I left the beach when the clouds came up, one of those inevitable late-August afternoon squalls, the eastern sky restless with lightning, rain beginning to whip the sad pastel balconies of the motels. My clothes were wet by the time I got home. It took them hours to dry in the humid air. The storm passed by nightfall but left a fetid, steamy stillness behind it.
Molly came over after dinner and we downloaded a current movie, one of the Victorian drawing-room dramas she was fond of. After the film she went to the kitchen to fix us drinks while I called David Malmstein from the phone in the spare room. Malmstein said he'd like to see Jase 'as soon as it's practical' but thought it would be all right to adjust the meds upward a few notches, as long as both Jase and I kept an eye out for any unpleasant reaction.
I hung up the phone and left the room and found Molly in the hall with a drink in each hand and a puzzled expression on her face: 'Where'd you go?'
'Just making a call.'
'Anything important?'
'No.'
'Checking up on a patient?'
'Something like that,' I said.
* * * * *
Within the next few days Jase arranged a meeting between me and Wun Ngo Wen in Wun's quarters at Perihelion.
The Martian ambassador lived in a room he had furnished to his own taste, from catalogs. The furniture was lightweight, wicker, low to the ground. A rag rug covered the linoleum floor. A computer sat on a simple raw pine desk. There were bookcases to match the desk. Apparently Martians decorated like newlywed college students.
I supplied Wun with the technical material he wanted: a couple of books on the etiology and treatment of multiple sclerosis, plus a series of JAMA offprints on AMS. AMS, in current thinking, wasn't really MS at all; it was a different disease entirely, a genetic disorder with MS-like symptoms and a similar degradation of the myelin sheaths that protect human nervous tissue. AMS was distinguishable by its severity, rapid progression, and resistance to standard therapies. Wun said he wasn't familiar with the condition but would search his archives for information.
I thanked him but raised the obvious objection: he wasn't a doctor, and Martian physiology was conspicuously unusual—even if he found a suitable therapy, would it work in Jason's case?
'We're not as different as you might think. One of the first things your people did was to sequence my genome. It's indistinguishable from your own.'
'I didn't mean to give offense.'
'I'm not offended. One hundred thousand years is a long separation, long enough for what biologists call a speciation event. As it happens, however, your people and mine are fully interfertile. The obvious differences between us are superficial adaptations to a cooler, drier environment.'
He spoke with an authority that belied his size. His voice was pitched higher than an average adult's but there was nothing juvenile about it; it was lilting, almost feminine, but always statesmanlike.
'Even so,' I said, 'there are potential legal problems if we're talking about a therapy that hasn't gone through the FDA approval process.'
'I'm sure Jason would be willing to wait for official approval. His disease might not be so patient.' Here Wun raised his hand to forestall further objections. 'Let me read what you brought me. Then we'll discuss it again.'
Then, the immediate business discharged, he asked me to stay and talk. I was flattered. Despite his strangeness there was something comforting about Wun's presence, a communicable ease. He sat back in his oversized wicker chair, feet dangling, and listened with apparent fascination to a quick sketch of my life. He asked a couple of questions about Diane ('Jason doesn't speak much about his family') and more about med school (the concept of dissecting cadavers was new to him; he flinched when I described it… most people do).
And when I asked him about his own life he reached into the small gray satchel he carried with him and produced a series of printed images, photographs he had brought with him as digital files. Four pictures of Mars.
'Just four?'
He shrugged. 'No number is large enough to substitute for memory. And of course there is much more visual material in the official archives. These are mine. Personal. Would you care to see them?'
'Yes, certainly.'
He handed them to me.
Photo 1: A house. It was obviously a human dwelling place despite the odd techno/retro architecture, low and rounded, like a porcelain model of a sod hut. The sky behind it was a brilliant turquoise, or at least that's how the printer had rendered it. The horizon was strangely close but geometrically flat, divided into receding rectangles of cultivated green, a crop I couldn't identify but which was too fleshy to be wheat or corn and too tall to be lettuce or kale. In the foreground were two adult Martians, male and female, with comically stern expressions. Martian Gothic. All it needed was a pitchfork and a Grant Wood signature.
'My mother and father,' Wun said simply.
Photo 2: 'Myself as a child.'
This one was startling. The prodigiously wrinkled Martian skin, Wun explained, develops at puberty. Wun at roughly seven terrestrial years was smooth-faced and smiling. He looked like any Earthly child, though you couldn't place the ethnicity—blond hair, coffee-colored skin, narrow nose and generous lips. He stood in what looked at first glance like an eccentric theme park but was, Wun said, a Martian city. A marketplace. Food stalls and shops, the buildings made of the same porcelainlike material as the farmhouse, in gaudy primary colors. The street behind him was crowded with light machinery and foot traffic. Only a patch of sky was visible between the tallest buildings, and even there some sort of vehicle had been caught in passing, whirligig blades blurred into a pale oval.
'You look happy,' I said.
'The city is called Voy Voyud. We came from the countryside to shop on this day. Because it was springtime my parents let me buy murkuds. Small animals. Like frogs, for pets. In the bag I'm holding—see?'
Wun clutched a white cloth bag containing mysterious lumps. Murkuds.
'They only live a few weeks,' he said. 'But their eggs are delicious.'
Photo 3: This one was a panoramic view. In the near ground: another Martian house, a woman in a multicolored kaftan (Wun's wife, he explained) and two smooth-skinned, pretty young girls in sacklike amber dresses (his daughters). The photograph had been taken from high ground. Beyond the house, an entire semirural landscape was visible. Green marshy fields basked under another turquoise sky. The agricultural land was divided by elevated roadways on which a few boxy vehicles traveled, and there were agricultural machines among the crops, graceful black harvesters. And on the horizon where the roads converged was a city, the same city, Wun said, where he had bought murkuds as a child, Voy Voyud, the capital of Kirioloj Province, its low-g towers tall and intricately terraced.
'You can see most of the delta of the Kirioloj in this picture.' The river was a blue band feeding a lake the color of the sky. The city of Voy Voyud had been built on higher ground, the eroded rim of an ancient impact crater, Wun said, though it looked like an ordinary line of low hills to me. Black dots on the distant lake might have been boats or barges.
'It's a beautiful place,' I said.
'Yes.'
'The landscape, but your family, too.'
'Yes.' His eyes met mine. 'They're dead.'
'Ah—I'm sorry to hear that.'
'They died in a massive flood several years ago. The last photograph, do you see? It's the same view, but taken just after the disaster.'
A freakish storm had dumped record rainfall on the slopes of the Solitary Mountains at the end of a long dry season. Most of that rain had been funneled into the parched tributaries of the Kirioloj. The terraformed Mars was in some ways still a young world, still establishing its hydrological cycles, its landscapes evolving rapidly as ancient dust and regolith were rearranged by circulating water. The result of the sudden extreme rain was a slurry of
