Martians Abroad

by Carrie Vaughn

  Okay, maybe this was a little bit fun.

  I felt awkward, but he didn’t seem to mind. Just smiled wider, steadying me with his hand on my hip. I grasped his opposite hand and used it to brace myself. Probably didn’t look like much, not like the elegant couples who must have been doing this their whole lives. But that didn’t seem to matter.

  Maybe I’d get used to all this after all. Earth gravity, the way the skirt hung off my hips and kicked around my knees, the way everyone around here seemed to care so much about not just what you did but how you did it. Courtship rituals. It was a game and I just had to learn to play by the rules, like Charles said. That was all.

  Tenzig yelped, a screech of shock. At least, it sounded like shock, and pain. He sure faked it pretty well, because I couldn’t tell what had gone wrong. At the same time, he pushed himself away from me and glared.

  “Ow! That’s my feet you’re stepping on! You’re so … so clumsy! You can’t even function in full gravity, can you?” With a final glare, he stalked off to the punch table, where a group of his friends clustered. His Earth friends.

  Leaving me there in the middle of the floor with a wide circle of people surrounding me, staring at me. Somebody giggled. I didn’t see who. The music never stopped.

  “I … I didn’t—” My voice choked, my eyes stung. Had I stepped on him without noticing? I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t put it past me. But I hadn’t. I knew I hadn’t.

  “I didn’t step on him,” I said softly, for all the good it did.

  Heads together, murmuring at each other, people turned back to the drinks, the food, the music. But they continued stealing glances at me over their shoulders. I could only imagine what they were saying about me. Bowing my head, I picked at the fabric of my skirt and walked out. Straight past Stanton this time. I didn’t care if she was standing guard. I didn’t care about anything. She let me go, following me with her granite gaze.

  17

  It had all been a setup. He hadn’t wanted to dance with me. The whole time, he wanted to stomp me into the floor in front of the whole school. Well, he succeeded. I should have danced with Ethan from the start.

  The air felt cold through the thin fabric of my dress, and my skin broke out in goose bumps. I suddenly wished for an environment suit, so I could hide better. I hugged myself, shivering, and my teeth started to chatter. I let them chatter because it kept me from crying, and how stupid was it, crying over something like this?

  I was determined not to run. Step by step, I walked back to the residence hall, my feet pounding on the concrete sidewalk in the awkward sandals that Angelyn made me wear. What idiot came up with the idea of walking on tiny little heels in high gravity? Finally, I reached the dorm building and keyed myself into the room. All I wanted to do was curl up in bed and stay there. Forever. I didn’t even care about changing clothes first. I didn’t care about messing up the nice dress. This stupid dress that I’d spent so much time worrying about. That I’d gone and asked my mother for. That I’d actually cared about.

  Reaching my bed at last, I sat down with a huff and slumped, too tired and numb to do anything. If I sat here long enough, maybe I’d melt and never have to talk to anyone again. A folded sheet of paper lay under the pillow. The white corner of it stood out against the gray blanket. I picked it up, unfolded it.

  A letter from Charles, handwritten in neat block letters on the back of his invitation to the banquet. How did he do that?

  IT’S JUST A GAME. YOU WIN ROUNDS, YOU LOSE THEM. THE TRICK IS NOT LETTING ON WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE LOST. MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ROUND.

  It could have meant anything, and for all I knew it was part of the same comedy routine that the whole evening had turned into. He was playing a joke on me, and just because I couldn’t see it didn’t mean he wasn’t laughing.

  I looked down at myself, at the dress I’d thought was so beautiful, the sparkly shoes, the slinky fabric and curves. Now it looked like a costume, something I didn’t have any business wearing. Everyone in that room had probably thought so, too. Had they all been looking at me and laughing?

  I unfastened and peeled off the dress, then went into the shower, spending a long time under the spray, turning it up as hot as it would go before shutting it off. That was one thing Earth had going for it that I’d gotten used to quick: long, hot showers. A truly excessive waste of water, but I could see why people liked it: it made my muscles melt. I felt better. When I got back to the bedroom, the place was still empty. Everyone else was still at the party, dancing. Having more fun than I was. I went to bed, curling up and covering my head with the blanket.

  The others came back maybe an hour later. I heard giggling down the corridor, then the door opened.

  “She’s in bed,” Marie whispered. I froze, my breathing shallow, refusing to move or make a sound, to give anything away.

  “Polly?” Ladhi said, her voice hushed. “Are you okay? Are you awake?”

  I didn’t say anything, listening to them come in, talking as they tried to keep their voices to whispers. They talked about the food, drinks, music, how nice everything was. Who danced with whom and who looked like they were serious. Through it all, I pretended to sleep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  * * *

  I must have fallen asleep very, very late, after the lights switched off and Ladhi and Marie stopped giggling and carrying on. But that just meant I had to wake up when the lights came on. Just because we partied the night before didn’t mean we weren’t expected to keep to the schedule today, which meant getting up, eating breakfast, and going to PE and study hall. I don’t know how Stanton and the rest of the tyrants expected us to get anything done today.

  Not that I wanted to get up at all. But I couldn’t stay under the covers all day. My bladder wouldn’t let me.

  I made sure to get up before everyone else, hurrying to dress and finish in the bathroom. Maybe I could get to breakfast before anyone else was awake to stare at me. Maybe I could just … lock myself in a closet for the rest of the year.

  No such luck, of course. When I got to the dining hall, people were already there, a handful of brave—awake—souls. I froze at the door, looking at them all.

  Charles was there. He looked up from his food, met my gaze, then looked down again. Which meant he wanted to talk.

  I couldn’t tell if everyone else was stealing glances at me, too. I should be used to it by now.

  Taking a deep breath, I walked up to the window to get a tray of food, then made my way to Charles’s table to sit across from him. I stared at him; he kept eating.

  “Well?” I said finally.

  “I was going to ask you that.”

  I stirred roasted potatoes with my fork. “I didn’t step on his feet.”

  “I know you didn’t,” I said. “I saw the whole thing.”

  “You did?” A witness. Vindication. I thought about it for a minute. “Why were you watching me?”

  He glanced at me sidelong, but otherwise his expression didn’t change. “Just looking out for you.” He said it deadpan, like it didn’t mean anything.

  We ate for a time, Charles hardly looking up and me continuing to study him for a hint of what he was thinking. I still couldn’t tell.

  “So why’d he do it?” I said. “Why’d he lie?”

  “To embarrass you. Draw attention to you. Bad attention, to take away from what you did at Yosemite. Win some kind of coup. Status point.”

  I thought about Charles’s note, about this being a game. “Did you know he was going to do that? Is that why you left the note?”

  He sat back and shrugged. “I had a feeling he was going to try something with one of us. He probably decided he wouldn’t get enough of a reaction out of me, so he went after you.”

  In the clear light of morning, I’d started to wish I’d had even more of a reaction. I wished I’d had my punch glass in hand, so I could have poured it all over him. Or I could have just, you know, punched him. “So he just wanted to make me look
bad and him look … what? Clever? Is it just because we’re from Mars?” I sighed and squished my food with the fork. If Tenzig showed up anytime soon, I might just throw the whole tray at him.

  “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” Charles said.

  I wanted to strangle Tenzig. Grab his head and dunk it in the punch bowl until he drowned. Drop him off the top of the building. Then I remembered … don’t let on when you think you’ve lost. Move on.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

  The corner of Charles’s lips flickered up in the briefest of smiles.

  “So. Do you think we should tell Mom that Angelyn’s dad was asking about her?” I asked.

  “I’m sure she’s already aware of the Chous’ interest.”

  “Really?”

  “He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t already know about her and her agenda. He was trying to find out something personal. Some kind of weakness. It’s like you said, he was fishing, he may not even have known for what.”

  Ladhi came in, then Angelyn, and they both gave me worried, sidelong glances as they picked up their trays and came to sit by me, tentatively, like I might bite their heads off. And I might have, but like Charles said, I had to let it go.

  “Are you okay?” Ladhi asked, wincing as if afraid of the answer.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and it was true. “Angry, but fine.”

  “Competition is one thing,” Angelyn said, biting. She sounded just as angry as me, which was comforting. “But people ought to be able to look good without tearing other people down. That defeats the whole purpose.”

  A hush passed over the room, and I knew what it was about without even looking up. Tenzig had arrived. People were watching him, and me, waiting to see what we would do, if Tenzig would rub it in by continuing the name-calling, or by gloating some other way, and if I would try to get back at him.

  What I did was turn to Angelyn and grin, saying, “I saw you dancing with Harald.”

  Angelyn blushed, and Ladhi jumped in, figuring out exactly what I was trying to do, telling her how sexy they looked, and pretty soon we were giggling and carrying on enough to make Charles roll his eyes at us. But we didn’t pay any attention to Tenzig.

  I heard Tenzig laugh even harder on the other side of the room, as if even that was part of the competition. I didn’t care. And I felt better.

  Right up until Ethan came into the dining hall. I hadn’t even said good night to him last night, and he was one of my real friends in this place. I apparently had forgotten that. I caught his eye and waved to him to make sure he came to our table. We always sat together, of course. I just worried that he might have thought things had changed. I didn’t want them to change, not like that.

  “Hi,” he said, slipping into place as the others scooted to make room.

  “Hi,” I said back. Still blushing.

  “So,” he said, picking at his food. I think he might even have been blushing, too, but his dark skin hid it better. “You have a good time last night?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve seen better parties.”

  “Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “Me, too.”

  I kind of wanted to drag him off to speak privately, but I didn’t want to wait. I might forget what I wanted to say, or I might change my mind about saying it. And if these really were my friends, it didn’t matter.

  I set down my fork. “Ethan, when you asked me to dance, I should have said yes. I’m sorry.”

  He hesitated, like he had to think about it a minute before he smiled. But he did smile. “I’m sure you were just confused about these strange customs that you Martians aren’t used to.”

  Sighing dramatically, I nodded. “Earth people just make everything so hard.”

  “It’s tradition,” Angelyn said defensively, but with a wry smile to make it okay. “It’s tradition to make things complicated.”

  I said, “Someday, you’re all going to come to Mars. I’ll show you around. We’ll go camping. With breathing masks, the way you’re supposed to.” And we all laughed. Except Charles, who seemed to be studying us like we were some kind of anthropology project.

  Maybe, just maybe, everything would be all right.

  On our way to class, I ran into Tenzig. Or he ran into me, on purpose. Not that it mattered. He had some quip or insult all ready to deliver. Maybe he would offer to give me dancing lessons. He kept talking about how he wanted to help me out, right?

  “Hey Polly. About last night—”

  Or maybe, could he possibly be trying to apologize?

  “—if you want me to teach you how to dance the right way, I could help you with that. I keep trying to help you and you keep snubbing me—”

  No, no apology there.

  “Tenzig,” I said, “you must really be worried about getting into a piloting program if this is the kind of sewage you have to pull to get noticed.”

  He stopped cold, staring at me in disbelief as I walked on.

  Yeah, by the end of that day I was feeling pretty good.

  18

  As if the first field trip hadn’t been traumatic enough, we had to do it all over again. Personally, I thought Stanton and her crew were crazy. This whole school was crazy. This whole planet. Then I thought they probably knew it and just didn’t care.

  The Earth kids were all very excited about the trip to the Manhattan Cultural Preserve. I got the impression this was going to be different from the town of Monterey.

  Angelyn explained. “It’s a city. Well, it’s an island and a city. An island with a city on it. It used to be the financial and political center of … of everything. The first United Nations headquarters is there. But it’s also got amazing shopping—real shopping, not online. And parks, theaters, restaurants, museums—the whole thing’s a museum, really. No one lives there anymore who isn’t part of the staff. It’s like a living history thing.”

  I had no idea what to expect after that. Mars wasn’t part of the United Nations. I kept wanting to ask how any of this was relevant.

  “I think we should go to one of the Moon colonies,” I said. “So you all can see how the other half lives.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve never been in zero g. I’d hate to go weightless and find out I’m one of those people who get sick from it.”

  “They can give you medication for that.”

  Once again, Stanton and her crew piled us in to a suborbital, and away we went.

  I watched out the window as we approached, and the area below disconcerted me almost as much as the wilderness around Yosemite had. I’d wanted to see what a giant aboveground city looked like—this was it. While I thought I understood the concept, I hadn’t quite understood the size of it. The land below us was solid city as far as I could see. Kilometer after kilometer of buildings made of concrete and steel, glinting glass, endless grids of streets. I’d done the reading. At its height, this island—a narrow corner of land, really—had had a population of over twelve million people. I couldn’t even imagine that. There weren’t that many people in the whole world—at least, not if the world was Mars. I kept wondering how many people could live crammed together like that. Apparently, some cities on Earth had even more people than that right now. And it was considered normal. I shivered thinking of it.

  We landed at a port outside the city and took a maglev to the island, preserved behind flood walls that kept back the waters of the rivers and harbor. The ocean—a different ocean from the one we’d seen on the last trip, because Earth just had that many oceans—was beyond the harbor, but it all still looked like unbelievably vast stretches of water to me. The train traveled a tunnel that went under the river, and that tunnel was the most at home I’d felt since coming to Earth. Underground, sheltered, safe. I wondered why people on Earth would spread upward, building towers hundreds of meters tall, instead of digging underground. Especially considering the gravity situation. I would have thought underground would be easier. Not as far to fall as from those
tall buildings. But apparently they liked that sunshine thing. Wimps.

  Once we arrived inside the cultural preserve, we took a bus, and an instructor—a specialist who lived on the island and spent all his time doing tours like this—lectured about the history, the buildings, and all this stuff that was supposed to be very important.

  We stopped in front of a massive, ornate building with columns, domes, and rows of windows, where we did a lot of walking and looking at things. A lot of walking.

  Mars had museums. We had Spirit and Opportunity, Viking and Curiosity, all resting under their own little domes to protect them from wind and dust, with bronze plaques mounted on them telling when they’d landed and why they were important. I’d been to the prefab habitat that had been chucked straight from Earth, where the original colonists had lived until the first tunnels of Colony One were finished. So it wasn’t like I didn’t know what museums were, or what I was in for this trip.

  Manhattan was different. The island was a location frozen in time on purpose and preserved as a memorial to the way things used to be. Every building we went to was a museum, filled with art or preserved animals or old furniture or a million other things. Clutter, basically.

  I had never really thought of history, because human history on Mars started with those monuments of old robots. I’d never thought about anything that came before because there wasn’t any evidence of it. We didn’t have clutter because no one had brought anything that wasn’t necessary, and we hadn’t been there long enough to accumulate it. Here, that’s all there was—scraps of what had come before, and before that, and before that, on and on forever. The guide kept talking about it all like it was my past, like I should feel some connection to it. But I didn’t. They showed us marble statues and I wanted to yell at them that Mars didn’t even have marble, or limestone, and I had never seen either one before in my life, and they should stop talking at me like I should know how amazing it was.