Old Mars Read online

  Another figure came around the bend in the canal. “Hey, Jorge …” The man stopped, fists planting on narrow hips, his lean face sharp-edged as a Rim rock in the morning light. “Jeez, these hogs don’t have the sense God gave rocks, do they? Don’t they get it that they gotta stay clear? Bring ’im in.” He started to turn back. “We’ll ship ’im back, prosecute for trespass. Maybe that’ll keep ’em away.”

  “Ah, it’s a kid, Ter.”

  “Can it, Jorge, you’re a damn softie.” The skinny man stepped forward, pulling plastic cuffs from his belt. “C’mere, kid. You’re in trouble now.”

  Suddenly, the air was full of hissing as dust devils circled, zigzagged. The skinny man yelled as a rock bounced off his forehead and Maartin caught a glimpse of bright blood. The other man, Jorge, ducked as a rock screamed past his head. Maartin tore free and ran, pushing off the smooth floor of the canal, stretching out and really traveling now, the walls flashing past, the man, Ter’s, shout torn away by distance. The dust devils danced around him, to the side, behind, so that he ran curtained by red dust, the canal an open path ahead. He didn’t slow to climb out where he’d come down, just kept running, settling into a rhythm so that his breather could keep up.

  Anger filled him, deep and dark, heavy as stone, an anger as big as the planet.

  He looked back, and the dust devils veered, so that he could see through the thinning dust. They weren’t chasing him—but they couldn’t catch him if they did. He could outrun any of the grown-ups in the settlement. Adaptation, Dad had called it when Maartin started winning their races, back when he was ten. “The planet is shaping you.”

  They weren’t going to catch him. His breather was working hard and he slowed, kind of pushing himself off with his toes, letting his body do the work, like the Martians moved, like their bodies could sort of float. He could see them again now—they weren’t dust devils anymore—pushing along beside him with the same floating gait, but lighter than he could do it. Rose drifted beside him and anger hummed in the air, making his back teeth ache.

  It would never be there again. The canal. The barges and the towers. He’d only see red rock if he came this way again. His stomach cramped up and he skidded to a stop. There was another collapse a klick farther on. He walked now, trudging along the smooth floor of the canal. The vague shapes of barges drifted above him on the surface of the water that used to be. The floor was like glass but not as slick. Dad said he’d looked at it … or one just like it … from Earth, when he was a boy and wanted to come here.

  Long time ago.

  Maartin stopped. The Rim came right down to the canal, as if the rock spires were ready to step into the water that used to flow here. He found the small fall of rock that let him climb the smooth face of stone to the foot of the Rim. Above him, two spires twisted skyward like dancers, upraised hands joined. A soft whisper tickled his mind.

  Grief. Anger. Maartin leaned back against the stone. Maybe it was dead for them, too, the canal, the water, the barges and players? A slow, depthless sadness filled him, their sadness. He blurred his eyes and looked out at the canal. Here, water still sparkled in it and on the far side, glittering crystal spiderways arched and twisted, crisscrossed and vanished into the distance. The people floated along the strands, long fingers waving at each other. Vines twined around the base of the spiderways here, thick with red, purple, and orange leaves. Their leaves were shaped a little like the tomato plants in Kurt Vishnu’s plot, even if the leaves weren’t green. Other plants that looked like spiny melons dotted the ground. That kind moved, too. He watched as one tall one stretched its branches, bruise-purple leaves quivering.

  A Martian drifted up and over the canal on one of the tall, looping arches that crossed it, coming quite close to where Maartin was standing. He, Maartin thought. The Martian stepped off the web strand where it ran past the Rim and looked at him. Really looked.

  Only Rose and sometimes Shane had looked at him, up until now. He shivered, couldn’t look away, and that dark sadness filled him, streaked with fiery veins of anger. He couldn’t look away. It was as if he were diving into red dust, dry, suffocating. He gasped. Jerked back. The long fingers curled, just so.

  A smile?

  He curled his fingers, felt … amusement. Approval.

  Another blast rocked the ground.

  The web and the water and the Martian all shimmered and …

  … were gone.

  Maartin slumped back against the rock tower, his gut hollow.

  He could see the towering plume of dust, couldn’t see which spire they had blown apart this time. How much more had died? He pushed himself to his feet, broke into a trot, measuring his breathing. Time to get home before Dad got back with the cyan crew and found him gone.

  To his left, all he saw was the empty red dust and scattered rocks on the canal floor. He slowed to a walk as the rows of low, inflated greenhouses came into view. Bad to show up panting. No reason to hurry. Their plot was at the far end, closest to the vestibule. He entered, sealed the door, and opened the inner door. The rush of warm, humid air soothed his dry lips, and he pulled off his breather for a moment, so that he could smell the rich green-and-dirt-scented air. Too bad you had to use a breather in here, but the air from the settlement filters was heavy in carbon dioxide, very low in oxygen. He’d passed out once, and Dad had had a fit. He pulled the door closed behind him. Seaul Ku was working in her plot, just across from theirs. “Were you lost?” Her narrow dark eyes, nested in smile-wrinkles, fixed on his face. “I saw you out there, following the dust devils. You looked lost.” She shook a blue-gloved finger at him. “You should not follow the dust devils. They can knock you down. Break your breather. Then what would you do?”

  “They … wouldn’t.” His tongue struggled, let the words out. Mistake. Too late to call the words back now. “I … I’m care …” He gave up, pulled his pad out, tapped it. I watch how the wind is blowing them along and stay clear. He smiled, but her eyes had narrowed with that look. Oh well. Your beets are bigger than ours. He gave her a big smile. Howcum?

  “Ah, it’s that greenish rock you find sometimes.” She wagged her finger at him again, her back not quite straight, even when she stood upright, so that she had to tilt her head up to look at him. “It’s got a lot of phosphorus in it, I guess. And the beets love it. Only because you help me when my back hurts.” She gave him a conspiratorial wink. “Try it, but don’t tell anybody else, especially not Sascha. He thinks he’s such a hot gardener.” She cackled. “You’re always wandering off, keep an eye out for it, bring some back. Bring some back for me, too, since I told you.” She gave him a sly look. “And I won’t tell your dad that you were out there. Your legs are younger than mine. Soreh told me that Rav, the market guy from town, asks specifically for my beets. And pays extra for them, too. Now, he’ll pay extra for yours, too.”

  Soreh said a lot of things. Won’t tell anybody. U want help? He didn’t need her headshake to know she didn’t, he could always see it when she was in pain, sort of like a heat shimmer in the air. Wasn’t there today. He nodded, waved, and stepped over the plastic tape that marked the boundary of each plot. “Dad … back …?”

  “Ah, they’re already in.” She squatted amidst the beet rows, gently loosening the reddish soil around each crown of dark green leaves. “I guess the patch wasn’t as big as Gus said it was and they got the seeding done early. He came by to see if you were here.” She kept her eyes fixed on her cultivator as she worked the moist soil. “I … said I didn’t know where you were. But you shouldn’t go wandering off like that.” She shot him a quick sideways glance. “You could get lost. Those dust devils could knock you down.”

  He shook his head, knelt, and started checking the drip lines, looking for any telltale dry or soggy patches that might mean a leak of too much precious water or a plugged line. He hurried. The longer Dad wondered where he was, the more likely he was to check back on the house database. Sure enough, he managed to find a couple of drippers
that were partially plugged. Dad would probably go over to Canny’s place. She brewed beer out of all kinds of stuff, and he’d heard Dan Zheng say that this batch was really good. Dad was pretty easygoing about his skimping on lesson time after a couple of beers.

  The sun was pretty low by the time he headed in, and he didn’t have to blur his eyes very hard to see the plaza and the fountains. Four or five musicians were piping pink and green mist from the twisted horns, over near the fountain. Some of their spinach was ready for market, and he detoured to the settlement-warehouse entrance. The weigh room was cold, right down near freezing. He set the unit basket on the scale, entered his dad’s code and contents. The scale beeped, uploading the weight of spinach contributed to their ag total for the month. Rubbing his stinging hands together, he headed for the door.

  Just as it scraped open.

  “Darn dust gets into everything. You gotta replace bearings here all the time.” The mayor, Al Siggrand, shoved the door all the way open. “Hey, your dad’s lookin’ for you!” He gave Maartin a fake scowl. “You weren’t wandering out there by yourself again, were you?” He talked a little loud, as if Maartin couldn’t hear right. “You know your dad told you not to do that. Do you remember?”

  Maartin nodded, but his eyes went to the man standing behind the short, squat mayor, dressed in a full miner’s suit. The miner he’d talked to.

  “Maartin, meet Jorge.” The mayor jerked his chin at the miner. “I guess these guys are tired of freeze-dried. They’re willing to pay good market price for some fresh stuff for a change.”

  Oh great, and now he’d tell the mayor that Maartin had been in the canal. Maartin swallowed.

  “Hey, Maartin.” The miner was smiling at him. He had a long, freckled face and hair that wasn’t quite the color of the Martian dust that coated the spots where the breather mask didn’t cover. “Nice to meet you. Want to sell us some of your produce? What do you and your dad grow?”

  Maartin pushed past them, out into the settlement alley.

  “Don’t mind him.” The closing door couldn’t quite block out the mayor’s words. “He’s not quite all there, got a head injury in a rockfall accident a couple years back. Can’t talk anymore. He gets lost, wanders off. We all kind of look out for him.”

  Fists jammed into his pockets, Maartin headed left, toward their rooms. He could feel the old city around them. Through the transparent skin of the settlement dome, dust devils danced in the fading light, weaving complex and angry patterns across the barren ground beyond the garden domes. The spires and spiderways shimmered in the bloody light of the setting sun.

  Angry?

  He stopped at the intersection to their alley. Blinked.

  Yes. Angry.

  Their door slid open to dark rooms. Dad would be at Canny’s. He headed there, feet scuffing up a thin haze of dust that seeped in no matter what you did. Canny’s big two-room place was just around the corner on the street and the door was open, which made the mayor mad because the rooms were all a higher O2 concentration than the dome itself, but with the jam of bodies crowding the space, you could see why. A half dozen people stood around the doorway, mugs in hand.

  “Hey, Maartin.” Celie, who made the mugs and some pretty cool dishes from the red Martian dust and sold ’em to the produce buyer from City, waved hers at him. “Give your dad time to finish his pint, eh?” She winked at him, her round face framed by gray curls.

  “Th … mayor … selling …” His tongue struggled with the words. To the miners, he tapped out. He faced her, horrified to feel a hot sting behind his eyelids.

  “Honey, it’s okay. Really.” She put her arm around him. “It’s a good thing they’re buying from us. They’re not the bad people who were responsible for the accident. They like our veggies. And they’re going to pay us a lot of money.”

  It wasn’t an accident and everybody knew it. And now they were killing the city. He blinked, struggling to hold in the tears.

  “Hey, Maart, where were you?”

  Dad saved him, face flushed, pushing through the crowd. “Darn, kid, I was worried. And then Seaul texted me and said you were cleaning drippers after all, that she figured you were working on someone else’s plot out there and that’s why she hadn’t seen you. Was that where you were?” His face relaxed some as Maartin nodded. He had the tears buried deep now.

  “… helping,” Maartin stuttered. He nodded some more.

  “Okay, then, you text me next time, let me know where you are.” Dad put an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t want to be organizing any search parties for no reason, hear?”

  He nodded, got a head tousle from Dad. He smelled faintly of cyans and a little bit like drying-out water. Maartin had helped them seed a few times, mixing in the cyanobacteria spores, setting up the pumps and microdrip system that brought the deep-drilled moisture up and wicked it into the soil. They didn’t need a lot of water, the cyans. They were engineered, just went into biosuspension when it got too dry, came back to life with more water. Sometimes Dad would squat over an established patch and take off his breather. He said you could smell the oxygen, that before Maartin died, he’d be able to walk around without a breather. Maartin couldn’t smell anything but cyans. He walked around without oxygen all the time in the dome.

  Dad got him a mug of juice and Maartin retreated to his usual perch on a plastic bin that stored bar towels and stuff, over in the corner. Nobody much noticed him, it was kind of dark there and, sitting, he was down low. People didn’t much look down when they were drinking Canny’s beer; they looked at each other or around the room at other faces. Four or five kids were playing some kind of chase game, running in and out. Celie yelled at them for it. He knew them. The girls were okay, he pretty much steered clear of the boys. Especially Ronan. He was the smallest, but he made up for it in meanness. Whenever the adults weren’t around, they did a great job of illustrating the pack behavior he’d read about in his school programs. He wondered if the Martians behaved like humans. He’d never seen any sign of conflict on the streets or the spiderways. No yelling. No pushing. Or maybe they weren’t all that different, just used another way to push one another around and call one another names.

  Rising voices snapped him out of it. The kid pack was back, hanging around the door. Hanging around five miners. Maartin stiffened, pulling back into the shadow beneath the makeshift bar.

  “Hey, folks, nice to meet you, just wanted to stop in, sample the local brew.” Jorge was in front, smiling and easy.

  “You guys aren’t finding any veins of your druggie-ore running our way, are you?” Celie spoke up and it went quiet, right now. Maartin watched as people moved or didn’t move. A small space opened up around the miners, and the hellos were halfhearted from the ones that didn’t move.

  The mayor bustled through the door, slapped one of the men on the shoulder. “This round’s on me!” He beamed, but he was looking to see who moved and who didn’t, too. “Let’s show these hardworking boys our hospitality. Fill ’em up, Celie!”

  The moment broke. Celie opened her mouth, but already people were crowding to the counter, their mugs in hand. And Dad? Maartin didn’t wait to see. He slipped to the wall, away from the rush to the bar, slipped along the wall to the door and out.

  “Hey, it’s the retard!”

  Maartin flinched as a hand closed on the back of his shirt and yanked him backward, around the corner and out of sight of Canny’s doorway.

  “They texted an alert, retard, and we had to go lookin’ for you.” Ronan’s breath was hot in his ear, stinking of garlic. “That was my time on the game-net and I had like five minutes left by the time they said we could quit lookin’.” He twisted his fist, and Maartin choked. “Retard, somebody’s gotta pay for my game time!”

  It was going to hurt. Maartin closed his eyes, but he could feel the other two boys, hanging just back from Ronan. Hunger. It felt like hunger. He shivered.

  “So.” Ronan’s voice was buttery and he twisted the shirt harde
r. “How do you think you oughta pay, retard?”

  He couldn’t breathe and in a minute he was going to start to struggle, his body wouldn’t obey him anymore. Red and green spots flashed against the blackness of his closed eyes and his chest was going to explode.

  Ronan yelped and let go. Maartin stumbled on his knees, barely feeling the impact, sucking in painful shuddering breaths that made him dizzy.

  “You got a thing about picking on people?” a slow, familiar voice drawled.

  Maartin scrambled on his knees. Jorge had Ronan by the back of the neck, was holding the boy about a foot off the ground, the way you’d hold a bag of fertilizer. Ronan’s eyes were wide and his skin had gone about three shades paler.

  “I’m talkin’ to you, kid.” Jorge shook him very very gently, and Ronan squeaked as Jorge let go suddenly and dropped him to his feet.

  He bolted to the corner. “I’m gonna tell the mayor,” he yelled back. “You can’t do that!”

  “Go tell him.” Jorge smiled. “And I just did it.” He looked down at Maartin for a long moment. “You need to learn how to do something to people like that, kid.” He held out his hand. “C’mon. Get up.”

  Maartin sucked in a breath. “Hit …?” The words came this time.

  “Yep.” His eyebrows rose and he tilted his head, frowning. “You’re not retarded. So how come people say that about you?”

  Maartin shrugged, looked away.

  “I mean, you act like an idiot, sure. Nobody oughta be runnin’ around out on a strange planet on their own. You get hurt, could be a while before your people get to you. I’ve seen miners die a couple miles from a dig just because they wandered off and didn’t tell anybody. This planet’s got more bad luck than a picnic’s got ants.”

  Maartin frowned. Shook his head. “Not … luck. Not … alone.” And he clamped his lips together. Those words had come out on their own, he didn’t mean to let them.

  “Yeah, I heard you got invisible buddies out there. I hope they can carry you home when you bust a leg.” But his eyes had gone very narrow, and Maartin had to look away again. “What do you see out there?”