Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

Then she introduced each new arrival, stating where they were from, what their specialties were, and lists of honors and awards, all from memory. It was an impressive performance. She even knew about us youngsters—Mike Manchester’s national (Canadian) spelling bee, Yuri’s solo with the St. Petersburg Orchestra, and my swimming medal, an extremely useful skill on this planet.

The way she looked at me left no doubt who it was who forbade Paul from being with me. I would try to stay out of her way.

People got together with friends or coworkers—almost everybodyhad been working along with one of the Martian teams en route—and moved toward the workstations and labs to talk. Oz and Josie took me and Card for a guided tour.

We’d already walked through the “hospital,” an aid station about three meters wide by ten long. It was connected to the changing room by an automated air lock; if there was an accident with the main air lock, it would seal off the whole colony.

That was the standard size for most of the buildings, three by ten meters, but most of them were divided into smaller sections. The mess hall where we all met was about two-thirds that size, two hundred square meters for a hundred not-too-crowded people, the rest of the space a very compressed kitchen and pantry.

About half of the overall floor space was “cabins,” more like walk-in closets, where people slept. Most of them were two meters long by a meter wide, three meters high, with upper and lower bunks for two people who had better be compatible. The bunks folded up to the wall, and desks for working or reading folded down. Four of the cabins were a half meter longer, for seven-footers.

The walls were colorful, in sometimes odd combinations. Each unit, twelve to thirty-two people, voted on a weekly color scheme. The walls glowed a comforting warm beige or cool blue most places, but there were bright yellows and moody purples and a Halloween orange.

We walked down the main corridor, about a meter wide, past six rows of cabins. The last bunch of sixteen had temporary partitions and improvised bunks, where most of us newcomer Earthlings would sleep. In normal times, that would be the recreation area, so people had real motivation to set up the new living areas we’d brought.

Then there were three large work areas, which besides labs and computer stations contained separate rooms for administration, power regulation, and environmental control—water, air, and heat. Finally, there was an air lock leading to the biosciences laboratory, where there were strict controls. We tried to be careful not to contaminate the Martian environment, and conversely, if there were dormant alien microorganisms in the rock and soil specimens, we didn’t want to let even one of them into our air and water. The consensus was that it was unlikely Martian microbes could affect us, but who wants to put it to the test? The whole area was kept at a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the colony, discouraging leaks.

Here I was on a brand-new world, making history, and my phone beeped to remind me that I had a history paper due tomorrow. I thumbed that it would be a day late, 10 percent grade reduction.

Oz invited Card and me back to the cabin he shared with Josie. The four of us could sit comfortably on the lower bunk. He showed me how the desk worked, folding down with retractable arms, revealing a small high-definition screen. The work surface was flat but had a virtual keyboard. The arms were a clever parallelogram construction that let you position the desk at various heights.

The walls were covered with pictures, only two his own work. From art history class I recognized Rembrandt, Pollack, and Wyeth paintings; the others were by Scandinavian artists I’d never heard of.

A public-address system called all “new colonists” to dinner. It was fantastic, after months of ship rations. Salad with fresh greens and tomatoes, hot corn bread, fried tilapia.

After the meal, we were invited to come up and look at the farm. Those tilapia weren’t the happiest-looking fish I’d ever seen, crowded into a small tank of murky water with agricultural waste (their food) floating on top.

Most of the crops had supplemental lights over their beds, Martian sunlight being pretty thin. It was easy to recognize stands of corn and apple trees, tomato plants, and beds of lettuce and cabbage. I didn’t know what rice looked like, but it was probably different on Earth anyhow; not enough water here for paddies. Kaimei laughed when she saw it.

We went back down to get our assigned sleeping areas straight and get on the shower roster. There were two showers, and you could sign up for a twenty-minute interval for the female one. (The men only had fifteen minutes; there were more of them.) There was a complicated list of instructions in the small dressing room.

We were allowed one hundred sixty minutes per month, two showers a week. The twenty shower minutes you had included ten for undressing and dressing. The ten minutes you were actually in the shower included only five minutes of actual running water: get wet, then soap and shampoo, then try to rinse off.

All of us newbies were penciled in for showers if we wanted them— if! I had one scheduled for 1720, and waited outside the door for ten minutes. Mrs. Washington came out, radiantly clean, and I slipped in to undress and wait for Kaimei to finish, behind the shower curtain. The dressing room was the same size as the shower, about a meter square, and, unsurprisingly, smelled like a girls’ locker room on Earth.

I chatted with Kaimei through the curtain when her water stopped and she switched to the dryer. No towels, just a hot-air machine. She came out, looking all new and shiny, and I moved my sweaty corpus in to be sluiced.

It was an odd sensation. The water that sprayed from the handheld nozzle was warm enough, but the rest of your body gets really cold, the water on your skin evaporating fast in the thin air.

The amber liquid that served as both soap and shampoo was watery and weak, probably formulated more for its recycling efficiency than its cleaning power. But I did get pretty clean, much cleaner than I’d ever felt on the ship. I used the last thirty seconds of rinse time letting the warm water roll down my tired back.

There was a fixed dryer about four feet off the ground, somewhat aimable, to get your back and butt dry, and a handheld thing like a powerful hair dryer for the rest. The heat was welcome, and I felt pretty wonderful when I pulled the curtain.

Dargo Solingen stood there naked, bony and parchment pale. She marched by me without a word. I managed “Hello?”

I dressed quickly and looked at the roster. There had been someone else’s name after mine, someone unfamiliar, but now it was Dargo Solingen. I supposed she could butt in line anytime she wanted, pulling rank. But it was an odd coincidence. Did she want to see the sexy body that seduced her pilot? As if you would have to be a great beauty to appeal to a guy who’s been celibate for three months. I think “nominally female” would fill the bill.

I shared a small temporary space with Elspeth and Kaimei—an air mattress on the floor and a bunk bed. We agreed to rotate, so everyone would have a bed two-thirds of the time.

No romantic trysts for a while. I could ask the girls to look the other way, but Paul might feel inhibited.

Hanging sheets for walls and only one desk, with a small screen and a clunky keyboard and an old VR helmet with a big dent on the side. The timing for that worked out okay, since Elspeth had classes seven hours before Eastern time, and Kaimei three hours later. We drew up a chart and taped it over the desk. The only conflict was my physical science class versus Kaimei’s history of Tao and Buddhism. Mine was mostly equations on the board, so I used the screen and let her have the helmet.