Chapter 1 - The Range

Author’s Notes - So, we begin our story. We pick our protagonist up as a late-adolescent, angsty youth, living with his father as impoverished yeomen terrafarmers out on the surface. Mars, as it turns out, is a tough place to live, and terraforming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s fairly common knowledge, at least amongst space nerds, at this point that Mars is basically the most-inhospitable-place-in-space, next to the hard vacuum of space itself. A lot of crazy ideas have been tossed out about how to make Mars a more hospitable place, and none of them really strike me as very sound. So, terraformation in our story is failing. It’s more interesting if it does.

I see a lot of parallels between attempting to terraform Mars and what the early homesteaders in the American West went through. No infrastructure, inhospitable, a wild climate that is actively trying to kill them, a future that depends on their steadfast ability to persevere. Nestor’s father understands what’s at stake for both himself and the planet as the whole, and through his haze of self-destructive depression at the loss of the rest of his family, is trying his best to pass that on to Nestor. Nestor is dreaming of the stars, and (due to the aforementioned paternal haze) is busy struggling with the practicalities of their life. Along the way, he makes desperate, but all-too-understandable errors. Errors that have some painful consequences.

Really, it’s that latter part that I was most ruminating on when I wrote this chapter. About how its so much easier to be optimistic for your future, when you don’t have to wrangle all the sticky realities of your present. About how wrangling with those sticky realities can create a desperation for escape, for relief, for some other way out. And where the dysfunction of both perspectives can lead to horrible outcomes.

The Creedes both awoke to the horn of the overland ice train honking its arrival. It was predawn, and Nestor opened his eyes and silently traced the pipes running throughout the hut in which they’d slept, and listened to those pipes tick and hiss with the superheated steam being pushed through them. Steam used to provide heat to Mars’s tentative atmosphere. Steam produced from melting and then superheating the very ice being delivered. The truck was dumping this hut’s delivery into the great hopper set behind the hut, and the clatter of Jupiter’s tears pouring down seemed to make the walls themselves shake.

“There’s the ice delivery,” Nestor said as he pivoted to sit on the edge of his shaky cot. Louis was still sprawled upon his very own bed, barely a meter away, with his eyes closed. Nestor could tell he was not asleep, however, because he was not snoring.

Nestor cut to the point he’d been angling for. “I went ahead and canceled the delivery for later in the week. And for this load today, she’s only deliverin’ to the runs that’re up right now.”

“We’ll get the other runs up, don’t worry,” his reclined father slurred from his bed. He lifted his arm and draped it across his head as he spoke.

 “At the rate we been cannibalizin’ the huts that’re down, we ain’t never goin’ to get those runs back up.” Nestor looked at his father while he said this, smiling at the flash of anger he saw Louis repress.

“We jes got a few runs down,” Louis responded gruffly as he pivoted to sit upon the edge of his own bed. “We’ll get ‘em back up here soon. We goin’ to the market today and you’ll see, I’ll find the money for some extra parts.”

Nestor rose and stretched and peered through the singular window in this hut into the predawn gloom glowing with the first hints of crimson outside. “If we goin’ to Poynting we need to leave,” he said, as he stretched again, “it’ll be mid-morning before we get there, if we go right now.”

Louis rose from his cot with a grumble and spent several seconds rooting around in his bedding, looking for a liquor bottle to drink from. He found naught and grumbled further.

“Gotta get this hut cleaned up,” Louis said aloud to the room at large. He had turned from Nestor, and seemed to no longer be aware of the boy’s presence. He squeezed past the machinery surrounding his bed and shuffled over to piss into the portable toilet they brought with them into the huts, itself a reeking technological marvel capable of recycling all their waters into something drinkable, and incinerating any solids to fine ash. At least, it did those things when it worked. Nestor could see as he glanced at that spattered device that it was not working this morning. He wondered to himself if it needed to be cleaned, and felt his mind recoil at the notion.

If Louis had been looking at Nestor, he’d have noticed the boy turning in a slow circle to survey the various tools and garbage the two of them had left scattered about upon finishing the prior day’s repairs. The hut was quite small, and with all the machinery and pipes, there was barely room to move in any direction. Nestor squeezed sideways through spaces between the heaters and crushers and generators to retrieve tools, nutrient paste packages, and empty liquor bottles, and he did so with a mincing gait, careful to not disturb the dust. The floor was technically concrete, but enough dust had intruded over the decades since its construction to thickly coat that surface, beginning the long and unavoidable process that converted all man-made objects into Martian terrain. Mars brooks no intrusion on her surface, and Mars makes all things dust, for Mars herself is poisonous, corrosive dust and nothing more. He produced a facemask and a glove from his pocket and donned both to retrieve a wrench that had fallen in a drift of that dust, and for the briefest of moments, a waft of sulfur rose from the bare patch of concrete left below the wrench. He wiped the wrench clean with a damp rag and appraised it for corrosion and found none.

“Toilet’s busted, Nestor. You gotta fix it ‘fore we leave.”

Nestor glanced back at the device on the floor and sighed, “Need to get parts in town. I cain’t fix whatever’s wrong with it with what I got.”

“It ain’t comin’ in the truck full,” Louis said as he turned from the toilet. Nestor only shrugged in response from his position on the far side of the hut.  

Louis looked forlornly around himself, as if he were having a moment of clarity about the cramped state of their lives, splitting time between the various huts scattered all over the property, midway up the slopes of Mount Ascraeus, and the range truck. Louis would go nowhere near the homestead, and so those were the only living options available.

Nestor watched his father gaping around the hut while he finished tidying and then walked over to his burnished ochre envirosuit piled carefully in the corner of the hut by the door. He lifted the scuffed helmet with its permanently-fogged-around-the-edges faceplate and he checked the seals at the neck for dust or debris and wiped them with cleaning solvent on a cloth and set that helmet on a shelf above the floor. He hefted the large backpack that recycled his air and provided his heat and recycled his waters, and he opened the flap at the top to fill the cargo chamber with their spare tubes of nutrient paste and liter bags of potable water, and closed the flap and ran the system diagnosis on the small screen on the side of the bag. Satisfied that all its systems were working today, even the heater that always seemed to be failing, he hung the backpack upon a hook by the door. He lifted the torso and pants sections and boots and cleaned all their seals with his rag and carefully put everything on, starting with the boots.

His helmet clicked into its seals and his suit filled with air and he looked over to his father, who had spent the intervening minutes pacing around and touching various items Nestor had already addressed in an act that very much looked like he was blessing the work. He sighed inside his helmet and took it back off. For the briefest of moments, Nestor considered remarking upon Louis’s ecclesiastical behavior, but on further reflection realized that Louis was merely…behaving. He was never very clear or intentional on these sober days, and it had been getting worse as time went on. Nestor decided this time, as so often before, to let it go, and quietly watched his father pace around the hut.

Louis finally deigned to put on his own envirosuit, but cleaning and putting all the various articles together took him so long that by the time he had fully dressed, Nestor had arranged the bag of tools and bag of garbage and toilet all about the entrance to the hut and was practically tapping his foot in frustration at being so waylaid. The moment Louis gave him the thumbs up to confirm that his suit was making air, Nestor depressurized the hut and walked out to deposit their waste upon the frozen pile of its antecedents behind the hut.

The ice train was already gone to wind its way through their maze of pipes to other empty huts. Louis walked over to inspect the hopper, saying over his coms with disbelief in his voice, “Amazin’ where this all come from. To think my grandaddy use to talk about how they’d harvest ice right here on Mars.”

Nestor gathered up the other bags and lugged them to the range truck. “Been a long time since anyone’s been able to do that.” He hefted the bags through the door in the back and then climbed the short ladder and knelt through that cramped space to stow them amongst the pots and pans and cookstove and bath, all squeezed together from the collapsible sides. As he passed it, he tapped the screen on the water purifier to run a quick diagnostic. Several errors came back, and after checking the logs, he found it hadn’t been working since the prior evening. Yet another repair, this one fairly urgent, as they only had the five liters in his bag and the 2 liters that the truck had purified.

He shook his head as his father climbed up the ladder and closed the hatch behind him and hit the button to pressurize the truck. They crouched, nearly touching in that tiny area while the surrounding space hissed full of air. The light on the airlock control changed to green, and they both took off their helmets, Louis saying the moment his came off, “Good long time. But jes you wait, maybe in yer lifetime, we’ll get a water cycle restarted here, and we’ll be gettin’ Mars-harvested ice once again.”

Nestor looked his father briefly in the eye and, saying nothing, turned and opened the door to the front of the truck. He ducked under his hammock, hung crosswise there and crawled over his father’s bed directly below. “Boy, you gotta get that hammock stowed proper,” his father yelled as he swatted the blanket infested net away and crawled through himself.

“What about your bed? It could be folded up and stowed,” Nestor said, lowering himself into the driver’s seat. He powered up the solar panels and checked the air recirculator status and engine status and found both working today and smiled at his first good luck. Louis dropped into the seat beside him.

“My bed don’t hang you up. Walkin’ through.”

Nestor shook his head and chose not to argue with his father. He shrugged, and they pulled away from that place in the dark, leaving behind only their dust and their waste and nothing else at all.

*****

The Creedes bounced across their property line, though in this place there was minor distinction to where such boundaries lay. The outflow pipes from their claim ran parallel to them, blinking red lights atop each section of pipe, keeping silent time as they passed. Looming out of the predawn dark before them was the huge collector pipe that ran past all the claims on Mount Ascraeus, a massive tube held suspended on pillars, for all its appearance harkening back to ancient aqueducts built by a culture long extinct on a world all-but-forgotten in this place. They passed under the collector pipe and Nestor pointed the truck towards the road to Poynting.

His father was huddled in the passenger seat looking down into a cracked tablet that glowed bluely back up at his face. Nestor knew without being able to see the screen itself that Louis had their last month’s market sale prices for water and heat on the screen. Louis held the tablet up to the side of Nestor’s face and pointed his finger at a line item there. “See? This one here is a good example. The Board come in a full two hours after we started producin’ heat on the Derby line and cut they rates in half. Ain’t no way of justifyin’ that. This one’s a winner.”

The terrain here beyond Ascraeus’s slopes was hard and flat and covered in all manner of rock, and Nestor careened around the larger of those boulders, his attention on the driving. He glanced briefly at the tablet and pretended to see what his father was trying to show him, and shrugged. “Ain’t it suppose to be that if everone starts producin’ in the same areas at the same time, the Board is allowed to reduce the rates?” He asked as he straddled the truck over a smaller rock.

His father shook his head and snarled, “They claim it’s to ‘disincentivize’ folks from only producin’ when rates are high. But I’ll tell you, boy, it’s really about power. They cain’t let a strugglin’ guy get too far ahead.”

“Then why they let you dispute the adjustments at all?”

“If we weren’t allowed disputes, boy, we wouldn’t make it. With the cost of ice and methane bein’ what they are. Cain’t have that. Let me win on jes enough of ‘em to keep us scrapin’ by.”

The sun broached the eastern horizon, and the saffron sky dazzled off Nestor’s left shoulder. He squinted through the dawn at his father, who had resumed scrolling through the line items on the tablet, “Well, as many disputes as you make at your Board hearin’s, they probably feel obligated to jes let you win on a few.”

“Only doin’ what a man needs to survive on his own, boy. Somethin’ you need to be learnin’. If they’d let me bring you into the hearin’ with me, you’d be learnin’ by watchin’ me in there. As it is, I gotta teach you out here. If you’d jes listen to me ever once in a while.” He looked meaningfully across at Nestor, who was at that moment busy guiding the range truck over the berms bordering the road. He finally managed it, and found on the other side a road that was flat and straight and featureless, and the truck’s six wheels bit into the good asphalt and they sped away.

Louis shook his head and returned to his tablet. “Not like you learnin’ anything. I oughta start makin’ you go in and argue a few disputes yourself here soon to start practin’, instead.”

By way of conciliation, Nestor looked over at his father and offered, “We oughta hire someone on to help. Wouldn’t need to worry so much about disputes if we had more of the lines runnin’.”

“We cain’t hire no one on, and you need to quit askin’, Nestor. We barely survivin’ out here. How we gonna pay someone new?”

Nestor stared straight ahead and said, faintly, “Family will sometimes work on credit. To help each other out.”

Louis looked up from the tablet and glared briefly at his son, and then looked out the window. The sun was finally above the horizon and had drawn long bold lines of shadow from each of the many boulders in the fields surrounding them, and he seemed to be measuring each of those lines mentally, as if the answer to Nestor’s statement may be out there amongst the wind and the rocks. Nestor continued his stare forward, images flashing through his mind of his father ejecting his uncles from their family homestead. A fight. A brandished gun.

Louis finally spoke up, his voice plumbing through the depths of grief and isolation welling up within his son, “Wouldn’t know where any of them was now anyways. It’s been years since…”

“Wouldn’t be no one you could ask? They cain’t have gone far, dad.”

Louis shook his head. “And what then? You think they’d jes come back and work fer me again? Wouldn’t want to try to steal it out from under me all over?”

“They was jes tryin’ to help.”

“Help. Help break the family claim into five pieces, maybe. Yer great-great-grandaddy didn’t buy him the largest claim on Ascraeus to have none of his descendants break that up, son. To have them brothers of mine come to me and try to destroy that legacy. Reduce it. Parcel it out. No.” His voice was breaking and Nestor could see Louis staring at him from the corner of his eye and remained looking dead ahead.

After a while, Louis looked back down to the tablet, though he was no longer scrolling. Finally, at length, Nestor put forth, “My great-great-grandad bought him a claim that is fifteen hundred square kilometers. He knew jes as well as you do that no one person can hydrofarm that much ground. You ask me, he intended for his descendants to share it. Not fight over it.”

“Wasn’t me who was fightin’, son. All four of them brothers of mine come out with a plan that day. After your momma…they saw a weakness in me, and…and they tried to exploit that. Tried to take from me what your grandaddy willed as mine. Had no choice but to defend myself. Defend our legacy. Wasn’t no other way.”

“I jes think they didn’t like how much you was drinkin’.” Nestor chose this moment to look over at his father, who now would not meet his eyes, and glanced back out his side window.

“Man’s allowed him some drink. Of a time. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. As if any of them is any better. Ain’t any of their place to say when they eldest brother is drinkin’ too much.”

“You can surely see how they might have been worried, though, cain’t you?”

“Worry is one thing. They was more than worried, Nestor. You don’t know them. Not like I do. You was still jes a boy back when they was in our lives. I knew what they was up to months before they tried it that day.”

“I was seven. Plenty old enough to remember. They was only ever kind to me.”

Louis shook his head and his face flashed red and he rose and stooped to the back of the truck. Nestor heard him drop into his bed back there with a grunt. Enough time passed that he’d thought Louis must be asleep, when from the back his father spoke, just loud enough for Nestor to hear over the truck’s tires upon the asphalt, “You don’t know them like I do. They wait ever day for their chance to try and take it again. It’s up to you and me to make so they cain’t. Don’t know what it will take for you to understand that.”

*****

They arrived at Poynting in mid-morning. The city of Poynting was buried beneath the central uplift of a complex impact crater bearing the same name, and sprawled underground six kilometers in all directions, with grand artificial caverns and tunnels that extended all the way out to the breccia of the crater floor. However, as they crested the rim of the crater, all that was visible below them was the city’s spaceport in the center and the solitary black line of the road winding its way down to meet it. 

Traffic had picked up, and they found themselves in a long unbroken line of delivery trucks that plodded their way towards the spaceport to pick up the day’s deliveries. The road forked as they approached the four immense cuboidal terminals of the spaceport, and the Creedes took the branch that led down a long ramp to the city’s main airlock and elevators, set just underground. Louis had come back to the front a few minutes before they’d arrived at the crater rim and sat in the passenger seat of the range truck grumbling to himself about the traffic, the sunlight, and Nestor’s driving for all these were subject to his review and none rose to his high standards. Nestor pretended he didn’t hear and instead focused on negotiating the truck into the crowded airlock. 

Nestor eventually cleared the airlock and proceeded through the wide primary tunnels to the Market. Poynting’s Market Plaza was an artificial expansion of a natural magma cave and the largest open-air space in the city, and endeavored to be all things to all farmers, offering anything a Tharsian terrafarmer could need. The Board didn’t start hearing disputes until after noon, and so they were quite early as Nestor pulled the range truck into a parking space cut into the Plaza walls. 

“I’m gonna head on over to the café,” Louis said over his shoulder to Nestor while he opened his door, “why don’t you go on and get a couple dozen tubes of nutrient paste and, say, ten gallon of drinkin’ water from that store yonder. And get some flavors of paste other’n Flaming Hot, hear?”

“Cain’t. I got somewheres to go,” Nestor responded, not looking at his father as he opened his own door. 

Louis paused on the truck’s step and turned back to look at his son, “The only place you have to go, boy, is over to that store to get groceries. What else do you have to do in this city?”

Nestor knew that the truth would not make his father happy and stared at the blank space between them for a moment and tried to decide whether to lie. Louis noticed the pause and shook his head and looked down and away.

“Jes do it, son. I don’t want to know what else you git up to in this city when I’m not around, and I don’t want you to lie to me about it. I got some errands to run myself after the hearin’s today, so you can do whatever it is you want to do then. But fer now, jes get the groceries, do it first.”

Nestor said nothing and nodded to his father and they locked eyes and then he looked away and hoped the nod would be enough. Louis grunted once and dropped heavily down from the truck’s single stair and plodded over towards the café next to the main Board building, that business already encircled by a line of waiting farmers snaking out its open door.

Nestor dismounted the truck and detached towards the grocery store across the Plaza, but as soon as his father disappeared into the crowd in front of the café, Nestor took a hard turn to a small offshoot tunnel. He was headed to the spaceport and followed a familiar route there, one he’d used every market day for the past year, ever since his first exploratory trip, pulled along by the current of the crowd to find himself spit out in front of the massive doped-glass windows of the passenger terminal, and had goggled as their radiation-protecting chemical treatment bizarrely distorted the shapes of the landing passenger shuttles. He paused in that same place today and watched a shuttle take off in a cloud of ochre dust which boiled out to briefly encompass the windows. He waited while the wind blew away the dust and watched the shuttle rise until the glare of the engines winked out and it became one with the granite sky above.

Nestor loitered and watched the lithe passenger shuttles come and go. He cast his glance across the dozen passenger pads and adjoining field of surface hangers draped over the top of the central crater uplift, beyond the control tower jutting a hundred meters out of the very center, looking to the distant side of the spaceport, where the huge cylindrical tankers and bulky ice haulers were coming in for landings at the cargo terminals, using a grace that seemed impossible for such large craft.

A man across the terminal made eye contact with Nestor and shared a meaningful look. Nestor bowed his head and hurried through the terminal all the way back to a nondescript and unlocked supply closet. He slipped inside and felt around behind the wall-mounted electrical box and produced a thin tablet from the space between the box and the wall. He opened the tablet and typed the locations of several of their huts into that tablet, and then replaced it in its hiding spot and slipped back out of the room, as unseen as always.

He saw no one as he exited the terminal into the tunnel that connected it with cargo terminals across the spaceport. Technically, this tunnel was restricted access, but Nestor knew from experience that no one would see him here and no one would stop his travel. He’d learnt a lot since the first time he’d taken this tunnel, ten months ago. 

*****

Nestor had decided on his first day in the passenger terminal that he needed to see a shuttle up close. He’d imagined sneaking out to a landing pad while the shuttle was loading, and once there he would admire all its details in a way that would draw the attention of the pilot, who would see in Nestor a comrade and who would offer to take Nestor up for a flight. He would offer the controls to the boy, and as soon as Nestor would touch those controls, it would be evident that flying was the boy’s destiny. The pilot would offer him a chance to be co-pilot, an offer that Nestor would immediately accept, and thus his destined life of adventure would begin.

He could get near no landing pads, nor could he gain access to the cargo terminals or hangars, but he had found this ignored and wholly abandoned maintenance tunnel, and had followed it all the way back to a small building that stuck off the cargo terminal like a boxy wart. The inside of the building was organized into a kind of common square, with doors all around for different businesses, mostly hotels and restaurants, all of which catered to the gypsy pilots who passed perpetually through. 

The busiest of the shops had no sign showing what services were offered within, and it was this shop that had intrigued him the most. He’d stood to the side of the square, invisible as all the other feral children of Poynting, and watched the people coming and going, and noticed the strange suits they wore and the way they carried themselves, and overheard the pseudo-technical way they spoke. He’d decided that they must all be pilots. 

Nestor chose a lull in traffic to surreptitiously slip into the full pilot’s lounge and chose a place along the back wall and tried to make himself look small. He was wholly ignored in these efforts, for at the center of the room stood an old, disheveled man before a half-circle of bored-looking patrons, in the midst of fending off heckles from his audience.

“I tell you, he was three meters tall, and he could write his name with his left foot as well as he could with his right hand. He come aboard my shuttle in orbit, and crawled along the ceiling, using both his hands and his feet equally!”

The circle of men erupted into a chorus of guffaws, the sarcastic among them adding to his tall tale:

“…and he had two thumbs on the heels of each foot!”

“…he navigated by making a set of clicks and hums!”

“…he steered his ship by sittin’ with the control stick up his ass and floatin’ about. Said it give ‘im finer control!”

The old man looked around at his hecklers with an awkward smile pinned to his face and then searched out to the broader crowd for a suitable distraction from this not-so-good-natured ribbing. He saw Nestor in the corner and their eyes met and Nestor knew what was coming and tried to flee but could see no way out.

“You there! Have you ever met a Floatsie?” The crowd quieted and heads and shoulders twisted to look back at Nestor. He shook his head.

“Neither have any of them,” the old man gestured around at the crowd with a frown upon his face.

“And neither have you,” someone from the crowd yelled back, to peals of laughter.

Nestor felt himself relaxing as they all looked back at the old man, when an enormous pair of hands grabbed his shoulders and lifted him from his seat and pulled him towards the door, the man attached to the hands looking down at Nestor with a frown.

“This ain’t no place for kids, you hear?” The giant admonished as he not-so-gently pushed Nestor out the door. 

Nestor stood at the lounge’s threshold and looked around the now-abandoned square, wondering what to do next. He had been at it for several minutes when the old man walked out. The man glanced around momentarily, and he noticed Nestor and examined the filthy adolescent boy dressed in a tattered jumpsuit before him and nodded.

“Saw you get kicked out. Why’d you want to come into such a place as this?”

Nestor shrugged and looked across the square. “Dunno. Jes wanted to see what was in there, I guess.” He took half a step away, uncomfortable at how intently the old man was staring at him.

“Not much in there, but a bunch of drunks, sadly,” the old man said with a wistful tone. “This new breed of pilots don’t get the romance of flyin’, nor of space. They’re jes workin’ for a wage. Hired guns. Used to be, you could go into this here pilot’s lounge and hear all manner of wisdom. About flyin’. About livin’. Direct from the mouths of the greats. Legends, all of them. These new pilots jes want to drink.”

The ceiling of the square was doped glass, and through its wavey panes they watched a tanker shuttle pass overhead, its engines casting long jets of blue and white and red behind the behemoth ship as it tilted to the east.

“Why do they all tilt like that right after takeoff?” Nestor asked the air above him as he stared without pause at the great ship rumbling away.

The man replied and puffed out his chest minorly, peering over at Nestor like a prospective pupil, “You cain’t just fly straight up to space and float there, is why. Ships only stay up there in orbit by movin’ so fast that gravity cain’t pull ‘em back down quick enough.”

They could just make out the engines’ streak against the steel blue sky as it moved from their purview.  

“What would happen if they flew straight up?” Nestor asked as he leaned and strained his eyes to see the tiny dot of the receding ship.

“Weeell, they’d come right back down,” the man smiled paternally at his young charge, “you see, gravity’s always pullin’ you back down to the ground. So if you go straight up, as soon as you stop acceleratin’, gravity starts pullin’ you back. Slowin’ you down until you stop movin’ up at all. And when that happens, then you’ll start fallin’ back.”

Nestor gave up trying to follow the ship and instead scrunched his face at the old man. “So flyin’ sideways makes it so you don’t fall?’”

The old man chuckled in a friendly sort of way, “Nah, not ‘xactly. Like I said, gravity’s always pullin’ you down. But if you go fast enough, you miss the ground.”

Nestor must have looked lost at this response because the old man smiled wisely and gestured with his hand to come stand next to him. Nestor sidled over, his eyes meeting the old man’s with suspicion. The man knelt with a labored grunt, and in the dust of the square he drew a large circle and then drew a curve coming up from the surface of the circle.

“Imagine you takeoff in a shuttle, but you only run the engines for a couple seconds. Your trajectory will look like this,” he completed the curve, bringing the far edge of it down to reconnect with the circle, “you go up for a bit, but eventually you run out of enough speed to overcome the planet’s gravity, and so she pulls you back down, until you hit the surface.”

Nestor nodded, “So you’d crash.”

“Uh-huh, and if you burn the engines for longer, the top of the curve gets longer, too. This is because you develop more speed…more velocity,” he drew a second curve out from the circle, much larger than the previous one, “once the top of that curve is at the altitude you want to orbit, you cut your engines and coast to the top.”

Nestor interrupted, “Why not jes run your engines all the way to the top of the curve?”

“You could do that, but it’d be wasteful, because the whole time you’re burnin’ you’re extendin’ the top of the curve of your trajectory, makin’ it higher and higher, which is a waste if you don’t wanna go higher and higher.”

“But how do you not crash? If you cut your engines, you’ll jes get to the top of the curve and then fall back down, won’t you?”

“Ah, but that’s it. Once you get here,” the old man pointed at the peak of his larger curve, “you burn your engines again. When you do that, you start pushin’ out this descendin’ part of your trajectory…”

He drew a line out from the peak of the curve, extending it around the circle, “…and if you burn long enough, you push the descendin’ part out and out and out until it loops all the way back around, makin’ a circle. You’re in orbit now.”

He beamed up at Nestor, who stared at the man’s drawings for quite some time, putting all the pieces together.

“Why couldn’t you jes go straight up and then burn facin’ the direction you want to go? Wouldn’t that do the same thing?”

The old man’s smile grew even larger. “You’re right, you could do that. ‘Cept, when you get to the top of a straight up-and-down trajectory, you have no velocity. Mars’s gravity has stolen it all. So you gotta burn real hard to develop enough speed to orbit. But, if you climb at an angle…”

Nestor interrupted, “You’ll still have some velocity at the top of the curve?”

“Right again. Which makes it easier to build enough speed to orbit.” The old man stood up and brushed his hand against the leg of his burnished envirosuit.

 “I’m Oscar, by the way,” he said, offering his hand. 

Nestor took it and shook once. “Nestor. Good to meet you, sir.” 

Oscar scoffed at the ‘sir’ but smiled a crooked half-smile back.

Nestor, who’d looked away as soon as he let go of Oscar’s hand, turned back and squinted at the old man. “Can I ask you somethin’?’’ He leaned towards Oscar slightly, who nodded an encouragement to go on, “… what is a Floatie?”

Oscar smiled a gracious smile. “I dunno what a ‘Floatie’ is, but a Floatsie is a man who’s adapted to live permanently in space.”

He paused for effect, looking closely at Nestor, who stared blankly back. He continued, “They change their bodies for zero G. You don’t need legs to stand when you’re on the float, so they change their legs to be more like arms, and they move around by graspin’ with both their feet and their hands. They have long necks they can bend all the way back, makin’ it comfortable to look ‘up’ constantly.”

Nestor craned his neck back, jutting his chin up, feeling the muscles stretch taut, and wondered what it’d be like to live like that. Oscar noticed and smiled to himself, seeming to enjoy the boy’s naivety.

“Their organs and blood vessels are adapted, too. They say if you expose a Floatsie to a full G for more’n a few minutes, you can paralyze them permanently, or even kill ‘em. They’re frail and are all limbs and they are just…off. Not human any longer. They’ve become somethin’ else entirely.”

Nestor stared at Oscar and tried to picture what he was describing, but found it impossible to picture such fantastical creatures.

“You met them flyin’ a shuttle?”

Oscar’s face became serious. “Floatsies control pretty much all the interplanetary shippin’ that goes on. Mars will only become terraformed with the help of ‘em. They go out to the asteroid belt, to the moons of Jupiter, even all the way out to Saturn, and they load up with methane or ammonia or water ice and bring it all back to the orbital depots. They live their whole lives in their ships, you know. Crazy ships that don’t use engines like our normal ships do. They use special engines, which require huge amounts of electricity, which they generate with these beautiful solar panel arrays all around their ship. Works of art, those ships are. The way they build their arrays, all sharp angles and swooping lines.”

He paused again, looking faraway, seemingly lost in fond memories. He snapped out of it and squinted at Nestor briefly, “Most folk never meet a Floatsie. They never come off their ships. Lotta pilots will swear there is no such thing as a Floatsie, and those ships are just piloted by AI, entirely flown by a computer.”

“But I know that’s not true. That’s the tale I was tellin’ back in there. Orbital Control give me a departure orbit one time that intercepted one of their ships. I was oriented for an inclination change burn, so I had my nose pointed up relative to my ship’s motion, and so I couldn’t see ‘em through my front windows. Radar started beepin’ a collision warnin’ and Control wouldn’t give me a safe avoidance vector quick enough and my starboard engine clipped one of their panels. Wiped me out. Spinnin’ like crazy. Couldn’t maneuver. Nothin’. I thought I was going to full-on-collide with their ship, but they flipped that big ole thing around to match my spin perfectly, our two vessels movin’ in sync there in orbit with a cloud of their shattered PV panel all around us.”

Nestor looked at Oscar, his eyes wide, and Oscar looked back at him with a satisfied smile, “Then they pushed in and used these great metal arms that cold-welded to my ship, and like it was nothin’, they stopped both our spin. And then one of ‘em come over to my ship and offered to help fix it, or at least fly me to a port. I told ‘em to fly me to the depot we’d jes left and so they dropped me there. Didn’t invite me on their ship, but I got a good look at the one that come over to my ship. He didn’t wear a spacesuit at all. Just a breather and what looked like normal clothes, at least normal for a Floatsie. I have no idea how he didn’t freeze.”

*****

Nestor blinked out of his memories and looked down at the spray of parts in front of him. He’d made no progress on fixing the disassembled sensors on the cloth. He was barely seeing them. He looked around the dilapidated hangar, then at Oscar’s old orbital ‘runabout’ shuttle, whose original lease on life had been ferrying parts and minor supplies between orbital depots. It had long since left service as a runabout, and sat before him in at least a dozen different pieces, the result of a morning spent chasing ghosts through the ship’s electrical system.

Oscar sat across from him on a stool, bent forward and shakily hefting spoonfuls of nutrient paste from a nearly-empty tube while he watched Nestor.

“Boy, you too thin. Young man like yourself needs to eat somethin’ more than nutrient paste.”

Nestor looked up and watched the old man methodically licking his spoon clean, “That right?”

“Get you some real food. Why don’t you use some of that money Vincent been payin’ to get some roast beef slices? At least some chicken chunks.”

“Real food? Ain’t it all made from the same thing?”

“Not exactly, not exactly. The fancy stuff is stitched together from what the real thing was made of. Jes no actual animals or plants involved. This here nutrient paste is different. Most efficient foodstuff known to man, nutrient paste. Has everthing yer s’posed to need.”

“That true?”

“It is, my boy. The original colonists invented it to use on they trip over from Earth. Those ships had thousands of souls on ‘em, and ever gram needed to be accounted for. Food weighs a whole lot. So does all the stuff you need to store it and make it into somethin’ worth eatin’. Nutrient paste was designed to provide ‘em the best bang for ever gram of it they brought.”

Nestor looked blankly at Oscar, and the old man smiled crookedly in return.

“Worked so good at keepin’ ‘em alive, they kept eatin’ it when they came planet-side. And here we are, still eatin’ it today.”

“It’s so great, but you want me to go buy the good stuff.”

“Well, you gotta live a little.”

“Maybe I’ll live a little once we get the rest of our runs back up. Which may never happen if Vincent keeps shortin’ me for each list of huts I give him.”

“Nestor, you know the agreement you all made. He needs your huts for storage. The ones you give him last time were too small to store anything in.”

“What is he storin’ that he needs so much space, though?”

Oscar shook his head and squeezed out another spoonful of paste and looked at Nestor over the heap upon his spoon and said naught else.

Nestor returned his stare for a few moments. “I cain’t change what’s already in the huts, Oscar. Of course there’s machinery in ‘em. That’s what they’re for. Not… whatever it is Vincent wants to put in ‘em.”

“Well, he was happy with t’other ones. Maybe jes give him those again.”

Nestor looked at the parts piled between his knees and shifted himself carefully forward to rise. “I can only give him the huts that are out of commission. Which is always changin’ as we get repairs done upstream. If we were a normal operation, I couldn’t give’m any huts to use. It’s only because it’s jes the two of us that I can do this at all.”

“Maybe it’s time you tol’ your daddy, son. Maybe he’d understand. Help you find some better huts to let Vincent use more permanent-like. You cain’t keep this secret from him forever.”

Nestor shook his head, “He wouldn’t like it. I cain’t tell him.”

“You also cain’t back out of a deal with someone like Vincent.”

“Why not? He didn’t seem so dangerous to me.”

“You only met him the once, Nestor. Do you think dangerous people walk around lookin’ that way? Would you’ve only known he was dangerous if he was covered in blood? Or threatened you with a weapon?”

“Well…”

“Danger lurks deeper’n that, son. Trust me when I say you ain’t likely to ever meet someone as dangerous as Vincent is.”

“Why’d you ever introduce us, then? I don’t know nothin’ about dealin’ with people like him, Oscar.”

“Thought I was helpin’, I guess. How many of your huts you been able to fix with the money he’s paid you? Plus, I needed some way to help pay you back for all the work you do for me. Repairin’ my shuttle like you do.”

“Aw, Oscar. I didn’t never ask for nothin’ from you. We could always figure somethin’ else out, you know.”

Oscar shook his head and looked far away. “Don’t have nothin’ else to give you, boy. Seems all I ever been able to do is make mistakes. This time ain’t no different from all t’other ones. I wish I’d done somethin’ else. Believe me when I say it.”

Nestor looked at the clock and Oscar followed his eyes and then they looked at each other and Nestor shrugged and shook his head. He stepped gingerly over the parts strewn everwhere. “I’m gonna have to finish these all up next time, Oscar.”

“They’ll still be there next time. You can bet on that,” the old man said, with a crooked, deferential smile.

“We really needed that money, you know. I don’t know what my father’s gonna do when he finds we don’t have enough money for all the groceries he wanted.”

“It’ll get better, son. Jes think about how to get Vincent the huts he needs, and I think you’ll be eatin’ real food in no time.”

“What am I supposed to do until then, though? Jes keep livin’ this way?”

Oscar smiled and walked the boy to the door, carefully stepping around the mess of parts scattered on the floor, “At least you’re still livin’. Which is about the best any of us can expect. I’ll have a talk with Vincent. Try to keep him calm while you figure out what you should do, boy.”

*****

Nestor crouched with his welder over a corroded-through section of pipe and listened to his father yelling over the coms. Louis had long since taken to drunkenly installing himself upon the roof of the range truck with his gun so he could “keep watch” for his brothers, and over the previous week this watch-keeping had devolved to his broadcasting over the coms screamed and incoherent rants at the desolation completely enveloping them both, raging against the wind and the grit and the very sun that shone down upon him with daggers of radiation bound cheek to cheek with light and life-giving warmth, life and death entwined and dappling upon a drunken face contorted with fury against all of it. While he welded the repair onto that pipe, Nestor wondered to himself if his father raged using the just right words at just the right level of inebriation, Mars and all the things within her might take notice of him and grant him reprieve, finally agreeing to make life fair. He decided, as he finished his work on the pipe, that he doubted it very much.

Louis was not yet aware that he was now out of liquor, though Nestor had been aware of this fact since Louis had opened the final bottle of the lot he’d purchased at the market a week prior. The hut Nestor was repairing was far enough up the claim that no resupply mission could easily be commissioned, and Nestor silently dreaded his father realizing these two facts over the coming hours. His repairs complete and his father completely inebriated, Nestor chose to hide inside the hut, pretending to be at work therein, and spent his time daydreaming a separate existence for himself, one where he was miraculously rescued, perhaps by one of his estranged uncles, and delivered to a youth spent recklessly optimistic for the future.

Sobering up from his bender left Louis wrathful, and he seasoned his wrath with dollops of anxiety and threw that stew upon Nestor at every occasion over the following evening, every minor slight rebuked, for he imagined even the merest of looks to foretell clandestine ridicule. As he sobered up overnight, Louis huddled up in the back of the truck and refused to allow Nestor to enter the truck at all. He claimed any motion of the truck would make him sick, including the motion of Nestor moving about inside. This was just as well for Nestor, who slept blessedly alone in the hut overnight, and further avoided his father after the sun rose on the next day by attending to the never-ending list of small repairs needed on the range truck’s exterior, this morning focusing his efforts on the GPS module, whose connections to the truck were corroding and required him to solder new.

When Louis emerged, it was past noon, and while he still had the access panel to the GPS module open, Nestor’s repairs had been finished for the better part of an hour. Louis would not meet his glance and had apparently been attending to his appearance, for his hair was greased and combed and his face was shaven and the only evidence of his crapulence were his sagging red-rimmed eyes and the network of burst vessels covering his nose.

Louis came abreast of where Nestor perched upon the truck and, looking down the expanse of the slope spread beneath them, said over his coms, “Come on, get down from there. It looks like yer done anyways. We goin’ to Hut 251. It’s been down fer too long, we gonna get it up. Today. Right now.”

Nestor considered this for a moment, trying to remember which hut that was, and if it was a hut he’d given to Vincent to use.

“That one of the bigger huts?”

“Yeah, it’s one yer grandaddy and me built when I was about yer age.”

“It one of them that has three runs out of it?”

“That’s right. Yer grandaddy always said we coulda fit a fourth pipe run in but we couldn’t never deal with the heat, the machinery bein’ so close together. We shoulda added an extra couple hunerd square meters when we built it.”

Nestor nodded. If it was the hut he had in mind, he knew there was no way he’d given it to Vincent to use. He swung out and dropped effortlessly down from the side of the truck, and together they picked up the tools and parts Nestor had scattered about as he’d worked and climbed up into the back themselves and pressurized the truck and departed with Louis bleary but cogent behind the wheel.

As they pulled out, this week’s ice delivery arrived at the hut, the overland train driver honking his horn and waving. Louis raised two fingers from his grip on the steering wheel in reply and looked over at his son and said, “Don’t those trains always amaze you?”

Nestor shook his head, “Shore are big.”

“They used to have bigger back on Earth. You know that?”

“Ancient Earth had trains like this?” Nestor asked, momentarily distracted as the dozen huge self-powered cars bounced in a linked and jointed manner before them much like a behemoth metallic caterpillar, a grub from the old world who had come to this new one and become a nigh-unconscionable beast in these harsher environs.

“In a way. Back on Earth, in the olden days before anyone came here, they covered the whole planet with steel. Can you imagine it?”

Nestor shook his head.

“Picture it, mountains covered in plates of steel borderin’ vast steel plains, perfect flat metal shinin’ in the sun,” Louis said in a smooth, calm voice, almost hypnotically.

“Did they really do that? Why’d they cover everthing in metal?” Nestor asked skeptically.

“It’s how we ended up here, son. They hated the natural world, wanted to make it more perfect, and thought they could coat everthing in metal to achieve that. And that’s what killed they world. What drove our ancestors here.”

Nestor looked at his father skeptically, and Louis continued, “They steeled over everthing, and then they built grooves in the steel and used these great trains with special wheels to travel along them, to deliver all the goods that they needed.”

Nestor scrunched his face. “What kind of special wheels?”

“Metal ones, which fit perfectly into the grooves, so perfectly they’d have thousands and thousands of cars in a single train. It’d stretch for hundreds of kilometers, so far you couldn’t see the end…”

*****

The hut was quite far away, and travel through their myriad pipe runs circuitous. It was nearly sundown when they arrived. Louis had spent what little energy he had in driving, and upon pulling the truck up next to the hut, climbed into the back seat and stretched out. He claimed he would only be a few minutes, but Nestor doubted that assertion very much. Nestor climbed over his father and through the small hatch to the truck’s rear, and closed that hatch to put on his envirosuit within those cramped environs. He depressurized the back and he considered taking the collapsible airlock over to the hut with him, if the wind wasn’t too bad.

The wind was, in fact, quite bad and so he abandoned the airlock at the truck. He opened the hut door a crack and squeezed inside while the wind tried to steal the door from his grasp and found himself face to face with a stack of crates. He reached around the crates and turned on the interior lights and blinked in confusion at the floor-to-ceiling rows of boxes, all labeled with their respective foodstuff. Just in front of him was a stack of crates of ‘Harvestland Leg-o-lamb’ shelf-stable roasts, beside it a stack of ‘Harvestland REAL GRAPE’ wine. He knew this was the expensive stuff, still made in a factory, but manufactured to appear as though it hadn’t been. Made to look like the real thing, even though none of its consumers had ever once in their lifetimes, or the lifetimes of grandparents thrice removed, ever smelled the real thing. There was a small fortune held in the crates in only this hut. He stared around for quite some time and tried to calculate just how many fortunes must be stored in other huts around their claim at that very moment.

Nestor backed slowly from the hut and attempted to think of a lie to facilitate his escape from this place. He knew he hadn’t given Vincent this hut, and yet Vincent was clearly using it, and he needed to get his father away from here. He could come up with no ready excuse and was given no time at all to contrive one as he rounded the rear corner of the truck to find his father fully besuited there and exiting the back door. Louis turned to look at him.

“There a problem? Why ain’t you at the hut?”

Nestor merely opened his mouth silently and shook his head. Louis cocked his own head at his son and walked past and fought against the wind gusts all the way over to the hut, while Nestor followed behind and wondered if tackling his father would save him. He decided that it would not.

Louis opened the door to the hut the same way Nestor had earlier and held it open for his son only momentarily before calling to Nestor over the coms, “Did you see all this stuff in the hut? Why didn’t you say nothin’?”

“Dunno.”

Louis exited the hut and looked appraisingly at this son. “Why do you look like that?” 

“Look like what?” Nestor replied, knowing the moment the words left his lips they would not be sufficient.

“Like yer guilty. There somethin’ you want to tell me about those crates, boy?” Louis leaned forward to see his son more clearly in the deepening early dusk shadows.

“I got somethin’ to tell you, and you probably ain’t gonna like it. But you do need to know, even if it makes you angry. And I hope that comin’ out and tellin’ you now will mean somethin’.”

Louis continued his even stare at Nestor, his expression hidden inside the gathering gloom of his helmet. 

“I been rentin’ out the huts to someone from Poynting. Ones that ain’t in use. I didn’t know what he uses ‘em for. I’m not allowed to ask. Seems like he’s smugglin’ food. As you can see. But he pays me…us…one hundred per hut.” Nestor noticed how quickly he was talking and forced himself to stop, hoping the amount paid might catch in the wind and blow away and take with it all consequence. 

Louis’s voice came over the comms in a remarkably even tone, stating with no question at all in his voice, “This is what you get up to on market days.”

Nestor nodded inside his helmet, saying nothing, not sure if his father could see the nod in the shadows, but afraid to say anything else.

Louis sighed over the comms, “Well, son, we ain’t doin’ that no longer. We goin’ over to Poynting and I will have a talk with this…person, and we will back out of it. I cain’t believe you’d do something like this without tellin’ me.”

“We cain’t back out of it, dad. Oscar says that he’s not a man you break deals with.”

“Oscar? That the one rentin’ out the huts?”

With vehemence, Nestor interrupted, “No. No, Oscar is my friend. It’s Vincent that is rentin’ out the huts.”

Louis waved Nestor off, “Look, any deal this Oscar…or Vincent…or whoever…any deal an adult makes with a child ain’t no real deal. What kind of man thinks he can take advantage of a child that way? We ain’t breakin’ a deal ‘cause no deal was ever made. Not one that should be honored.”

The sun had just dipped below the horizon and the last rays of light shone blinding between them and in that luster Nestor could almost believe the things his father was saying were true and was glad. 

*****

They met Vincent at a small restaurant on the edge of the city, so close to the breccia that the walls had been reinforced with three-centimeter-thick steel mesh to arrest the ceaseless demands of gravity upon a substrate that was closer to liquid than solid rock. There was no one in the restaurant but their subject and one other man who stood silently in the corner. Louis strode into that place with the confidence of a man coming to do business with an equal, and he nodded at the big man in the corner and at Vincent as well. He took the solitary open seat in front of Vincent without being asked and looked the man squarely in the eye. 

With no seat for himself, Nestor stood just inside the door, and trying not to look around, stared at the floor instead. He heard Louis speak first, in the manner of his agricultural peers, “How’re you doin’? How’s business treatin’ ya?”

Vincent didn’t respond. Nestor glanced up to see the man casting at his father with a hard stare that clearly indicated that Louis was wasting this man’s time and needed to rush to the point.

Louis cleared his throat, “My understandin’ is that you made some sort of deal with my boy there. And we come here today to talk to you about that deal.”

He cleared his throat again, and Nestor got the sense, without looking, that he was squirming in his seat. “And, well…he’s jes a kid, you see. He don’t know nothin’ about runnin’ our claim, and he ain’t in any sort of position to make deals with you.”

He stopped there, waiting for some sort of response. None came. “So what I come here to talk to you about is you removin’ any…any of your materials, or what have you…from our huts. We don’t want nothin’ to do with your business, and we won’t involve no law, neither. Jes want to be freed of any obligations, if you catch my drift.”

Still no response. Nestor stole another look and saw Vincent’s expression had changed to a hungry stare, a predator who has cornered his prey and is toying with it for his own amusement.

“No,” Vincent said curtly, after another several tense moments, “the deal is the deal. It does not matter if you think your son there isn’t capable of making such deals. He has made a deal with me and it cannot be broken. We will continue using the huts on your property for our storage needs, and you will provide us with your largest huts for this purpose. In addition, because your son has not provided suitable huts for my use in quite some time now, you owe me what I have lost by needing to make other arrangements for storage.”

“Well, sir, please. That don’t seem fair at all. You jes been usin’ whichever ones you want. How am I to be held responsible for any of this?”

“Fair?” Vincent chuckled menacingly, “That is your problem, my friend. You think that I am concerned with what you think is and is not fair.”

Louis’s voice became harder, more assertive. “We cain’t have you storin’ things in our huts. I hope you understand why, but even if you don’t, I jes won’t allow it. If this is about the money you say we owe you, I promise you we can figure somethin’ out, if you give me some time to put somethin’ together.”

He paused, the awkwardness of his pause hanging in the air. Nestor looked up again to see that Vincent was holding up a hand in a clear ‘stop’ gesture.

“I don’t want your promises. Your promises are worth nothing to me. Something you can do for me? You can allow me to use your huts as I wish. There is nothing else you can do.”

“W-what if we did involve the law? It don’t seem like you’re leavin’ me much choice…”

Silence again. Nestor peeked up to see the big man had lumbered over to loom over his sitting father. 

“You are threatening me now?”

Louis vigorously shook his head at the question.

“Yes, yes you are. That was a threat.”

Vincent’s eyes shifted up to the big man, seeming to send some covert signal, because abruptly and with no effort at all the big man had his father facedown on the floor, Louis’s arm wrenched up behind him, his fingers in the man’s palms. Nestor watched in horror as the big man methodically broke each finger, bending them back until they touched Louis’s wrist, seeming not to hear the screams, impervious to the man thrashing in pain beneath him.

His task completed, the big man stepped off Nestor’s father, leaving Louis sobbing on the floor. Vincent stood and walked over to Nestor, ignoring his father completely.

“Do you see what happens to those who threaten my business?” He said to Nestor, his nose nearly touching the boy’s, his breath bathing Nestor in hot reek.

“You will give me a list of your biggest huts, and I will use them indefinitely to whatever end I wish. Because you owe me, you will pay me back by handling transportation, from locations we provide to huts on your property. And transportation from those huts to other locations. I will pay you fifty per delivery. You will begin paying back what you owe on your first delivery.”

Prologue

Author’s Notes:

A warning, right out of the gate - some folks haven’t really liked this prologue, and have argued that it doesn’t fit or really have much of a place at all in the rest of the story. I, of course, intensely disagree, and while I hope you do too, please know that this prologue may not be for you, and you may not miss anything if you skip it. That out of the way, I’ll just briefly hit on what motivated me to write this, and what motivates me to keep it in.

I love origin stories. I love having a succinct bit of writing that lays the groundwork for where your hero is coming from, what made them “what they are”. A lot of authors and editors and reviewers will tell you that origin stories are cheap, or are unnecessary, and they’re probably right. That is probably why I hid my origin stories away in this, the prologue. I do quite love them, however.

I have a kind of interesting problem here, that in that this story technically has two protagonists. We have our ostensible protagonist, Nestor Creede, a naive young man who’s lived a hardscrabble life and is propelled forward into the darkness with the hope of finding some light somewhere out there. This prologue attempts to hit all the things that will inform who he is, as we begin our story officially in the next chapter. But there’s another protagonist in this story, a secondary protagonist, whose story mirrors our Young Nestor’s story, and hopefully helps to inform it - the planet Mars.

I can feel your eyes rolling, but stick with me here. Mars has lived her own life out there amongst the stars, while we humans have lived our lives here on Earth. While Earth has lived its own life. Mars (very possibly) once had oceans, and possibly even had life of its own. Mars is covered in volcanoes, mostly extinct. Mars has canyons and valleys and dry rivers and vast plains and seas of dust and has her own sky and her own stars. I want to tell the story of Mars. Of course, not I nor anyone alive truly knows the story of Mars. Scientists have some very good ideas, and where possible I tried to pull those ideas in, but the story of Mars remains unwritten. So, I created one, using as inspiration the “classics'“, and Native American stories and Norse sagas. I cribbed from them where I could, and I added new spins where I thought it made sense, and I approached the story I was telling of Mars as being the stories the characters within my story tell themselves about their world. This prologue tells the first of those stories, the story of the birth of Mars, and of her death, and of her rebirth.

THE HOMESTEAD

The line of mourners wraps around the Creede homestead’s small living room. They each pump Louis’s hand and share a sad look with him, but suppress their tears, for Louis is not a man who knows how to comfort a cry or how to cry at all. They pass by an empty spot next to Louis, and they picture there the sobbing ghost of his wife Martha, haunted by the loss of so many children, too many to recall in this moment when she can grieve no further. The mourners pause for a moment here, perhaps remembering Martha or perhaps hesitant to move to the next and final spot in the line, occupied by the last living Creede child, a gangly adolescent named Nestor who stands a diminished smaller mirror image of his father. Nestor stares into the middle distance and his eyes are glassy and catatonic and he stands stock still with no expression, a mannequin propped here for the mourners to tussle the hair of or offer unreturned hugs or cast sepulchral, awkward smiles at his expressionless face.

A memory of the last time he stood in this line, when his little brother Eric died, consumes Nestor’s mind. Eric had been a bit older than five in Martian years, 130 months of age all told, when he passed. Nestor pictures Eric’s body in his miniature casket, a wasted husk of what had at one point been a chubby, happy child, but who in death appeared so much less, dressed in a simple brown church-going suit, the only one the Creedes owned that would fit his diminished form. His skin stretched like leather over young bones. His head hairless and face sunken. A victim of one of the many ailments that preyed upon children this age. A victim of Mars.

Nestor recalls being forced by his parents to reckon with this thing in the coffin. It did not look like his brother and was no longer his confidant and was just a horrible dried out mummy which contained within it none of Eric’s memories or personality or anything recognizable or real. He had stared at it, and unable to express all that Death had taken from him, had broken from his parents and ran. He ran for his room, but as he passed down the hall, the thought came to him it was Eric’s room too, or at the very least all of Eric’s possessions still remained in there, persisting when their owner no longer did, except now they were all owned by that thing lying in state in their living room, and being unwilling to grapple with their very existence he had sought safety in the little storage cabinet beside his parents’ room instead.

It was a strange cabinet. He’d always thought that. It was tall enough for a small boy to walk into, but too short and deep for an adult to store anything of consequence within, because it’d be too much of a pain to recover. It was the perfect place for children to have adventures, however, and all the Creede children who’d made it past infancy, Nestor and Eric and even little toddler Emily and Lia, had found it to be an ideal refuge. It was dark and it could still fit him and, most importantly, was away from any tangible proof of the impermanence of his cohort. This had made it ideal, and so he ducked in and closed the door and sat in the dark and covertly cried while his parents walked by calling his name. They didn’t find him in his bedroom or in their bedroom and were walking room-by-room calling for him, voices trembling with anger while the polite whispers from the crowd in the living room rose to a din.

His uncle Kent found him there. Kent had opened the door, already crouched at Nestor’s level, clearly expecting him to be in there and unsurprised at finding him so. He was a massive man, nearly as tall as Louis, but quite broader; a holotype of all those whose every feature seems slightly enlarged. He shared his brother Louis’s taciturn personality, and he looked in at the bawling young boy hidden in the closet before him with an expression neither caring nor uncaring, neither empathetic nor antipathetic, simply seeing the boy for what he was and the need to recover in whatever way possible the boy from that place. Preferably before the boy’s father found them, as Louis was likely to react angrily at the embarrassment Nestor was causing him, and that was the last thing any sobbing young boy needed.

“Boy, you gotta come outta there,” Nestor in his memory can still hear Kent saying with a gentle rumble, “we cain’t hold all this up because you’re hid. All these folks are waitin’ on you, and it ain’t right to expect them to stand out there while you cry in here.”

Nestor had sniffled a few times, and then mumbled, “But Uncle Kent, I cain’t look at…at it. That cain’t be Eric.”

He’d started sobbing again at saying his brother’s name aloud, his whole body spasming with each sob. Kent reached in and grabbed the boy, his huge hand encompassing Nestor’s entire shoulder, and pulled the young boy out to envelop within his embrace, his face in Nestor’s ear. 

“Now you know that is Eric, Nestor, and don’t keep up with this ridiculousness,” Kent had whispered in Nestor’s ear, his hot breath and painful words making the boy’s ear burn. “We all lost so many folks we love, and we lost them in such horrible ways. But once they gone, boy, they gone and they cain’t come back. We’re left here without ‘em. The best thing we can do fer them, fer their memory and fer their legacy, is to make sure others don’t have to suffer like they did. Someday we’ll terraform this whole planet and then maybe that’ll end all this…grief. But until then, you cain’t run and you cain’t hide. You gotta be strong because you the only boy yer parents have left, and you have an important job…a duty…that you need to be ready fer. You understand?”

Nestor wonders, standing in this room now, if that same proscription applies, if he is still required to be strong for a family that is no longer, for now it is just him and his father, hardly a family at all. He certainly does not feel strong, not when the last of the mourners passes him by with their sad empty smiles and not when his father and he about-face and walk to stand before his mother’s frail body, asleep forevermore in her coffin. In fact, he does not feel much of anything, not on the long drive into town to the incinerator, nor when he watches through the glass window as his mother’s body is fed into the flames.

As he imagines her feet moving beyond the incinerator door, he can hear her voice hovering over the foot of his boyhood bed, telling him and Eric her favorite bedtime story, and as she passes from thing of substance to thing of ash, he tells himself that story for the final time.

A long time ago the Sun was born. She was a late child and was born into a universe where she already had many other siblings. Sun was born at the edges of our galaxy, so far away from her siblings that they could not hear her voice when she spoke, nor she theirs. Sun was a warm and friendly star, and she refused to allow such great distances to come between her and her siblings, so she would wave at them and then patiently wait for them to wave back across the gulf of time. But none of her siblings ever waved back to her, and she felt so very much alone.

After many millennia by herself, Sun decided to take matters into her own rays. There had been a lot of leftovers when the Universe made her, and she put them to good use. She spun together some gases swirling around her, and she formed them into a ball that rivaled her in size, and she put into the ball her brilliance and her desire to not be alone, for she wished for her creation to want to be with her for all time. She named her creation Jupiter, and for eons she and Jupiter danced together and marveled at the beauty of her distant siblings. 

Jupiter was brilliant and bold, but also quick to anger, and his fear of being alone made him covetous, and after eons had passed, Jupiter came to wish to find another like him. A planet with which he could dance as an equal. He began experimenting at spinning together some rocks that naturally orbited him, and soon learned how to build asteroids and moons and planetoids. He created many of them, all of which he treasured dearly, but the things he created were just inanimate rock. They could not speak with him nor experience the wonders of creation with him, and he felt no less alone with them. 

Sun noticed Jupiter creating his moons, and felt pity for him in his loneliness, for she too knew what it felt like to be alone. She realized she could make him another planet friend, so she gathered up the rest of the gases in her orbit, and she put into them only her warmth and love and she named her new child Saturn. Saturn and Jupiter danced together, and Jupiter showed Saturn how to craft her own moons, and for a while, all was in harmony.

Saturn eventually grew sad, however, for though she had a friend in Jupiter, he was neither warm nor loving and it was warmth that she most desired. Jupiter saw her sadness and knew he could never be what she truly wanted. Jupiter and Saturn went to Sun, to ask if she could make a third planet, one for Saturn to love, but Sun told them that there was no more gas in her orbit to make another planet, and she had no more of herself to give. If they wanted another planet, she advised, the only way would be to give some of themselves for that purpose. So Jupiter gave up some of his gases and Saturn gave some of hers, and into this they poured some of Saturn’s warmth and love and some of Jupiter’s brilliance, and together they made a child, smaller than them but still mighty, and they named this child Uranus.

Saturn dearly loved Uranus and doted over him endlessly. Uranus loved her too and chose his orbit to be closest to hers, so that they could always be near one another. Eventually Jupiter grew jealous of their closeness and demanded that Saturn make yet another planet with him, determined that this new planet should be closest to him instead. Saturn dearly loved her compatriot, even though he could not love her back, and wished to console him in his loneliness, so she acquiesced, combining some more of her atmosphere with Jupiter’s, giving what little warmth she had left to give and spinning it together with Jupiter’s boldness, and together they created a second child, who they named Neptune.

Neptune was made of too little warmth to care much for either of his parents and preferred to orbit alone at the edges of Sun’s influence and over time out in the black he solidified into pure ice. This crushed Jupiter, for he knew he had given so much of himself that he could not create a third planet. He orbited for eons, sullen and distraught at his involuntary solitude, jealously watching Saturn and Uranus dance together and experience the wonders of the cosmos in each other’s presence. His sullenness deepened until upon his face a great welt developed, which remains to this day as permanent evidence of how deep a despair he felt.

Sun saw her former companion in his pain and desperately wished to help. One day, Jupiter came to her and begged her to help him create further planets, by any means necessary. Sun told Jupiter that the only way to create a planet would be from the gases within him, and that he had precious few to spare, certainly not enough for even one new planet. Jupiter was adamant, however, and Sun was so determined to help that she agreed to use a tiny amount of Jupiter’s atmosphere, the bare minimum, really, to create a companion for him. But to make up for the gas Jupiter couldn’t provide, she would need rock, which would serve as a barycenter and core. She asked Jupiter to provide one of his moons for this purpose, and Jupiter offered Mars, a small ball of rock into which Jupiter had poured his boldness and brilliance, and he preferred this rock especially because her fires burned so bright. The Sun, upon seeing this luminescent ball of magma for the first time, informed Jupiter that there was no way to make her into a planet, for her internal fire would begin to extinguish the moment she left his orbit, and outside his orbit, she would soon die. Jupiter was determined to dance with his beautiful Mars, if only for a short while, and told Sun that a short time with one so bright would be worth much more to him than an eternity with any other, and so Sun made Mars into a planet and placed her closest to Jupiter, hoping that being close to him would be enough to keep her alive.

Mars and Jupiter danced together for a short time, even less than Sun had warned, and as predicted, Mars’s fires cooled, and she withered there in her orbit. Jupiter was so distraught at her decay that he openly wept, as only a planet can, his tears solidifying into a ring of icy asteroids between their two orbits, which remain there to this day, and forever document Jupiter’s great grief. 

But little did Jupiter know that humans, orphaned from their homeworld, would come along some day, and would gather up his many tears, and would take them all to Mars, to bathe her surface in his waters, and in so doing would resurrect his most cherished child to be their home forevermore.

Nestor and his father exchange no words on their way home, and upon passing the airlock to their meager homestead, Louis stops and turns to Nestor and says, “Go get your things, boy. Ain’t nothin’ here for us no more.”

“Where we goin’?”

“We goin’ out on the range, boy,”

Nestor does not want to go, and refuses to pack, until his father stalks back to his room and dumps his tiny dresser drawer full of clothes into a backpack and grabs Nestor firmly by the hand and hauls him hastily besuited out to their waiting range truck. By the time they pull away from the family homestead set in that draw on the slopes of Mount Ascraeus, it is full dark and ghosts of dust pass through their headlights as they drive and Nestor lays in the back and sobs. Sobbing for his lost siblings and his lost friends and his lost mother and his lost childhood. Sobbing with no consolation offered. Sobbing until his mind can take no more pain, and he simply drifts off to sleep. His father sits in the driver’s seat hunched over the wheel and makes no noise and moves no muscle not otherwise required to operate the vehicle and pays no attention to the boy in the throes of grief behind him until eventually his own shoulders begin to shake and he hunches fully over, head upon the wheel, letting the truck coast to a stop while spasms of grief that can no longer be suppressed wrack the body of a broken man.

An Experiment

Well, it’s been three months since I published my first novel, From Dust and Desolation. Those three months have been…underwhelming, to say the least. I wasn’t expecting immediate success, nor was I truly expecting to earn enough on my novel to recoup what I’ve spent in book design and website hosting and book review sites and (mostly fake) awards entry. I was hoping that a couple hundred, maybe a thousand, readers might give my book a try. Might enjoy it. Let’s just say even those (relatively tame) goals seem unachievably high, now. To quote one of my writing heroes - “So it goes.”

The one place where I’ve seen a mild amount of success is in readers picking up my book for free. Some folks might be offended by that, might be offended that their work has no monetary value in the Holiest of Holies, the Free Market, blessed be its name. I’m not offended. I’m actually OK with giving away my work for free. After all, I’m not a starving artist, and I’m not trying to support myself or my family on what I make from my writing. If people will read what I write for free, my stance is - OK, let’s let them read it for free.

After all, I get it. Book readership is way down, and yet the number of books published, especially in the self-published market, is high. You don’t know that my book is any good, and honestly it’s a big risk, and one I shouldn’t, in all fairness, be asking you to take. First time writer, in an incredibly niche market, with a depressing-sounding title…not many people are lining up to throw their hard-earned dollars at that.

So, from this point forward, From Dust and Desolation is now free to download from this site. Head on over to the store to download your free version, either in .pdf or in .epub format. I represent that the file you will download is completely safe, and should work in your specific e-reader of choice. I do not know how to make it work on your e-reader of choice, so please refer to other resources for troubleshooting assistance.

If downloading a file from a random website doesn’t tickle your fancy, that’s great. I can’t make this site work perfectly on your e-reader, but I’ll tell you what I will do. Beginning this week, and continuing every week until it’s done, I will post one chapter per week here, in my blog. I’ll add a little section of author’s notes a the beginning, formatted to make it easy for you to skip, if you don’t really want to read my notes (I know that I wouldn’t). Feel free to leave comments and I may (or may not) respond. I try to avoid online engagement, and I don’t want to seem ungracious, but I’m probably not going to re-litigate items I’ve already written down. If that makes any sense to you. But maybe other people will add comments, and you can fight (nicely, please!) amongst yourselves.

In any instance, I hope you enjoy. I do have a patreon that you can find here, if you’ve liked what you’ve read and would like to throw me a few bucks. I also have a paid version of my book in my store, you can pay for my book there, too, if that’s your thing. But no hard feelings if you don’t.