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 Fairy Graffiti  (12 ratings)by Stuart Atkinson Page 3 of 6 You know, I've heard there's even a VR "Museum Of Tragedy"
back on Earth now, a place in London where you can actually
stand on the grassy knoll and watch Kennedy's skull explode in
a fountain of red mist; or watch the Titanic slide beneath the
sea, or gaze up into the cloud-free Florida sky and see
Challenger blossoming into that white and gold fireball, its
booster rockets spearing into the blue like frightened animals.
Apparently you can even seat yourself by the window of the
vintage 747 which was almost hit by the meteoroid which wiped
Buenos Aires off the face of the Earth in 2018! Yeah, you can
look down on the boiling crater and scarlet-lit mushroom cloud
which were all that remained of almost five million souls. That
is, if you really wanted to. If you're that sick.
But I don't need VR to re-live the 2035 Murder. I was here when it happened. I was twenty one then, just another wobbly-legged, wide-eyed Newcomer relaxing in the mess after his first day on his new home. I'd spent most of the day getting my bearings, wandering around the corridors of the Base, getting used to the feel of the weights around my ankles which let me walk fairly normally in the low gravity, nervously and self-consciously announcing myself to my unimpressed department heads, that kind of thing. Eventually I'd completed my list of errands and after "acquiring" a hard-suit bounded out of an airlock and set foot on the surface of Mars. What a moment that was! After years of gazing longingly at photographs of it, I was finally there, standing on a golden plain strewn with jagged orange and red rocks. For a moment I thought to myself "this could be Death Valley, or the Sahara..." Until I realised that the sky above Death Valley was never the colour of a ripe apricot, like the one that arched above me. And the horizon was... well, it was wrong, too close, it curved too much too soon. That was when I realised I'd made it to Mars, I was finally there, and I know I just stood there for ages, slowly spinning round and round on the spot before I went back inside with an embarrassingly huge smile on my face. But it wasn't enough, and I sneaked back out - with a couple of other Newcomers - to watch the dawn. Our first dawn on our new home. Under a purple-black sky we pushed together and then sat ourselves down on some of the largest boulders we could find, then settled back to watch the show. I'd looked at the night sky from some of the darkest places on Earth - the centre of the Gobi, Antarctica - but I swear I had never seen as many stars as I did that night. It looked like someone had thrown a bucketful of diamond dust into the air! And the Milky Way... it cut the sky in half, being under it was like staring up at the underside of a huge silvery-white bridge... Then we saw Earth for the first time - a sapphire lantern blazing above the eastern horizon - and it hit us: we were on another planet, really, another planet, and as beautiful as it was Earth was just another star in the sky - just another sparkling jewel in a sky seeded with them. Unbelievable. We all deny it now, of course, but we all cried like infants. We waited patiently for the dawn, sat on our rocks, staring out into the universe, and after what seemed like a century the eastern sky began to brighten. Almost imperceptibly at first, nothing more than a lightening of the purple-black to deep purple, but it was like a chain reaction; once the brightening started it gathered pace with breathtaking speed, and we watched in dumb silence as the arc of the eastern sky changed colour, brightening, shifting from purple to violet to mauve and through every shade of blue imaginable until it shone with a warm, golden light, and then we watched that golden light spread across the whole of the sky until we were sitting underneath a vast orange and peach dome. That's when I knew, when all of us finally knew we were on Mars, and we bounded back inside feeling ten years younger, breathlessly looking forward to our tours with beaming smiles on our faces. It was the last time I smiled. History has shown that there was nothing we could do, but that doesn't help. History just tells us how the very first of the Children's activists - activists? Well, maybe that's what the bleeding hearts call them, even now. Me? I call them terrorists (and not "Terra-ists" as some of the tackier papers and Net sites call them), murderers, psychos... you get the idea - had hacked into the MarsNet system and found the supposedly-untraceable location of the spring then walked the hundred kloms from the base to the First Spring, "Ikoshi's Spring". Hiding among the boulder-clogged canyons and chasms by day, moving by night, she had hugged the terrain like a cruise missile for days, moving slowly, steadily, until she was there. Then she set up a camera, slaved it into the MarsComm satellite system, and beamed her ghastly act live to over a billion bewildered people across the Solar System. Even now, ten years later, I remember, word for word, what she said as she stood before the camera, mere feet away from the spring; at the end of my first day - my very first day! - on Mars. "We of the Children Of Adam Movement refuse to surrender Mankind's future to this alien abomination as the Governments and scientists of our world have done. It is our destiny to spread through space and inherit the stars, and we will not allow that destiny to be threatened by these horrors. We know many of you will condemn us, but know that what we do now we do for you, your children, and every child born after this day." Then she turned and dropped the grenade into the spring. Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2001 Stuart Atkinson, sffworld.com. All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author. The author has submitted the work in accordance with and in agreement with the following Submission Guidelines. |
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