Then, of course, I remember.
I was nine years old and didn’t have much choice. Any choice. The parents made the decision to apply for ‘the program’ and, being brilliant engineers, both under 35 with a kid who’d be into double figures before long, they were approved. Young Patsy turned six in the months while they toiled through the application process, and had turned eight when they received the official approval notice. My ninth birthday had just slipped into memory when we found ourselves assigned to Marsport.
That’s what we called it, way back when. You didn’t migrate, you weren’t relocated; you were assigned. As if taking a one-way ticket to Mars was just a job. I guess, to some people it might actually be a job. Certainly, some manage to rake together the cash for tickets back ‘home.’ Though why you’d actually want to return to Earth beats hell out of me.
Mars might be cold and sandy, but with our tiny population there’s space to move and almost unlimited resources. Just as importantly, we live in a place and time when enterprise is applauded. Earth is ... Earth.
If Mars is so damned cold and dry, you need an environment suit to step outside, Earth is so damned hot, humid, toxic, you need a cool suit and breather mask before you open a door. If Mars is sandy, windy and irradiated, Earth is wet, stormy and polluted. They only perks they can boast about that we can’t are air pressure, full gravity and natural immunity to solar radiation. But they pay a high: twelve billion people fighting for the high ground, while Mars is...
We’re big and wide open. You can still take a rover into the wilds of the southern hemisphere, find a parcel of land, stake your claim, set up a homestead. The northern hemisphere is fifty years settled, but half the south remains up for grabs, the way our ancestors headed for Australia and New Zealand.
My multiple-times-great-grandpa went to Australia, with no more choice than me coming to Mars. Patsy: Shanghaied at age nine. Paddy Joe Doyle: transported at 19 for the crime of stealing a whopping two (count ’em, two) loaves of bread. The fact he was starving, with three kid sisters and a sick ma at home in Ballymena counted for nada. Paddy Joe could’ve been lynched ... the English detested the Irish in those days.
Fast forward three short centuries and here I am. The family black sheep, Dublin Irish Doyle on one side, Gdansk Polish Pulaski on the other, transported -- ’scuse me, assigned -- to the region we call the Redsands (because on a very red world they’re exceptionally red), proud owner and proprietor of the only Irish pub on the whole planet, as far as we know.
When we bought it as a going concern, I wanted to call it ‘Paddy Joe’s’, but my partner (in business as in life) argued against changing the existing name. Sam’s usually right. Commuters from Marsport to Olympia already knew the dump as The Arcadians Hotel. “If it ain’t broke, Patsy,” he said, “don’t be fixing it.” I usually respect the Chicago-Italian wisdom of Sam Giannini, so --
The Arcadians Hotel it remains, but it wasn't a dump for long. Gone is the chrome and cyber-trash, unspeakable lite beer and even worse flash-food. We replaced the lot with fake wood and knock-off antiques, every widget realistic enough to fool the eye if not the fingertips. Genuine Guinness brewed in Marsport, and the best Italian food Sam’s mama knew how to make while the family bunked in the construction crew dorms in Olympia.
People get nostalgic for olden days they’re generations too young to remember. Chances are, if you really remember the past, you wouldn’t be sentimental. Mars’s first decades were crud, but memory wears rose-tinted glasses, thick as beer bottles. Luckily, my family’s assignment came years after the civilization of the northern hemisphere. Happily, we missed the tough times of living in bunkers, working in armor, wearing rad counters like jewelry. Adolescence was a tough enough ride without the fun and games of the ‘pioneer years.’
I think of The Arcadians as Paddy Joe’s, but I’m sure it ought to be called The Belter’s Return. So many of our locals and regulars have dribbled back from the mines, veterans of the asteroid belt, richer or poorer, like veterans of the Klondike and Yukon.
If you were assigned to Mars as a kid (maybe kicking and screaming, part of a privileged family, leaving behind everything) and Earthy offers zilch to go back to ... where can you turn your eyes but up, out? Few folks who head for the minefields in the belt to ‘make their fortune’ succeed. Some survive by sheer luck; a few pay handsomely for ambition, and land in places like the charming community of Arcadia, in the Redsands, freight-drop code M47 A09.
There’s worse places to live. I’ve seen a few. Arcadia’s all right. Marsport is an hour flight north, the capital, Olympia, ninety minutes in a more easterly direction. We’re right under the air traffic lanes, so we get plenty of passing trade. Arcadia’s a thriving little community with more than a hundred homesteads, according to the last census. The steaders are good people. I’d say salt of the Earth, if this were Earth --
But it’s Mars. It’s different. And we like it the way it is. We’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it free, open ... ours. If the crap on NewsNet is anything to go by, we might have to do just that. Politics never changes, no matter where you find yourself. If there’s any such thing as a universal constant, it’s this: politicians are at least two rungs lower on the evolutionary ladder than the amoeba.
And on that note, I must go start the clam chowder and make a vat of mango punch. A private party is coming in for an anniversary bash tonight. The house'll be hopping by seven, enough noise out of the sound system to shake the green plastic shamrock right off the plastic walnut ceiling beams.
Yet sometimes it all comes together, and the reasons for being in the Redsands are the best. Nothing beats being in the right place at the right time, when you can change the life of another human soul ― and in this part of Mars, the small pleasure of being the guardian angel comes around all too frequently. Anyone who lives here has some stories to tell!
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