The Best of Joe Haldeman (68 page)

It held the magazine up and pointed to it, with a smaller hand. “I would like to buy this.”

“I—I can’t take white people’s money. Only dirhams or, or trade.”

“Barter,” it said, surprising me. “That is when people exchange things of unequal value, and both think they have gotten the better deal.”

The imam looked like he was trying to swallow a pill. “That’s true enough,” I said. “At best, they both do get better deals, by their own reckoning.”

“Here, then.” It reached into a pocket or a pouch—I couldn’t tell whether it was wearing clothes—and brought out a ball of light.

It held out the light to a point midway between us, and let go. It floated in the air. “The light will stay wherever you put it.”

It shimmered a brilliant blue, with fringes of rainbow colors. “How long will it last?”

“Longer than you.”

It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I touched it with my finger—it felt cool, and tingled—and pushed it a few inches. It stayed where I moved it.

“It’s a deal, sir. Thank you.”

“Shukran,”
it said, and they moved on down the line of tables.

I don’t think it bought anything else. But it might have. I kept looking away from it, back into the light.

The imams and the white scientists all want to take the light away to study it. Eventually, I will loan it out.

For now, though, it is a Christmas gift to my son and daughter. The faithful, and the merely curious, come to look at it, and wonder. But it stays in my house.

In Chrislam, as in old Islam, angels are not humanlike creatures with robes and wings. They are
male ‘ikah,
beings of pure light.

They look wonderful on the top of a tree.

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO “THE MARS GIRL”

When I wrote the first line of this story I had no idea that I was embarking on a six-year project. The story grew into a novel that grew into a trilogy (
Marsbound, Starbound,
and
Earthbound),
which I hope is the best long thing I’ve written.

Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann had asked me to write a story for their anthology
Escape from Earth,
which had an attractive premise. Most sf readers my age (and somewhat older and younger) grew up on the Robert Heinlein “young adult” novels—though that particular classification didn’t exist at the time—like
Rocket Jockey, Farmer in the Sky,
and
Podkayne of Mars.
Gardner wanted long stories, novellas, written in that vein, though with a modern lack of restrictions on subject matter and expression.

Getting paid to reinvent Heinlein was irresistible. For research I revisited Podkayne, I guess with the question in my mind, “How would I write this differently?” I didn’t know it would take till 2012 to completely answer the question.

THE MARS GIRL

1. GOODBYE, COOL WORLD

he space elevator is the only elevator in the world with barf bags. My brother Card pointed that out. He notices things like that; I noticed the bathroom. One bathroom, for forty-some people. Locked in an elevator for two weeks. It’s not as big as it looks in the advertisements.

It wasn’t too bad, actually, once we started going up. Nothing like the old-fashioned way of getting into orbit, strapped to a million pounds of high explosive. We lost weight slowly during the week it took us to get to the Orbit Hilton, where we were weightless. We dropped off a dozen or so rich tourists there (and spent a couple of hours and no money, looking around) and then continued crawling up the Elevator for another week, to where our Mars ship the
John Carter
was parked, waiting.

The newsies called it “Kids in Space,” hand me a barf bag. The Mars colony had like seventy-five people, aged from the early thirties to the late sixties, and they wanted to add some young people. They set up a lottery among scientists and engineers with children age nine and older, and my parents were among the nine couples chosen, so they dragged me (Carmen Dula) and Card along.

Card thought it was wonderful, and I’ll admit I thought it was spec, too, at the time. So Card and I got to spend a year of Saturday mornings training to take the test—-just us; there was no test for parents. Adults make it or they don’t, depending on things like education. Our parents have enough education for any dozen normal people.

These tests were basically to make us seem normal, or at least normal enough not to go detroit locked up in a sardine can with twenty-nine other people for six months.

So here’s the billion-dollar question: Did any of the kids aboard pass the tests just because they actually were normal? Or did all of them also give up a year of Saturdays so they could learn how to hide their homicidal tendencies from the testers?

And the trillion-dollar question is “What was I
thinking
?” We had to stay on Mars a minimum of five years. I would be twenty-one, having pissed away my precious teenage years on a rusty airless rock.

So anyhow. Going aboard the good ship
John Carter
were seven boys and seven girls, along with their eighteen parents and one sort of attractive pilot, Paul Santos, not quite twice my age.

I just turned sixteen but am starting college. Which I’ll attend by virtual reality and email. No wicked fraternity parties, no experimenting with drugs and sex and finding out how much beer you can hold before overflowing. Maybe this whole Mars thing was a ruse my parents made up to keep me off campus. My education was going to be so incomplete!

The living area of the
John Carter
was huge, compared to the Elevator. We had separate areas for study and exercise and meals, and a sleeping floor away from the parents, as long as we behaved. I roomed with my best friends aboard, Elspeth and Kaimei, from Israel and California.

We spent the first couple of hours strapped in, up in the lander on top of the ship. Most of the speed we needed for getting to Mars was “free”— when we left the high orbit at the end of the Space Elevator, we were like a stone thrown from an old-fashioned sling, or a bit of mud flung from a bicycle tire. Two weeks of relatively slow crawling built up into one big boost, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars.

We started out strapped in because there were course corrections, all automatic. The ship studied our progress and then pointed in different directions and made small bursts of thrust, which Paul studied but didn’t correct. Then we unstrapped and floated back to the artificial gravity of the rotating living area.

It would take six months to get to Mars, most of it schoolwork and exercising. I started class at the University of Maryland in the second week.

I was not the most popular girl in my classes—I wasn’t
in
class at all, of course, except as a face in a cube. As we moved away from Earth and the time delay grew longer, it became impossible for me to respond in real time to what was going on. So if I had questions to ask, I had to time it so I was asking them at the beginning of class the next day.

That’s a prescription for making yourself a tiresome know-it-all bitch. I had all day to think about the questions and look stuff up. So I was always thoughtful and relevant and a tiresome know-it-all bitch. Of course it didn’t help at all that I was younger than everybody else and a brave pioneer headed for another planet. The novelty of that wore off real fast.

Card wasn’t having any such problems. But he already knew most of his classmates, some of them since grade school, and was more social anyhow. I’ve always been the youngest in my class, and the brain.

It’s not as if anybody had forced me into the situation. I was bored as hell in grade school and middle school, and when I was given the option of testing out of a grade and skipping ahead, I did it, three times. Not a big problem when you’re eight and ten and twelve. It is a problem when you’re barely sixteen and everybody else is “college age,” at least by the calendar.

I’m also a little behind them socially, or a lot behind. I had male friends but didn’t date much. Still a virgin, technically, and when I’m around older kids feel like I’m wearing a sign proclaiming that fact.

That raised an interesting possibility. I never could see myself still a virgin at twenty-one. I might wind up being the first girl to lose it on Mars—or on any other planet at all. Maybe some day they’d put up a plaque: “In this storage room on such-and-such a date…”

About a month out, we developed a little problem, that we hoped wouldn’t kill everybody more or less slowly. The ship started losing air, slowly but surely. We found out it was leaking out of the lander, but couldn’t find the leak. So we just closed the airlock between the lander and the living quarters.

Paul was not happy about that, having to run things away from his pilot’s console, using a laptop. But it wasn’t like he had to steer around asteroids or anything.

The six months actually went by pretty fast. You might think that being locked up in a space ship would drive people crazy, but in fact it seemed to drive them sane, even the youngest. The idea of “Spaceship Earth” is such an old cliche that Granddad makes a face at it. But being constantly aware that we were isolated, surrounded by space, did seem to make us more considerate of one another. So if Earth is just a bigger ship, why couldn’t they learn to be as virtuous as we are? Maybe they don’t choose their crew carefully enough.

Anyhow, Mars became the brightest star, and then a little circle, and then a planet. We pumped air back into the lander and left our home there in orbit. Some people took pills as they strapped in. I wasn’t that smart.

~ * ~

2. DOWN TO MARS

Someday, maybe before I’m dead, Mars will have its own Space Elevator, but until then people have to get down there the old-fashioned way, in space-shuttle mode. It’s like the difference between taking an elevator from the top floor of a building, or jumping off with an umbrella and a prayer. Fast and terrifying.

We’d lived with the lander as part of our home for weeks, and then as a mysterious kind of threatening presence, airless and waiting. Most of us weren’t eager to go into it.

Before we’d made our second orbit of Mars, Paul opened the inner door, prepared to crack the airlock, and said, “Let’s go.”

We’d been warned, so we were bundled up against the sudden temperature drop when the airlock opened, and were not surprised that our ears popped painfully. But then we had to take our little metal suitcases and float through the airlock to go strap into our assigned seats, and try not to shit while we dropped like a rock to our doom.

From my studies I knew that the lander loses velocity by essentially trading speed for heat—hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at a drastic angle so the ship heats up to cherry red. What the diagrams in the physical science book don’t show is the toothrattling vibration, the bucking and gut-wrenching wobble. If I’m never that scared again in my life I’ll be really happy.

All of the violence stopped abruptly when the lander decided to become a glider, I guess a few hundred miles from the landing strip. I wished we had windows like a regular airplane, but then realized that might be asking for a heart attack. It was scary enough just to squint at Paul’s two-foot-wide screen as the ground rose up to meet us, too steep and fast to believe.

We landed on skis, grating and rumbling along the rocky ground. They’d moved all the big rocks out of our way, but we felt every one of the small ones. Paul had warned us to keep our tongues away from our teeth, which was a good thing. It could be awkward, starting out life on a new planet unable to speak because you’ve bitten off your tongue.