“So would some tequila,” Max replied, walking toward the door with Judge Mishkin. “Incidentally, I don’t suppose you know what happens when you feed tequila to pigs, do you? … I thought not. . . . Well, me and my brother Clyde …”
They disappeared out the door, leaving Kenji and Nai
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Watanabe alone again. The couple glanced at each other and laughed. “You don’t mink,” Kenji said, “that those two are going to be friends, do you?”
“No chance,” Nai replied with a smile. “What a pair of characters.”
“Mishkin is considered to be one of the finest jurists of our century. His opinions are required reading in all the Soviet law schools. Puckett was president of the Southwest Arkansas Fanners Cooperative. He has incredible knowledge of farming techniques, and farm animals as well.”
“Do you know the background of all the people in New Lowell?”
“No,” Kenji replied. “But I have studied the files of everyone on the Pinta.”
Nai put her arms around her husband. “Tell me about Nai Buatong Watanabe,” she said.
“Thai schoolteacher, fluent in English and French, IE equals 2.48, SC of 91—”
Nai interrupted Kenji with a kiss. “You forgot the most important characteristic,” she said.
“What’s that?”
She kissed him again. “Adoring new bride of Kenji Watanabe, colony historian.”
6
M:
iost of the world was watching on television when the Pinta was formally dedicated several hours before it was scheduled to depart for Mars with its passengers and cargo. The second vice president of the COG, a Swiss real estate executive named Heinrich Jenzer, was present at GEO-4 for the dedication ceremonies. He gave a short address to commemorate both the completion of the three large spacecraft and the opening of a “new era of Martian colonization.” When he was finished, Mr. Jenzer introduced Mr. lan Macmillan, the Scottish commander of the Pinta. Macmillan, a boring speaker who appeared to be the quintessential ISA bureaucrat, read a six-minute speech reminding the world of the fundamental objectives of the project.
“These three vehicles,” he said early in his speech, “will carry almost two thousand people on a hundred-million-kilometer voyage to another planet, Mars, where this time a permanent human presence will be established. Most of our future Martian colonists will be transported in the second ship, the Nina, which will depart from here
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at GEO-4 three weeks from today. Our ship, the Pinta, and the final spacecraft, the Santa Maria, will each carry about three hundred passengers as well as the thousands of kilograms of supplies and equipment that will be necessary to sustain the colony.”
Carefully avoiding any mention of the demise of the first set of Martian outposts in the previous century, Commander Macmillan next tried to be poetic, comparing the forthcoming expedition to that of Christopher Columbus seven hundred and fifty years earlier. The language of the speech that had been written for him was excellent, but Macmillan’s drab, monotonic delivery transformed words that would have been inspirational in the hands of an outstanding speaker into a dull and prosaic historical lecture.
He ended his speech by characterizing the colonists as a group, citing statistics about their ages, occupations, and countries of origin. “These men and women, then,” Macmillan summarized, “are a representative cross section of the human species in almost every way. I say almost because there are at least two attributes common to this group that would not be found in a random collection of human beings of this size. First, the future residents of Lowell Colony are extremely intelligent—their average IE is slightly above 1.86. Second, and this goes without saying, they must be courageous or they would not have applied for and then accepted a long and difficult assignment in a new and unknown environment.”
When he was finished, Commander Macmillan was handed a tiny bottle of champagne, which he broke across the 1/100 scale model of the Pinta that was displayed behind him and the other dignitaries on the dais. Moments later, as the colonists filed out of the auditorium and prepared to board the Pinta, Macmillan and Jenzer began the scheduled press conference.
“He’s a jerk.”
“He’s a marginally competent bureaucrat.” “He’s a fucking jerk.”
Max Puckett and Judge Mishkin were discussing Commander Macmillan in between bites of lunch. “He has no goddamn sense of humor.”
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“He is simply unable to appreciate things that are out of the ordinary.”
Max was chafing. He had been censured by the Pinta command staff during an informal hearing earlier that morning. His friend Judge Mishkin had represented Max in the hearing and had prevented the proceedings from getting out of control.
“Those assholes have no right to pass judgment on my behavior.’ *
“You are most certainly correct, my friend,” Judge Mishkin replied, “in the general sense. But we have a set of unique conditions on this spacecraft. They are the authority here, at least until we arrive at Lowell Colony and establish our own government. … At any rate, there’s no real harm done. You are not inconvenienced in any way by their declaration that your actions were ‘untenable.’ It could have been much worse.”
Two nights earlier there had been a party celebrating the crossing of the halfway point in the Pinta’s voyage from Earth to Mars. Max had flirted energetically for over an hour with lovely Angela Rendino, one of Macmillan’s staff assistants. The bland Scotsman had then taken Max aside and strongly suggested that Max should leave Angela alone.
“Let her tell me that,” Max had said sensibly.
“She’s an inexperienced young woman,” Macmillan had replied. “And she’s too gracious to tell you how repulsive your animal humor is.”
Max had been having a great time until then. “What’s your angle here. Commander?” he had asked, after first quaffing another margarita. “Is she your private punch or something?”
lan Macmillan had flushed crimson. “Mr. Puckett,” the spacecraft officer had replied a few seconds later, “if your behavior does not improve, I will be forced to confine you to your living quarters.”
The confrontation with Macmillan had ruined Max’s evening. He had been incensed by the commander’s use of his official authority in what was clearly a personal situation. Max had returned to his room, which he shared with another American, a pensive forester from the state
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of Oregon named Dave Denison, and quickly finished an entire bottle of tequila. In his drunken state Max had been both homesick and depressed. He had then decided to go to the communications center to phone his brother Clyde back in Arkansas.
By this time it was very late. To reach the communications complex, it was necessary for Max to cross the entire ship, passing first die common lounge where the party had just ended, and then the officers’ quarters. In the central wing Max caught a fleeting glimpse of lan Macmillan and Angela Rendino, arm in arm, going into the commander’s private apartment.
“The son of a bitch,” Max said to himself.
The drunken Max paced outside Macmillan’s door in the hall, growing angrier and angrier. After five minutes he finally had an idea that he liked. Remembering his award-winning pig call from his days at the University of Arkansas, Max split the evening quiet with a horrendous noise.
“Sooo-eee, pig, pig,” Max hollered.
He repeated the call another time and then disappeared in a flash, just before every door in the officers’ wing (including Macmillan’s) opened to see what the disturbance had been. Commander Macmillan was not at all happy that his entire crew saw him, along with Miss Rendino, in a state of undress.
The cruise to Mars was a second honeymoon for Kenji and Nai. Neither of them had much work to do. The journey was relatively uneventful, at least from the point of view of a historian, and Nai’s duties were minimal since most of her high school students were onboard the other two spaceships.
The Watanabes spent many evenings socializing with Judge Mishkin and Max Puckett. They played cards often (Max was as good at poker as he was terrible at bridge), talked about their hopes for Lowell Colony, and discussed the lives they had left behind on Earth.
When the Pinta was three weeks away from Mars, the staff announced a coming two-day communications outage and urged everyone to call home before the radio systems
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were temporarily out of commission. Since it was the year-end holiday period, it was the perfect time to phone.
Max hated the time delay and the long one-way conversations. After listening to a disjointed discussion of Christmas plans in Arkansas, Max informed Clyde and Winona that he wasn’t going to call anymore because he disliked “waiting fifteen minutes to find out if anyone has laughed at my jokes.”
It had snowed early in Kyoto. Kenji’s mother and father had prepared a video showing Ginkaku-ji and the Honen-In under a soft blanket of snow; if Nai had not been with him Kenji would have been unbearably homesick. In a brief call to Thailand, Nai congratulated one of her sisters on having won a scholarship to die university.
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