I'm getting over a really bad cold/ flu, so my weekend posts will be going into next week. Of course, I happened to have another installment of the Space Guys and obsessive world-building. As usual, a table of contents is at the end.
The crew remained crammed into the Mission Fuselage for a week and a day. The quarters were too close for any secrets. Alek continued to share Jason’s bunk quite happily. They were not the only couple to do so, in or out of marriage. Anastasia kept company with both Jackie and Vasily, sometimes on the same night. Even so, Donald continued to press his own suit for her attention, without ever quite provoking her to drive him away. The greatest shock, however, came when Jason pushed back a partition and beheld Dr. Cahill bunked down with Jax. She had merely said, “Sorry, I was just leaving.”
Meanwhile, the crew were
pushed to step up a regimen of exercise to counter the effects of low gravity.
It required 90 minutes a day in a set of centrifuges that filled their own
module. It took a heavy toll on all of them, yet the Martians proved better
able to endure it. When Alek pressed him long enough, Jason offered a semblance
of an explanation. “It’s like… being a whale that was living on land,” he said.
“It’s hard getting in the water. But you finally know… what your tail is for.”
Alek had pondered only a moment. “That makes no sense at all,” she said in her uninflected voice. “I can tell, you are not even-“ He had kissed her then, and that quieted her for a while.
Where Jason thrived, Alek
quickly wilted. At one point, he found her simply collapsed a few meters from
the centrifuge. Jason had carried her to the adjoining infirmary. She had
mumbled, “No, no… I want to go home…”
“I know,” Jason had said.
“`There is no place like home.’ But we won’t be home for a while.”
That had brought her back
to lucidity. “But my home is Dalmatia,” she said. “Yours is Mars. If we both go
home, you will be gone.”
“I know,” Jason answered
between kisses. “We can work that out later.”
Inevitably, there were long periods when even the Martians were completely exhausted. Then they would lounge about, reading, listening to music, or watching movies and videos. Jason quickly got through his own set, of which the Kong set became consensus favorites. They also watched the adventures of Sparky the Space Squirrel. He visited the planets and moons of the Solar system, narrated by an authoritative voice that explained the science. He was frequently accompanied by Spunky, a girl chipmunk who was hinted as a romantic interest, and Tweel, a Martian ostrich creature. Jason vaguely hoped would that playing the adventures keep Moxon at bay. To his discomfort, Moxon insisted that he loved the character. He would not only watch the cartoons but laugh, a braying sound Jason had never heard at any other time, quite unlike the sharp barks that came when he made his own jokes. Once, he insisted they watch a very early black-and-white cartoon that was the first to feature the character. It turned out that it was a training film for power plants, in which the squirrel was just Sparky. Invariably, he did whatever the viewer was told not to do, resulting in electric sparks between his long, tufted ears. That got long and loud laughter from Moxon.
Another set that got approval were number of movies based on the Oz books in the ship’s library. They were on silvery discs that initially interested Jason more than the movies themselves. When he asked Alek about their circulation on Earth, she shrugged. “They never quite caught on,” she said. “Well, not yet. Mostly, they get used by businesses for data storage. For movies and music, people prefer microtapes. They do not scratch, plus you can play things you record yourself.”
The movies were mostly animated, many of them from the outlying satellites of the Federation. Jason shuddered at one that was made with stop-motion models, many clearly made from the fur and bones of real animals. The one he liked best was a retelling of the third book, prominently featuring Tik Tok and the evil Nome King. The film he knew best was different than the others. It was live-action, with bits of stop-motion. It was made as a musical, starring a blonde girl as Dorothy. She met the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the cowardly Lion. As per the story, they went on a quest to overthrow the Wicked Witch, who was guarded by the likes of giant bees, tiger-headed giants, and a flying ape. In their first viewing, Alek pressed against him as Dorothy told the Scarecrow, “No matter how dreary and plain it may be, there is no place like home.”
They also got a steady stream of broadcasts from Earth about the expedition, carefully cataloged by old Yuri. Seemingly every member of the expedition was being celebrated in some quarter of the Earth. The Martians were getting the highest proportion of coverage. It bemused Jason to see reporters from Earth venturing to the furthest reaches of the New Dakotas to interview his family and friends. He gave a meaningful glance at Jax when they saw an interview with his wife and Preacher Mosey. Jax glared back when another broadcast on Alek showed her in the lap of another man, who was interviewed as her fiancée. He shrugged and continued stroking Alek’s legs. “He never did this good as you,” she murmured to him.
Jason was more interested in the toy advertisements, which Yuri sometimes played back to back. Innumerable toys were based on the Janus and its crew. There were many representations of the ship itself, from crude, cheap playthings to realistic scale models. Then there were sets clearly modeled on toy soldiers, always groups of interchangeable space explorers with one or two women mixed in. He was most intrigued by the larger figures, evidently between 10 and 15 centimeters. Some were merely scaled-up toy soldiers, frozen in bold poses. Others were jointed toys referred to by the Earthside crew as kinetic toys. They could be moved in a range of poses, and their features tended to differentiate them. Some of them were soldiers in all but name, with out-of-scale versions of the plasma pistols that in reality were reserved for the 12 officers and the most senior members of the military contingent. Others appeared to be intended as dolls for girls, though rarely sold as such. These were sold along with stylized vehicles and sets representing ships, surface rovers and Martian-style living domes. On one of the few occasions Tanya wandered in, he heard her hiss, “Decadent exceptionalist kaka…”
At one point, Jason
talked to Raeder about the toys. “A significant part of our funding is from
product licensing,” he had said. “One of the conditions they all agreed to was
that they would not use the names or likenesses of any of the crew.” Even as
they spoke, an ad came on for a line called Major Maxon of the Strato Corps,
centered on a character definitely resembling Moxon.
That got a shrug from Moxon. “It’s an old line,” he said. “The Corps looked into it. As far as we could figure, a copy writer talked to an old-timer in a bar in Jakarta. It wasn’t one of ours, but it might have been a local auxiliary. It didn’t matter.” Jason nodded, then scowled as another ad came on. It was for a doll named Alexis Astra, a beautiful young lady with outfits for a dozen different careers. She definitely resembled Alek, while her gentleman friend was definitely not him, but could have been Jackie.
Then there was a stretch when Alek got to talking with Anastasia. That brought Anastasia to offer peace. “Look, we may be divided between the Union and Federation, but we have more in common with each other than anybody back on Earth,” she said. She had looked to Alek then. “You aren’t too bad. You’re crazy, but you’re friendly. And you aren’t nosey."
Jason looked between
them. He ventured to ask, “What happened between you to, anyway?”
“We met at a conference
once,” Alek said. No other comment was forthcoming from either of them.
“Well, if you’re friends
now, what do you want to talk about?”
“Boys,” Anastasia said
with a smile
“Boys,” Alek agreed.
“Then maybe I should go,” Jason said.
“You don’t have to,” Alek
said. “So, what is really going on with Jackie and Vasily?”
Ana smiled at that. “Sometimes, I need different things,” she said. “I can’t always get it from one man. Vasily and I came up together, so I owe him for that. Jackie mostly just likes to talk.” She looked to Jason. “Frankly, he says it’s easier to talk to me than it is to talk to you or especially to Jax. He tells me stories from his parents, and stories from their grandparents… Damn, your people really treated his like kaka. But they aren’t all the same, either. Down in Hellas, you got the ones who wanted Mars to be a great experiment in reconciliation. His folks were the ones who just wanted a place to live by themselves.”
“What about Yuri?” Alek
asked. Ana said nothing
“What about Donald?”
Jason put in.
“Ai, bog,”
Ana said. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing, actually,”
Jason put in. “Is there something to tell?”
“Never mind,” Ana said. “You know, I could give him a chance, but you’ve both seen what he’s like when he thinks you’re encouraging him. Anyway, what about you two? Are you getting married? Are you going to get married? What are you doing, anyway?”
“What, are you asking if
she’s a virgin?” Jason said. The women looked at him, then each other, and
promptly burst out laughing.
“We are taking our time,” Alek said. “I am an enlightened woman. He is an enlightened man. We do not need to rush.”
As they spoke, Moxon
wandered in, as he often did. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “A few people said you
three were together. I told them I’d check on you. I’ll clear out if it’s
private.”
“Is not private,” Alek
said. She held out one of the microprint sheets to Anastasia. “Can you read
this?”
Ana made no move to take
it. Instead, she looked at Jason. “You showed her your trick, didn’t you?”
“Only because Jax told
her about it,” he said defensively.
“`Your trick’,” Alek repeated. “So can you all do it, or only him?”
By then, Moxon was
sorting the disc boxes. Jason was past being surprised when he chimed in. “They
can all do something,” he said.
“Yeah, we’ve got time to
practice,” Jason said.
“What you show me is not practice,” Alek countered. “I looked into it. No human can read microprint without magnification. There is something more, so why don’t you not tell me?”
Moxon sat down then. “That’s the thing,” he said with his barking laugh. “Your Martian farm boy isn’t exactly human. None of them are. Are you?”
Jason met Alek’s gaze,
very uncomfortably. “It’s not like that,” he said. “Humans just aren’t built
for Mars. For all of us who were born there, it doesn’t just affect our bodies,
it affects how we grow. We have to receive injections, hormones and things,
starting before we’re even born. It mostly stimulates the growth of muscle
tissue and bone calcium. You could call it enhancement. We’d be like
superheroes out of the comic books if you put us in an Earth-like environment,
assuming something else didn’t go wrong like it probably would. But with what
Mars does to us, it really just evens things out. It’s like trying to fight a
fire that’s burning your house down by building more house.”
“You too?” Alek looked to
Anastasia.
The other woman met her gaze. “If anything, the Federation’s treatments are stronger,” she said. “He’s right about the rest. We call it the Tin Man problem, after Nick Chopper. It’s one of our only stories that’s not from the Greek myths."
“It is from a Greek
story, the ship of Theseus,” Moxon said. “But it works.”
Alek looked at Anastasia.
“Show me,” she said. She added boldly, “Hit me.”
Jason moved to intervene. Moxon just leaned forward. “You first,” Anastasia said. Alek swung with an open hand. She had barely raised her hand before the Martian caught her by the wrist. “It works on our reflexes, too,” Ana said. Then she countered with a back-handed blow that knocked Alek back in her seat. Jason rose to help her then, but Alek pushed him back. He held his ground, lifting her up.
“Now you know our secret,” Jason said. “Except… it’s not really a secret. We don’t talk about it, and the Administration makes sure it stays out of the press. But it’s all there if you know where to look. We all know you’re all about reading papers, no matter how far they are outside your specialties. So why would all this be a surprise to you?”
Alek relaxed. “I knew a little,” she said in her neutral tone. “It was back when we were just writing. Some of the stories were bad. I chose not to read anymore. I did not want to know no more, unless you told me.”
Jason untensed and drew
her into an embrace. “There is one thing I do not understand,” she said. “Moxon
could do the trick, too. So what happened to him?” They looked up. Moxon
was gone.
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