks without speaking to each other. He seemed to know what he was doing. I couldn't tell, it was all totally beyond me. Another two hundred years in freeze didn't appeal to him, and in retrospect I can't say that I was keen on it, either. He spliced the alien device into the drive, keyed himself into the System's matrix, and then he disappeared. I was baffled. I had no idea what happened. I looked at his work. I spend seven months studying it-- seven long months. I'm no physicist. It was gruelling work. I pored through every file, every note, every record, every schematic, every planning map. I finally realized what he'd done. It was something related to non-linear displacement with some rather creative work in energy conservation. He managed to do what he originally planned. He came back to Earth. But I worked out that he got a crucial calculation wrong, a simple slip in his math. Timing. He wanted to arrive in Havana just after we boarded the lifter. You see, I checked it pretty thoroughly. He got it wrong by five thousand years. There I was in an empty ship floating around Alpha Centauri, next to a strange, derelict spaceship filled with dead Aliens we'd murdered, and I had nothing to do. Absolutely nothing. I went through my maintenance routine for a few days before I settled on a course of action. There was nothing in policy guidelines about this. I couldn't continue the mission, that was obvious, especially not after the year's excitement. The upshot is that after a while I was bored, so I followed Tam back to Earth. I corrected his calculations, and I think I got it right. The System was very obliging. I set it on Auto and ordered it to return to Earth the long way. I wonder if it ever arrived. But it never left in the first place, then, did it? The place I appeared in-- you may remember a brief story on the third page of the Kareeb News five years ago-- was not the Cuba I'd left. In the Cuba I remember they spoke Spanish, not Kariba or Tsarogi. I was in shock for a long time. No-one spoke Union or even Uti English. It took me a while to get my bearings. People still try to guess where I'm from; I look like a Pacific islander, but my accent isn't right. I say I was adopted by a family in an obscure township in Wessex or even Anglia, because by my accent I'm obviously from somewhere in the European colonies The best guess I can make now is that Tam, who had everything as a child, gave the Américas the best defence it could have had. They got the whole range of Eur-Asi-African diseases, thousands of years before would-be invaders arrived. Christopher Columbus took Martian Kicking Cough back to Europe and it devastated Africa, Asia and Europe. You won't see the irony of this, naturally. And, of course, you don't call it Martian Kickers. It's strange that he didn't survive in myths or stories, but I think this sort of thing must happen a lot. I know it happened at least one other time. That's the reason I'm writing this. I met someone the other day. He was a tall sort, vaguely oriental-looking, and he told me that he came from Japan (part of Korea), on an Earth ruled by Germans, if you can believe it. He says they were doing some kind of experiment. He was drugged and put in a roundish chamber. He ended up here. He was told he was being sent a hundred years into the future, if he survived. It was, in fact, true. But it turned out it wasn't his world's future. So there may be more of you out there. Drop me a line if you get the chance. We should form a support group to keep us from getting homesick. And who knows; we may have something in common. Oh, and we have to keep the telescopes pointed at Alpha Centauri for the next few centuries. Tam was sure the aliens were coming in this general direction. Hopefully they can answer a few questions, or we can work together. We might be able to invent the Trans-Static Field by then, with a little help from an old pilot. Maybe we'll meet them half-way. Without ejection screens, this time. We'll have to work on decellerating. My new friend and I are leaving for Kayokiyah. I've always liked the plains; lots of wide open spaces. After a lifetime in metal boxes, it'll be a pleasant change. Look for us there. We're going to start a family. I'm sure it 'll really confuse the genealogists. |