Chapter 6

The passenger window of the surface-to-orbit spacecraft was a little bigger than aircraft windows in the 21st century. It was about two feet square, Ken estimated, and not composed of the thick, blurry double panes of glass as were passenger aircraft windows. Instead, the barrier between himself and the lethal Martian atmosphere was nothing but a thin layer of the same sort of clear plexiglass that made up the walls of the serenity level on top of the university building, or the glass that made up the windows of Karen's house. It looked dangerously flimsy to Ken's eyes and was so clean, one could hardly tell it was even there. He could see perfectly through it to where the taxiway of the spaceport was rolling by outside. Yellow lines were painted on the edges of the taxiway and blowing Martian dust drifted by on the dunes beyond. All around him he could feel the gentle thrum of the spacecraft's engines at idle. The inertial damping system was at work again and he could feel no motion.

"Tell me again how safe these things are," he said to Karen, who was sitting in the plush seat next to him.

They were seated near the front of the vehicle, just five rows back from the cockpit door. All around them other Martians were relaxing in their seats, some peering out the window as he was doing, others looking at the screens of their PCs or talking softly to each other.

"There has never been a fatal accident of a surface-to-orbit craft since the revolution," she assured him. "Not even one. For every take-off, there was a landing or a docking with all hands exiting safely."

He sensed no deceit at her words and they did make him feel better about being blasted into space toward an orbiting city in geosynchronous orbit on the other side of the planet. "What about before the revolution?" he asked.

"Well..." she said slowly, "there were occasionally some incidents back then. The Earthlings who ran the spacecraft industry in those days weren't quite as safety minded as we Martians are. They tended to sacrifice safety features if they were deemed too expensive to install or maintain. It was kind of like the airline industry back in your time, I imagine."

"What kind of incidents?" he asked. "Were they crashes?"

"Historically, the most common type of surface-to-orbit accident occurs during reentry as a result of something damaging the heat shield. Unfortunately, that usually results in everyone getting smoked."

"I see," he said, chewing his lip thoughtfully. He looked back out the window and noted they were now turning onto another taxiway, the landscape spinning slowly to another angle. They began to accelerate again, the lines on the ground picking up speed as they shot past them. A female voice from the intercom system then began to speak.

"Good morning, my butt buddies," it said. "What the fuck's the haps? They call me Lauren and I'll be flying this heap of shit for you today. We're talkin' about one hour and thirty-three minutes from lift-off to docking at Triad Spaceport, if we don't erupt in a ball of fuckin' flame halfway up."

There was a laugh from the rest of the passengers at her words. Ken however, didn't think it was the least bit funny. "I can't believe she just said that," he told Karen.

She shrugged, disinterested. "That's one of the oldest lines on the hard drive," she said.

"So anyway," Lauren, the faceless pilot continued, "just kick your shit back, have yourself some of our smoke if you're into it, and slap out with the ride."

They continued to head down the taxiway, traveling at about forty miles per hour, Ken estimated. Once again he reached down to check his seatbelt and once again became distressed when he remembered there weren't any seatbelts. Though his chair was quite comfortable, there was absolutely nothing to secure him to it. And something else was missing as well, he suddenly realized.

"Don't the flight attendants give a safety lecture before we take off?" he asked Karen.

"A safety lecture?" she asked, her brow furrowing in confusion.

"Yeah, you know, like what we should do if there's an emergency while we're in flight, a decompression or something like that?"

"If something like that happens," she said simply, "then we'll all die. What's the point of having a safety lecture if there's nothing to do about the problem?"

Ken really didn't have an answer for that one. He decided to just sit back and not think about the fact of what was about to happen. It was something he didn't do a very good job of.

After ten minutes of rolling along the taxiway Ken sensed a change in the thrum of the engines. He looked outside and saw that they were slowing down. The spacecraft turned one more time, edged forward a little, and then came to a halt. They sat there for a few seconds and then there was a clanking noise, clearly audible throughout the cabin.

"What was that?" he asked.

"The launching ramp locking onto us," she said. "It's built into the ground. Once we're parked on it and secured to it, it will elevate us to launch attitude, which is sixty degrees."

"So the front of the craft is going to lift up into the air?"

"It's already happening," she said, pointing out his window.

He looked and was startled to see they were indeed rising into the air, the front of the spacecraft being elevated to point at the red Martian sky. His head began that uncomfortable swimming sensation again at the conflict in sensory and movement input. He should have been pushed back in his seat, should have been holding on for dear life to keep from falling backwards toward the rear of the cabin. Instead, he was sitting nicely in his chair as if he were on level ground. He felt as if he could even get up and walk around in the aisles if he wanted, nearly perpendicular to the ground outside. In fact, three or four people were walking around at the moment, two of them uniformed flight attendants, one a passenger returning from the restroom.

"This is just too weird," he said, tearing his eyes from the outside so he wouldn't have to look at it.

"You've gotta love artificial gravity," Karen said as she fiddled with the computer console installed on the back of the seat in front of her. "Where would we be without it?"

"Safely back on Earth?" he asked.

She seemed to think this was a joke and she laughed. "How about some smoke?" she asked him, pulling a long hose out of a slot. "I just ordered up a few hits of some Eden green."

"You're going to smoke marijuana now?" he asked her.

"Why not?" she asked, putting the hose in her mouth. "It's the only way to fly." She began to suck on the hose, drawing in a large hit. When she finished she tried to hand it to him.

"Uh... no thanks," he said. "I've already got enough of the paranoids."

"Suit yourself," she said. "But if you want to order some booze instead, just access the menu on the screen in front of you."

"Booze? Its only eight in the morning."

This prompted another look of confusion from her. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Are you kidding?" he asked.

"I don't think so. Is there something wrong with using intoxicants at eight in the morning?"

He took a really good look at the other passengers for the first time and noticed that many of them were in fact sipping from bottles of beer or glasses filled with obviously alcoholic beverages. And they weren't Bloody Marys either, the one drink that had been deemed socially acceptable to consume in the morning hours in his time. "Well, back in my day," he said, "it was considered... uh... uncouth to drink alcohol before noon."

"Why?"

He found he really didn't have an answer for her. "I'm not sure, now that you mention it," he admitted. "What the hell? Maybe a little booze will mellow me out."

"Now you're talking," Karen said, taking another hit from her hose.

He ordered a rum and cola drink from the menu screen. No sooner had he finished pushing the buttons than a scantily clad and very attractive flight attendant appeared with it in her hand. She smiled flirtatiously at him, passed a few trashy words, and then told him he owed her a quarter of a credit. He laid some derm on her screen and she disappeared back down the aisle once more. He sipped from his drink, finding it refreshingly heavy on the rum. It warmed his stomach nicely as it went down.

A minute later the captain announced they had been cleared for lift-off. Ken had time for one last nervous look at Karen before the entire spacecraft began to thrum with power. Karen reached out and took his hand comfortingly as thick smoke erupted outside the window, obscuring the view.

"And we're off," Karen said, taking another hit from her hose.

Ken, fascinated and terrified, continued to look out the window. The smoke and dust cleared a moment later and he saw they were now several hundred feet above the ground and rising quickly. The spaceport dropped away below them, opening up in a panorama of taxiways and buildings. The speed of their ascent increased exponentially and within seconds, the entire city of New Pittsburgh became visible. And again, there was that uneasy feeling of not being able to feel any motion, even though his eyes could clearly see they were moving nearly straight up at a tremendous speed under what had to be crippling acceleration.

"What do you think?" Karen asked, watching his face.

He tore his eyes away from the window and looked at her. "I think I need a drink," he said, putting his glass to his lips and gulping nearly half of it in one swallow.

The engines continued to blast and they continued to rise higher and higher. Outside, the pink tinge of the sky gradually darkened to the black of space. Below them the landscape became a wide-open view of the cratered Martian surface, with no signs of human habitation visible. He could clearly see the curvature of the planet now. Six minutes into the flight the captain announced they were now free of the atmosphere and would be throttling down a bit for injection into the geosynchronous orbital path. There was a moderate lessening of the powerful vibration and a few mute pops that Karen explained were the maneuvering thrusters firing, adjusting their course. The engines burned for another ten minutes, during which Ken finished his first drink and half of a second one, and then suddenly cut off, leaving an eerie sense of silence.

"What now?" he asked, still looking out the window to the planet far below. A ways in front of them he could see the terminator between day and night approaching.

"Now we're just coasting," she said. "They've got us on a path that will carry us up to geosynchronous orbit and allow us to catch up to Triad, but that will keep us from actually breaking orbit and heading off into space. When we get closer they'll turn the ship around so they can decelerate us for docking."

"And Triad is on the night side of the planet right now?"

"Right," she said. "All of the terrestrial cities are in the western hemisphere. Triad orbits over the eastern hemisphere. That's so surface-to-orbit craft don't have to make a complete orbit to dock. They just blast up to the proper altitude and by the time they get there, they're at the station. It makes things much more efficient that way. We don't have to wait for a certain window to launch toward Triad or head back down to the surface."

He nodded, taking another sip. He was starting to relax and enjoy being in orbit now. "Won't it be the middle of the night on Triad though?" he asked.

"No, it's the same time in Triad as it is in New Pittsburgh. Since it's an orbiting city the actual position of the sun doesn't mean very much. The lights will be bright there and it will be the middle of the workday. During the evening hours the streetlights are dimmed down to help keep body rhythms aligned."

"I see," he said, his mind trying to grapple with that one and finally succeeding.

They floated in silence for a while. The ship overtook the terminator of the planet and the view of the landscape was replaced by total blackness. Outside, where the bulk of the surface didn't intrude, the stars shone with a brilliance he had never imagined. Not even in the clearest deserts of Earth, not even atop the highest mountain could they shine with this intensity and in these numbers. The individual constellations were meaningless, unrecognizable due to the sheer amount of other stars that ordinarily couldn't be seen. The white glow of the Milky Way, which was never more than a vague dusting on Earth, looked like an endless band of glowing steam, clearly visible in three dimensions.

"There's Earth," Karen said, leaning into his shoulder and pointing at a particularly bright, bluish colored star. "It looks like it's about three-quarter phase right now."

Ken looked where she was pointing, fascinated at the thought of viewing his home planet from a hundred million miles away, further than any human had ever been from it in his time. "Wow," he said, mostly to himself. "It's so small from here."

"Hard to believe that more than twelve billion people live on that little blue blob, isn't it?" Karen asked. "You can't tell by looking at it with the naked eye, although with a good telescopic magnifying program you can make out the city lights on the surface. If you look close you can make out the moon at about three o'clock."

He averted his eyes just a little, so that he wasn't looking directly at the planet, and sure enough he could see a dim point of light just to the right of it. "And there are cities on the moon too?" he asked.

"Oh yes," she said. "Almost as many people live on the moon as live on Mars. It's EastHem's primary mining colony. They have seven large cities on the surface and a complex economy."

Ken shook his head a little in wonder. "It's hard to imagine all of that," he said quietly. "I mean, I was up half the night reading about your history on the Internet and I've even seen pictures of it, but my mind just has a hard time accepting it. I just can't grasp that there are now people living on the moon, even people living on Mars and I'm now one of them."

"Culture shock," she said sympathetically. "As I told you yesterday, all of our cryogenic people have gone through it but you're probably experiencing it the worst, because we had no time to ease you into the way things are these days."

"Yes, it is mighty shocking all right."

"You seem to be handling it fairly well so far, though," she said. "And in time you'll adjust and even embrace our way of life, I think. You just need to see a little more of it in action. Jacob is going to be at Marjorie's house when you meet her. I'll talk to him about arranging that police ride-a-long I told you about."

"Jacob is your brother, right?" he asked, trying to remember all of the names she had thrown at him the day before.

"Fuckin' aye," she said. "My little brother, although he's half a meter taller than me and outweighs me by more than twenty kilos. He caught a military flight up from Eden, where he's stationed."

"He lives in Eden but he'll be able to arrange a ride-a-long for me with the New Pittsburgh police?"

"Oh yes," she said. "His husband used to work for NPPD."

Ken wasn't sure that he had heard her correctly. "Did you say, his husband?"

"Fuckin' aye," she said casually. "His name is Belung. He and Jacob met when Jacob was in flight training at New Pittsburgh. They just had their third anniversary."

Ken swallowed slowly. "Are you saying that Jacob is a... is a..."

"A faggot?" she asked.

"Uh... well, I was going to say gay, but..."

Karen laughed. "Now that's a really old-fashioned word. Wow. The only place you see gay used is in ancient literature. Here, the polite term for a male who likes to exclusively fuck the same gender is faggot, although rump-ranger, dick-smoker, and fudge-packer are also acceptable terms in mixed company."

"Those were all... you know... derogatory slang terms back in my day," he said, still trying to grapple with the fact that his grandson was... well... a faggot.

"Yes," she said, nodding. "Like 'fuckin' aye' and 'down with it' and 'suck my hairy ass, ' right?"

"Well, I never told anyone to suck my hairy ass, but... yes, I guess so."

"The normal evolution of words over the generations," Karen said. "Although here on Mars I imagine it evolved a little quicker than usual. Remember who our ancestors were, after all."

"Yeah," he said. "I suppose that makes sense." He swallowed again. "So on Mars gay... uh, faggots, are allowed to marry each other?"

"Yes," she said. "Homosexual and polygamous marriage has been legal on Mars since pre-revolutionary times, although the Earthlings didn't recognize such things when they ran the place. They still don't on Earth, by the way, in EastHem and WestHem both."

"Polygamous marriage is legal too?"

"Of course," she said. "If any two people or three people or ten people of any sex or combination of sexes wish to get married, what right does the government have to say they can't? What business is it of the government?"

"Well, back in my day they used to think it was a lot of their business. Marriage was heavily regulated and controlled. There was a lot of paperwork involved. And only a man and woman could get married."

"And, if I'm not mistaken," she said, "you had a divorce rate that was nearly fifty percent, right?"

"Yes," he said. "That sounds about right. What is your divorce rate?"

"Less than five percent," she said. "It's gone down considerably since we post-revolutionary children started to reach marriage age."

"Less than five percent?" he said in disbelief. "You have men marrying men, women marrying women, three and four people marrying each other, and only five percent of them get divorced?"

"Well, polygamous marriages of more than three are pretty rare, but yes, that's how it is. You have to understand though, marriage is viewed differently by us than it was by you."

"Differently? In what way?"

"It is considered an almost sacred thing among Martians," she said. "To marry a person is to make a deep commitment to them, to declare that you love them and you wish to spend your life with them."

"That's what marriage was in my day as well," Ken said.

"No," she said sternly. "That is not what marriage was in your day. That is what you pretended marriage was. What marriage actually represented to your society, and what it still represents to Earth society to this day, is a social conformity for both sexes. You were told by society that you must marry in order to be normal and so what happened was the desire for marriage became independent of the desire to find someone you actually wanted to spend your life with. Your people ended up marrying someone they thought they could get along with instead of someone they loved. Women ended up marrying for status and for what their husband did for a living. Men ended up marrying because career advancement demanded that a man maintain a family."

"That's not true," Ken said. "I married Annie because I loved her. I did want to spend the rest of my life with her. And obviously she loved me as well or she wouldn't have had me frozen and shipped off to space instead of just letting me die."

"Annie did love you, Ken, of that there is no denying. And I have no doubt you loved Annie as well. Unfortunately, however, you are a rarity among Earthlings of your time period. Surely you must see that, don't you? Think back to others you knew. Had most of your friends and acquaintances married by the time they turned thirty of your years old?"

"Yes," he said.

"And of all the people you knew who did that, how many of them were truly happy? Be honest now. How many?"

He did as requested and gave an honest evaluation of the people he had known and the status of their marriages. And, shockingly, he discovered she was right. His best friend at the SJPD was Jack Stellon. He and his wife barely tolerated each other. They had gone through two trial separations and both routinely cheated on each other. They remained a couple in name only for the sake of their children. His other two close friends, Rick Palestine and Jason Markley were both divorced and paying child support. Even his own parents had divorced when he was sixteen years old. Annie's friends were no different. At the time of his death Annie's best friend at the school had been knee-deep in divorce and child custody hearings. Annie's parents had divorced when she was a teenager too. Her sister, at the time of his shooting, had been slogging through a loveless marriage to a wealthy accountant and popping anti-depressant pills and Valium just to keep her sanity. Of all the people he knew, he honestly could not say any of them had a marriage as happy as the one he had shared with Annie. Not even one!

"My guess is you can't think of any, right?" Karen asked gently.

"No," he admitted. "I guess I can't."

"The sanctity of marriage is a beautiful thing," she said. "It is symbolic of love and respect and is the basis for childbearing and childrearing. You Earthlings at some point perverted the institution to the point where you had people marrying because they felt they had to, because they didn't want to be different from their friends, because they thought that was what a life had to encompass in order for happiness to occur. And what you ended up with was a world full of miserable people who eventually ended up hating each other. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule but they were rare. Your marriage to Annie was one such exception. You were one of the lucky few who happened to find someone you actually loved to marry. If I understand my family history correctly, you met Annie quite by chance, didn't you?"

"Yes," he said. "We met when I demonstrated for her class the helicopter I flew."

"A very fortunate turn of events," she said. "But suppose you hadn't met her that day? Suppose she had been sick or there had been some emergency that would have precluded you from demonstrating your aircraft for her. What would have happened in your life then? Would you have gone on searching for that perfect woman until you found her? Or would you have married someone else because you thought it was time to get married?"

Again he employed some brutally honest self-examination and again he found she was entirely correct. He had been 32 years old that day he had met her and had been dating semi-regularly for the past eight months an emergency room nurse he had met in a cop bar. He had vividly clear memories of turning the marriage idea over and over in his head in those days. And why had he been considering marriage to Jessica the nurse? Had it been because he loved her, or even because he thought he loved her? No. Of that there was absolutely no doubt. He had been thinking about it because it had seemed he was getting too old to be single, because people might start to wonder if there was something wrong with him, because his parents and his friends were always asking him when he was going to settle down. If he hadn't met Annie when he did it is very likely he might have proposed to Jessica the nurse within six months, surely no more than a year. And would they have been happy together? After living with Annie for two years, after enjoying a marriage to a woman he truly loved, he knew he would not have been. Within six or seven years, after producing a few children, no doubt, they would have been just another divorce statistic or just another couple enduring a loveless life of staying together for the sake of the children.

"I would've married someone else," he said.

"Whether you loved her or not?"

"Whether I loved her or not."

She smiled sympathetically at him. "That's exactly the sort of thing we have gotten away from here," she said. "The average age of marriage on Mars is around seventeen years old-about the age you are now. There is no legal basis for this, of course. Anyone on Mars can legally marry once they reach the age of nine. Most, however, choose not to. Most of us choose to explore life for six or seven years, to develop the maturity required to make such an important decision, to explore all aspects of sexuality. It has also been found that encountering true, mutual love, that finding the right person just takes that long. Sometimes it takes longer. There are people I know who are more than twenty years old before they find that special someone. One of the doctors at the hospital is 25 and still hasn't found that person. But in our society we are conditioned to wait until love finds us the same way your society used to condition you to marry young whether love existed or not."

"And there is no stigma attached to being 25 years old and unmarried?" he asked. "People don't start to... you know... wonder if you're all right?"

"No. We Martians tend to mind our own business about that sort of thing. It is assumed that if someone hasn't married yet, they just haven't found anyone they want to marry yet."

"And there is no stigma about being... uh... a faggot either?"

"Not among the majority of the population," she said. "We are however a very diverse society by nature, so naturally there are some people who oppose homosexual unions both on the sexual level and the marital level."

"Really? Who are they?"

"Mostly God-freaks," she said. "As I said, we have all types here on Mars."

"God-freaks? What are those?"

"Adherents to the ancient Earth religious teachings," she told him. "We don't have much organized religion here but what we do have is often very vocal. There are some Mormons, some Baptists, a few Catholics and Muslims. They like to tell the rest of us we're sinners, damned to hell, destined to be thrown into a pit of fire, and other such bullshit. They bag on the chosen lifestyle of the majority and spend a lot of their days trying to convert others to their viewpoint." She shrugged. "Most people just find them amusing. Who doesn't like being compared to Sodom and Gomorrah, after all?"

"Are you saying that religious people are the minority here?" he asked. "That most of the people are atheists?"

"No, I wouldn't say that most of us are atheists," she said. "It's just that most of us aren't down with organized religion. We don't believe there is a God somewhere who is going to punish us after we die because we like to engage in pre-marital or extra-marital sexuality, or because we have homosexual encounters, or because we don't believe exactly what has been written that we should believe. It's a common sense issue for most of us. The bible and the Koran are illogical and are obviously written with the idea of behavioral control of the population in mind. As Karl Marx said, religion is the opiate of the masses. It is designed to keep us in line by laying down a set of rules to follow on the threat of eternal damnation. It is designed to quell the urge for revolt by promising a better life after death. Why try to change the miserable system you live under if you get paradise after you die? Well here on Mars, we have revolted, we have changed the miserable system we lived under, and we have achieved a fairly decent lifestyle for the masses. Most of the people feel no need for religion here. Many of us-myself included-believe there is a higher power and there is even a Heaven and a Hell we may go to after death. But we also believe admission to that Heaven or that Hell is dependent on your deeds here in this life, not on the beliefs you hold or the deity you chose to worship. We believe your afterlife, if there is such a thing, is probably a reflection of the pain you have caused others throughout your lifetime. We believe pleasure is a virtue to be embraced and shared, not to be ashamed of and hidden."

"No shit?" Ken said in wonder, finding, much to his astonishment, that her religious theories actually made a certain sort of sense. Fundamentalist Christians wouldn't think so, of course, but then they had never been big proponents of common sense anyway.

Karen gave a dreamy smile. "You'll have to excuse me," she said. "I get really philosophical when I get stoned. Anyway, that's the Martian view of religion and spirituality for the most part. There are some atheists among us and there are the God-freaks. The atheists tend to keep to themselves. The God-freaks tend to get a bit annoying at times but most people just ignore them."

"I see," Ken said. "But going back to this marriage thing for a minute."

"Sure," she said. "What about it?"

"You just got done telling me how sacred you Martians view the institution of marriage, how seriously you take it."

"Fuckin' aye."

"Well, the other day, when I was in the hospital, and Zeal, the nurse, gave me that... uh... massage."

"Yes, what about it?"

"I asked her what her husband thought about her giving such massages and she told me he didn't mind."

She looked at him, perplexed. "I'm not quite down with where you're going with this."

"She implied to me that she often did other things with patients as well as... you know, other sexual things. I also got the distinct impression she did sexual things with other people who weren't patients as well."