Colony

by Leigh Matthews

  Silver had never felt good enough to earn her father's love or respect, no matter how hard she tried, and had the distinct impression that neither of her parents wished to be seen with her in public. So, while Silver had been curious about her Navajo ancestry, she quickly learned that asking questions about her mother's heritage was taboo in their household.

  Silver hadn't talked to another Navajo person until she was in college. A visiting lecturer tried making small talk with Silver about where she was from, which had left her feeling embarrassed at her ignorance of her family history. That embarrassment turned to anger at her mother, even though Silver knew it wasn't her fault, not really. A couple of weeks after their initial meeting, the lecturer sent Silver an email with some gentle suggestions for reading, and Silver spent a semester poring over books about her people and her history. When she went home for spring break, Silver tried to reach out to her mom, eager to talk to someone about everything she had learnt. Her mom told her to leave the past where it belonged, and the clipped, pained tenor of her voice made Silver close the books and go back to pretending that nothing was missing in their lives.

  Years later, on a geochemistry field-trip in Navajo land in Arizona, Silver thought of her mother and the lecturer. She looked him up, wanting to thank him for his kindness and his efforts to reconnect her with her native ancestry. He had become a professor at Stanford and was teaching a course on Decolonization, Self-Determination, and Space. Silver hesitated. She was thinking about applying for NASA and was doing all she could to quash the misgivings she already had about planetary exploration and the seeming inevitability of colonisation. It didn't seem fair to have her history, her heritage, which was so suffused with loss, become an invitation for this man to critique her dreams.

  Silver wondered now if the familiarity of an inhospitable environment was what had drawn her to Mars, and to space exploration in general. There were inherent constraints involved in space travel that meant astronauts and cosmonauts were typically pragmatic, utilitarian, and willing to embrace a degree of discomfort, and those were Silver's kind of people. It also seemed to Silver that a fair number of astronauts were trying to escape something back on Earth, press a kind of reset button on humanity, or both.

  When it was announced that Octavia would bring the first wave of civilians to Mars, Silver knew it marked a new era. As much as she wanted Cooper and Cosima to come with her, she also felt a certain defensiveness. Somehow, with this announcement, Mars no longer felt like the frontier, the exclusive territory of scientists and engineers like herself. Silver suspected that it wouldn't be long before the red planet began to feel crowded, just like Earth, and she would get itchy feet again.

  It had taken a while for Silver to admit this to herself, but as she listened to the message from Cooper, she suspected her wife had figured it out long ago. Cooper didn't want to keep chasing her across the galaxy, and Silver couldn't stay still.

  Long before she met Cooper, Silver spent a summer in the desert, far enough away from the city to avoid light pollution. With no classes to TA, Silver would lay on her back porch at night and stare up at the sky with a cold beer in her hand. She calculated distances and travel times, and revelled in the scratch of sand in her hair, thinking of what it would be like on Mars. She should have been working on her PhD proposal, but instead spent hours wandering the desert picking up ventifacts, the sharp rocks hewn by wind and sand over millennia.

  Silver turned these dusty rocks over and over in her hands and stared out across the expanse of desert, imagining herself walking on the surface of the red planet. She wanted to see for herself the geological oddities caused by the dry atmosphere of Mars and the slow swirl of dust filing down the rocks.

  After that summer, Silver scrapped her initial PhD plan and instead asked to join NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies team, known as the Desert RATS. Silver helped develop a wheeled rover, where each wheel moved independently. Unlike the rovers with tracks, the wheeled vehicles could tackle the type of tough terrain they would encounter on Mars. Years later, all those hours in the desert paid off when Silver got to pilot the fifth generation Curiosity Rover model as it made its way across the planet surface, gathering more data in just a few hours than they had gathered in all the previous years.

  It was hard to fathom, but three and a half billion years before Silver piloted the rover, the surface of Mars was similar to that of Earth: volcanoes and a denser atmosphere; Water at the surface; All the ingredients needed to spark life as we know it.

  Eventually, the red planet lost its protective magnetic field, and solar winds slowly stripped away the atmosphere. The stream of particles from the sun destabilised the water on the planet's surface, and Mars cooled to the point where all water retreated underground as ice.

  Scientists had once thought that the slow creep of water through cracks in the planet's surface meant that any microbes constituting Martian life had also retreated underground. Every test so far showed no trace of such microbes, however, and the current theory was that the red planet had simply never been home to living organisms. Most researchers had adopted the view that Mars was empty land, prior to the arrival of humans, of course, with their plans for colonisation.

  If Mars had once supported life, it wouldn't be photosynthetic. The planet was too far from the sun for plants to thrive, something they knew only too well from their work in the biodomes. Instead, any Martian organism would likely be chemosynthetic, feeding on chemical energy created by reactions between water and rock below the planet's surface.

  Silver had taken several biochemistry classes over her years in school, and had learned about the rock-eating microbes found deep in the Canadian Shield. The rock there was as old as the rocks on Mars. Scientists had spent decades of their lives two kilometres underground, poring over rock samples beneath Timmins and Sudbury, breathing stale air and searching for organisms that were over two billion years old.

  The idea of being so deep in the Earth, buried in darkness, gave Silver chills. She wanted to be out on the surface, watching the sun rise and set on the horizon. Now, on Mars, she missed the feeling of wind on her skin. Stepping outside without her EV suit or EMS would mean almost instant suffocation. The dryness of the atmosphere would cause all the moisture in her mouth, nose, and eyes to evaporate instantly. Her lungs would go into shock and, if that didn't kill her right away, the freezing temperatures would cause her muscles to solidify and she would die in excruciating pain.

  While the thin atmosphere on Mars remained unbreathable for humans, there was growing talk that this might be about to start changing. ESA had been holding international talks to establish protocols for transforming the Martian atmosphere. Giant terraforming projects were being planned, including setting up colossal mirrors in space that would reflect the sun onto the planet's poles to melt the ice there. Once this happened, there would be no going back. The technology was moving faster than the ethicists could handle.

  Hundreds of small biodomes, no larger than the size of a beer pitcher, were dropped to the planet's surface over a decade before Silver ever set foot on the planet. These miniature laboratories were designed to screw themselves into the soil and carry out programmed experiments, extracting minerals from the soil and carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the air. Most of these devices were now redundant, having served their purpose of gathering information to support the design of larger biodomes that would produce oxygen.

  India sent the first oxygen production plant to Mars in 2020, followed closely by MOXIE (the Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment), sent by the Americans in 2021. Over the next decade they built a bigger version of MOXIE and by 2032 they had begun building the biodomes. Almost all of the construction was automated, or had been done remotely, with a skeleton crew staying just two sevensols on the planet before returning to Earth.

  The original biodomes were carefully populated with plant life that thrived in a low-light environment, taking the carbon dioxide from th
e planet's atmosphere and releasing oxygen. The geoengineering projects faced a whole host of obstacles over the years, including a mysterious blight that killed off all but a few of the plants.

  These disasters set them back years, but as MOXIE was replaced by more advanced models, including an algae farm that produced huge amounts of oxygen, they had enjoyed considerable success. The last mission to Mars had established two large biodomes in just a few sevensols, and the engineers were halfway through setting up the third when they returned to Earth, taking advantage of the planets' alignment to keep travel time to a minimum.

  Biodomes One and Two were each around the size of two football fields, and were clustered together at the equator. These biodomes housed algae farms set up to produce a steady supply of oxygen for refilling any rockets that landed on the planet. This capacity massively reduced the cost of journeys to Mars, and allowed the ships to carry cargo instead of the oxygen needed to burn the fuel for the return flight. Any excess oxygen they produced after the ships were refilled was used to make the air in the station breathable for those astronauts who stayed behind.

  Increased oxygen production and work at the refinery meant that they now had enough fuel and oxygen to send Octavia back to Earth once the planets drew close again. They would leave behind a skeleton crew to support the civilians and to carry on work to expand the capacity of the settlement. They could launch Octavia now - in theory at least - but the orbits of the two planets meant it would be a longer, more difficult journey than it had been to get to Mars.

  Everyone on Mars had signed up for the trip knowing that if there were ever a need for an emergency evacuation of the planet, they would have to draw lots to see who got on the first ship home. There was no way to get everyone off the planet at the same time, and there were no passenger flights scheduled for another fifteen Earth months, or four hundred or so sols. A small ship, Octavia II, carrying mainly cargo, was due to leave Earth in the next few weeks, but this shuttle had only a small crew and wouldn't be properly equipped to transport civilians back to Earth.

  By the time this ship arrived, the new crew might be taking their first steps on a planet already undergoing radical transformation. The oxygen production capacity on Mars was now sufficient to comfortably meet existing needs and to begin transforming the atmosphere. The question was no longer whether they could carry out a project of such magnitude, but if they should. If they began geoengineering on a planetary scale, in just a few decades the atmosphere could go from less than one percent oxygen to the twenty-one percent level of Earth's atmosphere.

  Unlike some of her colleagues, Silver paid little attention to the discussion around atmospheric engineering, and the accusations of hubris attributed to the various agencies involved in creating a settlement on the planet. She had noticed that the agencies were careful, for the most part, not to use the word 'colony.'

  Occasionally, Silver considered the ease with which she had slipped into the role of coloniser, but as with the ever-present danger of the inhospitable Martian atmosphere, cognitive dissonance was a key part of her survival strategy. It wasn't lost on her that her Navajo ancestors had suffered greatly at the hands of colonisers. And, if she was honest with herself, she continued to feel the effects of both cultural and patriarchal oppression, including the legacy of her father's attitudes and behaviour.

  She had a nagging sense that her life and her outlook would be very different if she had grown up connected to her Navajo family, culture, and traditions. As an adult, Silver accepted that she could have developed such a connection herself, and she no longer thought it fair to place all the blame on her parents, however tempting that might be. She also recognized, albeit reluctantly, that if she really considered what settlement meant, if she thought back to her time in the desert and the land the white explorers had declared empty so they could justify its theft, she might come to a conclusion about space exploration that she didn't like.

  eight

  Silver woke with a jolt and quickly scanned the room for the figure she had just seen, again, in her dream. She was alone, and, for a second or two, that was a relief. Then she remembered Cooper's message.

  Rubbing the gritty residue of tears from her eyes and face, Silver rolled off her bed and checked the time. She didn't remember falling asleep, or even getting into her rack, but it was almost midnight. She had slept for close to twelve hours, but didn't feel at all rested. Her dreams and reality seemed to have folded into each other.

  She looked up at the clocks again. If everything was normal and she was back on Earth, she would have given Cosima her bath, then read at least two books before finishing with I Love You Through and Through. That book had become their way of conditioning Cosima to go to sleep with happy thoughts. Cosima would yawn dramatically, as if eating up all the oxygen in the room. Then she would tuck herself into Silver's shoulder, her little hand across Silver's chest, and be asleep within seconds. She had almost always slept well, something that Silver envied now. Once Cosima was settled, Silver would carefully lift her into her own bed before going to the kitchen, where Cooper would have poured her a glass of wine.

  With no alcohol at the station, Silver felt a twinge of envy. At least Cooper could dull the pain a little. Silver had to face it alone and sober. All she had now were memories of Cosima. Her baby would be so different now. She would have grown and changed so much in eleven months. Silver felt the phantom weight of her baby in her arms, and the memory felt tainted somehow. It wasn't real. This baby no longer existed, but the longer she spent on Mars, the more precious these tactile memories became.

  When she was born, Cosima had weighed just under six pounds, and Cooper had been so scared at first about every little jostle or bump. Silver remembered gazing down at their daughter in amazement, feeling the softness of her hair, her skin. It was like she was barely there at all. At times, Silver had imagined that Cosima was slight enough that she might be whisked away by one of the desert's calmest sand storms.

  Silver was so used to handling large cumbersome machines that she had felt a little scared by this tiny baby. She hadn't told Cooper though. She had felt the need to project confidence, to let Cooper see that their baby was robust, and that she could take care of them both. After Silver had returned to work, Cooper had bathed and dressed and put Cosima to bed more times than Silver ever would.

  When Silver had gone into labour, Cooper had frozen. The reality hit and Silver had needed to guide Cooper through even the most basic points of their birth plan. In the hospital, Cooper held Silver's hand and cried silent, happy tears as the nurse placed their tiny baby on Silver's chest. Cosima was born with a full head of dark, curly hair, like Cooper, and a darker complexion like Silver. The nurse, an older man, had laughed, presumably remembering when conception still required the involvement of male and female gametes. He smiled at Cosima and her moms and said, "A wonder of love… and science."

  As Silver thought back to that day, she realised she couldn't remember the colour of the little hat the nurse had placed on Cosima's head to keep her warm. It wasn't important, but it bothered Silver that this part of the memory eluded her. She focused on the feeling of the weight of Cosima in her arms, the warmth of her little body as she fell asleep on Silver's chest when she had finished feeding in the middle of the night. She had been so tethered to Cosima for that first year, and things between her and Cooper had never been better than in those nine months after their daughter was born.

  Silver wanted to keep hold of these happy memories, but her thoughts felt thick and dull. She kept thinking instead of the fights she had narrowly avoided with Cooper in the months leading up to the launch of Octavia, while they tried to keep the peace and leave on good terms.

  After those first nine blissful months, once Silver announced her intention to wean Cosima and return to work, things had changed between her and Cooper. Silver felt like Cooper began to slowly shut her out of family life. She took over the grocery shopping and cooking, would make playdates
and medical appointments without consulting Silver, and would then get angry at her when they clashed with a project meeting she couldn't miss. Silver lost track of the names of Cosima's friends and their parents' names. She couldn't keep up with the music classes, nursery rhymes, or favourite foods, and felt at times that Cooper made things deliberately obtuse as a way of punishing her for having wanted to return to work, for having wanted to have conversations about something other than diapers and breastfeeding, for having wanted her body and mind to be her own again.

  Silver felt the heaviness, the darkness, of those memories, and reached out to record a transmission to Cooper. As her finger hovered over the screen, she remembered the communications blackout and was relieved. She needed time to figure out what to say. She needed to respond not just react. Would things have been different if she had decided to stay on Earth? Would Cooper have relinquished some control and let her in? Maybe, if she went back, they could still work things out.

  Silver caught herself mid-thought, seeing that the idea of when she went back had switched to if. What if she didn't go back? What if she volunteered to stay on for another rotation?

  What if she just stayed on Mars and never returned to Earth?

  Silver clenched her fists and let out a low, guttural roar. What was she thinking? Of course, she had to go home to her baby and wife. Despite everything that had happened, she loved Cosima, and she still loved Cooper. Didn't she?

  Silver's thoughts raced and spiralled, her memories mixing with reality. It was hard to shake herself out of this dream-space, where she still thought of them as a family. It was as if the voice inside her head had surrendered all inhibition even while she was awake.

  She went to the washroom and splashed cold water on her face. Despite her confusion and sadness, she had to acknowledge that her family had crumbled long ago. She had disappointed Cooper, and there didn't seem to be any way she could make up for that now.