“But—what if they decide not to do that?”
“Trust has to start somewhere, Marguery,” he said earnestly. “Besides, we can exchange observers. Hostages, if you like. Put a few hundred humans on the Hakh’hli ship, and then on Mars when they get around to it. Leave a few hundred Hakh’hli on the Earth. They can be like what you call ‘ambassadors,’ and they’ll know right away if either side starts to cheat. No,” he finished, wagging his head, “I’ve thought it all out. It’ll work. Oh, it will take a while. Fifty years, maybe, before we finish cleaning up the Earth and make Mars worth living on—but it’s all going to go the right way, don’t you see? Every year things will get a little better, instead of a lot worse.” He leaned toward her, grinning. He gave her a quick kiss and then turned back to the instruments.
“Now,” he sighed, turning the sound back on, “let’s see what our friends think about it all.”
ChinTekki-tho was the first off the mark. “John William Washington,” he shouted. “Who are you to give orders to the Major Seniors? They will never give in to force! You ask us to swallow our own spit!”
And Hamilton Boyle snarled, “That’s not a decision for someone like you to make, Lysander! Forget it! The Hakh’hli have already proved that we can’t trust them!”
“It is Earth humans who have lied!” ChinTekki-tho shouted.
“Oh, stop it,” Lysander said wearily. “That’s what the, ah, ambassadors are for. Otherwise there’s no doubt you’d both lie and cheat.” He nodded judiciously. “You are both experts in this matter, of course. You have both lied to me too many times for me to believe anything you say now.”
Boyle said earnestly from his half of the plate, “‘We haven’t lied to you, exactly—”
Lysander laughed savagely. “ ‘Exactly,’ ” he mimicked. “And that word is also a lie! Boyle, I know that you lie; I know that Earth people lie easily and well, because I have seen how quickly I myself have learned to do it.”
“But you’re not—” Boyle began, and then stopped. In the ship Marguery’s hand flew to her mouth.
Lysander looked at her, then back at the screen. “I see there are still lies untruthed,” he said grimly. “What is it, ChinTekki-tho?”
The big Hakh’hli flexed his thumbs restlessly. “Ask your Earth-female and not me,” he grumbled in Hakh’hli.
“I’m asking you! And I want it in English.”
“You do not wish it heard in English,” ChinTekki-tho said earnestly. “Believe me in this.”
“Say it in English anyway! You didn’t find my parents alive in a spaceship. I wasn’t born of an American woman. The only ones there were Russian, and they were both male!”
ChinTekki-tho said gently, “That is true, Lysander. They were also both quite dead. They had been dead for some time, and there was no air in their ship; there was not enough viable tissue left, really, to salvage.”
Lysander flinched but held his ground. To hear it said was terrible, but he had been expecting something of the sort ever since the time in the underwater chamber. “What you mean,” he grated, “is that I’m Hakh’hli. You’ve done genetic alteration on me. Isn’t that true?”
But ChinTekki-tho was waggling his jaw negatively. “No, Lysander,” he said, “you are not Hakh’hli.”
And from behind him Marguery, sitting there almost forgotten, whispered, “No, Lysander. You aren’t even Hakh’hli.”
Of all the tones Lysander had heard in Marguery Darp’s voice, he had never heard a tone like that. He turned to search her face. “Is that true? And you knew that?” he croaked.
She nodded. Sadly. Tenderly. “We knew that ever since we checked your tissue samples—first your excretions; we had your toilet plumbing diverted, Lysander. Then the sample they took in the hospital and your sperm—”
“No one ever took a sample of my sperm!”
She managed to smile. “Someone did, dear Lysander. I did.” He flushed, even in that moment. She went on, “As soon as they began studying your DNA they could see that some of it wasn’t human. Naturally we checked it against the Hakh’hli cells from Obie’s body; it wasn’t that, either, though the Hakh’hli DNA was closer. Yours wasn’t anywhere near the DNA from the hawkbees we caught—well, no one expected it would be. But there were other tissue samples—”
He said harshly, “There couldn’t have been any other tissue samples! There wasn’t anything else alive from the ship!”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say alive, Lysander. The other tissue samples were the scraps of food that Polly and the others left over. The—the meat,” she finished wretchedly.
He stared at her incredulously, then turned to the screen. “Please, ChinTekki-tho,” he begged.
And the old Hakh’hli teacher said somberly, “It is true, Lysander. We had to use other sources of DNA. It was very difficult to splice the genes, preserving as many Earth-human characteristics as we could—and then a surrogate mother was needed to bear you. We borrowed some genetic material from the hoo’hik to make you, Lysander, and it was out of the womb of a hoo’hik that you were born.”
Chapter 24
Considered as housing, the planet Mars isn’t the kind of place one can move right into. In real-estate parlance it is what is called a “fixer upper,” but it has fine potential for tenants who are willing to do the repairs. The things that are scarce on Mars are air, water, and warmth. The thing it has plenty of is land. It has far more land surface than the planet Earth, because it doesn’t spend any precious surface area on oceans. For the Hakh’hli, that is what makes it worth having. Energy beamed down from the strange-matter engines in the big ship can boil water out of crystalline rock, cook air from oxides, smelt ores into steel to build all the habitats they want, and glassify rock to let the sunlight in. The Hakh’hli have the energy. Mars can give them the space to let their seventy-three million frozen eggs thaw, and hatch, and grow.
In the landing craft Lysander was staring blankly at the silent screen. It was only silent at the lander’s end of the circuit. Where the people on it came from, both Hakh’hli and human, they were not silent at all. They were shouting. The way they twitched and flung their arms about, the contortions of lips and jaws as they argued with each other made that certain. But Lysander had cut the sound off.
Marguery wasn’t even looking at the screen. Her attention was all on Lysander. Her first impulse was to throw her arms around him for solace, for if anyone had ever needed comforting, it was he. She hardly dared. His face was like granite. When she tentatively touched his cheek her fingertips felt the thump of a muscle pulsing under the skin.
Lysander jerked away from her touch, his face averted. He was saying something, but so softly that she didn’t realize it until he turned questioningly to face her. “What, Lysander?”
He said, in a voice like lead, “What am I, then? Am I human at all?”
She took a deep breath. “Dear Sandy,” she said, “you are John William Washington, and that’s all you need to be. The biologists say you can do everything a human being can do. You can think, you can walk, you can make love—”
“And make you sick while I’m doing it!”
She shook her head. “Not if I take my histamine blockers. We tested that out, remember? They even—” She hesitated. “They even said that it was possible you could father a child.”