Lost on Mars

by Paul Magrs

  I don’t know how long it took me to get home. It felt like it was several days, with the sun scorching through my winter dress all the way. Sweat streaming down my arms and legs. It was a shock to find the Homestead so peaceful, with everyone carrying on their afternoon tasks. Ruby was with Hannah at the well scrubbing out linens, and Ma was in the kitchen with Al. I could hear them clattering around, and their high, contented voices.

  I went straight to Toaster, who was out back, feeding grain to the chickens. He saw at once that something was dreadfully wrong.

  ‘We will go at once,’ he said, dropping the bucket of feed. The hens went crazy over the spilled grain as we rounded the outbuildings. That’s when Ma caught us.

  ‘Lora, what’s going on?’ she began, and then she must have seen something awful in my face, for she went very still all at once. She said, ‘It’s your Da, isn’t it? What’s happened? Where is he?’ She had hold of both my arms and was squeezing them tight.

  Toaster laid a cold mechanical hand on her. He made her stop shaking me. My teeth were rattling in my head. He said in a very steady voice, ‘I must go to him at once. Lora will come with me.’

  Ma let go immediately. It was like Toaster had been the boss of our family all along and we were programmed to do his bidding.

  Ma stood quite still, hugging herself, her rough woollen dress billowing in the breeze. She stood outside the Homestead watching us go.

  Toaster and I ran through the sand, past the low dunes. It was all uphill. Toaster ran smoothly. My lungs were heaving and I could taste my own blood, as if the harsh sand in the air was cutting me up inside.

  I shouted out directions and tried to explain. Toaster locked onto his target. I followed in his wake and we ran and ran. I could hear broken glass valves and fizzing circuitry crashing about inside his chest cavity. We didn’t slow for a second.

  At last we came to the rise in the cornrow where the hovercart could be seen quite plainly. Just as I had left it, wonky and lopsided on the rocks. Its silver skin glistening in the diminishing sunlight.

  Toaster pulled ahead, surging towards his objective. He was at the top of the hill several moments before I was.

  I came crashing to a halt beside our robot. I stared uncomprehendingly at the disturbed sand and the vehicle lying there and the gap by its skirt where my da had been. I stared and stared at the drying streaks of blood but it was no use. There was no avoiding the plain truth of it.

  Da had Disappeared.

  17

  Hannah didn’t fully understand what was going on, of course. None of us could really grasp the full meaning. Life – our lives – without Da in them didn’t make any sense at all.

  Ma hit me. Hard across the face. I think everyone else present was more shocked than I was. I fell over and they helped me back onto my feet.

  Men from the town were there, in our Homestead. Stomping about in their desert shoes, loading up their weapons. They organised a short, futile search. When Ma hit me they dragged her away to calm down.

  Those stinging slaps gave me something to focus on. I felt I deserved them. I had let Da down. I should never have left him alone out there on the prairie. He was pinned to the rocks, helpless as a beetle on its back. He was under the hideous weight of that metal machine. Even if I hadn’t directly caused his death, I was still a jinx. A Jonah, like they used to have on old spaceships, like in the old tales of discovery and disaster in the void.

  The very worst had happened. We had lost Da.

  Aunt Ruby took Ma away and put her to bed and made her swallow the strongest pills she had. Old pills from supplies Ma had tucked away in her cabinet. Things they gave to folk freaking out during deep space voyages. Ma went into a comatose state to ride through the days of grief. She floated above while the truth slowly sank in for the rest of us.

  Al and me, we looked after Hannah, who remained her bright and cheery self. This seemed kind of wrong, but as Ruby said, she wasn’t to understand.

  The town’s men gave up their search for the body.

  Night time, morning, afternoon, evening, night time again. The same again, and the same again. The days wheeled round and no Da came banging open our front door, stomping the sand off his boots. He didn’t whip off his hat and laugh at our stricken faces. ‘You thought I was missing? You thought I was dead? How could you think I’d ever leave you?’

  He never came in and kissed Ma and the baby and ruffled Al’s hair and mine. He just never turned up. It was like he had forgotten us in an instant, and turned his back.

  Those first few nights were so weird. I put the electronic seal on the outer doors of our Homestead. By doing that I was admitting that he was out there forever and never coming back.

  Ma slumbered and muttered and, as the strongest pills wore off, occasionally woke up screaming.

  Several days after Da Disappeared, I snuck out into the night. I checked that Al wasn’t following me, then I set off. I climbed the scrubland and crossed the crazed surface of the dead lake, and I thought about Toaster. I thought about his throwing Grandma’s eye and creating all these fractures. I climbed the crags on the far side and I called out to Sook.

  ‘You never came when I called last time. When I was more scared than I’ve ever been in all my life…’

  Just thinking about it made my heart start pounding again.

  ‘Didn’t you hear, Sook? Didn’t you care?’

  ‘I cared,’ she said. ‘I heard you.’

  She landed softly on the sand behind me. Her voice was clear and bell-like in my mind. I whirled about, frantic, glaring at her. She looked less like wood bark, more like soft flesh. Her eyes were glowing silver. She wore robes that looked like scaled wings, like a moth’s wings. Had she changed somehow? Did the Martian Ghosts evolve like that?

  ‘You let me down,’ I snapped.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You could have helped me. He was stuck there. I just needed some help…’

  ‘I couldn’t have helped,’ she said softly, hanging her head. ‘They wouldn’t have let me.’

  ‘Who?’ I demanded. Part of me didn’t want to understand, or to hear what she was going to say next.

  Sook said, ‘I can’t hold my people back, Lora.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I have pleaded with them and reasoned with them,’ said Sook. ‘For your sake and the sake of your family and everyone else you care about.’

  I gasped. ‘You’ve told them about us?’

  ‘I’ve told them that they should help you. That there is a great chance here. An opportunity to make peace and understanding between two great species. To give them their dues, they did listen. For a short while.’

  ‘W-what are you saying, Sook?’

  She looked me dead in the eye. ‘They aren’t interested in being your friends.’

  ‘But why?’ I said, sounding so childish I was ashamed. ‘Why not?’

  She looked worried about how she was going to break this next bit to me. ‘We have been starving for so long, Lora. It’s hard to get nourishment out of this world of ours. Poor vegetables and horrid algae. Bony little rodents. Making meals out of jewelled insects that come in plagues once a year and we treat the coming of those swarms like you do Christmas. It’s a pitiful existence. No wonder you think of us as insubstantial Ghosts. It’s a hard life on Mars. Harder for the Martians than it is for you humans. How do you suppose that makes us feel?’

  ‘I – I don’t know.’ All I could think though, was – You ate Grandma. You ate Da. Your kind might be eating his body at this very moment. All that knowledge. All that experience and skill. All that kindness and love. And you’re eating him. Grinding him up into smaller and smaller pieces and mincing him to paste between your teeth.

  Sook sighed inside my head. ‘You people are just so fat and juicy and chewy. That’s all my people can see. Even when someone like me stands up and says, “Look! The humans are thinking, sentient creatures. They have music, mathematics, ethics and art. Just as w
e have. They have arrived at a civilised status. They have all the sophistication we have developed, in some ways they are even more advanced. They can travel to other worlds and make their marks on other planets.” But none of these things impress my people. Not compared with the animal stink of you. The salty, milky, fatty, fleshy juice of you. They get distracted from their thoughts of civilisation and art by the saliva welling up in their parched mouths. By the acid rumbling deep inside their bellies, eager to digest. They can’t think of anything but stealing you away, one at a time, depleting your townships and homesteads and slowly and gradually feasting upon you all…’

  Now Sook looked and sounded different. Her voice was fuller and rounder and sweeter. I could hear other voices behind hers. It was like she had become a whole choir of voices inside her body. Her silver eyes glimmered. Her moth cloak was fanning out as the desert breeze caught up with us.

  ‘Sook … what should I do? I need to decide. Ma can’t. Neither can Ruby. I think I’m the one in our family who has to do the deciding now.’

  Then Sook’s voice went high and panicked, rising up out of all the others that her body contained. ‘You must take them all away, Lora. As many as you can get to follow you. Get them out of the town. Leave this place at once!’

  A horrible change came over her face.

  Startled, I fell back. I turned away and started to run. Ploughing through the pale sand.

  ‘Run, Lora!’ Sook shrieked after me.

  18

  ‘We’re moving,’ I told the whole family. ‘It’s time for us to go.’

  Ma, Al, Ruby and Hannah looked at me as if I’d gone crazy. They were eating the oatmeal Ma had prepared, just as she had thousands of mornings before. The old clock was ticking on the mantle over the fire and the range was blazing hot on the chilliest morning of the season. Ours was a house that was grieving, but it was still full of life.

  ‘We take what we can carry,’ I said. ‘We should go as soon as we can.’

  Ruby suddenly looked like exactly what she was. An old, tired woman. As old as Grandma had been. ‘Why the suddenness, Lora? What have you heard?’

  Toaster came in from outside. He could tell straight away that something was up. ‘What is it?’ he said. His metal body was braced against more bad news.

  Al told him, ‘Lora says we have to go. Abandon our Homestead and everything.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Toaster. Like me, he had heard Da making his plans aloud as he worked in the fields. ‘Yes, this is inevitable.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Ma muttered. ‘But we can’t now. How can we go now? How can we do anything without him?’

  I said, ‘I’ll be in charge, Ma. I know what to do.’

  They looked at me – half disbelief, half relief in their faces. Then Hannah did something odd. Maybe because everyone’s eyes were on me and I was the focus of all the attention in the room. She climbed down from her chair and came to me. I picked her up and she hugged me round my neck. She was warm as oatmeal.

  We would limit ourselves to one small bag each, and Ma would pack an extra bag of essential cooking implements. In the kitchen she went into a fit of panic over food supplies. What could we take? What could sustain us? I didn’t know either. A plaggy tank of distilled water could go on the hovercart. A small sack of oatmeal, a side of salted meat. Not very much. We’d have to find food on the road. Somehow.

  Already I was thinking about the townsfolk and who would come with us. How many? Maybe we could all pool resources, like they did in the old days; the early days on Mars before the town even existed.

  In the kitchen Ma grabbed my arm. ‘Your da would never want us to give up. To sit here waiting till we all got Disappeared.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, and I marvelled at her strength of will. I’d watched her control her panic and horror at the truth of what had become of Da. She’d gone robotic and cold like Toaster, to make sure we survived. She left her harp in the kitchen. With so much other stuff there wouldn’t be room for it. We were all leaving most of our lives behind.

  Al said, ‘Lora, we must make space for Ma’s harp. We can’t leave that. Her music, Lora…’

  He was right. For once he was right. I gave the nod to the harp.

  Then I found him supposedly packing his clothes into a bag. He’d left most of his clean stuff out, and was coaxing his lizard bird into his bag with a few rinds of bacon.

  ‘You can’t take that,’ I told him flatly.

  ‘I’m going to,’ he said, looking squarely at me. Perhaps because of the harshness of his tone, the lizard did as it was told. It crept into the bag and crouched there, clutching the rinds and chewing them delicately.

  ‘I mean it, Al,’ I told my brother.

  ‘You think you can tell everyone what to do,’ he snapped. ‘I’m taking Samuel Clemens, whatever you say. You’re not the boss of everything, Lora.’

  I left him to it, shaking my head.

  It took us only three days to dismantle our life in the Homestead. Toaster fixed up the hovercart till it was running as well as it ever had. We loaded it up till it was full to bursting. I wished that we had a different vehicle we could use instead. It was our only means of escape and we just had to use it, even if Da had been crushed and trapped underneath it.

  There was still blood on its skirts that I hadn’t been able to scrub away. I hoped the others would think it was a patch of rust or red sand corrosion.

  I fired up those engines. I was at the wheel, Ruby and Toaster either side of me, Ma and Hannah in the back. Al was riding atop George, and both beasts walked behind the hovercart lugging the bulk of our supplies. We made a pitiful convoy, I thought. But a brave one.

  I don’t know about the others – I was too busy driving, squinching my eyes against the dust in Da’s old goggles – but I never looked back at the old Homestead. Not once. Everything that it had meant to us and everything that we had been when we lived there – it was all gone. Now we were fugitives. We were like bugs, scrabbling about on the desert floor.

  No, we were settlers, all over again. That was a better way of seeing it. With everything we still called our own heaped onto our cart, we were looking for somewhere, far from here, where we could put down roots again. Da – and Grandma – would be proud of us, I thought.

  In town we were met by astonished stares. We were supposed to be hardy and resilient. We were Prairie Folk. We didn’t scare easily. We faced up to arduous times with fortitude. But they saw that day, when we rolled into town, a family on the run. We were mostly women folk, plus one jumpy boy and a kronky old robot. We had given in and we were running away.

  ‘But where will you go?’ Vernon Adams, at the counter of his emporium, looked neat as ever in his black uniform and white apron. His wife and daughter were standing beside him, and a whole storeful of shoppers stared at us.

  I’d thought about this long and hard. So had Da. He had kept this one up his sleeve. Da’s brilliant idea about where we should run to, when the day eventually came. I brought it out with some pride.

  ‘We’re following the source of the signals,’ I said. ‘All the meteorological reports we get on the radio. When the wind’s in the right direction and the radiation calms and sun spots fizzle down. Someone’s been broadcasting these messages for years, telling us about the weather. Someone with a powerful lot of technology, Da always said. A City, maybe. A human City. And that’s what we’re heading towards. That’s where we’re going, Mr Adams. Will you come too?’

  19

  Sheriff Baxter thought it was shameful that we wanted to run off and abandon town. He got up in front of the new public meeting and acted all scandalised at the suggestion. He even implied we had been sent off our heads because of Da’s Disappearance.

  ‘This is Our Town, our home,’ said the Sheriff. ‘How many years have we spent building it up? Why would we suddenly give up hope and turn it over to our enemies?’

  A great many agreed with him that night. Rumbles and grumbles loud enough to rais
e the rafters on the meeting hall. The line of Elders looked smug at all the noise.

  ‘They’re content just to sit still and do nothing,’ I hissed along our row to Al and Toaster. ‘They think they’re doing something good by doing nothing at all.’

  Ma’s hand crept into mine, and I was surprised. I suppose it was her telling me to shush, as well as a gesture of quiet support. We sat on those hard benches listening to all that complacent noise and I thought: Well, why should they even listen to a young girl like me? Why would they listen to some women, a young boy and a broken robot? Why should they accept our word about anything?

  We spent that night at Ruby’s house. Everything seemed like an anti-climax. After gearing ourselves up, here we were, under a familiar roof again. Sitting amongst Ruby’s memorabilia and tat. We spent an uneasy night in the beds we always slept in when we were in town.

  The next day Ruby lost it. She yanked out trunks and rotting boxes, all filled with old discs and mildewy books. She told us in a defensive voice that this was all history. It needed to be preserved. We couldn’t just leave it here.

  I agreed with her. I knew that it was all history. But she had to look again at the size of the hovercart. We couldn’t take any of this stuff with us.

  ‘But you’ve seen these films, Lora. Films of Earth! Films of life in the olden days and life during the settling!’ She sobbed and I had to harden my heart. Now I had to be really in charge.

  ‘One day maybe one of us will come back,’ I said. ‘Or somebody else will. You know, if you hide all your precious stuff away, in the cellar, say, then maybe it’ll keep safe.’

  The old woman started babbling. ‘It’s heritage. It’s the legacy.’

  But by now this just sounded like words to me. I got Al to help her shift the old junk into the basement. I knew we had to focus on practical stuff. I went through Ruby’s kitchen for the concentrated capsules she had salvaged from her days as a space traveller. She had very few of the disgusting things left. Just one final parcel. She had opened this last box to delight Grandma when she visited. A shame. They’d have been useful on our trek, since they took up so little space.