An Exile

At first, the rock outcropping looked like just that—an eruption of red, shadows almost purple in the dusk, with red expanse on one side of it and red expanse on the other side. It was easy to miss the rounder, softer shape of a man sitting on the edge of the tallest outcropping. I only noticed where he was when my eye caught the movement of his legs swinging back and forth like a little boy’s.

I had a lot of time to decide what I’d say to him as I struggled up the clay-red rocks. But even as I came up close enough to see his black sweater and the roll of white turtleneck coming out of the collar, I had no idea what I would say.

The Martian evening was drawing in, a deepness of purple and black growing over the landscape. I knew he heard me coming; I wasn’t moving gracefully.

He was looking out over the vast Martian landscape—the monolithic black shards of mountain ranges that shoved their way into the sky in the east, the spray of stars above us, jewel bright and completely unfamiliar to an Earth born child like me.

Panting and inelegant, I dropped to the ground beside him and, with a little forced bravado, dangled my legs off the side of the rock as well. He smiled at me, eyes crinkling behind the thick, square glasses, his white hair fluttering a little in the evening breeze. “Found me out, have you?”

“Is it okay?” I asked. “I can go away, if you’d rather.”

A lie. I couldn’t. Travel to Mars isn’t as common as he made it out to be. Elon Musk does not provide coach pricing in his rockets, let me tell you.

He chuckled. “No, no. I love that you all know where to find me. Though I’ve heard several people try for Africa and end up on the veldt, poor souls.” He shook his head. “Unwise.”

Relieved, I risked a grin. “So you don’t mind me and all your other fans coming to visit?”

“No, no, no. You do have to come all the way out to Mars, after all. It takes the extra dedicated sort. What brings you here? Not more writer’s block is it? You think too much!”

I shifted a little on the sandy red rock. “I, um, well, it’s a rescue mission, of sorts.”

“I’m quite dead. There’s no rescue for me.”

“It’s not you I’m rescuing. It’s your words.”

A look of concern came into his eyes. “So they’re burning the books in earnest, now? They’d already started when I left; I imagine it’s worse now.” He murmured quietly to himself, “Does a wolf pack stop before its killed its prey and eaten the guts?”

“The wolf pack isn’t just destroying the authors. It’s destroying us. Earth. People sit alone and snort the drug of algorithm. It’s designed to slide their minds easily into a darkness worse than anything Mr. Poe came up with. They’re talking about colonizing Mars, soon. I’ve beat them to it. I brought books. I’m going to have a library here, already, waiting.”

There had been years of cautiously hiding my secret, hoarding books, hoarding the money to come to Mars, and finally seeding the very ground with the books they wanted to squash out. The news about it bubbled out in my enthusiasm to convince him.

“I’ve got a building set up, an underground bunker. It’s just south of where they’re going to set up the first Martian colony. It’s going to be hard. They’ll be in a small space confined together. People will want to get away from the same old people, the mundane, the same old ideas that rattle around in their brains all day long…Maybe they’ll be so bored they won’t be scared to think. Maybe they’ll listen to the sound of the good words again. This is not Earth coming to wipe out the final remnants of imagination; it’s our one chance to break back in!”

He looked sad, staring out at the sky. “Will they want to read even then? Will they not come already wrapped in technology’s tentacles?”

“Well,” I coughed, “Yes, but…”

“But what?”

“Along with my books, I may have brought a virus that dismantles video feeds with me. It won’t harm them in any way—all communications will be open, except I’m disrupting all pre-recorded visuals, in whatever form they come in—handheld, streaming, all of it.” I paused, clasped my hands together. “I-I might need some help accessing the satellite, though.”

“And how am I going to help with this?”

“Well, your ghostly appendages, you know. Kind of like a lock pick set—you just shove in your finger, mold it to the space inside, and voila—instant key!”

“Is that how ghosts work?”

“It is now. Fantasy fiction, remember?”

He sighed. “Well, in that case…”

An hour later we were floating up to the side of the satellite. I was encased in my suit, tethered to the shuttle far below us. Bradbury was also in a space suit and tether, though he reminded me he didn’t need it. I felt like my stomach couldn’t handle watching an elderly author rise into the air with no nods to regular methods of keeping bodies safe.

We landed on the outside of the satellite with a clump. Bradbury inserted his finger into the pin-sized hole in the hull. There was a pause, “Reality shifting,” he mumbled to himself, “folding and reshaping around your ridiculous ideas about ghosts….”

The door popped open. I carefully inserted the USB drive—upside down of course. I flipped it. It went in. This would, possibly, be the only chance the colony on Mars had to freeing themselves from the technological rot and roots festering on earth. And it had happened in silence.

We began to drift downward. The black crescent of space on the horizon waned as the red planet rose up to meet us.

“It will not prevent the decline from happening again.” Bradbury said, as we watched Mars grow larger.

“But it might give us a respite.” I said. “A few generations of children born and raised awash in good words, It won’t be forever. But it’s not nothing.”

“Will you be staying to help them?”

“No…Actually, I thought I might leave a librarian to watch over things for me…”

He was further down than I was, but I heard him chuckle. “I suppose, if I could change Hemmingway’s death via story, you can take charge of my afterlife in story. What bullies these young authors are!”