by Libba Bray
“It’s a girl,” Chandra said a moment later. I saw a red, wrinkled face, then she was on the counter, being weighed and measured and tested. “Only five pounds, a little underweight, but otherwise she seems remarkably healthy.” Chandra laid her on my chest.
A few days later, a woman in Indiana would win a million dollars for naming my baby Virginia Dare Morrison—the first child born in the New World. But as she lay there, suckling for the first time, I murmured, “Podkayne of Mars,” and we just called her Poddy.
The Conestoga had not been stocked with infant necessities, so we had to make do. T-shirts were diapers. Archie made a mobile from some color-coded spare parts and dental floss, dangling it above the hammock that hung in my bunk. A blanket became a snugglie; while I worked, I carried her like a papoose from another, older frontier.
I breast-fed her for the first eight months, no extra draw on the closely measured rations. She got sponge baths, just like the rest of us. When she was teething, her cries filled the Hab—the bunks were only soundproofed enough to offer a bit of privacy—and the rest of the crew grumbled about lost sleep. But they watched her when it was my turn in the rotation to be outside, and she heard lullabies in four different languages.
Martian gravity is kind to toddlers. At thirteen months, Poddy massed eighteen pounds, but her chubby legs only had to support six as she pulled herself up and began to walk. It’s impossible to child-proof a spacecraft, but we blocked off the lab and the stairs to the upper level of the Hab, and strung tether cords across the hatchways. She could climb like a monkey.
She bounced and hopped the length of the greenhouse, laughing at the top of her lungs and bounding about in a way no Earth baby could. I sent vids to Pete, and they were replayed everywhere; a dance called the Poddy Hop was the new craze. Plans were made for a homecoming tour the next year: first martian returns.
But that was a problem, said the doctors.
Martian gravity might turn out to be sufficient for healthy growth. No one knew. Poddy’s stats were being studied by scientists everywhere, and would provide the data for future missions. But travel in zero-g was not a possibility, not at her age. She was still developing—bones and muscles, neurons and connections. She would never recover from seven months in free fall.
Every member of the crew already had muscle-mass and bone loss from the trip out. I’d known from day one that once the mission was over, I’d spend the next two years in hospitals and gyms trying to get as much of it back as I could.
For Poddy, they said, the loss would be irreversible. Mission Control advised: Further study needed.
A month before takeoff, I got their final verdict.
Poddy could not return to Earth.
If she did, even as an adult, she would never walk again. She would be crippled by the physics of her home planet, always in excruciating pain, crushed by the mass of her own body. Her lungs might collapse, her heart might not take the strain.
“We had not planned for children,” Mission Control’s message ended. “We’re sorry.”
I read the message three times, then picked her up and kissed her hair. I’d always dreamed of living on Mars.
Future missions would bring supplies, they promised. Clothes, shoes, a helmet, a modified pressure suit with expandable sections and room to grow. From now on, they would carry extra milk and vitamins, educational materials, toys and games. Engineers had begun working on a small-scale rover. Whatever she needed.
The next ship should arrive in seven months.
Tom reassigned duties for a five-person crew. By the time the Sacagawea was ready for launch, Poddy was talking. Just simple words. Mama, Hab, juice. She waved her tiny fingers at the porthole as her aunt and uncles boarded: Bye-bye Chanda, bye-bye Tom. Bye-bye.
We would never see them again.
Like my great-grandmother, I was a pioneer woman, alone on the frontier. Isolated, self-sufficient by necessity. Did it matter, I wondered as I heated up our supper, whether it was a hundred miles of prairie, a thousand miles of ocean, or millions of miles of space that separated me from everything and everyone I had known?
I read to Poddy, after the meal. A picture book, uploaded a week before, drawings in primary colors of things she would never see: TREE, CAT, HOUSE, FATHER. For her Earth was make-believe, a fantasy world with funny green grass and the wrong-color sky.
On the first of two hundred cold, black nights, Deimos and Phobos low in the sky, I sat by the porthole and cuddled my daughter, whispering as I rocked her to sleep.
Goodnight, Poddy.
Goodnight, moons.