Old Mars

One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the nineties, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1990, and has since become a mainstay of that magazine and one of its most frequent contributors, with more than thirty sales there to her credit. She has also sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New Space Opera, The Dragon Book, and to many other magazines and anthologies. Her linked series of “Drylands” stories, about an American Southwest rendered uninhabitable by prolonged droughts, proved to be one of Asimov’s most popular series, and now, alas, seems more germane than ever. Her novella “Gas Fish” won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award Poll in 1996, and was a finalist for that year’s Nebula Award. Her first novel, The Drylands, appeared in 1993, winning the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year; it was followed in short order by her second novel, Chimera, and her third, The Stone Garden. Her first short story collection, Synthesis & Other Virtual Realities, was widely hailed by critics as one of the best collections of 1996. She has also written four mystery novels under the name Mary Freeman. Her most recent books include a major new science-fiction novel, Horizons, and a reissued and expanded version of the Drylands novel and novelettes entitled Water Rites. A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives in Portland, Oregon.

In the poignant story that follows, we learn that living caught between two worlds can be difficult and painful—especially when you’re the only one who can see one of them.

Shoals MARY ROSENBLUM

MAARTIN XAI GRABBED HIS COVERALLS FROM THE HOOK BY the door, checked the charge on his breather, and headed down the street to the public lock, the one closest to the garden domes. Outside, the usual afternoon winds swirled, twisting dust devils across the red-and-ochre plain that stretched beyond the dome, bounded by the spires that edged the canal. A half dozen dust devils skittered across the dull green-brown of the cyan fields, raising thin trails of red dust.

That’s where Dad was, off with the other grown-ups, planting more cyan fields where they found enough water, down deep. Making oxygen.

Dad couldn’t see it the way it really was. None of them could. He strolled toward the garden dome until he was out of range of the lock cams, tasting Mars on his tongue, even as breather air filled his lungs. The dust devils changed course and zigzagged toward him and he smiled. Soreh, who ran the weigh room, had been complaining last night as she drank beer with Dad that the dust devils hung around the settlement, that they followed her. Dad had laughed at her.

She was right, but he didn’t tell her. She’d told Dad that he must have gotten brain damage in the blast.

Out of cam range, he hiked away from the low garden domes. Have to stop and check the lines on the way back. Not now. The leading pair of dust devils converged as he reached the edge of the cyan field, their passage a dry scuff in the thin atmosphere. He stopped, braced himself as they twirled around him. Let his eyes go blurry.