One of the commissary workers happened by and took a few moments to point out several outstanding features in the landscape, including the dome.
“Who’s in Dominion?” I asked.
The worker stopped, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean, who?”
“Is it humans?”
“Some,” he said thoughtfully. “Some Gentheran, so I’ve heard.”
“What are they like, Gentherans?”
He laughed shortly. “They’re little, about your size, and that’s all anybody knows. They wear full suits and helmets that cover their faces.”
“But they’re part of Dominion.”
“Well, they found us, and they helped us…”
“Why did they help us?” I asked. I’d been wondering about this for a long time.
The worker shrugged. “They told us they owe us a debt, but they didn’t go into any detail. Just said they owed us, take what they were offering and be grateful. That’s what we’re doing, I guess. We are grateful they’ve kept us out of the grip of ISTO, so far…”
“Isstow?” I had never heard it spoken.
“Interstellar Trade Organization,” he whispered, with a glance over his shoulder to the table where the adults were sitting. “ISTO has given Earth a provisional membership because the Gentherans asked them to. So long as we have that, the Mercans can’t cut up Earth for scrap.”
“Margaret,” my father called.
The worker hurried away. My brain spinning, I went back to the table to learn that one of the maintenance staff had offered to take me up onto the lip of Valles Marineris when she did her routine maintenance visit to a wind generator. It took a moment to take this in, because I was still lost in what the worker had told me.
“Well, Margaret?” said Mother impatiently.
“Oh, yes, ma’am, yes, please.” I said, daring to say nothing more than that.
While my parents remained below with their acquaintances, I was outfitted for the excursion. I wore the helmet and air supply unit I had worn during the shuttle trip, an item owned by every person on Mars or Phobos, just in case, and I was inserted into a dust suit that was actually quite a good fit, as it was owned by a “little person” on the maintenance staff, one Chili Mech, who had been hired, so I was told, at least partly for her ability to get in and out of tight places. Thus clad, I rode beside the worker in the elevator that took us to the rim.
When we emerged, I followed the worker to the “stem tower,” which is what the upright part of the windmill was called, and was told to stay there while the worker climbed the ladder to the rotor. I was not to wander away or go near the rim, even though there was a protective railing along it. Accordingly, I looped my arm through an upright of the ladder and stared ecstatically at the surroundings, relishing the differences from everything I had known before. There was a real horizon; there was distance and perspective; there was wind sound; there were dust storms moving about like whirling dancers. There were colors in the rocks and hills, new colors!
I turned to peer along the length of the canyon to the shining dome. There were Gentherans there, Gentherans who had helped Earth so the Mercans couldn’t cut Earth up for scrap. Why would they want to cut up Earth for scrap?
This train of thought was interrupted by a metallic shriek from above, and I looked up to see that the worker had opened a large door into the rotor housing. The door closed behind her with another shriek, and for a little time, I watched the dust devils that formed out of nothing and engaged in wild dances that carried them halfway to the distant mountains before they vanished. The dance was accompanied by soft, barely heard wind song that subsided into a momentary and unusual calm.
Out of nowhere, silent as the dried leaf drifting down in the greenhouse, a whirling thing came out of the sky and landed in the dust not fifty feet from where I was standing.
It looked like a dragonfly, or rather, like the pictures of dragonflies I had seen in my book about the wetlands Earth once had. A hatch opened in the side of the golden thing. A woman came out, unhelmeted, unmasked, her movement stirring the flowing robes she wore into crimson billows.
“You, girl,” she called in a glorious, glad voice. “Come with me!”
I felt…I felt something I had never felt before. Joy! Ecstasy! I felt…I felt the arms-reaching feeling, that this was it, the thing I’d needed, that I must go (that I must obey and stay where I was), that the woman was calling me (that I was probably imagining it). Standing there, with my arm thrust tightly through the stanchion, I felt my legs pounding, I saw the back of myself running away, not wearing a helmet or a suit, just free as air. I reached the woman, saw myself seized up by the woman, was seized up, saw myself taken, was myself taken into the dragonfly, and felt it go.
Then I swayed with dizziness, my eyes fell shut, and everything slipped away.
I Am Wilvia
Aboard the dragonfly, I was seized with shyness. No one else was there but the red-robed woman and a boy about my age. He was the first young person I had ever seen,
