Mary A. Turzillo - Mars is No Place for Children

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Mars Is No Place for Children

by Mary A. Turzillo

First published in Science Fiction Age, ed. Scott Edelman, May 1999

Nebula Awards(R) Winner

Kapera Smythe, her diary, Smythe Farm & Laboratories, Vastitas Borealis, Summer-January 31,

2202:

Mother and Dad asked me what I wanted for my sixth birthsol, and I said the antique wrist computer we

saw in Borealopolis a couple sols ago, at the flea market. So they sent for it and here it is! I deliberately

picked out one so old it won't network to the house computers, and I can have some PRIVACY at last.

A diary. So this is my diary. It doesn't have direct retinal imaging, and it's broken so I have to do text

only. But it's mine, and only mine! I used to keep a diary on the house net, but now I need to keep my

thoughts to myself. This will stay always on my wrist or under my pillow, and they'll never read what I

really think, or what I plan.

They're going to send me “home.”

To them, home is a little star I can see in the morning and evening sky. They say it's blue; to me it's just a

white star with a smaller white star always near it. A double planet. The bigger of the twin planets is the

one they call home, which, to be fair, is reasonable, I guess, since that's where they were both born.

Home is also where my precious older brother went, the one Mother always talks about when she says,

“Oh, Sekou learned to read when he wasn't even two,” or, “Remember how Sekou was so good about

doing his chores?”

When I was less than a mear old, they sent Sekou back to Earth because he had some disease that the

hospitals here can't treat. They have one picture of Sekou and me. I had my hair in cornrows, decorated

with little red beads. Sekou, about two mears old, had really short hair, almost none at all. He was

darker than I am, really cute, if a little bit skinny.

My mother is the worst with the Saint Sekou stuff. Dad is more sympathetic.

I get jealous of Sekou sometimes, but I think about him and wonder what it would be like to have a big

brother to play with. It's not worth leaving Mars, of course, but it would still be really great.

Maybe I should keep this diary so Sekou can read it.

Dear Sekou:

Our parents say they came here for their freedom, because the streets of every city on Earth were unsafe

for Kiafricans. Because Kiafricans after four centuries of legal freedom were still treated like second class

citizens, sometimes even lynched. But if they wanted freedom, why did they have to buy it with so many

mears of slavery (oops! they don't call it that term) indenture—to the Martian megacorp? And, as it

turns out, why am I not safe here on Mars? On Earth, the danger was violence. Here, it's another kind of

death hanging over our heads.

If they bought their freedom with nine mears each, eighteen mears together, of labor, if this is what they

had to pay for freedom, why am I not free to stay on the planet I love?

* * * *

Smythe Farm and Laboratories, Summer-February 2 , 2202

Dear Sekou,

It's harder than I expected getting time to record in here. I have to pretend to record in my diary on the

house computer, or Mother will get suspicious (Dad's the trusting type).

I think I'll record a little bit about why I love my home, because if I get sent back to Earth I'll want more

than pictures to remember Mars.

Let's see.

Our home. My bedroom, with its skylight so I can check on the wind and sun and stars anytime, even in

the night. The greenhouses full of Mother and Dad's experiments. The frost flowers we grow in the

low-pressure greenhouse. The patch of oxygen-conserving, antifreeze plants, amazing blades of green in

the sun from Summer-February until Summer-November. Antifreeze plants grow outside on the naked

soil, but unfortunately they don't flower. We have to propagate them from root cuttings. But they impress

Polaricorp, which is the corporation which runs this part of Mars.

The sky. The Winter-June sky, so full of stars. We live near the pole, and for three hundred glorious sols

each mear, the sky is full of jewels so thick I just have to make up stories about the King of the Universe,

who spilled them into our Martian sky.

The slow summer sunset and sunrise, such a delicate blue against the pink sky. The sols in Summer-June

when the sun doesn't bother to set, just floats on the horizon like a glowing silver medallion on a string of

invisible stars. The moons, bright like silver coins. Last mear there was an eclipse, and we waited until

Deimos almost glided over the sun, then stole a peek while one bright bead (because Deimos isn't very

round, it has valleys and humps) sparkled for a moment.

Sekou, you know Earth doesn't even have moons. Well, yes, it has the other planet, which people from

Earth insist on calling The Moon. (Do you call it that?) Can't they see it's way big? It's a planet, called

Luna, for heaven sake!

The huge valley, Valles Marineris. Oh, wouldn't I love to explore the bottom of that one. Maybe that's

where they'll find fossils, little stony pieces of bacteria or (here's a word I learned last week) diatoms.

Maybe I'll go there when I grow up. Maybe I'll be on a team that discovers fossils.

The great high mountains, bigger than the ones on Earth. No one will ever walk all the way to the top of

Olympus Mons, Mother says. But maybe she's wrong. She doesn't know me.

But of course I'm not going to grow up on Mars. They're sending me back, unless I can stop them.

Mother asked me where “the little wrist computer” is. Meaning this computer, my diary. She's not stupid.

She probably figured I'm keeping a diary. So I told her it was lost, I couldn't find it. Ha. As if anything

could get lost in this biome. Every every solar cell, every drainage pipe, every pane of glass, every fork,

every wrench, is in its place, almost like we worshipped them. Because they were either manufactured by

Martians in Valleston, or else (hard to imagine) brought from Earth. Like this, my old-fashioned, antique,

flea-market wrist computer.

Our house computer is sort of an antique, too. We're not like some city people that have contact lens

chips or headplants so we can watch the news or listen to music twenty four point five hours a sol. Or

Earth people who have Mars-knows-what nanotech junk, which is dangerous anyway after what

happened to that town in Scotland on Earth.

It's in my pocket. I always hide it when I take a bath or change clothes.

But maybe I better not record just yet what my plan is.

* * * *

Smythe Farm and Laboratories, Summer-February 5, 2202:

Dear Sekou,

I didn't feel very good for a couple sols there. That stupid doctor from Earth gave me some kind of

pep-pill, supposed to kill the bad cells and pump up the good ones. At least that's what they said. It

made me feel worse rather than better.

But let's talk more about Earth and why I'd rather die than go there, even if it's where you live, Sekou.

First, I wouldn't mind it so much, despite the awful things my Mother and Dad already told me about

how they mistreat us Kiafricans. The gravity is bad, I know, but you spend some time in a station where

you exercise everysol with big elastic bands and get strong so you can survive, plus they give you

calcium-magnesium vitamin D pills, and anyway I'm not quite through puberty, so maybe when my

hormones kick in (yeech, it feels icky to talk about this stuff), they'll grow me bigger muscles and bones

so I won't feel the gravity so much.

It would be an adventure. Plants grow outdoors all the time there. I've read they even kill plants they

don't want—weeds. Weeds? Imagine. I would feed them to the iguana, who would love them and get all

fat and juicy.

Although they don't have high mountains, apparently they do have huge thick clouds and weather with

lots of liquid H2O coming down out of the sky, which sounds weird but fun. And I'd love to see a live

river or ocean, since ours are all dead. Animals. They have animals running all over free. People keep

some of them for pets.

One of the girls in my on-line math class claims she has a pet cat. Obviously she's lying, just trying to

impress us. Everybody knows cats eat meat, and her family isn't going to keep something around that

lives that high on the food chain without paying its way. I saw a cat in the zoo in Polaris a mear ago. It

was all hairy, just like the holograms. They also have dogs, and ferrets and squirrels, and an alligator, but

nothing really huge, nothing that eats a lot, like whales or elephants or dinosaurs. However, somebody

was planning to bring a baby cow to Mars while it was still small enough to transport. They have

hundreds of other different kinds of animals on Earth.

Yes, I would love to go to Earth for a while. To see you, to find out how you grew up.

But I could never come back. That is, unless I was able to sell myself to one of the megacorps, like

Mother and Dad did. But you have to have special skills and training, like bioengineering, to get yourself

bought and your passage paid back to Mars.

Dad and Mother say I'm gifted. They mean different things by it, of course. Mother says I'm intellectually

gifted, I have a high IQ, meaning I do well in the on-line school. Dad says I have hoo-doo. I can divine.

Dowse for water, that means, in the form of underground permafrost deposits.

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