2017 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide

by Maggie Allen

  “No trees,” Mom replies. “They take too long to mature. They need food now, not five years from now.”

  “But you grew other things, like chile?” Andy asks.

  “Enough for family, not enough to sell. Conditioning the soil for nightshades is hard. They take up too many heavy metals,” Mom explains. “Greens, too.”

  “Then why didn’t you use hydroponics?” Andy asks.

  Mom pushes her plate away. “Stubborn pig-headedness.”

  “Flavor,” I retort. “Vegetables grown in water taste like water. It takes soil to grow really good food.”

  “It’s stupid,” Mom said. “Growing food in poisoned soil with poisoned water in poisoned air. If we’d done hydroponics, we could have lived in Bradbury, not out in the middle of nowhere. We could have grown twice as much. And your father would never have convinced me we should turn you into a green freak, just to reduce your need to eat. Now we can stop the treatments, and you’ll go back to normal.”

  I push away from the table. “I AM normal!” I yell at her. “On Mars, I’m normal. You’re the one who brought me here and made me a freak.” And before she can reply, I get up and walk out the front door.

  I’m thirty meters down the road, pacing along the fence, kicking up dust, wishing for a decent cornfield, when Mikey comes up behind me, swinging a flashlight. Redundant. The exo has plenty of exterior lighting.

  “That was mean, what your mom said.”

  “Nothing I haven’t heard before,” I tell him, though that’s not really true.

  I stop, realizing suddenly that there’s no dome, I’m in open air. Unprotected. I shiver all over.

  “Look,” Mikey says, “there’s the Big Dipper. Do you have that on Mars?”

  I look up. I can barely see it, with all the city light, but he’s right. “Of course we do. The stars are the same on Mars. My brother Jaime studies them. Sometimes, in the summer, we’d go out in the dome at night and lie on the soil, looking up between cornstalks at the stars. We’d try to guess where Earth was, and sometimes we’d even find it.” And suddenly, I’m okay again, because I’m under the same old sky.

  Mikey looks out at the rows of solar panels. “I think it would be cool, growing stuff again. I want to grow grapes, like Abuelito did. Do you think we can?”

  I look down at him. He looks so hopeful, one corner of his mouth trying to edge up into a smile. “Maybe. It depends on a lot of things: the condition of the soil, the availability of water.”

  “Could you check it? Tomorrow, maybe?”

  “Sure, why not?” I look down at him. “You’re the only one who doesn’t think I’m a freak. Why is that?”

  His shoulders start shaking, silently laughing. “Have you seen my eyes? I’ve been the family freak up until you came along.”

  I run the exo’s gloves along the fence, bumping over the rusted barbs in the wire. I wonder where his mom is. “Tía Rita doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “No, but other people do.” He paused to pick up an empty can from the ground. “They don’t know what to make of you, or where you fit in.”

  “We’re malezas,” I say, thinking of Abuelo. “Weeds. No one wants us, but we grow all the same.”

  “Heh. That’s better than guacamole, I guess.”

  We laugh.

  “Let’s go back and have dessert.” Mikey turns back to the house.

  The alarm goes off at seven a.m. on the dot. I wake up in the gel bed feeling like I’d been beaten. Every joint in my body screams in protest. In the bed next to me, Mom moans. “Oh, god, why did I ever think this was a good idea?”

  By the time we emerge from the hotel, the sun has risen well above the Sandia Mountains. I’m shocked to see that they are bluish-grey in this light, fringed and dotted with green. Nothing like Martian mountains. I feel betrayed somehow.

  Today, in daylight, I see nothing but wasteland, everything brown and dead, the Rio Grande dry as a bone, as it has been for fifty years. Empty buildings stare at me as we drive down into the valley. Broken windows gape open, adobe walls crumble. Sand piles in corners.

  At the farm, I find the same thing. I look at the fields and want to cry. Beneath the solar panels, in the perpetual shade, I can see that the topsoil is gone, used up or scoured away down to the parched clay beneath.

  Mom parks the car in the driveway. “Come on, Lupe.”

  “I told Mikey I’d check out the farm,” I reply. “I’ll meet you out here when you’re ready.”

  “But Lupe…”

  I stride away. Behind me, I hear the door open and close.

  I rev up my exo, hop right over the barbed wire fence, and prowl around the grounds, beside the neat, reflective rows of panels. I pass the bones of a toolshed, corrals for cattle, old cast iron bathtubs used as troughs, an ancient manual tractor, its tires all rotted. Shovel blades, their handles broken. A ditch, half full of sand. My feet raise puffs of dust as I walk. Everything is dead, I think.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spy movement. A bird darts under the fence in front of me. It pauses, cocking its head at me for a moment, its crest pointing back like its long tail. And then it darts forward under a row of solar panels to pull a wriggling beetle from the sand and gulp it down. Off it dashes, like a tumbleweed on the wind.

  A roadrunner, alive, breathing. Now I see small signs of life everywhere. A grasshopper, a bird, the curving tracks of a snake. Tiny specks of green in hollows and along the ditches. And there, just beginning to push its way up, a spear of asparagus. How is that even possible?

  I crouch down, free my hand from the exo, and push my fingers into the sand. To my surprise, it isn’t all sand, not here along the ditch. There’s still some soil, still some life. I feel an insect wriggle against my skin, something I’ve only ever felt in science class or a lab.

  If you don’t get dirty, you’re not doing it right.

  “Lupe,” my mother says behind me.

  I stand up, turn to her. Tía Rita has come with her.

  “What did you find?” she asks.

  I show them the asparagus, and they both gasp. “I had no idea anything could still grow out here,” Tía Rita says.

  “I’m amazed, too,” I tell her. “I think you’re in better shape than I thought.”

  She squints at me, the sun in her face. “You believe that? You think we can farm here again?”

  “You’ll need new topsoil, some amendments, and drip irrigation equipment. Some agricultural bots would help.”

  Mom looks at me. “Will you do it?”

  I take a deep breath. “No. I’m going home, Mom, you know that. I hurt everywhere. The sky is too weird. And every time I step outside without a suit or a dome, I have a panic attack. I hate it here. I want to go home.”

  Mom stares at me. “I didn’t really think what it would be like for you,” she said. “I love being home, even with the gravity. Everything smells right again, everything tastes right. And there are people, family! I have been so lonely, for so long. I guess I assumed you’d feel the same way. But I was wrong. I was thinking about me, not you. I… I didn’t want to leave you behind. I’ll miss you so much.” She wiped a tear from her eye.

  “Me, too,” I told her. “So how about a compromise? I’ll stay long enough to help you get the farm going again. But then, I’m going home.”

  She smiled at me. “Sounds good.”

  “So where do we start?” Tía Rita asks.

  “Have you considered planting weeds?”

  Builders for the Future

  by Salena Casha

  Salena Casha's work has appeared in over thirty publications. She was a finalist for the 2013-2014 Boston Public Library’s Children’s Writer-in-Residence. Her first three picture books were published by MeeGenius Books. One of them, titled Nuwa and the Great Wall, was featured in the 2014 PBS Summer Learning Project for kids and won honorable mention in the 2014 Hollywood Halloween Book Festival. When not writing, she can be found editing math books, carving pumpkins and trave
lling the world. Check out her website at www.salenacasha.com.

  Seraphina’s little brother was the first to notice when things changed. Maybe it was because he spent most of his days by himself in his family’s house on Mars trying to outwit the babysitter bots assigned to him. Or maybe he was in fact a better observer than anyone ever gave him credit for—a strange byproduct of his “condition.”

  So of course he was the one who first saw it during a snack break. The hologram floated in the traction tube and pinged under warped glass. It didn’t matter who the letter was for. He wanted to read it.

  He poked at the fingerprint sensor. It glowed red.

  Incorrect match.

  He frowned and punched the button again.

  Incorrect match.

  Even though he was persistent for an eight-year-old, after fifteen minutes of pressing, squeezing, and sticking his hand into the tube itself, he gave up. Whatever the letter said, it wasn’t worth losing fingers for.

  When Seraphina came home from school that day, about four hours after her brother found the letter, she saw it the moment she walked into their living pod. She knew the letter was supposed to arrive because Mark hadn’t been able to shut up about it during their year eleven science class.

  How he’d gotten his letter.

  How he already knew what the competition task would be.

  How he was going to be the first person in a hundred years from their school to be selected as a Builder for the Future.

  It wasn’t curiosity that Seraphina felt when she walked straight past the traction tube and up to her room. Yes, her hands itched to wind the message into playback, but she didn’t. Instead, she sat down at her work desk, popped out her building set and took apart the hovercraft miniature she’d skimmed together the previous night.

  The sleek hull shone in the limited glo-light of her overhead. It wouldn’t be like those huge ones that bobbed along Mars’ streets. It could never hold a person or a full-sized animal.

  Maybe a baby mouse. Someday. When it was good enough.

  With the sleek pin of her skimmer, she split the hovercraft into the strangest shapes and bits that she could, carving it into a massive puzzle of cubes and circles that hadn’t existed before. One-handed, she grabbed her timer. For a moment, she closed her eyes and took a quick, quiet breath.

  Her fingers found the clock and she punched start.

  It took her five minutes and twenty-four seconds to rebuild the craft, slightly different than the last. A little thinner around the edges with sharper propellers. She’d done it about a minute slower than the night before, so she took apart the spacecraft, skimmed it into different pieces and began again.

  Her fingers moved easily between the blocks. They were titanium, no tick marks or buttons to show where or how they fit together. Like a bike without training wheels. Her dad had used them at work to build structures, the kind that people lived in on Colony M. Once he built the miniature, he’d take it to the lab. They’d blow up the little pieces of matter until they were big enough to fit an entire person. The new building or craft or piece of equipment would then be assigned a place in Colony M. Easy to take apart if you had a giant skimmer, which the government definitely did.

  She’d taken the blocks from her father’s toolbox after he’d floated away. No one, not her mother, not her brother, not even those strange government men in suits who gave her family the news, had tried to take them away from her. They were hers just as much as they had once been his. Grown-up toys, they’d called them. But to her, they were more than that.

  After two hours, she’d gotten her time down to four minutes and twenty-six seconds. Good enough for now. She stretched, her neck aching, and then walked downstairs and ordered a snack pack from the kitchen bot, chocolate chip flavored. She sat by herself at the counter, her legs swinging in the air from the stool, gravity meter ticking steadily at her hip.

  “Fina, Fina! It’s broken!”

  Her brother rushed into the kitchen waving something that looked like an old Earth egg-beater. Seraphina had given it to him for his fifth birthday. It was a handheld gaming console, something he could sneak after lights-out and play. The Sleep Police couldn’t pick up on it because it operated on a secret wavelength. It projected a hologram of the game onto any flat surface and, if he wore it with the virtual glasses he had, it could take him anywhere he wanted.

  Once she’d caught him using it to go to virtual school at Seraphina’s instruction center which, given his position, wasn’t allowed.

  “What are you doing?” she’d asked.

  “Being normal,” he’d replied. “I just like to stand in the back and watch.”

  Sometimes, if she closed her eyes hard enough, she could feel him in the back of the classroom. One of the invisible.

  His dark curls fell into his eyes, and he brushed them away.

  “What happened?” she asked, setting down her chocolate-chip bar. He eyed the snack before handing over the toy.

  “It stopped lighting up, and now it just fizzles every time I try to turn it on.”

  She frowned, shook it, turned it upside down, and punched a few buttons. It whined. She’d need to take a closer look at the wires.

  “I’ll fix it tonight,” she said.

  “Caleb, please return to the nursery,” a robotic voice resounded through the halls.

  “Just one second,” Caleb called over his shoulder before turning to Seraphina.

  Something in his eyes told her that he hadn’t come out here at all to have her fix his toy. No. He was curious about something else. She didn’t need to look closer at the device to know he’d sabotaged it on purpose, just so he could talk to her.

  “You got a message you know. In the tube,” he said.

  “So?” Seraphina said, her mouth full of chocolate chips.

  “Can I watch you open it?”

  She waited for him to get bored with her and just walk away. She ate the entire bar, slowly.

  He didn’t move.

  Her mother often joked that it was his curiosity and persistence that got him banned from school. Seraphina knew the world didn’t work that way; the doctors said he had some sort of genetic mutation that made him different from everyone else. She had it, too, not enough to keep her from going to school, but she always knew what she was. And whatever it was that they both had, it gave them things other people didn’t see or understand. Like super-powered brains. And for Seraphina, a few other not-so-nice things.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll open it.”

  She pushed off from the table and landed on the floor, the gravity sensors pulling at her bare toes. Their home on Mars, according to the chart readouts, had a far lighter gravity than her ancestors’ original home on Earth. The first settlers had coated the planet in some sort of gravity paint that helped hold everyone in place. Or at least that was what it was supposed to do.

  She’d once found a corner of her instruction center in the cafeteria that had a little less gravity than normal. She wouldn’t have noticed except for the fact that her toes floated an inch above the ground before she righted herself. After that, she’d designed her own personal gravity meter and kept an eye on the readouts. She didn’t want to just start floating away into the hazy purple sky in the middle of an afternoon.

  Caleb followed her back to the front room, the message pinging insistently as she neared.

  She took a deep breath and swiped her finger across the monitor. A flash of fear went through her.

  What if she didn’t get in?

  What if Mark was the only one in her class allowed to go?

  What if she, Seraphina Saff, wasn’t good enough?

  The letter folded out in front of her in the air, the robotic voice of the holomail reverberating in space. She wanted to tell it to be quiet, but her tongue was heavy in her mouth.

  “Dear Ms. Seraphina Saff,

  We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted into this year’s Builders for the Future compe
tition. You were one of 20 selections within Colony M.

  The competition will be 24 hours in total and will take place in the Central Mars Natatorium on West Street two days from now at 12:00 Lunar Time. You are not allowed to bring anything with you, and you will be scanned for tools, data chips, and blueprints upon arrival.

  Best of luck.”

  Caleb whooped, jumping up and down. “You made it, you made it!”

  Seraphina didn’t move. She didn’t even smile. Her hands started to shake, though, and the urge she’d been fighting all her life, the urge to destroy something out of pure joy struck her in the chest.

  “I need to practice,” she blurted out as Caleb wrapped his arms around her middle.

  “Can I come watch?” Caleb asked, his arms still locked tightly around her.

  She wasn’t sure if he meant watching her practice or watching her competition. With her right hand, she gently pushed him away.

  “No,” she said, even though something in her chest pulled, and she knew she shouldn’t have said it.

  Caleb frowned, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “But…”

  Seraphina did not wait for him to finish his sentence. Clutching the hologram chip to her chest, she walked back upstairs and locked her bedroom door behind her.

  She had made it. At eleven, she was one of the youngest Mars pioneers to be selected for the program. The first woman who orbited Jupiter had won the competition years ago. Famous people were made in the builders’ competition.

  Like her dad.

  The urge to break something pinged through her like a zip of electricity, and she headed for the desk. Placing the letter on the table, she reached for the mini hovercraft she’d built. Her skimmer tore it to pieces, fingers finding every dent and crack. It felt good to destroy something, to reduce it to nothing. The letter on her desk pulsed with energy as she took a deep breath and eyed the timer beside her. She needed to practice.

  Making it into the BFF competition wasn’t enough for her, she decided, her hand hovering over the punch clock. She needed to beat Mark.