Old Mars

He closed his eyes, remembering. Mom and her gentle hands, her touch on his face, the way she laughed when Dad looked at her. A tear slid down his face and he wiped it away, Mars dust gritty on his skin, his eyes on the crystal spires, the sparkling water of the canal. Mom would believe him. That he saw … this. The way it really was.

If she was here.

An explosion shattered the quiet, and Maartin flinched as an invisible hand shoved him. The canal, the barges, vanished. On the far side of the canal, where the Rim rose against the pale greenish sky, a burst of red dust fountained upward and a narrow and elegant tower of rock dissolved into a waterfall of pulverized fragments. More clouds of dust billowed outward, and a faint thump followed. Dust devils skittered around him, zigzagging angry patterns across the ground, and he blinked, his eyes tearing as they filled with dust.

Miners. He swallowed. Hard. Felt the swallow turn to stone as it sank into his belly. He blurred his eyes, tried to see the spires again, the barges, through the drifting curtains of dust. He could see them to the left, to the right, way down the canal. Martians stood on the barges, fingers flickering and pointing.

In front of him, only dust, the canal bed empty and dry.

The pile of rubble that had been the rock tower seemed to smoke as dust seeped from it. Machines crawled around the edges, swallowing broken red stone, spewing tails of red dust and rock now. On either side, more columns of rock twined skyward, forming the rim, twisted like the horns of the unicorns he’d seen in the kiddie videos he used to watch. Carved by the wind, Dad said, they all said. The dust devils drifted across the plain toward the dust cloud, zigzagging around the machines. One of the figures grabbed at his full-face breather as a dust devil snatched at it, and one of the machines bogged down and stopped. More figures hurried to it.

He veered left, to the crumbled edge of the canal, where you could scramble down to the bottom. The sides were mostly still clean and vertical. Only here and there had they crumbled so that it wasn’t a sheer drop to the floor. He slid down, dust a red flag trailing away in the always-wind, stretched his eyes, trying to see water, barges.

“Hey.”

He froze. Looked over his shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing down here?” A short, squat figure, bulky in dull, metallic-colored coveralls, stepped forward to block his path. Maartin had missed him in the morning shadow.

A miner.

He stared into hard gray eyes behind safety goggles, a weathered face with a scraggle of beard sweating beneath a full-mouth breather mask.

“I asked you a question, kid.” A gloved hand clamped down on Maartin’s arm. “You coulda been under that rock when it came down. You wanta die?”

He shook his head, his stomach twisted up in his throat.

“Hey, we warned you folk at the settlement to stay away, didn’t you hear?” The gray eyes softened a bit. “We’re gonna be blowing another outcrop. You’re underneath, you could get dead.”

Dad hadn’t said the miners were coming. He wouldn’t. He struggled to find words.

“Hey, I got a kid brother about your age.” The miner let go of his arm. “I wouldn’t want to see him get hurt, neither.”

“You … killed … Mother.” That burst out, as clear and edged as broken glass. He swung at the man’s face, wanting to hurt him, wanting to …

“Hey, hey, whoa!” The man put his hands up, held him off, ducking the swings. “Cool yer jets, kid. We don’t kill anybody.”

Maartin grabbed at his breather hose, struggled as the man gripped his arms. The words were gone as abruptly as they had come and his tongue knotted, threatening to choke him.

Another figure came around the bend in the canal. “Hey, Jorge …” The man stopped, fists planting on narrow hips, his lean face sharp-edged as a Rim rock in the morning light. “Jeez, these hogs don’t have the sense God gave rocks, do they? Don’t they get it that they gotta stay clear? Bring ’im in.” He started to turn back. “We’ll ship ’im back, prosecute for trespass. Maybe that’ll keep ’em away.”

“Ah, it’s a kid, Ter.”

“Can it, Jorge, you’re a damn softie.” The skinny man stepped forward, pulling plastic cuffs from his belt. “C’mere, kid. You’re in trouble now.”

Suddenly, the air was full of hissing as dust devils circled, zigzagged. The skinny man yelled as a rock bounced off his forehead and Maartin caught a glimpse of bright blood. The other man, Jorge, ducked as a rock screamed past his head. Maartin tore free and ran, pushing off the smooth floor of the canal, stretching out and really traveling now, the walls flashing past, the man, Ter’s, shout torn away by distance. The dust devils danced around him, to the side, behind, so that he ran curtained by red dust, the canal an open path ahead. He didn’t slow to climb out where he’d come down, just kept running, settling into a rhythm so that his breather could keep up.

Anger filled him, deep and dark, heavy as stone, an anger as big as the planet.