Bitter Fruit

If you had a telescope, and you knew exactly where to look, you could sometimes see the fireworks from Earth. Of course, they weren't really fireworks; the terraforming was proceeding ahead of schedule, but still oxygen was too thin to waste on explosions of fire and color, even for Mars' most important holiday.

Jeanne sai'Karal sat on her bedroll, staring up at the night sky. She didn't have a telescope, or even binoculars, but she thought that if she squinted just right, she could see the occasional flash of green against the speck of pinkish light that was her home. She had spent several hours looking for just the right spot: Level enough to sit comfortably, a break in the trees large enough not to obscure the planet's path across the sky, but enough growth to block somewhat the omnipresent glow from the city below. After the thick goo she was forced to breathe in the city, the air on the mountain was a relief - still slightly syrupy, but not so much of an effort for her Martian lungs.

For this one night free from the ravenous media, Jeanne sat on the mountainside, watching her speck of a home and trying to pretend that there wasn't a ring of security personnel five miles down the slope, unapologetically turning away other campers, simultaneously respecting and destroying her demand for freedom on this one night of almost holy reflection and meditation.

Almost a year had passed since Jeanne had come to Earth, the first Ambassador from the Red Planet. Great-great granddaughter of Mars' first true Hero, Karal Tremain, she had never known the man who had survived the Great Betrayal, who had penned the Martian Declaration, who had fought in two of the five major battles, who had been the first Red President. She did carry with her a poignant holograph of the man, captured in his one hundred eleventh year, reaching to touch the face of the baby she had been. His gnarled and scarred fingers were preserved forever merely mims from her round, smooth cheek. Both President and child were smiling; at least it looked that way. In fact, the child, only one month from her birth, had probably been grimacing from gas, and the charismatic President, scarcely one month from his death, had looked like he was smiling even when scowling - but there was no way to tell from the picture, and Jeanne treasured its ambiguity as much as its enormous impact on the Earthlings.

Drawing her jacket closer against the chill of the evening, she watched the sky, wondering if she would see it when it happened. But no: a soft chime sounded, muffled by her bag, and the pink twinkle didn't change as she unseeingly reached into the bag to retrieve the nafa fruit and a knife. Her mother, Ambassador before her, must have planned months in advance to have the Fruit sent to her in time. "It is even more important while you are on Earth," the brief, neatly-written note had said, "to observe the Vigil properly."

All across Mars, as twilight deepened into night, the world was dying. Lights were doused, the holovids displayed black screens, the radios went silent, babies were hushed. Jeanne looked up at her world, hands working without her guidance to strip away the deep burgundy of the nafa husk, and her eyes strained in vain to see a change.

No change. Tears sprang to her eyes. Was this why? Was this the reason that the Earthlings didn't understand the pain of the Betrayal? That hundreds had been murdered in cold blood, thousands more dying in the rioting and chaos that followed, over a million in the war spawned from that chaos? Because Earthlings, looking up, saw nothing more than a pink twinkle, barely distinguishable from the yellow and white and blue twinkles? Because if every man, woman, and child on Mars were killed, it would not affect these Earthlings in the slightest?

The emotion welling within made her hands tremble, and Jeanne cut her thumb with the knife as she quartered the nafa. Physical pain achieved what the ache in her heart could not, and the tears spilled as she looked down to tend the cut. A tear lingering on the curve of her cheek refracted the glow of the city lights, and Jeanne suddenly found herself both frightened and angry.

I might never have been born. If you had killed Karal, there would be no sai'Karal line at all. My mother, the First Ambassador, would never have happened. My son, holding his first Vigil tonight, would be nothing more substantial than a whimsical fantasy of God, never so much as imagined by man. She shivered again, and hissed as the nafa juice seeped into her wound. How many? How many should have been, but were destroyed in the war caused by your paranoia and xenophobia?

Here, she had found, the war was old news, the Betrayal a shameful lapse best forgotten. Several of those Jeanne had met didn't even remember the reason for what they called the "Red War" - hadn't known until Jeanne herself had told them. Karal Tremain, then a mere foreman on the terraforming team, had stumbled into the details of a plot that would cause the colony's air bubble to catastrophically fail. Karal's quick action had re-sealed the bubble, and only - only! - a few hundred colonists had died or been irreparably damaged by the oxygen loss.

Worse had been Earth's response to the disaster - promises of aid and punishment for those involved that never came: hyperbolic pathos and nothing more. Slowly the horrified Martians had come to understand that the colony had been meant to fail, that their lives were to be forfeit to political gain. The sabotage had become a necessary measure after the inconvenient colonists had begun to actually succeed in their venture.

And now, though generations had passed, the shame of those politicians' successors led them still to gloss over the Betrayal to their ignorant citizens, to paint the Martians as barely more comprehensible than their green, bug-eyed, fictional counterparts - as if they were not all, after all, of the same blood! The old anger flooded Jeanne once again. Not so much as a memorial service! Perhaps a late-night news item, showing satellite-feed images of the fireworks, but no one on Earth understands about the Vigil, about the Bitter Fruit. An instant before the muffled chime inside her bag sounded, she realized it was time.

She bit into a piece of nafa, feeling her jaws clench and her throat spasm with the harsh taste. On Mars, the eldest of each clan served the nafa to their descendants. Even children tasting the Fruit for the first time seldom cried out, sensing even in their tender years the solemnity of the moment. Alone, Jeanne served herself, and thought of her great-grandmother, who would just now be offering the use-smoothed tray to Jeanne's son... She forced herself to say the ritual words, though she could not hear the millions of Martians who recited them with her. "Bitter Fruit is served to us. Sweetness must be sought." Karal had devised the ceremony in his second year as the Red President, desperately seeking an outlet for his people's pain and a way to commemorate the sacrifices endured by and for the colony. Though the Martians were already closely knit in mutual dependence for bare survival, the Vigil had worked better than even Karal had hoped to bind them together in spirit.

Slowly, the narcotic juice filtered into her body. As the sensation of euphoria overcame her, anger and fear and sorrow lifted. She sat, staring up at the stars - staring up at her home - releasing the hatred she only now realized had been growing within her for the last weeks. They can learn, she thought hazily. Released for the time being from the anger which hindered her, she could once again take up the work she had come to perform; she could once again continue to carefully and subtly teach the Earthlings what they must know to deal with their Martian cousins.

When the soft chime in her bag sounded again, her numb hand withdrew a Martian glow-lamp from her bag. She didn't need to look to turn it on, and so she was watching when she saw the Martian twinkle grow almost imperceptibly brighter.

Copyright 2001 by Elizabeth L. Brooks. Not to be reprinted without written permission of the author.