Chapter 15: Open Sky

The Park, March 2012

Barry tells Waylon there’s something Norm would like to show him. Waylon has known for three months that they were working on a surprise. He has caught the scheduling anomalies and the sections of Norm’s construction reports that ran light on detail, and he has let them have their fun instead of asking.

They walk the corridor toward the settlement perimeter, past the last pressurized junction, to a tunnel entrance Waylon hasn’t used before. The wall panel shows no airlock, suit staging area, or depressurization warning. The tunnel leads to open ground, and the air that reaches him carries soil, jasmine, and something faintly mineral. A breeze, on Mars. Waylon stops at the threshold with his hand against the tunnel wall. Ahead of him, thirty acres of landscaped ground, six football fields of it, fill an excavated valley within the sub-canyon. Walking trails wind through groves of trees, some silver-barked and plainly alien, others green-leafed and familiar. Blue-green ground cover carpets the spaces between gravel paths, the blade tips blushing red from the iron in the soil. The canyon walls rise sheer on three sides, layered red-brown and ochre, and above them runs the narrow ribbon of Martian sky. There’s no dome and no ceiling, only an invisible containment field holding the air in, and the sky above it is open.

“We thought you might want to be outside sometimes without a suit,” Barry says.

Waylon steps onto the ground and feels the gravity drop to Mars gravity, a third of what the domes hold. The grass under his boots is springy and denser than Earth turf, and the color shifts as a cloud’s shadow passes, bluer where the light dims, the red tips flaring where the sun catches them. He stands in it and breathes. The air tastes clean and faintly iron-edged, and it moves across his face with no helmet between.

Norm waits for Waylon to take the park in. The Mars trees stand in a loose grove near a pond, silver-grey bark and small waxy translucent leaves in dense spiraling clusters, low and wide-canopied, filtering the sun into dappled patterns on the ground below. Earth olive trees, silver-leafed and old-looking, grow beside a sheltered basalt wall where small citrus trees are bearing actual fruit. Bougainvillea climbs the basalt in magenta. Lavender and jasmine line the paths, sunflowers stand against the south-facing wall, and frangipani grows near the pond. A single Japanese maple with blood-red leaves sits where the morning sun reaches it first. Rosemary hedges border the gravel paths, thyme grows low between the path stones, and ornamental grasses in copper and gold catch the afternoon glow. Mars flowers rise from the ground cover in clusters, pale blue and silver-white, translucent petals holding the light. Hybrid fruit trees carry small round fruit, deep purple with a silver blush. All of it, Earth and Mars together, grows in soil that was dead rock a year ago.

He walks to the pond and crouches at the edge. The water, fed by extracted groundwater ice, lies flat, and below the surface bioluminescent creatures move in loose groups along the bottom, laterally flattened, cold blue-white, nothing like fish but what might have become fish if Mars had kept its water for another billion years. Their glow shifts in patterns that suggest congregation or communication. Barry explains it once: Mars had the chemistry, the lakes, and the time, and the deep Eridania cores still held what that water left behind. These are the logical outcome.

Small land creatures move through the ground cover near the pond’s edge, low-slung, smooth-skinned, pale silver-grey like the Mars tree bark, bioluminescent markings along their flanks pulsing faintly. They travel in groups of four or five, grazing the blue-green grass, and when Waylon crouches near them they lift their heads and look at him with large dark eyes and stay where they are. Barry calls them residents. Waylon watches them for a long time.

The memorial placard stands at the park’s far end, facing the canyon wall. It has been moved in from the open regolith where Waylon planted it in an EVA suit. The silver sheet of metal with its deep-cut lettering now rises from blue-green grass, with the flag on its post beside it, stiff on its spring arm against the Martian sky. The names and the flag are the same. The ground beneath them is alive.

Waylon stands in front of it and reads the names as he does every morning, while the breeze moves the grass around his boots. For the first time since he arrived on Mars he’s standing at the memorial without a suit. Phobos tracks overhead, fast enough to follow with the naked eye, while Deimos hangs nearly fixed, and Earth holds a blue-white point in the western sky.

A stone bench sits near the placard. Waylon settles onto it, and the basalt is cool through his clothes. He looks at the park Norm built and Barry conceived. They wait. Waylon leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands loose between them while the afternoon light moves across the silver face of the placard.

“How long,” Waylon says.

“Three months of active construction,” Norm says. “The containment field’s been stable for six weeks, long enough to support the new life. The constructors accelerated the growth, the way they raised the groves on Freehold, so the olive trees went into the ground already old and the Mars trees came up beside them. I didn’t show you earlier because I wanted the vegetation established. A park without trees and grass is an engineering project. This is a home.”

Waylon speaks to Barry through the link. You knew.

I helped design the climate model. Norm built everything else. A pause. The field holds a full atmosphere. Earth pressure, breathable air, open sky. The park heats and cools with the Martian day, on the same sol cycle the settlement keeps. The field stops the dust storms and the radiation at the boundary. We’ll even have rain overnight.

Of course Norm thought of everything.

Waylon looks back at the park. The breeze carries the jasmine again, the Mars flowers hold their translucent petals open to the filtered sun, and the residents graze near the pond in their small silver-grey groups. The canyon walls rise above all of it into the salmon sky.

“It’s a park on Mars,” Waylon says.

“Yes,” Barry says.

Marylee and Deni

Waylon brings Marylee and Deni through the tunnel entrance without telling them what’s on the other side. Both of them worked on the design with Barry and Norm, but neither has stood inside the finished space, and he wants to watch their faces when they do.

They step out of the corridor into the moving air, the layered scent reaching them before the park opens ahead in every direction.

Marylee stops. Her eyes move across the terrain and settle on the bougainvillea climbing Norm’s basalt wall, the magenta she chose because it grew in the Pacific gardens on Freehold before the attack. Deni sees it at the same moment, and her chin lifts and her lips press together once before they release.

Deni walks to the memorial placard. She stands in front of it and reads the names. Deni Truong Dalgliesh is cut into the silver beside Rowen’s, in the same deep lettering as Felix Truong, Omo, Remy Truong, Jaidee Truong, and Baby Truong, with Marylee Walker below them, and the woman reading it was built from the complete record of the person that name belonged to. She reads her own name on a memorial to the dead with her hands at her sides. She doesn’t touch the placard.

Marylee goes to the pond. She crouches at the edge and watches the creatures she grew from Eridania basin precursors in lab trays, swimming now in open water. In the lab they were a proof of concept. Here they’re alive. She holds her hand out over the water without touching the surface and watches the light beneath it shift under her shadow.

“The gene expression’s stayed stable,” Barry says through the park audio. “The population’s self-sustaining.”

Marylee doesn’t look up. “That’s good.”

She stays at the pond for a long time.

The residents appear near dusk. A group of five comes out by the Mars tree grove and crosses toward the pond, their flank markings showing brighter as the light drops. Marylee sees them first. Deni turns from the placard and watches them come. They settle at the water’s edge in a loose cluster, grazing, lifting their heads to take in the three of them. Below the surface the pond creatures pulse in the same blue-white family of color, the Mars tree veins begin their faint glow, and the Mars flowers in the ground cover, washed out all afternoon, surface now as the daylight fails, their slow blue-white pulse rising into view across the clusters.

Marylee watches all of it. “This is what I was building toward,” she says. “I just didn’t know it would look like this.”

The three of them sit together on the stone bench as the Martian evening settles. The temperature drops toward the mid-sixties as the sun leaves the canyon, and the air on his arms feels like an Earth evening. Deni sits between Waylon and Marylee with her hands in her lap, her attention moving across the park, the citrus grove, then the rosemary hedges Norm planted at her request, then the hybrid fruit trees in the copper light.