Chris S Hayes
Copyright © 2015 Chris S Hayes
All Rights Reserved
A Martian Folk Tale
It all started with Danny-Boy Mackenzie, on weekdays just the youngest of his brothers, on weekends the best damned jazz orchestra conductor in existence. Of course, since this story takes place about fourteen years after everybody on Earth managed to blow themselves to kingdom come and take every half-way decent saxophone player with them, that’s not saying a whole hell of a lot.
Danny-Boy was the spitting image of all eight of his brothers, which wasn’t a surprising thing since they were all clones of Mackenzie the kweesh farmer. Generous-minded folks said that Mackenzie just liked big families. Some of them joked that maybe he was looking to start his own baseball team. More realistic segments of the population suspected that he was a stingy man who’d discovered how to pay his workers next to nothing and leave all his money to himself once he was gone.
Breeding females were in short supply back then on Mars. What with terraforming being such a dangerous occupation, all the really smart girls had stayed back home on Earth until the job got done right. Unfortunately for everybody, the job on Mars wasn’t quite done yet when the boys with the toys back home decided to get hostile with each other, leaving Danny-Boy to grow up on a planet where the men outnumbered the women ten to one.
Fortunately, it didn’t take long after the big blow-up for the bio-wizards in Grissom City to start cranking out the next best thing. Reverse gender clones, they called them. They weren’t any help with the population problem since their chromosomes were still XY, but something those scientists did to the poor things in-utero made them into little girls with all the trimmings. Danny-Boy never understood the mechanics of it, but he sure enjoyed the results—in particular, one by the name of Dorinda who lived next door at the sawmill with her daddy, old Barney Klump.
Barney had kept the mill going long past the time when the thing should’ve fallen apart. He was good with machines, a regular tech-wizard, and that was fine by everybody in Ozyk. Martian dust got into everything. Even the simplest machines seized up eventually unless they were treated right, and without the machines, there would be no kweesh. In Ozyk, it was all about the kweesh—kweesh lumber for building, kweesh fiber for clothes, and most importantly kweesh leaves—dried and smoked, powdered and snorted, chewed like tobacco, baked up in brownies and cakes and eaten—you name it, they did it. There wasn’t much else to do in Ozyk that could make a man feel so good.
Dorinda didn’t look much like her daddy, which in retrospect should probably have given Danny something to think about, but he didn’t think much, especially when Dorinda was around. Dorinda, on the other hand, was always thinking. In that sense she was just like her daddy. Danny started having dreams about her the year they turned fourteen, but she didn’t seem interested. He figured if she had any dreams at all they were probably about board-feet, cants, and flitches. She was much more interested in helping her daddy keep the sawmill running than in boys. Of course, it never occurred to Danny that it might just be him she wasn’t interested in and not boys in general. Fourteen year old boys don’t generally think that way.
One Saturday, Danny was in his room conducting to a recording of Cab Calloway and His Orchestra he’d downloaded from the Central Library. He stood in front of a full length mirror with his white tailcoat on and was just really gettin’ down with the hi-de-ho’s when he got a text from Dorinda.
“CM OVR NEED U”
Naturally, he dropped everything and ran right over. He found Dorinda at the water wheel looking a mite distressed. It took him a second to figure out why, but he eventually noticed that the canal was bone dry.
“Well, ain’t that something!” he remarked. “Where’d all the water go?” Dorinda shot him one of her looks.
“The canal’s been dry for three days now, Danny. Where have you been?” She didn’t really expect an answer, and he didn’t disappoint. He just blushed.
“Never mind,” she said, sighing and rolling her eyes as a goofy grin spread across his face. Dorinda cut to the chase. “Daddy took the truck up to the dam yesterday. He thinks there’s a problem up there with those Grissom City suits and their darn computer diverting our water. He was supposed to be back this morning at dawn.”
“But it’s noon!”
“Exactly.”
Danny thought for several seconds with his face all screwed up. They’d had no end of trouble with the WMTC’s central computer deciding to ration their water supply during droughts the past few years, but the water had never been completely turned off before. Come to think of it, his da had mentioned something about ‘that evil computer with a mind of its own, tryin’ to take over the planet’ just last night. Danny hadn’t paid him much mind. Da always talked like that after a bellyful of his brother Patrick’s kweesh beer.
“We could call my da. He’ll know what to do.”
“Or we could borrow transportation and head up there to find out what’s going on ourselves and not bother your father,” Dorinda countered.
Danny stared at her and scratched his head. Although it was true that his da would probably be pissed if they bothered him in the middle of an irrigation crisis, neither of them was old enough to drive. And besides, every truck within reach was in use. He’d just opened his mouth to point that out when Dorinda gave him his marching orders.
“Go get Colin’s ID. I’ll make us lunch and meet you at the tether tower.”
His brother Colin was 18, which happened to be the legal flying age for personal airships. Dorinda didn’t hang around long enough for him to argue with her, so he went home to get Colin’s ID.
Colin was usually out by the drying sheds that time of day with the rest of his brothers, having a joint and watching Ian pummel the brother who’d annoyed him the most. Danny had felt all grown up the first time they’d invited him along and let him light up. Now it was a daily habit for him, just like it was for the rest of them. In Ozyk, especially in the Mackenzie household, smoking kweesh was just something a man did—like working, eating, fighting, and sleeping. It really didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t had a single day without it in over ten months. So when he went into the house, he picked up Colin’s ID from his bedside table, a loaf of bread and a sausage from the kitchen (since Dorinda’s taste in food was sometimes questionable), and a bottle of Patrick’s homebrewed root beer from the pantry, then shoved them all in a sack, slung the sack over his shoulder, and headed straight for the tether tower sans kweesh.