Martians Abroad Read online

  “Is that it?” I grumbled. “Doesn’t it depend on what you want to do with your life?”

  “Well, sure. But you want to succeed, don’t you?”

  Succeed, according to whom? My mother?

  I wanted to be a pilot. If being at Galileo made that easier, so be it. But I wasn’t convinced that the place was a guarantee to a great life. I put on a good front for her. “Sure.”

  I hadn’t brought very much from Mars: a couple of changes of clothes and my handheld. My boots, and a vial of red-brown sand that made me homesick just looking at it. Mom said they’d have everything here that I needed, and she was right. In our labeled closets we found a whole collection of clothing in exactly our sizes: tailored uniforms with blouses, jackets, slacks; loose-fitting knits for exercising; nightshirts for sleeping; dress shoes and running shoes; and a whole collection of underthings and socks and such. They’d taken scans and measurements from our records and produced it all.

  I dressed in the brand-new clothes that felt weird and different—they were made of natural fibers, Marie explained. Cotton. We didn’t have cotton on Mars, everything was synthetic. I didn’t think I’d have to get used to the clothes, on top of everything else.

  In half an hour the lights were off. At least the beds were nicer than on the Lilia Litviak. Thick and soft, with plenty of blankets. They were almost as nice as at home. The only reason they weren’t as nice was that it wasn’t home.

  6

  In the morning, an alarm rang. Actually, a soft bell that might have been pleasant in any other context chimed from our bedside terminals. As a wake-up call it was kind of oppressive. Especially when followed by Stanton’s fake-polite voice announcing that we had a half an hour before we had to line up for breakfast and orientation.

  I rolled over and something under my pillow crinkled. Paper. I slapped around above the bed before finding the reading lamp and touching it on.

  Polly’s eyes only the note read. And how had Charles snuck in here and slipped it under my pillow without waking anyone up? Did I really want to know?

  I opened the page and read: “Let me do all the talking.”

  Whatever that meant. Did he think either of us would get much of a chance to talk? I crumpled up the note and tossed it in my closet. I’d look for a recycle unit later.

  Marie was already out of bed and getting dressed. I wasn’t so eager. As long as I stayed in bed, I wouldn’t have to start the day, and I wouldn’t have to see what the next few years of my life were going to look like. But as long as I stayed in bed, I was delaying the inevitable. So I hauled myself upright.

  Our uniforms were a junior version of what Stanton wore. We’d all look the same, and no one would be able to tell I came from Mars, at least not by what I was wearing. That was probably the point, that we’d all look the same no matter where we came from. Except people would be able to tell anyway as soon as we talked—we all sounded different.

  I strapped on my dress shoes, trying to work out their stiff newness, just as Stanton appeared in the doorway. She studied me as I went to join Ladhi and Marie. Her look could have expressed disgust, contempt, or just the fact it was too early in the morning. I couldn’t tell.

  “Good morning, girls. This way, please,” she said, and walked out. We assumed she meant us to follow, and we did so, down the hall and through a set of double doors into a new room. Other clusters of students filed in with us.

  It looked like a dining and assembly hall, a wide, lofty space with windows lined along the high ceiling to let in sunlight. I squinted against the brightness and regarded the large space suspiciously. I still couldn’t see outside, to see what Earth really looked like.

  Those of us from the shuttle joined a swarm of a couple of dozen other students who’d arrived earlier—most of them from Earth. I could spot them pretty easily: they didn’t look like they’d been run over by construction equipment in the last day. They were muscular, straight, calm, and smug. The handful of us from offworld—we had to work hard just to breathe.

  We all lined up in rows, looking like clones in our uniforms. I spotted Charles, standing at the end of his row, arms crossed, studious. I hoped to catch his eye, but it seemed like he was trying not to look at me. Like he didn’t want to admit he knew me. But he wouldn’t be able to deny it. I’d never thought about it before, us being almost twins and looking a lot alike. But here, among all these strangers, I couldn’t help but spot it—we both had tall, wiry frames, pale freckled cheeks, narrow noses, and unruly hair the same red-brown as Martian dust. This was going to be just great—we’d be the two weird-looking Martian kids. No way we could hide.

  All of us offworlders, the kids from the shuttle yesterday, looked weird—spindly and pale. Even Ethan’s dark skin seemed more washed out than the other dark-skinned students. The students from Earth were big, bulky. Monsters. They could beat up us offworlders without breaking a sweat. Snap our delicate, low-gravity bones. We’d have to depend on the civilizing influences of polite society to keep them in check. I’d have said they looked like the weird ones, but we were on Earth, and there were a lot more of them than there were of us. They studied us all with something like contempt. To them, we must have looked like walking, talking skeletons. I started to understand what Lieutenant Clancy had been talking about. The lieutenant had had the build of a station-born person. He’d have known.

  We were all eyeing one another, like runners sizing each other up before a race.

  Along one wall was a long counter, and behind that had to be a kitchen, based on the warm smells of cooking food coming from it. At least they were going to feed us. Real food, not packaged ship fare. Soon, I hoped, but first, Stanton had a lecture to give.

  Her smile was stiff, her gaze appraising. She stood, hands clasped before her, at polite attention. “Welcome, all of you, to Galileo Academy. I know I don’t have to explain to you that your presence here makes you part of a prestigious tradition of excellence and accomplishment. Your time at Galileo will be challenging, to say the least, but you would not be here if someone, somewhere, didn’t believe you were capable of it.” She eyed me then, before her glance darted to Charles. I might have imagined it, her singling us out with an almost unconscious gaze. But to me it seemed to have meaning. The exceptions to the rule, maybe. Her wondering if we could really cut it here.

  Janson and the other adviser stepped forward then to list out the rules and procedures, sparing Stanton that chore. Each class had a structured schedule and we must not deviate from it, schedules would be transmitted to our handhelds, clean uniforms were provided in closets, soiled uniforms must be placed in proper laundry receptacles, off-campus communication via handhelds was restricted to the one hour before bedtime recreation-and-study period (the implication being we ought to be studying during recreation period, naturally). Don’t leave campus, stick with your classmates, stick to routine, listen to authority figures, and all will be well. Don’t slack off, don’t disappoint, and don’t fail the glorious tradition that is Galileo. I wasn’t sure I even understood what tradition was. People had lived on Mars for less than a hundred years, but that was all I knew. Anything that went on longer than that was alien.

  By the end I was thinking about how hungry I was and what they would feed us for breakfast. Breakfast on Mars was hydroponic greens, soy protein, juices, and supplements. That had seemed normal. I’d never thought that breakfast could be anything else until we got on the ship, where there’d been fancier foods: pastries, potatoes, fruits, more soy protein, but still the kinds of foods that were easy to make and transport in space, frozen and reconstituted. Before leaving Mars I hadn’t thought about how even the food would be different on Earth. I was about to find out what people ate for breakfast on Earth, or at least at Galileo, and I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I was still taking supplements, some of which were supposed to adapt us to Earth foods and microbes.

  Finally, Stanton and her minions stopped talking and pointed us to the counter, wh
ere food was served buffet style in heated servers. I didn’t recognize about half of it. Fortunately, I recognized the other half: fruit, potatoes, and cheese. Those were what I piled on my plate.

  I was starting to get nervous—even more nervous—because I wasn’t sure anymore what would be familiar and what wouldn’t. Back on Mars, I could look around and know if something was wrong, know if something looked different. But here, if something looked wrong, like if there was water running from a faucet or if a plate of food didn’t smell familiar, how would I know if it was really wrong or just weird? I couldn’t pay attention to every single thing every minute of the day.

  I was afraid we’d have to sit in our same nice straight rows, but lacking directions to the contrary, people scattered as soon as they had their trays filled. My carefully chosen breakfast in hand, Ladhi and I went to find Ethan and Charles. Maybe we could have our own little offworlder gang. I’d lost sight of Marie, then I spotted her—next to Tenzig Jones, who was at a table on the other side of the room. Well, it was nice that she had a hobby.

  Ethan spotted me first and waved. He and Charles had staked out one end of a table. We hurried over and sat across from them.

  Charles examined my plate after I set it down. “Good. I was going to warn you not to eat the bacon, it will probably make you sick. We don’t have the stomach enzymes to digest it.”

  “Even with the supplements?” I said.

  “Even then.”

  Bacon. One of the unrecognizable foods set out for us, evidently. I hated that I was a little bit pleased that I’d done something right in Charles’s eyes. Not that I’d ever tell him. “What’s bacon?” I said.

  “Fried pig muscle.” He pointed to a wrinkled, dried strip of brown on Ethan’s plate. Ethan puckered his mouth and pushed the bacon to the side of his plate, away from the other food.

  Um, right. We didn’t really have animals on Mars. Not agricultural animals, anyway, although the next phase of colonial development involved importing eggs and hatching chickens, and then building atrium pastures for goats. We had a few cats and dogs as pets that some colonists insisted on bringing, and a few laboratory animals. Our protein came from beans and soy, but on Earth, people still ate animal muscle. Trust Charles to think about it in exactly those terms.

  “Why wouldn’t they warn us about something like that?” Ethan said. “Limit what we eat until we’re used to it, or give us the right digestive aids or something?”

  “Yes, why wouldn’t they?” Charles said, not looking up from his plate, where he shoveled something that looked like oatmeal into his spoon.

  He let that hang there, and we all looked at our breakfasts like they were out to get us.

  “Well, I still think it’s exciting,” Ethan said. Things would be so much easier if some of his attitude would rub off on me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Everything’s so … weird.”

  Ladhi winced. “I’m so nervous, I know I’m going to screw up.”

  “Just relax,” Ethan told her.

  Charles frowned. He kept looking around like he expected something to happen. When his gaze finally focused, I looked to see what he’d spotted.

  Three of the Earth kids approached our table, closing us in and staring us down. If they looked big from a distance, they looked like giants sitting next to us.

  “Welcome to Earth,” said the one next to Ethan. He had brown skin, close-cropped hair, and appraising eyes that made me want to look away. He put his elbows on the table and leaned in, like he owned the place. “I’m George Lou Montes. This is Marielle Ella Kent and Elzabeth Lea Rockney.”

  He said the names like we should have recognized them. I wasn’t even sure I could understand him; he had a thick accent, rounded, that made the words run together. I had to listen closely and still wasn’t sure I got it. When we all stared blankly at him, he smirked. Like he’d scored a point.

  “Do we have to remember all those names?” I said.

  “Ethan,” Ethan said, extending his hand to shake. Which George didn’t, and Ethan let his hand rest on the table.

  “Just Ethan?” Marielle asked, and she and Elzabeth bent their heads together and giggled.

  Marielle had the most amazing golden hair, tied in a braid over her shoulder, making her look rugged, powerful. Elzabeth was pale, round, curvy, gazing out through half-lidded eyes, like she was always just about to laugh at something. They all filled out their uniforms, which suddenly seemed to hang on the rest of us like sacks.

  Ethan continued, unperturbed. “Ethan Achebe. But just call me Ethan. This is Ladhi Bijanai, and Polly and Charles Newton.”

  “Newton,” George said. “Are you really from Mars?” He glanced at us both, gaze narrowed, like he didn’t believe it.

  “Yes,” both Charles and I said at the same time, like a computer with two speakers. We glared at each other.

  “That makes you the first Martian students ever at Galileo Academy, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s what we’ve been told,” Charles said.

  “Though not surprising, I suppose. As I understand it, the Martian education system just isn’t up to standards.”

  I could punch him. And probably break my hand doing it. Right, then. I could glare at him.

  “The standards,” Charles said, “are entirely dependent on the desired outcome, or the context in which that education is required. I might question, for example, whether an exclusively Earth-based education would prepare one for surviving a week on a survey expedition across Utopia Planitia. What standards are you referring to, in this case?”

  George gave a huff—a laugh or a dismissal or both. “Earth’s a little more complicated than your colony, I imagine.”

  “What do you know about it?” I shot back. “You ever been to Mars?”

  “Polly…” Charles said in a tone of warning.

  Marielle leaned forward next, glancing between me and Charles. “Are you two brother and sister? Really?”

  I was about to answer, when Charles said, “We’re twins.”

  “That’s so weird,” Marielle said. “I mean, no family has more than one child these days. It’s so, well, primitive.”

  And on Mars, people were encouraged to have all the kids they could manage so we could actually build up a stable and productive population. But I wasn’t going to say that when it would only make me sound more weird.

  I had about lost my appetite. “I don’t understand what the problem is. Are you trying to intimidate us? Scare us? Bully us into treating you guys like some kind of king of the hill? Seriously?”

  Marielle and Elzabeth fell into another giggling fit.

  My face flushed, burning almost, even though I had no reason to be upset or embarrassed. They were the ones being idiots. And there wasn’t a thing I could say that they wouldn’t laugh at. Ladhi had slouched, shrunk in her seat, gaze locked on the tabletop. Ethan was eating toast like nothing was wrong. At least Charles was glaring. But at me. What had I done?

  “Excuse me,” I muttered, extricating myself from the seat, untangling my legs, which seemed to get knotted up in the chair legs and my own uniform pants. I finally managed it and marched out of the room, angry enough to spit.

  Colony One was the largest of Mars’s four established colony settlements, but it still wasn’t big, not by Earth standards, and there weren’t very many kids there. A hundred, tops. So we all went to one big school and chose courses based on our interests. We had age brackets but not really class groups. Apart from a handful of designated instructors, other workers and officials around the colony volunteered to teach special courses. By the time most of us got to be teenagers like me and Charles, we’d been all over the colony, we knew just about everyone, we’d learned about basic operations, and we had a pretty good idea what area of study we wanted to go into. I’d had my eye on the astrodrome as long as I could remember.

  There wasn’t anything wrong with the way we did school, it was just different. And sure, we had cliq
ues and groups and older and younger kids and the rest of it. But this, George and the others … something else was going on here.

  I needed to be alone, to think. But I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t know where anything was. All I could do was pace back and forth between the dining hall and the dorm room. Back home I’d escape to the garage, take out my scooter. Or if I couldn’t do that because of a dust storm or whatever, I’d go to the atrium and run. Just to get away for a little while.

  The thought of running here, three times heavier than I ought to be, made me ill. Even pacing along the corridor made me gasp for breath. This place was awful. Everything about it was awful.

  There had to be a way out of this building. So I kept walking.

  I found the garage where the bus had let us out last night. Now, in daylight, I could get a good look at it. It was another large room, like the dining hall, with a high ceiling and a row of distant windows to let in light. Daytime revealed a couple of transport buses, like the one that had carried us; some smaller vehicles that could carry three or four people lined up on the far side; and a row of two-wheeled individual transports that seemed useful and intriguing. Most of them looked muscle operated—foot pedals connected to chains and gears that turned rubber-coated wheels. But a couple of others seemed to have motors, like my scooter back home, but with wheels for riding on hard surfaces rather than hover lifts for going over sand. I wondered what I’d have to do to learn how to operate them. Maybe I couldn’t run too far right now, but one of those could probably help me work out some frustration.

  In the meantime, a door to the outside stood open, and that was all I wanted at the moment. To get out.

  Across the garage’s concrete floor, to the door, and through it, and I was outside.

  Air blew at me like a gentle breath from a vent grating. A flat drive led away from the garage, around a curve and out of sight. Away from it on both sides spread a lawn, trimmed grass, bright green—just like the atrium’s lawn, I thought smugly.