Lost on Mars E-Book

Paul Magrs

• Herausgeber: Firefly Press Ltd
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 396

Beschreibung

With the scale and scope of a great sci-fi epic, this is the story of Lora and her family, third generation settlers on the red planed, who are struggling to survive o a smallholding in the desert landscape, surviving storms and sinister rumours of unexplained disappearances - until one night Lora sees the Dancers. When her father and grandmother disappear, Lora and her family are driven out to seek a new life across the plains. But none of them are ready for what they find - the beautiful and dangerous City Inside.

Leseprobe

Contents

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LOST ON MARS

PAUL MAGRS

For the Clarkes and the Lakes

1

Dawn was coming over the edges of the plain. It was so early that we could hardly see each other. We were half asleep, all except Da, who was always up early and worked the land every day. That day we joined him at earliest light. We had about a day’s work ahead of us, he said. The dust storm would hit that very night. And in just a few hours all the crops would be gone. They’d be laid waste, he said.

So we were all out there. Ma, my little sister, my brother Al, Da and me. We took the beasts from their pen and rode out to the furthest edge of our land.

Grandma was up early too. But she wouldn’t come with us. She stood on the veranda of our Homestead and yelled at us, hollering fit to burst, her nightgown all stained and greasy. It was hard to pick out what she was yammering about. Ma always said that Grandma was just an old lady, and we didn’t have to pay her any heed…

Ma and Da explained to me when I was old enough to understand the truth. Grandma was not in her right mind. The trauma of her long life on Mars had sent her mind spinning in the wrong direction. She had been one of the first settlers on this world of ours. Grandma was an historical personage, is what Da used to say. No matter that she was baying like a hound on that porch. No matter that her cries would come chasing us across the desolate plains.

Ma said it was a shame Grandma couldn’t be given a knife like the rest of us, but Da just shook his head. He didn’t want to be giving the old lady a knife. I could understand that. I understood more than they knew, of course. I was almost fifteen by Earth years, which was the calendar we were still using on Mars. I understood more than they wanted me to.

The sun scraped higher up the sky and soon the long, cool shadows were the best places to walk. The scorching trails of heat were already too tiring to move in and we had to conserve our strength for the picking of the corn. Da had drilled us all in the technique, though I knew it already, having snuck out to help him before.

The alien corn stood about three feet taller than me. It was green, with all these furling tongues and shoots. You had to seize and unwind them and pluck the corns out of the grooves in the narrow leaves. They were like springs that wanted to snap back and protect their precious growth. But we needed that corn. It was the reason we lived out here on the hot plains. Da had coaxed all of this green stuff out of the dry earth with such patience and care. It had taken him years to get it this rich.

But all of this would be ruined by nightfall. According to the signs, storms were going hit us and strip the land completely bare. Ma made us rest after the first hour of picking rows of corn. We gathered round her and each took a plaggy bottle of milk she had kept cooling in her picnic bag. The milk was bluish in the morning light and I watched my younger sister drinking greedily. My heart twinged a bit when I saw Hannah drinking. She was only three, but she was out here with the rest of us. Her hands were streaked by the dark-green sap, same as ours.

The burden beasts were panting nearby, and Ma slopped some precious water into their bowls. They bowed in deference, and sipped thirstily. On their backs were strapped the great wicker baskets containing our haul so far. It didn’t look like much. If that was all we had harvested in the first hour, I wondered how much we’d end up with by the time the storms came blowing through.

I wondered if it would be enough.

Da was being hearty and confident. He jollied everyone along, exclaiming over what a great start we had made that morning. He was so proud of his girls, he told us. And of his son too, he said, clapping Al on the back as he drank up his milk. He almost spluttered it out. Al was younger than I was by a year, and more delicate, even if he was a boy.

My back was breaking, and my fingers were splitting and bleeding from teasing open the corn fronds. I shielded my eyes and looked back along the groves towards the Homestead. And I saw Toaster ambling his way up the green avenue towards where we worked.

The old machine was bringing us water. A great big vat of it, hoisted over his shoulder. He was just in time, too, because we were running out, as the sun hit its height. I watched him labour up the dusty track on those shaky, hydraulic legs. Toaster was so old even then and he was just about in pieces. Da had to keep patching him and looking for spare parts whenever he went into town. Sometimes I’d heard Da mutter to Ma that, really, the best thing to do would be to deactivate the old thing. Toaster was just a sunbed. What did we need an old sunbed for on the roasting surface of Mars?

Toaster came in the very first ship, with Grandma’s people. It had been a luxury ship, stocked with all kinds of devices, the likes of which we’d never seen, and were unlikely to see again, Da said. Many were destroyed early in the settling period, but Toaster had lasted as long as Grandma. She wouldn’t hear of his being deactivated, of course. Toaster reminded her of the days on Earth when ladies were pale and lived indoors, away from the sun’s harmful rays. When they lay within the glass innards of machines like Toaster and burned themselves slowly orange.

In more recent years Toaster was determined to prove he was still useful. He stood on his hind legs and fetched and carried. He was slow though, and sometimes Da would get kind of exasperated waiting for him when he got the jitters. I sort of liked him though.

‘Well, now, look at this!’ Toaster gasped, as he struggled up to us, bowed down by the heavy water. ‘Look at all this you’ve been doing!’ He peered into the baskets at the corn we’d gathered. He was right, too. We’d put on a burst of speed as the morning advanced, and we’d done well.

Da opened up the vat and Toaster helped him fill up our bottles. ‘Thanks,’ Dad told the Servo, and Toaster looked gratified by this, his metal face wincing as Da clapped his shoulder.

While we were all drinking our chilled water, and Al coaxed my sister out from under the cornstalks where she’d been dozing in the shade, Ma took Toaster aside. ‘Has the old lady settled down?’

Toaster lowered his voice tactfully. ‘She was shouting for quite a long time, madam, I am afraid to say. She is convinced that you will be caught out in the dust storm. She fully believes that you will all die today out here, and that she will be left to starve, alone in the Homestead.’

Ma nodded. She was fretting, I could see. Ma hated anyone to be upset, even Grandma. ‘I wonder if I should go back,’ Ma said to Da. ‘And check that she’s OK.’

Da shook his head. ‘I need all of you here. You too, Toaster. I reckon that we’ve got about four hours’ work left.’ Da stared into the boiling soup of the red skies. ‘See that?’ He nodded to the far horizons, where a peppery darkness was building up like a swarm on its way. ‘That’s what’s heading here.’ He sighed, gazing at the swaying green of the cornstalks. I looked round and saw how little we had actually tackled. Only a tiny portion of the precious crop would be saved and I could feel the terrible weight of Da’s sadness. All that work of his would be ruined within minutes of the dust storm touching down.

And so we worked with renewed concentration and vigour. I was amazed at Toaster’s speed. He tore into the cornrows, both hydraulic arms lashing out with mechanical precision. Dry chaff and waste flew in all directions as he worked.

It wasn’t too much later when Da stopped us all. ‘I was too generous in my estimation,’ he said. ‘I think we’d better go home now.’

It was barely three hours into the afternoon and a dry, nasty wind was rippling through the corn. It lashed at us like hot tongues saying bad things at our backs. Ma and Da and Al and Toaster worked busily packing up all the equipment, and covering up the panniers of fresh-cut corn.

Staring into the storm as it lowered on down through the heaving clouds, I imagined a whole desertful of sand up there, flying about. About to slice right through us. Everything living would be torn to shreds. Wild grit was flying through the air and landing in our hair, stinging our exposed skin. Ma tucked Hannah into her arms.

‘How long have we got?’ she shouted at Da. ‘Do we have time to get home?’

Da looked like he knew he’d cut it fine. He’d kept us out till the very last minute. He frowned and shook his head. ‘Of course we’ve got time. If we go now, and we don’t stop.’

He kicked the beasts into action. They were lazy, slouchy lizards but with the weather coming up even they were keen to get going. I’d never seen them so swift.

So we hastened home with the storm behind us and as much of our crops as we could carry in our baskets.

Al came walking alongside me. ‘Sometimes I could really hate Grandma,’ he said, softly, so that no one else could hear. ‘Not for all that she’s crazy and she shouts at us and does weird stuff. I mean, I could hate her for coming here in the first place. She had a good life on Earth. They were rich, weren’t they? And yet they had to come to Mars. Our lives could have been so different on Earth…’

Of course I’d heard Al going on like this before. He would start imagining what his life could have been like. On Earth, he would have been like a prince, maybe. He would have worn a cape of gold and gone walking in the rain. He would have had a yacht and gone sailing their oceans. He often came out with these dreams. That was just Al, though. He was my little brother. He was OK.

2

We only just made it.

The dust storm came roaring across the plain even earlier than we thought. We were loading the baskets into the store shed. First we knew, my brother Al gave a squawking shout of fear. We turned about and there they were: the worst storm clouds we’d ever seen. They rushed billowing out of the skies and they were in the fields of crops now. Destroying everything as they came.

Da spurred us on to unload the baskets and quickly secured the barn. I saw him look worriedly at the building. He was hoping it would stand up to the dust. If it didn’t, then we’d been wasting our time. And what about the Homestead? Would that stand up to the storm? But it had to. There was nowhere else to go.

We got home in time. Just as the eerie howling of the wind and dust could be heard like a threat rolling up the valley towards us. Ma hugged Hannah to her chest as she flung open the door of our home and we all toppled into our small house, finding it dark and still inside. I had never been so relieved in all my life.

Da was tethering the lizards into their pen at the back of the house. The creatures would have to take their chances in the storm.

Inside the Homestead, we found stuff ruined, flung down, torn into bits. Some of Ma’s good rugs and wall coverings had been rent apart. Pots and dishes had been smashed on the tiled floor of the kitchen. There was a strange, nasty smell.

None of us had to wonder who had messed the place up while we were out. It was always Grandma who did bad stuff like this as soon as our backs were turned. Although we were used to her strange goings-on, the wreckage was worse today. Da said it was likely the old lady had been super disturbed by the scary noises of the rising storm. I saw Ma break down in tears in her kitchen when she thought no one was looking.

Al and me went round upstairs, finding more damage, looking for Grandma in her favourite hiding places. Toaster was busying about already, putting things to rights and cleaning up the mess she’d made. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ we heard him say in his singsong voice. ‘Someone has had a busy day. Oh dear!’

Upstairs, through the thin roof covering, the sounds of the approaching dust storm were louder. Closer. More ominous. Al looked pale as he lit the lamps. He knew that the natural daylight coming through our windows would vanish, all of a sudden, very soon. None of us wanted to be sitting in the dark when the dust came.

‘Grandma, are you in there?’ Al asked, sounding such a scaredy-cat now, I wanted to push him aside and yell at her myself. I didn’t feel like she was venerable or historical. I felt like she was a dumbass old woman who was making our lives hell. She was giving Ma way more work and heartache than she needed to have.

‘You better get out of there, Grandma,’ I said, pounding on her door. ‘Come on. Open up. Da says it’s best if we’re all together, downstairs. He wants us all gathered together.’

‘Go away,’ came the old lady’s voice. Now she sounded weak. But I knew she was just weaseling. She was scared we’d be mad about the mess she’d made. Now she was turning back into being the sad old lady who wouldn’t do nothing wrong.

‘Please, Grandma,’ said Al, in his most winning voice. He knew that Grandma had a special soft spot reserved for him. He knew he was the best at getting her to behave. Apparently he was just like her brother at that same age. Her lost brother, the fantastic hero, Thomas. Sometimes when Grandma was crazy confused, not even knowing what year she was in, it was like she thought her Thomas was still with her. Al didn’t mind.

The door opened and she stood there, in her nightgown smeared with ashes. She had eyes only for Al.

‘Dust storm’s coming, Grandma,’ Al said, though it was kind of pointing out the obvious. By now the noise was pounding through the whole house. The windows had gone dim already. When I looked at the landing window there was a grainy fuzziness out there, like the haze on a broken monitor.

Grandma’s expression went clear like she briefly stopped being mad. She said, ‘Did you rescue the crops?’

Al nodded. ‘Yes! Yes, we did it. Well, we got some of them. Enough, Da thinks.’

Grandma looked down at her hands. ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I wish…’

‘Come and sit with us,’ said Al. ‘Ma’s making some broth and some soda bread.’

As he led her away, Grandma said, ‘I wish I could have helped you all.’

‘Hush, now,’ Al said, taking her towards the wooden stairs. I followed on behind, listening to the skittering and tapping noise on the tarp roof of the house. I was feeling bad, I guess, because I couldn’t feel sorry for Grandma. I felt kind of cold inside about her. I just didn’t care as much as Al did anymore and I thought that probably made me bad.

Downstairs Da had gathered everyone around the table where we ate our meals and prayed together each day. ‘Lora,’ he told me. ‘Come and sit down with us. Look, we’re all here. You sit with us now. Remember – nothing bad can happen to us. Not when we’re all together.’

That time, at least, this was true. Nothing bad happened to us that night. None of our family was hurt or killed by the storms that raged till the next dawn light came.

I don’t think any of us slept except Hannah and Grandma. We stayed together in our kitchen as the walls were battered. It was as if wild creatures were out there, trying to come inside to get us.

I think we sang every song we knew that night. When it seemed we had run out of singalong songs, Ma played her harp. It was a miniature harp, all gold, and she kept it wrapped in cloth underneath her and Da’s bed. It always made me feel drowsy, and half-awake, the liquid strings sent me dreaming of the rivers and seas of Earth. I had heard the grown-ups talk of such things, and I had even seen pictures. And I dreamed about them on music nights.

The storms raged and howled in the darkness outside and we did our best to ignore them. Then, when we were almost too tired to move or think, Da started telling us the old stories again. He told tales about Earth and our family and who they had all been in that other life. And then he told the story of Grandma and Grandpa’s generation, and how they had given up almost everything to create a new life for us.

We heard once more about the first landings and the first wave of settlers. The early disasters and the fights that broke out between folk when they tried to make homes for themselves. The constant struggle each day to bring subsistence out of the hopeless soil. They had it so much harder than we do, he said. We must be so grateful for the sacrifices of the previous generation. We were second and third generation settlers and we had an obligation to create a better life for those who came after us: that’s how it all worked. Each generation made it easier for the next, and they did it all out of love.

I guess I slept for a while that night in my chair, with thoughts like those going round in my head. When I woke up I thought I’d gone deaf. The roaring and the howling had stopped.

It sounded like a great big emptiness. I cleared my throat, just to make sure I could still hear anything at all. Then the whole kitchen started coming to life. Ma clattered about, cleaning our crocks with sand.I could hear Da stomping, carrying Grandma upstairs to her bed. There was the mechanical whirring of Toaster’s ancient joints as he began work again.

We had survived!

I felt like jumping up out of my chair, running outdoors and doing a lap of honour around our Homestead. Al grinned at me like he felt just the same way. Da came downstairs and he started to take down the wooden boards that covered the windows and doors. He got us kids to help him and we were so excited, we felt like we hadn’t been outside for several weeks. Martian sunlight felt so good on your face when you’d been shut inside like that. It felt slow and old. It warmed you right down to your toes.

Da tackled the door. It was stuck. The sand had been swept into a dune against the front of the Homestead. We all put our backs into it. It was only when Toaster put his hydraulic strength behind the door that we got it open.

We stepped out into an alien landscape.

Really, in the new morning, it looked nothing like it had the day before. My heart was hammering with excitement and shock.

Someone had reached down from heaven, or wherever, and smoothed his great big palm over our world. The sand had blown over everything so deeply it had smothered the whole lot. We were worried about our crops being damaged, but they had completely disappeared. Even the shape of the horizon had shifted, at the far edges of our familiar prairie. It looked hillier now.

Da looked grimly disgusted. He knew the storm was a bad one. He knew that chances were it would wipe the slate clean. But we checked on our storage hut and – amazingly – the building was still standing safe, and the crops we collected the previous day were all fine.

‘Praise the Lord,’ Da muttered, under his breath. I thought I even saw him wipe his eyes with relief.

We did a circuit of the Homestead. Da said we had to be careful of the shifting sands; they could be treacherous.

At the back of the Homestead we found our burden beasts. They were dead, of course. Their heads poked out of the new dune, and I stared at their closed eyes and their fringed lashes. I had names for our lizards. I called them Molly and George. Which was stupid and sentimental when they could die so easily.

Da sighed as he started digging the dead beasts out. ‘We’ll have to train up another pair,’he said. ‘We’ll be lucky to get two as good as these. Will you come to town with me, Lora? Al? There’s all sorts we need. Plus we have to check on the townsfolk. See that everything’s OK there.’

Both Al and I nodded, holding back our excitement. We loved to go to town.

‘Come on. Back indoors,’ said Da, staring at our dead animals. ‘We’ll tell Ma she’s got her work cut out for her filleting and salting these beasts for storage. At least we know we won’t starve, eh?’ He tried to make light of it, and talked about us having a grand barbecue maybe, and inviting all our friends from town.

But I didn’t want to think about eating Molly and George.

See? I was sentimental in those days. I tried to focus my thoughts on our trip to see the townsfolk.

And if I remember rightly, it was on this trip that we heard about the Disappearances. They had started up again.

3

The going was hard. Usually Molly and George would pull the hovercart all the way into town. With our beasts dead Da had to tinker with the complicated insides of the engine to make it hover again. The circuits of the instruction manual had long ago fizzled out. Like so many of the devices we’d inherited, we’d forgotten the original instructions and everything was a guessing game.

Da was a kind of super genius and he battled away with his whole box-load of greasy tools and what do you know? Pretty soon that old hovercart was lifting off the sand upon a cushion of jellified air. It quivered like heat haze on the prairie.

Al and I whooped, clambering aboard, and the cart wobbled underneath us. Da was busy kissing goodbye to Ma and Grandma and fussing over Hannah. He was always like that. He departed as if every trip was his last. He had seen too much calamity during his life on Mars. He had seen too many folk set off and never come back.

But Al and I were impatient that day. I wanted to feel the air streaming past us, all cool and sharp on my face. We both wanted to experience that lurching excitement in the pits of our stomachs as the hovercart accelerated to what would seem like impossible velocities.

As Da gunned the engines, Grandma stood alongside us in her old woollen dress and shawl and she had that crazy glint in her eye again.

‘You be careful in that town, do you hear?’ She narrowed her eyes at us. ‘You watch after these kiddies.’

Da nodded, pretending he was paying heed to her madness. We could tell that he was as keen to be off as we were. He jumped up in the driver’s seat, let out a yell, and wrenched the rusted wheel around. The hovercart shivered and bucked, and then we were off. Riding across the newly smoothed dunes that the storm had created.

We found town busy. People were out and about, using shovels to clear away sand drifts that had settled against the fronts of stores and houses. Folk were up ladders fixing windows and signs and tiles on rooftops. There was a cheery, businesslike atmosphere, as if the town was determined to carry on as usual. They wouldn’t let something like a storm get in the way of their everyday lives.

Al and I watched all of this as Da steered the hovercart down Main Street. He called out to a few men he knew and they answered him with gruff replies, or waved as they concentrated on their tasks. Da parked in a sandy lot behind the abandoned Post Office and gave us a handful of coins each, plus a list. He had the bigger list, detailing the heavier goods he would pick up at the Storehouse. Our list consisted of the no-less-important smaller items we could get from Mrs Adams’ store. Da always sent us there, so that we would have a vital task of our own to perform, he said. But Al and I knew it was also because Da couldn’t stand gossipy Mrs Adams holding court in her fancy goods emporium. I was surprised though, because that day he said, ‘Be sure to invite the Adamses to our barbecue. Don’t you forget, Lora.’

We watched our Da lope off towards the Storehouse where he’d be meeting up with other farmers and men from town and they’d spend the remainder of the afternoon discussing the storm. They’d be jawing about the impact of the disaster and drinking the homebrew. Then they’d be congratulating each other on getting through the worst of another stormy season.

But more had been blowing through town than hot wind and sand.

There were rumours. Tales of something terrible. Everyone was talking about it, as Al and I found out in the cool interior of Mrs Adams’ store.There were hushed voices and a kind of electric nervousness in the air. Al and I joined the huddled group of ladies and we eavesdropped.

I breathed in the hundred spicy scents of Adams’ Exotic Emporium. I examined beautifully arranged displays of dainty soaps and candles and dried flowers. Everything was scented with lemon verbena, cinnamon and white musk. I gazed at ribboned boxes of jellied fruits and sugar biscuits and all kinds of unguents in jars for prettifying and pampering yourself. All these things were lavishly displayed, even though none of the townsfolk could afford them.

We went to Mrs Adams’ place to spend money on things such as flour and sugar, powdered milk and eggs. All them costly frou-frou things from the Earthly past were left to rot luxuriously on the shelves and in cabinets. Really, Ma would say, whoever had need of talcum powder from Paris?

Tittle-tattle would tell you they were all thieved goods anyhow. The Adamses were profiteers from other folks’ misfortunes and everything in the Exotic Emporium had been filched from a shipwreck out in the desert.

It was true that once upon a time it was thought a good idea to transport luxury items from Earth to Mars. This was back when they were expecting the rich to come here in great numbers and to find this a world full of hope. That seems like a fairytale now – to think that they sent their expensive goods ahead of themselves, as if pampering was the most important thing those Earthlings could imagine.

As we stood among those clucking women, Al was twisting and pulling faces. We were so crushed between the starched pinnies and the wooden baskets we couldn’t even see Mrs Adams behind her glass counter. We knew, though, that she was weighing out goods on her silver scales and talking all animatedly.

We caught the odd phrase echoed by the ladies around us. We heard the word ‘Disappearances’ several times and this made our ears prick up. I heard ‘just a baby’ and ‘one of her lovely twins’ and then a kind of ghoulish excitement rippled through the shop. A shrill voice piped up: ‘Like she foolishly left a window open … and during a storm! What did she expect to happen to her precious babies? Of course one of them went flying out the window…’

‘Or it was snatched,’ snapped another, croakier voice. ‘Snatched from clear under her nose. Just like it used to happen before. They could always get at you and yours, no matter how secure you thought your Homestead was. Even when you were under lock and key and all your hatches were battened down they could still get at you!’

This particular raspy voice rose above the others and I recognised it almost at once. It belonged to Grandma’s only friend, Ruby. Ruby was an engineer and a legend in Our Town. She was also Grandma’s only surviving contemporary. She had more memory and knowledge than anyone still alive on Mars. She was revered and respected and it was surprising for us to even find her here, wasting her time gossiping with all these old dames. If Ruby was here then it must be important, she was no idle chatterer.

‘Tell us, Ruby, tell us,’ urged Mrs Adams.

‘What’s to tell?’ said Ruby, smoothing down her tangled white hair. She glowered at everyone in turn. ‘It’s the Disappearances. Seems like they’ve started up once again.’

A horrible pause followed this pronouncement, as everyone struggled to take in what she meant. It was something we’d heard the older people saying. The Disappearances. The very word made the colour drain out of the ladies’ faces.

Then Mrs Adams saw Al and me standing there with our wooden baskets and our list and our handfuls of coins. She decided we ought to be protected from all this gloomy adult talk, so she brightened her voice. ‘Why, it’s the Robinson children. Thank the Lord that you’re safe, my dears. I take it you all came through the storm in one piece and that your family is well?’

I nodded firmly and the ladies sighed with relief. They knew that we faced the brunt of the storm on the prairie. Here in town they’d have been hunkered in their shelters underground. I admit that Al and I basked in their admiration as we went up to the counter with our empty baskets.

I gave Mrs Adams our list and watched her frowning at Ma’s handwriting and then set about filling our order. I felt Al’s hand reach out to take mine and I knew straight away how he felt about what we’d heard.

Da had heard similar things from the men. In the great wooden Storehouse, where they traded and loaded up their wagons with heavy sacks of grain and barrels of oil, the men gossiped just as much as the ladies did. They just swore and spat more, is all. He always said that we weren’t the same as town folk. We lived on the Martian prairie and we were made of tougher stuff. Yes, we traded with them and we were still related to them, and all of us sure depended on one another for survival, but Da insisted that we were crucially different. They were used to their huddling together with their softer, sheltered living and their fancier things. They had time on their hands and idle tongues to match.

That day, though, it seemed that the gossip reached out and snared Da’s attention too.

‘Old Man Horace. He’s gone,’ Da told us tersely, as we loaded the hovercart with new provisions. Da didn’t believe in sugar-coating the truth, even for kids. He thought it was best we knew the worst from the very start.

Old Man Horace had been the town vagrant. Going back way before I was born, he had been racketing about the town. He may have been a filthy tramp, but he belonged to us, and every single Homestead had taken him in at Christmas time or Martian Thanksgiving. I could remember the Christmas I was eight and he came out to stay in the Homestead with us; he’d carved wooden animals for Al and me.

Now, according to the men in the Storehouse today, after the storm came rampaging through town, and left the whole place smothered in dust and all topsy-turvy, there was not a single sign of Old Man Horace. No one could remember who had volunteered to give him shelter. It was assumed that the storm had simply borne him away like an old rag swept out of the road.

‘They’re taking it to be an omen,’ Da told us, as we strapped the last of the sacks into the hovercart. ‘Damn fools. They’re talking like that dirty old guy was our mascot or something.’

Al looked as if he was longing to tell him about the baby that flew out of the window. But I jabbed my brother with my bony elbow. I didn’t want him troubling Da right now. This was unsubstantiated tittle-tattle and Da surely wasn’t in the mood for it. I distracted them both by asking about our replacements for Molly and George.

‘They’ll be ready in two weeks,’ said Da. ‘They’re still too young to leave their mother. They’re having chips implanted too. But before the month’s out we’ll be able to take them home with us.’

I wished I’d gone to the livestock pens with him, just so I could have seen the young burden beasts.

On the way home Da chatted brightly about the feast that we’d be having the following evening. He’d invited everyone he’d seen and now word would go round the whole town. Everyone was welcome at the Homestead barbecue. We could celebrate the fact we were all still alive and the summer storm was, hopefully, at an end.

And nothing more was said for the rest of the day about Disappearances.

4

Molly and George turned out to be delicious. Ma cooked them up right. Great hunks of meat marinated in sauces all the afternoon before our party. I helped hoist them out onto the makeshift cooking range outdoors, but most of the work was Ma’s. She was brilliant at this stuff. Obviously it was easier when supplies were more plentiful, but Da always said that Ma excelled at any time – feast or famine. She could keep us going on the most meagre rations.

The aromas swirled and drifted all the way into town, enticing folk out of their boltholes, attracting many more than we knew we’d have to feed. Their carriages and hovercarts came pulling up in our yard and some of these faces we didn’t even recognise. They were cousins and friends of townsfolk. All were welcome, Da announced.

Some folk brought kegs of foul-tasting homebrew. Noxious drink was passed around in plaggy beakers and as the sun went down, fizzing golden into the dunes, the party was getting rowdy. With the landscape so changed about, I wondered whether everyone would find their way home after darkness fell.

Grandma enlisted help from Al and Da to drag her heavy old armchair into the yard and there she sat, looking like the queen of our world. She wore a silver frock that she must have unearthed from the very bottom of her trunk. It shone glamorously in the moonlight and she was very proud of herself. She watched the revels going on with a strange expression on her face. I guess it was the kind of face you’d wear if you’d seen everything and done everything the world had to offer and now you were watching all the young people doing it all again.

There was music. Old discs that had been handed down from the first settlers. Later, when everyone was tired of those ghostly, over-complicated songs from Earth, we made our own music. Da fetched out his guitar and someone beat time on the empty kegs. Mr Adams played a shrill penny whistle and there were jigs and reels. I hung back when the dancing started, keeping a watchful eye on the proceedings. The grown-ups were drunk and enjoying themselves, but there was no way I was making a fool of myself.

The only dancing I’d ever done was away from anyone watching, with Hannah, when she was a baby, moving softly round as I held her in my arms and tried to get her to sleep. In all of the raucous music that memory came back to me and it caught my breath sharply. I looked for Hannah and saw her in the dress she’d had for her birthday. Ma had cleaned and pressed it and Hannah looked a peach. She was clapping and trying to join in, though she was too small for most people to notice. I kept a careful eye out in case my sister strayed too close to those stamping feet.

One cracked voice cut across everyone else and started to sing an old song. It was a story song: about the voyages that the settlers had made from Earth to come here. It was a song no one had heard in a long time.

By now it was properly dark. The stars were out, but we all felt safe because we were together. The whole town was here. We listened in respectful silence as Grandma rocked back and forth in her armchair. Her voice was like old creaking water pipes or ungreased engine parts. It told a tale come from the distant past and it was our duty to harken to it. Paying our respects to the sacrifices of those who had gone before us.

Her song went on forever, it seemed like. It was truly horrible. Even worse than the last time she’d inflicted it upon us. In the end, Toaster stepped forward to pat her on the shoulder and whisper in her ear. Her dirge-like singing faded out and she submitted to his hydraulic embrace, allowing herself to be manhandled indoors to her bed. It was too late for old ladies to be squawking at the tops of their voices in the cooling desert air.

The music and the party were over, and everyone became conscious of being out of doors in the dark. All of a sudden it was time to leave. In all the milling about – that was when the gossip started. People were tired and jumpy and whispers were going around – insidious and shivery – spoiling the party mood. People were talking about the Disappearances. It was as if our light and warmth and noise couldn’t keep the dark thoughts at bay forever. The shadows were creeping in to claim us.

Clearing stuff away, Ma caught those whispers and went straight up to Da. She was shaking with anger and fear. ‘You never told me about this. You never said what you’d heard in town.’

He froze. He was aware others had stopped to listen. They had caught the tension in Ma’s voice. ‘It’s only a rumour,’ he told her. ‘Old Man Horace just wandered off, probably. He was a drunk old man, weak in the head after years of being ill. It’s sad, but one day they’ll find his body in a dune out of town.’

‘And the Simcox child?’ Ma asked. Her voice was getting shrill and others were murmuring. The Simcox family were absent from our shindig that evening, most unlike them. It added credence to the rumour they had lost one of their babies. It had flown right out of its cot and through its nursery window into the eye of the descending storm.

‘So you don’t believe it?’ Ma asked Da. ‘You don’t believe that it’s happening again?’

He growled, ‘We need more evidence. We can’t all turn hysterical.’ He took hold of her and tried to shush her down.

‘Disappearances, Edward,’ she hissed. ‘You know the stories. You know what your mother said. Or have you forgotten?’

He smoothed down her hair. She wriggled out of his grasp. She beckoned to Hannah, who ran into her arms.

‘We’ve forgotten nothing,’ said Da.

‘The weather isn’t the worst thing,’ said Ma. ‘It isn’t the harshest, most deadly thing on Mars. We’ve had it easy for years. We’ve had it soft. Compared with the settlers.’ Then she broke into tears. This shocked both Al and me. We’d seen Ma cry before, but not in front of people from the town. She just crumpled up and fell down on her knees in the dirty cinders from the barbecue.

5

At the weekend Grandma took a bad fall. We heard a tremendous crash and all this cursing from her room and, next thing, Toaster came to us looking all concerned. Grandma’s cybernetic leg had seized up – sand in the joints. It was all corroded up and getting to be no use. Da said the only thing to do was to take her into town when we went for the replacements for Molly and George. Doc Eaves could fix up cybernetic limbs pretty well.

Grandma didn’t complain, even though she hated to go into town, on account of her looking so beat up and old. She hated to be seen by people these days. I reckoned she must have been hurting for real to agree so readily.

So we all went – apart from Ma and Hannah, who waved us off from the veranda. Grandma and Toaster were strapped onto the back of the hovercart like bits of old farm equipment and I guess we made quite a comical sight, buzzing along on the sand. Grandma kept yammering all the way across the plains. I could hear Toaster hushing her and placating her in reasonable tones.

Al and me sat up front with Da. We were both paying attention to how he drove the machine. We knew that our day would come when we’d have to know how to do everything Da could do, to support our own families in the future. One day we would have our own Homesteads somewhere on the prairie.

We were settlers – third generation – and it was our duty to grow up and spread out and occupy new land and have more children who’d carry on the sacred mission after us. Me, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life and, for as long as I could remember, I’d been learning and memorising all the skills and knowledge bound up in Ma and Da about surviving in our world. Al was the same. Well, I’d always assumed he was the same.

But something weird was going on with Al. He had started to question things. He wanted to knowwhyour whole purpose was to thrive and proliferate and multiply and colonise Mars. He was thoughtful, Al. Thoughtful and deep and troubled. At first he only voiced his questions to me, his older sister, and I only half-understood what he was talking about. I mean, what else would he or anyone else do with their lives? What else was there to do but try to survive?

Ma once said, ‘Mars doesn’t want us here. This whole world wants us to go back where we came from. The planet is rejecting us and trying to kill us off.’ She had been sick with a fever for some time after Hannah was born.

Funny thing was, the questions Ma asked then were just like the ones Al was asking lately. All that why why why. It shook me up and made me uneasy. I preferred just to get on with things.

In town we took Grandma to her appointment with Doc Eaves and left Toaster to wait for her while we took ourselves off to visit our new reptiles. The new Molly and George gazed at us sadly, I thought. As if they knew they had a whole lifetime ahead of nothing but servitude until the day they died and we chopped them up for another neighbourly barbecue. What was wrong with me? I should be happy. We had new members of the Homestead.

Then we found out that we’d have to stay in town overnight. Grandma didn’t just need work done, she needed a whole new cybernetic limb. She kicked up a ruckus and Da didn’t look too pleased either, when we returned to the surgery and heard. The good news, said the Doctor, was that he had just the right model of leg in stock and it was almost the correct size. He could effect the replacement almost immediately. But it was going to be expensive. Da blanched when he heard the figure.

‘Don’t pay it,’ cried Grandma, lying there on the Doctor’s bench. ‘Just take both my legs right off, why don’t you? What does an old biddy like me want legs for anyway?’

But Da told her she was shaming him, carrying on so. He said, yes, she would be having the leg, thank you, and he quickly made an appointment for the fitting the very next day. Grandma was helped down from the examining bench by Toaster and now she was looking smug at the prospect of a whole new robotised limb.

That night we stayed at the home of old Ruby, Grandma’s last surviving girlhood friend. Over the years we had stayed with her a number of times and her ramshackle place was familiar. She was a gruff old lady who’d lived through some rough times. She always boasted that she’d buried three husbands and nine babies and whenever she said that she always scared Al and me half to death.

Her house was pretty dirty and nasty inside. Ruby kept small lizard birds as pets and they left their slimy droppings just any old place. They skulked about in the rafters of every room and it was easy to imagine they were thinking up ways of doing their mess on us, or pecking out our eyes.

Ruby also had great piles of papers everywhere. Books and magazines in sliding heaps, dangerous as the shifting sands. All these things had been salvaged years ago from one of the crashed ships. Ruby’s home was the town’s unofficial library, though no one ever came by to read. Maybe because everything was stuck with lizard mess and old feathers.