Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

  “Why doesn’t he just put Taryn in anyway?” I asked.

  “Would you give someone like Taryn that much power if you had the choice?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Definitely not. That’s why everything here’s so tenuous. Rhys means well, but he doesn’t always grasp nuance. While maybe I grasp too much of it, I don’t know . . . but we balance each other.”

  He paused and glanced out the window.

  “Though I won’t be back for a while. And man, I know this is difficult because everything’s so new and we’re throwing you in the deep end, but I need you to hold Rhys’ leash until then. It’ll work. Deep down, Brandon wants C4—we all do—he just needs to be eased into it.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “And you might not trust me yet, but Caelus did this to me for a reason. It seems bad now, but it can get worse.”

  Despite the direness of the topic, Pierre looked serene. Instead of emotions pushing words out as with so many of the others, his were threaded into them, simultaneously guiding and being guided by. Serious, yet relaxed. And despite the ghastly bruise on his neck and hearing him struggle to speak, I felt my heart rate start to ebb and my feet sink into the soles of my boots in his presence.

  As soon as I said, “I trust you,” movement caught my eye and I saw one of the freighters disconnecting from the docking bay, pushing off with its thrusters like a megalithic, slow-motion swimmer. “Do they come often?”

  “Never before last month, but it’s been nonstop since.”

  “Isn’t the station self-contained?” I asked.

  “Almost. They have a pretty big machine shop. The only stuff they need to ship in from the GZ is building material and scientific equipment for the research facility.”

  “Or food. Have the meals gotten any better?”

  “They couldn’t have gotten any worse,” said Pierre.

  “Well, you just said yourself that things can always—”

  “Not that. Nothing can be worse than that,” he joked, but then started wheezing and had to lower himself back on the cot. “It makes sense that they’re doing it, though.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Expanding the station. If you stand right there, on the corner left side, you can see the new section going up. That’s what the freighters are hauling in.”

  I stepped around his cot to the spot he’d indicated and sure enough there was scaffolding on the station’s Inner Ring and blow torches burning around it, their fires like thousands of distant candles. When I squinted I could even see little red dots, Mars wrenches and gears, out in space suits—drilling, fastening, and welding away.

  “The war’s been going on a while now and there’s little hope of it ending any time soon. They need to train more officers,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “So don’t be thinking about taking the next freighter out of here.”

  I froze. “Did Sebastian message you?”

  Pierre shrugged. “Why would he have?”

  I didn’t answer. For a few seconds I was too embarrassed to even look at him.

  “We need you here. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” I paused. “But what am I supposed to do?”

  “As long as Brandon thinks he’s flying the ship, Caelus is okay, because he’s confident about his hold over him. But when that stops . . .”

  “And he’s really that worried about Taryn that he won’t just ax Brandon now?”

  “That, and the fact that even though C3 opposes Caelus’ captaincy, both C wings fight together against the other blocks. So if he cripples C3, Caelus hobbles himself in the process, which is especially true now. He’ll never lose another inter-block Challenge as long as he has Sebastian, so he’s dealing with this delicate balance of staying captain but still keeping C Block strong enough to beat everyone else.”

  “Why are you so sure we can control Brandon?”

  “I’m not. But I know he wants to do the right thing. We just have to give him a way to do it where he’s not going to end up . . . well, in here, like me.”

  Chapter 18

  The landing wobbled.

  “You’re not getting enough height ’cause you’re rushing the somersault,” I said as soon as Marco’s head poked out of the water. “The jump and tuck bleed together, but they still have their own shape. Here . . . watch me again.”

  “You graceful shit,” Marco said as I pulled myself back onto the jetty. “I get the concept, but doing it—”

  “Will take work because you’re not very coordinated,” I finished, laughing. “That can’t be a shock. Especially to someone who paid Danny Loch’s sister to practice making out him so he wouldn’t botch the job with Rachel Stegl. Which turned out to be pretty presumptuous of you.”

  Marco sized up another jump. “My STI test seems to say otherwise.”

  “You guys are insufferable,” said Verna, looking up from a copy of Wuthering Heights.

  “No, but I sure know who is.” I snatched the book out of her hands. “‘Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

  “Give it back,” said Verna. “I’m reading it—I’m reading it to write a criticism for Professor Dalton.”

  “Sure you are,” I said, closing the book. I wouldn’t have teased her so much if she wasn’t so anchored, but I immediately felt guilty targeting her extra-soft spot for sentimentality. It was great having such a playful, barb-trading relationship, but you always ran the risk of having one slice a little too deep. “Romances always make strong feelings, but strong feelings don’t always make romances. Write that down in your criticism.”

  Verna grabbed the book back and then shoved me off the pontoon.

  I knew the water was freezing but didn’t feel it, existing in separate states along with the willows and the lily pads and the tortoises. One state tinged in melancholy, anticipating summer’s end, and one in only watery sunlight.

  “They’re just trees and lakes, but you can make them into so much more than that,” I’d remembered saying.

  “How?” Marco had asked.

  “By believing in things.”

  Both Marco and I rested our forearms against the platform, chests heaving, still laughing. “You’re making us feel guilty, Verna, doing all that extra reading. Usually summer ends this slow, tragic death, but you’re just casually executing it on page one,” said Marco.

  “They made it very clear that the reading was optional,” said Verna.

  “Yeah, yeah. They say that. But it stops being so when people actually do it.”

  “Okay, I see,” said Verna. “I should stop developing as a person because you’re feeling insecure about your choice not to,” said Verna.

  “Develop as a person?” asked Marco, making a mocking, incredulous face that was mostly lighthearted, but a hint of condescension appeared in the way he drew out the last word. “With that pile of textbooks?”

  “And novels and essays and plays,” added Verna.

  “Well, that’s not you, it’s the authors requisitioning your head to advance whatever folly they couldn’t enact in their own lives,” said Marco.

  Verna laughed. “That has to be the most cynical description of scholarship I’ve ever heard.”

  “Naturally, because the scoundrels would never admit it themselves. It’s simple sophistry all around. But the problem is that foisting things onto thousands of impressionable strangers is an act of aggression.”

  I sighed. Marco was a known provocateur and usually when this side of him showed up we’d just kind of indulge him and laugh off whatever outlandish notion he was peddling, but today felt different. He’d been at odds with his parents after receiving a few school disciplinary censures, so I wasn’t sure if he was picking this idea to swing around because he actually believed
in it or because he was just feeling exasperated.

  “Nothing’s being foisted,” said Verna, squinting.

  “Sure it is,” said Marco. “Your young teenage soul just can’t realize it yet because it doesn’t have enough experiences of its own to go off of. You just have to be you.”

  “Me? More like ‘me’ in stasis. What would’ve happened if I’d said that when I was ten and shut everything else out? I would’ve been a selfish little brat forever,” said Verna, raising her arm to her forehead to block out the sun. “Don’t you think, Aaron?”

  Part of me wanted to take Marco to task because I knew people often started believing unfortunate things when they were really down, and I didn’t think a good friend would let him do that. But the problem was that there was just enough to what he was saying to make it complicated.

  “I think you’re both right,” I said. “Ideas can be powerful, so if their supporters over-apply them—which I think is what you’re worried about, Marco—they come at the expense of other good ideas. They’d never do this on their own, but we do it for them because we like having single ‘answers’ so much. Especially when we’re young,” I said, hoisting myself back onto the platform.

  “Hey. I’m not saying mainline the Kool-Aid here. Gosh. But at the same time, it’s like Professor Dalton said, ‘You’ve got to try things out. You’ve got to push things to the limit to know what’s possible’,” said Verna.

  “All right,” said Marco, and pushed me back into the water. I thought he was just playing around, especially since I’d just defended him, but when I surfaced again his eyes were waiting for me, staring. “It’s easy to talk balance when the board’s already exactly where you want it, isn’t it?”

  “Huh?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Not all of us have the luxury of such prudence,” said Marco.

  Chapter 19

  I woke up at five a.m., my U-dev’s silent alarm vibrating against my chest, telling me it was time for class. I had somehow worked my way out of my hammock in the dream and now I was staring up at it, my teeth chattering, shivering on the ground. My eyelids had felt heavy yesterday but today they felt like boulders, and I wanted to crawl back inside the memory and pick up where I’d left off.

  I considered grabbing a stim from the cupboard on my way out, though I’d never relied on drugs before, and dipping into boosters this early wouldn’t help me condition myself for the three or four hours of sleep a night people seemed to get here. There was a vat of red fluid in the back corner of the refrigeration panel that I hadn’t noticed before and I was about to pour myself a glass when I heard from behind me, “You don’t want that.”

  “Why?” I asked, turning around to see Fingers holding a towel wrapped around his waist, his black hair dripping.

  “You’ll just have to trust me on this one,” he said, filling me a cup of water instead. Then he took out a pen and re-inked the faded “Do Not Drink” label I had missed.

  A few minutes later I eased into a second-row chair for my first class, Space Science. The instructor—a plain-faced, balding man who’d been behind me for at least half the trek from C Block—greeted the class. “Good morning, everyone. I expect our new arrivals have already read the briefing files I sent along yesterday and are currently up to speed.”

  I had thumbed through them, but I definitely wasn’t “up to speed.”

  “We’ll be picking up where we left off in our groups on Wednesday. Any new Greens should join a group that only has two people.” I looked around with a modest fear of being left out and was about to join the team of a lanky, freckled boy and a shorter, somber-looking girl when I heard Daries’ voice calling from the back of the classroom. I started walking toward him, but I froze when I saw who he was with.

  “Keep going, buddy.”

  “But there’s already a three of you,” I said, sitting down in a chair by Daries, a guy I’d never seen before, and the girl from the catwalk.

  “Oh, Dr. Mitch won’t mind. As long as you don’t show up during his office hours, you’re golden.”

  I was immediately embarrassed for having already said something dumb, and a cold sweat slid down inside my uniform as I grabbed one of the biopads they’d just passed out—trying to buy time to think. I hadn’t seen her when I’d first come into class, and being caught off guard was leading to a chain reaction of self-doubt; I didn’t even hear the kid next to her introduce himself because I was so engrossed in pretending to be engrossed with my biopad.

  “I know it’s pretty interesting and everything, but you can at least say hi back, can’t you?” the kid said. “Daries, is this the one with Asperger’s you were talking about?”

  I blushed. “Sorry, I’m Aaron. You’re probably thinking of Sebastian, but he doesn’t have Asperger’s. He’s really—”

  “No one likes a label, I get it. The name’s Simon.”

  Then she spoke. “I’m Eve. It looks like you already know Daries.”

  “Yeah,” I said through a quaver, shaking their hands. I’d never fumbled like this before. Verna actually made fun of me for how smooth I was and the solid track record I had with girls. Not to say that there were a lot, but the ones I’d gone out with had been sought after, and because I’d been successful just by being myself I hadn’t felt like I needed to put on airs.

  I’d forgotten that version of me since the accident, though, because I didn’t want to be someone who was smooth. I didn’t deserve to be smooth. I deserved to be the quiet, standoffish kid in the corner who no one talked to.

  “You want to know a secret, Aaron?” Simon asked matter-of-factly.

  “Uh, sure.”

  “It really doesn’t matter if you figure that thing out or not.”

  “No?” I asked, my eyes returning to my biopad.

  “Because this class doesn’t count. None of the science classes do.”

  “You get a grade, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I did a regression analysis and it turns out they just add and subtract points in other areas to negate whatever it is.”

  Eve and Daries looked at each other, amused.

  “Then why have the class?” I asked.

  “That’s a really good question. You see Dr. Mitchell over there?”

  I turned and watched Dr. Mitchell talking to one of the Blues. He seemed genial, but was clearly irritated that the kid didn’t understand his explanation.

  “He looks bored.”

  “If I were the most renowned particle geneticist in the universe teaching an intermediate science course that doesn’t even count to a bunch of teenagers, I’d be bored, too,” Simon commented. “And the thing is, it’s not just him; it’s the whole faculty. Dr. Sun-Ku in Astrophysics, Dr. Sloan in Cellular Science, Dr. Juarez in Recombinant Genetics, on and on and on. I recognized Mitchell from some doco and knew I’d heard Jaurez’s name somewhere, and then I started looking them up . . . and it’s pretty nuts. So the next question is, why are they here?”

  “Probably just wanted to get away,” said Daries. “I think that’s true for a lot of people—the solar system and GZ are pretty fucked up places.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” asked Eve.

  “Oh, maybe—a little of this, a little of that. I got stuck and decided to spin the Fleet’s wheel of death.”

  “None of them were stuck, though.” Eve shook her head. “I followed them here instead of going to the science academy at Quin Mar like everyone recommended, because they could’ve gone anywhere they wanted. And there must be some compelling reason why they’re not at Quin Mar or getting paid a fortune working for some biotech company.”

  She turned toward me. “And you, Aaron? Any hot theories about what that is?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked down at my green uniform. “I just got here.”

  Simon cocked his head to one side. “Well, the good news, buddy, is that when they give you that new blue uniform in a few months, they’ll also give you a brain so you can, you know, start thinking a
nd having opinions and stuff.”

  Daries chuckled and my face went hot with embarrassment again. I felt Eve’s eyes on me and all of a sudden these shapeless insecurities I hadn’t even known I had leapt out as if I’d turned the lights on inside myself for the first time. I was paralyzed. It took twice as long to say anything, because now I had to imagine how it would sound to Eve, too.

  “An opinion isn’t something you just have, it’s something you form,” I finally said, remembering the conversation on the lake. “Or else it’ll form you.”

  “That’s deep,” laughed Simon.

  “But you know, we could just ask them,” I said.

  “Ask the teachers?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Because they wouldn’t tell us the truth,” said Simon, grinning, apparently amused by my naïveté. “No one around here does.”

  “But scientists aren’t very good liars, right? I mean, their whole thing is finding stuff out. Finding out the truth. I imagine it’d be pretty easy to tell if they weren’t.”

  “Where’d you find this kid?” asked Simon, turning to Daries. “We’re all so jaded we didn’t even think of the obvious thing.” He laughed. “Just ask them. I love it.”

  Eve looked at me and I was able to hold her gaze for a moment before everyone turned their attention toward the front of the class as Dr. Mitchell began speaking.

  “All right, I assume everyone’s compensated for the background radio noise, but things get more challenging as you get farther out, since the signal weakens by the square of the distance from the beginning mark. So if you’re four times as far away, the signal is only one sixteenth as powerful, and if you’re ten times as far away, it’s only one hundredth as powerful. And so on. It’s called the inverse-square law of electromagnetic propagation, and it’s your worst enemy in deep space.

  “And if that’s not enough, you’ve got your quasars, pulsars, and nebulas. In this system in fact, we’ve got one of the most energetic nebulas ever encountered, and it introduces numerous critical challenges for communications.” He paused. “But the beautiful thing about science is that unlike a living adversary who can react and move and counter, its challenges stay constant. You can surround them with determination and pry open their secrets with persistence. It just requires commitment.