Black Dirt

by Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The dirt in Bed Four was black.

Mattie Coyle knelt in the aisle with her arms in it to the elbow and let it tell her what it had done in the night. It was warm from the lamps. It was damp, not wet. It smelled the way a field smells in Kern County after the first rain in October, a raw sweet smell that comes up out of the ground and catches at the back of the throat, and the nearest rain was a hundred and forty million miles away, and there had been none on this ground for three billion years. The smell came from bacteria. Szabo had told her that the first week, standing in this same aisle with her glasses pushed up into her grey hair. Geosmin. The smell of earth is a thing that lives in the earth, Szabo said. You can grow it, like anything else.

Outside the dome the sky was the colour of weak coffee with milk in it. The wind that could barely lift a sheet of paper was lifting the fine stuff off the Nilosyrtis plain in long, lazy veils that would be over the solar field by noon. Inside, the lamps hummed and the fans turned, and thirty-seven beds of chickpea and dwarf wheat and potato stood in their rows going about their business, which was turning light into food, as they had for twenty-two years.

Three more sols.

She pulled a chickpea plant with the root ball whole, shook it, and held it up to the lamp. The fine outer roots were thin as hair and the dirt clung to them in a fur that would not shake loose. That was the fungus. You couldn't see the working part; that was inside the root, inside the cells, little branched things like winter trees that Szabo called arbuscules and Mattie called the plumbing. But you could see what it did. The dirt held on. Dirt that held on was dirt that was alive.

Twenty-two years ago it had been regolith: rust-brown, sharp as ground glass under the lens, no more structure to it than flour, and salted with perchlorate that had to be leached out three times before anything would live in it. Szabo's people had come down with a freezer full of spores and a crate of red worms, and they had planted chickpeas because chickpeas are stubborn. The chickpeas died. They planted again. By the fourth year the regolith had gone the grey of wet cement. By the tenth it was brown. Mattie had come in the eleventh, a soil hand off a contract crew, forty years old, too big for the bunks and too old to be impressed, and Szabo had looked at her hands and said, Good. Those will do.

Bed Four had gone black in the fifteenth year. The others followed it, slow, the way a bruise spreads.

She put the plant in the harvest tray and wiped her hands on her coveralls and stood up, and her knees told her about it.

---

The shuttle came down on the second sol, half a day early, out of a sky gone dull pink with dust. Mattie watched it from the airlock window: a flare, a long bloom of red that hung and drifted, and then the shape of the thing settling into it on four legs like an old dog lying down. Nobody got out for a long time. Nobody ever did. It took an hour for the dust to fall far enough to see by.

The man who came through the lock was younger than she had expected, which meant thirty-five or so, with a thin intelligent face and the soft hands of somebody who had trained in a centrifuge and never once in a ditch. He took his helmet off and the dome smell hit him. She watched it go into him: the wet, the green, the rot and sweetness of the compost room down the corridor, the geosmin. His eyes went shut for half a second.

"Ishaan Pell," he said. "Protection Office."

"Coyle."

"I know." He held out a tablet. "I'm sorry about the timing. The window moved."

"Windows do."

She didn't take the tablet. He held it a moment longer and then put it back in his thigh pocket, and she liked him a little for that, which annoyed her.

"You've read the order," he said.

"I've read it."

"Then you know it isn't my decision."

"I know whose decision it is," Mattie said. "Come and eat something. You've been living on paste for seven months, and we've got chickpeas."

---

They had chickpeas and flatbread and a little of the bitter greens from Bed Twenty-one, and he ate like a man who had forgotten food could taste of anything. The galley was built for twelve. The other ten chairs had been folded and strapped to the wall six weeks ago when the last of the crew went up, and the table looked too long without them.

"Twenty-two years," Pell said. "It's remarkable. I mean that."

"Szabo's work."

"Aurelia Szabo." He said it carefully, the way people say the names of the dead when they want you to know they have looked them up. "I read her papers on the way out. The phosphorus mobilisation work. She was the first to get seed set in pure regolith."

"Second year in Bed Four. She cried. I wasn't here, but they tell me she cried."

"Where is she now?"

Mattie got up and took his plate.

"Sorry," he said, to her back.

"No need. She's in Bed Four." She ran water over the plate, a careful cup of it, and set the plate in the rack. "What the regulations allow. Ash is mineral. Sterile. Nothing in it your office can object to. Bed Four ran heavy on phosphate the next season. The chickpeas liked it."

Pell sat and looked at his hands for a while.

"The autoclave takes a bed in half an hour," he said finally. "I've done the numbers. If we start tonight and nobody sleeps, we finish an hour before lift."

"I did the numbers in June."

"Of course you did." He almost smiled. "Coyle. I want you to understand why."

"I understand why." She turned around and leaned on the counter, which was the height for somebody six inches shorter than she was, as everything here was. "Somebody's going to come back in fifty years, or a hundred, with drills and a proper lab, and they're going to want to know if anything was ever alive in this ground before we got here. And if they dig up a spore of something we brought from a greenhouse in Montpellier, they'll never be sure again. One mistake and you've salted the whole question. I know. I signed the same papers you did, only I signed them twenty-two years before you."

"Then you know it's not cruelty."

"I didn't say cruelty. I said I understand." She pushed off the counter. "Finish your tea. I'll start the kiln."

---

The kiln was the big drum autoclave in the back bay, and it was not, strictly, a kiln, but the crew had called it that since before Mattie came and the name had stuck because of what it did. You fed it dirt at one end on a screw conveyor and it came out the other end at five hundred degrees, dry as a bone, dead as the plain outside. Then it went into the hoppers and the hoppers went out through the big lock on a crawler and you tipped it on the pile beyond the solar field, where it would cool in an hour and in a year would look like everything else.

She started with Bed Thirty-seven because it was the youngest and had the least in it.

The work was simple. Pull the crop. Bag the crop for the galley; nobody burns food. Then shovel. The beds were waist-high troughs of steel a metre wide and six metres long, and you stood in the aisle and swung the dirt into the conveyor hopper and the screw took it. There was a powered scoop that did the bulk of it, and she ran it, and then went in with the shovel, because the scoop left a hand's depth on the steel and she wanted that part in her hands.

Pell came in after half an hour in a pair of borrowed coveralls with the cuffs rolled four times. He stood watching her for a minute. Then he took the other shovel off the wall.

"You don't have to," she said.

"I know."

He shovelled badly. He bent his back instead of his knees and he took too much on the blade and spilled half of it, and in the low gravity the spilled dirt fell slow and soft as snow onto the deck, and he swore under his breath and went down to scrape it up with his hands. She didn't help him. After the first bed he learned to take less. After the second he learned to let his legs do it. By the third his palms were going, and she found him a pair of gloves, and he said thank you as if he meant it.

The dome smelled different with the kiln running. Under the green and the wet there was a hot mineral stink like a foundry yard, and something else beneath that, scorched and sweet: the carbon of twenty-two years going up the flue.

Somewhere around Bed Twenty-nine, Pell said, "What will you do? After."

"Go home."

"Where's home?"

"Bakersfield." She swung the shovel. "My sister's got a place out past Lamont. Almonds. Or she did. They pulled half of them when the water went."

"Will you farm?"

"I'm fifty-one, Mr. Pell. I'm going to sit on her porch and get fat, and when somebody at the co-op asks me what I did on Mars I'm going to say I grew chickpeas, and they'll say, well, that's nice."

He laughed, and then looked like he wished he hadn't.

"It's all right," Mattie said. "It's funny."

They worked. The hoppers filled and the crawler went out and came back, out and back, its tracks trailing slow red plumes across the plain in the floodlights. The night came down blue and then black, and two small moons went over, and the frost came out on the outer panes of the dome in long feathers. The cold out there was eighty below. In here they were sweating through their coveralls.

At Bed Eleven the screw jammed on a root mass and she went in with a bar and cleared it and cut her forearm on the housing, not badly. Pell taped it for her. His hands were shaking a little, from the work.

---

They came to Bed Four with five hours left before lift.

Mattie stopped at the head of it and leaned on her shovel. The lamps were still on over it; she had left them for last. The chickpeas stood up knee-high and grey-green with the pods hanging, nearly ready, a week from dry. She could smell the bed from where she stood. It was a stronger smell than the others. It always had been.

Pell stopped beside her.

"I'll take this one," he said. "If you want. You could go and pack."

"I'm packed."

"Then you could sleep. You've been on your feet for twenty hours."

"So have you."

He didn't answer that. He looked at the bed and then at her and then he took off his gloves, one finger at a time, as if it were a thing that needed doing carefully.

"The order," he said, "covers the beds. Everything biological in the habitat volume: beds, compost room, seed store, culture lines, all of it, through the kiln before departure. It's quite specific."

"I know what it covers."

"It does not cover," Pell said, "the station survey markers. Those are geological. They stay. They're the benchmarks for whoever comes next, for the drilling. There's one under the north footing of the dome, a metre down. I saw it on the plan." He folded his gloves together and put them in his pocket. "That's all I know. That's all I'm going to know. I'm going to go up to the galley and write my report, and it will take me two hours, and I will be very thorough."

He went. She heard his feet on the ladder, slow, a tired man's feet. Then the galley door.

Mattie stood there a long time.

Then she went to the stores and got a sample canister, the steel kind with the double seal they had used for shipping cores up to orbit, a litre and a half, threaded, with a gasket that would hold a vacuum for longer than she would live. She brought it back to Bed Four and knelt in the aisle.

She didn't take the black topsoil. She went in under it with her hands, down past the root mat to where the dirt was cool and close-packed and dry, where the roots had died back last season and the fungus had done what it did when the roots went: shut itself down, walled itself up into spores no bigger than a grain of fine sand, and waited. Szabo had shown her them under the scope the first year. Round, yellow-brown, glassy, like fish roe. They'll wait for years, Szabo said. Decades, maybe. Nobody knows how long, because nobody has ever had a reason to find out. They wait for a root to come by. That's all they want. A root, and they'll wake up.

She filled the canister with that. Then she found the earliest pod on the nearest plant, already dry, two seeds rattling in it, and picked it, and pressed it down into the top of the dirt, and screwed the lid on, and checked the seal twice, and sat back on her heels.

It was a small thing to hold. It didn't weigh anything, in this gravity.

Then she got up, and picked up the shovel, and put Bed Four into the kiln.

---

It took her an hour. She did it properly: every shovelful, the corners, the drainage gravel at the bottom, the dirt in the aisle where it had spilled, swept up and fed in. When it was done she hosed the trough with the last of the wash water and watched it run clean and red into the drain, the colour of the plain, the colour of everything here that wasn't the inside of this dome. She stood with the hose in her hand until the water ran out.

Then she went and suited up.

The north lock was the small one. She cycled it and went out with the canister in her thigh pocket and a hand auger over her shoulder, and the cold came through the suit at once the way it always did for the first minute, not real, just the mind knowing. It was an hour before dawn. The sky was black down to the horizon and then a narrow band of it was not black, but deep blue, the blue that comes before the sun on this world and nowhere else she had ever been. The frost crunched under her boots. Beyond the dome the shuttle stood on its four legs with its running lights going red, red, red.

The survey marker was where Pell said it would be: a little aluminium cap flush with the ground under the north footing, stamped with a number. She cleared the dust off it with her glove. Then she set the auger beside it and leaned her weight on the handle and started to turn.

The regolith came up in a brown spiral, frozen, hard as brick at thirty centimetres and harder below. Her breath roared in the helmet. Her shoulders burned. She turned and lifted and cleared and turned, and the hole went down, and the band on the horizon went from blue to pale to white, and when she had a metre she stopped and knelt and lowered the canister into it on its lanyard, and let the lanyard go after it.

She filled the hole with her hands. The regolith was sharp and loose and red as old blood in the first light, and it went back in the way it had come out, with nothing in it, the way it had always been. She packed it with her fists. She packed it with the flat of the auger. She brushed the dust over the place until it looked like every other place.

Then she stood, and the sun came up, small and white and far away, and threw her shadow a long way across the plain toward the pile of baked dirt beyond the solar field, the twenty-two years of it, already the same colour as the ground.

In the station log, under the north benchmark, the entry read: Marker checked and secured. Depth one metre. No change.

She went back in to wake Pell. There was still time to make him breakfast.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Leighā Brackett per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Leigh Brackett, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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