Rolling Thunder

Chapter 1

Once upon a time there was a Martian named Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond.

Whew! What a mouthful, huh?

That’s me, by the way. Six-foot-two, eyes of blue.

Mom and Dad got all whimsical naming me, with the Podkayne business. It was a time of patriotism; everybody was all hot about Mars for the Martians! and trying to be more Martian than their neighbor. In my high-school graduating class alone there were three John Carters, two Dejah Thorises, a girl named Burroughs, one poor fellow saddled with Edgar Rice, and a Bradbury. The name Podkayne came from a novel from last century that I’ve never read. I’ll get around to it one of these days, but I don’t much care for science fiction.

With a name like that, what are you going to do? Everybody called me Poddy growing up. When I reached my pissed-off teenager years I insisted on Patricia, which everyone shortened to Patty. In no time at all it was Poddy again. If I called them on it, they’d just say they’d said Patty, and I heard it wrong, and don’t blow your bubble, spacegirl.

These days I just go by Podkayne. One word, which will come in handy if I ever make it as a music star:

LT. (JG) PODKAYNE, NMR

.

It looked good on the brass nameplate, sitting there on my desk. NMR: That’s Navy of the Martian Republic. We’re here to protect the solar system.

What I was protecting it from at the moment was one California girl named Glinda. Most of the solar system didn’t really need protection from Glinda, but Mars sure did, and since Mars was my home, I took my job seriously. Well, as seriously as I could. With people like Glinda, it was a challenge.

So, Glinda, I said. Why do you want to emigrate to Mars?

She thought that over for a minute. I could tell, because her brows knit fetchingly, which made a pleasant jangling sound. There was enough metal up there to open a hardware store. Finally, she formulated her response.

Huh? she said.

I figured it was the three-syllable word that was confusing her.

Why do you want to leave Earth and go to Mars?

Oh. Well, I live to board, you know? I’m real good at it. I heard there was gigawaste snow up there on Mars. Some big mountain?

That would be Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, and she was right, the snow was waste. Or wasted, or bitchin’, or groovy, or cool, or the bee’s knees, depending on what era’s slang you were slinging.

So you’re a professional snowboarder?

She nodded enthusiastically.

I live to board. Like I said.

No, I mean … do you make a living at boarding? Another blank look. Are you a boarding instructor? There were hundreds of winter sports pros making a living on Mars; if she was really, really good, she might make it.

I don’t get it.

Making a living, I said. You’ll need a job when you get to Mars.

Comprehension dawned, and she smiled.

Oh, no problem. Mommy and Daddy will pay. Mommy and Daddy? She looked to be about thirty-five.

I see. Well, Glinda, what you need to do, then, is buy a ticket to Mars. When you get there, apply for a three-month visa. It’s renewable for another three months. Then you can come home to Earth.

More jangling of eyebrow hardware.

But I don’t want to come home. I want to go to Mars to stay.

Well, that’s your decision, of course, but if you just want to snowboard when you get there, it’s the easiest thing in the world just to buy a ticket, make a reservation at a hotel—there are hundreds of good ones, some right on the slopes, I have a few brochures I can give you—and then if you decide you want to stay, you can make an application for citizenship at the immigration office there. And save me the paperwork, I didn’t add.

No, I want to go to Mars. I want to be a Martian.

Honey, if you stay there a thousand years, you’ll never be a Martian. Hell, my father has lived there for over thirty years, and I barely consider him a Martian. If you get a residency permit and eventually are allowed to swear allegiance to the Republic and then have a child, she will be a Martian, but you never will be. Bottom line, you have to be born there. Otherwise, you’ll always be an Earthie or an immigrant.

But I didn’t tell her any of that.

Okay, I said, and opened a drawer in my desk. I pulled out one of the 230-page citizenship application forms and pushed it across the desk at her. Fill this in, I said.

What’s this? she said, suspiciously.

You don’t have to do the whole thing right now. The essay questions can wait.

She didn’t touch the paper.

I can’t read this, she said, somehow managing to entirely dismiss the idea of literacy in a few words, as though I should be ashamed for even asking. Give me the verbal version. I prefer that.

Then I’m sorry, Glinda, but there’s no point in going any further.

What are you talking about?

Mars only accepts literates for immigration.

That’s elitist!

Whatever. I had lost what patience I had ever had with this girl.

No way, ‘whatever.’ I know my rights.

Everybody on Earth knew their rights. People in Western America knew them better than most, even though they didn’t actually have as many as they thought they did.

I’m sorry, I said. Not!

I never heard such bullshit. It’s in the … laws, and stuff. ‘Nobody can’t discriminate on the basis of illiteracy.’

A double negative. It’s your constitution, not mine. This is the Martian Consulate, and we have extraterritorial status. Legally, this is Martian territory.

I’m not leaving here until you start treating me with respect, and by God you’re going to be facing such a lawsuit …

"Actually, you are leaving," I said, and stood up. For the first time, she looked a little less than totally self-assured. She was not a tiny woman, not by Earthie standards. Say five-six, five-seven. But women my height are rare on Earth. Standing, I towered over her. It can be intimidating. I hoped she didn’t know that, pound for pound, she was twice as strong as I was simply from years of snowboarding and from carrying her own mass around in the depressing gravity of Earth all her life.

She left in a huff. Maybe two huffs.

I’d been on Earth for six of their months, still had six months to go on this assignment, and I was dying from the terrible gravity, from the incredible crowds, from twits like Glinda, and from a bad case of homesickness. I was beginning to think it might be terminal. I wanted to go home.

Waaaaah! Mommy, I wanna go home!

Well, brace up, spacegirl. You have a job to do. It may be a stupid job and you sure didn’t ask for it, but there it is. You’re a Martian. Start acting like one.

I checked the clock and saw it was 3:13

P.M

. Official closing time of the office was 5:00

P.M

. Close enough. There was a sign on the outer door that I’d had made shortly after I arrived at my job in Western America. It said:

MARTIAN CONSULATE OF CENTRAL CALIFORNIA THE CONSUL IS IN

I flipped the card from

IN

to

OUT

and locked the door. Consul was one of my many titles at the Consulate. I was also the Chief Recruitment Officer, the Artistic Liaison, the Cultural Ambassador, the Director of Public Relations, and the resident spy. (Sssh! Don’t tell anyone!) I adopted these titles when and where it suited me. In addition, I was the secretary, the interior decorator, the hostess, the cook, driver, chief pilot, laundress, dishwasher, and janitor. If the Consulate needed a mime or a clown, I could be those, too. I took the back door from my storefront office and the elevator to the Consular Residence, which was three rooms on the fifteenth and top floor of the Baker Building, Pomeroy Avenue, Pismo Beach, California, Western America.

I stripped off my fatigues—the hideous rust-and-pink baggy shirt and pants I was required to wear when on duty and best not described in too much detail lest one lose one’s lunch—and applied SPF 45 sunscreen from my hairline to my toenails. Then I put on the little scraps of cellophane and dental floss Earthies require you to wear for modesty’s sake, and an oversized aloha shirt that screamed with bright-colored racing cars and surfboards.

I hit Pomeroy Street and it hit me right back, with a blast of air in the high nineties. There wasn’t as much of Pomeroy left to hit as there had been fifty years ago. Surf now crashed about four blocks inland of where it had at the turn of the century. This was due to what the Heartlanders called the temporary global climate fluctuation.

The old wooden pier was sheltered by a fairly new breakwater, made from demolished buildings. There were only a few watercraft tied up in the slips. My ride, Rosinante, was not quite a boat and not quite a Jet Ski. She was a sort of trimaran, broad and stable. She had won my heart as soon as I saw her nested in morning-glory vines in an Arroyo Grande backyard. I boarded and kicked the old engine into life.

The sky was vast, the ocean was vast, the horizon was far, far away, much farther than it could ever be on Mars. It felt like, on a really clear day, you could see Japan. The sea was calm, long, slow rollers about three feet high, and Rosinante ate them up with hardly a bounce, which was why I preferred her over a conventional ski.

The sunshine was glorious! Of course, it could burn you raw, but I was covered with enough sunscreen to deflect a blowtorch, and if you spent your time thinking of what a hostile environment the Earth was becoming, you wouldn’t go out at all. When I got back to Mars I’d have the only souvenir of Earth that ever impressed any Martian: a tan you just couldn’t get under UV lamps.

I called up my karaoke program and flicked through the thousands of accompaniments stored there, then clicked on Born to Be Wild, written by somebody with the delightful name of Mars Bonfire, first recorded by Steppenwolf. I fed it to Rosinante’s music system, and soon the sounds of heavy metal thunder were blasting out of the speakers, lead vocal by yours truly.

I followed it with Give Me Another Reason, a Tracy Chapman hit from the thirties, then switched to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Poor Wand’ring One, from The Pirates of Penzance.

Taking a deep breath, I launched into Musetta’s aria, Quando me ’n vo soletta per la via, from La Bohème. It was a stretch for me. I have an extra octave available to me on top of my normal contralto, like Julie Andrews had; I can be a mezzosoprano if I work at it, but I don’t usually try it in public. Here, nobody but the great white sharks would be offended.

To cool down I swung into "L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser," the famous habanera from Carmen. I was grinning broadly. From John Kay to Tracy, to Mabel, to Musetta, to Carmen. Quite a musical evolution for one morning.

I dropped a sea anchor and did a quick visual inspection of my hide, looking for patches of lobster red. I suppose a blonde really has no business exposing her pearly white skin to the lethal rays of Sol from a distance of only ninety million miles or so, but the sunshine was the only thing about Earth I liked. So I risked radiation burns, but carefully. I took off my big hat, and the shirt, and the bikini, and stretched out on Rosinante’s postage-stamp deck.

Two minutes later, my phone rang.

I said, Accept call.

A man in Navy uniform appeared floating above the sea. The ident line below his face named him Captain J. K. Carruthers, CID, WAM, MD. That meant Commander, Immigration Division, West America Region, Martian Delegation.

Lieutenant Strickland, how are you?

Fine, sir. Until you called.

Ah … it seems your grandmother is ill.

Grandma Kelly? I asked. I only had one living grandmother, but I had to say something, or I felt I’d stop breathing.

Pardon me? He was frowning. Oh, I see now. This says Garcia—

Granddaddy? What’s happened to Granddaddy?

If you’ll let me finish. Apparently it’s your great-grandmother.

Gran? I squeaked.

Here, I’ll forward the message to you.

Dad’s face replaced the captain’s.

Honey, I might as well get right to the bad news. Granny Betty is very ill. It seems to be some new variant of the autoimmune disorders, and the doctors say they can’t do anything about it.

He paused, then tossed his hair back in a gesture that was very familiar to me. He looked exactly like what he was: Ray Strickland-Garcia, Ph.D., an academic, a history professor at the university, probably the foremost authority on the colonization of space. Disheveled, a bit absentminded, usually up to his eyeballs in downloads of forgotten files playing on his old-fashioned external stereo.

They can’t tell us exactly how long she might live, but it’s a matter of weeks. A month at the most. She has elected to go into time suspension. She wants to see the whole family before she does this, and since you are the only one so distant right now, she insists she’ll take the chance and wait until you can get here. Your grandmother has secured you a thirty-day compassionate leave, so I hope you’ll lose no time.

"Of course I’ll hurry, Dad," I said, uselessly. Even if he was still on the line, it would be quite a while before my words could have reached him on Mars. I found myself trying to twist the Rosinante’s, accelerator even more, but she was already going flat out.

Your mother sends her love. I … I love you, too. Hurry home.

I was already consulting the train schedules while I pulled Rosinante into her slip at the dock and hit the ground running. I ran as fast as the relentless gravity would allow, up Pomeroy toward my apartment. With the heat of the day waning, there were a few people here and there on the street, and I got a few stares. Actually, more than a few. It wasn’t until I was getting into the elevator that I realized I had forgotten to put my bathing suit back on.

Earthies, you are so weird. I hope you enjoyed the show.

Chapter 2

When I boarded the maglev for Los Angeles a few minutes later, everyone on the train turned to stare at me. Not all at once, but as I moved down the car I created a wave of turning eyeballs. This time it wasn’t because of showing too much skin, nor was it my stunning beauty, nor my height. (I lied about the six-foot-two business; I’m six-four. As for the beauty, I’m not Miss Red Planet, but the face doesn’t stop clocks and the body is within acceptable parameters.) No, this time it was the uniform.

Mars is the Red Planet, right? So our flag, our spaceships, and pretty much everything else associated with government just has to be red. If you want my opinion, I’d tell you that the human eye can distinguish millions of shades, and there’s no crime in using one of them that doesn’t fall into the short end of the spectrum now and then.

That’s not the problem. I can wear red, I look good in red, with my blond hair and fair complexion. The little red beret in particular is quite fetching on me. But whatever you call it, the uniform is bright and loud. Those are two things I prefer not to be when I go out in public on Earth.

See, a lot of Earthies don’t like us very much.

So there I was in full-dress ceremonial uniform, two inches taller in my shiny black boots, a great leggy cardinal if you’re being charitable, a grotesque gawky flamingo if you’re not, moving down a row of people whose glances varied from freak-show interest to glaring dislike. Orders were that we were to show the flag when traveling. I wish whoever had written that policy was on the train with me as I tried to make myself small. Showing the flag is one thing. Wearing it is beyond the call of duty.

I found an empty seat and tried to lift the small bag I’d packed into the overhead rack. It didn’t contain much, just stuff I’d tossed in that I couldn’t do without and a couple changes of clothes. Even so, the Earth gravity defeated me on the first try. A guy in the seat in front of me jumped up to help. I had a good seven inches on him, but he tossed the bag into the rack easily, then wanted to sit beside me. I cooled him off politely. As soon as I was settled, two college guys from Cal Poly tried hitting on me, and I frosted them with a gaze I’d been working on in the mirror. It also didn’t hurt when I shifted a bit to bring my sidearm more prominently into view. That was also policy: Never appear in uniform without your weapon. Nothing like a loaded Glock in a leather holster to put a little respect into overeager frat boys.

It was the express train, so we stopped only in Santa Barbara and Ventura and some dreadful place in the San Fernando Valley before pulling into the downtown transit center in the City of Angels.

The Transit Center is vast, and underground. I had no trouble finding the right platform, having lived most of my life without exterior reference points, but by the time I made it there I was wishing I’d swallowed my pride and taken the handicapped tram. My boots were pinching my toes, and the gravity threatened to collapse my arches.

Soon I was on the nonstop maglev to the Area 51 spaceport, and for the first time I saw some other red uniforms. I felt like a dying woman staggering out of the desert to an oasis as I joined them, two girls and a guy, all jaygees like me. When they found out I was going Up and Out … going home! … they tried their best to conceal their envy—after all, it was compassionate leave, someone in my family was in trouble—but couldn’t quite do it. We traded horror stories about Earthies until the train pulled in at the port. Then we went our separate ways, and I never saw any of them again.

I found my way to the departure gate for the connector bus to the Martian Navy base ten miles away from the port. I was the only one waiting at the boarding gate, and when the bus came, I was the only one to board. Five minutes later I was zipping through the Nevada desert, stretched out across two hard seats. I watched a landscape roll past that most Earthies would probably call barren, desolate. Hell, I could see hundreds of yucca trees, sagebrush, a dozen kinds of cactus, even some tiny little flowers hugging the ground. A jackrabbit darted for cover as the bus cruised by. Barren? The place was a tropical rain forest, teeming with life, compared to my home planet.

Marsport 6 was just a big flat place in the desert, with half a dozen prefab metal buildings lined up along the edge. Functional, unadorned, Navy red. A Martian flag hung listlessly in the still air. Nothing moved. Nobody with any sense would be outdoors with the rattlesnakes and the tarantulas and the blistering heat. Most work around here was done at night, when the temperature sometimes dropped as low as ninety.

As the bus pulled up to the headquarters building I counted three bucket ships sitting in the distance, also painted Navy red, but not recently. They were pink and patchy, like they had a skin disease.

The bus stopped and I got out, ready to hurry into the main building, but I was stopped by a loud roar. I looked behind me and saw one of the buckets rising on a pillar of white smoke. I’d missed the last bucket of the day by five minutes.

Why do they call them bucket ships? They looked sort of like buckets. Just squat cylinders, wider than they were tall, with two rows of windows in a circle showing where the two decks were. A dome on top for the pilot to sit in, a metal cat’s cradle underneath to hold the bubble drive. Three landing legs, nonretractable.

With the ship dwindling at the end of a long vapor trail, the only sound now was the thrumming of the big air-conditioning units sitting by the prefabs. I realized I was dripping sweat, standing out in the desert with no sunscreen and a fractured ozone layer high above me. I hurried into the main building.

The staff confirmed that there would be no more departures until 0800 hours tomorrow, when I had a chance of making the 1200 sailing of the MNS Rodger Young.

I asked if there were any rooms in the Motel 6 and they said take your pick, so I trudged down a hallway to the first open door, room 101. I didn’t even have the strength to toss my bag on the dresser. I let it drop to the floor and collapsed on the bed. I just wanted to sleep for a few hours, but I knew there was something I had to do first.

I had three messages from Mars in my call-waiting queue. None of them were flagged red, which may sound odd given the emergency nature of my trip, but why should they be red-flagged? You don’t have a conversation with people on Mars, you have a correspondence. Right then, as I was lying there, my home was 190 million miles … thataway. Ahead of the Earth, which was catching up. That meant that any phone call I made wouldn’t arrive at home for seventeen minutes, and there could be no reply for another seventeen. Still, I felt a little guilty at not even having looked at the messages. So I clicked the first one. It was from Mom. She started right in.

We hated to just drop this whole mess on you so suddenly, Poddy, but there really is no time to lose. Gran is very sick. The doctors think she can hold out until you get here, but it might be a close thing. So … I know there’s no way to hurry a ship, I know you’ll do all you can do to get here in time …

She stopped, and took a deep breath.

"That’s what the family has decided, anyway. Mostly Kelly, of course. This is for your ears only, from your mother who loves you, from me to you.

"If you don’t want to come … don’t come. When you think about it, what’s the difference? She’s not going to die, not now, anyway, and I suggested that they stop her and then, next time you’re here, they can take her out for ten minutes or an hour or whatever she wants, and you can say what you need to say then.

Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, this has been a surprise to me, too, and some angry things have been said. But I wanted you to know that if you’d rather not be dashing about for no good reason, I’ll support you all the way. That’s all I have to say. Good-bye, Poddy sweet. I love you.

Well. I found it tough to sort all that out at once.

For one thing, Mom visits an entirely different Earth than I do. I’m Mars-born. I’m tall and slender, and a simple walk in the park makes my feet hurt and my back ache. Mom still loves the Earth. She was born here, and she and Dad make a pilgrimage back every year, at first going to Florida to try and help out; later, when things deteriorated too much in the Zone, they went to California or Mexico or Rio or anyplace with a beach. They love the wind and the blue sky and the forests and … just about anything about the Earth except the people, who almost no one on Mars can abide. She keeps herself in shape, so after the first few days, she doesn’t even mind the gravity.

So she thought she was doing me a favor by giving me an out, a reason not to abandon my long summer vacation on the world of melting ice caps.

Oh, Mom, I love you, but sometimes you haven’t got a clue.

Then there were the family discussions, and the angry words. That would be Kelly, of course. Kelly Don’t call me Grandma! Strickland. You may have heard of her. First president of Mars? Ring any bells?

I love Kelly, too … in my own way. I don’t think anyone loves Kelly in quite the way they love anyone else, except Grandpa Manny.

Being the granddaughter of a former president of Mars is not quite the deal it would be if my grandma was, say, expresident of Western America. We’re small potatoes, nation-wise, except for the power thing and the Navy thing. There’s not even a million of us; big-city mayors down here on Earth have more responsibility, in some ways. Of course, they don’t have the means to cut off the power to Earth’s billions …

Grandma Kelly tends to take over any situation she finds herself in, and that can include her daughter-in-law’s life. They’d locked horns more than a few times.

But Mom is no wimp, and Dad backs her up one hundred percent, and if it comes to it, Grandpa Manny will have a word with Kelly, and that’ll be the end of that. So I appreciated the gesture on Mom’s part, but frankly, I’d have gladly abandoned my post at Pismo on a much flimsier excuse. It’s not as if the ravening barbarian hordes of the Zone or the Christian Armies of the Heartland were just looking for the opportunity of Podkayne being away from her desk to establish a beachhead in the holy war against Redboy Hegemony.

I recorded a telegraphic message-received thing: Doing everything possible, expect departure oh eight hundred hours, rendezvous Rodger Young, ETA Deimos Base such-and-such a date, over and out. PS, I love you. Not much, I know, but a lot better than my last message: Earth price$ are ridiculou$! $end money!

Next message. A tough one.

She began the way she always does.

I hate talking this way. I don’t know why they don’t do something about this time lag thing. Gran wasn’t stupid, she knew there was nothing to be done to speed up radio signals, but she would never be comfortable with the time lag, even if she were around for another ninety years … which she might very well be, as I had to keep telling myself.

She still didn’t look her ninety-three years. There were good effects of her almost twenty years on Mars, some of which slow the aging process. Some put you at risk for problems the human body wasn’t evolved to encounter. Wrinkles form a lot slower, but you may need to have your arteries nanorooted every two years instead of every five.

Gran didn’t look ancient. She looked sort of translucent, like her skin was wax and there was a candle inside her that was slowly melting her away. Her hair was thin. If I’d had to guess her age, I’d have said a young seventy.

"Poddy, dear, the first thing is, I don’t want you to worry. If you want to come, then come. If you don’t, then I’ll understand that, too. It’s not like it’s that big a deal. I’ll see you again. The only question is, how old will you be when I see you? When you see me again, whenever that is, I’ll be just like this. A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair, but still full of enough piss and vinegar to keep me going for another week.

"I’m not in any pain. My immune system is shot to hell, they tell me, but they’ve cleaned me up like an old Ford getting ready for a Sunday drive, so I’m not likely to pick up any bugs. Mostly what I am is tired. Can’t seem to gather any energy, even in this wimpy stuff you call gravity up here. Walking from the bed to the toilet is like going up ten flights of stairs … but listen to me. One thing I swore was I’d never turn into that kind of old woman who can’t talk about anything but her symptoms.

"I don’t know much about what this is that’s fixin’ to punch my ticket. I gather they didn’t even have it when I was young. Poddy, I think it’s just old age, and I think when they tell me they figure they can cure it eventually, they’re full of shit.

"But maybe they aren’t, and what’s rolling the dice gonna cost me? I think the world—the one you’re on—is swirling around the toilet bowl, and I don’t much care whether I live to see the final flush or not. But for a chance to spend some more time with my family … hell, maybe for the chance to see your grandkids … I think I’ll give it a shot. Maybe they’ll uncork me just in time for us all to bend over and kiss our asses good-bye … but at least I’ll have that.

Hope you don’t think I’m a silly old woman. Don’t bother to call back. I’ll see you when I see you. Love you, dear. Bye.

I wiped away a tear and blew my nose. I knew it was the wise thing to wait for some privacy to see this stuff.

So … heard from Mom, heard from Gran. The next message should have been from Grandma Kelly, organizing every detail of my trip from Pismo to her front door.

But it wasn’t. I ticked the last blinking message light in my field of vision, and there was my favorite little brother, Mike. Also my only little brother, or sibling of any sort, but even if I had others he’d probably be my favorite. He came into my life when I was ten.

Hey, Pod-breath, he said, getting the mandatory insult out of the way, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’s just learning to mask his feelings like growing little boys seem to feel they should, but he couldn’t hide anything from me. Still, he soldiered on.

Thought you were rid of me, didn’t you? he said. Thought you’d escaped to the balmy shores of Pismo Beach. Never hear from you. Are you too busy saving Mars from the Earthie hordes? I don’t know what we’d do back here at home without girls like you guarding the gateways, Pod, but I want you to know we all appreciate it.

A short silence, then a sigh.

Enough of that. I don’t know why I called you, I can’t think of anything to say and you’re probably real busy right now … but I was just feeling really sad. There was a catch in his breath, and he looked away for a moment. Ten-year-old boys want so desperately to act like grown-ups, especially if they’re very, very smart.

So hurry home. Goose those rocket jockeys and tell ’em to boost two gees all the way, okay? You’ve been down there long enough, you must be muscle-bound enough to take it. You probably look like Mr. Western America by now. And if you don’t, you aren’t working hard enough. Anyway, see you soon.

I blinked

REPLY

and smiled for the camera.

Hell, peewee, I’ve got enough muscles in my eyebrows now to throw your flabby little ass right over Marinaris. And if I need any help I’ll just ask one of the bronzed beach boys I’m bringing back with me as pets to lend a hand. Have to beat them off with a stick every time I go to the beach. I have a wonderful tan; I’m going to be the envy of every girl on Mars, just like I already am the envy of all the little Earth girls.

I paused. Did I dare depart from the kind of banter we usually exchanged? Would that just worry him more? Tell the truth, my heart hadn’t been in the last bit of nonsense, but he was so far away, and he sounded like he needed me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. You can’t hug with a thirty-four-minute time lag.

You hang in there, Mike, I said. Take care of everyone until I get there. I know you can do it. Over and out.

Then I cried for a little bit.

My google tells me that a Motel 6 was a budget chain that, when it got started, offered you a reasonably clean room for six US dollars. Navy people don’t pay for the rooms, they’re free, a bonus of your mandatory enlistment and just about worth the price. Our Motel 6 had tiny slivers of soap in plain wrappers, one-piece toilets that gurgled and splashed when flushed, and shower stalls barely high enough for a girl to stand erect in and narrow enough to skin your elbows when you turned around.

I took a tepid shower after first almost scorching myself when one of the handles came off in my hand. I could feel the Pismo salt and sand washing down my body and into the drain. Then I dried off, more or less, with the table napkin provided for that purpose, wound my damp hair up in a bun on top of my head, and gathered up my uniform. I took it all down to the desk and handed it to the duty officer along with a plea to have it cleaned and pressed by 0600, as it was the only dress uniform I had. He looked me up and down.

You want some company? he asked.

Is this sexual harassment?

Just an offer. Lonely out here all night long. So I looked him up and down, and thought I might have been interested at another time, except for him being about ten years older than me and a career officer, but I shook my head and went back to my room.

The mattress was about the same quality as the rest of the accommodations, but then no mattress on Earth would be comfortable for me. I dragged this one onto the floor, which evened out the lumps a little, and sprawled out on it, on my back. My heels touched the floor. I moved up a little, and my head hung over the edge. They bought this stuff on Earth to save money, and it was all Earthie-sized. I got as comfortable as I could on the various gym equipment that seemed to have been stored in the ticking and figured I’d be asleep in five minutes. Hell, I was so tired I thought I could fall asleep on spikes.

And I did.

Chapter 3

I woke with a bad gravity hangover. There’s no way explain it to someone from Earth. I don’t drink; it has nothing to do with alcohol. It’s the curse of the Mars-born. We just never completely adjust to one gee. Unless I get a nap in the afternoon, take an opportunity to rest my legs and back several times a day, and spend an hour in carefully controlled exercise—swimming is about the only thing that doesn’t just about kill me—I wake up the next morning with a splitting headache, feeling like I’ve been worked over with a length of steel pipe.

I gobbled aspirin, not that I had much hope they would help, tried to make myself presentable in the tiny bathroom, surveyed the result in the steamed mirror, and wondered how Earthies did it. If this is what six months in one gee did to a girl with good skin, nice muscle tone, to-die-for cheekbones, clear blue eyes, and okay breasts, what would I look like in ten years? My eyes were more red than blue. Were those brown bags under my eyes, or garden slugs? And could that be the beginning of … jowls?

I had to get out of this horrible place. It was crippling me!

My uniform was hanging on the door, looking brand-new. Dressed and somewhat resembling a human being, I found my way to the commissary for a triple jolt of coffee. Say what you will about the Navy, one thing they do well is coffee. Always steaming hot, never prissied up with all the additives Earthies like to contaminate it with, and strong enough to bench-press two full-grown Martians a dozen times. I could practically feel my eyelids tightening.

Breakfast is another thing the Navy does reasonably well, though I’d advise you to stay away from the eggs. I stacked pancakes and drowned them in butter and syrup and finally began to feel something approaching okay as I sopped up the last of the mess and went looking for a place to wash my face. The girl that stared back at me in the mirror looked a little less like an internee in a concentration camp, but still not the perky Podster I had grown up with. I hoped to find that girl in free fall. That’s where I had left her.

"What do you mean, no bucket today?"

Okay, people can ask some pretty stupid questions when they’re blindsided and frustrated. Even me. The duty