Soreh said a lot of things. Won’t tell anybody. U want help? He didn’t need her headshake to know she didn’t, he could always see it when she was in pain, sort of like a heat shimmer in the air. Wasn’t there today. He nodded, waved, and stepped over the plastic tape that marked the boundary of each plot. “Dad … back …?”
“Ah, they’re already in.” She squatted amidst the beet rows, gently loosening the reddish soil around each crown of dark green leaves. “I guess the patch wasn’t as big as Gus said it was and they got the seeding done early. He came by to see if you were here.” She kept her eyes fixed on her cultivator as she worked the moist soil. “I … said I didn’t know where you were. But you shouldn’t go wandering off like that.” She shot him a quick sideways glance. “You could get lost. Those dust devils could knock you down.”
He shook his head, knelt, and started checking the drip lines, looking for any telltale dry or soggy patches that might mean a leak of too much precious water or a plugged line. He hurried. The longer Dad wondered where he was, the more likely he was to check back on the house database. Sure enough, he managed to find a couple of drippers that were partially plugged. Dad would probably go over to Canny’s place. She brewed beer out of all kinds of stuff, and he’d heard Dan Zheng say that this batch was really good. Dad was pretty easygoing about his skimping on lesson time after a couple of beers.
The sun was pretty low by the time he headed in, and he didn’t have to blur his eyes very hard to see the plaza and the fountains. Four or five musicians were piping pink and green mist from the twisted horns, over near the fountain. Some of their spinach was ready for market, and he detoured to the settlement-warehouse entrance. The weigh room was cold, right down near freezing. He set the unit basket on the scale, entered his dad’s code and contents. The scale beeped, uploading the weight of spinach contributed to their ag total for the month. Rubbing his stinging hands together, he headed for the door.
Just as it scraped open.
“Darn dust gets into everything. You gotta replace bearings here all the time.” The mayor, Al Siggrand, shoved the door all the way open. “Hey, your dad’s lookin’ for you!” He gave Maartin a fake scowl. “You weren’t wandering out there by yourself again, were you?” He talked a little loud, as if Maartin couldn’t hear right. “You know your dad told you not to do that. Do you remember?”
Maartin nodded, but his eyes went to the man standing behind the short, squat mayor, dressed in a full miner’s suit. The miner he’d talked to.
“Maartin, meet Jorge.” The mayor jerked his chin at the miner. “I guess these guys are tired of freeze-dried. They’re willing to pay good market price for some fresh stuff for a change.”
Oh great, and now he’d tell the mayor that Maartin had been in the canal. Maartin swallowed.
“Hey, Maartin.” The miner was smiling at him. He had a long, freckled face and hair that wasn’t quite the color of the Martian dust that coated the spots where the breather mask didn’t cover. “Nice to meet you. Want to sell us some of your produce? What do you and your dad grow?”
Maartin pushed past them, out into the settlement alley.
“Don’t mind him.” The closing door couldn’t quite block out the mayor’s words. “He’s not quite all there, got a head injury in a rockfall accident a couple years back. Can’t talk anymore. He gets lost, wanders off. We all kind of look out for him.”
Fists jammed into his pockets, Maartin headed left, toward their rooms. He could feel the old city around them. Through the transparent skin of the settlement dome, dust devils danced in the fading light, weaving complex and angry patterns across the barren ground beyond the garden domes. The spires and spiderways shimmered in the bloody light of the setting sun.
Angry?
He stopped at the intersection to their alley. Blinked.
Yes. Angry.
Their door slid open to dark rooms. Dad would be at Canny’s. He headed there, feet scuffing up a thin haze of dust that seeped in no matter what you did. Canny’s big two-room place was just around the corner on the street and the door was open, which made the mayor mad because the rooms were all a higher O2 concentration than the dome itself, but with the jam of bodies crowding the space, you could see why. A half dozen people stood around the doorway, mugs in hand.
“Hey, Maartin.” Celie, who made the mugs and some pretty cool dishes from the red Martian dust and sold ’em to the produce buyer from City, waved hers at him. “Give your dad time to finish his pint, eh?” She winked at him, her round face framed by gray curls.
“Th … mayor … selling …” His tongue struggled with the words. To the miners, he tapped out. He faced her, horrified to feel a hot sting behind his eyelids.
“Honey, it’s okay. Really.” She put her arm around him. “It’s a good thing they’re buying from us. They’re not the bad people who were responsible for the accident. They like our veggies. And they’re going to pay us a lot of money.”
It wasn’t an accident and everybody knew it. And now they were killing the city. He blinked, struggling to hold in the tears.
“Hey, Maart, where were you?”
Dad saved him, face flushed, pushing through the crowd. “Darn, kid, I was worried. And then Seaul texted me and said you were cleaning drippers after all, that she figured you were working on someone else’s plot out there and that’s why she hadn’t seen you. Was that where you were?” His face relaxed some as Maartin nodded. He had the tears buried deep now.
“… helping,” Maartin stuttered. He nodded some more.
“Okay, then, you text me next time, let me know where you are.” Dad put an arm around his shoulders. “I don’t want to be organizing any search parties for no reason, hear?”
He nodded, got a head tousle from Dad. He smelled faintly of cyans and a little bit like drying-out water. Maartin had helped them seed a few times, mixing in the cyanobacteria spores, setting up the pumps and microdrip system that brought the deep-drilled moisture up and wicked it into the soil. They didn’t need a lot of water, the cyans. They were engineered, just went into biosuspension when it got too dry, came back to life with more water. Sometimes Dad would squat over an established patch and take off his breather. He said you could smell the oxygen, that before Maartin died, he’d be able to walk around without a breather. Maartin couldn’t smell anything but cyans. He walked around without oxygen all the time in the dome.
Dad got him a mug of juice and Maartin retreated to his usual perch on a plastic bin that stored bar towels and stuff, over in the corner. Nobody much noticed him, it was kind of dark there and, sitting, he was down low. People didn’t much look down when they were drinking Canny’s beer; they looked at each other or around the room at other faces. Four or five kids were playing some kind of chase game, running in and out. Celie yelled at them for it. He knew them. The girls were okay, he pretty much steered clear of the boys. Especially Ronan. He was the smallest, but he made up for it in meanness. Whenever the adults weren’t around, they did a great job of illustrating the pack behavior he’d read about in his school programs. He wondered if the Martians behaved like humans. He’d never seen any sign of conflict on the streets or the spiderways. No yelling. No pushing. Or maybe they weren’t all that different, just used another way to push one another around and call one another names.
Rising voices snapped him out of it. The kid pack was back, hanging around the door. Hanging around five miners. Maartin stiffened, pulling back into the shadow beneath the makeshift bar.
“Hey, folks, nice to meet you, just wanted to stop in, sample the local brew.” Jorge was in front, smiling and easy.
“You guys aren’t finding any veins of your druggie-ore running our way, are you?” Celie spoke up and it went quiet, right now. Maartin watched as people moved or didn’t move. A small space opened up around the miners, and the hellos were halfhearted from the ones that didn’t move.