As Jeremy “Bear” Barrington pushed through the forest, he seethed with the toweringly righteous anger that can only be produced by the hormonal bouillabaisse that is the bloodstream of a teenage boy.

How DARE they treat him like a child! He was a man now, and could prove it if needed. (How, he was not sure, yet he was absolutely sure he could do it. )

His parents clearly thought that just because they were both highly respected scientists, with more degrees than a thermometer and enough grant money to buy their own planet just to study it, that meant that they knew everything and he knew nothing.

But he was FIFTEEM YEARS OLD, and already he knew more about life, real life outside of the lab, than they ever would. All he was asking for was for them to treat him with the respect he deserved. Was that so much to ask? Is that so hard?

Yet time and time again, they made it clear that they still thought of him as some helpless stupid little boy that still needed to be told what side of the slidewalk went faster. He could tell by the look in their eyes and the tone of their voices that they had no respect for him at all, and that was just plain intolerable.

And this latest incident was the most galling. All he had asked for was a simple puffer bike like all his friends already had. Nothing complicated or dangerous, just a seat, a frame, and six air-effect generators for lift and propulsion.

Everybody he knew at the Academy already had one, because apparently THEIR parents were reasonable. But he had to be stuck with parents who, despite his assurance that Don Jimenez from his Planetology class had told him that you couldn’t crash a puffer bike even if you wanted to, acted as though he was asking permission to wrestle a sharkskinned cavebeast nude with one hand tied behind his back.

He had even saved up his allowance for three whole months so that he could pay for it himself. He had the whole thing figured out. He had visions in his head of joining his Academy friends as they zoomed around Aristotle City, free as the wind, the air-effect generators humming their sweet soft tune around them, playing games like Catch A Fall and Touch The Dome.

It was this vision that had driven him for this last three months, and now, on the crest of his triumph, to have that glorious machine snatched away from him by the cruel and arbitrary whims of two people who clearly hated the idea of him being happy and wanted to suffer as much as possible… it was almost beyond enduring.

Angrily, he pushed aside bushes, occasionally pausing to wipe some sort of heavy, runny sap off his hands. The very fact that he needed his parent’s permission to buy and use a puffer bike was insulting enough. He was old enough to make his own decisions and take his own risks.

But the fact that his parents actually balked at trusting him with this tiny amount of responsibility made him almost choke to death on his own bile. The sense of betrayal was like an icicle thrust into his heart. Couldn’t they see how much they were hurting it? Don’t they understand that not having a puffer bike was making him miserable? Shouldn’t the happiness of their only child come before any stupid set of rules?

Not for the first time, he gave serious thought to just running away. He knew just how he’d do it. Sell his Copper Disk of the Sun (his first ever archaeological find) and use that money to book passage from Mars to… he didn’t know. Anywhere. Someplace cool. He looked old enough to get into the Halls of Glory on Valhalla Asteroid, and he had heard from Tso that they didn’t really care anyhow. As long as you had the cover charge, and maybe a little something extra to look the other way, you could practically be a toddler and they would let you in.

They said every type of pleasure known to humanity was available there, and in as big a portion as you could handle. Tso had run away to there when he was only fourteen and swore it was the best thing ever anywhere, bar none. But when pressed for details, he just put a fatherly hand on Bear’s shoulder and said “I can’t possibly do it justice. I learned so much when I was there. You have to go yourself to understand. ”

That only made Bear want to go all the more, to learn what Tso had learned, of course. His notions of physical pleasure were somewhere between innocent and pornographic, but he instinctively felt that he could learned a hell of a lot about a lot of things (but mostly sex) at a place like Valhalla.

They said that on Valhalla, you could try absolutely anything. Any kind of food, sex, drink, conversation, sport, game, or other human pleasure could be found somewhere on Valhalla.

This intrigued Bear.

So far, his parents had not quite managed to make him angry enough to sell his most prized possession and run off to the best catered whorehouse in the Sol system. But with this latest outrage….

By now, he had cooled off enough to realize he had wandered pretty far from home, and he instinctively looked for Ceres in the sky in order to get his bearings.

But Ceres wasn’t there. Not only that, the sky where it should be was entirely the wrong color, a kind of muddy yellow instead of Mars’ familiar pale, pale blue.

It was then that Bear remembered that this was not, in fact, the pleasant and safe Mars where he had grown up.

It was Exo-planet 18G, a completely untamed world that his parents were assessing for possible inclusion in the human worlds and possibly even becoming the Eighteenth Planet, if it proved terraformable.

And he absolutely no idea where he was.