Apollo's Outcasts

by Allen Steele

  After Mr. Porter tapped his gavel again, Ms. Fleming asked if anyone else cared to speak. She waited a minute, and when no one raised a hand, she told Mr. Porter that the town was ready to vote. The city manager read the proposition--that Hannah Wilford and her friends, my sister and I included, be granted political asylum and allowed to become Apollo citizens--and then called for a vote.

  Looking over my shoulder, I watched as townspeople ran fingertips across the LCD screens of their wristbands. Apparently the measure had been transmitted to everyone; no show of hands, but rather a secret ballot. That must have been why Ms. Fleming checked the identities of everyone who wanted to speak; the council was making sure that any nonresidents who might have shown up for the meeting wouldn't be able to skew the vote. After a few minutes, Mr. Porter, Ms. Fleming, and another council member downloaded the ballot into their pads. The three of them studied the totals, checked the numbers they'd received against each other, and then Mr. Porter stood up to announce the results.

  In favor: 732. Opposed: 209. Abstaining: 37. Absent: 22. The ayes had it; the motion passed.

  And that was it. I was now a citizen of the Moon.

  "Why walk when you can fly?" Nicole asked.

  We were standing on the edge of a parapet overlooking Apollo. It was just below the bottom of the ceiling dome, about 300 feet above the crater floor, and we were about to jump off.

  I tried not to look down, but couldn't help myself. The parapet jutted out from a guardrail-protected platform that circled the top of the crater and was normally used to inspect the dome. Just past its edge, the crater's interior walls sloped down toward Apollo's landscaped groves and meadows. The parapet didn't have a railing, so there was nothing to prevent a misstep that would cause me to make a long fall to the bottom.

  Nothing, that is, except the paragliding suit I wore. It was a red, one-piece outfit, skin-tight and made of some elastic composite, with long, thin membranes that extended out from my arms and legs when I stretched them apart. The suit would let me glide upon thermal drafts rising from the solarium; wearing it, I would temporarily become an airborne hybrid of a human being and a flying rodent.

  Yeah, right, I thought. Just call me Batboy. Paragliding was perfectly safe so long as I followed instructions. Or at least that's what I'd been told. "I'm not sure if I can do this," I murmured, stepping back from the precipice.

  "Sure you can." Logan was up there with us. He stood on the other side of Nicole and wore a suit identical to ours except in color: his was dark blue, while Nicole's was teal-green. All three of us wore helmets and goggles; small packs containing parachutes were strapped to our backs. "The first step is the hardest. After that, all you have to do is keep from falling."

  Not funny. I gave him a sour look and he grinned back at me. Logan had already done this before, with Nicole as his instructor. I'd watched from below, and when they'd landed I'd told them that I'd like to try this myself. Big mistake; they took me seriously. So for the next several days, I'd taken afterschool lessons in paragliding when I wasn't sweeping walkways and emptying trash containers. I wasn't bad at it, but up until then I'd only jumped off a low balcony on Tier 1 with a padded mat as my touchdown point. This time was the real deal. If I was going to earn my paragliding permit, I'd have to make a 91-meter jump....

  Who was I kidding? I wasn't really interested in paragliding. I was just jealous of the fact that Logan was spending more time with Nicole than I was. In fact, she was dangerously close to becoming his girlfriend. If I wanted her, then I'd have to show her that my best friend didn't have more guts than I did.

  So there I was, about to do something crazy. Only a few weeks ago, my idea of risky behavior had been crossing the street in my mobil. And now...

  "C'mon, Jamey." Logan was becoming impatient. "Jump already."

  "Stop pushing him," Nicole said, then looked at me again. "If you don't feel like you're ready for this, then don't...."

  "Oh, the hell with it," I said, and then I jumped off the platform.

  The morning after the town meeting, I began to settle in. Maybe I was rushing things a bit--after all, only a couple of days earlier I'd arrived on the Moon--but I didn't want to sit around and wait for someone to tell me what to do. Neither did Melissa, but that was to be expected. Her boredom threshold was even lower than mine; besides, I think she wanted to meet some boys. So Ms. Lagler took a day off from her job at the comptroller's office and escorted us to those places in Apollo we'd need to visit in order to fully become citizens in good standing.

  First stop was City Hall, a warren of offices on Tier 1, where a clerk took fingerprints and retina images from Melissa and me and added them to information embedded in our wristbands. The wristbands were redundant--our fingers and eyes were all that we'd need for the scanners that unlocked doors throughout Apollo--but since they also contained our comlinks and dosimeters, we were told to wear them at all times anyway.

  We were also registered to vote. The minimum voting age was sixteen, and as Apollo residents we were expected to cast our ballots in all elections and civil referendums. That was as much of a surprise to Melissa as it was to me; until then, no one had ever treated us as adults or respected our opinions in matters of public interest. I walked out of the clerk's office feeling just a little taller.

  With the right to vote, though, came an obligation to help the community. Our next stop was the Colony Service office, where another clerk had us press our fingers against a scanner before downloading into our pads a long list of job openings. The list ranged all the way from cleaning toilets and sweeping floors to spacecraft maintenance and aeroponic farming: something for everyone, regardless of age, gender, or skills. As Mr. Lagler said, there was no getting around this; Colony Service was mandatory, no excuses accepted. Not that MeeMee didn't try, but the clerk only frowned at her when she tried to cite a list of ailments and allergies--most of them imaginary--which would prevent her from working twenty hours a week. We were told that we'd have a few days to pick something from the list, but if we didn't volunteer for a job by the end of the week, one would be chosen for us.

  And finally, we dropped by Apollo High.

  The school wasn't anything like my school in Burtonsville. Instead of a big, two-story building with three wings and a parking lot, we found ourselves at a three-room schoolhouse on Apollo's east side that somewhat resembled a Spanish hacienda. Classes were already over for the day--they began at 7 a.m. sharp and ended at 12 noon, five days a week--so only the principal and his secretary were present when Melissa and I came in.

  As it turned out, Logan was there, too. He and Dr. Ernsting were in the principal's office when we arrived. The principal's name was Giovanni Speci, and he was one of the school's only two full-time employees; all the teachers were part-timers who did this as Colony Service. Apollo High had only twelve students, so we'd be in the same classes as the kids who were already there; our teachers would come and go through the morning, each taking turns to spend fifty-five minutes with us, until school let out at lunchtime, after which we were expected to report to our Colony Service jobs or, if we had any time left in the day, participate in sports.

  At first, it sounded like Apollo High would be a piece of cake: shorter hours, smaller classes, and part-time teachers. Any notions that my new school would be easy, though, disappeared when Mr. Speci downloaded our textbooks into our pads. Trigonometry and calculus; German, Spanish, and Mandarin; third-level English, with an emphasis on grammar and composition; American and European literature; world history; biology, lunar geology, and physics, including a seminar in astronomy; ethics and philosophy. I had to dump all the texts already stored in my pad just to make room for the new material. Compared to Apollo High, my old school in Maryland was the cakewalk I'd been expecting here.

  Melissa stared at her pad when she saw what it now contained. "How can you expect us to learn all this stuff?" she protested, her voice rising in horror. "We're in class only five hours a day!"

&nbs
p; "Oh, you won't be getting it all at once," Mr. Speci said. "Some of this, like the language, literature, and science classes, will rotate every six weeks. But you'll need to spend at least a couple of hours a night on homework if you're going to stay on top of everything...if you have that much free time, that is."

  Logan raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

  "The three of you are new here. That means you'll need remedial education in some areas." As he spoke, the principal turned to his secretary. "See if you can find someone who's available for the next three or four weeks to put them through Basic Lunar Skills." The young woman on the other side of the office quietly nodded as she typed something into her comp. "That's the course we give everyone who relocates here," Mr. Speci went on. "How to wear and operate EVA gear, how to react in an emergency, how to walk..."

  "I already know how to walk, thank you," Melissa said testily.

  "Really?" Mr. Speci pointed to her ankle weights. "Take those off, then walk to the coffee maker over there. If you can bring me a fresh cup without spilling it, then I'll believe you."

  MeeMee glanced at the carafe on a table next to the secretary's desk. It was only eight feet away. "Sure, why not?" she said, then bent down to unfasten her weights. She was careful enough to stand up slowly, but the second step she took was a little too hasty. Suddenly, it was if she'd decided to leap headfirst toward the table. She went sprawling across the room, arms flailing for balance as she yelled something scatological, and probably would have careened into the opposite wall if Mr. Speci hadn't stood up to catch her.

  "Nice try," he said dryly.

  Melissa scowled at him. The last thing she liked was making a fool out of herself. I was laughing out loud, but I shouldn't have. As it turned out, I'd have plenty of chances of my own to look like a dunce.

  For a second or two, I was certain that I'd just committed suicide.

  I'd thrown myself far enough away from the platform that it was unlikely that I'd hit Apollo's upper tiers before I slammed into the crater floor far below. My arms and legs were stretched out as far as I could, forming the snow-angel shape that my paragliding instructor had drilled into me during practice sessions, and I was resisting the instinctive reflex to either curl into a cannon ball or flap my limbs in panic; either one of those would have resulted in a fatal plunge.

  Nonetheless, I was falling. Not gliding. Not flying. Falling.

  I opened my mouth and was just about to scream when it seemed as if an invisible hand reached up and, ever so gently, began to push against me. I was still falling, but not nearly as fast; air pressure exerted itself against the suit's thin membranes, acting as a force against lunar gravity.

  I heard wind in my ears, felt it rush past my face. My velocity remained the same, but my trajectory was changing, becoming more horizontal than vertical. Just as it seemed as if I was about to clip the Tier 3 railing, my body shot forward and...

  I was flying.

  Not very well, perhaps, or very gracefully. I teetered back and forth, skittering this way and that as I fought for control. But it no longer seemed as if I was about to bury my face in a walkway I'd swept just a couple of hours earlier. Far below, I saw a couple of people look up from the park bench. One of them waved to me. I didn't wave back, but instead kept my arms and legs locked in position.

  "Way to go!" Logan yelled.

  I carefully looked to my left--my instructor had warned me that my head could act as a rudder and cause me to unintentionally change direction while in flight--and saw him coasting alongside me, only about fifteen feet away. He was grinning as he called out to me again. "Nice jump!"

  "Thanks!" I yelled back.

  "Jamey!" Nicole shouted, and I looked to my right to see that she'd settled into position on the other side of me. When she caught my eye, she gave me a thumbs-up with her left fist. I managed to respond the same way with my right hand and she grinned.

  "Follow me!" she yelled. Then she pulled in her right arm and veered away from Logan and me, heading toward the crater wall.

  I knew what she was doing, but I wasn't sure if I was ready for that yet. I didn't have much choice, though. Logan gave a rebel yell as he followed her. If I didn't want to be left behind, I'd have to do the same.

  Cursing myself for letting jealousy get me into this, I pulled my right arm in ten degrees and followed them.

  I didn't think I'd see Hannah at school. I mean, does anyone ever think they'll be sharing a classroom with the daughter of the president of the United States? Indeed, she later told me that Mr. Porter offered to find private tutors for her. But special treatment was the last thing she wanted; if every other teenager in the colony went to Apollo High, then that's where she'd go, too.

  Eddie was almost our age, but he didn't go to Apollo High, nor did he attend Apollo Elementary on the other side of town. The colony didn't have a special-education school because...well, to be honest, because he was the only intellectually disabled kid on the Moon, and the youngsters at the elementary school probably wouldn't have been patient with a fourteen-year-old boy still learning to read picture books. So Dr. Rice found a couple of other doctors at the hospital who were willing to tutor Eddie on his own, and so I didn't see him or his sister Nina quite as often as I had before.

  It's always tough to be the new kid in school. Everyone is a stranger, and since they already know each other, you can tell that they're trying to size you up as soon as you walk in. Melissa, Logan, Hannah, and I sat together in the back of the room on the first day, and I thought the twelve other kids in the room would sprain their necks staring back at us. Hannah wore her ball cap, but when it became obvious that this wasn't doing anything to conceal her identity--everyone already knew who she was--she took it off and stuck it under her desk, and I seldom saw her wear it again.

  And she almost always sat beside me, even after the four of us who'd come from Earth stopped hanging together as a group. I was a little annoyed by this. I liked her well enough, sure, and had gotten over the fact that she'd taken Jan's place, but nonetheless it felt as if she was clinging to me. And as much as she was attracted to me, I was attracted to someone else...Nicole. I would've preferred to sit next to her, but Logan always found a way to beat me to the seat beside her. A couple of times, I managed to get there before Logan, yet while Nicole was cordial and polite, it soon became clear that she preferred my best friend to me...and whenever I'd glance over my shoulder, I'd find Hannah looking my way.

  The only other kid in school I'd met before was Billy. Nicole had told me that there was a good side to him, but if there was, I couldn't find it. He was convinced that I had no business being on the Moon and never missed an opportunity to put me in my place. He hung me with a nickname, "Crip," because of the ankle bracelets I wore while learning to walk in lunar gravity, and continued to call me that even after I got rid of them.

  Billy was hardly the swiftest kid in class, but my struggle to catch up was a constant source of amusement for him. He was always ready to make some remark at my expense, usually when I'd get the wrong answer about something everyone else in the room knew by heart, such as the exact circumference of the Moon or when the first American and Russian probes landed there. At first the others thought he was funny, but when it became apparent that he was being a bully for bullying's sake, a couple of people told him to shut up. He put a cork in it, but only reluctantly, and the contempt never left his eyes.

  My first impression of Apollo High had been correct; it was much tougher than what I was used to. From seven to twelve, I was immersed in schoolwork so intense that I often had a headache by lunchtime. I'd been a pretty good student back home, usually scoring As and Bs on pop-quizzes and tests, but the rote-learning strategy that once served me well--memorize, regurgitate, forget--didn't work here. My new school wasn't interested in having us develop test-taking skills; our teachers wanted us to truly understand what we were being taught, not just spit out true-or-false answers. So we were expected to come to school prepared to
discuss our assignments from the day before, and I soon found that, if I didn't spend enough time doing my homework, I'd be in danger of falling behind. And Apollo High had only two grades: pass or fail.

  To make matters worse, one of my teachers was Mr. Lagler himself. Apparently he'd decided to keep secret from Melissa and me the fact that he'd be our language teacher. On the third hour of our first day, though, he sauntered into the room right after the five-minute break following physics class. At first, I thought it was a practical joke; so did Melissa, who laughed out loud when he told us to open our pads to chapter 2 of Introduction to German. But it wasn't a gag; our guardian was also one of our teachers, so there was no question of what we'd be doing after dinner from now on.

  Melissa had it worse than Logan and I did. She'd never had classes with her little brother, and so she thought she'd been demoted. It took a while for her to realize that Apollo High didn't have grade-levels and that she'd graduate only when she completed the curriculum, whether she was eighteen or eighty. Back home, she'd spend her days passing notes to other girls, flirting with boys, sneaking naps in the back of the room, and getting her friends to let her peep over their shoulders during tests. None of that happened here. When it was 0700, everyone went to work, period; those five-minute breaks were used for stretching or visiting the restroom, and then our noses were back against the grindstone. And when there's only sixteen kids in the entire school, it's pretty easy to tell when someone is slacking off.

  For the first week or so, I felt like I'd been tossed in the deep end with my arms and legs tied together. But just as I'd learned how to swim even though I was incapable of walking, I gradually learned how to cope with a workload far more demanding than what I'd had before. By the end of the second week, the headaches were over and I was too busy to really notice or care who sat beside me.