Old Mars

Fists jammed into his pockets, Maartin headed left, toward their rooms. He could feel the old city around them. Through the transparent skin of the settlement dome, dust devils danced in the fading light, weaving complex and angry patterns across the barren ground beyond the garden domes. The spires and spiderways shimmered in the bloody light of the setting sun.

Angry?

He stopped at the intersection to their alley. Blinked.

Yes. Angry.

Their door slid open to dark rooms. Dad would be at Canny’s. He headed there, feet scuffing up a thin haze of dust that seeped in no matter what you did. Canny’s big two-room place was just around the corner on the street and the door was open, which made the mayor mad because the rooms were all a higher O₂ concentration than the dome itself, but with the jam of bodies crowding the space, you could see why. A half dozen people stood around the doorway, mugs in hand.

“Hey, Maartin.” Celie, who made the mugs and some pretty cool dishes from the red Martian dust and sold ’em to the produce buyer from City, waved hers at him. “Give your dad time to finish his pint, eh?” She winked at him, her round face framed by gray curls.

“Th … mayor … selling …” His tongue struggled with the words. To the miners, he tapped out. He faced her, horrified to feel a hot sting behind his eyelids.

“Honey, it’s okay. Really.” She put her arm around him. “It’s a good thing they’re buying from us. They’re not the bad people who were responsible for the accident. They like our veggies. And they’re going to pay us a lot of money.”

It wasn’t an accident and everybody knew it. And now they were killing the city. He blinked, struggling to hold in the tears.

“Hey, Maart, where were you?”

Dad saved him, face flushed, pushing through the crowd. “Darn, kid, I was worried. And then Seaul texted me and said you were cleaning drippers after all, that she figured you were working on someone else’s plot out there and that’s why she hadn’t seen you. Was that where you were?” His face relaxed some as Maartin nodded. He had the tears buried deep now.

“… helping,” Maartin stuttered. He nodded some more.

“Okay, then, you text me next time, let me know where you are.” Dad put an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t want to be organizing any search parties for no reason, hear?”

He nodded, got a head tousle from Dad. He smelled faintly of cyans and a little bit like drying-out water. Maartin had helped them seed a few times, mixing in the cyanobacteria spores, setting up the pumps and microdrip system that brought the deep-drilled moisture up and wicked it into the soil. They didn’t need a lot of water, the cyans. They were engineered, just went into biosuspension when it got too dry, came back to life with more water. Sometimes Dad would squat over an established patch and take off his breather. He said you could smell the oxygen, that before Maartin died, he’d be able to walk around without a breather. Maartin couldn’t smell anything but cyans. He walked around without oxygen all the time in the dome.

Dad got him a mug of juice and Maartin retreated to his usual perch on a plastic bin that stored bar towels and stuff, over in the corner. Nobody much noticed him, it was kind of dark there and, sitting, he was down low. People didn’t much look down when they were drinking Canny’s beer; they looked at each other or around the room at other faces. Four or five kids were playing some kind of chase game, running in and out. Celie yelled at them for it. He knew them. The girls were okay, he pretty much steered clear of the boys. Especially Ronan. He was the smallest, but he made up for it in meanness. Whenever the adults weren’t around, they did a great job of illustrating the pack behavior he’d read about in his school programs. He wondered if the Martians behaved like humans. He’d never seen any sign of conflict on the streets or the spiderways. No yelling. No pushing. Or maybe they weren’t all that different, just used another way to push one another around and call one another names.

Rising voices snapped him out of it. The kid pack was back, hanging around the door. Hanging around five miners. Maartin stiffened, pulling back into the shadow beneath the makeshift bar.

“Hey, folks, nice to meet you, just wanted to stop in, sample the local brew.” Jorge was in front, smiling and easy.

“You guys aren’t finding any veins of your druggie-ore running our way, are you?” Celie spoke up and it went quiet, right now. Maartin watched as people moved or didn’t move. A small space opened up around the miners, and the hellos were halfhearted from the ones that didn’t move.

The mayor bustled through the door, slapped one of the men on the shoulder. “This round’s on me!” He beamed, but he was looking to see who moved and who didn’t, too. “Let’s show these hardworking boys our hospitality. Fill ’em up, Celie!”