There is no chi to be found on Mars, Vicky’s grandmother worries. She frets over how Vicky and her future family will properly set up for health and prosperity, how they can welcome chi into their home and gently guide it into all of the nooks and crannies of their destinies, how they will know to avoid the darts and arrows of misfortune, without the proper tools to measure and mark their home.
Vicky laughs and tells her grandmother, “I can’t take the old ways with me, Nai Nai. The old ways are for Earth, not Mars.” She looks at Earth’s dying horizon, where the red planet burns a tiny pinprick low in the sky. “Mars will have his own flying stars.”
In a few weeks, Vicky will be one of a select few hundred healthy, young colonists hurtling through space, to seed new life on their neighboring planet. Even though she’s proud to have been selected for the honor, Vicky aches to know that she is leaving everyone who loves her. No family —not her parents, not her brother, not Nai Nai— because the Terran Alliance wants genetic variety. No friends, for none in her circle lucked out other than her. She laughs with Nai Nai because if she doesn’t, dread for her upcoming loneliness will overwhelm her.
When the time comes, Nai Nai presses a square package wrapped in worn terry cloth into Vicky’s hands. It is heavy for its size, and about four inches square.
Ten centimeters, Vicky reminds herself. On Mars, everything is metric.
She tries to give the package back to her grandmother. “I can’t,” she protests. “We can only take one personal item, and I already have mine.”
“Leave that other thing behind then,” Nai Nai insists. She curls Vicky’s fingers over the cloth covering and squeezes her frail hands around her granddaughter’s. “This is a part of you, a part of us, that cannot be replaced. Don’t ever forget where you came from.”
“What is it?” Vicky asks, relenting at the urgency in her grandmother’s voice. Vicky couldn’t let her last real-time, face-to-face moment with Nai Nai be one of anger and resentment.
“A way for you to find your way home.”
It isn’t until the shuttle has launched and docked at the orbiting transfer station, miles above Earth, that Vicky has a moment to breathe and reach for her tattered, vintage paperback of The Odyssey, the one personal luxury she is allowed. She pats at the inside pocket of her standard-issue jumpsuit and is confused for a moment when she withdraws a square package. Then she remembers, with a long sigh, that she’d given up the paperback at the weigh-in station for Nai Nai’s gift.

She waits until she has passed the security checks that allow her to board the ship, which will take her and three hundred other colonists to their new home. She takes a seat at one of the countless vinyl tables in the windowless civilian mess deck. Most of the colonists are busy settling into their berths or hanging out anywhere there’s an observation window, so Vicky has her pick of tables. Still, she chooses to sit in the middle of the expansive room, affording her the most privacy from idle onlookers. Whatever she’s about to unveil, it’s the last piece of her past life, and she is reluctant to share it with just anyone walking by.
She unfolds the terry cloth, corner by corner, until she stares at the round, intricately marked metal disc inlaid in the square, wooden base lacquered red. The black-painted metal is covered in characters and sigils in gold and red she doesn’t understand, because she never learned to read Chinese. Two perpendicular red lines intersect to quarter the board into perfect squares. At the very center wobbles a thin, metal needle in an enclosed bubble of water.
Vicky laughs, because there’s nothing else she can do. Nai Nai’s gift is a compass used by feng shui practitioners, a luo pan in miniature. Convenient. Travel-sized.
And it will be totally useless on Mars.
Vicky Wen and the three hundred colonists from her ship are the fifth human payload the international colonization effort has successfully deployed on Mars, so by the time they arrive at Carter’s Landing, it is already an established colony of nearly a thousand people.
A flat sheet of translucent aerogel covers Gale Crater, with the mountain of Aeolis Palus poking up through the middle, like a doughnut. The aerogel keeps the bowl warm and self-contained, heating temps up to 65 degrees Celsius north of the Martian low of negative 60. On days when the human algae in the algae pond get too warm, the colony’s environmental systems pump photochromic solution into the silica base of the aerogel, to shade the crater’s inhabitants and block the heat. A layer of radiation-shielding glass sandwiched in the middle of the aerogel protects the colonists the way Mars’ weak atmosphere cannot. Outside of Carter’s Landing, beyond the protective shelter of its aerogel ceiling, colonists must suit up in EVA gear.
The south section of the crater is partitioned off from the northern section with aerogel walls. To the north is the main colony— living quarters carved into the bedrock of the crater, businesses and public spaces down in the flat plains of the crater’s belly. To the south sprawls the colony’s agricultural endeavors. There, the agricultural team has seeded microbes from Earth into the Martian dirt, hoping that the transplants will take, fueling the food production necessary to propel the colony into self-sufficiency.
It is in the south that Vicky spends much of her time, working 12-hour shifts as one of the base’s solar electrolysis specialists. She tends to the solar power generators lining the rim of the crater that feed the power grid for the greenhouses, ensuring that the panels are kept clear of red dust and replacing damaged solar cells. In the greenhouses, she makes sure the electrolysis machines are converting the abundant carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into methane to fuel the heaters, along with water to fuel everything else.
Plastic piping weaves throughout the greenhouses like arteries, filling the air with the sound of trickling water as it courses through the hydroponics. Smaller tubes branch out, snaking over and among shelves of shallow pans that hold crumbly red dust mixed with composted waste, which is somehow nurturing pallets upon pallets of leafy greens. It smells the most like Earth here, in the greenhouses, of decomposition and moist air and life fighting for a foothold.
Vicky isn’t the only Chinese woman working in the agriculture department —not by a long shot, with China as one of the colony’s key founders and leading nation partners— but she is the only one who hyphenates. Her extra appendage du nom dangles like a handicap every time she has to shake her head and smile her ignorance whenever a colonist tries to speak to her in Mandarin or Cantonese.
“Ahh,” they would say in English, once they realize the gap, “you are ABC.” 
Sometimes the response comes with a barely concealed sneer. Sometimes a pitying look or an awkward pat of the hand on her arm. Never does it come without that sick, heavy feeling of dread weighing down Vicky’s stomach.
American-born Chinese, Vicky remembers. An acronym that should’ve died a horrendous death ages ago, and yet somehow not only survived centuries of diaspora, but also human migration through space.
Usually accustomed to success, she hates feeling incompetent, especially here in an environment where everyone needs to contribute, where dead weight is frowned upon. More, she hates her lack of fluency in her own heritage. It makes her feel like she should know better, that she should have tried harder to connect with her ancestors. It makes her feel guilty.
“I’m American, yes,” Vicky would correct, holding onto a false smile to mask her embarrassment. “Actually, Taiwanese-American, if you really want to get technical about it.”
The first correction usually amuses the Chinese. The second does not.
And the nickname still sticks.
“Do not worry, Wen xiao jie,” one of the botanists says one day, after observing her deflection of yet another one of his compatriots’ well-meaning but awkward comments about the pitiable watering-down of her blood. He carefully preps another tray of lettuce seed starts, his hands as rock steady as his demeanor. “Wagging tongues that do not sit still will soon find themselves twisted into knots they cannot unravel.”
Vicky frowns, trying to remember if the idiom comes from some classical piece of Chinese literature she’s unfamiliar with. Then again, she’s pretty much unfamiliar with most of it, so she might as well give up pretending she understands the reference.
“It’s just stupid,” she retorts. “You would think that here on a new world, where everyone’s starting fresh and we depend on each other for our very survival, people would be kinder.” She starts removing her EVA suit, privately amused at Lao Yi Yan’s averted, flushed face as he realizes she isn’t going to take the time to change in a more private space. “All this gossip and sniping behind each other’s backs. We’re the Terran Alliance, for crying out loud, not China versus the U.S., or the elders versus the youngsters, or whatever else people want to fight about.”
She strips down to her base layer and pulls on a sleeveless romper that covers her figure from neck to knees, more to protect Lao Yi Yan’s sense of modesty and propriety than out of self-consciousness. She isn’t an exhibitionist by any means, but American public school and co-ed gyms had long ago desensitized Vicky to the idea of contorting her body or her circumstances to hide while doing something as simple as changing clothes. Over the romper, she wears her shoulder sling bag, in which she carries a few essentials everywhere she goes while at base. She’ll head home soon, as soon as she types up her session notes, and she doesn’t want to forget her things.
“Who do those culture snobs think they are?” she continues, still seething. “We’re not on Earth anymore.”
Lao Yi Yan laughs and shakes his head, the corners of his dark brown eyes crinkling with easy humor. He shelves the completed pallet on a standing tower half-filled with other pallets, and starts assembling the next one as Vicky hauls her EVA suit over to a bench and cleans the dust —that cursed, ever-present, never-ending dust— from its surfaces with a fine-haired painters brush, flat and wide like her palm.
The botanist is one of the few Chinese who accepts her American attitude as-is and doesn’t question why she doesn’t act more lady-like. More Chinese. He looks about her age, with the same dark peasant skin tone as hers that browns at the merest touch of sun, although in a man it’s not so objectionable. At least, that’s what Nai Nai would’ve said.
As if the memory of her has conjured up her ghost, Lao Yi Yan says, “It is harder for some to change our old thoughts. Our old ways.”
Unconsciously, Vicky touches the strap of her shoulder sling bag. The hard lump of Nai Nai’s luo pan rests against her lower scapula. Lao Yi Yan’s sharp eyes pick up her movement. She can tell he wants to ask but is too polite. And because he respects her privacy, and because she’s gone too long without a friend —first the months-long journey here, then her months-long adjustment to a new work schedule in the battle to maintain a foothold on this dusty planet— she decides to take out the luo pan and show it to him.
His eyes brighten as he recognizes the writing and the design. “This is what you brought?” he asks. He reaches for the luo pan and, at her nod of permission, takes it and runs his fingers lovingly over the carved sigils. “Why did you choose to bring this?”
“I didn’t choose it.” Vicky shrugs. “My nai nai gave it to me at the last minute. I had to ditch The Odyssey for it, and I’m still a bit sore over that.”
“But surely you can access archives of The Odyssey from the central computers.”
“Of course, I can.” Vicky watches Lao Yi Yan murmur the words under his breath as he caresses the characters engraved into the black metal. “But nothing quite beats being able to read and touch words on paper.” She nods toward the luo pan. “Or other tangible surface.”
Lao Yi Yan chuckles. “I understand.” He returns the luo pan, and she’s surprised by how much her shoulders relax when she tucks it back into her bag. “It is well made,” he says. “But whatever will you do with it here, without magnetic poles? It is dead weight.”
Indeed, the needle has spun erratically in its heavenly pool ever since she arrived, never quite sitting still, never pointing in the same direction. Mars doesn’t have the stable magnetic fields that Earth does, generated from a molten core. Instead, solar winds buffet Mars’ sparse atmosphere and create bubbles of magnetospheres, roving chaotically over the planet, changing magnetic fields as often as some colonists have changed romantic partners. The needle spins in confused mimicry of her thoughts and desires.
She looks at Lao Yi Yan and realizes, for the first time, that his kind, compassionate expression might be masking another question that he is too polite or shy to ask. She realizes, too, that she wants him to ask.
And she is too American to wait.
She starts typing up her session notes in her terminal, to pass on to the specialist taking over for the next shift. “I don’t know what to do with it,” she says casually. “But why don’t we brainstorm over dinner?”
They don’t talk about magnetospheres or dead weight that night, or the next, or the one after that. Instead, they bond over their shared disgust of the MREs the colonists must endure until crop production is in-ground and reliable. Yi Yan admits, blushing furiously, that he sometimes breaks off a tiny lettuce leaf and chews on it while working, just for the taste of something fresh, that didn’t come out of a pouch or extruded by the food printer. All of the food produced in the greenhouse is supposed to be delivered unmolested to the colony’s warehouses, to be distributed equally to the communal kitchens that feed the colonists.
Vicky grins impishly and tells him that, if he’d like, she’ll pull off a couple of pea pods for him, too, the next time she visits the legumes greenhouse to check on their electrolysis tanks. Yi Yan’s eyes widen, then crinkle as he nods.
Tongues wag, as they usually do, when a new relationship starts —especially within the same department— but Vicky learns from Yi Yan how to remain stoic and let the winds of rumor swirl around her without affecting her mood. From her, he learns how to adapt to the unexpected, how to adjust course the way a river flows around obstacles in its path, even if it means leaping across a chasm on little more than a wing and a prayer.
They apply for a co-habitation residence and are quickly approved. They’re both in prime reproductive health, and the colonial governing board is eager for them to produce children. It is cheaper and easier to ship in supplies than colonists. Yi Yan is eager, too, but on this no small matter, Vicky is in no rush, and he is content to settle in for the long haul.
On move-in day, neither brings more than a small trunk of their belongings. There is not much to collect, when their hours are consumed with building life rather than living it. 
But as they unpack, Vicky lifts her grandmother’s luo pan from the bottom of her trunk, and the gleam of the golden sigils catches Yi Yan’s eye. He comes over and wraps his arms around Vicky from behind, hugging her to him.
“Perhaps,” he murmurs, “it can be a good luck remedy. Like in the old world, when the feng shui practitioners used to prescribe remedies to mitigate bad omens. Now that we share a home, it may not be a bad idea to make sure we’re set up for long happiness together.”
“Wait, a scientist who believes in superstitions like feng shui?” Vicky laughs. “Now I’ve seen it all.”
“And why not?” Yi Yan returns solemnly. “There is both wind and water, after all, here on Mars.”
Vicky cranes her neck to eye Yi Yan with skepticism. “That doesn’t mean there’s chi here.” She catches herself. “I mean, the old ways don’t exist on Mars.”
He nuzzles her neck softly. “Let us find out how well the old ways work,” he suggests.
And, for a little while, at least, they work on creating life rather than building it.
It turns out that creating life is much, much harder on a planet that’s inherently inhospitable to Terran bodies. Vicky and Yi Yan’s son Ulysses, when he arrives, is both late by several years and early by two weeks— a squalling ball of self-righteous indignation weighing in at 2 kg and immediately ensconced in an incubator, even though he seems to kick and scream just fine on his own.
But with so many extra incubators for the babies who didn’t make it, Ulysses lucks into concierge care for a week as both his parents and the pediatrics team dotes on him.
“Better safe than sorry,” the head OB-GYN says as he checks the readings on the incubator. The idiom strikes Vicky as absurdly fishwiferly —especially coming from a medical doctor— after the long years of data-filled charts that led to carefully programmed hormone treatments for both her and Yi Yan.
Yi Yan nods in sage agreement as he hovers over the incubator. Vicky watches, exhausted in her hospital bed, as he runs a finger down the incubator’s plastic covering that temporarily distances them from their son until he is deemed well enough adapted to Martian gravity and the colony’s terraformed environment. Yi Yan and Vicky share a look of wonder, of awe that this mini-human had survived the odds. Ulysses represents a bridge, the embodiment of their past, present, future— not just for them alone, but for their fledgling Martian colony as well. A second-generation Martian. Vicky is overwhelmed for a moment by the thought of being responsible for all her son represents.
A polite knock on the door interrupts them. The hospital administrator pokes his head in and the pediatrics team shuffles out, as the room is too small to fit more than a handful of people standing around Vicky’s bed. The admin is here to finalize Ulysses’s birth certificate in the central records system.
When the admin asks Yi Yan to spell out his name for the entry under Father, Yi Yan clearly and carefully spells with a small, self-conscious smile: I-A-N.
Vicky is so startled she forgets to say anything until after the admin leaves. She struggles to sit up straighter in her hospital bed, and Yi Yan comes over to help prop her up with an extra pillow.
“Where did ‘Ian’ come from?” she blurts out.
“It sounds close to my Chinese name, doesn’t it?” he says, beaming. “Close enough.”
“But it’s not you.”
The idea that her Chinese husband would Westernize his name distresses Vicky more than she expected. She doesn’t have a Chinese name herself, to Nai Nai’s disappointment. Her parents named her Victoria at birth— not for any great historical figure, but for Nike, the goddess of victory, because they wanted her to have the good fortune of a winner’s name. From a practical standpoint, they’d also wanted her to blend in with her American upbringing.
So, Vicky isn’t sure why she isn’t happy about her husband’s sudden change, but she is.
“I’m still me,” Yi Yan —no, Ian— says.
He presses a kiss to her forehead. She turns her face away. Even the kiss feels different. Cheapened, somehow.
Ian doesn’t seem to notice. It makes her tears even harder to hold back.
The cracks in their marriage keep forming and widening, despite their desperation to recapture the magic of their courtship. Vicky insists that Ian is losing too much of himself, and that the little quirks that made him Yi Yan have disappeared. He doesn’t even look away anymore when she changes in the shared public space of the greenhouses. It makes her wonder what kind of identity Ulysses will inherit from parents who are as wobbly and uncertain as the needle in her grandmother’s luo pan.
Ian insists that every small change he makes is because he wants to integrate with the colony. That he must, if he is to survive in this new world.
“You should understand why I do these things,” he tells her in a bewildered and injured tone. “You, after all, were both Taiwanese and American, on the old world.”
“And it sucked,” Vicky retorts. “It didn’t always work. Don’t repeat my failures.”
He trails a hand down her cheek. The gesture is so tender, so rare these days, that it shuts her up faster than anything else he could’ve said.
“But when it worked,” he says gently, “it worked magnificently. You are unlike anyone else I’ve ever met.”
New nations arrive with their own payload of colonists every year, and the petri bowl of Carter’s Landing grows more and more mixed. Soon, the colony will not need to depend on bi-annual supply infusions from Earth to survive. The southern half of the crater thrives with fields of green, and there is talk of possibly transplanting the potted fruit and nut trees from the greenhouses directly into the Martian soil. Little by little, the colony is divorcing itself from the home world.
The greenhouses themselves have gotten crowded, and the pallets of starters outgrow their space faster and faster. Vicky doesn’t log as many hours in the greenhouses and in an EVA suit as she used to, now that Carter’s Landing has swelled to more than fifteen thousand human souls and there are more colonists to share the workload.
One of them is Lara Biswas, a hydroponics expert, a widow who arrived with her son Suresh at Carter’s Landing almost a year earlier. She works alongside Ian in botany and Vicky in electrolysis in the Agriculture rotation, and it doesn’t take long for Lara to discover that she’s found a tutor, of sorts, in Ian.
“Suresh discovered Journey to the West in the digital library,” Lara says one day to Ian while they are all working in one of the greenhouses. “And he’s been staying up late to devour it. His favorite character is, of course, Zhu Bajie.” She chuckles and pats her belly in a fair imitation of a laughing Buddha.
Ian smiles, his brown eyes distant with nostalgia. “Ah, yes. The warrior pig. He was my favorite, too. If he has any questions about the translated texts, he can ask me.”
An Earth-born child, Suresh is as round-cheeked and soft as Lara is lean and wiry. Vicky can only assume that the boy takes after his father. Suresh is in the same class as Ulysses —fifth grade already! — and Vicky worries that she hadn’t heard of this homework assignment from her son.
She wonders what else she is missing.
“Isn’t that sort of an advanced text for the kids to be reading?” Vicky asks with snide irritation. The only thing she remembers about Journey to the West, from when she was a child and her mother tried to read it to her, was that she hated talking animals —especially monkeys. The whole story, she remembered was kind of weird and creepy— an opinion she knew was unpopular, so she’d always kept it to herself.
Lara shrugs. “Suresh seems to be handling it just fine.”
“In China,” Ian says, “we learned to recite Sun Wukong’s seventy-two polymorphic transportations before we learned how to write our own names.”
“Well,” Vicky snarks before she can help herself, “we’re not in China anymore, are we?” and grabs her EVA suit so that she can check on the solar panels— and get away.
She leaves on the sound of Lara and Ian’s deafening bewilderment.
Today, she sits in an uncomfortable, plastic folding chair in Carter High School’s auditorium, along with a few hundred other proud and beaming parents. The grade school is graduating another crop of students, to be delivered to the high school next door. Both schools share use of the auditorium, since there isn’t enough space nor materials to build separate spaces. Still, Vicky looks forward to coming back here again in four years to watch her son graduate, this time from high school.
Lara spies Vicky and waves, then threads her way through the crowd and the rows of chairs to plop into the empty seat next to Vicky.
“Whew,” Lara says, fanning herself with a hand. “I didn’t think I’d make it. One of the pipes burst and I just barely got a spare part printed and installed before getting here.”
Vicky smiles and pats Lara’s knee. For Vicky, she has long since moved past her initial resentment of Lara and Ian’s easy camaraderie, once she recognized that Lara was less a rival and more an object of sympathy. Lara has not, in the years since she arrived on Mars, formed a romantic attachment of any sort, with anyone of any gender. The widow still mourns.
“Glad you got it all sorted out,” Vicky says. “Suresh was looking for you earlier, and I promised you’d be here in time.” With her fingers crossed all the way.
“Glad I didn’t break your promise then.” Lara cranes her neck to scan the gymnasium, packed nearly full by now by the excited chatter of parents and students, then raises a smooth eyebrow at Vicky. “Where’s Ian?”
“Working,” Vicky says, and her tone makes it clear that she doesn’t want to talk about it. In the end, the differences between Ian’s way of thinking and Vicky’s had simply been too much to overcome for them both.
For Ian and Ulysses’s sakes, Vicky has not made a fuss in public about their looming separation, allowing Ian to move at his methodical, thoughtful pace as he extricates himself from the possibility of public embarrassment. Vicky doesn’t understand that line of reasoning, viewing divorce as just another relationship status, but it is something deeply personal to Ian, and she still loves him enough to concede to him this ground.
Lara’s other eyebrow rises. She doesn’t probe further. Still, Vicky sighs to herself. The gossip will spread through Agriculture like wildfire, and the whole damn department will whisper about the couple that used to be Ian+Vicky, and whether they were long for this —or any— world.
At least Vicky has entered perimenopause. She would not be pressured to re-partner by the colonial governing board, as she is no longer a viable reproductive partner. Getting pregnant, staying pregnant, delivering safely, and then raising that one child was hard enough to last her several lifetimes. She doesn’t think Ian would want to go through it again either— not that it would be any of her business, soon enough.
After the ceremony, Vicky and Lara team up. Neither are tall nor broad-shouldered, but together, they manage to elbow their way politely through the crowd gathering around the soon-to-be freshmen. Groups break off from the main crowd as parents find their children and whisk them off to celebrations elsewhere.
“You take that back, asshole!” a shrill voice shrieks from off to the side, near the corner of the stage.
Lara gasps. The voice belongs to Suresh.
“Birthed on Earth,” another voice taunts in a singsong— a voice so achingly familiar that Vicky’s heart skips a beat before it sinks with dread. It’s Ulysses. “Broad in girth, low in worth. Earthy Earther Earth.”
Vicky shoves harder against the wall of backs separating her from her son, Lara hard on her heels.
The sea parts to reveal two boys locked in a standing grapple. Ulysses is taller, but slight and fragile, with thin skin that shows the pulsing roadmap of arteries and veins beneath. His chin is tucked to protect his soft throat from being punched or gripped in a chokehold. Suresh is bigger-boned, denser, having had the advantage of growing up in full gravity; it will not take much longer for him to overpower his taller classmate.
“Ulysses Lao!” Vicky roars, reaching through the tangle of limbs to snatch her son’s ear and tug, despite the fact that he is nearly as tall as she is. “Apologize right now!”
Ulysses lets go of Suresh and stumbles backward with his mother. He grimaces against the pain but doesn’t cry out. His eyes are dark and narrow, shooting accusations at his opponent. Lara has gripped Suresh’s chin and is examining his face for cuts and bruises, but Suresh clenches his fists and glares right back at Ulysses out of the corner of his eyes.
“But he called Dad a low-down, good-for-nothing commie!” Ulysses sputters.
Suresh wrenches his chin from his mother’s grasp. “Because he is!” he snaps. “You haven’t seen what China’s done in Terran Alliance councils since your parents left Earth. My father died trying to maintain peace!”
“Lai le, lai le,” the school principal says, shoving his way out from the crowd and stepping between the boys. He is one of the original China colonists, barely taller than Vicky, with thinning white hair and a booming voice that belies his narrow chest and frail shoulders. “That’s it. Enough. Go home, all of you.” He glares from Lara and Suresh to Ulysses, then finally to Vicky. His eyes narrow as he recognizes her, and disapproval flickers— not just for the misbehavior that she’s been caught up in, by the sin of her son, but for looking —outwardly, at least— like him, and therefore bringing shame on his people. “You ABCs should know better than to pick on outsiders,” he says, louder, for the benefit of the crowd so that they know that she is not like him. Not at all.
Vicky hasn’t heard that nickname in ages, and it stuns her into momentary silence. She becomes aware that now, with a proper authority figure taking charge, surly mutters are rising from among the parents and other teenagers in the crowd. Ugly mutters to mirror ugly words. Words Vicky had heard and ignored, heard and never repeated. Words she never thought she’d hear from her own flesh and blood.
Vicky lets go of her son and looks at Lara. A shivering fear arcs between the women, and an understanding passes.
Lara is blonde and whiter than Earth’s moon, but her son Suresh bears his father’s dark coloring. And both of them are Terran enough to remember the race riots on Earth that drove them to Mars.
At least Ulysses was born here, earning him a certain credibility among the colony. But Vicky and Ulysses are still no better off, with one foot in two worlds— the Western from Vicky’s American childhood, the Eastern from both hers and Ian’s ancestry.
More than two, Vicky realizes. She is caught, also, between Earth and Mars —between the past she’s distanced herself from, and the future she’s striving to bring closer to the colony— and she doesn’t have enough feet to dance this ugly little dance.
She can deal with Lara and Suresh and that fallout later. Right now, she has to protect her son.
“Let’s go,” Vicky says, and drags Ulysses away, through the bustling, crowded streets twisting around the aerogel-covered expanse of Gale Crater and to the safety and privacy of their burrow, carved deep into the crater’s ochre walls. She slams the double bolts of their door into place, the metallic clang ringing through the rock-shorn hollows of their home like a death knell.
She turns to face her sullen son.
“Did you ever think,” Vicky asks in slow, measured, even tones, “that you’re lucky to even have a father to insult?”
It was a dirty blow, but it had to be said. Vicky still can’t believe that her son would pick on anyone, much less a fatherless child. How horrid of a mother did she have to be, to miss these signs of bullying, from her own child?
Whatever retort Ulysses had at the ready, it dies without ever being uttered. He snaps his jaw shut, jutting it forth in stubborn and silent rebellion.
Vicky crosses her arms, not yet softening. “Do you even know what a commie is?”
“Something bad,” Ulysses mutters.
“So, no.”
“It can’t be anything worse than ‘ABC,’” he flings back. “What does that mean?”
It’s something she doesn’t want to teach her son. She doesn’t want to teach him how epithets reach across light years and centuries to still dig their barbs deep under one’s skin.
“It means that some people still haven’t learned how to be human,” Vicky answers evenly. “You didn’t even know what Suresh was talking about, did you?”
Ulysses raises his chin, defiant in the middle of the living room. “Didn’t have to know what he meant to know that he was being insulting.”
It is in moments like these, when he stands tall and proud, that he reminds Vicky more of Achilles than Odysseus. Even though both warriors had been on the winning side of the Trojan War, one had lost everything while the other fought through a decade-long journey not only to return home, but to reclaim his family. One day, she’ll teach her son that lesson. That one can be both a hero and a loser. That winning a war didn’t mean the most important battles had yet to be fought. That some wars should never have been fought in the first place.
Small favors, that at least Vicky doesn’t have to teach her son the pros and cons of Earth’s governments. Not yet, anyway. At Carter’s Landing, every nation represented had started fresh. It’d long ago been agreed that there was only one nationality on the red planet: Martian. And with that had come Martian rule and Martian law.
But as today proved, people couldn’t help but take sides anyway— even under a singular, aerogel roof. And once an “other side” is established, conflict is inevitable.
She sighs, and it’s as if a pressure valve has released in the room. Ulysses slumps onto the sofa, and Vicky perches carefully on the arm on the other side. She wants to hold her son as she used to, when he was much smaller and much younger, but she knows she’ll only push him further from her if she does.
“What started the fight anyway?” she asks, trying to puzzle out the root of the problem.
A faint flush along his neck is the first tell that she’s on the right track. She’s about to press him for information when he shifts his shoulder sling bag to his chest, unzips it, and withdraws a small square. He tosses the luo pan on the sofa cushions between them, and she picks it up, incredulous, trying not to tremble at the thought of it being damaged in a potential tussle with teenaged boys.
“I thought Dad and I were very clear that this was not ever to leave the house,” Vicky says. She’s amazed her voice isn’t hoarse with the effort of trying not to shout.
“Dad’s the one who told me to take it with me,” Ulysses mumbles. “For my finals. I just forgot to put it back.”
Vicky stifles her anger. Another mark against Ian. Another point upon which they could not agree to disagree and have instead pulled apart their son. She despairs that they will get through this separation with Ulysses intact, healthy enough to forge new relationships once his parents have formalized their divorce.
“It’s not a goddamned toy,” Vicky snaps. She rises to her feet and stalks to the curio chest in the corner, where they keep the bits and pieces of their life archived underneath a keypad lock. She punches in the code with vicious jabs of her finger.
Ulysses stiffens. “Well, he said it’d bring me good luck. And I needed it. I barely passed some of my classes.”
Vicky pauses with the lid of the chest raised, luo pan in hand. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Mom,” he says with a tone much too grown up for her taste. “I’m thirteen. I don’t need to tell you everything.”
She brushes her fingers over the carved sigils of the metal disc, thinking, remembering a time when those sigils drew out a genuine smile from Yi Yan. When they prompted a conversation, a dinner, a confession, a bridge, a relationship. A marriage. A son she’ll lose to a war they should not be fighting.
She must unravel this knot before it’s too late.
“Did your father tell you why this luo pan is good luck?” Vicky asks without turning around.
She feels Ulysses’s chi tempering from hot defiance to cool curiosity. “No,” he says.
She brings the luo pan back over to the couch and offers it to her son. He takes it, hesitant, and automatically runs his fingers over the carved sigils, feeling the plains and troughs of its surface. She watches him study the luo pan’s makeup, its symbols, its crazily gyrating needle in the center.
“What do these say?” Ulysses asks, touching the Chinese characters engraved in metal.
Vicky points to the symbols as she describes the twenty-four mountains, the directions they represent. She speaks the Chinese words, abruptly grateful that her husband taught them to her a long time ago, and explains what they meant on Earth, when the luo pan had been used to calculate the best and most auspicious direction for a home to face, to bring its occupants health and prosperity.
When she’d been on Earth, she’d never cared to learn feng shui. Now that both Earth and Nai Nai are gone, she wishes she could’ve heard Nai Nai’s stories with a kinder ear so that she could pass those stories more carefully on to her son. For now, this is all she has, her elementary understanding.
As she in turn teaches her son of the old ways, she watches his face soften with wonder. If he knows where he comes from, then perhaps he will understand that we all come from the same place. Perhaps the next time war comes knocking on his doorstep, he’ll step aside and invite his fellow warriors in for a conversation. A bridge. A relationship that does not end in blood flowing across ravaged land like coursing water.
This is a part of his heritage, though he didn’t know of it until now, and she scolds herself for not thinking to teach it to him sooner. She wishes she had more to give him. How silly of her to think that because her home is on Mars, and Earth is so very far away, that she can and should cut all ties with her past.
“Do you believe him?” Ulysses asks her seriously. “Dad, I mean. When he says a luo pan is a good luck charm? It’s supposed to be a compass, I thought.”
“It used to be,” Vicky says. “Back on Earth, it was a compass that pointed the way toward good luck.”
“What is it here?”
Dead weight, she remembers Yi Yan saying once, but she doesn’t repeat it out loud. The idea is too forlorn to give it a voice.
“Nobody else believes in luck.” Ulysses whispers this as if ashamed, and he holds the luo pan with uncertain hands, an uncertain future in his palms.
Vicky sees, at last, what it is about her son that sets him apart from his peers, that compels him to lash out against others so that their derision may not be directed at him. Carter’s Landing is full of scientists and engineers, because that’s what Earth’s leading nations had brought first, to build life on an inhospitable planet.
But no one had given enough thought to what it takes to sustain life. To live life. To nurture a better one, in the future that comes after. Not yet, anyway. So there is no one left to give life to the old ways, to gently remind them that there are things that cannot be explained by science or rationale, and that is okay to convey the inexplicable in stories of myth and magic.
It is the hazard of placing all of one’s faith in what is tangible and explainable, Vicky realizes, that results in the loss of the old stories that shaped the idea of faith in the first place.
Nai Nai, you were right. I needed to find my way back home, if not for me, then for my son.
Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dig into the digital archives, and find Journey to the West, along with the rest of the classics, and she will ask Yi Yan to teach his wife and his son about what these old stories mean, and she will not make fun of talking animals. And, in turn, she will call up The Odyssey and all of the Greek tales she fell in love with as a child, along with the rest of the classics, and teach her husband and her son what these old stories meant to her.
The present bridges the past and future, and if there are no experts in the humanities here at Carter’s Landing to build and preserve that bridge, then Vicky will just have to do it herself. As she’s always done.
The luo pan isn’t dead weight. It’s her bridge.
“I believe in luck,” Vicky says. “I believe in Dad, and I believe in our good luck charm.” She smooths the dark hair from her son’s forehead. “All of these things are, after all, what brought you to us.”
Ulysses thinks for a moment, then his troubled features smooth like the placid waters of a calm, summer lake. Tomorrow is as uncertain as the needle spinning in the luo pan, but for now, Vicky is content to let the west wind guide her son home.