In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  He turned back to the house, and a Martian wind blew over dead, black corn.

  The crawler trundled along the Cape Road at 50 km/h on ribbed, hard rubber balloon tires, kicking up a billow of red dust for the wind to take. The crunch of gravel beneath the wheels was louder than the hum of the power plant, and not even enough sound to echo off the high walls of maroon thoeliitic basalt rising into foothills on the right. Sweeping out to the left and disappearing over the horizon was Plantation 216, a thousand square miles of geometrically placed rows of pyramids, each a hundred feet high. They were covered in flat panels of blue silica glass, and would have once looked like a blanket of sapphires sparkling in the thin sunlight. Now most of the panels had fallen in, leaving blackened titanium skeletons spotted with cobalt blue where panels had held on. Many centuries ago this was one of ten thousand plantations where early Martian corn was cultivated, before it was sturdy enough to grow out in the open. Back when Mars was Earth’s breadbasket.

  Now it was a place for the wind to whistle. The soil was ruined, and the ancient irrigation systems – along with the knowledge of how they worked – had disintegrated over the endless years.

  It was a half day’s drive from Cortez’s farm to Cape Verde, and he would leave 216 behind and pass all of Plantation 217 as well before he got there. The crawler had the road to itself, and would not pass another vehicle for the next ten hours, its only company the cold wind buffeting the enclosed cab.

  Dinah played in the back with Isaiah, a simple game with a pair of polished sticks, something he could keep up with. Isaiah was eight, only three years younger than his sister, but he struggled. In the front seat Cortez watched the gravel track unroll ahead of him. If the wind kicked up much more he’d need the headlights, but for now the dust was thin enough and he had no trouble staying on a road his people had traveled for over a millennium.

  A hymn, How Great Thou Art, came softly from a speaker mounted overhead next to the comm set, which hadn’t worked since he’d acquired the crawler. Not that there was anyone to talk to. No one had a working comm set. He supposed he should have pulled it out, gotten rid of the excess weight, but it was small and besides, throwing it away felt like giving in. It was something he’d never be able to articulate, but he felt that every piece of technology discarded brought them closer to the inevitable, an acknowledgement that eventually it would all be gone, and his people weren’t the kind to give up like that.

  Although staying on the road was easy, keeping his eyes off the digital fuel gauge was not. There was only one bar left, a dark red color, maybe enough to run the crawler until the end of the summer. Once it was gone there would be no way to re-energize the fuel cell, and the vehicle would become a relic of plastic and metal wherever it came to rest. That would mean the journey to Cape Verde would turn into a ten day walk through the cruel landscape, a brutal proposition for a man on his own, never mind with two children. Once the Martian winter set in, with temperatures dropping to minus one-hundred-twenty degrees and winds of up to 400 km/h, it would be an impossibility, even in an emergency. He thought about Dinah’s cough. Not that there was anything to be done, there were no doctors left since folks moved on. People lived or they died, and that was just the way of things now.

  After a few hours, Dinah sang Isaiah to sleep and then nodded off herself. The speaker played The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Cortez drove. Outside, the distant sun climbed towards midday and a summer high of twenty-seven degrees. The wind rocked the cab gently as the crawler spit gravel and bumped along the road. He drove with the sounds of Jesus and solar winds, and thought about Glory Day.

  Cape Verde sat a kilometer back from the rim of Victoria Crater, a massive depression created by a meteor four billion years earlier. There were many like it on Mars, the planet’s proximity to the asteroid belt and the unstable comets hanging in Jupiter’s orbit the reason it was covered in ancient impact basins. Although nothing of significance had hit the surface since colonization, two-thousand years was but a blink to the red ball, and the planet would certainly be struck again.

  The city, a once thriving capital, was now a sprawl of bare titanium bones and broken blue glass. East and west of the ruins stood the decaying cone shapes of atmospheric processors rusting back into the land. A tiny cluster of intact buildings hugged the ruins at the edge nearest the crater, all which remained of Cape Verde. The muted yellow of lights glowed from a handful of these structures, at the center of which stood a low building which the sand had scoured down to bare metal. A glowing purple sign on a pole outside said LEVI’S.

  Elson Willard stood next to the well in his back room, arms crossed over a narrow chest, wearing an apron which had once been white but was now closer to ivory. He listened to the asthmatic wheeze of the motorized pump, watching the conveyor belt of scoops rise empty from the depths. The pump coughed and began to stutter, the belt slowing, and he gave it a good kick. It settled back to its normal rhythm.

  “You’re gonna put your foot through that thing one day,” Helen called from the other room.

  “Yeah, the last day,” he yelled back to his wife, not taking his eyes off the slow-moving scoops. They went by empty, one after the other, each clotted with red soil. Was today the day it ran dry, he wondered? The pump stuttered again and he gave it another kick. Over the chug of the motor he heard the bell at the front door ring, and a man’s voice saying, “Happy Glory Day.” His wife responded in kind.

  A scoop emerged with a red blob in it, giving off a faint pink smoke. “Hallelujah,” he muttered, quickly dumping it into a bin. Five more full scoops appeared, and he emptied these as well before shutting down the pump. As always, he wondered if it would ever start again. Elson used a rusty trowel to transfer the dry ice into a pressurizer – it worked better than the pump, at least – and minutes later he had four liters of red fluid. The pressurizer piped it into a filter to separate the soil, and after a few moments of whirring pumped cloudy water into a plastic jug. Elson carefully capped the jug and placed it on a shelf with a dozen others, next to the last sack of beans, and then headed out front, wiping his hands on his apron.

  A cadaver of a man with a thin ring of white hair was hanging his parka on a hook beside the door. “Happy Glory Day, Brother Elson,” he said, smiling with black teeth. “May the Lord bless and keep thee.”

  “Happy Glory Day to you too, Preacher, but it’s a little late for blessings. The corn’s gone.”

  Helen shot her husband a dark look, as the Reverend Amos John took a stool at the long counter. To the right was space for the general store, full of empty shelves. To the left stood the empty, cracked red plastic booths of the diner. The preacher set a dog-eared bible on the chipped counter beside him.

  “Haven’t seen you in ages,” said Helen, pouring a cup of weak coffee and sliding it in front of him. “Knew we’d see you today, though.”

  He gave her a mildly disapproving look. “You’d see me if you came to Meeting.” She looked down, embarrassed.

  “Folks still go to Meeting?” Elson asked, taking a stool two down from the preacher.

  The man sipped his coffee, frowning over the rim. “Not so much, and it’s a pity. There’s much need for prayer these days.”

  Elson snorted. The shaded bulbs overhead made their tightly-pulled, blackened skin look almost blue. Helen leaned on the counter. “Seems the thing worth prayin’ on most is Glory Day, ain’t that so, Reverend?”

  “Amen to that, Sister.”

  Elson rolled his eyes. His wife might still put stock in all that foolishness, but he had no use for it. All the praying in the world mattered not a speck to the fully-automated re-supply ship in orbit overhead, and computers didn’t give a damn about Jesus. So much so that last Glory Day, twenty-four months ago, they hadn’t seen fit to send down their blessings at all. It had been a crushing blow to the community, and now it was the equivalent of four Earth years since they’d had a drop. Plenty of folks hadn’t made it as a result.

 
Amos John rested his long fingers on the bible. “May the Lord look kindly upon us, and grant us a plentiful Supplement. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said Helen, as Elson rose to get a bowl of beans off the steamer in the kitchen. The preacher would of course expect a free meal in exchange for his prayin’-over, and Elson knew that insisting upon payment would only get him in nitters with his prayerful wife. Not that the preacher, or anyone else for that matter, had anything with which to pay, and other than beans Elson had nothing to sell them.

  Folks started to arrive shortly after Amos John tucked into his meal.

  The crawler rolled to a stop outside Levi’s just as evening was beginning to settle over Cape Verde, the small sun throwing a crimson twilight across a dusty sky as it dropped along with the temperature. Through his windshield Cortez could see Olympus Mons silhouetted in the distance, the highest mountain in the solar system, and at twenty-seven kilometers three times the height of Everest. It looked black against the bloody sky, a lonely monolith which cared nothing for the plight of men like Cortez.

  Around him stood a half dozen crawlers of assorted design, all parked as close to the front of the building as they could be, each as battered and used up as his own. A few figures emerged from the vehicles and hustled inside as the wind brought down the cold.

  Dinah pulled Isaiah in close as the three hunched into their coats and made the short walk, hurrying to get inside. Levi’s was bright and warm, and smelled of beans and coffee. Helen was serving up small, steaming bowls on the counter, but as soon as she saw Dinah and Isaiah she descended upon them, smothering them in hugs and kisses, making Isaiah giggle, and then guiding them into the kitchen where she’d hidden away some hard candy. Cortez watched them go, grateful for the way Helen had taken to the children after Eve passed.

  He shook hands with the men, who were drawn off to one side by a little glowing heater. Someone produced a small plug of tobacco, a treasure squirreled away from the last Supplement, and passed it around to appreciative noises. They talked on the dealings of men in low tones, and that meant the crop, for they were all croppers. Had anyone’s survived? No, not a bit of it. Were the rains gone for good, do you think? Is there enough seed for spring planting? Was there anything left in the community stockpile? They all knew the answer to that. Did anyone have any food put up? Not much was left.

  They looked over at their families, the women clutching together and talking about food and illness and death, with Amos John moving among them. He was not included in the discussions of croppers. Their children sat in a circle and played games on the floor. All were skeletons hugged tightly by leathery, UV blackened flesh, cheekbones and knuckles and ribs jutting outwards, lips peeled back tightly from black teeth in perpetual smiles. Their torn clothing hung on them like sacks, and more than a few were coughing.

  Talk turned to the Supplement. “There’s so many less of us than last time,” said Elijah. “The Supplement’s sure to go further. Plenty for all, an answer to our prayers.”

  Cortez frowned. The only answer he’d ever received had been, “No.”

  “The drop not coming last year,” said Samuel, an older man who carefully dropped his spit into a bucket near the heater, “that was nothing more than a technical thing. A glitch.” He nodded wisely. “It’ll come for sure this time.”

  “That’s right,” said a cropper named Remus. “And I’ll bet you Elson’s beans they double it up this time, on account of missing it last time.”

  Yes, that sounded right, they all said. None of them managed to look at one another as they said it.

  “How’s your young-uns,” asked Samuel, pointing his chin at Cortez. Their farms weren’t too far from one another.

  Cortez chewed his lip. “Dinah coughs.” He shrugged. “Isaiah is as he is.”

  The men looked past him at the children playing on the floor. Isaiah sat among them trying to track the progress of a red ball being passed from hand to hand, a glassy smile on his face. When the ball came to him he didn’t reach out, just looked at it.

  Eve Cortez died while giving birth to the boy, and her husband had gone through a hard patch trying to raise a child with difficulties, a three-year-old girl and his crops all by himself. Privately some of the men wondered at how the boy had managed to survive, and thought the real blessing might have been if he hadn’t. Still, they knew the kind of man Cortez was, and that he’d sooner plant himself in that red earth than give up on his kids or his crop. And yet his tenacity hadn’t kept his corn standing, and they wondered if it might be what finally broke him. They wondered this of themselves, as well. Their corn was gone, too.

  Samuel changed the subject. “Heard Caleb’s boy Aaron made some good finds in the city. Heard he brought back a few tools and even a halfway decent pair of boots.”

  “I heard he found medicine,” offered Remus, immediately drawing frowns from the other men. If anyone had found medicine, they all would have heard about it. They didn’t doubt the tools or the boots, though. Aaron had been scavenging in the ruins since he was a child, and had a particular talent for uncovering useful scraps.

  “And I heard,” said a cropper named Zion, who’s wife was friendly with Caleb’s wife, “that he didn’t come back the other day, and Caleb went in to look for him, and he didn’t come back neither.”

  There were glances exchanged and solemn nods. That was likely true, as neither man was here at Levi’s, and no one missed Glory Day unless they were dead or dying. Caleb’s wife was sitting in a chair in the corner, crying and being comforted by some of the women, turning the question mark into a period. The ruins were dangerous, filled with unstable metal and rotten flooring, and an incautious step could send a man plunging through to impalement, broken limbs or the equally final fate of simply being trapped in a hole. There was no question of men gathering to go look for someone lost in such a way, it just wasn’t done. Kin might risk themselves, but that was expected, a search party was not.

  Dinah appeared next to her father and tugged on his sleeve. “Papa, Missus Forbes says I can have Chloe’s sweater, long as you say it’s okay.”

  Cortez looked across the room to a drawn woman with vacant eyes, whose dark skin had gone ashy. Sarah Forbes had lost her daughter, a girl Dinah’s age, only a few weeks ago. No one said exactly to what, she just hadn’t woken up one morning. Most suspected starvation. Dinah coughed and Cortez cupped her narrow face in one hand, looking into eyes which had purple smudges under them, and were slightly more sunken than they had been a week ago.

  “Of course. Mind you tell her thank you.”

  He looked up to nod at Chloe Forbes, but the woman was staring at the floor. Dinah skipped away, and Cortez drifted off from the men, wandering into the empty half of the building which had been Levi’s general store. No one knew who Levi was or had been, including Elson, whose ancestors had been running the place for two centuries. The shelves and clothing racks were bare except for some dusty shelf tags, and a hand-lettered sign so yellowed and curling with age that it could barely be read. Sorry, COKE out of stock. Cortez didn’t read too well, and didn’t know what coke was. For his whole life he couldn’t remember the store being anything but empty. He passed through and stopped at the big window in the far wall.

  Standing before it, watching the night descend, his breath made a little cloud of fog on the cold glass. From here there was an impressive view of the receiving field, with one of the ancient atmospheric processors in the distant background, visible only as a great cone shape against a darkening sky. His eyes lifted to the heavens, immediately picking out the bright light high above. It wasn’t a star or a satellite; it was the Glory, hanging there in orbit, matching the rotation of the small planet.

  He looked just to its right, at a dark spot which hadn’t always been there. Cortez remembered his father first pointing it out to him when he was a child, a brilliant blue speck which glittered like a far-off jewel, the cradle of human life and a technological wonder so bright that it radiated like a
star. Earth went dark without warning when Cortez was ten. There had been no communication with it or anyone since.

  As he watched the sky he wondered if once upon a time the people of Earth had looked up at Mars, entranced by the agricultural marvels which fed them all. It started when they – They were the scientific wizards and all-powerful thinkers of Earth – discovered glaciers of CO2 on Mars, which fit considering its topography was covered in river and lake depressions, an indicator of past surface water. Unfortunately Mars also had a thin atmosphere and no magnetosphere, resulting in low atmospheric pressure. Lack of sufficient pressure meant that when the six month Martian summer arrived, the increasing temperatures caused the ice to sublimate to gas instead of transforming to liquid water.

  To make matters worse, solar winds tore at the poorly protected planet constantly, stripping away atoms from the outer atmospheric layer, causing it to become thinner and thinner. This made it difficult to store heat, and allowed in heavy levels of ultraviolet. The stripping of atoms was so severe that Mars left a dirty cloud of ionized atmospheric particles behind as it moved through space. Cortex had heard this called the Pigpen Effect, but didn’t understand why. Finally, “air” which was heavy with carbon dioxide and the methane which leaked from old volcanoes made colonization unattractive.

  But they did it anyway. They built the enormous processors and manufactured an atmosphere, forcing the sky to cloud up and rain while developing irrigation at the same time. Settlers were slowly exposed to increasing levels of the natural environment until, over the many generations, their bodies had evolved so they could breathe in the open, their skin pigment darkening and toughening to protect them from the UV. They invented a breed of corn which eventually took hold and thrived in the open soil, commenced farming on a global scale, and solved the hunger problems of an Earth bursting with overpopulation.