Линда Нагата - The Martian Obelisk

“But you didn’t want to risk interrupting work on the obelisk?”

“You said you didn’t want to hear anything.” He shrugged. “I took you at your word.”

“Nate, will you just say it?”

“You have a granddaughter, Susannah.”

She replayed these words in her head, once, twice. They didn’t make sense.

“DNA tests make it certain,” he explained. “She was born six months after her father’s death.”

“ No .” Susannah did not dare believe it. It was too dangerous to believe. “They both died. That was confirmed by the survivors. They posted the IDs of all the dead.”

“Your daughter-in-law lived long enough to give birth.”

Susannah’s chest squeezed tight. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the child is still alive?”

“Yes.”

Anger rose hot, up out of the past. “And how long have you known? How long have you kept this from me?”

“Two months. I’m sorry, but…”

But we had our priorities. The tombstone. The Martian folly.

She stared at the floor, too stunned to be happy, or maybe she’d forgotten how. “You should have told me.”

“I know.”

“And I… I shouldn’t have walled myself off from the world. I’m sorry.”

“There’s more,” he said cautiously, as if worried how much more she could take.

“What else?” she snapped, suddenly sure this was just another game played by the master torturer, to draw the pain out. “Are you going to tell me that my granddaughter is sickly? Dying? Or that she’s a mad woman, perhaps?”

“No,” he said meekly. “Nothing like that. She’s healthy, and she has a healthy two-year-old daughter.” He got up, put an age-marked hand on the door knob. “I’ve sent you her contact information. If you need an assistant to help you build the habitat, let me know.”

He was a friend, and she tried to comfort him. “Nate, I’m sorry. If there was a choice—”

“There isn’t. That’s the way it’s turned out. You will tear down the obelisk, and this woman, Tory Eastman, will live another year, maybe two. Then the equipment will break and she will die and we won’t be able to rebuild the tower. We’ll pass on, and the rest of the world will follow—”

“We can’t know that, Nate. Not for sure.”

He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”

He opened the door. For a few seconds, wind gusted in, until he closed it again. She heard his clogs crossing the porch and a minute later she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road.

You have a granddaughter . One who grew up without her parents, in a quarantine zone, with no real hope for the future and yet she was healthy, with a daughter already two years old.

And then there was Tory Eastman of Mars, who had left a dying colony and driven an impossible distance past doubt and despair, because she knew you have to do everything you can, until you can’t do anymore.

Susannah had forgotten that, somewhere in the dark years.

She sat for a time in the stillness, in a quiet so deep she could hear the beating of her heart.

This all looks like hope .

Indeed it did and she well knew that hope could be a duplicitous gift from the master torturer, one that opened the door to despair.

“But it doesn’t have to be that way,” she whispered to the empty room. “I’m not done. Not yet.”

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Copyright © 2017 by Linda Nagata

Art copyright © 2017 by Victor Mosquera