We of the yellow family specialize in memory, not original thinking, but I do have a theory about the Others: I think they’re lying. We do have evidence that they are capable of marvelous things, like inventing us and modifying a part of Mars so that we had a place to live before we inherited the Earth. We know they can make a small bomb powerful enough to eliminate life on Earth. But that doesn’t mean that everything they say is true.

We have three sources of information about the Others. The primary thing was the coded message, which was like an ancestral memory in the yellow family. But it was not a regular memory; we had no access to it until we looked at a triggering light that came from the Other who was watching us from Triton, the satellite of Neptune. I saw that light and fell down and started babbling, and so did every other yellow Martian who saw it. We all said the same thing; three separate recordings give exactly the same nonsense sounds.

A human researcher discovered that there were two simultaneous messages in our stream of nonsense. One was amplitude modulation, and it was like a pattern of ones and zeros, modeled after a method that humans had used, attempting to communicate with other stars, what they call a Drake diagram. It told the humans something about the Others—how long they had been in the solar system, the fact that they had a body chemistry based on silicon and nitrogen, and the fact that we were made by them.

But there was a much more complex message hidden in the frequency modulation, an extremely concentrated burst of information that was in the language of the red Martian family. There is only one red individual at a time, and he or she is our leader.

The red language is the most complex Martian language, the only one that has a written form. Our leader only had a couple of days to live—the bomb was inside him—and he had no time to analyze and write down the long message. But he had it in his memory, and translated most of it into our consensus language, talking constantly to Mars as he sped to the farside of the Moon to die.

I wish he had lived long enough to discuss the truth of what the Others had told him through us. His replacement will be able to, but she won’t be old enough to have mastered the language for many ares.

So we go off to meet our mortal enemies, and most of what we know about them is from the pack of lies they told our leader just before they murdered him.

Chapter 5 - SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

5

SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE