Journey Back to Mars: a sci-fi collection

by Hugo Huesca

  Quark stopped listening. He was there out of respect for his old friend. He was sure his duty ended at having to endure speeches, especially by a man who had never bothered to stop by Dangler’s garden after school and grab a hydroponic apple. The old man would go red with fury and swear storm and destruction upon Quark and his friends. Chase them out wielding a polyplastic shovel, you know, the works. But each Friday, without fault, they would return and find the gate unlocked and the branches –that were just that, apple-tree branches in aluminum trails filled with a special solution—with those sweet apples unwatched.

  While the first Colony Mayor talked about death and the legacy they were building, Quark searched for his friends among the crowd. He found them easily, because they were wearing the same orange spacesuits he was wearing, so they stood out of the black jumpsuits like a trombone in a rock band. Orion had it the worse of the three, because his dad was a safety freak and had made him wear the polyplastic helmet even now. The poor kid looked like a robot with the dome-shaped helmet. Quark quietly, with deliberate movements, got their attention and then mouthed they should get together ASAP for a meeting.

  After the speech, which went on and on and then never got anywhere, the technician brought the ashes to a small hole in the ground and emptied the vase there. Then he planted a seed, covered it in dirt and watered it. Eventually, it would become a tree, just like the other small plants growing in a row next to it. That would have pleased Mr. Danglers very much.

  The procession broke down in separate groups, with people gossiping about Danglers, about Cunningham and about whatever adults talked about. Mostly other people. No one paid attention to the kids, so they easily skittered off to a more private part of the park, so they could hold a proper meeting for the fallen comrade. Because when Quark, Orion and Lizzy got together and no meddling earthling was in sight, they became ‘The Futurisians,’ the self-proclaimed most secret society on the entirety of Mars.

  “I thought that Bob Cunningham would never shut off,” complained Orion. He took off his helmet as soon as he was sure his dad wasn’t hiding in a bush, ready to catch him disobeying.

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” Lizzy chided him. She had decided about a week ago that she would be the moral compass of the Futurisians. Which was an interesting choice, since she spent more time in detention than the other two put together. “He is our elected leader.”

  “Well, I didn’t vote for a leader,” complained Orion. He took a small tablet out of his pocket and booted up a video game he had been tinkering with while at school.

  “Neither did Mr. Danglers, or my parents,” Quark said, thinking aloud, “I think they don’t take this Bureau business as seriously as they should. We ought to get together sometime, all the two-hundred-and-three, and decide on a new leadership all of us agree on. Bureaus are dumb anyways.” Also, he should be the new president.

  “You are not counting the babies,” Lizzy reminded him, “again.” Neither of them subtracted the four deaths, because one thing was knowing people die, and another very different, was being eleven years old.

  “That’s because those don’t count yet. They are larval-stage Martian men, so they don’t do much between crying and blabbering. We have to put our share of the work around here.” Lizzy, who hadn’t decided yet if she liked the newborns or not, opted to go for a safe play and rolled her eyes at him.

  “I don’t feel we do much work,” said Orion, trying to pay attention to the debate and to his game at the same time, “we mostly hang around, and get in trouble.”

  “Don’t say that!” Quark managed to still talk in a whisper and sound scandalized, “We do lots around here! We lift the spirits of everyone in the Colony, we are its youth! Without us they would have nothing to keep them motivated, they look at our exploits for inspiration, and relief from their routines. With that, and school, it’s a miracle we get any time for ourselves at all.”

  Lizzy seemed like she wanted to argue the point, so he deflected:

  “Focus guys, this is an official meeting,” he said. Since he was older, he was the leader, so he got to call the official meetings. Both his leadership and his age were still under debate, but this week he had quorum.

  “I never voted for you either,” complained Orion, but his heart wasn’t really on it.

  “Listen, I have a proposal to make,” Quark said, “we ought to name Mr. Danglers an honorary Futurisian.”

  The other two members considered it.

  “Well, I am going to miss him, hanging around the gardens and chasing us with that shovel,” Lizzy said, “and he never snitched on us, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said Orion, “he was solid. Things aren’t going to be the same around here. Maybe we should do something for the guy.”

  On that they agreed.

  Part of being an honorary Futurisian, they decided, was that you should get a private ceremony after the burial. So they waited until the adults naturally drifted off the park and into the buildings and passageways around them, enjoying the little leisure time that they got on weekends. Then they got to the little mound where Danglers’ tree was planted. Each of them bid him farewell.

  “Goodbye, Mr. Danglers,” Orion said, “hope they have real apple trees where you are going.”

  “You were sweet,” said Lizzy, “but not too much; which is good, because we are Martians, and we don’t do sweet very well. I hope you aren’t so lonely now.”

  Quark thought for a while. Then he said, talking to the soiled earth: “You understood our traditions, and had grit. You were a good friend.”

  Afterwards, Quark felt a grim satisfaction. Who knew what Danglers’ would have wanted for his own ceremony, but this was as good as the other one, in Quark’s opinion.

  They started to walk away from the trees, looking for adventure. Thanks to some rounding up the scientists of Earth had done before the Colony arrived on Mars, they had kept the same days of the week. Today still was a Saturday morning, which to the kids meant wandering around the Colony, looking for trouble.

  There was just one man near the park with them. He was a long, slim fellow dressed in black garments. He was staring intently at the park. He gave the air around him a vaporous, humid quality. Quark walked towards him, to get a better look. He pretended to be just wandering around, looking at the ceiling, which right now was trying to emulate a clouded blue sky.

  Quark had only seen clothes like that in movies and pictures of Earth. Those weren’t the jumpsuits he saw around the Colony, but a battered old suit of a washed out black, that seemed too big for the lanky man. He was also wearing a top hat, like the old black and white movies that were Lizzy’s favorites; it looked just as tattered as his suit. He wore black shoes that must’ve been shiny once, but now were a sad black covered in scratches.

  The man looked so out of place that Quark wasn’t even sure he was there. He looked back to his friends for a second, they were still by Danglers’ new tree; and when he turned back, the strange man was looking straight at him.

  Quark gasped, and took a step back. He was instantly angry with himself, because Martian men didn’t gasp when some weird fellow looked at them. But the man was as pale as snow, and had black eyes that seemed like tar. Quark was sure he had seen a color like that before, just not in a person’s eyes. The man had thin lips, which curled in a faint smile, and then he turned back towards the building, as if he had never moved at all.

  “Did you guys see that?” Quark asked to the other two Futurisians, going straight back to them, “who the hell is he anyways?”

  “Well, that’s Old Sullivan alright,” said Orion, in a know-it-all fashion. “I asked my dad earlier today, before you arrived. He was at the funeral too, behind Bob the Mayor.”

  “He has always been here,” added Lizzy, looking at Quark as if he had gone mad. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Right,” he thought, “that is obviously Old Sullivan. How could I forget?” He was always in the Colony, since Quark could remember. Bef
ore, even. Doing what, exactly? He didn’t look like a technician, or an engineer.

  “He is a private man, I think my dad said so,” said Orion, his eyes squinting trying to get a better look at the man. After a minute or two, Old Sullivan simply turned around and left, walking at a calm, slow pace, as if enjoying a walk in the woods.

  “I don’t like him,” decided Quark, “I don’t trust that hat and that suit and those eyes. He seems mean.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Orion, biting his lip. His dad had taught him to distrust old mean men, even if there weren’t any on the Colony… except for Old Sullivan, of course. “He is just an old man.”

  The three Futurisians stared at each other, without much to add. They knew something was wrong, but they couldn’t put their finger on what.

  Contrary to popular belief around the Colony, the Futurisians didn’t actually go around looking for real trouble, they were Martians and settlers too, so they understood their duty to the Colony. And Old Sullivan had a big “Real Trouble” sign hanging around his black hat as big as a neon warning as far as the kids were concerned. They knew they should stay out of it.

  But Quark was eleven and Lizzy and Orion were ten, and that’s not an age when a kid can just ignore a mystery that appears right in front of their faces.

  When his parents called him to his tablet some hours later, Quark had decided the Futurisians were now on a new adventure. They didn’t have to exchange any words to agree, it was just obvious.

  So they planned to get a video-conference going, later tonight, and each went their separate ways, after Lizzy reminded Orion to put on his helmet before his dad saw him and freaked out.

  Quark met with his parents, who had spent the day in the cinema, watching an old earth movie about the last war –which sounded dreadfully boring. Quark had always thought that movies were funnier when atomic weapons were just speculation and cool doomsday devices; when movies documented a real war, it was just a bunch of dying around, with no real adventure.

  Soon they were back on the buggy and out of the airlock, well on their way home on the far part of the Colony. Outside, on Mars surface, the sun was setting. The sky had a faint, blue-and-gray tint under the dying light. There were no clouds that he could see, and the sun was a pale dot that seemed so far away and lonely, more so as the light became weaker and weaker. He could see Phobos peeking near the horizon. Its sister, Deimos, would come later.

  “Dad… who is Old Sullivan?” Quark asked, out of nowhere, as he was falling asleep. He took a long breath of cold recycled air and forced himself back to wakefulness.

  His dad seemed confused. “What do you mean? He is just Old Sullivan,” he said, looking at his son over his shoulder for a second, “why, you didn’t go around pestering him today, right? You know he is a private man.”

  “Yeah, of course I know that,” said Quark, and it was true, even if he didn’t remember knowing that before. He massaged his temple, sensing the start of a headache with each bump of the buggy with the Martian road. “But who is he? What does he do around here?”

  “Hope you didn’t ask him that,” intervened his mom, “that would have been very rude.”

  “Yes, very rude,” agreed his dad, “everyone is doing their best of the Colony, you know that. Don’t bother the poor man, he is old.”

  Quark closed his eyes and scratched his head. “Sure, I didn’t bother him. I was just wondering… It doesn’t matter, you know. It’s just a game with my friends.”

  “Sure kiddo, sure.” Said his dad, and his attention returned to the road.

  “Well, now I am sure,” thought Quark, to himself, “that something is wrong with Old Sullivan.” For outside, the sky had shifted into night. The sun went down and for one brief moment, before the stars appeared, the sky was covered by a deep, all-encompassing darkness. The alien black looked just like the black in Old Sullivan’s eyes.

  That night, Quark went to bed early. He bid his parents goodnight and left them to their work in the first floor of their home, which was also a laboratory filled to the brim with machines. To Quark, a house was a place where you found computers as big as a horse. They cranked out sheets and sheets of raw data, while his mother calmly interpreted them over a cup of coffee, and his dad worked on his experiments.

  Quark’s room was on the third floor. Thankfully for the settlers, living space was not a problem for them, thanks to the robots, and everyone there enjoyed more than enough living space to live with some comfort. Families had it even better, since they saved the Colony the use of some Life Support machines, they got even more furniture and room.

  So the boy had enough privacy to start a conspiracy. He came into his room, got out of his space-suit and changed into some comfortable overalls. Then he locked the door, dimmed his windows –screens, but indistinguishable from transparent glass— until the Martian surface disappeared from view. He didn’t feel like star-watching tonight.

  Lizzy had already started the conference call. Quark joined the Futurisians by pressing a button on his tablet, and donning his cable-less earplugs. His friends’ faces appeared floating atop his bed, holographically rendered thanks to a projector installed in the ceiling, which had been a gift for his tenth birthday.

  “Did you guys find anything?” he asked them, lying in his bed, and going straight to business.

  “No, sorry,” said Orion, “we were hoping you had better luck.”

  “Not that much. My mom said the same as Orion’s dad, ‘Old Sullivan has always been around, now stop asking because he hates being around people,’” said Lizzy.

  Quark nodded. “Yeah, same around here. I don’t like the guy, and even if I’m supposed to remember him being around, I just…”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t feel right,” Lizzy added. “I think he is lying, somehow.”

  “I… think so,” Quark said, “my head hurts when I think too hard about it.”

  “Same here,” said Orion, “I remember him being around on my birthday, but I don’t have any pictures with him that day.”

  They pondered this new information. Quark checked his own tablet for any picture of the man, and wasn’t surprised when he found none. “This doesn’t really prove anything,” he thought, “I don’t go around taking photographs of the whole Colony. And yet…”

  “But what can we do?” said Orion, his head looking someplace invisible to Quark, probably checking no one was spying on them, “The adults believe him, it’s not like we can do something about him, we are only…”

  “Don’t say it,” Quark warned him.

  “Whatever. But you know it’s true. It can be dangerous.”

  “So we let the adults solve it,” Quark said, scratching his head, “somehow we are onto him, and they aren’t, right? So we prove to the adults that this Old Sullivan isn’t who he says he is. We get him on video, lying, and then they will have to believe us.”

  “Not a bad call, I think,” Lizzy told him, and gave Orion one of her mischievous looks. His dad worked surveillance, which was a relaxed, well rewarded job around the Colony, to make sure everything was okay and the machines functioned perfectly. He took his job very seriously.

  Orion sighed, “I thought you were going to say something about that. I think I’m still grounded since last time we tried to pull a Spy Mission…”

  “Tomorrow,” Quark decided, “we have to do this as soon as possible. I don’t want that man hanging around the Colony, doing gods know what.”

  None of them did. It was their Colony, and their only home and Quark didn’t want Old Sullivan even remotely near his home or his family.

  Later that night, Quark fell into a nasty sleep, filled with bad dreams in the middle of the night. The darkness of his room became more and more menacing with the slow dribble of the hours. He had never feared the dark before.

  In his dreams, the window of his room opened inward, which was impossible, because it was not truly a window, but a screen, with only steel plates behind it.

&nb
sp; A tint-like mist poured slowly inside, fell heavily to the floor, and raised itself. It condensed more and more until it became a solid, pale, lanky figure with sharp jaws and pointed cheeks, and with black eyes the color of the darkness before the stars. Then the remaining mist coalesced and clothed him in a familiar battered suit, and a black top hat on his bald head.

  Old Sullivan was in front of his bed, smiling just like he had done when he caught Quark ogling that morning, at Mr. Danglers’ funeral. The boy wanted to scream, to call for help or at least raise his hands to defend himself, but this was a dream, a deep dream, and he was powerless.

  “I hope you don’t mind me visiting,” said the man. He had a raspy voice, sharp as a knife but jagged as if his throat was a cavern. He didn’t move his mouth to speak, yet Quark heard him as if he had talked directly into his ear. “But we need to chat a bit, young Quark, about what you saw today.”

  Old Sullivan looked around as if the darkness meant nothing to him like he could see without problem everything in the boy’s room: his movie posters, his music tapes, his books lying around everywhere. The man smiled. “You humid-men never change, especially not the children.”

  There was no happiness in that smile, no joy, not even hate. Sullivan smiled like a man grew a mustache just to have something to wear on his face. Quark could only look on, shaking inside his own mind, feeling his heart race and fill his veins with adrenaline that felt as liquid fire. He wanted to run away, warn his parents, turn every single light in the house on, and put as much distance as possible between himself and that lanky, pale man with black eyes.

  “I used to like children,” Old Sullivan explained, while he sat on the edge of Quark’s bed, “I even had one or two of my own. That was long ago, and I’ve forgotten their faces. I guess I’m not used to children anymore,” that voice was maddening.

  “I forgot how different your mind is from a fully-formed one, how the humid-mind won't settle until years later. In a way, it was my fault you noticed what you did this morning. And because I’m feeling generous, I’m here to talk to you, instead of fixing my mistake in a… more direct way.”