Aditi said, “You’re not angry, are you?”
He looked into her bright brown eyes and saw that she was worried. Or acting, he couldn’t help thinking.
“Are you?” she repeated.
“Aditi, dear, we’re lovers. We shouldn’t have secrets between us.” Then he added, “Do you really love me?”
“Oh, Jordan,” she gushed, and flung her arms around his neck. “Of course I love you! I never thought this would happen, but I do love you, truly I do.”
“And I love you, Aditi my darling. But…”
She pulled away from him slightly. “But you’re suspicious. I can’t say I blame you.”
“It’s just that, the more we learn about you, the less it all adds up.”
She nodded. “I know.”
Pointing to a stone bench a few meters from where they stood, Jordan said, “Why don’t we sit there and you can explain it all to me.”
“I’ll explain as much as I can,” she said, sitting on the bench.
Jordan sat down beside her. The stone was warm from the afternoon sunlight.
“Contact between two intelligent races is a very delicate matter,” Aditi began. “Especially when one of the races is so much younger than the other.”
“I understand,” he said. “But you—Adri, that is—he hasn’t been entirely truthful with us.”
“Oh no!” she blurted. “He’s been completely honest with you. He’s never told you anything that’s not true.”
“But he hasn’t told us the entire truth, has he?”
Aditi fell silent for a moment, and Jordan recognized that she was using her implanted communicator to ask for instructions.
Grasping her by the shoulders, he demanded, “Don’t ask Adri how to answer me. You tell me, yourself.”
Strangely, she smiled at him. “Very well, that’s what I’ll do.”
“Adri can hear us?”
“Not now. I’ve turned off my communicator.”
“Just like that.” Jordan snapped his fingers.
So did Aditi. “Just like that. It’s controlled by the brain’s electrical fields.”
“So we’re alone.”
“Yes. Completely.” Looking almost impishly pleased with herself, Aditi asked, “So what do you want to know?”
“Why has Adri been so … so deceptive with us?”
“It’s not deception, Jordan. Not in the least. Adri and the others decided that we would answer all your questions completely truthfully, but only the questions that you actually ask. Nothing more. No additional information.”
“Why would—”
“You’re like schoolchildren, Jordan. We didn’t want to give you more information than you could handle. So we decided to answer your questions truthfully, but to go no further than your questions. As you learned more about us, learned to ask deeper questions, we would answer them.”
“Like schoolchildren,” he murmured. “And you’re our teacher.”
“One of them.”
“That makes me teacher’s pet, I suppose,” he said, surprised at how bitter it sounded.
Aditi didn’t seem to notice the sharpness of his tone. With a smile, she murmured, “Much more than a pet, dearest. Much more.”
“You were … assigned by Adri to educate me?”
Her eyes went wide with surprise. “As a teacher, I was asked to be part of the committee of welcome.” Lowering her eyes, she went on in a near-whisper, “I had no idea that I would fall in love.” She hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, “You did fall in love with me too, didn’t you, Jordan?”
His heart melted. “Yes, I did, Aditi. Hopelessly, helplessly in love.”
She beamed happily at him.
So they sat on the stone bench in the warm afternoon light as the sun dipped lower and the shadows lengthened. Aditi explained Adri’s rationale for dealing with the visitors from Earth.
“We didn’t want to swamp you with too much information about ourselves. We decided to let you find out about us and our world at your own pace.”
“You’re a teacher, but I haven’t seen any children in your city. None at all. Do you have schoolchildren?”
“I teach adults,” Aditi replied. “Children are rare among us.”
“I see.”
“We don’t have the same kind of family relationships that you do,” she said.
“You told me that you do have marriages,” he recalled.
“Rarely.”
Suddenly he felt himself smiling. “So if I were to ask for your hand in marriage, would I have to get your parents’ consent?”
“My parents?”
“Your mother. Your father.”
Aditi shook her head slightly. “I have no parents.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“No. You don’t understand. I wasn’t gestated in a woman’s womb. I wasn’t born, the way you were. None of us were.”
Jordon felt his insides quake. “What do you mean?”
“I was created from genetically engineered cell samples. All of us were.”
“Created…” Jordan’s mind reeled. “You mean, in a biovat? Like meat?”
“More sophisticated than your biovats,” she replied. “An artificial womb. All of us were produced in such devices.”
“Even Adri?” Jordan heard his voice squeak.
“Yes, even Adri. Every one of us has been generated in a laboratory facility.”
MARS
Tithonium Base
Tithonium Chasma is a part of the great Martian rift valley, which stretches nearly four thousand kilometers across the frozen rust-red desert of Mars. The rugged multihued cliffs of its south face rise some two kilometers above the valley’s dusty floor. The cliffs of the north face are not visible from where Tithonium Base stands; the valley is so broad that they are beyond the short horizon.
Wearing a transparent nanofabric pressure suit, Jamie Waterman stood before the flat inscribed stone that marked his wife’s grave. Not that Vijay’s remains were there. On Mars you couldn’t bury a person: her decaying remains would contaminate the Martian ecology. No, Vijay had been cremated, as she had wished, and her ashes carried into space and jettisoned there by one of the rockets returning to Earth. Her spirit became a cloud of ashes, drifting eternally in space.
Looking back at Tithonium Base, Jamie saw that the structures looked timeworn, weary. Just as he felt. Old. Tired. The Navaho part of his soul felt that death was coming. Looking up into the clear, butterscotch sky of Mars, he felt that soon his spirit would be a cloud wafting up there, looking down upon a long, arduous lifetime’s work.
Jamie had spent his life striving to keep human explorers working on Mars, uncovering the buried villages of the long-extinct Martians, translating their prayer tablets, helping the struggling Martian lichen to survive the pitiless harsh environment.
And working to keep the million-year experiment going.
Now it was all in danger again. Funding from Earth was drying up, evaporating like a puddle of water in the thin Martian atmosphere.
His son, Ravi, walked out to meet him, full of youthful energy. He was almost half a meter taller than his stocky father, his skin darker than Jamie’s copper hue. But he had his father’s easy smile, his father’s clear brown eyes, his father’s broad cheekbones and unbending perseverance.
“Y’aa’tey,” Ravi said. The old Navaho greeting. It is good. “I figured you’d be here.”