Red Passport

The rejection arrives on a Tuesday, Mars Standard Time, printed in the cheerful blue font Earth uses for everything it is ashamed of. APPLICATION DENIED. Reason code 7: applicant does not meet the physiological requirements for unassisted Earth residency. Appeal window: thirty days. Asli Vural, twenty-two, the first human being ever born off Earth, reads it twice and laughs once, briefly, the way you laugh at gravity itself. Her bones are Martian. Her heart, raised on one-third weight, is a long-distance runner's heart on a planet that never made it run. Earth's doctors are not wrong. Earth would crush her politely, in about six weeks. That isn't why she applied. In a drawer beside her bunk: her mother's voice on an old chip, recorded in a hospital in Izmir before the colony ship left. A street address. A grandmother who is ninety-one and refuses, with legendary stubbornness, to die before meeting her. Twenty-eight days left in the appeal window. The next transfer ship leaves in nine. Asli looks at the rejection, then at the red horizon out the viewport — the only horizon she has ever owned — and begins, very calmly, to write two letters. One is an appeal. The other is a plan.