James Scotson - Planets Falling

Adam and Maggie led the security detail along with four other family leaders. They formed pairs and set out to trace the last days of William Holst. Holst had indeed shuttled into low orbit the week before his death, likely to send his message to earth. After his death, his apartment was emptied and was now occupied by an elderly grade-school teacher named Harly Warren. Warren let Adam and Maggie into the space. He excused himself and left to visit the pub in the local plaza.

“Mr. Warren used to go to the pub all the time during school lunch, so I bet he’ll be there for a while,” Adam mused as they looked around the well-worn trimmings of the old teacher’s home. Harly was a well known alcoholic. He was a wise and interesting teacher in the morning and a complete mess after lunch. “Maggie, you were adamant about coming here. What do you expect to find? Holst’s belongings were all recycled long ago.”

“I think Holst was hiding the stuff here. If we look in the right place, we’ll find a hidden freezer or stasis compartment.”

“How are we going to find it here?” He pointed at the piles of old books, mounds of unwashed clothes, and walls covered with antique mechanical clocks. The ticking was somehow comforting and annoying simultaneously. Dust and cobwebs coated everything. Maggie coughed.

“You, Adam the Fuerst of the colony, have no imagination. You know so much. But thinking outside the box is my side of the mountain. We shut the power off to the apartment. If the freezer was holding something so dangerous, Holst would’ve arranged back up power. We simply search for a spike in the electrical field and that should be where it is hidden.”

“That’s pretty clever Maggie.” He paused. For some reason, he felt the need to respond to her veiled anger. “I know you’re still angry about me leaving—” He paused thoughtfully. “Leaving us, what we had. I have responsibilities and couldn’t give you the time you deserved. You knew that. We’ve been over this so many times.”

She turned to him swiftly and glared. “You left because you’re an ambitious, self-centered ass. I was nothing more than an impediment to your progress. God forbid you would spend some time devoted to others and not your own self aggrandizement. And I won’t even go into the weird relationship you have with your mother.”

“That’s not fair Maggie,” he muttered and shuffled to the power supply to the apartment.

The apartment fell into darkness and Maggie the engineer went to work looking for a power spike in the walls, floors, and ceiling. It was no time before the gadget she was holding led her to a small panel in the floor of Warren’s study — a grubby room with a desk and more piles of books. The panel appeared to be another floor tile. She moved the books aside. “The panel must have a biometric lock. That’s Sarah’s specialty. I’ll call her over.”

They sat in the dark contemplating the dusty gloom.

“Now that you are the poohbah of mars, what’s next for you Adam?”

“Maggie, you know that mom has been grooming me for this since birth. I can’t disappoint her.”

She rolled her eyes. “Adam, you need to stand up to her and do things for yourself.”

Within a few hours, Sarah appeared. With a few modifications of her computer, she identified the locking mechanism, synthesized a tissue match for Holst, and was waving it over the panel. A small blue light appeared in the floor and the panel flipped open. Inside was a handle. “It’s all yours,” Sarah motioned to Adam. He kneeled and turned it. Dust billowed and books tumbled. A cubicle roughly six feet square rose from the floor, towering in the cramped space. Maggie stepped toward it and reached out to touch it. In response, a door clicked open; inside was a brightly lit rack of shelves, empty with exception of a small data disk. They grabbed the disk and closed the door. The cube descended back into the floor.

“Are you going to tell Mr. Warren that he has a secret compartment in his office?” Sarah asked.

“He’d just use it to chill his vodka.” Maggie kicked the books back over the space. Only a vaporous cloud of dust betrayed their discovery.

The first time Adam and Maggie kissed was underground. Adam had sworn her to secrecy about the chamber, but everyone knew about the network of underground ecosystems the fabled Dr. Ferris had planted across the planet.

Their exact whereabouts was another story. Maggie was ecstatic when Adam shuttled her to another domed colony — this one devoted largely to microengineering, the process of developing microbial communities that could condition planets, not just mars, to rapidly warm and produce breathable gases.

It was late and very dark. The stars twinkled in the martian sky. They docked the vessel, wandered the quiet walkways of the colony, and approached an unremarkable sheet metal building. He grabbed her hand and led her to a lift inside. They descended and the temperature rose. When the lift stopped, her eyes grew wide at the impossible vista of greenery before her.

It was night belowground as well. However, light from a faux earth moon shimmered over the lichen-blanketed rocks. Moss draped over the boulders and ferns. Water was trickling through a simulated stream. Tiny, pale yellow flowers littered the landscape. This was the closest to earth she had ever been in her life. She could only wonder what the chamber would look like in simulated daylight.

“How does she do it?” she wondered aloud to herself.

“Green thumb,” Adam remarked quietly. “She’s really quite remarkable. Understands all the cycles, minerals, micronutrients, light needs, temperatures, humidity. The works. She starts out with the most basic components and then sets up a series of successional stages. Basically, it is applied ecology from earth. Of course, the complexity and cycles that took millions of years of evolution on earth don’t apply here. But thinking about the shape that earth is in right now, the evolutionary rules don’t matter there anymore. I think her real goal is not to terraform mars.” He picked a flower and put it in her hair. “I think she wants to preserve it all here and once humans get done wearing down earth, she can rebuild it. She may seem positive but deep down, she’s very angry.”

They walked quietly along a walkway next to the stream. For a moment, she imagined that no pump recirculated the water — that she was walking in a forest on earth. He turned to her, gently touched her ear, and his lips met hers.

She whispered, “Tell me what you want to do with it all. Your mother won’t be in charge forever.”

He picked another flower and grinned. “Let’s run away. We can set up a shack in one of the colonies near the poles. We could change our identities. I could be a maintenance worker and you could do whatever you want to do. Paint, write, sculpt.”

“I’m training to be an engineer, Adam dear. Precision, detail, you know? Not much room for the messiness of art. I set all that aside years ago. And you wouldn’t last a day doing things someone else tells you to do unless it was your mother. You’d have the entire colony figuring out ways to melt the poles and warm the climate.”

“I suppose.” He jumped into a puddle and splashed her. “But promise me that we’ll always have fun.

Maggie, Sarah, and Adam inserted the disk in a viewer in Adam’s home. The time stamp on the video was dated the morning that Holst died. Holst’s face peered from the screen, pale and worn. His eyes were ghoulish, vacant, as if he was already frozen and dried — a husk in the red dust. The backdrop was green and lush — Holst was standing in one of the underground ecolabs. A winged insect fluttered behind him. He spoke, clearing his throat.