Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “Thought you didn’t like them,” said her mum in surprise, turning to stare at Attlee.

  “We made up,” said Attlee.

  “That’s nice,” said Attlee’s mum.

  “Might sleep over two days.”

  “Having a party, are they?”

  “Working on lesson plan project.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s nice too.”

  They scraped up the corner crust with their spoons, savoring it. “How’s Uncle Dave?” Attlee inquired.

  “Busy,” her mum replied.

  Busy went without saying in the Collective, but in this case it meant that Attlee’s mum wasn’t likely to be seeing Uncle Dave for walks along the Tube anytime soon. Uncle Dave wasn’t an uncle really; he had just been friends with Attlee’s mum before she’d married Attlee’s dad. Uncle Dave was kind and besides was a boffin in a white coat, doing science stuff. Boffins earned perks within the Collective because they worked with their brains. Uncle Dave had told Attlee that she had a good mind too. Attlee thought that if her mum married Uncle Dave, life would get a lot nicer for all three of them. Attlee had loved her dad, but he was gone. Attlee was a realist.

  Attlee put the dish and the two spoons in the sink and carefully measured water to soak them, while her mum stretched out on the bed and opened a buke. She was absorbed in watching her holos by the time Attlee shouldered her pack, masked up, and crept out.

  The little bluish sun had set and the temperature was dropping fast out in the black night out there beyond the vizio roof. Shivering, Attlee found a storage shed and ducked into it long enough to strip down to her thermals and pull on the psuit. It was too big, of course, but a few loops of duct tape (no Martian ever went anywhere without a roll of duct tape) around the wrists and ankles snugged it close. If it bulked awkwardly under her outer clothes, Attlee didn’t care. Even with half its sensors broken, it still kept her deliciously warm.

  The wind had picked up Outside and was howling, hissing sand against the vizio by the time Attlee got to the lock by Besant Fields. Hobby and Jennifer were huddled together in the red light of the warning lamp. As Attlee drew near, Jennifer reached up and turned her speaker on.

  “You took your time,” she complained.

  “I’m here, ’n’t I?”

  “All arranged with your mum?” demanded Hobby. Attlee nodded. “All right, then. You go in there and you go all the way to the end. You may not even get there before morning. If you get to the end you need to look for a rock that’s got SHADOWCATS scratched on it. You need to take it and put this in its place.” Hobby drew a big flattish chip of stone from her pocket and thrust it at Attlee. Attlee took it and glanced at it briefly. It was marked s-c.

  “Then, if you make it back you have to bring it straight to the secret shed,” Hobby said.

  “You lot waiting here for me?” Attlee shoved the stone into her pocket.

  “As if!” cried Jennifer. “We done our test, thank you very much. I’m not standing out here freezing all night.”

  “So you both went all the way out there and had it out with the Old Roach, huh?” Attlee looked hard at Hobby.

  “Of course we did!”

  “How big is he?”

  “I couldn’t see him very well,” said Jennifer, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Big as a tractor,” said Hobby. “But I can’t say anything else. That would be telling.”

  “Right,” said Attlee, putting as much scorn as she knew how into her voice. “Ayck-oh. Step aside, then.”

  They moved and Attlee palmed the lockpad and stepped through as it irised aside. Then it had shut behind her and she was alone in the dark, staring down the long passage into Besant Fields.

  The canal ran down the passage’s center, from the place just in front of her where the pipes fed it, to the far vanishing point in the darkness. The moistness in the air was rich, heavy, like perfume. Attlee lifted her mask cautiously, then slid it off her face. She gulped in a breath. She could taste the oxygen, the water droplets. It was just the sort of lush pleasure the kids of the Collective were taught to distrust. That’s sensual, that is. Bad for you. As if to underscore the admonition, something flickered with movement far ahead.

  Nothing really there, Attlee told herself. Nothing to be scared of anyway. Except Mars. And Mars is enough.

  Every Martian kid knew that there had once been a time when ancient Mars had been like ancient Earth, a little blue planet with water and an atmosphere, but something had smashed Mars into—what had the book said?—into its own Permian Extinction that never ended. Only algae had survived, down in the frozen water. But just as Earth had healed itself of its Permian catastrophe, Mars might be healed too, and that was why everybody had to work selflessly at the Great Work of giving him back an atmosphere and freeing his water to fill his vanished seas. . . .

  Attlee stepped forward, clenching her fists on the straps of her pack. Nothing jumped out at her, and so she took another step, and another, and after that she just put her head down and kept walking.

  At Besant Fields the domed area widened out, with rows of beets on one side of the canal and rows of cabbage on the other. Attlee paused here and looked around suspiciously. Though the wind howled outside beyond the vizio transparence, though it moaned and spattered the walls with blown sand, no breath of air moved in here. The beets and cabbage were as immobile as though they were painted on the rows. Only the water moved, flowing down the canal, throwing little glints of green around the walls where a safety light reflected off its surface. Had that been what she’d seen?

  Of course it had been. Must have been. Attlee marched on along the service path next to the canal, resolutely ignoring all the sneaking memories that came creeping to mind now. Hadn’t it been Besant Fields that had been hit by the first-ever Strawberry the Collective had faced, a long time ago when they were newly arrived on the planet? The cyclone of pink sand and red boulders roaring up out of the west was very rare here on the Tharsis Bulge, but came paying a special visit to the Collective to test its resolve. It had destroyed the temple the Ephesians had built, it had picked up another building and whirled it like a hat until it landed on a ledge far up Mons Olympus, and it had ripped through Besant Fields.

  Don’t think about that. Useless memories make you weak.

  But it was hard not to remember the whispers passed among the adults when they thought children were asleep: It tore away the vizio like it was cobwebs. The cabbages froze and dried in an instant, they looked like green glass and shattered to bits if you kicked them. The boulders came smashing down and bashed the canals so the water froze and blew away as frost; you can still see the places where the concrete was replaced. And we hadn’t learned yet to wear psuits, see? There was only one man, Alf Higgins, who had traded for one. And he was wearing it, and he was one of the five who was in Besant Fields when it happened.

  He saw it all and lived to tell it. Saw the others, heroes of the Collective all, picked up and whirled away like straws. They all hung on to the vizio frames but one by one their hands froze and they lost hold, all except Alf. The gloves of his psuit kept his hands from freezing. But whether they were scoured to death or froze or were smashed by rocks going ’round and ’round, all of them died, see? Except Alf. Which is why we always wear psuits in the fields now.

  And we went out weeping and found the heroes’ bodies, one by one, with their clothes shredded away and the black blood frozen in their mouths, and those four red polished stones mark where we buried them, and those are the graves of the heroes of Mars. They’re shrines, that’s what they are, to the first who gave their lives in the great work of making this planet the perfect world.

  Attlee hated that story. It was a lot of talk to give you the shivers, the same way Hobby was always talking to impress the kids. Making up things. The Strawberry had been real enough, that was even in their history lesson plans and you could still see the foundations where the Ephesian Temple had stood. The other bits, though . . . people
becoming heroes with shrines just because they were in an accident and got killed . . . that was stupid.

  It wasn’t like they had wanted to die. It wasn’t like their deaths had done any good. Attlee’s dad hadn’t wanted to die either, when the tractor fell down the dune and onto him, but there had been the same kind of talk at his funeral. Fat lot of good a fancy tombstone did anybody.

  Attlee shrugged and quickened her pace now, reaching the lock into Besant Annex. It was loud here, where the canal dove into pipes that took it underground and up again into the Annex. She palmed the lockpad and went through hastily.

  Besant Annex ran on for kilometers and kilometers, striking north. Someday, when the Collective had terraformed the whole planet, it would be only one of thousands of vizioed canals crossing the face of Mars, carrying water everywhere. For now it was the most that had been managed, a long, long tube of air over cultivated soil, with the canal running down its center like an artery. If the Collective had a good year there might be enough money to drill more wells, extend the annex. Someday it’ll be too long for the Shadowcats to send kids walkabout like this. Wonder what we’ll do then?

  Attlee walked for hours, going through lock after lock. To her left, beyond the vizio, Mons Olympus blotted out the stars. Before her, rows of cabbage gave way at last to potatoes, and then gradually to barley. The smell of the air changed too; just as wet, but not so heavy with fertilizer. Attlee didn’t know what sort of smell it was. She was wondering about it, half in a dream as she paced along, when the cockroach darted out at her.

  It had scuttled up her leg and was making straight for her face before she coordinated herself enough to beat it off, smacking it away into the vizio wall in a frenzy of disgust. Acting on a lifetime of habit, Attlee had her mask down and had pulled a hammer from her belt in one smooth motion. She watched the roach, which lay immobile where it had fallen. It was a big one, maybe the size of a rabbit. A faint hiss and a warning pulse on the safety light told Attlee there was a puncture in the vizio, probably from one of the roach’s spurred legs. She took her eyes off the roach for a split second, just long enough to glance at the light. When she glanced back the roach had flipped itself over and was coming at her again.

  Attlee leaped into the air and stamped on it, but the roach whistled in fury and pushed back under her boot, refusing to be crushed. It took several blows with her hammer before she was sure she’d killed it. The spiked legs kept flailing, slowly now. Attlee turned, gasping for breath, looking to see if any others were lurking about. Seeing none—and Attlee knew how to spot the curve of a shiny carapace, the involuntary twitch of an antenna—she put away her hammer and dug out her roll of duct tape. The vizio puncture was easy to find by the needle-jet of burning cold it was admitting. Attlee patched it and stepped back into the comparative warmth of the potato field.

  She eyed the dead roach distrustfully. You’re not so big, she thought. Are you the Old Roach? No wonder the likes of Hobby and Jennifer saw you and lived to tell the tale.

  Looking ahead, though, Attlee saw that Besant Annex stretched on a long way yet, curving slightly as it veered northwest, its vizio panels glittering faintly in the starlight. Closer to she saw that some of the potato plants were dying, pulled up, their roots all gnawed through and tubers dug out of the sand. Had one roach done all that?

  Wary, hammer in hand, Attlee searched along the rows for any other insects, but nothing attacked her. It wasn’t until she got to the end of that section of the canal that she saw the black hole in the ground, right by the conduit pipes. After a long staring moment of incomprehension, she realized what it must be. Snarling in disgust, Attlee scuffed sand into it to close it, stamped hard to collapse it. Bloody roaches!

  She jumped through the lock into the next length of the annex, holding her hammer high. Nothing but the peaceful trickle of water along the canal, seeping under its layer of algae, and the boom and sigh of the wind Outside. Silvering barley stood tall and motionless along both lengths of the fields. Anything might be hiding back in there. Anything might come rushing out at knee level.

  So that’s it, thought Attlee. It ’n’t one big old roach, it’s a bunch of regular ones, only biggish, and they’ve learned to dig the ground. And they hide in the day, when the grown-ups come out here, so that’s why only Shadowcats ever see them, here at night.

  And that would be why those stories might be true, about some kid that went missing and all they found was his gnawed bones out here. Some kid who maybe pushed his mask up, same as Attlee had, so he could smell all the sweet wet air, but he maybe hadn’t had the sense to pull it back into place. And maybe he’d got tired and lay down for a sleep. With his face and hands uncovered, and no psuit like Attlee had, and then the roaches came.

  Attlee shuddered. Something bright yellow was flashing in her field of vision; one of the working sensors in her psuit was telling her that her heart was beating fast. She clenched her fists.

  “Listen! You don’t understand me, because you’re stupid roaches. But any of you takes me on, I’ll kill you, see?”

  Nothing answered her. Blown sand gusted against the vizio. She raised her hammer in the darkness, gripping it tight. “Shadowcats rule OK!” she cried, and immediately felt silly. Oddly, it diminished her fear.

  She began to run along the canal footpath, jogging steadily, counting her strides as she went. Each stride was a meter; five hundred meters brought her to another lock; five hundred more took her down the next bit of canal and all the way to the next lock.

  All this, she thought, just so I can join the Supreme Council. Had she ever actually wanted to join the Supreme Council? What was so great about sitting in on private meetings with Hobby and Jennifer? It was the first time Attlee had ever thought about it objectively. Then again, thinking objectively wasn’t really encouraged, was it?

  You got born and your parents dropped you off at the Collective’s baby-minders, so they could work while you got fed your pabulum. As soon as you were old enough you got put to work doing baby stuff for the Collective, feeding rabbits and chickens or cutting air filters out of paper—anything a little kid could do—so you’d learn to be a good worker. As you got stronger you were given your roach hammer and set to harder jobs, learning to repair tractors or pick cotton. Until you were fifteen Earth years old, though, the work day ended at two in the afternoon.

  It was supposed to give kids a chance to play, before settling down with their lesson plans; a chance to have some “unstructured time” so they could just be kids. The only problem was, most kids in the Collective didn’t know what to make of unstructured time. They wandered listlessly in the Tubes, uneasy without someone shoving chores at them. And so the Shadowcats had been founded.

  Bill Haversham had started them. He had been born on old Earth and he had said a cat was a kind of animal you didn’t eat, but people had used to keep them because they hunted rats, which were like roaches only not bugs. So the Shadowcats were the great roach hunters, the kids who were best with their hammers, fast and brave and smart.

  That had been the idea, at least. Shadowcats were supposed to band together and have exciting adventures stalking and killing roaches. Sometimes that happened, it was true, but mostly they held meetings that were just like little Collective meetings, where everyone sat around and listened to Council members talk on and on. But at least it was something to do, until you turned eight—sixteen in Earth years—and went to work full-time.

  Attlee had begun to suspect that she’d be bored by the Shadowcats long before she came of age. She wasn’t sure they didn’t bore her now, actually.

  But what’ll I do with the next two years if I drop out of the Shadowcats?

  She thought about it as she pounded grimly along. She liked books. Attlee was good at her lesson plans. Everyone said she was smart, though they usually said it with a slight sneer, as though cleverness was something to be ashamed of. Uncle Dave didn’t, though. What if she had the brains to be a boffin? Wear a white coat like
Uncle Dave, get a nicer place to live, work with clean hands in the Collective’s laboratory instead of grubbing in the fields like her dad and mum? You weren’t supposed to be ashamed of grubwork, because it was honest labor and a noble sacrifice that would transform the planet. Attlee wasn’t ashamed of it, but she didn’t fancy being crushed to death in a stupid accident because Earth tractors didn’t work well in Martian gravity, or for some other fool reason.

  Wrong to think that way. That’s practically criminal. Selfish. You don’t get to have a future; the future belongs to everybody. Somebody has to work in the fields. Your mum and dad did. Think you’re too good for that? Pride’ll be your downfall.

  But some kids were smart enough to become interns, and learn to work alongside the boffins. If she spent more time on her lesson plans, took some extra courses instead of hanging out with the Shadowcats, would Attlee qualify to become an intern?

  Is that why you want Mum to marry Uncle Dave? So you can get a soft job?

  No! Attlee wanted her mum to marry so she’d be alive again, instead of the dead-eyed low-priority field mule she’d been since Attlee’s dad had died. Rise up in the dark and spend your days cutting irrigation trenches in the clay with a shovel, and come home worn out and only too glad to do nothing but watch old holos until you fell asleep, every night for the rest of your life until you died, when you got called a hero. Her mum had used to laugh sometimes. Now she never even smiled.

  And it was obvious that Uncle Dave cared about Attlee’s mum, the way he looked at her, the way he’d asked her out to walk in the Tubes, the way he’d invited them over to his shelter and cooked them dinner. Boffins got allotted a lot of good food. But Attlee’s mum seemed content to disappear inside a cocoon of apathy and exhaustion, as though her life was already over and there was no point hoping for anything new.

  Still, if Attlee worked with Uncle Dave, that would make reasons for Attlee’s mum seeing him more often, wouldn’t it? And then she’d have to come back to life. She could be proud of Attlee being smart, instead of apologetic. She’d have a reason for taking an interest in things.