by Paul Magrs
His unlovely geometric face turned to look down at me and it was streaming wet.
‘You shouldn’t have come after me, Lora.’
‘Are you running away?’
Al came pounding up right then, raggedly out of breath. Toaster said gently, ‘You two should have wrapped up warmer. I blame myself for this.’
‘What are you doing?’ shouted Al. ‘None of us should be out here.’
‘We heard you letting yourself out of the Homestead and we came after you. You shouldn’t be here.’
He shrugged and gave us a look like he didn’t care about that stuff. He was intent on some mission of his own.
He felt around inside his chest cavity with his strange, telescopic fingers. He flexed them and produced what he wanted to show us. It lay in his metal palm and we stared at it uncomprehendingly. It rolled a little, like it had a life of its own. It was a blue sphere, about as big as a marble.
‘I found this,’ he explained. ‘I found it in the red dirt. I picked it up and dusted it off and hid it away inside my chest. I found it the day after they took her away. It wasn’t just her leg that got left behind.’
Al and me both felt like that little sphere was looking back at us.
Grandma’s false eye.
‘She must have struggled against whoever was kidnapping her that night,’ said Toaster softly. ‘In the fight as they dragged her outdoors, her eye must have burst right out of her head and landed in the street. No ordinary eye, this, of course. Engineered on Earth in the olden days at unimaginable expense. Blue crystal technology. That’s why your Grandma could see things that no one else could. Because of this.’
‘You hid this from us?’ asked Al.
‘I tucked it behind a broken bulb in my chest. I didn’t know what to do. I tried not to think about it too much as I went about my duties. And yet, I told myself, my first owner had been Grandma, right from the start. I owe her the greater loyalty. So I walked around with a precious secret locked inside my chest and, I admit, it’s worried me ever since. It’s her final gift to old Toaster.’
Al and me looked at each other. The sunbed had inherited Grandma’s crazy-assed thinking, too. We all three of us looked at the blue eye again and it was like Grandma had found a way to keep a watch on all of us.
‘You humans had your ceremony to mark her passing,’ said Toaster. ‘But I wasn’t even allowed to attend. I was indoors doing the Homestead chores when you were under that tree, round the grave I’d dug. You were sharing your memories of her, and all the while I was thinking: my memories go back furthest.’
None of us had even thought of asking Toaster to take part. There were quite a few mourners that day. Ma had said she needed Toaster to be in the kitchen, preparing refreshments.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him.
Toaster shook his head. ‘So. I choose to mark my owner’s passing in this way. My own way.’
Al was grossed out by the sight of the eye. ‘What are you going to do?’
Toaster closed his fist and drew it back, high above our heads. Then he used every ounce of his strength to fling the eye as hard as he could into the sky. It flew across the breadth of that barren lake.
The three of us watched, amazed, as the tiny point of blue light sketched a tall parabola and started to fall. It landed too far away for us to see.
10
The whole of the lake bed started to ripple and shudder. The three of us cried out in alarm, not quite sure what we were seeing. We turned and started running for the rocks, but Al kept looking back. He was shouting what was happening; about the jagged black cracks that were spreading out from the centre of the dead lake. They looked like cracks in a mirror, or the dangerous ice that people would skate across in the old stories.
Toaster was low on energy after his trek out here and the two of us were held back by helping him. ‘It’s an earthquake,’ screamed the sunbed. ‘I have precipitated a ghastly catastrophe! Leave me! You must abandon me to my deserved fate.’
Toaster could be dramatic like this. All we could do was put all of our strength into it and yank him along to safety, to the hilly crags, away from the shattering lake. The zig-zagging cracks were widening and the dense weight of sand spilling through.
When we reached the relative safety of the rocks, we stopped, panting and wheezing. Then we looked back at a bizarre sight. A crazy web-work of fractures filled the whole expanse.
Al said, ‘What have we done?’
‘It is your grandma,’ said Toaster. ‘It is her furious spirit, wreaking vengeance on the world.’
‘Rubbish,’ I snapped, wondering when Toaster had become so illogical and superstitious. ‘It’s the shifting sands. It’s got nothing to do with Grandma and her eye.’
The two males – my brother and the sunbed – weren’t convinced. We set off for home, wondering if the rippling impact of the strange disaster had woken anyone up, hoping they had slept through it so we could return to our beds unnoticed. We were caked in filthy, blood-coloured sand and I think we were in shock.
Secretly I believed, just like the others, that this had everything to do with Grandma’s eye. It was as if, when Toaster flung it and it landed upon the sand, the eye triggered some kind of response from the landscape. Mars itself had claimed the remains of the ancient settler.
As we approached the Homestead Al seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘We could have fallen down those cracks,’ he whispered to me. ‘And never be heard of again.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But there’s no use dwelling on that. We’re home and safe now.’
But the thought stayed with my brother from that night on. That the ground could open up and swallow us at any moment never to be seen again. Or maybe hostile creatures would emerge from those cracks in the land and steal us away.
It spooked him, is the best way of putting it. I’d always complained about my being the older and most grown up of the pair of us. But Al was growing up overnight, into a wary, dubious person, who expected to meet with danger everywhere he went. In truth, I’d have preferred to have my childish brother back, who wasn’t yet scared of the world.
And what did I feel? I felt excited. Even when all those crazy cracks were appearing and we were trying to outrun them. I felt so thrilled and alive. At last, I thought, something is happening. Here is the truth. Here is the proof. There’s something living on Mars that’s bigger than us. There’s something alive and intelligent here. And it’s watching us, and waiting.
Of course I never shared these feelings with anyone. They would have thought me insane. And maybe I was. Maybe the hot Martian dust had got into my head and corroded my wits.
So we survived the weird night of Grandma’s eye and pretty soon it was Hallows Eve. This was an excuse for another small gathering at our Homestead. Ma prepared traditional loaves and sweets and she tried once again to teach me the traditional womanly roles for a festival such as this. I knew it was important, but I wasn’t in the slightest bit interested. I’d always known I’d one day be running a whole place myself, like Da had. I wasn’t going to be just some man’s wife, staying indoors to bake stuff. I told her, ‘Ma, it’s kind of you – but if you want to teach someone, teach Hannah. Teach Al.’
Ma looked so hurt, each time I had to tell her like this.
Da and I spent time breaking in the new beasts, Molly and George. They were so much younger and hardier than the previous pair. I saw how we had been making do with feeble burden beasts for some time. These two were obedient and strong and they’d both been – for considerable extra cost – supplied with a command chip, which made practically everything much easier. Now they could understand when Da explained what they needed to do. They didn’t need instructions dinning into their ears or whipping into their hides. The command chips were amazing, but I wondered if the beasts having the rudiments of our language might make it even harder, later on, when it came time to put them down and eat them. Da didn’t seem to think so. As he put it, animal
s and humans and Servo-Furniture were united in the effort to ensure human survival on Mars. Everything was subordinated to that effort – most especially the lives of beasts, and the beasts would naturally understand that.
Al did, in fact, help Ma prepare the sweetbreads and sickly drinks for Hallows Night. We sat up till late as guests told tales that were pretty dumb and harmless, mainly.
Then Mrs Adams volunteered to tell a tale. She was done up in her finery, standing by the range and looking haggard in her ritzy purple dress. She was holding her glass of punch with one little finger sticking out all elegantly like she thought she must set an example of deportment. When she stood there and promised us a story to top them all, I was expecting something pretty corny.
‘Alice, don’t,’ said her gentle-faced husband, Vernon, but Mrs Adams shushed him and looked annoyed. Then she started telling us a story that happened several weeks back, to do with the fancy goods that the Adamses imported – or rather, salvaged – from the wreckage of the giant ship in a valley to the east of us. And the Adamses getting spooked that day.
She began by reminding us that she and her husband rode out twice a year to the wreck of the Melville in the eastern hinterland. I noticed Da and a couple of the other adults exchange a glance at this. No one ever knew for certain which wreck the Adamses took their supplies from. Usually it was hushed up. It was known that the Melville, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald and Stein were within a few days’ ride from our town. Twice a year the Adamses took their hovercart into the eastern hinterland and stole stuff from a ship named after a man who wrote a book about a giant fish. A ship that was a hundred years old and not going anywhere ever again.
‘I hate those expeditions,’ Mrs Adams said. ‘Over the years we have made so many. It’s become a familiar feeling. The dread when I even think about that smashed ship, all rotting away and only its tail fins jutting out of the sand. Each time we climb aboard we have to go deeper and deeper into the hold, searching for supplies. Each time I feel we are grave robbers.’
That was true enough, I thought. And what was worse, they were bringing back all their loot – the tinned essentials, the dry foodstuffs and the fancy doo-das – and forcing us to pay money for them.
‘I hate it,’ Mrs Adams said. ‘For twenty years we’ve been raiding the Melville and the others lying out there in the wasteland. When we went there a couple of weeks ago, it was different. This is the tale I have to tell you.’
This was breaking our Hallows Eve rules. Didn’t everybody have to tell a made-up tale? Something horrifying and gruesome that had come straight out of their head?
Her moon-faced husband crouched by our hearth, looking up at his wife, telling her that she needn’t do this. She shrugged. ‘They all need to know.’ Then she launched right in. How she and her husband made their bi-annual pilgrimage on the first of the month into the hinterland. It was a journey that would seem impossibly far to the rest of us, she declared. She was really playing up her part, making herself and her husband sound like great adventurers.
They drove through days and nights, taking turns at the controls of their hovercart; soothing the fever that their little girl Annabel was coming down with; fixing their broken engine when they were halfway there; spending a night lying under the stars; shooting one of those tall, purple hares and roasting it over a fire.
‘Our journey was so much more hazardous than usual, we were relieved to see the wreck of the Melville on the horizon. That oh-so familiar rusting hull looked almost welcoming…’
They clambered aboard through a breach in the side, taking ropes and torches and all their usual equipment. Their pretty daughter Annabel was back on her feet, though choking with sneezes that echoed in that cavernous interior.
‘Poor child, I felt cruel,’ said Mrs Adams. ‘But we only went that way twice a year. Only Annabel is small and limber enough to fit through the twisting nooks and crannies deep within the Melville.’
So the Adamses sent their nine year old down into the hull of the fallen ship. At nine Annabel was an old hand at having a rope tied around her waist and being lowered into the waiting darkness. Oh, she was very used to shining her torch around in the inky spaces – looking out for boxes, crates, anything useful. Anything she could lay her little hands on.
Annabel was sitting by the front door, on a hard wooden chair, staring into space. She didn’t seem aware of her mother holding court. She was in a pretty dress that was too small for her and she was unfazed by all our stares.
Mrs Adams went on. ‘This time, I knew there was something different about the Melville. I guess we knew that supplies aboard the ship couldn’t last forever. The past few years we’ve had to probe further into the hold. We’ve had to carry more and more rope with us, lowering Annabel deeper into the darkness. We’ve scoured room after room, breaking open doors that have been sealed for decades. Never mind the danger.
‘But there is also treasure. Things we all need. Things we have become used to by now, eh? Remember the lobster bisque? The sherbet bonbons? The steak and kidney puddings? The freeze-dried shrimp?’
She had us licking our lips. Thinking about the exciting days when the Adamses threw open their shop doors following one of their expeditions.
‘This time the Melville seemed vaster, more echoing and chillier within. Its hull rang with clangs and bangs as we let ourselves in. It seemed like we were disturbing somebody’s peace, just by being there.’
‘Don’t, dear,’ said Vernon Adams, but he was shushed by everyone in the room.
Mrs Adams went on. ‘I thought it was ghosts in the ship. Come out at last to ward us off. But it wasn’t. They were people. Real people. We could hear them distantly, deep in the bowels of the Melville. They were blasting down doors and tramping about. Moving aside great big hunks of bulwarks and ramparts. Drilling and burning through sheer metal walls.’
My Da asked, ‘Who were they, Alice?’
She shook her head. ‘We don’t know. They had serious equipment. Stuff we’d never heard. We listened to the disturbed echoes and thought about it. They could have come from anywhere on Mars. Places we don’t know nothing about. There was an urgency and an ugliness to the sounds we heard, as if they were wanting to rip the Melville open to see what it hid. We take from the Melville twice a year, but I hope that we respect her. We even say a little prayer to the Melville’s soul, each time, before we leave her behind.’
If it had been Da, he’d have done everything he could to find out who the strangers were. He looked excited by the descriptions of the sounds of their heavy-duty machinery – the blasting and the drilling. He looked hungry to know more about people who could use such technology, in order to tear open a cruiser like the Melville.
‘Annabel was sick,’ her mother said. ‘We thought we could keep away from the invaders. We thought we might creep in and out without them even knowing we were there. So we tied up Annabel and lowered her through the high ceiling of a new storeroom we’d found. She was crying and vomiting and suffering mightily, but the brave girl never lost heart – even through all that hullaballoo. Down and down she went and straight away started putting the things she found into the bags we lowered after her. We kept hauling up bags of clanking tins and sending Annabel down for more.
‘Poor Annabel was feeling even worse by now and I was scared we had pushed her fragile health too far. Her ears were ringing with all the noise and she was dizzy. Her hands were covered in rope burns, the poor child. I had to keep telling her about the almighty feast we could have when we got home. Now all we had to do was finish loading up the hovercart and steal away. Before any of the noisy ones realised that we were there.’
Mrs Adams paused. I knew she was enjoying everyone looking at her. She was drinking all that attention in.
‘We worked and we packed our hovercart with all these essential goods and then – miraculously – we got away unscathed and flew home.’
She threw up her hands to receive our applause, which was thunderous. Onl
y Da looked perturbed and annoyed by her words and I knew why. The Adamses had only thought about themselves – their own business and their safety. To him, they had a duty to investigate further. Me, I shared his feelings.
The evening went on and more tales were told. Silly ones and old ones – about people who ate human flesh and drank blood and those who turned into four-legged beasts with fangs and wings. And skeletons that came out of the sand, back to life, and pumpkin heads that haunted the cornrows and prairies.
Later I was out back, feeding the new Molly and George. The animals hunkered down, snuffling and grateful as I patted them and whispered. But after a few minutes I realised I wasn’t alone at the back of the Homestead. A small figure was sitting there, staring at the sky.
‘Those germs still ain’t gone away,’ I remarked, sitting beside her.
‘Nope,’ she said.
I looked sideways at her. ‘You’re braver than I thought.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I never knew, till your Ma said. I never knew how they put you on a rope and all.’
She sighed. ‘Yeah. Just about as soon as I could hold a torch and lift boxes. Just as soon as I stopped screaming when they put me down in the dark.’
‘That’s horrible,’ I told her.
‘Ma sure was the star of the show tonight,’ Annabel said.
‘I guess she was,’ I said.
‘One thing she got wrong,’ Annabel said. ‘The people who were drilling and lasering and cutting open the insides of the Melville. I saw them. When I was down in the hull.’
‘You did?’
‘I tried to tell my mother. I tried to tell my father. They didn’t want to know. But I am telling you, Lora.’
My heart was thumping, because I knew something bad was coming.
‘They weren’t human beings.’
11
Colder days came in. There were ice crystals in the air some mornings. Al and I would go to stand on the tallest dunes and open our mouths, sticking out our tongues, even though Ma always said it wasn’t safe. One evening Da came back from the fields coated in frosting like we’d spray on the tree at Christmas.