The storms raged and howled in the darkness outside and we did our best to ignore them. Then, when we were almost too tired to move or think, Da started telling us the old stories again. He told tales about Earth and our family and who they had all been in that other life. And then he told the story of Grandma and Grandpa’s generation, and how they had given up almost everything to create a new life for us.
We heard once more about the first landings and the first wave of settlers. The early disasters and the fights that broke out between folk when they tried to make homes for themselves. The constant struggle each day to bring subsistence out of the hopeless soil. They had it so much harder than we do, he said. We must be so grateful for the sacrifices of the previous generation. We were second and third generation settlers and we had an obligation to create a better life for those who came after us: that’s how it all worked. Each generation made it easier for the next, and they did it all out of love.
I guess I slept for a while that night in my chair, with thoughts like those going round in my head. When I woke up I thought I’d gone deaf. The roaring and the howling had stopped.
It sounded like a great big emptiness. I cleared my throat, just to make sure I could still hear anything at all. Then the whole kitchen started coming to life. Ma clattered about, cleaning our crocks with sand. I could hear Da stomping, carrying Grandma upstairs to her bed. There was the mechanical whirring of Toaster’s ancient joints as he began work again.
We had survived!
I felt like jumping up out of my chair, running outdoors and doing a lap of honour around our Homestead. Al grinned at me like he felt just the same way. Da came downstairs and he started to take down the wooden boards that covered the windows and doors. He got us kids to help him and we were so excited, we felt like we hadn’t been outside for several weeks. Martian sunlight felt so good on your face when you’d been shut inside like that. It felt slow and old. It warmed you right down to your toes.
Da tackled the door. It was stuck. The sand had been swept into a dune against the front of the Homestead. We all put our backs into it. It was only when Toaster put his hydraulic strength behind the door that we got it open.
We stepped out into an alien landscape.
Really, in the new morning, it looked nothing like it had the day before. My heart was hammering with excitement and shock.
Someone had reached down from heaven, or wherever, and smoothed his great big palm over our world. The sand had blown over everything so deeply it had smothered the whole lot. We were worried about our crops being damaged, but they had completely disappeared. Even the shape of the horizon had shifted, at the far edges of our familiar prairie. It looked hillier now.
Da looked grimly disgusted. He knew the storm was a bad one. He knew that chances were it would wipe the slate clean. But we checked on our storage hut and – amazingly – the building was still standing safe, and the crops we collected the previous day were all fine.
‘Praise the Lord,’ Da muttered, under his breath. I thought I even saw him wipe his eyes with relief.
We did a circuit of the Homestead. Da said we had to be careful of the shifting sands; they could be treacherous.
At the back of the Homestead we found our burden beasts. They were dead, of course. Their heads poked out of the new dune, and I stared at their closed eyes and their fringed lashes. I had names for our lizards. I called them Molly and George. Which was stupid and sentimental when they could die so easily.
Da sighed as he started digging the dead beasts out. ‘We’ll have to train up another pair,’ he said. ‘We’ll be lucky to get two as good as these. Will you come to town with me, Lora? Al? There’s all sorts we need. Plus we have to check on the townsfolk. See that everything’s OK there.’
Both Al and I nodded, holding back our excitement. We loved to go to town.
‘Come on. Back indoors,’ said Da, staring at our dead animals. ‘We’ll tell Ma she’s got her work cut out for her filleting and salting these beasts for storage. At least we know we won’t starve, eh?’ He tried to make light of it, and talked about us having a grand barbecue maybe, and inviting all our friends from town.
But I didn’t want to think about eating Molly and George.
See? I was sentimental in those days. I tried to focus my thoughts on our trip to see the townsfolk.
And if I remember rightly, it was on this trip that we heard about the Disappearances. They had started up again.
3
The going was hard. Usually Molly and George would pull the hovercart all the way into town. With our beasts dead Da had to tinker with the complicated insides of the engine to make it hover again. The circuits of the instruction manual had long ago fizzled out. Like so many of the devices we’d inherited, we’d forgotten the original instructions and everything was a guessing game.
Da was a kind of super genius and he battled away with his whole box-load of greasy tools and what do you know? Pretty soon that old hovercart was lifting off the sand upon a cushion of jellified air. It quivered like heat haze on the prairie.
Al and I whooped, clambering aboard, and the cart wobbled underneath us. Da was busy kissing goodbye to Ma and Grandma and fussing over Hannah. He was always like that. He departed as if every trip was his last. He had seen too much calamity during his life on Mars. He had seen too many folk set off and never come back.
But Al and I were impatient that day. I wanted to feel the air streaming past us, all cool and sharp on my face. We both wanted to experience that lurching excitement in the pits of our stomachs as the hovercart accelerated to what would seem like impossible velocities.
As Da gunned the engines, Grandma stood alongside us in her old woollen dress and shawl and she had that crazy glint in her eye again.
‘You be careful in that town, do you hear?’ She narrowed her eyes at us. ‘You watch after these kiddies.’
Da nodded, pretending he was paying heed to her madness. We could tell that he was as keen to be off as we were. He jumped up in the driver’s seat, let out a yell, and wrenched the rusted wheel around. The hovercart shivered and bucked, and then we were off. Riding across the newly smoothed dunes that the storm had created.
We found town busy. People were out and about, using shovels to clear away sand drifts that had settled against the fronts of stores and houses. Folk were up ladders fixing windows and signs and tiles on rooftops. There was a cheery, businesslike atmosphere, as if the town was determined to carry on as usual. They wouldn’t let something like a storm get in the way of their everyday lives.
Al and I watched all of this as Da steered the hovercart down Main Street. He called out to a few men he knew and they answered him with gruff replies, or waved as they concentrated on their tasks. Da parked in a sandy lot behind the abandoned Post Office and gave us a handful of coins each, plus a list. He had the bigger list, detailing the heavier goods he would pick up at the Storehouse. Our list consisted of the no-less-important smaller items we could get from Mrs Adams’ store. Da always sent us there, so that we would have a vital task of our own to perform, he said. But Al and I knew it was also because Da couldn’t stand gossipy Mrs Adams holding court in her fancy goods emporium. I was surprised though, because that day he said, ‘Be sure to invite the Adamses to our barbecue. Don’t you forget, Lora.’