In The Falling Light (32 page)

The face reappeared, contorted with pain,
shaking with sobs. It began to wail and cry. Giant tears splashed
into the bowl, and to Jack’s alarm, the water was up to his chest
in moments, huge drops landing like rain, hammering him. The giant
carried on, and Jack found himself immersed to his chin, kicking
his feet and waving his arms.

I’m swimming, he thought suddenly. I’ll
float to the top and just climb out!

Then, still sobbing, the giant thundered,
“Bad!”
and jabbed its finger down into the bowl, pinning a
thrashing Jack to the bottom.

Stupid beans, he thought.

He drowned choking on salt.

Amber cirrus clouds crept overhead. They did
not gather and darken as they once had, did not bring the rain,
only marched on to distant places without touching the land. The
winds came instead, sweeping over peaks and ridges, hooting past
openings in the rock, laughing down the canyons. When it reached
the open land it became a great shushing sound, pulling at the soil
and gathering it upwards in masses of fine particles, turning the
red sky brown.

Traces of water vapor and dust, but no rain,
and in the fields the soil cracked and powdered. Squat stalks of
blackened corn lost their grip on the land and fell against one
another, brittle, their leaves curled and crisp. Dust fell upon the
corn, adding its weight and bearing it to the ground.

High summer, and twenty-three degrees.

Cortez stepped from his domed house and felt
the wind. It blew cold against skin which was leathery and
blackened from the ultraviolet, and the calloused hands he thrust
into the pockets of his hooded parka were large and lined with the
red earth. He walked to the wire fence, boots kicking up red dust,
and leaned his forearms on a post. He wore scratched goggles and a
dirty pink mask to ward off the dust, which nonetheless found a way
in to grind between his teeth and wear down the enamel, just as it
wore down the land.

A three foot stalk had fallen against the
wire, and he snapped off a small ear, stripping away the flaking
leaves and brittle silk. Martian corn was black to begin with, the
same shade as his skin, but these kernels were so hardened and
devoid of moisture that they gleamed like the silica glass so
common on this red world. The ear was only a few inches long,
killed well before maturity. He pitched it into the field as he
squinted out across the acres of withered crops, the wind kicking
up swirls of dust between the fallen rows and making the leaves
crackle.

“Is it all gone, Papa?” said a small voice
beside him.

He hadn’t heard her come up, and didn’t look
down at her, only stared into the field. “Yep.”

“Won’t none of it come back?” She coughed, a
long dry hack he didn’t care for. She’d picked it up over the
winter, and it had hung on. Sometimes he found dark brown spots on
the pillow in the bed she shared with Isaiah.

“It’s all gone. Where’s your brother?”

“He’s playing in the dooryard.” She wore
goggles and a mask too, her small, dark face barely visible within
the hood of her coat, the ring of synthetic fur worn down and
looking patchy like a dog with mange. Not that he had ever seen a
dog, except in pictures.

“Crawler all packed? You bring the water jug
and your blanket?”

“Yes.” She used the tip of her boot to draw
a circle in the dust.

“You pack the satchel?”

Her boot moved in a slow circle and she
nodded. “There’s only the two foil packets of bread and the can of
onions.”

Cortez stooped and picked up a clod of rusty
soil, slowly rubbing it between his palms until it crumbled to a
powder which the wind carried away like smoke. Magnesium,
potassium, sodium and chloride, high alkaline pH. Its nutrients
could support life, the hardy Martian corn in particular, but as
tough as it was it still needed moisture to save it from the wind,
needed a sturdier anchor than the iron oxide dust. He’d plowed
these fields his entire life, had crawled on his hands and knees
picking out iron and nickel asteroid fragments to keep from
breaking a blade, had worked in wind which could carry a man away
and cold which turned his black fingers white. He’d buried his kin
out here, had buried Eve. This was his soil, but even he couldn’t
make it rain.

“Happy Glory Day, Papa.”

Cortez just nodded at her, and she walked
back towards the house, coughing. He hung his head and tightened
his fists, then just let his arms hang by his sides as he looked up
at yellow clouds without promise. Beyond them, pale and muted
behind the rusty smudge of sky, the twin, irregular shaped moons of
Phobos and Deimos hung close together. A gust lifted the surface of
his fields into the air and clouded them from view.

He turned back to the house, and a Martian
wind blew over dead, black corn.

The crawler trundled along the Cape Road at
50 km/h on ribbed, hard rubber balloon tires, kicking up a billow
of red dust for the wind to take. The crunch of gravel beneath the
wheels was louder than the hum of the power plant, and not even
enough sound to echo off the high walls of maroon thoeliitic basalt
rising into foothills on the right. Sweeping out to the left and
disappearing over the horizon was Plantation 216, a thousand square
miles of geometrically placed rows of pyramids, each a hundred feet
high. They were covered in flat panels of blue silica glass, and
would have once looked like a blanket of sapphires sparkling in the
thin sunlight. Now most of the panels had fallen in, leaving
blackened titanium skeletons spotted with cobalt blue where panels
had held on. Many centuries ago this was one of ten thousand
plantations where early Martian corn was cultivated, before it was
sturdy enough to grow out in the open. Back when Mars was Earth’s
breadbasket.

Now it was a place for the wind to whistle.
The soil was ruined, and the ancient irrigation systems – along
with the knowledge of how they worked – had disintegrated over the
endless years.

It was a half day’s drive from Cortez’s farm
to Cape Verde, and he would leave 216 behind and pass all of
Plantation 217 as well before he got there. The crawler had the
road to itself, and would not pass another vehicle for the next ten
hours, its only company the cold wind buffeting the enclosed
cab.

Dinah played in the back with Isaiah, a
simple game with a pair of polished sticks, something he could keep
up with. Isaiah was eight, only three years younger than his
sister, but he struggled. In the front seat Cortez watched the
gravel track unroll ahead of him. If the wind kicked up much more
he’d need the headlights, but for now the dust was thin enough and
he had no trouble staying on a road his people had traveled for
over a millennium.

A hymn,
How Great Thou Art,
came
softly from a speaker mounted overhead next to the comm set, which
hadn’t worked since he’d acquired the crawler. Not that there was
anyone to talk to. No one had a working comm set. He supposed he
should have pulled it out, gotten rid of the excess weight, but it
was small and besides, throwing it away felt like giving in. It was
something he’d never be able to articulate, but he felt that every
piece of technology discarded brought them closer to the
inevitable, an acknowledgement that eventually it would all be
gone, and his people weren’t the kind to give up like that.

Although staying on the road was easy,
keeping his eyes off the digital fuel gauge was not. There was only
one bar left, a dark red color, maybe enough to run the crawler
until the end of the summer. Once it was gone there would be no way
to re-energize the fuel cell, and the vehicle would become a relic
of plastic and metal wherever it came to rest. That would mean the
journey to Cape Verde would turn into a ten day walk through the
cruel landscape, a brutal proposition for a man on his own, never
mind with two children. Once the Martian winter set in, with
temperatures dropping to minus one-hundred-twenty degrees and winds
of up to 400 km/h, it would be an impossibility, even in an
emergency. He thought about Dinah’s cough. Not that there was
anything to be done, there were no doctors left since folks moved
on. People lived or they died, and that was just the way of things
now.

After a few hours, Dinah sang Isaiah to
sleep and then nodded off herself. The speaker played
The Battle
Hymn of the Republic,
and Cortez drove. Outside, the distant
sun climbed towards midday and a summer high of twenty-seven
degrees. The wind rocked the cab gently as the crawler spit gravel
and bumped along the road. He drove with the sounds of Jesus and
solar winds, and thought about Glory Day.

Cape Verde sat a kilometer back from the rim
of Victoria Crater, a massive depression created by a meteor four
billion years earlier. There were many like it on Mars, the
planet’s proximity to the asteroid belt and the unstable comets
hanging in Jupiter’s orbit the reason it was covered in ancient
impact basins. Although nothing of significance had hit the surface
since colonization, two-thousand years was but a blink to the red
ball, and the planet would certainly be struck again.

The city, a once thriving capital, was now a
sprawl of bare titanium bones and broken blue glass. East and west
of the ruins stood the decaying cone shapes of atmospheric
processors rusting back into the land. A tiny cluster of intact
buildings hugged the ruins at the edge nearest the crater, all
which remained of Cape Verde. The muted yellow of lights glowed
from a handful of these structures, at the center of which stood a
low building which the sand had scoured down to bare metal. A
glowing purple sign on a pole outside said LEVI’S.

Elson Willard stood next to the well in his
back room, arms crossed over a narrow chest, wearing an apron which
had once been white but was now closer to ivory. He listened to the
asthmatic wheeze of the motorized pump, watching the conveyor belt
of scoops rise empty from the depths. The pump coughed and began to
stutter, the belt slowing, and he gave it a good kick. It settled
back to its normal rhythm.

“You’re gonna put your foot through that
thing one day,” Helen called from the other room.

“Yeah, the last day,” he yelled back to his
wife, not taking his eyes off the slow-moving scoops. They went by
empty, one after the other, each clotted with red soil. Was today
the day it ran dry, he wondered? The pump stuttered again and he
gave it another kick. Over the chug of the motor he heard the bell
at the front door ring, and a man’s voice saying, “Happy Glory
Day.” His wife responded in kind.

A scoop emerged with a red blob in it,
giving off a faint pink smoke. “Hallelujah,” he muttered, quickly
dumping it into a bin. Five more full scoops appeared, and he
emptied these as well before shutting down the pump. As always, he
wondered if it would ever start again. Elson used a rusty trowel to
transfer the dry ice into a pressurizer – it worked better than the
pump, at least – and minutes later he had four liters of red fluid.
The pressurizer piped it into a filter to separate the soil, and
after a few moments of whirring pumped cloudy water into a plastic
jug. Elson carefully capped the jug and placed it on a shelf with a
dozen others, next to the last sack of beans, and then headed out
front, wiping his hands on his apron.

A cadaver of a man with a thin ring of white
hair was hanging his parka on a hook beside the door. “Happy Glory
Day, Brother Elson,” he said, smiling with black teeth. “May the
Lord bless and keep thee.”

“Happy Glory Day to you too, Preacher, but
it’s a little late for blessings. The corn’s gone.”

Helen shot her husband a dark look, as the
Reverend Amos John took a stool at the long counter. To the right
was space for the general store, full of empty shelves. To the left
stood the empty, cracked red plastic booths of the diner. The
preacher set a dog-eared bible on the chipped counter beside
him.

“Haven’t seen you in ages,” said Helen,
pouring a cup of weak coffee and sliding it in front of him. “Knew
we’d see you today, though.”

He gave her a mildly disapproving look.
“You’d see me if you came to Meeting.” She looked down,
embarrassed.

“Folks still go to Meeting?” Elson asked,
taking a stool two down from the preacher.

The man sipped his coffee, frowning over the
rim. “Not so much, and it’s a pity. There’s much need for prayer
these days.”

Elson snorted. The shaded bulbs overhead
made their tightly-pulled, blackened skin look almost blue. Helen
leaned on the counter. “Seems the thing worth prayin’ on most is
Glory Day, ain’t that so, Reverend?”

“Amen to that, Sister.”

Elson rolled his eyes. His wife might still
put stock in all that foolishness, but he had no use for it. All
the praying in the world mattered not a speck to the
fully-automated re-supply ship in orbit overhead, and computers
didn’t give a damn about Jesus. So much so that last Glory Day,
twenty-four months ago, they hadn’t seen fit to send down their
blessings at all. It had been a crushing blow to the community, and
now it was the equivalent of four Earth years since they’d had a
drop. Plenty of folks hadn’t made it as a result.

Amos John rested his long fingers on the
bible. “May the Lord look kindly upon us, and grant us a plentiful
Supplement. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Helen, as Elson rose to get a
bowl of beans off the steamer in the kitchen. The preacher would of
course expect a free meal in exchange for his prayin’-over, and
Elson knew that insisting upon payment would only get him in
nitters with his prayerful wife. Not that the preacher, or anyone
else for that matter, had anything with which to pay, and other
than beans Elson had nothing to sell them.