Launch Pad (26 page)

“I’ll not argue that,” I said. “She dispatched three ruffians who attacked us and did so with unseemly ease.”

“Ah!” Kroner said. “We thought that was she. Very good, Diana. Of course, that’s what she’s been trained and bred for, so it’s fitting that she did.”

“Trained for close combat?” I asked. “What sort of war are you expecting?”

“Not that,” Kroner explained. “For you, as for most of the rest of humanity, killing any sentient being—and many lower animals—would be murder. You’d have to steel yourself and be highly motivated to perform the act. For Diana, killing anything that isn’t human—or even humans who are clearly ‘enemy’—is equivalent to hunting. And, like, a good hunting dog, she enjoys it. Isn’t that so, Diana?”

She nodded. “I can’t see anything wrong with killing an enemy. And the fact that I know this is genetics and conditioning doesn’t matter—all attitudes anyone has are a result of genetics and conditioning. If you gentlemen will excuse me, it’s been a long day and I think I’ll go to bed.”

Kroner and I spoke privately for a short while after Diana retired. I suspect Diana listened at the door, as she was awake when I went to bed, but if so I’m glad of it.

“Does this mean I have to worry about Diana’s getting angry at me and breaking my neck?” I asked Kroner, when she had left.

“Not at all,” he said. “If anything, the opposite. She may tend to overprotect you. To kill a human being who is not an enemy would, in any case, be murder, and she is incapable of murder.”

“How does she determine an enemy?”

“I think, at the moment, she’ll take your word for it. She appears to be fixated on you. You may call it love, if you like, but we prefer the scientific term.”

“I appear to be fixated on her,” I said. “Whatever you call it.”

“That’s fine. We approve. As long as you aren’t planning to use her—or make a political issue or anything of that sort—we’re on your side.”

“What is she doing here anyway? Is school out? Vacation?”

Kroner fixed himself another drink. “No,” he said. “This is part of her training. Mixing with humanity to learn more fully what it is she may be fighting for. Two years of this—going and doing more or less where and what she wants—then she’ll be ready for, let’s call it graduate school.”

“More fixating?”

“That’s right. Fixating on man. Those in charge of this project seem a bit afraid of their creation.”

“Historical precedent,” I said. “Or, at least, literary.”

“Yes,” Kroner said. “Take care of Diana. Enjoy her. Love her. She needs more love than the other girls.”

“You mean she fixates more strongly?” I asked.

Kroner smiled. “As of now,” he said, “I’m on vacation. Bye.” He picked up his coat and left.

I went in to sleep with Diana and she held me tight for a long while. I think she would have cried if she had known how. I held her, but it’s hard to comfort someone who cannot cry.

O O O

Back in realtime—away from Earth and Anno Domini—I used my status to find out about the Project. Diana opted to stay with me. We fixated well together. It was difficult, even for me, to open the private record of Project Diana. It was the most recent in a line of such projects dating back to shortly after the Mabden Annihilation. I immersed myself in it and read motive, intent, achievement, method, fear and design in the record crystals.

Earth is afraid of its heroes. Always has been.

Diana is sterile by design. Female by convenience—easier to control without the Y chromosome. Sterile by design. Safer. Can’t breed a super-race behind our backs.

Diana’s cells won’t regenerate. Our long life depends upon regeneration—actually replication—of certain cells. Diana’s—let us call it template—is inaccessible to our techniques. Also by design. Safer thus. Can’t make long-range plans behind our backs. She will also age fast and be old by forty—probably dead by fifty.

I went home that evening and cried myself to sleep. Diana held me, but the crying frightened her and she couldn’t help because I wouldn’t tell her why, and it’s hard to comfort someone unless you know why he’s crying.

I have two years with her before she has to go off to prepare for the war we may never have. She wants to go. They want her for twenty-five years, she says, and she owes them that.

We’re planning what we will do when she returns. There are so many things she wants to do and see in this vast galaxy. I promised to show them all to her.

I hardly cry at all any more, even late at night.

***

Sylvia Ascending

By Sandra McDonald

1.

Last night I slept poorly, lost in dreams of green seawater swirling around my ankles, my white flesh sickly pale; the knobs of my bones stuck out obscenely. The smell of salt was so strong that I woke with my nose wrinkled against my cold pillow. In a long-ago life I was a gray-skinned merwoman who swam with her lovers in dark currents. Red seaweed trailed from our fingers as we darted around sharp rocks. Whales called to us with their mournful, thunderous voices. In this life I’m trapped on a planet without waves or currents, tides or whirlpools. Mars is an ugly desert of rust and dust that wears at my soul. When I tell people my dreams, I’m assured that they’re nothing but fanciful imaginings based on the holomovies played to all Hub 3 children in Nursery, but no one dreams as vividly as I do. Especially now with Decision Day looming like a serrated knife over the soft belly of a defenseless clam. The others have all made their choices while I drown in indecision.

2.

Last night I went with John to a party in Hub 4. On the way we strolled under a dome stained midnight blue, with distant white lights poorly mimicking the constellations. John’s long brown hair was swept back neatly, his nose long and strong, his shoes polished to a mirror-like shine. I was the demure virgin princess in my white dress and crocheted white sweater. When his smooth hand found mine, I felt electrified. A girl is not a girl until a boy touches her and makes her real. As we passed, young trees stirred in the artificial breeze along the promenade; court attendants paying homage to John’s royalty. But his father won’t be deputy commander of the colony forever. Where does a prince of Mars go when the golden throne passes? To earth, to earth. A path denied to those of us without money or political connections.

His hands when we danced were hot on the small of my back. We drank sour wine and in a dark corner he kissed me as if he wanted to swallow me whole. He says that if we marry I can come to earth with him. We will walk barefoot through jungles and swim down icy rivers and do all the things that all the Martian-born long for. The great inland museums are all shrines now, guarded by robots who roll tourists through sealed stacks of books. We will escape our mechanical guide, scale the shelves with picks and ropes, tear open brittle pages with our oily hands and inhale the old words like atoms of oxygen. We will row a boat over Greenwich, where learned men once declared the Prime Meridian, and drop wreaths over the watery graves of rocket launch pads off the diminished coast of Florida.

He looked hurt when I told him he said those things only so I’d agree to make out with him. Men on Mars are all alike. They will say and do anything for the prize. The male animal has changed very little in his leap across the void. They crave what they can’t have, flatter and persuade with sweet lies, claim their brief moment of primal ecstasy and then move on.

On Earth it must be even worse, because there’s so many billions of them, all the fishermen and soldiers and factory workers forced away from the fertile coasts after the rape of Mother Earth, and they are hungry to hold women, to fondle them, to punish them for their own transgressions.

It doesn’t matter if John truly wants to sweep me up and carry me over a threshold; he is not the other half of my soul. He never presses his nose to portholes to study the sky. He cares nothing for the mystery of gravity, which swings stars around each other like partners on the dance floor. If I succumb to marriage it would be to someone like Marquez, who is second in astronomy class only to me. Once we argued so long and passionately about white holes that the pod went home and left us in a yellow pool of light in the otherwise dark classroom. He wants be a brilliant engineer. He dreams of bigger and better hubs across the face of Mars, mega-Hubs of domes and gravity traps. His decision is made.

If I could, I would be the anti-Marquez. I would sweep my arms across the landscape, dredge up ancient incantations from the time when my kind wielded primal power, and turn Mars back to ocean and mountains under the protection of a blue atmosphere. But there is no neat little checkbox and career path for Miracle Worker. Only terraformers can ever bring the oceans back to Mars, and that will be long after I’ve gone to ash and char in the crematorium.

3.

Today Dr. Hardy asked to see me after pod. He is tall and lanky and always looks like he is thinking deep thoughts. He told me that I have the highest intelligence of anyone in my cohort, which I knew but warmed me inside anyway. The human ego inflates so easily under flattery. He believes I should decide on astrophysics for my career track. Perhaps to be a researcher, or even a teacher. I told him that my passion is for literature and nature. If only I could sit in a forest all day long, content with sunshine and strawberries and piles of books. He urged me to consider more viable options. If I don’t choose for myself, I’ll be assigned to support services and demoted down to Hub 2. That’s what happened to Mother when Father died. Or worse, I could be sent to agro services in Hub 1, where workers toil in low gravity until their bodies succumb to age and frailty.

When I left his office my hands were trembling with rage at the unfairness of this age and this planet. Freedom is an illusion when you depend on the bureaucracy for the very air you breathe. We drink clean water only because the corporation pipes it to us. We have shelter from radiation only because the corporation protects us. Those of us in Hubs 3 and 4 have the corporation to thank for the dark matter traps that keep our feet rooted to the decks. I hate the corporation so thoroughly that if I could, I would stab it through its heart with a silver dagger.

4.

Tonight, Evan took me to the Hub 3 gardens. His kisses are too clumsy and he sweats heavily all the time but he has a sweetness that John lacks, like strawberries might taste if they were warmed by the sun. He has chosen Administration. He envisions a long, safe future in a cubicle, manipulating numbers and charts and bureaucracy. I know he will marry some sweet girl like Elizabeth, with her round face and heavy breasts and cheerful nature. They’ll be happy until they aren’t, and then they’ll part bitterly and blame each other to all their friends; alliances will shift, connections break, affections dissolve into the static.

He says I should choose Administration like he has. I told him it would be a slow, painful death by a thousand paper cuts, even though no one uses paper anymore. He kissed me more and said that I am “deliciously unique” but that means nothing. The stars above each spin in their own unique orbits and glow with their own unique fires, but are as common as grains of sand on the dry Martian shores.

Decision Day is two days away.

5.

Today was awful with unexpected news. A girl in Pod 8 killed herself this morning. I knew her only in passing. She had a thin face and unruly brown hair and heavy hips. An unsmiling girl, the kind I see in my bathroom mirror every day. Somehow she evaded the security scanners and triggered an emergency airlock. She took off her clothes before she stepped outside; how brave. Corporation banned the video but I can imagine it clearly. Under the rising sun, she spread her arms wide and embraced the sky. Picture her as a religious figure, a martyr to the loneliness and bleakness of this planet. Stripped away of artifice and hope and a future. No one survives unprotected out there. Mars freezes your skin and poisons your lungs. It is the antithesis of Earth; the dark twin to Earth’s beauty. She is not the first to succumb to the wrongness of this world; she won’t be the last.

Rumor says that she wanted to join the Explorer Corps. She wanted to lift herself from Mars and sail across the void to the Jovian frontier. But her scores were too low to qualify. Scores define us here. They define and limit us, put us into tiny boxes of potential, hammer the lids shut.

If I were brave enough, I would forge a hammer and smash away at the constraints. But I’m such a coward. A frail, uncertain coward with none of the strength or motivation that I always pretend to have when the boys look my way.

Today was full of tears for the poor dead girl. I suppose I cried, too, but with bitterness. If I stripped myself bare and walked out an airlock they would only say that I did it for attention.

6.

Decision Day. I chose Agro Services and Hub 1.

7.

Dr. Hardy has put a stop-hold on my graduation. He says he won’t allow me “such a self-destructive indulgence” and threatened to keep me in pod until I’m a doddering old woman with gray hair. I’m touched by his caring. He doesn’t see Hub 1 as I do: a promised land free of bureaucracy, career woes, and the slow blood poisoning of letting others decide your fate.

The girls in my pod think I’m crazy. The boys think I’m joking, but their gazes seemed unsettled, nervous. John took it upon himself to explain in boring detail that I was wrong, so very wrong, such a misguided girl, you’ll be sorry, Sylvia. With a deep line of anxiety between his eyebrows, Marquez said I’m too idealistic. I don’t feel idealistic. For the first time in years, I feel weighted down (how ironic) and tied to a future that I am forging for myself.

8.

In my quarters, everything sterile and white, silence like a suffocating blanket. I’ve tried listening to music, old lectures, and even the grim news of America at war again. I wish we had war here. Mars is named for the war god, after all. During battle heroes would rise and cowards would fall, and we would face each day with cold uncertainty that would test our resourcefulness. But there is nothing here but boring peace, so I tuned to the recorded sounds of Earth whales in their briny depths. I think whales must be marvelous creatures, enormous yet graceful, not like ugly girls on a Saturday night with no social invitations to accept or decline, no stammering or self-confident boys on her doorstep. How sad a creature I am. Whales swim in pods, but my pod has moved in a direction that no longer includes me.

9.

Mother’s face, mottled pink with anger and disappointment. Her lips thin and tongue sharp as she delivers disapproval. “You think only of yourself, Sylvia” and “How will you take care of me in the future?” I don’t know who told her of my decision or why I answered her call from Hub 2 when I was already feeling sick and weary. She says she will tell Dr. Hardy’s superiors that I was distraught by my classmate’s suicide. That I should not be held accountable for decisions made in the disorienting freefall of grief.

I didn’t point out that my life has already been one long continuous swell of grief punctuated now and then by fleeting pleasures; a glass of sweet almond milk, a fragrant rose newly in bloom, the press of a hot kiss at the hollow of my throat. The slow, building joy of an evening with someone who respects and admires a girl for her brain as well as her body. The sharp burst of pleasure at a difficult physics problem solved, all the perfect mathematics aligning with the universe.

Perhaps I would not be so melancholy if Father had lived. He was not a handsome man but in his thick, doughy face one could see the ancestral line of hardy peasants, farmers and soldiers. I remember his small, approving smiles at my early schoolwork, as juvenile and amateur as it was. The way he would sit at a desk and write the old-fashioned way with swirls and curls of black ink on crisp white paper. The smell of his shirt as I pressed my nose to his chest. Last night I dreamed he was standing on the horizon of ocean while I remained trapped on shore, and he kept calling my name the way my family did when I was young: Sivvy, Sivvy.

Youth is the perfect time if you have the shelter of caring parents. They indulge you in golden stories of fairies and elves, of Hobbits and orcs, of purple dragons in the nighttime sky, music and magic melding together, and only gradually do you realize those are stories of an illusory world. The glow fades and darkness emerge as you are squeezed forward into the mold of adulthood, where men see women as little more than sex machines created for their pleasure. Where corporations deny you the basic civil right to pursue your own dreams and passions. Where you must constantly compete with others on the shifting fields of charm and sexuality, painfully aware that your family name has no influence and your intelligence is derided because of your gender.

We are born in optimism only to learn that we are infinitesimally small cogs in the galactic machinery. To discover that death stalks your loved ones and will cruelly rip them from you, regardless of how much you gnash and wail. To realize that being smart means the others will try to tear you down out of jealousy and spite. To feel your body develop a maddening deep itch that can only be soothed by a boy’s hands and attention. To come to the painful recognition that your worst enemy is the one lurking within, smearing oily dismay and cold doubt over every small accomplishment. To realize that the Milky Way spins around a similar core of destruction, and there is no escape once the black hole starts to suck you in.

10.

An exuberant evening last night with Antoine, who had passes to the new planetarium show and decided to share them with me. Antoine is slimmer and taller than I am. He spent most of his life on Hub 2 until his family won an upgrade in the lottery. He has dark skin and green eyes and smiles often, although never quite laughs.

The planetarium is an old machine, almost a relic, but its popularity endures among those of us who can never go outside and look up into the true nighttime sky. We sat near the center, warm hands entwined, and tipped our chairs back in the velvet darkness. Grand music swelled up exactly as an old composer had written it. Above us, stars faded into life and we ascended from the peak of Olympic Mons into the nighttime sky. Phobos whipped by us on its endless, fruitless loop around the planet. Deimos crossed our path in its more leisurely fashion. Onward we sailed through the asteroid belt with its lonely rocks, and soon Jupiter appeared: the patriarch of the solar system, wearing a uniform of red storms and brown eddies, war ribbons and ceremonial loops. The pressure of Jupiter would crush us within seconds if we tried to descend to its mysterious core, but Io is a fiery moon of volcanoes and lovely Europa hides an ocean under her cloak of ice. Past the satellites we flew, toward Saturn and her spinning ice rings, onward toward Uranus and Neptune and the Kuiper belt, through the heliopause, into the great mysterious Oort Cloud. I was overcome with dizziness not from the shifting visage but from realizing how thunderously wrong I’ve been, how thick-headed and strange. I felt my body hurling across the galaxy as a spot of light among a billion other illuminations of thought and space and time and knew, suddenly, what I had to tell Dr. Hardy.