Moonboy is a good pianist, huge hands, but he usually plays silently, with earphones. He’s writing a long composition that he began when he left Mars. He’s a xenologist, of course, like Meryl and me, so we have plenty to do, getting ready to meet the Others. Meryl also does word and number puzzles with grim seriousness. Taped to her wall she has a crossword puzzle that has ten thousand squares.

Namir does woodwork as well as cooking; he brought some fancy wood and knives from Earth. He also studies poetry, though he says he hasn’t written any since he was young. He works with formal poetry in Hebrew and Japanese as well as English; his job title at the UN before Gehenna was “cultural attaché.” I wonder how many people knew he was a spy. Maybe they all did. He even looks like a spy, muscular and handsome and dark. He moves with grace. I sort of want him and sort of don’t.

The Martians weren’t in on the after-dinner conversation; they rarely join us for meals. They don’t eat human food and perhaps they’re uncomfortable watching us consume it. But I’m pretty sure that their answer to “What do you plan to do for the next six and a half or thirteen years?” would be “Same as always.” They’re born into a specific social and intellectual function and don’t deviate much.

Fly-in-Amber’s yellow family are recorders; they simply remember everything that happens in their presence. They’re weirdly acute and comprehensive; I could fan a book’s pages in front of Fly- in-Amber and immediately afterward—or ten years after—he could recite the book back to me.

Snowbird’s white clan is harder to pin down. They classify things and visualize and articulate relationships. They’re naturally curious and seem to like humans. Unlike Fly-in-Amber’s family, I have to say.

Every kind of Martian has remarkable verbal memory. They’re born with a basic vocabulary, evidently different for each family, and add new words just by hearing them. They have no written language, though human linguists are making headway on that. Meryl and Moonboy and I are adding to an existing vocabulary of about five hundred words and wordlike noises, with help mainly from Snowbird. Meryl is best with it; she worked with porpoise and whale communication, inventing phonemelike symbols for repeated sounds.

We’ll never be able to speak it; it’s full of noises that people can’t make, at least not with the mouth. But Moonboy believes he can approximate it with a keyboard in synthesizer mode, with percussion, and fortunately Snowbird is fascinated by the idea and willing to work with him hour after hour, tweaking the synthesizer’s output.

This doesn’t read much like a diary. I remember my freshman year, on the way to Mars, studying the London journals of Pepys and Boswell. But Pepys was wandering around his ruined city, and Boswell had Dr. Johnson to write about, then going down to London Bridge for his whores. The professor said Boswell had a condom made of wood. That’s stranger than Martians.