Marsbound

1 THE UNDEAD

It wasn’t a lot of luggage for six years; for the longest journey anyone has ever taken. We each had an overnight bag and a small titanium suitcase.

We stepped out into the warm Florida night and carried our bags to the curb. I looked back at the house and didn’t feel much. We’d only lived there two years and wouldn’t be coming back. I’d be twenty-five then, and getting my own place anyhow.

Dad pointed out Jupiter and Mars, both near the horizon.

The cab hummed around the corner and stopped in front of us. “Are you the Dula party?” it said.

“No, we’re just out for a walk,” Dad said. Mother gave him a look. “Of course we are. It’s three in the goddamned morning.”

“Your voice does not match the caller’s,” the cab said. “After midnight I need positive identification.”

“I called,” my mother said. “Do you recognize this voice?”

“Please show me a debit card.” A tray slid out and Dad flipped a card onto it. “Voice and card.”

The doors opened silently. “Do you require help with your luggage?”

“Stay put,” Dad said, instead of no. He’s always testing them.

“No,” Mother said. The luggage handler stayed where it was, and we put our small bags in the back, next to where it crouched. Its eyes followed us.

We got in, Mother and me facing Dad and Card, who was barely awake. “Verify destination,” it said. “Where are you going, please?”

“Mars,” Dad said.

“I don’t understand that.”

Mother sighed. “The airport. Terminal B.”

“The undead,” Card said in his zombie voice.

“What are you mumbling about?”

“This thing you humans call a cab.” His eyes were closed and his lips barely moved. “It does not live, but it is not dead. It speaks.”

“Go back to sleep, Card. I’ll wake you up when we get to Mars.”

Locked up in a spaceship with my little brother for six months. Plus parents and a couple of dozen strangers. We were lucky, though; six months was about the shortest possible flight. It can take more than a year when Mars is farther away.

When we come back, he’ll be almost as old as I am now. That’s only a little less strange than zombies.

2 GOOD-BYE, COOL WORLD

It’s the only elevator in the world with barf bags. My brother pointed that out. He notices things like that; I noticed the bathroom. One bathroom, for thirty-six people. Locked in an elevator for two weeks. It’s not as big as it looks in the advertisements.

You don’t call it “the elevator” once you’re in it; the thing you ride in is just the climber. The Space Elevator, always capitalized, is two of these climbers plus fifty thousand miles of cable that rises straight up into space. At the other end is the spaceship that will take my family to Mars. That one will have two bathrooms (for twenty-six people) but no barf bags, presumably. If you’re not used to zero gee by then, maybe they’ll leave you behind.

This whole thing started two years ago, when I was young and stupid, or at least sixteen and naive. My mother wanted to get into the lottery for the Mars Project, and Dad was okay with the idea. My brother Card thought it was wonderful, and I’ll admit I thought it was spec, too, at the time. So Card and I got to spend a year of Saturday mornings training to take the test—just us; there was no test for parents. Adults make it or they don’t, depending on education and social adaptability. Our parents have enough education for any four people but otherwise are crushingly normal.

These tests were basically to make us, Card and me, seem normal, or at least normal enough not to go detroit locked up in a sardine can with twenty-four other people for six months.

So here’s the billion-dollar question: Did any of the kids aboard pass the tests just because they actually were normal? Or did all of them also give up a year of Saturdays so they could learn how to hide their homicidal tendencies from the testers? “Remember, we don’t say anything about having sex with little Fido.”

We flew into Puerto Villamil, a little town on a little island in the Galápagos chain, off the coast of South America. They picked it because it’s on the equator and doesn’t get a lot of lightning, which could give you pause if you were sitting at the bottom of a lightning rod long enough to go around the Earth twice.

The town is kind of a tourist trap for the Space Elevator and the Galápagos in general. People take a ferry out to watch it take off and return, and then go to other islands for skin diving or to gawk at exotic animals. The islands have lots of bizarre birds and lizards. Dad said we could spend a week or two exploring when we came back.

If we came back, he didn’t say. It’s not like we were just moving across town.

Mother and Dad both speak Spanish, so they chatted with the taxi driver who took us from the airport to the hotel where we would get a night’s rest before ferrying out to the elevator platform. The taxi was different, an electric jeep long enough to seat a dozen people, with no windshield and a canvas sun canopy rather than a roof. I asked what happens if it rains, and the driver summoned up enough English to say, “Get wet.”

Card and I had a separate room, so Mom and Dad could have one last night of privacy. I hoped they were taking precautions. Six months of zero-gravity morning sickness? I wondered what they would name the baby who caused that. “Clean up your room, Barf.” “No, you can’t have the car, Spew.”

(After all, they named Card Card and me Carmen, after an opera that I can’t stand. “Tor-e-ador, don’t spit on the floor. Use the cuspidor; that’s what it is for.”)

We dumped our bags and went for a walk, Card one way and me the other. He went into town, so I headed for the beach. (The parentiosas might have assumed we were going to stay together, but they didn’t give us any specific orders except to be back at the hotel by seven, for dinner.)

My last day on Earth. I should do something special.

3 CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN

The beach was less sand than rock, a jagged kind of black lava. The water swirled and splashed among the rocks and didn’t look too great for wading, so I sat on a more or less smooth rock and enjoyed the sun and salt air. Real Earth air, breathe it while you can.

There was a big gray iguana on a rock, maybe ten yards away, who ignored me. He didn’t look real.

With the noise of the surf on the rocks I didn’t hear the man come up behind me. “Carmen Dula?”

I jerked around, startled. He was a strange-looking older guy, maybe thirty, his skin white as chalk. With a closer look I saw it wasn’t his skin; it really was something chalky, some kind of absolute sunblock. He was dressed in white, too, long pants and long sleeves, and a broad-brimmed hat. Kind of good-looking aside from the clothes.

“Didn’t mean to startle you.” He offered his hand, dry and strong under the chalk. “I’m Paul Collins, your pilot. Recognized you from the passenger roster.”

“The climber has a pilot?”

“No, just an attendant. What’s to pilot?” He smiled, metal teeth. “I’m the pilot of the John Carter of Mars, this time out.”

“Wow. You’ve done it before?”

He nodded. “Twice as pilot, once as copilot, there and back.” He looked out over the ocean. “This’ll be the last one. I’m staying on Mars.”

“The whole five years?”

He shook his head. “Staying.”

“For… forever?”

“If I live forever.” He squatted down and picked up a flat stone and spun it out over the water. It skipped once. The iguana blinked at it. “I have to stay on either Earth or Mars. I’m sort of maxed out on radiation.”

“God, I’d stay on Earth.” Was he crazy? “I mean, if I was worried about radiation.”

“It’s not so bad on Mars, underground,” he said, and tried another stone. It just sank. “Go up to the surface once a week. And those limits are for people who want to have children. I don’t.”

“Me, neither,” I said, and he was tactful enough not to press for details. “That’s why you’re so protected? I mean the white stuff?”

“No, more thinking about sunburn than hard radiation.” He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, what there was of it. It had obviously just been mowed, down to about a quarter inch except for a trim Mohawk. “I haven’t had a tan since I was… just a little older than you?”

“Nineteen,” I said, adding six weeks.

“Yeah, twenty-one. That’s when I joined the Space Force. They don’t encourage tans.”

That was interesting. “I didn’t know the military was in on the Mars Project.” Officially, anyhow.

“They aren’t.” He eased himself down, stiffly, to sit on the rocks. “I quit after five years. It was all air flying. One suborbital, big deal. My tour was up, and this sounded more interesting.”

“But you only get to do it three or four times?”

“There’s that,” he admitted, and threw a pebble at the iguana, missing by a mile. “They’re way too conservative. I’m trying to change their minds.”

“You couldn’t do that better here on Earth?” I sat down next to him.

“Well, yes and no. Right now, if I stay there, I’ll be the only pilot on Mars, in case something goes wrong and they need one.” He threw another pebble at the lizard and missed by even more. “Can’t throw worth a shit since I went to space.”

I took aim and missed the creature only by inches. It glared at me for a long second and slid into the water.

“Not bad for a girl.”

I decided he was joking, but you couldn’t tell from his expression. “I’ve heard that spaceflight can be hard on the muscles.”

“It is. Even though you exercise every day, you get weaker. I’m weak as a kitten in all this gravity.”

Inanely, I said, “I left my cat behind. In Florida.”

“How old was it? Is it.”

“Nine.” Half my age; I hadn’t thought of that.

He nodded. “Not too old.”

“Yeah, but she won’t be my cat when we get back.”

“Might be. They’re funny creatures.” He rubbed his fingers as if they hurt. “So you’re out of school?”

I shook my head no. “Going to start university by VR in September. Maryland.”

“That’ll be interesting. Odd.” He laughed. “I partied through my first year; almost flunked out. Guess you won’t have to worry about that.”

“There aren’t any parties on Mars? I’m disappointed.”

“Oh, you have people, you have parties. Not too wild. You can’t exactly send out for pizza and crack a keg of beer.”

I had a sudden empty feeling, not hunger for pizza. I tried to push it away. “What do you do for fun? Go out exploring?”

“Yeah, I do that, go up and collect rocks. I’m a geologist by training, before I became a flyboy. Areologist now.”

I knew about that; Ares is Greek for Mars. “Ever discover anything new?”

“Sure, almost every time. But it’s like being a kid in a candy store, or it would be if you could find a store where they kept bringing in new candy. It’s not hard to find stuff that’s never been classified. You into geology?”

“No, more like English and history. I had to take Earth and planet science, but it wasn’t my… favorite.” My only C besides calculus, actually.

“You might learn to like it, once you have a new planet to explore.” He wiggled a pebble out of the sand and looked at it, purple. Scratched it with his thumbnail. “Funny color for lava.” He tossed it away. “I could show you around if you like. Mars.”

Good grief, I thought, is the pilot hitting on me? Over thirty? “I don’t want to be a bother. Just go out by myself and wander around.”

“Nobody goes out alone,” he said, suddenly serious. “Something goes wrong, you could be dead in a minute.” He shrugged. “No ‘could’ about it, really. Mars is more dangerous than space, outer space. The air’s so thin it might as well be a vacuum, for breathing.”

“Yeah.” It’s not like I’d never seen a movie. “And then the sand-storms?”

“Well, they don’t exactly sneak up on you. The main danger is getting careless. You’ve got ground and sky and gravity. It feels safer than space. But it’s not.” He looked at his watch and got up slowly. “Better get on with my exercise. See you tomorrow.” He plodded off, obviously feeling the gravity.

I didn’t ask whether he wanted company. Interesting guy, but we were going to be stuck in a room together for six months, and would see plenty of each other.

I didn’t really feel like company at all. Maybe I could put up with the iguana. I picked my way out to the farthest place I could stand without getting my feet too wet, and watched the swirling, crashing water.

4 LAST MEAL

On the way back to the hotel, I ran into Paul again. He was sitting alone in the shade of a thatched-roof patio outside a shabby bar called the Yacht Club, drinking a draft beer that looked good. I sat down with him but asked for a Coke, out of a vague concern that Dad might come by. Drinking with a man, oh my. I didn’t know the legal age, either; if I was carded, he’d find out I wasn’t really quite nineteen.

It was a short date, anyhow. We’d just exchanged “where you from?” formalities when his cell pinged and he had to go off to the Elevator office. I did learn that he was from New Jersey but didn’t have time to ask about Mafia connections or how to breathe carbon monoxide.

It was not a pleasant place to sit alone and wonder what the hell I was doing. My friends back home were about evenly divided between being jealous and wondering whether I’d lost my mind, and I was leaning toward the latter group. The Coke tasted weird, too. Maybe it was drugged, and when I slumped unconscious they would drag me into the hold of a yacht and smuggle me off to Singapore for a rewarding career in white slavery. Or maybe it was made with sugar instead of corn syrup. I left it, just to be on the safe side, and went on to the hotel.

Speaking of Coke, that’s what we weren’t having for dinner, no matter how much Card and I might have liked it. Or a pizza or hamburger or even a cold can of beans. Of course it was going to be fancy, the last real family meal for six years.

“Fancy” in the Galápagos was not exactly Park Avenue fancy. They don’t serve up the iguanas, fortunately, but there wasn’t much you’d find on a normal menu.

The hotel restaurant, La Casa Dolores, served mostly Ecuadorian food, which was not a surprise. I had picadillo, a Cuban dish that sounded like hamburger over rice, and pretty much was, although it tasted strange, like Mexican but with a lot of lemon juice and a touch of soap. Mother said that taste came from a parsleylike herb, cilantro. I trust they won’t be growing it on Mars. Or maybe it’s their only green vegetable.

Dad, being Dad, ordered the most outrageous thing on the menu: tronquito, bull penis soup, along with goat stew. I refused to look at any of it, and propped a menu up between us so I wouldn’t be able to see his plate. Mother got ceviche, raw fish, which came with popcorn. It actually looked pretty good (I like sushi all right) but, excuse me for being practical, I had visions of thirty-six people waitingin line for that one bathroom. I didn’t want too much adventure on the first day.

(Card ordered a sausage with beans, but only ate the beans. Maybe the sausage looked too much like Dad’s soup. I didn’t want to know.)

Mother asked what we’d done all afternoon. Card had a detailed analysis of the island’s game rooms. Why go to Mars when you can virtual yourself all over the universe, killing aliens and rescuing big-breasted babes? If we run into aliens on Mars we probably won’t have a single ray gun.

I told them I’d met the pilot. “You think he’s only thirty?” Mother asked.

“Well, I haven’t done the math,” I said. “He was in the Space Force for five years? So he was at least twenty-six when he got out. He’s been to Mars three times after that, and probably spent some time on Earth in between. Got a geology degree somewhere.”

“Maybe in space,” Dad said. “Passing the time. He looked thirty-ish, though?”

Dad was still eating, so I didn’t look at him. “He looked zombieish, actually. I guess he could have been older than thirty.”

I explained about the sunblock, but didn’t mention his offer to take me rock-hunting. Dad was being a little too protective of me, where males were concerned, and thirty-some probably didn’t sound old to him.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Mother said evenly, “that he recognized you and remembered your name. I wonder if he knows all twenty-five of the passengers’ faces. Or just the pretty girls.”

“Please.” I hate it when she makes me blush.

“Ooh, my pretty,” Card said in his moron voice, and I kicked him under the table. He flinched but smiled.

“None of us are going to look all that great with no makeup,” I said. Not allowed because of the air recycling. I wanted to get a lipstick tattoo when I heard about that, but neither parent would sign the permission form. It’s not fair—Mother had a cheek tattoo done when she was not much older than me. It’s way out of style now and she hates it, but that doesn’t have anything to do with me. If you get tired of a lipstick tattoo, you can cover it with lipstick, brain.

“Levels the playing field,” Dad said. “You’ll be at an advantage with your beautiful skin.”

“Daddy, don’t.” Mention the word “skin” and all of the acne molecules in my bloodstream get excited and rush to the surface. “I won’t exactly be husband-hunting. Not with only five or six guys to choose from.”

“It won’t be quite that bad,” Mother said.

“No, worse! Because most of them plan to stay on Mars, and I’m already looking forward to coming back!” I stood up and laid my napkin down, and walked out of the restaurant as fast as dignity would allow. Mother said, “Say excuse me,” and I sort of did.

I managed not to start crying until I was up in the room. I was angry at myself as much as anything. If I didn’t want to do this, why did I let myself be talked into it?

Part of it might have been the lack of boys where we were headed, but we’d talked that over. We’d also talked over the physical danger and the slight inconvenience of going to college a couple of hundred million miles off campus.

I put in my earplugs and asked for Eroica, the Tad Yang version. That always calmed me.

I stepped out onto the balcony to get some non-air-conditioned air, and was startled to see the Space Elevator, a ruler-straight line of red light that dwindled away to be swallowed by the darkness. Maybe the first two miles of fifty thousand. I hadn’t seen it in the daylight.

The stars and the Milky Way were brighter than we ever saw them at home. I could see two planets but neither of them was Mars, which I knew didn’t rise until morning. Dad had pointed it out to me on the way to the airport, which seemed like a long time ago. Mars was a lot dimmer than these two, and more yellow-orange than red. I guess “the Yellow Planet” didn’t sound as dramatic as the red one.

I darkened the room and listened to the rest of the symphony, then went back down to the restaurant in time to get some ice cream along with a sticky sponge cake full of nuts and fruit. Nobody said anything about my absence. Card had probably been threatened.

Dad treated me his delicate girl-in-her-period way, which I definitely was not. I’d gotten a prescription for Delaze, and wouldn’t ovulate until I wanted to, after we got to Mars. The download for the Space Elevator had described the use of recyclable tampons in way too much detail. I was just as happy I’d never have to use them in zero gee, on the John Carter. Vacuum sterilizes everything, I suppose, so it was silly to be squeamish about it. But you’re allowed to be a little irrational about things that personal. I managed to push it out of my mind for long enough to finish dessert.

Card and I tried TV after dinner, but everything was in Spanish except for CNN and an Australian all-news program. There was a Japanese Game Boy module, but he couldn’t make it work, which didn’t bother me and my book at all.

The room had a little fridge with an interesting design. Every bottle and box was stuck in place with something like a magnet. If you plucked out a Coke or something, the price flashed in the upper right-hand corner of the TV screen, and a note said it had been added to your room bill.

The fridge knew we were underage, and wouldn’t let go of the liquor bottles. But we were evidently old enough for beer—a sign said the age was eighteen, but the fridge wasn’t smart enough to tell whether it was serving me or my brother. So I had two beers, which helped me get to sleep, but Card stayed awake long enough to build a pyramid of his six cans. I guess I could have been a responsible older sister and cut him off, but there wasn’t going to be a lot of beer out on the Martian desert.

5 PIZZA HUNT

Our parents didn’t say anything about the $52 added to our room bill for beer, but I suppose they took one look at Card and decided he had suffered enough. He’d told me he’d had beer “plenty of times” with his sag pals at school. Maybe it was the nonalcoholic variety. This was strong Dutch beer in big cans, and six had left a lasting effect. He was pale and quiet when we left the hotel and seemed to turn slightly green when we got aboard the boat, rocking in the choppy waves.

They didn’t put the Earth end of the Space Elevator on dry land because it had to be moveable in any direction. Typhoons come through once or twice a century, and they need to get it out of the way. The platform it sits on can move more than two hundred miles in twenty-four hours, far enough to dodge the worst part of a storm. Or so they say; it’s never been put to the test.

The ribbon cable that the carrier rides also has to move around in order to avoid trouble at the other end—dodging human-made space debris and the larger meteors, the ones big enough to track. (Small meteor holes are patched automatically by a little robot climber.)

The platform was about forty miles offshore, and the long thin ribbon the elevator rides wasn’t usually visible except for the bright strobe lights that warned fliers away. At just the right angle, the sun’s reflection could blaze like a razor line drawn in fire; I saw that twice in the hour and a half it took us to cover the distance.

Paul Collins, the pilot, looked more handsome without the white war paint. He introduced himself to Card and my parents, proving that he could recognize passengers who weren’t girls.

Before we got to the Space Elevator platform itself, we skirted around a much larger thing, the “light farm,” a huge raft of solar-power cells. They didn’t get power directly from the sun, but rather from an orbiting power station that turned sunlight into microwaves and beamed them down. Then it gets beamed right back up, in a way. The carrier’s electric motors are powered by a big laser sitting on the platform; the laser’s powered by the light farm. There’s another light farm in the Ecuadorian mountains that beams power at the carrier when it’s higher up.

The platform’s like an old-fashioned floating oil rig, the size of an office building. The fragile-looking ribbon that the carrier rides spears straight up from the middle of it. The laser and the carrier take up most of the space, with a few huts and storage buildings here and there. It looked bigger from down on the water than in the aerial pictures we’d seen.

We took an elevator to the Elevator. There was a floating dock moored to the platform. It was all very nautical feeling, ropes creaking as the dock moved with the waves, seagulls squawking, salt tang in the air.

Our boat rose and fell with the dock, but of course the open-air elevator didn’t. It was a big metal cage that seemed to move up and down and sideways in a sort of menacing way as we bobbed with the waves. If you were sure-footed, you could time it right and just step from the dock onto the elevator. Like most people, I played it safe and jumped aboard as the floor fell away.

We all had identical little suitcases made of light titanium, with our ten kilograms of personal items. Twenty-two pounds didn’t sound like very much, but we didn’t have any of the stuff that you would normally pack for a trip, since we couldn’t take clothes or cosmetics. Three people had musical instruments too big to fit in the metal box.

The elevator clanked and growled all the way up. We clattered to a stop and got out onto a metal floor that felt like sandpaper, I guess some stuff to keep you from slipping. There was a guardrail, but I had a stomach flip-flop at the thought of falling back down the way we’d come. A hundred feet? Hitting the water would knock you out, at the very least.

Like we didn’t have enough to worry about; let’s worry about drowning.

To the salt air add a smell of oily grease and ozone tang, like a garage where they work on electric cars—and pizza? I’d have to check that out.

A guy in powder blue coveralls, the uniform of the Space Elevatorcorporation, checked to make sure we were all there and there weren’t any stowaways. We each picked up a fluffy towel and a folded stack of clothes. There was a sign reminding us that the clothes we were wearing would be donated to a local charity. Local? The Society for Naked Fish, I supposed.

I’d just had a shower at the hotel, but no such thing as too clean if you’re going without for a couple of weeks. Or five years, if you mean a real shower.

The women’s shower room only took six at a time, and I didn’t particularly want to shower with Mom, so I left my stuff stacked by the wall and went off to explore, along with Card, who was looking a little more human.

The climber wasn’t open yet, which was okay; we’d be spending plenty of time in it. It was a big white cylinder, about twenty feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, rounded on the top. Not a vast amount of room for forty people. Above it was a robot tug, all ugly machine. It would pull us up a few hundred feet, before the laser took over. It also served as a repair robot, if there was something wrong with the ribbon we were riding on.

“Big foogly laser,” Card marveled, and I suppose it was the biggest I’d ever seen, though truthfully I expected something more impressive, more futuristic. The beam it shot out was more than twenty feet in diameter, I knew, and of course it carried enough power to lift the heavy carrier up out of the Earth’s gravity well. But it was only the size of a big army tank, and in fact it looked sort of military and menacing. I was more impressed by the big shimmering mirror that would bounce the laser beam up to us, to the photocells on the base of the carrier. Very foogly big mirror.

Three other young people joined us, Davina and Elspeth Feldman, sisters from Tel Aviv, and Barry Westling from Orlando, just south of us. Elspeth looked a little older than me; the others were between me and Card, I figured. Barry was a head taller than him, but a real string bean.

Elspeth was kind of large—not fat, but “large-boned,” whatever that really means. You couldn’t help but note that most of us future Martians were on the small side, for obvious reasons. Someone has to pay for every pound that goes to Mars. Mother spelled out the inescapable math—every day, you need twelve calories per pound to stay the same weight: someone who weighs fifty pounds more than you has to pig down everything you eat plus one Big Mac every day. Over the six-month flight, that’s eighty-five extra pounds of food, on top of the extra fifty pounds of person. So small people have a better chance in the lottery.

(They call it a “lottery” to sound democratic, as if every family had an equal chance. If that were true, I wouldn’t have lost a year of Saturdays to the cause.)

Thinking of food made me ask whether anyone had found out where the pizza smell was coming from. No one had, so we embarked on a quest.

The search led, unsurprisingly, to a shed with a machine that dispensed drinks and food, alongside a microwave in which someone had recently burned a slice of pizza. Elspeth produced a credit card and everyone but my brother tried a slice. He didn’t miss much, but we were more after the idea of pizza than the actuality. We didn’t know for sure that there wouldn’t be any pizza on Mars, but it seemed likely.

Barry and Card went off to play catch with a Frisbee while the rest of us sat in the shade. Neither Elspeth nor Davina was born in Israel; their family moved there after the war. Like ours, their parents are both scientists, their father a biologist and mother in nanotech, both of them involved in detoxifying the battlefield after Gehenna. Davina started to cry, describing what they’d had to do, had to see, and Elspeth and I held her until it passed.

Maybe there wouldn’t be pizza on Mars, but there wouldn’t be that, either. What hate can do.

6 FEARS

There was no privacy in the shower, and not much water—I mean, all you could see in any direction was water, but I guess the salt would froog up the plumbing. So you had to push a button for thirty seconds of lukewarm unsalted water, then soap up, push the button again, and try to get the soap off in another thirty seconds. Then do it again for your hair, without conditioner. I was glad mine was short. Elspeth was going to have the frizzies for a long time.

She has quite a dramatic figure, narrow waist and big in the hips and breasts. Mother describes me as “boyish,” which I think is Motherspeak for “titless wonder.” Women built like Elspeth are always complaining about their boobs bumping into things. Things like boys, I suppose.

I liked her, though. It could be a little awkward, the first thing you do when you meet somebody is cry together, then strip naked and jump in the shower, but Elspeth was funny and natural about the latter. In the desert kibbutz where she spent summers growing up, they didn’t have individual showers, and the water was rationed almost as severely as here.

Light blue used to be one of my favorite colors, but it does lose some of its charm when everybody in sight is wearing it. We left our “civilian” clothes in the donation box and put on Space Elevator coveralls and slippers. Then we went to the media center for lunch and orientation.

Lunch was a white cardboard box containing a damp sandwich, a weird cookie, and an apple. A bottle of lukewarm water, or you could splurge a couple of bucks on a Coke or a beer out of the machine. I got a beer just to see Card’s reaction. He pantomimed sticking a finger down his throat.

The media center was one room with a shallow cube screen taking up one end of it. There were about fifty folding chairs, most of them occupied by powder blue people. With everyone in uniform, it took me a minute to sort out Mother and Dad. Card and I joined them near the front.

The lights dimmed, and we saw a mercifully short history of spaceflight, with an unsurprising emphasis on how big and dangerous those early rockets had been. Lots of explosions, including the three space-shuttle disasters that all but shut down the American space program.

Then some diagrams showing how the Space Elevator works, pretty much a repeat of what we saw at the lottery-winner orientation in Denver a few months ago. Even without that, I wonder if anybody actually ever got this far without knowing that the Space Elevator was—surprise!—an elevator that goes into space.

It was interesting enough, especially the stuff about how they put it up. They worked from the middle out both ways, or up and down, depending on your point of view: Starting at GEO, the spot that orbits the Earth in exactly one day, and so stays overhead in the same spot, they dropped stuff down to Earth and raised other stuff up into a higher orbit at the same time. That way the whole thing stayed in balance, like a seesaw stretching out both ways at the same time.

We were headed for that other end, where the John Carter and the other Mars ship had been built and would launch from.

They spent a little time talking about the dangers. Sort of like a regular elevator in that if the cable snaps, you lose. You just fall a lot farther before you go splat. (Well, it’s not that simple—Earth elevators have fail-safes, for one thing, and the Space Elevator wouldn’t actually go splat unless we fell from a really low altitude. We’d burn up in the atmosphere if we started falling at less than twenty-three thousand kilometers; above that, we’d go into orbit and could theoretically, eventually, be rescued. But if the cable snapped that high, on our way to where the John Carter is parked, we’d go flinging off into space. Then that theoretical rescue would really be just a theory. There aren’t any spaceships yet that could take off and catch up with us in time.)

There’s a lot of dangerous radiation in space, but the carrier has a force field, an electromagnetic shield, for most of that. There are huge solar flares that would get past the shielding, but they’re rare and give a ninety-one-hour warning. That’s long enough to get back to Earth or GEO. The Mars ships and GEO have hidey-holes where everybody can crowd in to wait out the storm.

I’d read about those dangers before we left home, as well as one they didn’t mention: mechanical failure. If an elevator on Earth develops a problem, someone will come fix it. It’s not likely to explode or fry you or expose you to vacuum. I guess they figured there was no reason to go over that at this late date.

When we left home, a lot of my friends asked me if I was scared, and to most of them I said no, not really. They have most of the bugs worked out. It’s carried hundreds of passengers to the Hilton space station, and dozens up to the far end, for Mars launch.

But to my best friend, Carol, I admitted what I haven’t said even to my family: I wake up terrified in the middle of the night. Every night.

This feels like jumping off a cliff and hoping you’ll learn how to fly.

7 CANNED MEAT

We walked up a ramp, took a long last look at sea and sky and friendly sun—it would not be our friend in space—and went inside.

The carrier had a “new car” smell, which you can buy in an aerosol can. In case you’re trying to sell a used car or a slightly used Space Elevator.

There were two levels. The first level had twenty couches that were like old-fashioned La-Z-Boy chairs, plush black, with feet pointing out and heads toward the center. Each couch had a “window,” a high-def shallow cube, all of which were tuned to look like actual windows for the time being. So there was still sun and sea and sky if you were willing to be fooled.

There was a little storage bin on the side of each couch, with a notebook and a couple of paper magazines. And that stack of barf bags.

Three exercise machines, for rowing, stair-stepping, and biking, were grouped together where the ladder led up to the second level.

The woman who was our attendant, Dr. Porter, stood on the second rung of the ladder and talked softly into a lapel mic. “We have about sixty minutes till liftoff. Please find your area and be seated by then, strapped in, by one o’clock. That’s 1300, for you scientists. I’ll be upstairs if anyone has questions.” She scampered lightly up the ladder.

I have a question, I didn’t say. Could I just jump off and swim for it?

My information packet said I was 21A. I found the seat and sat down, half-reclining. Card was next to me in 20A; Mother and Dad were upstairs in the B section.

Card took a vial out of his packet and looked at the five pills in it. “You nervous?” he said.

“Yeah. Thought I’d save the pills for later, though.” They were doses of a sedative. The orientation show admitted that some people have trouble falling asleep at first. Can you imagine?

“Prob’ly smart.” He looked pretty much like I felt.

The control console for the window came up out of the armrest and clicked into place over your lap. On one side it had a keyboard and various command buttons, but you could rotate it around, and it was like an airplane tray table with a fuzzy gecko surface.

Card tapped away at the keyboard, which caused a ghostly message to cascade down the window in several languages: MONITOR LOCKED UNTIL AFTER LAUNCH. I touched one key on mine and got the same message, dim letters floating down in front of the fake seascape.

“They’re just trying to make us feel comfortable,” I said, but it was kind of disappointing. The window would normally be a clever illusion—you could play a game or read a book or whatever, but nobody could see what was on your monitor unless they were right in line with it. Sitting on your lap. From any other angle, it would look just like a window looking outside. It had something to do with polarization; the screen was actually showing two images, but you could only see one or the other.

With an hour to kill, I wasn’t going to just sit and look through a fake window. I joined Barry and Elspeth in trying out the exercise machines, which were mainly for those of us going on to Mars. The others were just tourists going to the Hilton; they weren’t going to be in space long enough for zero gee to turn their bones to dry sticks and their muscles to mush.

Then we went upstairs and took a look at the zero-gee toilet. We’d sort of trained on it in Denver, in the Vomit Comet, the big ancient plane that gave us fifty seconds of zero gee at a time—up and down, up and down, all day long. I was able to get my feet into the footholds and lower my butt into place, but that was it. I’d learn about the rest soon enough.

But not too soon. There was a regular toilet next to it, with a sign saying FOR USE UNTIL 0.25 G. So we had a few days.

The “personal hygiene” closet looked claustrophobic. Once a day you got a plastic bag with two washcloths wetted with something like rubbing alcohol. Get as clean as you can, then put the same clothes back on. It would be a little better on the John Carter, better but weirder—zip yourself up in a plastic bag?

The galley was on the opposite side of the room, just a microwaveand a surprisingly small refrigerator, and a bunch of drawers of food and utensils. A fold-down worktable.

In the middle of both rooms, both levels, was a round table with eight seat-belted chairs, I guessed for socializing. Wouldn’t it be smarter to have smaller, separate tables? Just in case there turned out to be somebody you couldn’t stand the sight of?

After six months, that might be everybody, though, including the mirror.

Mustn’t think negative thoughts, as Dad says. Only two weeks in this one, then a change of scenery for six months. Then a new planet.

“It’s funny,” I said quietly to Card, “on the boat over, I thought I could pretty well tell who were the rich people and who were the neo-Martians.”

“Fancy clothes?”

“Or careful down-dressing. An ironed tee shirt—that’s a dead giveaway. With clean old jean shorts?”

“But here—”

“Yeah, and it’s not just clothes. No makeup or jewelry. That has to rag them. It’s going to be interesting.”

“Some of the Martians are rich, too,” Card said. “Barry’s dad’s an inventor, and he has all kinds of patents. They came out in their own plane.”

“Couldn’t afford a ticket?”

“Sure, right. He’s got two planes, two motorcycles, two cars, just in case one breaks down. They live on the lake in Disney.”

Billionaires, but still. It seemed kind of wasteful to have two of everything, even if money’s not an issue. But I didn’t say anything. “Barry seems like a nice enough guy.”

Card shrugged. “Sure. I think he’s a little scared of his dad.”

“I wonder if his dad eats bull-dick soup. That’s scary.” Card started giggling, and so did I. Mother gave us a warning look, and that made it worse. We climbed back downstairs, snorting, and managed not to break any bones.

8 STOP

I guess there’s something to be said for launching the old way, riding three thousand tons of high explosive on a tower of fire. Dangerous but dramatic. When we took off, it was sort of like an elevator ride.

We were all strapped into our seats, probably just to keep us from wandering around. The tug above us made a whiny little noise, and there was a slight bump, and the platform below us slowly fell away. In a few seconds, you could see the big energy farm. I strained at the seat belt, but couldn’t get close enough to the “window” to see the laser and the mirror—dumb of me. It wasn’t really a window; if the camera wasn’t pointed at the laser, I wouldn’t see it.

The noise stopped, and there was another bump. “Switching over,” Dr. Porter said over the intercom. A woman of few words.

The main motors were much smoother. There was a slight press of acceleration and a low hum, and in a couple of minutes we were up to our cruising speed, about 250 miles per hour.

After a couple minutes more of going straight up, we were higher than most airplanes, and you could easily see the curvature of the Earth as the Galápagos came into sight. My ears started to pop and crackle with the air pressure dropping. Upstairs, a couple of the younger kids were crying. Ears or fears?

It wasn’t really anything new; we’d sat through a twelve-hour test of it at the Denver orientation, thin air with beefed-up oxygen, and everybody managed to live with it. We’ll be breathing something like this for the next five years. (The high oxygen content was why we couldn’t bring regular clothes—everything has to be absolutely nonflammable. And smokers have to quit.)

Little numbers in the corner of the window showed how high we were and what the gravity was. At seven or eight miles, the edge of South America was coming into view. The sky was getting darker and darker blue, and by twenty-five miles it was almost black. You could see a few stars, at least on this side. I craned my neck to see the windows behind me; the ones facing the afternoon sun were dimmed.

Soon the sky was inky black, and I shivered involuntarily. For all practical purposes, we were in outer space. Outside the elevator, you wouldn’t live a minute.

That would be true in an airplane, too. I told myself not to panic. I considered taking one of the pills, but instead just closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

When I opened my eyes, the gravity had fallen to 0.99. I’d lost a pound already, on the Space Elevator Diet. (Money-back guarantee—in one week, your weight problem will be gone!)

That was one advantage we had over the old astronauts. They went straight from one gee to nothing, and about half of them got sick. We had a week to get used to it gradually. But we did have barf bags, too.

That made me glance down to the pocket on the side of the chair. I did not count the number of bags in the stack, but rather pulled out the magazines.

We didn’t get paper magazines at home, except for occasional catalogs. These felt funny, kind of heavy and slippery. I guess that was like the clothes, nonflammable paper.

One was the Space Elevator News, with a sticker on it that said, “Take this copy home with you.” Not to Mars, I think. The others were the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune, which I’d read back at the hotel (for the comics), Time, International Photography, and Seventeen.

“God, you’re reading a magazine?” Card said. “Look, South America!”

“I saw it miles ago,” I said. But Earth really was starting to look like a planet, and we were only thirty miles up. I’d thought it would take a lot longer than that.

“You’re free to unbelt now and walk around the carrier,” Dr. Porter said. “Sometime before 6:00, check off your dinner preference, and I’ll call for you when it’s ready.” Doctor, chef, and waitress all in one, impressive. Though I suspected there wouldn’t be much chef-ing involved, and I was right.

Once you got over the novelty of seeing the Earth out there, it was kind of like watching grass grow. I mean, it wasn’t like Low Earth Orbit, where the real estate rolls along underneath you, constantlychanging. I figured I could check it out once an hour, and tried the keyboard.

It worked pretty much like the console at home. Bigger picture and more detail. Out of curiosity I typed in a request for porn, and got an alphabetical menu that was a little daunting. I knew that Card would get ACCESS DENIED, which made me feel mature and privileged. (He’d probably devise a work-around in a couple of hours, but he could have it. I don’t really get porn. After the first couple of times, it sort of looks like biology.)

There were a couple of thousand video and virtual channels, but unlike home, the console didn’t know what I liked; there was no SUGGEST button. But I could goowiki anything.

The word “menu” started blinking in the corner of the screen, so I clicked on it. There were twelve standard choices for dinner, mostly American and Italian, with one Chinese and one Indian. Then there were ten “premium” meals, with wine, which had surcharges from $40 to $250. Some of them were French things I’d never heard of.

I clicked on beef stew, safe enough, and wondered whether Dad was going to rack up a huge bill ordering French stuff made of unspeakable parts of various animals. Mother would probably rein him in, but they both liked wine. There goes the family fortune.

You could toggle and zoom the window. I put the crosshairs on Puerto Villamil, and cranked it up to 250X, the maximum. The image wobbled and vibrated, but then cleared up. I could see our hotel, and people walking around, the size of ants. With careful toggling, I found the rocky beach where I’d spent my last time actually alone.

“Hey,” said a voice behind me, “that’s where we met?” It was the pilot, of course, Paul Collins, crouching down so he could see what was on my screen. Was that impolite?

“Yeah, where you nailed that iguana with a rock. Or am I imagining things?”

“No, your memory is perfect. I wondered if you wanted to play some cards. We’re getting a game together before anyone else claims the table upstairs.”

I was flattered and a little nervous that he had come down to find me. “Sure, if I know the game.”

“Poker. Just for pennies.”

“Okay. I could do that.” The kids in high school had stopped playing poker with me because I always won, and they couldn’t figure out how I was cheating. I wouldn’t tell them my secret, which was no secret: fold unless you have something good. Most of the other kids just stayed in the game, trusting their luck, hoping to improve their hands at the last minute. That’s idiotic, my uncle Bert taught me; only one person is going to win. Make it be you, or be gone.

I got my purse out of the little suitcase and glanced at Card. He was wrapped up in a game or something, virtual headset on. Mental note: that way nobody can sneak up behind you and see what you’re doing.

Upstairs, there were five people at the table, including Dad. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Might as well just give her the money.”

“Come on, Dad. I don’t always win.”

He laughed. “Just when I’m in the game.” He actually was a pretty bad poker player, not too logical for an engineer. But he played for fun, not money.

We spent a pleasant couple of hours playing Texas Hold-’em and seven-card stud. I dealt five-card stud a couple of times, the purest game, but that wasn’t enough action for most of them.

Dad was way ahead when I left, which was both satisfying and annoying. I learned that pilot Paul plays pretty much like me, close to the chest. If he stayed in, he had something—or he bluffed so well no one found out.

I went in with ten dollars and left with twenty. That’s another thing Uncle Bert taught me: decide before you sit down how much you’re going to win or lose, and stop playing at that point, no matter how long you’ve been in the game. You may not make any friends if you win the first two hands and leave. But poker’s not about making friends, he said.

The gravity was down to 0.95 when I went back to my chair, and I could almost tell the difference. It was a funny feeling, like “Where did I leave my purse?”

I could just see North America coming up over the edge of the world. Zoomed in on Mexico City, a huge sprawl of places you probably wouldn’t like to visit without an armed guard.

Card was still in virtual, doing something with aliens or busty blondes. I put on the helmet myself and chinned through some of the menu. Nothing that really fascinated me. Curious, I spent a few minutes in “Roman Games: Caligula,” but it was loud and gory beyond belief. Settled into “midnight warm ocean calm,” and set the timer for six, then watched the southern sky, the beautiful Cross and Magellanic Clouds, roll left and right as the small boat bobbed in the current. I fell asleep for what seemed like about one second, and the chime went off.

I unlocked the helmet and instantly wished I was back on the calm sea. Someone had heard the dinner bell and puked. They couldn’t wait for zero gee? There went my appetite.

After a few minutes there was a double chime from the monitor and a little food icon, a plate with wavy lines of steam, started blinking in the corner. I went upstairs to get it, hoping I could eat up there.

I was the second person up the ladder, and there was a short line forming behind me. They said they would call ten people at a time for dinner, I guess at random.

There were ten white plastic boxes on the galley table, with our seat numbers. I grabbed mine and snagged a place at the center table, across from the rich kid, Barry.

He had the same thing I did, a plate with depressions for beef stew with a hard biscuit, a stack of small cooked carrots, and a pile of peas, all under plastic. Everything was hot in the middle and cool on the outside.

“I guess we can say good-bye to normal food,” he said, and I wondered what dinner normally was to him. Linen and crystal, sumptuous gourmet food dished out by servants? “Water boils at 170 degrees, at this pressure,” he continued. “It doesn’t get hot enough to cook things properly.”

“Yeah, I read about coffee and tea.” All instant and tepid. The stew was kind of chewy and dry. The carrots glowed radioactively, and the peas were a lurid bright green and tasted half-raw.

Funny, the peas started to roll around on their own. A couple jumped off the plate. There was a low moan that seemed to come from everywhere.

“What the hell?” Barry said, and started to stand up.

“Please remain seated,” Dr. Porter shouted over the sound. The floor and walls were vibrating. “If you’re not in your assigned seat, don’t return to it until the climber stops.”

“Stops?” he said. “What are we stopping for?”

“Probably not to pick up new passengers,” I said, but my voice cracked with fear.

Dr. Porter was standing with her feet in stirrup-like restraints, her head inside a VR helmet, her hands on controls.

“There isn’t any danger,” her muffled voice said. “The climber will stop for a short time while the ribbon-repair vehicle separates to repair a micrometeorite hole.” That was the squat machine on top of the climber. It separated with a clang and a lurch; we swayed a little.

I swallowed hard. So we were stuck here until that thing stitched up the hole in the tape. If it broke, we’d shortly become a meteorite ourselves. Or a meteor, technically, if we burned up before we hit the ground.

“I heard it happens about every third or fourth flight,” Barry said.

I’d read that, too, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be scary. Stop, repair the track, move on. I swallowed again and shook my head hard. Two children were crying, and someone was retching.

“Are you all right?” Barry asked, a quaver in his voice.

“Will be,” I said through clenched teeth.

“How about them Gators?”

“What? Are you insane?”

“You said you live in Gainesville,” he said defensively.

“Don’t follow football.” An admission that could get me burned at the stake in some quarters.

“Me, neither.” He paused. “You win at poker?”

“A thousand,” I said. “I mean ten bucks. A thousand pennies.”

“Might as well be dollars. Nothing to spend it on.”

Interesting thing for him to say. “You could buy stuff when we stop at the Hilton.”

“Yeah, but you couldn’t carry it with you. Unless you have less than ten kilograms.”

Maybe I should’ve saved a few ounces, bring back an Orbit Hilton tee shirt. Be the only one on the block.

The pilot Collins sat down next to Barry. “Thrills and chills,” he said.

“Routine stuff, right?” Barry said.

He paused a moment, and said, “Sure.”

“You’ve seen this happen before?” I said.

“In fact, no. But I haven’t ridden the elevator that many times.” He looked past me, to where Dr. Porter was doing mysterious things with the controls.

“Paul… you’re more scared than I am.”

He settled back into the chair, as if trying to look relaxed. “I’m just not used to not being in control. This is routine,” he said to Barry. “It’s just not my routine. I’m sure Porter has everything under control.”

His face said that he wasn’t sure.

“You’re free to walk around now,” Dr. Porter said, her head still hidden. (I suppose pilots can walk around all they want.) “We’ll be done here in less than an hour. You should be in your seats when we start up again.”

Barry relaxed a little at that, and turned his attention back to dinner.

Paul didn’t relax. He stood up slowly and took the vial of white pills from his pocket. He shook out two into his hand and headed for the galley, to pick up a squeeze bottle of water. He took the pills and went back to his seat.

Barry hadn’t seen that, his back to the galley. “You’re not eating,” he said.

“Yeah.” I took a small bite of the beef, but it was like chewing on cardboard. Hard to swallow. “You know, I’m not all that hungry. I’ll save it for later.” I pressed the plastic back down over the top and went over to the galley.

The refrigerator wouldn’t open—not keyed to my thumbprint— so I took the plate and a bottle of water back down to my seat.

Card was reading a magazine. “That food?”

“Mine, el Morono. Wait your turn.” I slid it under my seat but kept the water bottle. The pilot had taken two pills; I took three.

“What, you scared?”

“Good time to take a nap.” I resisted telling him that if the Mars pilot was scared, I could be scared, too, thank you very much.

I pulled the light blanket over me. It fastened automatically on the other side, a kind of loose cocoon for zero gee.

I reached for the VR helmet, but it was locked, a little red light glowing. Making sure everyone could hear emergency announcements, I supposed. Like “The ribbon has broken; everybody take a deep breath and pray like hell.”

After about a minute, the pills were starting to drag my eyelids down, even though the anxiety, adrenaline, was trying to keep me awake. Finally, the pills won.

I had a nightmare, but it wasn’t about the Elevator. I was with Elspeth, and we were working alongside her parents in the after-math of Gehenna.

Whoever caused Gehenna had started it months before, by contaminating the water supplies of Tel Aviv and Hefa. People who had lived in those cities even for a few days became carriers of the azazel, an initially harmless nano-organism that migrated to the lungs, to wait. It wasn’t even organic, just a submicroscopic machine.

Then the second part came. One minute after the beginning of Passover, thirteen car bombs and suicide bombs exploded simultaneously in Tel Aviv and Hefa and their suburbs. They were relatively small explosions, with a lot of smoke. It was a windy day, and the vapor from the bombs spread quickly.

They called it a “coadjuvent” reaction, which sounds cozy. Dust from the bombs activated the azazels. People’s lungs stopped working. They could breathe in, but couldn’t breathe out.

Respirators could delay death, for the ones who were already in hospitals. Two million others were dead in minutes.

So in my dream, Elspeth and I went from one rigid rotting corpse to another, collecting identification tags. Behind us was heavy machinery, digging a trench.

Mass burial was against Jewish law, or custom. But the smell was unbearable.

9 LOSING WEIGHT

I slept about ten hours, with no sense of rest. When I woke up it was right at midnight; the Elevator restarting hadn’t awakened me. The window said we’d gone 2250 miles and we were at 0.41 gee. You could see the whole Earth as a big globe. I took the pen out of my pocket and dropped it experimentally. It seemed to hesitate before falling, and then drifted down in no hurry.

It’s one thing to see that on the cube, but quite another to have it happening in your own world. We were in space, no doubt about it.

I unbuckled and pointed myself toward the john. Walking felt strange, as if I were full of helium or something. It was actually an odd combination of energy and light-headedness, not completely pleasant. Partly the gravity and partly the white pills, I supposed.

I went up the ladder with no effort, barely touching the rungs. You could learn to like this—though we knew what toll it eventually would take.

Probably the last time I’d sit on a regular toilet. I should ask the machine when we were due to hit a quarter gee and switch to the gruesome one. Go join the line just before. Or not. I’d be living with the sucking thing for months; one day early or late wouldn’t mean anything.

My parents were both zipped up, asleep. Several people were snoring; guess I’d have to get used to that.

There were four people I didn’t know talking quietly at the table. Downstairs, two people were playing chess while two others watched. I took the copy of Seventeen from my chair and walked over to the bike machine. Might as well get started on saving my bones.

The machine was set on a hill-climbing program, but I really didn’t want to be the first person aboard to work up a sweat. So I clicked it to EASY and pedaled along while reading the magazine.

So little of it was going to be useful or even meaningful for the next five years. Hot fashion tips! (“Get used to blue jumpsuits.”) Lose that winter flab! (“Don’t eat the space crap they put in front of you.”) How to communicate with your boyfriend! (“E-mail him from 250 million miles away.”)

I hadn’t really had a boyfriend since Sean, more than a year ago. Knowing that I was going to be in outer space and on Mars for six years put a damper on that.

It wasn’t that simple. The thing with Sean, the way he left, hurt me badly enough that the idea of leaving the planet was pretty attractive. No love life, none of that kind of pain.

Did that make me cold? I should have fallen helplessly in love with someone and pined away for him constantly, bursting into tears whenever I saw the Earth rise over the morning horizon. Or did I see that in a bad movie?

There weren’t any obviously great prospects aboard the carrier. They might start to look better as the years stretched on.

And the Gehenna dream was still with me. I did start to cry a little, and the tears just stayed in my eyes. Not enough gravity for them to roll down your cheek. After pedaling blind for a minute, I wiped my eyes on a nonabsorbent sleeve and cranked on. There was an article on Sal the Sal, a hot new cube star that everyone but me had heard of; I decided to read every word of that and then quit.

He was so sag beyond sag it was disgusting. Fascinating, too. Like if you can care little enough about everything, you automatically become famous. You ask him for an autograph, and he pulls out a rubber stamp, and everybody just comes because it’s so sag. Forgive me for not joining in. I bet Card knows his birth date and favorite color.

Pedaling through all that responsible journalism did put me on the verge of sweating, so I quit and went back to my seat. Card had put aside the helmet and was doing a word puzzle.

“Card,” I asked, “what’s Sal the Sal’s favorite color?”

He didn’t even look up. “Everybody knows it’s black. Makes him look 190 pounds instead of 200.”

Fair enough. I handed him the magazine. “Article on him if you want to read it.”

He grunted thanks. “Five letter word meaning ‘courage’? Second letter P, last letter K?”

I thought for a couple of seconds. “Spunk.”

He frowned. “You sure?”

“It’s old-fashioned.” Made me think of the pilot, who seemed to have “spunk,” Space Force and all, but was scared by an Elevator incident.

I sat down and buckled in and got scared all over again myself. He had a point, after all. Accidents could happen on the way to Mars, but nothing that would send us hurtling to a flaming death in Earth’s atmosphere.

Don’t be a drama queen, Dad would say. But the idea of dying that way made my eyes feel hot and dry.

10 SOCIAL CLIMBING

The fear faded as we fell into routine, climbing up toward the Hilton midpoint. We grew imperceptibly lighter every hour, obviously so day by day. By the sixth day, we’d lost 90 percent of our gravity. You could go upstairs without touching the ladder, or cross the room with a single step. There were a lot of collisions, getting used to that.

It was getting close to what we’d live with on the way to Mars. We wore gecko slippers that lightly stuck to the floor surface, and there were gray spots on the wall where they would also adhere.

The zero-gee toilet wasn’t bad once you got used to it. It uses flowing air instead of water, and you have to pee into a kind of funnel, which is different. The crapper is only four inches in diameter, and it uses a little camera to make sure you’re centered. A little less attractive than my yearbook picture.

I hope Dr. Porter gets paid really well. Some of the little ones didn’t climb the learning curve too swiftly, and she had to clean up after them.

It didn’t help the flavor of the food any to know where the water came from. Get used to the idea or starve, though. I found three meals on the menu I could eat without shuddering.

I mostly hung around with Elspeth and Barry and Kaimei, a Chinese girl a year younger than me. She was born in China but grew up, bilingual and sort of bicultural, in San Francisco. She was a dancer there, small and muscular, and you could tell by the way she moved in low gravity that she was going to love zero gee.

The smaller kids were going detroit with the light gravity. Dr. Porter set hours for playtime and tried to enforce them by restraining offenders in their seats. Then, of course, they’d have to go to the bathroom, and wouldn’t go quietly. She looked like she was going to be glad to send them on to Mars or leave them at the Hilton.

I would, too, in her place. Instead, I got to go along with them, at least the ones who were ten and older. After we left the tourists at the Hilton, we wouldn’t have anybody under ten aboard—if there were any small children in the Mars colony, they’d have to be born there.

Luckily, the two worst offenders were brother brats who were getting off at the Hilton. Eighty grand seems like more than they were worth, and you’d think their parents would have had a better time without them. Maybe they couldn’t find a babysitter for a few weeks. (Hell, I’d do it for less than eighty grand. But only if they let me use handcuffs and gags.)

We weren’t supposed to play any throwing and catching games, for obvious reasons, but Card had a rubber ball, and out of boredom we patted it back and forth in the short space between us. Of course it went in almost ruler-straight lines, how exciting, even when he tried to put English on it—he needed speed and a floor or wall to bounce off, and a little bit of space for the thing to bounce around in. But even he was smart enough not to try anything that would provoke Dr. Frankenstein’s wrath.

Elspeth and I signed up for the exercise machines at the same time, and chatted and panted together. I was in slightly better shape, from fencing team and swimming three times a week. No swimming pools on Mars, this century. Probably no swords to fence with, either. (The John Carter fictional character the ship was named after used a sword, I guess when his ray gun ran out of batteries. Maybe we could start the solar system’s first low-gravity fencing team. Then if the Martians did show up, we could fight them with something sharper than our wits.)

Actually, Elspeth was better than me on the stair-step machine, since in our flat Florida city you almost never encounter stairs. Ten minutes on that machine gave me pains in muscles I didn’t know I owned. But I could pedal or row all day.

Then we took turns in the “privacy module,” which they ought to just call a closet, next to the toilet, for our daily dry shower. Moist, actually; you had two throwaway towelettes moistened with something like rubbing alcohol—one of them for the “pits and naughty bits,” as Elspeth said, and the other for your face and the rest of your body. Then a small reusable towel for rubdown. Meanwhile, your jumpsuit is rolling around in a waterless washing machine, getting refreshed by hot air, ultrasound, and ultraviolet light. It comes out warm and soft and only smelling slightly of sweat. Not all of it your own, though that could be my imagination.

I fantasized about diving into the deep end of the city pool and holding my breath for as long as I could.

Six hours before we were due at the Hilton, we were asked to stick our heads into the helmets for “orientation,” which was more of a sales job than anything else. Why? They already had everybody’s money.

The Hilton had a large central area that stayed zero gee, the “Space Room,” with padded walls and a kind of oversized jungle gym. A pair of trampolines on opposite walls, so you could bounce back and forth, spinning, which looked like fun.

People didn’t stay there, though; the actual rooms were in two doughnut-shaped structures that spun, for artificial gravity, around the zero-gee area. The two levels were 0.3g and 0.7g.

The orientation didn’t mention it, but I knew that about half of the low-gee rooms housed permanent residents, rich old people whose hearts couldn’t take Earth gravity anymore. All of the people in the presentation were young and energetic, and vaguely rich-looking in their tailored Hilton jumpsuits, I guess no different from ours except for the tailoring and choice of colors.

We would stop there for four hours and could explore the hotel for two of them. We were all looking forward to the change of scenery.

“Don’t use the Hilton bathrooms unless you absolutely have to,” Dr. Porter said. “We want to keep that water in our system. Feel free to drink all of theirs you can hold.”

The four hours went by pretty quickly. Basically seeing how rich folks live without too much gravity. Most of them looked pretty awful, cadaverous with bright smiles. We looked at the prices at Conrad’s Café, and could see why they might not want to eat too much.

We did play around a bit in the weightless-gym area. Elspeth and I played catch with her little sister Davina, who obediently curled into a ball. Spinning her gave us all the giggles, but we had to stop before she got totally dizzy. She looked a little green as she unfolded, but I think was happy for the small adventure and the attention.

I did a few bounces on the pair of trampolines, managing four before I got off target and hit the wall. Card was good at it, but quit after eight or so rather than hog it. I suppose two people could use it at once if they were really good. Only once if they weren’t. Ouch.

The interesting thing about the jungle gym was gliding through it, rather than climbing on it. Launch yourself from the wall and try to wriggle your way through without touching the bars. The trick is starting slow and planning ahead—a demanding skill that will be oh-so-useful if I ever find myself having to thread through a jungle gym, running from Martians.

Dr. Porter had found a whistle somewhere. She called us to the corridor opening and counted noses, then told us to stay put while she went off in search of a missing couple. They were probably in Conrad’s Café guzzling hundred-dollar martinis.

I mentioned that to Card and said there wouldn’t be any vodka or gin on Mars—and he bet me a hundred bucks there would be. I decided not to take the bet. Seventy-five engineers would find a way.

The missing duo appeared in the elevator, and we crawled back home to wait in line for the john. The carrier seemed cramped.

The John Carter would be about three times as big, but nothing like the Hilton. After that, though, a whole planet to ourselves.

11 UP AND OUT

The trip from the Hilton out to the end of the tether was more subdued than the first leg. Only twenty-seven of us and all headed for Mars, except Dr. Porter. We did the gravity thing in reverse, slowly weighing more until we would (temporarily) have full Earth weight at the end of the tether.

We couldn’t go back to using the gravity-operated toilet. Didn’t want us to get used to it again, I suppose. When they fling us off to Mars, it will be zero gee again.

We spent a lot of time sitting around in small groups talking, some about Mars but mostly about who we were and where we came from.

Most of us were from the States, Canada, and Great Britain, because the lottery demographic was based on the amount of funding each country had put into the Mars Project. There were families from Russia and France. The flight following ours would have German, Australian, and Japanese families. A regular United Nations, except that everybody spoke English.

My mother talked to the French family in French, to stay in practice; I think some disapproved, as if it was a conspiracy. But they were fast friends by the time we got to the ship. The mother, Jac, was backup pilot as well as a chemical engineer. I didn’t have much to do with their boy, Auguste, a little younger than Card. His dad, Greg, was amusing, though. He’d brought a small guitar along, which he played softly, expertly.

The Russians kept to themselves but were easy enough to get along with. The boy, Yuri, was also a musician. He had a folding keyboard but evidently was shy about playing for others. He would put on earplugs and play for hours, from memory or improvising, or reading off the screen. Only a little younger than me, but not too social.

He did let me listen in on a bit of Rachmaninoff he was practicing, Rach 3—Piano Concerto no. 3—and he was incredibly nimble. (I studied piano for five years and quit as soon as Mother would let me. I’m an avid consumer of music but will never be a producer of it.)

Our doctor on the way to Mars would be Alphonzo Jefferson, who was also a scientist specializing in the immune system; his wife, Mary, was also a life scientist. Their daughter, Belle, was about ten, son, Oscar, maybe two years older.

The Manchester family were from Toronto, the parents both areologists. The kids, Michael and Susan, were ten-year-old twins I hadn’t gotten to know. I didn’t know Murray and Roberta Parienza well, either, Californians about our age (Murray the younger) whose parents came from Mexico, an astronomer and a chemist.

So our little UN among the younger generation was two Latins, a Russian, two African-Americans, two Israelis, and a Chinese-American, slightly outnumbering us plain white-bread North Americans.

We’d all be going to school via VR and e-mail during the six-month flight, though we started going on different days and, of course, would have class at different times, spread out over eleven time zones. If Yuri had a class at nine in the morning, that would be ten for Davina and Elspeth, eleven for Auguste, five in the afternoon for us Floridians, and eight at night for the Californians. It was going to make the social calendar a little complicated. As if there was anything to do.

Meanwhile, we could enjoy the extra elbow room we got from dumping off the nine tourists. I moved upstairs to sit next to Elspeth, which put Roberta on my right. Dr. Porter rolled her eyes at three young females in a row, and told us to keep the noise down, or she’d split us up. That wasn’t exactly fair, since the little kids were the real noisemakers, and besides, most of our parents were on the second level, too.

But you had to have some sympathy for her. The littlest ones were always testing her to see how far they could go before she applied the ultimate punishment: locked in the seat next to your parents with the VR turned off for X hours. She couldn’t hit them— some parents wouldn’t mind, but others would have a fit—and she couldn’t exactly make them go outside to play, though if she did that once, the others might calm down.

(It was no small trick to get a recalcitrant child back to its place while we were still in zero gee. They’d push off and fly away giggling while she stalked after them with her gecko slippers. Hard to corner somebody in a round room. The parents or other adults usually had to help.)

What finally worked was escalating punishment. Each time she had to strap a kid in, she added fifteen minutes’ VR deprivation to everyone’s next punishment, no exceptions. At ten, they were old enough to do the math, and started policing themselves—and behaving themselves, a small miracle.

We went a little faster on the second half, and it would’ve taken only four and a half days, except we had to stop again while the robot repaired a tear in the tape ahead.

I had a vague memory of watching the news when they started building the two Mars ships eleven years ago. They’d taken the fuel tanks from the old pre-Space Elevator cargo shuttles, cut them up, and rearranged the parts. The first one, the Carl Sagan, was assembled in Low Earth Orbit; the second up at GEO, where the Hilton is now. I guess the Elevator wasn’t available for the first. Anyhow, they both took a long crawl up here, spiraling slowly up with some sort of solar-power engine. The first one took off while they were still working on ours.

The Sagan had made two round-trips, and was on its third, in orbit around Mars now. Ours had only been once, but at least we knew that it worked.

Of course a spaceship doesn’t have to be streamlined to work in outer space, with no air to resist, but the fuel tanks these were built from had gone through the atmosphere, and so they looked kind of like a hokey rocket ship from an old twentieth movie, though with funny-looking arms sticking out on the left and right, with the knobs we’d be living in.

We could see the John Carter a couple of hours before we got there, at least as a highly magnified blob. Slowly it took shape, the stubby rocket ship with those two pods. Once we were on the way, it would start rotating, once each ten seconds.

The carrier slowed down for the last couple of minutes. Strapped in, we watched the spaceship draw closer and closer.

It wasn’t too impressive, only ninety feet long, unpainted except for the white front quarter, the streamlined lander. We were going in through the side of that, a crawl tunnel like we’d used for the Hilton, but with gravity.

The carrier came to a stop, and Dr. Porter and Paul put on space suits to go check things out. They came back in a few minutes and said things were fine, but a little cold. The air that came through the open air-lock door was wintry—colder than it ever gets at home. Paul said not to worry; we’d warm it up.

They opened the storage area under the exercise machines, and we all pitched in, carrying things over. There were some pretty heavy boxes, a lot of it food and water for the trip. “Starter” water, that would be recycled. I’d almost gotten resigned to the fact that a little bit of every drink I took had gone through my brother at least once.

You could see your breath. I had goose bumps, and my teeth started chattering. Barry and his parents were the same way, fellow Floridians. My parents and Card seemed to have some Eskimo blood.

A lot of the stuff we stored in the Mars lander, under Paul’s supervision. Some of it went into A or B, the pods where we’d be living.

That was sort of like the Hilton in miniature. There was a relatively large zero-gee room, a cylinder twenty-two feet long by twenty-seven feet wide. On opposite sides there were two four-foot holes, A and B, with ladders going down. No elevators.

It was all kind of topsy-turvy, with the temporary gravity we got from the Elevator cable’s spin. Up and down were normal in the little spaceship, the lander. Pretty much like an airplane, with seats and an aisle. But carrying stuff back into the zero-gee room, we walked along the wall. We carried stuff down a ladder into B and strapped it into place. Then we waited back in the Elevator while they turned the thing around 180 degrees. Then we could go down A’s ladder.

I couldn’t get warm. Fortunately, one of the things I delivered was a bundle of blankets for “Sleeping A.” I was A-8, so after we finished, I liberated one of the blankets and wrapped it around myself.

Saying good-bye to Dr. Porter was more emotional than I would have thought. Tears that acted reasonably, rolling down your cheeks. She hugged me, and whispered, “Take care of Card. You’ll love him soon enough.”

She went back to the carrier, and the air lock closed. Paul warned us we all had thirty minutes to use the toilet, then we’d be strapped in for almost two hours. I didn’t really need to go, but might as well be prudent, and I was mildly curious about what I’d be putting up with for the next six months. I got at the end of the line and asked my reader for a random story. It was an amusing thing from France a million years ago, about a necklace.

The zero-gee toilet was the same as the carrier’s, but without the little camera. I didn’t miss it; nor did I miss the target.

We strapped into our seats in the lander and waited for twenty minutes or so. Then there was a little “clank” sound, the cable letting go of us, and we were in zero gee, flung away.

Most of the speed we needed for getting to Mars was “free”—when we left the high orbit at the end of the Space Elevator, we were like a stone thrown from an old-fashioned sling, or a bit of mud flung from a bicycle tire. Two weeks of relatively slow crawling to the top built up into one big boost, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars.

We had to stay strapped in because there would be course corrections, all automatic. The ship studied our progress, then pointed in different directions and made small bursts of thrust.

It was only a little more than an hour later when Paul gave us the all-clear to go explore the ship and get a bite to eat.

Compared to the Space Elevator carrier, it was huge. From the lander, you go into the zero-gee room, which was about three times the size of our living room at home. The circular wall was all storage lockers that opened with the touch of a recessed button, no handles sticking out to snag you.

You climb backward down the ladder, in a four-foot-wide tunnel, to get to the living areas, A or B. Both pods were laid out the same. The first level, for sleeping, had the least gravity, close to what we’d have on Mars. Then there was the work/study area, basically one continuous desk around the wall, with moveable partitions and maybe twenty viewscreens. They were set up as fake windows, like the carrier’s “default mode”—thankfully not spinning around six times a minute.

The bottom level was the galley and recreation area. I felt heavy there, after all the zero gee, but it was only about half Earth’s gravity, or 1.7 times what we’d have on Mars, the next five years.

It had a stationary bicycle and a rowing machine with sign-up rosters. You were supposed to do an hour a day on them. I took 7 A.M., since 8 and 9 were already spoken for.

Elspeth and Davina found me down there, and we had the first of a couple of hundred lunches aboard the good ship John Carter. A tolerable chicken-salad sandwich with hot peas and carrots. Card showed up and had the same. He made a face at the vegetables but ate them. We’d been warned to eat everything in front of us. The ship wasn’t carrying snacks. If you got hungry between meals, you’d just have to be hungry. (I suspected we’d find ways around that.)

It was a lot more roomy than you’d expect a spaceship to be, which was a provision for disaster. If something went wrong, and one of the pods became uninhabitable, all twenty-six of us could move into the other pod. Then if something happened to it, I guess we could all move into the zero-gee room and the lander. I don’t know what we’d eat, though. Each other. (“It’s your turn now, Card. Be a good boy and take your pill.”)

I sat down at one of the study stations and typed in my name and gave it a thumbprint. I had a few letters from friends and a big one from the University of Maryland. That was my “orientation package,” though actual classes wouldn’t start for another week.

It was very handy—advice about where to get a parking sticker, dormitory hours, location of emergency phones and all. More useful was a list of my class hours and their virtual-reality program numbers, so I could be in class after a fashion.

It was a little more complicated for me than for the kids actually on campus. Up in the right-hand corner of the screen were UT, Universal Time, and TL, time lag. The time lag now, the time it took for a signal to get from me to the classroom, was only 0.27 of a second. By the time we got to Mars, it could be as much as twenty-five minutes (or as little as seven, depending on the distance between the planets). So if I asked the professor a question at what was to me the beginning of the fifty-minute class, he’d already be halfway through, Earth time. He’d get my question while everybody else was packing up their books, and his answer would get to me twenty-five minutes after class was over.

Actually, it would be even more complicated once we were on Mars Time, since the day is forty minutes longer. But I didn’t have to worry about that until we got halfway there, and switched.

Ship time was Universal Time, until we hit the halfway point, which put us on the same schedule as people living just upriver from London, which I guess had made sense when they were planning things on Earth. Why not go straight to Mars Time? Whatever, I got a few pages into the college catalog, and my body said sleep, even if it was only two, 1400, to the folks in Merrie Olde Englande. I dragged my blanket up to the light-gee sleeping floor and wrapped myself up in it, and slept till the dinner bell.

12 TROUBLE

The first week or two we were under way, I was asleep as much as awake, or more, which got Mother worried. She had me go talk to Dr. Jefferson, who asked me whether I felt depressed, and I’m afraid my response was a little loud and emotional. I mean, no, I wasn’t depressed; I was just imprisoned and hurtling off to some uncertain future, probably to die before I was legally an adult, and I asked him aren’t you depressed?

He smiled and nodded (maybe not “yes”), and gave me a light hug, the big black bear, which might have made me slightly telepathic. It wasn’t so much the abstract danger. I was really upset at not being able to concentrate, falling asleep over my college homework… but what was that, compared to being the only doctor aboard, waiting for someone to need an appendix out, or even a brain tumor? Or just pulling a tooth or looking up someone’s ass with an ass-o-scope. He only had to take care of twenty-six of us, but anything could happen, and he was responsible for our lives or deaths.

He probably had a suitcase full of pills for depression, and said he’d give me some if I needed them, but first he wanted me to keep a personal record for a week—how many hours asleep and awake; when I lost my temper or felt like crying. After a week, we would talk about it.

He said he was no psychologist, but that seemed to work, maybe because I wanted to impress him, or reassure him. After a week, I was sleeping eight hours—counting the hours lying with my eyes closed listening to music—and pretty much awake the rest of the time. And I was undramatically less sure that space wanted to kill us all, especially me.

All of us between ten and twenty had “jobs,” which is to say chores. Mine was easy, cleaning the galley after meals, a lot less mess than the kitchen at home, with nothing actually cooked. Card had to clean the shower, which I suppose enriched his fantasy life.

Everybody spent thirty minutes a day learning about Mars. That was mostly boring reinforcement of stuff we already knew, or should have known. I tolerated the half hour until regular classes started, and really just sort of thought about other things while it droned on. Nobody was testing me on Mars facts, but I had exams in history and math and philosophy.

Of course, Mars would test me on Mars. I knew that and didn’t think about it.

School was absorbing but tiring. Part of it was that every professor was kind of a star—I suppose every subject, every department,picked its most dramatic teacher for the VR classes, but the net result was almost like being yelled at—“This led to the Hundred Years War—how long do you think that war LASTED?” “Look where potassium and sodium are on the Periodic Table—what does THAT suggest to you?” Socrates and Plato getting it on, more than I wanted to know about student-teacher relationships. And could I have just one subject that’s not supposed to be the most important thing in the world? I should’ve taken plumbing.

Actually, the stories and plays in the literature course all promise to be interesting, no surprise, since that has always been the most enjoyable part of school. It doesn’t have any exams, either, just essays, which suits me.

I didn’t want to major in lit, though. I couldn’t see myself as a teacher, and I don’t think anybody else gets paid to read the stuff for a living. I didn’t have to choose a major for a couple of years. Maybe I could become the first Martian veterinarian. Wait for some animals to show up.

Something I would never have predicted was that the virtual-reality classrooms smelled more real than our real spaceship. If someone was chewing gum or eating peanuts near where you were “sitting,” it was really intense. Our air aboard the John Carter was thin, and it circulated well. When you peeled the plastic off a meal, you could smell it for a few seconds, but then it was pretty much gone, and a lot of the flavor as well.

Roberta and Yuri were also starting college, though in Yuri’s case it was more like a practical conservatory. Most of his courses were music. (I wondered how the time lag was going to affect that. When I suffered through my first piano lessons in grade school and middle school, I cringed in anticipation of the whack-whack-whack Ms. Varleman would make with her stick on the side of the piano whenever I lagged behind. I might have liked learning piano if the teacher was twenty-five minutes away!)

My life settled into a fairly busy routine. Classes and homework and chores and exercise periods. A blood test said I was losing calcium, and so my forty-five-minute exercise requirement went up to ninety minutes; two hours if I could schedule it. Hard to beat the combination—what else is both tiring and boring for two hours?

Actually, I could read or do limited VR while I was biking or rowing. It’s kind of fun to row down the streets of New York or Paris. You do get run over a lot, but you get used to it.

Routine or no routine, the possibility of disaster is always in the back of your mind. But you always think in terms of something dramatic, like an explosion on board or a huge meteoroid collision. When it did happen, nobody knew but the pilot.

We had sprung a leak. On the cube, that would be air shrieking out, or at least whistling or hissing. Which would be kind of nice, because then you could find it and put a piece of duct tape over it. Ours was seeping out silently, and we didn’t have too long to find the problem.

Paul put a message up on every screen, a strobing red exclamation point followed by WE ARE LOSING AIR! That got almost everybody’s attention.

We were losing about a half of one percent a day. We were still four months away from Mars, so the oxygen would be getting pretty thin if we didn’t fix it.

It was easy enough to find the general area of the leak. Every part of the ship could be closed off in case of emergency, so Paul just had us close up each section of the ship, one at a time, for about two hours. That was long enough to tell whether the pressure was still dropping.

First we closed off Pod A, where I lived, and I was relieved to find it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in Pod B, either, nor the solar-storm radiation shelter. It wasn’t the zero-gee center room, which basically left the lander. That was bad news. As well as being the vehicle that would get us to the Martian surface, that was where all the pilot’s instrumentation and controls were. We couldn’t very well just close it off for the next three months, then refill it with air for the trip down.

In fact, though, we wound up doing a version of that. First, Paul tried to find the leak with a “punk”—not like Granddad’s ancient music, but a stick of something that smoldered. The smoke should have led us to the leak. It didn’t, though, which meant we didn’t have a simple thing like a meteor (“micrometeoroid,” technically) hole. A seam or something was leaking, maybe the port that the pilot looked through, or the air lock to the outside.

Of course there was also an inside air lock, between the lander and the rest of the ship, and that gave us the solution. Paul didn’t have to live in the lander; he just checked things every now and then. In fact, he could monitor all the instruments with a laptop thing, from anywhere.

So although it made him nervous—not being able to run things from the pilot’s chair—we closed off the lander and just let it leak. If Paul had to go in there every day or two, he could put on a space suit and go through the air lock.

It made some of us nervous, too, like being cargo in a ship without a rudder. Okay, that was irrational. But we’d already had one emergency. What if the next one called for immediate action, but Paul had to suit up, waiting for the air lock to cycle through? That took about two minutes.

In two minutes we covered almost a thousand miles. A lot could happen. And there weren’t any space suits for the rest of us.

13 VIRTUAL FRIENDS AND FOES

I was not the most popular girl in my classes—I wasn’t in class at all, of course, except as a face in a cube. As the time delay grew longer, it became impossible for me to respond in real time to what was going on. So if I had questions to ask, I had to time it so I was asking them at the beginning of class the next day.

That’s a prescription for making yourself a tiresome know-it-all bitch. I had all day to think about the questions and look stuff up. So I was always thoughtful and relevant and a tiresome know-it-all bitch. Of course it didn’t help at all that I was younger than most and a brave pioneer headed for another planet. The novelty of that wore off real fast.

Card wasn’t having any such problems. But he already knew most of his classmates, some of them since grade school, and was more social anyhow. I’ve usually been the youngest in class, and the brain.

I was also a little behind my classmates socially, or a lot behind. I had male friends but didn’t date much. Still a virgin, technically, and when I was around couples who obviously weren’t, I felt like I was wearing a sign proclaiming that fact.

That raised an interesting possibility. I never could see myself still a virgin five years from now. I might wind up being the first girl to lose her virginity on Mars—or on any other planet at all. Maybe someday they’d put up a plaque: “In this storage room on such-and-such a date…”

But with whom? I couldn’t imagine Yuri tearing himself away from the keyboard long enough to get involved. Oscar and Murray seemed like such kids, though once they reached college age, that might be different.

There would be plenty of older men on Mars, who I’m sure would be glad to overlook my personality defects and lack of prominent secondary sexual characteristics. But thinking of an older man that way made me cringe.

Well, the next two ships would also be made up of families. Maybe I’d meet some nice Aussie or a guy from Japan or China. We could settle down on Mars and raise a bunch of weird children who ate calcium like candy and grew to be eight feet tall. Well, maybe not for a few generations.

Nobody talked about it much, but the idea of putting a breeding population of young men and women on Mars gave this project some of its urgency. After Kolkata and Gehenna, any nightmare was possible.

The mind veers away from it, but how much more sophisticated would the warriors have to be, to make the whole world into Gehenna? How much crazier would they have to be, to want it?

We got into that once on the climber, Dad doubting that it would be physically possible, at least for a long time, and also doubting that the most fanatical terrorist would be that crazy. To hate not just his enemies, but all of humanity, that much. Mother nodded, but she had her bland patient look: I could argue, but won’t. Card was kind of bored, familiar as he was with playing doomsday scenarios. Sometimes I think that nothing is really real to him, so why should doomsday be any different?

Time started passing really fast once we were settled into school, and most of our parents into their various research projects. It was more comfortable than you would expect, with all of us crammed into a space the size of a poverty-level tenement—but the parents and kids seemed to be giving each other more respect, more space.

Even the little kids calmed down. Mary Jefferson taught all four grades at once, in a partitioned-off part of B galley, and when they weren’t in school or exercising, they played down in the zero-gee room, pretty far from anyone’s work area, and usually respected the no-screaming rule.

(The idea of “Spaceship Earth” is such an old cliché that Grand-dad makes a face at it. But being constantly aware that we were isolated, surrounded by space, did seem to make us more considerate of one another. So if Earth is just a bigger ship, why couldn’t they learn to be as virtuous as we are? Maybe they don’t choose their crew carefully enough.)

Roberta was having more trouble than I was, making the transitionfrom high school to college. For one thing, she’s very social, and used to studying together with other girls and boys. That wasn’t really possible on the ship, with us all going to different schools. Besides, she’d tested into advanced math and chemistry, while I was starting with calculus-for-dummies and general physical science. We both had English lit and philosophy, but of course with different textbooks.

Mother sometimes worried about my tendency to be a loner, but it turns out to be an advantage, studying when your classmates are millions of miles away.

I did coordinate my study hours with Roberta, so we were both doing lit and philosophy homework at the same time, and she helped me over some humps in the math course. We also had exercise and meal hours together most of the time, along with Elspeth.

It was not much like anybody’s picture of college life. No wicked fraternity parties, no experimenting with drugs and sex and finding out how much beer you can hold before overflowing. Maybe this whole Mars thing was a ruse my parents made up to keep me off campus. My education was going to be so incomplete!

That was actually a part of college I hadn’t been looking forward to. Not “growing up too fast,” as Mother repeatedly said, but looking foolish because I didn’t know how to act when confronted with temptation. When do you politely decline and when should you be indignant?

And when should you say yes?

14 MIDWAY

At the midpoint of our voyage, Mars was a bright yellow beacon in front of us, Earth a bright blue star behind. It was an occasion to party, and the Mars Corporation had actually allotted a few kilograms’ mass for a large plastic bottle of Rémy Martin cognac for that purpose.

Since several of the adults didn’t drink, it proved enough to get the rest of them about as intoxicated as they wanted to be, or perhaps a little more. Like me.

We joked about the drinking age between planets, and my parents shrugged. Since there was no other alcohol aboard ship, I wasn’t likely to become a drunkard. Which doesn’t mean I couldn’t get into trouble.

Paul had only one drink, mixed with water—the curse of being captain, he said wryly—but I had three before my parents went to bed, and maybe two afterward. It lowered my inhibitions, but I suppose I wanted them lowered.

The drinks were served in the galley, where there was gravity to keep the booze in the glasses, but some of us moved into the zero-gee area to dance. Pretty strange, dancing without a floor. It was all kind of freestyle and rambunctious. We took turns asking the ship for music. A lot of it was old, jazz and ska and waterbug, or ancient like waltzes and rock, but there was plenty of city and sag.

Paul and I danced for a while, usually with each other, and I guess I started feeling glamorous, or at least sexy, dominating the captain’s attentions. Not that there was much unmarried competition.

The zero-gee room goes to night-light from midnight till six, conserving power and giving people a reasonably private, or at least anonymous, place to have sex—or romance, but I don’t think much of that was going on. There was no real privacy in the sleeping quarters, just a thin partition, which didn’t prevent some people from embarrassing the rest of us. But most couples waited and met at one dark end or the other of the zero-gee room.

At midnight the only others in the zero-gee room were the Manchesters, who left us alone after a bit of obvious yawning and stretching.

Afterward, we agreed that we both had been sort of time bombs ticking, waiting for the midnight hour. If I hadn’t wanted to be “seduced,” I could have left while the lights were still on. But there was something desperate going on inside me, that wasn’t just sexual desire or curiosity.

Our whispered conversation had gotten around to virginity, and my sort of in-between status, which I’d never told anyone about. But the booze loosened my tongue. When I was thirteen I was fooling around with a boy who had “borrowed” his sister’s vibrator, and in the course of investigating how to use it, he was a little clumsy and popped me. It wasn’t very painful, but it was the end of that relationship, right at the playing-doctor stage.

He didn’t go to my school, so I didn’t know whether any of the other boys knew about it, but I imagined they could all tell at a glance that I wasn’t a virgin anymore. After about a year or so I realized that I still actually was.

I was unpopular and unattractive, or at least felt like it. Skipped a grade but then got it back after my parents took me out of school for a year to go overseas. They worked in London and Madrid, and I went back and forth, learning about enough Spanish to order a Coke in a restaurant.

From not speaking Spanish it only took a few minutes for the conversation to get about to the difficulties of having sex in space, with lack of privacy being only one of several problems, with the conservation of momentum and angular momentum high on the list. Difficult to describe, so I asked him to demonstrate, with our clothes on, of course.

That stage didn’t last too long. We explored another problem, that of getting at least partially undressed while both of you had to hold on to a handle or go spinning apart.

We did manage to get our bottoms mostly removed. He looked kind of large, if smaller than my friend’s sister’s vibrator, but he was slow and gentle. As soon as he got it all the way in, he ejaculated, but we stayed together, and he recovered in a few minutes and did it again.

I’d been prepared for an ordeal, but in fact it was all pretty exciting and fun. I kept losing my grip, and he’d swim after me, while I groped for one of the handles. We wound up floating in midair, though, holding each other’s shoulders, rotating slowly, then not slowly.

I didn’t really have an orgasm until later, in the shower, but it was still overwhelming. Floating in space with Paul inside me, and me inside his arms. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night, and I woke up with the feeling still fresh. His face in the twilight, eyes closed, concentrating, then losing control. And me not a virgin anymore, not even technically.

It was several days before we could find the privacy to talk about it. We were both in the galley for the last breakfast shift, and I killed some time cleaning up the microwave and prep area until the last people left.

He said it quickly, almost sotto voce: “Carmen I’m sorry I took advantage of you.”

“You didn’t. I loved it.”

“But you were drinking, and I really wasn’t.”

“Just to get up the courage.” Not strictly true; I’m sure I would have had a couple no matter who was at the party. “Don’t feel guilty.” He was still sitting down; I leaned over and hugged him from behind. “Really, don’t. You made me so happy.”

I could tell he was trying not to squirm. “Made me happy too,” he said in an unhappy voice.

I sat down across from him. “What? What is it? Age difference?”

“No. That’s part of it, but no.” He leaned back. “It’s my being pilot, which is to say captain.” He visibly struggled, trying to find words. “I want to show you how I feel, but I can’t. I can’t court you; I can’t treat you differently from anybody else.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t expect—”

“But I want to! That night meant as much to me, maybe more, and I want to treat you like a lover. I can’t even wink at you, not really. Let alone hold your hand, or…”

Or do it again, I realized. Even if we manufactured an opportunity. “Do you really think it’s a secret? The Manchesters pretty obviously left to give us some privacy.”

“You haven’t told anybody?”

“No.” Not in so many words. But Elspeth and Kaimei gave me big grins that were pretty clear.

“That’s important. The ship runs on rumor as much as hydrogen. People will whisper; they’ll know, but as long as you and I keep it private, my… my authority isn’t compromised.”

His authority. And a devilish part of me wanted to tell everybody. I’m a real woman—I’m fucking the captain. “I can see that.”

Somebody was coming down the ladder. He stood up.

It was my mother, coffee cup in hand.

“Oh… hello, Paul.” Amazing how much she could communicate with two words.

“Morning, Laura. See you later, Carmen.” He went up the ladder as soon as she let go.

She watched his retreating ass with a little smile. Then she got a spoonful of coffee and poured hot water on it. “I was younger than you,” she said. “Seventeen, and no, it wasn’t your father.”

“You didn’t meet until graduate school,” I said inanely.

“He’s eleven years older?”

“More like ten. He was born in February.”

She put some sugar in the coffee, not normal for her. “Don’t get too attached to him. He has a life on Mars, and he’ll have to stay there.”

“I might want to stay there, too.” Even as I said the words, I couldn’t believe they’d come out of my mouth.

“We all have the option, of course.” She touched my shoulder. “He’s a nice man. Don’t forget there are a billion of them back on Earth.”

She capped the coffee and swung up the ladder, back to her research station, without saying any motherly things like Don’t let him hurt you or Don’t let your father know, proving life is not a soap.

Of course Dad would know, along with everybody else. If the pilot had fucked any other innocent young thing, I suppose I would have known by breakfast.

I didn’t feel particularly young or innocent. If everyone knows, why not keep doing it? It wasn’t as if I could get pregnant; with Delaze, I wouldn’t start ovulating until after we’d landed on Mars, as he well knew. Even mighty space-pilot sperm wouldn’t live that long.

After we reached the halfway mark, all of us young ones met our volunteer “Mars mentors,” people who weren’t teachers or parents but wanted to help us with our transition to their world.

My guy was “Oz,” Dr. Oswald Penninger, a life scientist like Mother. He had a big smile and a salt-and-pepper beard.

Conversation was awkward, with an eight-minute delay between “How are you?” and “Fine,” but we got used to it. It was kind of like really slow instant messaging. You ask a question, then do something else for a while, and he answers, then does something else for a while. We didn’t normally use visual, unless there was something to show.

He was like everybody’s favorite uncle, acknowledging the difference in our ages but then treating me like an equal who didn’t know quite as much. I grew to like him better than I did most of the people on board, which I suppose was predictable. He was sixty-three, an African-American from Georgia, exobiologist and artist. They didn’t have paper for drawing, of course, but he did beautifully intricate work on-screen that galleries in Atlanta and Oslo printed and sold.

Should an artist’s pictures match his personality? Oz was a jolly plump man, given to sly wordplay and funny stories. But his art was dark and disturbing. He’d studied art in Norway for two years, and said his stuff was positively cheerful compared to the other people’s in his studio. I’d have to see that to believe it.

He zapped me the software that he uses for drawing, but I’ve never had much talent in that direction. He said he’ll show me some tricks when we meet in person. Meanwhile, I’ve downloaded a beginner’s text on cartooning and will try to learn enough to surprise him.

Funny to have a friend you’ve never touched or actually seen. I wonder whether we’ll like each other in person.

15 SEXUAL DISORDER

About a week went by without Paul suggesting another tryst, if that’s the right word. He seemed to be going out of his way to treat me like just another passenger, which was of course according to plan. But I was a little anxious because he was playing the part too well.

He wasn’t avoiding me, but nobody on the ship was harder to get alone. I kept taking the last breakfast shift, and finally managed to corner him.

As I approached, he got a kind of resigned look, but reached out and took my hand. “I’m afraid I’m in trouble. With Mars.”

“Because of me?”

He shrugged. “You’re not in trouble. But somebody heard, and is whizzed at me for ‘seducing one of the Earth children.’ ”

“I’m not a child! I’m nineteen, going on thirty.”

“As I pointed out. They still say it was immature and unprofessional of me. Maybe they’re right.”

“It’s not fair. We didn’t really do anything wrong.”

“Somebody thinks otherwise. Somebody here, who told somebody there.”

“Who? Someone who has it in for you, or me?”

“I’m pretty sure who it is on Mars, but I don’t know about here. It didn’t have to start out malicious; just a juicy scrap of gossip.” He took a sip of coffee that was probably cold. “I hope your parents don’t find out this way.”

“Oh, they know. At least Mother does, and she’s okay with it.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s good. But I guess we’d better put it on ice for a while.”

I tried to keep anger out of my voice. “I don’t see why. What’s done is done.”

“The sexual part, yes. But now it would be insubordination as well. Which might be more serious. Would be.”

“For your career.”

“Not exactly. Nobody can fire me. But the colony’s a small town, and I have to live there the rest of my life.”

“If you…” I almost said something I would regret. “If you say so. But once we’re on Mars?”

“Things will be different. People will get to know you, and accept you as an adult.”

“Eventually. Guess I’ll be one of the kids from Earth for a while.”

“Not for long, I hope.” He brightened. “Privacy isn’t such an issue there, either, finding a time and place. My roommate wouldn’t mind getting lost for a couple of hours, and you’ll pick one you can trust.”

Kaimei or Elspeth, for sure. “Unless they stick me with Card.”

“They wouldn’t be that cruel.” He stood and hugged me and gave me a long kiss. “I’d better move along. You’ll be okay?”

“Sure. I’m sorry. But I can wait.” I didn’t start crying until he was gone.

16 A NEW WORLD

Someday, I thought, maybe before I’m dead, Mars will have its own space elevator, but until then people have to get down there the old-fashioned way, in space-shuttle mode. It’s like the difference between taking an elevator from the top floor of a building or jumping off with an umbrella and a prayer. Fast and terrifying.

We’d lived with the lander as part of our home for weeks, then as a mysterious kind of threatening presence, airless and waiting. Most of us weren’t eager to go into it.

Before we’d made our second orbit of Mars, Paul opened the inner door, prepared to crack the air lock, and said, “Let’s go.”

We’d been warned, so we were bundled up against the sudden temperature drop when the air lock opened, and were not surprised that our ears popped painfully. It warmed up for an hour, and then we had to take our little metal suitcases and float through the air lock to go strap into our assigned seats, and try not to shit while we dropped like a rock to our doom.

From my studies I knew that the lander loses velocity by essentially trading speed for heat—hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at a drastic angle so the ship heats up to cherry red. What the diagrams in the physical science book don’t show is the tooth-rattling vibration, the bucking and gut-wrenching wobble. If I’m never that scared again in my life, I’ll be really happy.

All of the violence stopped abruptly when the lander decided to become a glider, I guess a few hundred miles from the landing strip. I wished we had windows like a regular airplane, but then realized that might be asking for a heart attack. It was scary enough just to squint at Paul’s two-foot-wide screen as the ground rose up to meet us, too steep and fast to believe.

We landed on skis, grating and rumbling along the rocky ground. They’d moved all the big rocks out of our way, but we felt every one of the small ones. Paul had warned us to keep our tongues away from our teeth, which was a good thing. It could be awkward, starting out life on a new planet unable to speak because you’ve bitten off the tip of your tongue.

We hadn’t put on the Mars suits for the flight down; they were too bulky to fit in the close-ranked seats—and I guess there wasn’t any disaster scenario where we would still be alive and need them. So the first order of the day was to get dressed for our new planet.

We’d tested them several times, but Paul wanted to be supercautious the first time they were actually exposed to the Martian near vacuum. The air lock would only hold two people at once, so we went out one at a time, with Paul observing us, ready to toss us back inside if trouble developed.

We unpacked the suits from storage under the deck and sorted them out. One for each person and two blobby general-purpose ones.

We were to leave in reverse alphabetical order, which was no fun, since it made our family dead last. The lander had never felt particularly claustrophobic before, but now it was like a tiny tin can, the sardines slowly exiting one by one.

At least we could see out, via the pilot’s screen. He’d set the camera on the base, where all seventy-five people had gathered to watch us land, or crash. That led to some morbid speculation on Card’s part. What if we’d crash-landed into them? I guess we’d be just as likely to crash into the base behind them. I’d rather be standing outside with a space suit on, too.

We’d seen pictures of the base a million times, not to mention endless diagrams and descriptions of how everything worked, but it was kind of exciting to see it in real time, to actually be here. The farm part looked bigger than I’d pictured it, I guess because the people standing around gave it scale. Of course the people lived underneath, because of radiation.

It was interesting to have actual gravity. I said it felt different, and Mom agreed, with a scientific explanation. Residual centripetal blah-blah-blah. I’ll just call it real gravity, as opposed to the manufactured kind. Organic gravity.

A lot of people undressed on the spot and got into their Mars suits. I didn’t see any point in standing around for an hour in the thing. I’m also a little shy, in a selective way. Paul had touched me all over, but he’d never seen me without a top. I waited until he was on the other side of the air lock before I revealed my unvoluptuous figure and barely necessary bra. Which I’d have to take off anyhow, for the skinsuit part of the Mars suit.

That part was like a lightweight body stocking. It fastened up the front with a gecko strip, then you pushed a button on your wrist and something electrical happened and it clasped your body like a big rubber glove. It could be sexy-looking if your body was.

The outer part of the Mars suit was more like lightweight armor, kind of loose and clanky when you put it on, but it also did an electrical thing when you zipped up, and fit more closely. Then clumsy boots and gloves and a helmet, all airtight. The joints would sigh when you moved your arms or legs or bent at the waist.

Card’s suit had a place for an extension at the waist, since he could grow as much as a foot taller while we were here. Mine didn’t have any such refinement, though there was room to put on a little weight if I loved Mars cooking.

Since we did follow strict anti-alphabetical order, Card got the distinction of being the last one out, and I was next to last. I got in the air lock with Paul, and he checked my oxygen tanks and the seals on my helmet, gloves, and boots. Then he pumped most of the air out, watching the clock, and asked me to count even numbers backward from thirty. (I asked him whether he had an obsession with backward lists.) He smiled at me through the helmet and kept his hand on my shoulder as the rest of the air pumped out and the door silently swung open.

The sky was brighter than I’d expected, and the ground darker.

“Welcome to Mars,” Paul said on the suit radio, sounding clear but far away.

We walked down a metal ramp to the sandy rock-strewn ground. I stepped onto another planet.

How many people had ever done that?

Everything was suddenly different. This was the most real thing I’d ever done.

They could talk until they were blue in the face about how special this was, brave new frontier, leaving the cradle of Earth, whatever, and it’s finally just words. When I felt the crunch of Martian soil under my boot it was suddenly all very plain and wonderful. I remembered an old cube—a movie—of one of the first guys on the Moon, jumping around like a little kid, and I jumped myself, and again, way high.

“Careful!” came Paul’s voice over the radio. “Get used to it first.”

“Okay, okay.” While I walked, feather light, toward the other air lock, I tried to figure out how many people had actually done it, set foot on another world. A little more than a hundred, in all of history. And me one of them, now.

There were six of them waiting at the air-lock door; everyone else had gone inside. I looked around at the rusty desert and stifled the urge to run off and explore—I mean, for more than six months we hadn’t been able to go more than a few dozen feet in any direction, and here was a whole new world. But there would be time. Soon!

Mother was blinking away tears, unable to touch her face behind the helmet, crying with happiness. The dream of her lifetime. I hugged her, which felt strange, both of us swaddled in insulation.

Our helmets clicked together and for a moment I heard her muffled laugh.

While Paul went back to get Card, I just looked around. I’d spent hours there in virtual, of course, but that was fake. This was hard-edged and strange, even fearsome in a way. A desert with rocks. Yellow sky of air so thin it would kill you in a breath.

When Card got to the ground, he jumped higher than I had. Paul grabbed him by the arm and walked him over.

The air lock held five people. Paul and the two strangers gestured for us to go in when the door opened. It closed automatically behind us, and a red light throbbed for about a minute. I could hear the muffled clicking of a pump. Then a green light, and the inside door sighed open. “Home again,” Paul said.

17 THE LAND OF OZ

We stepped into the greenhouse, a dense couple of acres of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. The air was humid and smelled of dirt and blossoms. A woman in shorts and a tee shirt, cut off under her breasts, motioned for us to take off our helmets.

She introduced herself as Emily. “I keep track of the air lock and suits,” she said. “Follow me, and we’ll get you square.”

Feeling overdressed, we clanked down a metal spiral stair to a room full of shelves and boxes, the walls unpainted rock. One block of metal shelves was obviously for our crew, names written on bright new tape under shelves that held folded Mars suits and the titanium suitcases.

“Just come on through to the mess hall after you’re dressed,” she said. “Place isn’t big enough to get lost. Not yet.” They planned to more than double the underground living area while we were here.

I helped Mother out of her suit, and she helped me. I needed a shower and some clean clothes. My jumpsuit was wrinkled and damp with old sweat, fear sweat from the landing. I didn’t smell like a petunia myself. But we were all in the same boat.

Paul and the two other men in Mars suits were rattling down the stairs as we headed for the mess hall. The top half of the corridor was smooth plastic that radiated uniform dim light, like the tubes that had linked the Space Elevator to the Hilton and the John Carter. The bottom half was numbered storage drawers.

I knew what to expect of the mess hall and the other rooms; the colony was a series of inflated half cylinders inside a large irregular tunnel, a natural pipe through an ancient lava flow. Someday the whole thing would be closed off and filled with air like the part we’d just left, but for the time being everyone lived and worked in the reinforced balloons.

We walked through a medical facility, bigger than anything we’d seen since the Hilton. No people, just a kind of medicated smell. Forty or fifty feet wide, it all seemed pretty huge after living in a spaceship. I don’t suppose it would be that imposing if you went there directly from a town or a city on Earth.

The murmur of voices was pretty loud before we got to the mess hall. It sounded like a cocktail party, though the only thing to drink was water, and you don’t dare spill a drop.

The mess hall was big enough for about two dozen people to eat at once, and now there were a hundred or so, sitting on the tables as well as the chairs, milling around saying hello. We twenty-six were the first new faces they’d seen in a year and a half—about one Martian year, one “are,” pronounced air-ee. I’d better start thinking that way.

The room had two large false windows, like the ones on the ship, looking out onto the desert. I assumed they were real-time. Nothing was moving, but then all the multicellular life on the planet was presumably right here.

You could see our lander sitting at the end of a pair of mile-long plowed grooves. I wondered whether Paul had cut it too close, stopping a couple of hundred feet away. He’d said the landing was mostly automatic, but I didn’t see him let go of the joystick.

I saw Oz immediately and threaded my way over to him. We shook hands, then hugged. He was a little bit shorter than me, which was a surprise. He held me by both shoulders and looked at me with a bright smile, and then looked around the room. “It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? All these people.”

Seventy-five new faces after seeing the same two dozen for months. “They look like a bunch of Martians.”

He laughed. “Was the landing rough?”

“Pretty awful. But Paul seemed in control.”

“He was my pilot, too. Good old ‘Crash’ Collins.”

“ ‘Crash’?”

“Ask him about it someday.”

An Asian woman a little taller than Oz came over, and he put his arm around her waist. “Josie, this is Carmen.”

We shook hands. “I’ve seen your picture,” she said. Josie Tang, Oz’s lover. “Welcome to our humble planet.”

I tapped my foot on the metal plate. “Nice to have real gravity.”

“The same no matter where you go,” Oz said. “I’ll give you a tour after the formalities.”

When Paul and the other two came into the room, an older woman started tapping on a glass with a spoon. Like many of them, men and women, she was wearing a belted robe made of some filmy material. She was pale and bony.

“Welcome to Mars. Of course I’ve spoken with most of you. I’m Dargo Solingen, current general administrator.

“The first couple of sols”—Martian days—“you are here, just settle in and get used to your new home. Explore and ask questions. We’ve assigned temporary living and working spaces to everyone, a compromise between the wish list you sent a couple of weeks ago and… reality.” She shrugged. “It will be a little tight until the new modules are in place. We will start on that as soon as the ship is unloaded.”

She almost smiled, though it looked like she didn’t have much practice with it. “It is strange to see children. This will be an interesting social experiment.”

“One you don’t quite approve of?” Dr. Jefferson said.

“You probably know that I don’t. But I was not consulted.”

“Dr. Solingen,” a woman behind her said in a tone of warning.

“I guess none of you were,” he said. “It was an Earth decision, the Corporation.”

“That’s right,” Solingen said. “This is an outpost, not a colony. They don’t have families on Moonbase or even Antarctica.”

Oz cleared his throat. “We were polled. Most of us were very much in favor.” And most of them did call it “the colony,” rather than Mars Base One.

The woman who had cautioned Solingen continued. “A hundred percent of the permanent party. Those of us who are not returning to Earth.” She was either pregnant or the only fat person in the room. Looking more carefully, I saw one other woman who appeared to be pregnant.

You’d think that would have been on the news. Maybe it was, and I missed it, not likely. Mother and I exchanged significant glances. Something was going on.

(It turned out to be nothing more mysterious than a desire for privacy on the women’s part, and everybody’s desire to keep Earth out of their hair. When the first child was born, the Earth press would be all over them. Until then, there was no need for anyone to know the blessed event was nigh. So they asked that we not mention the pregnancies when writing or talking to home.)

Solingen went on to talk about work and living schedules. For those of us in school, study schedules would continue as on the John Carter, and we’d be assigned light duties “appropriate to our abilities.” Probably fetch-and-carry or galley slave, as we called kitchen work on ship.

Then she introduced each new arrival, stating where they were from, what their specialties were, and lists of honors and awards, all from memory. It was an impressive performance. She even knew about us youngsters—Mike Manchester’s national (Canadian) spelling bee, Yuri’s solo with the St. Petersburg Orchestra, and my swimming medal, an extremely useful skill on this planet.

The way she looked at me left no doubt who it was who forbade Paul from being with me. I would try to stay out of her way.

People got together with friends or coworkers—almost everybodyhad been working along with one of the Martian teams en route—and moved toward the workstations and labs to talk. Oz and Josie took me and Card for a guided tour.

We’d already walked through the “hospital,” an aid station about three meters wide by ten long. It was connected to the changing room by an automated air lock; if there was an accident with the main air lock, it would seal off the whole colony.

That was the standard size for most of the buildings, three by ten meters, but most of them were divided into smaller sections. The mess hall where we all met was about two-thirds that size, two hundred square meters for a hundred not-too-crowded people, the rest of the space a very compressed kitchen and pantry.

About half of the overall floor space was “cabins,” more like walk-in closets, where people slept. Most of them were two meters long by a meter wide, three meters high, with upper and lower bunks for two people who had better be compatible. The bunks folded up to the wall, and desks for working or reading folded down. Four of the cabins were a half meter longer, for seven-footers.

The walls were colorful, in sometimes odd combinations. Each unit, twelve to thirty-two people, voted on a weekly color scheme. The walls glowed a comforting warm beige or cool blue most places, but there were bright yellows and moody purples and a Halloween orange.

We walked down the main corridor, about a meter wide, past six rows of cabins. The last bunch of sixteen had temporary partitions and improvised bunks, where most of us newcomer Earthlings would sleep. In normal times, that would be the recreation area, so people had real motivation to set up the new living areas we’d brought.

Then there were three large work areas, which besides labs and computer stations contained separate rooms for administration, power regulation, and environmental control—water, air, and heat. Finally, there was an air lock leading to the biosciences laboratory, where there were strict controls. We tried to be careful not to contaminate the Martian environment, and conversely, if there were dormant alien microorganisms in the rock and soil specimens, we didn’t want to let even one of them into our air and water. The consensus was that it was unlikely Martian microbes could affect us, but who wants to put it to the test? The whole area was kept at a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the colony, discouraging leaks.

Here I was on a brand-new world, making history, and my phone beeped to remind me that I had a history paper due tomorrow. I thumbed that it would be a day late, 10 percent grade reduction.

Oz invited Card and me back to the cabin he shared with Josie. The four of us could sit comfortably on the lower bunk. He showed me how the desk worked, folding down with retractable arms, revealing a small high-definition screen. The work surface was flat but had a virtual keyboard. The arms were a clever parallelogram construction that let you position the desk at various heights.

The walls were covered with pictures, only two his own work. From art history class I recognized Rembrandt, Pollack, and Wyeth paintings; the others were by Scandinavian artists I’d never heard of.

A public-address system called all “new colonists” to dinner. It was fantastic, after months of ship rations. Salad with fresh greens and tomatoes, hot corn bread, fried tilapia.

After the meal, we were invited to come up and look at the farm. Those tilapia weren’t the happiest-looking fish I’d ever seen, crowded into a small tank of murky water with agricultural waste (their food) floating on top.

Most of the crops had supplemental lights over their beds, Martian sunlight being pretty thin. It was easy to recognize stands of corn and apple trees, tomato plants, and beds of lettuce and cabbage. I didn’t know what rice looked like, but it was probably different on Earth anyhow; not enough water here for paddies. Kaimei laughed when she saw it.

We went back down to get our assigned sleeping areas straight and get on the shower roster. There were two showers, and you could sign up for a twenty-minute interval for the female one. (The men only had fifteen minutes; there were more of them.) There was a complicated list of instructions in the small dressing room.

We were allowed one hundred sixty minutes per month, two showers a week. The twenty shower minutes you had included ten for undressing and dressing. The ten minutes you were actually in the shower included only five minutes of actual running water: get wet, then soap and shampoo, then try to rinse off.

All of us newbies were penciled in for showers if we wanted them—if! I had one scheduled for 1720, and waited outside the door for ten minutes. Mrs. Washington came out, radiantly clean, and I slipped in to undress and wait for Kaimei to finish, behind the shower curtain. The dressing room was the same size as the shower, about a meter square, and, unsurprisingly, smelled like a girls’ locker room on Earth.

I chatted with Kaimei through the curtain when her water stopped and she switched to the dryer. No towels, just a hot-air machine. She came out, looking all new and shiny, and I moved my sweaty corpus in to be sluiced.

It was an odd sensation. The water that sprayed from the handheld nozzle was warm enough, but the rest of your body gets really cold, the water on your skin evaporating fast in the thin air.

The amber liquid that served as both soap and shampoo was watery and weak, probably formulated more for its recycling efficiency than its cleaning power. But I did get pretty clean, much cleaner than I’d ever felt on the ship. I used the last thirty seconds of rinse time letting the warm water roll down my tired back.

There was a fixed dryer about four feet off the ground, somewhat aimable, to get your back and butt dry, and a handheld thing like a powerful hair dryer for the rest. The heat was welcome, and I felt pretty wonderful when I pulled the curtain.

Dargo Solingen stood there naked, bony and parchment pale. She marched by me without a word. I managed “Hello?”

I dressed quickly and looked at the roster. There had been someone else’s name after mine, someone unfamiliar, but now it was Dargo Solingen. I supposed she could butt in line anytime she wanted, pulling rank. But it was an odd coincidence. Did she want to see the sexy body that seduced her pilot? As if you would have to be a great beauty to appeal to a guy who’s been celibate for three months. I think “nominally female” would fill the bill.

18 MARSWALK

I shared a small temporary space with Elspeth and Kaimei—an air mattress on the floor and a bunk bed. We agreed to rotate, so everyone would have a bed two-thirds of the time.

No romantic trysts for a while. I could ask the girls to look the other way, but Paul might feel inhibited.

Hanging sheets for walls and only one desk, with a small screen and a clunky keyboard and an old VR helmet with a big dent on the side. The timing for that worked out okay, since Elspeth had classes seven hours before Eastern time, and Kaimei three hours later. We drew up a chart and taped it over the desk. The only conflict was my physical science class versus Kaimei’s history of Tao and Buddhism. Mine was mostly equations on the board, so I used the screen and let her have the helmet.

Our lives were pretty regimented the first couple of weeks, because we had to coordinate classes with the work roster here, and leave a little time for eating and sleeping.

Everybody was impatient to get the first new module set up, but it wasn’t just a matter of unloading and inflating it. First there was a light exoskeleton of spindly metal rods that became rigid when they were all pulled together. Then floorboards to bear the weight of the things and people inside. Then the connection to the existing base, through an improvised air lock until they were sure the module wouldn’t leak.

I enjoyed working on that, at first outdoors, unloading the ship and sorting and preassembling some parts; then later, down in the cave, attaching the new to the old. I got used to working in the Mars suit and using the “dog,” a wheeled machine about the size of a large dog. It carried backup oxygen and power.

About half the time, though, my work roster put me inside, helping the younger ones do their lessons and avoid boredom. “Mentoring,” they called it, to make it sound more important than babysitting.

I hardly ever saw Paul. It’s as if whoever was in charge of the work details—guess who—took a special effort to keep us apart. One day, though, while I was just getting off work detail, he found me and asked whether I’d like to go exploring with him. What, skip math? I got fresh oxygen and helped him check out one of the dogs, and we went for a walk.

The surface of Mars might look pretty boring to an outsider, but it’s not at all. It must be the same if you live in a desert on Earth: you pretty much have the space around your home memorized, every little mound and rock—and when you venture out, it’s “Wow! A different rock!”

He took me off to the left of Telegraph Hill, walking at a pretty good pace. The base was below the horizon in less than ten minutes. We were still in radio contact as long as we could see the antenna on top of the hill, and if we wanted to go farther, the dog had a collapsible booster antenna that went up ten meters, which we could leave behind as a relay.

We didn’t need it for that, but Paul clicked it up into place when we came to the edge of a somewhat deep crater he wanted to climb into, then cross to the hill in the middle, its “central peak.”

“Be really careful,” he said. “We have to leave the dog behind. If we both were to fall and be injured, we’d be in deep shit.”

I followed him, watching carefully as we picked our way to the rim. Once there, he turned around and pointed.

It’s hard to express how strange the sight was. We weren’t that high up, but you could see the curvature of the horizon. The dog behind us looked tiny but unnaturally clear, in the near vacuum. To the right of Telegraph Hill, the pad where the John Carter had been raised to stand on its tail, waiting for the synthesizer to slowly make fuel from the Martian air.

Paul was carrying a white bag, now a little rust-streaked from the dust. He pulled out a photomap of the crater, unfolded it, and showed it to me. There were twenty X’s, with numbers from one to twenty, starting on the top of the crater rim, where we must have been standing, then down the incline, and across the crater floor to its central peak.

“Dust collecting,” he said. “How’s your oxygen?”

I chinned the readout button. “Three hours forty minutes.”

“That should be plenty. Now you don’t have to go down if you—”

“I do! Let’s go!”

“Okay. Follow me.” I didn’t tell him that my impatience wasn’t all excitement, but partly anxiety at having to talk and pee at the same time. Peeing standing up, into a diaper, trying desperately not to fart. “Funny as a fart in a space suit” probably goes back to the beginning of spaceflight, but there’s nothing real funny about it in reality. I’d taken two antigas tablets before I came out, and they still seemed to be working.

Keeping your footing was a little harder, going downhill. And it had been some years since I’d walked with a wet diaper. I was out of practice.

Paul had the map folded over so it only showed the path down the crater wall; every thirty or forty steps he would fish through the bag, take out a prelabeled plastic vial, and scrape a sample of dirt into it.

On the floor of the crater I felt a little shiver of fear at our isolation. Looking back the way we’d come, though, I could see the tip of the dog’s antenna.

The dust was deeper than I’d seen anyplace else, I guess because the crater walls kept out the wind. Paul took two samples as we walked toward the central peak.

“You better stay down here, Carmen. I won’t be long.” The peak was steep, and he scrambled up it like a monkey. I wanted to yell Be careful, but kept my mouth shut.

Looking up at him, the sun sinking under the crater’s rim, I could see Earth gleaming blue in the ochre sky. How long had it been since I had thought of Earth, other than “the place where school is”? I guess I hadn’t been here long enough to feel homesickness. Nostalgia for Earth—crowded place with lots of gravity and heat.

It might be the first time I seriously thought about staying. In five years I’d be twenty-four, and Paul would still be in his early thirties. I didn’t feel as romantic about him as I had on the ship. But I liked him and he was funny. That would put us way ahead of a lot of marriages I’d observed.

But then how did I really feel about him? Up there being heroic and competent and, admit it, sexy.

Turn down the heat, girl. He’s only twelve years younger than your father. Probably sterile from radiation, too. I didn’t think I wanted children, but it would be nice to have the option.

Meanwhile, he would be fun to practice with.

He collected his samples and tossed the bag down. It drifted slowly, rotating, and landed about ten feet away. I was enough of a Martian to be surprised to hear a faint click when it landed, the soles of my boots picking the noise up, conducted through the rock of the crater floor.

He worked his way down slowly, which was a relief. I was holding the sample bag; he took it and made the hand signal for turn off your communicator. I did, and he stepped over close enough to touch helmets. His face close enough to kiss. He spoke, and his voice was a faraway whisper. “Can you come sleep with me tonight?”

“Yes! Oh, yes.”

“My roommate’s putting in an extra half shift, from 1800 to 2300. Are you free during that time?”

“Class till 1900, but then, sure.”

He gave me an awkward squeeze. Hard to be intimate in a Mars suit, but I could feel his gloves on my shoulders, the welcome pressure of his chest.

He turned his comm back on and gave me a mischievous wink. I followed him back the way we had come.

At the top of the crater wall, he stopped and looked back. “Can’t see it from here,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

“What?”

“My greatest triumph,” he said, and started down. “You’ll be impressed.”

He didn’t offer any further explanation on the ground. He picked up the dog’s handle and proceeded to walk around to the other side of the crater.

It was a dumbo, an unpiloted supply vehicle. Its rear end was tilted up, the nose down in a small crater.

“I brought her in like that. I was not the most popular man on Mars.” As we approached it, I could see the ragged hole someone had cut in the side with a torch or a laser. “Landed it right on the cargo-bay door, too.”

So that was how he’d become “Crash” Collins. “Wow. I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”

He laughed. “It was remote control; I landed it from a console inside the base. Harder than being aboard, actually.” We turned around and headed back to the base.

“It was a judgment call. There was a lot of variable wind, and it was yawing back and forth.” He made a hand motion like a fish swimming. “I was sort of trying not to hit the base or Telegraph Hill. But I overdid it.”

“People could understand that.”

“Understanding isn’t forgiving. Everybody had to stop their scienceand become pack animals.” I could see the expression on Solingen’s face, having to do labor, and smiled.

She really did have something against me. I had to do twice as much babysitting as Elspeth or Kaimei—and when I suggested that the boys ought to do it, too, she said the “personnel allocation” was her job, thank you. And when my person got allocated to an outside job, it would be something boring and repetitive, like taking inventory of supplies. (That was especially useful, in case there were actual Martians sneaking in at night to steal nuts and bolts.)

When we got back, I went straight to the john and recycled the diaper and used a couple of towelettes from my allotment. No shower for eighteen hours, but I was reasonably fresh, and Paul wouldn’t be that critical.

At the console there was a blinking note from the Dragon herself, noting that I had missed math class, saying she wanted a copy of my homework. Did she monitor anybody else’s VR attendance?

I’d had the class recorded, of course, the superexciting chain rule for differentiation. I fell asleep twice, hard to do in VR, and had to start over. Then I had a problem set with fifty chains to differentiate. Wrap me in chains and throw me in the differential dungeon, but I had to get a nap before going over to Paul’s. I set a beeper for 1530, ninety minutes, then got the air mattress partly inflated and flopped onto it without undressing.

At 1800 I tried to concentrate on a physical science lecture about the conservation of angular momentum. Sexy dancers and skaters spinning around. The lecturer reminded me of Paul. Probably any male would have.

Went to the john and freshened up here and there. Then walked up to 4A—no way to be discreet about it—and tapped quietly on the door. Paul opened it and sort of pulled me in.

We hugged and kissed and undressed each other in a kind of two-person riot. He was extremely erect; I played with it for a minute, but he said that might prove counterproductive, and carried me to the bed and caressed me all over, and with his hands and tongue brought me to orgasm twice, my jaws clenched, trying not to make too much noise.

Then he showed me a picture of a frieze in India, and I copied it, putting my arms around his neck and clasping his hips with my legs while he entered me. Probably a lot easier on Mars than in India. It was a pleasant sensation but odd, since he completely filled me, his penis bumping the top of my vagina with every thrust.

Maybe in the future there will be advertisements: Come to Mars and fuck like an Indian goddess. Maybe not.

I didn’t have a third orgasm in me, but his was plenty for both of us. Then we lay in his narrow bunk, spoon fashion, dozing, until his erection came back and we did it again, in that position. Nicely intimate but not too stimulating, which he took care of afterward with his fingers.

An hour or so of dreamless sleep, and he woke me with a hand on my shoulder. He was fully dressed. “Jerry wouldn’t mind walking in on you like this,” he said, “but you might be startled.”

I dressed quickly and kissed him good night. There was nobody in his corridor, but I did pass a couple on the main way, including Jerry, who gave me an arched eyebrow and a little wave.

I slipped into our temporary room and undressed quietly without turning on the lights.

“So how was our pilot?” Kaimei murmured in the dark. When I didn’t say anything, she continued. “A simple deduction, Sherlock. You don’t exactly smell like you’ve been riding a bicycle.”

“I’m sorry…”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. Sweet dreams.”

In fact, my dream was odd, and disturbing. I was trying to find a party, but every door opened onto an empty room. The last door opened onto the sea.

Not delivering my homework like a good little girl got me into a special corner of Dargo Hell. I had to turn over my notes and homework in math every day to Ana Sitral, who obviously didn’t have time for checking it. She must have done something to piss off the Dragon herself.

Then I had to take on over half of the mentoring hours that Kaimei and Elspeth had been covering, and was not allowed any outside time. The extra babysitting time came out of my ag hours, working on the farm upstairs, which most of us considered a treat, as Dargo well knew.

I had been selfish, she said, tiring myself out on a silly lark, using up resources that might be needed for real work. So I had the temerity to suggest that part of my real work was getting to know Mars, and she really blew up about that. It was not up to me to make up my own training schedule.

Okay, part of it was that she didn’t like young people. But part was also that she didn’t like me, the sex kitten who’d distracted her pilot. She didn’t bother to hide that from anybody. I complained to Mother, and she didn’t disagree, but said I had to learn to work with people like that. Especially here, where there wasn’t much choice.

I didn’t bother complaining to Dad. He would make a Growth Experience out of it. I should try to see the world her way. Sorry, Dad. If I saw the world her way and cast my weary eyes upon Carmen Dula, wouldn’t that be self-loathing? That would not be a positive Growth Experience.

19 FISH OUT OF WATER

After a month, I was able to put a Mars suit on again, but I didn’t go up to the surface. There was plenty of work down below, inside the lava tube that protected the base from cosmic and solar radiation.

There’s plenty of water on Mars, but most of it is in the wrong place. If it was ice on or near the surface, it had to be at the north or south pole. We couldn’t put bases there because they were in total darkness a lot of the time, and we needed solar power.

But there was a huge lake hidden a few hundred meters below the base. It was the easiest large one to get to on all of Mars, we learned from some kind of satellite radar, which was why the base was put here. One of the things we’d brought on the John Carter was a drilling system designed to tap it. (The drills that came with the first ship and the third broke, though, the famous Mars Luck.)

I worked with the team that set the drill up, nothing more challengingthan fetch-and-carry, but a lot better than trying to mentor kids when you wanted to slap them instead.

For a while we could hear the drill through our boots, a faint sandpapery sound that was conducted through the rock. Then it was quiet, and most of us forgot about it. A few weeks later, though, it broke through. It was Sagan 12th, which from then on would be Water Day.

We put on Mars suits and walked down between the wall of the lava tube and the base’s exterior wall. It was kind of creepy, just suit lights, less than a meter between the cold rock and the inflated plastic you weren’t supposed to touch.

Then there was light ahead, and we came out into swirling madness—it was a blizzard! The drill had struck ice, liquefied it, and sent it up under pressure, dozens of liters a minute. When it hit the cold vacuum it exploded into snow.

It was ankle deep in places, but of course it wouldn’t last; the vacuum would evaporate it eventually. But people were already working with lengths of pipe, getting ready to fill the waiting tanks up in the hydroponics farm. One of them had already been dubbed the swimming pool. That’s how the trouble started.

I got on the work detail that hooked up the water supply to the new pump. That was to go in two stages: emergency and “maintenance.”

The emergency stage worked on the reasonable assumption that the pump wasn’t going to last very long. So we wanted to save every drop of water we could, while it still did work.

This was the “water boy” stage. We had collapsible insulated water containers that held fifty liters each. That’s about 110 pounds on Earth, about my own weight, awkward but not too heavy to handle on Mars.

All ten of the older kids alternated a couple of hours on, a couple off, doing water boy. We had wheelbarrows, three of them, so it wasn’t too tiring. You fill the thing with water, which takes eight minutes, then turn off the valve and get away fast, so not too much pressure builds up before the next person takes over. Then trundle the wheelbarrow up a ramp and around to the air lock, leave it there, and carry or drag the water bag inside and across the farm to the storage tanks. Dump in the water—a slurry of ice by then—and go back to the pump with your wheelbarrow and empty bag.

The work was boring as dust, and would drive you insane if you didn’t have music. I started out being virtuous, listening to classical pieces that went along with my textbook on the history of music. But as the days droned by, I listened to more and more city and even sag.

You didn’t have to be a math genius to see that it was going to take three weeks at this rate to fill the first tank, which was two meters tall and eight meters wide, bigger than most backyard pools in Florida.

The water didn’t stay icy; they warmed it up to above room temperature. We all must have fantasized about diving in there and paddling around. Elspeth and Kaimei and I even planned for it.

There was no sense in asking permission from the Dragon. What we were going to do was coordinate our showers so we’d all be squeaky clean—so nobody could say we were contaminating the water supply—and come in the same time, off shift, and see whether we could get away with a little skinny-dip. Or see how long we could do it before somebody stopped us.

At two weeks, the engineers sort of forced our hand. They’d been working on a direct link from the pump to this tank and the other two.

Jordan Westling, Barry’s inventor dad, seemed to be in charge of that team. We always got along pretty well. He was old but always had a twinkle in his eye.

He and I were alone by the tank while he fiddled with some tubing and gauges. I lifted the water bag with a groan and poured it in.

“This ought to be the last day you have to do that,” he said. “We should be on line in a few hours.”

“Wow.” I stepped up on a box and looked at the water level. It was more than half-full, with a little layer of red sediment at the bottom. “Dr. Westling… what would happen if somebody went swimming in this?”

He didn’t look up from the gauge. “I suppose if somebody washed up first and didn’t pee in the pool, nobody would have to know. It’s not exactly distilled water. Not that I would endorse such an activity.”

When I went back to the water point, I touched helmets with Kaimei—always assuming the suit radio was monitored—and we agreed we’d do it at 02:15, just after the end of the next shift. She’d pass the word on to Elspeth, who came on at midnight. That would give her time to have a quick shower and smuggle a towel up to the tank.

I got off at 10 and VR’ed a class on Spinoza, better than any sleeping pill. I barely stayed awake long enough to set the alarm for 1:30.

Two and a half hours’ sleep was plenty. I awoke with eager anticipation and, alone in the room, put on a robe and slippers and quietly made my way to the shower. The roster was almost empty at this hour.

Kaimei had already bathed, and was sitting outside the shower with a reader. I took my shower and, while I was drying, Elspeth came in from work, wearing skinsuit and socks.

After she showered, the three of us tiptoed past the work/study area—a couple of people were working there, but a hanging partition kept them from being distracted by passersby.

The mess hall was deserted. We went up through the changing room and the air-lock foyer and slipped into the farm.

There were only dim maintenance lights at this hour. We padded our way to the swimming pool tank—and heard whispered voices!

Oscar Jefferson, Barry Westling, and my idiot brother had beat us to it!

“Hey, girls,” Oscar said. “Look—we’re out of a job.” A faucet in the side was gurgling out a narrow stream.

“My father said we could quit,” Barry said, “so we thought we’d take a swim to celebrate.”

“You didn’t tell him,” I said.

“Do we look like idiots?” No, they looked like naked boys. “Come on in. The water’s not too cold.”

I looked at the other two girls, and they shrugged okay. Spaceships and Mars bases don’t give you a lot of room for modesty.

I sort of liked the way Barry looked at me anyhow, when I stepped out of my robe and slippers. When Kaimei undressed, his look might have been a little more intense.

I stepped up on the box and had one leg over the edge of the tank, not the most modest posture, when the lights snapped on full.

“Caught you!” Dargo Solingen marched down the aisle between the tomatoes and the squash. “I knew you’d do this.” She looked at me, one foot on the box and the other dangling in space. “And I know exactly who the ringleader is.”

She stood with her hands on her hips, studying. Elspeth was only half-undressed, but the rest of us were obviously ready for some teenaged sex orgy. “Get out, now. Get dressed and come to my office at 0800. We will have a disciplinary hearing.” She stomped back to the door and snapped off the bright lights on her way out.

“I’ll tell her it wasn’t you,” Card said. “We just kind of all decided when Barry’s dad said the thing was working.”

“She won’t believe you,” I said, stepping down. “She’s been after my ass all along.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Barry said. He was a born romantic.

All of our parents were crowded into the Dragon’s office at 0800. That was not good. My parents were both working the shift from 2100 to 0400, and needed their sleep. The parents were on one side of the room, and we were on the other, with a large video screen in the middle.

Without any preamble, Dargo Solingen made the charge: “Last night your children went for a swim in the new Water Tank One.

Tests on the water reveal traces of coliform bacteria, so it cannot be used for human consumption without boiling or some other form of sterilization.”

“It was only going to be used for hydroponics,” Dr. Westling said.

“You can’t say that for certain. At any rate, it was an act of extreme irresponsibility, and one that you encouraged.” She pointed a hand control at the video screen and clicked. I saw myself talking to him.

“What would happen if somebody went swimming in this?” He answered that nobody would have to know—not that he would endorse such a thing. He was restraining a smile.

“You’re secretly recording me?” he said incredulously.

“Not you. Her.”

“She didn’t do it!” Card blurted out. “It was my idea.”

“You will speak when spoken to,” she said with ice in her voice. “Your loyalty to your sister is touching, but misplaced.” She clicked again, and there was a picture of me and Kaimei at the water point, touching helmets.

“Tonight has to be skinny-dipping night. Dr. Westling says they’ll be on line in a few hours. Let’s make it 0215, right after Elspeth gets off.” You could hear Kaimei’s faint agreement.

“You had my daughter’s suit bugged?” my father said.

“Not really. I just disabled the OFF switch on her suit communicator.”

“That is so…so illegal. On Earth they’d throw you out of court, then—”

“This isn’t Earth. And on Mars, there is nothing more important than water. As you would appreciate more if you had lived here longer.” Oh, sure, like living in a spaceship doesn’t count. I think you could last longer without water than without air.

“Besides, it was improper for the boys and girls to be together naked. Even if they hadn’t planned any sexual misbehavior—”

“Oh, please,” I said. “Excuse me for speaking out of turn, Dr. Solingen, but there was nothing like that. We didn’t even know the boys would be there.”

“Really. The timing was remarkable, then. And you weren’t acting surprised about them when I turned on the lights. Nor modest.” Card was squirming, and put up his hand, but the Dragon ignored it. She turned to the parents. “I want to discuss with you what punishment might be appropriate.”

“Twenty laps a day in the pool,” Dr. Westling said, almost snarling. He didn’t like her anyhow, I’d noticed, and spying on him apparently had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. “They’re just kids, for Chris’sake.”

“You’re going to say they didn’t mean any harm. They have to learn that Mars doesn’t recognize intent as an excuse.

“An appropriate punishment, I think, would start with not allowing them to bathe for a month. I would also reduce the amount of water they be allowed to drink, but that is difficult to control. And I wouldn’t want to endanger their health.” God, she was so All Heart.

“For that month, I would also deny them recreational use of the cube and VR, and no exploring on the surface. Double that for the instigator, Ms. Dula”—and she turned back to face us—“and her brother as well, if he insists on sharing the responsibility.”

“I do!” he snapped.

“Very well. Two months for both of you.”

“It seems harsh,” Kaimei’s father said. “Kaimei told me that the girls did take the precaution of showering before entering the water.”

“Intent means nothing. The bacteria are there.”

“Harmless to plants,” Dr. Westling repeated. “Probably to people.”

She looked at him for a long second. “Your dissent is noted. Are there any other objections to this punishment?”

“Not the punishment,” my mother said, “but Dr. Dula and I both object to the means of acquiring evidence.”

“I am perfectly willing to stand on review for that.” The old-timers would probably go along with her. The new ones might still be infected by the Bill of Rights, or the laws of Russia and France.

There were no other objections, so she reminded the parents that they would be responsible for monitoring our VR and cube use, but even more, she would rely on our sense of honor.

What were we supposed to be “honoring,” though? The now-old-fashioned sanctity of water? Her right to spy on us? In fact, her unlimited authority?

I would find a way to get back at her.

20 NIGHTWALK

After one day of steaming over it, I’d had enough. I don’t know when I made the decision, or whether it even was a decision, rather than a kind of sleepwalking. It was sometime before three in the morning. I was still feeling so angry and embarrassed I couldn’t get to sleep.

So I got up and started down the corridor to the mess hall, nibble on something. But I walked on past.

It looked like no one else was up. Just dim safety lights. I wound up in the dressing room and realized what I was doing.

The air lock had a WARNING OVERRIDE button that you could press so the buzzer wouldn’t go on and on if you had to keep the inner door open. Card had shown me how you could keep the button stuck down with the point of a pencil or a pen.

With the air-lock buzzer disabled, a person could actually go outsidealone, undetected. Card had done it with Barry for a few minutes early one morning, just to prove it could be done. So I could just be by myself for an hour or two, then sneak back in.

And did I ever want to be by myself.

I went through the dress-up procedure as quietly as possible. Then before I took a step toward the air lock, I visualized myself doing a safety check on another person and did it methodically on myself. It would be so pathetic to die out there, breaking the rules.

I went up the stairs silently as a thief. Well, I was a thief. What could they do, deport me?

For safety’s sake, I decided to take a dog, even though it would slow me down a bit. I actually hesitated and tested carrying two extra oxygen bottles by themselves, but that was awkward. Better safe than sorry, I said to myself in Mother’s voice, and ground my teeth while saying it. But going out without a dog and dying would be pathetic. Archcriminals are evil, not pathetic. I clicked the OVERRIDE button down and jammed it with the point of a penstick.

The evacuating pump sounded loud, though I knew you could hardly hear it in the changing room. It rattled off into silence, then the red light glowed green and the door swung open into darkness.

I stepped out, pulling the dog, and the door slid shut behind it.

I decided not to turn on the suit light, and stood there for several minutes while my eyes adjusted. Walking at night just by starlight— you couldn’t do that any other place I’ve lived. It wouldn’t be dangerous if I was careful. Besides, if I turned on a light, someone could see me from the mess-hall window.

The nearby rocks gave me my bearings, and I started out toward Telegraph Hill. On the other side of the hill I’d be invisible from the base, and vice versa—alone for the first time in months.

Seeing the familiar rock field in this ghostly half-light brought back some of the mystery and excitement of the first couple of days. The landing and my first excursion with Paul.

If he knew I was doing this—well, he might approve, secretly. He wasn’t much of a rule guy, except for safety.

Thinking that, my foot turned on a small rock and I staggered, getting my balance back. Keep your eyes on the ground while you’re walking. It would be, what is the word I’m looking for, pathetic to trip and break your helmet out here.

It took me less than a half hour to get to the base of Telegraph Hill. It wasn’t all that steep, but the dog’s traction wasn’t really up to it. A truly adventurous person would leave the dog behind and climb to the top with her suit air alone, and although I do like adventure, I’m also afflicted with pathetico-phobia. The dog and I could go around the mountain rather than over it. I decided to walk in a straight line for one hour, see how far I could get, and walk back, following the dog’s track in the dust.

That was my big mistake. One of them, anyhow. If I’d just gone to the top, taken a picture, and headed straight back, I might have gotten away with the whole thing.

I wasn’t totally stupid. I didn’t go into the hill’s “radio shadow,” and I cranked the dog’s radio antenna up all the way, since I was headed for the horizon, and knew that any small depression in the ground could hide me from the colony’s radio transceiver.

The wind picked up a little. I couldn’t feel or hear it, of course, but the sky showed it. Jupiter was just rising, and its bright pale yellow light had a halo, and was slightly dimmed, by the dust in the air. I remembered Dad pointing out Jupiter, then Mars, the morning we left Florida, and had a delicious shiver at the thought that I was standing on that little point of light now.

The area immediately around the colony was as well explored as any place on Mars, but I knew from rock-hounding with Paul that you could find new stuff just a couple of hundred meters from the air-lock door. I went four or five kilometers and found something really new.

I had been going for fifty-seven minutes, about to turn back, and was looking for a soft rock that I could mark with an X or something— maybe scratch SURRENDERPUNY EARTHLINGS on it, though I suspected people would figure out who had done it.

There was no noise. Just a suddenly weightless feeling, and I was falling through a hole in the ground—I’d broken through something like a thin sheet of ice. But there was nothing underneath it!

I was able to turn on the suit light as I tumbled down, but all I saw was a glimpse of the dog spinning around beside, then above me.

It seemed like a long time, but I guess I didn’t fall for more than a few seconds. I hit hard on my left foot and heard the sickening sound of a bone cracking, just an instant before the pain hit me.

I lay still, bright red sparks fading from my vision while the pain amped up and up. Trying to think, not scream. It was dark again.

My ankle was probably broken, and at least one rib on the left side. I breathed deeply, listening—Paul told me about how he had broken a rib in a car wreck, and he could tell by the sound that it had punctured his lung. This did hurt, but didn’t sound different—then I realized I was lucky to be breathing at all. The helmet and suit were intact.

But would I be able to keep breathing long enough to be rescued?

I clicked the suit-light switch over and over, and nothing happened. If I could find the dog, and if it was intact, I’d have an extra sixteen hours of oxygen. Otherwise, I probably had two, two and a half hours.

I didn’t suppose the radio would do any good, underground, but I tried it anyway. Yelled into it for a minute, and then listened. Nothing.

These suits ought to have some sort of beeper to trace people with. But then I guess nobody was supposed to wander off and disappear.

It was about four. How long before someone woke up and noticed I was gone? How long before someone got worried enough to check and see that the suit and dog were missing?

I tried to stand, and it wasn’t possible. The pain was intolerable, and the bone made an ominous sound. I couldn’t help crying but stopped after a minute. Pathetic.

Had to find the dog, with its oxygen and power. I stretched out and patted the ground back and forth, and scrabbled around in a circle, feeling for it.

It wasn’t anywhere nearby. But how far could it have rolled after it hit?

I had to be careful, not just crawl off in some random direction and get lost. I remembered feeling a large, kind of pointy, rock off to my left—good thing I hadn’t landed on it—and could use it as a reference point.

I found it and moved up so my foot was touching it. Visualizing an old-fashioned clock with me as the hour hand, I went off in the 12:00 direction, measuring four body lengths inchworm style. Then crawled back to the pointy rock and did the same thing in the opposite, 6:00, direction. Nothing there, nor at 9:00 or 3:00, and I tried not to panic.

In my mind’s eye I could see the areas where I hadn’t been able to reach, the angles midway between 12:00 and 3:00, 3:00 and 6:00, and so on. I went back to the pointy rock and started over. On the second try, my hand touched one of the dog’s wheels, and I smiled in spite of my situation.

It was lying on its side. I uprighted it and felt for the switch that would turn on its light. When it came on, I was looking straight into it and it dazzled me blind.

Facing away from it, after a couple of minutes I could see some of where I was. I’d fallen into a large underground cavern, maybe shaped like a dome, though I couldn’t see as far as the top. I guessed it was part of a lava tube that was almost open to the surface, worn so thin that it couldn’t support my weight.

Maybe it joined up with the lava tube that we lived in! But even if it did, and even if I knew which direction to go, I couldn’t crawl the four kilometers back. I tried to ignore the pain and do the math, anyhow—sixteen hours of oxygen, four kilometers, that means creeping 250 meters per hour, dragging the dog along behind me… no way. Better to hope they would track me down here.

What were the chances of that? Maybe the dog’s tracks, or my boot prints? Only in dusty places, if the wind didn’t cover them up before dawn.

If they searched at night, the dog’s light might help. How close would a person have to come to the hole to see it? Close enough to crash through and join me?

And would the dog’s power supply last long enough to shine all night and again tomorrow night? It wouldn’t have to last any longer than that.

The ankle was hurting less, but that was because of numbness. My hands and feet were getting cold. Was that a suit malfunction, or just because I was stretched out on this cold cave floor? Where the sun had never shone.

With a start, I realized the coldness could mean that my suit was losing power—it should automatically warm up the gloves and boots. I opened my mouth wide and with my chin pressed the switch that ought to project a technical readout in front of my eyes, with “power remaining,” and nothing came up.

Well, the dog obviously had power to spare. I unreeled the recharge cable and plugged its jack into my LSU.

Nothing happened.

I chinned the switch over and over. Nothing.

Maybe it was just the readout display that was broken; I was getting power, but it wasn’t registering. Trying not to panic, I wiggled the jack, unplugged and replugged it. Still nothing.

I was breathing, though; that part worked. I unrolled the umbilical hose from the dog and pushed the fitting into the bottom of the LSU. It made a loud pop and a sudden breeze of cold oxygen blew around my neck and chin.

So at least I wouldn’t die of that. I would be frozen solid before I ran out of air; how comforting. Acid rush of panic in my throat; I choked it back and sucked on the water tube until the nausea was gone.

Which made me think about the other end, and I clamped up. I was not going to fill the suit’s emergency diaper with shit and piss before I died. Though the people who deal with dead people probably have seen that before. And it would be frozen solid, so what’s the difference. Inside the body or outside.

I stopped crying long enough to turn on the radio and say good-bye to people, and apologize for my stupidity. Though it was unlikely that anyone would ever hear it. Unless there was some kind of secret recorder in the suit, and someone stumbled on it years from now. If the Dragon had anything to say about it, there would be.

I wished I had Dad’s zen. If Dad were in this situation he would just accept it, and wait to leave his body.

I tipped the dog up on end, so its light shone directly up toward the hole I’d fallen through, still too high up to see.

I couldn’t feel my feet or hands anymore and was growing heavy-lidded. I’d read that freezing to death was the least painful way to go, and one of my last coherent thoughts was “Who came back to tell them?”

Then I hallucinated an angel, wearing red, surrounded by an ethereal bubble. He was incredibly ugly.