by T E Olivant
The First Poet Laureate of Mars
T E Olivant
Copyright © Tania Scott 2019
Front Cover Illustration © Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Dedicated to the fellow delegates at 20BooksEdinburgh for their inspiration, laughter, kindness and endless supplies of biscuits
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
(W.B. Yeats, ‘Adam’s Curse’ 1904)
And in the trembling blue-black of the sky
A red orb, worn as if it had been a shell
Punished by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
(Hester Dousainy, ‘Mars’s Curse’ 2658)
Prologue
“Have you ever written even a single line of poetry?”
“No,” Hester replied. She waved a hand in front of the viewscreen to minimize the video of her friend. On the rest of the screen she checked her shuttle details. Less than a day and she would be flying towards a new future. Whatever the hell that might be.
“Have you minimized me?” Cat said.
“No. Look, I need to get on with the packing.”
“Right. It’s not that you don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say.”
Hester turned her back so that Cat couldn’t see her roll her eyes. She grabbed her clothes and stuffed them into the travel bag that she had bought that morning. It didn’t take long. Two sets of the scratchy overalls that she was automatically issued by the government of Sat Earth. A couple of dresses that looked nice from a distance if you didn’t come close enough to see the frayed hems and loose threads. A pair of work boots.
Hester bit her lip as she unwrapped a sheet of tissue paper. High-heeled black shoes. Her mother’s. Barely worn. She placed them carefully on top of the bag.
“Hester? Are you still there?”
“Of course.” She turned back to the viewscreen. She didn’t feel bad about zoning out from her friend – Cat was in the symgym anyway doing some sort of complicated workout that involved her long limbs flailing in front of the camera.
“Right. Aren’t you worried that someone on that stupid red planet is going to work out that you are not a poet? That, in fact, you spend most of your time watching movies about hunky men who solve crimes.”
“Actually, some of the movies have pretty women solving the crimes. And no, I’m not worried.” Not worried at all. Petrified more like, with the kind of fear that had hardened into a lump just above her diaphragm.
“Whatever possessed you to do it?”
Hester’s cheeks turned red. “You live on Sat Five, isn’t that right?”
Cat’s limbs fell back to her sides. “Yeah?”
“Well, I’m on Sat Three. You know what that means?”
Cat nodded but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The first orbiting Earth colony had been unimaginatively named Satellite One. It had lasted over seventy years before it disintegrated into space dust. The next colony was Satellite Two. It had been a truly epic feat of engineering, thousands of people crammed on to a metal hemisphere stuck onto a lump of asteroid. All this had meant, hundreds of years later, that humans could create the most Earth-like place yet, the famous Satellite Three.
It was utopia. Artificial parks. A ceiling that held up a fake sky so you could watch the clouds that once floated over Earthen landscape. Homes for hundreds of thousands of humans fleeing from the broken planet below.
But that was two-hundred and eighty years ago. The place was now, frankly, a shit hole. Anyone with any money had long since moved to the newer sister satellites of four, five and six. Or to one of the other colonies. Only Near Earthers like Hester were stuck on Three with its oily air and water that tasted like it had already passed through someone else’s kidneys. Which of course it had.
These were just some of the things that Cat could never appreciate, given that she had grown up on Sat Five.
“Anyway,” Hester took a long deep breath. “Let’s just say I wanted a way out. No, Cat, I needed a way out. And when I saw the poetry thing…”
“Have you ever even read a poem?”
“Of course. I studied twentieth-century literature remember.”
“Oh yeah. Instead of doing engineering or something useful.”
Hester had to shrug at that one. It probably hadn’t been the best life choice ever.
“I was hoping to get into the movies.”
“Well, isn’t everyone?”
“Ok, but it meant I had just enough knowledge to convince the Martians that I could do it.”
“Do what exactly?”
“Ummn… laureate?”
“I don’t think that’s a verb. The Poet Laureate of Mars. I’ve got to admit, it’s got kind of a nice ring to it. Who did it before?”
“I’m not sure.” Hester turned back to her packing. In fact, she’d searched the web for details of the previous Poet Laureates right after she got the message through to say she’d been given the job. Only there hadn’t been any previous Laureates. Not that she could find anyway. She was not just the current Poet Laureate of Mars, but the first and only one. That wasn’t helping the knot in her stomach.
“How did you get the gig in the first place?”
“I sent in a poem. That’s all. Look, it’s no big deal.”
“You didn’t send them your Script?” Cat managed to give the word a capital letter. Hester had told Cat about the Script, but not any of the details. She kept them close to her heart. One day everyone would see her story, and Mars was one step closer to that.
“I told you, they needed a poem.”
“You just wrote a poem and it was good enough to win you a trip to Mars?”
“Ummn… yeah.”
“Hester?” Cat glared at her through the screen.
“Well… I might have sent them something I found somewhere. But I did rewrite it a bit…”
“Oh no, you plagiarized?” Cat was appalled. “By the frozen Earth Hester, that’s a custodial offence if the Augments find out.”
“No one will ever know. It’s a really ancient poem, and I made sure it wasn’t on the database.”
“How did you find it?”
�
��In a book.” Her eyes flicked over to the shelf above her bed. Half a dozen real paper books, the most valuable things she owned. Among them an anthology of Irish literature from 1500 to 2300. It was well-thumbed.
“And the poem?”
“By some old Irish guy. Yeats. No one reads him anymore. Anyway, like I told you, it doesn’t matter.”
“You are so going to get caught. You do realize that the Augments control Mars.”
“I am aware of that fact.”
“And the Augments already hate your guts because…”
“Ok, no need to go into ancient history.” Hester tried to think of a way to get out of the call. Her friend was not exactly helping with her anxiety levels.
“Listen, I’ve got to go,” Cat said, saving her the trouble. “Sun time in half an hour and I need to get home for it.”
Hester felt a pang of envy. Cat had no idea how lucky she was to have her own solar light. Hester looked down at her pasty white skin, so light it was almost translucent. Three hours a week, that was the amount of sun time that someone living on Satellite Three could look forward to. But on Mars it was different. She’d even done the VR walkthrough. A miniature sun at the center of the complex. Light for everyone. Oxygen too, not to mention meals that weren’t made from algae. It was worth it. It had to be. She grabbed the books from her shelf and put them into her travel bag. Whatever it took, it was worth it.
“All right. I’ll call you from Mars.”
“You better. Poet Laureate. Well, I can’t say I don’t think you’re a fool for the way you’ve gone about it. But I hope it works out for you.”
Hester bit her lip. Cat was just about her only friend and they’d never met. She would still call her from Mars, but somehow it didn’t feel the same. It felt like she was leaving her behind.
“Oh, and you might need this.”
Hester’s computer pinged as a file downloaded. She opened it up.
“A dictionary?”
“Yeah. Thought you might want to look up a few rhymes for dust. Enjoy Mars, Poet Laureate!” She cackled with laughter as the call ended.
Chapter 1
Tolly pretended he couldn’t hear the whispers from the other crew members. He felt a flicker of frustration, then damped it down. They had probably forgotten about his Augmented hearing. Or possibly they just didn’t care.
“Didn’t know we’d be sharing the ship with an Auggie.” A skinny guy with almond-shaped eyes and a shock of black hair was glaring at him from the table nearest the porthole.
Tolly kept his gaze straight ahead as he shoveled food into his mouth with his flesh hand.
“Didn’t know they even ate,” the same man said. Auggie’s left eye flickered slightly as he pushed his self-defense program up the list of current tasks. The guy was unlikely to start something onboard ship, but it was worth being prepared.
“Of course they eat,” a woman said. She was short and squat with blond hair the color of bio oil. “Like an engine that needs fuel.”
She wasn’t wrong, Tolly thought as he pushed another spoon of the soup-stew into his mouth. His taste buds were long gone, but given he’d lived half his life onboard spaceships eating unidentifiable gloop out of metal trays, he didn’t see that as a bad thing.
“Listen, as long as they do their job, I don’t have a problem with them.”
Tolly looked up at this voice. The Captain. A black woman with a shaven head and shoulders that suggested she spent more than the minimum time in the symgym. She was looking straight at him. She hadn’t forgotten the augmented hearing then.
The Captain pushed herself off her seat and walked over to Tolly. She sat down on his left side, probably because of the scar that ran down the other side of her face and culminated in a knot of flesh that might have once been an ear. Cosmetic surgery to fix it must have been affordable on a captain’s wages so she had chosen to leave the scar. Interesting.
“I’m Captain Derouge,” she said. She didn’t hold out her hand and neither did Tolly.
“I’m your Cartographer.”
The Captain smiled. She had guessed that.
“Well, we’re due to take off in a couple of hours. Just a quick survey today. The real work will start tomorrow. I hope we’re not going to have any problems?” She met his eyes.
“No problems from me.”
“Good. And I’ll vouch for the others. They might not want an Auggie on board but they won’t cause you any trouble.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Where did you come from anyway,” the Captain relaxed, slumping back in her seat now that she had said her piece.
“From an inner planet.”
He should probably tell her where he’d come from. It would be in his file, after all. And yet… maybe now wasn’t the time.
“You came back on one of the new space fleet ships then. What are they like? I hear the engines purr like a kitten.”
“No. I came back on a single man cruiser.”
The Captain raised her eyebrows.
“But that must have taken forever!”
“Nine years and six months,” Tolly replied. He checked his vitals. Heart rate up a couple of beats, but blood pressure stable. Good.
“In stasis?” She asked, incredulous, although she must already know the answer.
“No stasis chambers on the old cruisers.”
“No stasis. On a one-man cruiser. Ten years? All alone?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you go mad?”
“How would I know if I did?” Tolly showed his teeth at the woman to let him know that he was kidding. The Captain’s shoulders tensed.
“Right. But I guess the Augments would have made sure you were fit to serve? In one of those adjustment centers or something.”
“Yes.” Oh yes, indeed they had. Four weeks of intensive post-deployment analysis in a definitely-not-interrogation center. Then once he had passed that with flying colors it was three months in a general adjustment center with all the other Augments who were getting ready to go out in the big wide galaxy.
“And they wouldn’t let you on this mission if you had any lasting… well, problems.”
“Of course not.” Tolly flicked a switch in his brain that upped his dopamine a little, just to take the edge off the conversation. But the Captain wasn’t really annoying him, tactless though she was. It was just another day at the office.
Chapter 2
“Congratulations!”
The man sitting down across from her was impossibly old. Hester had heard that people on Mars tended to avoid the usual cosmetic uplifts that halted the march of old age. But she had never actually seen someone like that face to face. And what a face it was! Great craggy canyons followed his cheek to his jaw. His eyes were so sunken in folds of flesh that she wondered if he could truly see out of them. She caught herself staring and dropped her eyes back to the floor.
“Thank you,” Hester murmured. She noticed that her hands were trembling. Was it too late to back out?
“I’m pleased that you have been selected as Mars’s first ever Poet Laureate. I’m sure you’re going to do an admirable job.”
Hester’s head spun. The two-year trip, all but a week of which had been spent in stasis, had left her feeling like she had the solar system’s worst hangover. Her tongue was dry and fat and her eyes burned. She knew she was making a terrible first impression, but there was nothing she could do about it until she had slept in a proper bed and not a tank of life preserving gunk.
“Thank you, Mr.…”
“Professor Creighton, head of the Martian University.”
“Of course,” she rubbed at her eyes, “thank you, Professor. I’m so grateful for this opportunity.”
“Mmn,” the man looked down at his datapad as if to say you should be. Hester heard a snort of laughter and turned to see a skinny white guy with green tattoos all over his face. Where had she read about tattoos on Mars again? Something about the original colonists, but her fuzz
y brain couldn’t give her the answer. She could ask the guy, but she didn’t like the way he was looking at her like she had no right to be there. But possibly that was just her paranoia.
“You’ll be staying in the student housing. Not exactly the lap of luxury, but it’s functional.”
“I came from Sat Three,” Hester said.
The Professor whistled through his yellow teeth. “Then I’m sure it will feel like paradise.”
You’re not wrong, Hester thought, and took another deep breath of Martian air. The systems that kept oxygen flowing around the Martian colony were literally centuries more advanced than what she had grown up with on Sat Three. It felt like she could truly breathe for the first time in her life.
I won’t screw this up, she thought, I won’t.
“I’ve loaded your key onto your datapad so you should be able to get to your accommodation fine. Any problems, your point of contact is Doctor Graym. He’s our head of entertainment studies. He’s an Augment, by the way. We’re very accepting on Mars.” The Professor said that as if he wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good thing.
“And the ummn… spending allowance?”
“Oh yes,” the man peered at the datapad. “To cover your expenses and paid monthly.”
“Would it be possible to get an advance?”
The man glanced up at her and couldn’t have failed to notice that her cheeks were red with shame. Hester glanced over at the young assistant and caught an unpleasant smirk on his face.
“Of course,” he said with a little cough. “If you give me your datapad I’ll patch it through right now. Three hundred enough?”
That would be enough to live on for six months on Satellite Three. Hester had no idea how far it would go on Mars, but she wasn’t exactly a big spender.
“That will be fine.” Hester had to fight not to sway on her feet. If she didn’t get out of this office soon she would collapse at the Professor’s feet. That would not be the best first impression.
The Professor seemed to notice her discomfort. “Well, that’s all for today. There will be a formal ceremony to appoint you to your position in a couple of days. But I guess you’d like to get settled in now?”