“I salute you. I love you. The helium-3 that you mine is the life-blood of the terraforming process. Soon the red planet will have breathable air, livable soil. And soon, when Mars is habitable, when you brave pioneers have made ready the red planet for us softer Colors, we will join you and you will be held in highest esteem beneath the sky your toil created. Your sweat and blood fuels the terraforming!
“Brave pioneers, always remember that obedience is the highest virtue. Above all, obedience, respect, sacrifice, hierarchy …”
I find the kitchen room of the home empty, but I hear Eo in the bedroom.
“Stop right where you are!” she commands through the door. “Do not, under any condition, look in this room.”
“Okay.” I stop.
She comes out a minute later, flustered and blushing. Her hair is covered in dust and webs. I rake my hands through the tangle. She’s straight from the Webbery, where they harvest the bioSilk.
“You didn’t go in the Flush,” I say, smiling.
“Didn’t have time. Had to skirt out of the Webbery to pick something up.”
“What did you pick up?”
She smiles sweetly. “You didn’t marry me because I tell you everything, remember. And do not go into that room.”
I make a lunge for the door. She blocks me and pulls my sweatband down over my eyes. Her forehead pushes against my chest. I laugh, move the band, and grip her shoulders to push her back enough to look into her eyes.
“Or what?” I ask with a raised eyebrow.
She just smiles at me and cocks her head. I back away from the metal door. I dive into molten mineshafts without a blink. But there are some warnings you can buck off and others you can’t.
She stands on her tiptoes and pecks me good on the nose. “Good boy; I knew you’d be easy to train,” she says. Then her nose wrinkles because she smells my burn. She doesn’t coddle me, doesn’t berate me, doesn’t even speak except to say, “I love you,” with just the hint of worry in her voice.
She picks the melted pieces of my frysuit out of the wound, which stretches from my knuckles to my wrist, and pulls tight a webwrap with antibiotic and nervenucleic.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“If I don’t lecture you, you don’t quiz me on what’s what.”
I kiss her on the nose and play with the thin band of woven hair around her ring finger. My hair wound with bits of silk makes her wedding band.
“I have a surprise for you tonight,” she tells me.
“And I have one for you,” I say, thinking of the Laurel. I put my sweatband on her head like a crown. She wrinkles her nose at its wetness.
“Oh, well, I actually have two for you, Darrow. Pity you didn’t think ahead. You might have gotten me a cube of sugar or a satin sheet or … maybe even coffee to go with the first gift.”
“Coffee!” I laugh. “What sort of Color did you think you married?”
She sighs. “No benefits to a diver, none at all. Crazy, stubborn, rash …”
“Dexterous?” I say with a mischievous smile as I slide my hand up the side of her skirt.
“Reckon that has its advantages.” She smiles and swats my hand away like it’s a spider. “Now put these gloves on unless you want jabber from the women. Your mother’s already gone on ahead.”
3
THE LAUREL
We walk hand in hand with the others from our township through the tunnelroads to the Common. Lune drones on above us on the HC, high above, as the Goldbrows (Aureate to be technic) ought to be. They show the horrors of a terrorist bomb killing a Red mining crew and an Orange technician group. The Sons of Ares are blamed. Their strange glyph of Ares, a cruel helmet with spiked sunbursts exploding from the crown, burns across the screen; blood drips from the spikes. Children are shown mangled. The Sons of Ares are called tribal murderers, called bringers of chaos. They are condemned. The Society’s Gray police and soldiers move rubble. Two soldiers of the Obsidian Color, colossal men and women nearly twice my size, are shown along with nimble Yellow doctors carrying several victims from the blast.
There are no Sons of Ares in Lykos. Their futile war does not touch us; yet again a reward is offered for information on Ares, the terrorist king. We have heard the broadcast a thousand times, and still it feels like fiction. The Sons think we are mistreated, so they blow things up. It is a pointless tantrum. Any damage they do delays the progress of making Mars ready for the other Colors. It hurts humanity.
In the tunnelroad, where boys compete to touch the ceiling, the people of the townships flow in merriment toward the Laureltide dance. We sing the Laureltide song as we go—a swooping melody of a man finding his bride in a field of gold. There’s laughter as the young boys try running along the walls or doing rows of flips, only to fall on their faces or be bested by a girl.
Lights are strung along the lengthy corridor. In the distance, drunk Uncle Narol, old now at thirty-five, plays his zither for the children who dance about our legs; even he cannot scowl forever. He wears the instrument suspended on shoulder straps so that it rests at his hips, with its plastic soundboard and its many taut metal strings facing up toward the ceiling. The right thumb strums the strings, except when the index finger drops down or when the thumb picks single strings, all while the left hand picks out the bass line string by string. It is maddeningly difficult to make the zither sound anything but mournful. Uncle Narol’s fingers are equal to the task, though mine only make tragic music.
He used to play to me, teaching me to move to the dances my father never had the chance to teach me. He even taught me the forbidden dance, the one they’ll kill you for. We’d do it in the old mines. He would hit my ankles with a switch till I pirouetted seamlessly through the swooping movements, a length of metal in my hand, like a sword. And when I got it right, he would kiss my brow and tell me I was my father’s son. It was his lessons that taught me to move, that let me best the other kids as we played games of tag and ghosts in the old tunnels.
“The Golds dance in pairs, Obsidians in threes, Grays in dozens,” he told me. “We dance alone, because only alone do Helldivers drill. Only alone can a boy become a man.”
I miss those days, days when I was young enough that I didn’t judge him for the stink of swill on his breath. I was eleven then. Only five years ago. Yet it feels a lifetime.
I get pats on the back from those of Lambda and even Varlo the baker tilts me his brow and tosses Eo a fist of bread. They’ve heard about the Laurel, no doubt. Eo tucks the bread into her skirts for later and gives me a curious look.
“You’re grinning like a fool,” she says to me, pinching my side. “What did you do?”
I shrug and try to wipe the grin from my face. It is impossible.
“Well, you’re very proud of something,” she says suspiciously.
Kieran’s son and daughter, my niece and nephew, patter by. Three and three, the twins are just fast enough to outrace both Kieran’s wife and my mother.
My mother’s smile is one of a woman who has seen what life has to offer and is, at best, bemused. “It seems you’ve burned yourself, my heart,” she says when she sees my gloved hands. Her voice is slow, ironic.
“A blister,” Eo says for me. “Nasty one.”
Mother shrugs. “His father came home with worse.”
I put my arm around her shoulders. They are thinner than they used to be when she taught me, as all women teach their sons, the songs of our people.
“Was that a hint of worry I heard, Mother?” I ask.
“Worry? Me? Silly child.” Mother sighs with a slow smile. I kiss her on the cheek.