This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
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Copyright © 2010 by Joe Haldeman.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-17143-1
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Interplanetary voyages—
Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A353S73 2010
813’.54—dc22
2009040932
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Gay, Judith, and Susan: Muses, Graces
PART 1
THE SEED
1
NATIVITY SCENE
An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.
You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.
(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)
But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.
“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.
“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.
“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.
It wasn’t much like conventional motherhood, since it didn’t hurt, and I couldn’t pick up or even touch the little ones yet. On their “birth” day, they were separated from the machine’s umbilicals and began to ease into real life. As close to real life as they would be allowed to experience for a while.
Josie, Oz’s love, broke the uncomfortable silence. “Try to be serious, Oswald.” She gave Paul a look, too.
A bell dinged, and our drinks appeared on a sideboard. Paul brought them over, and I raised mine in toast. “Here’s to what’s- her-name and what’s-his-name. We do have another week.” Actually, there was no law or custom about it yet. These were the first, numbers one and two in a batch of six, the only twins.
Children born naturally in Mars hadn’t done well. They all got the lung crap, Martian pulmonary cysts, and if they were born too weak, they died, which happened almost half the time. When it was linked to an immune system response in the womb, in the third trimester, they put a temporary moratorium on natural births and had the mother machine sent up from Earth.