Saving Mars by Cidney Swanson Page B

often, and when I think of him, yes, Jessamyn, I will regret his absence.”
    Jess felt a flash of hot anger against Earth and the cruel satellites. “Promise me one thing, Eth. Promise you’ll take control of that laser array.”
    “That is what I am meant to do.”
    “It shouldn’t have happened,” whispered Jess. “It’s wrong. As wrong as …” Jessamyn broke off, unable to think of anything that was comparably unwarranted.
    Her brother sat beside her, not speaking, not demanding that she complete her thought. She found his presence deeply comforting.
    At last, pointing to the heavens, she spoke again. “We’re traveling fifty-five million kilometers and the stars don’t change. They should be different, don’t you think?”
    “What other stars would they be?”
    “I don’t know. It seems like, if we journey so far, shouldn’t the stars be different?”
    “Fifty-five million kilometers is a very short distance, Jessamyn. We are not leaving our solar system.”
    “I know. It just feels like … I don’t know how to explain it, Eth.”
    “We are small creatures, Jessamyn, and the universe is infinite.”
    Jess followed the arch of the treated observation window from one side to the other across the field of stars. “Yeah, guess we all got a good dose of our insignificance today.”
    “We are small, but we are also infinitely great, Jessamyn. Infinitely important.”
    “You figure?”
    “Our companions are gone, but their importance reaches outward and onward. For each of us. For everyone on Mars. Their importance is boundless. Like the universe.”
    The pair sat in silent contemplation of the heavens. At last Jess spoke again.
    “Do you believe that, Eth? That the universe simply goes and goes and goes?”
    “Of course it does.”
    “I know it’s infinite .” Jess said, repeating her brother’s word. “But do you actually believe in it? In infinity? In something that has neither beginning nor end?”
    “I believe,” said Ethan.
    “Hmm,” sighed Jessamyn.
    Between Mars and Earth, while clocks kept time with the stars, the Red Galleon and her crew advanced toward hope.

Chapter Nine
    ANOMALOUS READING
    Prior to the inception of the Terran Re-body Initiative, Earth faced several grave problems. Overpopulation had led to hunger and war on an unprecedented scale. Local governments attempted to eliminate these problems, but none had anything like the success of those who recompensed desired behaviors using a variant of a re-bodying program. Such plans offered a reward, in the form of placement inside a new younger body, gifted to those citizens engaging in behaviors that combated their nation’s worst problems. Put simply, the Terran obsession with youth provided an incentive to work toward peace and plenty. But where to find healthy young bodies in numbers sufficient for those who had earned them? A program in Belarus gained precedence and became the model for the worldwide Terran Re-body Initiative.
    Predicated upon the idea that youth was wasted on the young, eighteen-year-olds “swapped” places with fifty-four-year-olds using a method of consciousness transfer. The eighteen-year-old, now said to be in “twobody,” spent the next eighteen years in the aging fifty-four-year-old body whilst apprenticing for the work that would be his or her life’s contribution. At the end of the apprenticeship years, another body transfer was made into “threebody.” (Most Terrans agreed that the switching from a seventy-two-year-old body into a thirty-six-year-old body was the single most satisfying transfer.) Threebodies thus had a body age that matched their chronological age. And when they completed their eighteen years of useful contribution and good behaviors (their “working years”), they retired, at the age of fifty-four, into svelte, young, eighteen-year-old bodies for the last quarter of their lives.
    A beautiful solution, agreed most Terrans, providing severe checks against anti-social