Starbound

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An hour after my children were born, we went up to the new lounge to have a drink.

You couldn’t have done any of that on the Mars I first knew, eleven years ago. No drink, no lounge, no children—least of all, children born with the aid of a mother machine, imported from Earth. All of it courtesy of free energy, borrowed energy, whatever they wind up calling it. The mysterious stuff that makes the Martians’ machines work.

(And is, incidentally, wrecking Earth’s economies. Which had to be wrecked, anyhow, and rebuilt, to deal with the Others.)

But right now I had two gorgeous new babies, born on Christmas Day.

“You could call the girl Christina,” Oz suggested helpfully, “and the boy Jesús.” Oz is sort of my godfather, the first friend I made in Mars, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when he’s joking.

“I was thinking Judas and Jezebel myself,” Paul said. Husband and father.

“Would you two shut up and let me bask in the glow of motherhood?” The glow of the setting sun, actually, in this new transparent dome, looking out over the chaos of construction to the familiar ochre desert that was more like home now than anyplace on Earth.

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