The Martians’ swimming pool has to be continuously recaulked. Long hours of immersion—totally unnatural, of course, for Martians—must do something with the chemistry of their skin, which makes the water react with the caulking compound. Try to get those two out of the water, though.

Along with Meryl and Moonboy, I’m chipping away at the Martian language. Snowbird is more helpful than Fly-in-Amber, but even so it’s a frustrating experience.

Moonboy is developing a good ear for using the synthesizer to simulate Martian sounds, and in a real sense he’s the only one of us who can “speak” Martian with anything like a useful vocabulary. With merely human larynx and vocal cords, I can do about three hundred words that Snowbird can recognize consistently, but many of those, like “swimming,” are neologisms derived from human sounds.

Moonboy can play more than ten times my number of words, but a similar problem is emerging: we can only talk about experiences that humans and Martians share. Most of what they do and think is hidden from us.

Some may even be hidden on purpose. We have no idea what their secret agenda might be. They might not even know.

When the lone Other communicated to us from Neptune’s satellite Triton, it did so at first through a long rote message that Fly-in-Amber and other members of his family recited after a hypnotic stimulus. They translated it for us, but how complete was the translation? How honest?

We must always keep in mind that the Martians were created by the Others for the sole purpose of contacting us after we developed the ability to go to Mars. We were no danger to them until then.

This is the only thing that lone Other said to us in a human language, in response to our first message: