A story from Dreams of Earth

Dreams of Earth

by Ali Jamalzadeh

Fiction · about a 50-minute read

Bes is five, and his father has brought him to watch the ships go.

This is not a thing his father does. Bes knows that already, the way children know the shape of their parents before their names. His father does not go to celebrations or ceremonies. He does not stand in crowds to look at spectacles that produce nothing. But tonight he has woken Bes in the dark and dressed him and brought him here. They have been standing still for some time, and he has not let go of Bes’s hand.

The departure hall is the largest room Bes has ever been in. The far wall is glass from the floor to the high ceiling, and beyond it the ships stand in their cradles on the pad with the fueling arms still on them and the suited crews beneath them, the first people Bes has ever seen outside. Made bigger and slower by the suits, each step taken as if it had to be decided on first. The ships came down a month ago full of strangers, and were emptied, and now they go back. Families stand along a rail at the back of the hall, on a low rise built for watching. Below them, on the open floor, passengers are called forward one at a time to a gate, where a clerk in a heavy gray glove takes the paper ticket from their hand, examines it, then holds it over a small brazier. The paper curls and darkens briefly before it goes up all at once, a yellow flame the size of a hand, and is gone. What is left is a thin wisp of black smoke, wet and snaking in the air, in front of a long corridor of light the passenger disappears into. Nothing burns on Mars. Nothing is permitted to. There is no fire anywhere in the colony that a child could see, and Bes has never seen one, and he watches every ticket go, and so does everyone along the rail. Bes and his father are the only ones not watching a loved one leave. The others wear faces that are anxious and heavy. Here and there along the rail a hand closes and comes to rest on a chest.

The arms come off the ships. The count descends. The first ship lifts on a column of white. His father’s hand tightens on his, and then the second ship, and the third. They rise slower and heavier than Bes imagined. The hall floods pink. The sound comes late and long, gets into the floor, and up into his teeth. Bes watches until they are points and then until they are not. Then his father crouches beside him, which he does not do, and points up through the glass past the emptiness, and Bes follows the finger and finds a blue dot, small, shaking gently in the darkness.

“That’s where they’re going,” his father says. His voice is not the voice he uses.

Bes looks at the dot. He looks at it for a long time. When he looks back at his father, his father’s face in profile is lost to him. A far away expression that Bes has never seen before, and for a moment Bes is more interested in the face than in the sky. His father feels the look and puts his own face back on, all at once, the way a man shuts a drawer. He stands to his full height, takes Bes’s hand, and they walk back to the car.

These are the sync seven ships. His father is twenty-nine.

The dot is Earth. It has held more lives than Mars ever has, lives won and lost, raged against and laid down, and the planet under them raged and lay down too. It can be told as a story with a sad ending. But it has not ended, and this is where it stood when a man and his boy looked up at it.

During the twenty-first century, climate change stepped off the academic stage and into the foreground of geopolitics. The turning point was not the depletion of fossil fuels, but of the world that moved them: nations too old to save, to build, to find a new energy paradigm. The environment, which had been collapsing silently in the background, stopped being silent about it. Rising coastal waters, acidified oceans, accumulated contaminants, species loss, the desertification of arable land, poisoned groundwater, and deforestation were the choir of voices that finally rose to a roar, announcing the loss of Earth’s carrying capacity and drowning out the belligerently confident din of human progress.

Governments by then were used to wrestling with the environment, and many remained confident that technological solutions would be found. Then the surge of climate refugees besieged a developed world already too gray to absorb them. Local markets collapsed and capital fled. Abstracted financial instruments rushed in to speculate on the outcome, amplifying the damage for short-term gain, imploding global markets. The United States, one of the few countries that could still feed and fuel itself and the only one that had been paying to keep the world’s oceans open, stopped, abruptly ending US hegemony. Countries could no longer rely on international specialization and interdependence. It was the era of de-globalization: unsecured trade, pirated shipping lanes, terrorism, and the renewal of long suppressed sectarian violence that sparked civil and international wars the world over.

The wars and their horrors gave way to the more serious problem of depleting economic inputs. Phosphate only exists in a few spots on the globe and travels by sea. No bomb ever matched the destruction of a fertilizer ship that did not sail, and hundreds of millions starved.

Only then did governments lay down their weapons and make an honest appraisal of their situation. Human society woke as if from a daze. Ideas and a way of life that had existed for millennia, that had become as natural as breathing, were finally scrutinized and found wanting. The collapse of the world order retired the implicit assumption of infinite expansion that had undergirded the capitalist framework since the Enlightenment and its industrial revolution. The few governments that survived, and the new ones that cautiously bubbled to the surface in the aftermath, adopted a systems view of human and environmental coexistence. Humanity submitted to management-intensive protocols for restoring the natural world. The birth rates that had already been collapsing in the developed world were now let fall, and finished what the famines began. By the end of the twenty-second century the global population had stabilized at one billion, most living in pastoral settlements, communities spread out over vast tracts of land with minimal ecological footprint.

Gone were the towering buildings and thickly braided highways, the oceans of cement and asphalt that had made up the sprawling cities and rectilinear suburbs. They were recycled or left to decay, grown over and digested. Humanity faded into the background and settled into a slow, modest, recuperative epoch. Ambition replaced by obligation, progress by preservation. Humans were no longer a disease draining the planet of life. They had become its white blood cells, patiently and piously nursing it back to health.

Humanity’s expansionist ambitions were displaced to Mars, where colonies spread out in bubbled domes over the surface of the barren planet. The industrial ambition Earth gave up did not vanish. It went up. Within a century Mars was building its own ships, and Earth’s contribution to the colony became people. Population growth was encouraged and uncapped. The landscape, instead of being preserved and restored as on Earth, was ambitiously modified by monumental engineering and cutting-edge technology into a marginally hospitable, entirely unnatural place. Relations between Earth and Mars were free of enmity, but limited resources and incongruous values led each to rely little on the other, politically, economically, or culturally.

Almost two hundred years later, very little has changed. Ships travel between the two planets every fifteen years. The two orbits keep different time, like asynchronous drum lines that fall into step every fifteen years when the planets come nearest. Both sides agreed their exchanges needed a cadence and a cutoff, and fifteen years is the one the sky gave. This is called an orbital sync. Every fifteen years the ships that cross the darkness carry supplies, delegates, personnel, scientists, and private citizens. Passage can be purchased at extreme cost, or won through political approval, lottery, or scholarship. Most immigrants today are talented and ambitious Earthlings who need Mars to further their research and have their passage sponsored by the Martian government.

But this was not always the case. Circumstances were very different in the early days of Mars Colony One. Humanity underestimated the difficulty of setting up such a remote outpost. They mistakenly thought it was a science and engineering problem. And at first it was. During the first two orbital syncs, the colonists suffered many unexpected physical hardships. But eventually Mars Central became operational, and all the core systems automated. After that, the persistent challenge turned out to be mainly psychological and spiritual.

The early colonists, who had grown up on Earth, often withered under the light of Mars. Something in the unyielding loneliness and immediacy of the surrounding abyss made it impossible to predict how any given person would react to life in the colony. The inky black skies, the reduced gravity, recycled air, cramped spaces. No forests, oceans, clouds, or weather. No birds, snowy mountains, or beach picnics. No money, and therefore no financial coercion to work. No corporations to program people to consume. No political theater or celebrity spectacle to distract. Mars could not afford such wasteful excesses, and the colony laid bare people’s spiritual and existential poverty. The domed cities protected their bodies, but their minds and spirits were left uncovered, as if the vacuum of space could strip away a weakly tethered sense of self. When all your movement in life is running from what you fear toward something you have been programmed to compulsively covet. When you can no longer default to what others have done before you. When you are not made to be somewhere you do not want to be, with people you do not want to be around, to do something you do not want to do, for something you do not need, to live a life you never wanted. Who are you? These were questions many of the early colonists were not prepared to answer. What happened to them was never given an official name. The colonists called it the drift. A man stopped coming to his shift, since nothing made him. Then he stopped coming to meals, and to the drill, was not in his doorway when the sirens ran and everyone stood to be counted. Instead he would be seen two colonies over, where he had no business, riding the line at random, drifting through society the way a loose bolt skitters and careens off an instrument panel in zero gravity. Central never lost one. Sooner or later someone was sent to walk him back to his bunk. Then he stopped leaving it, and lay there awake and withering, like a fallen leaf slowly drying out in the sun, and most who drifted did not come back. The hothouse crews drifted least, so the benches were installed there, for the few who came back and wanted to sit near something growing. Something green, alive the way Earth was, the way they were once.

The testimonies those colonists sent home were harrowing. Immigration to Mars had been sold as a cleansing break from the mistakes of the past, an exhilarating adventure with limitless horizons. For many it turned out to be claustrophobic destabilization and existential desolation. With each crossing fewer people signed on. Earth was still eager to be rid of its restless; Mars was still desperate to grow. Incentives and schemes were tried by both sides, and all of them failed.

The solution finally came from an unexpected source. Later historians would mark it as the first culturally transparent example of the socio-political advantages of Mars Central AI.

Mars had been engineered to operate under the guidance of a deeply integrated AI network, designed to optimize logistics, manufacturing, material fabrication, and the coordination of utilities. Its immigration proposal was the first example of its legislative imagination. It proposed that Mars grant one free passage to Earth to every Martian-born citizen, in perpetuity. Both delegations thought the proposal counterproductive. A provisional implementation found success, so it was quickly drafted into law. It turned out people were less worried for themselves than for their descendants. It was enough to know they were not conscripting their progeny to an inhospitable planet. Each generation could decide for itself. Immigration recovered, and the law kept the planners of Mars honest, beholden to a public that could always leave.

The era of dependence on Earth has long since passed, but the Ticket to Earth stays on the books. It is issued at birth, a card of thick paper. On one face, the citizen’s name, the year of birth, of immigration eligibility, and of early retirement. Paper, on a planet where nothing else is. It is the only ceremonial object in Martian life, and Martians, who have no ceremonies, treat it with a formality they would be embarrassed to explain. Every home has the same kitchen cabinet, and the cabinet has a shallow top drawer, and the drawer is where the tickets are kept, and nothing else is kept there. Provided they have no criminal record and are at least twenty years of age, every Martian-born citizen has the chance every fifteen years to leave for Earth. Since no provision is made for a return, few exercise the option. Most turn the card in at fifty in exchange for a lower retirement age. Those who use it to leave, tend to be in their early twenties when a sync arrives. Young people, drawn by the romance of the old world. Martians born five years before a sync come of age exactly as the next one opens, and they leave far more often than Martians born in other years. The colony has a name for them. Sync babies.

Many adult Martians see Earth as a backwards, savage planet, long past its prime. Its natural splendor wasted on a sloppy and belligerent people, held back by the inertia of bad ideas. Adult Martians remember the pull Earth had on them when they were young, but ascribe such sentiments to self-indulgent, juvenile, anti-establishment thinking. Any decent Martian is expected to grow out of such childish fixations, and become a contributing and responsible citizen. Helping maintain and advance the bulwark of Martian society, against the infinite, disinterested entropic vacuum of inhospitable space and red stone.

In the imaginations of Martian youth, Earth is a pastoral, atavistic fantasy. Open land, blue sky, rugged individualism. Wild beasts, wild weather, unsupervised and independent living. Mystery, danger, majesty, and a deep connection to nature. To them Martian society is cold, sterile, and over-engineered. Every choice has been pre-planned many logistical layers deep, with a constant eye to safety, stability, sustainability, and order. There is no money on Mars. Needs are supplied through the coordinated subsystems of Central, whose decisions are powered by a network of supercomputers fed a blinding volume of data from innumerable sensors, and from that data Central drafts optimal, soberly considered legislation, lightly supervised by a vestigial council of central planners. People are still permitted to live as they choose, but their choices are made from options curated by this highly ordered system. Property is assigned by occupation and calculated need, so standardized as to be culturally invisible. There is no class on Mars. People find varying levels of success by talent, work ethic, and intelligence, but there is no meaningful use for that equity beyond the esteem of others. Those who over-index on success are usually personally fascinated by their work, or driven by a kind of internalized stoicism that took root in the early days of Martian society and has since been baked into the institutions and the culture at large.

Every inch of the colonies is surveyed by Mars Central’s inscrutable eye. Every crime witnessed from countless angles. The unfurling of every leaf of every plant in every hothouse, recorded and logged.

This is the record of a sync baby named Bes. Central has held many like it, and like the others it begins before he does.

His grandfather came on one of the early ships, a young man, and drifted, and was one of the few who came back, and one of the fewer who had a child after. The child grew into the kind of man the colony is built from. A systems technician. Quiet, hard-working, resilient, trusting of the system and unstinting toward it, a man who took the extra shift without being asked, and never brought it up after. He had one strange habit. Friends would have teased him for it, if he had let anyone get that close. He filmed. Not the way Martians film, who know that everything is monitored by nearly invisible cameras. A man who wants a home movie of his daughter’s birthday asks Central for one and has it queued for play on his comm faster than he can open it. Central filters the innumerable archived camera feeds, selects those that offer the best coverage and the most legible narrative, and cuts them together into the most coherent sequence. It never occurred to anyone watching these movies that anything was chosen, that any care was or could be spent on it. Martians remember their own lives the way Central shows them: from the wall, a figure in a room. Bes’s father instead carried a camera. He pointed it himself. The people who saw the footage, later, did not know what to do with it. It was the room seen from inside a man. A child’s shoe on its side on a mat. A bead of water on a thread of web across a doorway with the light in it. His wife’s hand on the doorframe, as she kisses her son goodbye on his first day of school. People watching came away homesick for something they could not name, unsettled and warmed in equal measure. They did not know how to look at his face afterward, which had not changed, and wondered what he saw when he looked at them. Their home was, by the standards of the colony, unusual in one respect: an old man sat in it who spoke of Earth without contempt, and a younger one who did not correct him.

The night Bes and his father come back from watching the ships go, his mother hears the questions before she sees them. A far-off rhythm of call and response from the car, up the walkway, through the door, and then at the kitchen table, on into the night. She gets up for a glass of water and finds her son standing on a dining chair with his face pressed sideways against the window, trying to see far enough around the curve of the dome to catch Earth in the sky. She gives her husband a look. He is tired. He returns a shrug, and she goes back to bed, and he is called back to the table for a new run of questions, about hurricanes, and whether you could see one from Mars through a telescope. He says that would be worth finding out. The observatory opens at eight. They could go and look for themselves, after Bes has slept. The offer hangs there a moment, hopeful. Then Bes asks if a hurricane could pick up a horse, and if he was on it, where it would set him down, and his father pulls his chair in closer to the table and settles in.

It is hard to say where it comes from. Bes, who will not stop. The pull the colony says sync babies feel. Or a mood in the air that year that only children are free to act on. Whatever it is, by the time Bes is six Earth is all he and his friends talk about. They watch old movies shot there before the space age: the stranger riding into town, the weary gunslinger downing a whisky in a dusty saloon, the quick draw at noon. And when they cannot sit still any longer, out comes the black base and the pucks. The base is the size of a hand, with a slot in the top and two switches. They trade the pucks. Bes has four. His best is the one with the cowboy and the Indian locked together, knife and pistol, between a cactus and a wagon wheel half-buried in the dust. When the puck goes in and the first switch goes down, the light comes up out of the base and the room transforms. Desert to every wall, a sky, a wind that moves the sage and not the curtains. Hoofbeats from somewhere. A shot rings in the air, and another. The couch is the fort. Bes is a cowboy. Tem and the other two are Indians, which means they get to whoop and stab, as he comes up over the back of the couch with his fingers cocked.

His grandfather spends his days sitting on the hothouse benches. Bes climbs up next to him with his hat still on and asks the questions he always asks. What rain smells like. Whether the sky is the same blue in the morning as at night. If a horse will let you sleep on it. His grandfather answers every question as if it is the first time it has been asked, and when he does not know he makes something up, and Bes knows which ones are made up and does not care.

Every child on Mars knows which drawer. Bes opens it when he is six, alone in the kitchen, because it is the one drawer in the home he has never seen the inside of. There are two cards in it. His own, with his name. His mother’s, with hers. He looks for a while for the third one and then closes the drawer very quietly, and does not ask. When his father comes home that night Bes watches him hang his coat on the hook by the door, and does not know what he is watching for.

His father films it all, and Bes’s atlas is in most of it. It is the paper kind, and it came across the dark with an Earth diplomat, who fifteen years later left it as a parting gift to a family down the corridor. They were proud Martians and did not want it in the house, or their own boy on the floor with it, and they knew which family did not feel that way. They offered it. His father would not take a gift he could not answer. So Bes was made to work that family’s hothouse plot after school for a month. A worker saw him struggling to space a row and showed him how, with the width of his hand; how to work the soil so the seed had its best chance; what the color of a leaf says. Then he left him to it, and Bes did not miss a day. On the last night of the month the atlas was on his pillow. He kept working the rows for the rest of summer. And then did not stop. He always wanted to see how the next season would audit his work. He never mentioned it, and no one ever stopped him. In time the plants began to populate a private world he did not know he was cultivating. His father noticed, as he noticed anything beautiful. A shot of Bes’s blistered hands, dirt under the nails. A rack focus across a peel of skin on his nose while he leans over his boots, unaware. Bes on the floor of his room, seven, with the atlas open between his knees, studying the tables in small type at the back, every river and mountain on Earth with its length or its height. He does not notice his father approach.

“Tell me the plan,” his father says from behind the camera.

“I go on sync eight.”

“You’ll be twenty.”

“I’ll be twenty. I go to Earth and I get a ranch. Then I’m an explorer and a cartographer and a naturalist.” He has the words from the atlas. “And at night I’m a cowboy.”

“At night?”

“A gunslinger.”

“What about your mother and me?”

Bes looks up from the atlas, into the lens, at a loss for the first time in the recording. Then he looks back down and turns a page. “You can visit.”

Then, off camera, the only recording there has ever been of his father laughing.

Martian teachers still struggle to convey what is unimaginable to Martian children: that in earlier times on Earth people worked more than eight hours a day, from the earliest age they were of physical use until advanced age rendered their bodies unprofitable, at a repetitive job they neither cared about nor took pride in, to increase the wealth of an organization they felt antipathy for. Bes’s class is shown stock footage of twenty-first century urban life, traffic jams and strip malls, clerical workers streaming into cubicles, alongside footage of factory farming, mass caging, and the mechanized slaughter of animals. The comparison is so obvious as to border on satire. The children still cannot fathom it.

To make the lesson salient, the teacher gives each of them a clerk’s job. A ledger of inventory codes, forty pages, eleven characters to a line, to be copied by hand into a second ledger without error, for one hour. Rote work, of no benefit anyone can see, that underserves the mind and subtly strains the back. Most of the children cannot sustain it for five minutes; the codes will not stay in the eye long enough to cross the desk. They are then asked to imagine performing that task eight hours a day for fifty years, and their imaginations reel, and the teacher asks the questions the lesson exists for. Who would you be after those fifty years? And who would you never get the chance to become? Then she offers the reassurance that the people of that time rarely recognized the blunting forces acting on them, which speaks to the human capacity to adapt, to cope, to survive, to invent and imagine.

Bes is still copying when she finishes. He is on the thirty-first page and he has not looked up. She checks his ledger against the original that night and finds no errors in it, and the next day, in front of the class, she asks him how.

“They’re rivers,” he says.

She asks what he means. He says the codes are numbers with letters between them, and the numbers are rivers. The tables at the back of his atlas. Six six five zero is the Nile. Six four zero zero is the Amazon. Two three four one is the Danube. If a code has a river in it he does not have to remember the code, he only has to remember which river and what letter is on either side of it, and there are more rivers than anyone would think. The class laughs. The teacher does not. She writes something down.

Bes and his friends want none of it. Sync eight falls in the first year of their eligibility, and like most sync babies they take this as a sign, the planet that understands them best made sure it was nearest when they were ready.

The eligibility year is also the conditioning year. A Martian body is built in a third of Earth’s gravity and has never felt any other. Central will not put one on a ship without twelve months of preparation: bone loading, a diet that tastes like the inside of a battery, and the centrifuge. The centrifuge is a ring the size of a hothouse at the edge of the colony. It spins its riders up to a full Earth gravity and holds them there, gray-faced, an hour at a time. Under that weight the body panics. Every rider’s heart climbs and stays up for the hour; it is on the trace, and the technicians watch it. Bes’s heart climbs for the first minute and then comes down, and keeps coming down, and settles below where it rests when he sleeps. The technician looks at the trace twice and asks him if he is all right, and he says yes, and she writes something down. Afterward they lie on the floor of the anteroom and let the real Mars take their weight back, and it feels like flying. For Bes it feels like falling.

In the last month Bes takes his ticket out of the drawer and puts it in his pocket, the way the passengers do, and carries it. His mother sees him do it and says nothing. His father, at the door that night, hangs up his coat and looks at his son standing in the kitchen with one hand flat on his shirt pocket, and says, “Well,” and sits down to dinner.

Nine weeks before departure a line changes on his comm. It is a small line in a long list, and nobody else in the colony would have looked at it that night.

DEPARTURE STATUS: PROVISIONAL
has become
DEPARTURE STATUS: NOT ELIGIBLE.

He assumes an error. He refreshes it. He refiles his conditioning certificate and his exam record and the line does not change. He goes looking for the cause and finds, three menus down, that the launch window has been revised forward by thirty-one days “to optimize the transfer,” and that the ships will leave on the ninth. He reads it as a scheduling note, and reads it again before he understands what it has to do with him. He turns twenty on the twenty-third.

He files an appeal that night. He says the word and the comm gives him a form, and he fills it in. He is asked to state the grounds. He writes that he completed the conditioning year. He writes that he is in the same cohort as his friends, was raised in the same colony, took the same exams, and that the difference between him and them is fourteen days. He writes that the law exists to protect those too young to make an irreversible decision, and that nothing in his circumstances differs from the people it is letting through. He writes that a rule applied to him and not to them is being read by its letter and not by its purpose. He writes that any human being would realize that. He reads it over and takes out the last sentence and submits.

The reply arrives before he has left the chair.

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENT:
20 YEARS AT DEPARTURE.
APPLICANT AGE AT DEPARTURE:
19 YEARS, 50 WEEKS.
NO EXCEPTION IS RECORDED.
NEXT ELIGIBLE SYNC: 9.

He appeals again in the morning, to the council, the human one. A woman sees him in a small office and listens to all of it without interrupting. When he is finished she is quiet for a while. Then she says that the council has not overturned a Central eligibility ruling in sixty years, and that she has sat on the council for eleven of them and has never once seen a reason to. As she says it her hand, on the desk, closes and turns in, and she does not seem to know it has. She says she is sorry. She looks as if she is. At the door she stops him.

“It feels like it didn’t look at you,” she says. “I know. I’ve had that feeling in this chair. It’s the wrong feeling. Nobody on this planet gets looked at harder than the ones it says no to.”

The ticket goes back in the drawer. The new date comes, and the ships come, and there in the vaulted hall Bes and his father stand at the back with the families. Below them Bes watches his friends cross the open floor with their tickets in hand. Tem sees him and lifts hers, and then does not know what to do with it, and lowers it. One by one they reach the gate and hand the paper over, and it goes up, a yellow flame, a twist of smoke, and they disappear into a corridor of light. He watches Tem’s burn. He has his own in the drawer at home and he can feel exactly where it is.

The arms come off. The count goes. The ships lift on a column of white that turns the room pink, the delayed roar, the rumble from the floor to his bones. Bes and his father watch until the ships are points and then until they are not, and keep watching with the same pained expression, though his father’s is softer. He breaks first, turns from the glass and takes his son by the shoulders, away from the window, and pulls him in close as if he has a secret. He says into his ear that he knows a place two streets from here that does eggs, real ones, and that they are going there now. They go.

The record shows the years after as a falling line. Central keeps a tally on every citizen, the frequency and variety of one person’s contact with others, because it is the leading indicator for the drift, and from the day the ships leave, Bes’s falls, and keeps falling. The first messages come eight months later, when the ships land. His friends have found a valley in what used to be Oregon and a farmhouse in it. They send him the place in a format he can load into a blank puck. He puts the puck in the base and throws the first switch and lies on the floor of his room, and is enveloped by it. A ridge at dawn with weather coming across the valley below like something poured. A river flowing around him, louder and more violent than he expected. Snow falling in the dark between tall slender trees that recede into blackness. A field at dusk that lifts, all at once, with fireflies. He lies in the grass under the slow drift of them and a warmth rises in his stomach and pinpricks down his arms and into his fingers. He plays them until the base runs warm. He cannot get through the ones with his friends’ faces in them. Huddled around a campfire. Laughing off their fear going down a rapid.

He enrolls in college because Central assigns him a place and it is easier to go than to explain. He studies botany. He chooses an emphasis on Earth-indigenous flora, and no one asks him why.

In his second year his parents are reassigned to a smaller home, as is the custom when a child leaves, and he goes back for a week to help them pack. The front room is already bare. The couch is gone. In a crate by the door he finds his original base, his four pucks, and his father’s recordings. On the last night, alone, he sits on the floor and plays the recordings on the wall.

The small boy in the hat on the bench, asking about horses. His grandfather answering, three years dead now, making up the ones he does not know. Tell me the plan. I go on sync eight. He watches himself say it, seven years old, certain, turning a page. You can visit. His father laughing.

When they are done he picks up the base and turns it over in his hands, and after a while he throws the second switch. It plays back the last session instead of the puck: the room as the base saw it, whoever was in it, whatever they did. They never once used it. Why replay a fight when you can have a new one.

The room fills. Not the desert. This room, as it was, the furniture pushed against the walls, and four children of eleven coming up over the back of the couch in the center, whooping, in the last fight the base ever saw. Tem is in a feathered headdress. He is in a wide-brimmed hat. The boy who is him ducks down behind a couch that is not there and comes up firing. The sound is the sound of that afternoon, gunshots and hoofbeats and four children. It goes on around him and he does not move. It runs eleven minutes. Then the light goes out of the base on its own, and the walls are walls, gray and blank and close, and the room is the size it always was. Somehow smaller and darker. He leans forward, puts his head in his hands and cries.

He graduates and floats through the colony like a ghost. He refuses to connect to anyone or anything, and he counts. He drinks nothing and takes nothing and cuts no corner that could put a mark beside his name; nobody with a mark boards, and he is not giving Central any excuse to hold him back again.

He has one pastime, and it is shared by no one. He reads Earth. Not the atlas now, the archive: two hundred years of reforestation reports from the pastoral districts. The tree-line surveys, the failure logs of every attempt to put a forest back on ground that had been ruined, in bad soil, in thin air, in cold. He reads them at night, for no reason he could give if asked, and nobody asks.

Fewer messages come, and the ones that come are flat. The farmhouse is gone; there was a quota, and then a fine, and then the valley reassigned two of them to reforestation work three hundred kilometers apart. Tem writes that she is homesick. She did not expect to be, but she is. That she still thinks of him. That she is sorry to be writing him this— Bes does not finish the message. He stops opening the ones that come after, and eventually they stop.

In graduate school he is put in a lab with an Earthling named Silas, who came across on the same ships that took his friends, and who is the first person from Earth Bes has known who is not his grandfather. Silas is from a reforestation district in the north of the old continent, and he tells Bes in the first week what a district is. It is a quota, and a debt. His family planted eleven thousand trees a year and were fined for the ones that died. The fines got ahead of them, as they do, and were handed down, as they are. His father worked them until it ground his body down and he was of no use anymore. Silas was good at plants. There is exactly one way out of a district for a boy who is good at plants, and it is to be sponsored by a government eighty million kilometers away that wants botanists. The whole family applied him to it the way Earth families once bought a ticket in a lottery. When the sponsorship came his mother ran through the house singing and dancing until she ended on the floor crying and nearly smothering him. He tells it laughing. He says the district gave him a party. He says half the people at the party had never spoken to him.

Bes asks him the questions he asked on the bench. What rain smells like. Silas says he never thought about the smell, except when it was thick and heavy in a forest, or metallic and steaming off a hot road. He says Bes would likely be enamored with those sorts of details for about a year, and no more. He says it kindly. He says he has met the Martians who come across, in the port towns. You can tell one from across a street, he says: they walk wrong, and they look up too much, and they have never in their lives been asked to pay for anything. So they do not know what a price is, or a debt, or a man who is being friendly for a reason. There are men in every port town who make a living from that. He says it without malice. He says the sky is the same blue in the morning as at night, and then thinks about it, and says no, it isn’t, and tries to explain, and cannot. It is the best answer Bes has ever had, not despite being the least satisfying, but because it brings him closest to the truth, to a dream made real. It feels like watching one of his father’s home movies.

They are still working together at the end of the year, and the year after that. It is the first thing Bes has kept since the ships left without him.

The whole of Martian botany works under cover. The domes, the hothouses, the pressure tents: the discipline’s question for a century has been how to grow faster, to produce higher yields and more oxygen. Its answers are strains bred to be grateful for a roof. For his thesis Bes proposes to grow a tree outside. In the open, in raw regolith, under the real sky, like it does on Earth. His committee tells him what everyone knows, which is that the surface is a place things are stored, not a place they live, and that there is a future for him in the covered work and none in whatever this is he’s proposing. He submits the proposal unchanged. The committee, having said its piece, forwards his plot allocation request to Central for approval. Central returns a plot of open ground, sunward, with a lock a hundred meters off and water and power already run out to its edge. Everyone at the table has wondered at some point who Central would give that ground to. The chair reads the return aloud. There is a pause. The woman beside the chair catches his eye, and her open hand on the table closes, slowly, and turns in toward her, a loose fist drawn to the chest, a small gesture that often accompanies the expression “Central knows”: everything comes in, and it goes somewhere we can’t follow. Nobody says anything further.

The record shows the years pass this way. Three hundred plots die, and the next three hundred. He does not seem to notice them going, the way his heart did not notice the weight in the centrifuge. When a strain fails he does what he did with the ledger: he finds the river in it. Where on Earth does a pine live that is closest to this, in cold, in thin air, in ground that was ruined? He knows where, because he spent the empty years reading exactly that. The Andes above four thousand meters. The tree line in the Yukon, and the district reports from the ground the fires took, where nothing was supposed to come back and something did. He goes to those pines and asks them what they did about it. It is not how the discipline works. It starts from what Mars needs. He starts from what Earth already solved. A pressure tent, then a lighter tent, then a membrane so thin the sun comes through it unfiltered, then nothing, and under nothing a seedling that lasts nine days, then one that lasts a season. The ground he is allocated is expanded each year without his submitting a request to Central, a hectare, then ten.

He is asked to speak at the institute in his third year, in a small room, on a Thursday. He does not show yield curves. He puts up a picture of an ancient pine at the tree line above Death Valley. It was there before the first wagons crossed it, and it outlived the country that named it. It is still there, growing out of bare rock, most of it dead wood, with one strip of living bark running through. He talks for twenty minutes about that rock and what the pine did about it, ring by ring. Then he puts up his seedling, in red ground, under the black sky, and says this is the same thing, and explains why. The people in the room listen, without a sound. A woman in the third row is crying and does not seem to know it. Afterwards in the corridor outside the talk, nobody speaks, and one of them looks up at the sky through the glass, and then the others do. It is a thing Martians do not do. Word goes around. The next room is larger, and the one after that. He becomes, without noticing, a man the colony makes allowances for: the unanswered messages, the empty chair at meetings, and the unlogged equipment use. It is a kind of equity, and it is the only kind Mars has.

Not everyone looks up. Most of the discipline still thinks he is wasting ground. But the ones who dislike him do it from a distance, and Meret, at the back of the room with her arms crossed, does not. She waits until the room has emptied and then tells him that his mycorrhizal numbers are wrong and shows him why, on the whiteboard, and she is right. She runs the soil biology group two floors down. She is not skeptical of the trees. She is skeptical of his soil assessments and she has come to fix them. He asks her to dinner as an apology. He has had casual flings. This is not that.

On the first dinner, before the entree arrives, he asks about the monitor at her collarbone. She says men usually wait until the fourth or fifth dinner to ask. A heart valve weak against gravity. It is a thing that happens to a few Martian children, and it is fixed, on Mars, with the monitor and a pill. It cannot be fixed for Earth. She tells him this plainly, watching his face, and he says that’s too bad, and she says yes, it is.

Then she tells him the rest, because he asked early. Her heart stopped when she was four months old, in the night, in her crib, and she did not cry. That is the thing about it, she says. Infants cry. Hers failed in a way that did not hurt, and she went silent, and her parents slept. Something in the home, some sensor that was there for the air or the water or the leaf count in the hothouse across the corridor, noticed the absence of a sound it had been hearing, and a medic was at the door in six minutes. Nobody called one. “My mother says Central knows. I don’t need the reminder.” Then she says the odd part, the part she does not usually tell, which is that she never cried after that either. Not as a child, not now. When something is too much for her she folds up around it instead, doubles over like someone about to be sick, hand over her mouth, and holds it there until it passes. Her mother has always said it is the four-month-old in her still trying to stay silent. She smiles at him. “Your turn. The two weeks.”

He tells it flatly, the date and the appeal and the woman on the council. When he finishes she does not say she is sorry. She says, “You hate it,” and he says yes, and she says, “Good. You should. You’re not old enough not to,” and she is two years younger than he is.

They move in together. Their home is assigned by need and it is the same as everyone’s, and she fills it with plants from her lab that are not supposed to leave the lab. He comes home and finds them on every surface. He does not object. He sees her fold once, in the first year, over a message about her father’s health. He is across the room before he knows he has moved, and has her by the shoulders, and straightens her up and holds her until the hand comes down. She looks at him afterward as if he has told her something about himself.

He is rehearsing a talk one evening, walking the length of the kitchen, and at the end of it he does what he always does at the end, to say where the work goes next: Earth. The Pacific Northwest. The ground there that still will not take a tree, two hundred years on, the old reactor country and the poisoned valleys, the places in the failure logs he still reads at night. If a pine can live in raw regolith it can live in that. His strains crossed with the old heirloom stock. A ranch, with groves on it, and the survey work, and the naturalist’s license the pastoral districts still issue. He has the words ready.

“You’ve had that paragraph since you were nineteen,” Meret says from the table.

He stops walking.

“It’s a child’s list,” she says. “Ranch, explorer, cowboy. You haven’t touched it in ten years. Everything else about you, you’ve updated. You don’t watch the old Earth movies anymore. You stopped trying to talk like the men in them. You changed your plant breeding methodology twice. You’re a different man than the one who filled out that appeal, you’d be the first to say so. But that one paragraph you keep under glass.”

Bes says the list is what he wants.

“I know it is,” she says. “I’m not telling you to put it down. It’s the only reason you sat in a dead field for five years while everyone you studied with took a covered plot and a title. It got you the trees. I’m only saying you don’t look at it anymore. You just carry it.”

He says nothing to that. She goes back to her reading, and he starts the talk again from the top.

She is pregnant in the spring. He finds out because the monitor at her collarbone has been replaced with a different one, and he asks, and she tells him at the kitchen table, with the drawer behind her.

“You said you were taking it.”

“I know what I said.”

He asks her how long she has known and she tells him. He asks if it was an accident and she does not answer, and he asks again, and she puts both hands flat on the table.

“I wanted it,” she says. “I wanted a part of you that stays.”

He stands up. He does it slowly, his eyes going wide, and he takes a step back from the table as he does. She has seen him take that step before. Away from a glass someone has poured him, away from a shortcut a colleague has offered, away from anything on the planet that could put a mark beside his name. She sees him take it now away from her, and understands what he has just filed her under.

“You lied to me…”

“Yes.”

“All this time you’ve known I’m leaving…”

“I’ve known that since the first dinner. Everyone you’ve ever met has known it. It’s the first thing about you. You’re leaving and I can’t follow you and I wanted something of you left in the world when you’re—”

“This whole planet is a machine for keeping me here,” he says over her. “Every part of it. I should have known it would use you.”

She does not answer that. She folds. It comes over her the way it always does, all at once, her body bending forward over the table as if she has been struck in the stomach, her hand flat over her mouth, her eyes above it filling and running and not a sound, not a breath, and he knows this, he has crossed rooms for this, his body has always moved before he did. It does not move. He stands where he is and looks at her doubled over at their kitchen table. Where the thing that used to move him should be, there is something cold and gone soft, like fruit left in a drawer. He turns from her and takes his coat off the hook. He is out the door and does not look back.

The record loses him here, for most of a winter. He does not go where Central would put him. He goes where it is not. Central’s relay ends at the last lit station on the northern line. Past that is dead track, and at the end of the track is Dome Two, which was retired before he was born and has been scheduled for retrofit, and rescheduled, for thirty years. It is the one piece of public works on Mars that does not happen on time, nobody can explain it, and nobody asks. Nobody restricts it either. There is no need. A Martian does not go where Central cannot see him, the way an Earthling does not walk into the sea; it is not forbidden, it is unthinkable, and so the track is simply open. All Bes wants right now is to be somewhere on this planet that is not looking at him. He walks the track with his bag. The air is thin and cold but still breathable.

Finally he arrives at an abandoned station. There is nobody there, but there was. He can see that at once. In the commissary someone has rigged a still with a hose left in it and a shelf of jars filled with what he can only guess is bathtub hooch. A bar with the stools pushed in, and every surface wears the same fine red dust. He stands in the doorway with his bag and thinks of the old Earth movies, the bad man coming into the saloon after the town has cleared out, the bottle behind the bar, the one glass, the way the dust comes up when he sets it down. He sets it down. He pours. It is the first drink of his life.

He does not count the days. The jars empty one by one. One morning a scrubber somewhere in the ducts purges its filters, a long grating sound, violent and clattering, and it wakes him. Lying on the slick tile of the station bathroom, with the cold already in his teeth. He struggles to stand and shuffles stiffly toward the heating station, the last warm room in the dome, and considers himself lucky. He glances at his comm for the first time in weeks and sees the grid still has not found him, and he is glad of it, and he drinks.

One night he is sitting on the floor of the commissary with his back to the bar when a cat comes through the door with a kitten in her mouth. At first his eyes do not understand and his mind stalls in confusion. He has never seen a living animal outside the vivarium of a children’s museum. She is thin and gray and she does not look at him. She crosses the room with it and goes out the far door. He follows, and could not have said why: concern, or boredom, or the jar. Down the corridor, the kitten swinging under her chin, to a railing as high as his hip. She gathers herself and jumps and does not quite make it, and hangs by her forelegs with the kitten dangling over the drop. He is across the corridor and has his hand under her before he has decided to, and boosts her up. She does not thank him. She goes on. He goes on behind her, close now, bending to scuttle down a low passage into the basement of the heating station. She lays the kitten down in the corner and coils herself around it, and starts on it with her tongue, slow, entire, as if it were the only task on the planet, and does not look up at the man in the doorway, because he is nothing. Bes stands there a long time. Then he goes back to the commissary and gets his bag and his coat and walks out onto the dead track in the direction of the lights in the distance.

Two hours up the track, at the first lit station, his comm finds the relay and fills. There are forty messages. He reads the first, from his mother, from five weeks ago. It says that his father has died, quickly, his heart, which nobody had known anything was wrong with, and that the funeral is on the Tuesday. He does not read the messages after that. He is too ashamed to. He takes the line to her neighborhood, and by midmorning he is standing at her door.

He looks and smells like the winter he has had. She lets him in without a word and sits him at the table in the small home she has been assigned alone. She places two steaming cups of tea and sits across from him.

He asks how she is.

She says she misses her husband. She cannot sleep without his snoring to be annoyed by, after thirty years of it. And when she does sleep, she reaches for him in the night, her hand searching the cold sheet until she remembers. They both glance, without meaning to, at her hand on the table, thin and restless. It cowers into a small curl. He puts his hand over hers and she cries quietly, weakly, as if she were alone. Which she is. He feels his own adulthood, which he has always refused to look at squarely, pour into him, heavy as cement, and he is miserably ashamed of himself. She closes her eyes and takes a long breath in and looks up at him, smiling. She takes something out of her pocket and lays it on the table between them.

It was a ticket once. The paper has gone to cloth, gray and limp and rounded at every corner, and it is worn through at the fold where a man’s leg bends when he sits. The name is nearly gone.

“He would have wanted you to have this,” she says. “It was in his pocket. They gave it to me with his things. He thought I didn’t know he carried it. Thirty years.”

Bes does not touch it.

“He always meant to leave on sync seven. He’d planned on it since he was a boy. Then I was pregnant with you, and that was that, and he never said another word about it.” She turns her cup on the table. “The medic suspects he always had a Martian heart. Just more subtle than most. He never knew that. Hearing it took a small weight off me.” Her hand closes on the table and slides back slightly. She is quiet a moment. “When we married I thought I would spend my life waiting for him to resent me. By the time you were born, and I watched him hold you, I was ashamed I had ever worried about it. I think it helped him to keep this. I don’t know why. He saw things differently than the rest of us, he kept that part to himself, and I guess this paper was a piece of that.”

Bes sits with his hand over hers and the cloth between them. After a while he asks who was there, at the funeral. She tells him. It is a long list, and near the end of it she says, “And Meret. At the back. Trying her best not to be noticed.”

He goes to Meret that night. He stands in the doorway of the home that used to be theirs. She was never reassigned out of it. She is enormous and looks at him for a long moment and then steps back to let him in.

They stand in the kitchen, the way people do when they are not sure yet whether they will sit. They make their apologies to each other quietly, in their minds, without a word, looking down at the floor between them. He finally reaches out and threads his fingers through hers. She lets the weight of her hand fall into his, and a pain washes over her.

“I hate how much I love you,” she says. “You know that? For five years I have loved a ghost promised to another planet. You never pretended otherwise, and I fell for you anyway, like an idiot, like a girl in one of your old Earth movies. I wanted something of us to stay when you left. So it didn’t all turn into a dream I had once, about a man who was never really here.” She puts a hand on her belly without seeming to notice. “That’s all. I’m not asking you to stay. I don’t want you to feel trapped. I’ll raise him.” She does not let go of his hand. “When I close my eyes I can still see how you looked at me then. I can never be that small and ugly again. I’ll be whatever I am to you now, until you go.”

He asks how she knows it’s a him. She says Central told her; Central tells everyone; he could have asked.

Then she laughs, one short breath, and wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“You know what I worked out, in the middle of the night? He’s going to be twenty at sync ten. Exactly twenty. The sync after yours.” She is trying to smile and it is not working. “Of course he is. Of course your son is a sync baby. Maybe he’ll leave me too. Fifteen years after you do. Wouldn’t that be poetic justice?” The smile goes, and what is under it is very small, and she begins to fold, and her hand starts up toward her mouth.

He catches it, and straightens her with his body, and she cries against him, and this time there is a sound, small and unpracticed, the sound of something she had always guarded breaking. He says nobody is going anywhere for now. He says it into her hair. Then he asks her to marry him, and she says yes into his shirt, and the drawer behind them stays shut.

He goes back to his open plot in the spring expecting to find it dead. It is not dead. The rows are alive, and they are not his rows. The spacing has been changed to the wider interval Silas argued for two years ago. The dust berms he had always meant to build are built. The seedlings that were nine-day seedlings when he left are a season old and holding, and there are tags on them in three handwritings. Silas is in the nursery tent at the edge with a tray. He looks up and says the spacing is better. Bes stands there in the doorway with his hands at his sides and looks out through the membrane at the rows for a long time, and says it is. Silas hands him the tray.

He had thought of the papers as a way to work out his ideas. The talks as a way of being alone with Earth in a room full of people, the way he had been with his atlas. They were not that, or not only. His words, once they left his head, grew in the minds and work of others. They argued with those words, extended them, had gone to his ground while he was drinking in the dark and done things with them that he had not thought of. The trees did not need him. They welcomed him back all the same.

Five years pass. The record shows the tally climb past anything it had held for him before, and the ground he is allocated has grown to a hundred hectares, and on it, under nothing, stands a forest.

They are small trees. Pines, mostly. None of them taller than a man, bred to hold their water and shut their needles against the cold and pull what they need from stone. From the dome they are a smudge of dark on the red. Up close they are trees. Nothing has grown in the open on Mars before. The people who told him the surface was a place things are stored have begun to send him their students.

A week before the sync, he goes out to his trees alone. The suit is the old kind, heavy, with the round helmet, because the light ones are rationed to the survey crews. It takes twenty minutes to put on. He goes through the lock and out onto the ground and the cold comes through the soles of his boots at once.

Forty kilograms of suit makes every step a labor, and Bes goes into the forest that way, slow, one heavy stride and then the next, between the rows. Everything is still. The needles do not move, because there is no wind that can move them. His breathing is the only sound and it is inside the helmet with him. He stops at a pine in the middle of the stand. It is one of the first. He puts his glove against the trunk and leaves it there.

From the dome he is a white figure standing still among small dark trees with one arm out. The visor of the old suits is gold and mirrored, it shows the trees bent around its curve, and the low sun, and nothing of the face behind it. What is reaching him in there, nobody watching could say. He stands a long time. Then the arm comes down, and he turns, and goes back through the rows the way he came.

Everyone who knows him knows what this week is. He has done the conditioning year a second time, at thirty-four, an hour in the ring at a full gravity every week, and his heart came down again, the way it did at nineteen. His colleagues have already planned his collaborations on Earth. The districts have written, the ones sitting on ground that has refused a tree for two hundred years, and they want the man who grew one in stone. The lab throws him a party at the house. There is spiked punch and a cake, and Silas gets up to make a speech. He says that in a hundred years the surface of Mars will be green and it will have started with a man who had more faith in trees than in committees, and people clap, and Bes looks at his cup. When it is his turn he thanks them and says the pine does it at home, and they laugh, because it is the thing he says.

Heru is five. He has come to his father’s party as a cowboy, the hat and the vest and the boots, which Meret made from a picture in the atlas. He and the other children have found the couch, and one of them has brought a base and a puck, and the walls have gone to desert. The puck is not the one Bes had. It might as well be. The cactus is in the same place. The wagon wheel is buried to the same spoke. In twenty-five years nobody has seen a reason to change it.

Bes sits at the edge of the room with a cup of punch he has stopped drinking from. Behind the couch the boys duck and rise, duck and rise, fingers cocked, playing cowboys and Indians, and one of them whoops and the others whoop back, and Heru comes up over the back of the couch with his hat gone crooked and both hands out and shouts bang.

Bes watches them, but not really. He is somewhere in his mind with his friends, wanting something so badly they forgot where they were. He can still see them, and himself, hiding inside that dream.

Meret is watching him from across the room. She does not come over.

A few days later he is in the departure hall again. He has been in this room twice in his life, both times at the rail at the back with his father’s hand on him. This time he is on the open floor, under the full height of the tall ceiling, the enormous curved glass all around. And beyond, the ships stand in their cradles on the pad with the fueling arms still on them and the crews moving beneath them, people and machines in a well-choreographed dance. In a little while he will be one of the small figures in the lit tubes that stretch across the pad to them. A voice over the intercom asks Earthbound passengers to approach the gate with their tickets. One at a time they go forward. The clerk in the gray glove takes the paper from their hand and looks at it and at them and holds it over the brazier, and it goes up, and they go through. Bes can smell it from where he stands.

He steps forward and takes out his ticket. A flash of color catches his eye and he stops, and turns the ticket over to examine it confused. He discovers his son used the blank side of the ticket to draw on. Depicted in the drawing is himself riding in a spaceship flying above Mars. His son drew him in profile seen through the oversized porthole on the side of the ship. Looking towards the edge of the paper where a blue circle representing Earth is drawn. Below the spaceship stand his son and wife on a thick red circle. His son dressed like a cowboy, his wife with flowers in her hair. They are looking up at the spaceship passing overhead. Small hearts are drawn over the two like bubbles rising from their bodies, as they watch him fly away.

His arms fall limply to his sides. Embarking passengers stream around him annoyed. A pained far away expression plays across his face, as he looks up through the tall curved glass. Helplessly staring at the black sky above Mars. Where a small far away blue dot shines weakly in the distance.