Journey Between Worlds (25 page)

He laughed and squeezed his arms tight around me. “That's what I've been trying to convince you of all along!”

 

 

Our wedding day was everything I could have hoped for. Paul married us, naturally, and Kathy was matron of honor. Alicia was a junior bridesmaid, though we didn't have a large wedding party, and there were none of the fancy trimmings girls expect on Earth. I couldn't have a long wedding gown; but I did have a white dress, made over from one of Ms. Preston's, and I wore Mother's silver beads with it. (White's practical for everyday here, with our dustless, filtered air, so it's a very welcome addition to my small wardrobe.) And I had a magnificent bouquet, picked from the Champs-Elysées gardens with the special blessings of the city council.

We chose a traditional form of the service, a particularly lovely one, I think—the one where the bride says
whither thou goest I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge
during the exchange of rings. Isn't it strange, how words from so long ago and so far away can still be so appropriate?

We're going to the new colony of Syrtis City when the time comes; it'll be a few years yet before it's founded, but Alex is on the planning committee. What's more, he wants to go before the first dome is up. It'll be hard—dangerous, even. We won't have the comforts New Terra provides. During the early stages we'll be living in a pressurized hut and going Outside every day. (We'll both have to learn how to cycle the airlock!) I don't like the idea, especially considering the baby there'll be before then, but I guess if another city is to be built, that's the way it's got to start.

Meanwhile, besides going to college, I'm still working at the school part-time. I'll probably transfer to the high school as soon as I qualify for my teaching credentials. From the career standpoint, I'm better off here than I'd ever have been at Maple Beach; teachers have higher status in the Colonies than on Earth. And now that I see things objectively, I know my career does matter to me. (The Maple Beach school wasn't a very good one—that was why Dad and Gran sent me away to school—yet I'd planned to teach there indefinitely! It never even occurred to me that I'd have to move if I wanted a promotion.) I'm fortunate; I wasn't faced with a really hard choice about marriage, a choice between my work and living with the person I love. It's ironic. Julie Tamura wrote that she was surprised to hear I'd given up “everything” to become a homesteader's wife, which goes to show how little some people know about the Colonies.

Of course I don't care about advancement for the sake of salary, since on top of our earnings and Alex's secondary homestead rights, we have what I inherited from Dad plus all that insurance money. But I'd like to take part in establishing the new colony's schools. Besides, we're going to put all of Dad's money into the Syrtis City venture. That's what will get it on its feet, Alex believes—using locally controlled funds instead of depending on subsidies from Earth's governments. So you might say that Dad accomplished something for Mars after all, and I know that would please him.

Alex and I have rather a full social life, and not only with our own friends, because occasionally we're invited to the sort of function I used to attend with Dad. I'm learning not to hate it, because I know I'm going to be in for a lot more of that kind of thing if Alex's ambitions work out the way I think they will. It's lucky I had some experience and got well acquainted with people like the Ortegas. If and when Alex decides to run for some sort of office, I want to be a help, not a hindrance, though I doubt if I'll decide to go into politics myself.

Around the first of January, when the
Oregon Trail
came in again, I had a happy surprise: a wedding present from Gran! I'd never dreamed that she would send anything; she can't afford interplanetary shipping rates any better than most people can. But this wasn't a package, it was simply a fairly thick envelope. At first I was puzzled, because Gran and I correspond regularly through the normal data-link channel; there'd be no reason to send a letter aboard a ship, for it would be out-of-date weeks before it got here.

But the envelope didn't contain a letter, other than a brief handwritten note. Its bulk came from something wrapped in white tissue and sealed with gilt-edged tape. It was the locket! My ancestor Melinda Stillwell's gold locket, that had traveled the long, hard ox trail across terrestrial plains and mountains, all those many years ago.

I could imagine Gran standing by the window as she wrapped it, looking out at the shimmering blue ocean that I shall never see again. Holding the locket up and swinging it by its chain as I used to do when I was little, I thought of how I'd once wished that I'd been a pioneer woman in an unsettled land. Never make a wish unless you're prepared to see it come true in some astonishing way that you'd never even dream of! Because that may be how it turns out, though if you're lucky, like me, you'll also get some things that you didn't have the sense to wish for.

Now, strange as it still seems to me, I'm truly beginning to think of myself as a Martian! Is there anything more to it than love? Do I believe in the big dream myself, at all?

Well, I've pondered it a lot, and this is what I think: It's the future. Because if you don't believe that human beings will keep growing and changing and moving on, you don't believe in the future at all. If Alex and I weren't here, there'd be others; that's how it's always been, all the way from ancient times through the New World colonies, the western pioneers, the colonization of this solar system—and someday on to the stars. It may be Manifest Destiny as Alex says, or it may simply be that people, individual people, always want to see what's over the hill. It may be something else. But I do believe that if this thing wasn't being done by
somebody,
Earth would be in real trouble someday. I know enough now to say that you can't put permanent bounds on your horizons.

Things never stay the same, and that goes for worlds, too. You can't impose stability on the human race any more than on your own life. A civilization that can't expand will turn to violence, I'm told. Or at least decay. How paradoxical that the only way to assure the future for Earth is to leave it!

Maybe it's not what I'd have chosen to do alone. In fact I'm fairly sure it's not, but Alex wants it, and I love him. After all, that first Melinda wouldn't have chosen the covered wagon journey, either, if not for love of her husband, Jess. Maybe she lay in the bare, drafty log cabin night after night dreaming of the old Massachusetts seaport town, the way I dream of Maple Beach. The way the pilgrims who built that town must have dreamed of England. . . .

If the baby's a boy, we're going to name him after Dad. If it's a girl, I think we'll name her Susan—maybe even Susan Constance—because, while not all our memories of
Susie
are happy ones, it was in those days that we began to fall in love. And the very name
Susan Constant
was always something of a symbol for us.

Perhaps when little Susan gets old enough, she'll enjoy playing with Gran's locket, the way I used to do, and perhaps someday she'll have a daughter of her own to pass it on to. I wonder how many times it will be handed down before it comes to the girl who'll look wistfully back at a faint star, growing still dimmer in the center of a viewport, and say: “That's the sun.” Not Earth, or Mars, but the sun! There will always be new worlds, I guess, as long as there are new generations.

This story, first published in 1970, was written several years earlier—before the Apollo flights to the moon, before anyone had gone to another world in a spaceship and looked back at Earth from a distance. It was based on the ideas I had about space when I myself was growing up. Yet when I came to revise it for republication, I found that the only facts to be updated, apart from the details of references to computer technology, were those related to the discoveries made in 1976 by the Viking landings on Mars.

In most ways, the story's initial edition was more relevant to today's world than to the era during which I wrote it—and there are more young people today who share my interest in the future. But I have made some minor changes that reflect modern women's outlook toward marriage and toward careers. My views of these things have changed more than my views of space have. I believe more than ever in all that I originally said about the significance of space colonization.

The settlement of new worlds may not proceed just as I've described it. Like many space advocates, I now think that the problems of Earth such as overpopulation and pollution can best be solved by building human habitats not on distant planets, but in space itself. It's possible that orbiting colonies will become a reality before Martian colonies do, although this book does not mention them. That makes no real difference to the story. Society a century from now will not be just as it's imagined today in any case; still people's dreams and people's feelings will remain the same.

Readers who would like to talk about the story are invited to write to me at [email protected], and to visit my Web site at
http://www.sylviaengdahl.com
. I'm looking forward to meeting you there.