We had our checklist of things we were supposed to look for, and images to take with our handhelds. I kept having to look at the sample images to be sure I was finding the right things. The idea of finding anything larger than microscopic creatures just running around was so weird. After finding a crab—what was supposedly a little one, as big as my thumb—with its claws, shell, and flat black eyes, my skin itched. The things could be anywhere, buried in the sand under my feet, crawling along behind me.
We got a ten-minute warning to finish our work. Angelyn and I found our shoes and dusted off our feet the best we could. The wet sand stuck to my skin like glue. I rinsed off as much as I could in the water, watching Angelyn for how to do it, but I just got more sand on me, and when I tried to brush it off I got it all over my hands and arms.
Angelyn just laughed. She seemed to love it. “Yeah, you never really get it all off until you get in the shower.”
“Great,” I muttered.
Back at the bus, beyond the grass-covered dunes, Ladhi stood shivering, hugging herself. “This place is disgusting,” she said. “I’m never going to get all the sand off me. I can feel it in my hair.” She scrubbed her fingers in her hair for emphasis.
“On Mars they vacuum you before you come in out of the air lock, to get all the sand off.”
“I could use a good vacuuming.”
Mr. Han asked us to transmit our images and reports for grading. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been able to tell a gull from a sandpiper. Sure, this was all nice, pretty, and educational, and I would always remember sticking my feet in an ocean full of water. But I wondered if the point of all this was to demonstrate yet again that us offworlders didn’t know anything about Earth.
That night, we stayed in a borrowed dormitory at a nearby university, and the next day we headed to Yosemite Park for what Stanton called a “self-esteem and confidence-building workshop.” I didn’t even know what that meant, so I took a chance and asked Angelyn.
“It’ll probably be some obstacle course or game or something,” she said.
“So glorified PE.”
“A little. But better—a different kind of PE. It’ll be fun.”
I huffed, skeptical.
It was worse than I could have possibly imagined.
First, Yosemite Park. If the ocean was overwhelming, this place was even more so. The ocean went on forever, but at least it all looked the same. Yosemite had trees, forests, rocks, mountains, cliffs, meadows, rivers—all in the same place. We got out of the bus and I saw trees—an endless blanket of them. Just like the ones Ethan was so excited about, and sure enough, in the bus he had his face pasted to the window and could barely sit still. I had read about forests. I knew what they were—lots of trees together. I had seen trees—the atriums at home had them. So I should have known what to expect. But I didn’t. Hundreds of trees. Millions of them. There wasn’t a roof, so they kept growing, so high I couldn’t see their tops.
If I scoured away all the vegetation, the cliffs and valleys here would have looked like the ancient river-cut valleys on Mars. But here, the river was still cutting through the valley. More moving water.
I hated the way this planet kept startling me.
“Close your mouth, Polly,” Charles said, walking past me, following the rest of the class as we left the bus. The instructor—somebody new, a Mr. Kristoff Anthony Keller, who was a local guide for the park—led us from the bus down a dirt trail that passed through part of the forest, winding in between towering pine trees. I reached out and scraped my hand across the bark. They didn’t even feel like atrium trees. These were rough, scarred, damaged, and probably had bugs crawling all over them, invisibly. Birds and other animals rustled in the branches.
The path left the trees and entered a meadow, a wide swath of grass like the lawns at Galileo except these were wild—uncut and smelling of dry sunlight. I never thought about sunlight having a smell before. Several piles of equipment lay before us: backpacks, tarp-wrapped bundles, coils of rope. Some of it looked like survival gear.
Then we learned what the “workshop” was going to involve.
Stanton and Keller split us up into groups and assigned each group to one of the piles of gear. Charles and I had somehow ended up in the same group, probably because all the offworlders had been shuffled off together, once again separated from the Earth kids because, as Stanton explained, they didn’t want to push us too hard. Everyone understood that we couldn’t handle the exertion.
That was getting really old. We’d had time to adapt by now and managed to keep up with the Earthers, usually. Not that we looked it—we still all looked like skinny little twigs, but never mind.
So here we were: Charles, Ladhi, Ethan, Tenzig, Marie, Boris, and me.
“I shouldn’t even be in this group,” Tenzig muttered, staring longingly at the group next to us, which included George, Angelyn, and Elzabeth. “I’ve spent enough time on Earth my bone density is practically normal.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage somehow,” Ethan said.
I picked through the gear: backpacks, a stove, a bundle of freeze-dried food, a GPS unit, thermal blankets, some rope and tarps. Survival gear. This seriously looked like the most normal collection of objects I’d seen since getting to Earth. We had everything here we used on Mars except breathing masks and air canisters—which we wouldn’t need here, of course.
Keller explained what we were going to be doing with the equipment: spending the night outside. We’d hike on a predetermined route, follow directions, find our camp, prepare our food, conserve our water, and return in the morning. This was an exercise in cooperation and confidence building.
“When this is all done, you’ll feel like you can conquer the world!” Keller announced happily. He was younger than Stanton and much more exuberant. He wasn’t here to mold us into perfect Galileo students; he was here to get us as excited as possible. Which made me suspicious. He had to be hiding something.
Stanton gazed on blandly.
“As if I’d want to conquer the world,” Charles said flatly, and the instructor gave him a nervous sidelong look.