Life on Mars by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

Author:Jonathan Strahan (Ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Viking Children's
Published: 2011-04-14T07:00:00+00:00

Helene came and got me a couple days later, rescuing me from a truly epic sulk in my parents’ cabin.

“You look like Martian crap,” she said.

“How’s that different from Terran crap?” I asked her.

“It’s redder, with a slightly longer day. Also, less gravity.”

My father chuckled and my mother smiled and I heard the klaxon go off in the back of my head, the one that went ALERT! ALERT! PARENTS ARE ABOUT TO SAY SOMETHING LIKE “IS THIS YOUR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND, DAVID?”

“Mom-Dad-this-is-Helene-we’re-going-out-now-’kay-bye,” I said and grabbed Helene and dragged her down the corridor as fast as I could. From behind me, I heard my parents call sarcastically, “Nice to meet you, Helene!” and “Come by anytime,” and other parents looked at us from their bunks through their open doors as we tore ass toward the hatch that led in-ship, toward the low-grav zones.

“What is it?” I asked, when we were through the air lock that separated the decks.

“I’ve been leaving you messages in-game but you haven’t answered them. Finally, I decided to see when you’d last logged in and I saw that it had been like seventy-two hours ago and I decided you must have something terminal so I came to find you so I could tell you my secret before you died.”

“What secret?”

“You’re really a crown prince who was hidden away by the king and queen, sent to live with a provincial bourgeois family so that the evil grand vizier couldn’t catch you. You are the rightful heir to the ancient kingdom of Freedonia.”

“You’re weird.”

She bowed. “Indeed. So, what is it? Cholera? Plague? The crushing ennui of daily existence in a futile and uncaring universe?”

I squirmed. The deck we were on was lightly trafficked—it had a different night than we did, everybody slept in shifts—and semideserted at this hour. I was conscious of the fact that Helene was very pretty and somehow managed not to smell like the Smell, but rather like something slightly floral and nice. I was conscious of the fact that we were alone. I was conscious of the fact that the last time I’d spoken with Helene, I’d chased her off by treating her to an uninvited lecture on corporate responsibility.

“I just didn’t feel like coming out,” I mumbled, staring at my shoes.

“Oh, right then,” she said. “Okay, back you go. See you later.”

She began to walk away. I stared at her retreating back.

“Wait!” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “Yes?”

“I feel like coming out now,” I said.

“Oh, all right then. Let’s go find Vijay.”

I felt weirdly disappointed. Helene wanted to hang out with me and Vijay, which suggested that the half-formed romantic suspicion I’d felt was totally unfounded. Of course. Why would someone as pretty as Helene want anything romantic to do with someone like me? Besides, she was as weird as a sack of snakes; there was no way to predict what was going on in her pointy little head.

I knew, approximately speaking, where Vijay’s quarters were. The “scholarship” bunkroom—the place where

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