February 2170
Aelfwyrd rode the train back to Bowie City by himself. The machine slid on a cushion of magnetism thousands of kilometers across the Martian surface. It was a soft, gentle, and incredibly firm ride. The forces of inertia and magnetism held the vehicle in place as solidly as the planets are lashed to the sun. He found himself thinking about the energies which whipped him over the alien planet’s surface. His transportation moved forward as certainly as the molecules of his body were bonded, as time moved in only one direction, as logic controlled the choices in his life.
Once a month, Doctor Aelfwyrd would spend a long weekend with his family. His wife Rebecca was a surgeon at the royal hospital. They had three small children together.
She was a thin, flat-chested, brown-haired ball of energy and competence. She was smarter than he was, when it came to regular life, and he knew it. He was happy about that. She would always find the right words where he struggled to explain anything. Aelfwyrd was not the kind of scientist who knew how to make his work accessible to the public. He knew how to do it. He commonly used the technical jargon when simpler words would work better. It was just the way his mind worked.
They had plans to dine together at the Green Knight’s Tavern, one of the fanciest of the restaurants in Bowie City. As Aelfwyrd hurtled over the red sands of Mars, he felt like the restaurant summed up everything he was missing in his life. He wanted to sit under the trees, breathe the fresh air, eat the freshest food which could be had on the fourth planet, and finally see his wife again.
He didn’t bring any bags, not even a briefcase. He carried a copy of Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur which he had been casually reading for more than a year. He didn’t have a lot of time to read for pleasure anymore and was only about a quarter of the way through. He read over three hundred pages a day, but they were all reports and data about his patients. A lot of them were dying. Too many of them were dying. More than any of his estimates had suggested.
He watched as an unusually thick and lush patch of Martian fungus passed by his window. He paused the image, rewound, and then magnified it. He had a massive collection of the few and sparse native life-forms back in Albion. But he had never seen so much of it growing in one single spot.
Mars was an angry place. It was inhospitable. Aelfwyrd had often been caught by the coincidence that the planet had been so well named. How could the ancients have known? Did the name color his perception of the red planet? Or was it just the color which the ancients had named the planet for? But that didn’t answer the question, it begged it. Why was Mars red? He understood how. Every child did. But he understood enough to also ask why. There might have been red jungles, vast continents of autumnal leaves, but instead it was a planet which lay dying and bleeding. It was a red planet, a sore and swollen and aching place. Mars was everything martial and marked and marred which the name implied. It was arid, arrested, a victim of arson like Ares himself.
The Green Knight’s Tavern was a shelter. They had a grove of over forty green and leafy trees growing under a plesiathoid dome. Some of the leaves would fall. They would land on the stone floor and on the tables. No one minded. It was a source of joy. Other trees grew in Bowie City, but in the public areas they were still sparse. For a tree to grow as big as these, twenty or thirty feet high, required that they begin their lives on Earth and be transported whole up to the red planet. That was not cheap.
Rebecca sat underneath a white-trunked dogwood. She wore a revealing white floral dress and an exquisite necklace of gemstones, which Aelfwyrd had never seen before. She was drinking a glass of ice water. The table had already been set with a large central bowl of salad.
She embraced him, sinking her face into his neck. “Oh, David.”
He kissed her lightly. They sat down.
“That’s an amazing necklace. Where did that come from?” he asked.
Her eyes began to glisten. She didn’t cry, but there was moisture in front of her brown eyes. “David, it’s Baldur. We got word on Wednesday.”
She pulled out one of the other seats at their four-person table. There was a personal effects locker on the seat.
“Oh, damn,” he said.
Baldur was Aelfwyrd’s elder brother. He was an astronaut with NASA. Aelfwyrd and he didn’t get along well. They were very different people.
“What happened? What did they say?”
She nodded. “Triggle particles. He was in orbit around the rings of Saturn, collecting the trigglified water. But something went wrong and the metal of their ship began absorbing the particles. It expanded to something like forty times its original size. It cracked open and left the crew unprotected. They were found strapped to a large hunk of ice. They had run out of air.”
He grimaced. “That’s horrible.”
He picked up the locker and lifted it onto the table.
The waiter came over and asked if they were ready to place their order. Rebecca ordered the duck for herself and the chicken for her husband. Aelfwyrd didn’t look up at the waiter as he figured out the box’s mechanism. It opened just as the waiter left.
“The necklace was inside. I’m not sure where it’s from, but a friend of mine tells me that these sorts of gems can’t form on Earth. There are a lot of exotic compounds in there. The blue stone, my friend says that it’s hardened Venusian ore. It would have spent the last billion years or so as a liquid and only hardened when it was harvested and taken up into space.”
Aelfwyrd found himself thinking about Baldur when he was just out of college. Baldur had a stardust jacket. It was shaped like a leather jacket, but it was transparent and filled with a blue liquid and sparkling particles. Baldur would wear it without any shirt and go dancing. The women had always loved Baldur: his poetry, his singing.
There were an embarrassing amount of rocks in the locker, very few of which could be bought in any store. The only reason why Baldur owned them was because he had actually been to the places where you would find them. Aelfwyrd thought Baldur was crazy. He wouldn’t have wanted to live for months inside of a tiny metal box and get thrown across the solar system. He wouldn’t have wanted to go so long without seeing his family. Baldur had never married. He didn’t have any children.
“What are we supposed to do with all of this?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I guess it’s ours now. I thought maybe I would take a few pieces, frame them, and put up a display in the living room.”
“That would be nice.” He found a thin flat white piece. It felt smooth. Aelfwyrd remembered Baldur telling him about it. It was what they called a Phoebic Feather rock, from the moon Phoebus up above Mars. There were pits on Phoebus, like gravel pits, filled with them. The government was looking into using them as shielding on some of the newer spaceships.
“How have you been otherwise? How are the children?” Aelfwyrd asked, in a quiet and somber voice.
“Everyone’s wonderful. Liam has started reading in Chinese.”
“Really?”
She smiled.
“And what about you? What have you been doing for sex?” he asked.
“Mostly I’ve been with the Hendersons.”
“That’s good. I always liked having sex with the Hendersons.” He tried to sound cheerful, but his heart was heavy.
At this point, Rebecca’s beeper went off. She pulled out her phone and checked the message. “I don’t know what this could be. I’m not on call.”
She read the message.
“Baby, I’m so sorry. It’s an emergency.”
“You have to go?”
“I do.”
He frowned as she stood up. “I understand. I’ll take care of the kids.”
He kissed her on the cheek and she ran out.
Aelfwyrd sat back down. He took up his fork with his right hand and let his left drape down into his brother’s locker. It was like a pirate’s treasure, or a dragon’s horde. His brother had left him a treasure chest, just like they had imagined when they played together as children.
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When he had finished his meal, he had them wrap Rebecca’s up to go. He tucked the locker under his arm, balanced the doggy-bag on top of it and walked out of the dining area. Before heading out, he walked into the grove and sat down.
His brother never understood Aelfwyrd’s work. Even before he had moved onto human subjects, he didn’t think it was worth experimenting on animals. They had argued. Baldur never understood the good which could come from a sacrifice. What did a few mice and dogs matter if people would be able to live on Mars? Soon, the horses would be able to run wild all over the red planet. There would be thousands, maybe millions. There might be more horses on Mars than Earth in twenty years. Didn’t the new lives make up for the price at some point?
A man walked into the grove. He was holding a mixed drink and half dancing to the music which was playing in the background. It was Bob Marley’s Natural Mystic. Aelfwyrd hadn’t even noticed the tune until he saw the red-haired Arabian man dancing.
He saw Aelfwyrd, almost jumped with surprise. He laughed, and then sat down next to him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think anyone would see me dancing. How embarrassing.”
“That’s alright,” Aelfwyrd said quietly and distantly.
“My wife is leaving me,” the man blurted out.
“I’m sorry,” Aelfwyrd said. Then he added, “Do you deserve it?”
The man laughed. “I guess I do. It feels like we’ve been coming apart for three years now. Can you imagine that? We’ve been dying, not living, for three years.”
“Your death is dying,” Aelfwyrd frowned.
“Heh. So, what’s wrong with you? You look sadder than me?” The man slurred his words just a little as he spoke.
“My brother. My brother died,” Aelfwyrd surprised himself by telling the stranger.
“Was it sudden or a long time coming?”
“It was sudden. He died in a space accident.”
“I’m sorry. Aw, what am I saying, I didn’t kill him,” the man drunkenly joked.
“No, you didn’t.”
Neither spoke for an awkward moment. Then the man pointed at the locker under Aelfwyrd’s arm. “He’s not in the box, is he?”
Aelfwyrd laughed, maybe a little harder than the joke deserved. “No, he’s not in the box. These are his things. It’s like he left me a treasure chest.”
“Was your brother a pirate?”
“Yeah, he was like a pirate. He worked for NASA. But I could imagine him on an old wooden pirate ship. He was one of those big personalities. I could never get in a word when he was around.”
“What happens to that?” the man asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where do his powers go? What happens to the way Baldur talked, to his bravado, his powers?”
“Nothing. I mean, he’s dead,” Aelfwyrd replied, confused.
“He’s dead, but what if you imagined that everything that was better about him, everything he could do that you couldn’t just went into you? Imagine if you could eat his spirit and take it into yourself?”
“Eat his spirit?”
“Not his soul. His spirit.”
They both sat there for a while. Then Aelfwyrd realized that the man had fallen asleep, his head leaning back against a hundred-year oak. He picked up his things and went home, but he found himself thinking about the man’s words for many years to come.