There is still no shortage of volunteers, which makes me think that Earth must be a very unpleasant place.

4

NO ORDINARY HERO

I had to name the boy Red, after my friend who gave his life to save us all. Paul and I tried on various names for our daughter, and settled on Nadia, Russian for “hope.” Which we need now. (They both had the middle name Mayfly, sort of a joke between me and the memory of Red.)

There were probably a good number of human boys and girls named after that particular Martian. You couldn’t say the name in Martian, a series of clacks and creaks and whistles that means “Twenty-one Leader Leader Lifter Leader.” He saved me from dying of exposure, or stupidity, and a few years later, he saved the world by putting himself on the other side of the Moon when he realized he’d become a planet-destroying time bomb. Not something that happens to ordinary heroes.

The Martians had told us about the “Others” early on—the other alien race that supposedly had brought the Martians to Mars, tens of thousands of years ago. At first we wondered whether they were myth, or metaphor, but the memory family (those who always wore yellow, like Fly-in-Amber) insisted that the Others were actual history, though from so far ago the memory was all but lost.

They were as real as dirt, as real as death.

The memory family didn’t know that they had another function, besides using their eidetic memories to keep track of things. They also retained a coded message, generation after generation, that would be transmitted to humans when the time was right.

The decoded message seemed innocuous. By means of a checkerboard digital picture, a “Drake diagram,” we learned that the Others were a silicon-nitrogen form of life; they evidently lived immersed in the liquid nitrogen seas of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

Various mysteries began to come together after the Others revealed their existence, like the paradoxical combination of high technology and scientific ignorance in the Martian city. (They apparently lived only in one huge underground complex, about the size of a large city on Earth, but with more than half of it covered with creepy fungoid agriculture.) The Others had built the city and populated it with thousands of bioengineered Martians, evidently for the purpose of keeping an eye on Earth, an eye on humanity.

The city had no obvious power source, but they had apparently limitless power from somewhere. Human scientists eventually figured it out, which gave us unlimited power as well, evidently bled off from some “adjacent” universe. I wonder what we’ll do if they show up with a bill.

The Other that lived on Triton—many other Others were light-years away—gave us ample demonstration of what unlimited power can do.

It nearly destroyed the satellite Triton in one tremendous explosion. An instant before the explosion, it escaped, or something did, in a spaceship that screamed away at more than twenty gravities’ acceleration. Its apparent destination was a small star called Wolf 25, about twenty-four light-years away.