Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Mom and Dad were forward in the adults’ cabin, where they were being served fake no-booze Champagne (no one was allowed to touch alcohol for seventy-two hours before lift—this was also from the briefing, and had been accompanied by graphic images of free-fall vomit), far from the howling, spitting kiddilees.

  The announcements played twice, once in English and once in “Simplified English,” for the foreigners. Simplified English had been new to me when I entered the program, but I soon got used to it, words of one or two syllables drawn from a vocab of five thousand or so. I sometimes even found myself chatting in it over dinner with my parents, which drove them crazy. But Simplified was the official mission language, which had been decreed by the Mars Corp in its charter on the sensible grounds that we couldn’t have a new world with a hundred stupid complicated languages, but English was as stupid and complicated as they come—“the tough coughs as he ploughs the dough”—so Simplified was the right compromise.

  The pove listened closely to both sets of announcements, like he was anxious to learn Real English so he could stop being such a pove, but I knew it was a lost cause. Poves are poves are poves. Once you’re born a pove, you get all the lessons of being a pove, the idea that the world owes you a living, that you can just get by being lazy and begging, and it’s nearly impossible to unlearn that lesson. But he’d have to, if he was going to make it on Mars. No handouts on Mars, pove!

  They played the liftoff countdown through the PA in the cabin, and at first we all laughed and counted down with it, like it was New Year’s Eve: 10, 9, 8 . . .

  But by 4, no one was counting along. The whole ship was rumbling like a dragon, shaking slightly, feeling full of potential, like it had its legs coiled underneath it and it was getting ready to jump, which it was. And when it did—3—we would be under way, on a one-way journey to an alien world, and we would never see the green hills of Earth again.

  At 2, I started crying, really bawling, though I couldn’t tell you why. Screw the Earth, anyway, the crummy old planet with its environmental bellyaching, its teeming anthills of poves and refugees and crazy religious people with their suicide bombs. But it was Earth, my Earth, my homeworld, and—

  1.

  I wasn’t the only one crying. We were all sobbing, and the only reason it didn’t sound like a nursery school before nap time was that the engines were so damned loud you’d couldn’t hear it if you threw back your head and screamed as loud as you could. The pove next to me was crying, too, and I wondered if his parents were forward, or whether he was one of the orphans the Mars Charity put on board the ship to show what a great bunch of people they all were. We all were.

  And then we were boosting. It was like a thousand hands on every centimeter of me, pushing as hard as they could, even on the back of my throat, on my tongue, on my nose, on my lungs, and it didn’t stop, it got worse and worse and worse and then

  everything

  went

  black.

  The next thing I knew, the pressure was off, and I seemed to be falling in no particular direction. I had just enough time to open my eyes and see the loose ends of my face mask straps floating around my head and think, Free fall! and then my stomach decided to send everything it had up to have a look at the wonder of space travel. I gagged and tried to pitch forward, but the straps held me in.

  Mars, Inc. had anticipated this, of course. Us kiddilees hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours—the grown-ups ate like hogs, but they had the antinausea injections that weren’t kidsafe. My stomach was practically empty, except for some stringy green mucous and bile that tasted like—well, it tasted like puke!—and it burned in my throat and sinuses. A little escaped my lips and floated up my nose and back down my throat and I started to choke.

  I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people were making gagging noises and choking noises. The blob of puke was lodged in my windpipe and I could only get whistling sips of air past it, and I was seeing stars. There weren’t any space attendants nearby, and even though I was mashing the call button, I couldn’t hear anyone rushing to my aid.

  Then there were small, calloused fingers at my straps, undogging my shoulders, arms, wrists, forehead, so that I could lean forward—the falling feeling worse than ever, my stomach churning. A small, strong fist thumped me between the shoulders and I coughed convulsively and the puke was back in my mouth and I spat it out and saw it wobble away like a jellyfish.

  It was only then that I saw whose small hands had been on me. The pove, who had somehow slipped his bonds and had hooked his foot through one of his straps so that he was able to maneuver while floating above me. He smiled at me as my puke-jellyfish hit him in the chest, leaving a splotch like a greasy paintball hit.

  “You okay?” he said. He had a funny convenience-store-clerk accent, clipped but somehow liquid.

  “Fine,” I said, and it came out with a rasp from my burning throat. He had drifted so that he was upside down, his face bobbing centimeters from mine. “Thanks.” It was disorienting. He had toothpaste breath. It made me conscious of the fact that my breath smelled like a dead bear’s butthole.

  He put a hand out. “Vijay Mukherjee,” he said.

  “David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith,” I said. He snorted. I was used to that. I waited until he’d finished snickering and said, “The Third.” It’s true. Great-grandad had been the first, converted from Brian to Brionn by a Marine induction sergeant who couldn’t spell, and I was the third to bear his name. It was silly and long and weird, but it was mine, and no one else had a name like it (except Dad and Great-grandad, of course).

  I still felt like I was falling, but it wasn’t as unpleasant as it had been, and I could see where it would stop feeling like falling and start feeling like flying, eventually. “Thanks,” I said, then “sorry,” gesturing at his stained shirt. He waved off my apology.

  “Think nothing of it. We’re going into space together, my friend! We can’t let little things get to us!” He shook my hand again. He had calloused fingers, but a soft handshake, limp and a little damp. Everyone I knew shook hands like they meant it. But this pove—Vijay!—had rescued me from my choking and hadn’t put up a fuss when I puked on him. (A nasty part of me wondered if his slum or whatever wasn’t carpeted in worse things than puke). I could live with a damp handshake.

  The space attendant finally showed up and demanded to know what we were doing out of our straps and then didn’t want to listen when he explained. The spacer—who floated through the air with the greatest of ease—strapped us back in without missing a word in his lecture on shuttle safety.

  I turned my head to look at Vijay and I could see that he was doing the same. “Thanks again,” I said, my voice muffled by my mask, which reeked of barf.

  He gave me another thumbs-up, and then we boosted again and were pushed back into the chairs.

  Debarking at Eagle’s Nest Station was a lot simpler than boarding had been on Earth. The space attendants swarmed us and bound us wrist-and-foot to our neighbors with soft bungee cords in chains of ten kids. Then they simply grabbed the lead kid and towed the whole chain along the length of the shuttle, through grown-up territory, through the air lock, and into the station’s mustering area. We were cut loose and then each of us was issued a set of one-size-fits-all Velcro gloves and slippers, and we struggled into them, some of us flying off into the low ceiling, which might as well have been the floor, except that no one was standing on it at the moment.

  It was all pretty chaotic. Every few seconds, ten more colonists came through the air lock, pushing us all farther in, and anyone who wasn’t Velcroed down drifted away, and it soon became clear that there just wouldn’t be enough room in the mustering area for all of us, but more people started coming out, and I couldn’t find Mom or Dad in the press, and then Vijay plucked his way along the carpet to me and said, “Come on, it’s too crowded on this wall, let’s stand on one of the others,” which sounded like a crazy plan but I couldn’t say exactly why, so we pushed
off together and grabbed the ceiling with toes and hands, laughing as we were skidding and ripped around until we were standing upside down (relative to everyone else, though I still felt like I was falling in every direction at once). At first people stared at us in that familiar hey-you-stupid-kids-cu-tit-out way, but as the room grew more and more crowded, many of the other kids and then some of the grown-ups joined us on the “ceiling.”

  I knew some of the other kids from orientation. There was the big, butchy red-haired boy who liked to mouth off, but who was looking as pukey as I felt. There was the shy girl with the incredible movie-star face and big, wide-set violet eyes, who wasn’t looking shy at all now, but was looking frankly and unashamedly at the upside down adults below her, peering through the seaweed tangle of hair that floated around her head. There was the dreamy girl who never turned her earphones off—you could tell, even though they were implants, because she was always doing this head-bobbing thing to the rhythm—now wide awake and plucking her way across the ceiling on her hands, feet brushing the hair of the adults “below.”

  I spotted Mom and Dad just before the space attendants pushed through the last tensome and dogged the air lock. As it sealed, the air pressure in the room changed slightly and I realized with a shiver that the funny-looking door I’d passed through wasn’t just a door, it was a door between two spaceships and that the only thing that had stopped me from being sucked into space where my lungs and eyeballs would explode while my body turned into a freeze-dried popsicle had been some accordioned metal, rubber, and plastic. And now that was gone, and the shuttle that had lifted us to Eagle’s Nest was floating through that same void.

  The same void that I was going the spend the next six months sailing through in a tin can whose thin skin would be all that stood between me and total assplosion.

  A space attendant standing sideways, sticking out of the wall like a thumbtack, touched an invisible button on her work space and a two-note whistle sounded. “Colonists, attention please.” Her voice was amplified and came from every corner of the room. It was the same system they used in orientation: the room’s cameras knew where the speaker was and tuned an array of directional mics to follow them, so that you could speak without the inconvenience of a mic. “Colonists?” she said again, when the chatter barely dimmed. It was as loud as a rocket engine (well, not quite) from all the talking. She twiddled an invisible knob, using some hand jive the ship’s computer understood. “COLONISTS,” she said again, her voice so loud it actually made we want to go to the toilet as it vibrated the poo I hadn’t realized was lurking up my colon.

  The silence was thunderous. My ears rang. “Welcome to Eagle’s Nest,” she said, “I am Lainie. Just Lainie. As in ‘Lainie Lainie, no complainy.’ I am your mommy for the next six glorious months aboard the Eagle, and it will be my job to head off any potential strife before it rises to the level of complaint. We live by a strict ‘no whining’ ethic on Mars—that’s why you signed up to go—and it’s never too soon to start practicing.” She gestured at the kids and the few adults on the “ceiling.” “I see that some of you have already gotten into the no-complainy state of mind and solved your own problems by your own wits. Good people of upside down land, I salute you.” She ripped off a perfect navy salute. Her uniform was vaguely naval, though Mars Colony didn’t have a navy or an army. It had a security force, of course, contracted for out of the colonial fees and charged with enforcing our Mutual Code of Conduct and Respect. But Lainie didn’t talk like one of the meatheads who worked security around the Mars, Inc. properties; she talked like a Marsy, smart and confident and assertive. Like my parents and all their friends.

  “Now, we are just about ready to move you from the Nest straight onto the Eagle. We’ve been making her ready for days now, and she is just in her final inspection from the International Space Agency—” She squeaked out “International Space Agency” in a pinched, cartoony voice, the way every Martian did. No one liked the pencil pushers at the ISA, with all their stupid rules. “And then we can get you aboard. We didn’t anticipate this delay, and unfortunately, we can’t let you wander around the Nest. This is a working jobsite, and there’s no way you could be safely permitted to move about freely, much as we’d like to let you.” She drew a breath and said, in one long word, “Marsincdeeplyregretstheinconvenience,” and grinned. More than a few people chuckled with her. Phrases like “deeply regrets the inconvenience” were the kind of thing we were going to Mars to escape.

  “It shouldn’t be very long folks. In the meantime, think happy thoughts, talk among yourselves, mingle. These are the people you’ll be spending the next six months with. These are the people you’ll be sharing a planet with for the rest of your lives.”

  Okay, an admission. I’m not much of a Martian. Martians are supposed to be full of colonial pluck, ready to grab Earth’s neighboring planet with both hands and head butt that mother into submission. We are the winners, humanity’s best hope for surviving once stupid Earth is used up by the poves and the stupids. We’re all rich, of course, and that’s how you know we’re winners. We didn’t whine like all the poves who claim that the world owes them a living. We made our own fortunes on Earth and now we’re off to set up a new planet that’ll be as great as the Earth could be, if only you left all the whiners out.

  But I’m not much of a Martian. I’m not much of a winner. I guess that makes me a loser.

  Here’s the thing: my grades are okay, Bs and B plusses, except for a C in American history, which, honestly, I deserved. I think I slept through more than half those classes. I would have given me a D minus.

  Here’s the thing: I’m not the popular kid. I’m not even the popular kid’s best friend. I’m the kid that the popular kid’s best friend used to play with before he made friends with the popular kid. I’m not the last picked for teams, but I’m the last picked from the kids who aren’t total spazzes or fat or handicapable or whatever.

  Here’s the thing: the only place I’m not a loser is when I’m playing Martian Chronicles, the Mars Colony game that I’ve lived, breathed, eaten, and shat for the past five years. The reason for this is that I am a stone Martian Chronicles monster freak. I can play MC for eighteen hours without coming up for air, bringing it with me to the toilet and the table. There’s something that just fits in the game, which sounds kind of boring from the outside: you are a Mars colonist and you have to build your homestead, sell your wares and services, work to elect sympathetic officials (or become an official yourself), and try to get your neighbors to see things your way when it comes to the day-to-day running of Ares City.

  Boring, right? Wrong. The game is all about figuring out what everyone else wants, and how to make them feel like they’re getting it, even though you’re really the one getting what you want. I have a huge fortune in MC. I’m a ray-gun millionaire. (The Mars, Inc. company scrip—our money—is called “the ray gun,” or “the Martian ray gun” if you’re feeling formal. There’s even a ray gun on every bill, stylized and old-fashioned and cool.) Not real money, but I know that if I can do it in MC, I’ll be able to do it on Mars. And then I won’t be a loser anymore, and I’ll be a real Martian.

  I am self-aware enough to know how pathetic this sounds. And I’m pathetic enough that I don’t care.

  The Eagle took on her passengers after three long hours stuck in the Eagle’s Nest mustering area. For a group of no-whiners, there was a lot of complaining about the strange, lengthy time stuck there in zero-gee (not technically zero, as orientation had reminded us, just microgravity but I couldn’t tell the difference), waving back and forth in the air-recirculator’s breeze like a bed of sea kelp. They whined about the wait. They whined about the line for the toilet. Then they saw the toilet—a kind of giant vacuum cleaner you stuck your whole ass into—and they whined about that. The only ones who weren’t whining were the kids who were hanging from the ceiling and the adults who’d joined us. We were having too much fun in upside down land to worry about the toilets or the
wait. And there was plenty of room on the roof.

  “What’s your corp?” the girl with the violet eyes said, with no preamble at all. She was asking about Martian Chronicles—specifically, what my corporate affiliation was in-game. That is, which team I played for.

  “DBOS-Corp,” I said casually. She had thrown up on the shuttle, too—I could tell by the flecks of dried puke down the front of her shirt.

  She nodded sagely. “I hear good things about it, but isn’t it a hard company to ladder up in? Super-competitive?”

  “I don’t really need to worry about that,” I said. “I’m the CEO.” It didn’t come out as casual as I’d hoped, because I caught someone’s floating, gelatinous sneeze in the eye as I said it and ended up twitching and flinching away.

  She cocked her head at me. “If you’re lying, I’ll find out as soon as we get our cabins. And then I’ll spend the next six months making fun of you.”

  I held up two fingers in an obsolete Boy Scout salute. “I swear by Ares, God of War. May he strike me down with, uh, lightning?” (I wasn’t really clear on what Ares—the Greek name for Mars—did in the course of his war-godly duties.)

  “Okay, that’s impressive.”

  “Seriously,” said a voice from a few centimeters “over” my head. I looked up and found Vijay floating in space just “above” (Okay, I’m going to stop with the “above” and “over” and “below” quotes. There was no up or down, okay?) “That is fantastic. Really top-hole.”

  He’d taken off his light jacket and twisted it into a rope with one of his Velcro gloves safety-pinned to the end of the sleeve and stuck to the bulkhead’s surface. In effect, he’d created an anchor line, and he was using it to fly around the middle of the room like a superhero.