Lost on Mars

by Paul Magrs

  Toaster stared at me calmly. ‘I really don’t think Al will find anything in the Archives of The City Insider though.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because I don’t think this is a real City,’ he said.

  He bustled off with all the dishes loaded up in his arms and vanished into the kitchen. He didn’t say what he meant. Not yet. Toaster was still thinking it over.

  Thinking too much was never really in my nature. I slung on my new hat and coat and decided I’d ride the elevator downstairs to get some air. I secretly loved the elevator and used any chance I could get to have another go in it. Of course we’d never had anything like it in Our Town. That wonderful arrangement of metal ropes and gears and cogs, all chiming and clanking away, pulling that cage up and down, up and down all day. It was like being inside some wonderful clock.

  Toaster made a few concerned noises about coming with me, but I decided that I wanted to be by myself. He looked woeful and I laughed. ‘Really, Toaster. It ain’t dangerous out there.’

  Actually, some of the looks he’d been giving me lately – equal parts wary and worried – reminded me of how he would look at Grandma back in the day. As if at the grand old age of nearly sixteen I’d turned into a crabby, crazy lady.

  He was just trying to help, though. It was what he’d been programmed for, after all. He was built to look after the members of our family, no matter what. It just about destroyed him to see what had become of us all.

  I got aboard the empty elevator. We were on Storey 202. Pretty high. Dazzlingly high. I couldn’t even conceive of the distances and forces involved in building and living so high. The metal grilles slammed and I gave myself up to the gut-wrenching lurch of its rapid descent. I spared a glance at myself in the highly polished mirror. My hair was up under my shapeless hat, my dress was plain, but tidy and pressed.

  Al would tell me that I ought to dress up more. People in the City Inside noticed such things, he’d said, once or twice. He said that I made a habit of dressing like a servant. Well, that suited me fine. I’d no desire to go putting on airs. Al needed to wear fancy outfits and suits more than I did. He seemed so pleased to wear the ancient, old-fashioned stuff that the City people preferred. They put me in mind of the folk in my old electric books.

  When we first got here I thought we’d gone mad. The women looked just like the etched illustrations in the Brontes and the Dickens. I thought we’d flown with Sook into a world of madness. But this kind of dress turned out to be normal. It was how people had been living here for just about forever.

  The elevator deposited me in the wide foyer of our building. It was all mellow, gleaming sunlight down there. The Downstairs Market was held here everyday, and the place was all hubble bubble with folk milling about. They came from the residential apartments above and from the other buildings in our district, which was called Stockpot, of all things.

  Multi-coloured awnings stretched over rickety booths, where City-dwellers of all kinds plied their wares. It was a shambolic place, a little bit rough and ready. You could hear accents other than the refined talk that my brother was trying so hard to imitate. In the Downstairs Market you could hear all kinds of surprising things.

  I had my basket and a pocket full of credits and I was checking out the fresh produce. Weighing fruits and vegetables in my hands, squeezing them, smelling their firm, plump skins. It was all luxurious to me, after some of the rubbish we’d had to eat in the desert and the deep canyons of the wilderness. I’d never forget the taste of rat or blue Jack Rabbit or those dreaded dried capsules Aunt Ruby loved so much.

  I couldn’t believe the gorgeousness of the colours and aromas that they took for granted in the City Inside. I drifted over to where some old guy was stirring a huge pan over a naked flame. Yellow rice, chunks of sizzling meat and tiny baby squid. The smell was irresistible.

  Sometimes I wondered what Da and Ma would make of this place. I didn’t suppose either of them could have imagined a City like this. Towers of a thousand storeys and everyone living in vertical harmony. The vastness of the numbers involved were hard to imagine, even when you were right in the middle of it all.

  Funny, that I was thinking about my parents as I moved through the market. Just about then I heard one of the songs that would always remind me of them. One of the old songs Ma used to play on her harp.

  I could still picture her pale, slender fingers rippling at the tall, taut strings. It was the same song: ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home.’ It was being played just the same as she always played it. I could hear the liquid notes of a harp, drifting over the crowd’s heads.

  Suddenly I was being pushed backwards through time. I was back in the Homestead, in the days before we fled. Before anyone died or was made to Disappear. I was hearing Ma play her harp by candlelight.

  Then the moment of disorientation ended and I was back in the Downstairs Market. Ladies and gentlemen in their elaborate clothes and bustled past me. Thieves and ragamuffins went about their business. No one took any notice of the sunbaked teenage girl in the plain dress and messy hat as she stood there having a reverie about an ancient song from planet Earth.

  I saw a gap in the crowd and where the music had come from. A young man stood beside a newspaper stand. He was filthy, unwashed, with dreadlocks and a terrible red jumper that hung to his knees in tatters. His music was finished for the day, and he was manhandling a golden-stringed instrument into its case, stowing it away with infinite care. At his feet, beside a hatful of tossed coins, was a small black creature. It was hard to say whether it was a cat or a dog.

  31

  I was drawn to them, in the whole crowd. I don’t know why. The harp music was still filling up my head, even though he’d put the instrument away.

  The boy said his name was Peter, and the cat-dog’s name was Karl. I dropped a couple of coins into his battered hat and I flashbacked onto Old Man Horace, the kindly hobo of Our Town. The man who blew away out of town when the big storm hit. He was the first of our Disappearances. But this was a much younger man.

  I knelt down to pat Karl, and still couldn’t tell if he was a cat or a dog, but he liked having his ears tickled all the same. He was malnourished, and so was Peter.

  ‘I know you,’ Peter said. He was staring into my face as I straightened up.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  His thin face and straggly beard weren’t familiar to me.

  ‘I’ve read about you,’ he said, becoming excited. ‘In the newspaper. I’m sure of it!’

  Oh. Oh yeah. My two minutes of celebrity. When we were featured in a few articles in The City Insider. It was how Miss Tillian Graveley had first come into our lives, despatched by her editor father to get our story. They wanted to know where we had come from, and how we had found our way to their City.

  I remembered the terrible photos that had accompanied those articles. Al, Toaster and I looked wild and beaten up, like we’d been through hell. We were filthy and completely bewildered-looking. The photographers’ crystal bulbs were going off and they crowded us. Al was scared and aggressive. Like the gallant old protector he was, Toaster powered up his laser blasts and was ready to fight the strangers to the death.

  But all they wanted to do was grab our pictures and talk to us. They wanted to hear about the girl, the boy and the robot who had wandered out of the impossible desert, from the wrong side of Mars.

  ‘It was some story,’ Peter the harpist was saying. He had a disconcerting habit of staring straight into my face. He was so handsome, I wanted to flinch away from looking at him. It was like looking into the sun. All I could think was that he would see the flaws in my own face; the dried-out skin, and the half-truths I had told about our prairie past.

  He said, ‘I guess you think a vagrant doesn’t keep up with the papers, or know everything that’s going on. But this vagrant does. I spend my mornings in the City Library, you see. Reading everything I can lay my hands on. It’s good there, in the public reading room, though it c
an get rowdy at times. They even let Karl come in with me. They know he’s old and sensible, and can be relied upon to behave himself. Also, he’s an avid reader.’

  I patted Karl on the head again, and it looked like the cat-dog was grinning at me. His mouth went right around his head and it was like he was one great big, panting smile.

  I turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ said Peter. ‘I want to hear more about your story. I bet those newspaper articles didn’t cover the half of it. They always smooth over the real truth of things, don’t they?’

  He was right enough about that. Even the inquisitive Miss Tillian Graveley wasn’t interested in the more gritty and gruesome stories we had to tell. She and the other reporters just wanted the big story. They wanted to know about a triumph over adversity. A testament to the spirit of man. Stuff like that.

  I stammered at Peter the vagabond, ‘Actually, I don’t want to go over all that again. You see, we’re trying to make a new life for ourselves, my brother and I. And it’s all starting to fade, anyway… It’s nearly three months now since we arrived in the City Inside…’

  Why was I gabbling at him? There was something kind and tender about his face. It made me feel he deserved an explanation. Anyone else and I would have turned and gone.

  ‘I understand.’ He picked up Karl and hugged him close. ‘You want to leave your old life behind. Too painful. Well, I can roll with that.’

  I smiled at him.

  ‘But you live here?’ he asked. ‘In Stockpot?’

  ‘We’re in this very building,’ I told him.

  ‘Then I’ll look out for you in future,’ he promised. ‘This is my new patch for busking. I was just trying it out today. But we like the market, don’t we Karl? The people have been pretty friendly. So I guess we’ll see you again.’

  ‘My name’s Lora.’

  ‘I know,’ he nodded. ‘I read all about you. How you journeyed all the way from your little town in the back of beyond. How you left your Homestead on the prairie. I read all about it. All those thousands of miles you travelled with your people, with no idea of what you were heading towards. With no idea that you would wind up here.’

  As he talked, I was aware of the dryness of my skin again, seasoned by the hot winds. My hair was bleached white by the sun. I was aware of my rough talk and how I hardly knew how to hold polite conversations with City people.

  I said quick goodbyes to both Peter and Karl and I hurried away. I put them out of my mind as I bought my groceries, hunting around the intricate by-ways of the Downstairs Market. At the same time my heart was thrumming with the thought that I might have made some new friends. Even if one of them was only a cat-dog and the other a messy boy with a harp.

  When I wandered by with full bags a little later, their spot was empty. They’d gone wherever they went when they were done with busking.

  I headed to the elevators and Storey 202, where it was my turn again to cook supper. I still wasn’t over the novelty of cooking fresh food, things I hadn’t had to forage or loot from abandoned stores.

  Soon pans were steaming, I was chopping up vegetables, and Toaster was trying to engage me in conversation. He had been hanging out with other Servo-Furnishings from this building. One of his shocks in the City Inside had been learning that he wasn’t the last of his kind at all. He was unique, sure, in his design, but it turned out that in this City nearly everyone could afford to have domestic appliance help.

  Toaster would bump into these guys when he was doing the recycling or the laundry in the basement. He found them all fascinating and, because they were all much more primitive designs than himself, he was pleased and flattered by their attention.

  So Toaster was burbling on about his conversations with the other robots that afternoon. It was all who said what about who else, and what their human beings were like to live with. Then he said something strange, which snagged my attention.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked him, with my chopping knife raised in mid-air.

  ‘I said that I was trying to learn from the other Servos more about where the City Inside is actually located. I wanted to know if they knew any geography.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They couldn’t tell me. They said that the City Inside is the only place they know. It’s all anybody here has known. No one goes anywhere else.’

  Toaster and I looked at each other. He had a strange expression on his face. I said, ‘Toaster, earlier you started telling me that you didn’t think this place was real…’

  He nodded firmly. ‘I’m becoming more convinced of it, Lora.’

  ‘But what does that mean exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘I think … I think we are inside the globe: the globe of Mars that the lizard birds had in their throne room. I think we have been placed inside a miniature City Inside. Like people used to put ships in bottles.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It wasn’t like Toaster to be fanciful. He wasn’t programmed for it. Had his circuits been shaken up so much that he could believe in such weird thoughts?

  ‘You mean we’ve been shrunk and put inside a model City?’ I started to laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking stung by my laughter. ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. Yes.’

  32

  The apartment door crashed open and Al came bursting in. He was carrying armfuls of paperwork, with his cravat untied and his smart jacket slung over one shoulder. I smiled to myself, thinking that he’d never be the proper, stiff little gentleman who seemed to be all the fashion in this City. The formality and all that decorum couldn’t quite contain my brother.

  As soon as he was in the kitchen he was gabbling away about his day at work. Who he saw and what was going on. He loved the whole business of breaking news coming over the wire. He said that his morning was spent in the Archive Rooms, polishing the expensive cherrywood cabinets that housed the computers. He had to gather up the great long threads of tickertape that came spooling out.

  Then he was keen to get to his biggest story of the day. ‘It’s about Grandma,’ he said. ‘Mrs Margaret Estelle Robinson.’

  ‘Did you look her up?’

  ‘I went to the machine that is supposed to know everything about everyone who ever came to Mars. And it does, Lora. It knows everything. And guess what? I found thirty-eight Margaret or Estelle Robinsons or combinations of those names. I found thirty-eight Grandmas!’

  I couldn’t take this in. How could there be thirty-eight of her?

  Al said it only took ten minutes of his lunch hour. Ten minutes of that wooden computer grinding its teeth and cogitating over the old records. He anxiously kept an eye on the door while it worked. Then a great long thread of tickertape came spewing out with the details of thirty-eight women called Margaret and/or Estelle Robinson. The machine chattered and whirred and Al ravelled the paper up, wrapping it round and round his wrist like an endless strand of wool.

  Now he passed it to me. I squinted at the tiny print. It was in some kind of code. Somewhere in all this tangled information was the life of our Grandma. The grand old lady of our family. I glowed with pride for only a moment before I was thinking, how would they know about her? With all the many thousands of people in this City Inside? How would they ever know about a Grandma on a prairie that was so far away?

  And if Toaster was right, and all of this place was miniaturised and trapped inside the globe – then the City Insiders couldn’t know anything at all about the world outside, could they?

  But Toaster had been talking crazy. No way could his theory be right. Could it?

  Al was looking at me strangely. He tapped the spool of paper. ‘They know who Grandma was. They know who we are. They have all that information in their machines. They already know all about us, Lora.’

  I frowned. I admitted to myself that I hadn’t expected the computers to find anything. I didn’t expect all this information – whatever it contained.

  I gav
e the spool of paper to Toaster to see if he could make anything of it. He held it up to the light, frowning. ‘I think I can learn to read this code. I could feed it through my circuits and I’ll tell you what it says.’

  ‘How long will that take?’ Al asked.

  ‘Not long.’ He looked eager and I remembered how attached to Grandma he had always been. He’d known her all of his life, since the very beginning. ‘One of these thirty-eight women has to be her,’ he muttered.

  ‘Toaster,’ I said. ‘How do you think the people here know about us?’

  He didn’t answer. But he looked perplexed.

  That night I had some trouble going to sleep.

  I thought about the starvation and the hardships that we endured on the prairie. The Disappearances and everything we suffered, and how we had only just survived. Did these City people know that we were there all along? Did they know what we were going through?

  Why did they never come and help us?

  Did they know that the rest of our people were still out in that wilderness?

  Could they help me find them?

  It was the question I had longed to ask someone since I had arrived here. But so far I had never found anyone I could trust enough.

  I lay awake most of that night. Through my bedroom wall I could hear Toaster clumping about in the drawing room. Just as I was on the verge of sleep I thought I heard his electronic voice, muttering away to himself. Then it stopped.

  The sunlight poured through the wooden shutters. It was a watery, thin light here, even on Storey 202. Back at home the dawn light was much more spectacular. Shimmeringly beautiful, waking us rudely each morning to another day’s hard work. Here life was easier and the light was more dull.

  That morning brought two things. Both unexpected. Both were official notifications. The first came for Al, who was soon banging on my bedroom door and looking tearful when I let him in.

  ‘Tillian just telephoned,’ he said. I never heard it ring, I realised. I must have fallen asleep, after all, in the hours before dawn. Al was sobbing and trying to hide it. I wanted to hug him or something, but I knew he’d never allow it.