Old Mars

“I don’t know that your dad thought you’d come back,” said Jacky. She was tall and thin, with cheeks weathered by the Martian winds, but she had a smile for him, and a treat of homemade blackberry jam. Jacky had always been a better big sister than Bev, and Dave had often wondered why his father hadn’t married her and made her a real part of the family.

“He’s been gone quite a while, hasn’t he? My sister said months.”

Jacky looked at her watch. “One hundred and thirty-three days.”

Dave leaned an elbow on the table, gathered up a few crumbs of the flatbread, and tossed them into his mouth. “I saw Rekari’s boat at the dock. Did he go along?”

Jacky nodded. “But he came back, a month or so ago. He said somebody had to look after the business. Not that there’s been any lately. I haven’t seen a tourist since last year.”

Dave paid the check in Earth creds, and Jacky tucked them into her shirt. “It’s good to see you back, kid. Maybe there’ll be something better for dinner. I hear the Warners have an extra chicken. I might be able to talk them out of it.”

“I’d like that,” said Dave.

“Check back at five.”

He went outside and headed for the Martian quarter.

The main street was busier now, with people doing their morning shopping before heading out to the scrubby fields of genetically modified peanuts, potatoes, and barley that stretched eastward from Hiddekel. On the west side of the canal, someone seemed to be trying to raise wheat again—that happened every decade or so, according to his father, when new settlers arrived from Earth. It never worked very well, but it usually produced enough spindly stalks to feed a few goats. Dave had eaten plenty of wheat bread on Earth, and he didn’t think it was anything special. Chicken, though, was something else.

Several people stopped to say hello to him, to ask about his experience on Earth, to tell him how good he looked, and it was much more than a ten-minute walk before he finally reached Rekari’s compound. The arc of cottages there, with its open side to Hiddekel, which the Martians called Moreyah, had stood, Rekari once said, for a thousand years, which wasn’t all that long by Martian standards. The cottages themselves were made of a local soft red stone, with roofs of woven plant fiber coated with hardened clay. The Martians grew the plants for their seeds, which humans considered inedible, and fed the seeds not just to themselves but to small lizards living in burrows in the canal walls. The lizards were their primary source of protein, and humans also considered them inedible. Dave had tried lizard stew once, and only courtesy kept him from spitting out his first and only mouthful. He had always thought it was a good thing that Rekari’s people felt much the same about human food—that meant there was little competition for those kinds of resources between Martians and Marsmen. Although his father had insisted that in an emergency, Martian food would not kill him. Fortunately, Dave had never needed to test that claim.

Rekari’s son Burmari was in the center of the arc, working on a boat that was obviously new and nearly finished, only the mast and sail missing. When he saw Dave, he made the Martian sign for welcome, then walked over to clap him on the shoulder in a human greeting. Like all Martians, Burmari was thin and wiry, with ruddy skin and large, pale eyes, and he was more than a head taller than any Marsman. Dave smiled and reached up to return his greeting. They had known each other all of Dave’s life.

“School treated you well,” said Burmari. “You look healthy and strong.”

He spoke in the local Martian language, but Dave had no trouble understanding him; since childhood, he had been as fluent in it as in English.

“Extra gravity will do that,” said Dave. “But I’m happy to be back where there is less of it. Where is your father?”

But before his son could respond, Rekari came out of the cottage at the far end of the arc, and he made the sign of greeting, then held his arms out for a very human-style embrace.