The Bookseller of Mars (Part 1)

I am where the hurt people go. Not the crying, soft, gentle people. I’m not sure there are any of those left. No, I am where the killers turn when the buried piece of them that is still human reaches out, yearning for the light.

Now there are two killers at my door. Boy-children. I see them on the crackly intercom screen in my kitchen, the red desert stretching out behind them. I will let them in, I’m sure. I always do.

“Guns stay outside,” I call through the mic.

They turn to each other and whisper. They look about fourteen or fifteen –   the age I was when I first came to Mars over a decade ago, a filthy, scared teenage girl, bundled onto a starship along with the rest of the refugees from Earth.

Originally, thirty thousand of the global elite were planned for those starships. But when society fell to floods, fire, and disease, SpaceCorp took whoever could make it to the launch site in burning California. Beggars can’t be choosers during the apocalypse.

The day we landed, I filed out of the ship into the sterile light of the Mars station with the other aching, stinking survivors. We took gear from metal boxes as an armed group of SpaceCorp employees watched over us. The most precious item was a metal cube the size of my fist. If I pressed the button, it would pop open to the size of a cargo container. A ready-made home for the elite’s life on Mars; temperature controlled, CO2 to oxygen conversion, a greenhouse for food, and a drillbug to bore down into Martian rock for water.

That cargo container is where I find myself now, all these years later. Hidden under an outcrop of rock on the edge of the desert, far from the violence and squalor of the settlements. 

“We’re not leaving our gun,” calls the blond kid on my screen.

“Then you aren’t coming in.” On Mars, everyone’s a killer.

The kid kicks the ground, sending up a cloud of ochre dust.

“You don’t understand. It’s Jay,” he gestures to the boy next to him. “His regulator’s beeping.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s a real problem for Jay.” If his regulator is beeping, he doesn’t have long. That vital metal chip sits in your nostril, creating a bubble of oxygen and pressure that stops your blood from boiling in the Martian atmosphere. Beeping means breaking.

“Fuck,” says the blond. He turns to Jay and motions to put the gun on the ground. Jay shakes his head and grips it tighter.

I move a plant’s green tendril to hit the intercom button again. “I’m alone here, if it makes you feel better. And I don’t have a gun… within easy reach.” I look at the stack of books next to my bed. A pistol sits on top.

The blond grabs Jay’s shoulders, pleading, but the other boy simply stares into the intercom camera and holds the gun to his chest.

He’d rather die than come into my house unarmed? Jesus. Who knows what they’ve been through.

I groan. This kid is about to die on my doorstep because of his own stubbornness. I’ve buried bodies in the rocky ground before, but none this young.

Pushing the button, I open my cargo container’s airlock. The boys whip their heads around and scramble in, the door slamming down after them. It floods with air and repressurizes.

On my airlock monitor, I see Jay breathing deeply. Tears stream down the blond’s cheeks through the red dust. He scoops Jay into a ferocious hug, gripping his silver jacket so hard I think it might rip.

The kids hold each other like that until I press the button to open the door to my home. They separate, tense and defensive, hurt wolf pups ready to bite. Jay raises the gun, but his hands are shaky, uncertain.

“That was pretty fucking stupid,” I say. “Put the gun down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The blond wipes his tears. Jay lowers the gun. That’s better.

Martian-born kids. They’re slimmer, muscles softer than mine were, growing up on Earth. They walk with a graceful float in their step, no muscle memory of Earth’s gravity weighing down their every move. They remind me of birds – hollow bones.

Jay is short, on the childish side of his teen years, with red-brown skin like the Martian dust. His eyes are honey. His blond friend is so pale I can see his blue veins. He’s taller than Jay and his wide eyes dart around my home. 

I gesture for them to sit at the scrap-metal table. They do, and Jay lays the gun by his feet.

“I’m Melanie. Tea?”

“Uh, yes please,” says the blond. “I’m Ben.”

I busy myself over at the sink, filling a pot with water and setting it on the thermal pad to heat.

“So, what are two kids doing out in the Martian desert with a failing regulator?” I scoop dried herbs into three mesh metal balls and set each in a mug.

“Got lost on a school trip,” says Ben. “We were trying to walk back to our settlement when the beeping started. Bookseller is the only thing on the map in this part of the desert. We knew you were our only hope for getting air.”

I snort. “I didn’t know I was a feature on any maps.” Maps of Mars are rarely accurate, anyway, often scrawled on wheat husk paper after a long journey. But if these boys go to school, it means they’re from the SpaceCorp settlement  –  the only place with the resources to build any real infrastructure. The most organized settlement we have. And the most vicious. Perhaps they have half-decent maps. What they definitely don’t have, however, is school trips. These boys are liars. And most likely, runaways. “Aren’t you lucky you managed to find me.”

I feel the cold tip of a gun at my back. Damn.

“Why’d you tell us you were alone?” asks Jay. “I see two plates stacked up there on your drying rack. Two cups. Two forks. You got a boyfriend hiding here?”

I flick a look at my drying rack.

“Girlfriend,” I say. “And no. She’s gone. Just a few days ago… I – I didn’t have the heart to put it all away yet, if you must know.”

On Mars, you get used to reading the truth in someone’s voice. I guess he hears mine.

“Oh.” The gun moves away from my back.

“She isn’t dead.” I can’t stand for this kid’s sympathy to be wasted on the idea of Cara. “Just gone. Apparently, life in a settlement is more interesting than here surrounded by badly written books.” I slam the teas down and slump into my seat. Jay and Ben watch me warily. “Now, if you’re quite done threatening me, maybe we can enjoy this tea.”

Ben kicks Jay under the table. “Uh, yeah. Sorry,” Jay manages.

“So… uh, you make all this yourself?” Ben gestures around my cargo container home. Masters of conversation, these two.

I look around. He doesn’t mean the greenhouse extension, the shelves, or the tins of preserved foods, which, as a matter of fact, I did make myself. He means the towers of books that line every wall. 

“They don’t call me the bookseller for nothing,” I shrug.  

“How’d you do all this?” A spark of wonder lights Ben’s blue eyes. Now, even in my heartbroken state, I’m not going to destroy what might be the only spark of wonder currently on Mars.

I sigh. “After the starships landed, everyone in the settlements started acting out the sequel to the earthly apocalypse — real Mad Max shit. I ran out here into the desert alone and popped my cargo container. Raised myself until I got an infected cut and had to venture back into a settlement to trade my food for medicine. While I was there, I met a guy who’d pulp wheat husks and turn it into paper. I came back and traded all my preserves for five notebooks.”

“That’s a bad trade,” says Ben.

“I know,” I snort. “But I wasn’t in the healthiest state of mind. Anyway, I started by re-writing the classics, from memory, as well as I could. Everything I’d been studying in school on Earth. Some part of me knew they were worth saving and I'm glad I did. They sold first when I went back to the settlement to trade. Then, people started visiting me, threatening me, demanding I write the books they'd left behind. Soon, they realized they’d get better stories if they were kinder. Creativity can’t exactly flourish at gunpoint.”

They’d wanted the stories so desperately. You see, when your home is burning or filled with your dying family, you don’t think to bring your favorite book or e-reader as you escape. You just get your weapon and get yourself to the launch site by any means necessary. And on Mars, there’s no infrastructure to build phones or TVs. Our exodus from Earth meant we left all our stories behind.

“People told me plots and I spun them into books. And now, that’s all I do, rewriting shittier versions of the books we had on Earth.”

“And it’s safe here?” asks Ben. “Settlers don’t ever raid you?” 

“I rewrote The Handmaid’s Tale for the leader of a raider gang a while back. It’s been particularly quiet since then. Maybe she put in a good word for me.”

I sip my tea. Indeed, my customers are hard, bitter people. Did you ever see those pictures of a fox or a crocodile or a bear — some creature that is all claws and bite — with a butterfly landing on their nose? They used to put those pictures in cheap yearly calendars. Anyways, the biter closes their eyes and they let the butterfly land, because behind the claws there’s a soft warm creature that just wants a nap in the sun. In my little cargo container, killers rest and tell me about their favourite books. They ask me to write a story. And I do, because sometimes, I see the horror and the haunt slip away. Just for a moment.

“So basically, you just hide out here and sell stories to the dangerous assholes who come through?” asks Jay.

“I —” Ouch. “Better than being stranded in the desert on a school trip… or are you running away from SpaceCorp?” 

Jay’s hand drifts down to his gun.

“Hands where I can see them. Or I won’t be fixing that regulator of yours.”

His hand shoots back to his lap. “You can fix it?”

I nod. “Put your gun up there, next to mine. On top of that stack of books.”

Jay waits for a consenting look from Ben and then stands, placing the gun next to mine. 

“Much better. Now, give me your regulator.”

He fishes it out of his nose, wipes it on his trousers, and sets it on the table.

“Right, I’ll get to it. You guys can wait over there,” I gesture to the pile of pillows and blankets that serves as my sofa. I tell them they can help themselves to whatever food or books they want, as long as they’re quiet.