The Strange E-Book

Nathan Ballingrud

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 418

Beschreibung

Ray Bradbury meets The Martian in this chilling page-turning tale of Mars' first colony, fallen to madness after all contact with Earth ceased, perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer. Anabelle Crisp is fourteen when the Silence arrives, severing all communication between Earth and her new home on Mars. One evening, while she and her father are closing their diner in the colony of New Galveston, they are robbed at gunpoint. Among the stolen items is a recording of her absent mother's voice. Driven by righteous fury and desperation to lift her father's broken spirits, Anabelle sets out to confront the thieves and bring back the sole vestige of her mother. Accompanied by her loyal robot, an outcast pilot and a hardened outlaw, Anabelle must travel through derelict mining towns where a mineral called the Strange has transformed its residents in bizarre ways, across the Martian desert and to the shadowy Peabody Crater where she will discover than New Galveston, once a safe haven, is nothing more than a guttering candle in a dark world.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: What Happened to Me

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Part Two: What I Did About it

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Part Three: The Consequences Thereof

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Acknowledgments

About the Author

“The Strange is an adventure tale of the best kind: an unusual setting with vivid characters and an unpredictable ending. With every turn of the page, I wondered what would happen next.”—Charlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author of An Easy Death and the Sookie Stackhouse series.

“Very readable, compelling storytelling, a wonderfully engaging central character, full of atmosphere and beauty and strangeness. Thoroughly excellent space-western. Written in the spirit of Bradbury’s Mars and capturing something of Bradbury’s brilliance.”—Adam Roberts, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, BSFA award-winning author of Jack Glass

“Ballingrud’s brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is a thrillingly inventive blend of the science fiction, western, and horror genres, a roaring adventure story of a girl, her gentleman robot, and a planet of ghosts. The perfect novel to take inside your heat tent and curl up with on a cold Martian night.”—Owen King, New York Times bestselling author of The Curator

“Star Wars meets True Grit in this cinematic tale of a human girl fighting to keep hope alive on a Martian world. Nathan Ballingrud compellingly blends frontier western with rootin-tootin space opera, and the result is epic in scope, thematically rich, and gleefully spooky in places. This is an atmospheric, immersive delight, and so evocative that I kept expecting red sand to trickle out from between the pages.”—Josh Winning, author of The Shadow Glass and Burn the Negative

“The Strange breathes vivid life into a Mars that’s both fascinating and frightening. The journey of Annabelle Crisp across those red sands—she’s a wonderful character, full of energy and determination—was a battle for answers, for autonomy, for humanity itself. I rooted for her every step of the way.”—Aliya Whiteley, Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted author of Skyward Inn

“A worthy successor to Bradbury, this is far and away the best novel I’ve read all year. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”—Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Migration

“Pure joy, to finally see Nathan Ballingrud’s astonishing storytelling gifts applied to the broad canvas of a novel. A killer score for those of us who are already hooked on the pathos and haunting power of his worlds, The Strange is sure to swell the ranks of the addicted immeasurably.”—Sam J. Miller, Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City

“Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award-winning author of The Changeling and Lone Women

“As thrilling as it is heartfelt. Told through the memorable, feisty voice of a precocious young woman, The Strange explores greed and grief against an unforgiving landscape that bucks against the human obsession to conquer and own. The action and fascinating alternate history snare attention, and the characters—each haunted by ghosts of their own—glimmer off the page.”—Nathan Tavares, author of A Fractured Infinity

“A page-turning science-fantasy that sparks with originality, despite treading well-worn ground. Part western, part horror, part old-school SF, The Strange finds something new and compelling in the haunted deserts of Mars. The protagonist, Anabelle Crisp, is a young woman out for revenge. Vividly drawn, she seethes with outrage and is armed with the sharpest of sharp tongues. I thoroughly enjoyed her journey.”—T. R. Napper, author of 36 Streets

“The Strange is utterly wonderful. Having harnessed the inventive worldbuilding of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, it embarks on an odyssey that becomes ever more unsettling and hallucinogenic. It’s a wild tale set on a Wild West Mars, and I very much hope there’ll be more.”—Tim Major, British Fantasy Award shortlisted author of Snakeskins

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The Strange

Print edition ISBN: 9781803362694

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803362700

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Nathan Ballingrud 2023

Nathan Ballingrud asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Mia,

the toughest, most resilient personI have ever known.

I’m proud to be your dad.

“Doesn’t an old thing always know when a new thing comes?”

RAY BRADBURY,“—AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT”

part one

whathappenedto me

I was thirteen when the Silence came to Mars, settling over us like a smothering dust. We don’t talk about those days much anymore, and most who lived through them are dead. I’m old now—extravagantly old, I like to say—and I’ll join them soon enough. Maybe that’s why I find myself thinking back on those years more frequently, in the night’s long hours: the terror and the loneliness that afflicted us all, and the shameful things we did because we were afraid.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking, too, about old friends and old enemies, about how sometimes they were the same people. And maybe that’s why dear old Watson has come to visit me at last, gleaming in the lamplight, full of his own enchanted tales.

All my life I’ve wanted to write adventure stories, but I’ve always been more suited to reading than to writing. I never believed my imagination was up to the task. It’s only now, close to the end, that I realize I never had to imagine one.

My name is Anabelle Crisp. This is the story of what happened to me, what I did about it, and the consequences thereof.

*   *   *

IT WAS EARLY evening and we were closing up the Mother Earth Diner. Normally my father liked to keep the place open well into the night. We’d been living with the Silence for nearly a year, and during that time it seemed that more and more people wanted a warm, bright place to be when darkness fell. My family was happy to provide that place. We specialized in good Southern cooking—beans and rice, collard greens, barbecued pork, that sort of thing—and we had our walls covered with pictures of famous Earth cities and landmarks. The Silence had imbued those photographs with an elegiac quality, it was true, but that only heightened their appeal.

That night, we were closing earlier than usual. The Moving Picture Club was presenting a picture show in the town square, which would draw most of the folks away from us. That was fine with me; I was hoping to make it down to the square to see it myself. They were running The Lost World again, and though I’d seen it twice before, I was eager to go again. Arthur Conan Doyle was my favorite writer. In my excitement, I was rereading The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, its spine cracked from the love I had shown it.

Joe Reilly was our last customer of the evening. He was despised by many in New Galveston, and it was his habit to come in when he was most likely to remain undisturbed. I would have been happy to bar him entry altogether, but Father wouldn’t have it. So I served him with curt silence. He ate quickly, wolfishly, and said, “You closing early tonight, Anabelle?”

“You know we are.”

“Well. I guess I ought to let you get to it.” He laid down his money and headed out. It was a relief; usually he lingered.

I brought the dishes to the back where Father and Watson, our Engine, were cleaning up. Father had been talking under his breath and went quiet when I came back. He was talking to Mother again. I knew it gave him comfort, but it hurt to hear, nonetheless. He tried to do it only when I wasn’t around, but sometimes I guess he couldn’t help himself.

Watson was a Kitchen Engine—a bipedal construct, humanoid in form, utilitarian and featureless. I called him Watson after the character in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but he wasn’t much more than a dishwashing program that my parents had overlaid with an inexpensive personality template—English Butler—to amuse themselves and their customers. He was no more programmed to be a detective’s sidekick than I was raised to be the world’s greatest amateur sleuth. It was a lie I chose to believe in.

I was only in the back for a minute, so when I returned to the dining area I was surprised to see a man at the counter. He sat hunched over his clasped hands, studying the entanglement of his fingers like he might puzzle out some mystery there. The hair on his head was long and tangled, blond, dusted with the soft pink shades of the low Martian desert. He wore one of the heavy-weather jackets favored by the nomadic cults, protecting them from the fatal cold of the nights outside the city. A symbol branded onto the leather of his right sleeve identified him as one of the Moths—named after the strange, body-harvesting moth native to Mars, the kind that nests in the dead. He raised his head to look at me and I was struck by his face, which was beautiful in a hard, unforgiving way—the way a desert is beautiful. His eyes were pale green, faintly luminescent; I would have mistaken him for one of the miners if not for the symbol on the jacket. I thought he must have been my father’s age at least—somewhere in his forties—until he spoke and I heard the youth in his voice.

“I was beginning to think I was gonna die here before someone decided to serve me.”

His rudeness surprised me. I did not know him, which was unusual in New Galveston but not impossible, especially if he belonged to one of the desert cults. Still, my father and I were respected in the community and generally treated accordingly.

“I’m sorry, but we’re closed.”

“Sign says open.”

“I was about to turn it off.”

“But you ain’t yet, so I guess you must be open. I’ll take some black coffee.”

Not knowing what else to do, I turned around and put some water on the range to boil. It bothered me, this outsider coming in and delivering orders like that. And it bothered me even more that I obeyed.

For a few minutes there was nothing to do, so I leaned against the counter while he sat there watching me. I slid my book under the counter, not wishing to provide this man an opening to further conversation. I heard Father messing around in the back, cleaning the dishes and putting them up. Talking to Mother. It was private: a quiet expression of grief, unremarkable and without harm; but now that this man heard it, I was embarrassed.

“Who’s back there?” the man said.

“My father. This is his place.”

“Who’s he talking to?”

“Our Engine,” I said. The lie was easy by now. “He’s a dishwasher.”

“Dishwasher, huh? So where’s your mama?”

“Earth.” I felt the blood in my face.

“So you help him run the place? He lets his little girl out here to deal with all the dissolute human scum that comes through these doors while he hides away doing women’s work with Engines in the back?”

“Our customers aren’t scum. Generally they are more polite than you are.”

“Well, I’m sorry if I offend.”

“If you were really sorry, you would collect yourself and walk out that door. As I said, we’re closed. They’re showing a picture in the square tonight and I would like to see it.”

“Little girl, I have come from the desert. I am tired and I am in need of shelter and some pleasant company. But more than any of that I am in need of hot coffee. And under this roof I find I am able to acquire all of it at once. I ain’t inclined to leave.”

The water started to whistle behind me and I poured it over the coffee grounds. “Well, I’m not inclined to be very pleasant,” I said.

“Yeah, you made that clear already. What are you so fired up to see, anyhow?”

“They’re showing The Lost World.” Saying the words conjured the image of those beautiful dinosaurs, and I felt an unwelcome childish thrill.

He laughed and shook his head.

I wished I hadn’t answered him; now I was ashamed as well as angry. When I poured the coffee into his mug, I allowed a generous portion of grounds to slide in with it.

He said, “Ain’t you seen it a hundred times anyway? And won’t you see it a hundred times again? There won’t be any more pictures coming from home now. What we got is what we got.”

I didn’t answer him. It wasn’t something I hadn’t thought of before. But I still held on to the notion that maybe we could make new pictures somehow. Eventually. I held on to the notion that the interruption in our normal life we’d been suffering under for so many months would soon be righted. All it needed was the application of hard work, reason, and mostly patience. The world moved according to a long-standing order, and it would come back as soon as people started acting regular again.

I wouldn’t trouble to argue the point, though. He had his cup of coffee, and as far as I could figure it, my obligation to him had reached its conclusion. “Ten cents,” I said.

He wrapped his dirty hands around the cup and closed his eyes, breathing in the smell of it. “That don’t mean anything,” he said.

I felt my patience snap. “It means you owe us ten cents! You can’t just force your way in here when we’re trying to close and then not pay for what you order!”

He put down his mug gently and said, “Force? Little girl, calm yourself down. I will pay you when I’m ready to pay you. And if you think money means a goddamn thing anymore, you’re more childish than I thought. The old things don’t matter anymore. Don’t you get that?”

I heard the door to the kitchen open behind me, and my father said, “Belle, are you shouting? What’s going on out here?”

Father looked tired. Those days, he always did. He wasn’t very tall, and he’d been thin even when in good health, but in the months since the Silence started he’d come to look almost skeletal. His hair had thinned away to nothing on top, and what was left was mostly gray. His clothes, wet with water from washing dishes, hung loosely from his body. His face was worn. He was turning into an old man right in front of me. It was hard to look at him anymore without feeling a bewildering tangle of sadness and fear.

“I told this man to pay for his coffee and he won’t do it.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Anabelle, it’s just coffee,” he said into my ear. To the dusty scavenger across the counter, he said, “My daughter is headstrong. It’s what keeps me honest.” I bristled; he had no right to apologize for me. Not when I was in the right. He offered the man a smile. If you did not know him, it might have seemed genuine.

“Your sign said open,” said the man, as if my father had challenged him in some way.

“Of course. We’re closing up, but you’re welcome to stay and finish.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and shut it off.”

“I don’t mind staying open a while longer. To be honest, you’re doing me a favor. I have work to do here anyway. And I wouldn’t mind the company.” Father walked around the counter with his broom, ready to clean the main floor.

“I said shut the sign off.”

Father stopped, turned to look at the man. Another surge of anger galloped through my blood. I was always hot-tempered, and it got me into trouble sometimes, but some folks brought it out. Some folks just needed to be hit in the face.

I wanted Father to put him in his place. I wanted him to grab this intruder by his filthy collar and drag him kicking and hollering through the diner and throw him outside. I wanted him to blacken those pretty eyes. But it wasn’t his way. He’d always been a mild soul. He liked tranquility and he liked good manners. I used to wonder what it had been that caused such a delicate-natured man to volunteer to be one of the first permanent colonists on Mars, those ten years ago. Brave men did that sort of thing. My father was not brave.

Mother was.

“All right,” he said. He flicked his eyes to me and then back to the man. “Just stay calm. I’ll shut it off.”

“I am calm, old man. I’ll stay that way too as long as you do what I say.”

Father walked to the sign hanging inside the window, and as he did this I calculated my odds against the intruder. I had boiling water to hand, but it would take me two or three good strides to fetch it, another to turn around and fling it at him. That left him too much time. We’d taken the knives to the back to be washed; the fryer was off, the oil cooling. Watson remained in the back, scrubbing plates, as useless as a potted plant. So I glared fiercely at him and I hoped his imagination was sufficient to interpret the magnitude of ills I visited upon him in my mind.

The vacancy of his expression as he looked back at me suggested it was not.

Father pulled the cord on the neon sign. It sputtered and went out. He flipped a switch and half the interior lights went out, too, leaving only the kitchen illuminated, and a few emergency lights here in the dining area. He stayed quiet as he walked back around the counter, until he stood beside me. “There,” he said. “We’re closed. Anabelle, go back in the kitchen.”

“You just stay where you are, Anabelle,” the man said.

“Do as I say. Right now.”

I moved to obey, even though every impulse told me to stay.

The man slapped his hand on the countertop. “Do you not listen? Do you not—”

My father raised his voice, too, but before I could parse what he was saying, the stranger removed a pistol from his belt, hidden beneath his coat, and with a grace and a practice I would not have attributed to one with such a rough aspect, he flipped it once in the air so that he held it by its barrel, and he brought it down in a vicious strike against my father’s temple, dropping him to the counter like a sack of oats. Father slid to the floor; I tried to hold him up, but he was too heavy. The intruder had the gun by its grip again, the transition too fast for me to follow, its open end pointed at my face.

“Now goddamn it, you stay right there!”

I was terrified. I did not move. I watched my father bleeding quietly onto the floor, which was filthy from the treads of our feet and the sand blown in from outside. He was as still as a moon in the open sky.

“Help me with him,” the stranger said. He climbed over the countertop and slid down on our side. He hooked his hands under my father’s shoulders and looked at me. “I said help me, girl!”

I did. I would like to tell you that I fought him, that I grabbed whatever was at hand and attacked him without regard for my own safety. But I was afraid. His quick action had taken the fight straight out of me. Now I was alone with him, and I was afraid. So I took my father’s ankles, and when the man instructed me to help carry him into the back, I obeyed.

We called this room the kitchen, even though most of the actual cooking was done on the range up front, where the customers could watch you. This back room was narrow and used mostly for washing dirty dishes and storing ingredients. A large, waist-high icebox fit snugly next to the sink. On the other side of the sink was the back door, with a heavy security bar fit across it. We liked to pretend New Galveston was too small to accommodate the sort of criminal to make such a measure necessary, but Father maintained that bad men could be found everywhere. Though I had always believed him, I was sorry to see it proved so powerfully.

Watson stood by the sink. He looked so intimidating: his large metal body solid and strong, like a big, invulnerable barrel. His arms were made of steel and could crumple a human skull in the grip of their rubber-padded pincers like a grapefruit. The light from his eyes, in that moment, made him look deadly, like something from a dime novel. I wished with my whole heart that he would surprise this man—that he would surprise me.

“Oh dear,” he said.

The man did not spare him a glance. We laid my father on the floor. As soon as I released his ankles I backed up against the wall, next to a shelf stacked with jars full of preserves, with flour and sugar and oats. Each one a missile I was too scared to use. I felt my breath passing into and out of my lungs. I felt the pulse of blood in my head, so heavy that it made me feel faint.

The stranger stood over my father, examining him the way a veterinarian might a felled horse. He glanced at me. “He ain’t dead, just so you know.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I’d seen dead people before—once when two boys were horsing around on a tractor and one fell beneath the disc harrow dragging behind them, and several more later on, when the influenza cut through us all like a holy judgment. All of them looked just as still, just as expunged of possibility, as my father did then.

“Here’s what’s going to happen.” When I didn’t look in his direction, he clapped his hands together once, sharply. “Do you hear me, little girl? Pay attention. I am going to open that back door there and make a signal. Then some of my friends are going to come in. They’re going to take a look around here and see what might be useful, and then they’re going to go ahead and take it. After that, we’re all going to leave. All right?” He took a step forward and said, “Are you hearing me?”

“I hear you just fine! You’re a thief! That’s all you are is a damn thief!”

He had the nerve to look angry. “You better be glad that’s all I am. You better hope that’s all I stay. You might not think it, but this can get a whole lot worse. So just stand there quietly like a good little girl and let this play out the way it’s meant to.”

The stranger slid the security bar from the back door and pulled it open, letting in a cool blast of night air. He leaned out and made a low trilling sound, like the Martian cricket that was always infiltrating our greenhouses. After a few moments he stepped away and two others came in.

A man and a woman, both dressed for the cold, each face scoured ageless by the harsh and unblocked winds of the plain. The man was tall and bald, with the same reflective green eyes as the stranger. He ignored my fallen father and me, moving instead to the shelving behind us and scooping preserves into a sack. The woman had black hair chopped short and a stocky frame, her face pockmarked with acne scars. She glanced at me and then at my father. “Dead?” she asked.

“Now Sally. What do you take me for?”

“You probably shouldn’t ask.”

She joined the other in the scouring of our stores. While they ransacked for food, the stranger went to the table my father used as a desk and overturned the small boxes he kept there, scattering receipts, pens, paper clips, and the hard round cylinders we used for Watson—for recording messages, for music, for backup. He gathered these latter up and slipped them into the pockets of his jacket. It was this loss, even more than that of the food, that would hurt us.

The whole operation took less than five minutes. As they filed out into the night, silently and quickly, taking with them whatever they could of our food and water, the man who started it all made a stop at the icebox and opened it up, removing from the foggy interior a choice bit of frozen Kansas beef.

On his way to the door he stopped by Watson and patted his cheek. “You ought to come looking for me, big fella. It’s a different world out there for folks like you.” Then he looked back at me. He touched a finger to his head, as though he were raising the brim of an imaginary cap, and said, “Name’s Silas Mundt. I don’t reckon you’ll see me again.”

“You better pray I don’t,” I said.

“Enjoy the picture show, Anabelle. I believe you can still make it if you hurry.”

And then he closed the door behind him. I hefted the bar back into place, locking us in, and then rushed to my father, who was indeed still alive, and breathing shallowly. I cleaned the blood from his head with the hem of my dress. Only then did I allow the tears to come, and they came with a force that frightened me.

It would be some time before I allowed them again.

This all happened a long time ago: in 1931, almost a full year after the Silence began. Back then, we still measured years the way we did on Earth. That would have made me fourteen. Seven, according to Martian reckoning. But nobody used the Martian way then. That would come later.

What I remember most about being a girl during the first year of the Silence was the terrible presence of the saucer. I could see it from my bedroom window in our little hab, and I would stare at it sometimes in the evening, as the sky was opened up to the stars, drawing out crowds of earthgazers. The saucer rested in a declivity just beyond the border of the town. Its dome rose above the low metal roofs of the habs like a squat silver hill, reflecting the light of the setting sun. Sometimes Mr. Reilly, its pilot, would go inside and fire up the engines—just to keep them in working order, he’d say. When he did that, the lights around its circumference would ignite in a bright blue radiance. The light reflected from the sides of our habs, making New Galveston look like a handful of blue diamonds dropped in the desert.

Mr. Reilly didn’t run the engines often, though. The reason he gave was that it used fuel, and fuel had to be conserved if we were ever going to dare the trip home. But the real reason, which I knew even then, was that seeing the saucer all lit up made people a little crazy. They started thinking too hard about climbing in and going home. And nothing fired up an argument in those days like talk of going home.

Serious arguments were things to be avoided, if possible. Sheriff Bakersfield had only a few cells in his jail, and there were no facilities available for long-term confinement. What’s more, we didn’t know if we’d be able to keep growing enough crops to feed everyone as it was; we didn’t want to face the question of whether we should use some of that food for permanent prisoners.

So mostly the saucer stayed quiet and dark. It had acquired the somber aspect of a monument. Sometimes it felt more like a tombstone.

I felt its presence as I ran toward the town square, even though I couldn’t see it from my vantage point. It was like a manifest insult.

The picture had already started. The screen looked like a silver pool turned on its side, shedding a flat light in the darkness. Rows of wooden chairs were set out in rank and file before it, with people affixed to them like dark little mushrooms. The mighty heat lamps that surrounded the town and permitted us to survive outside at night had been brought more closely in, creating a wide pocket of afternoon warmth; it was an indulgence, but one the governor allowed from time to time. The movies soothed anxieties.

On the screen I saw the jungles of Earth—something I had never seen in real life, something I would never see. I grabbed the first two grown men I encountered and ordered them to follow me and to arm themselves and to fetch the doctor and to fetch the sheriff and to secure the town and who knows what else. Though it must have surprised them to receive directives from a half-grown girl, they could see the distress in my face, and they moved to action.

In minutes we’d managed to transport my father to our hab, where Dr. Land hovered beside him, crumbs from his dinner still stuck to the long ends of his fine white mustache. Our hab was standard-issue for a family of three: two bedrooms, each with space for little more than a bed, a bureau, and a breath; one living area composed of a small dinner table and chairs, a writing shelf that folded flat against the wall and hitched there, a kitchen, and barely enough space for whatever personal effects might have accompanied us from Earth. All of this crammed like gunpowder into our little aluminum bullet. When the rain fell against our roof it sounded like the German infantry, or so my father told me.

When I joined him at his bedside, forcing my way through the clucking neighbors gathered in the living room, my father had come back to consciousness and was vomiting into a pail Dr. Land had positioned by his head. The stink of it filled our little home. It shocked me: it made what had happened suddenly real, irrevocable. I suppose I expected to enter that room and see Father standing straight and sure, knowing precisely what to do, restoring order. Instead he was sick. I didn’t understand why being struck should make him vomit, and that it did so seemed to indicate a peculiar weakness in him. It was as though he was dissolving in front of me.

He beckoned me closer, saying my name in a muted voice. I stood there silently and let him touch my face.

“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

“No, but Dad, they—”

“Hush.” Once assured of my safety, he seemed to have no interest in learning the particulars of the robbery. “Let me lie, Anabelle. Go on back and lock up. Get someone to go with you.”

Dr. Land put a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, there’s no need for an escort, I don’t think. This whole town is bustling with the news. Those boys are long gone by now.”

“They weren’t just boys,” I said. “There was a woman, too.”

The doctor cast a doubtful eye upon me. “Well, in any case, I think you’ll be just fine on your own. Go on and do as your daddy tells you.”

Father had turned his face to the wall. He did not look at me as he said, “Please, Anabelle. Do as I ask.”

As I headed to the front door, I cast a glance into my own room, where Watson waited for me, heavy and solid in the shadows, the orange light from his eyes like little candles in the gloom.

“Shall I accompany you, Miss Crisp?” he said. I thought of the hero I’d named him after and felt ridiculous. John Watson, the character, was an ex-soldier, a capable fighting man, and a sharp intellect. The idea that a Kitchen Engine could protect me was absurd, as he’d already proven.

“No,” I said. “You’re useless.”

He turned away, back toward my room. As his head rotated away from me, the lights of his eyes disappeared from my view. It felt like an omen.

*   *   *

THE DINER WAS only a couple of blocks from our hab. I looked down the road to the town square and saw that the film had been shut off, the screen folded up and put away. People were collecting the rows of chairs and taking them back to the classrooms and the churches. A woman saw me walk by and hollered something at me, but I didn’t stay to find out what.

A cluster of men were gathered at the diner, which looked as bright and busy as a workday lunch rush. I pushed my way through the front door, into a discussion already underway about what to do.

Wally Bakersfield, the heavyset, middle-aged sheriff of New Galveston, was in the middle of surrendering. “Pursuit at this hour would be too dangerous,” he said. Hearing that almost dropped me to my knees. I had assumed that there would be only one option here, and that all voices would be unanimous in its support. That Sheriff Bakersfield of all people advocated bowing the head to these wretches indicated a weakness at the core of ourselves, one I would not have given credence to even an hour earlier. I was reminded of my father vomiting into a bucket. “Best to wait until morning,” he said. “We’ll have daylight on our side.”

“By that time they’ll be miles away!” I shouted. Several of the men, who had not seen me enter, turned to look at me with expressions as various and cloudy as their own cowed hearts. “They’ll disappear into the desert! You all know that!”

A big blond farm boy—one of the Dunne boys, a beefy clod named Fenris—put his hand on my shoulder and suggested I go back to check on my father, who was no doubt in need of a daughter’s ministrations. He smiled at me the way you smile at boisterous children, or at good-natured dogs in the high reaches of enthusiasm.

I wanted to go. I was small in a grove of tall men with loud opinions, and though I was typically not shy with my own, that was with my peers. These were adults accustomed to being taken seriously, accustomed to reacting to hardship with wisdom and careful methodology, accustomed most of all to doing these things free from the buzzing of little girls.

But it felt wrong to leave the diner to this crowd of angry men. There were nine or ten of them at this point, stalking around like ants from a kicked nest, talking in big voices about what they would have done if they’d been here, and the necessity for prudence now that it was past.

One of them came out of the back room and said it was all picked over; there was nothing left. They speculated about my father’s future and came to grim conclusions.

“It’s just too risky, keeping all this food in one place,” someone said. “He was asking for trouble.”

“I fear that if it weren’t the outlaws, it would have been one of us before much longer.”

“Now, Jacob—”

“You know I’m right. It’s just going to get worse. You mark me. Once the larders get light, you watch what happens.”

“We’re a God-fearing people,” someone else said. “Not savages. God will see us through.”

“God never set foot on this rock. It’s red for a reason. Red and cold.”

“Don’t let Preacher Spivey hear you talk like that! He’ll drown us in sermon.” This was followed by an easy laughter.

I couldn’t abide it any longer. These men were jawing like they were sharing a smoke after dinner. “And what of the thieves that came in here and attacked my father and stole from us? Why do you keep going on like you was some kind of philosophers, when you could be out reclaiming what we lost? There was only three of them!” I turned to the sheriff. “One of ’em’s called Silas, and he’s with the Moths! There was a woman, fat with short dark hair! Two of them’s eyes were shining green.”

He cut his eyes away from me. He looked troubled, and I thought I knew why.

“Dig Town,” someone said.

“Assemble some men who ain’t scared of the dark and bring them back here!”

“You curb that ignorant tongue, young lady!”

It was Jeremiah Shank, the most loathsome man on Mars. He was tall and too thin and I was sure he walked in the favor of the Devil, whose approving gaze pinched his face into a permanent scowl. He worked as the colony’s cobbler, and he wasn’t a very good one. It remains my fervent belief that he made every shoe a fraction too small in an effort to pull the spirit of the colony into accord with his own.

“Will you have us race into darkness to be set upon like lambs? Will you have them fatten their stores with our own flesh? You’re a child, with a child’s notion of the world. Go back to your daddy, as you were told.”

It was especially galling to hear direction from him; everyone knew his own children had run off to Dig Town once his wife had died. He had no standing to say anything to me, as far as I was concerned.

I felt the hand on my shoulder again. Fenris leaned into my ear and said, “Come, Anabelle. You’re not doing any good here.”

“But I’m supposed to lock up,” I said weakly, and I felt the heat of tears gathering behind my eyes. The diner belonged to my father, and to my mother, and to me, too. It had been invaded twice now tonight, each time by offensive, entitled oafs strutting about like it was their own. It felt abhorrent to leave them there, like leaving a mob of unruly boys in a room full of delicate things. It felt like surrendering ownership of something precious.

“I’ll walk you back,” Fenris said.

“I needed your help earlier tonight. I don’t need it now.”

He looked properly chastened, though I wondered, unkindly, whether it was real or only for show. I always thought that there was something of the actor in Fenris, that he knew how he was supposed to behave and acted accordingly, though he did not feel it in his heart. Looking into his face, which radiated kindness, I wanted to slap him for the liar I believed him to be.

But I did not. I shouldered past him, hot with shame, and I left the diner in defeat. The light from the windows painted a bright wash over the ruddy sand at my feet, and the clamor of their useless talk followed me like a stink in the air.

The paths connecting the homes and the buildings of our colony were well trod, both by human feet and by the plodding of our Engines. I could have followed the packed dirt to my own front door in my sleep, and according to my mother had once done that very thing, but the thought of going back to the sick-smelling hab, where my father languished in his compromised dignity, held no appeal for me. I turned right, off the road, toward the swelling darkness of the desert night.

Colonists often had difficulty getting used to the colder temperatures of Mars, upon their first arrival. The sun is smaller here, the days shorter and cooler. Twilight is the common mood of our sky. I was only five when I came here, overwhelmed by everything new and wonderful, but I still remember the unpleasant shock of it. You did not want to be caught outside the protection of the municipal heat lamps at night, and I found myself wishing for my coat as I approached New Galveston’s edge. I wrapped my arms around myself as a strong gust of wind carved into me, spraying my face with sand that collected in the corners of my eyes and sifted down my shirt. I peered through it, across the flat black plain to the distant rise where I once would have been able to see the low lights of Dig Town, where they mined the mineral called the Strange, which gave the illusion of life to our Engines. But Dig Town was mostly dark these days.

Beyond that was the vast, haunted Peabody Crater: where the Moths dwelt, where the old War Engines still roamed, where spirits were rumored to walk.

I looked for any sign of the thieves: the light of a lantern, the movement of a shadow. There was nothing, of course, other than the long coils of sand that seemed to extend into the night like mystical, winding trails, their far ends connecting to mysteries and riddles, to fantastical cities, or to the long death of the world.

The stars overhead were a shimmering curtain. Somewhere up there was Mother. What she was thinking—if she was thinking any thing at all—was just another mystery.

*   *   *

FATHER WAS ASLEEP when I got home. The door to his bedroom was ajar, and by the splinter of light that extended into it I could see his back as he faced the wall. Still wearing his undershirt, he looked small and boyish in the double bed. His work shirt was draped over a nearby chair. The sick-bucket rested on the floor within easy reach, exuding an evil stench.

I retreated to my own room and changed into my nightclothes. As I settled into bed, the orange glow of Watson’s eyes rotated again into view. I could hear the grit in his servitors: no matter how much we cleaned and polished the Engines, the sand would never completely come out. They needed deep maintenance, new parts. Parts that would never come.

Well, I thought. Somebody will think of something. The Engines won’t die. They can’t.

“Are you well, Miss Crisp?”

“Yes, Watson.”

“Mr. Crisp is ill. He’s still suffering from the attack.”

“Yes, I know. No one is doing anything about it.” I felt despair threaten again.

“Surely it will be put to rights soon enough. The guilty will atone. Justice will prevail. This is civilization, after all.”

“Yes, Watson. Let’s go to sleep now.”

“Good night then, Miss Crisp. Dream well.”

Watson always bid me good night that way. It amused me that he issued it as a directive, as though it were a job one could perform well or poorly. I wondered what he understood about the notion of dreams, wondered if he was curious about what they were like. On good nights, when I felt cocooned in the security of my family and the optimism that comes from faith in the world’s order, I would allow myself to consider the possibility that he did not have to wonder at all, that perhaps Watson and all other Engines dreamed as we did. I imagined that such dreams would be beautiful, as stark and clean as bones scoured by sand. A series of numbers, an ordering of geometrical theorems. A catalogue of answers to impossible questions, glimmering like steel in sunlight.

But that night I knew the interior of his mind for what it was: programmed algorithms; the illusion of personality. He was as cold and as dark as the space we had crossed to come here.

Again, I heard the grating sound as he rotated his head away from me. The light from his eyes lit the corner of my little room and faded, as he dimmed them in deference to my need for sleep.

Mother left for Earth a month before the Silence.

I remember the night it was decided. Mars was different then: vibrant and thrilling, still riding the crest of expansionist excitement. New Galveston was the first official colony established here, but there were other, older settlements: Dig Town, the collection of wattle-and-daub homes and network of tents that had gathered around the great hole they called the Throat, the principal mining site of the Strange; Brawley’s Crossing, an unofficial settlement of stowaways and explorers that predated our own town by at least a decade; and a spiderweb of smaller towns and villages full of philanthropists, pioneers, hermits, and reprobates—the driftwood of civilization that had been accumulating over the years since Chauncy Peabody’s celebrated landing in 1864.

But New Galveston was the jewel. We represented the first organized effort to build a permanent presence here. We were the ones who benefited from the direct exchange of goods with Earth, we were the town that made all the travel brochures and inspired the dreams of working folks yearning for the opportunities that once lured whole families to the American West. Laborers came in droves to lay ties for a railroad, which we believed would one day be the glory of Mars. Wealthy adventurers came to wander into the deserts, and famous personalities vacationed here, eager to take in the exotic atmosphere of a wild new place.

The last night of my normal life found me with my parents on the outskirts of town, on our way to the local baseball game. A barnstorming team was visiting from Earth, featuring players from the Cuban and Negro Leagues for the first time, and Father had heard that their pitcher could throw harder and faster than any white man who’d ever taken the mound. He did not believe it, and we all headed for the game in curious disbelief. My father was eager to see our own Martian Homesteaders put a dent in this upstart’s fancy reputation, but I was secretly hoping to see a dazzling display of strikeouts.

A train of people made the easy walk to the ballfield, the warmth of the afternoon still riding the breeze, a last lingering comfort before the evening chill settled upon us. The sky was bright, spangled with shades of red, the night still crouched behind the curve of the world. People brought picnic baskets; their Engines walked or rode on treads beside them, including our own Watson, who’d been turned into a pack mule for our sandwiches and our lemonade.

It was Watson that stopped us, rotating his rust-mottled head to observe the Postal Engine racing to catch us.

“I believe we are wanted,” he said.

The Postal Engine hurried along, navigating the furrowed track with ease. It came to a ratcheting halt a respectful distance from us. The train of people parted around it, some of them giving us lingering glances. Standard practice was for people to pick up their own mail at the post office; if the Engine came for you, it usually meant an emergency.

“An urgent message for you, Mrs. Crisp,” it said in its cheery metallic voice.

Although no great calamity had yet befallen me, I felt a sickness in my gut. The Engine’s sprightly tone rang like a funeral bell, inspiring a sudden, peculiar loathing. Its voice appalled me. It was as though its engineers had been so intoxicated with the excitement of Mars that it must have seemed impossible to them that one might ever again receive bad news.

“Let me have it,” Mother said, and the Postal Engine extruded a cylinder from one of its ports, which Mother took. It then pivoted on its treads, its function fulfilled, and trundled homeward. My parents exchanged a glance. With a command word—“bluebonnet”—she shut down Watson’s awareness and ejected his personality cylinder from a port in his head. In its place she inserted the recording cylinder.

Watson hummed for a moment, and then he spoke to us in Aunt Emily’s voice.

“Alice, it’s Mother. She’s suffered another setback. Dr. Spahn gives her six months, at best. Her memory is fading. Some days she doesn’t even know who I am. She calls me by your name. I think you should come, if you want to see her before the end. I’m sorry, I know it’s not easy. But I believe it’s now or never.”