Blue Hearts of Mars (2 page)

“I’ll see you again, I promise.” He stood up. Each motion away from me tore a piece of my heart out. Not to be dramatic. I’m not that way, you know. Dramatic. I mean, I can be a bit. But not too bad. Nothing like my friend, Mei, anyway. So when I say it felt like chunks of my heart getting ripped out, I’m not teasing. It was like somehow there were tenterhooks driven into the flesh of my heart by that piercing blue color of his eyes and that smile, and those blasted fingernails that were so perfect, I wanted to feel them all over my body. He moved away, and the hooks pulled pieces of flesh with them.

I felt a cry rise in me for him to wait, but I hunched down into my seat and watched him leave the coffee bar. The group of kids from school pushed around him. I saw some of them make robot-like faces at him and knock their shoulders into him.

I hated them for it.

“Retta!” One of them shouted at me. It was Stig. Stupid, stupid Stig. He was a caveman, I swear. “Retta! Pour me a tall one!”

Right. Like the coffee bar served alcohol and not coffee. Real hilarious.

He came darting toward me and got in my face. I swatted him away, and not in a playful manner. In a “you’re a terrible person” way.

He fell backwards laughing, dodging another arm-punch from me.

“Leave me alone, Stig. I’m off, my shift is over.” I glanced at Matt, my boss, who was wiping the counter behind the bar. We shared a mutual look of disdain and he shook his blond head slowly at me. He hated to serve customers like Stig.

Outside I saw Hemingway stop at the fountain in the middle of the plaza. I wanted to run after him. Something in me said I’d never see him again if I didn’t. He stared down at his reflection, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans—I wondered if they were that FreeMars brand—pulled something out, a cappa or a markka or something, and tossed it in. I found myself fantasizing about what he wished for.

*****

I got home and threw my RedSand jacket down—I suddenly hated it after my conversation with Hemingway—heaved a huge, dramatic sigh and fell onto the big sofa in the front room. I glared at the jacket for a moment, loathing its hideous colors and feeble design. And not just because of Hemingway.

Well. Maybe it was because of him.

“What’s wrong with you?” my younger sister Marta asked, only glancing at me over her shoulder for a moment before returning to her work. She was fingertip-painting on the window Gate. So far she’d done a rather intricately detailed house with ceramic roof tiles and a nicely landscaped yard. The Gate was on transparent view, so the house appeared to be nestled into the slope that rose into the mountain Elysium Mons in the hazy distance on the other side of the glass, out in the unprotected atmosphere. Our apartment was almost on the top level of the dome-scraper and there were red mountains beyond the dome. New Helsinki was in a valley—it protected us slightly from the dust storms.

I sighed again. There was an ache in the pit of my stomach. “Oh, you know, nothing,” I answered her at last.

“How was work?” she asked absently, adding the figure of a woman to the veranda. I noticed it and felt a pang in my gut. Was it supposed to be mom?

“Work? Work was great. Fantastic. As always.”

She glanced over her shoulder at me again and raised a mocha-brown eyebrow at me. “You look like crap. Did Stig ping you with a rude message about breaking up again or something?” Oh the inquiries and the pinging. I sighed again and flipped over onto my back so I could stare at the ceiling.

I rubbed my wrist near the edge of the Link where it was curling slightly from being worried so much by me when I was lost in thought. I hadn’t been pinged by
anyone
in what, two days? I was a veritable wallflower. Seeing Stig in person wasn’t much worse than his awful, poorly written messages.

“Nah,” I said. “But he came into the coffee bar. That wasn’t much better.”

“You know he just wishes you were still his. And I mean
his
. He thinks love is about possession.”

“That’s totally it.” Marta was four years younger than me, and sometimes we didn’t really get along. Usually because she acted immature about things. There were times when she exhibited a surprising acumen about random subjects, however, like, for instance, this startling insight into the mentality of my former boyfriend, Stig.

“I hope you just ignored him, Retta. You’re too good for him.”

I laughed. “Thanks Marta.” I searched my mind for something nice to say to her. I couldn’t recall anything going on in her life besides her partiality to Gate fingertip-painting. “So that house looks amazing. I think it’s your best yet.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” she said, absently.

I wanted to ask if she’d gone outside much that day to hang out with kids her age or if she’d just stayed cooped up in the apartment. But I didn’t.

Instead, I glanced at my Link. When was the last time I’d gotten a message? A while. “So,” I said, sighing, remembering how I could see galaxies in Hemingway’s eyes. “Maybe I’ll just go to my room. You OK or should I make dinner?”

“I ate some soup already. Not really hungry now.” She turned back to her painting.

I watched her fingers gliding over the glass for a minute. Sighing again—I was losing count, but it must have been the tenth one since getting home—I got up and went to my bedroom, to my own Gate, and punched a few translucent buttons. The glass clouded over until it was dark. I pulled up the Database of All Human Knowledge—really it was a very grandiose name for such a tiny amount of information. Still, maybe there was something on there about why blue hearts like Hemingway were so human-like. Maybe it was a conspiracy to crap on susceptible teenagers like me. Maybe it was just to toy with us, to dangle forbidden fruit before us and snatch it away when our eyes got too big and our mouths watered so much we just gave in. That had to be it. Because I could see no other reason to taunt us. I mean, did anyone else feel the way I was feeling right then, or was I just a freak?

I felt like a freak.

The database didn’t help. Of course there were no explanations. It was just how things were. Like how the cities were under domes and how all our houses were in these narrow complexes that towered so high they almost touched the dome. Things just were. Right? And kids like me just had to get used to them. That’s what my dad said when I got irritated over injustices.

I programmed my Gate to play music and laid down on my bed and listened to the sounds pouring in around me. With my eyes closed I could still see Hemingway and his perfect jaw line that swept up to his ear, his cheek bones molding the bends of his skin in all the right ways, the curve of his bottom lip when he smiled, his brown-gray close-cropped hair. And his laugh. I could hear it. His steel-blue eyes were looking at me in my mind, tap-tapping into my brain, his eyes alight with electric galaxies.

I stared into his eyes in my mind. Could I ever get close to him? I needed to. There was so much I didn’t know about him. What was it like when he slept? How did his body feel to hold? How did his hair smell? Did it have a fragrance the way a human’s would? I needed to know.

The song played. I started feeling really down. Like there was no hope for me.

Sitting up in bed, I scraped my fingernails over my scalp and through my hair, which was long, caught the bulk of it into one hand and pulled it into a crazy, twisty knot on top of my head. I went to the mirror in my small bathroom.

“OK,” I said, “It’s OK. You’re not a freak, self,” I coached myself. It worked. Well, usually. It wasn’t working now. Maybe when my dad got home I could talk to him about it.

Yes. Sounded like a good idea. He’d confine me to my room for a month until I forgot about Hemingway.

“OK, you’re being insane.” I said to my reflection. I flinched. A strand of blonde hair fell into my face out of my cool hair-tower. My skin was pale, normally, but it looked paler than usual at the moment. My hazel eyes were as boring as ever. But looking at them right then, I could see nothing extremely different between my own eyes and what I’d seen in Hemingway’s. There was consciousness there. Something alive. Something brilliant and self-aware.

That was the most important thing about it, right?

How fickle am I? A week went by and I was beginning to forget that I’d ever been interested in a guy named Hemingway. Really. That’s how fickle I am.

The thing about it was, I knew I just needed to get past him and all the energy he was taking up—thinking about him, wanting to see him again, daydreaming about him.

The rules are pretty strict. From childhood we’re taught there’s something different between humans and androids. They have no souls. Beneath their skin, there’s blood, sure, but it’s running through arteries and veins that have the building blocks of metals in them. I mean, if you cut open an android like Hemingway, you’d see almost everything you’d see in me. The biggest difference, I guess, so they say, is that his heart is this big bluish thing. And mine is red.

But for myself, I’ve never looked inside an android. I’ve also never even seen my own heart. For all I know, I too have a blue heart. And maybe our hearts look the same.

“Ms. Retta,” the historical geography teacher was saying.

“Uh, what?” I asked, looking back at him, away from the window where I was watching a crowd of athletes walk by as they headed for the sports field. They looked good. That’s what I was thinking, to be quite honest about it. My eyes focused on the teacher, Dr. Craspo, who was an android, by the way. That was the rumor anyway. I’d never seen any evidence to back that up, though.

“We all thought you might know the answer to the question,” Dr. Craspo said, tilting his head down and looking at me over the tops of his spectacles. He wore those for effect, entirely. I was quite sure of that.

“Which question was that, Doctor?” I asked, feeling my ears begin to burn. I tried coaching myself into not blushing all the way. It wasn’t working.

“Can someone else fill Retta in?” He glanced around, pursing his lips like he’d caught me being real bad or something, as though daydreaming was a sin or the like.

The most obnoxious girl in the universe lifted her hand.
Oh please
, I said to myself, sighing, and shaking my head dramatically. A few of my neighbors noticed and muffled their chuckles.

Of course Dr. Craspo called on her. “Agatha,” he said.

She turned to me with her eyebrows all raised like she was my superior, and spoke while wagging her head for emphasis, “Where was the first extraterrestrial human colony?”

Her voice was like the high-pitched whine of the atmosphere filters in the industrial section of the dome. It made me want to claw my ears out, and I’m not being dramatic when I say that.

I nodded and smiled politely at her, as though this were the most important question in all the galaxy that anyone could ask me. I leaned forward attentively, and tilted my head to one side as though seriously considering it. “Ah, beautiful. Beautiful question, Dr. Craspo, and thank you so much, Agatha, for bringing it to my attention. As we are all aware, the first and most historical human colony out into the stars, as they used to say, was on the moon, of course. Earth’s moon, that is, as we all recall that several other moons have had colonies on them, both successful and unsuccessful. But let’s not dwell on the tragedies of human history.”

I almost thought some of my classmates might stand up and clap when I finished. Just for teaching Agatha a lesson. And Dr. Craspo, a bit, since he had a propensity for trying to catch us students when we were daydreaming or nearly falling asleep. Sometimes historical geography could be unusually boring.

But no one clapped. Everyone’s head swiveled as one back toward the teacher. His mouth was drawn into a thin line. “Thank you for that very educational answer, Retta,” he said dryly. I waited for him to say something about paying better attention next time, but he didn’t. He just turned back to the giant Gate behind him and began whipping objects across the display with his hand. Here comes Earth’s moon, whup, there it goes, here comes Titan, and Europa, and there they go. Here’s a satellite image of the first colony, there it goes, here’s a detailed image of the first enormous civilization movers as they crept through space out towards their fates among the moons and stars.

It went on like that.

Finally class was over.

Out in the hall, a few of my friends approached to congratulate me on showing up Craspo. We laughed and then moved in a large herd towards the cafeteria. I got a lunch tray with some kind of salad on it and went to a table with my oldest friend, Mei. We sat down and she launched immediately into some story about a show she’d been watching all week. I’d never heard of it because I worked three times a week after school and didn’t have time to watch shows. Not that I wouldn’t have liked to.

“So the premise is basically that all of these people are confined in a ship that’s just drifting along. They’re told that it’s going somewhere. But when they look out the ports, they can’t tell if they’re moving. The whole thing is to see how they work together. Like with cabin fever. It’s a total psychological experiment, right?”

I nodded. “Sounds gripping, really. I wish I could see it.”