Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

  “I am well.” Harpreet nodded her head in a tiny bow and then narrowed her eyes. “And you, child? Your name is upon everyone’s lips this morning.”

  “Why?” Jess felt suddenly worried. “Are they saying it’s my fault?”

  “No, child. What a dreadful thing to assume,” replied Harpreet. “Everyone speaks of your bravery, daughter.”

  Jessamyn frowned. She hadn’t felt at all brave. “Do they know the extent of the damage yet?” she asked.

  Harpreet tilted her head to one side. “The Secretary General will be making an announcement shortly. I think it would be unwise for me to say more.”

  Jessamyn nodded. She wasn’t here to talk about the fire, in any case. “Did you already have your morning wet ration?”

  “No, child. I have been sitting here, waiting to see who the Divine might bring my way this morning.”

  “Oh,” said Jess. “Well, I don’t want to get in the way of anything, um, divinical.”

  Harpreet gazed for a long minute into Jess’s eyes. Then she reached her soft, brown hands to take one of Jessamyn’s. “I see only you before me this morning.”

  “Oh,” Jess repeated. She smiled a tiny bit.

  “Let us go place our orders, shall we?” asked Harpreet.

  Jess wondered how the old woman knew she hadn’t already sipped water with her family. Maybe Harpreet really could read minds.

  The old raider leaned in and whispered, “Your lips are still chapped this morning. You weren’t planning to skip the most important water of the day, were you child?”

  Jess touched her lips self-consciously as the two crossed a small plaza, joining a line of others waiting for their morning fix. When Jess reached the front of the line, she pressed her thumb atop a glowing square.

  “One regular,” she said. “Please,” she added, thinking of Harpreet’s easy politeness.

  “We’ll have that right out for you,” said the young man, indicating the far end of the counter.

  Jess collected her drink and looked around for an empty table out of earshot from others. She found one nestled into a corner and waved Harpreet over to the lonely nook. Harpreet had stopped to scan her thumb at a ration-vending box. After retrieving a copper-wrapped bar, the old woman walked briskly to join Jess.

  “So, my dear Jessamyn,” said Harpreet, angling into a chair across from Jess, “How can I help you today?”

  Here goes, thought Jess. She took a deep breath and began. “There’s been a terrible mistake.” As the suspension and the fire swirled together in her mind, she felt her chest tighten.

  “Have a sip first, daughter,” said Harpreet. Her voice sounded so sad, as though she, and not Jessamyn, had just lost her future.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jess murmured as she blinked back tears.

  “There is no shame in a tear or two,” replied Harpreet. “They are a gift from the Divine meant to remind us to pay attention to our feelings. You have survived a terrifying ordeal.”

  Jess shook her head. “It’s not that. I didn’t come to talk about the fire.”

  Harpreet’s dark eyes widened a fraction of a centimeter as she raised her eyebrows. Go on, she seemed to say.

  “I’ve been suspended from flight,” said Jess. “Even though I did everything right. I saved my ship. I kept retrieval costs to a minimum, bringing it in as close as I could. I did the best job I could, Harpreet, and now they won’t let me fly.” She lowered her voice. “For all I know, they may kick me out of the Academy.”

  The old woman reached for the copper-colored nutrition bar and began peeling the wrap away from the ration inside. The wrapper caught a bit of sun and flashed orangey-gold light back at the window. She smoothed the wrap, preparing it for the recycling mechs, not meeting Jessamyn’s eyes.

  “You are not being expelled,” said Harpreet at last.

  Jess swallowed in relief. She’d been worried that with the Ice Fest and the fire, something had slowed down her receipt of an expulsion notice. But if Harpreet declared her still a student, she was still a student. She watched as the old woman examined the date-stamp on the wrapper. It listed a Terran time Jess never paid any attention to.

  “I miss your grandfather, Jessamyn,” said Harpreet.

  Jess looked up and saw that the old woman had now fixed her gaze upon the Marsian landscape.

  “He was one helluva pilot,” said Harpreet. “I’ll never forget his fearlessness, taking on the passage through the satellites.”

  Jess squirmed. She didn’t want to be impolite, but she wasn’t here to discuss her pirate granddad.

  Tapping the date-stamp with a bony finger, Harpreet spoke. “I remember the day he and I loaded this particular shipment of rations onto the Red Galleon.”

  “This exact ration shipment?” asked Jess.

  Harpeet nodded. “He was in a foul temper that day. It was our second on Earth and he thought that, as pilot, he should be exempt from such a menial task. A quick look at the duties roster showed that he was wrong. He’d signed on without reading the fine print.” Harpreet laughed. “Oh, he was angry.”

  Jess wondered how to politely bring Harpreet back around to the problem at hand.

  “But a pilot must always obey orders,” continued Harpreet, meeting Jess’s eye. “Our commanding officer exercised her right to keep your grandfather working the entire day. He swore at her long and loud, but she didn’t back down—”

  “And when they returned home, she married him,” Jess murmured. It was a story she knew well.

  “When they returned, they married,” agreed Harpreet. “And it lasted just long enough for your mother to be brought into the world.”

  Jess nodded. Her grandparents’ divorce was notorious. Most Marsians, if they married, stayed married for life.

  “He could only see things from one point of view, your grandfather.”

  Jess remembered the arguments between her granddad and her mom. “His point of view,” she said.

  “Precisely,” said Harpreet. She pushed her mostly uneaten ration bar a few centimeters away. “Do you know, I find I have less appetite as the orbits go by. Would you do me the great courtesy of preventing my ration from being wasted?”

  Jess stared at Harpreet. No Marsian would ever think of wasting their dry ration. It would have been the worst form of sacrilege, a dishonoring of those raiders who had risked everything to obtain food. That aside, Jess wondered how could anyone not want two-thirds of their morning meal? As a seventeen-year-old, Jess still received three dry rations a day and couldn’t imagine how adults made do with only two.

  “Are you sure?” asked Jess, already eyeing the ration hungrily.

  “Yes. You sit here for your meal and think about your grandfather.” Harpreet swung her feet around as if in preparation to leave the table.

  “But—” Jess paused to compose herself. “You haven’t told me anything. Please. You have to tell me what to do.”

  Harpreet sighed, settling back into her bunk. “You are very alike, your grandfather and you.”

  “My granddad’s dead,” replied Jess. “He can’t help me.”

  “Hmm.” Harpreet resumed gazing out at the landscape of red dirt and brown rocks. The sky glowed, warm and golden. “He died a bitter and lonely man. I visited him every day, but he had long since given up challenging himself, looking for ways to grow, to learn, to become attuned to the harmonies of minds unlike his own.”

  Harpreet turned and faced Jessamyn. “You must not make his mistakes, my child.” She paused and waited until Jess’s eyes met her own. “If you can see things only from your own limited perspective, what does it matter if you are the best pilot of your generation?”

  Jess’s heart swelled within her. If she was the best pilot of her generation, then why in Hades had they grounded her?

  Harpreet continued. “To be a pilot, to be a raider, especially, one must learn to see things from more than one perspective. What is it that makes you a good pilot, Jess?”

  The quest
ion caught Jessamyn off guard.

  “Take a moment and think about it,” said Harpreet.

  Jess closed her eyes. What made her a good pilot? How was she supposed to know that? She came up blank. And then she remembered something her father had said to her mother the first time Jess had been at the helm of a flying ship. “She flies from here,” her father had said, pointing to his belly. It was true, Jess thought. She felt things with her gut that others didn’t seem to notice. She acted with certainty when others doubted. It led her to take risks others wouldn’t.

  “I fly with my gut,” said Jess.

  Harpreet nodded. “Yes, child. You fly using this intelligence.” Harpreet tapped the space over her navel. “Exactly as your grandfather did.”

  Jess waited for Harpreet to say more. When she didn’t, Jess spluttered out, “And?”

  The old woman smiled. “Can you learn to call upon your other intelligences? To see things not only from here,” she pointed at her belly, “But from here as well,” she said, pointing to a spot on her forehead, just above her eyes. “A pilot must be a member of a team, Jessamyn. A pilot must learn to say ‘no’ to the voice which tells her to disobey a direct command.”

  Jess flushed. So Harpreet had heard everything.

  “There are times, child, for both kinds of wisdom.” Harpreet leaned in and took Jess’s pale hand once more in her own dark ones. “But even as it takes teamwork to put out a great fire, so also it takes teamwork to keep a pilot in the air. Daughter, if you wish to be more than a merely good pilot—if you wish to be a great pilot—you must learn the wisdom of working in harmony with others.”

  Jess wavered, uncertain whether she felt affronted or encouraged.

  “And now, my dear, you must excuse me as I have an engagement with the Secretary General.” Harpreet smiled as she rose. “It does not do to keep such a busy person waiting.”

  Jess found herself seated alone, staring at the barren landscape, with no idea how she was ever going to get herself above its surface again.

  She knew she ought to go to classes. But if they were grounding her, and if Harpreet refused to help her get un-grounded, well, what was the point of returning to MCAB? Expulsion, which had sounded so terrifying this morning, no longer seemed so awful. The really dreadful thing had already happened: she couldn’t fly.

  And so, after sitting by herself for an hour in a lonely corner, Jessamyn heard the news that the Secretary General was giving an address in the Pavilion about the Rations Storage fire. A Fountain employee found Jess in her corner.

  “We’re closing,” he said, apologetically. “Everyone wants to hear Mei Lo’s announcement.”

  Nodding, Jess followed the crowds exiting through the tunnel that linked the Fountain with the Crystal Pavilion. The news awaiting them was not good. In fact, it was the worst news Mars Colonial had heard in a century.

  Chapter Five

  I’LL DO MY BEST

  Inside the pavilion, citizens had gathered; many had remained in town after the Festival of Singing Ice, and these were joined by reporters from as far away as New Tokyo. Jessamyn hugged the back wall of windows, settling between two families with small children, one of whom asked in the over-loud whisper of the very young, “Is that the hero, Mama? Her?”

  Jess felt her face flaming with color and pushed forward into the crowd. She was no hero. For all she knew, her presence at the fire had made things worse and not better.

  The Secretary mounted the dais which had been hastily reconstructed from yesterday. She took a moment to survey the crowd before her. Then, gripping either side of the podium, she spoke.

  “My friends, I come before you today in my capacity as Chief Executive Officer of Mars Colonial. I am here to inform you of what we know and what we don’t know. It is with deep regret that I confirm the destruction by fire of over ninety percent of our dry ration reserves.”

  Whispers rushed through the building like tiny breezes. It wasn’t possible. Someone must have gotten a detail wrong. Surely ninety percent was the amount of food which survived, not the amount which had been destroyed. The Secretary allowed time for the implication to sink in: Mars could not wait the scheduled number of orbits before sending raiders to Earth to trade for rations on the black market.

  Jessamyn felt as though parts of her body had liquefied and were now sinking down, down, settling low in her abdomen, growing heavier with the passing seconds before the Secretary spoke again.

  “For a century and more, we have dared violating the No Contact Accords in twenty annum intervals,” continued the Secretary. “The fact that it comes earlier than expected is unfortunate but does not mean our defeat as a people. Every generation has had to face the risk before us now.”

  Jess, only seventeen, had never experienced the anxious launch, threading a route past the armed Terran satellites in high Mars orbit, never known the weeks of radio silence while Marsians waited to see if this was the raid where they were discovered—the raid which ended in all-out war between Mars and Earth.

  The emotional climate of the pavilion felt to Jess as many-layered as a Terran cake. Underpinning all rested a base-mood of anxiety. A thin paste of frantic hovered over this, followed by alternating layers of disbelief and wonder that such a thing could come to pass. Atop everything however, was spread, like a smooth ganache, the sentiment of sobriety.

  The Secretary spoke again. “The fire began last night at approximately 7:50 New Houston time. It has been determined that the cause was the small vacuum mechs deployed to keep the facility free of external contaminants. Yesterday, during the Festival, some four thousand persons toured the facility housing our rations. The mech’s designer recommended last annum that we install a cooling system in the devices which would prevent conflagration should the mechs become overtaxed by excessive cleaning.

  “Because we did not heed that advice, we now stand at the brink of the collapse of Marsian civilization.” The Secretary took a slow breath and began to outline a plan to prevent widespread starvation.

  “Mars Colonial Command informs me that a window for travel to Earth will open in less than six weeks. I am confident that the brave men and women who have been preparing for the opportunity to serve as Mars Raiders will be more than able to meet the challenges brought on by an accelerated timetable.

  “Raider Mombasu—forgive me—Harpreet has conferred with me and agreed to reassume the role of negotiations specialist aboard the Red Galleon when it launches for Earth.”

  The crowd stomped and clapped their approval upon the mention of Harpreet’s participation. The plan would surely succeed if Harpreet supported it.

  But Jessamyn’s heart was already sinking with a terrible realization: her life-long dream of flying as a raider had just been obliterated. With the recent suspension on her record, MCAB would never recommend her for this raid. And in twenty orbits, her fair skin would look too reddened and wrinkled—she would have a characteristically Marsian appearance. Only those with skin healthy enough to pass for Terran were chosen for the journey to Earth. The risk of someone discovering that Mars was in violation of the No Contact Accord was too great—no one who looked Marsian could go to Earth.

  Harpreet, old though she was, had been blessed with melanin, which offered her body natural protection from Mars’s high dosage of ultraviolet light. Harpreet’s warm chocolate visage was neither reddened nor wrinkled. She was the ideal raider, regardless of her age. But even if Jess’s record was spotless for the following twenty annums, Jess would never be selected for the next raid.

  She missed the close of the Secretary’s speech. Dragging herself back through the tunnel, Jess waited for the Fountain to reopen, retrieved her walk-out suit, and went home with her heart cut in pieces like a handful of Mars-rock reduced to gravel.

  Jessamyn’s family sat for evening rations that night, minus Ethan, who had been called to Mars Colonial headquarters. Jess at first assumed this was because the government wanted to blame him for the fire—the mechs
were his invention.

  “No,” sighed Lillian. “No one’s blaming him. Ethan told them how to prevent this and they didn’t listen. Now they all look like idiots.”

  “They’re asking his advice on ancient Terran computer systems, if you can believe it,” said Jess’s father, separating two ration bars into four pieces.

  He handed Jess a half-bar.

  “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to her meal.

  “We’re on half-rations,” her mother replied, lips tight and thin. “Weren’t you listening to the Secretary?”

  Jessamyn stared mournfully at the reduced portion, not thinking it wise to admit she’d left the Secretary’s address early. “Won’t people starve?” she asked.

  “The old and the sickly are at risk,” replied Jess’s mom. “The very young as well.”

  Jessamyn felt her heart miss a beat: did her mother’s dry-lung qualify Lillian as sickly? “Planetary Ag respects you, Mom. You have to tell them.”

  Jess’s mother stood abruptly and left the room.

  Her father sighed, smoothing ration wrappers.

  “Your mom’s upset. She spent the morning running experiments for Planetary Agriculture, and she’s worried about a test that calls into question the nutritional value of the emergency rations from New Tokyo,” said her father. “And she’s angry that her algae pot program wasn’t implemented last annum. As a supplement to ration bars, it would have helped.”

  “We’d be eating that stuff?” asked Jess, staring at an algae pot. “What about health issues?” Everyone knew people got sick on Mars-raised food.

  Jess’s father gave her half a smile. “Your mom will always have detractors, but even they agree the algae’s not going to kill anyone. All the data looks promising.”

  A call from Mars Colonial Command interrupted the silence between Jess and her father. He took the call, making a series of nods, grunts, and assents before clicking off.