by Jeff Wheeler
Every story is, remember? Every story happens. You breathed Wick and Valden into existence once again. You brought Valden to the Longwall house. You sent Wick to the cabin, not once but twice. You led them both to the dragon’s maw. You curled Valden’s fingers around the boy’s throat. You.
Do not be disheartened. We all are murderers, all destroyers. Yet we are also creators. There is one thing you can do for the boy, one small thing. Resurrect him, if only for a little while. Start at the beginning of Wick’s story . . . then simply stop. Let his life linger in those sweet moments, suspended like a brittle leaf in an updraft, until someone else finds this story and snuffs him out again. And again. And again.
Here, we will do it together, we fellow murderers . . .
Once there lived a boy who climbed trees and took their branches for fishing rods, pretend swords, or brittle structures he would later kick down. A boy who buried his mother’s necklaces and his father’s spare coins—treasures he could then unearth and rebury. Who set leaves on fire just to stomp them out. Who collected bugs in jars, where they either died forgotten or survived long enough to be set free. Who swam and ran and whooped and laughed. Who created and destroyed. Who did the things all boys do. And like all boys, Wick Longwall knew he was special. So he climbed and dug and laughed, and dreamed the dreams of a special young boy. Of all the wonders yet to come.
About Scott Hughes
Scott Hughes’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, One Sentence Poems, Entropy, Carbon Culture Review, Redivider, PopMatters, Strange Horizons, andCompaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology.
PAWPRINTS IN THE AEOLIAN DUST
By Eleanor R. Wood | 3,800 Words
REMAINING TIME: 6 hours 38 minutes
My boot prints look odd in the amber dust. It’s been four months since the transport touched down, and I have been walking this plain nearly every day since we arrived. It’s only just dawned on me what’s wrong with the imprints I leave on the ground. They’re missing their counterpart.
They’re missing your footprints alongside them.
I haven’t cried since losing you, but the tears are welling now, threatening to mist up my visor. I swallow to relieve my tightening throat, but it’s no use. All I can see are the images of every Earth walk of the last fifteen years, superimposed over the rocky ground before me. My bare footprints in the wet sand; your pawprints in perfect outline beside them. My hiking-boot tread marks on the forest trail; your five-padded marks just in front. My shoe print in the wet, sucking mud; your footprint appearing for a brief moment before water fills it and the mud re-forms. I can see you looking back at me with your lolling grin, delighted to be outdoors with your pack mate, roaming, scenting, marking, being.
But I’m alone, and no walk was ever right without you. I took the mission after you died, hoping to leave the painful reminders behind and start new memories. I’d put on a brave face for too long: “men don’t cry” and all that nonsense. I fled the planet to escape my grief. Foolishness. It was never confined to a single orb, but tangled up in my soul. I dragged it with me into space, and now, on Martian soil, here is a stark reminder that your loss still guts me.
There are no dogs here. We have no sheep to herd, no rats to hunt, no kills to retrieve. Our territory needs no defending. We have no blind settlers to guide or smuggled drugs to detect. Yet I miss you more keenly at this moment than ever before. I’m so far from home . . . so far from our shared haunts. You’ll never again leave an imprint on Earth’s surface, and neither will I.
Aeolis Mons dominates the horizon to my left; the sheer wall of Gale Crater is somewhere off to my right. And in front of me. And behind. The Aeolian Plain seems vast, but only from my vantage point. From space, I’m standing in a circular imprint with a small mound at its centre.
Remaining time: 5 hours 11 minutes
Jorge and I rode the buggy twenty kilometres out from Bradbury Landing this morning. Most of the settlement was still asleep, but we wanted to make an early start. Priya’s tracking a dust storm headed our way, but she predicts it won’t hit before early evening.
“Have you made it to site six yet, Huw?” Jorge’s voice is tinny through my earpiece.
“On my way now, with samples from four and five,” I reply. “How ’bout you?”
“The drill was stuck at site ten, so I’ll have to bring Anders along next time to repair it. But I’m hoping to get a couple metres of core from eleven. We’ll need plenty to keep us busy if we’re gonna be stormbound for days!”
“That’s for sure. I’ve gathered a few surface-rock samples too—there are some interesting fragments out here, possibly volcanic.”
“Possibly?” Jorge laughs. “You seen this mountain?”
“Yeah, all right, smart alec.” I smile at his infectious guffaw. “No harm in keeping an open mind.”
“Well, there’s no doubt in mine, man. The ground up here’s littered with lava frags.”
“Make sure you bring some down with you, then!”
Jorge’s working the foothills while I take the plains. We need samples from both to see how they compare, but scouting Aeolis Mons itself is a task we haven’t got to yet.
The thought transports me back to the Brecon Beacons, with you. The steep trails were easier for your four legs than my two. You’d be ahead of me all the way, urging me onward until we reached the top of a bluff and stopped to take in the magnificent view along with our sandwiches. Always fish paste for you . . . your eternal favourite. Sometimes we’d stay until dark to absorb the dazzling sky. I was ten years old when Brecon Beacons National Park became an International Dark Sky Reserve. I remember begging my da to take me up there after dark. That first camping trip was the night I decided to be an astronaut. The magic of that sky, unobscured by so much as a particle of light pollution, remains the most breathtaking experience of my life. I have never felt tinier, or more massive. I felt the entire universe was mine for that brief moment. The need to get closer to it, to see it for myself, to be more than a passive observer, etched itself onto my bones.
And here I am twenty years on, collecting geological samples on Mars. I shove aside your love of beach pebbles as I pick up an especially smooth rock fragment. I refuse to dwell on your penchant for digging as I nudge soil away from an embedded piece of possible haematite. I can almost feel the sharp sting of sand as your efforts spray my legs.
No. I’m not doing this. Not now. A warehouse door clangs down in my mind, shutting the memory off. It hurts to push you away, but not as much as it would to cling to those times and everything we’ll never share again. I ignore my solo boot prints and continue my work.
The sun moves across the hazy sky as I move across the plain. The chronometer in my helmet tells me there’s plenty of time before Jorge and I have to worry about Priya’s forecast.
Remaining time: 3 hours 52 minutes
It’s wrong.
The dust storm hits just after 1400 hours. It begins as a rusty haze on the horizon, quickly darkening the sky as it approaches. My heart begins to pound as I turn back toward the buggy, which I’ve managed to leave far behind.
“Jorge? Are you seeing this storm?”
“I see it.” His reply is already fuzzed with static. “I’m on my way back, but I’m not going to make it before this thing hits.”
“Me neither. Just fix the buggy’s position and follow your display. I’ll see you there.”
His reply is garbled by static interference. It sounds affirmative, but I can’t be sure he heard what I said. Jorge’s experienced and level-headed; he’ll be fine. I break into a run, not daring to look over my shoulder at the approaching cloud. My vision fogs up as the first powdery particles fill the air like smoke. There’s no buffeting wind like you’d expect on Earth. The atmosphere is so thin here that I’d feel no more than a light breeze were I to strip off my suit. But in minutes I’m consumed by the cloud.
I keep level with the blinking light
on my visor’s display, guiding me to the trusty buggy. I’m breathing deeply to stay calm, knowing there’s no real danger as I’ve already crossed this plain. I know there aren’t any sudden drops or ledges to stumble from, but I’m still walking blind. I’ve been out in dust storms before, but never this far from the settlement. Waiting it out isn’t an option—it could rage for days. My suit has already switched to its reserve oxygen supply, which gives me about two hours’ worth at normal exertion. The suit’s atmosphere compressors convert thin Martian air into gas dense enough to breathe, but with the air full of particles, the compressors have shut down to prevent the filters clogging.
I keep going, trusting my display and the ground beneath my feet. A warning blinker is telling me communications are down, but I’d twigged that following my chat with Jorge.
The dust swirls do funny things to one’s vision. The mind’s need to make patterns and sense from chaos creates images that come and go in seconds. It’s hypnotic and disorienting. My feet are taking me forward, but my eyes tell me I’m standing still amidst a maelstrom of moving shapes and whorls. As the dust becomes heavier, the light fades, its dusty orange glow subsumed by the thick brown air.
Something brushes against my leg. It’s the lightest touch through my suit. I look down and see nothing, of course; I can barely make out my own boot. I’m just about to dismiss it as a near-collision with an unseen boulder when I glimpse a shifting motion in the dust ahead. A bushy tail follows trotting brown feet into the curtain of gusting particles.
My treacherous heart leaps for an instant. I stop in my tracks as it falls again, hard. My throat clenches at the vision, so longed-for and so impossible. Curse this dust and my image-starved eyes. I take a breath, blink firmly, and trudge on.
The open-topped buggy looms out of the cloud a moment later. Dust has yet to settle on it, as the intense Martian breeze keeps it all moving. There’ll be a dense layer everywhere when the storm stops, but for now objects in its path are merely stung with millions of tiny grains which then continue on their way.
There’s no sign of Jorge. He must have gone farther than I did today. I take the driver’s seat and wait for him, peering ahead into the storm. Several minutes pass. My senses report nothing but the constant scattered ping of sand against my helmet. I could start driving the buggy toward Jorge and catch him up if I knew his precise direction. But even with the headlights on, I’d risk colliding with him. Or crashing into an unseen ridge.
Remaining time: 3 hours 18 minutes
I switch off the now-defunct storm countdown. My chrono says it’s been over half an hour since I spoke to Jorge. He should be here by now.
“Come on, Jorge,” I mutter, sharply aware that he can’t hear me.
I spot a defined shape in the dust. I lean forward, expecting Jorge’s suited form . . . but it’s smaller and nearer than I thought. The clogged air shifts, and my heart freezes.
You’re standing there. Your chocolate fur, with its ruffles and tufts, is clear against the red dust. Your back is to me and you’re looking over your shoulder, ears pricked, giving me your “What are you waiting for?” expression. The storm seems to hold its breath—or maybe that’s just me—but only for a moment before the vision is obscured. You walk on just as the dense cloud swallows you up.
I’m rooted to the spot, knowing I’m seeing things but desperate to follow. My heart is thumping and there’s a lump in my throat the size of a walnut. Even as I stand up and step away from the buggy my rational mind is demanding that I sit back down and get a grip. But your face . . . your eyes, dark and pleading, focusing their will on mine with an expression so familiar it’s like I saw it yesterday. Come with me.
It’s been over a year since I looked into that face. Your eyes were fogged with age, but they still regarded me with their depth of knowing, like you could see into my soul. You always could. It’s why I’m walking away from the buggy now, back into the blanket of dust, in a direction I haven’t walked today, over ground I have no reason to trust.
But I trust you.
I walk forward with a surety I didn’t have earlier, even though my blinking sensor is telling me I’m getting farther from the buggy and its promise of safe return home. The ground is rocky, the dust is all-consuming, and I can barely see my gloved hands before my visor. But every few moments I catch a glimpse of something more: dust re-forming behind a gently waving tail, a ghostly canine shape just a touch darker than the raging motes all around me, poised to make certain I’m close behind.
We hike for a quarter of an hour, and my anxiety at the claustrophobic storm becomes a fading memory. I lull myself into the bittersweet familiarity of walking with you, just the two of us, on a jaunt of exploration and companionship, like all the old times. I can’t see a damned thing apart from your occasional reminders that I’m not alone out here. You were always our scout on unfamiliar terrain; you could find a path if ever there was one.
The ground is sloping now, becoming slowly steeper, and I realise we’re at the foothills of Aeolis Mons. This is craggy country, with dips and drops and gullies, and it’s foolhardy to continue. I slow down, but there’s a nudge of encouragement against my leg and I know you’re guiding me. A rational thought intrudes, and it’ll bring panic along for the ride if I acknowledge it.
Maybe this is crazy, but right now it’s the only thing that makes sense. Later on I can marvel at my stupidity, but not now. Not yet.
I don’t know if I’m following my loneliness and loss. I don’t know if I’m hallucinating as my oxygen supply dips. I don’t know if I’m lost on a distant planet, being led to my demise by a desperate dream that I know can never be. But I do know it’s not just me out here. I do know there’s still no sign of Jorge. I do know I’ve trusted you from the moment you chose me, the one puppy that was more interested in me than his littermates.
I haven’t completely lost it; I know you’re dead. I held you to the last. I buried you in the garden. I’d never known tears could pour out like that, in a broken-dam cascade of exhausting grief. I was helpless to bottle them up until that initial flood had passed. Your remains are hundreds of millions of kilometres away on the planet we once shared. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can feel you here now, guiding me somewhere important.
And then, all at once, I’m there.
The bulk of a Mars suit is sprawled on the ground before me, just visible through the choking haze. I’m kneeling in a flash, reaching for Jorge’s helmet, trying to see whether he’s conscious. He grabs my hand.
“Huw . . .”
“Jorge, what happened?” Our radios seem to be working at ultra-close range.
“The ledge . . . I fell.” He jerks his head upward and I realise he’s lodged at the base of a steep drop. “I think my leg’s broken.”
His left leg is crumpled under him, twisted at a nasty angle. He cries out when I help him stand, and he leans heavily against me, favouring his right side.
“Come on. Let’s get you back to the buggy.” We wrap our arms around each other’s shoulders and begin to limp back.
“How did you find me?” he rasps through the pain.
“Doesn’t matter how. Let’s just be glad I did.” He could have lain there for days before the storm cleared enough to discover his body. You knew he was there. You led me to him, recognising an injured pack mate in dire need.
You’re here again now, a gentle blur of movement in the stinging dust. My sensor will take me back to the buggy, but I feel safer following your lead. Even with the low Mars gravity, our return is slower with Jorge’s dependence on me and it’s nearly half an hour before the buggy looms through the storm. It’s the most welcome sight I’ve ever seen.
I ease Jorge onto the passenger seat and climb in beside him. He can barely sit and I know every jolt of the vehicle will be agony for him, but there’s nothing for it.
“What do we do now?” he asks. I can just about make out his face through the visor. He’s gritting his teeth.
“We head back.” I start the motor.
“What? You can’t possibly drive in this, man . . . You can’t see your hand in front of your face out here!”
“We don’t have a choice, boyo. We’ve got to get you back, and our air reserves are dropping fast.” Besides, I’ve got a feeling. “Just sit tight and trust me.”
“Trust you? Don’t give me that Kenobi line, amigo. You. Can’t. See.”
“Then you’d better lean forward and help me look.”
The buggy’s inertial guidance system will take us back to Bradbury no problem, but there are still an awful lot of boulders out here. Jorge’s right—I can’t see a thing. But you’re waiting, right there in the shifting brown fog. You’ve led us this far, my old friend. Jorge’s given no indication that he can see you, and I’m not about to explain and shatter my illusion of sanity.
I begin driving, easing the buggy forward, squinting ahead as if looking for unseen dangers. In reality, I’m looking for your beckoning shape. I follow your tail through clear passage across the plain, trusting your sure feet and keen nose to guide us past all obstacles. And you do. But it’s slow going. It’s a forty-minute ride back to the settlement at reasonable speed, with clear atmosphere. Under these conditions, we’re looking at over an hour. It’s time we don’t have.
50 minutes oxygen remaining
My display is giving me regular updates now. I’m trying to stay calm, breathing as shallowly as possible, but I know I’m pushing my luck.
“How’s your O2?” I ask, not daring to take my eyes off you.
“Getting low.” Jorge’s reply is tense.
“How low?”
“Twenty-five, thirty minutes.”
My stomach knots. Our air compressors would have switched off at roughly the same time. Jorge’s lower reserves must be due to his fall and the corresponding pain. He’ll have been breathing harder than me.
“Hang on, mate. Short breaths. We’ll get back.” But I don’t know if we will.
