It is a fine day for a parade at Unity Station, first settlement of its kind. Dome One’s silver cap glitters high above the makeshift town, and beyond, the familiar daylight stars. A baby wind, just a little one, whispers around the feet of Unity’s citizens, picking up red grains of sand and flinging them about with glee.
Look, can you see them all? Every man, woman, and child is dressed today in what their great-great-grandparents might once have called their Sunday best: shoes polished, slacks pressed, collars straight. The orange-and-blue emblem of the Martian flag waves from breast pockets and straw hats and sweaty little hands; a quiet pride sparkles in every eye.
Can you hear the patient silence? Main Street, usually a-clamour with one-ride whizzers and atomic buggies, is still and quiet but for a pregnant hum of anticipation. At dawn its cold, flat stones were swept clean by the ruddy-faced morning workers whose whistled songs color the dreams of the sleeping. And again, at oh-eight-hundred hours, and then once more as the first glint of the midday sun fell upon them — just to be sure.
Can you feel the heat? Unity Station’s citizens, all two-hundred and fifty-eight of them, bear the weight of the summer, shifting foot to foot, pulling at collars, relishing discrete fan-waves of a hat when they think no-one is looking. Children antse on mothers’ shoulders and in fathers’ arms, growing impatient. Where is the excitement? The promised show? What is the reward for sitting still?
“Mama!” whispers five-year-old Peng, with the urgency that only a five-year-old can have. “When are they coming?”
Mama Li Na sighs. “Soon, tian-tian. You know how far they have traveled.”
“You remember the holo I showed you yesterday, right, sweetie?” says Mama Abigail. “They’re coming from very far away, all over the planet. And some of them are very, very old.” She picks up the boy and plops him on her wide, strong shoulders. “I’m sure they’ll be here any minute now.” Peng giggles and reaches for her pocket flag.
Sweat glistens on her brow and the minutes pass and the horizon stays stubbornly blank. Well, today’s the day, isn’t it? Peng tugs at her hair all tied up in a neat bun and she feels it unravel, followed by the familiar sensation of small teeth chewing at the ends. Whatever keeps him occupied. She catches Li Na smiling slyly out of the corner of her eye, watching the boy’s mischief. Abigail has just thought of the perfect snark to whisper when the dust clouds finally blur the horizon. Isolated murmurs meld into a cry from the crowd. They are coming!
The dust clouds become specks and the specks grow larger and larger, gaining shapes and attributes: wheels, solar panels, arms and appendages. The western airlock opens and the crowd waits with bated breath to see the great artifacts, their sacred heritage on this magnificent planet. The Triumphant III leads the way. She has room for six; but only one woman drives her, smiling and waving like the Queen of England through deep yellow glass.
Behind her, Triumphant I and II creep side by side through the streets. They were lost together, nearly 17 years gone by now, when Two became trapped in a sand pit and One came to the assist, only to fall prey to the same fate. Parents in the crowd remember well the day spent glued to the station’s view-screens — only a handful to share, back then — watching the crew of Triumphant III come to the rescue of the settlers, leaving the crafts to the elements. Until today.
Next come the Searchers: the great, autonomous, car-sized laboratories on wheels, seven altogether, who roamed the hills tens of kilometers outside the dome, testing, looking for water and for raw materials for the station, returning with blocks of ice and chunks of gypsum and little glass tubes of precious minerals. Their bulk threatens to crack the thin stones below as they trundle past. Peng waves to them, but they don’t wave back.
A slower advance for the Old Guard. Six hybrids clatter slowly along on plastene spheels, missing a solar panel here, an antenna there. Their handlers amble genially behind, control boxes in hand, chatting and laughing and waving to children who stomp their feet and shout with delight at the sight.
Their dust has long settled by the time the First Generation, the patron saints of this lonely red world creak by. There is no clamour this time, only the reverent silence of a people come face to face with their own origins. On cracking wheels they come, on silver, hovering platforms and even carried in human arms, humanity’s noble vanguard processes.
Rosalin Franklin. Curiosity. Perseverance. Every citizen in the Station knows their names, knows by heart every name that will pass. They lead the way like they were born to it, every motion snappy like a trio of high school drum majorettes. Of them all, they served the longest, and Unity Station could never have existed without their painstaking reports on the makeup of this soil. Wrrrr go three drills, functional after all these years, to the delight of children along their way.
Can you see the smile on the face of the human pushing joysticks and clicking switches to ensure the smoothest passage of Opportunity? Look at her shine, every atom of soil brushed carefully from her wing-like carapace, round little wheels free at last. Her sister rover, Spirit, rolls cheerfully alongside; the pair reunited for the first time since the long-past spring of 2003. Tiny in comparison, Sojourner proudly trails behind.
Nearly a parade of their own, Mars’s landers of old glide by; dignified, elegant, eight in all: Insight and Phoenix, gleaming like the day they were built; Schiaparelli, once scattered across the sand, but today, reconstructed, a shining image of the lander lovingly assembled on Earth so long ago; Beagle 2 and Pathfinder, open like sunflowers to the sky; Viking I and II and little Mars 3 bring up the rear.
Last come the crashes, early leaps for glory fallen like great waxen wings. Three handlers cradle their remains in their arms with the gravity of years, and striking banners announce their names: Mars 2, Mars 6, Deep Space 2.
They’re all here, whispers the crowd. Together at last — our heritage, our birthright.
“Xià! Xià!” squeals little Peng, bored with his perch high above the sea of heads.
“Alright,” Abigail concedes, lifting the squirming boy over her head, “but — Peng!” She grabs too late, he has already shot straight off. The crowd gasps as the small boy raises a cartoonish dust cloud in his race for the rovers. Hey! He can’t be — Catch him! — Somebody get ahold of that boy! —
No one is that fast, of course.
“Oppy!” The rover comes to a standstill as he throws his short arms around her neck and he buries his face in tubing and wires. “We missed you,” he coos.
The crowd is aghast.
But her handler just smiles. With a few clicks he swings her camera head around. Bzzzzt, she replies.
Look! Look at all the faces, see the shock turn to compassion.
Abigail pushes her way out of the crowd.
“It’s alright, ma’am,” he says, with an easy smile. The other handlers nod and come to a halt.
The children come first, little boys and girls in school jumpsuits flooding out into the street to poke at wheels and grasp tubes and run fingers along smooth solar panels; then their parents, curious to see and touch for themselves.
And so today, Mars’s heroines come back to life, whirring and beeping, churning gears and turning circles, basking in the return of human contact — for the end of the route is the Martian History Museum, where they will ascend once again as the silent and stoic guardians of a vast and empty world.
Picture it, see it in your mind’s eye: one day the sky will be blue and the distant sun warm, the children grown and the soil fertile, the tendrils of a new, gentler civilization reaching ever outwards to the stars. But it is here, in Dome One, where the air is recycled and the dust cold, that humanity will remember the day it touched its own mythology.
