Sighing dramatically, I nodded. “Earth people just make everything so hard.”
“It’s tradition,” Angelyn said defensively, but with a wry smile to make it okay. “It’s tradition to make things complicated.”
I said, “Someday, you’re all going to come to Mars. I’ll show you around. We’ll go camping. With breathing masks, the way you’re supposed to.” And we all laughed. Except Charles, who seemed to be studying us like we were some kind of anthropology project.
Maybe, just maybe, everything would be all right.
On our way to class, I ran into Tenzig. Or he ran into me, on purpose. Not that it mattered. He had some quip or insult all ready to deliver. Maybe he would offer to give me dancing lessons. He kept talking about how he wanted to help me out, right?
“Hey Polly. About last night—”
Or maybe, could he possibly be trying to apologize?
“—if you want me to teach you how to dance the right way, I could help you with that. I keep trying to help you and you keep snubbing me—”
No, no apology there.
“Tenzig,” I said, “you must really be worried about getting into a piloting program if this is the kind of sewage you have to pull to get noticed.”
He stopped cold, staring at me in disbelief as I walked on.
Yeah, by the end of that day I was feeling pretty good.
18
As if the first field trip hadn’t been traumatic enough, we had to do it all over again. Personally, I thought Stanton and her crew were crazy. This whole school was crazy. This whole planet. Then I thought they probably knew it and just didn’t care.
The Earth kids were all very excited about the trip to the Manhattan Cultural Preserve. I got the impression this was going to be different from the town of Monterey.
Angelyn explained. “It’s a city. Well, it’s an island and a city. An island with a city on it. It used to be the financial and political center of … of everything. The first United Nations headquarters is there. But it’s also got amazing shopping—real shopping, not online. And parks, theaters, restaurants, museums—the whole thing’s a museum, really. No one lives there anymore who isn’t part of the staff. It’s like a living history thing.”
I had no idea what to expect after that. Mars wasn’t part of the United Nations. I kept wanting to ask how any of this was relevant.
“I think we should go to one of the Moon colonies,” I said. “So you all can see how the other half lives.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve never been in zero g. I’d hate to go weightless and find out I’m one of those people who get sick from it.”
“They can give you medication for that.”
Once again, Stanton and her crew piled us in to a suborbital, and away we went.
I watched out the window as we approached, and the area below disconcerted me almost as much as the wilderness around Yosemite had. I’d wanted to see what a giant aboveground city looked like—this was it. While I thought I understood the concept, I hadn’t quite understood the size of it. The land below us was solid city as far as I could see. Kilometer after kilometer of buildings made of concrete and steel, glinting glass, endless grids of streets. I’d done the reading. At its height, this island—a narrow corner of land, really—had had a population of over twelve million people. I couldn’t even imagine that. There weren’t that many people in the whole world—at least, not if the world was Mars. I kept wondering how many people could live crammed together like that. Apparently, some cities on Earth had even more people than that right now. And it was considered normal. I shivered thinking of it.
We landed at a port outside the city and took a maglev to the island, preserved behind flood walls that kept back the waters of the rivers and harbor. The ocean—a different ocean from the one we’d seen on the last trip, because Earth just had that many oceans—was beyond the harbor, but it all still looked like unbelievably vast stretches of water to me. The train traveled a tunnel that went under the river, and that tunnel was the most at home I’d felt since coming to Earth. Underground, sheltered, safe. I wondered why people on Earth would spread upward, building towers hundreds of meters tall, instead of digging underground. Especially considering the gravity situation. I would have thought underground would be easier. Not as far to fall as from those
tall buildings. But apparently they liked that sunshine thing. Wimps.
Once we arrived inside the cultural preserve, we took a bus, and an instructor—a specialist who lived on the island and spent all his time doing tours like this—lectured about the history, the buildings, and all this stuff that was supposed to be very important.
We stopped in front of a massive, ornate building with columns, domes, and rows of windows, where we did a lot of walking and looking at things. A lot of walking.
Mars had museums. We had Spirit and Opportunity, Viking and Curiosity, all resting under their own little domes to protect them from wind and dust, with bronze plaques mounted on them telling when they’d landed and why they were important. I’d been to the prefab habitat that had been chucked straight from Earth, where the original colonists had lived until the first tunnels of Colony One were finished. So it wasn’t like I didn’t know what museums were, or what I was in for this trip.
Manhattan was different. The island was a location frozen in time on purpose and preserved as a memorial to the way things used to be. Every building we went to was a museum, filled with art or preserved animals or old furniture or a million other things. Clutter, basically.
I had never really thought of history, because human history on Mars started with those monuments of old robots. I’d never thought about anything that came before because there wasn’t any evidence of it. We didn’t have clutter because no one had brought anything that wasn’t necessary, and we hadn’t been there long enough to accumulate it. Here, that’s all there was—scraps of what had come before, and before that, and before that, on and on forever. The guide kept talking about it all like it was my past, like I should feel some connection to it. But I didn’t. They showed us marble statues and I wanted to yell at them that Mars didn’t even have marble, or limestone, and I had never seen either one before in my life, and they should stop talking at me like I should know how amazing it was.
I started thinking that maybe my grandfather and the other colonists had come to Mars because it wasn’t littered with so much stuff.