Martians Abroad

by Carrie Vaughn

  At least the instructors didn’t expect us offworlders to be able to lift as much, run as far, or play as hard as the Earth kids. Not that we even could without bursting our arteries or breaking bones. In another sense, it made it worse. We were segregated. The runners lagged far behind the Earth runners, the non-Earth kids had to play with each other rather than their Earth classmates, who could accidentally break our bones just by running into us. And I had to stand there lifting tiny little weights no bigger than my own hand. I’d have laughed at me. Not that the Earth kids laughed. They didn’t have to.

  The one classmate who was even worse off than Charles and me and the rest was Boris. He grew up on one of the lunar bases and was used to one-sixth gravity. He’d been through all the same supplement regimes and exercise routines that the rest of us had, but he had so much more catching up to do. He couldn’t even manage the hand-size weights. He sure tried, turning red in the face, his whole frame trembling as he lifted it off the floor.

  An upperclass student intern was supervising us that day: Franteska—I couldn’t remember her other two names—was a third-year with short black hair and a stunningly muscular physique. But then just about everyone on Earth looked stunningly muscular to me. She was an athlete, she informed us repeatedly, proudly, as proof of her qualification to judge us on every little thing. Franteska watched Boris struggling, and I was afraid she was going to give him a hard time, lay out some cutting insult that would make me have to yell at her. And she looked like she wanted to, but she didn’t. Instead, she gave a big sigh and told him to put down the hand weights. Instead, she gave him a set of flat disks that she’d pulled off another piece of equipment—not weights but bolts that held the weights in place. These he could successfully lift in a standard curl, though he still appeared to be working hard. Boris frowned and wouldn’t look at anyone. He never gave up. We all looked out for him, to make sure he had space.

  Only way to get through was to get through, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard.

  In the evening came dinner, then recreation hour, then lights-out. Every minute of the day was structured and accounted for. If I wanted to record messages for home, I’d have to skip math homework, or do it in half the time. Or skip history reading. Or skip lunch. On weekends, we didn’t have class, but we had required extracurricular activities, more study hall, and supplemental PE for offworlders. Biophysical development, they called it. We called it remedial PE. Whoever heard of remedial PE?

  Even if we got along great with the Earth kids, we would have stayed separate from them, formed our own cliques, and not made friends among them. It might have made me sad if they didn’t drive me crazy every time I tried talking to them.

  This was what my life was going to be like, week after week. The Galileo program was three years long—Earth years, at least, which were shorter than Mars years. But it still felt like forever.

  The dorm buildings had a couple of big study rooms with good lighting, desks, and terminals, thank goodness, where we were supposed to spend our recreation hours doing homework. Reading for history, a ton—Earth ton, not the lighter Mars ton—of math problems, astrophysics, biology, geography (Earth geography, and I asked if we were going to be studying Mars and was told not until next year, like the history). I never knew where to start when I sat down to study. I usually jumped around. A couple of math problems until it drove me crazy, some history reading, some scribbling on my hand terminal, some more reading. And over and over again. Eventually, somehow, every day, I managed to get it done.

  The system was rigged: we didn’t grow up knowing basic Earth history like the names of countries that participated in this thing called World War II. Mars didn’t even have countries—each colony was an independent business conglomerate. That was how colonists were originally encouraged to settle, they’d get their own country out of it, basically. The stations in the outer system worked like that, too. So Galileo was a contest and a bunch of us arrived here with negative points. Not only that, some of our evaluation was based on how much we participated in class—raised our hands and answered questions—but Professor Broderick, the history instructor, never called on non-Earthers. And yet we just kept going because we didn’t have a choice.

  Charles buried himself in the work and hardly ever came back into the light. We had a couple of classes together—history and PE—but he hardly ever talked to me. When I tried to talk to him, he gave me a look like I’d interrupted something important. He probably decided that associating with me would hold him back. That was okay. I didn’t need him. Ethan, Ladhi, and I stuck close, eating meals together and helping each other with homework. Tenzig and Marie joined in sometimes, along with the other offworlder kids. After the first week or so, most of the Earth kids stopped needling us so badly. Probably because it was way too easy and they got bored with it. And they were swamped with as much homework as the rest of us. They’d have to pick between teasing us or keeping up with astrophysics.

  We’d been at Galileo for four weeks, and the routine had become familiar enough that I could believe I’d been doing it forever. Except I still got tired just walking to class, I was still lifting half the weights of my Earther classmates, and I dreamed about rocky brown Martian horizons every night. I missed the smell of canned air from a breathing mask.

  One study period, as I sat at one of the tables with a half dozen others and read history on my handheld, I wondered again how the details of international relations on Earth a hundred years ago were relevant to knowing how to fly starships to Jupiter. My mother would tell me I needed to learn this so that I could be well-rounded. So I could understand the way things were now—even Jupiter had been influenced by what had happened on Earth a hundred years ago.

  I’d read the same page three times and thought maybe I ought to switch to working on math, when the girl sitting next to me leaned over.

  “Hey, you’re Polly, right?”

  I was so startled I could only stare. She was an Earther, dense and strong. Her hair was black and she wore dangly earrings with her uniform, which wasn’t supposed to be allowed. I got the feeling she slipped them off when Stanton was around. “Yeah,” I said, blinking. Angelyn, that was her name. I couldn’t remember her other two names, though I was sure I’d heard them. I braced for whatever jab she was about to deliver.

  “My terminal died and wiped out the whole assignment for history next week. I’ve got it all loaded back on, but—can you remind me, what are we supposed to be reading?”

  Was she really just asking me a question? A normal question? “Um … the book on twentieth-century African politics. First three chapters.”

  “Great, thanks,” she said, and smiled. A perfectly normal smile. I smiled back. She went back to her seat and we both sat there reading, like nothing had ever been wrong with the universe.

  9

  Astrophysics was, predictably, my favorite class, and not just because it brought me a little closer to home and didn’t make me feel like a boneless weakling. When the instructor, Ms. Chin-sun Lee, asked questions, I usually knew the answers. I even started raising my hand, because it was embarrassing that no one else was doing so. And Ms. Lee called on me, smiling when I gave my answers because I was usually right. She said things like, “Good job, Ms. Newton!” and I might have kind of loved her for it. In her class, the knots finally left my stomach. It was the one class I felt like I could get a tiny bit ahead in the one-up competitions that a lot of class time degenerated into. I’d done escape-velocity calculations before. I knew how orbital mechanics worked. I knew why interplanetary navigation was harder than it looked, because your points were always moving in relation to each other, though I still mucked up the details when I tried to work the equations out on my own. At least predicting the orbits of asteroids was relevant. To me, anyway.

  Angelyn—Angelyn Marian Chou, I learned, but she was okay with people calling her just Angelyn—was one Earth student I could count on not to give me a hard time by reflex. I didn’t
automatically suspect her when she talked, or wait for her to spring a trap. She was, near as I could tell, honest. Startlingly normal, for an Earther.

  I helped her with astrophysics, she helped me with Earth history, and I never felt like she was trying to show off how much smarter she was.

  “Polly, how did you get so good at those calculations? I swear I’ll never wrap my brain around it.”

  Orbital mechanics. Mostly, it was formulae involving mass, velocity, gravitational pull, and distance from gravitational masses. Trigonometry and vectors. A lot of numbers to juggle, but once you knew how to calculate them, it was mostly a matter of plugging them into equations. It also helped to be able to picture what was actually going on in the real world. I’d been thinking about what orbital mechanics actually look like since I decided I wanted to be a pilot.

  “I don’t know,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to say too much because letting the wrong bit of information slip meant giving them ammunition.

  But Angelyn pressed. “Do they teach this differently on Mars? I can understand why you’d need to know more about astrogation in the colonies—”

  “No, it’s more just me. I learned a lot of it on my own—” And that didn’t look odd at all. A few other people at the study hall looked over, listening in on our conversation, and I blushed because I’d already given too much away. After all, who would voluntarily study M-drive mechanics? “I want to be a pilot,” I blurted, trying to explain, to make myself seem less weird. Failing.

  Tenzig smirked, because of course he did. “Wait a minute. You’re here prepping for flight school?”

  I wasn’t going to lie, and downplaying that would mean betraying my own heart. I wouldn’t do that, not even to avoid the confrontation. “Yes.”

  Not just that, and I would never say it out loud, but I also wanted to go farther than anyone else had ever gone before. I wanted to be one of the people who didn’t fly just interplanetary but interstellar. They were building the big multi-M-drive ships now that would make that happen. I’d be just finishing up school by the time the first missions to Alpha Centauri were ready to go. I would be part of that. I never said it out loud because I couldn’t bear it if people made fun of me for it. People like Charles.

  Tenzig shook his head, chuckling like this was hilarious. The others looked back and forth between us. Maybe waiting to see who would throw the first punch. I could probably deck him without breaking my hand.

  “You really think you can get into flight school just because you want to?” Tenzig said.

  “Not just because I want to. I’m good enough to do it. I’ll pass any entrance exam they throw at me.”

  His expression sank into pity. “You need more than that. You need connections. Why do you think I’m here? When they only have a few spots, and lots of people who can pass the tests, who do you think they’re going to pick?”

  “They’ll pick the best people they can.”

  “You just don’t get it, do you? If they have to pick between you and me, who are they going to pick?”

  I curled my lip. “I’ll arm wrestle you for it.”

  “My grandfather pioneered the Moon Belt shipping routes. My parents are responsible for carrying most of the ore mined in the Belt to the manufacturing platforms. If my mother called admissions at the school, what are they going to tell her?”

  “Hello?” I said. Someone stifled a laugh, I didn’t catch who.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you don’t have any pull with these people.”

  On paper, I was just as good as him. No, better. “My mother is director of operations of Mars Colony One. My grandfather was one of the charter colonists,” I said, my voice sticking on the words, because I felt like I was using them as a weapon. Or maybe a crutch. I wanted to do this on my own, not depend on my family for getting me through this. On Mars, no one cared who my mother was, I had to pull my own weight.

  “You think that means anything to anyone here?”

  “Martian greenhouses feed your Belt miners,” I said lamely.

  “Flight school admissions don’t care about that, only what you can do for Earth.”

  We could throw out counterpunches over and over, and it wouldn’t do any good. Did I expect him to suddenly say, “Oh, yes, you’re right, how could I have been so ignorant”? No, he wasn’t going to do that. But I kept arguing anyway. Charles would have walked away by now.

  “I think—” I had been about to call him a couple of names but realized I probably couldn’t even insult him right. I’d use some weird Martian insult, like Dusthead or You’re full of sewage, and he’d just laugh at me. I tried again. “I think we’ll find out which of us is right, in the end.”

  Then I walked away.

  * * *

  Six weeks in. My skin itched. I was tired of second-guessing every word that came out of my mouth. The longer I stayed, the thicker and weirder my Martian accent sounded. I had to get out of here. I had to do something. Back on Mars, I’d take out a scooter. I wouldn’t even go very far, just run it around the colony a couple of times. That was all. I wanted to do that here. I had to do it, or I’d go crazy.

  I asked around to find out about those cycles in the garage, what class I would have to take or club I would have to sign up for to learn how to ride one. Nobody knew. Nobody would admit they were there. I even did the responsible thing and went up to Stanton herself one morning at breakfast and asked.

  “Ms. Stanton?” I said, as politely and demurely as I could. “You know those cycles in the garage? What are they for?”

  I had noticed by now that when she was annoyed, she got even more polite. “They belong to the groundskeeping staff, for inspecting the perimeter of the grounds.”

  “So there’s no way I could take a lesson on one, or check one out?”

  Her smile grew even more stiff. “Of course not.”

  “There’s no class I could take, or request for PE—”

  “Not at all,” she enunciated, and I took the hint.

  That didn’t mean I thought she was right.

  Doing some research online during study hour, I found the manuals for the motorcycles. When the library-monitor program that kept tabs on us asked what I wanted them for, I gave some excuse about working on a physics problem, and it authorized my looking at them.

  I had a couple of problems from the start: I’d need a keycard to activate the cycles, and I’d have to dodge the surveillance cameras.

  I wasn’t the best hacker in the universe. If I had to guess who was, I’d say Charles. At least, he’d gotten himself into most of Colony One’s computer systems by the time we’d both started school. He didn’t mess around with anything important. He just wanted to see if he could, “Just in case,” he always said. He and Mom kept up a polite fiction about it—she knew he could do it, and therefore all the department heads and officials at Colony One knew he could do it, but they all pretended that they didn’t know, just as long as Charles left everything the way he found it, which he did, because he knew they knew and were letting him alone.

  But I wasn’t going to ask him for help. Not in a million years. Any hacking I did, I had to use my own know-how and hope it was enough. Which meant not poking too hard. Which meant not trying to do anything crazy like actually shut down the security cameras in the garage. I did, however, find a maintenance program that would temporarily shut off the cameras in that part of the dorm while it tested the electrical system. That would give me about half an hour without anyone tracking me.

  All I had to do then was figure out how to steal a keycard, fake a keycard, or learn how to bypass the security lock on a motorcycle.

  At PE the next day, Angelyn and I spotted each other on weights. I’d bench-press while she made sure I didn’t crush myself with the measely ten kilos I’d loaded, and then I’d do the same for her—thirty-five kilos. I felt like a pity case—she could lift three times as much as I could. But she didn’t seem to mind. I even asked her about it,
why she would want to lift weights with me when she could help someone who was more at her level. She blushed and confessed that she wanted an easy day of it, and spotting for me seemed the way to do it. “But I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t actually want to hang out with you,” she added quickly.

  Hey, at least she was honest. And that gave me a chance to talk to her when it was her turn to lie back and lift.

  “So, do you ride motorbikes?” I hoped that wasn’t too suspicious.

  She wrinkled her nose, easily hefting the weights in a set of repetitions. “Not really. Once on vacation on St. Thomas we rode aqua jets, but it’s not really the same thing. Going that fast seems a little bit scary to me.”

  “Oh, but it’s not, I had a scooter back on Mars, and it’s amazing, the way the whole world just whips on past … anyway. Have you seen the cycles in the garage?”

  “The garage? No, I haven’t been in there since we got here.”

  “Well, they’ve got these electric cycles. Stanton says they’re for the groundskeepers—”

  Her eyes widened. “You didn’t actually talk to Stanton about it, did you?”

  “Well, yeah, I wanted to know, I figured I ought to ask.”

  “You just keep pushing, don’t you?”

  I frowned. “I never know I’m doing it until I’ve already done it.” There were all these rules that no one had bothered to write down, like that you weren’t supposed to ask questions because it made you look weak.