Lost on Mars

by Paul Magrs

  My brother Al was changing. It was as if he had gone into shock. When we entered the City Inside, it was like getting to know a whole new person. His old, inquisitive, argumentative self had been driven away. He went quiet when we entered the City. He seemed smaller and wide-eyed. Overawed by the vast buildings and the complicatedness of everything.

  Everything was strange to us. Our lives had changed utterly in the blink of an eye. But, surprisingly to me, Al started to settle in way before I did. He was keen to feel secure and cosy here. He was looking for stability and routine. He was looking, for the first time in his life, to fit in.

  ‘Al’s bringing his girlfriend round,’ I told Toaster.

  ‘His girlfriend!’ he said, with a robotic chuckle.

  ‘She works in the place where they found Al a job.’

  ‘A job!’ cried Toaster. He seemed amazed that so much had gone on while he’d been having his make-over and repairs. ‘But he’s only thirteen.’

  ‘Fourteen, now. People start working early here, in the City Inside.’ They had explained the whole thing to me. Everyone worked so very hard in the City, and that was why it was such a splendid place. If we were to settle here we must learn to be hard-working people, too.

  ‘I’m not sure he should have been made to get a job,’ Toaster frowned.

  ‘It was driving him crazy, being in this apartment all day, with me just writing like this. So Al has got a job and he’s met this girl, Tillian Graveley. It’s amazing. He’s fitting into this new life brilliantly. He’s a child of the prairies, just like me, but I guess he’s more adaptable … he always wanted to be some place else, didn’t he?’

  Toaster looked searchingly at me. He examined my face. When I looked in the mirror it surprised me. The sand and sun of the wilderness had changed my skin and my hair. It had scoured me and made me less soft. I felt older than just over fifteen.

  ‘So,’ I said, getting up and starting to clear away my mess. ‘I’ve got to fix dinner.’

  Toaster decided to help me. He said he had nowhere else to go. We prepared steamed greens and boiled chops and hot lava sauce. The kinds of food Ma used to make. Prairie food. It felt like keeping up a tradition, but truth be told, I didn’t know how to cook much else. What did the other people eat in this City Inside?

  When I was a kid growing up on the prairie we always knew where we were. This was our Homestead, these were our fields and our cornrows. This was the road that took us to town. Church, the school room, the meeting room, Adams’ Exotic Emporium, Aunt Ruby’s house, the Storehouse. Everything was laid out plainly, clear as anything. Our little, tiny world. It was all we needed to know.

  That seemed so wonderfully simple to me. Imagine knowing your life was going to be limited like that. The limits of your town and the routines, seasons and festivals in the year. The winter and summer traditions; the reaping and sowing and storming; the celebrating and the slow eking out of supplies in the leaner times. The long, long days when the ground was frozen or covered in plagues of metal insects.

  When I was a girl I used to ask, but isn’t there any more than this? Is this really the whole, entire world? But I wished I could go back there now, to that small world of ours and our cosy limitations. I wished that we lived again in a knowable world.

  This new world was much too big.

  I’d read about cities in the old books, of course, and seen them on tapes and films from Earth. Cities that soared up into the sky, cities sunk into the sea. Ones built deep inside the Earth and others on mountain tops at impossible heights. Cities created on a magnificent scale. All for showing off. All just because the human race could.

  Wasn’t that part of the reason Earth got too hot and inhospitable? Weren’t the cities why our great grandparents left and came to places like Mars? The cities were vast clockwork toys that expanded and expanded and ran out of control. They became too full and, in order to save themselves, drove their own people out into the wilderness.

  The books and records always made the old cities seem so exciting. I would lie awake at night and try to imagine what the cities would be like. Where you could walk up and down in public and be a stranger. I would fantasize about being in a City one day. But I knew my dreams would come to nothing. Because there were no cities on Mars. It was too young a colony.

  A City is what we had been brought to. A City had taken us in.

  29

  Right on time, Al arrived with his new girlfriend. I heard the jangling of keys in the lock and their lowered voices as they came into the hall. I was making a last check on dinner and wiping my hands on a towel. I wished I could hear what they were murmuring to each other. They sounded nervous, as if Al was bringing home a girlfriend for his parents to inspect. Then it hit me. Of course he felt like that. The only family he had left was me – and Toaster, too. Naturally he wanted this meeting to go well, and for me to like his new friend.

  I met them in the drawing room, which was flooded with evening light. Our apartment was high up enough to catch the sun. We were told that this was a great privilege when we were moved here.

  The young woman was blinking and smiling. Toaster stood by, taking her wrap and her bonnet. She was dressed in a formal tea-gown with a hooped skirt and laced bodice. She was very pretty and delicate-looking, with green eyes and gleaming, honey-coloured hair. She was a couple of years older than Al, I thought, maybe about the same age as me. Looking at the pair of them, it was easy to believe they were just kids playing dress-up games and pretending to be polite grown-ups in an old book or play.

  Al was such a gangly boy and he’d always worn ragged outdoors clothes. Now he looked unnaturally smart in his grey work suit. He was holding his breath. This moment was important to him. So important that he had barely reacted to Toaster’s amazing transformation. I knew the old sunbed’s feelings must have been hurt by this. Instead, Al’s gaze was fixed on this young woman as she extended her hand for me to shake. She wasn’t nervous or over-keen to be liked, or if she was, she had the good sense to conceal it.

  ‘Miss Graveley.’ I smiled at her and found myself saying that I had heard a lot about her.

  ‘Tillian, please.’

  Al was too young for a girlfriend. He’d never shown any interest in girls before. I wondered what all this was about. He could be devious, my brother. Maybe there was a hidden reason for this, I thought.

  We sat in the comfortable chairs by the picture window, overlooking the towers of glass and polished metal that surrounded our apartment block. Toaster went off to make us drinks in the coloured glasses that Al had bought at the Downstairs Market last Saturday, especially for this purpose. Miss Tillian Graveley was our first proper guest. It truly felt as if we were all playing at being grown-ups.

  Tillian made gracious, admiring remarks about Toaster’s refurbishments. She was amazed a vintage creation could look so new again. Of course, there was a spring in Toaster’s step after this, as he left to check on our dinner’s progress. Al blushed because he realised he hadn’t admired Toaster enough. In his old age the Servo-Furnishing was increasingly prone to flattery. Tillian was soon musing aloud about interviewing Toaster for the newspaper that her father owned and that she and Al were working for. Tillian was that very unusual thing, she explained – a female reporter, forever on the lookout for curious subjects.

  I wondered if that was all we were to this young lady, Al included? Were we just curious and unusual specimens? A hot topic for her newspaper, The City Insider. The wanderers who came from the wilderness. The survivors of the Martian plains.

  But I had to stop being defensive and suspicious. This is what the wilderness had done to me. I didn’t trust anyone apart from Al and Toaster. Everyone else I might have trusted or relied upon was long gone.

  Then I realised that the smart, assured Miss Tillian Graveley was smiling at me. ‘Dinner smells wonderful, Miss Robinson.’

  ‘Lora,’ I corrected her. ‘Enough with all the formality. If there’s one thing you people
of the City Inside can’t get enough of, it’s all this damned formality.’

  She smiled, but I knew she thought I was strange and rude for cutting through her manners like this. They all thought I was a wild girl. Here it was all elaborate sirs and madams and doffing of hats, and bowing, scraping and saying everything but what you really meant to say. I guess that life in the City Inside was so easy compared with what they called the wilderness. They needed all the courtly manners just to fill up their days. Like the way they paid visits to each other’s homes and sat sipping tea or playing silent games of cards or doing weird, very slow formal dances. Nobody in the City Inside seemed to know how to let their hair down, or have a really good fight or a laugh.

  Although the City Inside represented safety and a possible home at last, after more than two months I was finding it all a bit dull. Miss Graveley was a bit dull too, I decided.

  But Al seemed to like her well enough. She and I had our stilted conversation and my brother’s eyes went back and forth between us, his hands crushed together in his lap. He didn’t have to worry, though. What was I going to do, even if I disapproved of his choice of girlfriend? In the City they regarded fourteen as old enough to work for your living and, if he truly wanted, he could afford to leave my care and the apartment they had given us, and take off by himself. My heart gave a tight squeeze at this thought.

  Toaster served the meal. I watched it appear, dish after dish; this homely prairie food, steaming in its platters. I guess it seemed primitive and unsophisticated to a City girl like Tillian. But she hid those thoughts, if she had them, and beamed with delight at every forkful and unaccustomed flavour.

  I tried to stop myself watching her like a hawk. This shouldn’t have been a test. Toaster put some fancy music on the radio station and drew the blinds and lit the lamps. Between the songs, the voice of an announcer read out the names of districts of the City Inside, along with descriptions of what weather they could expect tomorrow. The names were like lists of strange, random words, and I remembered tuning in our radio on the prairie. So this is where we had been making towards, and we got here in the end.

  ‘Lodger, Eventide, Kestrel, Softspot, Turnstile, Mousetrap, Stockpot…’

  Al was talking. He was telling us about his work in the Archive Rooms of The City Insider. Already he had learned so much about how the data machines worked, and where everything was filed away. He marvelled at how much information was stored inside a roomful of machines no bigger than this apartment of ours. ‘I’m talking about, like, everything, Lora. All knowledge. Everything that was ever known by human beings, going right back to the start. The sum total of everything!’ His eyes widened and he looked so funny in his enthusiasm that Tillian and I couldn’t help laughing at him.

  He flushed with very Al-like crossness. ‘But don’t you think that’s amazing, Lora? I sit there every day thinking, Why, I could find out anything. I could type in any word or phrase or name and the devices would rattle into action, think it over, and eventually they would tell me all there is to know about that particular thing or person.’

  I asked him, ‘And have you tried it? What have you looked up?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, darting a glance at Tillian. ‘All my time is spent looking up the things I’m told to. It’s forbidden to go nosying through the archives for your own benefit. These are very expensive machines. Besides, there’s a million things I want to know. Where would I even start?’

  We all smiled at that as well, even Toaster, who was going round with dessert dishes. I found it a little sad, too, the thought of Al wondering what it was he most wanted to know about. I guess, high up on that list would have to be what had become of our mother and our sister. But I didn’t know how much he thought about things like that, did I? Sometimes Al was like a typical fourteen year old. His feelings were a closed book to me. He might just have accepted the fact that the rest of our family were lost to us. We couldn’t bring them with us. They only made it so far. Only we three came to the City Inside. Somewhere on Mars they were still wandering through the wilderness.

  Whenever I pictured them, alone, still struggling through the desert, I knew what I must do. Even if Al found a new home and settled down, I knew I couldn’t settle here in the City. I had to find them. I had to do something about finding my folks.

  30

  Next morning at breakfast Al wanted to know what I thought of Tillian. We were eating grapefruit segments that Toaster had brought for us. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to all the fresh fruit they had in the City Inside. I’d had a lifetime of dried, salted, and pickled foods and the glass gardens I’d been told about, where they grew amazingly juicy and colourful vegetables and fruit, were mind-boggling to me.

  Al was looking at me earnestly, so I told him that Tillian was a very polite and attractive young lady. He blushed.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit young to become so attached to her?’

  He glared mutinously. ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘It’s just all a bit sudden. You’re my little brother, and here you are with a job and a girlfriend who seems so…’

  ‘Seems so what?’

  ‘Well, sophisticated, I guess.’

  ‘That’s how it is here, Lora,’ he told me, very seriously. ‘Everything’s better and more sophisticated than we’re used to. We’ve gotta fit in with them. That’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Are you happy doing that?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah, I am,’ he said. ‘Now she wants me to meet her parents. They live in the Darwin District. Sorry if I’m snappy … it’s because I’m nervous. They do sound … rather grand.’

  I smiled ruefully: ‘rather grand’! Al was already starting to talk like one of these City people. I guess he was going to have to, if he really wanted to fit in.

  Too late for me, of course. I’d be a farm girl and a prairie girl all my life.

  ‘Al, they’ll love you. Why wouldn’t they?’

  He pushed his unfinished fruit away. (The waste! I thought. That was something else I couldn’t get used to. At the Homestead nothing – not a single scrap – ever got wasted.)

  ‘It’s the…’ He lowered his voice and looked away from me. ‘It’s on our Martian Thanksgiving, Lora.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. If I added anything he’d think I was angry and envious. But really, how could he even consider it? No one else in this City would celebrate or even know about our Thanksgiving. It was nothing to do with them. Only we could celebrate this important day together. We only had each other. Would he really leave me alone on that day? Alone in a City where I couldn’t even find my way around? I couldn’t even work the public transport system. Al could get around fine, of course. He was slotting into life so easily. Too easily.

  I was going to be stuck here. A prisoner in this small apartment on one of the most important weekends of the year.

  I brightened my voice. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  He looked at me again, smiling. ‘Tillian said it might not be the right thing to do. Leaving you alone. We haven’t been in the City Inside very long and … well, she said you might get lonely without me.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of her,’ I said.

  Al laughed. ‘I had to tell her, “You really don’t know my sister yet, Tillian. Why, she’s the toughest young woman you’re ever likely to meet. Why would she care two sticks about being alone? She’s not scared of anything. The things she’s done in her life!” I told her that she wouldn’t believe even half of what you’ve had to face up to. The way that you took charge of us all and led us and made sure we kept together through the wilderness…’ Al shook his head and whistled.

  I was touched by his words. He gabbled away and I was pleased that he had explained me like this to his girlfriend. In the past Al had never had a good word to say about me. At the same time I was thinking that I really did mind about being left alone, but I didn’t want to worry him. He needed more than I did to find new roots, and going out to visit Tillian’s fami
ly was a big step.

  Al got up cheerfully to go work in his archive. Carefree, he seemed. Who would have thought that? After all the dangers and disasters and nearly everyone we knew being dead and all? Who’d have thought Al would turn out to be so happy?

  Before he left that day he said, ‘I’m thinking of doing a search with the machines at work. I’m sure they won’t mind too much, if I do it in my lunch hour, say.’

  ‘What will you look up?’

  ‘I want to know more about old Earth. Things I don’t really understand. Like kangaroos or pizza or Alexander the Great or the Great Barrier Reef … things you used to read about in books. People in this City get kind of snobby about knowing all about old Earth.’

  ‘I guess they do.’ I had noticed this too. Al had always been a bit snobby about old Earth stuff, too. I remembered his games when he’d pretend to be a prince of Earth, on a yacht with a cloak and everything.

  ‘Anyhow, I think I’ll look up someone specific. I’ll find out if they have anything in their Archive about Grandma.’

  I was surprised by this.

  ‘Except I’ll need to know her full name, Lora. I don’t think I ever knew what it was. She was just Grandma to us. Names seem to have been so complicated, back on Earth. I can’t just type ‘Grandma’ in, cos I guess I’d find – why, maybe thousands of different Grandmas!’

  ‘It was Margaret,’ I told him. ‘She was Margaret Estelle Robinson. But I don’t think…’

  ‘I’ll find her.’ Al smiled, and then whirled out of the apartment.

  Toaster was clearing up the breakfast things. His electronic ears had perked up at the mention of Grandma.

  ‘Al wants to go digging into the past,’ I said.

  ‘Very laudable,’ he nodded. ‘Too much of our history has been lost. The things we left behind. My memory being burned out in patches. It would be good to remember more.’

  ‘Would it?’ I grimaced.