Casey rested her head on the window of the train. She loved the cool feeling compared to the warm air blasting through the vents. She watched the dusty red rocks and soil pass by her in craters and hills, pockmarked with patches of green and blue in intersecting circles. Far in the distance she could see Tharsis, the massive lump taking up most of the horizon, gouged by Marineris. Even further she saw a faint glimmer in the sky.

“Asimov.”

The outer anchor for the space elevator, Asimov Station, carved through a captured carbon asteroid. Absolutely massive, but it looked like just a pinprick from where she sat.

Casey turned away from the window and took her phone from her pocket. The same message, unanswered, sat there, waiting for her. 

“Hey kiddo! Know you’ve been a bit worried about what’s next but…”

Five days from now she was meant to head to Gordium, the base on top of Arsia, and the Mars side anchor. Her dad pulled string after string after string to get her resume up that thread and into management. She was scheduled for an interview for some kind of logistics job. “Extremely stable, always in demand.” “Regular raises.” “My buddy says the workload is relatively light, just a lot of hands needed to coordinate shipments.”

She’d been to Gordium forever ago. Saw those shuttles going up one side of the redwood-thick cable and down the other. 

Casey began to type up a message, “Sorry, saw this and just forgot…” She deleted it. “I’m not sure it’s right for me…” Deleted that one too. “Do you know any of mom’s old coworkers…” All gone.

She turned her phone upside down and looked around the train car. There was a rowdy group of teenagers passing around some sort of VR set. Their blue and yellow uniforms indicated they were heading home for break from the academy. 

She thought about how her dad would always tell her how bumpy train rides were back on Earth. He knew the history of every kind of transportation. One time he spent the entire four hour trip explaining all the differences in engineering that came with lighter gravity and advancements in electromagnetics that allowed the trains here to be so smooth. Casey never felt the sway of motion. 

So much had changed in her dad’s lifetime. He wasn’t in that first mission, one of the first 100, but he came up not long after. Probably the third or fourth ship to touch down. His company wanted a representative on Mars to handle some of the logistics for their future space port. 

On the trip to the red planet he met Casey’s mom. The two kept bumping into each other in zero-G. The first time was accidental, but the rest was a love story Casey heard throughout her childhood.

Mom worked more in the genetics side of this grand project. She defended her thesis en route, a project based on using bacteriophages to splice in DNA plants. The rest of the passengers began to despise the taste of beets after her big breakthrough.

Casey turned back toward the window. Several of the blue dots were algae her mom specifically designed. She would always say that it was a collaborative endeavor and she was just one hand in the project, but everyone knew she was the brains in increasing the salt tolerance of at least three types of cyanobacteria. Though she never quite figured out what specifically changed their hue.

One day, over 10 years ago, when she was little more than knee-high, Casey’s mom took her out of the base they lived in and toward a self-sufficient lab built into a nearby cliff face. That moment stayed with her, playing on repeat.

After working their way through a series of airlocks and decontamination showers, Casey remembered the last door opening and seeing the largest plant she had ever seen. It was a tree, almost eight feet tall. And then her mom told her that they could actually grow bigger in the right circumstances. She explained that some trees were taller than the crater rim that made the outer perimeter of their settlement. 

Casey didn’t believe her, but her mom wanted to show her something else, so she let it slide. Casey’s eye was guided toward the roots where her mom pointed out the red soil. 

“Wait! I thought soil was brown?” 

Her mom corrected her. “Most of the soil we use is made with a recipe that matches Earth’s bio-crust. But this tree? That’s straight Martian soil! The atmosphere isn’t warm enough to plant this outside, not yet, but we found a way to design a sort of nitrogen fixing symbiosis with a fungus that likes to live in this tree’s roots.”

Casey’s gaze followed the trunk of the tree and up to its branches when she saw a new fruit. It looked like white crystals dangling in spikes.

“Yeah! Space Case! Good eye. The fungus actually gives the tree the salt, which it brings up to the branches, and then we harvest them, making the soil even less salty for the next generation!”

An announcement that the train was reaching Innsbruck brought Casey back. She sighed, missing her mom. One expedition to search for a good place to seed a forest, followed by a freak dust storm…

No one found her transponder.

But Casey had that moment burned into her memory. That sacred tree… that sacred grove.

Casey pulled up her conversation with her dad again.

“Hey dad…I think we need to talk a bit. I think I want to go back to school…”

Send.

---

If you like this story, or any of my other posts, please become a Patron, or share my work with someone else who might enjoy it.