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by Joe Haldeman
1
I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.
Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.
Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was "roach," or at least that's as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.
One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can't defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between "How are you?" and "Fine."
The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.
White Hill and I were "bred" for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the blasted surface unprotected.
I didn't like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.
When I worked through the final airlock cycle; for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint. Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.
"Welcome home," she said. "You're Water Man."
She inflected it properly, which surprised me. "You're from Petros?"
"Of course not." She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. "Galan, an island on Seldene. I've studied your cultures, a little language."
"You don't dress like that on Seldene, either." Not anywhere I'd been on the planet.
"Only at the beach. It's so warm here."
I had to agree. Before I came out, they'd told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.
She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. "My name is White Hill. Zephyr Meadow-Torrent."
"Where are the others?" I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.
"Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration."
"You've already been around?"
"No." She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. "All the story's here, anywhere. It isn't really about history or culture."
Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. "Did you visit my world when you were studying it?"
"No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago." She smiled at me. "It was almost as beautiful as I'd imagined it." She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn't say it precisely in English, which doesn't have a palindromic mood: Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.
"When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I've learned a lot from your sculpture, though."
"How young can you be?" To earn this honor, I did not say.
"In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-squeeze."
I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that's about fortyfive years' squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than foray light-years from her planet. That leaves enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.
She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. "Don't overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to ThetaKent after your world."
"Really? When I was there?"
"No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went." She made a palindrome in my language: Predator becomes prey becomes predator?"So here we are. Perhaps I can still learn from you."
I didn't much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: "I'm more likely to learn from you."
"Oh, I don't think so." She smiled in a measured way. "You don't have much to learn."
Or much I could, or would, learn. "Have you been down to the water?"
"Once." She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. "It's interesting. Doesn't look real." I picked up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.
"first body?" I asked.
"I'm not tired of it yet." She gave me a sideways look, amused. "You must be on your fourth or fifth."
"I go through a dozen a year." She laughed. "Actually, it's still my second. I hung on to the first too long."
"I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible."
"Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute." I had been making a "controlled" fracture in a large boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. "It affected all of my work, of course. I can't even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body."
"They are hard to look at," she said. "Not to say they aren't well done, and beautiful, in their way."