Martians Abroad Read online

  “Great,” I muttered.

  Back at the bus, beyond the grass-covered dunes, Ladhi stood shivering, hugging herself. “This place is disgusting,” she said. “I’m never going to get all the sand off me. I can feel it in my hair.” She scrubbed her fingers in her hair for emphasis.

  “On Mars they vacuum you before you come in out of the air lock, to get all the sand off.”

  “I could use a good vacuuming.”

  Mr. Han asked us to transmit our images and reports for grading. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been able to tell a gull from a sandpiper. Sure, this was all nice, pretty, and educational, and I would always remember sticking my feet in an ocean full of water. But I wondered if the point of all this was to demonstrate yet again that us offworlders didn’t know anything about Earth.

  That night, we stayed in a borrowed dormitory at a nearby university, and the next day we headed to Yosemite Park for what Stanton called a “self-esteem and confidence-building workshop.” I didn’t even know what that meant, so I took a chance and asked Angelyn.

  “It’ll probably be some obstacle course or game or something,” she said.

  “So glorified PE.”

  “A little. But better—a different kind of PE. It’ll be fun.”

  I huffed, skeptical.

  It was worse than I could have possibly imagined.

  First, Yosemite Park. If the ocean was overwhelming, this place was even more so. The ocean went on forever, but at least it all looked the same. Yosemite had trees, forests, rocks, mountains, cliffs, meadows, rivers—all in the same place. We got out of the bus and I saw trees—an endless blanket of them. Just like the ones Ethan was so excited about, and sure enough, in the bus he had his face pasted to the window and could barely sit still. I had read about forests. I knew what they were—lots of trees together. I had seen trees—the atriums at home had them. So I should have known what to expect. But I didn’t. Hundreds of trees. Millions of them. There wasn’t a roof, so they kept growing, so high I couldn’t see their tops.

  If I scoured away all the vegetation, the cliffs and valleys here would have looked like the ancient river-cut valleys on Mars. But here, the river was still cutting through the valley. More moving water.

  I hated the way this planet kept startling me.

  “Close your mouth, Polly,” Charles said, walking past me, following the rest of the class as we left the bus. The instructor—somebody new, a Mr. Kristoff Anthony Keller, who was a local guide for the park—led us from the bus down a dirt trail that passed through part of the forest, winding in between towering pine trees. I reached out and scraped my hand across the bark. They didn’t even feel like atrium trees. These were rough, scarred, damaged, and probably had bugs crawling all over them, invisibly. Birds and other animals rustled in the branches.

  The path left the trees and entered a meadow, a wide swath of grass like the lawns at Galileo except these were wild—uncut and smelling of dry sunlight. I never thought about sunlight having a smell before. Several piles of equipment lay before us: backpacks, tarp-wrapped bundles, coils of rope. Some of it looked like survival gear.

  Then we learned what the “workshop” was going to involve.

  Stanton and Keller split us up into groups and assigned each group to one of the piles of gear. Charles and I had somehow ended up in the same group, probably because all the offworlders had been shuffled off together, once again separated from the Earth kids because, as Stanton explained, they didn’t want to push us too hard. Everyone understood that we couldn’t handle the exertion.

  That was getting really old. We’d had time to adapt by now and managed to keep up with the Earthers, usually. Not that we looked it—we still all looked like skinny little twigs, but never mind.

  So here we were: Charles, Ladhi, Ethan, Tenzig, Marie, Boris, and me.

  “I shouldn’t even be in this group,” Tenzig muttered, staring longingly at the group next to us, which included George, Angelyn, and Elzabeth. “I’ve spent enough time on Earth my bone density is practically normal.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage somehow,” Ethan said.

  I picked through the gear: backpacks, a stove, a bundle of freeze-dried food, a GPS unit, thermal blankets, some rope and tarps. Survival gear. This seriously looked like the most normal collection of objects I’d seen since getting to Earth. We had everything here we used on Mars except breathing masks and air canisters—which we wouldn’t need here, of course.

  Keller explained what we were going to be doing with the equipment: spending the night outside. We’d hike on a predetermined route, follow directions, find our camp, prepare our food, conserve our water, and return in the morning. This was an exercise in cooperation and confidence building.

  “When this is all done, you’ll feel like you can conquer the world!” Keller announced happily. He was younger than Stanton and much more exuberant. He wasn’t here to mold us into perfect Galileo students; he was here to get us as excited as possible. Which made me suspicious. He had to be hiding something.

  Stanton gazed on blandly.

  “As if I’d want to conquer the world,” Charles said flatly, and the instructor gave him a nervous sidelong look.

  Keller sounded way too chipper. Like he was getting ready to start an experiment. Which he kind of was. “All right, you’ll have to pick someone in your group to be in charge of the map and GPS. The rest of you divide up your gear, pack it up, and get ready to move out.”

  Kids in the other groups started moving on either side of us, and someone laughed—probably thinking this was fun. In our group, we just stood there looking at one another, wondering who was going to start.

  “Well?” I said to Charles, “aren’t you going to demand to be in charge of the GPS since you think you’re the only one who could possibly be smart enough to use it right?”

  “What makes you think I’d do that?” he said. “It’s not like we can get lost—the instructors will be monitoring us the entire time. They’ve given us a path to follow. There are no real stakes here, so I don’t care what we do.”

  “I’d rather we didn’t embarrass ourselves,” Tenzig said.

  Charles donned a thin, sly smile. “And there’s the part of the exercise they didn’t tell us about.”

  I huffed in frustration. Couldn’t he get through anything without being all smug?

  “Would anyone mind if I took charge?” Ethan said, and I had to admire him for stepping up.

  “I probably have a lot more navigation experience than you,” Tenzig said, reaching into the pile for the handheld GPS unit. “Why don’t I take it?”

  “Fine,” Ethan said. But I thought I’d rather have Ethan telling us where to go than Tenzig. I’d just have to keep in mind what Charles said: none of this really mattered, did it?

  I dived into the gear and started sorting it into reasonable-size batches to go into the packs. If we each took one heavy thing—tent, stove, water—and one light thing—food, stove fuel, ropes—we should do all right.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Tenzig demanded, watching me.

  “I’m packing. What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “You’re doing it wrong is what you’re doing.”

  “No, I’m not.” I’d done overnight expeditions on Mars, I knew how to pack.

  “We’re not going to be able to carry it all,” he said.

  “Yes, we are, if we take it easy.”

  “I’m not letting the rest of you slow me down—”

  “Look, you’re in charge of the GPS, why don’t you let the rest of us handle the packing?” I said, staring up at him.

  “Everything all right here?” Keller asked. His smile never wavered.

  “Fine,” we all muttered at him.

  He helped us secure the gear in the packs and showed us how the packs were supposed to fit, which helped a lot. The packs had frames that balanced the weight, so we’d be able to carry more than we thought we could, even with Earth gravity. He
explained the directions, pointing out the start of the six-kilometer-long trail we were meant to follow. Many trails branched out from here, I saw, meaning none of us could really get lost. Our campsite would be at the end of the trail. We’d spend the night there, pack up in the morning, and be back by lunch. And probably be ready to murder somebody.

  The other groups started out before we did, but that was okay. Charles may have been right, this might have been a competition, but I was betting the winners wouldn’t be judged by how fast they did things. I wanted to get this right.

  Somehow, the seven of us hauled our packs onto our backs, stashed individual water canteens where we could reach them, and prepared to set off into the wilderness.

  “Aren’t there animals out here that can kill us?” Ladhi said to Keller as he was waving us off. “Like bears and dogs and stuff?”

  “They won’t bother you here,” he answered. “Trust me!”

  We started walking, reached the trail, and within minutes we could no longer see the meadow behind us, or hear anything but birds and our own breathing.

  “He was supposed to say no,” Ladhi said, frowning.

  13

  We walked. The packed-dirt trail went through the edge of some woods, winding around trees and rocks. Every now and then, the forest opened up to places where the hillside was bare rock with fallen boulders strewn through the trees. Active geology at work. Even I recognized the signs, and the familiarity with formations I’d seen on Mars was comforting. The trees lined a meadow in a valley, and across the open grass, the steep wall of a cliff rose up. Just like a cliff on Mars. Except for all the trees, of course. Something kept whistling in the branches above us. Tiny little birds, hopping around, zipping between branches. I only caught glimpses of them.

  “How can they expect us to sleep outside?” Ladhi said. She kept glancing up, like she expected the sky, or trees, or rock, or anything, to fall down on us. “That’s inhumane. Isn’t there some kind of law about that? About cruel and unusual punishment?”

  “Technically, by enrolling in Galileo we agreed to any Galileo-related activities. Including this,” Charles observed. “The courts would consider it consensual.”

  “What would happen if we refused to play along?” Boris wondered. Dripping sweat cut stripes through the dust on his face and neck.

  “Black marks on your record,” Tenzig said. “They could probably even boot you out.” The station kid was making a good show of pretending the exertion in heavy gravity didn’t bother him, but he was sweating as much as the rest of us, and his steps weren’t any faster.

  Ethan sighed, slapping his arm. “Ow. What was that? Oh hell, was that alive?” He was staring at a tiny red smear on his palm.

  “Bugs,” Tenzig said.

  “Insects,” Charles added. “Parasitic. They feed on human blood.”

  Flinching, Ethan made a retching noise and scrubbed his hand off on his pants.

  “Oh, gross!” Ladhi said. “I thought that instructor said nothing out here would attack us!”

  “He probably didn’t think insects were worth mentioning,” Charles said.

  I’d seen clouds of the little freaks—a hundred black specks that hovered off the trail, like antigravity dust. Life—this planet was swarming with it and I wasn’t sure I liked it. It made everything so grubby. On Mars, we knew exactly where the life was and could be confident that it would swarm only in petri dishes.

  “They don’t really eat blood, do they?” Ladhi said, checking her arms, patting her shirt, eyes wide and horrified.

  “It’s probably best not to think about it too much,” I said. That was what I was doing—not thinking about it. I just had to remember that people had been living on this planet for tens of thousands of years, and humanity had somehow been able to survive bloodsucking insects during that time. Mostly. Charles had wisely not mentioned the diseases they might be carrying, which was something else I’d read about and was trying to ignore. Sure, space would kill you given half a chance, but nobody talked about the millions of ways Earth was constantly trying to kill people.

  We’d been given lotion to spread over our skin to protect against UV radiation. This shouldn’t have been too scary, since on Mars we had to wear entire environmental suits to protect against radiation. But it was a reminder that as much as people liked to think it, Earth wasn’t totally safe. It was just a different kind of dangerous.

  “I’m really sorry, guys, but I need to take a break,” Ethan said, sinking onto a rock in a small clearing.

  None of us argued. The trouble with stopping was how hard it was to get started again. My legs ached, from my feet rubbing in my boots to the burn in my muscles. It was easy enough to fold up and sit on the ground, right where I stopped.

  We sat on rocks and dirt, too tired to talk, taking sips from our canteens. The air felt so hot I had trouble breathing. I didn’t think air could get this hot without killing us all. And yet here we were, miserable and alive.

  Ethan splashed water from his canteen onto his face, which seemed like a great idea.

  But Charles said, “Careful with that. We have to make the water last until tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” Ethan put the cap on his canteen, which he put back in its slot on his pack.

  This wasn’t a test of cooperation or a confidence-building exercise. It was a test of sheer endurance. How long could we last before screaming for someone to come and take us back home?

  “Maybe we could just sit here until tomorrow,” Ladhi said. “How would they know?”

  “They’re tracking us,” Tenzig said. “I bet they come check on us if they see our GPS unit stops for more than a few minutes before we get to the camp.”

  “And how many black marks would that get you?” Charles said. Tenzig scowled.

  The sense that this was all a game increased when we reached our destination. The narrow trail curved around a hill, and the forest opened into a wide, flat space cleared of rocks and debris. It looked like it had been prepared for us.

  “According to the GPS, this is it,” Tenzig announced, which we’d all pretty much figured out for ourselves.

  We’d gotten here just in time. The sun was setting, the shadows darkening. Being in a valley with mountains around us, we were losing light quickly. We had flashlights, but it would be best if we could get everything set up before the sky got completely dark.

  We were too tired to argue about how to set up. Ethan and Ladhi got the stove up and running. Tenzig, Marie, and I managed to put up our shelter, a sheet of lightweight fabric held up with poles and ropes. Charles and Boris sorted the food and arranged something resembling dinner. Each of us laid out our own bedroll. Charles discovered a container of insect repellant in our mini first-aid kit. We used just about all of it on ourselves and around the perimeter of the site. It had a sharp, mediciney stink to it, but I figured that was a good thing—if it stank, surely the bugs would stay away.

  The food was some raw stuff—fruit, nuts, chocolate—and some freeze-dried stew stuff that we added water to and cooked over the stove. I didn’t taste it so much as feel it—the hot food felt incredibly good after the long, sweaty day, warming my stomach, then my whole insides. We nibbled for a while, cleaned up, put everything away, and turned the setting on the stove from cook to heat. As hot and sweaty as we’d been during the day, the air had turned chilly after dark. We were glad for the blankets.

  The five of us set our bedrolls in a circle around the stove, wrapped ourselves in blankets, then … just sat there. It felt early. As exhausted as we clearly were—Tenzig wasn’t even arguing with anyone—we didn’t seem to want to sleep. So we talked.

  “I don’t know how I’m ever going sleep,” Ladhi said. “There’s things out here waiting to eat us. I just know it.”

  “They probably cleared out any animals before they brought us in,” Ethan said reassuringly.

  “Human beings weren’t meant to sleep outside,” I said. “If we were meant to sleep outsid
e, why did we evolve into living in houses? Forget colonizing the solar system, roofs are one of humanity’s greatest achievements.”

  “Hey, turn off the stove for a minute,” Charles said.

  Ladhi complained, “No, it’s cold out!”

  “Just for a few minutes, I want to see something.” He was looking up into the night sky visible above the clearing.

  Ethan turned off the stove, and the orange heating element faded.

  We’d all been staring at the light, so we needed a few moments for our vision to get used to complete darkness. When the outlines of the trees and mountains around us took on definition, Charles pointed up.

  “Look,” he said.

  We looked up and saw the stars. Millions of sharp and sparkling lights on a black backdrop. Nothing between us and the universe.

  I saw a line of three stars close together and my breath caught. Orion’s Belt—was that Orion?

  “It’s the same constellations we have,” I murmured.

  “Of course it is. A couple hundred million kilometers doesn’t mean much next to light-years,” Charles said.

  “I know that, I just wasn’t … I dunno. Expecting it.”

  “There—we don’t see that at home.” He pointed to a reddish spot close to the horizon. “That’s Mars, I’m pretty sure.”

  I wasn’t used to hearing Charles sound uncertain about anything, but I could understand why he might. Hard to believe that tiny, inconsequential spot was an entire planet—our home. Rationally, we knew it was. Emotionally, it was hard to take in. The spot of light was so tiny. So far away. But it was also pretty—bright and twinkling, it stood out from all the other lights around it.

  “Can we see Jupiter?” Ethan asked.

  “Given the time of year and location, I think … there.” Charles pointed to a strong buttery light in a different part of the sky.

  “Oh, wow,” Ethan breathed. “I’ve seen Earth from Jupiter through a telescope. It looks just like that, just a twinkling dot. But it’s blue. You can tell it’s blue.”