“Which would be great if they also weren’t for losing.”
“I don’t think I like it here,” Ladhi murmured.
“We just have to stick together,” I said, and Tenzig looked like he felt sorry for us.
8
Hi Beau,
It’s been rough. I’m trying to give it a chance, I really am. But we’ve got so much holding us back before we even start. The gravity, for one. The lack of ceilings. I go outside and keep reaching for an air mask, and I have to remind myself that I don’t need it here. You just breathe in all this raw unfiltered air. I hate to think what kind of bugs and germs and muck I’m sucking in along with it. We have filtration for a reason, you know? And the rooms are so big, they waste so much space here.
Then there’s the Earth kids. So get this, everybody here has three names, and they introduce themselves with all three names like they expect you to remember, when I have trouble remembering even one because they’re different. I asked Charles why they’re so big on their fancy names, and he said it’s tradition. It’s what they do because they’re proud of themselves and their families. But it’s so complicated.
They hate us, they really do. They say things like, if we—or our parents, or grandparents, or whatever—had been good enough to make it on Earth they never would have left. We’re all losers and charity cases. They don’t even know what it’s like on Mars, or the Moon, or the stations or anything. And they don’t care. What’s worse, the instructors are pretty much the same way.
I don’t see how I’m supposed to learn anything if I have to spend all my time being furious at everyone.
Yours dejectedly,
Polly
* * *
PE was the worst because we were automatically at a disadvantage and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. George was right: compared to them, by their standards, we were broken. At least we could pick the sport we wanted to do—running, weight training, or a handful of team games played with balls that I couldn’t follow without watching very carefully. I picked weight training, because at least there I could stand in one spot. Charles ran because, he explained, he could do it alone. I’d watch, and he’d be the last one in the group running around the school’s track—until the others lapped him—and not seem to notice. He kept his face forward, his legs moving, however slowly, and just got the job done.
At least the instructors didn’t expect us offworlders to be able to lift as much, run as far, or play as hard as the Earth kids. Not that we even could without bursting our arteries or breaking bones. In another sense, it made it worse. We were segregated. The runners lagged far behind the Earth runners, the non-Earth kids had to play with each other rather than their Earth classmates, who could accidentally break our bones just by running into us. And I had to stand there lifting tiny little weights no bigger than my own hand. I’d have laughed at me. Not that the Earth kids laughed. They didn’t have to.
The one classmate who was even worse off than Charles and me and the rest was Boris. He grew up on one of the lunar bases and was used to one-sixth gravity. He’d been through all the same supplement regimes and exercise routines that the rest of us had, but he had so much more catching up to do. He couldn’t even manage the hand-size weights. He sure tried, turning red in the face, his whole frame trembling as he lifted it off the floor.
An upperclass student intern was supervising us that day: Franteska—I couldn’t remember her other two names—was a third-year with short black hair and a stunningly muscular physique. But then just about everyone on Earth looked stunningly muscular to me. She was an athlete, she informed us repeatedly, proudly, as proof of her qualification to judge us on every little thing. Franteska watched Boris struggling, and I was afraid she was going to give him a hard time, lay out some cutting insult that would make me have to yell at her. And she looked like she wanted to, but she didn’t. Instead, she gave a big sigh and told him to put down the hand weights. Instead, she gave him a set of flat disks that she’d pulled off another piece of equipment—not weights but bolts that held the weights in place. These he could successfully lift in a standard curl, though he still appeared to be working hard. Boris frowned and wouldn’t look at anyone. He never gave up. We all looked out for him, to make sure he had space.
Only way to get through was to get through, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t hard.
In the evening came dinner, then recreation hour, then lights-out. Every minute of the day was structured and accounted for. If I wanted to record messages for home, I’d have to skip math homework, or do it in half the time. Or skip history reading. Or skip lunch. On weekends, we didn’t have class, but we had required extracurricular activities, more study hall, and supplemental PE for offworlders. Biophysical development, they called it. We called it remedial PE. Whoever heard of remedial PE?
Even if we got along great with the Earth kids, we would have stayed separate from them, formed our own cliques, and not made friends among them. It might have made me sad if they didn’t drive me crazy every time I tried talking to them.
This was what my life was going to be like, week after week. The Galileo program was three years long—Earth years, at least, which were shorter than Mars years. But it still felt like forever.
The dorm buildings had a couple of big study rooms with good lighting, desks, and terminals, thank goodness, where we were supposed to spend our recreation hours doing homework. Reading for history, a ton—Earth ton, not the lighter Mars ton—of math problems, astrophysics, biology, geography (Earth geography, and I asked if we were going to be studying Mars and was told not until next year, like the history). I never knew where to start when I sat down to study. I usually jumped around. A couple of math problems until it drove me crazy, some history reading, some scribbling on my hand terminal, some more reading. And over and over again. Eventually, somehow, every day, I managed to get it done.
The system was rigged: we didn’t grow up knowing basic Earth history like the names of countries that participated in this thing called World War II. Mars didn’t even have countries—each colony was an independent business conglomerate. That was how colonists were originally encouraged to settle, they’d get their own country out of it, basically. The stations in the outer system worked like that, too. So Galileo was a contest and a bunch of us arrived here with negative points. Not only that, some of our evaluation was based on how much we participated in class—raised our hands and answered questions—but Professor Broderick, the history instructor, never called on non-Earthers. And yet we just kept going because we didn’t have a choice.
Charles buried himself in the work and hardly ever came back into the light. We had a couple of classes together—history and PE—but he hardly ever talked to me. When I tried to talk to him, he gave me a look like I’d interrupted something important. He probably decided that associating with me would hold him back. That was okay. I didn’t need him. Ethan, Ladhi, and I stuck close, eating meals together and helping each other with homework. Tenzig and Marie joined in sometimes, along with the other offworlder kids. After the first week or so, most of the Earth kids stopped needling us so badly. Probably because it was way too easy and they got bored with it. And they were swamped with as much homework as the rest of us. They’d have to pick between teasing us or keeping up with astrophysics.
We’d been at Galileo for four weeks, and the routine had become familiar enough that I could believe I’d been doing it forever. Except I still got tired just walking to class, I was still lifting half the weights of my Earther classmates, and I dreamed about rocky brown Martian horizons every night. I missed the smell of canned air from a breathing mask.
One study period, as I sat at one of the tables with a half dozen others and read history on my handheld, I wondered again how the details of international relations on Earth a hundred years ago were relevant to knowing how to fly starships to Jupiter. My mother would tell me I needed to learn this so that I could be well-rounded. So I could understand the way things were now—even Jupiter had been influenced by what had happened on Earth a hundred years ago.
I’d read the same page three times and thought maybe I ought to switch to working on math, when the girl sitting next to me leaned over.
“Hey, you’re Polly, right?”
I was so startled I could only stare. She was an Earther, dense and strong. Her hair was black and she wore dangly earrings with her uniform, which wasn’t supposed to be allowed. I got the feeling she slipped them off when Stanton was around. “Yeah,” I said, blinking. Angelyn, that was her name. I couldn’t remember her other two names, though I was sure I’d heard them. I braced for whatever jab she was about to deliver.
“My terminal died and wiped out the whole assignment for history next week. I’ve got it all loaded back on, but—can you remind me, what are we supposed to be reading?”
Was she really just asking me a question? A normal question? “Um … the book on twentieth-century African politics. First three chapters.”