Silas led us down the same tunnel he’d emerged from. It descended steeply. Joe and I followed him, and Sally brought up the rear. There weren’t any electric lights set up down here, and the meager light behind us disappeared after we turned a corner. We followed the beam of Silas’s flashlight; he swept it back and forth in constant motion, so we could tell where the walls were, when the passageway narrowed or the ceiling dropped close. The temperature fell precipitously. It occurred to me that the sun had never touched these walls, not once in all the long Martian years. Until the Moths moved in, perhaps nothing living ever had either.
I glanced behind us, fancying I sensed a presence keeping pace. But everything behind was darkness. I imagined something large there, with a hard metal wall where a face should be and a cold algorithm for a heart. I thought of poor Watson keeping to his station by the crevice in the bitter cold, the War Engines circling like carrion birds. I prayed Silas was right, and that they would leave him alone.
We continued to descend for some time, until at last we saw a bloom of light on a distant wall. We stepped into a vast chamber, open to the sky; above us was a silver spray of stars. The flashlight had limited reach, but a luminous green mist covered the cavern floor, which stretched for many hundreds of feet. Rising from it were rows of translucent crystalline structures of various heights, flickering like film projections, steaming like organs wrested from a butchered pig. They were at once organic and mineral, at once solid and spectral. Maneuvering among them, a farmer tending his demented crop, was the bent figure of the astronaut I’d seen waving at us from the precipice. His suit was degraded, rotted and torn in various places. Sparks occasionally spit from behind a bent metal plate on his chest, and a network of heat coils glowed from one arm where the fabric had entirely melted away.
To one side of this garden stood a spaceship. It was much smaller than the Eurydice, a large sphere with a viewport in the front and a short ramp extending from its belly to the ground. It was old, battered, and scratched; it looked like something excavated from the ground rather than descended from the clean corridors of space. I recognized it from our discussions in Miss Haddersham’s classroom: the Lamplighter, the vessel piloted here nearly seventy years ago by Chauncy Peabody, the first man on Mars.
The astronaut straightened, seeming to observe us as we approached. The light was too dim to make out his features behind the faceplate, but I detected movement there: a kind of dark-winged fluttering, as though he were not a man but a spirit made of feathers. Mushrooms were attached to one side of the faceplate’s interior. A chill rippled over my skin.
Silas guided us between the weird structures. Sounds came from some of them: weeping, laughing, hints of faraway voices. Other kinds of sound, too: long, nearly inaudible grinding; frequencies of noise that vibrated against the interior of my skull like continental tremors, the musings of earth and stone.
At the base of each of these strange, insubstantial structures was a cylinder affixed to a metal rod pounded into the ground. I knelt to look more closely. Each cylinder had been cracked open on one side, exposing the receptacle that housed the granules of the Strange, making them vulnerable to the influence of the ground-clinging mist. Breached and exposed this way, each functioned as a kind of seed for the apparitions rising from them.
A garden of ghosts, grown from the receptacles of the Strange contained within the cylinders.
Mother was down here.
Sally touched my shoulder. “Get up, Anabelle.”
I couldn’t. My muscles wouldn’t work. I felt light-headed, nauseated. “Mother?” A whisper at first, then a shout. “Mother?” One of these ghosts must be hers.
“Silence the child,” said a new voice: an older man with a cultured accent, a kind you didn’t hear much in New Galveston.
Sally knelt beside me. “You stop your caterwauling. We don’t know nothing yet. Let’s figure it out before we start raising hell.”
Too dazed to argue, I let her haul me to my feet.
“Thank you, Mrs. Milkwood. I’m obliged.” The voice belonged to the astronaut, who knelt to continue his work. He was pulling the cylinders from their rods and placing them delicately into round slots on a metal tray, like rows of test tubes.
I could see then what seemed wrong about his head. Behind the astronaut’s faceplate was a skull, its forehead resting against the cracked glass, utterly inert. Crawling over it, fluttering against the faceplate, were several fully grown black moths. I noticed then one or two occasionally crawl out of a rent in the suit, a few more clinging to the exterior. He was infested with them.
I felt as though I was looking at a child’s Halloween drawing. The skull’s mouth did not move when it spoke. The voice coming from the external speaker sounded somehow inhuman, like a thing that had never had warmth or breath behind it.
Joe had half a smile on his face, but his eyes held terror. He looked like he wanted to run. “What the hell is this?”
“Watch your mouth,” Silas snapped. “Mr. Peabody don’t care for harsh speech.”
“Especially not in the presence of a lady,” the thing said. Looking at me, it corrected itself. “Two ladies. How do you do, miss? My name is Chauncy Peabody. Forgive me for not extending my hand. Time does not allow me the luxury of formalities, as I’m sure you understand.”
“That’s all right,” I said weakly. “My name is Anabelle Crisp.”
“And you, sir?”
“… Joe Reilly.”
The thing turned toward Silas. “The pilot. I don’t need a pilot. Why did you bring these people here?”
“I didn’t. They came on their own. The girl there wants to take one of these cylinders back home with her. I figured she came all this way, why not.”
The thing looked at me again. The skull jostled as it turned, making a dusty sound. I noticed a tether drooping from the suit, trailing off into the mist, in the direction of the Lamplighter. It served as an umbilical, meant to connect the suit to the ship’s oxygen and to its motherboard. This suit was a crude Engine with a corpse trapped inside.
Chauncy Peabody’s corpse: the first man on Mars. This talking monstrosity had once been a man with a complicated legacy, celebrated by our textbooks but spoken of darkly by my mother.
Chauncy Peabody—the living one—had been a professor of astronomy at the University of North Carolina, where he had served with distinction for the first ten years of his career, until Jefferson Davis called him to duty in service to the Confederate States of America upon the outbreak of the Civil War. Peabody refused. The history books will tell you that he cited as justification his belief in the equality of all men under God, and as a corollary his opposition to the institution of slavery. According to Mother, this wasn’t true. In fact, he cared little for the plight of the slave in America. He cared only for his research on Mars, which he had come to believe was not only habitable by human beings, but reachable in a relatively short trip. Hoping to avoid conscription so he could continue his work, he wrote a letter to the president, underscoring the importance of his studies and even suggesting the potential of the red planet as a new home for the Confederacy.
Jefferson Davis was appalled at the notion of ceding any ground to the Union—let alone the whole of the Earth—and proved unsympathetic to the professor’s arguments. Peabody was discharged from his position, and though the history books will not say this either, he was forced to leave in haste under cover of night, lest the morning find him hanged as a traitor. Peabody did not like his chances crossing through Virginia, so he fled west, where he trusted that a more indifferent population would cause him less trouble. Eventually he found himself in Galveston, Texas, the city from which he eventually launched the Lamplighter. He landed on Mars, sent one transmission home, and was never heard from again.
Or so I had thought.
“They’re not yours to give, nor hers to take,” he said. “They’re mine.”
“The hell they are,” I said. “You stole everything down here. And you can keep it all, as far as I care. I only came for my mother.”
Silas put his hand on my shoulder. I shook it off.
“Mr. Peabody,” he said. “We ain’t gonna be able to take them all with us anyway. You know that.”
Something about the astronaut changed. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it; it was akin to a sudden temperature drop, or a charging of the air before a sandstorm. It radiated like a dark star, a terrible, malignant energy, a brutal intelligence. The moths in the helmet careened in agitation, fragile wings pressed against the glass, frantic bodies hurrying in and out of the skull’s mouth, eyes, a fissure in its head.
The others felt it, too. Even Silas went pale.
“Come away,” he said, and turned quickly toward the Lamplighter, not troubling to see if we followed.
We did.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“It’s Mars—what you call the Strange—alive in him. When the Lamplighter crashed here, it crashed right into one of those veins. It went all over the ship, into the circuitry. What happens to the cylinders we make on Earth happened here, too. It came to life. The Lamplighter is alive. And since the suit is tethered to it, it uses the suit to walk around, to talk to us. Like Sally said: sometimes he thinks he’s Peabody, sometimes he knows he ain’t. It’s those times you got to be careful.”
“What do you mean it came to life?” I said. “The cylinders aren’t alive!”
“They are, though. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They are alive. How do you think you can give the Engines such convincing personalities? There’s life at the root of that. They’re all little fragments of the same being. It’s just that the amounts used in the cylinders are too small to do anything. Mr. Peabody here, in this garden, he’s nurturing them. Like plants. Exposing them to more of it, allowing them to grow.” Silas spoke with an intensity I didn’t like. “He’s a new kind of being, and he’s shepherding a new species into existence. The real Martians.”
The idea rocked me back on my heels. That was why Watson was starting to dream. He was out in the crater, and all that sand laden with the Strange was working its way into his body. Feeding what was already there. Who was he turning into?
Joe said, “Where the hell does that leave us? We have a huge, insane Engine in here and deranged War Engines out there.” I could hear the barely contained panic in his voice.
Silas gave him a brilliant smile. Despite myself, I was reassured by it. He radiated confidence. “He’s not insane. Remember how I told you Mars interprets us through the vessel it’s in? This one sees us through Peabody and his ship. He’s an explorer. He’s a leader. He wants to go back to Earth. He wants to see what’s there.” Gesturing toward the garden of ghosts, he added, “And he wants to bring as much of Mars with him as he can.”
Going back to Earth will end the Silence, I thought. The realization numbed me.
“All he needs now is the Eurydice’s fuel, Joe. He’ll fly you back there to get it.”
“Sally and Anabelle, too,” Joe said.
“Of course. And myself, too, to make sure it gets done. Let’s just not agitate him before then, okay?” He looked at me. “You can have what you came here for. It won’t make a difference to him, or to anything else. It probably won’t make a difference to you, either. It ain’t the same as it was before.”
I knew it, but I didn’t want to hear it spoken aloud. The thought of what being exposed to the Strange might have done to her made me feel sick. But still, I was finding it hard to stay angry at Silas. I was warming to him, despite the rage I’d been nurturing since the robbery. He was, after all, giving me exactly what I wanted. And he was the only one on Mars actively working to go back home. “I understand why you’re helping him outfit the ship,” I said. “But why the garden? Why are you helping do that?”
Silas smiled, his eyes unfocused. “Because it’s beautiful. And because we’re not.”
THE LAMPLIGHTER’S HULL was painted a creamy white, and the ornamentation over the rivets indicated that the ship was of nineteenth-century vintage. A fluttering tarp—once part of a brightly colored tent—had been fashioned into an awning over the entrance. I had a vision of Peabody reclining in a chair underneath it, watching while the living people in his thrall labored in his weird garden.
Within, a hallway stretched in both directions. One way terminated in a ruin of twisted metal beams and plates; the other, though buckled, turned toward the ship’s dark interior.
The hallway canted steeply downward. Sand had blown or trickled in over the many years the ship had been stuck here. A narrow path had been forged through it, but I slipped more than once as I followed Silas down. Absolute darkness soon overwhelmed us. Silas flicked on his flashlight and reached for a switch on the wall. A series of yellow lamps lining the ceiling stuttered into life. One flickered and went out. A few others hummed and sparked but managed to stay lit.
The corridor made a curving circuit around the vessel’s central portion, where I assumed the engines resided. Small storage compartments along the way held oxygen generators and cans of preserved food, most of them ruptured and spoiled. The hallway leveled out and terminated at the main cabin, an area about half the size of my hab back in New Galveston. The sand had filled the chamber once, and though Silas’s people had since removed most of it, small drifts still rested in corners and under control panels. Hanging loosely from the back wall was a foldout cot, one strut snapped, the blankets stiff with sand. What I had first taken to be solid wall, glinting oddly in the dim light, was in fact a bubble of hard glass, built to weather the occasional strike of small meteors and random debris. It had done its job well, withstanding the force of impact when the ship crashed into Mars. Through it we could see the garden, and Chauncy Peabody carefully collecting his cylinders.
The interior walls were made of wood, now dry and cracked. Brass railings were fitted along the circumference of the room. Curtains had once been hung on runners bolted to the ceiling over the window, so one might draw them and indulge in a fantasy of life at home. They had long since rotted away, hanging in black tatters on either side of the glass. A smashed bookshelf reposed against one wall, its spilled contents—treatises on astronavigation, geology, agriculture; biographies and journals of great explorers; as well as a variety of popular novels—mostly buried in sand. Broken china suggested a tea set or dinnerware. A star chart hung from one wall, the portrait of a handsome woman beside it. Papers and charts had been blown all over the room, most of them torn and crumpled beneath the astronaut’s trudging feet. As Joe and Sally took it all in, I stooped and picked one up. It looked like a partial manifest: so many pounds of salt pork, so many jars of preserved tomatoes, so many gallons of water.
Weariness threatened to overwhelm me. The day had held too much: I couldn’t take it all in. Mother was here, somewhere: promised to me, yet still not in my hands. Watson was outside: ostensibly safe, yet surrounded by hostile entities, and alone. War Engines patrolled the entrance to the cave, trying to get in, some already ghoulishly integrated with human bodies. Peabody’s corpse patrolled his macabre garden. Mars itself was alive.
And then there was Silas: the man I’d come here wanting to kill, become my willing ally.
I needed to sleep.
But first there was work to be done, preparing for departure. We put some effort into making the cabin habitable for the short journey to Dig Town, focusing first on returning the heating system to working order. Peabody (not really Peabody, I reminded myself: it was the Lamplighter that was alive; like the War Engines outside, it was using Peabody’s corpse as a kind of puppet) had apparently devoted a considerable portion of his energies into self-preservation, bowdlerizing the parts of the ship that had been crushed or broken in the crash and repurposing them into maintaining the integrity of the cabin, which Silas claimed was the home of his true consciousness. I stared with macabre interest at the bank of cylinder receptacles, just like the one I’d seen on the Eurydice, where the ship’s power center was maintained. Peabody’s consciousness was housed there: self-awareness as either a miracle or a disease.
Silas left us on our own at one point, returning about twenty minutes later. He had a little canvas bag with him, which he opened for me.
“I didn’t know which one it was,” he said. “So I brought ’em all.”
Inside were four cylinders; I recognized them as the ones he’d taken from our diner. My heart beating, I carefully retrieved the one with Mother’s recording. It was cracked, like the others. Dull metal, smudged with oil and gritty with sand. Ugly, clumsy, decidedly mundane. Not like any grail, nor any jewel of Opar.
But it was hers, and I had it again.
After all this, I’d only had to ask, and it was returned.
“Where were they?”
“They were planted in the garden. I just pulled them while Peabody was loading others into the hold. He didn’t know. No reason he has to.”
It was a quiet, profound moment. Joe and Sally watched me, and Joe looked pleased. Silas crouched beside me, strong and confident. Without hesitation or complaint he quietly provided me with what I needed when I asked it of him, shoring up the foundations of a life I’d thought utterly collapsed. I clutched the cylinder tightly, anticipating the look on Father’s face when I brought it back to him. I knew it was Silas who had caused all this in the first place—I hadn’t entirely lost my faculties—but so much more had gone wrong since then that this victory felt profound.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Sure, kid.” He gave me a friendly chuck on the shoulder. “Anyway. Back to it.”
While we worked, Peabody would occasionally come in, each time carrying a tray of cylinders, covered and fastened. He would walk between us, unspeaking, and secure them in a storage closet with several shelves. The closet was too small to accommodate his full garden. I asked what would happen with the rest.
“We’re gonna have to leave a little earlier than we’d planned, thanks to them War Engines,” Silas said. “We were gonna place the ones we couldn’t take in Engines, like your Watson. Since we can’t do that, we’ll leave them where they are. We’re connecting the cylinders with wire in the hopes that the entities that grow will be able to communicate with each other. Or maybe they’ll become one entity. Who knows? In any case, we’re just giving them a boost. They’ll do whatever it is they do. They’re the real Martians. Not us.”
“Why not us?” I said. Everyone in New Galveston was so fixed on getting us all to identify as Martians—especially since the Silence—that it seemed almost heretical to hear a contrary opinion.
“ ’Cause we’re a disease. We never should have come here.”
Joe scoffed.
“What, you don’t think that’s true? Everywhere we go, we lay waste. We take and take and take, and leave nothing behind us. Look at them War Engines outside; that’s how Mars knows us. Killers. Ruiners.”
I remembered what the War Engine had called us. Filth.
“There’s good things here,” Sally said.
“Name one.”
“The tribes.”
This caught me off guard. “You mean Indian tribes?”
“I do. Out past Brawley’s Crossing, which I imagine you believe is the farthest outpost of human life, are the Cherokee and Lakota Nations.”
“What?”
“Didn’t know about them, did you? New Galveston might be the first official colony, but people have been moving back and forth between Earth and Mars for over sixty years. You really think you’re it?”
Brenda had said as much back at school. I never thought for a second she could be right. Were there really that many more people here?
“How many?”
Sally shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
“I don’t believe you. I’ve never seen them.”
“You think they came all this way to shake the white man’s hand? You ain’t seen them because that’s how they like it.” She watched me try to reckon with this news, and so I know she took great joy when she said, “And that’s just the ones I know about.”
“Well anyway,” Silas said, eager to regain the floor, “let them have it. They won’t last long. Nobody who stays here will, thank God. We need to get back home, and we need to stay there. Peabody’s how we do it.”
Conversation slowed after that. The lights were turned low. As we arranged ourselves around the small room—Joe and Sally lying atop their heat tents instead of inside them; Silas leaning back in the pilot’s chair with one leg crossed over the other, a cigar burning in one hand—I felt a weakening of some resistance inside me. Resistance to what, I couldn’t have said at the time, though now I know that it was to everything. To my companions, to my circumstance, to the dissolving order around me. I allowed myself to feel cradled in this warmly lit bubble of safety. With that feeling came a rising sadness, as something I had ignored or fought to suppress saw its chance for a reckoning.
I clutched my mother’s cylinder in my hand, unable to believe I had it at last, and with no need for argument or struggle. The rest of New Galveston could stew in its cowardice, in its pettiness and greed. The Silence had broken them, and it was clear to me then that they would stay that way. But it would not be silent in our home. It would not be silent in my father’s broken heart.
I’d rescued my mother’s voice, and I was bringing it home.
And, maybe, I was bringing home the answer to the Silence itself.