This all happened a long time ago: in 1931, almost a full year after the Silence began. Back then, we still measured years the way we did on Earth. That would have made me fourteen. Seven, according to Martian reckoning. But nobody used the Martian way then. That would come later.
What I remember most about being a girl during the first year of the Silence was the terrible presence of the saucer. I could see it from my bedroom window in our little hab, and I would stare at it sometimes in the evening, as the sky was opened up to the stars, drawing out crowds of earthgazers. The saucer rested in a declivity just beyond the border of the town. Its dome rose above the low metal roofs of the habs like a squat silver hill, reflecting the light of the setting sun. Sometimes Mr. Reilly, its pilot, would go inside and fire up the engines—just to keep them in working order, he’d say. When he did that, the lights around its circumference would ignite in a bright blue radiance. The light reflected from the sides of our habs, making New Galveston look like a handful of blue diamonds dropped in the desert.
Mr. Reilly didn’t run the engines often, though. The reason he gave was that it used fuel, and fuel had to be conserved if we were ever going to dare the trip home. But the real reason, which I knew even then, was that seeing the saucer all lit up made people a little crazy. They started thinking too hard about climbing in and going home. And nothing fired up an argument in those days like talk of going home.
Serious arguments were things to be avoided, if possible. Sheriff Bakersfield had only a few cells in his jail, and there were no facilities available for long-term confinement. What’s more, we didn’t know if we’d be able to keep growing enough crops to feed everyone as it was; we didn’t want to face the question of whether we should use some of that food for permanent prisoners.
So mostly the saucer stayed quiet and dark. It had acquired the somber aspect of a monument. Sometimes it felt more like a tombstone.
I felt its presence as I ran toward the town square, even though I couldn’t see it from my vantage point. It was like a manifest insult.
The picture had already started. The screen looked like a silver pool turned on its side, shedding a flat light in the darkness. Rows of wooden chairs were set out in rank and file before it, with people affixed to them like dark little mushrooms. The mighty heat lamps that surrounded the town and permitted us to survive outside at night had been brought more closely in, creating a wide pocket of afternoon warmth; it was an indulgence, but one the governor allowed from time to time. The movies soothed anxieties.
On the screen I saw the jungles of Earth—something I had never seen in real life, something I would never see. I grabbed the first two grown men I encountered and ordered them to follow me and to arm themselves and to fetch the doctor and to fetch the sheriff and to secure the town and who knows what else. Though it must have surprised them to receive directives from a half-grown girl, they could see the distress in my face, and they moved to action.
In minutes we’d managed to transport my father to our hab, where Dr. Land hovered beside him, crumbs from his dinner still stuck to the long ends of his fine white mustache. Our hab was standard-issue for a family of three: two bedrooms, each with space for little more than a bed, a bureau, and a breath; one living area composed of a small dinner table and chairs, a writing shelf that folded flat against the wall and hitched there, a kitchen, and barely enough space for whatever personal effects might have accompanied us from Earth. All of this crammed like gunpowder into our little aluminum bullet. When the rain fell against our roof it sounded like the German infantry, or so my father told me.
When I joined him at his bedside, forcing my way through the clucking neighbors gathered in the living room, my father had come back to consciousness and was vomiting into a pail Dr. Land had positioned by his head. The stink of it filled our little home. It shocked me: it made what had happened suddenly real, irrevocable. I suppose I expected to enter that room and see Father standing straight and sure, knowing precisely what to do, restoring order. Instead he was sick. I didn’t understand why being struck should make him vomit, and that it did so seemed to indicate a peculiar weakness in him. It was as though he was dissolving in front of me.
He beckoned me closer, saying my name in a muted voice. I stood there silently and let him touch my face.
“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
“No, but Dad, they—”
“Hush.” Once assured of my safety, he seemed to have no interest in learning the particulars of the robbery. “Let me lie, Anabelle. Go on back and lock up. Get someone to go with you.”
Dr. Land put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, there’s no need for an escort, I don’t think. This whole town is bustling with the news. Those boys are long gone by now.”
“They weren’t just boys,” I said. “There was a woman, too.”
The doctor cast a doubtful eye upon me. “Well, in any case, I think you’ll be just fine on your own. Go on and do as your daddy tells you.”
Father had turned his face to the wall. He did not look at me as he said, “Please, Anabelle. Do as I ask.”
As I headed to the front door, I cast a glance into my own room, where Watson waited for me, heavy and solid in the shadows, the orange light from his eyes like little candles in the gloom.
“Shall I accompany you, Miss Crisp?” he said. I thought of the hero I’d named him after and felt ridiculous. John Watson, the character, was an ex-soldier, a capable fighting man, and a sharp intellect. The idea that a Kitchen Engine could protect me was absurd, as he’d already proven.
“No,” I said. “You’re useless.”
He turned away, back toward my room. As his head rotated away from me, the lights of his eyes disappeared from my view. It felt like an omen.
THE DINER WAS only a couple of blocks from our hab. I looked down the road to the town square and saw that the film had been shut off, the screen folded up and put away. People were collecting the rows of chairs and taking them back to the classrooms and the churches. A woman saw me walk by and hollered something at me, but I didn’t stay to find out what.
A cluster of men were gathered at the diner, which looked as bright and busy as a workday lunch rush. I pushed my way through the front door, into a discussion already underway about what to do.
Wally Bakersfield, the heavyset, middle-aged sheriff of New Galveston, was in the middle of surrendering. “Pursuit at this hour would be too dangerous,” he said. Hearing that almost dropped me to my knees. I had assumed that there would be only one option here, and that all voices would be unanimous in its support. That Sheriff Bakersfield of all people advocated bowing the head to these wretches indicated a weakness at the core of ourselves, one I would not have given credence to even an hour earlier. I was reminded of my father vomiting into a bucket. “Best to wait until morning,” he said. “We’ll have daylight on our side.”
“By that time they’ll be miles away!” I shouted. Several of the men, who had not seen me enter, turned to look at me with expressions as various and cloudy as their own cowed hearts. “They’ll disappear into the desert! You all know that!”
A big blond farm boy—one of the Dunne boys, a beefy clod named Fenris—put his hand on my shoulder and suggested I go back to check on my father, who was no doubt in need of a daughter’s ministrations. He smiled at me the way you smile at boisterous children, or at good-natured dogs in the high reaches of enthusiasm.
I wanted to go. I was small in a grove of tall men with loud opinions, and though I was typically not shy with my own, that was with my peers. These were adults accustomed to being taken seriously, accustomed to reacting to hardship with wisdom and careful methodology, accustomed most of all to doing these things free from the buzzing of little girls.
But it felt wrong to leave the diner to this crowd of angry men. There were nine or ten of them at this point, stalking around like ants from a kicked nest, talking in big voices about what they would have done if they’d been here, and the necessity for prudence now that it was past.
One of them came out of the back room and said it was all picked over; there was nothing left. They speculated about my father’s future and came to grim conclusions.
“It’s just too risky, keeping all this food in one place,” someone said. “He was asking for trouble.”
“I fear that if it weren’t the outlaws, it would have been one of us before much longer.”
“Now, Jacob—”
“You know I’m right. It’s just going to get worse. You mark me. Once the larders get light, you watch what happens.”
“We’re a God-fearing people,” someone else said. “Not savages. God will see us through.”
“God never set foot on this rock. It’s red for a reason. Red and cold.”
“Don’t let Preacher Spivey hear you talk like that! He’ll drown us in sermon.” This was followed by an easy laughter.
I couldn’t abide it any longer. These men were jawing like they were sharing a smoke after dinner. “And what of the thieves that came in here and attacked my father and stole from us? Why do you keep going on like you was some kind of philosophers, when you could be out reclaiming what we lost? There was only three of them!” I turned to the sheriff. “One of ’em’s called Silas, and he’s with the Moths! There was a woman, fat with short dark hair! Two of them’s eyes were shining green.”
He cut his eyes away from me. He looked troubled, and I thought I knew why.
“Dig Town,” someone said.
“Assemble some men who ain’t scared of the dark and bring them back here!”
“You curb that ignorant tongue, young lady!”
It was Jeremiah Shank, the most loathsome man on Mars. He was tall and too thin and I was sure he walked in the favor of the Devil, whose approving gaze pinched his face into a permanent scowl. He worked as the colony’s cobbler, and he wasn’t a very good one. It remains my fervent belief that he made every shoe a fraction too small in an effort to pull the spirit of the colony into accord with his own.
“Will you have us race into darkness to be set upon like lambs? Will you have them fatten their stores with our own flesh? You’re a child, with a child’s notion of the world. Go back to your daddy, as you were told.”
It was especially galling to hear direction from him; everyone knew his own children had run off to Dig Town once his wife had died. He had no standing to say anything to me, as far as I was concerned.
I felt the hand on my shoulder again. Fenris leaned into my ear and said, “Come, Anabelle. You’re not doing any good here.”
“But I’m supposed to lock up,” I said weakly, and I felt the heat of tears gathering behind my eyes. The diner belonged to my father, and to my mother, and to me, too. It had been invaded twice now tonight, each time by offensive, entitled oafs strutting about like it was their own. It felt abhorrent to leave them there, like leaving a mob of unruly boys in a room full of delicate things. It felt like surrendering ownership of something precious.
“I’ll walk you back,” Fenris said.
“I needed your help earlier tonight. I don’t need it now.”
He looked properly chastened, though I wondered, unkindly, whether it was real or only for show. I always thought that there was something of the actor in Fenris, that he knew how he was supposed to behave and acted accordingly, though he did not feel it in his heart. Looking into his face, which radiated kindness, I wanted to slap him for the liar I believed him to be.
But I did not. I shouldered past him, hot with shame, and I left the diner in defeat. The light from the windows painted a bright wash over the ruddy sand at my feet, and the clamor of their useless talk followed me like a stink in the air.
The paths connecting the homes and the buildings of our colony were well trod, both by human feet and by the plodding of our Engines. I could have followed the packed dirt to my own front door in my sleep, and according to my mother had once done that very thing, but the thought of going back to the sick-smelling hab, where my father languished in his compromised dignity, held no appeal for me. I turned right, off the road, toward the swelling darkness of the desert night.
Colonists often had difficulty getting used to the colder temperatures of Mars, upon their first arrival. The sun is smaller here, the days shorter and cooler. Twilight is the common mood of our sky. I was only five when I came here, overwhelmed by everything new and wonderful, but I still remember the unpleasant shock of it. You did not want to be caught outside the protection of the municipal heat lamps at night, and I found myself wishing for my coat as I approached New Galveston’s edge. I wrapped my arms around myself as a strong gust of wind carved into me, spraying my face with sand that collected in the corners of my eyes and sifted down my shirt. I peered through it, across the flat black plain to the distant rise where I once would have been able to see the low lights of Dig Town, where they mined the mineral called the Strange, which gave the illusion of life to our Engines. But Dig Town was mostly dark these days.
Beyond that was the vast, haunted Peabody Crater: where the Moths dwelt, where the old War Engines still roamed, where spirits were rumored to walk.
I looked for any sign of the thieves: the light of a lantern, the movement of a shadow. There was nothing, of course, other than the long coils of sand that seemed to extend into the night like mystical, winding trails, their far ends connecting to mysteries and riddles, to fantastical cities, or to the long death of the world.
The stars overhead were a shimmering curtain. Somewhere up there was Mother. What she was thinking—if she was thinking anything at all—was just another mystery.
FATHER WAS ASLEEP when I got home. The door to his bedroom was ajar, and by the splinter of light that extended into it I could see his back as he faced the wall. Still wearing his undershirt, he looked small and boyish in the double bed. His work shirt was draped over a nearby chair. The sick-bucket rested on the floor within easy reach, exuding an evil stench.
I retreated to my own room and changed into my nightclothes. As I settled into bed, the orange glow of Watson’s eyes rotated again into view. I could hear the grit in his servitors: no matter how much we cleaned and polished the Engines, the sand would never completely come out. They needed deep maintenance, new parts. Parts that would never come.
Well, I thought. Somebody will think of something. The Engines won’t die. They can’t.
“Are you well, Miss Crisp?”
“Yes, Watson.”
“Mr. Crisp is ill. He’s still suffering from the attack.”
“Yes, I know. No one is doing anything about it.” I felt despair threaten again.
“Surely it will be put to rights soon enough. The guilty will atone. Justice will prevail. This is civilization, after all.”
“Yes, Watson. Let’s go to sleep now.”
“Good night then, Miss Crisp. Dream well.”
Watson always bid me good night that way. It amused me that he issued it as a directive, as though it were a job one could perform well or poorly. I wondered what he understood about the notion of dreams, wondered if he was curious about what they were like. On good nights, when I felt cocooned in the security of my family and the optimism that comes from faith in the world’s order, I would allow myself to consider the possibility that he did not have to wonder at all, that perhaps Watson and all other Engines dreamed as we did. I imagined that such dreams would be beautiful, as stark and clean as bones scoured by sand. A series of numbers, an ordering of geometrical theorems. A catalogue of answers to impossible questions, glimmering like steel in sunlight.
But that night I knew the interior of his mind for what it was: programmed algorithms; the illusion of personality. He was as cold and as dark as the space we had crossed to come here.
Again, I heard the grating sound as he rotated his head away from me. The light from his eyes lit the corner of my little room and faded, as he dimmed them in deference to my need for sleep.