This was hardly the problem I’d expected to be confronted with on my first day in the Colonies. And what was worse, I didn’t have a single thing to wear to such an affair; all I’d brought, besides my tired-looking travel suit, were school clothes. Moreover, I’d already observed that Colonial styles weren’t a bit like styles at home. Women in the subway and hotel lobby had been wearing either shorts or skirts that weren’t much longer; no one had on regular pants. (I had to admit that however impractical a style this might have been in cold climates, it was suitable for the steady seventy-two-degree climate of New Terra’s domes.) Dad was no help; he seemed to think I should never have gotten into such a fix.
“Mel, honey, if you needed clothes, why didn’t you tell me before we left?” he said impatiently. “I’d have given you money if you’d asked for it. If Portland stores didn’t stock Colonial styles, Orlando’s would have. Of course, I don’t know much about these things—”
He’d known enough to come prepared himself, with shorts and jackets that would have looked like something out of a musical comedy at home, I noticed. I shook my head. “It wasn’t the money,” I said. “It just never occurred to me. I knew I wouldn’t be dating, and I never thought about being invited out with you. Look, I’ll just stay here tonight, Dad. I’d rather, really I would.”
“Nonsense. Certainly you won’t; you can’t stay in the hotel for the next five months. Besides, there are some social obligations attached to the kind of business I’ll be doing, Mel. That’s one reason the firm agreed to send you in your mother’s place. Put on your travel suit for now, and we’ll try to get you a dinner dress this afternoon.”
Mr. and Ms. Ortega from the chamber of commerce met us in the hotel restaurant and treated us to a typical Colonial breakfast: cereal, muffins, tomatoes, and ham. Things like the butter, sugar, and coffee were obviously synthetic, and I could see they’d take some getting used to. The cereal and muffins were passable, though not exactly like those at home, and the tomatoes were fresh. I didn’t dare ask what the “ham” was made of.
The oddest thing about New Terra, the thing that hit me right away, was the absence of vehicles. (Cars aren’t needed in the domes; people actually get around faster than in a regular city, because the subway’s efficient and walking’s not much of an effort under the low gravity.) It was nice to see gardens full of familiar, imported flowers where I’d normally expect streets, though I knew they were there as much to help take carbon dioxide out of the air as for aesthetic purposes. But something was missing. In spite of crowds New Terra seemed empty. Nothing I could define clearly—just a certain, well, alienness. Perhaps the trace of antiseptic in the air, or the raw cleanness of the place, as though it had been newly dusted. And it wasn’t a free sort of emptiness. On the top level the sky showed through the translucence of the dome, but it didn’t look real, somehow; it was unchanging, like a painted cyclorama.
The Hilton, where we started out that day, is near the center of New Terra’s largest dome; its front door opens onto the big central plaza called the Etoile, from which all the malls radiate. The main mall is, naturally, the Champs-Elysées, and it’s distinguished not only by the hotel of the same name, but by the city hall. None of the buildings looked very big to me, but I found that they’re like icebergs; there’s more to them below than above. In fact, they’re normally entered from below, directly from the subway.
I was rather depressed by the residential districts, although I knew it wouldn’t be practical to pressurize acres and acres of space just so everyone could have a real house and yard. Apartments are much more economical—after all, there’s the cost not only of land, but of air. And I had to admit that they weren’t bad-looking apartments, with their roof gardens and all. Lots of people live in apartments on Earth, by choice. Only they have a choice.
“What kind of houses do people on the homesteads have?” I asked Ms. Ortega.
“Homesteads? My dear, you have the wrong impression. There aren’t any homesteads like in the old American West. The homesteaders live right here; most of us are homesteaders, or our parents were.”
“But I thought the whole idea of homesteading was to give people free land.”
“It started that way. But undomed land isn’t any good. We do retain an option to claim acreage Outside, but it’s worthless until somebody discovers a use for it. Basically, homesteaders’ rights mean title to an apartment and a share in the farm.”
“You mean the farmers live in town and commute to their fields, the way they do in some of the Asian countries?”
“Well, not exactly,” she explained. “Nobody owns particular pieces of ground in the farm domes. That was tried, but it wasn’t practical. Most of the people aren’t farmers; agriculture’s a specialized, scientific thing, particularly here. So the farm is a cooperative and homesteaders receive financial shares in it. They buy food like anybody else.”
I didn’t really understand it at first. How could shares in the farm be given to arriving homesteaders without decreasing the value of the original holders’ shares? Later, when I studied how the Colonies are set up, I discovered that the whole thing was underwritten by the government when the life-support system and the initial domes were installed. This business of reserving shares for new homesteaders was all part of the original charter. It’s complicated, but the effect is that by the time they retire, a homesteading couple will end up with outright ownership of their farm shares; they can sell them or pass them on to their children, along with their apartment, free and clear. They get the same high salaries as nonresident workers, too. The contract they sign to get free passage from Earth says they both have to hold jobs for at least ten Martian years, except while on maternity or disability leave. It also says they have to have at least two children, and may have as many more as they want tax free, because the whole idea behind subsidized fares is to build up the population.
Of course there’s a lot more to New Terra than the residential domes. There’s the equipment for extracting oxygen from the ground, for instance. We left the industrial domes, the power and atmosphere plants, and the waterworks for another day, but we did take a quick look at one of the farm domes. I was happy to see all those healthy-looking plants, though I knew their vigor came from chemical feeding, without any help from the Martian soil.
Before going back to the hotel, Dad and I stopped at a store we’d noticed across the mall, but buying a dress proved to be easier said than done. We hadn’t known about the thirty-week minimum delay between placing an order and getting it filled. The store was expecting a few open-stock clothes in as soon as Susie’s cargo was unpacked, but I found that there was a waiting list a mile long on which my name naturally didn’t appear. The clerks were more than a little shocked that I could need something already, having just gotten off the ship; as we went out, I overheard some disparaging remarks about “tourists.”
I had only one recourse: to borrow something from Janet. She was staying at the Champs-Elysées; I called her, and went over. We managed to pin up her blue microfiber shift so that it wasn’t too awful on me. Janet hadn’t gone in for Colonial fashions, either; she would have been the very last person to say, “When on Mars, do as the Martians do.” So I can’t say that I looked stylish. But after all, I thought, I wasn’t a Colonial, and why should anyone expect me to dress as if I were?
Dinner that night was as miserable as I’d thought it would be. The one and only bright spot was the note of pride I heard in Dad’s voice when he introduced me as, “My daughter, Melinda.” I just hadn’t anticipated the extent to which we were going to be welcomed into Colonial society. It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand how vital it is to New Terrans to have firms like Dad’s invest in Mars, and how proud they are to show off their accomplishments to anyone from the mother planet.
There’s a lot less formality surrounding the governor and other officials in the Colonies than there is on Earth; we were not only welcomed, we were the guests of honor.
It was a big dinner party: Governor Matsumoto and his wife, Mr. and Ms. Ortega, and at least a dozen others, all of whom went out of their way to be cordial. I sat there in my ill-fitting, pinned-together dress, with my face burning and the air seeming even more stuffy and inadequate than usual, wishing that I would pass out and not revive until I was on my way back to Earth. And the only time I managed to say anything, other than “How do you do,” and “I’m pleased to meet you,” it was wrong.
I was seated between the governor and a distinguished-looking gentleman whose name I hadn’t caught, but who told me that he and his wife had been born in Ethiopia. There had been a long discussion about Earth’s coming review of the Colonial appropriation, and everybody had agreed that it was absolutely essential that the word get back as to all that was being accomplished on Mars.
“The important thing to be put across is that this isn’t just some far-out scientific experiment,” said someone. “What public opinion on Earth usually doesn’t recognize is that we live here. We’re neither laboratory specimens nor a parasitic drain on Earth’s economy; we’re simply people fighting to be self-sufficient. What we need is the equipment to produce more of what we use—we don’t want handouts.”
Dad assured them that he’d help in any way he could. There was a lull, and the man on my right turned to me. “How do you like New Terra so far, Ms. Ashley?” he asked.
Well, I hadn’t been paying a great deal of attention; my thoughts had been quite literally millions of miles away. And I knew I couldn’t tell him the whole truth. So I answered with the first reasonably optimistic thing that popped into my head. “Oh, it isn’t bad at all,” I said, with all the cheerfulness I could muster. “It’s so much more civilized than I expected.”
There was a frigid silence. Dad glared at me, and I think he was about to say something, but Governor Matsumoto beat him to it. “We may be a frontier world,” he said dryly, “but even our most biased critics have seldom accused us of being an uncivilized frontier. Times have changed since pioneers lived in rough camps, you know.”
Times have indeed changed. But the pioneering spirit hasn’t, and what I knew of it wouldn’t have gotten me past Iowa, if I had lived in Melinda Stillwell’s time.
Chapter 9
I’ll always be glad that I began to understand the Colonial viewpoint a little in time to be of some help to Dad. Oh, not to share it, but at least to have some conception of what it was all about. It was because of Dad that I first tried, at any rate, for when it finally dawned on him what my true feelings were, he was terribly perturbed. He’d ignored my lack of enthusiasm on the Susie, thinking I was bound to get wrapped up in the excitement once I got to Mars. But after the fiasco of our first dinner party, he couldn’t do that anymore.
On our way back to the hotel that night Dad came as close to blowing up at me as he ever did. We exchanged some bitter words. In his eyes I was biased, provincial, and rude, and I suppose I was. Vaguely I knew that such a bias was what Alex had been trying to warn me about, though he’d charitably assumed that I wouldn’t have had it without copying Janet. Or maybe he used Janet simply as an excuse to bring up the subject. Dad was willing to make excuses for me, too; his was that he should never have left me in the same school in the same part of the world for so long. He even hinted that Gran and Maple Beach might be at the back of my narrow way of thinking. At that point, I retreated into my room and slammed the door.
But neither of us could stay mad for very long. I could see that my remark hadn’t been exactly polite, and that Dad had every right to be embarrassed by it, considering the company we’d been in. And Dad admitted that I was entitled to my opinions. “Mel, honey,” he said, “it’s just that I want you to have the whole of life for your horizons. I don’t want you earthbound—literally, or figuratively, either. You don’t have to like Mars; just don’t condemn it automatically, without recognizing what’s happening here.”
It took me a while to figure out what he meant by that, but when I did, I resolved to make an honest effort to find out “what was happening.” After all, I was stuck on Mars, and would be for another five months, reckoned by Earth’s calendar.
The hardest thing for me was the fact that our social life didn’t stop after one evening; Dad got acquainted fast, and we were entertained several times a week. At the beginning I was sure I could never go to another dinner with those same people. But Dad insisted that I couldn’t insult them again by refusing, any more than they could fail to include me in their invitations. So I went. It was the only thing I ever really did for him. I don’t kid myself that I came to Mars merely for Dad’s sake; there was too much else involved. Attending those dinners was different. Personally I wouldn’t have cared what the leaders of Colonial society thought of me if I hadn’t had to see any of them; but Dad did care, and his job was important to him.
The people we met were nice to me, but cool. Word had got around; the antagonism wasn’t all one-sided. Most Colonials are chauvinists, though their background does encompass two worlds, and the smallest slight to their city is a worse offense than any personal insult could ever be. At first, I didn’t see the other side of the coin, the kind of camaraderie New Terrans have that isn’t found anyplace on Earth nowadays. Sure, they’re stiff-necked about their pride in the Colonies, and they bristle when you contradict that. But it’s natural enough, when you stop to think what they’ve gone through to build this place. Their society’s a tight little circle, as well-fortified as the dome itself, but you don’t have to be anybody special to be accepted into it; all you have to do is treat Martians as human beings, not as if they were little green men or something.
It’s funny how my worst problems on Mars were things that I hadn’t anticipated in spite of all my doubts. It seems ironic that the most unpleasant aspects of those first few weeks grew out of situations that might have existed anywhere. In between the dreaded social engagements, I was bored. Just plain bored! I don’t know what Dad had thought I would do on Mars while he was wrapped up in his work. There are just so many hours that you can alternate between a hotel room, the library, and the public park. Janet’s entire life revolved around the biology lab; Alex was working; and I didn’t know anyone else besides Dad’s friends. For that matter everyone’s busy on Mars, even the children. And you can’t get to like a place by loafing.
The old fear still haunted me, but not so much as I had expected it would. New Terra’s so big and substantial looking that it’s hard to think of its having an artificial atmosphere. Occasionally, going through one of the wide-open emergency airlocks at a building’s entrance, I would get the shivers thinking of why it had been built that way, though there was some comfort in the knowledge that even if the dome should be punctured there’d be plenty of time to get inside before that airlock would be sealed. (The same setup’s used in the tunnels between domes, but it’s not noticeable there because you go through them only in subway cars.) All the same, I had no desire to go Outside. Alex suggested it once, but I put him off; he was terribly busy then with his new job, and for a time he let it ride.
I saw Alex and his family about once a week, and it was the one thing I really looked forward to. The first time, Dad went to the Prestons’ with me. It was certainly a contrast to those other dinner parties; everything was happy and relaxed and natural. Ms. Preston was a lively, warmhearted person whom I liked immediately. Young Alicia was very much like her, with the addition of some thirteen-year-old enthusiasm. Mr. Preston was calm and confident and strong, and it was easy to see whom Alex took after. Alex was—well, Alex. It was almost as good as seeing someone from home.
Dad took us all out to the best restaurant in the city a few days later, but since he was usually tied up with his business associates I was afraid we wouldn’t see the Prestons often. Alex asked me out the very first weekend, and it was then that I told him about Ross, whom I somehow hadn’t mentioned specifically before. I don’t think Alex was surprised, though. The next night his mother called me
and asked me to dinner again, and I decided that going to his family’s, when invited by his parents, was not exactly the same as dating. When I got there, Alex treated me just like a sister, and that’s how it was from then on.
It was the sort of family that I’d always wished, secretly, that I’d been born into. Not that I would have wanted to trade Dad in for Mr. Preston or for anybody else; but together the Prestons seemed to have something. Whatever it was, Mars was about the last place I’d have expected to find it. The way they lived certainly couldn’t have had anything to do with it. Always before, when I’d imagined family life, I’d pictured—well, a real home: a place with a big living room, and books lining the shelves, and curtained windows looking out on a yard where the children could play, and maybe even a fireplace. And a kitchen smelling of home-cooked food, and silver tableware reflecting candlelight, and fragile, antique china dishes like Gran’s for Sunday dinner. None of those things were possible in the Colonies. The Prestons’ apartment was just like a thousand others on the outside, and on the inside it had the kind of modern decor I’ve always hated. If it could be called “decor,” that is; the furniture was rather sparse. Half the time Alex, Alicia, and I lounged on the floor. They had to clean the dishes from one meal—not wash them in water, heaven forbid, but stick them in the sonic cleaner—before they could set the table for the next. It wasn’t that the Prestons were poor; actually they were quite wealthy by Earth standards, though only in the middle brackets for New Terrans. But things just aren’t available on Mars.
And still, in a way I envied them! I envied Alicia especially, which was a crazy thing. Considering she’d never even seen Earth, I’d have thought I would have been sorry for her. Only Alicia didn’t know what she was missing, and she did have parents, at an age where parents are very important. And she had Alex, permanently, for a brother.
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