Lost on Mars

by Paul Magrs

  He growled, ‘We need more evidence. We can’t all turn hysterical.’ He took hold of her and tried to shush her down.

  ‘Disappearances, Edward,’ she hissed. ‘You know the stories. You know what your mother said. Or have you forgotten?’

  He smoothed down her hair. She wriggled out of his grasp. She beckoned to Hannah, who ran into her arms.

  ‘We’ve forgotten nothing,’ said Da.

  ‘The weather isn’t the worst thing,’ said Ma. ‘It isn’t the harshest, most deadly thing on Mars. We’ve had it easy for years. We’ve had it soft. Compared with the settlers.’ Then she broke into tears. This shocked both Al and me. We’d seen Ma cry before, but not in front of people from the town. She just crumpled up and fell down on her knees in the dirty cinders from the barbecue.

  5

  At the weekend Grandma took a bad fall. We heard a tremendous crash and all this cursing from her room and, next thing, Toaster came to us looking all concerned. Grandma’s cybernetic leg had seized up – sand in the joints. It was all corroded up and getting to be no use. Da said the only thing to do was to take her into town when we went for the replacements for Molly and George. Doc Eaves could fix up cybernetic limbs pretty well.

  Grandma didn’t complain, even though she hated to go into town, on account of her looking so beat up and old. She hated to be seen by people these days. I reckoned she must have been hurting for real to agree so readily.

  So we all went – apart from Ma and Hannah, who waved us off from the veranda. Grandma and Toaster were strapped onto the back of the hovercart like bits of old farm equipment and I guess we made quite a comical sight, buzzing along on the sand. Grandma kept yammering all the way across the plains. I could hear Toaster hushing her and placating her in reasonable tones.

  Al and me sat up front with Da. We were both paying attention to how he drove the machine. We knew that our day would come when we’d have to know how to do everything Da could do, to support our own families in the future. One day we would have our own Homesteads somewhere on the prairie.

  We were settlers – third generation – and it was our duty to grow up and spread out and occupy new land and have more children who’d carry on the sacred mission after us. Me, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life and, for as long as I could remember, I’d been learning and memorising all the skills and knowledge bound up in Ma and Da about surviving in our world. Al was the same. Well, I’d always assumed he was the same.

  But something weird was going on with Al. He had started to question things. He wanted to know why our whole purpose was to thrive and proliferate and multiply and colonise Mars. He was thoughtful, Al. Thoughtful and deep and troubled. At first he only voiced his questions to me, his older sister, and I only half-understood what he was talking about. I mean, what else would he or anyone else do with their lives? What else was there to do but try to survive?

  Ma once said, ‘Mars doesn’t want us here. This whole world wants us to go back where we came from. The planet is rejecting us and trying to kill us off.’ She had been sick with a fever for some time after Hannah was born.

  Funny thing was, the questions Ma asked then were just like the ones Al was asking lately. All that why why why. It shook me up and made me uneasy. I preferred just to get on with things.

  In town we took Grandma to her appointment with Doc Eaves and left Toaster to wait for her while we took ourselves off to visit our new reptiles. The new Molly and George gazed at us sadly, I thought. As if they knew they had a whole lifetime ahead of nothing but servitude until the day they died and we chopped them up for another neighbourly barbecue. What was wrong with me? I should be happy. We had new members of the Homestead.

  Then we found out that we’d have to stay in town overnight. Grandma didn’t just need work done, she needed a whole new cybernetic limb. She kicked up a ruckus and Da didn’t look too pleased either, when we returned to the surgery and heard. The good news, said the Doctor, was that he had just the right model of leg in stock and it was almost the correct size. He could effect the replacement almost immediately. But it was going to be expensive. Da blanched when he heard the figure.

  ‘Don’t pay it,’ cried Grandma, lying there on the Doctor’s bench. ‘Just take both my legs right off, why don’t you? What does an old biddy like me want legs for anyway?’

  But Da told her she was shaming him, carrying on so. He said, yes, she would be having the leg, thank you, and he quickly made an appointment for the fitting the very next day. Grandma was helped down from the examining bench by Toaster and now she was looking smug at the prospect of a whole new robotised limb.

  That night we stayed at the home of old Ruby, Grandma’s last surviving girlhood friend. Over the years we had stayed with her a number of times and her ramshackle place was familiar. She was a gruff old lady who’d lived through some rough times. She always boasted that she’d buried three husbands and nine babies and whenever she said that she always scared Al and me half to death.

  Her house was pretty dirty and nasty inside. Ruby kept small lizard birds as pets and they left their slimy droppings just any old place. They skulked about in the rafters of every room and it was easy to imagine they were thinking up ways of doing their mess on us, or pecking out our eyes.

  Ruby also had great piles of papers everywhere. Books and magazines in sliding heaps, dangerous as the shifting sands. All these things had been salvaged years ago from one of the crashed ships. Ruby’s home was the town’s unofficial library, though no one ever came by to read. Maybe because everything was stuck with lizard mess and old feathers.

  Grandma and Ruby greeted each other noisily and straight away Grandma started bragging about the new leg her beautiful and marvellously generous son was going to buy for her.

  Ruby talked as we ate the meal Toaster had made. She talked about a new spate of mysteries. It had now been confirmed that the Simcox baby was gone and the mother was inconsolable. Old Man Horace’s body had not been found, plus there were two other Disappearances rumoured in the past week. So it seemed to become official. The Disappearances were back.

  ‘Exactly like before,’ said Grandma so gloomily that Al and me didn’t dare ask what had happened. We sat at Ruby’s table under a giant orange lamp, eating our supper capsules off of china bowls. The whole wooden table was covered with an exotic rug. Because Ruby believed in equality for all sentient beings Toaster sat up at the table with us. He looked very pleased to be there. Da said Toaster would be incorrigible after. He said the two old women were giving the sunbed ideas.

  Bedtime, and Al and me were sent off to the attic where we always slept, going back years of visiting Ruby in town. Da hugged and kissed us goodnight at the bottom of the staircase. He told us to pay no heed to those crazy old ladies. It made them feel more alive when they dwelled on stories of terrible things in the past, but we kids weren’t to feel frightened or upset by it.

  I looked at Al and he looked at Da. Al’s pale, wide-open eyes were luminous in the dark hall. But like I say, he was always more sensitive than me, plus he was younger. I told Da we were disturbed by none of it. Da chuckled and gave us each a five-credit note. We were absolutely stunned by this. As our reward for recent help and support, we were free to spend all this cash at Adams’ Exotic Emporium on just anything that we liked.

  Al and me went up to the attic. We were so tired we fell asleep almost at once. I was in my clothes, clutching my five-credit note in my fist.

  I woke up in the early hours to the noise of Al and the lizard birds snoring. Something told me I had to get up at once and move to the window. I don’t know why. I had to clamber up, peer out of that dusty old window and look down at the street below.

  Ruby lived at the corner of First and Fourth. You could see the red rutted Main Street from this gable window. I’d always loved the view from here. In the daytime you could see all the townspeople passing by, but not now. The streets at night were deserted. The red sand looked pale under the Ea
rth light.

  I stayed there, looking down at the street, as if I knew something was about to occur.

  And, sure enough, after a minute or two, it did.

  They came out like dancers floating onto an empty stage. There was no music, just my brother and the lizard birds breathing heavily in their sleep.

  Down there, outside, the dancers moved along dreamily, as if to music of their own. Music I’d never heard before.

  They were the ghosts of Martians.

  6

  These weren’t townsfolk out there, down on the streets. No one I had ever known looked anything like this. They were taller than the human beings I knew, and skinnier – way skinnier than anyone I had ever seen. Skinny like old bones you find sticking out of the sand. They had no facial features I could see – just eyes. Glowing purple eyes, flickering like candles in a window. They were mostly naked. Some wore red-and-white striped hats, others wore socks or gloves. One had a scarf streaming over its shoulder.

  There were eight – no, nine – of them below on the street. They were coming off Main Street, round the corner of Ruby’s house. Mostly they clung to the shadows, but one or two dared to stroll down the middle of the road as if they just didn’t care if anyone saw them.

  They moved stealthily on those long naked legs. They paused now and then and I realised that they were peering inside the shrouded windows. They gathered together, and the pale beams from their eyes seemed to shine into the buildings. As if they were looking for something in particular.

  I called to Al. It took me a few moments to find my voice. He woke with a cry, like he didn’t know where he was. I told him to get himself over here, and take a look out of this window. My brother stood there in his rumpled sleeping shirt and pants and gazed down into the street.

  ‘What? What, Lora? What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  He was right to look so mystified and perplexed. Because when I looked again, I couldn’t see them any more, either. The ghostly dancers had completely crept away.

  ‘Why do you say they were ghosts?’ Grandma snapped at me. ‘And why do you insist on saying they were Martians?’

  I had waited until Da was out, off to see his friends at the Storehouse, before I brought up what I’d seen in the night. The old ladies clearly didn’t believe a word of it, and they delighted in quizzing me, turning me round in circles.

  ‘Martians and ghosts!’ old Ruby guffawed. ‘Damn girl doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She ain’t seen nothing like what we’ve seen in our lifetime!’

  Grandma cawed loudly in agreement. ‘We’ve seen Martians. And we’ve seen ghosts. We’ve seen things like you wouldn’t believe. Things you would never brag about seeing afterwards. You kids these days – you’re all soft and mollycoddled.’

  Both old dames were looking at me and Al defiantly but I shouted right back, ‘I saw them in the street outside! In the Earth light. They were looking in people’s ground-floor windows. They were peeping and prying.’

  ‘Hoodlums,’ scoffed Grandma. ‘Simple straightforward bandits and robbers. Why, they most probably come in from some other town. Some place we don’t even know about.’

  ‘They were Martians,’ I said.

  ‘All the Martians died,’ snapped Grandma.

  ‘They were their dead ghosts,’ I said. I don’t know how I felt so sure.

  Al touched my arm gently. I shrugged him off. He said, ‘Lora. You’re scaring the two old ladies. You’re getting them all worked up.’

  ‘Toaster,’ I called, and he came scooting in from the kitchen. ‘Did you detect anyone – anything – lurking about outside last night?’

  He mused on this, drying a cup with a tea towel. ‘Outside last night? I was deactivated last night, I’m afraid, Miss Lora. I never detected a thing.’

  I tutted. ‘You’re no use,’ I said.

  There was a complication with the grips for Grandma’s new leg and Da asked Al and me whether we’d mind staying one more night at Ruby’s place?

  So we’d have another day of eating the weird concentrated foodstuffs the old ladies loved so much. Stuff like that reminded them both of their glory days when they were space travellers and early settlers and everything they ate came in dried-up capsule form.

  Also, they loved to watch ancient videotape of the take-offs and landings of various spacecraft they’d been aboard. ‘I’m in there! So are you!’ ‘We’re both in that one!’ And they’d dissolve in giggles at the absurdity of it: of surrendering your life to such fragile-looking devices. The video films were crackly and it was hard to make out what was going on. But Ruby and Grandma sat there clapping and then blubbing together as they re-watched hours of this footage.

  Occasionally they saluted the flickering screen.

  Al and me watched and waited for the most interesting parts. The pictures of places on Earth. I have to admit that we were both fascinated to see folk in old-fashioned dress waving to the camera and going about their everyday business on this alien world. The cities were huge and impossible. It was like they were made out of boxes and tubes of cardboard and spray-painted silver. Did anyone really live in places like that? I tried to imagine what the din must have been like. Why wasn’t everyone driven completely mad living in crushed places like that?

  But there are only so many hours you can sit looking at scratchy pictures with the old folk. Al and me decided to go out in the afternoon. Those five-credit notes were burning holes in our pockets. Grandma caught wind of what Da had given us and she was scandalised. ‘You’ll waste it! Kids with so much money to fritter away! No wonder your family hasn’t got anything! It’s like when you have a barbecue and go inviting the whole town! You lot will never amount to anything and then you’ll all starve!’

  She shrieked this at us, standing on Ruby’s porch. Then she went back in to watch more of their movies behind the closed shutters.

  Out in the street I examined the red dust of the road, trying to find marks left by the strange people I had witnessed in the night. Al sighed with impatience. ‘If they were ghosts, like you say, they’d hardly leave footprints, would they? They’d be lighter than air.’

  The road was a blurry mess of different tracks. Already that morning too many people had been down this way. I gave up and we headed to Adams’ Exotic Emporium to blow our cash.

  Mrs Adams’ store was relatively quiet. She was presiding over her counter, watching us like a lizard bird as we entered. I always got the feeling that she distrusted us. She thought because we were country children we were dirtier, rougher and inclined to thieve. Though I resented that, I was of course a first-class thief. As I moved through the store, my hands had a life of their own. I lifted trinkets and gee-gaws – rubber bugs and gobstoppers – and slid them into my pockets. I had warned Al many times never to copy me. His lack of subtlety and skill would get us caught.

  Right now she was levering open the lid of a rusted steel drum. Dust swirled in the air. Mrs Adams drew out a brown paper parcel. Al and I stepped nearer. By the markings on the drum it was plain to see that the consignment had been sent from Earth many, many moons ago, and it wasn’t addressed to anyone still alive in this town. This was contraband, whatever it was.

  Of course, it didn’t help that our town didn’t have much of a name. Being the earliest settlement of houses in this landmass, it had always simply been known as Our Town. Sometimes I thought that was a purposeful thing. Like we wanted to keep separate from everyone else. We didn’t really know what was happening on the rest of Mars. And very few of us even cared.

  Al and I watched over her shoulder as Mrs Adams donned white cotton gloves to unwrap the ream of brown paper. Inside was a case of pale wood. And inside this was a mass of blue tissue paper. Between each sheet was a set of glass slides, each no bigger nor thicker than a fingernail.

  Mrs Adams looked almost glad to see us. She’d had a shipment, she said, in which I would be very interested. A long-looked-for consignment of reading matter had come into the s
hop at last. I had been waiting along with her and several others in the town who were also avid readers. We had already read every scrap that Mrs Adams stocked in her lending library.

  She flicked through them. Each bore a vivid smudge of colour. They were shimmering, beautiful objects. I was dizzy at the sheer profusion of slides, knowing that each contained a whole book. There must have been over two hundred inside that canister. I don’t think I had ever seen so many in one place before.

  I forked out a good portion of my five-credit note to Mrs Adams that day. She let me choose a bunch of those glorious slides and she said I could keep them for a whole month. Take them back to the Homestead and everything. She gave me a printed list of titles so that I could choose the most exciting ones. I used the colours of those slides to help me, imagining that dark purple meant Romance, steely blue meant space adventures and green – for some reason – meant grand historical epics.

  Meanwhile Al went round the shop filling a basket with novelties and sweeties. Give him five credits to spend and the whole lot would disappear in a flash. He’d always toss it away on rubbish.

  I was the eldest child in our family and so I would always be in charge. Ma and Da had drummed that into me. If – God forbid – anything ever happened to them, I was to look after my brother and sister. I understood, didn’t I? Of course, of course I understood. Sometimes the thought gave me nightmares.

  Not that anything bad was ever going to happen to our parents, they said. They had a great deal yet to offer, and life on Mars still had much in store for them.

  For some reason I was going over this in my head that day, as Al crammed stuff into his basket: handfuls of marshmallows, toy telescopes and pointless card games. I flicked through the colourful slides and chose five. I imagined evenings when my chores were over, sitting in the dark of my room, all peaceful, with the screen glowing and words from old Earth marching past my eyes. Half my mind was taken up chasing alluring titles like Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights, but the other half was roving over and over the thought that one day I would have to be in charge.