Holtz tells him, “We’re going for a swim now.”
He looks down again. A black cloud rises to the surface of the water. It’s a vast school of fish, at least half a mile across. At its edges, the larger predator fish feast upon the bounty.
“Is it safe?” Borman asks her.
She simply steps off the side of the craft and disappears. He stares down after her in horror, watching as she plummets toward the ocean surface. Such a fall would be fatal on Earth. She vanishes beneath the surface with a light splash, surfacing and waving up at them a moment later. Jim laughs and steps off to follow her. Borman looks over at Skioth. “Go on,” the Martian urges, “I’ll be here for you when you’re ready to get out.”
“Mind taking it a bit lower for me?”
“I already have,” Skioth replies. When Borman turns around, he’s amazed to see they are mere inches above the water.
He jumps in, immediately finding himself surrounded by fish the size of tuna feeding on the shoal of smaller fish, an abundance of sea life the likes of which he has never seen. He surfaces, grabs a few quick breaths and then fills his lungs in order to dive down as deep as he can. When he reaches the bottom edge of the shoal, he finds creatures the size of whales gathered in pods of a dozen or so, feeding from beneath. The predators appear to have no interest in this stranger in their midst. For some reason, Borman senses he is in no danger.
For perhaps half an hour, they swim through the teeming mass. Borman doesn’t want to leave, but eventually he’s forced to quit because he’s so tired he can barely keep his head above water. He is the last to leave the ocean and he might have struggled to get himself back onto the Martian craft if not for Holtz, who simply reaches down and plucks him out with surprising strength. Borman is laughing now in exhausted exhilaration. “My God… That was unbelievable.”
“The ocean is our planet’s lifeblood,” she tells him. “A wild explosion of life in abundance, but also a closed system that must therefore self-regulate.”
“Like chaos in a bottle,” says Jim.
“The source of all mystery,” says Skioth, “and the ultimate expression of balance, the principle to which we have dedicated our lives.”
“I see that,” says Borman, “I really do. But you live in a world where all things are possible. And you yourselves said there aren’t very many of you. I just don’t get why having Jim here is such a problem for you.”
“When everything is possible, honoring rules becomes more important than ever,” says Skioth.
“If everyone remained free to create at will,” says Holtz, “within a short time, our world would be overrun.”
“What about children? You have them, don’t you?”
Borman hears Jim’s sharp intake of breath. Her expression turns blank and Holtz turns away to avoid eye contact. “There are no children here.”
He says, “By choice?”
“We do not die,” says Holtz. “Hence we must never have children.”
Borman is shocked by this. “You’re immortal?”
“We can die,” says Skioth. “We choose not to.”
“Which means… you’ve all been here since the beginning.”
Holtz says, “I was young when this world came into being. An element of that youth will forever remain, no matter how I old I get. The memories remain clear to me.”
For the first time since his arrival, Borman finds himself feeling sorry for them. Beautiful though this world may be, he’s not sure he would have the mental fortitude to contemplate remaining alive in it forever. Of course, he’d also prefer his final days to be spent on Earth rather than Mars, but that choice is no longer his to make. He sees in her eyes that Holtz senses his reaction and is saddened by it. But, somehow, she also understands.
Embarrassed at having his innermost thoughts laid bare, he steps closer toward the edge to get a better look at the water, now once again far below them. As he does so, the disc lurches to one side on a shift in the air current. He staggers off balance toward the side of the wing, expecting to take another tumble into the water, except some sort of irresistible force prevents him from falling.
He turns to her. “You’ve had your swim,” she says.
Borman asks, “How far away is the Martian capital?”
“The other side of the world,” says Holtz, resuming her focus on the way ahead. Once more, they gain speed until the surface of the ocean becomes a blur.
“One thing I’d like to know,” Borman whispers to Jim. “Maybe you know the answer to this. They say they’ve been watching us. But they know most of what’s on TV isn’t real, right?”
“It’s not hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction,” he says. “I’m told that is the least of what the monitors in the capital can do.”
Holtz says, “We listened with great amusement to the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. It’s a story well known to our people, how quickly Americans came to believe they were being invaded by Mars.”
Borman says, “Every boy in America equates Mars with alien invaders.”
Holtz smiles knowingly. “That is no accident.”
Borman shrugs and shakes his head. Skioth says, “For thousands of years on Earth, the word Mars has been synonymous with war. To wage war, you must hate your enemy, and the Befalyn’s hatred burned hot.”
“You’re saying it was the Ryl who made humans fear Mars?”
“When they lived among you openly, they were your gods,” says Holtz. “Their words, their ideas, became yours. Martians know all too well the pitfalls of this kind of hatred. It was inside us too. And to them we were warlike, though it was a war we quickly lost.”
“Was their technology more advanced than yours? Is that why you started trading with them?”
Skioth says, “Their metallurgical arts were indeed a science unknown to us. They did teach us much in that regard. But we surpassed them in the power of the mind.”
“In that sense, the Befalyn forced us to advance more quickly,” says Holtz. “The unification of thought was in its infancy when the war began.”
“But it’s what started the war,” says Skioth. “It’s a skill the Befalyn coveted greatly, though it was not something that came naturally to them.”
“They needed your help,” says Borman, “and they wanted to move to Mars to get it.”
“It was clear to us their permanent presence on Mars would result in them seeking to rule,” says Skioth. A group of islands appears to the left on the edge of the horizon. Dark clouds hang over them, a heavy rain falling. “The Rain Islands,” he says, pointing. “For those who love the wet.”
“I don’t get why the Ryl destroyed the planet,” says Borman. “It’s cutting off their nose to spite their face.”
Holtz appears confused by the expression, but says, “It was not their intention.” Her husband scoffs at the remark. “That is,” she persists, “not at first. Here, as in several matters of importance, Skioth and I differ in our views. But we do know this — killing becomes easier the more you do it.”
“That was a long time ago, right?”
“About 22,000 Earth years,” she says. “When your planet was in the middle of an ice age.”
“Much of Earth at that time was uninhabitable,” says Skioth. “On what fertile land remained, life was hard. The Befalyn had already been on Earth for 100,000 years by that time. They regarded it as their own. But they also knew they had to leave to survive.”
“Why didn’t they just return to their own world?”
Holtz says, “Their world travels across the galaxy on an ellipsis between our sun and the twin stars of Sirius. The orbit takes thousands of years to complete. Over those distances, the planet’s orbit is irregular. It is prone to the influence of other large planetary bodies. Hard to pinpoint.”