Lost on Mars (6 page)

I lay awake in my room until all the adults were in bed and the house Da had built for us eight years ago settled down creakily into its timbers. All I could hear were the hot winds cooling as they blew over the dunes. Then I heard Ma and Da murmuring to each other in bed, in the room next to mine.

He said to her, ‘It'll soon be time to start again. Can you bear it?'

Her voice – when she answered him at last – was so sad and desperately tired. ‘I'll have to, won't I, Edward? We'll all have to start again.'

There was a long pause. ‘I think we will, yes. We have to go somewhere else.'

I heard Ma crying softly.

Da said, ‘We know this is happening, it's happened before. This is what we heard about, isn't it? The tales and rumours in those other towns. We knew that it could happen here. We knew it was possible … even inevitable.'

‘You're right,' Ma said. ‘I know.'

‘It's already too late for my mother,' he said.

9

One night – not too long after – Al shook me awake. I knew right away that something was up.

‘I dunno what it is,' he said, looking worried. He was in his little-boy pyjamas, but his face in the starlight looked older than his thirteen years. You could see the softness was starting to leave his features. For the first time I saw that my brother was growing up. ‘Something is happening.'

The house was reasonably quiet. Squeaking timbers and the clink and hiss of the cooking range as it cooled in the kitchen below us. It was a still night outside with no wind. The house smelled of that evening's dinner. Al was annoying me now, just standing there, ears pricked. I climbed out of my bed and he seized my arm.

Clunk
. There was a definite clunking noise from downstairs. There it came again. Someone was moving around heavily. It'll be Ma or Da, I thought. Or Aunt Ruby, who seemed to be living with us now after all. One of the adults would be up in the night, unable to sleep. Plagued by cares and vexations, the way that adults seemed to get.

Clunk, clunk,
it came again.

Then there was the precise noise of the front-door lock. Someone was easing it round.
Thunk
. It was open.

‘OK,' I said. ‘That's not right.'

No one was ever allowed to mess with the seal on the front door of the Homestead except Da. Especially not at night.

Yet someone was heading outside.

‘Come on,' I told him. Downstairs we went. How eerie it was, seeing the front door open, casting moonbeams on the scrubbed kitchen table and floor.

We ventured outside, where the air was chill and the prairie looked even wilder than usual. All the warmth had leached out of the sand and the jagged pillars of rock standing at intervals on the wide open space. Shades of cinnamon and hot paprika had drained from the land. All was pale and frosty blue.

Soon we found disturbed sand. Muffled prints of someone dragging their feet like a sleepwalker. We followed the unswerving trail into the shallow hills, where sprigs of gorse were growing and a few murky shapes dashed hither and thither. Martian hares. Blue Jack Rabbits. Bad eating. We'd tried them once and never again.

‘Uh, we shouldn't go too far,' said Al.

I agreed with him. Looking back, I saw that the ground had risen almost imperceptibly and we could see the whole Homestead in all its modest glory. Here was the main house, the outbuildings and the sheds where the new Molly and George were sleeping. It looked so peaceful and vulnerable. The land about us was seething with mysterious and secretive noises which we – when I actually thought about it – knew very little about.

Still we ploughed on, carefully testing out the safety of the ground. The last thing we needed was one of us stepping onto shifting sands and getting caught up and lost forever. When the sand became the consistency of finely milled flour, that was the most dangerous sign.

We hauled ourselves over a craggy brow of rock and beyond there was a shallow bowl about a mile across. Once it had been the bed of a vast lake and usually it was a broad expanse of smooth, dry perfection. I'd been out and seen it before, though Da didn't like us to come out this way. Yet here we were, looking at this one-time lake, like a silver mirror under the stars.

Al pointed. I jumped when I saw what he meant. It was impossible to miss.

It was Toaster we were following. Of course, it had to be Toaster.

Those clumpy, square feet dragging along. The clunking noises we'd heard. I think Al and me had known from the start that we were pursuing the sunbed into the night, but neither of us had liked to give voice to the thought. There was a definite possibility that Toaster had gone rogue. He had broken every rule in the Servo-Furnishing book. He had endangered and abandoned his human family, striking out into the outdoors at night and even leaving the door open. This was very bad news and it could only end with his total deactivation.

I called out to him. I called his name again and again and he took no notice. I set off at a run. Al flew alongside me, his breaking voice filled with panic. ‘If he's flipped out he could be dangerous, Lora! Be careful! Don't get too close!'

I was in no mood to be careful. I had known Toaster as long as I had been alive. He had been nursemaid to all of us, and nanny, butler and cook, babysitter and tutor and everything. Our family had drawn upon his great reservoirs of knowledge and energy and generosity for decades. We'd even played horsies, riding around on his back, when we were little. He was one of the only touchable links we had left with Earth, and this was the first time I saw that for the plain truth it was.

‘Toaster!' I screamed and started to run onto that dead lake.

Still he didn't turn. As I got closer I saw that his tanning bulbs were on. They flashed spasmodically in his bodily cavities, ultraviolet in the night. I wonder if he even knew they were malfunctioning so badly. They would drain his energy away, along with all this exertion, and he was in danger of getting stranded out here.

I caught up with the errant sunbed and saw with a shock he was crying. It should have been impossible, but there were certain things that Grandma's Servo-Furnishings had been customised for, over the years. Her second husband had been some kind of whizzo robotics man. And so Toaster the sunbed could express his emotions just as freely – why, much more freely – than the human beings we knew.

His unlovely geometric face turned to look down at me and it was streaming wet.

‘You shouldn't have come after me, Lora.'

‘Are you running away?'

Al came pounding up right then, raggedly out of breath. Toaster said gently, ‘You two should have wrapped up warmer. I blame myself for this.'

‘What are you doing?' shouted Al. ‘None of us should be out here.'

‘We heard you letting yourself out of the Homestead and we came after you. You shouldn't be here.'

He shrugged and gave us a look like he didn't care about that stuff. He was intent on some mission of his own.

He felt around inside his chest cavity with his strange, telescopic fingers. He flexed them and produced what he wanted to show us. It lay in his metal palm and we stared at it uncomprehendingly. It rolled a little, like it had a life of its own. It was a blue sphere, about as big as a marble.

‘I found this,' he explained. ‘I found it in the red dirt. I picked it up and dusted it off and hid it away inside my chest. I found it the day after they took her away. It wasn't just her leg that got left behind.'

Al and me both felt like that little sphere was looking back at us.

Grandma's false eye.

‘She must have struggled against whoever was kidnapping her that night,' said Toaster softly. ‘In the fight as they dragged her outdoors, her eye must have burst right out of her head and landed in the street. No ordinary eye, this, of course. Engineered on Earth in the olden days at unimaginable expense. Blue crystal technology. That's why your Grandma could see things that no one else could. Because of this.'

‘You hid this from us?' asked Al.

‘I tucked it behind a broken bulb in my chest. I didn't know what to do. I tried not to think about it too much as I went about my duties. And yet, I told myself, my first owner had been Grandma, right from the start. I owe her the greater loyalty. So I walked around with a precious secret locked inside my chest and, I admit, it's worried me ever since. It's her final gift to old Toaster.'

Al and me looked at each other. The sunbed had inherited Grandma's crazy-assed thinking, too. We all three of us looked at the blue eye again and it was like Grandma had found a way to keep a watch on all of us.

‘You humans had your ceremony to mark her passing,' said Toaster. ‘But I wasn't even allowed to attend. I was indoors doing the Homestead chores when you were under that tree, round the grave I'd dug. You were sharing your memories of her, and all the while I was thinking: my memories go back furthest.'

None of us had even thought of asking Toaster to take part. There were quite a few mourners that day. Ma had said she needed Toaster to be in the kitchen, preparing refreshments.

‘I'm sorry,' I told him.

Toaster shook his head. ‘So. I choose to mark my owner's passing in this way. My own way.'

Al was grossed out by the sight of the eye. ‘What are you going to do?'

Toaster closed his fist and drew it back, high above our heads. Then he used every ounce of his strength to fling the eye as hard as he could into the sky. It flew across the breadth of that barren lake.

The three of us watched, amazed, as the tiny point of blue light sketched a tall parabola and started to fall. It landed too far away for us to see.

10

The whole of the lake bed started to ripple and shudder. The three of us cried out in alarm, not quite sure what we were seeing. We turned and started running for the rocks, but Al kept looking back. He was shouting what was happening; about the jagged black cracks that were spreading out from the centre of the dead lake. They looked like cracks in a mirror, or the dangerous ice that people would skate across in the old stories.

Toaster was low on energy after his trek out here and the two of us were held back by helping him. ‘It's an earthquake,' screamed the sunbed. ‘I have precipitated a ghastly catastrophe! Leave me! You must abandon me to my deserved fate.'

Toaster could be dramatic like this. All we could do was put all of our strength into it and yank him along to safety, to the hilly crags, away from the shattering lake. The zig-zagging cracks were widening and the dense weight of sand spilling through.

When we reached the relative safety of the rocks, we stopped, panting and wheezing. Then we looked back at a bizarre sight. A crazy web-work of fractures filled the whole expanse.

Al said, ‘What have we done?'

‘It is your grandma,' said Toaster. ‘It is her furious spirit, wreaking vengeance on the world.'

‘Rubbish,' I snapped, wondering when Toaster had become so illogical and superstitious. ‘It's the shifting sands. It's got nothing to do with Grandma and her eye.'

The two males – my brother and the sunbed – weren't convinced. We set off for home, wondering if the rippling impact of the strange disaster had woken anyone up, hoping they had slept through it so we could return to our beds unnoticed. We were caked in filthy, blood-coloured sand and I think we were in shock.

Secretly I believed, just like the others, that this had everything to do with Grandma's eye. It was as if, when Toaster flung it and it landed upon the sand, the eye triggered some kind of response from the landscape. Mars itself had claimed the remains of the ancient settler.

As we approached the Homestead Al seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘We could have fallen down those cracks,' he whispered to me. ‘And never be heard of again.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘But there's no use dwelling on that. We're home and safe now.'

But the thought stayed with my brother from that night on. That the ground could open up and swallow us at any moment never to be seen again. Or maybe hostile creatures would emerge from those cracks in the land and steal us away.

It spooked him, is the best way of putting it. I'd always complained about my being the older and most grown up of the pair of us. But Al was growing up overnight, into a wary, dubious person, who expected to meet with danger everywhere he went. In truth, I'd have preferred to have my childish brother back, who wasn't yet scared of the world.

And what did I feel? I felt excited. Even when all those crazy cracks were appearing and we were trying to outrun them. I felt so thrilled and alive. At last, I thought, something is happening. Here is the truth. Here is the proof. There's something living on Mars that's bigger than us. There's something alive and intelligent here. And it's watching us, and waiting.

Of course I never shared these feelings with anyone. They would have thought me insane. And maybe I was. Maybe the hot Martian dust had got into my head and corroded my wits.