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.