by Maggie Allen
“No. And didn’t you tell me that the microphones are so sensitive they pick up everything?”
“Yes, that’s true. Did you do anything, then? Make a nasty face or anything?”
“No! You saw—I was nice! More nice than H’raf deserved. He was so rude.”
“Well, he told his parents that you were rude.”
What? “I was not rude! You saw!”
Dad stepped in. “Yes, we did and you were fine, Nia. We don’t understand this at all, honey. But the aliens are pretty upset. So tomorrow, try to be extra nice to H’raf, okay?”
“Tomorrow? I have to go again tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Mom said, her voice softer now. “They’ve requested another play date. It’s so important, Nia. Please try.”
“I was trying!”
“I know. Let’s come up with a plan to interest H’raf tomorrow.”
When Mom and Dad finally left the room, Jordan looked up from his ant farm. “Rude,” he said. “Nia was rude, rude, rude!”
“Shut up,” I said. I wanted to say a bad word, but he would only tell Mom, so I didn’t. Little brat.
The “plan” for the next day’s play date was for me to bring different stuff to show H’raf. So I did.
I brought the programmable holo drone that you can make fly around the dome while it projects 3-D pictures of anything. I have a lot of software for it. I projected a jungle, a pair of baby elephants, a ballet dancer. I programmed the ballerina myself, doing leaps and twirls. “You like, H’raf?”
H’raf smiled and said nothing.
I showed him my fighting robots. They’re really fun. One person works one robot and the other person works the other, and the first robot to fall down, loses. I acted out for him how his robot would work and I held out the remote.
H’raf smiled and did nothing.
I unpacked my building set. It had light, strong bricks and motors and you can make awesome stuff. I started on a car we could ride around the dome in. I showed him how the bricks fit together and handed him one.
H’raf smiled and didn’t take it.
That was the last straw—I mean, the last brick! It really was! The stupid kid wouldn’t do anything, and all the alien adults were doing something with their feet, shifting around on the rocky moon like they were feeling something, but I didn’t know what. And everybody looked at me making a fool of myself. And the cameras went on recording. And I lost it.
“I hate this!” I ripped off my s-suit and stomped toward the elevator. Dad rushed toward me. The alien adults shifted their feet even harder. I didn’t care. Over my shoulder, I called, “Go home, H’raf! Just go back where you came from!”
Mom was really mad. She stormed into our apartment where Dad had been trying to calm me down for half an hour. Jordan sat on the floor with his ant farm, his mouth hanging open while he listened.
“Nia! What was that?”
Dad’s calming down hadn’t worked very well. I jumped up from my chair and faced her. “That was me leaving! H’raf wouldn’t do anything! I was trying, you know I was, so don’t get all upset with me!”
Mom doesn’t calm down easily either. We’re alike that way. She said, “Don’t take that tone with me, young lady! I’ve just spent half an hour trying to apologize to the alien leader. That’s his son you insulted. Actually, you insulted all of them! Didn’t you see them making angry gestures with their feet?”
“I didn’t know their stupid feet moves meant they were angry! And I don’t care if the aliens were angry or not. They’re the ones who should apologize! I tried and tried…”
Mom’s voice softened. “I know you did. But, Nia, you can’t tell visitors to go back where they came from. It’s rude. Remember when we first moved to Earth and those mean kids called you ‘Moony’ and told you to go back to where you came from? How did you like it?”
Jordan finally said something. He grinned and said, “Nia’s in trouble. Heh heh.”
That really was the last straw, or brick, or something. I burst into tears, ran into my room, and slammed the door. I wasn’t coming out ever, not even if I starved to death. No, I wasn’t! What I said to H’raf was justified!
J-U-S-T-I-F-I-E-D. It means you were right.
I wasn’t justified.
This came to me in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I kept remembering how bad the bullying felt when I first moved to Earth, and Ellen and David and their jerky friends kept telling me to go back to the moon. Did H’raf feel bad like that?
Also, I remembered that when I showed him the fighting robots, his eyes got sort of brighter. Maybe he did like them—although if he did, why didn’t he take the remote I tried to hand him so he could work one of the robots? I didn’t know. But I didn’t want him to feel bad because of me. I also did not want to apologize to him in front of a whole bunch of people and cameras.
I could do it right now, alone.
I put on my clothes in the dark bedroom and slipped out of my room. A night light glowed dim in the big room. I had just reached the door to the outside corridor when Jordan’s bedroom door opened. His bedroom used to be a closet because, since the aliens arrived, we have all these important people from Earth crammed into Alpha Colony and nobody gets much space. Jordan stumbled out in his babyish pajamas with stars and planets all over them. “Where are you going?”
“Shhhhh! You’ll wake Mom and Dad!”
“I want to go, too!”
“No, you don’t. I’m going someplace really scary.”
It was the wrong thing to say. I forgot what a lunatic Jordan can be. “I want to go someplace scary!”
“No. Go back to bed.”
“If you don’t take me, I’ll scream real loud and Aunt Julia and Uncle Wayne will wake up and then you won’t be allowed to go.”
He was such a brat. But I saw from his grinning face that he would do it. I would have to take him. “Oh, all right! But don’t blame me if you die.”
It didn’t bother him at all. He picked up his ant farm—why was he bringing that? But on second thought, maybe it was a good idea. Maybe H’raf would like it. He hadn’t liked anything else I’d brought him, but maybe he was interested in bugs. I was feeling desperate.
Alpha Colony doesn’t have security cameras in the corridors around the living areas. There were so few of us living here before, only a hundred and fifty people, and everybody knew everybody and trusted them, or they wouldn’t be here. There are security cameras other places in Alpha Colony, but I used to live here. I know all the back routes and old tunnels and even some of the e-codes to open doors. Jordan and I made our way to the s-suit room with no problem. There were cameras on the ceiling, but we wouldn’t be here very long. I hurried both of us into s-suits, ignoring Jordan’s dumb comments (“Cool!” “Maybe we’ll see a moon monster!” Like there really were such things.)
Alarms sounded; we ignored them. The aliens’ shuttle was in the shuttle bay, right next to the s-suit chamber, and before any guards could run in to stop us, I was knocking on the bay door. I think the aliens were watching because the airlock opened instantly. We went into the airlock and it shut just as the first guard raced toward us.
“Cool!” Jordan said, still holding his ant farm
All of a sudden, I wasn’t so sure. The shuttle bay would be filled with the aliens’ air. The aliens controlled the air lock. What if they decided to puncture our s-suits because I had insulted them? Mom said we didn’t understand their culture yet. Maybe I was doing a really stupid thing. Maybe I would get both me and Jordan killed.
It was too late to change my mind. The air lock opened on the other side.
Four aliens stood outside their shuttle, waiting for us. Three adults and H’raf. Before anybody could kill us, I yelled, “I’m sorry! H’raf, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. I don’t want you to go back home. Stay here forever. I’m really sorry.”
The aliens didn’t say a word or lift a tentacle. But at least they weren’t making angry-moves with the
ir feet. Out of their space suits, they looked smaller. Also bluer, and more alien. Their tails were visible, about two feet long and strong-looking.
I said again, “I’m sorry. You see, I—”
Jordan screamed.
I whirled around to face him. He wasn’t hurt, but his face was red. He yelled, “My ants are dead!”
I peered through the glass. Some of the ants did look dead. Others twitched, and then they stopped and they looked dead too. All at once I knew what had happened. The s-suits kept the alien air away from Jordan and me, but the ant farm had teeny holes in it so the ants could breathe. The alien air was poison to them.
Jordan cried, “You killed my ants!” and threw the ant farm at H’raf.
Luckily, it missed. The thing fell onto the rock floor of the shuttle bay and the wooden frame shattered. Dirt, plastic, and ants flew everywhere. It was a mess and…oh, what if there was something in the ant farm that was poisonous to the aliens? What if it killed them?
They must have thought so too, because they all jumped into their shuttle and slammed the door. Jordan lay on the deck, yelling and kicking his legs and turning red. The alarms sounded and a really angry voice said over the sound system, “Nia Philips! Open this airlock door right now!”
But it was like I couldn’t move at all, I was so miserable. I’d wrecked the mission. I’d killed aliens (maybe). I was a terrible, terrible person. And it was all my own fault.
No—some of it was Jordan’s fault. He threw the ant farm, not me. I yelled at him, “Help me clean up this mess!”
Behind me, the shuttle door must have opened because H’raf and his father stood there, both wearing s-suits. H’raf said, “Okay.”
I whirled around. “What?”
“I’ll help,” H’raf said. “I’m sorry the small creatures are not living more.”
I stared at him. He smiled, bent, and started using a small vacuum-like-thingie to suck up the dirt and ants.
I blurted, “You’re talking! To me! You’re cooperating!”
“Of course,” he said. “You are now polite. But that one—” He pointed with s-suited finger at Jordan—“must stop making so much noise.”
I said, “Good luck with that,” and bent to help sweep up dead ants.
It turned out there was an explanation for all this. The aliens have not just a different language but a different culture and do things much different than we do. Whenever someone is a guest, you’re supposed to start a visit by ordering them to do something. That shows that you are willing to accept them like members of the family, because family members order each other around all the time. Then the guests feel welcome and everything can go on from there. When I yelled at Jordan to help clean up the ant farm, H’raf thought I was yelling at him, so he felt welcome on Alpha Colony. Up till then, nobody had ordered the aliens to do anything.
Like I said: weird. But it did sort of make sense. My family orders me around all the time.
So now, it’s a few weeks later. Jordan got shipped back to his other cousin back on Earth, where he can have all the ants he wants. H’raf and I, plus Jillian and Ben and two other alien kids spend a lot of time together.
I was right about the fighting robots, they’re H’raf’s favorite. I like a thing he has, a b’b’cal (blow out twice and twist both thumbs to the left). Before you use it, it looks like just a lump of green plastic. But when you talk to it, it responds to your voice by changing shape, and you can make really cool things out of it. The alien kids and we are learning each other’s tech, culture, and language.
About the language. H’raf is a lot better at English than I am at alien. So are B’h’pril and T’june. When I ordered Jordan to clean up the dead ants, H’raf and the other aliens already understood most of what humans said. We don’t understand as much, partly because we’re short a finger to make all the words. Also, I think they’re smarter than us.
That’s okay as long as I can still spell better. So everything is copacetic.
That means good.
C-O-P-A-C-E-T-I-C.
Red Dust and Dancing Horses
Beth Cato
Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in a lair west of Phoenix, Arizona. She’s the author of steampunk fantasy novels such as The Clockwork Dagger (a 2015 finalist for the Locus Award for First Novel) and The Clockwork Crown from Harper Voyager, with a new series called Breath of Earth starting in 2016. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.
No horses existed on Mars. Nara could change that.
She stared out the thick-paned window. Tinted dirt sprawled to the horizon, mesas and rock-lipped craters cutting the mottled sky. It almost looked like a scene from somewhere out of the Old West on Earth, like in the two-dimensional movies she studied on her tablet.
Mama thought that 20th-century films were the ultimate brain-rotting waste of time, so Nara made sure to see at least two a week. Silver, Trigger, Buttermilk, Rex, Champion — she knew them all. She had spent months picturing just how their hooves would sink into that soft dirt, how their manes would lash in the wind. How her feet needed to rest in the stirrups, heels down, and how the hot curve of a muzzle would fit between her cupped hands.
The terraforming process had come a long way in the two hundred years since mechs established the Martian colonies. Nara didn’t need a pressure suit to walk outside, but in her lifetime she’d never breathed on her own outside of her house or the Corcoran Dome. There would never be real horses here. Not for hundreds of years, if ever.
But a mechanical horse could find its way home in a dust storm or handle the boggy sand without breaking a leg. She could ride it. Explore. It was better than nothing. Her forehead bumped against the glass. But to have a real horse with hot skin and silky mane…
“Nara, you’re moping again.” Mama held a monitor to each window, following the seal along the glass. “No matter how long you stare out the window and sulk, we can’t afford to fly you back to Earth just to see those animals. They’re hard to find as it is. Besides, you know what happened when that simulator came through last year.”
Yeah. She did.
Each Martian-borne eleven-year-old child had sat in a booth strung with wires and sensors so that they could feel the patter of rain and touch the flaking dryness of eucalyptus bark. Nara smelled the dankness of fertile earth for the very first time. She threw up. The administrators listed her as a category five Martian. She would need the longest quarantine time to acclimate to Earth if she ever made the trip.
“Blast it, another inner seal is weakening,” Mama muttered, moving to the next window.
The dull clang of metal echoed down the hall, followed by the soft whir of Papa’s mechs. Hope sprung in her chest. Papa would understand. He would listen.
Her feet tapped down the long tunnel to his workshop. Nara rubbed the rounded edge of the tablet tucked at her waist. Sand pattered against the walls as the wind whistled a familiar melody.
The workshop stood twice as big as the rest of the household, echoing with constantly clicking gears. The grey dome bowed overhead, the skylight windows showing only red. Papa’s legs stuck out from beneath the belly of a mining cart, his server mechs humming as they dismantled the plating on a small trolley alongside him.
The workshop was half empty. The basalt mine had received a new load of equipment just two weeks before, and as Papa described it, he’d have a lull before everything decided to break again. Judging by the lack of dents on this cart, the lull was already over.
“Hey, girly. Hand me the tenner,” Papa said, his hand thrusting through a gap in the chassis. Nara passed him the tool. “What’re you up to?”
“Nothing.” Nara slipped open the tablet, expanding the screen with a tug of her fingers. After a few taps, she accessed the data she wanted: the anatomy of the horse. Her fingers flicked up, removing the layer of skin, then the muscles, leaving the bones. One of the nearby mechs bowed, his knees fluid and graceful as he pick
ed up a tire and conveyed it to a stack on the far side. Nara squinted, looking between the mech and the screen.
“You’re never up to nothing,” Papa said. She heard the grin in his voice. “Did Mama kick you out of the house?”
“Not yet.” She grinned back. “I was wondering something, actually. Think I could use the extra space you have in here to make a project?”
Wheels whined as Papa pushed himself out. “What sort of project?” Grey and red smudges framed the skin around his goggles.
Nara held up the tablet, projecting the images out six inches. Papa chuckled low. “Why am I not surprised?” he asked. “You want to build a horse?”
“I think I can,” she said, her eyes full of confidence.
“Oh, I know you can, I just didn’t think you’d settle for that. Let me see.” He held it directly overhead, then grunted as he passed it back. “The leg structure’s not that different than the diggers you helped me with last month. Your main issues will be balancing the mass and nailing the AI.”
She nodded, her mind already filtering through the possibilities. She had to think of horse breeds, no — she would think of specific horses. Trigger, her favorite. He was tough and fast, with all the grace of a dancer. Oh, how he could dance. His hooves shuffled, his gold skin shimmering and muscles coiling. Nara would watch him, holding her breath. Nothing on Mars could move like that.
“You’ll have to use the scrap pile,” Papa continued, snapping her out of a reverie. “But if you need anything fresh, you need to order through me, and you’ll have to work for it. This isn’t going to be cheap.”
“Cheaper than a trip to Earth,” Mother said from the doorway. “And speaking of expenses, we’re going to need inner sealants replaced on three windows as soon as this storm is over. One gap was so big a fiend beetle could almost squeeze through from inside the walls, and God knows what it would cost if one of those got in.”
