Old Mars

“Who doesn’t care?” The smile looked artificial. “The miners, Maartin? These aren’t the bad men who … who hurt you.”

I want them to make you whole, too. His fingers struggled. I want you to see. We’re not alone here. She share. We just don’t see.

He started going to the garden domes every day, weeding all the beds. They’d built the beds on a pretty plaza, a graceful, free-form space tiled with pale blue and soft green octagons that sparkled with crystal dust. Two fountains played watery music and soft blue and pink mists spread from the slender black tubes that rose from the tumbling water. Sometimes one of the people stopped to speak to him. He recognized them by feel; Soft-sweet-happy, or Firm-thoughtful—he had had word names for them once, but he couldn’t remember those. Then there was Sharp-edge-alert. Sharp-edge-alert didn’t speak often. He thought about the miners a lot, Maartin could tell. He sometimes felt Maartin. Well, felt wasn’t quite the right word, ’cause they couldn’t really touch each other, like you’d touch a plant or dirt or a stone. But he would sometimes put a hand on Maartin and it would … sink into him.

Maartin didn’t like the feeling much. It didn’t hurt, but it felt … wrong. Like something was stuck in his flesh and shouldn’t be there. When the others “touched” him, their hands brushed his skin the way any human hand would do, but he didn’t feel anything. If he tried to touch them, he found, they shied away if he let his hand slide into them. So he didn’t.

Only Sharp-edge-alert pushed his hands into Maartin, and Maartin never saw him do that to any of the people.

The human residents mostly left him alone, although Seaul Ku, who weeded there a lot, too, sometimes talked to him. But even she did the slow-talk thing and used baby words. So he didn’t try too hard to talk back, kept his fingers working in the soil. She wasn’t there the afternoon that Jorge came to the gardens.

He looked old. Maartin straightened to his knees, his fingers asking what was wrong, scattering soil crumbs across his thighs.

“What are they?” Jorge squatted to face him. “What are the people you see if they’re not ghosts?”

His fingers danced, explaining. He shook his head. Groping for words. They were getting harder to find. “They … are … the pearls.” Inadequate. “Like … like …” He thought hard, running through all the earth-things he’d learned. “Projector? Storage? They … live … forever. Until the sun … eats the planet.” Gave up, slumping, his fingers snapping and weaving his frustration in the air between them.

Jorge was staring at them. “Live forever?” He shook his head. “They can’t be alive. Like you said, they’re images. Ghosts. Not real. The pearls are rocks.” He lifted his head to meet Maartin’s eyes.

He wanted Maartin to say yes. Wanted it a lot. Maartin shook his head. He studied the explanation as his fingers rippled and twined it in the air. “Spectrum.” That was close. “Energy?” Not quite. “Different spectrum. They live.”

Jorge closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the hope was gone. “Cory and Bantu have been scratching around here when nobody was watching.” His voice was hoarse. “Your settlement is sitting on a shoal.”

Maartin didn’t bother to nod. Sharp-edge-alert had drifted up behind him. It occurred to Maartin that Sharp-edge-alert always seemed to be close by.

“I’m …” Jorge sucked in a ragged breath. “I’m going to warn your mayor. To leave. Just clear out of here. The settlement. I’ve … you can’t talk to them. It’s all about … going home. Like I told you.”

They would destroy the settlement, the way they’d destroyed the other one. Worse, because the shoal was beneath them, not up in the rocks above. He closed his eyes, imagining the mayor, his father, when the big earth-chewers rolled up to the gardens. “The mayor … will call the Planetary Council.” Maartin groped for the words, forced them out. “They’ll help.”

“No, they won’t.” Jorge shook his head, looked away. “We got better weapons and they know it. We’ll pay off the people who need paying off—you can do that when you’ve got a shoal’s worth of pearls. Everybody wants them, Maartin.” His voice was harsh. “Everybody. You better ask your Martian buddies to defend you if you want to stay here.” His laugh came out as bitter as the bleakness in his eyes. “Nobody else is gonna do it. Come on.” He grabbed Maartin’s arm. “I gotta get back before they suspect I came over here to warn you, or I’m dead meat.”

“You’ll kill …” His fingers writhed outrage. “You’ll kill … the city.”

“The settlement, you mean? Not if you guys don’t fight back.” Jorge was dragging him along the path now, toward the exit lock.

He didn’t mean the settlement. Sharp-edge-alert drifted along behind.

Anger.