Iterations and other stories (collection)

“That world has prodigious gravity, remember? Calculations show that a respectable fraction of all the material that has ever been knocked off our world by impacts would eventually get swept up by the blue planet, falling as meteors there. And, of course, many forms of microbes can survive the long periods of freezing that would occur during a voyage dirough space.”

Delp regarded the blue point of light, her eyestalks quavering with wonder. “So the third planet is really a colony of this world?”

“That’s right. All those who live there now are the children of this planet.”

Rosalind Lee was giving her first press conference since being named the new administrator of NASA. “It’s been five years since we lost the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander,”

she said. “And, even more significantly, it’s been thirty-five years— over a third of a century!—since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. We should follow that giant leap with an even higher jump. For whatever reason, many of the unmanned probes we’ve sent to Mars have failed. It’s time some people went there to find out why.”

The door to Teltor’s office irised open. “Teltor!”

“Yes, Dostan?”

“Another ship has been detected coming from the blue planet—and it’s huge!”

Teltor’s eyestalks flexed in surprise. It had been years since the last one. Still, if the inhabitants of planet three had understood the message—had understood that we didn’t want them dumping mechanical junk on our world, didn’t want them sending robot probes, but rather would only welcome them in person—it would indeed have taken years to prepare for the journey. “Are there signs of life aboard?”

“Yes! Yes, indeed!”

“Track its approach carefully,” said Teltor. “I want to be there when it lands.”

The Bradbury had touched down beside Olympus Mons during the middle of the Martian day. The seven members of the international crew planted flags in the red sand and explored on foot until the sun set.

The astronauts were about to go to sleep; Earth had set, too, so no messages could be sent to Mission Control until it rose again. But, incredibly, one of the crew spotted something moving out on the planet’s surface.

It was—

No. No, it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

But it was. A spindly, insectoid figure, perhaps a meter high, coming toward the lander.

A Martian.

The figure stood by one of the Bradbury’s articulated metal legs, next to the access ladder. It gestured repeatedly with four segmented arms, seemingly asking for someone to come out.

And, at last, the Bradbury’s captain did.

It would be months before the humans learned to understand the Martian language, but everything the exoskeletal being said into the thin air was recorded, of course. “Gitanda hatabk,” were the first words spoken to the travelers from Earth.

At the time, no human knew what Teltor meant, but nonetheless the words were absolutely appropriate. “Welcome home,” the Martian had said.

Wiping Out

Author’s Introduction

The commission for this story came with a deadline only eight weeks away. I was swamped with other projects, including cohosting a two-hour TV documentary for Discovery Channel Canada, but I agreed to the assignment anyway.

The editors wanted space opera, a subgenre of SF with clear-cut heroes and villains, and lots of shoot-’em-up action; Star Wars is space opera. I dislike the way that subgenre so often glorifies war, and found it difficult to come up with an idea.

Then, on January 2, 2000—just one week before the deadline for this story—the documentary I’d been working on aired, and I had a few friends over to watch it on TV with my wife and me. The program was called Inventing the Future: 2000 Tears of Discovery, half of it was devoted to my predictions for the next millennium, and the other half was a retrospective of the seminal inventions of the last one thousand years, including the atomic bomb. Afterwards, one of my friends, Sally Tomasevic, noted that, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” That comment inspired me, and I dived into writing this story the next morning.

* * *

They say flashbacks are normal. Five hundred years ago, soldiers who’d come home from Vietnam experienced them for the rest of their lives. Gulf War vets, Colombian War vets, Utopia Planitia vets—they all relived their battle experiences, over and over again.

And now I was reliving mine, too.

But this would be different, thank God. Oh, I would indeed relive it all, in precise detail, but it would only happen just this once.

And for that, I was grateful.