Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman [Haldeman, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Mars (Planet), Space Opera, General, Science Fiction, Space colonies, Fiction, Angels
ISBN: 9780441017393
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 2009-07-27T23:00:00+00:00

3

THE DRAGON LADY

Paul was so sweet when he came in from his search. He hugged me so hard I cried out, from the rib, and then laughed. I’ll always remember that. Me laughing and him crying, with his big grin.

For hours he had pictured me out there dead. Prepared himself for finding my body.

It was his for the asking. At least that hadn’t changed.

Mother wanted to call a general assembly, so I could tell everybody the complete story, all at once, but Dargo Solingen wouldn’t allow it. She said that children do stunts like this to draw attention to themselves, and she wasn’t going to reward me with an audience. Of course she’s an expert about children, never having had any herself. Good thing. They’d be monsters.

So it was like the whisper game, where you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence to the person next to you, and she whispers it to the next, and so on. When it gets back to you, it’s all wrong, sometimes in a funny way.

This was not particularly funny. People would ask if I was really going around on the surface without a Mars suit, or think the Martians stripped me naked and interrogated me, or they broke my ankle on purpose. I put a detailed account on my Web site, but a lot of people would rather talk than read.

The MRI didn’t help much, except for people who wanted to believe I was lying. Dr. Jefferson said it looked like an old childhood injury, long ago healed. Mother was with me at the time, and she told him she was absolutely sure I’d never broken that ankle. To people like Dargo Solingen that was a big shrug; so I’d lied about that, too. I think we won Dr. Jefferson over, though he was inclined to believe me anyhow. So did most of the people who came over on the John Carter with us. They were willing to believe in Martians before they’d believe I would make up something like that.

Dad didn’t want to talk about it, but Mother was fascinated. I went to talk with her at the lab after dinner, where she and two others were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on an experiment.

“I don’t see how they could be actual Martians,” she said, “in the sense that we’re Earthlings. I mean, if they evolved here as oxygen-water creatures similar to us, then that was three billion years ago. And, as you said, a large animal isn’t going to evolve alone, without any other animals. Nor will it suddenly appear, without smaller, simpler animals preceding it. So they must be like us.”

“From Earth?”

She laughed. “I don’t think so. None of the eight-limbed creatures on Earth has very high technology. I think they have to have come from yet another planet. Unless we’re completely wrong about areology, about the history of conditions on this planet, they can’t have come from here.”

“What if they used to live on the surface?” I said. “Then moved underground as the planet dried up and lost its air?”

She shook her head.

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