In The Falling Light (33 page)

Folks started to arrive shortly after Amos
John tucked into his meal.

The crawler rolled to a stop outside Levi’s
just as evening was beginning to settle over Cape Verde, the small
sun throwing a crimson twilight across a dusty sky as it dropped
along with the temperature. Through his windshield Cortez could see
Olympus Mons silhouetted in the distance, the highest mountain in
the solar system, and at twenty-seven kilometers three times the
height of Everest. It looked black against the bloody sky, a lonely
monolith which cared nothing for the plight of men like Cortez.

Around him stood a half dozen crawlers of
assorted design, all parked as close to the front of the building
as they could be, each as battered and used up as his own. A few
figures emerged from the vehicles and hustled inside as the wind
brought down the cold.

Dinah pulled Isaiah in close as the three
hunched into their coats and made the short walk, hurrying to get
inside. Levi’s was bright and warm, and smelled of beans and
coffee. Helen was serving up small, steaming bowls on the counter,
but as soon as she saw Dinah and Isaiah she descended upon them,
smothering them in hugs and kisses, making Isaiah giggle, and then
guiding them into the kitchen where she’d hidden away some hard
candy. Cortez watched them go, grateful for the way Helen had taken
to the children after Eve passed.

He shook hands with the men, who were drawn
off to one side by a little glowing heater. Someone produced a
small plug of tobacco, a treasure squirreled away from the last
Supplement, and passed it around to appreciative noises. They
talked on the dealings of men in low tones, and that meant the
crop, for they were all croppers. Had anyone’s survived? No, not a
bit of it. Were the rains gone for good, do you think? Is there
enough seed for spring planting? Was there anything left in the
community stockpile? They all knew the answer to that. Did anyone
have any food put up? Not much was left.

They looked over at their families, the
women clutching together and talking about food and illness and
death, with Amos John moving among them. He was not included in the
discussions of croppers. Their children sat in a circle and played
games on the floor. All were skeletons hugged tightly by leathery,
UV blackened flesh, cheekbones and knuckles and ribs jutting
outwards, lips peeled back tightly from black teeth in perpetual
smiles. Their torn clothing hung on them like sacks, and more than
a few were coughing.

Talk turned to the Supplement. “There’s so
many less of us than last time,” said Elijah. “The Supplement’s
sure to go further. Plenty for all, an answer to our prayers.”

Cortez frowned. The only answer he’d ever
received had been, “No.”

“The drop not coming last year,” said
Samuel, an older man who carefully dropped his spit into a bucket
near the heater, “that was nothing more than a technical thing. A
glitch.” He nodded wisely. “It’ll come for sure this time.”

“That’s right,” said a cropper named Remus.
“And I’ll bet you Elson’s beans they double it up this time, on
account of missing it last time.”

Yes, that sounded right, they all said. None
of them managed to look at one another as they said it.

“How’s your young-uns,” asked Samuel,
pointing his chin at Cortez. Their farms weren’t too far from one
another.

Cortez chewed his lip. “Dinah coughs.” He
shrugged. “Isaiah is as he is.”

The men looked past him at the children
playing on the floor. Isaiah sat among them trying to track the
progress of a red ball being passed from hand to hand, a glassy
smile on his face. When the ball came to him he didn’t reach out,
just looked at it.

Eve Cortez died while giving birth to the
boy, and her husband had gone through a hard patch trying to raise
a child with difficulties, a three-year-old girl and his crops all
by himself. Privately some of the men wondered at how the boy had
managed to survive, and thought the real blessing might have been
if he hadn’t. Still, they knew the kind of man Cortez was, and that
he’d sooner plant himself in that red earth than give up on his
kids or his crop. And yet his tenacity hadn’t kept his corn
standing, and they wondered if it might be what finally broke him.
They wondered this of themselves, as well. Their corn was gone,
too.

Samuel changed the subject. “Heard Caleb’s
boy Aaron made some good finds in the city. Heard he brought back a
few tools and even a halfway decent pair of boots.”

“I heard he found medicine,” offered Remus,
immediately drawing frowns from the other men. If anyone had found
medicine, they all would have heard about it. They didn’t doubt the
tools or the boots, though. Aaron had been scavenging in the ruins
since he was a child, and had a particular talent for uncovering
useful scraps.

“And I heard,” said a cropper named Zion,
who’s wife was friendly with Caleb’s wife, “that he didn’t come
back the other day, and Caleb went in to look for him, and he
didn’t come back neither.”

There were glances exchanged and solemn
nods. That was likely true, as neither man was here at Levi’s, and
no one missed Glory Day unless they were dead or dying. Caleb’s
wife was sitting in a chair in the corner, crying and being
comforted by some of the women, turning the question mark into a
period. The ruins were dangerous, filled with unstable metal and
rotten flooring, and an incautious step could send a man plunging
through to impalement, broken limbs or the equally final fate of
simply being trapped in a hole. There was no question of men
gathering to go look for someone lost in such a way, it just wasn’t
done. Kin might risk themselves, but that was expected, a search
party was not.

Dinah appeared next to her father and tugged
on his sleeve. “Papa, Missus Forbes says I can have Chloe’s
sweater, long as you say it’s okay.”

Cortez looked across the room to a drawn
woman with vacant eyes, whose dark skin had gone ashy. Sarah Forbes
had lost her daughter, a girl Dinah’s age, only a few weeks ago. No
one said exactly to what, she just hadn’t woken up one morning.
Most suspected starvation. Dinah coughed and Cortez cupped her
narrow face in one hand, looking into eyes which had purple smudges
under them, and were slightly more sunken than they had been a week
ago.

“Of course. Mind you tell her thank
you.”

He looked up to nod at Chloe Forbes, but the
woman was staring at the floor. Dinah skipped away, and Cortez
drifted off from the men, wandering into the empty half of the
building which had been Levi’s general store. No one knew who Levi
was or had been, including Elson, whose ancestors had been running
the place for two centuries. The shelves and clothing racks were
bare except for some dusty shelf tags, and a hand-lettered sign so
yellowed and curling with age that it could barely be read.
Sorry, COKE out of stock.
Cortez didn’t read too well, and
didn’t know what coke was. For his whole life he couldn’t remember
the store being anything but empty. He passed through and stopped
at the big window in the far wall.

Standing before it, watching the night
descend, his breath made a little cloud of fog on the cold glass.
From here there was an impressive view of the receiving field, with
one of the ancient atmospheric processors in the distant
background, visible only as a great cone shape against a darkening
sky. His eyes lifted to the heavens, immediately picking out the
bright light high above. It wasn’t a star or a satellite; it was
the
Glory
, hanging there in orbit, matching the rotation of
the small planet.

He looked just to its right, at a dark spot
which hadn’t always been there. Cortez remembered his father first
pointing it out to him when he was a child, a brilliant blue speck
which glittered like a far-off jewel, the cradle of human life and
a technological wonder so bright that it radiated like a star.
Earth went dark without warning when Cortez was ten. There had been
no communication with it or anyone since.

As he watched the sky he wondered if once
upon a time the people of Earth had looked up at Mars, entranced by
the agricultural marvels which fed them all. It started when they –
They
were the scientific wizards and all-powerful thinkers
of Earth – discovered glaciers of CO
²
on Mars, which fit
considering its topography was covered in river and lake
depressions, an indicator of past surface water. Unfortunately Mars
also had a thin atmosphere and no magnetosphere, resulting in low
atmospheric pressure. Lack of sufficient pressure meant that when
the six month Martian summer arrived, the increasing temperatures
caused the ice to sublimate to gas instead of transforming to
liquid water.

To make matters worse, solar winds tore at
the poorly protected planet constantly, stripping away atoms from
the outer atmospheric layer, causing it to become thinner and
thinner. This made it difficult to store heat, and allowed in heavy
levels of ultraviolet. The stripping of atoms was so severe that
Mars left a dirty cloud of ionized atmospheric particles behind as
it moved through space. Cortex had heard this called the Pigpen
Effect, but didn’t understand why. Finally, “air” which was heavy
with carbon dioxide and the methane which leaked from old volcanoes
made colonization unattractive.

But they did it anyway. They built the
enormous processors and manufactured an atmosphere, forcing the sky
to cloud up and rain while developing irrigation at the same time.
Settlers were slowly exposed to increasing levels of the natural
environment until, over the many generations, their bodies had
evolved so they could breathe in the open, their skin pigment
darkening and toughening to protect them from the UV. They invented
a breed of corn which eventually took hold and thrived in the open
soil, commenced farming on a global scale, and solved the hunger
problems of an Earth bursting with overpopulation.

Cortez used his index finger to draw a
circle in the fogged glass, then tapped a pair of moons off to one
side. He stared at the image.

Something had happened back in his
ancestors’ times. They stopped running the processors, and people
started leaving for Earth in great numbers. The city emptied
rapidly, leaving no one to maintain the sprawling plantations or
the sophisticated technology of Cape Verde. Cortez didn’t know what
became of them, and couldn’t imagine they fared well outside the
carbon dioxide and methane environment of Mars, upon which their
biology relied.

Those who stayed were croppers, folks who
had a kinship with the land, who had buried their people in the red
soil, raising their children, living and dying amid that black
corn. They couldn’t leave, wouldn’t leave, even as year after year
the atmosphere bled off unchecked, the UV rising and the
temperatures falling as Mars hurried back to its former state. Each
generation saw less rain, smaller corn, higher winds and the
unstoppable decay of technology, the knowledge with which to
replace or repair it lost over the long years. Still the croppers
stayed, tightening their belts in order to feed their children,
clawing their lives out of the red soil.

They
eventually sent the
Glory
into a Mars orbit, an unmanned supply vessel packed with everything
the croppers could need; food, medical supplies, clothing, spare
parts and fuel cells, even educational and training materials. As
the corn continued to fail, the croppers became increasingly
dependent upon the Supplement, dropped once every twenty-four
months in the middle of Martian summer.
They
had once
appointed administrators to measure out the supplies amongst the
remaining population, but that practice had moved on as well, and
now the people divided the supplement as a community, according to
need. It was fair, and there were few disputes.

Cortez looked at the receiving field, a
large, wind-scoured stone pad ringed with lights which hadn’t
worked since he was a boy. On each of the four edges stood over a
hundred of the empty supply landers, big cubes which had once been
white but were now pink from embedded dust. They had been stripped
of anything useful, even wiring, and pushed off to the side. A
person could just look at the many landers and tell them apart, old
from more recent, by their condition.

He felt a pair of bodies press close against
him on either side. Isaiah stood on his right, sucking his thumb,
and on the other side Dinah’s small hand crept into his own. They
all looked out the window.

“Will it come, Papa?”

“Can’t say, honey. I hope so.”

Isaiah’s thumb popped out and he breathed on
the glass, fogging it. Cortez waited to see what the boy would
draw, but he just went back to sucking his thumb.

“It has to come, doesn’t it, Papa?” Dinah
squeezed his hand. Cortez knew his daughter wasn’t talking about
launch programming, but about their mortality. He didn’t reply.

Outside a bitter wind kicked up a dust devil
a hundred feet high, and it marched across the receiving field
before twisting into the night. The bright spot which was
Glory
hung silently in the heavens, and Dinah coughed, a few
raspy barks ending in a rattle. He squeezed her hand back. An hour
passed, and one by one the folks of Cape Verde gathered quietly at
the window around them, eyes turned upwards. A few of the youngest
children fidgeted, but everyone else was still, all wondering the
same thing.

“Let us offer up a prayer,” Amos John said
at last.

Some of the men frowned at him and shook
their heads, but Cortez turned to the preacher. “I think that would
be a good idea.”

Fifty people linked hands and lowered their
heads as Amos John spoke, his voice soft, lacking its usual jump
and holler. “Dear Lord, we thank you for letting us come together
as a community. We ask you to watch over our sick, and welcome home
the loved ones we’ve lost. We know you have a purpose for our
hardships, and we accept your mysterious ways and trust in your
divine wisdom. Lord, we pray that you deliver the Supplement unto
us, so that we can continue your work a bit longer. Help us to be
strong. Help the corn. Amen.”