Father elected to finish cleaning the diner himself the next morning, deciding to send me back to school. I confess to being relieved. I preferred laboring under the iron hand of Miss Haddersham, who hammered information into our stubborn skulls with all the delicacy of John Henry driving steel. Miss Haddersham considered her students a kind of affliction, I believe, a malady of the soul she’d acquired for the sins of a former life. She was short, soft, and round. Her body was made for grandchildren to fold themselves into, but her heart was designed for a harder purpose: driving cattle or running a prison house. God save the child who misapplied an apostrophe in her essay book, or who failed to appreciate the sublimity of Alexander Pope. She paced before the chalkboard in long, hungry strides, and she patrolled the aisles between our desks like a Hun looking for a breach in the Great Wall.
All of this was made endurable by the presence of my friends, Brenda Lewis and Dottie Olsen. “Friends” might be a strong term; we spent time with each other more by default than by choice. Neither popular nor pariahs, we each struggled making friends for our own reasons. I had a personality some found prickly or overwhelming; Brenda was a Black girl (and despite the egalitarian ambition of the colony’s founders, it seemed we couldn’t leave our prejudices behind); and Dottie was so intensely shy that a lot of folks thought she must be simple. Circumstances made us allies. We sat together to have our lunch at midday, and when the class broke off into group study, we naturally fell in with each other. I found them at our usual place when we were dismissed for lunch—sitting in the shadow of a storage shed a few hundred feet from the schoolhouse.
They received me with uncharacteristic silence, and I was immediately put on guard. I sat down with them and opened my bag lunch. Father, perhaps feeling sorry for me, had packed me a sticky bun as a treat. I ignored the thin sandwich and took it out first, pulling off a hunk and shoving it into my mouth.
“Where’d you get that?” Dottie said.
“From my lunch bag,” I said, waving the bag and bugging my eyes at her.
Dottie lowered her eyes in embarrassment, and right away I felt bad about it.
“Don’t act like that,” Brenda said. And then, to Dottie: “She got it from the diner. Where else?”
“I didn’t mean it,” I said. I looked at Dottie. “Want a piece?”
She nodded her head, so I gave her one. Naturally I had to give Brenda one, too, and suddenly half my bounty was gone. I felt resentful about it—they weren’t the ones who’d been robbed, after all. But I tried not to let it show.
“I thought you didn’t have nothing left at the diner,” Dottie said.
“That ain’t true. We still got plenty.” That was an exaggeration, of course. We didn’t have plenty anymore. But we were far from cleaned out. And anyway, I didn’t want to risk my sudden celebrity by admitting the truth.
“Is it true one of them was a woman?” Dottie asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“I know who it is,” Brenda said.
I stared at her. “No, you don’t. How could you?”
“She’s a carter, like my dad. Takes things from one settlement to another. Her name’s Sally Milkwood. She goes to different places than he does, though.”
“What, like Brawley’s Crossing?”
“Other ones. Farther-out ones.”
“There ain’t no farther-out ones.”
“That’s not what my folks say. My folks say there’s Indians.”
She said that last word in a dangerous hush. I found the notion absurd, and vaguely thrilling. Aware that I was in danger of losing the stage to Brenda, I changed the subject to Silas Mundt and the cultists.
“One of them was from a desert cult,” I said. “Maybe one of the cannibal cults.”
It worked. They watched me hungrily. “How can you tell?” Dottie asked. “Did one of them try to eat you?”
“I think they ate before they got there. Silas had blood on his mouth, though. Probably a little snack. A baby, I suppose.”
“Ugh!” They were delighted.
“He had a moth symbol burned onto his jacket.” I leaned in a little bit. “One of the ones that live in dead people.”
Dottie recoiled. “That’s gross.”
Brenda seemed unimpressed. “It’s not gross. It’s a grave moth. They cultivate flora in the bodies. They turn people into little gardens.”
I frowned. I hadn’t heard that. It sounded morbidly beautiful.
“How do you know?”
Brenda shrugged. “I listen to my parents talk when they think I’m asleep. Dad knows a lot about bugs. I think those cultists worship them or something.”
“Why would people worship moths?”
“Because the Moth cultists grow ghosts, and moths are attracted to ghosts.”
More nonsense. I felt like she was trying to upstage me. “You made that up.”
“I did not! I told you, my parents talk about this stuff. I pay attention.”
Although it hadn’t been an attack, it felt like one. My face felt hot. I wanted to tell her that I would listen if I had parents who talked, but I didn’t. My mother was gone and my father only talked to her ghost.
Before I could open my mouth, Dottie fired her biggest gun. “Well, my parents don’t believe you were really robbed anyway. They said you’re making it up.”
“… what?”
“My mama said you made it all up so you can hide more food.”
I was so stunned I couldn’t even feel angry. I just looked at her, and then at Brenda, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. If this was what my friends thought, how many others thought the same? How many thought we were hoarding food for ourselves? How many thought we were the liars and the thieves? Was this what the sheriff meant when he was talking about troubling notions?
I stood up suddenly, ready to fight, alarming them both. Ashamed—by their fear, by their suspicions—I turned and fled. I left my books and my bag in the classroom, left my lunch and my half-eaten sticky bun. Something was on fire in my head, something I could not recognize and that drove me into the street, away from the school and from the town square, away from the diner and even my own hab, away from Father. Away from all of it.
THERE WAS ONLY one place to go in New Galveston when you wanted to get away from everything. When even the deep desert didn’t seem far enough, and nothing would do but another world.
Joe Reilly’s saucer, the Eurydice, rested on the launchpad half a mile outside the town limit. On windless days the pink sand and dust covered it like a caul, giving it the appearance of a relic from an older age: something cobwebbed and forgotten. A haunted house full of the ghosts of an entire world.
But windless days were rare here, and normally it was scoured clean. The circumference of the saucer was marred by scorch marks from repeated reentries into the atmosphere, and by the tiny dents and pockmarks left by random small meteors found in the dark hollows of space. Despite these scars, the ship looked fit and capable. Ready to vault back into the sky, which was its natural habitat, and take us all home.
In a small wooden shack erected a hundred yards or so from the launch pad lived Joe Reilly. I wondered sometimes what it must be like to be him. Unlike most of us, he hadn’t come here as a settler. He’d never had any wish to remain on Mars at all. He was just a pilot running a route. He’d arrived here a little over a year ago as part of his regular rotation, expecting to remain for his typical four-month layover. Then the next saucer from Earth would arrive and he would fly home, his own ship laden with passengers, letters, Martian-grown produce, and unrefined tonnage of the Strange, the cultural offerings of Earthers acclimating to a new world.
Then the Silence happened.
Joe Reilly wasn’t the only forced resident. There were the governor and his family, only meant to stay here for a six-year term, half of which had already elapsed; the visitors and tourists from home, including a Hollywood starlet said to be recovering from overwork; a barnstorming baseball team called the Havana Vaqueros, comprised of Cuban and Negro League players; not to mention dozens of visiting family members, prospectors, geologists, and botanists.
All of them, now, permanent Martians.
I stopped at the edge of the launchpad, the tips of my dusty shoes just an inch or two shy of trespassing, and stared up at the underside of the saucer.
From beneath, it reminded me of one of the strange fungus farms Widow Kessler was rumored to cultivate in her basement. While flat and round on top, the underside was a bewilderment of fuselage and piping, great black cones that belched fire and smoke, lights and hatchways and steel plates. It looked like a beautiful puzzle, and it amazed and infuriated me that the minds that had assembled and guided such a magnificent machine could not solve the simple riddle of the Silence.
What happened to Earth? Where did everybody go?
“What are you doing here, kid?”
His voice startled me and I jumped back a step, as though I’d been caught in a crime.
Joe Reilly stood in the doorway to his shack. He was dirty and unshaven, dressed in filthy trousers and an undershirt, his suspenders hanging unused at his sides like yanked circuitry. The room behind him was in shadow; I had the impression that he’d spent his morning in bed, hiding from the world while the rest of us went about the hard work of living in it. It was altogether an appalling image and it bolstered my low opinion of him.
Still, he was a figure of such importance and controversy that he had an aura of mythology about him, and I felt my courage falter.
“Looking at the Eurydice,” I said.
“What for? Nothing’s changed about it.”
“I guess I just wanted to get a close-up view of what a wasted life looks like.”
Something in his face changed. He seemed always surprised by the hatred arrayed against him, and I felt a small, brief sympathy. He put his elbow up against the doorjamb and leaned into it, staring at the ground between his boots. Then he looked back at me and said, “You know, you really are a hateful girl. Do you have any friends at all?”
That stung. In fact, it was true: I didn’t have any real friends. Brenda and Dottie had made that clear. I didn’t have the kind of friends you could go to in times like this, when everyone around you seemed to be malfunctioning in some indefinable way. When all you wanted to do was light the world on fire.
“Watson is my friend,” I said, regretting it immediately.
He gave me a mean little smile. “Your only friend is an Engine,” he said.
“That still leaves me with one more than you got.”
He broke eye contact. I knew I’d beaten him, but it didn’t make me feel good. He said, “You should try being nice to people, you know? It might change your whole life.” He turned around and was about to go back inside when I said, “I want to see inside the saucer.”
I couldn’t believe I’d managed to say it. I didn’t even know I wanted to go in until that moment. He turned back to me. It was clear from his face that he couldn’t believe it either. After a moment, he said, “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
He stepped into the sunlight, the wind catching his sleep-crushed hair and rippling over his clothes. He looked around, as though I might be the advance force of a secret assault team. But we were alone out there, the town low and wind-scuffed behind me, the desert long and barren behind him.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
I shrugged.
He approached me slowly, stopping a few feet away. He put his hands in his pockets, took them out again. I could tell he was nervous. At this distance, I could also tell that he’d been drinking. Prohibition was still in effect back then, and the sight of someone so brazenly in the grip of alcohol unnerved me. It made me wonder if I’d stumbled into a dark situation. His eyes were bloodshot and his face looked old and worn-out, though I knew he had not yet passed his thirties.
“What do you want to go in there for, Anabelle?”
I’d been braced for hostility or contempt, or at the very least a curt dismissal, but his voice was soft. Almost wistful. He was genuinely curious, and—although I could not be sure of it at the time—he asked with kindness.
“I just want to see.” I was quiet, too. The fight had gone out of us both, it seemed.
“It’s not a good idea.”
And just like that I felt the anger move inside me again, like an old snake shifting beneath a rock. But I kept my reason. I didn’t want to be the girl who was too mean to have any friends. “I’m tired of everybody telling me my ideas are no good.”
He actually smiled at that one. “Yeah, well. I guess I know how that feels.” He looked up at the underside of his ship. I tried to read something from his expression, some indication of his real thoughts. But there was no secret message for me there. His face was just a face, and whatever he thought was locked behind it.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea because I don’t think any good can come out of it. I think you’re here to hurt yourself, Anabelle, the way people sometimes do when they’re sad. If you go in there, you’re going to start thinking about what it’ll feel like when the engines are lit, how the walls and the floor will vibrate and how you’ll feel it tremble in your gut. And since that won’t happen, you’re going to come out angrier and sadder than you were when you started.”
“You don’t know how I’d feel about it,” I said, sensing those phantom tremors already. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Yes, I do. Yes, I surely do. There’s not a person here who doesn’t wish for that very same thing.”
“Except you.”
He turned away from me and headed back to his beaten little shack. “Go to school,” he said. “Or I’ll report you for truancy.”
“And I’ll report you for being drunk!”
He waved a hand dismissively and went inside, shutting the door quietly behind himself.
I stood abandoned for a few moments, unaccountably stung by his dismissal of me, and even more by the things he had said. There was no reason to care what this man thought, but he had spoken my secret fear aloud, and it rattled me to hear it.
I sat on the sand, leaning against one of the Eurydice’s struts. The sun perched at its apex, and Mars was nearly as warm as it ever got. I stayed under the shadow of the saucer, trying to decide where to go. The thought of crawling back under the malignant glare of Miss Haddersham—not to mention into the orbit of my traitorous friends—was too ridiculous to contemplate. Home was no good; Father was in his dark place, and there was no room for me there. And because I was skipping school, I would have to stay away from town. Adults were meddlesome people, and I wouldn’t be able to walk ten yards before somebody would want to know my business. So I kept my back to New Galveston and I looked out toward the desert, where our doom seemed to gather in vast, invisible forces. Hunger. Drought. The cultists with their sinister designs. The Strange, a manifest derangement growing through the very rock of the world.
The wind nipped at my clothes and my hair, and the sand blew in great, soft curls out in the distance. I found myself wishing for one of those sandstorms of apocalyptic beauty, like I’d seen in the paintings of the early settlers. Something to carve us back down to our essentials.
I don’t know how long I sat there, mesmerized by the zephyrs skimming across the sands. At some point I stopped thinking in concrete terms or with any identifiable intent; instead I fell into a kind of waking trance, my mind dispensing with thought in favor of drifting clouds of mood and perception, so that I became for a while a vessel for longing, for sadness, for resolve, and even for a peaceful resignation. It was a rare thing to be able to indulge in this kind of separation from the moment, and later I wondered if that was what it was like to be a child on Earth, sitting beneath a summer sun while the wind rippled grass instead of sand, having no more immediate concern than what was playing on the radio later that evening, or what your mother might make you for dinner.
“Well, get up, then.”
Joe Reilly was standing over me, still in a state of moral disrepair, but with his hair slicked back and his suspenders up over his shoulders where they belonged. I noticed that the sun had shifted its position in the sky, and the day had progressed well beyond noon.
“I wasn’t hurting nothing,” I said, climbing sullenly to my feet. My leg muscles had seized up and I took a moment to rub some life back into them.
“You really want to see inside the ship?”
I wasn’t sure if he was playing some kind of trick on me. I wanted to say something clever, to let him know that I was too sophisticated to be fooled by him, but my mind was empty and my want was great. “Yes,” is what I said, and there wasn’t even a hint of sophistication in it. Just wide-open hope.
“All right then,” he said. “Let’s make it quick.”
A HATCH OPENED in the smooth plain of metal above me, descending jerkily to the ground with a sound of shearing metal.
“Is it supposed to sound like that?”
He regarded it unhappily as it completed its slide, speaking only when it had finished. “No. It needs to be serviced. It was due for maintenance when it got back to Earth.”
“Can you fix it here?”
“I can do some. But I’m just a pilot. This thing needs experts.”
“What about Mr. Wickham? He fixes Engines. I bet he’d help.”
Mr. Wickham lived in Dig Town, but he was one of the few who made regular trips to New Galveston.
“I said experts. Harry doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Now come on, climb up.”
The on-ramp was wide and smooth, allowing for handcarts to pass to and fro. A handrail stretched along one side for the passengers. The interior was lit; since it would be foolish to keep running the lights while not in use, I presumed they were activated by the on-ramp. I could see the ceiling from my vantage point: the joint of two metal plates, with naked rivets running along a welded seam.
I was five years old when my parents brought me here, so of course I’d been in a saucer before—this one, or one just like it. We’d spent endless weeks crossing the distance between planets, but my memory of the interior was impressionistic. I remembered it being very comfortable, the way I imagined the inside of a rich person’s house. I remembered a big room with toys and games, where I spent time with other kids. We were all too young to be anything but bored.
Joe walked up the ramp, and I followed him. We made our way down a short, unadorned passageway of metal plate. He passed by an open door on his left, and I stopped to look. Like the hall we were in, the one the door opened onto was naked steel. It ascended steeply to another door, standing open at its far end. I saw a glittering bank of lights within, and a wall with receptacles for cylinders just like the ones we used to power our Engines. The corner of a scuffed window showed the Martian sky.
“Come along, Anabelle.”
“Is that where you fly the ship?”
“Come along.”
The hallway curved to the right and we entered the passenger side of the vessel. Here the walls were paneled with wood, the floors were carpeted, and the rooms, when in flight, were illuminated by electric lamps. We passed through a series of them, arranged like a small labyrinth, though I found that I knew instinctively which room would adjoin with another, more often than not. There was a small theater, with tables and chairs arranged around a narrow stage; a library, which Mother had frequently haunted; and a playroom, which seemed so much smaller to me now. The floor was clean and orderly, the toys and the board games and the art supplies all secured in their places. It had never been this clean during flight. I walked into the corner and experienced a thrill of delight when I found my initials scraped into the molding along the floor, along with those of every other child who burned frustrated hours in this room. So this was the ship I’d traveled on after all. I relished the symmetry of it.
Another long hallway curved along the circumference of the ship and led me to the observation deck, a wide room with comfortable chairs and tables and a service counter that adjoined a small kitchen, where my parents had occasionally donated their time. A huge window dominated the room. We’d watched Earth recede behind us as we left—something I recall vividly, as Mother had made such an issue of it, demanding I sit with her on her lap—and later we watched the astonishing gulf of deep space, as still as a painting, during the long months of travel. Finally, we witnessed Mars appear there, too, the glaring red eye that would be our home. We watched it come with hope and fear, but mostly with exhausted relief.
Now, of course, all it showed me was sand and rock. Miles upon miles of sand and rock. A dark serration ridged the horizon, marking the boundary of the vast Peabody Crater. This was where huge deposits of the Strange breached the surface, eroded by the wind and blowing freely over the sand. Where ghosts were rumored to wander. I wondered if you could see them from here.
Caves were said to wend through the boulders littering the middle of the crater, remnants of an ancient meteorite, and it was widely believed that the cultists made their homes there. I imagined them burrowing into the ground, into their dark holes, bearing my mother with them like Persephone into hell.
Persephone, though, had a savior.
“I told you,” he said.
“Why won’t you take us home?”
“You know the reasons. Let’s not go through it all again. Christ, I have to say this every month at town hall. I’m tired of it.”
He was right. I did know them. Everyone did. The ship could not take everyone. No one knew what we would be going back to. There was only enough fuel for a one-way flight; if the Earth was ruined, then it was a death sentence for everyone on board. The ship might be useful in other ways: it could be scrapped for parts and used to keep the failing Engines running; the fuel and the oil could be repurposed for the Engines, too, and it was beyond debate that the Engines were vital to our survival.
It was the fear of firing the only bullet in your gun, and missing.
But this was a minority opinion. It was nothing in the face of the bereavement we all felt for our home, and for the people still there—even for those of us who never planned on returning. It was a wonder to me that Joe Reilly had been able to keep his life during that first year after the Silence started. I am convinced that if anyone else had the faintest notion of how to fly the saucer, or even if they believed that they might learn how to do it, then Reilly would have found himself the recipient of a misdirected bullet, or the victim of a freak house fire. At the very least he would have spent his days wasting away in one of the sheriff’s jail cells, a traitor to his own people.
But no one else knew how to fly it. It was absurd. Even as a child I was astounded that there were not fail-safes in place. What if the pilot had taken ill, or what if he’d suffered an accident? Who would have flown the ship then? I suppose the thinking at the time was that the next ship would always be along shortly, stocked with an extra pilot once we’d radioed the situation.
That was my first lesson in how tenuous our grasp on civilization really was. It made me wonder if the Silence, too, was all down to some catastrophic bungling, some calamity born of simple, garden-variety incompetence.
We’d been blinded by optimism. We represented the first flush of our expansion into the stars. After Mars, what would come next? The moons of Jupiter? Saturn? Would we follow the Germans’ example and launch a generation ship to fly past it all, out into the bright stellar fields? All of this seemed not only possible, but inevitable. No one thought it would end the way it did. No one counted on God’s indifference.
I knew all the reasons Joe Reilly gave for not going home. I knew the reasons the governor gave.
But I also knew the real reason.
Fear.