Lost on Mars (21 page)

But Al seemed to like her well enough. She and I had our stilted conversation and my brother's eyes went back and forth between us, his hands crushed together in his lap. He didn't have to worry, though. What was I going to do, even if I disapproved of his choice of girlfriend? In the City they regarded fourteen as old enough to work for your living and, if he truly wanted, he could afford to leave my care and the apartment they had given us, and take off by himself. My heart gave a tight squeeze at this thought.

Toaster served the meal. I watched it appear, dish after dish; this homely prairie food, steaming in its platters. I guess it seemed primitive and unsophisticated to a City girl like Tillian. But she hid those thoughts, if she had them, and beamed with delight at every forkful and unaccustomed flavour.

I tried to stop myself watching her like a hawk. This shouldn't have been a test. Toaster put some fancy music on the radio station and drew the blinds and lit the lamps. Between the songs, the voice of an announcer read out the names of districts of the City Inside, along with descriptions of what weather they could expect tomorrow. The names were like lists of strange, random words, and I remembered tuning in our radio on the prairie. So this is where we had been making towards, and we got here in the end.

‘Lodger, Eventide, Kestrel, Softspot, Turnstile, Mousetrap, Stockpot…'

Al was talking. He was telling us about his work in the Archive Rooms of
The City Insider
. Already he had learned so much about how the data machines worked, and where everything was filed away. He marvelled at how much information was stored inside a roomful of machines no bigger than this apartment of ours. ‘I'm talking about, like, everything, Lora. All knowledge. Everything that was ever known by human beings, going right back to the start. The sum total of everything!' His eyes widened and he looked so funny in his enthusiasm that Tillian and I couldn't help laughing at him.

He flushed with very Al-like crossness. ‘But don't you think that's amazing, Lora? I sit there every day thinking, Why, I could find out anything. I could type in any word or phrase or name and the devices would rattle into action, think it over, and eventually they would tell me all there is to know about that particular thing or person.'

I asked him, ‘And have you tried it? What have you looked up?'

‘Oh, no,' he said, darting a glance at Tillian. ‘All my time is spent looking up the things I'm told to. It's forbidden to go nosying through the archives for your own benefit. These are very expensive machines. Besides, there's a million things I want to know. Where would I even start?'

We all smiled at that as well, even Toaster, who was going round with dessert dishes. I found it a little sad, too, the thought of Al wondering what it was he most wanted to know about. I guess, high up on that list would have to be what had become of our mother and our sister. But I didn't know how much he thought about things like that, did I? Sometimes Al was like a typical fourteen year old. His feelings were a closed book to me. He might just have accepted the fact that the rest of our family were lost to us. We couldn't bring them with us. They only made it so far. Only we three came to the City Inside. Somewhere on Mars they were still wandering through the wilderness.

Whenever I pictured them, alone, still struggling through the desert, I knew what I must do. Even if Al found a new home and settled down, I knew I couldn't settle here in the City. I had to find them. I had to do something about finding my folks.

30

Next morning at breakfast Al wanted to know what I thought of Tillian. We were eating grapefruit segments that Toaster had brought for us. I didn't think I'd ever get used to all the fresh fruit they had in the City Inside. I'd had a lifetime of dried, salted, and pickled foods and the glass gardens I'd been told about, where they grew amazingly juicy and colourful vegetables and fruit, were mind-boggling to me.

Al was looking at me earnestly, so I told him that Tillian was a very polite and attractive young lady. He blushed.

‘Aren't you a bit young to become so attached to her?'

He glared mutinously. ‘I don't see why.'

‘It's just all a bit sudden. You're my little brother, and here you are with a job and a girlfriend who seems so…'

‘Seems so what?'

‘Well, sophisticated, I guess.'

‘That's how it is here, Lora,' he told me, very seriously. ‘Everything's better and more sophisticated than we're used to. We've gotta fit in with them. That's what I'm doing.'

‘Are you happy doing that?' I asked him.

‘Yeah, I am,' he said. ‘Now she wants me to meet her parents. They live in the Darwin District. Sorry if I'm snappy … it's because I'm nervous. They do sound … rather grand.'

I smiled ruefully: ‘rather grand'! Al was already starting to talk like one of these City people. I guess he was going to have to, if he really wanted to fit in.

Too late for me, of course. I'd be a farm girl and a prairie girl all my life.

‘Al, they'll love you. Why wouldn't they?'

He pushed his unfinished fruit away. (The waste! I thought. That was something else I couldn't get used to. At the Homestead nothing – not a single scrap – ever got wasted.)

‘It's the…' He lowered his voice and looked away from me. ‘It's on our Martian Thanksgiving, Lora.'

‘Oh,' I said. If I added anything he'd think I was angry and envious. But really, how could he even consider it? No one else in this City would celebrate or even know about our Thanksgiving. It was nothing to do with them. Only we could celebrate this important day together. We only had each other. Would he really leave me alone on that day? Alone in a City where I couldn't even find my way around? I couldn't even work the public transport system. Al could get around fine, of course. He was slotting into life so easily. Too easily.

I was going to be stuck here. A prisoner in this small apartment on one of the most important weekends of the year.

I brightened my voice. ‘Don't worry about that.'

He looked at me again, smiling. ‘Tillian said it might not be the right thing to do. Leaving you alone. We haven't been in the City Inside very long and … well, she said you might get lonely without me.'

‘That's very thoughtful of her,' I said.

Al laughed. ‘I had to tell her, “You really don't know my sister yet, Tillian. Why, she's the toughest young woman you're ever likely to meet. Why would she care two sticks about being alone? She's not scared of anything. The things she's done in her life!” I told her that she wouldn't believe even half of what you've had to face up to. The way that you took charge of us all and led us and made sure we kept together through the wilderness…' Al shook his head and whistled.

I was touched by his words. He gabbled away and I was pleased that he had explained me like this to his girlfriend. In the past Al had never had a good word to say about me. At the same time I was thinking that I really did mind about being left alone, but I didn't want to worry him. He needed more than I did to find new roots, and going out to visit Tillian's family was a big step.

Al got up cheerfully to go work in his archive. Carefree, he seemed. Who would have thought that? After all the dangers and disasters and nearly everyone we knew being dead and all? Who'd have thought Al would turn out to be so happy?

Before he left that day he said, ‘I'm thinking of doing a search with the machines at work. I'm sure they won't mind too much, if I do it in my lunch hour, say.'

‘What will you look up?'

‘I want to know more about old Earth. Things I don't really understand. Like kangaroos or pizza or Alexander the Great or the Great Barrier Reef … things you used to read about in books. People in this City get kind of snobby about knowing all about old Earth.'

‘I guess they do.' I had noticed this too. Al had always been a bit snobby about old Earth stuff, too. I remembered his games when he'd pretend to be a prince of Earth, on a yacht with a cloak and everything.

‘Anyhow, I think I'll look up someone specific. I'll find out if they have anything in their Archive about Grandma.'

I was surprised by this.

‘Except I'll need to know her full name, Lora. I don't think I ever knew what it was. She was just Grandma to us. Names seem to have been so complicated, back on Earth. I can't just type ‘Grandma' in, cos I guess I'd find – why, maybe thousands of different Grandmas!'

‘It was Margaret,' I told him. ‘She was Margaret Estelle Robinson. But I don't think…'

‘I'll find her.' Al smiled, and then whirled out of the apartment.

Toaster was clearing up the breakfast things. His electronic ears had perked up at the mention of Grandma.

‘Al wants to go digging into the past,' I said.

‘Very laudable,' he nodded. ‘Too much of our history has been lost. The things we left behind. My memory being burned out in patches. It would be good to remember more.'

‘Would it?' I grimaced.

Toaster stared at me calmly. ‘I really don't think Al will find anything in the Archives of
The City Insider
though.'

‘Why's that?'

‘Because I don't think this is a real City,' he said.

He bustled off with all the dishes loaded up in his arms and vanished into the kitchen. He didn't say what he meant. Not yet. Toaster was still thinking it over.

Thinking too much was never really in my nature. I slung on my new hat and coat and decided I'd ride the elevator downstairs to get some air. I secretly loved the elevator and used any chance I could get to have another go in it. Of course we'd never had anything like it in Our Town. That wonderful arrangement of metal ropes and gears and cogs, all chiming and clanking away, pulling that cage up and down, up and down all day. It was like being inside some wonderful clock.

Toaster made a few concerned noises about coming with me, but I decided that I wanted to be by myself. He looked woeful and I laughed. ‘Really, Toaster. It ain't dangerous out there.'

Actually, some of the looks he'd been giving me lately – equal parts wary and worried – reminded me of how he would look at Grandma back in the day. As if at the grand old age of nearly sixteen I'd turned into a crabby, crazy lady.

He was just trying to help, though. It was what he'd been programmed for, after all. He was built to look after the members of our family, no matter what. It just about destroyed him to see what had become of us all.

I got aboard the empty elevator. We were on Storey 202. Pretty high. Dazzlingly high. I couldn't even conceive of the distances and forces involved in building and living so high. The metal grilles slammed and I gave myself up to the gut-wrenching lurch of its rapid descent. I spared a glance at myself in the highly polished mirror. My hair was up under my shapeless hat, my dress was plain, but tidy and pressed.

Al would tell me that I ought to dress up more. People in the City Inside noticed such things, he'd said, once or twice. He said that I made a habit of dressing like a servant. Well, that suited me fine. I'd no desire to go putting on airs. Al needed to wear fancy outfits and suits more than I did. He seemed so pleased to wear the ancient, old-fashioned stuff that the City people preferred. They put me in mind of the folk in my old electric books.

When we first got here I thought we'd gone mad. The women looked just like the etched illustrations in the Brontes and the Dickens. I thought we'd flown with Sook into a world of madness. But this kind of dress turned out to be normal. It was how people had been living here for just about forever.

The elevator deposited me in the wide foyer of our building. It was all mellow, gleaming sunlight down there. The Downstairs Market was held here everyday, and the place was all hubble bubble with folk milling about. They came from the residential apartments above and from the other buildings in our district, which was called Stockpot, of all things.

Multi-coloured awnings stretched over rickety booths, where City-dwellers of all kinds plied their wares. It was a shambolic place, a little bit rough and ready. You could hear accents other than the refined talk that my brother was trying so hard to imitate. In the Downstairs Market you could hear all kinds of surprising things.

I had my basket and a pocket full of credits and I was checking out the fresh produce. Weighing fruits and vegetables in my hands, squeezing them, smelling their firm, plump skins. It was all luxurious to me, after some of the rubbish we'd had to eat in the desert and the deep canyons of the wilderness. I'd never forget the taste of rat or blue Jack Rabbit or those dreaded dried capsules Aunt Ruby loved so much.

I couldn't believe the gorgeousness of the colours and aromas that they took for granted in the City Inside. I drifted over to where some old guy was stirring a huge pan over a naked flame. Yellow rice, chunks of sizzling meat and tiny baby squid. The smell was irresistible.

Sometimes I wondered what Da and Ma would make of this place. I didn't suppose either of them could have imagined a City like this. Towers of a thousand storeys and everyone living in vertical harmony. The vastness of the numbers involved were hard to imagine, even when you were right in the middle of it all.