“Great, thanks,” she said, and smiled. A perfectly normal smile. I smiled back. She went back to her seat and we both sat there reading, like nothing had ever been wrong with the universe.
9
Astrophysics was, predictably, my favorite class, and not just because it brought me a little closer to home and didn’t make me feel like a boneless weakling. When the instructor, Ms. Chin-sun Lee, asked questions, I usually knew the answers. I even started raising my hand, because it was embarrassing that no one else was doing so. And Ms. Lee called on me, smiling when I gave my answers because I was usually right. She said things like, “Good job, Ms. Newton!” and I might have kind of loved her for it. In her class, the knots finally left my stomach. It was the one class I felt like I could get a tiny bit ahead in the one-up competitions that a lot of class time degenerated into. I’d done escape-velocity calculations before. I knew how orbital mechanics worked. I knew why interplanetary navigation was harder than it looked, because your points were always moving in relation to each other, though I still mucked up the details when I tried to work the equations out on my own. At least predicting the orbits of asteroids was relevant. To me, anyway.
Angelyn—Angelyn Marian Chou, I learned, but she was okay with people calling her just Angelyn—was one Earth student I could count on not to give me a hard time by reflex. I didn’t
automatically suspect her when she talked, or wait for her to spring a trap. She was, near as I could tell, honest. Startlingly normal, for an Earther.
I helped her with astrophysics, she helped me with Earth history, and I never felt like she was trying to show off how much smarter she was.
“Polly, how did you get so good at those calculations? I swear I’ll never wrap my brain around it.”
Orbital mechanics. Mostly, it was formulae involving mass, velocity, gravitational pull, and distance from gravitational masses. Trigonometry and vectors. A lot of numbers to juggle, but once you knew how to calculate them, it was mostly a matter of plugging them into equations. It also helped to be able to picture what was actually going on in the real world. I’d been thinking about what orbital mechanics actually look like since I decided I wanted to be a pilot.
“I don’t know,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to say too much because letting the wrong bit of information slip meant giving them ammunition.
But Angelyn pressed. “Do they teach this differently on Mars? I can understand why you’d need to know more about astrogation in the colonies—”
“No, it’s more just me. I learned a lot of it on my own—” And that didn’t look odd at all. A few other people at the study hall looked over, listening in on our conversation, and I blushed because I’d already given too much away. After all, who would voluntarily study M-drive mechanics? “I want to be a pilot,” I blurted, trying to explain, to make myself seem less weird. Failing.
Tenzig smirked, because of course he did. “Wait a minute. You’re here prepping for flight school?”
I wasn’t going to lie, and downplaying that would mean betraying my own heart. I wouldn’t do that, not even to avoid the confrontation. “Yes.”
Not just that, and I would never say it out loud, but I also wanted to go farther than anyone else had ever gone before. I wanted to be one of the people who didn’t fly just interplanetary but interstellar. They were building the big multi-M-drive ships now that would make that happen. I’d be just finishing up school by the time the first missions to Alpha Centauri were ready to go. I would be part of that. I never said it out loud because I couldn’t bear it if people made fun of me for it. People like Charles.
Tenzig shook his head, chuckling like this was hilarious. The others looked back and forth between us. Maybe waiting to see who would throw the first punch. I could probably deck him without breaking my hand.
“You really think you can get into flight school just because you want to?” Tenzig said.
“Not just because I want to. I’m good enough to do it. I’ll pass any entrance exam they throw at me.”
His expression sank into pity. “You need more than that. You need connections. Why do you think I’m here? When they only have a few spots, and lots of people who can pass the tests, who do you think they’re going to pick?”
“They’ll pick the best people they can.”
“You just don’t get it, do you? If they have to pick between you and me, who are they going to pick?”
I curled my lip. “I’ll arm wrestle you for it.”
“My grandfather pioneered the Moon Belt shipping routes. My parents are responsible for carrying most of the ore mined in the Belt to the manufacturing platforms. If my mother called admissions at the school, what are they going to tell her?”
“Hello?” I said. Someone stifled a laugh, I didn’t catch who.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you don’t have any pull with these people.”
On paper, I was just as good as him. No, better. “My mother is director of operations of Mars Colony One. My grandfather was one of the charter colonists,” I said, my voice sticking on the words, because I felt like I was using them as a weapon. Or maybe a crutch. I wanted to do this on my own, not depend on my family for getting me through this. On Mars, no one cared who my mother was, I had to pull my own weight.
“You think that means anything to anyone here?”
“Martian greenhouses feed your Belt miners,” I said lamely.
“Flight school admissions don’t care about that, only what you can do for Earth.”
We could throw out counterpunches over and over, and it wouldn’t do any good. Did I expect him to suddenly say, “Oh, yes, you’re right, how could I have been so ignorant”? No, he wasn’t going to do that. But I kept arguing anyway. Charles would have walked away by now.
“I think—” I had been about to call him a couple of names but realized I probably couldn’t even insult him right. I’d use some weird Martian insult, like Dusthead or You’re full of sewage, and he’d just laugh at me. I tried again. “I think we’ll find out which of us is right, in the end.”