by Ruth Morgan
Settling myself in the middle of the crinoid circle, I read all our poems aloud one by one, but the images merely floated away and vanished in the cold, empty air. There was no audience.
‘Jonah,’ I began. ‘There’s a slim chance you may be listening … if you can hear me, all I’m asking is that you listen. Give me a chance to explain something. You know what I am and you know where I come from, but Jonah, you should know as well as I do how much I love Earth. And there are plenty of people on Mars who love it too…’
I sat quietly for a moment. I felt nothing, no other presence, yet I felt compelled to continue.
‘I didn’t know that we were enemies, your people and mine. They’ve never told us that, I mean it’s not generally known on Mars, I mean… We knew about the War for Earth of course but… For a long time after, the people from my planet didn’t come back here not for hundreds of years. I guess the War must have drained our resources. Gradually, the cities on Mars became bigger and more and more Domes were built. That’s where we live, mostly dug into the ground under these great glass Domes full of air we can breathe because outside we’d … we’d … anyway, about ninety years ago, the missions started…’
My voice faltered. If Jonah was listening, it was going to be hard to tell him the next part.
‘These missions are surveys, you see? The ones in charge want to take what they failed to take all those centuries ago. Only they want more. This time they won’t stop until they’ve taken it all. But this world can never be recreated, no matter how much DNA they collect. The interconnectedness of everything, you couldn’t replicate that. Everything we can possibly learn from Earth will be gone and, you see, this is where I come from too. It’s where my ancestors lived once upon a time. Jonah, despite the way I look to you, I don’t just come from Mars, I come from Earth too.’
I dissolved into tears. No one was listening and no one cared. I could scream and wail about the unfairness of everything as much as I liked, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Halley was right – about that, at least.
‘Bree?’
I scrambled to my feet.
‘Who are you talking to?’ Doc Carter stepped from the shadows. He shone his tilelight full at me so I couldn’t see him properly. How long had he been standing there? How much had he heard?
‘No one.’ I tried to swallow my tears.
Carter came to the edge of the crinoid circle and I had to squint at him through the blinding light. When he lowered his tile, I could see that his expression was a mixture of fear and suspicion.
‘How do you know all these things,’ he asked slowly, ‘about the War for Earth?’
‘There are pictures upstairs,’ I faltered. ‘It shows it all. The Earth humans being attacked. The Mars humans in ships in the sky. It’s not exactly the way we’ve been told.’
‘You worked all this out from the pictures upstairs?’
I nodded, biting my lip, shaking. There was a long pause.
‘The human mind can be fragile, Bree.’ He couldn’t disguise the nervous quiver in his voice. ‘You know how strong our people’s feelings are for the motherplanet, even though unlike us they’re never going to come here. For the good of the people, the decision was taken long ago never to reveal these … details…’
‘Details?’ I cried, tears cascading down my cheeks. ‘We were the enemy! We were the ones who fought them in the War for Earth. We watched them die! These are more than just “details”.’
‘Earth humans were stupid and self-destructive,’ he countered. ‘They could have saved themselves. If they’d handed over the code, we had the technology to destroy their weapons.’
I shook my head and looked at him with revulsion. ‘If they’d handed over the code we would have overrun them anyway.’
‘Who’s Jonah?’ he said.
The question pulled me up short. ‘It’s just the name I gave… It’s what I started calling the energy. That face on the screen.’
‘Really?’ Carter looked unconvinced. ‘In a couple of days the celephet will be ready,’ he said.
The more I tried to control my sobs, the more I trembled. ‘The celephet won’t do any good,’ I blurted out.
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because Jonah, I mean the energy, will not submit to torture. That’s all the celephet does. I’ve told you before. It’s an instrument of torture.’
Carter stepped into the circle, standing right in front of me, almost in the same place where Jonah normally sat. I saw his face twitching.
‘Bree…’ His voice was unsteady. ‘The celephet is going to work and do you know why? I’ve devoted the past ten years of my life to it, that’s why. It’s my whole reason for being here. It will work.’
‘It won’t work,’ I said in a small voice.
‘IT WILL WORK!’ he shouted in my face. I was terrified. His nostrils flared and his shoulders heaved. I shrank from him but in the shocked silence which followed, only punctuated by my shaky breathing and gulping, he made a big, visible effort to regain control of himself.
‘What I heard you say a few moments ago was highly treasonable. Were I to report it to Core Panel, it would certainly spell the end of your school career and that would just be the start.’
I stared at him.
‘And you don’t think I bought that story about the celephet getting caught on something, do you? I’m not a fool. You deliberately destroyed it and put the future of our Great Quest and Purpose in jeopardy.’
I continued to stare at his flawless, plastic good looks, at strange odds with his mean mouth and the tic at the corner of his eye. I hadn’t the strength to deny what he’d just said and I knew that my silence condemned me as much as an admission of guilt.
‘I thought so.’ He nodded. ‘Another treasonable offence. This isn’t looking good for you. Or your family.’
‘Lock me up then,’ I mouthed in spite of myself, in spite of the dreadful fear which had clutched me hearing those last three words.
Carter took a deep breath. ‘I could order that,’ he said. ‘We can do this the hard way, or we can do this the easy way, but the result will be the same, I promise. Despite all you’ve done to try to wreck my plans, I’m willing to give you one last chance, but you’ll have to promise, promise, to co-operate this time.’
Why was he giving me this choice? Knowing for a fact that I’d deliberately ruined his experiment once before, why would he try to get me to co-operate again? I knew the answer: he still thought I was stupid, didn’t he? To him, I was as I had always been, a silly girl of low intelligence he could manipulate, if not as easily as he’d originally thought, to fall in with his plans. Doing it his ‘easy way’ would be preferable because it wouldn’t attract any negative attention from the rest of the crew: Pico, Lana Leoni, my friends, people who I guessed would still argue for recolonisation of Earth if they got the chance.
‘So.’ His voice was suddenly warm and hushed. His finger stroked the curve of my cheek, a hair’s breadth from my skin. My body stiffened. ‘Will you wear the celephet for me again, Bree? Willingly?’
I looked up into his red-rimmed eyes. He knew he’d won. What could I do? I swallowed. I nodded.
‘Is that a yes, Bree?’
It took some effort to part my lips in the shape of a ‘yes’.
‘All right then.’ I tried not to flinch as he laid his hands on my shoulders, massaging his thumbs backwards and forwards in a loving and forgiving manner, claiming me as his own once more. ‘That’s it. That’s good. Good girl.’
I let him guide me from the fossil room, back through the hall, his arm firmly around me. All the time he talked in that special low, reassuring tone of his, promising that there was no danger and that back home we were going to be famous and our names would go down in history. I nodded from time to time, feigning acquiescence. But although pretending might buy me some time, I was so, so sick of pretending. My stomach felt queasy and I was still trembling as we replaced our hoods and visors and I
automatically headed for the class one parked at the top of the steps.
‘No.’ He pulled me back. ‘You’re coming back to Base with me, Bree. No more night-time jaunts for you. You’ll be here again soon enough.’
I had no choice. I climbed into his sleek machine and he lowered the roof. I hadn’t been in one of these more modern, entirely voice-operated amphibicals but I appreciated the smoother, faster ride straight away. Once he’d set the autopilot, we negotiated speedily and effortlessly thorough the dark maze of the humped landscape and then he spoke to me again.
‘This place can get to you. You’ve been up on that site for too long. Tell you what, how would you like to go out for the day tomorrow? I’ll get Halley to take you somewhere. You’ll feel better for it, I guarantee.’
I said nothing.
That evening there was a storm, the first huge Earth storm I’d witnessed, with thunder rumbling like the belly of some hungry sky-god, forks of lightning leaping to Earth and endless heavy rain hammering down. Most of the crew at Base congregated in the fourth-floor common room and we turned out the lights, to view the lightning’s ferocity as it tore the sky apart.
When the rain was at its heaviest and visibility at its lowest level, a dragomansk flew head-on into the window with an enormous, shocking bang. It was only squashed against the glass for a split second. I saw its eyes burst on the pane which ran with sticky, brown bubbling acid before it fell. Fortunately there was no damage to the window. I wondered if it had survived and, if not, whether Halley would be out hunting for the corpse tomorrow morning or whether he’d left that phase behind.
In bed that night I listened to a fully orchestrated gale being conducted outside. Gusts of wind moaned and whistled round the building and sudden blasts shook the windows. The recordings I’d heard of the storms on Mars were worse than this, much worse, but here I was conscious that only a thin layer of brick protected us from violent elements beyond our control.
Strangely, with so much else to worry about, what had preoccupied me all evening was why everyone was insisting that Earth had ‘got to me’. Annoyingly, Halley and Carter were right – it had. Our Dome is home to many thousands of people packed into a relatively small space so you’re never alone for long, but having viewed the Dome from the outside, I could appreciate how solitary it actually was. On board the Byd we’d been little more than a small, insignificant group of atomic clusters hurtling through endless space, but at least you could hold the hand of another human being when you started thinking that way. Why had being on Earth so particularly got to me? Perhaps because it felt like the most lonely of all lonely places in the universe, a place which should have been able to sustain human life in abundance, but was virtually empty of it; a place where it should have been possible to roam about unconfined, except you could not. Earth was the cradle of human life, yet humans weren’t welcome there anymore.
Although the wind had calmed by breakfast, it was still moaning, aggrieved that it hadn’t managed to find its way into the building, and though the rain was lighter, it fell incessantly. The sky above us was filled with a strange, sickly, sulphurous light and the western edge was turning darker by the minute. Nisien, Robeen and I sat at our table. Nisien was complaining that he wouldn’t be able to carry out the tests he’d wanted to that morning because Halley was taking me out on a trip. Eventually, even Robeen looked up from her Kyrachess and asked him to give it a rest. Halley had already messaged me, asking me to meet him by the entrance straight after breakfast. I guessed that at that very moment he was probably being given his final briefing by Carter, but I was past caring. The thought of having to spend an entire day with him turned my stomach.
‘So here we are again.’ Halley was already waiting by the front entrance, but he didn’t seem as sure of himself as usual, I could tell by the way he hugged his visor to his chest. If I was going to go along with the charade, I decided I might as well make it look convincing. When he saw me smile, his body relaxed a little.
‘I’m under orders to give you a fun day out.’ He did an unconvincing little mock salute. I walked up, placed my hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek, biting my lip teasingly at the look of surprise on his face.
‘That’s to say sorry for giving you such a hard time,’ I sighed and tilted my head to one side. ‘I don’t know what’s been wrong with me. Well, I do: it was being holed up in that Museum all those days. You were right, you and Doc Carter. And I do know how worried you’ve both been about me. Thanks for that.’
Halley nodded.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we’re going out, just you and me. It’ll be fun.’
‘Where do you fancy, then?’
‘I don’t mind. We could start with the canals. I mean, if you want to?’
‘I guess it’s always been a special place for us, huh?’ He was relaxing more and more.
I took his hand and swung it to and fro. ‘But no dragomansk hunting, deal?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh deal, I mean, oh, definitely not,’ he flustered. ‘I can’t say I don’t find them fascinating, but no, I think I learned my lesson there.’
‘Come on then, let’s go.’ I gave his hand a quick squeeze and we prepared to leave, but just at the last moment he pulled me back.
‘How about a real adventure?’
‘What do you mean?’
He glanced up the stairwell to check that no one was coming, then looked at me and that wicked secret smile I’d once loved spread slowly across his face.
‘Follow me.’ Still holding my hand, he led me down a small, dark passage. I knew immediately which way we were heading, straight for the service rooms. I was forced to run to keep up with him.
‘You must be joking!’ I said as he let go of my hand and approached the class four parked in the middle of the workshop. No one else was around, the day’s work hadn’t begun. He climbed onto the skirt of the vehicle and squinted inside, then held out his arm, beckoning me.
‘I have the activation code,’ he said, ‘up here.’ He tapped his forehead.
‘Do you know how seriously Nisien’s going to kill you?’ I said. ‘Never mind just you, me as well!’ But before I could make any more protests, the roof of the hulking amphibical was retracting and Halley was climbing in and crooking his finger at me.
‘Aw, come on,’ he said.
Against my better judgement, I stepped up onto the skirt. Halley patted the seat next to his, inviting me in. ‘This thing’s proper heavy-duty. We can go much further, inland or out along the coast, if you like. We wouldn’t be able to do that in a class one. Nothing can stand in our way, not with the “Barroblaster” on board. Come on, then.’
The doors at the front of the workshop were already beginning to slide apart, preparing for our exit.
‘You’re mad. You don’t have the authority to do this.’ On impulse and because at heart I was past caring, I climbed in and the roof slid shut above our heads.
‘I have all the authority I need,’ he laughed. ‘Especially with you here.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’ But he was chuckling to himself and I knew exactly what he meant: I was everyone’s ticket to getting what they wanted. As long as he followed Carter’s instructions, which were basically to look after me and get me to cheer the hell up, and as long as he brought me back in one piece, Halley was right: he probably could get away with it. A minor slap on the wrist at worst. The way he rubbed his nose with his finger so casually, the way he whistled softly through his teeth as he began steering the brute up the ramp so expertly … everything exuded a mean kind of confidence.
I turned to see Nisien careering into the workshop, calling out and waving his arms above his head. The look on his face was one of frustrated outrage but we were already trundling on to the back road with the vehicle’s giant wheels kicking up dust. When he glanced at the rear view screen and saw Nisien screaming at us to stop, Halley roared with laughter.
‘He’ll thank me.�
�� He wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘Believe me, he will thank me. This thing hasn’t had any kind of proper test drive with his machine on board yet. It’ll speed up the whole process. I’m doing him a favour.’
‘Are you sure this vehicle’s safe? It’s rattling, listen. Wasn’t it decommissioned?’
‘It’s absolutely safe. One hundred and one percent.’ His eyes twinkled as he glanced at me. ‘All right: one hundred and two percent. Look, I wouldn’t risk it, would I? Especially not with you on board. It’s mechanically sound, it’s just an old model and they rattle. It’s built like an elephant. We drove one just like it out in Mumbai.’ By now, Nisien was out of sight.
‘We could have offered to take him and Robeen with us. It’s big enough. We could have all had an adventure together,’ I said.
‘’Fraid not. Nisien might not realise it but it’s his turn to help out at the site today. He’ll be up there at the caves with Robeen thoroughly enjoying himself in half an hour. By then, he’ll have forgotten about it.’
‘I really doubt that.’
‘In any case, I much prefer just the two of us, don’t you?’
‘Well, yes, of course.’
I felt sorry for Robeen having to spend the day with Nisien in one of his moods and this time the mood was perfectly justifiable which would only make it worse. Still, remembering the little act I’d signed up to, I smiled sweetly at Halley.
We drove to the coast, taking a wide detour to avoid the clifftop site. The class four was a lot more rattly and echoey than the more modern vehicles I was used to but it got us easily over some pretty rough terrain after we left the road. Halley was ecstatic when we came across a fallen tree blocking our path, its huge earthy root system upended towards us. Rather than go around it, which we could easily have done, he decided to road test the Barroblaster. The freezing beam shot from the front of the amphibical, encasing the tree in a brilliant blue light. This appeared to harden before our eyes as an invisible force squeezed the tree flatter and flatter in the middle. The blue beam shut off abruptly and the long double ellipse of the tree exploded at either end just the way I’d seen in demonstrations, only this tree was big and the burst of frozen wood shards and sparkling, powdered ice was even more spectacular. Halley whooped in delight and a ‘wow’ or two escaped me.
