When I was older, I realized that all sane children come to this realization, but just then it was like a nightmare that I would wake up from. I didn’t wake up. It stayed there, that dark hole in the future. Eventually I asked about it. Why did we exist? What were we for? Mother said hush don’t think about it. Father said, take care of her, Louise. After a while I realized we never wake up from the nightmare, but we do learn not to think about it.
I watched the Mars surface, near Olympus Mons, where nests of snaky whirlwinds squirmed across the craters. The wind swept the surface all the time, erasing any marks the exploration robots made. Humans didn’t do exploration. They stayed in the canyon depths of Valles Marineris except for maintenance trips to the wind generators on the rim. I couldn’t see the towers with their huge, balanced vanes from my window, but I knew all about them. I knew about the water mines at the pole, too, where the coring machines chewed the ancient ice into slurry and sent it south, down long pipes to the canyons.
We were on Mars and Phobos because depopulating Earth was urgently important, and Mars was to be colonized as part of Project Compliance, to keep us from being classified as barbarians. I had no idea what that meant, and the didactibot refused to tell me. It didn’t lie, but it only told me the things people thought I ought to know, so, obviously, I wasn’t supposed to know about barbarians.
I was the only child on Phobos, and most of the things people said to me were politenesses. “Good morning, Margaret.” “Too bad, Margaret.” “Well done, Margaret.” “How are you today, Margaret?” Each of these had an answer I had been taught to give: “Good morning to you, as well.” “Yes, it is too bad.” “Thank you for noticing.” “Very well, thank you for asking.” They never said anything different or strange or new.
Besides politenesses, people talked about work. Mother kept records in the hydroponic gardens, and she talked about sorting systems and constructive interfaces. Father worked in the lab, and he talked about new oxygen-creating bacteria and newly constituted biomic-clusters being sent down to the surface. Once I asked Father why they kept on doing it. He said it was to find out what would happen.
I asked if he didn’t already know what would happen.
“Tell her,” my mother said. “Tell her the way you told me.”
Father flushed. “That was private,” he said, leaving the room and shutting the door behind him.
Mother shook her head. “He told me about it when we were just getting to know one another. It was romantic and eloquent and nonscientific, so of course he doesn’t like to repeat it.”
“But you do,” I said.
She smiled, a tiny secret smile I had never seen before. “It was a happy time for us, and he was eager about the work. He told me he dreams of creating a paradise down there in the ravines, a world in which all the living things work together to form a functioning miracle, something beautiful and marvelous and good. He never told anyone but me.”
“But he doesn’t know what will happen?”
“Not really, no. Sometimes experiments end up doing the opposite of what they intend; some tiny organism is wrong, and everything rots and dies. Other times, the project shows great promise, but it doesn’t quite get there. Your father says no one will know for sure until it happens. That’s how science works.”
The other thing people talked about was the weather down on Mars. Sometimes there were storms that blew up so much sand they hid the planet behind a gray veil. When that happened, I pretended the storm had spun us off into nothingness, and when the dust cleared we’d have gone somewhere else. I didn’t tell anyone this. They had been very upset with me when I cried about the pinwheel wearing out. I didn’t want to upset them again.
The people down in Valles Marineris lived in the “green ravines.” That’s where the water came out of the polar pipes to be used and collected and used and collected, over and over. Green ravines had transparent roofs. Mirrors on the canyon walls reflected the pale sunlight down through the roofs, and the plants inside produced breathable air. I thought when I grew up I’d get a job on the surface where I could live in a green ravine and do something real: run a corer in the water mines or help maintain the wind power stations. Being a child on Phobos Station didn’t seem real at all.
Grown-ups on Phobos had regular jobs, but my only job was to be schooled. Each year my didactibot added words to my vocabulary list, and that helped me explain things. I learned that the adults on Phobos were meticulous and painstaking and sedentary. Nobody ever went anywhere or did anything. Everybody had constipation and insomnia. Everyone talked about that, even in front of me. Politenesses, work, weather, constipation, insomnia, and ennui.
The consultants recommended more use of the gym for constipation and insomnia and more attention to hobbies to fight ennui. Phobian hobbies included playing in the orchestra, singing in the chorus, working with the theater group, or joining arts and craft exhibits. Everyone did things or made things fastidiously and meticulously, but not superlatively, so that nobody on station would think they were trying to show off. Showing off or “winning” caused ill feelings. So did criticism.
“But I think his painting is awful,” I said once.
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” my father, Harry Bain, said. “You can find something pleasant to say about it.”
“The colors were all muddled,” I offered doubtfully.
“Then you say that you appreciate the earthy, organic tones,” said Louise Bain, my mother.
One time, when the didactibot and I were getting
