In Dust And Dreams

For your contemplation this evening, dear reader, a tale of what you might stumble across on those moments when you wander...

In Dust And Dreams by M. K. Dreysen

Van chattered at me like a three year old while we walked the red dust. "And Herana, when the inspectors came, you should have heard her. She called me every fifteen minutes, 'That bastard, he brought a student with him, she's writing citations as fast as she can get the keyboard working'. I told her, I says, 'Herana, relax, fix what they tell you to fix and we'll get through it.' She and Gene both, they were hot as steam for a week after."

"Even though you resolved everything before they left?"

"Even then. Like they took it personally."

I grinned, behind my helmet's sun tinting. "It's Herana's baby, Van." Their unit, air and water handling for the habitat. A double fistful of thousands of souls, grubbing beneath the surface and dependent in every way on the kilos of water, the meters of air, that Herana and Gene kept moving.

The inspectors liked Van's little corner of the world. For the trainees they brought, to learn at a plant that didn't produce anything more complex than air and water.

And for the view we walked through. Sure, a lot of reds and dust above and below. But the canyon before us and the mountain beyond that...

I concentrated on the dirt in front of me, and the shack that I'd dragged Van out to visit.

"How much time are you spending on this, Doc?"

I shook my head side to side in the helmet, automatic. "Eh, not all that much. You don't want to know, do you?"

"Of course not. Once you find out, we have to do something about it."

Old argument; new facility manager. Old-guard Fen had passed a few pointers along to his apprentice. Fortunately, I hadn't found Van's bad habits too ingrained to work away.

"I don't like leaving trouble for you to deal with when I'm gone, Van."

He grunted his grudging agreement. Besides, he knew that I'd asked him to come along out of courtesy.

One way or another, I was getting my samples today. I'd let the shack and its contents sit too long unanalyzed as it was. Fen had retired last year, I'd spent a fair few hours on video with Van since. Talking him through what I could help with, more lending an ear of sympathy than anything else.

I'm good at that, I guess. What our bosses get up to in the corporate towers at the pole doesn't much interest me. And I've been here so long, surfed their waves of "Transformation!" so often, that I can let Van's new responsibilities and aggravations and the venting that goes with them just skate off me. And I do sometimes have a few ideas for how he can handle them.

Thus, the sample bag he was carrying, looped over his shoulders. We'd pulled those first. That's what pays my freight, after all.

Cleaning up whatever residues lay beneath the sun and windtorn shack? That was pure cost. Fortunately, Veronica, mine and Van's boss, felt the same way I did. And she was ten years closer to retirement than me. She didn't want to leave us with it.

Plus, we had budget to spend, for once. Yay! Thus the trudge.

Van got quiet as we reached the shack. I say shack, really I guess it was bigger than that. Big enough for someone to have parked a car in, and then surrounded it with some kind of lake.

Ok that sounds odd. The car's one of the older style surface rovers, sitting there for close to a century on some kind of platform in the middle of this little pond. And then the shell built over both of them. From the shallow end of the pond, you can just walk to the car's platform.

I didn't do that. I walked around to the other end, the deep end of the pond. Thirty meters or so of deep, at that end. I'd measured that one early in my time here, handlining it down and that I had to do twice because the fluid lies to you from the surface.

Water, at least that's what most of it had to be. Clear, but definitely not clean.

Water where it should have either vaporized away, leached away, or frozen solid in the shack's shadows.

And spanning the placid surface hiding a drop you'd never want to fall into? A ramp to the car's platform.

"Looks like they drove it in over the deep end, doesn't it?"

Van shrugged.

I ignored the cynicism. But I didn't walk across. Too many decades for this little scientist, thank you. No, I just knelt down to fill my sample bottle. "We know it's a high mineral content."

"Because it's not frozen solid, right. That's not what worries me."

The original pit that we'd repurposed had belonged to a mining company. Our company had resurfaced the dome, and rebuilt the surface equipment, heat and air exchangers, wind and solar power units, three times in the century since.

And they'd also spent the decades ignoring what public history the government made available for the place. What the mining company had done with their wastes, for starters.

The monitors in my surface working suit hadn't beeped, not any more than normal, when I'd dipped my sample. Which told me the first thing I needed to know. "It's not hot, Van."

"Small favors."

I shook my head, then pondered the car. But that could wait. It wasn't hot, either, not from the outside at least. First let's see what the liquid held.

I wonder if any of us notice the decon shower anymore. Alternating air and water sheets, not much more than a walk through a shower really. When I was a kid, my mom had made me pace it out. "Here, just say this poem to yourself, 'All at once a midnight...'" and that slowed me down so the water and air currents did their job.

The verses still do that job now, but the rhythm's so far built into my pace I just listen to the sound and timbre of my mother's voice, rather than the words.

Just like when we pulled them, I run Van's samples first. Air samples from the exchangers take a different method, but the various liquids and solids I run through the sintering platform. Three lasers and a flash and then it's all gas to be fed to the chromatographs and the spectrometers.

Van's lab tech has the gear, but mostly I need the bench space for my traveling units. Lou's equipment's for their daily samples, me I'm confirming and digging into separate paths, so using my road portable lab helps me with the paying portion of the proceedings.

When the computer spits out the first pass results, I and my tablet wander down the hall to Van's office. "Lou's setup is pretty well dialed in, Van."

"Cool. Anything showing up you're worried about?"

Lou does the work, Van keeps track of the numbers they send him. I do the worrying and the trends. "Nothing out of the ordinary. Dust season, but you knew that."

"Boy howdy."

Sure and it's always dust season, but there are worse periods than others.

"Get any results from the shack yet?" Van asked.

At least I heard only interest, and maybe a little dread. Not boredom, and thank the absent gods for that. "Not yet, they're cooking now while your samples go through quantification checks."

"Let me know if you see anything..."

"If I start running for the outside, just try and keep up."

His laughter followed me back down the hall to Lou's place.

Same basic story with my samples.

And same basic lack of results. Oh, the elemental symbols poured by on the screen, that old familiar periodical, in new balance. Mostly a handful of minerals that we always had to deal with when we dug beneath the surface. Dissolved there and in their combination preventing the cold cold surface nights from freezing the saturated solution.

And there in the oh so smallest of proportions lay the fun ones, of course, your leads and your coppers and a whiff or three of uranium. Not enough of that to ping even a brand new monitoring system, but all together a little bit of a devil's brew. Enough to be toxic if we made the mistake of using the water for anything important.

"Miner's leavings, just like we'd expected."

"You're certain? No surprises, Doc?"

"Not even a little bit. Just all the fun happy stuff that comes along for the ride. And prevents you from recycling the water for anything useful, not 'til you concentrate it up, anyway." Pull off steam under the right conditions and we'd just cycle it clean into Van's system. Which was nice, and he was happy not to have to do anything more than...

"Figure out where to put the goo yet?"

Figure out the goo. The sludge that we'd reduce the fluid too, and then pump somewhere. There are no real solutions to that, other than the right kind of concrete, now that we knew what the fluid held. "Wanna check out the car?"

"No." But he did go with me.

Same basic walk back, and I didn't worry now about wading through the shallow water to get to the car. Hood and trunk, and maybe the batteries beneath the former had done their bit to add to the water's hidden troubles beneath.

The cab was open to the world. They'd needed surface gear a century ago just like we did, so no point in providing the riders with anything more than a roll cage.

And thus, the trunk.

I stumbled back from the mummy, desiccated and almost absorbed now into the mat layering the trunk's bottom, as soon as my eyes found it waiting for me underneath the trunk's lid. "Oh damn."

My foot met the ramp as I stumbled back a step; the material sagged under my weight. A century and time had done work. I windmilled my hands, desperate for balance, until I found the edge of the car's trunk and stopped the unrolling catastrophe before I ended up in the drink.

"Don't want to try and swim in a suit, do you?"

"Not even a little bit, Van. I do not recommend it." Once you get going, especially with the mineral content of the saturated water, you're ok, but the first few moments while your mind screams at you... no thank you.

Van made his way over from the car's front end. "Oh damn," he echoed.

"Yeah. At least it's an adult." And that was a small favor my mind didn't appreciate. I made sure my helmet recorded everything while I poked my head and light into the trunk. "And however they got here, we won't be doing any detective work."

Innocent explanation or not, the mummy's story had disappeared from our ken long ago. I almost touched their forehead, in auto-sympathy like I'd done when we'd put Mom to rest. Just a soft touch to let me and them both know I appreciated that they'd lived and breathed and done... well they'd lived, and that was something all by itself.

Where I was and what I'd found tried to intrude on that moment, long enough to keep my from my self-appointed duty for a minute, two. And then I shrugged it all off.

I touched their forehead, just enough. The skin didn't break nor bend, and their eyes didn't open, no more than had my mother's. "Ok, Van, call the rabbi."

"Right." Both our resident all-souls-in-whatever-flavor therapist and chaplain, and our local anthropologist, Vicky wore many hats. I'd even promised to bring her some, with labels and everything, so she could keep track.

She'd flipped me the finger and a smile to go with it.

"Ok, she's coming. With Lou."

Van and I wandered outside the shack and waited. For what, other than the pair of surface walkers, Vicky's helmet a green a couple shades more neon than that decorating mine, and Lou's a riot pattern of yellow over metal?

Not much, really, other than maybe a little time to talk of other things than work.