From Mars to the Stars

I would like to thank Randi for her invitation to this story event, Surfing with the Alien.

I'd also like to thank my beta readers for their helpful suggestions and also thank Randi for her editorial assistance.

This is not the first Science Fiction story that I have ever written, but the first I have published on Literotica. And I'd like to thank Literotica for being here for the writers and readers.

*

Paul Daley was listening to the radio on his PodU as the MarsCar drove him from work to home. He was enjoying the red sunset. "It's just after 4PM Mars Zone 1 Time. Later on this evening, I'll be talking live in the studio to Steffani Parker who is the Professor of Modern History at Mars Central University. We'll be talking about her new book The History of the Settlement of Mars.

"In her book she provides hitherto unpublished details of the attempts by NASA to shut down the then largely private colonization of Mars led by Elon Musk and others in favor of NASA's own proposals to colonize Venus using floating habitats suspended 50 km above the Venusian surface beneath balloons filled with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gasses.

"The tragic loss of the NASA Star of Venus experimental floating habit when it exploded and crashed to the ground with a loss of 150 people including crewmembers, top NASA officials, politicians and specially invited guests including a number of leading social media influencers, resulted in US President Peter Franklin ordering the immediate virtual gutting of NASA and the redirection of the remaining Venus colonization funds to the Project Mars colonization program, which had until then, been largely starved of official funding.

"Now, several decades later, Venus still remains off limits to human settlement and as you'll know, there are currently five cities on Mars, with a number of mining operations and terraforming sites dotted all over our planet, plus various research establishments, including the North and South Pole stations, several mining operations and the vacation resort at Olympus Mons. Currently, 15 million people are now living on Mars.

"But that's not until just after the 6PM news cycle, so until then we'll have our regular programming of ancient music styles. This evening's program will be almost two hours of jazz music from the 1920s and 1930s. The music is specially curated and introduced for us by Lee Jones, Professor of Ancient Music at Mars Central University."

As the first strains of jazz music swelled up, Paul turned off his PodU with a grin. He wasn't really a fan of music from previous centuries, and besides, it was time to leave the MarsCar as he had arrived at the home he shared with his parents and his older brother.

Even though space in the Martian cities was no longer at the premium it had been in the very early days, families still tended to stay together longer than they had in the old Earth times, though both Paul and his brother Cooper would be looking at moving out from the family home. Paul, in the very near future as he and his bride-to-be, Emily Hall, would be married in two months' time and they were already looking at what accommodation would be available for a young married couple in the capital city of Mars, Elonia.

His brother had been dating his girlfriend Sandrina for five years, but they still seemed nowhere close to setting the date for their marriage. Sandrina was sharing an apartment with a work colleague. Whenever Paul raised the subject of when he and Sandrina would marry, Cooper would just grin and shrug it off.

When he entered the house, Paul felt a sense of surprise because not only were his parents there, Emily's parents were there, too. And Emily was sitting on the two-person sofa with Cooper by her side.

"Hi, everyone," Paul said. "Hey, Coop, where's Sandrina?"

"Oh, she's at home this evening, Paul."

Paul suddenly had a bad feeling about the situation. "Why is everyone here?"

His father cleared his throat. "Paul, the reason we are all here to meet you from work is that we, both families, that is to say, have an important announcement about your proposal of marriage to Emily. We, as the two families, have all decided that your marriage proposal to Emily must be rejected and that, instead, as the oldest male child in our family, Cooper will be marrying Emily and not you."

At first Paul wanted to laugh, but then he realized that they were deadly serious about this. "What the fruck? Are you joking? How the hell did you come up with this idea?"

His mother interjected: "Paul! Please moderate your language! I know you are angry, but please! We realized that you would be upset by this development, but we came to the conclusion that it would not be seemly for the younger son of our family to marry the only daughter of the Hall family. After all, we are two of the most important original settler families in Elonia, and we have an example to set to everyone else."

"I don't believe this nonsense! Emily, please tell me you don't agree with this crap?"

Emily had the grace to look guilty. "I'm sorry, Paul, but after both our sets of parents spoke to me, I came to agree with them. I know this will be very painful for you, but I feel it's for the best for both our families. And eventually I know you'll come to think this way, too."

His father interrupted: "Paul, I understand that there might be a certain degree of awkwardness for you at work, with Cooper and you in the same company facility, so therefore I'm proposing that we move you to one of our other facilities, perhaps the mining station at the North Pole? But I've not really given it much consideration yet, to be honest."

Emily looked irritated at the interruption, but she said nothing to Paul's father. She glanced at everyone in the room.

"Can I speak with Paul in private, please?" They all agreed to her suggestion and she walked through to the kitchen of the home. Paul followed her seconds later, closing the door behind them.

They stood awkwardly for a time before Emily spoke. "Paul, I know this will be upsetting for you, but I'm sure you'll find someone else to marry when you are ready."

"That's not going to happen, is it?" he replied bitterly.

"There's a relatively small population in Elonia, only 4 million people. And when any eligible women hear that you dumped me for my older brother, do you think they'll continue to date me? There's no way they'd do that! They'd drop me like a hot rock!"

"Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't!" From her tone of voice, it was obvious that Emily knew this was more than likely what would happen to Paul, with Martian society being what it was.

Paul pushed past her without a further word and he walked through the living space of the house. Nobody spoke to him, as they didn't know what to say.

He walked up to his room, quickly stuffed some clothing into a backpack and stomped back into the living area. His mother said "Paul, where are you going?"

He replied tersely "You don't need to know" as he walked through the door and out of the house.

He called a MarsCar, which swiftly arrived. He told the AI driver, "Take me to the Elonia Hilton Hotel." and as the vehicle moved effortlessly through the streets, he used his PodU to make a booking at the hotel.

As the MarsCar traveled toward the hotel, which was three miles away, he was thinking about what he was going to do about this shiddy situation. He thought about getting in touch with Cooper's girlfriend, Sandrina. Had Cooper told her that she was now, or at least soon to be, his ex-girlfriend? Or was that being kept secret from her at present? Paul decided to avoid speaking to Sandrina, at least for the moment.

Tears flowed for several seconds. He didn't know what to do. His life had become a nightmare; he worked for the family business and the family of Emily were one of their biggest co-partners.

He soon realized that if Emily could easily switch her allegiance from him to Cooper, perhaps her love for him was not what he had thought it was? Was she more in love with the idea of making a good marriage with family connections, rather than caring about who she actually married?

He wanted to vanish, but what could he do? Where could he go? Martian society wasn't actually big enough for someone to disappear and moving to Earth was virtually impossible due to several factors, including that the gravity on Earth was much higher than the gravity of Mars. In fact, Martians, as the inhabitants of Mars referred to themselves, required a medicinal compound sold under the brand name Gravneg which countered the effects of the much weaker Martian gravity on the human frame.

Less than an hour later he was signed in at the Hilton Hotel, and was in his small but comfortable room.

He lay on the bed and watched the wall-sized Telvid, just for something to do. He was watching the all-day news channel and realized he was watching an interview with an old friend of his, Max Baxter, talking about the Picardy Project, which was the name chosen for the latest part of the Elon Musk Starship project, which was sending Starships off to Alpha Centauri to settle the Earthlike planet that was in the solar system there.

Volunteers from Mars, and also Earth, to a somewhat limited extent, were being placed in stasis within the Starships, and using the revolutionary Krasnov-Kirkham Drive, the journey to the planet would take 50 years, rather than the near-20,000 years it would have taken without the use of the drive. The drive wasn't true full Faster Than Light Travel, but it was near enough.

Suddenly, Paul knew what he was going to do. He used his PodU to track the contact details of Max and gave him a call.

"Hi, Paul! It's been a while. How are you?"

"I've been better. In fact, I think I could do with your help. I'm staying in a room at the Elonia Hilton. Can you meet me at the Hilton, or do we need to meet elsewhere, instead?"

Sounding cautious, Max replied "The Hilton's fine, actually. I'll be able to get there in about 20 minutes. How about meeting you in their Maye Musk restaurant?"

"Yeah. That'll work for me," Paul replied. "I'll book us a table."

They broke the call and Paul took a quick shower in the room, changing into less formal clothing.

When he took the Elv down to the ground floor, he asked for a table for two in the Maye Musk restaurant. At that relatively early stage in the evening, the room wasn't that full and there were only a few of the tables with the green "reserved" light globes floating over them, but when the booking manager saw the surname on Paul's charge card, from his somewhat fawning attitude Paul suspected that, somehow, a table would have been found for him no matter how full the restaurant had been.

As he sat down, waiting for Max to arrive, the fawning reaction of the booking manager intrigued him. Was his family and Emily's family really that influential in Martian society? He supposed that they might well be. But it was genuinely something that he'd never given much mind to.

When Max arrived, Paul stood up and they clasped hands, Martian style. "Good to see you again, Paul."

"Same here, Max! Would you like to have something to eat, maybe a drink, too? My treat!"

"Yeah, thanks. That sounds great. Let's look at the menu, okay?"

They each opted for a bottle of Martian Chronicles Brewery Red Planet Ale and both selected a steak and fries. The steak was grown from cell cultures in the food labs in the second largest Martian domed city, Bradbury. Barsoom-Burroughs Meats was the name of the company. The potatoes for the fries were grown hydroponically locally in Elonia. Or so the menu informed them.

After they had eaten and started on their second bottles of ale, Max said, "Okay, Paul. What's troubling you? You have, or had, at any rate, a perfectly good home only a couple of miles away from here, so why are you staying here? What's gone wrong? Is it something to do with your fiancé, Emily?"

"What made you ask about Emily?"

"Nothing, really, but she seems to have recently cut off several people from her wedding chat groups, including my wife."

"Oh, right. I didn't know about that. But that's all old news, as they say. Thing is, my wedding is off. Emily has canceled it, but Emily's marriage is still on. Her groom has changed. I'm no longer Emily's groom. I have been usurped by my older brother Cooper, because Emily will be marrying Cooper and not me."

Max looked stunned, let out a gasp and said "Why in the hell?"

Paul said "Let me go through the whole rigmarole." He explained how he had been blindsided by his family, Emily's family and Cooper, about how they had come to the conclusion that the marriage between the two families must be between Cooper, as the oldest son of the Daley family, and between Emily, the only child of the Hall family.

"Fruck!" Max replied. "Your family, and Emily's, really take this First Settler nonsense very seriously, don't they? Have they always been this way?"

Paul shrugged before responding. "Well, not really. They sometimes attend the Settler Families Gatherings, they observe the Annual Settler Memorial Service, but apart from that, nothing, really. I mean, they're not members of any committees or anything, as far as I'm aware."

"So, how can I help you, Paul?"

"With what's happening, I doubt that I have a future on Mars. After all, I don't think I'll be considered a good catch by any of the eligible women, seeing that Emily is going to marry my brother and not me. I will not be able to continue working with Cooper at our parents' company, I'll be virtually unemployable, so I want to leave Mars. It's the only option I have."

"You want to go live on Earth?"

"No, Max, I don't. I called you because you are the director of the Picardy Project and I want to volunteer to take part, to be sent off to the Alpha Centauri system on a Starship."

Max looked dumbfounded and said "Shid! OK, I think we'd best take this to your hotel room. We'll need to keep this confidential."

Once back in Paul's room they ordered a mixed box of beers and snacks from room service and began discussing how they would get Paul onto one of the Starships.

"I want to get a place, but I don't want to take the place of anyone who is already booked to go. How can I get on the program? Is there a waiting list? How long is it?"

Max took a pull from a bottle of beer and replied "Whilst there is a waiting list, there are always people coming on and off the list. People change their minds all the time, plus some people have changed circumstances, develop health issues or whatever."

He activated his PodU and showed him the list. "See? We have 200 people on the list, but if we look at it in real time, the number has just gone up to 201, then down again to 198.

"If you are 100% certain about wanting this, as Director of the Project I can help you create an application on the system, plus backdate it to normalize your application. Do you want me to do this?"

"Yes, please. When can we start?"

"There's no reason why we can't start right now. Obviously, we'll need to get a psych and phys evaluation arranged for you, there's no way around this, but this is an automated process with an AI on line and we can book this now, if you want."

Paul took a swig of beer, nodded and said, "Yeah, no time like the present!"

By ten that evening, much to Paul's surprise, they had completed the entire process and Paul was booked to take a flight from Mars to the Phobos Station where he would meet with the Starship Gargarin and the other four people who had been selected for the mission to make the journey to Alpha Centauri late the next evening.

"The event that your two families put in motion is pretty shiddy," said Max, "but their timing, unbeknownst to them, was perfect. Because after the launch, tomorrow, there will not be another for two months. That one will be the last one for at least another year."

The trip of the Gargarin would be the second such mission. No one knew the status of the previous mission, because although the Krasnov-Kirkham Drive had drastically reduced the journey time to the star system, there had, as yet, been no related technological leaps in communication technologies to allow faster than light communications, though a team led by Deana Krasnov, the younger sister of Harri Krasnov of Krasnov-Kirkham drive fame was leading a team who were working on several very promising lines of research.

The next morning Paul got up, showered and signed out of the hotel. He decided against breakfast, and whilst traveling in the MarsCar, he sent an email to HR quitting his job.

He also messaged his parents asking for everyone to meet him at the family home.

It was noon by the time he arrived and they were all waiting for him. Was it his imagination, or were they all wearing facial expressions of a variety of sneers? He shrugged inwardly thinking "Oh, well!"

"Paul, there was no reason for you to not stay at home last night. This is your home, too, you know? Your family home," his mother said in an aggrieved tone of voice.

"Well, Mother, after what was dumped on me yesterday, I wasn't sure that it was my family home any longer. I felt marginalized and excluded by my own family."

His father interjected, "But that's not true, Paul! You might not be getting married to Emily, but you'll still be a major part of our family. Well, both of our families. Whilst it's true that you won't be married to her, you'll be her brother-in-law and when they have children you will have a very important part in their lives as a very special uncle to them."

Paul shook his head and gave a bitter, sardonic laugh. "No. No way. You think I want to hang around here as an utter spare part, watching Cooper and Emily with the children that should have been mine? That's not going to happen.

"What is going to happen is that I am going to get the hell out of this shiddy situation. I'm not going to be sent to that mining camp at the North Pole, because I have resigned from the company. Because you were right about me not being able to show my face for shame at work, with everyone knowing that my fiancé had thrown me over for my brother.

"In fact, I have decided to leave Mars for good."

His mother gasped "What? Leave Mars? Whatever for? Where will you go? Earth? The Moon colony?"

Cooper guffawed "Earth? What the fruck can you do on Earth? The air will be too thick for you to breathe and you'll break your bones with the heavy gravity."

Paul shook his head. "I'm not going to the Earth or the Lunar colony. I'm going to ship out on one of the Starships to Alpha Centauri."

There were screams, shouts, yells, protestations of one kind or another, but they couldn't change his mind. Paul Daley was leaving Mars. For good.

He sent a brief note to Sandrina telling her of what had happened. She didn't respond.

That evening Paul met with the other four passengers of the Gargarin. They were all dressed in a soft one-piece jumpsuit and were asked to lie down in their own pods.

The techs moved purposefully from pod-to-pod getting each occupant to breath in a gas to help them fall asleep. "OK", the tech said when it was Paul's turn "Just breathe in on the count of 5... 4... 3... 2... 1."

"1...2...3...4...5..."

"What happened?" asked Paul. "Didn't it work?" His voice sounded surprisingly gruff to him.

"Just don't speak for a while," a voice said. His throat was hit with a soothing spray and he coughed up some mucus, which was removed by a suction device.

"Don't worry," the voice said. "That was just a mucus aggregation that was removed from your vocal folds. Only to be expected after your body has been in stasis for 50 years! Welcome to Alpha Centauri!"