Planets Falling (5 page)

Chapter 7 – Past Loves

Holst brought young Ferris to the cavern a few days after she arrived on mars.  All was darkness and then light. She was raised in a small village in northern North America, far away from the sprawling cities.  The sky was always so crisp; the tradewinds wound through the forest from the ocean, embracing her in a blanket of brine - the exhalation of life itself. The cavern had no wind.  Mars had no ocean.  But she would conjure up the very essence of life in those depths.

Light was the first brush stroke on her canvas.  The generators thrummed and the artificial plasma panels shone with solar brilliance.  With cells and water and her very own breath, she would bring this world to life, even as the one she left was
quickly dying.  She knew this by the very smell of the ocean during her last day on earth.  Stepping on that transport to mars was the worst decision of her life, but the only viable one.  The wind on earth was becoming dull, lackluster.  Decay assaulted her nostrils.  There was no looking back.  She would be the center of it all- a new garden, a novel opportunity.

While she extracted the best from all the brilliant minds around her, she found herself slowly spinning around the one that had empowered her.  Holst was the provider, the enabler, the critic, and the goad.  He wasn’t too bad to look at either.  He grasped what was deep inside her and pulled it out so that it could bask in the sunlight and thrive.  As the cavern began responding to her whims, she lost track of time and space.  Was it days or perhaps months she spent in that underground playground bringing her world to life? When she momentarily rose from the mist, Holst was there to provide what she needed.

One afternoon she stopped to rest. She closed her eyes and inhaled.  She swore the ocean breeze had traveled across the void to greet her once again. Childhood was hers for so fleeting a moment.  When she opened her eyes, she found herself no longer falling toward Holst but spinning freely on her own.

Chapter 8
– Birth

Adam had recently been born.  Pinchot escaped the cries of her tiny son, leaving him in Jon’s able care, and was now awash in her element.  Although she enjoyed the company of others and adored her family, she relished her time underground with the life - her life.  The set of caverns on the planet served as replicates.  As the caves converged or diverged from one another, she learned new and intimate things about the necessities of creating a secure, efficient ecological system in an inhospitable locale.  Years passed in those caves as her tiny boy learned to roll, walk, and talk.  Jon was present for these events.  She was not.

Pinchot was working late one night in a remote underground ecosystem in the southern hemisphere of mars.  Jon and Adam, who was now just five years old, were traveling earthside to meet with Jon's uncle.  The uncle was old and one of the last remaining Fuersts.  It was time for Adam to realize that he had a bloodline that extended beyond the red planet.  She wasn’t lonely.  She had all that she needed in the soil forming beneath her feet.  After all, there was a bit of Jon in it.

In this southern cavern, once a remote outpost during early mars exploration, she noticed that the algae, moss, and lichens occupying the space were acting strangely compared to those encrusting her other subterranean units.  Magma created deep in the crust of the planet was very close to this cave.  Warm, nutrient rich water bubbled from springs and was far superior to the manufactured water in most of the other caverns.  She collected several samples and sent them to the microbiological labs.  Within a day, her colleagues sent her some intriguing results.  The microbes in the martian water were unique and very likely of unearthly origin.

When Adam and Jon returned, she found herself wanting to keep the discovery secret.  The microbiologists inquired about the organisms but she reported that they had disappeared.  She’d certainly provide the scientists with more samples if she found them.  It was clearly a lie, but who was to question her?  She found herself spending more time than necessary in this particular chamber.  Strange things were happening.  Lichens began glowing dimly.  Algae were growing where no light penetrated, a feat impossible for photosynthetic creatures. An unprecedented merger was occurring between organisms from two planets. And then, there were the dreams.

Pinchot was a napper. She never slept a full night.  Rather, she stretched out in a still spot either in her offices topside or on a clump of moss or grass in an underground lab and tumble into slumber.  Her dreams were always vivid, occupied by all the smells, colors, and sounds of the world she wanted to make. 

When she slept in this unique chamber though, her dreams diverted toward a darker but compelling place.  Images and voices clung to a greenish mist. Some she recognized as friends and family long gone.  Others were anonymous faces peering at her with serene countenance.  Most troubling were the children, especially the grinning young boy who she recognized as a victim of the breach event.  She’d known his mother, a talented chemistry teacher. The grief hung on that woman for years.  The woman and her family eventually wandered back to earth, leaving a hole in their chemistry faculty and a twist in Pinchot's gut.

When the figures began appearing during her waking moments, Pinchot suspected something was very wrong biologically or that she was losing her mind.  She sampled the air and the water.  The usual mixture of gasses and molecules were there, so she was not being poisoned by a chemical exhalation of one of the new life forms taking hold.  Her mind seemed sound.  No magical mystery tour for Ferris.  The images, breathless words, and cold touches of the ghosts never appeared in her other experimental chambers or aboveground.  She was convinced that whatever she was encountering was real and that it was related to the life evolving in the cavern.

Adam was seven when she made contact with one of the others.  She was taking oxygen readings near a small pool of martian water.  A hand, nearly solid, reached out of the liquid and touched her wrist.  She dropped her computer and then saw or felt - it was difficult to process the sensation- a day on earth.  Smoke snaking its way between ruined, cragged trees.  Clouds, acrid and dull, wisped in fetid wind.  The soil was cracked.  No life.  It was whispering.  No life.  She realized she was not experiencing the past but seeing a future. A future
for earth.

She slipped from reality and floated in a world without substance.  Light, sound, taste, touch - they all were mixed.  Memories and premonitions were as substantive as the sun or the stars or the martian dust.  At this moment, she knew that she was chosen.  She needed to act.  But not now.  She would know when.

The next day she returned home to colony 1.  Jon could sense a change in her.  Not physical.  She seemed her cheerful, somewhat spacy self.  But he felt as if something had changed in her spiritually.  If he didn't know better, he would have sworn that she was glowing ever so slightly.  Of course that was a trick of the light, how the sunshine and lamps reflected on her skin.

When Adam was ten, she awoke to an anxious voice on a transmitter.  A technician in the southern region reported a catastrophic failure of the regional power grid.  An unanticipated meteor impact had incapacitated several colonies.  They were evacuating. Unknown to the technician, the cavern of ghosts, of solace, of depths beyond understanding was in danger as well.  Its energy source was linked to the grid and would have grown dark and cold.  She quickly rushed to a shuttle, spending the tense minutes at the helm nursing the sinking feeling one must have when their child is drowning and help is too far away.  When she arrived, light and heat were gone, except at the location of the pool in which the two springs fed.  By headbeam, she stumbled to the site and tucked a little of the water into a stasis container.  It glowed for a few hours but then dimmed and died out.

It took three months to restore power to the grid.  When the plasma panels hummed and artificial sun rose again in her cavern, she was amazed at the grief she felt as she scanned the brown, shriveled world before her.  In the years to come, she tried to restore life to that place.  Vegetation returned.  But the ghosts did not.

Chapter 9 - Death

Adam and Maggie stood in the airlock where William Holst had taken his last breath of dry, artificial colony air.  Adam fondled Heldren’s data puck in his hand.  "Here we go," he said as he placed his finger on the activation key.  The puck became transparent.  A small screen appeared on its surface indicating that the recording device was located and being accessed.  Within a few moments, the accumulated images of thousands of lockages over decades were in his grasp.  Somewhere within those digitized files were the final moments of Holst's life.

They decompressed the files in Sarah’s lab.  "I think I found it," Sarah announced. "You all ready?"

Adam and Maggie nodded.  And the imagery unfolded.

The camera faced the heavy airlock door.  The panel that activated the lock was out of sight.  Holst appeared in the video stepping backward - he was talking to someone, pleading.  A small data pad sat loosely in his hand.  He waved it, as if in offering to the unknown person.

"Maggie, was a data tablet found with Holst's body or in the airlock?" Adam queried.

"No.  But that doesn't mean that it wasn’t overlooked out there.  They were assuming a suicide, so no formal investigation occurred.  They collected the stiff, dragged him inside, and that was the end of it.  The death was caused by asphyxiation and decompression."

In the shimmering scene, Holst's shoulders slumped. He was resigned to his fate.  He turned toward the airlock.  Warning lights blinked, the doors opened, and the frail man walked into oblivion.

"Hm, wait a minute." Sarah was pointing at a shadow on the wall to Holst's left.  "There’s a shadow when the light blinks.  See?"  She pointed at the screen’s grainy image.

The shadow was slim and unquestionably feminine in form.

"I think Holst had company," Maggie muttered.

Adam knew the shadow belonged to his mother.  "I need to go." 

Within moments, Adam powered up his shuttle and was en route to his mother's most recent experiment- a patch of mosslands she was tending at the equator of the planet.  His vessel settled near a tiny station, a shack really, where Pinch
ot and her staff were housed.  Storage containers, all-terrain vehicles, canisters, and stray equipment littered the area.  The air was balmy for mars, hovering just above freezing.  Ferris and her crew would not be in the building.  This time of day, high noon on mars, they were dispersed throughout the research zone collecting data, setting up experimental plots.  Adam inspected his environmental suit. All colonists had a special relationship with their suits.  The saying about babies on the planet was suit first, diaper second.  The suit was the one assurance against a cold, unpleasant departure from life on the surface of mars.

Suit on, pressurized, and checked, Adam set out to find his mother.  He followed a well-worn path between looming boulders and through deep crevasses until he came across a lean, lanky figure kneeling in the dust next to a path of emerald fuzz.  The man stood.  "Well, well, well. Adam Fuerst.  What brings you here?"  It was Henry Bodson, a close friend of his father and mother.

"Looking for mom.  Is she near?"

"About a kilometer to the west." He pointed down a rock shaded path. 

"Thanks."  Adam began walking away.

"Congratulations on your promotion to Principal.  You’ll be a great leader.  I still can’t believe that little boy I used to swing around in the air is now the boss."

"Thanks Henry."  Adam wondered whether Henry sensed the remorse and sadness in his voice over the communications line.

Adam
marveled at the vast beauty of the terraformed mars landscape even as his life was spinning into confusion and disbelief.  Life now adorned the rocks reflecting all colors of the rainbow.  Signs of life on mars were far from a single shade of green.  Rather, the lichens and algae were all colors- orange, purple, even maroon, accentuating the planet's natural red dust.  Given the time of day, there were few shadows and he was actually beginning to sweat.  He adjusted the ventilation in his suit.

He shimmied around a boulder and there she was - Ferris Pinchot in her glory.  Her hands rested on her hips as she stood surveying the landscape around her.  Adam was dumbstruck.  Before her stood a small plot of sturdy woody shrubs.  "Vascular plants on mars?" The amazement was evident in his voice.

"Hello my boy."  She said without turning to him.  "We may get these critters to stick.  Did you know that the plants are starting to boost the local oxygen concentrations?  We’re finally getting somewhere.  Now if I can live another two centuries, I may get some satisfaction."  She laughed to herself.  "I expect you’re not here to pay your old mother a social visit."

Adam searched for the words.  Was there a delicate way he could approach her?  The little boy awed by his mother cowered in her shadow.  Finally, the tension burst.  The shadow fizzled.

"Were you with Holst the night he died?" Adam sat on a slab of basalt.  There.  It was done.

"Yes, Adam my dear, I was."  She walked toward him, brushed off dirt from the rock, and sat down next to her son.  "You’re not the only one obsessed with those awful days before you were born.  Strange how a horrible event could be filled with such opportunity.  I guess that’s how it always goes."  She sighed.  He did not look at her.

"Were you responsible?"

She seemed genuinely confused.  "For the breach?
Of course not.  Your father and I could have easily died.  And it interrupted our coffee break.  We began to suspect Will early on though.  He was very ambitious and a bit like me.  Dreamed of turning this place into a garden.  I think he was led astray by the company and was deluded into thinking the event would set us on a new, productive trajectory, which it did, even though there were unfortunate consequences."  She closed her eyes, chin lowered to her chest.

"So what happened the night he died?"

"It all started years ago.  He confided in me.  A deep, ugly secret. He had a weaponized version of the bacterial strain that caused the event.  Something infinitely more dangerous to the colonies.  In fact, he believed it could hobble entire civilizations.  I spent years trying to guess where he kept it hidden.  The solution was so obvious.  But you know that already."  She touched his shoulder with her gloved hand.

Adam stiffened.  "So you and Holst?"

"Years ago, Adam. Long ago, when I was young and lonely and so very sad and angry.  Confused, really.  I love your father, even if he was too willing to indulge me in my incessant tinkering.  And in dragging you everywhere with me.  I know that you feel so conflicted."  She paused, waiting for some response.  Adam remained silent, hidden in his suit.  "Well, back to your question about the night Will walked out onto the surface.  He came to me with news that the vial was gone from his apartment and that we needed to get it back.  I informed him that I had taken care of it."

Adam suddenly felt very heavy, his feet unable to shift.  "What do you mean by that, mom?"

"Earth, Adam.  We are all exiles of our own blind indulgence.  When you were a boy I met someone, or perhaps something, that made me realize that there’s no future there.  For life.  Life is so very rare.  And I’m afraid we don't understand even the half of it.  There’s much more beneath the surface, below the molecules, the energy.  Life is a doorway to something magnificent and exceptional.  I simply cannot allow that to dim any further."

Adam shifted slightly.  "Mom, what did you do?"

She smiled sadly.  Her blue eyes were now grey.  "I’m unwinding it all.  Earth will be my grandest garden."