The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

and did not watch over Marta at all because Marta was too rebellious. Malleable Amelia was subject to all the commands of their mother. As in, obtain straight As, no social life, no boyfriends until there came that rich boy her mother approved of. Then she’d gotten sick and it had gotten even worse.

Amelia swallowed the pomegranate seeds.

‘And now this bitch says I can’t mention any of that.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Amelia asked.

‘Nahum’s daughter. Some meddlesome fool informed her I was typing out my memoir and her daddy is included in it. Would you believe she had the audacity to phone me a couple of days ago and threaten me with a lawsuit if I say her father did drugs? He ate mushrooms out of little plastic bags, for God’s sake. He was lovely and he was a mess. Who cares at this point? They’re all dead.’

Lucía leaned back, her face growing lax. She lost the look of a stone idol and became an old lady, wrinkles and liver spots and the flab under her neck, like a monstrous turkey. The old lady squinted.

‘What do you intend to do on Mars?’ Lucía asked, but she glanced away from Amelia, as if she didn’t want her to discern her expression.

‘Grow plants,’ Amelia muttered.

‘You can do that?’

‘Hydroponics. It’s the same technology you’d use for a marijuana grow-op on Earth. Everything is inside a dome. They are terraforming with microbes, but it will take a long time for anything close to farmland to exist outside a biodome.’

‘I suppose it’s not like in my movie. You can’t walk around in a dress without a helmet.’

‘No. But the suits are very light now, very flexible.’ Modern-looking suits, strips of luminescent thread running down the leg. Amelia had pictured herself in one of those suits one out of each seven days of the week.

‘And you can fly there. Just like that?’

‘Not quite. If you get a Class C visa, you can go as a worker, but they garnish your wages. They pay themselves back your fare. Half your pay goes to the company that got you there and they play all kinds of tricks so you owe them even more in the end. But if you get a Class B visa, it’s different. You are an investor. You pay your passage and you do whatever you want.’

‘You never do what you want, Amelia. There are always limits. I should know. I got my Mars. It was made of cardboard and wire, and the costume designer stabbed me with pins when they were adjusting my dress and it wasn’t nearly enough.’

There’s no comparison, Amelia wanted to say. No comparison at all between a limited, laughable attempt at an acting career that ended with a whimper, and Amelia’s thoughts on crop physiology and modified plants that could survive in iron-rich soil. Amelia, staring at the vastness of the sky from her tiny outpost. Amelia on the Red Planet.

‘Why Mars? You could grow crops here, couldn’t you?’ Lucía asked.

Amelia shrugged. It would take too long to explain. Fortunately, Lucía did not ask more about Mars and Amelia did not steer the conversation back toward Lucía’s memoir. When she got home, she lay in her bed and looked for photos of Lucía. Gorgeous in the black-and-white stills, the smile broad and wild, the hair shiny. Then she looked for Nahum, but there were few of him. It was the same couple of photos: two headshots showing a man with a cigarette in his left hand, the other with his arms crossed. His life was a short stub. Three movies. As for the scriptwriter, she found he’d used a pen name for his erotic novels and you could buy them used for less than the cost of a hamburger. But at least they’d all left a trail behind them, a clue to their existence. When Amelia died, there would be nothing.

On her napkins at the coffee shop, she now drew faces. Lucía’s face in her youth, the Hero’s face, the Space Queen. She sketched the glass city of the movie, the space pirates and a rocket. Amelia had a talent for drawing. If she’d been born in another century, she might have been a botanical illustrator. Better yet, a rich naturalist, happily documenting the flora of the region. An Ynes Mexia, discovering a new genus.

But Amelia existed in the narrow confines of the Now, in the coffee shop, her cell phone with a tiny crack on its screen resting by her paper cup.

She was out of coffee and considering phoning Elías. It was not love sickness, like when she’d been younger, just boredom. A more dangerous state.

She bit her lip. Fortunately, Pili called right then and Amelia suddenly had something to do: go to the police precinct. Pili had been busted for something and she needed Amelia to bribe the cops. Amelia cast a worried look at her bank account, at the pitiful savings column she had ear-marked for Mars, and got going.

The cops were fairly tractable and they did not harass her, which was the best you could say about these situations.

It only took Amelia an hour until they shoved Pili outside the station and the two women began walking toward the subway. On Mina, the romería for the holidays was ready for business, with mechanical games and people dressed as the Three Kings. Santa Claus was there too, and so were several Disney princesses. Tired-looking parents dragged their toddlers by the hand and teenagers made out on the Ferris wheel.

Pili had a busted lip, but she was smiling and she insisted they buy an esquite. Amelia agreed and Pili shoved the grains of corn into her mouth while they walked around the perimeter of the brightly lit assemblage of holiday-related inanities.

‘The bastards didn’t even bother giving me a sandwich,’ Pili said. ‘I was there for eight-fucking-hours.’

‘What did they nab you for?’

‘I was selling something,’ Pili said. She did not specify what she’d been selling and Amelia did not ask. ‘Hey, the