Lost on Mars (20 page)

In the daylight we looked so filthy. Our clothes were just rags.

Then there came a loud, frightening vibration through the ground.

Al saw them first, approaching at great speed from far away. He gasped in amazement and pointed frantically.

I could hardly believe what we were seeing.

There were about a dozen men on horseback thundering toward us. They were riding out of the City Inside and it was obvious they were coming for us.

28

The people of the City Inside fell in love with Toaster. They revered him. To them he was an astonishing survivor. He was a bona fide piece of the past. I think the people of the City were more glad to see him than they were to see Al and me. We were just two dishevelled, half-starved, bewildered-looking kids.

Toaster was fixed up by the City people. They dug out old manuals and they gave him a wonderful repair job. He received a complete makeover. They fitted him with reinforced glass plates and new bulbs. It turned out that no one actually made parts like his any more, so reinventing the sunbed was a unique challenge for the scientists of the City Inside. (Or, our hosts, our rescuers, our captors. Whatever we wanted to call them.) They were thrilled to recreate Toaster.

He came to my door and knocked and waited. Standing proudly to attention, gleaming as he waited for me to answer. Of course I could hardly believe it. Over the years Toaster had taken such a battering. Now he looked like he did on those really old photos of Grandma's that we'd left behind at the Homestead. He looked like he must have back in the days of the first settlements.

Toaster was the brightest thing in the apartment. He looked at the rooms that Al and I were living in and he tried to seem enthusiastic. The truth was, they were a bit bare and shabby. I guess, in the few months since our arrival, I'd not been concentrating on making the place pretty and homelike. I'd been working.

‘What have you been writing?' Toaster asked, glancing at the heaps of papers and stuff on the long table in the dining room. There were pencil shavings and torn scraps of paper everywhere.

‘About us,' I shrugged. ‘About everything that we did, and where we came from.'

When we first came to the City Inside I spent time thinking about the books I'd brought with me. There we were, fleeing across the plains of Mars with our friends and family and a few belongings. We carried scraps of food and plaggy bottles of water. And I had an electric book that contained a whole load of the world's literature.

By ‘world' I meant Earth, of course. I didn't know if anyone on Mars had written anything I'd like to read. Our Town was so small and isolated. I guess there might have been someone scribbling something down, somewhere on Mars. I guess Martian books were being written and I just didn't know about them. Someone, somewhere, would always find the time to write it down. Their stories, their feelings. The secrets that they were hoarding.

Our little town was so ignorant and lost upon the face of Mars. Maybe every town had its own disaster and all the people had fled. Maybe all their written books got left behind, just as we left behind Grandma's photos and Aunt Ruby's tapes.

Now that we'd stopped running, and there was nowhere else to go, I'd decided to start writing. We were safe among human beings we didn't know and we weren't sure what they expected of us. All I could think to do was to start writing my book. So here I was. Writing down how it was, and what we had to do, and how we ended up.

I tried explaining this to Toaster and he nodded. ‘I can help,' he said, and sat thinking hard. ‘Though my memory cells are shaken up.'

I smiled at him. I already knew this. He had told me when they rode us into the City Inside. He said he had new portions of his mind missing, after all the hectic times we had been through.

We still didn't fully understand what had happened. All we knew was that we had been placed within this City and that we had lost our Ma and Hannah and the others and there was no going back. We prayed that handing us over as a tribute had been enough; that they had survived and that the lizard birds had set them free. We knew we were on our own in the City Inside. And several uncertain months went by.

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.