Story Excerpt

Moon and Mars
by James Patrick Kelly 

One

Mariska Volochkova settled onto a swivel chair that had started life as a bar stool over in North Robinson. “Surprise me,” she said. Now it served as the lone styling station for the base’s makeshift salon.

“I hate it when they say that.” Andra floated a styling cape over Mariska’s spacer uniform and snapped it behind her neck. “Okay, we’ll have to keep it simple since there’s not much to work with here.” She spritzed product onto Mariska’s head and rubbed it into her hair.

“On account of her head got shaved,” said Neha, Mariska’s newly designated mentor, who’d already had her turn in the chair. “Because of the accident. That’s why she’s still here on Mars and not on Natividad.”

“Wait, you’re the hibernator?” said Andra. “Natalya’s clone? The one who survived. . . .”

“She tried to save them.” Neha cut her off. “Only the rescue ship was late.”

Mariska crossed arms under the cape. “It was a shitshow.” She fought to control her voice. “I was lucky.” She had lost four shipmates and was herself still recovering from cerebral hypoxia. “They weren’t.” She hated that everyone on her new crew wanted to talk about the Shining Legend disaster, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“Sorry.” Andra gave Mariska’s shoulder an apologetic squeeze. “I’ll just shut my big mouth now and get to business.” She sifted a lock of damp hair between her fingers and clucked in satisfaction. “Straight and fine. Six, seven centimeters. Easy to cut.” She regarded Mariska in the workstation screen she used as a mirror. “I could plump it into something roundish? Maybe an asymmetrical look?”

Mariska was grateful that Andra had taken the hint and moved on. By all reports she gave the best cuts on the crew, which was why Mariska had agreed to visit the storage and supplies team here on base. Andra was someone she wanted to befriend.

Nosy J-Gunn from the engineering team happened to pass by then—probably on purpose. Neha offered a warning feed and Mariska opened her head to receive it.

=Watch out, he’s prowling.=

=What for?=

=Information, mostly. But whatever you’ve got.=

“Wait, let’s think about this,” said Andra. “What do you want your hair to say?”

“Say?” Mariska frowned. “Hair is hair.”

J-Gunn snorted.

Mariska twisted in the chair to see Neha and Andra giving her the look. “What?” She’d been getting the look ever since she’d joined the crew of Natividad a week ago.

“Maybe on the Moon hair is hair,” said Andra, “but here we’re talking the starship way. Have you been up yet?”

Mariska shook her head. “My mother thinks I’m not ready to boost to orbit.” Natalya Volochkova was the ship’s chief medical officer.

“Oh, okay,” said Andra. “Well then, on the ship, when your hair talks, the crew pays attention.”

“What does that mean?”

Neha cut in, tugging at her curls. “Regulations say your hair can be fifteen centimeters long and no more. Right, Andra?”

Andra shrugged. “Captain isn’t that strict, but yes.”

“Wearing it long means you’ll need more visits to the chair to stay under the limit.  That’s time wasted sitting here, plus waiting to sit. Plus paying whatever you’re willing to barter. Why? You could go with a deck cut.”

“No decks,” said Mariska. On Shining Legend she’d worn her hair in a plain deck, running the vacuum trimmer over her scalp with a three-centimeter comb every few weeks. She wanted to put all that behind her now. “Makes my head look like a mushroom.”

“A prominent parietal ridge is a sign of intelligence.” Neha struck a pose and feathered a hand across her own skull bulge. Andra had trimmed Neha’s hair close on the sides, leaving a reverse ponytail gathered in an auburn swoop at the top.

“Or a swollen head.” said J-Gunn.

“We’re all about variety,” Andra said. “Which means color matters.” She’d chosen a gold palette for her curly mop. “Shape matters. Length matters. Some people think long hair signals you’re available. Or desperate, in J-Gunn’s case.”

“Hey.” He pretended to take offense. “I’m shopping. Haven’t found Rita Right yet.”

Andra ignored him. “Partners, on the other hand, usually have sensible hair.”

“As in short,” said Neha.

There was another thing Mariska couldn’t keep track of: who was partnered with whom on this crew. Besides volunteering to leave everything behind to jump through the wormhole, Natividad’s colonists were inventing a new social contract. Partners—either pairs or groups—were emotionally and usually sexually involved, but not exclusively. When they got to Destination, they would start making babies, and partners would become parents, raising not only their own offspring, but others as well.

“So are you available?” said Andra. “Or are you and Marsboy partnered?”

Mariska had joined the crew to be with Elan. She knew he wanted her and she wanted him. But they hadn’t actually discussed partnering.

“Wait, you don’t know?” Neha twisted to stare Mariska in the face.  “She doesn’t know.”

“He’s Martian,” Mariska felt like pulling the styling cape up over her head. “They’re shy about things like that.”

“I’ll say,” said Neha. “I practically threw myself at him back when he signed on.” She winked at Mariska. “Don’t worry. I just bounced off.”

“You wanted to partner with Elan of Mars?” said Andra.

“Why not? Actually, I was thinking more of a tryout, but I definitely imagined him making the team. I can think of worse sperm donors.” She fixed J-Gunn with a significant stare.

“Is it cold in here or is it me?” he said.

“Umm, people?” Andra clicked her scissors impatiently. “Unlike you, I haven’t got all day. Mariska?”

She let Andra talk her into an asymmetrical style: pixie cut left and a classic A-line bob on the right. Neha approved; she said something about reframing the roundness of her face. Mariska was fine with the new style; she had been feeling a little lopsided lately. But was her face really round? Maybe she should cut back on the colonist chow.

“Have you two seen this?” J-Gunn held out an arm exposing the datacuff beneath his uniform sleeve. “I thought it’d be encrypted but no. This is straight from Ops on Sweetspot Station. AllSpace is assigning another eight new members to our command, lander, and nav teams. They’re busting Goto, Murph, and Buskirk back to standby crew.”

“Seen it, don’t believe it.” Andra snorted in disbelief. “Never happen.”

Neha and Mariska bent over the cuff’s screen. “But that’s what it says.” Mariska glanced at the smirking J-Gunn. Their attention made him puff up a size and a half.

“How come you have this?” said Neha.

“Because I see things.” He tapped the corner of his eye. “Take off your spacer blindfolds. Stop being naïve about this mission.”

“You don’t get assigned to a colony ship, you volunteer,” said Neha. “We’re headed to Destination to stay. That’s the plan.”

“Colonists are.” J-Gunn leaned back. “But what if the crew isn’t? It’s the damn Plan B.”

“What’s Plan B?”

“Rumors are that the Council of Nine wants to change the mission. Natividad drops us off and comes right back. Which is why they’re replacing people on the nav and command teams, get it? Including a new hibernator who is not Mariska here. Plan B means we get stranded.”

“Screwed, you mean.”

Mariska grabbed J-Gunn’s wrist for another look. She’d missed seeing the additional hibernator at first glance. Maybe the crew thought Mariska was part of this Plan B. But she wasn’t. She was going to Destination to stay. With Elan.

“But we need Natividad with us,” said Neha. “Without it we’ll never survive. It’ll be the Martian Abandonment all over again.”

Andra was disgusted. “They might as well cancel the mission altogether.”

“Maybe that’s the real Plan B,” said J-Gunn.

“But we’re almost ready. In another couple of months . . .”

“No, he’s right,” said Neha. “Those asshole Firsters keep pressuring AllSpace. They say they need Natividad more than our colony does. And if losing the ship compromises the mission enough to scare us off, then they can cancel without taking responsibility for doing it.”

“Too devious.” Andra whisked the cape off Mariska and shook it. “Firsters aren’t that smart.”

“Captain won’t let them get away with it,” said Neha. “Neither will your mother.”

Mariska wasn’t so sure about that. Captain Pilar Martinez was a legend, but she was just one woman. If you believed the polls, there were a billion Firsters across AllSpace looking to keep Natividad’s precious antimatter in the Solar System. And as for Natalya Volochkova, well, she couldn’t control her own cloned daughter.

 

Mariska and Elan worked out side by side on the racks, doing full body squats against the gravity of Mars. She tried to keep up with him, but sweat made her feel like a sponge. Not her most attractive look, and why hadn’t Elan mentioned her new haircut? Had he even noticed? She worried he was having second thoughts about being together. Sometimes his shyness irked her. He could see her panting from her exertions so he offered a feed to save breath. She opened her head.

=Don’t worry about J-Gunn. He likes to hear himself talk. Nothing is settled about the replacements.=

=So you’ve heard?=

=It’s a rumor, just like Plan B is a rumor. I’m sick of them.=

She logged off the rack to rest. Elan kept pumping. Her Martian was the only one of his kind on the starship crew. Lips pulled back from identical flat teeth, he strained up from every squat. He was long and strong with the glossy skin of his chest the color of green tea. Martians were genespliced to survive their planet’s harsh climate and could even venture onto the surface with breathers. Was he going shirtless to show off? He couldn’t sweat through that keratin-saturated skin or the photoreceptor nodules that stippled his shoulders so maybe he was trying to tempt her. It was working.

=Besides I thought it would be me who got kicked off. Sweetspot Ops is anti-Martian.=

=Not true. Everybody seems to like you.=

He attacked the rack as if he could muscle his way to the stars. Mariska was exhausted just watching him. It wasn’t fair. The gravity on Destination was 71 percent that of Earth, which meant that both of them needed to add muscle to keep up with the Earthborn colonists. But Mars gravity was 38 percent that of Earth, while the Moon was just 17 percent, which meant Mariska had more bulk to add. Which she was doing, despite ninety-five days in emergency hibernation followed by months recovering from the oxygen deprivation that had killed her shipmates. Elan liked to say that going deep—hibernating—was her superpower, but although he knew about her desperate gamble to save the crew of Shining Legend, she’d never told him the story of her other more selfish hibernation. It had cost her six years of growing up back when she was a girl. While she was twenty-three chronologically, she still had the body of a scrawny teen. Natalya had prescribed a program of targeted strength training and a personalized diet of printed colonist chow. The high protein shakes and energy bars laced with anabolic enhancers and growth factors had changed her so that she hardly recognized herself in a mirror. She had thighs now. Breasts. When was Elan going to notice?

=I wonder if Andra suspects me of being a replacement.=

=But you’re not. Everyone knows you’re only here because of Natalya.=

=I’m here because of you.= Natalya had opened the door, but Mariska had walked through.

They showered next to one another after the workout. Watching water stream down his taut body, she imagined licking it off his chest. Natalya’s cocktail of hormones had boosted her libido to orbit. Masturbation was pleasant enough, but Mariska was overdue to have sex with someone who wasn’t herself. Preferably Elan, if he would give her a sign that he was interested. Was he? He’d let her watch many times as his nubbly photoreceptors unfurled to the light, an intimacy that by custom Martians only shared with one another. But she’d never seen anything between his legs but the shock of pubic hair. His organs nestled coyly within his body cavity against the harsh Martian environment. She’d been too young to have sex with Jak Csiky, her first boyfriend back on the Moon, but she could tell when Random, her only other lover, was excited. How was she to know when Elan was aroused?

“Would you wash my back?” She turned away from him and reveled in his soapy touch on her skin, his spindly fingers swabbing under her arms. Thinking about getting him excited was getting her excited.  She squirmed as his hands slipped down her back.

“I like your spine, Moon.”

“My spine?” Her breath caught. “Hey, what are you doing, Marsboy?”

“Counting your vertebrae. Cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral . . . what, no tailbone?”

“My mother’s design.” She swallowed hard and pushed his hand away. “Don’t tease, Elan.”

“You don’t like?”

“I’d like it a lot.” She twisted away from him. “If you have follow-up plans.” She pinned him against the wall of the shower and kissed him. He wasn’t much of a kisser yet, but she was working on that. Hot water sluiced down her forehead and cheeks as she stretched up to him. Mariska flicked her tongue against his teeth and then stepped primly back into her own shower. She wasn’t about to force herself on him, much as she wanted to.

“Plans?” he murmured.

“Hi, Mariska.” Pakson Okumu stepped into the shower room and hung his towel on a hook by the entrance. “Elan.” He was one of the seconds on the command team and had been catching Mariska up on navigation and control since she had joined the crew. He stepped to one side of a shower faucet, spun the handle all the way over. “Heard about the massacre? They’re replacing half of command staff with Firster goons.”

“I thought that was just a rumor,” she said, giving Elan a hard stare.

“Think again. Eight replacements across three teams. Captain is going to have to put her foot down.”

“What can she do?” said Mariska.

Elan turned his shower off. “Pilar may be a fossil, but she knows her way around AllSpace.” He nodded toward the exit. “Not worried.”

Although he didn’t have plans, Elan had intentions. He nuzzled her ear in the locker room and suggested they needed to be alone. Mariska stifled a nervous laugh and brushed a kiss across his cheek. Escalante Base had two hotrooms designated for fraternization, but when they queried Control they found both booked for the next two hours. Elan’s shift on the lander Picas started at 18:00—in two hours and sixteen minutes. Postponing their tryst felt like a mistake to Mariska, but where could they be alone? Mariska had the top bunk in a quad dorm room while she waited for a permanent assignment on the starship. Elan now slept on one of the landers, deployed on the shakedown tests of the starship’s new skyhook. Picas was attached to one end of a six-hundred-kilometer tether and its twin Corazones to the other. They rotated continually around the midpoint in low Mars orbit, scooping up cargo at the base and flinging it to Natividad.

Elan was downcast. =So we wait then? If that’s what you want, it’s okay.=

=Not okay. And not what I want.=

Even without his feed, she could tell he was as disappointed as she was. She grabbed his hand and started walking, although she had no idea where she was going. But if she had to open every door on the base, she was going to have her reluctant Martian.

“Wait.”  He stopped so abruptly that his grip spun her around.

“What?”

“I’ve got an idea.” He caught her shoulders and aimed her in a different direction. “Step this way.”

The motor pool was equipped with an assortment of one- and two-person dust buggies and twenty rovers, ten of which were to be shipped assembled to Destination. All were available prior to launch and were parked in the main hangar. Most ran on treads to negotiate the raw Martian landscape, although a couple had been retrofitted with solid elastomer wheels to ride the roads around the base. There were tankers and passenger vans and flatbeds designed to accept stacks of containers. After Natividad unloaded at Destination, the plan called for Elan and the lander team to manage surface transport.

“We have to qualify on all these rigs.” Elan stopped in front of two nearly identical vans, boxes squatting on six big wheels. “And I feel the sudden need for a training mission.” He winked. “We won’t even need surface suits where we’re going.”

“Are you allowed?” She caught his arm. “Could we get in trouble?”

“Worth the risk.” He thumbed open the door. As Mariska looked inside, a dashboard screen woke up, bathing the cockpit in chilly blue light. Elan checked to see that nobody was watching, then he gave her his biggest smile.

“A bit cramped.” Mariska tried to imagine the two of them stretched on the rover’s thinly padded bench seat.

“You’ll see.” The door sealed with a slurp.

 

Elan took the turn that led to the crater’s north rim. The sun was a dusky cue ball on the horizon that barely illuminated the regolith road. He drove with the headlights on, but the charged dust of Mars stuck to the van’s viewports, and he kept having to ionize the glass. Every so often he’d miss a pool of dust and a wheel would catch, jostling her into him. Mariska tried to convince herself that this was romantic.

He kept both hands on the steering yoke, intent on the driving. “We should be okay. Nobody out here but bots and crazy people,” he said, as he steered past the mineral dump onto the main road toward Ferryland.

Before construction of Natividad, Escalante had been one of a handful of privately owned ports on Mars. Its little fleet of ferries made the jump to orbit to unload long haul freighters and then returned cargos to the base. When AllSpace tightened its hold on interplanetary trade, most indy ports closed or were repurposed. The Martians who owned Escalante had hoped to convert it to a shipyard where Mars-to-orbit equipment could be repaired and resold, but the venture had soured. Old Bent and his family had eagerly accepted AllSpace’s proposal to lease the base during construction of the colony ship. The Martians had moved off base to live on their ferries and commuted to work at the base, where they did maintenance and repair. Less than half of the hodgepodge of ships in Ferryland were occupied. The rest were mothballed, with a handful kept launch-ready by the lander team.

Elan pointed. “Behold our accommodations, Moon.”

The squat ferry Jigger’s Loop was being used for junk storage, so it didn’t have the yeasty smell of living quarters. As she emerged from the airlock, Mariska saw a mural painted in real paint sprawling across the crew deck. Alien heads, presumably the Builders, floated in space around the mouth of a nightmare-red wormhole.

“Can’t say I like the décor.” She recognized one of the heads as the Syringian ambassador Tk-tk from the New Dawn science fiction series. Of course, no one, not the New Dawn writers nor this Martian artist, had ever seen one of the mysterious Builders, who had haunted humanity’s imagination since the discovery of the wormhole.

The anomaly in the Oort Cloud was the only trace of the Builder civilization. While a few held that the wormhole had formed naturally and there had never been any Builders, nobody took the skeptics seriously. Most thought that the wormhole was incredibly old and that the Builders were extinct or at least gone. But how to explain why they’d built a space-time shortcut to a galaxy fifty-four million light-years away? Some claimed that they had seeded life on Earth and had left the wormhole as an invitation. Maybe they would reveal themselves once humanity was advanced enough to find it. The flaw in that theory was that the scout ship Korolev had already visited galaxy M60-UCD1 at the other end of the wormhole. Pilar and Natalya and their crew had explored the solar system nearest the opening of the wormhole, but had failed to make contact. They had, however, discovered a habitable planet that they had called Destination.

Elan dimmed the lights and the Builders’ mural faded to dusky shadows. “Better?”

“Much.” She bent to unsnap her shoes and stepped barefoot into the faux moss rug that covered the deck.

“I just double-checked with Bent; no one is coming this way anytime soon.”

“How did you find this place, anyway?”

“Bent is a friend, and he’s proud there’s a Martian on the crew. Wishes he could go, I’m thinking. This was his Builders’ store before he got out of the business.”

“Builders’ store?”

“Interested in them as a social phenomenon. He used to buy junk that people claimed was theirs.”

Mariska didn’t want to talk about Old Bent or the Builders, but she wasn’t ready to stop talking either. Was this where she and Elan were finally going to make love? “It’s . . . nice.”

“I know, not very romantic.” He eyed the carpet. “Or comfortable. But watch.” He opened lockers until he produced a canister of guardgoo. He sprayed a thick layer of the quick-drying packing foam toward her feet, backing her into a corner until she fell giggling on top of it.  Bubbles within the goo swelled, raising her off the deck. As the surface reacted with the air, it went from tacky to smooth, outgassing a faint plastic smell.

“What do you think? Hell of a lot softer than titanium.”

=It’s perfect.=

She settled cross-legged and wide-eyed in the middle of the vast makeshift mattress, the goo yielding pleasantly to her weight. She was ready to open not only her mind but her body to him, but this was unfamiliar territory for her. Was it for him?

“Are you cold, Moon?”

“No,” She waited for the tingle of his feed, but he wasn’t offering.

Instead he peeled his shirt off and tossed it aside. The silliest, sexiest grin she had ever seen spread across his face. “If we face the ladder . . .” He aimed her away from the offending Builders’ mural. “. . . would you mind if I turned up the lights?” The buds on his shoulder had already begun to swell. He wore a spacer uniform when he was on duty, but whenever he could he liked to bare his photoreceptors to the light. Going shirtless changed Elan, made him a little giddy. She was all for that.

“Max it, if you like.” She was used to squinting when they were alone together.

He flicked his middle finger against a couple of the growing ribbons of skin as if to encourage them. “Here we are then.” He danced a couple of steps before kneeling in front of her. “What do we do now?”

“Whatever we want.”

“I know, but . . .” He settled back on his heels. “What do you want?”

“I think we should talk.”

“About what?”

“I decided about the talking, Marsboy.” She pressed her hand into his. “You decide what about.”

“Oh.” He considered. “Okay, maybe I’ve been assuming something I shouldn’t.”  He met her gaze for a long moment, then glanced down in characteristic embarrassment. “So here it is. I love you and want to be your partner.” He turned her hand over so that it was palm up. “Now.” He touched the tip of her forefinger. “On Natividad.” Then her middle finger. “When we get to Destination.” Ring finger. “And happily ever after.” Pinkie.

She was melting. “You do, do you?”

“Yes.” He waited. “This is where you say what you want.”

“I want to be as happy as I am right now.” She pushed him over and he sprawled, laughing. “That means I have to have you.” She climbed onto him, straddling his chest.  “No one else will do.”

“Is it time for kissing yet?” He craned his neck, admiring her.

When it was in shadow, Elan’s green skin was thick and hard, but in the light it softened so that it seemed almost to breathe. The ribbons of flesh along his shoulders grew as big as she had ever seen them. When she pinched one of the photoreceptors upright and ran her fingers along its length, he sighed as if his soul was leaving his body.

=My love.=

Her uniform shirt bunched up her back as he tugged at it. She ducked through the neckband, then collapsed onto him, giggling as she wriggled out of the sleeves.

=You’re beautiful.=

=No, you.=

Her stomach slid across his. The silky sensation reminded her of swimming in the Muoi pool on the Moon, the way her heart pounded and her skin tightened with pleasure. His mouth was hot, and she realized that there was nothing wrong with his kissing, nothing she could think of because she had no thoughts of her own. It was only =We . . . us.= Feeds wide open to one another, their first mind convergence was overwhelming because they were merging both thoughts and bodies. They lost themselves in one another and, in a blissful swirl of feed and feeling, past, present, and future collapsed. =blood flush=gasp and moan=his erect receptors display like plumage=her toes curl=their tongues flick=heat between her legs and his=so much skin so brown so green so hot so smooth=slipping together=their bodies at once questions and answers=I am=I am=We are=

“Oh.”

The sound of her voice surprised her and she felt a shiver of dread as she came back to herself, her mind filled with her thoughts alone. Had she kept some selfish lump apart from him at the end?

“Oh?” He sifted her hair through his fingers. “Does that mean you love me too?”

“Yes.” She kissed him, confident then that she had opened herself completely for the first time. “Oh, yes.”

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Copyright © 2024. Moon and Mars by James Patrick Kelly