Chapter 1: Quadrant Meeting Day

Bradbury Canal, October 7, 2131
Quadrant Meeting Day

It was another Quadrant Meeting Day on Bradbury Canal, the oldest and most boring colony on Mars. Boring for a ten-year-old boy. Alan B. Scarlett was a third generation Martian and like all native born Martians, he was tall and slim. He took after his dad with dark hair and penetrating dark eyes. Unlike his dad, Alan was far from quiet and introspective. Alan never whispered when a shout sufficed. His older sister Christa took after their mom with light blond hair, sparkling eyes and a slim figure that was starting to draw admiring stares from the men of Bradbury Canal.

Their parents, Harrison Scarlett and Laurel Clark-Scarlett were scientists, xenobiologists studying fossilized viruses. That’s what they said, at least. Alan heard them quietly say the terms “Project X” and “Project X point One” when they thought he wasn’t listening. Alan loved to pretend that they were secret agents trying to eliminate the threat from the Eastern Bloc with their research, but when the day was over and they sat at the table for dinner, they were still Harrison and Laurel Scarlett.

Alan’s parents Harrison and Laurel were both born there at Bradbury Canal. How much more boring could you get? So were all four of his grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa Scarlett were among the first humans born on Mars, Stuart Scarlett and Judith Resnik-Scarlett; they were born on Bradbury Canal while it was under construction.

Bradbury Canal, the first permanent human settlement on Mars, looks like a revolving space station. That’s because when it was being built, they had everything needed to build a revolving space station, so they just built a revolving station on the ground, then later they filled in the gaps. It was named Bradbury Canal in honor of Ray Bradbury, who wrote The Martian Chronicles, a famous early science fiction collection of stories about Mars. Of course, every prediction that Bradbury made was wrong ... except the one about the atomic war on Earth. He got that right. But they’re still a fun read.

Naming the station canal was almost a joke. At the end of the Martian Chronicles, an Earth family had just settled on Mars and the children wanted to see the Martians. All the native Martians were dead, so the father of the family took his family to a Martian canal which was full of Martian water and said, “look in the canal and you’ll see the Martians.” So, the family looked and saw their reflections on the surface of the Martian water, telling them they were the Martians. Therefore, if you want to see the Martians, just look in the Canal, and that’s how it got its name.

Even ten-year-old Alan got that message, but what he didn’t get was, “what’s a reflection on the surface of the water?” In the Bradbury Canal, water came in pipes. Everyone had a graduated water bottle that you would connect to a dispenser coupling and an exact amount of water would be transferred to the bottle, and that was part of your daily ration. An open body of water in the three dozen colonies was rare. There wasn’t one on Bradbury Canal but Alan’s mom’s brother, Ray Clark, said that at Perseverance station there was an ornamental canal. On Mars, the word canal had become synonymous with any open body of water. If an ocean mysteriously appeared on Mars, it would be called a canal.

The residents of Bradbury Canal were mostly scientists with a sprinkling of poets mixed in. Nobody knew why hard science breeds bad poetry, but it’s there. The residents of Bradbury Canal were to a person vegetarian and proud of their diet and their colony. Alan was nine years old when he discovered that the “Martian Steak” his mom had been feeding him was tofu.