Journey Between Worlds (13 page)

Of course, I'd been preoccupied; lately that awful, nagging fear had been absorbing all the emotion I could get up. Yet having arrived on Mars, why should I be less concerned about missing Ross than about missing Alex?

I slipped on my robe and went back to the sitting room, determined to write to Ross right away. Hardly anyone had written letters on the ship because transmission back to Earth was too expensive. In New Terra, though, the data-link facilities were more powerful, and I could probably afford to send one every week or so. Ross might have written to me already; why, I wondered, hadn't I thought to check as soon as we arrived?

Picking up my handheld computer, I searched for the plug-in to the local Net, wondering whether it was linked to the TV screen or if I'd be stuck with my tiny one throughout our stay. Just then the door to Dad's compartment opened and he called out, “Everything okay, Mel, honey?”

“Yes. I'm worn out, but I'm not sleepy.” He didn't close the door, and after a minute or two I went on, “Dad?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Is ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder' true?”

Dad came over and stood beside me, his hands on my shoulders. “That depends on how much in love you are, I guess. With your mother and me it was always true.”

“Even before you were married?”

“Especially then.”

“Did you miss Mother when you weren't with her? Did you think about her much?”

“All the time!” He smiled, remembering. “Finally I knew I couldn't do justice to my job without giving more attention to it, so I gave up the field bonus, and went back and married her. She wouldn't let me turn down the next site I was offered; she went with me instead. Peru, it was. That was the year before you were born.”

What was wrong with me? I thought. How could I not feel that way? Would I move to Peru to be with Ross? Or suppose he had wanted to homestead on Mars, as Dad once had—but that was impossible to imagine, because Ross
wouldn't.

 

 

The next morning I was awakened by Dad's voice, talking to someone on the phone. I couldn't hear what he was saying; I lay there, not wanting to get out of bed and face the day, until he knocked on my door and called, “Come on, honey. We're invited out to breakfast.”

Immediately I was wide awake. Alex had called much sooner than I'd thought he would! It must be Alex; after all, we didn't know anyone else that well.

But it wasn't. It was the president of the chamber of commerce. It seemed that he and his wife were anxious to show Dad and me around the city, starting right away. While I was puzzling over that, Dad remarked, “Better get out your fanciest dress for tonight, honey. We're going to a dinner party at the governor's.”

I dropped my hairbrush. “The
governor
? Do you know him, Dad?”

“No, but he's very much interested in having my company open a branch here, you know.”

Well, I hadn't known; or at any rate I hadn't stopped to think. The last thing I wanted was to go to a formal dinner and have to talk to all those dignitaries. The dinners Ross's mother had given had been bad enough. I'd dreaded them, but sometimes Mr. and Ms. Franklin had wanted their son to be present when they entertained, and I'd had no choice but to attend as his date. Often there had been important businessmen there, and Ross had been anxious for me to make a good impression; but I'd never been able to open my mouth. The food always tasted like so much sawdust to me on those occasions.

This was hardly the problem I'd expected to be confronted with on my first day in the Colonies. And what was worse, I didn't have a single thing to wear to such an affair; all I'd brought, besides my tired-looking travel suit, were school clothes. Moreover, I'd already observed that Colonial styles weren't a bit like styles at home. Women in the subway and hotel lobby had been wearing either shorts or skirts that weren't much longer; no one had on regular pants. (I had to admit that however impractical a style this might have been in cold climates, it was suitable for the steady seventy-two-degree climate of New Terra's domes.) Dad was no help; he seemed to think I should never have gotten into such a fix.

“Mel, honey, if you needed clothes, why didn't you tell me before we left?” he said impatiently. “I'd have given you money if you'd asked for it. If Portland stores didn't stock Colonial styles, Orlando's would have. Of course, I don't know much about these things—”

He'd known enough to come prepared himself, with shorts and jackets that would have looked like something out of a musical comedy at home, I noticed. I shook my head. “It wasn't the money,” I said. “It just never occurred to me. I knew I wouldn't be dating, and I never thought about being invited out with you. Look, I'll just stay here tonight, Dad. I'd rather, really I would.”

“Nonsense. Certainly you won't; you can't stay in the hotel for the next five months. Besides, there are some social obligations attached to the kind of business I'll be doing, Mel. That's one reason the firm agreed to send you in your mother's place. Put on your travel suit for now, and we'll try to get you a dinner dress this afternoon.”

Mr. and Ms. Ortega from the chamber of commerce met us in the hotel restaurant and treated us to a typical Colonial breakfast: cereal, muffins, tomatoes, and ham. Things like the butter, sugar, and coffee were obviously synthetic, and I could see they'd take some getting used to. The cereal and muffins were passable, though not exactly like those at home, and the tomatoes were fresh. I didn't dare ask what the “ham” was made of.

The oddest thing about New Terra, the thing that hit me right away, was the absence of vehicles. (Cars aren't needed in the domes; people actually get around faster than in a regular city, because the subway's efficient and walking's not much of an effort under the low gravity.) It was nice to see gardens full of familiar, imported flowers where I'd normally expect streets, though I knew they were there as much to help take carbon dioxide out of the air as for aesthetic purposes. But something was missing. In spite of crowds New Terra seemed empty. Nothing I could define clearly—just a certain, well, alienness. Perhaps the trace of antiseptic in the air, or the raw cleanness of the place, as though it had been newly dusted. And it wasn't a free sort of emptiness. On the top level the sky showed through the translucence of the dome, but it didn't look real, somehow; it was unchanging, like a painted cyclorama.

The Hilton, where we started out that day, is near the center of New Terra's largest dome; its front door opens onto the big central plaza called the Etoile, from which all the malls radiate. The main mall is, naturally, the Champs-Elysées, and it's distinguished not only by the hotel of the same name, but by the city hall. None of the buildings looked very big to me, but I found that they're like icebergs; there's more to them below than above. In fact, they're normally entered from below, directly from the subway.

I was rather depressed by the residential districts, although I knew it wouldn't be practical to pressurize acres and acres of space just so everyone could have a real house and yard. Apartments are much more economical—after all, there's the cost not only of land, but of air. And I had to admit that they weren't bad-looking apartments, with their roof gardens and all. Lots of people live in apartments on Earth, by choice. Only they
have
a choice.

“What kind of houses do people on the homesteads have?” I asked Ms. Ortega.

“Homesteads? My dear, you have the wrong impression. There aren't any homesteads like in the old American West. The homesteaders live right here; most of us are homesteaders, or our parents were.”

“But I thought the whole idea of homesteading was to give people free land.”

“It started that way. But undomed land isn't any good. We do retain an option to claim acreage Outside, but it's worthless until somebody discovers a use for it. Basically, homesteaders' rights mean title to an apartment and a share in the farm.”

“You mean the farmers live in town and commute to their fields, the way they do in some of the Asian countries?”

“Well, not exactly,” she explained. “Nobody owns particular pieces of ground in the farm domes. That was tried, but it wasn't practical. Most of the people aren't farmers; agriculture's a specialized, scientific thing, particularly here. So the farm is a cooperative and homesteaders receive financial shares in it. They buy food like anybody else.”

I didn't really understand it at first. How could shares in the farm be given to arriving homesteaders without decreasing the value of the original holders' shares? Later, when I studied how the Colonies are set up, I discovered that the whole thing was underwritten by the government when the life-support system and the initial domes were installed. This business of reserving shares for new homesteaders was all part of the original charter. It's complicated, but the effect is that by the time they retire, a homesteading couple will end up with outright ownership of their farm shares; they can sell them or pass them on to their children, along with their apartment, free and clear. They get the same high salaries as nonresident workers, too. The contract they sign to get free passage from Earth says they both have to hold jobs for at least ten Martian years, except while on maternity or disability leave. It also says they have to have at least two children, and may have as many more as they want tax free, because the whole idea behind subsidized fares is to build up the population.

Of course there's a lot more to New Terra than the residential domes. There's the equipment for extracting oxygen from the ground, for instance. We left the industrial domes, the power and atmosphere plants, and the waterworks for another day, but we did take a quick look at one of the farm domes. I was happy to see all those healthy-looking plants, though I knew their vigor came from chemical feeding, without any help from the Martian soil.

Before going back to the hotel, Dad and I stopped at a store we'd noticed across the mall, but buying a dress proved to be easier said than done. We hadn't known about the thirty-week minimum delay between placing an order and getting it filled. The store was expecting a few open-stock clothes in as soon as
Susie
's cargo was unpacked, but I found that there was a waiting list a mile long on which my name naturally didn't appear. The clerks were more than a little shocked that I could need something already, having just gotten off the ship; as we went out, I overheard some disparaging remarks about “tourists.”

I had only one recourse: to borrow something from Janet. She was staying at the Champs-Elysées; I called her, and went over. We managed to pin up her blue microfiber shift so that it wasn't too awful on me. Janet hadn't gone in for Colonial fashions, either; she would have been the very last person to say, “When on Mars, do as the Martians do.” So I can't say that I looked stylish. But after all, I thought, I wasn't a Colonial, and why should anyone expect me to dress as if I were?

 

 

Dinner that night was as miserable as I'd thought it would be. The one and only bright spot was the note of pride I heard in Dad's voice when he introduced me as, “My daughter, Melinda.” I just hadn't anticipated the extent to which we were going to be welcomed into Colonial society. It wasn't until much later that I began to understand how vital it is to New Terrans to have firms like Dad's invest in Mars, and how proud they are to show off their accomplishments to anyone from the mother planet.

There's a lot less formality surrounding the governor and other officials in the Colonies than there is on Earth; we were not only welcomed, we were the guests of honor. It was a big dinner party: Governor Matsumoto and his wife, Mr. and Ms. Ortega, and at least a dozen others, all of whom went out of their way to be cordial. I sat there in my ill-fitting, pinned-together dress, with my face burning and the air seeming even more stuffy and inadequate than usual, wishing that I would pass out and not revive until I was on my way back to Earth. And the only time I managed to say anything, other than “How do you do,” and “I'm pleased to meet you,” it was wrong.

I was seated between the governor and a distinguished-looking gentleman whose name I hadn't caught, but who told me that he and his wife had been born in Ethiopia. There had been a long discussion about Earth's coming review of the Colonial appropriation, and everybody had agreed that it was absolutely essential that the word get back as to all that was being accomplished on Mars.

“The important thing to be put across is that this isn't just some far-out scientific experiment,” said someone. “What public opinion on Earth usually doesn't recognize is that we
live
here. We're neither laboratory specimens nor a parasitic drain on Earth's economy; we're simply people fighting to be self-sufficient. What we need is the equipment to produce more of what we use—we don't want handouts.”

Dad assured them that he'd help in any way he could. There was a lull, and the man on my right turned to me. “How do you like New Terra so far, Ms. Ashley?” he asked.

Well, I hadn't been paying a great deal of attention; my thoughts had been quite literally millions of miles away. And I knew I couldn't tell him the whole truth. So I answered with the first reasonably optimistic thing that popped into my head. “Oh, it isn't bad at all,” I said, with all the cheerfulness I could muster. “It's so much more civilized than I expected.”

There was a frigid silence. Dad glared at me, and I think he was about to say something, but Governor Matsumoto beat him to it. “We may be a frontier world,” he said dryly, “but even our most biased critics have seldom accused us of being an uncivilized frontier. Times have changed since pioneers lived in rough camps, you know.”