Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

Nobody talked about it much, but the idea of putting a breeding population of young men and women on Mars gave this project some of its urgency. After Kolkata and Gehenna, any nightmare was possible.

The mind veers away from it, but how much more sophisticated would the warriors have to be, to make the whole world into Gehenna? How much crazier would they have to be, to want it?

We got into that once on the climber, Dad doubting that it would be physically possible, at least for a long time, and also doubting that the most fanatical terrorist would be that crazy. To hate not just his enemies, but all of humanity, that much. Mother nodded, but she had her bland patient look: I could argue, but won’t. Card was kind of bored, familiar as he was with playing doomsday scenarios. Sometimes I think that nothing is really real to him, so why should doomsday be any different?

Time started passing really fast once we were settled into school, and most of our parents into their various research projects. It was more comfortable than you would expect, with all of us crammed into a space the size of a poverty-level tenement—but the parents and kids seemed to be giving each other more respect, more space.

Even the little kids calmed down. Mary Jefferson taught all four grades at once, in a partitioned-off part of B galley, and when they weren’t in school or exercising, they played down in the zero-gee room, pretty far from anyone’s work area, and usually respected the no-screaming rule.

(The idea of “Spaceship Earth” is such an old cliché that Grand-dad makes a face at it. But being constantly aware that we were isolated, surrounded by space, did seem to make us more considerate of one another. So if Earth is just a bigger ship, why couldn’t they learn to be as virtuous as we are? Maybe they don’t choose their crew carefully enough.)

Roberta was having more trouble than I was, making the transitionfrom high school to college. For one thing, she’s very social, and used to studying together with other girls and boys. That wasn’t really possible on the ship, with us all going to different schools. Besides, she’d tested into advanced math and chemistry, while I was starting with calculus-for-dummies and general physical science. We both had English lit and philosophy, but of course with different textbooks.

Mother sometimes worried about my tendency to be a loner, but it turns out to be an advantage, studying when your classmates are millions of miles away.

I did coordinate my study hours with Roberta, so we were both doing lit and philosophy homework at the same time, and she helped me over some humps in the math course. We also had exercise and meal hours together most of the time, along with Elspeth.

It was not much like anybody’s picture of college life. No wicked fraternity parties, no experimenting with drugs and sex and finding out how much beer you can hold before overflowing. Maybe this whole Mars thing was a ruse my parents made up to keep me off campus. My education was going to be so incomplete!

That was actually a part of college I hadn’t been looking forward to. Not “growing up too fast,” as Mother repeatedly said, but looking foolish because I didn’t know how to act when confronted with temptation. When do you politely decline and when should you be indignant?

And when should you say yes?

At the midpoint of our voyage, Mars was a bright yellow beacon in front of us, Earth a bright blue star behind. It was an occasion to party, and the Mars Corporation had actually allotted a few kilograms’ mass for a large plastic bottle of Rémy Martin cognac for that purpose.

Since several of the adults didn’t drink, it proved enough to get the rest of them about as intoxicated as they wanted to be, or perhaps a little more. Like me.

We joked about the drinking age between planets, and my parents shrugged. Since there was no other alcohol aboard ship, I wasn’t likely to become a drunkard. Which doesn’t mean I couldn’t get into trouble.

Paul had only one drink, mixed with water—the curse of being captain, he said wryly—but I had three before my parents went to bed, and maybe two afterward. It lowered my inhibitions, but I suppose I wanted them lowered.

The drinks were served in the galley, where there was gravity to keep the booze in the glasses, but some of us moved into the zero-gee area to dance. Pretty strange, dancing without a floor. It was all kind of freestyle and rambunctious. We took turns asking the ship for music. A lot of it was old, jazz and ska and waterbug, or ancient like waltzes and rock, but there was plenty of city and sag.

Paul and I danced for a while, usually with each other, and I guess I started feeling glamorous, or at least sexy, dominating the captain’s attentions. Not that there was much unmarried competition.

The zero-gee room goes to night-light from midnight till six, conserving power and giving people a reasonably private, or at least anonymous, place to have sex—or romance, but I don’t think much of that was going on. There was no real privacy in the sleeping quarters, just a thin partition, which didn’t prevent some people from embarrassing the rest of us. But most couples waited and met at one dark end or the other of the zero-gee room.

At midnight the only others in the zero-gee room were the Manchesters, who left us alone after a bit of obvious yawning and stretching.

Afterward, we agreed that we both had been sort of time bombs ticking, waiting for the midnight hour. If I hadn’t wanted to be “seduced,” I could have left while the lights were still on. But there was something desperate going on inside me, that wasn’t just sexual desire or curiosity.

Our whispered conversation had gotten around to virginity, and my sort of in-between status, which I’d never told anyone about. But the booze loosened my tongue. When I was thirteen I was fooling around with a boy who had “borrowed” his sister’s vibrator, and in the course of investigating how to use it, he was a little clumsy and popped me. It wasn’t very painful, but it was the end of that relationship, right at the playing-doctor stage.

He didn’t go to my school, so I didn’t know whether any of the other boys knew about it, but I imagined they could all tell at a glance that I wasn’t a virgin anymore. After about a year or so I realized that I still actually was.

I was unpopular and unattractive, or at least felt like it. Skipped a grade but then got it back after my parents took me out of school for a year to go overseas. They worked in London and Madrid, and I went back and forth, learning about enough Spanish to order a Coke in a restaurant.

From not speaking Spanish it only took a few minutes for the conversation to get about to the difficulties of having sex in space, with lack of privacy being only one of several problems, with the conservation of momentum and angular momentum high on the list. Difficult to describe, so I asked him to demonstrate, with our clothes on, of course.

That stage didn’t last too long. We explored another problem, that of getting at least partially undressed while both of you had to hold on to a handle or go spinning apart.

We did manage to get our bottoms mostly removed. He looked kind of large, if smaller than my friend’s sister’s vibrator, but he was slow and gentle. As soon as he got it all the way in, he ejaculated, but we stayed together, and he recovered in a few minutes and did it again.

I’d been prepared for an ordeal, but in fact it was all pretty exciting and fun. I kept losing my grip, and he’d swim after me, while I groped for one of the handles. We wound up floating in midair, though, holding each other’s shoulders, rotating slowly, then not slowly.