wb :

The idea that the landscape of Mars is red is a commonly-held myth. Photos from the first martian probes in the 1990s showed a panorama of red but those were really colour-enhanced - for scientific purposes, for sensation, who can say? Having discovered another uninhabitable grey rock in space would not guarantee NASA's budget - after all, we already had the moon and as far as the average voter was concerned, that was enough. In reality, the martian landscape is almost uniformly grey, punctuated by canyons, but these are grey canyons studded with grey rocks on ancient grey riverbeds. From space, the planet looks red because of iron oxide in the atmosphere. From the ground, the sky is grey, but the ever-present iron oxide dust looms nevertheless.

It was dark on mars. That was how it always had been, the shroud of night almost perpetually drawn over the red planet not by the presence of clouds (she had none) but by sheer virtue of distance.

Above the spaceport the sky was a deep grey. It was night-time. The daytime came and went with whimsy but each cycle brought no more than a tinge of brightness to the otherwise twilight surroundings. Six billion miles was a long way for the warmth which sustained green earth to travel.

It was also one hell of a long way for a spacecraft to travel.

That day, the spaceport was crowded.


Mother held my hand as we thronged with the crowd; pulled and pushed, seeping our way like rivulets of water between the cracks of parched earth towards the wire fence. I felt myself being pulled upwards by her muscular arms. Mother hoisted me to a perch on her shoulder so I could get a good view of the spacecraft: at seven, i was tall but most of the rugged colonists were taller: it was water day, there was to be a spacecraft (we didn't know what it was to look like), and it would come like rain from interstellar space to our dry little hole in the middle of our desolate solar system.

The first we heard was not the rush of the sonic boom or the parting of the sea of reddish clouds like a crack in some divine firmament to let in the first rays of a new sun, shedding brilliant light on the small pack of cold colonists and filling their eyes with a spiritual fire. Standing there I could fathom a small wet throng wading through the river Jordan; a crack in the sky; a deep voice of command.

The first we heard was not the torrential pour of combustion engines flaring in gigantuan struggle against the pull of the planet, lowering the silver spacecraft first by metres, then by feet, then by inches. When the ramp was extended, a man in a half-spacesuit stood at the doorway framed by a halo of brilliant, cutting but that is an image for later. Before there was light there was sound...

...and the sound was the word. A baby crying. It was little cousin Zechariah, nobody could hear anything of the spacecraft let alone see through the dusty haze, it was night-time, it was Mars, it was the spaceport; and he had had a brief premonition, the sort only available to the very very young, of the grief that is our birthright.

Labels: prose