The story winds to its end as the principles find some measure of closure, and some questions are answered -- to varying effect.

Thanks for stickin' with me, guys. Here's the last of it. Not all happy, but not (I hope) all that sad either.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

Water, Paper and Clay, by Rob Baird. Part 5: "Renaissance"

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In the lobby of the office building, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed my lawyer, telling her to burn the note. She said she had received it from the person I'd entrusted to mail it to her — but she hadn't read it, which defeated the last hope I might've had. It also meant that I was left to carry the burden of my attempt, and its subsequent failure, alone. 

When I clicked the phone off, I found that my knees would no longer support me, and I had to lean heavily against the wall for support. I sank down, slumping into a bench set up against the side of the wall. 

Adam and Barbara had become extremely cordial for the remainder of our discussion — upbeat enough that I wanted to end the conversation as soon as possible. There was nothing for me to sign; no paper trail. They had thanked me again for my cooperation, and then permitted me to leave. 

Now I was alone with my thoughts. The receptionist stared at me blankly for awhile — the way you do, when you're trying to think about whether or not to say anything. He never did. 

I wan't certain whether or not I wanted to hate myself. Partly, the answer was yes — I should've been stronger. I should've fought them for longer. Maybe I could've talked them out of their threats. Maybe they wouldn't have followed through on them anyway, considering how barbaric the notions had been.

But probably not. Probably Ellis had been right: the only thing that would've happened was that my demise would have acquired some degree of dignity, cared about only by myself. Nobody would bother to write "he followed his conscience" on my tombstone, and the world would end anyway. The world, and Amy Buchanan with it.

I wanted her advice, but it wasn't something I could actually solicit. What was the point? Even if I thought Adam and Barbara would permit me to do so — and they almost certainly would not — what could it possibly accomplish? Drawing her into the abyss of my wretchedness? Amy, who could not even read? That was a surprise to me, at first, though I suppose it explained some things — her uncanny habit for pronouncing foreign words correctly; the general limiting of her reading to those books that could be obtained in the public domain and downloaded to a speech-synthesizing box. I'd never asked her; it hadn't ever mattered. 

And why should it have? Between the two of us, after all, I was the real charade. I put myself together enough to meet Amy for a late dinner that night, at a diner closer to Olympia — she didn't have the chance to get out of Eleazaria often, and I figured it was a good, neutral place. 

"You know, I had the strangest day," she said.

I didn't want to discuss this, but there was really no choice. "Oh? My day was pretty normal — just a lot of paperwork, really."

"I got called up to where you work. At first I thought that maybe something was wrong, you know — like maybe something had happened to you? I don't know whether you ever told anyone about us. So I thought maybe it was that, but then... they made me wait for a good long while. Turns out it was actually pretty good news."

"Oh, good news, huh?" I was only picking at my dinner, drawing out a flat noodle on occasion and taking a halfhearted bite.

Amy nodded, with a smile — her tail was starting to wag; I could feel it, flicking against my ankle. "Yep! Two of your coworkers — this very nice collie chap and a real pretty young vixen..." She snickered at my expression. "It's okay, I know you've probably asked her out or something. Anyway, it turns out that, you know, that lottery, for the tickets on the ark? The one you was talking about, awhile back? I got a ticket, an' so they pushed that twelve-twenty we filled out to the front of the line. I got reclassified as a class 3 — lower echelon, sure, but still!" 

I wanted so desperately to be happy for her, but I had to force any emotion into my voice. "Oh — that's really good news!"

She must've caught some oddness, some hesitation in my voice, for she leaned forward conspiratorially. "You didn't have anything to do with that, did you? Pulled some strings?" She took my hand and squeezed it tightly, leaning across the table to press her lips against mine quickly. I returned the kiss as best as I could. "No, no, you don't have to tell. But... you know, if you did then... thank you. I know it's not like... you're bribing me or anything, nothing like that. I'm just really happy, I think. You know, I'd say, it's about the best day of my life." She paused, so that it was clear that the train of thought had been broken and she was beginning a new one. She smiled widely, showing off white teeth and the bright, dancing eyes within her black mask. "I love you, Aaron."

She was beautiful in her ecstasy, and I wanted to scream. 

*

"I know that you and I weren't ever very close, Dr. Turner." Elizabeth Yun began the conversation by acknowledging the undeniable. "I know that you didn't really like me. Or any of the AIDA employees."

We were sitting at the edge of the gantry; the rain had stopped, for a time, and we were watching the rockets, being lifted into their launch configuration. Word had come in the previous day that the other countries who were participating in the Project were ready — even the United Nations had managed to rush their spaceships to completion. Watching the end result of our work changed what I had to think about; I was no longer invested in its completion. "I think it was the government," I said. "Nobody likes the government. It means, I guess, nobody really likes the face of it."

"I tried to do the right things. I didn't want to hurt anybody, Dr. Turner, we just... sometimes we didn't have a choice. As a species, we have so few options..." 

"I know," I admitted, very quietly. 

She continued as though I hadn't spoken at all. "That doesn't mean that it was right, not all the time. The triage system... it must've seemed like a good idea, when it was first proposed. You have two kilos of wheat for two people for a week. Do you split it up evenly, between the agricultural scientist and the homeless person? I think the answer is supposed to be 'yes,' you should. It's the Christian thing... we're all children of the same god, aren't we?"

"Are we?" I didn't have a good answer. I didn't even really know that many Christians, not even the bastardized version that Ad Int had co-opted into something like a state religion. Dezirian, like me, belonged to this church; it was why we called each other 'brother.' But I do not believe in gods.

"We're supposed to be. But how do you do that? It's not enough for both of them. If the scientist lives, then he might find a way to grow more food and save a dozen people from starvation a week. If the homeless person lives, he... I don't know. So it was supposed to be logical, clinical even. That's where the tests came from, too. Of course it wasn't that simple; it was never that simple. It became complicated... political. You'd get torn between things."

"Things?" I wasn't sure what to make of this meeting — she'd asked for it, quite out of the blue. I was not any more comfortable talking to her than I ever had been. 

The cat nodded, her eyes flicking over my face — never quite meeting my gaze, as though she herself was ill at ease. "They were always looking at our statistics, trying to make sure we weren't gaming the system. But what can you do? You try to do the right thing. I remember, a few months back you came in, asking if I could get Maria Wells promoted. We did, and three days later her mother checked into a new hospital. I'm not stupid, Dr. Turner. I'm not... I'm obviously not as smart as you guys, but... I knew what was going on. But we had a quota, right? So... if I did that, then that meant that I had to turn down Rodger's request for a special dispensation for his brother. Cancer, I think, from the request sheet. I'm sure he thinks that I'm... heartless. A monster..."

"No," I lied. Rodger Kumamoto worked in life support engineering with Jake, and I only knew him distantly. The sickness and eventual, inevitable death of his brother had been crushing to him; I'd heard him inveighing against Ad Int repeatedly. These days, Jake told me, he had taken to heavy drinking. And, as with forty-five thousand other crimes, I now learned that I was partly responsible.

"He should," Yun said, as if sensing that I felt this way. "I am a monster — evil, calculating. But that's what they do to you. They make you that way... until there's nothing left of you. And when you try to do the right thing, it's like they know. I was so happy when you came and asked me about Maria's promotion, because it was something I could do — like I could make something right. It was the end of the month, the end of my quota, and I had a spare slot. Rodger came in the next day and... I had to turn him down."

"I don't know what you're supposed to do about that." My voice came out sounding haunted, and I forced some energy back into it. "I don't know how you do the right thing when... you're right, there are limited resources. It must be a terrible burden."

"But you know that," she said quietly. "It's why I asked to talk to you. I got called into one of my supervisor's office, after you went to talk to Dezirian. He explained everything about what happened. I knew, about the selections. They told all of us the week before the lists went public."

"Do you know when they made the decision?"

"To select them? It's probably always been part of the plan. What else would you do? You'd end up with tens of thousands of petty thieves and alcoholics. So I'm sure they always wanted to do it, really." She frowned heavily, and her right paw bunched momentarily into a fist. "You know that you're the only one who ever said anything. Probably that's a combination of your class five girlfriend — I know about that too, don't worry; it's been in your file for a couple months now — and your... temperament. You don't challenge the system, which means you spend all the time you might've spent fighting irrationally deep in thought, instead. You and Ellis both are like that. Maybe somebody else has guessed, but... they couldn't bring themselves to think that we'd actually be that cruel."

"So I guess you know what happened last week, then?"

"Your final stand? Yeah, it was the internal bulletin this morning." The feline's face lost its grace in a moment of brief anguish. "I wish that I could do that. That I could've even tried... I just... I can't, Dr. Turner. I'm sorry. I don't even know why, I just... can't." She swallowed again, and her breathing started to catch. "I'm sorry," she repeated in a low whisper, almost lost in the white noise of the loading machinery below.

"I don't really think there's anything you could've done."

"Maybe not. But..." I could no longer tell what the cat was looking at, and from her expression it might not have been anything that I could have even seen. "Maybe it's better for you? We had to lie a bit. We said that you could take your immediate family, on the ark. For most people, that would've been true. Marriages of convenience... that was another matter. I probably would've had to deny your wife a ticket. I was going to try to tell you that, last week, but I couldn't find the strength to talk to you. I... you and... a hundred others, but... you're the only one who understands..." Her voice had taken on a pleading, desperate tone. 

"There's no way out," I sighed, and thought of that song again: no one here gets out alive. "They'll get you in the end, anyway, I... if I was foolish to think otherwise, Ms. Yun, then I don't see how you could be expected to do anything more."

"Ellie." She murmured this so indistinctly that I couldn't hear it, at first.

"What?"

"Ellie. Please call me Ellie." 

Yun had asked us to call her that on countless occasions. It had always felt like a transparent attempt at winning our sympathies. Now, it sounded like a blatantly, desperately human request, and I found myself wondering whether it might've been so all along. "Aaron, then. And... at this point, Ellie, the only thing I can say is that I think we've moved past the point at which men can judge us."

"Then who's left?" The tone of her voice suggested that she dearly wanted someone to step up to the task. Tears had begun to stain the yellow fur of her face, darkening it ever so slightly. "Oh, god, Aaron, who's left?"

"God, I guess," I said. Honestly I wasn't sure. "If you believe in him, then god can judge us. I don't, myself, but... you do, don't you?"

She nodded, and her expression was so plaintive that I put my arm around her. Yun collapsed against me, sobbing openly into my jacket. I held her, and tried not to join her. The rain was starting up again, lightly at first, and I could no longer hold back. At the edge of the gantry we wept, and the world wept with us.

*

We discovered, the next morning, that Ellie Yun had hung herself in her office, an occurrence that the official bulletin that came out at noon described as being related to family issues. I surmised that she had not been willing to wait for god to judge her, but of course this was yet another thing that I could discuss with no-one.

Worse than this, perhaps, was my realization that I could no longer face Amy Buchanan. Whenever I thought of her, whenever I looked at her picture on my phone, I was confronted by my own worthlessness. I met with her a few times, as the days ticked by, but it became harder and harder to make conversation. She asked me what was wrong; I could not answer. 

So far as I know, she never connected the dots between my question about doing the right thing, her promotion, and my change in mood. At least, she never said anything to me, and her mood didn't suggest any recognition. Absent this, I could only linger in my own misery.

Much of the lingering took place at night. Sometimes, I merely recalled my conversation with Adam and Barbara, their clinical voices and their smooth demeanor. Sometimes I saw them carrying out the act, and I awoke with Amy's screams lingering in my ears. 

I tried to explain this to Jake Ellis, who was the only person I could really talk to. "I don't know what that says about me," I said. "Were you right? Was the whole thing a joke? The fact that I was in love, the fact that I wanted to settle down with her... Did I make it all up?"

"I don't think so. I think... well, I gather, at least, that your feelings for each other were genuine, weren't they? No, I think it's mostly that you've experienced this trauma, really, and you have nobody to share it with. Nobody to lean on. Well, nobody except for me. I'm terrible at that, though, Aaron."

"You're good enough," I reassured him. "But alright, then, fine — what do I do? What am I even possibly supposed to do? We've got a week left until the launch. I don't know how to try to reconcile with her. I don't even know how to explain myself."

"Have you asked a therapist?"

"No. I've considered it, but the only ones I know work for the Project, and... word might get back, you know?"

"Perhaps it's best if you and Amy kept your distance?"

In the short term, this would not be a problem. I had snapped at her the previous night, over something completely inconsequential, and stormed from the café. I presumed that we would reconcile, though I hadn't even begun to think of how. "The terrifying thing for me, Jake, is that... I think I want to, you know? Maybe not forever — maybe it'll get better as time goes by. Right now it's like I had invested myself in this and it's just... it's just like it's turned against me. But that's taking the easy way out, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"And I shouldn't do that, right?"

Instead of answering me, he sliced up the reconstituted meatloaf that Ad Int had provided us for lunch, waiting until he was completely finished to answer. "I don't know." He looked up at me for a moment, as if looking through my eyes and into my tortured thoughts. "I don't know, Aaron. You're going to be on the same planet together for the rest of your lives. If what you had — for whatever reason — isn't going to overcome your self-doubt, then you might as well try to end it now, don't you think? It's not going to get better, Aaron, is it? Not soon. You're going to think about what you did, or... what you didn't do... that's going to last for awhile. If she reminds you of that..."

"Perhaps what we need is some time, then..."

He shrugged. "Time or distance, but with a week to go until the launch and being cooped up on those starships after that, it's not like you have all that much of either, is it?"

"What would you do, in my shoes?"

"Walk away," he said. "But that's my personality. I guess I would take a step back from it, try to look what it all meant. I'd tell her that I needed some time to put together my thoughts, and then I'd take it. That's what I'd do."

I nodded my thanks to Jake, and went back to my office to begin writing down my thoughts. Eventually it took the form of a letter; I worked and reworked it until I was satisfied. It didn't say much, although uniquely for my experience over the last few weeks, everything in it was the truth. 

I apologized for my abrupt departure the previous night. I told Amy that I loved her, and that the time we had spent together had fundamentally changed my life for the better. I told her that I thought she would finally come into her own on Mars, and that I hoped she would make the best of it regardless of what happened to me. I told her that I needed to think about some things that had happened to me. I told her that I hoped, eventually, we could settle down. In slightly better spirits, I slid the letter into the mail courier slot and started packing up for the night. 

I fully planned to follow through on what I'd said. I hoped that my change in mood was temporary — that eventually, I would be able to come to terms with what I'd done, to myself and for her. I sincerely believed what I'd told Jake, that it might get better with time. I told myself that I could wait. 

I haven't seen Amy Buchanan since.

*

In the abstract, I rationalized that, whatever it had done to me, getting her the promotion and the ticket was a gift for her — a sacrifice that I had made, I suppose. It was a self-serving way of looking at it, and I admitted as much to myself willingly. But, at least in those first few weeks, it became unbearably painful to even think about her — so I didn't.

I know that she made it to Mars, though I don't know what ever became of her and we embarked on different ships. The Renaissance Project employees were all put on the second ark, which in stenciled letters plainly visible from the gangplank declared itself to be the Columbia. We had individual rooms, which I thought at first to be slightly wasteful until Dezirian told me that they would become the walls of houses and office-spaces when the arks were disassembled on Mars. 

We strapped in to four-point harnesses, in a communal area towards the bow of the ship — in theory, if the launch went poorly, it would detach, and float down on massive parachutes. When I asked Jake how likely he considered a safe landing under such circumstances to be, he grinned and simply shook his head. 

The launch itself, however, was quite straightforward. There was a deep rumble from far below us, and then the skyline, visible through the ship's broad portholes, started to move. The acceleration built, until we were being forcefully shoved down into our seats, but all of us remained pointedly fixed on the windows, as the buildings of the Renaissance Complex we had inhabited for five years gave way to the dull grey of the cloud cover, which whitened steadily until it broke away completely into a brilliant, glorious blue. At that moment, I fully apprehended what it meant to be reborn, and I understood why they had given the ship such inexplicably large windows. 

Then the blue faded away, deeper and deeper, and it became a stark, unforgiving black. The force on our bodies lessened, until it seemed that we might almost be floating, a sensation that lasted only for a few minutes before the stardrive kicked in with a thump that shuddered through the ship.

The Columbia was built like a skyscraper, with its bulkheads representing floors. We accelerated steadily, at a rate of about half of Earth's gravity — low enough to seem peculiar, but high enough to not be entirely uncomfortable. The goal was to prepare us, also, for life on Mars, where gravity would exert an even lessened influence. 

It's strange, but I hadn't really thought much about Mars as a planet — instead of just a set of parameters for our simulations. Ad Int had discouraged us from staring too closely at Mars, lest we become disaffected by the magnitude of the task before us — so I didn't, really, even know exactly what it looked like. A series of probes had precisely metered the soil and atmospheric components, which was good enough for our modeling. 

Vaguely, I knew that the Adhikari process involved directing asteroids and comets towards the planet. Beyond that, I had no clue how it was supposed to work, although Ad Int's propaganda said that tens of millennia of supercomputer-hours had been spent on precisely calculating the impacts and their results. We had been promised a certain atmosphere — like Earth's, but with an inverted, and imbalanced, ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide. The fact that we were, even now, hurtling towards the red planet suggested that these promises had been kept. 

"When you hit a planet with an asteroid," Jake said, looking over a tablet as we ate a very uninspiring lunch in the ship's galley, "you greatly disturb its internal geology. It would take centuries to restore its equilibrium."

"Alright?" What I was eating described itself, rather optimistically, as chili — which I ate because, with suitable infusions of pepper sauce, it at least had some flavor. Maria and I had been working throughout the voyage — nobody wanted to live inside the prefabricated habitats forever, and correcting this required starting the process of recreating life as early as possible. On the other hand, since the generators and atmospheric regulators for the domes were already operational, Jake's work was essentially done until we reached Mars. He'd been filling his time in studying the planet. "So the planet is out of equilibrium?" 

"Well, they mitigated it by timing the various impacts so that they would dampen each other out. It's pretty clever, actually. But the tolerances... Christ, Aaron, you think you had it rough? The final asteroid had a mass of three million tons. They had a margin of error of about five minutes one way or the other before the impact either did nothing, or did more harm than good. They managed to get it within six seconds of its ideal impact time and less than a hundred meters off its optimal impact point. Three million tons! Oof, and we thought we had it bad."

"Are we going to be able to breathe?"

"Of course not. Not until you guys do your job and get the oxygen levels up. But... it's a question of months, now, not years or centuries. It's all pretty amazing. The liquid water component is already forty percent of its planned final level... temperature is... well, you'd need a coat, but it's not that bad. Good god, Aaron. Good god."

Focusing on my work had allowed me to re-center myself, and I was able to take Jake's enthusiasm in stride. It was, after all, quite impressive, what we'd done. We would be living in a massive geodesic, at first — essentially just like the settlements on Earth. But now, they were saying that, if the creation of life went well — and the advanced teams had already started seeding the lakes with bacteria and plankton — we might be able to leave the domes in a matter of months or years, not lifetimes.

Halfway through the journey, the ship flipped over, and after a brief pause we resumed our customary half gravity, applied now to our deceleration as we neared Mars and weakening steadily to lessen the shock when we finally landed. Everyone on the ark was counting the days — myself included. We watched on the monitors, or from the rearward viewports, as the planet drew closer — orange, darkened in places where water had turned the plains into shallow lakes. As we got closer, the barest hint of an atmosphere emerged. Finally they sounded the alarm for us to take our seats; Jake clapped me on the back and we strapped in, waiting for our descent. 

It was rough, but otherwise uneventful. The ship's parachutes and rockets brought us to a landing with a solid thud; we skidded a few tens of meters over the Martian regolith, and then that was it: we were there.

Home.

*

Eden City had  been carefully prepared for our arrival; it was a massive geodesic, three kilometers in radius — though with very thin walls; the pressure differential was virtually nil, and the dome served only to shield us from the occasional dust storm and preserve our oxygen. At first, they set up alarms to go off if the dome's integrity was compromised, but after the first dozen times it became obvious that this did little but needlessly worry people; they turned the alarms off, and the engineers worked in silence.

With the exception of the much-lessened gravity, which at this point we scarcely noticed, life inside the geodesic was much the same as it had been on Earth. Beyond a handful of generators, oxygen was provided from the vast orchards and fields that had been cultivated — the soil was basic, and had required treatment, but the advance teams had done that the year before. Now we had fresh fruit and vegetables, and trees beneath which to stroll — under a blue sky, separated only by the equilateral triangles of the protective dome. It didn't require umbrellas or raincoats — this was maybe an even greater novelty than the gravity, for most of us. Even back in Olympia, the dome had been close enough that one could never forget about it, looking up. Here, it was three kilometers away — it darkened the sky slightly, but this effect was evenly spread, and you could essentially forget about its existence unless you were standing close enough to see it stretching up and out of the ground.

We had only limited contact with the other cities on the planet, which were a few hundred kilometers away; each of the ark fleets had landed near the outskirts of a separate dome. Mars was about a million souls, all told. The bulk of these came from the Asian arks, which had been engineered with the help of the world's largest economy; eighty thousand people from the Eurozone had joined us, with another hundred thousand embarking on the crowded UN arks. News from that city was particularly confusing; one got the impression that they had had less time to plan things than the rest of us had, and the chatter was frequently contradictory or unhelpful. 

Not that we had much time to talk. Maria and I were constantly busy, supervising the translation of our plans from computer simulations to reality. We watched the atmospheric and soil conditions like a hawk, day by day, introducing each new plant; every new species of microscopic organism. They would've been completely invisible on Earth, but here the effect was miraculous. An open elevator stretched up to the ceiling of the geodesic dome, where there was a small observation post. From there, we could look out, and watch.

We ignored the vertigo, Wells and I, because the view was so astonishing. To either side of us, the air seemed to take a reddish haze, but above us was a clear blue sky, almost always cloudless and untainted, beneath which the rocky plains of Mars stretched away. And radiating from the dome began to snake thin lines of green, growing thicker with each passing hour and day as the lichens and mosses started to spread. Wells had brought with her an old bottle of scotch, the same color as the Martian landscape; we opened it, toasting each other when we discovered the first sprout of grass, poking up through the soil. 

We were, in fact, up in the observation tower when the alarms went off — it had been some time since this had happened; we looked at each other anxiously as we descended the kilometers-long cable back to solid ground. Had the integrity of the dome been compromised more seriously? Had there been a fight? We could not have even guessed the magnitude of the disaster.

Contact with Earth had been sporadic, and neither Maria nor I had anyone left on the planet we cared about — we tended to ignore the news. On the ground, we discovered that everyone was packed into a dense crowd, surrounding the radio tower. We learned the news through sharp whispers and horrified expressions. 

Another nuclear exchange.

We had a team with a telescope, monitoring the planet closely to keep track of atmospheric conditions. It had been of sufficiently high resolution that they detected the burst of light, blossoming over Denver. Then there had been others, swiftly, like camera flashbulbs illuminating the world's remaining cities. It had come to a slow, tapering halt, like god's own rainstorm, and then the planet was dark.

We didn't know why it had happened, and I suppose we've never really found out. The official word was that, with the governments having moved to another planet, Earth had become precipitously unstable. Only a few hours of news were transmitted to us after the bombs went off, before rioting closed the transmitters for good. 

On Mars, the response was one of shock. We had never been planning on returning to Earth, of course, although a few people were waiting, or hoping, that more of her citizens would come to join us — a conceit I did not indulge, for obvious reasons. Now we became sharply, painfully aware that we were alone. We were self-sufficient, in everything but our souls; the quiet from Earth was overwhelming.

A lot of what we are, as a species, is bound up in the concept of our planet — more than you'd think, I imagine. Even the name terraforming harkens back — "to make something like Earth." Like a child, running away from home, we now found that what we had escaped meant more to us than our initial estimation. Having the rug pulled out from underneath us, then, was devastating. There were a few deaths that night — a couple in fights; the rest self-inflicted. The communal areas, too, were overcrowded; people gathering to drink what they had brought aboard the arks in their personal weight allotment, or partaking of the marijuana that occupied a few rows of the fields underneath the dome. 

I found Jake Ellis at a bar near the edge of Eden City. It made its money selling liquor crudely distilled within the geodesic — unsurprisingly, Ad Int had planned ahead to take care of our more basic needs. The stuff, even heavily diluted, was vile. We settled for water. 

"Now what?" I asked. I had to admit to myself that I was shocked; wounded, even. I came to Ellis because I thought he might have a more practical answer. 

And indeed, at my question Jake merely shrugged. "I guess we go it alone. Nothing's changed, really, has it?"

I was torn. The easy answer was that, no, nothing had changed — there weren't any more arks coming before, and there weren't now. Something about the stark silence from Earth was still highly disconcerting, and the minimalistic official response from the Martian government — which was still Ad Int, for us; we hadn't yet figured out how to govern ourselves — was not terribly reassuring. "No. It just feels... different. Space feels a lot blacker, you know? The night sky..."

"Is beautiful," Jake said. "The night sky is beautiful. Did you ever think you'd be able to see so many stars?"

"No," I admitted. 

"Take the things that life gives you in stride." The cat smiled, very thinly. "What is dwelling going to get you, anyway? There's nothing we can do to change it now."

I looked down at my fingers, at the long, dark claws — the keratin at the tips, which I was now wearing away against the counter of the bar, had come from Earth. As had I. As had Jake. "It's not only that. I've just been trying to think, you know... what happened? I thought all the nuclear arsenal had been locked up, or destroyed. I thought that was part of the agreement, when the Last World War ended. Am I misremembering?"

He shrugged again. "That's what they said, but... you can never be sure. Paranoid generals, maybe they kept a few in reserve. Figured that... governments come and go; treaties come and go. Only thing we have a real good handle on is fighting. Every few decades there's a fool of an inventor, who comes along and says that they've made war obsolete with their new weapon. It's never true — wasn't true with gunpowder, wasn't true with the airplane, wasn't true with the nuclear bomb. So maybe that happened — somebody finally wised up and realized they'd better keep a few atomics on hand to fix what somebody else started."

It was a lengthy rationalization, and to some degree it made sense — perhaps some enterprising general had decided to squirrel away a few bombs for a rainy day. But then, given what we already knew... "I was just thinking that it's... I wonder if word leaked out about the way they did things... if that's where the riots came from. And if that's where the riots came from, it just seems... convenient."

"Convenient," Jake repeated. He took a long drink of his water, staring over my shoulder and through the window, out into the expanse past the triangles of the geodesic.

"Leaving them behind, with no government, no resources... it was a death sentence anyway, but... maybe there was enough infrastructure left that somebody might've tried to pay us back, you know? Maybe somebody would've rigged up a transmitter, and told everybody up here the truth. Maybe they would've put together another spaceship, with just enough payload for a warhead. So... maybe... maybe Ad Int decided to hurry the process along."

Jake looked at me, now, a long, lingering gaze that ended with a sag of the cat's shoulders. He didn't say anything — but then, the absence of the denial said more than enough.

*

Whether it was true or not, we kept going. This time, my listlessness was joined by the majority of the residents of Eden City. But even this ebbed, as the months drew onwards. Wells and I began to seed the first of the insects, and the larger flowering plants that would support yet more microfauna. 

I started to get over my depression, if for no other reason than it seemed that I was the only one so afflicted. Even Jake Ellis, who had been a perpetual cynic on Earth, seemed to be warming up to his new life. He called me over from my office, around eight months after our arrival, a grin writ all over his face. 

"Did you see?" 

"No?"

His grin widened, and he grabbed my paw, dragging me around to the other side of the building and stretching out a finger to indicate something, off in the distance. "Look!" 

For a few seconds, I had no idea what he was trying to get me to notice. Then I saw it — the billows glimpsed on the horizon, spilling like a sigh into the dark blue of the Martian atmosphere. The first cumulus cloud. "Son of a gun," I said. It took me a moment or two to realize that I, too, was smiling.

"It's been awhile coming," Jake said. "The atmosphere's been getting more and more saturated — there were some rumors of low-altitude formation, over by the Indian colony. I think this is probably the first we can verify, though."

"Good." The water vapor content in the atmosphere had continued to rise, as the planet grew warmer and ice from the asteroid impacts and polar ice caps started to melt. It had only been a matter of time before the first cumulus cloud. Soon there would be more — and more earthlike weather, swept up by the Martian winds. The hardest thing to get used to, overall, had been the lack of rain — without that white noise, life seemed difficult to fathom. I'd never thought that I might miss the sound, or the feeling of wet droplets, falling against my nose. 

It was already possible to venture outside the geodesic, for short periods of time — the oxygen content was roughly equivalent to ten thousand meters of elevation, higher than Mount Everest back on Earth. Jake was one of the first twenty or thirty to take advantage of this, standing, leaning against the door of the dome and taking slow, measured breaths. Jake said he did this every day — trying to acclimate. Eventually, his lung capacity and the rising oxygen content of the atmosphere would meet in the middle. 

Over a dinner of fresh salad — our meals were increasingly prepared entirely from Martian produce — I finally asked him about his change in mood. He had experienced something approaching a complete reversal of his normal cynicism; he was open, cheery, enthusiastic. "Don't take this the wrong way," I said, "but it's a bit of a change, isn't it?"

Jake grinned widely. He had just come back from outside the dome; his muzzle was rusty with blown dust. "It is. You don't even have to say it. I feel happier than I've been in years, you know? I think I'm happier on Mars than I've been... well, anywhere, really. I love it here."

"I'm trying to decide if I do, myself. It's why I'm asking you."

"I think the important thing to do is to figure out what Mars means to you, personally." He stabbed at a tomato, bringing it to his lips and biting down decisively. "Beyond good food, I mean. Beyond that. What does it mean to you?"

The salad was, I had to admit, delicious. Everything about Mars should've buoyed me — the skies were blue, the air was warm inside the geodesic, and our jobs had been going well. It would take years, still, until we could make that apple pie — but there was nothing to suggest that we would not, eventually, triumph. "Back on Earth, I used to be absolutely terrified of the future." I hadn't admitted this to very many people — I guess he was perhaps the second. "I used to be certain that the world was going to end at any moment. That was why I worked at Renaissance — 'cause it distracted me. The work was so hard that I didn't have a chance to take a step back. It's sort of what I've been doing here."

"You haven't been enjoying this? The food? The new discoveries? Going for a walk and feeling the soil of a completely alien planet beneath your feet? Doesn't that animate you at all?"

"I haven't let it. It's still so functional to me. Sometimes, your damned grin is pretty infectious — like when there was that first cloud, or when you saw the ladybug on the outside of the dome. But the rest of the time I... I'm just trying to keep going. I keep thinking about what it took to get us here, and what we left behind, and..."

Jake put his salad to one side, and leaned forward, folding his paws over and resting his muzzle on them, his elbows braced at the edge of the table. "You want to know what Mars is to me, Aaron? I'll tell you. Mars is exactly what you just described. It's a chance to forget all that. Don't you see that, Aaron? On Mars, we have no past. There are no skeletons in the closet. There is nothing to regret. We have nothing but the present, and what it does for the future. That's it, Aaron. That's it."

"You're saying we just kind of forget Earth?"

"No. Oh, no. I say we cast the bitch off, that's what I say. All this sentimentality about how great Terra was? It was a shithole, Aaron. It was cancerous and grim and rainy and dying, and we were dying with it. And now it's gone, and so what? We'll go back in two thousand years, when the radiation has ebbed a little and maybe the atmosphere has started to clear up. We'll go back, and we'll see what's left, and it'll be like a museum. Boy Scouts will go there on a field trip, to see just how badly a species can fuck up. And, maybe, to learn how to do what it takes so that that never, ever happens again."

"We did some good things, too, on Earth." 

For a moment, Jake rested his muzzle on one paw only, while the other pulled his wallet out. "Did I ever show you my ID card? No? Look at it." He passed it across the table. 

It was a decent enough hologram; the cat's head marked on it turned in profile as I moved the card around. "What am I looking at?"

"The class. What class am I?"

"Two. Wait. Two slash eight? You're a probational two?"

"Was. And before that, I was just an eight. And before that I was a one. I was in school at Berkeley, studying computer science. Perfect PAAs, perfect grades. I had it made, Aaron. I had it fucking made." The quantity of the swearing, too, was new — he was jocular and relaxed. 

"What happened?"

"My folks were... opposed, let's say, to the Ad Interim Democratic Authority. They ran an underground paper, tracking some of the worst excesses of AIDA and, well, they got on somebody's bad side. It was a free speech issue, but nobody cared about free speech. They were too busy just trying to get by. I was home for the summer, and... I was asleep, I remember, when there was the knock at the door. Ad Int goons, wanted to bring 'em in. I don't actually know how it happened — who was right or wrong. I just know that there was shooting. My dad was good with a gun; had an old .45 and some ammunition for it. When I came downstairs, one of the two cops was lying on the floor, wounded; the other was standing over this... this incredibly horrible scene. Just awful. Blood everywhere, all over my dad's notes and my mom's dishes. She'd been knocked back into the shrunk where we kept the fine china. They were already dead. The guy was shocked — he didn't see me creep down the stairs; didn't see me pick up the knife from the kitchen table. His partner tried to warn him, but he couldn't, not before I cut his throat." 

"Jesus Christ..." 

"The other guy, I just shot — didn't have to take the element of surprise, or anything. He didn't put up a fight. I considered running, anyway, but... wasn't any point in that. They were already starting to close in on the neighborhood; somebody had called the cops when they heard gunfire. The judge recognized my age and the extenuating circumstances. Thirty years hard time; labour in a mine in western Pennsylvania. I only did a year and a half of that until somebody begged the judge to let me go on parole and work out at McChord. Reinstated to a provo class two." 

"I guess I never knew that..."

"You never asked. But. You never wondered why I sat by myself? People find out; word gets around. You were so much a damned workaholic you never had the chance to gossip, and Wells is a pretty good soul so she didn't mind. But they knew. Anybody I ever gave my ID card to knew, as soon as they bothered to look up my file. They judged me. They gave me weird looks. My neighbors never invited me over to any community functions, and they made their kids walk faster past my house. But then I came here. And you know what, Aaron? Nobody cares. Nobody cares who you are — they only care what you do. Nobody asks what class I am. If I need ID, I just show my Project badge. That's what Mars is to me, Aaron — it's a blank slate. It's a chance to start over. It's the ability to have the first day in my life all over again, and to be awake for it. I wouldn't throw that away for anything, and Earth can burn to a cinder for all I care." 

He didn't seem especially angry or judgmental; he grinned again, then, when I told him that might make it less attractive to the Boy Scouts. Then, after we finished dinner, he pulled me up, away from the bright lights of the settlement, to the door of the dome, and I stood out in the cold of the Martian twilight, watching a billion stars slowly come to life.

*

We could watch the oxygen content rise, until it was the equivalent of five thousand meters, then four thousand, then three. By a thousand meters, we could spend all day out of doors, and Maria and I did, walking the perimeter of the geodesic to count the number of clovers, and tag the locations of the first anthills. 

Eden City rested at the edge of a cliff and, a hundred meters or so below it, water was slowly filling in an ancient Martian plain. This they unimaginatively called Eden Lake; we monitored the alkalinity carefully as we continued to add species into it, like master chefs monitoring a boiling soup. Eleven months after arriving on Mars, we released the first fry into the lake, and six weeks after that we spotted the first fish, snatching what I thought might've been a fly from the surface of the water. There was little shade in the lake — we'd had to go with our second choice of fish on account of this — but the water was all glacial, and it was icy to the touch. We trailed our toes in it anyway, stirring up honey-colored clouds in the silt. 

Now that it was possible to live outside the geodesic — the geiger counters confirmed that the ambient radiation had dropped, and with the building ratio of oxygen we were growing closer and closer to life back at McChord — they were starting to disassemble the arks, breaking them into their component pieces. The reactors that had driven the stardrive they left — eventually, they would be buried and sealed in glass, to avoid contaminating the groundwater when it started to flow — but every bit of the rest of it was pulled apart. 

Columbia became, over the course of a month or so, Columbia Township, a short distance from the geodesic. Enterprising farmers — the agricultural scientists from Cheyenne College, I guess — had started planting crops, in long straight rows; they were the first to move into the town. Next came the engineers, converting the huge photovoltaic sails that had once sprung from the hull; they arranged them to catch the greatest amount of sunlight — in time, as our industry developed, they would be mounted on motors, but for now they formed a great, dark sea. 

After that, settlement was made generally open. They turned Columbia into shops and offices and apartments, and people slowly migrated away from the geodesic. A café opened, selling ersatz coffee at first: the Eurozone settlements had the best land for plantations, but we wouldn't have fresh coffee beans for some time yet. All the same I stopped by, and got to know the owner, a young woman from old Florida named Susan, quite well. 

The industrial paradigm was completely different. We were small, still — though the first child conceived on Mars was born only ten months into our stay on the planet — and the massive factories that dominated the landscape on Earth had no use. Small mining concerns were exploring the Martian countryside, and found it richly abundant — but they sold their wares to tiny shops, with a handful of employees, who manufactured parts and consumer goods in a nearly artisanal fashion. It was like village life ten thousand years ago, and I thought I could get to enjoying it. So did Jake, who quit his job to start a business doing analytical work for farmers, planning what crops they should plant, and in what rotations. He had no competition, and he enjoyed his work — when I saw him, wearing a t-shirt and strolling along an irrigation pipe that ran into the lake, he almost seemed to glow.

It wasn't all happy, of course; there were deaths, a few suicides, still, as people realized that they couldn't completely leave Earth behind. I could never bring myself to find out where Amy had settled, but I still thought of her from time to time — of the way she smiled, and the way she looked when she argued with me, and the way her tail waved, the rings tracing subtle arcs in the air. She had potential, and Jake was right — it didn't matter who you had been, on Earth. If she had been illiterate when we started, I hoped that she'd learned something during our time together. Secretly, indeed, I hoped she might've become a librarian — the first public library opened early on in Eden's history, and moved swiftly to the town of Renaissance. That was the largest settlement, with around seventy percent of the North American fleet's population, and I rarely ventured there.

So sometimes, late at night, I left the dome, and sat at the edge of the cliff, watching the starlight reflecting on the still, calm waters of the lake far below. I thought about everything that might've been — everything I had gambled and lost; everything I had never had the will to try to gain in the first place. I thought about a little café, a haven from the deluge, and a thousand dreams I had indulged within it. I wondered if it was still there, or if it had burned when the rest of the world had seemed to. Would an archaeologist, a thousand years hence, find it? Would he know what it had been? Would he know what it had meant?

Or would it have crumbled away to nothing, as so much that seemed so important so often did?

I wanted to be alone because I had convinced myself that this was the only appropriate result — it was well and good to say that we should gain a second chance on a new planet, but the ghosts of the past are persistent, and I was haunted. I still woke up at night, sometimes, in a cold sweat, with my claws bunching up the sheets in primal terror, and when I thought of love, I saw myself in an empty room, with a bare lightbulb, and I heard a cold voice asking: "I wonder what she'll think about you, Aaron." I knew that I would never find the strength to seek an answer to that question.

Dirt crunched next to me, one night, and in my peripheral vision I saw a pair of legs join mine. "So this is where you've been spending your time, huh?" 

I shrugged. "Sometimes it gets too loud, too bright down in Eden, you know? I feel like I have to get away."

Maria nodded. "That's because you're still living there. Have you considered moving out? They're opening up Columbia for general settlement. I'll bet it's a lot quieter, there. I'm sure you could move in if you wanted."

"Oh?"

"There was a notice about it in the office yesterday."

"Oh." I sometimes read the bulletins; more often I did not, for they were full of the banal trappings of a town trying to invent itself — committee meetings, parties, dances. 

"I, uh... I've been considering moving out. Right now I still live in Eden, too."

"Columbia?" 

"Yeah. I can walk up to Eden, or take the shuttle. The real question is just... where to live, you know? Different neighborhoods, and... stuff. You don't have any preference, though, do you?" 

"I haven't really considered it, I guess."

The shepherdess leaned forward, until she could just make out the buildings of Columbia below us. "I had kind of gathered. Most people are pretty excited about moving. But if you don't care... that much... you know, two-person class one housing in Columbia looks out on the lake. It's supposed to be pretty nice... quiet neighborhood, at the end of that long walkway they've been building."

"It probably is pretty nice," I admitted. "Though they're pretty adamant about the two person thing, and I don't want to go through the hassle of finding a roommate."

"I figured you wouldn't want to go through all that, yeah. But I was kind of thinking that, well... I mean, if you wanted, I'm looking for a place too now, and..."

I arched an eyebrow up at her. "You really think you want to do that?"

She smiled, in that vaguely tender way she had sometimes. "I mean, it just seems pretty convenient. Are you planning on leaving the department soon?"

"Striking out on my own like Jake? No, I hadn't really planned on it. You're right, it would be pretty convenient. We could take the same shuttle."

"I could make sure you leave work at a reasonable hour." The shepherdess grinned at me, toothily, disarmingly. "And if you wanted to come up to the cliff here sometimes, of course, I wouldn't stop you..."

Jake would've told me to take the chance, I thought. Then I realized that this suspicion itself — that I would be best suited asking someone else for advice — was itself part of the problem. I stepped up and away from the edge of the cliff, giving Maria a paw to help her up. "Sure," I said. "Let's do it."

*

We moved into the apartment — a house, really; it shared only one wall with any neighbors — the following week. I had brought very little with me to Mars — some books, some old paperwork, and an antique Curta calculator Dezirian and I had found in one of the old offices at McChord. I admired the mechanical device for its elegance, and the rattling sound it made as I turned it. 

Wells, too, had travelled lightly. She had brought a guitar — lamenting, slightly guiltily, the space it had taken up, on the grounds that if any strings broke they could probably not be repaired. All the same she played it, when I asked her to; CPE Bach's Solfeggietto and, sitting on the edge of a rocky outcropping that protruded into the lake, Mauro Giuliani's Andante in C. The sound carried out and over the water, coming back to us in faint echoes off the cliff. 

Our apartment was, however, dominated primarily by her mother's mosaic — it must, I realized on seeing it, have taken up all of her weight allowance that the guitar did not occupy. She confirmed this, with a pleased grin: three changes of clothes, the guitar, and the mosaic had been all she'd taken with her.

It was, however, absolutely gorgeous. And now, staring out and across the lake, we could match it up to the sunset on the Red Planet. She bought some clay from an artisan in Renaissance — Martian clay, the color of caramel — and fired it, breaking it into pieces to remake the landscape of the mosaic. At a lower resolution, but perhaps more striking for all that, it was a perfect picture.

As the skies grew ever cloudier, Maria and I continued our work diligently. I found that I retired to the clifftop more and more rarely; that I was increasingly content to spend my evenings in the apartment with Wells, reminiscing or making plans for the future. The plans became more complex as the skies did, until both were heavy, laden with potential.

Dezirian found this terribly amusing. "If I were any better a fortune teller," he said, sticking his tongue out at me, "I could've predicted the lottery numbers and retired early." Dezirian and his husband lived on the next block over; we saw them frequently, and when he retired from Ad Int to open a small store in Columbia's central square we made a point to buy as many of our groceries there as we could.

Still, though he fancied himself a fortune teller, neither Wells nor I were much impressed by his prognostication. If we were a relationship, neither of us knew when it had started. Eighteen months after arriving on Mars, we had yet to say that single, all-powerful word. It was more that we comforted each other; that we each understood the other's needs. And, sure, there was an inexorability to it all — I knew that I would ask her to marry me, in time, or she would ask me, and I knew that we would agree. But it was a slow, languorous affair. There was none of the quick, delirious courtship I had had with Amy; my heart didn't race. But it felt placid and content, and maybe that was really what I needed. I tell myself that, at least.

The sky was thick and grey, and we both felt as though the inevitable might happen at any moment. We hadn't been scheduled to work that day, and were out behind the apartment, tending a small garden — functional and restrained, as matched both our personalities. Herbs planted from seeds we got from Dezirian; sunflowers we borrowed from the Project's stock — being a government employee has to have some perks, after all. She had a spade out, and I had some potting soil, and the apple seedling she'd selected. The scion looked so vulnerable, despite all the promise it held, and the shepherdess worked diligently to make the ground perfect for the rootstock that would nurture it. 

We both stopped at the same time — perhaps there was a sound, or a change in the smell of the air. Whatever the reason, we stood up, and I took her paws in a tight squeeze. 

We waited.

The first drop, large and imposing, struck Maria between the ears. The second hit the soil with an audible thump, as did the third. Then the sky opened. It churned the dust into thick mud and struck our ears so that they bowed under the weight. It drenched our clothes and our fur, and I wrapped my arm behind Maria's back, pulling her into a giddy, impulsive kiss. It was rain, cold rain; rain we had fled a thousand times before. Now it was music: all around us, doors opened as people stepped out, disbelieving.

I turned my muzzle upwards, into the downpour, and laughed.