Alluvium (3 page)

“What I’m trying to say is that maybe if the shuttle didn’t eventually stabilize and instead we died that day, would it have been better to spend my last minutes of life fighting my fate like the others or to be understanding of it like my father."

Saul pondered for a moment with no answer in sight. “So, what did you choose?" he finally asked Hollis.

“That’s easy," weakly told Hollis. "I screamed like the rest of them."

Suddenly sirens rippled throughout the entirety of the station. A metallic sheath glided down the observation deck’s window and closed off the pair from the sunset’s finale, a half-relief for Hollis.

Station-wide alert, level six dust storm imminent. All personnel return to personal cabins immediately for security lock-down,
a loudspeaker boomed into their ears.

“Looks like that’s our cue!" yelled Saul over the sirens. "We’ll continue this conversation later!"

Saul ushered Hollis from the observation deck, down the stairs, and back into the main hallway. Flaring lights illuminated the entire expanse to guide the colonists to the safety of their rooms. Before he too departed to his room and into the crowd, Saul flashed Hollis a peculiar smile. “There’s no shame in screaming, Hollis! It means you’re still alive!" he screamed, and then he was gone with the others.

As Saul scampered off, Hollis remained in a silent headcount in the main hallway as the other colonists passed him by. He told himself that he was simply assuring the security of the colony, taking to Saul’s altruistic attitude, but he knew that the true reason for his wandering eyes was much more selfish in nature. He was searching the crowded hall for someone in particular, and she too was searching for him. His eyes hovered over their heads, and he blinked only when the lights did, hoping to spot her vibrant red hair amongst the pool of brown and blacks and yellows. And just as quickly as he identified her did he turn his gaze to another colonist, leaving her no hints of his partiality. But as brief and trivial as the encounter appeared to be to an untrained eye, it was enough to send the young girl to sleep with the unparalleled comfort of love.

Hours later Hollis Reyes found himself in his room attentively listening to the rumbling of rocks of the dust storm against the titanium shielding of the Hub. His sleep was not as forthcoming as the young red-headed girl down the hallway, and he lay contorted in his bed with his mind running away into the shifting shadows of the past. He decided that he would allow himself yet another night’s intoxication of one of the many unheard herbs held in the wicker box at the bedside table to seek any sense of serenity from his mind. He needed to rest, no matter the cause. The bedside drawer glided open with a wave of his hand, and from within the brown wicker lockbox, Hollis selected a deep yellow-shaded shrub. He chewed on the dried and crushed leaves, releasing the chemicals from its veins into his own, and waited in great anticipation.

Within minutes, he could to feel the sedative cascade over his bubbling mind, and with what little energy he had left, he concentrated on being in a better place. Perhaps a tropical island, or a log cabin in a thicket of evergreen trees. Anywhere would do but a tin-can buried deep in the dirt, filled with twenty-two lost souls, and far from any home he may have once had. As Hollis drifted further away to faraway places, the pattering rocks began to sound closer to the pattering of rain, and the dream that haunted him every night returned for one more.

Screams pulled the sleeping boy through worlds and back to the red one. The lights in the room bent in a blur, and the sedative-induced daze dragged everything in and out of focus. Half-awoken, Hollis peeled his back from the sweat-soaked mattress and rubbed his tired eyes to life. Was he the one screaming? He swung his legs over the drop-off of the bed and jumped to the cold floor below. Quickly, he regained his balance and reestablished himself with the prosaic surroundings of his sleeping quarters. The marble-masked room he found himself in resembled a mausoleum, with windowless walls and a dry stillness in the air, and like a deeply buried tomb, few things of life were found within.

Amid Hollis’ sweep of his room something polluted him in an uneasy bind. Something unknown to him. What was here that wasn’t before? What was wrong? Unconcerned by this undiagnosed apprehension, Hollis continued with the rituals of his morning activation. It took him longer than usual to shake away the remnants of the self-induced sedative from his tingling muscles, and he did so with little grace. He wildly whipped his limbs in the air in an effort to bring back the flow of blood and roughly shook his shoulders in a rhythmic motion. Once control over his body was regained, Hollis stepped over to the colonial suit hanging on the far end of the room in his empty wardrobe. He effortlessly fastened the orange and white fabric over his naked skin and felt the
intelligent-insulation,
as they called it, take its hold, synchronizing with the organic beats of his body with the thin fabric that kissed his skin. Once the symbiotic suit finished its calibration with his biology, Hollis touched the logo of a budding sprout stitched into the upper left breast of the suit’s fabric. It lit up in a golden glow. “The seed of civilization is ours to grow," he recited sarcastically in remembrance.

The screams came again. Sharp, and yet distant, the screams pierced through the walls of the room, effectively jolting Hollis from his disconnected and sleepy state. He had heard them after all. Alerted, Hollis pulled from his bedside mirror and made for his door, strapping on his boots and exiting into the main hallway in a fumble of perverse excitement. He followed the course of the screams as they twisted through the station and he was slowed down only by the fear of where the maze would lead him. As he passed by the other personal cabins, he realized all were emptied of sleepers, and that his door was the last to open to whatever nightmares laid ahead.

Hollis checked the galley, the port-decks, and all other corners of the Hub only to find more emptied spaces. It wasn’t until he stopped before one of the Decompression Rooms that he localized the screams. They were coming from the outside. The blinking red light on the rooms hatch informed Hollis that it was already decompressed to the outside atmosphere, and he would need a helmet if he wished to proceed any further. Energized by what could be beyond the door and thinking little of the consequences, Hollis scavenged through the nearby lockers producing the necessary protection. The sleek glass visor of the colonial helmet would provide a reasonable barrier from Martian debris, and the well-supplied oxygen tank would give him something to breathe for a dozen or so hours. Ready to continue in full-dress of the exo-suit and looking like a deep sea diver outfitted to explore an alien and unseen territory, Hollis entered into the small Decompression Room. He closed himself off from the remainder of the Hub and entered the key-code that opened the locked passage to the desert. A spark of fear flared to life inside Hollis at that moment, and he wanted to turn back, to stay buried, but it was too late.

Door opening. Foreign atmosphere detected,
declared the speakers above his head.

The door retracted, and the blinding light from the open sky forced Hollis to shield his eyes. For Hollis, this had been the first time he left the Hub since contact with his home planet was lost months ago. The closest he had been to Mars was through an accidental glance out a misplaced window and even then would it be for less than a half-second. Hollis had no choice now but to come face-to-face with his new world if he wanted to find out what had happened to the colony, and he did so in great hesitance. He stabilized his wavering stance and took a deep breath of the filtered air from the oxygen tank.

“You can do this," he whispered.

He lifted his foot from the comfort of the metal tiles in Decompression Room and dug it deep into the cracked dirt of the Martian desert ahead. Another set of shrill cries greeted his entrance into the outside in an unceremonious fashion, and Hollis followed the sounds up the inclining sandbar that took him from the underground facility and onto the great desert plain. He crested over the peak and looked upon the wasteland with regret as it spread out before him. It was just as barren and dry as he remembered. Nothing could be seen on the horizon but sand and sky. The dark orange plateau was uniform throughout, only broken in its simplicity by small scatterings of rocks and distant dunes. The echoing screams returned and alerted him once again. Hollis turned to a huddle of dark figures on a desert hill not but a few meters from the porthole he was exiting.

“Come on," he huffed to himself in preparation, slowing his accelerated heart-rate.

In long strides, Hollis bounced along the flat sands and up the hill to join the rest of humanity. The further he went into the desert, the further he was from the safety of the Hubs subterranean shields. He pushed away these thoughts. He kicked up clouds of dust around him with each contact he made with the dirt and left footprints that would be forever molded into it. Up and up he drove himself, the cries growing louder and louder as he grew nearer to the crowd. Once upon the hill’s crest, Hollis approached the motionless mass of onlookers and could hear them mumbling prayers to themselves beneath their soft sobbing. He shifted himself into the heart of the human circle and recoiled to what he found within.

A naked woman laid buried under a layer of sand and rubble, torn and beaten by the shards of a hundred sharp rocks. Her body was as blue and as frozen as ice, and she looked nearly like shattered glass laying there in pieces. Janya. It was her, Hollis was certain. She could hardly be identified in the carnal chaos, and it took Hollis a few seconds to realize it was actually the Janya he knew and loved on display. Her body was reduced to fragments and not much more. Sobbing into what was left of her bloody breast was Asnee. He filled the Martian sky with curses and pounded holes into the reddened loam at the body’s side with his fists.

“I have nothing left! You took it all! You took everything!" Asnee shouted upwards into the morning light.

Hollis backed away and turned himself from the horrific display in a swell of disgust and revolt. Was he still dreaming? Could this be real? Could this be human? He asked one of the colonists standing nearby to make sense of the situation.

“What the hell happened here? What the hell am I looking at?" he asked.

The colonist, Maven Atoll, head engineer of the colony, responded in a very shaken voice. "She- she must have made off during the lockdown last night, slipped right past us. This morning Selina and Marcus found the Decompression Room unlocked and Janya out here, just like this, without her suit or any protection. She- she ran right out into the storm."

Hollis shuddered at the thought of rocks meeting bare skin in the dead of night. “Why did I come here?” Hollis muttered to himself in a daze.

Maven lowered his eyes as if feeling responsible himself. “We’ve all just been having such a hard time lately it’s- it’s hard to notice these things. When misery becomes normalcy then how do you know what to look for? How do you know who really needs to be taken care of when we all do? We’re all just blind out here is what we are. We can barely see our own hands in front of our fucking faces. Before we know it, we’ll all be buried in the sand, just like her. Fuck, she was just a kid. Just a kid. We’re all fucking kids. Why did they choose us?"

Hollis didn’t have any assuring words for Maven or any of the other stunned onlookers. He could only focus on the exhibit of extinction that was before him. His moist breath shot into the helmet's visor in irregular bursts and disappeared the sea of scared faces into the foreground of a hot and condensed cloud. Asnee’s screams faded away. Everything faded away. The visor hazed over until Hollis was isolated and alone inside a suit that left little air between its constricting cloth and his skin. He found a new tomb, locked within, out in the open. A tomb that grew deeper with each expelled breath and each passing thought. Deeper and deeper. The suit clung to his skin like a snake does its prey, but as much as he despised its hold, it was the only thing keeping him alive in the open desert.

In a blind tumble, Hollis retreated from the hill as quickly as he climbed it. He had to go to the last oasis in the desert. He had to go to the garden. As he sprinted across the desert expanse, a young red-headed girl from amidst the crowd watched him with equal agony. She called after the running boy but he was too far gone, and the space between them became too great for any syllable to traverse.

A crystalline-dome expanded on the horizon. Its hexagonal trim erected from the depths of the bedrock and flickered in the light of the rising dawn. Such perfect symmetry had no place on this world, thought the botanist as he inspected the repeating patterns in the glass, but it did remind him of a place that existed on another world. Far found within the rejected rim of Mexico City stood an eroded church with the same mesmerizing mirror-work as the approaching dome. As a young child, Hollis Reyes had used the abandoned church as a hideaway from his life of abandonment. He would routinely skip school and lonely dinners absent of his apathetic father to gaze endlessly at the stain-glass murals of the church. The windows were fastened against the walls so that, no matter the placement of the hour, the sun was also streaming through. The light rays would enter the windows colorless and exit in a flood of the spectrum, staining the rotting wooden canvas of the church below with color. The church’s decomposing decor was kaleidoscopic under the windows projected light, but the spectacle was lost with the setting of the Sun. Young Hollis would stare at the fluorescent fireworks in the murals until the moon was high in the sky and the beauty was forced to fade away.

The glass murals of the abandoned church told a fable that Hollis could not recite and was written in a book that he had never read. His family once held the book on their bedside table within an arm’s reach, but when that very bed turned into a hospice for Hollis’ dying mother, the book became layered under the dust of untouched things. After his mother's passing, Hollis swore to swear to no God. He would enter the abandoned church only as an insult and sit down on one of the splintered pews to drink and smoke away his childhood in misdirected anger. But it was the mural in the glass that truly kept him coming back, and even though the story it spoke eluded him, Hollis would spend the time in the abandoned church fabricating his own plot to accompany the pictures. The looming figure backed with white feathered wings was not retracting the half-eaten apple from the frightened and naked man and woman but instead giving it to them. In the shallow pools of Hollis’ youthful eyes, he chose to witness an action of kindness in the picture where the starved were fed by the full. This interpretation of the glass partly sparked young Hollis’ dedication to finding the solution of starvation by bioengineered agriculture, and it was in this way his ticket to Mars was eventually earned.

Hollis shook his mind away from the past and came back to the present. He tightly gripped the wheel of the Dune Crawler as it trailed towards the rising crystal cathedral tucked away in the Martian hills. He followed along a crooked path that was losing its distinction with each passing breeze and could not decide whether it was the bumps in the terrain or the lingering emotions from earlier in the morning that shook his body uncontrollably. He held a firmer grip on the rover’s steering-column to steady his tremors and erased his mind of the images of blood-soaked sand. The garden did not allow for any bad thoughts to enter its borders, and Hollis had only a few more seconds to clear his mind of malice before he arrived at its gateway. As the Crawler pulled to a halt before the glass bio-dome, Hollis leaped from its hold in a gravity-defying jump and delicately landed near the entrance. He approached the dome, and with a swipe of his biometrics, the door slid open. He entered the small enclosure inside and was quickly transitioned into another ecosystem.

Door opening. Oxygen-safe atmosphere detected.

As Hollis lifted off his heavy helmet he lifted off the weight of Mars.

The fresh air hit Hollis’ exposed face with an unrelenting force, nearly knocking him back towards the desert beyond the glass. He managed to hold his stance and breathed deeply in until his lungs could hold no more. But something was not right. The air tasted stale and lifeless and not as it should, and worse was the wafting smell that reeked of death and decomposition. Hollis pushed further through the confines of the tight elastic tunnel that led from the entrance and through a small aperture that connected to the main chamber of the greenhouse. His fears came to fruition with his emergence.

The gardens once lush foliage had dwindled in size and color during his months away. Leaves dripped from their limp stems like flesh torn from bone and drifted through the thin atmosphere littering the cobblestone lawn at the end of their long descents. All that was once green was now a dark and dead hue that made their falling look like ash from a great fire.

Hollis fell to the stones with the leaves.

"I have nothing left," he moaned aloud, mimicking an earlier cry. His shouts beat against the glass of the garden and could not break free.

Hollis was not as effective in containing things that grew as the greenhouse was, and his emotions at last burst beyond his barriers. He was exhausted in pretending that everything was fine. He knew that the vessel was out of control and the ground was quickly approaching and there was no stopping the collision. Death was inevitable, and it was the very time to start screaming. Not but an hour before had he seen the crest of the approaching void with Janya's brutal self-mutilation, and she was only the first to fall. More deaths would follow in the days to come until there were no more things to die and the planet was as bare and lifeless as it was when they first arrived. Mars was indifferent to the events that transpired on its surface and to his own species survival. No matter the amount of chaos that happens on its crust, the Martian core would still burn for a millennium in total ignorance.

And yet, in the face of this utter hopelessness, Hollis asked himself why he sought the garden as a refuge in the first place, and why its death was the biggest catastrophe of all. Perhaps, deep down, he believed its resurrection could bring light to the dark. Perhaps Saul and the Computer were right about EDN, his research, and that's why he felt compelled to come back after so many months lost: to finish what he started and save his species.

To be forgiven.

Hollis rose from the ground, and his trembling body composed itself once more. He swept off the spoiled vegetation that grasped the fibers of his suit. The tree sprout logo above his heart flared red, a warning sign of his current state of health and psychology.

“
Cálmate
," he whispered reassuringly.

Hollis patrolled through the vast rows of browning brush, evading all the fallen life with precisely set steps. He passed a large glass room and reached a collection of formula tanks bolted alongside industrial-piping that was stationed beside an elevated workstation. Swimming aimlessly in violet liquid tubes were hundreds of tiny white seeds that looked like whole planets of their own backlit by a sparkling purple nebula.

Each seed in the tank was constructed entirely different than the next, with years of care and precision, and yet each one was entirely useless in its own right. If the botanist was to pluck any one of the seeds from the amethyst sea and bury it into Martian soil it would burst apart, or sprout a crippled stem, or petrify in the frost, or turn to odd colors like a chameleon, or root itself around a rock and choke. Any one of the hundreds of seeds would do nothing that Hollis wished and instead follow its organic blueprint all the way to its death. Hollis was their creator, each one of them, and they were his failed children. It was his hand that destined the fate of hundreds of seedlings to death until one was shaped to perfection. Trial and error, trial and error, trial and error until a single seed birthed a future without a desert.

This seed, appropriately named EDN, if assembled without fault, would build a tree on the surface of Mars. This tree would sprout within days, and after a week of maturation it would cast a shadow nearly thirty feet in length. Pulsing through the cracks of its sturdy white-trunk would be a life-force so compelling that it could hold against anything the atmosphere of Mars had to offer. Every day the tree would pollinate the skies with hundreds of more seeds of its kind, sprouting even more trees in the same fashion, and these new trees would repeat the cycle, as would the next grouping. This delivery process would ensue until the whole planet was hidden under an oxygen and nitrogen-rich forest and the desert was drowned below grass and green. The roots of the tree would dig deep into the crust of Mars, past the dry surface layer, and extract the water-enriched soil deep below. The water would then be pulled into the leaves of the tree and moisturize the surrounding air, shaping the dead atmosphere into something more, forming clouds, varying weather patterns, and perhaps even a water cycle. This new atmosphere would act like a shield around the planet protecting its inhabitants against solar radiation.

It was in Hollis’ hopes that at the moment the last seed was planted Mars would have taken the form of a new Earth, a much more wild Earth, and they could stop hiding behind walls and helmets and step out into their new world. A true planet-wide terraformation in the process of a few years. If Hollis wanted this reality, there would be many tireless nights of research ahead before EDN was ready.

The botanist flooded the tanks and released the old useless seeds into the drainage duct on the floor. He watched as they spiraled into the black hole, one by one into the gargling abyss, until there were none. His past failures would not be missed. It was the future he cared about.

It was in this action that the botanist knew where he must go next.

Pushing back through the withering thicket, Hollis plucked a variety of strange herbs for his collection back in his box in his personal cabin. He sealed them away safely in a suit pocket. He took one last gulp of clean air before firmly locking the exo-helmet back on his head and exited the compound. If he were to even considered restarting his research and one day growing his fabled tree, he would need to make one last check at another distant location. Hollis climbed back into the Crawler, making sure the gas levels were adequate, and made off to the great
Valles Marineris
on the far side of the territory, feeling a little spark of purpose for the first time in many months.

The arid pastures passed by in great speeds as the Crawler moved through them. It was the spaces between the colony’s stations that disturbed Hollis the most, and he escalated the rover’s speed to break the gaps. He did not like the way in which each patch of the open desert looked the same as the next. Everything was identical and indistinguishable in the wastelands. It created the illusion that he was going nowhere. After an hour of driving, it began to feel like a bad dream where no matter how fast he went, he remained in the same place. This sensation disturbed Hollis so much that he unlatched his exosuit pocket and retracted one of the strange plants he had taken from the garden. The plant was tinted a light green color and shaped like a globe, marked with dozens of pointed protrusions that made it difficult to hold. It looked like a tiny throned-apple sitting in the palm of his hand. He peeled the spiky husk open revealing a white bundle of seeds inside and tore the seeds from the plants cavity, tossing them into his mouth without a second's thought. This specific plant did not put him to sleep as the other one did during his many sleepless nights. It did quite the opposite. Quickly it took hold of his mind. Hollis’ eyes widened on the sliding sands outside the rover as they began changing in color from white to blue to black to orange, like a frightened chameleon warding away a predator, and the dunes began to rise and fall like a stormy sea. Clouds flew by overhead and took foreign designs and geometrical shapes and appeared to chase after the Crawler as it crossed the oscillating ocean of sand. In most realities, these visuals would have frightened Hollis, but not in this one. He smiled upon the forming mirages and continued his crossing over the pulsing and dynamic desert. The barren land was now more appealing to his senses. He was not on Mars anymore, and this was exactly where he wanted to be.

He was freed from the sands of time.

The Sun circled the planet at unfathomable speeds, dipping below the horizon to his left and rising rapidly to his right. Four times it rounded, leaving a trail of spiraling flames as it shot across the sky. It ricocheted back and forth like a heated match of tennis and with every return bounce night came, and then day, and then night, and then day once more. Under each new sun, the desert waves grew steeper, pulling the Crawler high into the spinning sky. The vehicle leaped over a dunes peak and came back down again with such immense force that Hollis’ stomach and mind were stirred. The sandy waves burst apart at the rovers side spraying dust against its armor and rocking it back and forth. Just when the storm became too strong night fell instantly, and all was calm again. The stars hummed a soothing song in their soft vibrations and swirled and spun about with their own life. Then, just as quickly as it went, the day dawned again and with it the sands became alive once more. The colors turned, the dune seas churned, and Hollis thought the cycles would last forever.

But then it was gone. The visions quickly faded along with the animated flat-lands, and the Crawler thrust back into old and familiar terrain. The recognizable landmarks of the deserts desolation returned as the sands settled back into their normal motions and color. The high’s end seemed to come sooner with each and every use of the flower’s seeds, and Hollis always wished dearly that the trip would last forever, but it never did. All things were destined to end, and Hollis accepted this truth as the desert flattened and the Valles Marineris came before him. He had reached his destination.

In the dead language of Latin, the Valles Marineris meant
Mariner Valleys,
named after the Mariner 9 Mars Orbiter of the nineteen-seventies. Wrinkled into the rocks east of the Tharsis region of Mars, the valley expand to nearly the length of the United States in size and was understood to be the third largest canyon system in the solar system, the first being found on the planet Earth, and the second on Venus.