Alluvium (4 page)

Before Earth was lost and his research to create EDN was in full effort, Hollis had utilized the Valles Marineris as the testing site for prototype seedlings. The United Nations, NASA, and the Extraterrestrial Colonial Society saw it as the perfect environment for Hollis’ flora to flourish, and thus instructed him to make it his outdoor laboratory for his research. The valleys deep depression into the ground unearthed richer and wetter soil for cultivation and also shielded any possible growth from the sandstorms on the higher plains. Hollis could find no place more perfect to grow the tree, but after his many years of failure, he was convinced otherwise. The valley, in its fertility and abundant resources, had become a mass burial ground for Hollis’ failed experiments. An elephant graveyard. A place where things came to die. But perhaps this time would be different.

Hollis parked the Crawler at a small outlook station at the edge of the canyon system.  He moved across the sands in a daze, still plagued by the sting of sea sickness from his short journey across the desert. He staggered up a series of crumbling steps to the small circular station at the valley’s overlook and keyed open the dusty door.

Welcome to Outlook Station Seven
,
Colonist Reyes. It has been 42 days since your last visit,
the speaker system stated.

Hollis wandered into the halls of the station, dragging trails of sand into the metallic structure. As Hollis knew he would not be staying long, he remained in his bulky exosuit. It was hard for him to move in the heavy armor, but he managed well enough, and it was always an extra safety precaution. He entered the stations workshop and inspected the hundreds of folders and papers that were spread chaotically on the tables. Each folder held statistics and test data of a specific batch of seeds. Hollis opened one, reliving his past disappointments:

EDN TEST 132              March 13, 2078              ID: B-132

•
March 09 (Morning): B-132 is planted in valley region A. Showing signs of initial weakness to Martian rock in top-soil. Will also plant B-132 in valley regions D and G as the loam is softer and more accepting.

•
March 09 (Afternoon): B-132 is planted in valley regions D and G and showing good promise of survival.

•
March 09 (Late-Afternoon): B-132 of valley region A has suffered from intense stress from rock pressure. All seedlings burst before initial sprouting stage- as expected, batch was a failure.

•
March 09 (Night): B-132 of valley region D have also suffered same results. B-132 of valley region G however have begun the first stages of birth. 10 seedlings have breached the surface, 2 others have died below ground.

•
March 10 (Early Morning): Unfortunate results. 9 seedling sprouts have withered and died from over-consumption of carbon-dioxide before bark development. Only 1 sprout remains.

•
March 10 (Afternoon): Tree has passed bark developmental phase and has a sturdy trunk of about 2 feet in diameter, standing 5 feet in height. Promising. Very very promising.

•
March 10 (Late-Afternoon): Tree has budded chromatic white leaves, however fragile, still produces oxygen from the carbon dioxide at 3x the rate of regular North American Populous tree. Trunk diameter is at 4 feet, standing height is 11 feet. Although B-132 is weaker than the desired EDN this may be enough to populate the planet. Have I done it? Need to wait until night to be sure.

•
March 10 (Nightfall): Fragile leaves of B-132 have been torn apart by the passing winds before full development. Trunk has lost moisture and begun peeling. The tree is dying. This is over.

•
March 11 (Morning): Tree has withered and shows no signs of oxygen production. It was unable to disperse its seedlings let alone acquire 10% of full development. B-132 is inefficient for Martian terraformation. Cancel batch. Start over.

Hollis Reyes, Colonial Botanist
                

Hollis tossed the pages across the room. There were countless documents, written on different days with different seedling batches, but each one of them ended with the same words:
Cancel batch
.
Start over
. The words burned into his brain like a brand that would never go away. Two-hundred and fourteen trials. Thousands of hours of research. Two years on another world away from his old life. All of it, only so that those words would be printed at the end of a single sheet of paper.
Start over
. He could not create the world for his colony, as he had promised, and now, he had nothing more to show for his dream than a dusty room full of papers- papers made from Earth’s dead trees.

Welcome to Outlook Station Seven, Unknown Identity. It has been 9 hours since your last visit,
declared the station’s speaker system.

Hollis stopped everything. He did not move or make a sound. Someone had activated the entrance scanner of the compound. Whoever had entered was unknown by the computer system, which recognized all the logged identities of the colonists of Mars. There could be no ‘unknown identities’ on a planet with only twenty-two people.

Cold blood seeped through Hollis’ veins as he spoke aloud. “Hello?" he called. “Who’s there?"

Nothing but the fluttering of paper in the desert breeze. The door had most certainly been opened and the station was decompressed, but thankfully Hollis kept his helmet secured so that the contaminated air would not harm him. He coiled around the curling passageway as all his senses began to heighten to the coming threat.

“Hello?" he called again.

A disembodied voice echoed back down the hall in response.

Because the rain is warm
, it said.

“What did you say?" Hollis shuddered, rounding his way towards the entrance. “Who

are you? How do you know about that?!"

As Hollis neared the origin of the voice, the halls began to hum with the pounding of a rainstorm outside its walls. The sound became deafening, so much so that Hollis had to grab hold of his head to fight back the piercing pattering of rain that penetrated his mind.

“That’s impossible," Hollis gasped as the sound of rain grew heavier in his mind and booming thunderclaps shook the station.

Hollis propelled himself off a wall and sprinted towards the entrance of the station. He could not believe it. Was this actually rain on Mars? Had his research worked after all? Perhaps one of the seedlings survived, unknown to him, and matured on its own, building a forest without his knowledge, deep in the valley. Plums of sand sprayed into Hollis’ visor as he burst through the open doorway and into the sunlight. He was lost for a moment, unknowing of which way was up and which was down. When the dust settled Hollis was in the barren desert again, and he waited in expectation for the raindrops to shower over him. But there was no rain, only the dry and clear skies of before.

Because the rain is warm

There was the voice again. Hollis’ sudden excitement overpowered his disappointment of the lost storm. He spun around to catch a shadow curl around the corner of the station carrying the mysterious voice with it. As fast as he could, Hollis hurled himself after the elusive specter.

“Wait!" he yelled.

He stumbled over the rising plateau beyond the outlook station. The rock cracked beneath his boots and cascaded down the cliff face. He tried to keep up with the ghost, but the exosuit was cumbersome and ill-fitting. Still, he persisted. He scrambled like a dog after a bone, bounding over the complex terrain, nearing the valley’s precipice.

And then he saw it, standing there at the edge, unlike anything he had ever seen before. It looked like one of the figures in the stain-glass windows of the abandoned church of his childhood. It stood strong, with its back towards him, gazing across the endless canyon system that was the Valles Marineris. From the creature’s back thick luminescent wings protruded and fluttered in the breeze. The creature itself almost resembled a human, but in its presence something was utterly inhuman. Its translucent skin was crystallized, reflecting the Martian sun back in multiplied brightness, and the glare blurred Hollis’ gaping eyes. Hollis lifted his hand above his visor to shield his eyes from the light hoping get a better look, but before doing so the apparition leaped into the deep ravine and out of sight.

“No!" he screamed. “Wait!"

Hollis approached the canyons precipice in slow and steadfast strides. At its edge, he peered overboard in both fear and awe as if he were on the deck of a ship watching the strong ocean tides crashing at its bow below.

The diverging fractals of the valley cracked deep into the planet's surface in ever-extending roots and endlessly spread to the horizon. The Sun struck the rippling rocks in the valley in golden light and cast shadows against the slopes. From this view, Hollis continued his inspection of the descending canyons, hoping to find the animal within. His eager eyes followed along the ruptures of the walls, and the layers of rock and time rolled by until he found the canyon's bottom. But he found only just that. Whatever it was that he saw, it was gone now.

The sound of upturned gravel from behind urged Hollis to turn around in a quick spin. Another Crawler was parking beside his, next to the outlook station, and another colonist in an exosuit emerged from its cold metal structure. Hollis made out the red hair behind the helmet. It was Autumn Florentine, the colonial meteorologist.

“Autumn, here!" Hollis yelled to her to join him, and he hastily turned his helmet back to the valley’s bottom looking for the ghost.

Autumn warily approached him up the incline. “The valley? It’s gorgeous isn’t it. My favorite place in the colony," she spoke solemnly. “We use to come here all the time together, remember?”

She joined beside Hollis at the edge, visibly upset behind the glass barrier of her visor. “I knew that I would find you here," she said.

Hollis persisted, still invested in the disappearance of the spirit. “No, I just saw someone! Something! I swear to you there was something here just a moment before you came, but it jumped into the valley! It was like a human, but different, and it had these great wings on its back!"

“Hollis, there’s nothing down there," Autumn said, and raised her voice. “Listen, everyone is back at the Hub dealing with Asnee, and you should be there too. He’s been trying to kill himself since we found Janya, but a few of us managed to restrain him. He’s safe for now, but we need you there for him. He’s your best friend, and he needs you to start acting like it." Autumn took a moment. “We all need you, Hollis."

“I’m telling you there was something here! It’s down there somewhere, right now!" cried Hollis manically still searching the valley.

Awareness swelled to Autumn, and she took a step forward. “Hollis, what’s wrong with you?" She looked far into his dilated and twitching eyes behind the mask. “Fuck, Hollis, you’re high aren’t you! You’ve been using those sick drugs of yours again! How could you do that at a time like this!"

“But there was something-" Hollis stumbled. “A visitor."

“No, Hollis! There’s no one there! There’s nothing else on this entire planet but the nineteen people back at the Hub who need your help! They can’t afford to have you wandering throughout the desert losing your mind! Come on, let's go! You’re done doing this shit!”

“I can’t go! It might come back, don’t you see! Maybe it has the answers! Maybe it can save us!" Hollis cried.

“Hollis, there’s nothing here but us, don’t you see that? No one is coming to save us. No aliens, no humans, no God! It’s only just us now!" she was crying and moving closer to him. “But that’s okay! We’ll get through this together! So come to me, please! Step away from the edge!" Tears trickled down her cheeks and formed a pool at the bottom of her visor. “There is nothing down there! It’s just us! Only us!"

“I can’t go. I can’t go. It might come back. I can’t leave. Not again. I can’t," mumbled the madman. He wobbled in his standing and took heavy breaths. The sprout logo on his suit began to flare red again, a warning of his failing body systems. Autumn’s suit logo, a cloud which designated her as the colony’s meteorologist, was burning a healthy golden radiance in defiance.

“Come back to me!" Autumn cried.

“I can’t go. I can’t go. It wants me to follow it," Hollis moaned as he stumbled to the cliff's edge, kicking off small rocks that tumbled in a cascade of clicks and crumbles. “I need to follow it."

“Please, Hollis! Stop!" Autumn outstretched a hand in horror, attempting to grab hold of his shadow before it disappeared over the crest.

“I can’t. I can’t go back," he repeated. The chasm was calling to the lost boy louder than the frightened girl beside him. Hollis had made his choice.

“I won’t lose you too!" cried Autumn.

“I can’t," whispered Hollis. He lifted one heel to the clouds. He was going over.

“I’m pregnant!" Autumn burst in a mixture of fear and love. “You can’t leave us both! You can’t leave your child!"

And Hollis thought for a moment. He thought with what little mind he had left.
Pregnant. Pregnant. Autumn is pregnant? Mine?

Before the jumper could jump his legs buckled beneath him, and he fell instead, but not forward into the rocky abyss, but backward into Autumn’s awaiting arms.