Lost on Mars (24 page)

Everything was cramped, even when we emerged into a kind of town square. I had to duck to avoid banging my head on the ceiling of wet rock. Then Peter squeezed my hand and led me into a mean-looking building with narrow windows. Inside there were dormitories and small alcoves, like cupboards, and I realised that this stuffy, musty place must be where he lived. When we were both inside his alcove, he pulled a curtain across a rail and there was hardly any room for us both. I perched on the unmade bed.

‘I'm sorry it's so … awful,' he smiled.

He manhandled the harp into the corner of his tiny room and, as he did so, I noticed a squirming bundle of black fur in a nest of blankets on the bed. It was Karl, who had woken at the sound of our voices. His eyes shone like he recognised me. He tried to get control of his awkward, trembling limbs so he could come and sit on my knee.

‘Didn't do so well busking without you, boy,' Peter laughed. ‘But look what I brought back anyway!' At first I didn't know whether he meant me or the sack of bones, which he quickly opened for the cat-dog to see. Karl was sniffing crazily, leaping about the confined space, bumping into everything.

It struck me that this was it. This tiny corner of a room, curtained off from a whole load of similar alcoves, was the full extent of my new friends' lives. I thought about everything that the Authorities had given to my brother Al and me when we came to the City Inside. It hardly seemed fair. I felt ashamed. What was so special about us?

I could hear shuffling, mumbling noises behind other curtains, so I kept my voice low. ‘How come you have to live like this?'

Peter looked offended by my question as he sat watching Karl nibble and paw at the bones. ‘Hey, there's nothing wrong with this place. I like it here.'

Karl settled back on the bed, his limbs all over the place, chewing noisily.

‘But it's so dark and dirty,' I said, the words out before I even knew it. I sounded like such a prissy housewife. In our Homestead, and in my apartment, everything was scrubbed clean and kept immaculate. Even on our journey through the wilderness we never let our standards slip. But it was rude to judge other people like that.

Peter's face darkened. ‘Some of us don't have any choices,' he said.

I remembered that I was stuck down here in this place he called the Den. No one else knew where I was. He could do anything. Though I was sure he wouldn't. I was sure he was a good person.

‘We can't all live in Stockpot District.' He pulled a face at me to ease the tension.

I tried to tell him, ‘Hey, Al and me, we've got nothing, either. We came to the City Inside with absolutely zilch.' I could feel myself flushing with indignation. My embarrassment was making me defensive. ‘So you needn't act the poor boy with me. You never had to walk across half the planet, did you? You never had to flee from the Martian Ghosts? You never had to fear being eaten or lose half your family…'

‘Hey, hey,' he said, taking hold of my shoulders. I shrugged him off. ‘It's OK. You needn't get upset.'

I was getting worked up. Somehow the things I said to Peter and those he said to me felt important. For the first time in ages I'd met someone I wanted to explain everything to. Everything I'd seen and lived through.

We sat on the lumpy-bed with his little cat-dog between us. Karl was making lip-smacking noises.

‘You're an asset to the Authorities,' Peter said. ‘They want you here. You and Al and Toaster – they stand to learn a lot from you. You're the people of the future.'

I stared at him. ‘How can that be? You all live in this totally magnificent City. We lived in a shack on the prairie…'

Peter shrugged. ‘Maybe. But tell me, Lora. When did your people first leave Earth?'

I answered automatically. We learned all this stuff by rote in the school house. ‘2094 was the year our first Settlers came to Mars. Grandma and Aunt Ruby and old Toaster were on the first wave. Aboard the
Melville
.'

Peter whistled at this. Then he looked like he was about to tell me something I'd find surprising. I braced myself. ‘And do you know when this City Inside was first built?'

This had been puzzling me. I'd asked Toaster about it, but he kept saying his circuits were damaged and thinking was coming hard to him. I lay awake in our new apartment sometimes wondering how the City Insiders could have all this. These towers and pipelines and all these riches. How could they be as civilised as this?

‘When was the City Inside built?' I asked Peter. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer.

‘1900,' he said. ‘It's been here over 250 years.'

34

When Al and Toaster and me woke up in the City Inside, we didn't know what we had fallen into. We stumbled into the streets and we couldn't understand why everyone was wearing such old-fashioned dress, why horses pulled carriages, why men wore hats and women bonnets, and why everything seemed to run by clockwork. We thought we were dreaming. I thought we had fallen into one of my Victorian books that had got so mashed up in my electric machine. All the belching chimneys and the clattering hooves – surely we'd fallen down a rabbit hole and come up in the past?

But the sky between the blocks was pink and orange and the dirt underfoot was good Martian dirt. The horses stamping impatiently through the traffic were green and reptilian. This was still the world we had known, but it was the human beings who were the mystery.

They were surprised and delighted by us. They took us in and gave us medical examinations and they fixed up Toaster, so that he looked better than he ever had. But they couldn't fix his memory circuits. The technology bamboozled them.

The Authorities were astonished by us.

And now I knew why.

We came from a planet 250 years after they had left it behind. They were the secret City Inside, somewhere on the other side of Mars. No one on Earth in our time knew about them. But somehow they had thrived.

That afternoon in Peter's musky-smelling alcove in the Den, the two of us sketched out a history of his people and mine.

‘So … other people came to Mars before we did,' I said.

‘Many more,' said he. ‘We came from England. Well, our ancestors did. In the last millennium. Sorry about that.'

I gawped at him. In our town we were settlers. I was part of the third generation. Mars was new and uninhabited. We were holding on by our fingernails.

But before Grandma and Ruby grew old on the prairie – almost two centuries before them – the British were here. Drinking tea and all the other strange things they do.

They came from the late Victorian period, Peter explained. He brought out albums, showing me scratchy pictures and dim photographs. He had books piled up, dusty under his messy bed, and he yanked them out excitedly.

‘How did we not know?' I kept saying. ‘How could we be such fools?'

Several thousand human beings absconded from planet Earth and came to Mars between 1885 and 1902.

‘Oh, it wasn't very widely publicised,' Peter told me. ‘It was all quite clandestine and hush-hush.'

They came in bunches of several dozen, in spacecraft no larger than a motorised lorry, which were built very quietly in Newcastle-upon-Tyne docks. These ‘Celestial Omnibuses', as they were called, were manufactured in the North, away from prying eyes. The people who were leaving all belonged to a secret society. They were ‘Insiders'. None of them were very pleased about the way life on Earth was heading. They were convinced man was about to do irreparable harm to himself and his planet. Well, that turned out to be true, though not for a while yet.

They signed up and paid extortionate prices by monthly installments. All of them were convinced they were going to be happy colonists on a new world, creating a better life.

Just as we were, almost two centuries later, when we settled thousands of miles away, across the supposedly barren surface of Mars.

They came here, all that time ago. They landed their brass and lead-lined spacecraft here in the dust bowl and set about making their towns, to plans laid down by the geniuses in charge of the exodus. The Mars Exodus, the Insiders had called the whole enterprise, Peter told me.

And so the City Inside grew up over the decades and centuries. They were secret and independent of Earth and soon completely forgotten by everyone down there, apart from surviving members of their secret society and the custodians of their papers and affects, who – it was rumoured – would secretly keep them abreast of some of the useful technological advances on old Earth. Their colony expanded and settled in and grew hugely. Filling out this whole, magnificent City.

By the time my grandma and her generation of settlers left for Mars, they knew nothing at all about the Victorians far across the vast deserts.

Perhaps that was just as well. How would Grandma and Aunt Ruby or even Da have reacted to this? Would they feel foolish and amazed like I did? Would they have felt tiny and futile, building their dust-blown towns and never knowing about the City Inside?

I didn't know. I just didn't know.

I was sitting in an underground Den on a snowy day with a boy and his cat-dog. I was learning all this stuff, where I came from. I was having my mind blown.

‘OK,' said Peter at last. ‘You're reeling, aren't you? We can stop talking about all this cosmic stuff, and time and civilisation and everything for a while, if you like.'

‘But it's important!' I burst out. ‘I need to understand. No one's ever gone from one civilisation to the other, have they? Me and Al and Toaster – we're the first, aren't we? The first to understand.'

‘I guess so,' said Peter.

I thought about that Dean of the University. Dean Swiftnick. Yeah, no wonder he wanted to talk to me. If the Authorities knew what me and Peter had just pieced together – I guess I had quite a few things in my head that they'd want to know about. I had about 250 years of Earth history and advances locked away somewhere inside me. Valuable stuff they knew hardly anything about.

I must have looked completely freaked out by now. Peter jumped up off the bed. ‘Come on. Enough now. I'm taking you to the pub.'

Karl went happily into his walking harness and, even though he could only manage about ten yards under his own steam, he was glad to get some exercise. Peter carried him the rest of the way through the dark streets. A sulphurous drizzle had started up. I couldn't imagine why anyone would prefer to live down here to up above, amid the green glass towers.

Then we arrived at the pub – a dingy, neon-lit place where people huddled around strange-looking pipes that bubbled as we passed and emitted multi-coloured smoke. There was music like nothing I'd ever heard before – jangling and discordant – and somehow it got under my skin straight away. I loved it.

Peter put Karl on the busy bar, and the cat-dog drew attention from the men standing on either side. The animal didn't look so sickly as he sat there while Peter ordered some drinks.

We sat at a small table and I found myself telling him about Al's problems at work.

‘They're not used to people breaking rules,' he said. ‘Poor Al. There are rules everywhere in the City Inside and the Authorities are used to people who would never dream of breaking them.' He sipped his drink and grimaced. He dribbled a little into a clean ashtray for Karl to lap up, which couldn't have been good for him. The stuff was spirits. I pretended to sip mine in a grown-up fashion but didn't like the taste much. ‘They're very precious about the bits of technology they've managed to cobble together over the years. Only a very few geniuses know how all these miraculous things work.'

‘They certainly don't seem to want people to use the archive computer for personal reasons,' I said. ‘Al should have thought it through. He's been brought up to think he can't do anything wrong. He was always pretty inquisitive as a little kid.'

Peter was paying close attention to me and seemed about to say something, when the lights plunged even dimmer and much louder, aggressive music came on. All eyes were on a single figure standing under a sodium light. It was a man, I think, starting to dance. He was dressed up as a robot. But a robot in a tutu and tights, with loads of make-up slashed across his face and a white wig hanging in tatters. He moved his mouth to the words of the song and moved his body to a pounding beat. I thought I recognised the song, but couldn't put my finger on it. He slung a feather boa around his shoulders and made the crowd laugh and howl with drunken appreciation.

Peter was watching my face as I stared, mouth open at the performer.

He reminded me of Madame Lucille, the dressmaker. I was remembering how she'd danced so outrageously for us, lit up like a star on the sand dunes that night. The night she'd made us all dress up.

Down in the Den there was no telling how late it was. Soon enough I felt tired. I should have been home hours ago. Al would be wondering where I'd got to. He went on like he was tough, but I knew he hated being in the apartment without me.

I asked Peter to show me the way back out to the surface, and tell me how to get back to Stockpot District. He just needed to point me in the right direction, and I could find my own way. I knew at once he was disappointed. By then we had watched a number of dancers come and go, each more elaborate than the last.