Veronica Bradwell sat back on her heels, stretching her spine and neck as she worked out the kinks. She'd been weeding for over an hour now, pulling the clumpy patches of algae and fungal threads out from around the lettuces, breaking them apart and pushing them deeper, working her fingers through the friable loam. She had worked hard to build this soil, since very little that was natural was normal in Panschin. There was enough sunshine pouring through Dome Two to grow her vegetables and so of course, there was more than enough light for the terraformers to grow too.
She turned her sticky, slimed hands over, studying the greenish-reddish blobs clinging to her deep green fingers. The wetter chunks oozed down, dropping to the soil where they lay like clotted blood.
The terraforming algae, lichens, and fungus were what were remaking Mars into a viable planet. They made oxygen. They built up organic material in the soil so it could be used to grow things to eat. They supported every other kind of life on what had been a dead planet made of red sand. They made life possible. They had killed her mother.
The very air, she knew, was full of microscopic spores. It was why every flat surface that was bare sand or rock and got some sunlight was soon covered with a thick layer of algae. Fortunately, the terraformers were out-competed by most plants once the soil moved from dead sand to something more viable that could support life. Even so, if she wanted her lettuces to be at their best, she still had to break up the jelly-like masses so that the lettuces didn't have to work as hard. Vegetable growing could be tedious work, but it earned her desperately needed hard coin.
And, if Veronica was honest and she was always honest with herself, it gave her a bit of pleasure to break apart the fungal masses with her own hands instead of using a hand cultivator. If you were susceptible to fungal infections, and Mrs. Bradwell was, eventually you caught one of the many wasting diseases and eventually, you died from one of them. Breaking up the fungal masses, she supposed, released still more spores into the air, but what was a few more when every breath was full of them? And these were immature spores, not yet viable. She had killed them and they would rot, instead of growing.
Perhaps if her mother had gone outside the Domes of Panschin more often, she would have been healthier but she had not. Perhaps if her father had not cheated his investment clients and then been caught red-handed, her mother would have fought harder. Perhaps if her father, Simon Bradwell, had not taken the easy way out -- avoiding the sure verdict in the courtroom by slitting his wrists in the bath -- everything would have been different.
Or not. It was all past now; the scandal, the grief, the hurtful divorce, the lawsuits, the bankruptcy hearings, the remains of the once proud Bradwell family refusing to speak to her and her younger sister Shelby as though they were contaminated. All done and gone and what remained was Veronica Bradwell doing her damnedest to keep herself, Shelby, and her great-aunt Neza safe, secure, housed, and fed. Dwelling on the past, with its mistakes and sadness, did not weed or water lettuces nor did it pay the monthly lease on the White Elephant looming up behind her.
Veronica squeezed a big blob of algae between her fingers, watching it drip into the narrow slot she had dug in the soil with her fingers. It was just too bad the terraformers weren't edible. If they were, that would be one less thing to fret over. The edible algae from the tanks had to be paid for. The vat-grown yeasts had to be paid for as well. Government provided mil-rats were free, but they didn't often show up in Panschin, so far to the north and well away from wherever they were manufactured. When they did get shipped to Panschin, they went directly to the families of the miners living in the underground tunnels. It was assumed if you lived above ground in a dome, especially a dome like Dome Two, you could afford to buy what you ate.
This was not true, but there was nothing Veronica could do about it. In fact, many of the people who did live in Dome Two, in the formerly grand mansions now decaying into tenement houses, would cheerfully have eaten free mil-rats as opposed to paying out hard coin for algae pudding and yeast blocks. Her little family certainly would.
It was strange, to live in a mansion like the White Elephant, yet worry over every penny spent. What was left of this branch of the Bradwell family looked rich to outsiders, not hanging on by their fingernails. But she and Shelby were still very lucky. Veronica knew that. They had a home thanks to Auntie Neza. Shelby was able to attend Panschin University, using up the last of Auntie Neza's trust fund. The tiny yard around the White Elephant allowed Veronica to grow a surprisingly wide array of vegetables and even some fruit. What they didn't eat themselves, Veronica sold at the back doors of local restaurants and bars or traded to other enterprising pioneers taking over the decayed mansions of Dome Two. Truthfully, Veronica sold most of what she grew as she made more money by selling her produce to the Dappled Yak bistro than she spent purchasing algae pudding or yeast blocks to eat.
They were lucky. They had a house with a very favorable lease, they were all healthy, Shelby had a chance at a career -- if only she would paint to market instead of trying to be an artiste -- and Veronica knew how to grow vegetables and write up magazine articles showing other people how to do it too. Learning how to write charming yet coherent instructions was about the only benefit of her own unfinished degree from PanU. What a waste of money that had turned out to be, trying to get a degree in Martian Literature.
Veronica pushed that regret away firmly. It had been the right thing to do at the time and she loved literature. She smiled at the colorful lettuces, every shade of delicate, newly alive green. They were pretty enough to almost be a substitute for the flowers she really wanted to grow and had, before her world fell apart. What would her professors say if they knew she was writing articles for gardening columns telling people how to grow carrots in containers? Probably tell her she was wasting her talents, but what did they know? They weren't trying to make ends meet, when the ends always seemed so far apart.
She wiped her hands, rubbing the last of the algae off onto the soil, then rubbed them cleaner on her shabby coverall. As Veronica stood, she could hear the white gravel surrounding the sunken bed crunch under her feet. It glinted in the filtered sun. It was very quiet at this time of day and she wished there was a bird or two to sing. Not much lived inside the Domes other than people, even in Dome Two with its green spaces. She walked slowly around the sunken bed, surveying her miniature world. It would soon be time to rake out the gravel again, breaking up the algae and lichens trying to establish a foothold. She wouldn't have bothered, but they were unpleasantly slippery to walk on and she couldn't afford to fall and injure herself. Besides, the white gravel, next to the White Elephant, reflected every bit of the yellowed sunlight flooding through the dome and the additional light made her garden grow better.
Veronica missed the sound of birds although she rarely enjoyed the privilege of hearing them. She remembered every moment of every time she had been able to leave the domes of Panschin and go outside.
The sky had been immense, full of scudding clouds, stretching upwards to forever, deepening its pink-tinged blue from the horizon to its highest point, a subtle shift of tone that could not be duplicated in paint. The air had felt alive; a whispering breeze that carried the scent of living things and the chatter of their voices. There had been insects, birds, many kinds she thought, and other creatures as well. At any rate, the sounds did not remain the same, always changing, unlike the recordings that people sometimes played in their homes to pretend they lived outside in the fresh air.
The steppes surrounding Panschin had gone on forever, meeting the horizon at long last, an endless deep sea of every shade of brown and green, bowing and rustling before the wind. The hills undulated under their cloak of grass, promising strange new places on their other sides, the sides hidden from her view. They were sides she would never see.
Dome Two, the most spacious dome in Panschin, was nothing like being outside. The dome made sure of that. It was high but not as high as the sky was and it suffered from an irregular, yellowish haze that distorted the sky beyond. It was the largest dome in Panschin, four klicks across but you always knew you were inside a manmade structure. The immensely thick, tall stone walls that held up the glassteel made sure you could never see past the dome and out into the wider world. You always knew the size of the box you were trapped in.
The glassteel of Dome Two had yellowed with age and no longer let through the sun as it had when it was new. The ventilation may have been state of the art when Dome Two had been built, but it wasn't anything like being outside. It wasn't as nice as the ventilation in Dome Five and certainly not as nice as Dome Six. Dome Six was sometimes opened to the outside in sections during the summer heat, allowing in true sun, true breezes, even birds who took up residence in the strips of green landscape scattered among the towers. Since Dome Two could not be opened to the outside air, birds rarely found their way within, even the ubiquitous steppes sparrows. Those who did tended to live on the grounds of the university, where the students competed to stuff them full of crumbs. The few squirrels were even fatter.
Veronica stared up at the dome overhead, trying to peer through it to see the wide, exciting, amazing world beyond. It was a sunny day outside. She could tell. There were few clouds today, blocking the warming light. Spring was a good time in the dome, before the summer sun made it hot and stuffy and after the wild temperature swings of the winter. The moons were up somewhere, they always were, but not over Panschin. They were too far north for the moons to be visible other than as dots at the horizon, dots that would never show above the walls supporting the dome. You had to be outside on a hilltop to see them racing past the edge of the world, barely above the horizon. At night the stars were invisible, obscured by the haze of the glassteel and the few lights inside Dome Two bouncing off its underside. A cloudy, rainy night didn't look much different from one that was clear from inside the dome.
You never forgot that a translucent bowl was suspended over your head.
Veronica wove her way between the sunken beds, each edged in stone, crunching across the raked gravel. The beds that weren't full of luxuriant plant growth, in one stage of maturity or another, were crammed with terraformers. The terraformers didn't need to be watered or cared for so she left them to their own devices. When she needed a new bed, and she had the water available, she spaded under the algae and planted her precious seeds, carefully counting them out so there was never any waste.
Astonishingly, the gardening books sent to Panschin from points further south assumed you would plant many seeds and then weed out the excess plants. Veronica had quickly realized that this was useless information inside the domes, considering the cost of seeds and the scarcity of soil to plant them in, so her very first article for 'Panschin Today' had discussed how to space out and plant only what you needed. That article had launched her career as a sometime magazine writer who understood the needs of Panschin gardeners.
Unfortunately, the magazines didn't want many articles on gardening as most people in Panschin didn't have any growing space at all, not even a container in front of a window. You had to live aboveground to have a window and most of the residents of Panschin lived in the tunnels below.
Yes, Veronica and Shelby were fortunate. She chose to walk all around the White Elephant, enjoying the precious, tiny yard that surrounded the house. Dome Two was unique in Panschin. When it had been built, the builders wanted to emulate what was done elsewhere on Mars, closer to the equator, where people lived outside year-round. This far north, nobody lived outside year-round, not if they wanted to stay alive through the harsh, unending winter.
The richest citizens, who all naturally expected to live in Dome Two as soon as it was built, wanted gardens to surround their grand houses. They wanted green, open space to surround Panschin University, the museums, the opera house, main library, the hotels, the shopping arcade, and restaurants. Every possible amenity was conveniently located in Dome Two for the benefit of those residents, and it was believed that nothing could be grander or better built, so it was all built to last.
However, despite their experience with building Dome One, the dome builders had not fully reckoned on the ventilation issues a larger dome would have. Nor had they fully grasped how stuffy a dome could be in the summer, despite its larger size. The glassteel that made up the dome had been a new, improved formulation that hazed over in a manner that the developer claimed could never happen. The lawsuit over that issue had been wending its way through the courts for decades and it was widely expected that a ruling would take another decade at least.
The green spaces and yards turned out to need watering on a regular basis. Water was a precious resource in Panschin but somehow, the dome developers had overlooked the fact that most places that had outdoor greenery also had rain that watered those gardens for free. This omission had spurred another lengthy lawsuit, still being fought out in the courts.
Every single green space in Dome Two had to be hand-watered. If you could afford it, you tapped into the public water system and ran expensive hoses full of expensive water. If you couldn't, like Veronica Bradwell, you scrimped and saved for what you could afford. She didn't waste a drop of water, catching and reusing that precious fluid and never letting any of it go down a drain. She carried around a heavy watering can and never watered anything that didn't need it.
It only took a few moments to circle around the house, so much larger than the garden that surrounded it. Veronica made her way to the mailbox, mounted on the low stone wall that marked off the Bradwell estate from the houses around it. Like the White Elephant, those houses were large and the gardens surrounding them tiny. Unlike the White Elephant, their tiny yards were overrun with terraforming algae whereas her little domain was green and lush with actual plants. Unlike the White Elephant, some of those formerly grand homes had been subdivided into tiny apartments. Not all of Veronica's neighbors bothered to convert their little yards into money-makers, although she was not alone in her endeavors. Some of those neighbors were far more experienced than she was and were more willing to take attention-drawing, lease-breaking risks.
She studied the mailbox, mottled with bright lichens, feeling that familiar mix of anticipation and dread. She wanted to find an acceptance letter and a check for her latest effort on growing limon trees in containers, but Veronica expected it to be a rejection and it was. She was afraid to find another bill and of course there was one. This one was from the Panschin Gazette, asking if she wanted to renew her ad.
Veronica had, in yet another attempt to earn some money, run an advertisement listing the White Elephant as a bed and breakfast. Very few people had taken advantage of her advertisement, despite the White Elephant's convenient location near to the center of Dome Two. Those who deigned to stay in Dome Two, now so déclassé but still the heart of most cultural events in Panschin, were either rich enough to choose one of the formerly grand hotels or were too poor to afford even Veronica's very reasonable rates. Everyone else who came to Dome Two to attend the opera or visit the museums took the trams back to their homes or the finer hotels in Dome Five and Dome Six after the event was over.
She studied the house, still well-kept, even if the style was sadly outmoded. The White Elephant was a two-story building, with two wings surrounding the lofty entrance. As customary in Panschin, there were two more stories below ground, with light shafts to illuminate them during daytime. Also customary, the White Elephant did not have a true roof as there was no need for a roof under a dome. It had, instead, a rooftop terrace that covered the entire footprint of the building, other than the atrium opening. Unusually, the terrace did not have a simple balustrade. Instead, the White Elephant's balustrade was made of a wall of pink and gray tile, similar to what a roof would be, if the White Elephant had been located where houses needed roofs to keep out the rain.
The faux roof was topped with lacy wrought iron in a fanciful design of leaves and flowers. The pink and gray tiles, along with the whitewashed walls, and the purely decorative gray shutters at every large window, were why the house had been called the White Elephant for as long as Veronica could remember. Regular sweeping with long-handled brooms kept the building clean from algae.
As always, Veronica wondered if she dared rent out rooms to boarders. There were plenty of them available in the house, although most of the furniture had been sold. There was even some demand, from people who worked in Dome Two and did not want to live farther out. Many people hated living underground in the tunnels, but housing above ground in Dome Three, Dome Five, and Dome Six tended to be expensive. Dome One's ventilation was so unpleasant that few people lived there if they could afford to live anywhere else. Dome Four was industrial and, technically, nobody was supposed to live there at all although some people did. Dome Two was déclassé, down at heels, not where the better classes lived anymore, and could be unsafe, but it had room aplenty if you didn't mind the somewhat seedy and bohemian atmosphere that accompanied the ventilation and heating issues.
The problem was that Auntie Neza's lease, so favorable in so many ways, was decidedly unfavorable on the subject of subletting. If the Second National Bank of Panschin found out she was subletting, their century lease would be voided and her little family would be out on the streets. Renting out rooms as a bed and breakfast narrowly skirted the issue as those tenants were temporary. Even so, Veronica was cautious about her advertising.
She studied the bill, debating what to do. Her last guests, many weeks ago, had covered the cost of the bill from the Panschin Gazette with some left over for the lease. Should she renew when there was no guarantee of more paying guests? Veronica sat down on the low wall, moodily running her hands over the granite. The lichens covered the gray granite in shades of soft greens and browns, the blotches making a pattern she could not read.
At last she sighed and decided to try another month. Optimism demanded that she give the fates a chance to work their magic. There was enough cash left hidden in the cracked cookie jar to try again. Maybe this next ad cycle would bring in paying guests. The biennial mining conference was rapidly approaching so it could happen. That conference always brought a flood of visitors to Panschin and they all had to stay somewhere. Maybe, Veronica smiled at the soft, earthy lichens, those visitors might even come to one of the gallery showings she hosted and buy one of the ugly paintings, earning her a tiny commission. It could happen.